Papago Baby Shrine

Glimpses into the gay and carefree past when Arizona was young and rough and rather wild-when corsets and mustaches were fashionable and the decades reeked with lavender and old lace and snuff.

Presented in cooperation with the department of Archives, State Capitol Building, Mulford Windsor, librarian.

In the beginning of the last decade of the last century, Bisbee was in the throes of a large-scale mining expansion. Hard rock miners were swarming into the camp from all the stopes and drifts from Butte and Michigan south. Bisbee was then, as it is today, a busy progressive town. But "them" were the days! You went a'courting your best girl in a horse and buggy, and it was fashionable to go down to the depot and watch the train come in.

In 1883 the Tombstone Volunteer Fire department Hook and Ladder company was the talk of Arizona territory. The scene above marked the crowning of the queen; so it was fitting that the boys should turn out in all their finery for the auspicious occasion. History does not record whether there was a fire that day. It would have been too bad to soil those white gloves. Tombstone must have been a pretty good town, despite the shootin' and feudin' we hear about today. A good fire department always means a good town!

Along about the first decade of this century baseball was the principal sport in the Clifton-Morenci district. Games were generally mild descriptions of assault and battery, because everyone took their baseball seriously. Sometimes after the games, when tempers were not too ruffled, the teams hired a hack and went on a picnic. In this picture Pete Riley, a business man in Clifton today, can be seen standing on the driver's seat. What the photographer failed to show in this picture was the keg of beer which most surely went along on the picnic.