Yours Sincerely

RETURN AGAIN: It has been a pleasure and a privilege to relive the beauties of Arizona through your courtesy in sending to us the monthly copies of your Arizona Highways.After two weeks in Arizona this last winter, we thought we had pretty well covered the points of interest in your state, but we now find that we have barely scratched the surface, and will have to return again and again to see and enjoy it all.

W. L. WILLITS, Wrightwood Lumber Co., Wrightwood, Calif.

Once Arizona gets into your blood, you will always return. Only repeat visitors realize how much there is to see.

A few months ago I was in your city and at that time was complimented with a subscription to the Arizona High ways magazine. I have been receiving them regularly and I want, at this time, to express to you my appreciation of this courtesy.

Yours is a very wonderful magazine and I read it each month from cover to cover.

My visit early in May was my first trip to Arizona and I soon learned to love your city and the desert. Needless to say the receipt of the magazine recalls many very pleasant hours spent there and there is always something of pleasure and especial interest on each page for me.

E. W. Kite, The Order of United Commercial Travelers of America, Columbus, Ohio.

TRADING POSTS: It seems to me that every issue of Arizona Highways so greatly improves that one might be forgiven for writing each month to tell you what a work of art it is. Not only that but it reacts well for Arizona. We leave the end of this week for a trip through Arizona, and we will spend a fair amount of money for gasoline, lodging, food, etc. as well as the other items so easily purchased from the Indians and trading posts. Shopping at trading posts has a charm and a novelty unknown elsewhere. To enter a seemingly deserted post, and look around, one is surprised as he becomes accustomed to the dark-unobtrusively along the floor against the wall. Haberdashery, saddlery, jewelry, even pawn-shop, are all included in the one trading post. So you see, Arizona Highways does a good service in pointing out to prospective tourists, seasoned travelers, and any one living in or visiting Arizona by revealing many of the unknown beauties and historic and interesting places which might not otherwise ever be known or seen.

Earl Albert Russell, Hollywood, Calif.

SUPAI: We think your June issue very fine for Supai. With an income of $53 per person in Supai, we are hopeful of increasing the income somewhat by the "tourist project." Arizona Highways magazine has been most generous of space in this and other issues on Supai. Your information has been very accurate.

C. F. Shaffer, Superintendent, Havasupai Indian Reservation, Supai, Arizona.

SAND IN YOUR SHOES: When back east each winter every copy of Arizona Highways that reaches me is "jes like a visit of an' ol' friend." Being an artist who has paint ed pictures in the Southwest, the articles and engravings in each issue of your magazine recall that land of color, of amazing distance, high mountains, tre mendous canyons, and flat deserts. So enchanting, mysterious, primitive, romantic, artistic-but words fail to describe it. When one has "sand in his shoes" that means, return again to the land of fascination, of abundant sunshine, gorgeous scenery, of tradition and relics of the past that's Arizona.

Peter Frank Biehl, Lakewood, Ohio.

thing about our land you can't put down on paper, can't catch in paint. And when you get "sand in your shoes" you'll always come back to try again.

RECEPTION IN HOLLYWOOD: Emily Barrye tells me that it is to you that I am indebted for the beautiful Indian number of your magazine, which reached me a day or two ago. I can't tell you how impressed I am with it nor how much I appreciate your sending me a copy.

Although we are fortunate enough to own the Curtis set on the North American Indian we are constantly in need of more material.

Helen Gladys Percey, Head of Research Dept., Paramount Pictures, Inc., Hollywood, Calif.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER CORONADO: Thank you much for the June and July numbers of your hand some magazine just received. I literally read everything in the two issues, last night, because, for one reason the book is admirably made, and for another, I am one of the original discoverers of Arizona having been a train dispatcher on the "Atlantic & Pacific" at Winslow only a few weeks after Coronado came through. Indeed Fred Harvey and I helped to build that line. I fancy I might still be there if it hadn't been for some difference of opinion between me and the division superintendent. He said two trains going in opposite directions could not pass each other on the same track without confusion, and I told him he was mistaken, and some night I'd prove it.

So, one night-well, here I am

Charles Dillon, Los Angeles, Calif,

Darkness of the interior to see Indians sitting

Arizoniques

Though the youngest State in the Union, Arizona has a forest of magnificent petrified logs estimated to be sixty million years old; dinosaur tracks in sandstone, the footprints of prehis toric monsters; ruins of cities of an cient races of Indians dating back many centuries; and the spectacular Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, wholly within Arizona, where is laid bare through eons of years of erosion, all of the geologic ages of the earth.

The Hopi Indian heaven, called the “underworld,” is considered below the earth, not above; and the rattlesnakes, from whose poisonous venom the Hopis are apparently immune, are used by them in their barbaric Snake Dance, which is a prayer for rain. These rattlesnakes are called by the Hopis, their little brothers.

There are many juniper trees in Arizona's forested heights, cut regularly for lumber that is eventually used in fine chests. It is a wood that resembles and is frequently but erroneously called cedar.

The United States Magnetic Observatory near Tucson, maintained by the Coast and Geodetic Survey of the Department of Commerce, is the only government owned one of its kind in the United States, excepting one in Maryland. Three others are at Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Instruments at this institution record changes in the earth's magnetism and measure earthquakes, and are so delicate that seldom are visitors permitted within the buildings that house them.

The Colorado River, second longest river in the United States, now dammed and controlled by Boulder Dam, drains 250,000 square miles and passes through Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Arizona to the Gulf of California, and it drops more than 6,000 feet from the junction with Green River in Utah, to the Gulf.

The city of San Francisco, California, was founded by a Spanish expedition from Tubac, Arizona, an adobe village between Nogales and Tucson, now practically a ghost town though then the most important Spanish settlement in what is now Arizona.

Although Arizona, one of three states having the smallest amount of cultivated crop land, is third from the top of the list in valuation of crops per acre. This remarkable situation is due to the great system of reclamation dams which upon release of impounded waters, turns the desert valleys into verdant fields of rich crops.

Although Arizona is one of the driest states in the Union, there is enough water stored behind Boulder Dam in Lake Mead to supply 5,000 gallons to every person on earth. Skull Valley, near Prescott, was so named because soldiers in 1864 fought a party of Mojave and Tonto Apache Indians there and left without burying the Indian dead. Many bones and skulls were found bleaching along the valley by emigrants who later traversed the route.

There are more than a thousand spe-cies of cacti known to botanists, and a majority of these are native to Ari-zona. They range in size from diminu-tive types the size of a button, to those reaching a height sometimes exceeding forty feet.

In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, the United States troops were ordered out of this territory, leaving the pioneers at the mercy of the Apache In-dians. Many were massacred and all of the surviving settlers either fled to the then fortified Tucson, or left the country entirely.

The night-blooming cereus, a member of the cactus family, blooms but once a year its large white flowers of rare beauty and spicy fragrance open only once, between sunset and early morn-ing usually in the latter part of June, while the so-called Century Plant, not of the cactus family as usually sup-posed, blooms but once in ten to twenty years, then dies.

Paper money, of local issue, redeemable in silver, was the medium of exchange in Tubac, now a ghost town, in the late 1850's. The eight hundred or more population was comprised mostly of Mexicans, few of whom could read. The different denominations of paper money were therefore indicated by pic-tures. That bearing a pig was worth a bit; a calf, two bits or twenty-five cents; a rooster, half a dollar; a horse, a dollar; and a bull, five dollars.

Oraibi, in northern Arizona, is the only Hopi Indian village that occupies the same site as it did in 1540, and it is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States.

William H. Kirkland, for whom the town of Kirkland, Arizona, was named, was married in Tucson in May, 1860. It is believed this was the first marriage in Arizona of a pioneer white couple.

Viola Jimulla, a woman, is the tribal leader of the Yavapai Indians, whose fifty members live on a small reservation northwest of Prescott. The tribe has neither traditions nor a culture of their own. All record of their early existence has been lost and because their leader disapproves of all ritual dances, there are no ceremonials held among the Yavapais.

The population of Arizona in 1870 was 9,658; in 1880, 40,440; 1890, 88,243; in 1900, 122,931; in 1910, 204,354; in 1920, 334,162; in 1930, 435,573; and in 1940, 498,520.

The census of 1940 reveals the popu-lation of Arizona by counties, as follows: Apache, 24,076; Cochise, 34,540; Coconino, 19,030; Gila, 23,924; Graham, 12,154; Greenlee, 8,725; Maricopa, 185356; Mohave, 8,552; Navajo, 25,173; Pima, 72,931; Pinal, 28,874; Santa Cruz, 9,541; Yavapai, 26,417; and Yuma, 19,227.

The Indian population of Arizona, as shown by the 1940 census, is 51,800.

Motorboat racing is becoming a popular all-year sport in Arizona. The availability of many lakes formed by great Arizona dams is an incentive for the sport.

Phoenix Boy Scouts, at their annual summer encampment at Camp Geronimo, in northern Gila county, each year stage a genuine lion hunt. The hunt, directed by a government lion hunter, never fails to net a large mountain lion.