THE WATERS OF THE HASSAYAMPA

THE WATERS OF THE HASSAYAMPA Liars' Paradise May Be Destroyed by the March of Progress

By Bert Fireman THE HASSAYAMPA is Arizona's most romantic stream. Of the Colorado much has been said and sung. There have been songs and poems written of its silvery splendor, its magnificence in the moonlight. The newspapers and magazines have expounded profusely upon the wondrous Boulder Dam. Adventurers have ridden the rapids of the river in tiny boats and have made movies of their experiences. All this is mere patter in contrast to the simple little ditty of the Hassayampa: "Those who drink its waters bright, Red man, white man, boor, or knight, Girls or women, boys or men, Never can tell the truth again." So humble is the origin of that ditty, its author is unknown. So powerful and majestic is its appeal that busy travelers have clambered down the rocks along Highway 89 south of Wickenburg to pull a sandy draught of the trickling stream. As a small boy I dropped on my knees and dipped a freckled face into the cool waters that were murmuring softly over the clear sands. I drank beside the white-faced cows that grazed on its banks. I drank and wondered, mostly of the hoary old prospector who recited the verse to me. He stumbled as he walked. I thought the grave would be his next "mother lode." But he swore the tale was true. He also told me another ditty, which I have forgotten. It said that the drinker would never die. That appealed to me. I came back to drink of the Hassayampa's cool waters several years later. This time I had hunted quail in the Vulture mountains. My throat was dry. The river was a dozen feet wide, still placidly winding among the sand bars on a southward course to where, 35 miles west of Phoenix, its meager waters join the Gila and flow on to the Colorado and thence to the Gulf of California. This time the water was sweet. A cow pony splashed into the river on its opposite side and 50 feet upstream from me. The water was soon swirling with sand and with minute particles of moss. As I walked upstream, past the pony, he watched me with sad brown eyes. "Poor fool," he might have been thinking, "this water will make the two-legged creature an immortal liar."

When I am an old man, according to the legend, I will return to drink again of the waters of the Hassayampa. But newspaper accounts of a dam to be built on it sometime in the future make me believe I'll troll for bass in its impounded waters. Out of sentiment, I'll drink every time I am on the banks of this quaint little stream.

Seventy-five years ago, when Arizona's mining was the major and only industry of a young territory, letters written about the quest for gold along the sandbars of the river named it "Assamp." Undoubtedly the Indians meant for it to be the Hassayampa. That means, according to the late Col. J. H. McClintock, who was an authority on Arizona names, "water that is hidden," and it can also be interpreted as "water that is in a dry bed." Either name is understandable. Very much like other western streams, the Hassayampa, without warning or good purpose, now and then disappears in the sands, only to appear again bubbling like a spring a hundred yards, a halfmile or a half-dozen down the bed. Without reason to the layman-it sinks, and without cause it springs from the earth. When it emerges it is always cooler. Nature, perhaps, is endeavoring to be kind to the wayfarer who drinks here.

This habit of the river makes convenient fords. At one of these, Wickenburg has been built. The arrastras of the early gold mills of Arizona were perched on the banks of the river at the town of Wickenburg. Here Pauline Weaver and others of the old-time prospectors of Arizona hunted for gold and then washed in the river. It was during one hot day's revelling, when brown bottles were being cooled in the Hassayampa and prospectors lay in the shade of cottonwoods clinging to its banks, that one among the crew became jovial. He was a man of letters. He had read the classics. In his hilarious mood the invigorating potions of the beer and the cooling qualities of the river became to his mind-resting from the tortuous task of digging ore confused elements. What the beer was doing, he thought was the virtue of the water. "You've heard about the wondrous stream They call the Hassayamp; They say it turns a truthfui guy Into a lying scamp; And if you quaff its waters once, It's sure to prove your bane; You'll ne'er forsake the blasted stream Or tell the truth again." At least, that is the story told of the origin of the poem. Authorities say the

JUNE, 1937 ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

The young engineer discovers that he can figure out just about anything on his slide rule except how to pay the grocery bill this month.

The author was named Orick Jackson. I don't know.

The Hassayampa rises on the steep slopes of Mount Union, a few miles from Prescott. Dropping swiftly out of the pine country, where snow amid the rocks gives it perpetual life, the river winds through rugged mountains and then drops off a high plateau to where travelers first see it, meandering out of the mountains that lie east of Yarnell hill.

It flows southward from near Congress Junction to Wickenburg, through a pretty green valley watered by frequent floods. Here the cattle and ponies of guest ranches feed on the grass that crops out of clear sand and nibble the tenderest leaves of many willows and cottonwoods.

Past Wickenburg, the river flows through a canyon, quiet as a whispering song most of the year, but sometimes a raging torrent, and then out onto the desert floor a few miles west of Morristown. Thence its course is winding again through the cactus groves and mesquite thickets to the Gila. The river, in all, is barely 100 miles in length.

Where it lurches from the canyon, reclamationists plan to dam its course and spread the waters, that usually waste their power to make the desert bloom profusely, upon the fertile soil of a contemplated irrigation project that will add another unit to Arizona's spread of reclaimed lands.

Reclamation may rob the languid Hassayampa of its glory. A man-made lake will be a dismal substitute for the little stream that trickled over the sands and washed the desert's clogged dust from the throats of men who carved Arizona from Nature's wildest pattern, long ago.

The Hassayampa has watered men, good and bad. Along its shady bankswhere now tourists from Iowa and New Hampshire and elsewhere park their trailered autos-renegades and rustlers once hid away from the posses of law and order. But fine people also drank there, men of caliber whose deeds have been perpetuated in the state's history manuals.

Travelers have halted their laboring chariots on Highway 89, skirting the river, to feed a fuming Model T with allnecessary water.

Perhaps that bloke didn't appreciate the Hassayampa. But I do. I don't want to see a dam spoil the anecdotes of the liars who reminisce of the river.

As the pony thought, I've tasted the waters of the Hassayampa. I shall never die. I shall never again tell the truth.

ARIZONA GRASSES

BY J. J. THORNBER Professor of Botany, University of Arizona The Grass Family in Arizona is one of 136 families of flowering plants and ferns native to the State. It is the second largest of our plant families, with a total of 351 species and varieties, being exceeded in number of species only by the Aster or Sunflower Family. It is one of the most widely distributed of our great plant groups and is represented by a larger number of individual plants in our State than those of all the other 135 families combined. In Arizona one species out of every eleven is a kind of grass, and our grass flora represents 7 per cent of the grasses of the world. Few states in our great country have as large a grass flora as does Arizona.

An interesting observation about grasses is that they are commonplace plants. Persons in almost every walk of life have a fairly good idea of what one means when he speaks of grasses and for the most part recognize them at sight. They greet us every day in our lawns where they form a cool, green, velvety turf. The stockmen thinks of them as his most important forage plants that extend for miles in every direction over plains, foothills and mountains. The farmer sees in them his pasture and meadow plants, and his hay and grain