Arizona's Opportunity

The four-hundredth anniversary of the Coronado Expedition, rated by historians as the greatest land exploration in all the colorful story of the Spanish conquest of the major portion of the Western hemisphere, comes in 1940. The entire Southwest is preparing to celebrate the "Cuarto-Centennial," as it has been styled by the New Mexican group that inaugurated the movement. Two years ago New Mexico launched the movement for a great celebration of this event, created a state organization, started definite research and planning. They now have reached the point of complete state organization, and have worked out a plan to spend, on the New Mexico portion of the celebration alone, two million dollars.

They have set up as a tentative series of budget items such things as a half million for pageantry; four hundred thousand for publicity and advertising over a four-year period; one hundred and twenty-five thousand for a memorial shaft and museum; the same sum for restoration of the old governor's palace and additions to the present museum; a fund of seventy-five thousand for publication and re-publication of southwestern historical material; and over a hundred thousand for rehabilitation and care of state monuments and the placing of historical markers.

Gutzon Borglum, Famous Sculptor, Outlines Plan to Commemorate Coronado Expedition

Shortly after New Mexico inaugurated the Cuarto-Centennial movement a group of Arizona citizens began urging the world's greatest sculptor-engineer, Gutzon Borglum, to come to Arizona, look the field over, and suggest what should be done toward the creation of historic memorials and toward suitable methods of participating in the 1940 Cuarto-Centennnial.

There were a number of reasons for inviting the famous sculptor to make suggestions to Arizona. One is the fact that more than forty years ago, when a young art student in San Francisco, it was he who made the suggestion to California that they do something about preserving, restoring and utilizing their old missions as attractions. His friend Charles F. Lummis took up the suggestion, created the necessary organization, did the work, and for a quarter of a century it has been admitted that the Missions have attracted to California more people and more money than anything else.

Another reason is that Borglum is creating, at Rushmore and Stone Mountain, the greatest historic memorials in the world's history, and that Rushmore is annually attracting to the Black Hills more than a quarter of a million people who are spending in the neighborhood some twelve million dollars and that the business of the railroads, oil companies, and all others who serve tourists has (Continued on Page 21)