Salome

WELCOME TO SALOME "Where She Danced/ MOST FAMOUS LITTLE SALOME FROG CITY IN THE WEST IM 7 YEARS OLD

Much-traveled U. S. Highways 60 and 70, important transcontinental routes, form the main street of Salome, friendly desert oasis.

BY LAWRENCE CARDWELL

Even on maps it looks like a long way between water holes up in northern Yuma County, Arizona. And it is. In these days of paved highways and fast automobiles when it doesn't take long, your speedometer still says it's not a crowded country.

About half way between Wickenburg and Blythe, California, on U. S. Highway 60-70, Salome, complete with airfield, modern accommodations, automobile facilities, and the legal machinery for quick marriages, squats invitingly on the floor of the desert. And it's only 150 miles to Old Mexico if you feel the need of a quick divorce so, among other advantages, everything is handy for legalized emotional happiness.

Salome doesn't sneak up on you; it is seen for several miles from either direction. In the daytime it glistens in the warm sunshine, and at night in its own multi-colored neons. It's just about far enough that you want a drink or a bite to eat or something-maybe just to stretch your legs and sniff the desert sunshine. An average of 700 cars and 300 trucks and buses pass through Salome every twenty-four hours: ninety per cent of them stop for one reason or another.

While Salome now seems to have settled down to a permanent location, it had more or less trouble determining where best to put down roots. Early in 1904 Salome hadn't even been dreamed up. Its site was only part of the surrounding desert; brush, cacti, rabbit and deer tracks, and occasionally man sign. where some venturesome prospector had passed.

Then Dick Wick Hall and a party of mining engineers came that way. One of the engineers believed artesian water could be easily developed in the wide valley. The Santa Fe Railroad had just completed the survey for the Parker cut-off. Dick Wick Hall began to dream.

It is hard to tell the story of Salome without confusion with the story of its father. It was Dick Wick Hall's baby. He conceived it, nursed it along through the years when it seemed hardly worth the effort, and made it famous by his humorous writings while its only link to the outside world was a pair of wheel ruts that wound and squirmed among the desert boulders and sand washes.

Dick, born DeForest Hall, March 20, 1877, at Creston, Iowa, came to Arizona in 1899. He was a promoter in the true sense of the word, mining, oil, newspaper, and land development-anything that was a legitimate gamble and might show a profit. His Salome property was the only thing he ever owned that he wouldn't sell.

With artesian water in the immediate offing and the railroad survey stakes shining white across the desert, Dick rounded up his brother, Ernest, and C. H. Pratt and they organized the Grace Valley Development Company, filing squatters' rights on 1500 acres of land along a mile or so of survey stakes. Their headquarters was completed in the fall of 1904 and the first well in northern Yuma County was drilled. Water was struck at 150 feet, but it wasn't artesian.

With the vision of a vast irrigation project thus blighted, but not to be stymied by such a trifle when they had plenty of well water in a parched country, they built a large store building, restaurant, saloon, and hotel. Mrs. Pratt's given name was Grace Salome, so it was a natural sequence to call the "town" Salome after having used up her first name in naming the company. Other wells were drilled but artesian water did not materialize in any of them.

In 1905 the railroad was actually built. But, as fate has a habit of doing about the time a person builds themselves a town and are all prepared for fame and fortune, the railroad re-surveyed and found a better grade a half mile south; Salome was left high and dry along a row of now weathered gray stakes. However, fate did not reckon on Dick Wick Hall. He pried up what buildings were moveable, along with the name Salome and the postoffice (being the postmaster) and moved right down to the new tracks. There seems to have been some words locally and considerable correspondence with the Postal Department about the post office, but it was never moved back. For a number of years. while Dick was mining and real estating around the country, there wasn't much to excite folks about Salome-even whether it had a post office.In 1920 Dick Wick Hall returned from a Texas oil venture with nothing left but his Salome property. More and more hardy souls were sweating and cussing and working their way cross-country in automobiles. Roads were a-building; the Phoenix-Los Angeles route, then via Buckeye, Hassayampa and northwest to Salome, was graded to the Hassayampa River; from there to the Colorado River it was dirt, sand, boulders, chuck-holes, and high centers. But Salome was on its staggering line of march.

Dick, now married and with two children, started his later-to-be-become-famous "Laughing Gas Station" and decorated orated the building with printed signs of his own gay humor: "The Softest, Sweetest Air on Earth," "Free Hot Air-Hell Can't Be Very Far Away," "You Don't Have To Stay Here, But We Do," and many others. He went miles out along the road in both directions and stuck up similar signs at particularly aggravating spots. Travelers needed a laugh along the road. Coming by a mimeograph machine he began "publishing" the Salome Sun when and as he felt in the mood, running off about a thousand copies per issue, which he passed out to his gas customers. Because of its pungent humor the Salome Sun was reprinted in big newspapers and magazinesDick Wick Hall, who founded Salome, credited the town with an annual growth of 100 per cent a year: "19 people in 19 years." He poked fun at the roads, but always bragged about the fertility of the land: "Melons don't do very well here becuz the vines grow so fast they wear the melons out dragging them around the ground-and in dry years we sometimes have to plant onions in between the rows of potatoes and then scratch the onions to make the potatoes eyes water enough to irrigate the rest of the garden-and the kids sure do hate to scratch the onions on moonlight rights." Another yarn of Hall's is the story of Mac, the Yale sprinter, who took a job herding sheep and was warned by Reed, his boss, not to lose any: "The sheep and Mac soon disappeared in the brush and nothing more was thought of them until supper time came and no sign of Mac or the sheep. Reed commenced to worry about the sheep, and about seven o'clock was about to start out looking for them when Mac at last came driving them up through the brush into the corral and, after shutting them in, came up to the chuck tent, streaked with dust and perspiration and from all appearances, tired out. Before Reed could say anything. Mac burst out: 'Boss,' he said, 'I'm through. They thought back east that I was a foot racer, but I'm not. Almost any sheep herder that can herd that band for a week and not lose lambs can beat all the world's

D. W. HALL SOLD "LAUGHING GAS" AND LAUGHTER IN SALOME

records. I didn't lose any today and I ran every one of those damn lambs back into the band every time they tried to get away, but one day is enough for me. I'm all in, but they are all there. Go and count them up and then give me my time. I'm done.' "Reed, knowing that there were no lambs in the band and that none of the ewes could have lambed yet, went down to the corral to investigate and, off in one corner, huddled up by themselves, he counted 47 jackrabbits and 16 cottontails. He had his ideas about feeding children: "I'd like to find out who told my WIFE that SPINACH was good for children. My kids are like all other children-they don't like anything that is GOOD for them and they think their DAD is all right. They also have an idea that if SPINACH is good for CHILDREN, BIGGER doses of it ought to be good for their DAD, so my WIFE, in order to get the KIDS to eat SPINACH, feeds ME SPINACH three times a day and makes ME say I LIKE it, until I feel like a HOLSTEIN COW or the INSIDE of a GREENHOUSE.When asked why Salome danced, he said: "Everybody seems to think I am the man that made her dance, but it wasn't my fault. I told her to keep her shoes on or the sand would burn her feet." Of his frog, Hall wrote, "I raised him on the bottle, Shasta and Pluto water, mostly, and that is why he is a lively and Healthy Frog-even though he can't swim yet, it isn't his fault. He never had a chance but lies in hopes. Three years ago Fourth of July. Palo Verde Pete shot off a box of Dyna mite and the Frog, thinking it was Thunder, chasedthe cloud of Smoke two miles down the road thinking it might rain. Once he went to sleep under the office, and while asleep it rained, and he woke up just in time to see it stop and to get his feet wetbut he is older and wiser now and getting like the rest of the natives. He just thinks he is having a Hell of a Time-if the World looks Blue and Your Luck is Bad and You think You are having a Hell of a Time-why just stop and think of My Frog -Seven Years old and he Can't Swim.' Hall created the famous Greasewood Golf Lynx, "Located. At and around Salome, Arizona-Where She Danced-and the folks who see it all Say Nobody Never Saw Nothing Like It Nowhere. The Course is Just a Little over Twenty-three (23) Miles Around and All Hazards and Bunkers are Natural-No Artificial Ones Needed. Some Eastern Folks Spend the Season Here a Purpose Just to Play Around it Once-and Some Others who Have Been Here Several Seasons ain't ever Got Around it Yet. Players are Warned to Use Maps and Not to get off the Far A Ways between the Holes. Coyote and Rabbit Holes don't count. Good Guides Who Know the Course can be Obtained at the Blue Rock Inn, (the nineteenth hole), and Caddys, Horses and Canteens, also Tents and Camping Outfits can be Leased by the Week, Month or Season, Provided a deposit is Put Up and All Caddys, Horses Lost on the Course Must Be Paid For."

here and abroad. At the instigation of editors Dick wrote more humor for the Saturday Evening Post and other national magazines. Salome became famous, but the road was still lousy.

Like the fathers of many backward projects, Dick did not live to see the "road" rerouted and become a paved trans continental highway and Salome grow into the healthful desert resort of his dreams. He died April 28, 1926, and was buried beside his little office where so much of his humor had originated. This was his wish. The grave is marked by an eight foot shaft of ore samples, and a cross of gold-flecked quartz down the center of the crypt, all brought in by pros pector friends mostly from mines and prospect holes that he had been interested in at one time or another.

The following year Mrs. Addie Lee Van Orsdel arrived in Salome seeking health for her husband. The 1874-foot alti tude, mild winter climate, and desert sunshine proved benefi cial. They built a small service station and lunch room-and caught the infection of Dick Wick Hall's Salome dream. They added to and improved, and plugged Salome in the Dick Wick Hall tradition, and business increased as more cars came that way. Van's became a landmark in its own right. Mr. Van died in 1933 but she carried on. The paving was coming.

But Salome wasn't through moving. Most of its few build ings lounged on the north side of the tracks, but the Vans had established themselves on the south side of the tracks facing the road before it crossed into town. The new highway survey stayed south of the railroad and Salome was left in the wrong place again. Today there are only two or three deserted store buildings quietly disintegrating north of the tracks while the new Salome had her agile feet firmly set on both sides of the wide highway.

In 1936, about the time the paving was finished, Van's caught fire and burned to the ground. In a matter of days Mrs.

Van had the wreckage cleared, a temporary place operating, and plans under way for the building of a bigger and better Van's. Other filling stations, garages, and lunch rooms were mushrooming along the highway. Transcontinental buses were routed that way; traffic became heavy; business was brisk. Dick Wick Hall's dream was materializing.

California had passed its three day cooling-off-period and physical-examination marriage law. With the new fast high way and only 63 miles over the State line, Salome became a marriage mecca. The name of the Biblical dancing girl seemed especially appealing to the matrimonially inclined. Justice of the Peace John A. Provorse, who held forth in Salome for ten years, married 3,022 couples. He rendered 24 hour service, from license to benediction.

Sheffler Brothers of Los Angeles took over Van's and just across the highway built a modern fifty unit motel with air conditioning and swimming pool that is second to none any where. Today there are three other courts comprising another 32 units. Prices range from $1.50 to $4.50 per day depending on the accommodations and number in the party. Six restau rants and three bars do their best to make the traveler's stop satisfying.

Salome's one general mercantile store serves a 25 mile