The Pottery of Ida Redbird

Of all the native handicrafts of Arizona Indians, one of the most interesting is pottery making. It has remained unchanged while most other native customs are fast disappearing. Today there are but few potters still practising their craft in southern Arizona. One of them is Ida Redbird, a Maricopa Indian, who lives near Laveen not far from Phoenix. Her pottery has become well known in Arizona where she has demonstrated at the State Fair and other public occasions.

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY GLADYS AND TED SAYLES

The method used by Ida Redbird has long been practised by her tribe and by the nearby Papago and Pima potters. The beginning of pottery making goes back to the time when the Arizona desert was the scene of the highest civilization developed in America before the coming of the white man.

While the method is a primitive one, that of shaping a lump of clay into the desired form and firing it without the use of an elaborate kiln, is not as simple as it may seem.

First, the right kind of clay must be found: clay that will be suitable for the kind of pottery to be made and which can be fired and decorated. Ida Redbird may never have studied chemistry, giving her a knowledge of the properties of clay necessary for pottery making, but her experience has taught her where to look for the best clays. These are found in the river valleys and on the mountainsides. To test them, they are tasted; for only the sweet, earthy clays, without bitter salts, can be used. Some In making of the pottery only simple tools are used.

Clay is moistened and making of pottery begins. Wet clay is kneaded into shape of pancake, then padded into form. Roll is to build sides of the bowl.

Clays are known to produce porous vessels for cooling water or for cooking, others are best suited for polished wares.

Ida Redbird digs all the clay she uses and carries it home in a gunny sack. After the clay is drived and pulverized, it is mixed with water to form a stiff mass not sticky but soft enough to be handled. Indian pottery making is usually done out of doors on sunny days during the winter time, when the clay is not so cold as to be unpleasant to handle. When the moulding is to take place, all the necessary tools are gathered together, close beside the sitting worker.

First, a lump of the wet clay, of a size judged to make the greater part of the vessel, is pinched off and well kneaded by hand. When it has reached the desired pliability, it is roughly shaped and placed on some object that serves as a mould or anvil, such as the rounded bottom of an upturned vessel. With a wooden paddle she spanks the clay until the desired thickness is reached. Then, very carefully, she lifts the roughly formed vessels from the mould and with her fingers presses out the air bubbles and other deformities. Now it is set aside for a few minutes to sun dry.

If a deep bowl or jar is being made, more clay must be added. While the vessel is is drying drying sufficiently to be handled, thick rope like coils of clay are hand rolled on a heavy wooden plank. They are added one at a time to the wall of the vessel, bringing it up to the desired height. As each coil is built up, she dips her fingers in water, moistening the place where it is joined to the vessel. The coil is next smoothed by hand and shaped to conform with the rest of the pot.

With her paddle and a small anvil she will fashion the pot into any shape to suit her fancy The rim is then moulded carefully; excess clay is pinched off or, when needed, is added. At this stage, the vessel is again sun dried for half an hour until it resembles wet leather. With her polishing stone usually a smooth, river worn pebble she carefully goes over the entire pot, shaping and smoothing the clay until she is satisfied with her efforts. Finally, it is thoroughly sun dried and turned from time to time, to prevent cracking.

With tin protection, pottery is fired. Black paint made from mesquite tree sap is applied for artistic effects.

After coil is pressed on rim, bowl is covered with thin red slip, then the vessel is rubbed to a high polish.

If the vessel was made for the purpose of cooking or cooling water, it is ready for firing. Others require a special treatment of the surface. They are first covered with a coating, called a slip, to give the pottery a beautiful orange red color. This slip is made of carefully selected oxide of iron or hematite. The grinding, sifting, washing and drying of the raw material takes many long. weary hours, and is usually done during the summer months. When ready to use, the dry slip is soaked in water to form a paste and applied with a small piece of cloth. This done, the seemingly endless task of polishing is begun. Quick, short strokes of the stone are passed over the surface of the pot many times, resulting in a highly glazed effect.

After again thoroughly drying, the pot is ready for the first firing, which is done in an open fire for about thirty minutes. Old pieces of tin are used to form an oven to protect the vessel from the flames and fallingwood. When the fire has burned down, the pot is moved to the hot ground adjoining the fire. There it is allowed to cool.

The painting usually takes place after several vessels have received their first firing. The paint used by the Maricopa Indians is made from the gummy sap that comes from mesquite trees. Bark, which is stained black, is pulled from the trees and boiled for many hours, strained and boiled again until it is brilliant. The paint is applied with a pointed stick, toothpick or match. After the paint has dried, the pot is given a second firing for a short period.

When the pot has cooled, the polished surface is carefully wiped with a greasy rag, afterwards to be gone over with a dry cloth. It is then ready for use.

After decoration is applied, pottery is fired again. The article is finished. Below, vessels sun-dried and fired.

Story of the Salt...

The Western Hemisphere's largest prehistoric “apartmenthouse” types of cities existed a thousand years ago. It is believed to have been the commercial crossroads of its region, a “Chicago” for the tribes of what are now Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Old Mexico. A century-long drought is believed to have been the reason why the culture at Kinishba faded and died. But that mystery, too, is one not fully solved by such a guess.

On the supposition that primitive culture did not support as many persons per acre as present-day methods, and that Indian tribes of long ago suffered from disease, the elements, and war-losses proportionally beyond those of present-day civilization, it still is reasonable to assume that perhaps 50,000 persons inhabitated the valley and the watershed of the Salt in prehistoric times. It supports, or is inhabited by, more than 300,000 of Arizona's present estimated 710,000 persons. The business of enabling six to live where one once existed has been achieved through more efficient agricultural procedures and a diversity of other pursuits, notably industry and mining.

Off of the Salt River watershed, minus the Verde River, comes an average annual flow of 700.000 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover one acre one foot deep, or 40,000 cubic feet, or nearly a quarter of a million gallons. This is the water that was mentioned previously as being sufficient to cover 700,000 acres one foot deep. Storage dams on the Salt alone will impound two and one half times this amount. The reason for the extra storage is that it is needed to retain floodwaters and equalize the wet years with the dry, as far as the needs of the farmers are concerned.

Where does this flood of water come from? Out of the White Mountains. And off the Natanes Plateau. And from the slopes of the Seven-Mile Mountains, the Pinals, the Sierra Anchas, the Mazatzals, the Superstitions, the McDowells, the Phoenix Mountains, the Salt River Mountains, and other lesser ranges which are really parts of the great chains which geographers identify as “the foothills of the Rockies.” This is a mountain-and-valley type of geography, and the Salt River is one of the great forces of nature that has made it that way.

There are not many lakes to feed the flood. But there is Louise Lake, a little gem snuggled up under the Mogollon Rim near the head of Cibecue Creek; and Wild Horse and Walker Lakes, also close under the Rim, near the head of Canyon Creek. There also are Woolsey and Big Lakes, near Mount Baldy.

Arizona is not a lake country, though; except for its man-made lakes, of which the Salt River has more than any river in America except for the Tennessee. The lakes that man has created are Roosevelt, behind Roosevelt Dam; Apache, behind Horse Mesa Dam; Canyon, behind Mormon Flat Dam; Saguaro, behind Stewart Mountain Dam; and the little lake that sometimes sits softly on its haunches behind the diversionary structure known as Granite Reef Dam.

A multitude of springs feed the river, too. Among the largest are Hackberry Spring, on Cherry Creek, Bottle Spring, near Pleasant Valley, and Mud Spring, in the Tonto Basin. But there are others some running all year except when ice locks their doors; some running only in the spring and summer, until the wetness has been drawn out of the mountain soil; and some coming to life only during exceptionally wet years.

The Black River is the larger of the two streams that meet a few miles west of Fort Apache to form the main body of the Salt. But it and its mate, the White, both curl their arms around the bases of Ord and Baldy particularly Baldy and draw off through a hundred tributaries the crystal waters.

The Black River begins high in the mountains on the east side of Mount Baldy, about a dozen miles from the New Mexico border in Apache County, just west of Nutrioso and almost on a direct line between Alpine and McNary. It curls around Colter Reservoir and Big Lake, and picks up Coyote Creek, Pachete Creek, Paddy Creek, Beaver Creek and Bear Wallow Creek as it flows south to become the border between Apache and Navajo Counties on the north and Graham County on the south. Then, with Freezeout, Prieto, and Stove Creek emptying their occasional waters into its channel, the Black turns north There are many rivers in the world but there is no small river that does more work for mankind than the Salt.

into Gilà County, where it is joined by Pranty Creek and Deer Creek. From the north side of the Black, however, there are coming other waters out of Willow Creek and its tributaries, Sweater and Burnt Corral Creek; Bonita Creek and its tributaries, Corn Creek, Tonto Creek No. 2, and Peary Creek; Turkey Creek No. 2; Georges Basin; Indian Creek, and Nash Creek. Off Corn Creek there branches Hurricane Creek, with eight gullies, for which the map lists no names, which draw directly down the sides of Baldy.

Meanwhile, the White River has had its Genesis in Snowstake Gulch, on the north slope of Old Baldy, and has flowed southwesterly, picking up Trout Creek, Diamond Creek, and the East Fork on the way. The East Fork has come down directly from the slope of Baldy, in a bee line, with Rock Creek emptying into it about midway between Baldy and Fort Apache.

Carrizo, Forestdale, Corduroy, Cedar, Cibecue-those are the creeks from the junction of the White and the Black to where Salt River Draw comes in, on the north side of the Salt. At the head of Salt River Draw is the little settlement of Grasshopper. And where the Draw joins the River are the salt beds which give the stream its flavor and its name.

Still on the north side of the Salt, and moving south toward Roosevelt Dam, the stream accepts the waters of Canyon Creek and its two tributaries, Oak Creek No. 2 and Rockhouse Creek; Soldier Creek, Cherry Creek, Turkey Creek No. 1, Coon Creek, Cholla Creek, Oak Creek No. 1, and Sallymay Creek. From the south side of the Salt there pour in the contributions, large and small depending on the wetness or dryness of the season, of Ash, Hess, Pinal, Pinto, and Campaign Creeks. Two of these are important. Pinal Creek drains the Globe-Miami sector, and one of the tributaries is Live Oak Creek in Miami.

Pinto Creek has two tributaries, named with simplicity and directness West Flow and East Flow. One map of this area shows West Flow spelled "Flo" the cartographer probably was thinking of a girl-friend with that nickname when he drew the region.

The Salt now is at the spot where it has merged with the Tonto to form Roosevelt Lake. This lake is large or small, also depending on the season and the moisture. Roosevelt Dam was built in 1905-11. and so there are many Arizonans, including Governor Sidney P. Osborn and State Tax Commissioner C. Warren Peterson, who can remember when cattle grazed at the confluence of the Salt and the Tonto, where normally the acres now are inundated.

"Salt River Gorge" where U. S. High-way 60 crosses the Salt north of Globe.

How much water comes down the Salt? We have already stated that the average annual flow is 700,000 acre feet. Now let us tell you what a flood can be like. Once before Roosevelt Dam was built, a terrific flood came down the Salt. It met a similar flood out of Tonto Basin, and when the waters had subsided, after much property loss for people in the valley below, a tree was found 250 feet up on the side of the gorge, where the turbulent torrent had tossed it. And on several occasions such floods have poured down on the Salt as to fill the lakes behind all the dams within a few weeks. When the Salt wants to be small, few streams can be smaller; but when it wants to be big-look out!

Tonto Creek itself has a number of tributary streams: Cline, Greenback, Rye, Gun, Spring. Gordon, and Haigler Creeks are the main ones, though there are no fewer than 10 mapped tributaries high in the mountains underneath the Tonto Rim that have been given no names, or at least none which the U. S. Geographic Board thus far has chosen to recognize.

The Salt passes through a strait gate, and a narrow one, from Roosevelt Dam to where it broadens out into the Salt River Valley. In that stretch only four minor streams empty into it, all from the south. They are, from east to west. Pinyon, Fish, Tortilla, and La Barge Creeks. Fish Creek is famous as a tourist spot; it contains the much-photographed, awe-inspiring Walls of Bronze, visible from Fish Creek Hill on the Apache Trail. And, by the way. the Apache Trail runs through or near the Salt River Canyon all the way from Roosevelt Dam down to Apache Junction, a trip no person who visits or lives in Arizona should miss taking at least once.

The Verde is a river in itself, and suffice it to say that it empties into the Salt just east of Granite Reef Dam. The Verde alone is large enough to cause the Salt's channel to be swollen with floodwaters, were it not for Bartlett and Horseshoe Dams.

The contributions to the Salt are almost ended by the time Granite Reef Dam is reached, and the withdrawal of its waters begins. Only Cave Creek and the tiny creek that runs out of Paradise Valley join the Salt from there until the Salt resolves itself into the Gila. But out of the Salt there flows many, many canals the principal ones, broad and deep, themselves sizeable rivers in this desert country.

The Salt River joins the Gila just northeast of a point from which almost all of Arizona's land measurements begin. It is the Gila and Salt River Base and Meridian point where the Base Line and the Meridian join and it is abbreviated on maps, deeds, and other descriptive papers as the G & SR BM.

At this vital point, the Salt has come 200 miles from where the Black and the White meet, and 300 miles if the lengths of those rivers is considered. It has drained 13,000 square miles of watershed, including that of the Verde. It has been joined by a half hundred tributaries large enough to bear names, another score almost as large but unnamed, and hundreds ranging in size down to gullies and arroyos. It has traveled from the lofty slopes of Baldy, which towers 11,590 feet above the sea, to the level lands of the Salt River Valley, a mere 1,000 feet in altitude. It has carved itself out a tremendous story in scenery along the Apache Trail and in Salt River Gorge. And it has contributed green, growing wealth to a once-parched empire.

The Salt River did not always go by that name. It has had no fewer than four names not counting those which the Indians, both prehistoric and modern, may have given to it.

Its first name was Rio Azul-"Blue River" given by Friar Marcos de Niza, who came into what now is Arizona in 1539, with his Moorish black servant, Esteban. Apparently this name did not stick; or, if it did, it was soon ignored. For a year or so later Coronado's men, forced to cross the flooding Salt River on rafts, named it Rio de las Balsas "River of the Rafts." That name, too, proved temporary.

In the late 1700's, two more priests, one of them of Austrian birth and Italian nationality, and the other truly a Spaniard, came into what now is Southern Arizona. One was Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Austrian-born Italian who chose to go into the Spanish colony to perform his life work of building missions and spreading the Gospel. He used Fray Marcos' name for the Salt, or independently named it the same thing, the Rio Azul no one is sure now which was the case. It might have been either, but the fact that Kino probably has available to him Marcos de Niza's data inclines one to believe it was the former. The other priest of the 1700's was Padre Garces, who met death at the hands of Indians at Yuma on July 17, 1781. Garces named the river Rio de la Asuncion. The first surmise normally would be that the name honored the Christian Ascension; but the probability is that Garces was merely putting onto the river the name of Friar Juan de la Asuncion, whom Dr. Elliott Coues, early 20th Century historian of this region, believes was the discoverer of the Gila River.

The name "Salt River" was appended sometime early in the 19th Century, though by whom there is no record. Brig. Gen. A. W. Whipple called it the Salt in 1851, and wrote of his surprise that it was not salty to the taste he must have drunk water far from the salt beds, or have found the stream when it was freshened by a recent rain. In summation of all that has been written and said about the various narnes of the Salt River, this can be said: It is possible that the early discoverers numbered more than one, because the stream might have been "found" in several places before the discoveries were related through the making of a comprehensive map. It is worthy of note that Father Kino, who in Austrian fashion put "oder Blau Fuss" (literally, river with the blue face) on one of his maps, also on one map called the stream Rio de la Asuncion, after Garces' nomenclature. At any rate, by 1851 the name was established, as the Salt in English and the Salida or Salinas in Spanish. It was a name so natural and so appropriate that it has withstood the decades. Although some chamber-of-commerce-minded folk wish that it were the River of Roses or the Stream of Sunshine, it has remained the Salt, a tangy, lusty, flavorsome, tough yes, salty river, leavening the whole countryside through which it passes, and carryingenough salt on into the Gila so that portions of the streambed between Buckeye and Gila Bend are white with the substance.

"Canyon Lake," where the Salt is held by a dam

The Salt isn't the only interesting name along the river.

There is Freezeout Creek, so called because in the early days the cattlemen played a great deal of freezeout poker in the vicinity; and there are Poker Mountain, West Poker Mountain, and Poker Gap, all in the same area, and all drawing their names from the same gambling cowpokes.

Some of the names come from trees: Ash Creek, two Oak Creeks (neither of them, of course, the one which is a tributary of the Verde just south of Flagstaff), a Cherry Creek, a Cedar Creek, and, as though just one tree were not enough, a Forestdale Creek.

Names of people are on other tributaries: Sallymay, Hess, Gordon, Haigler, Cline, Georges Basin, and Nash. The Army is represented with Soldier, Gun, and Campaign Creeks.

Early settlers found one creekbed rank with luxurious growths of wild rye, so they called the stream Rye Creek. Birds and animals have lent their species names: two Turkey Creeks, a Deer, a Trout, a Beaver, a Bear Wallow, and a Coyote.

The colors are evident in the Black and White Rivers. As early as 1846, Lt. W. H. Emory, exploring Arizona, found the waters of one stream dark, and he named it the Prieto, or Dark, River. It later was Anglicized into Black River. There is also a Prieto Creek, not to be confused with the river, although the creek empties into the Black.

The White got its name because it flows out of the White Mountains, and originally was called White Mountain River, according to Will C. Barnes.

There are plenty of Indian and Mexican names: Cibecue, Carrizo, the word Indian itself, Prieto, Pinto, Pinal, Tonto (two of them) and Bonita.

And things, all sorts of things, including Rockhouse, Diamond, Snowstake, Stove, Greenback, and Corduroy have given names to the Salt's tributaries.

Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a powerful poem about the sound of American names. Painted Post, he wrote of; and Deadwood, among others. There are just as powerful,just as interesting names in the Salt River Basin. Take Squaw Tit Peak, for instance, with the delicate-minded moderns have corrupted into the nicer Squaw Peak. Or Horse Mesa what robust zestful stallion, its mane flung with the wild winds, inspired that odd name? The feed was always good on that Mesa, Historian-GeographerBarnes wrote, and so the sheepmen took their horses there. And then there is Camelback Mountain, with the legendof the kneeling camel to support its unforgettable name. The names of the Salt River Basin alone are enough tomake one love the sound of Arizona names, just as Benet loved the sound of American names.

The Salt River Basin is full of stories and legends. There is the story of the big wind that blew through the White Mountains in 1880, a wind so strong that it flattened trees in some portions of the mighty range. The memory of this big wind still lives in the name of Hurricane Creek, near the foot of Mount Baldy. There also is the story of Apache Cave, or Skull Cave, where a band of Apache Indians was wiped out by the United States forces under command of a Major Brown. This cave is loThe influx continued: Such great pioneers as Jacob Hamblin, whom the historian James H. McClintock called "The Leatherstocking of the Southwest." Hamblin was an explorer, a geographer, a historian, a family-founder, a religious leader, a farmer, a long-rifleman, a timbercountry statesman, and a colonizer, all rolled into one. Charles D. Poston, first Arizona delegate to Congress, spent his final years, waiting for his last long rest, by the side of the Salt in Phoenix. T. C. Sirrine, C. I. Robson, G. W.

Sirrine, and F. M. Pomeroy, who established the city of Mesa, and A. F. McDonald, Mesa's first mayor, came to the Salt River Valley just a few years after the Civil War.

Then there were Jack Swilling, who dug the first of the modern canals at what is now Phoenix and who wanted to name the newborn town Stonewall, in honor of the memory of Stonewall Jackson; and Darrell Duppa, the English remittance man, who saw a greater vision even than that of Swilling, and, looking at the ruins of the Hohokam civilization, suggested the name Phoenix because "a new city will spring Phoenix-like upon the ruins of a former civilization." (The statement is quoted in various ways by various historians; regardless of the exact words, all agree on the general language and the significance.) Into the Salt's purview also came Capt. William A. Hancock, "the Clive of Arizona," an Army officer, and venturer, and empire-builder, whose role as officiant at the arrival of the first railroad train in Phoenix was typical of much of his life; John Derby, a writer, who chose as his pen name John Phenix; E. K. Baker, pioneer stage station owner and operator; and a legion of others.

Located near where Horse Mesa Dam has since been built. The soldiers chased the Indians into the cave, and, unable to follow them further, filled the cave with gunfire which ricocheted off the rocky walls and ceiling, killing braves, women, and children. This massacre was part of a long and bitter Indian war in Arizona of which the Americans, according to Barnes and other historians, can hardly be proud.

The flow of the Salt's water is exceeded in romance only by the tide of people who have come into its valley.

There were the very early explorers and missionaries, already named: Marcos de Niza, Coronado, Garces, and perhaps Juan de la Asuncion. Coronado's captains, Cardenas and Tovar, and Coronado's scribe, Jaramillo, saw at the very minimum the highlands of the eastern Salt watershed, and drank from some one or more of its tributaries to quench their thirst so that they could push on toward the Seven Cities of Cibola. The Mormon Battalion passed south of the Salt on its historic march, in 1846, to California; but members of that Battalion returned, and there is a story to the effect that some of them thought the region around what now is Mesa was ideal for a new Zion.

The Army followed, with stalwarts like General Whipple in the vanguard. By now the pioneers were many it was the middle of the last century and there were already Arizonans who classed themselves as oldtimers, and looked down their noses at newcomers. Much Has been written about carpetbaggers; well, a goodly number of the folk who came into this valley carried carpet-

HUBERT A. LOWMAN

The Salt, in the early part of its career, is a wild mountain stream, racing through deep canyons on its way to the sea.

The Salt River Valley was not the only place along the Salt, of course, where colonies sprung up. Ranchers went into the Tonto Basin and far up onto the higher reaches of the watershed, including into Pleasant Valley -where two families, named Graham and Tewksbury, later to become widely publicized, settled. This was a country of notorious renegades, including some of the most desperate robbers, rustlers, and murderers of all. breeds, and half-breeds, known in the West. The country lying just above the confluence of the Salt and the Tonto was a particularly good cattle range, and competition was strong for the right to run stock there. The ancient ruins of an ancient people, high in the mountainside a few miles east of this confluence, looked down on bloodshed once more those ruins can be seen now by any tourist, and are evidences in themselves of how a primitive people sought a grand, and a safe view. We moderns have designated the ruins Tonto National Monument. It was into this general area, only a little farther east, that Archie McIntosh, a Hudson Bay trader, decided to spend his last days-on a ranch, of all things for a man used to the Arctic snows. He set himself down five miles from the Salt on Pinto Creek. What brought him here originally? He was one of Gen. George Crook's most trusted scouts. Like a multitude who followed after him, he came to look and remained to stay.

Baldy itself was originally named Thomas Peak, after Maj. Gen. Thomas of the Army, an early visitor to this hinterland. Bucky O'Neill, the Arizona Rough Rider whose monument stands in the courthouse square in Prescott, knew the watershed and the valley of the Salt well. So did the Charles T. Hayden family, of whom the father became famous in Arizona annals for establishing Hayden's Crossing (now Tempe); the mother, Sallie Hayden, as postmistress of Tempe; and the son, Carl, as Arizona's first statehood representative in Congress and later for more than two decades one of Arizona's senators. Former Sen. Ralph Cameron was another pioneer.

All these people and thousands upon thousands more came to this valley and these canyons and gorges, uplands and lowlands, to give character to, and draw character from, the Salt River.

They formed a pattern: First came the Indians, the aborigines, of course. Then the Spanish priests and explorers; followed by the adventurers, the explorers, the soldiers, and then the colonizers. The colonizers themselves took on different characters some, the first ones, were interested in mineral wealth. Others, coming just after, sought tremendous ranges of land for their livestock, and created empires as vast as some small countries. Then, with the coming of the U. S. government and the passage of the Homestead Act, the small homesteader came to settle. There were conflicts between him and the big landowner, and not all these were resolved peacefully. After the homesteaders came the real empire-builders, the men who saw sites for cities and founded them, who set up industries, who established communications, and who built roads. Darrell Duppa and Jack Swilling were of this class; and so were a hundred others whose names still are good, solid, substantial "coin of the realm" in Arizona. When these people had well begun their work, Arizona ceased being a raw frontier; but these people still are coming, and will continue to come for generations, and their work is far from done. It is a salutary thing to consider that somehow, somewhere there has been room in the vast watershed and valley of the Salt for all these folk. It implies that there will be room for more like them. And the blood that runs in veins of folk such as they were, is the lifeblood of Arizona.

Seven of the 44 major points of interest scenically in Arizona, as listed on the 1948 Arizona Highway Department Map, lie along the course of the Salt River itself and again we do not include the domain of the Verde, a whole vast scenic region by itself.

These seven are the Apache Trail, which is a hundred-mile stretch of superb heights, tremendous distances, dazzling color, and infinite variety; Horse Mesa, Mormon Flat, Stewart Mountain, and Roosevelt Dams; Tonto National Monument; and Pueblo Grande, the City of Phoenix archaeological site on the north bank of the Salt River about seven miles east of downtown Phoenix.

The Apache Trail is exactly 98 miles long, from Apache Junction at the foot of Superstition Mountain to where the Trail enters the main U. S. Highway 60-70 But man has harnessed the Salt, and before it joins the Gila, it fills canals and nourishes a broad agricultural empire. between Miami and Globe. Along the Apache Trail are Goldfield and Tortilla Flat; the little post office of Roosevelt itself, named for Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, the great reclamationist who helped father this first of all big public irrigation and power dams; Fish Creek and the Walls of Bronze; and a hinterland of woods and water, of promontories and peaks, of wilderness so primitive and vast that part of it has been preserved as a Wilderness Area deliberately so that its wild life and flora will not suffer from man's depredations.

As one goes over the Apache Trail, he has opportunities to turn off into a still vaster back country-the country "up under the Rim." There lies the land Zane Grey and others have described, the land of the Tonto Basin and the Mogollon Rim, Pleasant Valley and its war "To the Last Man," and other realms of sagebrush, scrub oak, pine and juniper as romantic and remote.

That is a country for fishing, camping, or simply picnicking. Great cattle ranches are located on this part of the watershed, significant of the range's importance in the growth of the West-ranches like that of the pioneer Armers, northwest of Globe. The dude has left his mark here, too; only generally, once having seen the region, he has stuck.

The civilization of the Salt takes effect where the water enters Roosevelt Lake. From there to the spillway of Stewart Mountain Dam is an almost unbroken chain of manmade lakes, 60 miles in total length.

What became of the Salt then? How does it live its last days and spend its last miles? We have said before that it irrigates the broad green acres of the Salt River Project. But there is a little-told story as to how the water is divided, and how the Salt comes under man's rule, that is pertinent. It is parallel to the grand tale of reclamation which is so familiar that it need not be retold.

The water thunders through the penstocks or over the spillway at Stewart Mountain Dam-out of Saguaro Lake, the first of the big manmade lakes one reaches as one goes up the Salt from Phoenix. The water runs down the Salt's channel, which is used as a natural "canal," to Granite Reef Diversion Dam. There it is divided into two main canals, large enough to carry a total flow of 4,000 second-feet.

In this channel, and behind this diversion dam, the waters of the Salt mix with those of the Verde, the flow of which is harnessed by Horseshoe and Bartlett Dams.

From the two main canals, the water is diverted into secondary canals, thence into laterals, and finally into irrigation ditches. Each farmer is delivered water on his order, the water being measured carefully with weirs.

There is, inevitably, some overflow and some wastage. This goes back into the Salt and Gila River channels through the New and Agua Fria River channels, in the instance of canals north of the Salt River; and directly into the confluence of the Gila and Salt in the case of southern canals. Some goes back, of course, through simple percolation through the soil.

When the water returns, the Salt's mission is ended. It exists no more; though in the salt marshes between Phoenix and Gillespie Dam, and in the salt cedars and tamarisks which line the banks of the Gila, there are ample evidences of the alkalinity which the Salt River has carried from far up in the mountains, to spread out onto the flat lands.

And now the waters which once trickled out of the melting snowbanks, sang down through the forest glades, babbled over small rapids in the draws and the creeks, and roared through the canyons and the gorges, are stilled to a quietness which comes to all Nature just before the end. Almost noiselessly except where a headgate is opened so that a lifesaving transfusion can be given to the soil the water moves through the canals. The Old Salt, the roaring Salt, the lusty Salt, has spent his energies and dies quietly. Dies, yes; but only to be reborn into the Gila. And even as the Salt lies dying, a new Salt is rising up among the snow orchids and the pines, among the cavernous canyons deep-shaded by juniper trees, where bears love to wallow. The warm spring sun touches the brow of Baldy, the forest rings with music, the tributaries of the Black and the White gather up the melting snows. A vast and bosomless Nirvana may lie two hundred miles away in the desert; but the Salt is starting a-fresh and in its youth it is eager.