Reporter on Horseback

Weighing a hundred pounds and walking with a cane, I set out, in 1896, for Arizona. As a young man of twenty-four, I had just won a life and death battle with pneumonia. My doctor, who was probably ahead of his time when it came to understanding the salubrious effect of Arizona climate, ordered me to the Territory.

In those days, the 113,000 square miles of Arizona cradled only 100,000 people. Of these, 25,000 were Indians. It was wild country, and my blood raced to visions of excitement on the frontier.

Nearly all my experience had primed me for the great adventure. My father, P. J. Smalley, was a fighting newspaper editor in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the days when most fighting was not with words but with knives and guns.

At the age of ten, I went to work as local reporter on my father's paper, the Argus. By the time I was sixteen. I was covering the disastrous drouth of 1888 for the St. Paul Globe. Already I had known personally such desperadoes as Jesse James and the Younger brothers

I reached Phoenix with forty dollars in my pockets. but I had letters of introduction to Oakes Murphy, who later became governor, and to his brother, Frank. They gave me a job on the Arizona Republican which they owned. A morning paper, the Republican had to be off the press by midnight, for then the power was shut off.

Six days a week the paper appeared and on Sunday, the editor went to church and prayed to the Lord for help

BY GEORGE H. SMALLEY AS TOLD TO NAT MCKELVEY

in keeping the struggling sheet alive. Payday was an irregular thing. Harvey Lee, business manager, would call the staff together, doling out a few dollars here and there. Then he would give the reporters orders on stores. The stores paid their advertising accounts in merchandise. I used to get a ticket worth five dollars in meals at Coffee Al's North and South Restaurant on Washington Street. I'd also get a laundry order so I could keep my six suits and one set of tails in good order in case the newspaper folded and I had to pawn them. We got our Associated Press news through Western Union several blocks away. So I would run down there many times during an evening before getting a full take. If five pistol shots split the night air, it meant a fire was raging somewhere. One or two pistol shots we disregarded, for they usually meant merely another tragedy in one of the nearby gambling houses. Sometimes a big story would break just before our midnight deadline. Then I would write it feverishly while Bushley, our foreman, makeup man and pressman, stood over me, tearing off short takes to rush to our lone Mergenthaler linotyper. Under the strain of night work, long hours, and excitement, my health again began to fail. So, with bor rowed money, I bought a small ranch on the desert, quitting the newspaper. The outdoor life with plenty of good food worked wonders. When I went to the little rancho, I weighed 112 pounds. Six months later, I had gainedforty and felt like a million plus. In those days, the Apache Indians were pretty primitive. Sometimes a party arty would stop at the ranch. The bucks were naked, except for loin cloths, and the women and girls were bare from the hips up. Coffee Al, the restaurant man, took a picture of a young Indian girl with a buxom bosom and a nursing papoose. He put this up in his North and South Restaurant, labeled: "Hot meals at all hours." By 1897, I was back with the paper. My first assignment took me to Tucson to check on progress of the new University of Arizona. There I met for the first time Lydia Roca, the little girl with the saucy gray-green eyes. Later, she would be my wife. After the Tucson trip, I made an overland journey to the Grand Canyon to write news stories about mining. I traveled in a buckboard, complete with camping outfit and provisions. I slept either on the ground or in rough, tough mining camps where entertainment was ample, if not royal. On this trip, I met two grand characters, Bucky O'Neill, famous Rough Rider and politician, and John Hance. Hance was the greatest story teller since Baron Munchausen. He liked to tell about his pumpkins which grew from the canyon floor all the way to the rim and hung on the rocks like balloons, waiting to be plucked. While examining claims down in the canyon, I did a foolish thing and became something of a hero becauseof it. I climbed Hogan's slide, a short route up and down, from rim to river. Made by Dan Hogan, the slide was a series of notches cut in the rock for foot and hand holds. The wall was nearly perpendicular. Being a tenderfoot, I didn't know you couldn't climb a cliff in razor-toe shoes, so I did and lived to tell it. Had I slipped, I would have fallen a thousand feet to sure death.

Hot on the trail of a so-called gold strike, I entered Mexico in November, 1897. At Minas Prietas, an American dulce vendor told me that the strike was reality, that he personally had hefted a satchel containing $200,000 in gold from the new fields. Said he had lifted it with one hand. When I explained that much gold would weigh nearly 800 pounds, the man winced and muttered and backed down. There was no strike.

While in Mexico, I met Colonel Kosterlitsky, Russian renegade and army deserter, who headed the Mexican Rurales. Recruited from Mexico's prisons, the Rurales were a tough bunch, tough enough to clean out the bandit menace of northern Mexico. Frequently, Kosterlitsky told me, they resorted to the ley de fuego. They would tell a prisoner he could escape, then shoot him down when he tried it. Sometimes, before being shot, prisoners had to dig their own graves.

While poking around the Yaqui River near Soyopa, I stumbled across an American prospector, stone blind, unable to care for himself.

"Last night I could see," he told me. "When I woke up this morning, my eyes wouldn't work."

Putting the fellow on his horse, I led him to a doctor at Minas Prietas. The doctor skillfully removed a scale from the man's eyes, restoring sight. The scale, the doctor told me, was bat secretion and had fallen into the pros-pector's eyes from an ocotillo cactus roof while he slept.

In Soyopa, I met Captain Tracy Dearth, known to the Mexicans as El Capitan. A fugitive, wanted for mur-der in Wisconsin, he had lived in Yaqui country for 25 years. He introduced me to Tubatuma, chieftan of the Yaquis. At the Indians' camp, according to custom, we handed over our .45s, placing ourselves under the protec-tion of Tubatuma. Had we kept our guns, we would have been enemies in the eyes of the Indians.

In one of the Indian huts, a young girl lay writhing on the ground, deathly sick from a rattlesnake bite high on her thigh. When we approached, the girl's mother quickly covered her, true to Yaqui modesty. El Capitan prepared a special mash of green potatoes to draw out the poison. The Yaqui mother applied it and the girl recovered.

While on the trail, I met a fellow who said his name was Smith. He seemed jovial enough until we would stop by a stream to swim or bathe. Then he would insist that I go a mile or two away from him. I couldn't under-stand this until one day, quite by accident, I discovered that he wore around his middle a canvas belt. Buckled so tightly it made him black and blue, the belt contained gold bars. Smith was a smuggler for the Mulatos Gold Mine, smuggling gold bars into the United States to avoid an export duty imposed by the Mexican government. I kept his secret.

My Mexican trip was a lot of fun, and I made some good money writing about it. But I failed to become a big-time mine operator. Back in Phoenix, I again reported mining operations for the Republican. In 1899, I uncovered the Spenazuma Mining swindle. Dr. Richard C. Flower, a quack and eastern confidence man, had established a fake mine near Geronimo and was mulcting millions of dollars by selling stock to gullible folks.

Flower was a cynic who told his attorney to name the fake mining corporation "anything that will make the suckers spend their mazuma." The witty lawyer called it Spenazuma. I publicized the illegitimate nature of this mine, and we ran Flower out of Arizona. Years later, he was captured in Toronto, Canada, by the Pinkerton people. He died while awaiting trial.

Soon I went to Tucson to edit the Daily Citizen for Herbert Brown. When I got the paper, there were only a few dollars in the safe and a bundle of outstanding bills. In fact, the most outstanding thing about the paper was the mass of accounts payable. Tucson, in the year 1900, was a town of 7,500, wide open for liquor and gambling with percentage girls hustling everyone they could.

In 1901, I became engaged to Lydia Roca, the girl with the saucy eyes. I wrote my own announcement for the paper, leaving it in the copy basket. Somebody on the staff got hold of it, changing a few points. Next day I was mortified to read in my own paper that my staff doubted "that any girl would marry a man with a glass eye, a wooden leg, and who, having been scalped by the Yaquis, wore a wig."

About this time, the Citizen changed hands and politics and I lost my job. I established the Tucson Post, a weekly, the only Republican paper in Pima county. Lydia and I were married now, and I told her she should patronize my advertisers. She took me literally. When I went to pay the bills and collect for the advertising, I found that I owed my advertisers more than they owed me. Lydia had bought something from each one, whether or not she needed it.

Colonel Alexander O. Brodie, who had been with Teddy Roosevelt in the Rough Riders, became governor of Arizona. At his urging, I took up work as his secretary. Very deeply I felt that I was giving up my future as a writer. I hoped this was not true.

Governor Brodie took office July 1, 1902. I became his man Friday. I wrote his annual report to the Secretary of the Interior, speeches, messages to the legislature and hundreds of letters. I even wrote magazine articles under the governor's name. One of them appeared in Cosmopolitan.

One of my jobs for Governor Brodie was to arrange for Teddy Roosevelt's visit to the Grand Canyon. I secured a brass band of six so-called musicians and several hundred citizens turned out to greet the President. One of them was Sandy Donohue, bartender at Flagstaff's Senate Saloon. He pestered me until I introduced him to President Roosevelt. Sandy eyed the President a minute, then blurted:

"By God, you are a better looking man than your picture, you old son-of-a-bitch!"

Roosevelt, who understood the rugged West, guffawed.

At the Canyon, following a speech, Roosevelt asked me to have the band play the popular "Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight." Being Mexicans, the musicians didn't know the tune and so played the only American song they could, a funeral dirge. When I told the President that they didn't know "Hot Time," he bawled, "The country is going to the dogs!"

When the Governor resigned to take a post in the Ordnance Department of the Army, I got a job as clerk of the federal court in the newly created fifth judicial district. We lived in Globe in the home of George W. P.

Hunt, late a state legislator and for many terms governor of Arizona. I was very fond of him.

He used to have his meals with us, and he ate with his knife. This amazed my little daughter, Yndia, who remarked: "Mr. Hunt, look out you don't cut your mouth." Hunt laughed. But after that he quit eating with his knife, at least at our house.

While clerk of the court, I bought my first automobile. It was a two-seated Reo. There was no garage in Globe, and I did all my own mechanical work. I paid fifty cents a gallon for gasoline. The Reo was a wonderful car. It had dry cells for ignition and carbide lamps for night driving. The motor was a two-cylinder job and the steering wheel was on the right. The tires, very thin, were of fabric. To get them I had to send to El Paso.

I always carried an extra chain for the chain-driven motor, extra axles and extra leaves for the springs. The brakes had bands made from camels' hair, and they frequently caught fire if pressured too long. On a 140-mile journey to Tucson to see Sarah Bernhardt, the renowned actress, my Reo used up four new tires and twelve inner tubes. It broke an axle and lost a wheel. Auto travel was a real adventure in those days.

In 1912, Arizona became a state, and I lost most of my money by bad guessing on the Cordova mine at Globe. I went back to my first love, newspaper work. In Los Angeles I worked for the Tribune, then I went to San Francisco to work for the Morning Call. But I missed the freedom of Arizona. I didn't like San Francisco where the sun seemed to set behind the first house.

Traveling to Phoenix on the train, I had a terrible presentiment. I saw my dear old Dad in a white gown. going skyward. Sure enough, I received a telegram saying that my father had passed away on November 27, 1912. A grander man never lived. Somehow, the death of my father recalled all the marvelous freedom I had known as a boy. I could see drunken Irishmen and Germans battling in the streets of my home town, Caledonia. Minn. It was elemental, but it was wonderful too. My adventurous past made me proud to be the son of a fighting newspaper editor and a sort of reporter on horseback myself. And, too. it sure was fun.