Hellzapoppin' - From Buckeye to Broadway

Tribute to a Ghost Town

ARIZONA is full of them, the ghost towns, the towns that live on memories. This year Arizona has a new ghost town. No deserted mine, no empty shack, no bullet-riddled theatre will serve as a reminder of its living past. Its relics won't contribute anything to the romance of Arizona history. The land on which it was built will be swept clean of it, and it will stay alive only in the minds of several groups of the people who lived there. The symbol of their lives there, the slim, arching beauty of Bartlett Dam will outlast even their memories. The excitement and urgency of a big construction job drew us together from various parts of the country, and our town rose as quickly as it will vanish, but for all its brief life it ran the gamut of small-town experience.

Eagerly the women, at least, waited for the completion of the trim green and white bungalows which were to be our homes. Fervently we argued with the carpenters over the number of closets and shelves we could have. Our hardwon shelves and cupboards lie in neatly stacked piles of used lumber now! We moved in when the varnish on the floors was scarcely dry, and the inevitable parting with our homes seemed far off. We hung curtains, we discussed color schem-es and furnishings, and anyone would have thought to hear us, that we were settling permanently. To one who has moved eighteen times in five years, two and a half years in one place does seem a fairly permanent arrangement!

Bartlett Dam is finished now and the camp is just another ghost town-except to the men and women who lived there. This is a simple, beautiful account of life at Bartlett Dam, where flower gardens and window coolers were important and where tragedy came with the floods and rockslides.

The curtains hung, the rugs down, we gave a party. It was the first of many very pleasant social functions at Bartlett Dam. There was the gleam of white linens, and candles, and the tinkle of ice in crystal glasses, the laughter of welldressed men and women enjoying an evening together. A dream, a mirage, perhaps, it was so brief.

The women played bridge and drank tea together. They did their work, wheeled their babies out for an afternoon stroll and shopped at the commissary. A few brides began their housekeeping there. The men worked, and some of them died at their jobs. We had a newspaper which the teacher and her pupils published weekly. There were Christmas programs at the school house, and a Sunday school met in the big garage.

We planted flowers and lawns. It isn't easy to plant flowers when one knows he won't be there to see them very long. I wonder how the desert will treat those two clumps of chrysanthemums I transplanted by the corner of the house. I laugh now when I remember how we all used to charge out into the night to chase The Bull from our garden. Someone would hear a snort, a satisfied crunch, and with a yell, "It's The Bull" he'd grab the handiest weapon and tear outside. In various stages of undress, others soon joined him. I encountered one of my neighbors sleepily jogging down the road with a rock almost too large to carry, much less throw. Where the bull came from no one knew, and he was charmed, that animal, for we never found anything that would really frighten him. He finally got Tom's corn just as it was ready to eat. Then they put a fence around camp and a first-class cattle guard at the gate, and our nightly diversion of chasing The Bull was no more.

The Indians, some of whom were lab orers on the dam lived on the wide banks of the river just below the cliffs which was our back yard. They built hogans of mesquite branches, cardboard, old doors, blankets and pieces of canvas. Their camp presented a motley appear ance, but I sometimes thought it be came a part of the environment more easily than we did. Their presence al ways tinged our life with unreality. It was disconcerting to look from the win dow of my well equipped modern kitchen and see the smoke rising from their fires. Pleasantly their laughter and talk float ed up to us. We could hear them playing a scratchy rendition of "Oh, My Pretty Quadroon" over and over again. We could smell their food cooking. When the river was swollen with flood-waters, Indian women climbed the hill to get water from the tap in my yard. Fasci nated, I watched them carry it back in huge tins atop their heads, their many petticoats swinging gracefully as they walked.

But there was inconsistency in their lives, too. Wilhelmina told me she visit ed one of their hogans looking for the Indian who gathered wood for us. He and his squaw were seated on the floor of their smoky hogan, and with properly arranged napkins, knife and fork were preparing to eat their evening meal.

Someone with authority felt their near ness to the river was polluting its wa ters, so they were requested to move. The chief, I understand, replied with dig nity, that they had lived for many many years beside that river without polluting its waters, but pressure was brought to bear on them, and the squaws tore down the hogans. One morning they were gone. Some weeks elapsed, and the in cident was forgotten though I missed my neighbors. Then there was a com motion by the river once more and I looked out of my kitchen window to see the squaws matter-of-factly moving in again. The hogans were up once more. There they stayed.

The camp doctor must have a story to tell. He nursed us through epidemics common to small towns. He led my child, for one, safely through pneumonia. He treated scorpion bites and small ac cidents. He delivered babies, including premature ones, for whom he built incu bators in which he installed them safely. He cared for the injured when there were catastrophies on the job.

There was a night when his small hospital was crowded. We were reminded that night that we led no ordinary Amer ican lives. Our quiet evening was shat tered by a shrill wail that rose from the camp. Their dogs began to bark and howl, and that unhappy sobbing "Aiy, Aiy. . . Aiy, Aiy, Aiy," rose and fell as we looked at each other fearfully. Disaster death, it meant, I knew, but to whom and where? "Aiy, Aiy Aiy, Aiy, Aiy." It sounded like women weeping for the concentrated grief of the world.

When our men came driving back from the job, it was almost less shock ing to hear their story of the rock-slide, and to see them wash the blood from their faces with the garden hose, than to listen to the mournful chant of the Indian wo men.

My heart was heavy as I listened to the chant for the dead which began again early the next morning in the hogan nearest my house. Jessie, my Indian wash-woman, and I were hanging clothes.

She pointed to the hogan below and said, "Her son was killed in the rock slide last night." Then, briefly, "My hus band work on those rocks all day yester day. The slide came just after he quit."

I nodded to her. We were kin. "Yes, I know how you feel, Jessie. My husband worked there, too." Then we changed the subject abruptly, as construction camp women always do when such talk arises, though I always wondered if those red letters on the water tank reminded the men of danger as constantly as they did me. "Safety First," they screamed at us. Ordinarily the Verde River is a small stream in a wide, dusty river bed. It (Turn to Page 30)