VIVA EL BURRO!

This investigation begins at a guest ranch in old Wickenburg. At dim dawn he stuck his head through my window and blasted me off my pillow. No lament in all nature was ever so saturated with melancholy chagrin. In heart-bursting “blues” style he choked, almost sobbed with woe, then swelled like a rusty bellows to hysterical brays. His erratic rhythm was ludicrous yet tragic. His heart was broken. Who was the criminal?Human nature? Why not? The burro has been betrayed. For centuries all over the world, the lot of his kind has been hard; certainly here in the desert states, a land for which he dared so much and bore such heavy burdens, he is the lowliest pariah, driven away with sticks and stones. If we could psychoanalyze the miserable little outcast we might sympathize with his complexes, even forgive his out-spoken, ear-splitting dejection.

The burro, elsewhere called the donkey, comes of the noble Equus family, yet his cousin, the horse, snubs him socially and his halfbrother the mule, contemptuously kicks him all over the corral. In fact, the sensibilities of the burro have been lacerated by man and beast for so long it is not strange that bitterness is strongly mixed with the natural meekness of his personality. It may even be that his vanity has been done to death.Today he roams furtively in the outskirts of a civilization he himself brought burro-back into the desert. The picture of despair, his ears hang lopsided, all passion spent. His coat is ragged and buttoned with burrs; his sad little tail is frayed with thorns. Disillusioned eyes peer from hairy caverns in his shaggy face, and he is not above stealing his keep as best he may. If he ever feels a moment of pride he conceals the evidence with that pathetic genius peculiar to the downtrodden.

And again, why not? Long ago his trust also died a natural death. His tribal memory cannot recall ever having known appreciation. Individually, of course, he found a few men friendly but he knows this occurred only when his stamina and loyalty were sorely needed. With the passing of the emergency, he was always promptly forgotten. All this, in spite of the fact that he had a right to expect a better deal. When the world was young the sleek, proud wild ass was lured into man's stockades with promises of love and protection. Forswearing the freedom of the wilderness he naively pledged in return the full measure of his strength and sagacity. Straight away his captors requited his confidence with derision, his meekness with abuse, and his dignity with contempt. They even called him a donkey, making his name a reproach and fostering evil prejudices against him.

In the beginning such an attitude could not have been caused by his appearance. Asiatic wild asses the Onager of Syria and Arabia, the Kulan of Mongolia, the Kiang of Tibet; and all those native to Africa are notably handsome animals. Nor could it have been because he was stupid. Wild asses are smart, alert, and remarkably able to cope with the obstacles of nature. Besides having incredible eyesight they avoid ambush and pitfall with something like extrasensory perception. And certainly he was not slow. No horse can overtake nor outlast him. Roy Chapman Andrews, who brought back a fine stallion from the Gobi desert for the New York Zoological Park Exhibit, said even his automobile had to do its best to keep up in cross country races. He mentioned also how gracefully they run and how beautiful they are in motion.

So, it would seem, our dilapidated burro, broken-spirited to utter indolence and so ugly he's funny, is only what man has made him through centuries of enforced association. (If that sounds like a donkey talking, I'm only being logical.) The first domestication of the wild ass is curtained in the folds of antiquity. It is certain donkeys were belabored in Egypt earlier than 3400 B. C. Abraham rode one from Beersheba to Mount Moriah. The Babylonians sewed up conquered kings in the skins of asses as luscious wine from the ranches, and under tons of fabulous wealth from the mines; returning over the perilous trails bearing precious casks and chests from Chihuahua to the gay little capital of Sante Fe.

In the meantime in Arizona every effort toward development staggered under the scourge of the Apache, with never anything to show for heart breaking struggle but abandoned ranches and mines. Only two Spanish settlements were ever able to hold on to life at all; Tubac where the first presidio was established, and squalid, adobe-walled Tucson to which the presidio was moved in 1776.

An important date that, in the far away eastern colonies. It was then, to celebrate the birth of the new nation, that George Washing-ton, the farmer who made good, received two congratulatory gifts; a jack and jennet from the King of Spain, and a magnificent French jack from the Marquis de LaFayette. These animals were the first of the kind to arrive in the east and mule breeding began at once, growing rapidly to major proportions and having immeasurable effect on westward expansion. Indeed, the whole country, especially Missouri, has always openly acknowledged its debt to that son of a donkey.

However, as the frontiers advanced, the donkey himself was left behind. But he sent the mule. And it was he who drew the heavy prairie schooners over spidery trails ever nearer and nearer to the little Spanish world living alone in the deep southwest. At last, the day came when the Sante Fe Trail broke through to the Rio Grande and the Nordic adventure began.

Although Sante Fe was literally the end of the trail, every wagon unloaded a man or two with the compelling urge to go on. What happened next was inevitable. Little western burros, who needed no trail and feared no wilderness, brought the first Americans into Arizona.

A few trappers got away from Sante Fe as early as 1824 after personally inspecting every burro in the Spanish settlement, no doubt. In those days men's very lives depended on the endurance, perseverance, and cooperation of their pack animals whose staunch backs and steady feet must bear all essentials for survival in the wild.

The burros themselves needed nothing. They subsisted on any rough forage they could find during the night while their masters slept; consequently, on nothing at all sometimes for days. The wild ass in his native habitat seeks water only at five day intervals. How long the indestructible little western burro can go between drinks no man has lasted long enough to find out. When his master dies of thirst the burro takes up life on his own and lives on forever. At least, to my knowledge, nobody ever saw a dead burro.

After the trappers came the Mountain Men and a hardier breed of adventurers no land ever knew. Although they too trapped beaver, otter, muskrat, and small game, they were preeminently hunters of deer, antelope, bear, and mountain lion. But hunter and trapper were equally dependent on the burro. For many years these forerunners of civilization, using Bent's Fort, Taos, and Sante Fe as headquarters, crossed the divide and braved the perils of the hinterland; trapping down the Gila, the Salt, the Verde, and the Colorado; hunting across the vast high plateau and wild mountain region of northern Arizona. They went singly or in two's or three's, each with one or more burros; following no man's trail but leaving behind trails no man had trod before. In vocabulary and character these tough, half-wild wilderness men were the prototype of Kentucky's Daniel Boone; a match for the Indian in courage, cunning, and even cruelty. Nevertheless, they and their loyal burros blazed the way for later commerce and broke the trails for later highways, prospering mightily until the market gave out.

Presently traders began to follow the trappers and hunters. As more and more wagon trains arrived from the east with ever increasing amounts of merchandise their trader instinct drove them to build great unwieldy wings on the backs of burros to bob along into the unknown for barter with the Indians. Gradually, in the course of twenty or thirty years these traders penetrated as far south as the beleaguered village of Tucson where they found burros already in residence. But that's getting ahead of the story.

At this point we must use a string of dates to tie up the burro's tale. He probably first became a permanent citizen of Arizona when Spain established the presidio at Tubac in 1772 and his era lasted in full swing for well over a hundred years. The burro may have travelled with the wandering padres long before he came to Tubac, he may have labored with them in building isolated missions; there's no way to be sure that he did or did not, which fits perfectly into the pattern. Nobody ever seems to have thought of giving the burro a hand.

In 1774 and 1775 Spanish soldiers broke two trails through to California. Burros probably tagged along after the horses carrying most of the supplies, but again nobody left a diary giving them credit. We do know, however, that as mines and haciendas crept north out of Sonora, every Mexican looked to the burro for heavy duty.

By 1804 the Santa Rita and Planches de Plata mines were sending large quantities of incredibly rich ore burro-back to Chihuahua. This probably was the most arduous and dangerous assignment burros ever had. Indians and geography made every mile a death trap. However, the absentee owners hated to give up silver was coming out in chunks, one weighed twenty-seven hundred pounds so they kept trying. Time and again every miner was murdered but always, sooner or later, more were sent in. And the burros' work went on. The worst of it was that when the Indians captured a pack string, they might toss away the ore, but would surely eat the burros.

No foolin', southern Arizona in those days was one tough little corner of the world for man or beast. And for sixty-five years it got worse. By 1822, when Mexico won its independence, the missions had languished, ranches, haciendas, and mines were abandoned, and the whole country given back to the Indians. Only about five hundred Mexicans lived by the trigger alone inside Tucson's adobe wall. There, for once in history, the burros were better off than the people. When things got too tempestuous they could take off across the desert and live on what the Indians didn't want.

It was while Arizona lay thus naked in the sun forgotten of God and man that the Sante Fe Trail reached the faraway northern New Mexico settlements. That first dribble of Americans out of Sante Fe brought their burros only into the mountainous plateau country of northern Arizona, totally unaware that anything had ever happened in the low southern desert. In 1824 Independent Mexico formed the Territory of Nuevo Mexico, including all Arizona and New Mexi-co. But at that time, little anybody anywhere in Arizona knew or cared about that, if only they could stay alive through the next Apache raid.

During these dark and fearsome days Arizona's first climate-seeker arrived; and registered-Pauline Weaver on a wall of Casa Grande Ruins, which, truth to tell, was the best hotel then to be found within three thousand miles. Pauline turned out to be quite a man. Born in Tennessee, he came the long way round by the far north-west where, as hunter and trapper for the Hudson's Bay Company, he wearied of cold and snow. Breaking his lone way south through the Rockies, he travelled the wild country along the Colorado and thus achieved the distinction of being also first to enter the state from the west. You can't read Arizona history of the next forty years without meeting this man and his burros on every dangerous trail.

However, only his burros ever knew the whole story of his fearless service to the state. Arrow-straight, eyes and ears Indian-keen, long hair on his shoulders, Pauline Weaver literally lived adventure and romance; trapping, hunting, prospecting, scouting; learning Indian dialects, smoke signals, and ways of savage warfare; and, strangest of all, winning the selfless love of Ah-say-a-mo, an Indian maiden who saved his life many times at the risk of her own. (Of course, you must know the rest for years Ah-say-a-mo watched over Pauline Weaver from a distance, with love's clairvoyance came to him briefly in his moments of need; and, at last, slipping away from her own people to his lonely tent, tended him through the dark night of his death, drew up his blanket, and disappeared with the dawn, according to one legend.) In 1846 Pauline Weaver and his burros, commuting into Tucson, chanced to be present when its forlorn inhabitants discovered there was a war on and somebody besides Apaches thought they were worth fighting over. This, of course, occurred during President Polk's war with Mexico, when Lt. Col. Cooke and the Mormon Battalion passed through, raised the American flag, and pushed on to California; thus breaking the first wagon road through Arizona. In this history making enterprise Weaver joined Col. Cooke as pathfinder, interpreter, hunter, and peace-maker with the Indians.

For a long, long time Cooke's Road had little to do with the eclipse of the burro. It was, nevertheless, the dim far off beginning. But highways, steel rails, and the craze for speed were still less than dreams in the minds of Arizonans for years to come. Many trappers, Mountain Men, and traders were yet to drift in and out of the border country; and the heyday of the prospector and his burro was still ahead.

About 1850 things began to happen fast. Following the Gadsden Purchase, engineers and survey expeditions explored the border, forty-niners prodded their oxen over Cooke's Road, and the high-wide-and-handsome bad man, anybody too tough to live even in Texas, came in shooting. Renegades, gamblers, outlaws, rustlers, and prostitutes from all points east made Tucson their mecca. Then in 1858 the first Butterfield stage dashed across the state on its phenomenal twenty-five day, twenty-eight hundred mile run from St. Louis to San Francisco. This might have had little effect on the immediate activities of the burro except for the fact that the influx also brought in mining men with money and flaming enthusiam. And of course, in their wake, Throughout Mexico the burro is an important part in the life of the country. This street scene by Don Smith is in Sinaloa. The burro is a sturdy animal and is unusually resistant to the desert heat. He thrives, and grows fat on the sparse parched desert vegetation.

Frederic A. Baker, in this study, shows two burros in their most valuable work-hauling wood. They can carry heavy loads, and seem to be adapted by nature for the rough desert country. A burro in many ways is superior to a horse for heavy and tedious work.

Came assayers and plungers, quick to give grubstakes. The day of the prospector and his burro had begun at last.

Although the U. S. government built forts and established a few garrisons here and there over the state, for forty years prospecting continued to be desperately precarious. Apaches still didn't go in for glad-hand committees in their Chambers of Commerce and when a prospector and his burro left a mining camp or settlement and struck out across the desert they were on their own, sharing alike scorching days, eerie nights, and constant danger of lurking ambush. The grim old goldseeker was spurred by visions of wealth, the burro had only the bitter weariness of the desert, but they went forward together, equally indomitable.

A few old-timers, remembering the hardships and dangers of the wild trails, will admit under pressure that without the burro the development of the southwest would have undoubtedly been retarded many years. But human nature being what it is, they usually hasten to add that every burro is a stubborn, contrary little devil, at his best in avoiding work. C. B. Glascock, in GOLD IN THEM HILLS, repeats a story in line with this accusation.

He tells of one Charlie Higgins who chanced to visit a ghost town. The doors and windows of its abandoned shacks were fallen in, but a few die-hards still puttered around at the mine. And down in the flat fifty or sixty burros were picking up a living as only burros can. Mr. Higgins needed four good pack animals. One of the putterers owned that number. They went down to the flat together, the owner pointed out his burros, and the deal was made in their presence.

Next morning Mr. Higgins went back to cut out his burros. They were not there. All the others were. But his were gone. He rushed up to the mine, found the man who had taken his money and said a few fighting words. But the seller refused to believe the burros had disappeared so the two men went back to the flat to settle the argument. Sure enough, all the burros were right there, as unconcerned as ever, except the four Mr. Higgins had bought. At last, they gave up looking and, on no friendly terms, started back to camp.

As they passed an old, ramshackle cabin Mr. Higgins caught a glimpse of ears sticking up above a crack in the boards, and eyes peeking out. And, believe it or not, he found those four burros inside - huddled together, hiding, waiting, hoping the threat of going back to work would pass them by. Nothing stupid about that, at least.

After the Civil War many strikes of stupendous richness were made, and according to the usual story, burros themselves discovered about ninety percent of the mines that ever paid off. This, of course, was not because of their hunger for gold but because of very real hunger for something they could chew. Prospectors had a way of stopping just anywhere night overtook them, usually with no thought at all about browse for their animals. These they simply turned loose in the darkness to rustle for themselves. Quite naturally the burros developed the aggravating habit of wandering far afield; up mountainsides, into canyons, along arroyos, or wherever they hoped something might reasonably be expected to grow. Meanwhile, the men, after eating well of venison, wild turkey, or maybe just plain jerky, would sleep trustfully only to wake up next morning hopping mad because their pesky beasts were not standing ready for the pack saddle. The story always ends with the burro found astraddle a vein of gold or silver.

This happened to Henry Wickenburg. And the longer he searched the madder he got. When at last he scrambled up a slope and caught sight of the errant offender he snatched up a rock and threw it the better to express his irritation. The rock had a glint. He took a look, and found in his hand the first ore to be taken from the greatest gold mine ever to be discovered in Arizona. But did he name that mine for the half-starved little devil who led him to it? Oh no, a thing like that never happened in all history. The world famous Vulture Mine, near the town of Wickenburg, was so named because Henry Wickenburg looked up to heaven one morning and saw, of all things, several of those unlovely birds circling over his mountain of gold. Even so, if your heart be compassionate, you may well shed a tear for Henry Wickenburg. Before he died he came to know the full measure of frustration all burros feel. His heart too was broken. No more than they did he get one cent of the wealth taken from his mine, nor any rewarding happiness for his labor.

Those were the years when burros were really making history. One bore Ed Schieffelin to the smugglers' camp at the Brunckow ranch on the San Pedro. At night long trains of pack burros would come in from Old Mexico, and secret, dangerous things went on in the aban-doned old ranch house. The burros knew it was no place for an out-sider so they let Schieffelin bed down in their corral. At dawn he slipped away with his burro and went into the mountains of ambush and death where men hadwarned him he'd find only a tombstone for reward.

At dusk Apaches passed near. Schieffelin almost bored his body into the wide top of a tall rock, he lay so flat to hide his tombstone for sure if the least noise warned the Indians of his presence. Now had come the perfect opportunity for that burro hidden in a nearby dry wash to avenge the grievances of his kind. But did he limber up his lusty bellows. No. Indeed he did not. That burro froze in his tracks, quit chewing, and probably held his breath. Otherwise one of the richest silver mining areas ever discovered on earth would never have been called the Tombstone District. Neither would the most spectacularly wicked town of the old west have gained fame under the name of Tombstone, Arizona.

Not long after the Civil War a few wandering traders established regular routes and so became peddlers, hawking their wares burro-back at cattle ranches, mining camps, and scattered settlements; al-ways dodging Apaches, always plodding on. At that time the most populous section of the state, therefore the best market, lay along the Santa Cruz Valley, called by Edwin Corle, in DESERT COUNTRY, the Cradle of the West. If so, a rough-riding, blood-letting cradle it was, infested from end to end with human vermin. Tubac was recklessly alive again. The ranches were armed camps against rustlers and Indians. Tucson, the largest town, was according to J. Ross Browne in ADVENTURES IN APACHE COUNTRY, in 1868, “lit-erally a paradise of devils.” Now the burros of a certain peddler named Mr. Isaacs served this turbulent market. Between stops Mr. Isaacs expected any minute to lose his scalp; in the village he couldn't haggle in peace for gun fights in the streets. He couldn't take it. He decided to settle down. So, on the river bank some miles south of Tubac he unloaded his burros, set up a store and quite naturally called it Isaacs. But when the Mexicans round about distorted his beautiful name to Ee-zee-oks, he haphazardly chose another. Thus it is that Nogales today is the town the burros brought in.

Although the heavy work of the burro was done in the early dawn of Arizona's today, their dainty tracks led to new mountains of gold, silver, and copper, to new canyons, to new rivers, and to new towns until well after the turn of the century. For many years, be-ginning in 1912, Ben Lilly, with his five hounds and five burros, served under the Forest Service and later under the Biological Sur-vey, as Arizona's first hunter of predatory animals. Yet nowhere is the burro commemorated on the state's map except in two in-stances; Burro Creek in Yavapai county, and Burro Springs in the Hopi country. Even Will Barnes in his careful book on the place names of Arizona fails to say how this happened. Neither is the burro represented on the Seal of Arizona, although the first gov-ernor of the state often remarked to show that he was indeed a man of the people that he entered Arizona “pushing a burro.” Even today in 1946 the burro still serves Arizona. Of course, only a comparatively small proportion of the large burro population is allowed the dignity of working for a living but prospectors are still out in the hills, and up in the Navajo country, where children herd the sheep, burros are indispensable. Mexicans north of the border still cling to their friend, although they do not honor him at fiestas and cry Viva el Burro, as is the custom in Old Mexico.

The cold fact is that the great day of the burro is past. He has no place on the highway and small hold on the hearts of the people. He runs wild in the Grand Canyon; ownerless and homeless, he lives like the alley cat around small towns and mining camps, sometimes even gets ordinances passed against him for being a public nuisance. No wonder his heart is broken.

However, just for the record, mention should be made of the one man remembered as truly loving his burro Captain Cooney, who forsook the State Legislature of New Mexico in 1892 to hunt the fabulous Adams diggings from Navajoland to the Sierra Madres of Old Mexico. His burro was the only partner he ever wanted. They humored each other, talked to each other, ate beans and sourdough biscuits together and, until 1914, roamed the wilderness practically arm in arm. This man was the exception above all exceptions, Black Pete the only burro to live in history not lost in anonymity.

It is not suggested that man today each take unto himself a burro, to love and live with, and forsaking all others cleave to so long as both find it agreeable. Neither is it recommended that we return to pack and burro days, but one little thing could be done; unique and ornamental. Good publicity too, for the only section of the Union with the right to do so use black metal silhouettes of the plodding burro as highway markers at thoughtfully selected spots along the routes he was the first to travel.

The pioneers were a brave and hardy lot, justly celebrated, highly honored. We think well of them and don't overlook this they think well of themselves. They form associations, register their names, set down their stories in print, and are just as sure as people can be that they, and they alone, started Arizona on her way.

But the burro knows better. In the dim dawn he brays aloud the truth:Time as it lengthens weaves grandiose illusions.

The burro is a familiar figure in the Indian scene of Arizona. The small animal, with his philosophical disposition and his gentle personality, makes a wonderful pet for children. This scene was taken by Josef Muench deep in the Navajo country at a sheep camp.

Despite the modernity of this modern day, the burro is still a factor in the life of the Southwest country. Isolated mines in places where there are no roads send their output to market by burro. Chuck Abbott shows here a burro ore-train about to be loaded.