PARADOX COUNTRY

PARADOX

Almost everything about Arizona's southeast corner is unusual. It started that way four hundred and thirteen years ago when a big, swaggering colored man passed by with two greyhounds and a harem of three hundred Indian girls, and practically nothing normal has happened there since. It is a topsy-turvy land of the old, the new, the past, the present and the future mixed up in a tangy, Far Western brew with a taste all its own. Gleaming streamliners snake by hardriding cowboys rounding up cattle on ranches big as Eastern counties; Cadillacs doing eighty cross trails with plodding, bewhiskered prospectors leading burros into lonely hills; sleek aluminum trailers park in canyons near campfires of sombreroed Mexican woodcutters or a group of Apaches gathering acorns; and crumbling skeletons of prehistoric redmen, a couple of thousand years old, are dug out of excavations for an airplane hangar. Only last month a retired Cleveland manufacturer andhis wife gave a cocktail party to celebrate the completion of their ultra-modern chrome-and-glass ranch house, while up the road a mile or two Jeb Flaherty took time off from hunting mountain lions to pot-shot at Hank Fox in a feud so old neither of them could tell you what started it. The housewarming ended the evening at the country club dance. Hank Fox went to the hospital. Jeb and his dogs treed a snarling, two-hundred-pound cat by sunrise. Yes, that country down there where Arizona meets old Mexico and New under the blue Southwestern sky puts its stamp on people and always has. It's big and hard, and indifferent, and it may lick you. But there is a haunting, magnetic quality about it which gets under your skin and stays there. A he-man country, sure enough, but women like it toomaybe because there are plenty of he-men in it. But if the inhabitants of this paradoxical region are sub-, ab-, and super-normal and never do anything according to Hoyle, it is really not their fault. Nature started some millions of years ago to make southeastern Arizona different

BY WELDON COUNTRY

from any other place on earth, and the humans just follow along. Perhaps, in a way, they are laboratory specimens, for it looks as if Mother Nature, in a capricious mood, tried out an experiment on a ground scale.

Square in the middle of the hottest and driest deserts in North America she plumped a roomy oasis about the size of West Virginia which has one of the pleasantest yearround climates in the country. Down there along the Mexican border are places where summers are cooler than southern Minnesota, yet January is as balmy as central Georgia or Mississippi.

This natural air-conditioning trick was achieved by boosting the whole region into the sky, where it gets a unique combination of cool breezes in summer and a warm winter sun. In fact, the sun works overtime twelve months of the year and is on duty nine-tenths of all daylight hours. Unlike the low central and western parts of the state, southeastern Arizona is high: fully eighty percent is above 4,000 feet and much of it 1,000 feet more. Then, too, in July and August, towering white thunderclouds build up into the afternoon sky and obligingly drop refreshing showers to green up the country and cool the air.

On this unique high island in the desert Nature then went to work and carved out broad, sweeping river valleys, rolling plateaus, and long, swelling mountain ranges to the blue horizon, a hundred miles away. Over the hills she spread a carpet of grass for thousands of cattle to graze, and buried treasures of gold, silver and copper for men to dig up. And to finish it off she scattered oak groves here and there and covered the mountaintops with five hundred square miles of lush evergreen forests she must have stolen from Oregon and British Columbia.

But Nature skimped on water and she left the landscape vast, harsh and rough-hewn. So her experiment produced a country where men can live, work and play, but with a set of rules that have to be learned if you want to succeed. No sissies need apply, and those who believe they can smooth the rough edges and tame the country will fail.

The particular region I am talking about extends from the New Mexico line to around Nogales, and north from the Mexican border to the Gila River. But it excludes Tucson and its surrounding desert valleys. This parcel of real estate came with the Gadsden Purchase-that strip of land stretching along our southern boundary from Texas to California, bought by Uncle Sam in 1853. The canny old gentleman picked up 45,500 acres for $10,000,000 and inadvertently got a bargain. The country has paid off twenty-toone in cattle and minerals, and in recent years has tapped a new source of gold-tourists.

The two C's-Cows and Copper-still dominate the economy of southeastern Arizona. Since the days of the Spaniards cattle and mine dumps have been a part of the scenery. Business goes up and down with the price of beef and if Bisbee's movie theater shows rows of empty seats, copper probably dropped a point or two that day. The mines have an Eastern connection and are mostly owned by the big Phelps Dodge Corporation in New York, but the cow business is as native as the cactus and mesquite out on the range.

If you want to get the feel of this great Southwestern industry, ride with the cowhands some morning when the wind blows fresh and clean in your face and the buttes and mesas stand sharp against the sky. Limber up your muscles helping brand a few calves; pile your tin plate twice at the chuck wagon; and lounge around the evening campfire as the hands tell stories and sing under the stars. But excuse yourself when they start mending fences, repairing the windmill or doctoring sick stock-for that is what cowboys do nine-tenths of the time. In fact, on a cattle ranch you have to be an expert veterinarian, dietician, plumber, electrician, engineer, carpenter and a right handy man with the baling wire. There is no union either, and you are on call twenty-four hours a day. But raising cattle is as old as civilization and as broad as mankind-which makes it one of the most absorbing and satisfying activities a man can engage in. Presumably, the same is true of the region's other great industry-mining. Since the misty dawn of the Paleolithic Age, a gnawing, feverish excitement has stirred men to search for riches in the earth. For over two centuries southeastern Arizona's mineral wealth has lured treasure seekers from all parts of the world, and today there are scores of men among the wrinkled hills working claims with an undying, ever-renewable conviction that tomorrow they will strike their fabulous bonanzas.

This faith has paid dividends in Arizona. The state's fame and fortune rest on the three and a half billion dollars in gold, silver, copper and other minerals which have come from her mines. The southeastern corner has contributed a large share of this, but until the dread Apaches were finally vanquished in 1886, prospecting in that remote, inhospitable country was a hazardous and often fatal occupation.

Nevertheless, back in 1877, a prospector named Ed Schieffelin was convinced that the region held vast treasures for the taking and he vowed that nothing was going to keep him from finding out.

"I like the excitement of being right up against the earth, trying to coax her gold away to scatter it," he said, and he left the newly established frontier army post of Fort Huachuca to prospect the barren, Apache-infested hills east of the San Pedro River. "All you'll find is your Tombstone," the soldiers warned him. But they were wrong. True, Ed didn't discover any gold, but he struck one of the richest silver veins the world has ever known, and in four years his Tombstone became a lusty, rip-roaring camp of 15,000 people. Its history is livelier than any fiction and it topped the list of Western mining towns for downright vicious lawlessness. In Tombstone hell-raising became almost a civic duty. During the time that a flood of silver poured from the Tough Nut, Lucky Cuss, Goodenough, Contention and other mines in the 1880's, more bandits, gamblers, prostitutes, gunfighters and desperadoes walked Tombstone's streets than any other place in the country, and the Earp-Clanton shooting fray at the O.K. Corral was probably the most famous exchange of whistling lead in the West. The camp had only a few years of active life. Then underground water flooded the mines and Tombstone was left for dead among its barren desert hills. However, a town with a newspaper called The Epitaph; with grave markers in its Boothill Cemetery reading "Hanged by Mistake"; and a sheriff named John Slaughter, address Tough Nut Street, Tombstone, had too rugged a constitution to become a ghost. And it didn't-quite. In recent years Tombstone has perked up as a health resort, advertises its genial year-round climate, and playfully re-enacts its past hangings, shootings and brawlings in the riotous days of the Helldorado each year in October. But there are ghosts aplenty haunting the hills and canyons of southeastern Arizona. Throughout the area are scattered the crumbling adobe skeletons of once husky mining camps-Gleeson, Pearce, Dos Cabezas, Paradise, Helvetia, Duquesne, and dozens more each with its stirring history and proud, lingering memories of the brave deeds of the boom days. Some maintain a sleepy suspended animation, serving as post offices and general stores for surrounding cattle ranches while waiting to be reborn. As I said, miners' hopes never die.

Then there is Bisbee, a city with a copper lining, very much alive deep in its canyon in the colorful Mule Mountains, twenty-four miles south of Tombstone. European pundits who tell us that all American cities look alike should visit Bisbee. The town strings along two converging canyons between polychrome mountains rising a thousand feet or more. Tier upon tier of houses climb the stark grey, buff, brown and red slopes on either side and find precarious footholds atop dizzy retaining walls. Long flights of steps clamber helter-skelter up the heights and lead to steep, twisting lanes reminiscent of Italian hill towns. It has been said that a Bisbeean, if so minded, can sit on his porch and spit down his neighbor's chimney, and the Post Office Department flatly refuses to risk heart failure delivering mail in such a vertical community. So the citizens must drop down upon the post office to collect their letters from impressive ranks of windowed boxes.

Since 1880, Bisbee mines, paced by the famed Copper Queen, have yielded close to a billion dollars in copper, gold, and silver. Today, operations have begun on the huge Lavender Pit, which will be a mile long, a half mile wide, and several hundred feet deep. Buildings have been razed, houses moved a couple of miles down the canyon, roads relocated, and Bisbee's surroundings made even more fantastic-if possible. But Bisbeeans can smile upon their town and lacerated scenery, for soon theirs will be the boomingest mining town in the country.

Bisbee ore goes to the big, 300-acre Phelps Dodge Copper Smelter at Douglas, out in broad, flat Sulphur Spring Valley, twenty-five miles east. Marked by two tall stacks, plumed with yellow smoke, and girdled by black slag heaps, the grim Stygian smelter has a capacity of 100,000 tons of ore a month and when operating full-blast employs 800 men.

Douglas, a border city of some 10,000 population and the fourth largest in Arizona, is the civic antithesis of cramped Bisbee. It is an open, roomy place of wide shade-less streets where the arching sky, spreading valley and distant, tawny mountains seem as much a part of the town as the Elks Club and the Presbyterian Church. A child of the smelter, the young city still obeys its mother, but in recent years has taken some toddling, baby steps on its own. Several light manufacturing plants have settled in Douglas, and north of town the once unbroken cattle range has suddenly sprouted a green checkerboard of irrigated fields. Cotton gins, chili pepper and vegetable canneries are giving business a new stimulus. Then there is always the chance that the wildcat drilling rigs scattered northward up Sulphur Spring Valley to Willcox might strike the state's first oil field.

less streets where the arching sky, spreading valley and distant, tawny mountains seem as much a part of the town as the Elks Club and the Presbyterian Church. A child of the smelter, the young city still obeys its mother, but in recent years has taken some toddling, baby steps on its own. Several light manufacturing plants have settled in Douglas, and north of town the once unbroken cattle range has suddenly sprouted a green checkerboard of irrigated fields. Cotton gins, chili pepper and vegetable canneries are giving business a new stimulus. Then there is always the chance that the wildcat drilling rigs scattered northward up Sulphur Spring Valley to Willcox might strike the state's first oil field.

Although Bisbee is named for a San Francisco lawyer who never saw the place, Douglas was laid out in 1900 and honors Dr. James Douglas, minister and physician with a sharp eye for copper stains, who negotiated the purchase of the Copper Queen Mine for Phelps Dodge in 1880 and later became the company's president. His grandson, Lewis W. Douglas, ex-ambassador to the Court of Saint James, recently retired to his cattle ranch among the grassy, oakdotted hills of Sonoita, and it has long been rumored that Princess Margaret will visit daughter Sharman there. Southeastern Arizona will then find itself for the first time in the international social column, but if I know anything about the region, the royal visit will not cause even a ripple of excitement. For one of the outstanding characteristics of southeastern Arizonans is a complete apathy towards those with wealth, power, fame, position or ability. Movie stars, high politicos, industrial magnates, authors, scientists, and even John L. Lewis come and go, but no one wants their autographs, there are no welcoming committees, not a telephone book is torn, no bunting flies-in short, nobody seems to care.

Out under the brilliant Arizona sun, with a hundredmile sweep of country for a background, human beings fail to remain impressive. Nature quickly whittles them down to size. That is perhaps why class distinctions are nonexistent and a man is never rated by his business or position. He stands or falls by what he is, not what he has. At rural parties, dances, and community gatherings cooks, cow punchers, farmers, storekeepers, prospectors, miners, dudes and millionaires mix in easy coequal familiarity. I believe the reason for these anomolous social and economic patterns is because southeastern Arizona has not yet outgrown the pioneer stage of development. In a pioneer country, unlike the city, a man's battle for livelihood is with the land, not with other people. His necessities and comforts come from his own efforts rather than through community organization. Thus, the pioneer's problems are individual, immediate and are best solved by himself alone. The job at hand is all-important to a continuation of three square meals a day, so long-range cooperative enterprises become secondary and tend to be leisure-time, cultural activities. Such an independent environment puts all men on an equal footing in their non-competitive, personal battle with the land, and lumps them into one general social and economic class without regard to the size of their bank balances.

Where sun and wind, droughts, floods, pests, heat and cold are an active, vital part of daily living, people's surroundings are infinitely more important to them than they are to city dwellers. Nature sits on each man's doorstep and can't be ignored, for she is boss. So natural phenomena become the chief subjects for thought and discussion, with the weather easily heading the list of absorbing topics of conversation. Even gossip takes second place.

Water is the life blood of the region and the rhythmic throbbing of the pump is the heartbeat of every ranch. But there has never been quite enough moisture to go around, and water is always southeastern Arizona's greatest concern. Each winter storm and summer shower is watched as anxiously as anxiously as stock market operators scan the ticker tape. "Getting mighty dry," is a standard conversational gambit, and it is told that when Noah looked out of the Ark on the forty-first morning of the Flood and announced that the weather was clearing, an Arizona cowboy aboard remarked, "Yeah, but what we need is one more good rain."

Good feed is the basis of the cattle business and generous summer rains are essential to its prosperity. When they do come, hills and valleys are spread with a fresh, bright carpet of grass, green as a golf course. During July and August the sky becomes the most animated and spectacular part of southeastern Arizona's scenery: gigantic white cumuli boil thousands of feet upwards and trail purple curtains of rain across the land. Often you can count ten storms at once in a grand, elemental chorus accompanied by continuous rolling thunder, pyrotechnic lightning flashes, and high-arched rainbows. To me, it is then that southeastern Arizona is at the top of its form-a fascinating and exciting place to be.

But all this talk about pioneers and unleashed natural forces may be misleading. For you would be wrong in assuming that the area is a raw, new, undeveloped semiwilderness. Actually, it is a land old in human living, with a lively and colorful background of history. Red-skinned progenitors of present-day Indians peopled the country ten thousand years ago and left evidences of the oldest wellestablished culture in the Southwest. Swashbuckling Spanish conquistadores in shining armor were exploring southeastern Arizona more than half a century before the British founded Jamestown. Led by the indomitable Jesuit, Father Eusebio Kino, blackand brown-robed priests spun a tenuous web of civilization northward from Mexico seventy years in advance of Father Junipero Serra's famous chain of California Missions. Arizona's first white settlement at Tubac in the Santa Cruz Valley, north of Nogales, established in 1752, was, in fact, the jumping-off place for the long land journey to the Pacific Coast. From there in 1776, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza started on his remarkable trek across a thousand miles of desert with 240 colonists for the founding of San Francisco.

The past seems closer and more significant in southeastern Arizona than in crowded, fast-growing urban centers. Man has little changed the face of Nature and you can survey the parade of history back to the beginnings of things. For instance, beside the general store in the little San Pedro Valley town of Palominas, just north of the Mexican line, is a marker which tells that in 1540 Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his army entered what is now Arizona at that point on his quixotic search for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibolla, reputed to be paved with gold and encrusted in jewels. The expedition was a miserable failure as far as treasure was concerned, but Coronado's quest bequeathed a Spanish heritage to one-eighth of the United States. It is still strong in the Southwest, four centuries later.

But a year in advance of the dashing Captain-General, the huge, handsome negro, Esteban de Dorantes, and the Franciscan padre, Fray Marcos de Niza, cut northward through the land. The strange odyssey of this mismatched scouting team of earthly slave and Man of God is one of the most dramatic and unbelievable in the annals of American exploration. Esteban strutted vaingloriously across a page of history to be transfixed by Zuñi Indian arrows, but to this colored man goes the honor of being the first outsider from across the seas to set foot in Arizona and New Mexico.

Through the region in 1846 went the Mormon Battalion, fighting wild bulls on the way. They were followed by California Argonauts who plodded to the gold fields by way of the southern Overland Trail, and in 1858-1861 Butterfield stagecoaches from Missouri to the Pacific Coast rattled though the vast, empty country in clouds of dust. Meantime, and all the time, were the Indians for southeastern Arizona was Apache country.

There are people still living today who remember the deadly, ever-threatening Apaches, most savage and warlike Indians on the continent. For three hundred years no white man, woman or child was safe from bands of marauding braves who swept down out of the mountains like devastating tornadoes. Murdering, pillaging, kidnaping, burning and torturing, the Apaches fought to hold their ancestral homeland. But the pushing, energetic white intruders excelled the savages at lying, treachery and cruelty, and the United States Army finally bottled up Geronimo, last battling Apache chief, in Skeleton Canyon on the New Mexico line, sixtysix years ago.

The Apaches are gone but not forgotten. Today, a county, a town and a mountain bear the name of Cochisewise leader, outstanding general, and great Americanwhose warriors outfought and outmaneuvered the whites from 1861 to 1872. Cochise died as he had lived, unconquered and unconquerable, and his story is one of the epics of the Southwest. The unique friendship of this Apache chief for one American, stage driver Tom Jeffords, is the subject of Elliott Arnold's fine, sympathetic novel, "Blood Brother," and a Technicolor movie version appeared last year, called "Broken Arrow."

The thunder of battle once again reverberated among the hills of southeastern Arizona in the Twentieth Century. From 1910 to 1918 Mexico seethed with boiling political stews which on occasion spilled over the line. While Pancho Villa and his insurgent peon army were on the rampage, the border towns of Nogales, Naco and Agua Prieta were besieged and shelled with Krupp guns. Later, Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 provoked retaliatory military operations under General Pershing.

Villa alive or dead were the orders, but nothing in particular was achieved except strained relations with the Mexican Government. After chasing mirages back and forth across the border, troops were recalled in 1917 to combat a greater menace across the Atlantic. However, it was exciting while it lasted and southeastern Arizonans along the boundary for several years ducked stray bullets, heard exploding shells and saw some of the first bombs ever dropped from airplanes.

But there are increasing signs that the old days of pioneer Arizona are gone. The geographically and mentally isolated southeastern corner will be the last to show the change, but already a quiet revolution has started there. Nowadays, you will still meet the most authentic-looking cowboy-booted, Stetson-hatted Westerners between Denver and Los Angeles. They may even talk cows, copper or the weather. But be not deceived. Most of them are outlanders, newcomers, dudes, Easterners-even Republicans!

For the truth is that southeastern Arizona is on the verge of being rediscovered. These people are the vanguard of a new generation of pioneers who are bound to transform the country into something very different from what it is now. The modern pioneers are Chicago businessmen, Minnesota farmers, retired Ohioans, writers, artists, and health seekers from almost everywhere. Some of them have considerable means, most of them enjoy leisure, and all of them feel that they have found an agreeable and stimulating environment. But more than anything else, it is the paradoxical climate that pleases them most.

This new country of theirs offers year-round recreation and outdoor activities. There are roads to the horizon, unlined by neon lights, signboards, hamburger stands or factories. They can drive in an hour from barren desert to campgrounds among pine, fir, spruce and aspen like the Maine woods, where the twilight song of the hermit thrush is the only sound to break the forest stillness. In the mountains, too, are high-perched wild-flower meadows, cascading streams-with trout in them, if you know where to lookand lofty viewpoints surveying thousands of square miles of valleys and arching blue ranges resembling waves in the sea.

There are a dozen scenic exclamation points: like Chiricahua National Monument, a fantastic wonderland of standing rocks; the deep canyon of Cave Creek, between pinnacled walls of painted stone; two-mile-high Mount Graham; and rugged Cochise Stronghold in which the great chief lies buried-but no white man knows where.

The present-day southeastern Arizona pioneer can hunt quail, doves, mountain lions, bear, whitetailed deer or wild hogs, and fly in a couple of hours to the Gulf of California for deep-sea fishing. If he likes animals without shooting them, he can stalk buffalo and antelope in his car on 35,000 acres of the Fort Huachuca reservation. Naturalists have also discovered that the region has a greater climatic range and more unique varieties of plants, animals, and insects than any other section in the United States. One authority states that 160 of the 640 nesting birds in the United States make their home in southeastern Arizona.

You can stay at dude ranches, attend rodeos, county fairs, horse and cattle shows; see good night games of the Brooklyn Farm Bisbee-Douglas Baseball Team; and cross the line to gay, or at least noisy, Mexican fiestas in Sonoran Nogales, Naco and Agua Prieta. Furthermore, you can do what a lot of us would secretly like to try out in this atomic age of watch-spring nervous tension-just sit quietly on our porches and look out over a slice of peaceful, undisturbed, widespreading country the size of a couple of Rhode Islands.

Then there are the infinite details that give a distinct flavor and atmosphere to the place-flaming sunsets; velvety, star-lit nights; blazing autumn colors in the mountains; the feel of thin, dry air and the pungent smell of sun-cured grass and creosote bush-but these are things each person discovers for himself.

Yes, definitely another C has been added to the Cows and Copper as a third cornerstone of southeastern Arizona's life and economy. It is Climate. And of the three C'sCows, Copper and Climate-the last, paradoxically enough in this paradoxical land, is unquestionably destined to be the greatest.

"Hasta la vista," as they say both sides of the border down in the Paradox Country-but it means, "Be seeing you."