Arizona Cotton-Ancient and Modern

Cotton...Ancient and Modern

BY RICH JOHNSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLEN C. REED When Chris Columbus sailed into the New World in 1492, the people of Arizona were growing cotton and weaving it into cloth. In fact they had been doing so for at least three or four hundred years before Chris and Queen Isabella conspired to put the American continent.

Archaeologists, rooting into the affairs of the ancient ones in Arizona, have found cotton cloth in burials dating back to the days of the cliff dwellers. And that's sometime before there was a government support price on cotton, in case you don't remember.

If you rummage through some of Arizona's museums you'll find pieces of this prehistoric cotton cloth. Our wonderful, dry climate helped preserve it and moths don't eat it. The moral is, according to cotton growers, that if you buy cotton clothing you can wear it for hundreds of years if you live in Arizona, of course. That may not appeal to many women, but most cotton growers are men.

One of the peculiar things about Arizona's prehistoric cotton is that much of it was grown in the high, cool northern part of the State where nobody would dream of trying to grow it today because of the short growing season.

There's very excellent proof that the Indians who lived in Northeastern Arizona grew cotton. The proof is that it was still grown there until very recently by the Hopis. The late Dr. Robert Peebles, cotton breeder, found it in isolated garden patches, probably cultivated for ceremonial uses.

"It is a good illustration of the adaptability of plants to environment," Dr. Peebles said. "Instead of growing tall on a strong stalk, Hopi cotton had a weak stem which caused it to lie on the ground, where the warmth of the earth made survival and production of lint possible." Because of its hardiness, cotton breeders are still interested in it, and keep it alive in experimental plots.

Bumping over a few hundred generations of cotton-picking native Arizonans, and landing in the nineteenth century when Americans began discovering this wondrous desert land of ours-and making snide remarks about its frightfulness-we find many diarists mentioning cotton.

John R. Bartlett, head of the U. S. Boundary Commission, reported in 1854 that he saw cotton raised by the Pima and Maricopa Indians equal to the best Sea Island cotton.

J. Ross Brown observed in 1864 that "cotton flourishes with remarkable luxuriance in the Pimo Villages."

In fact, when you buy Pima cotton shirts today, you memorialize Arizona's Pima Indians for their ancient agri-cultural skill. The Pimas have grown irrigated cotton from time immemorial, and they were the spiritual found-ers of the vast cottonseed meal industry, too. Only they didn't feed the seed meal to cows. They pounded the cotton seed with mesquite beans to make a flour for their own food, or they parched the cotton seed and ate it without grinding. It's rich in protein, and maybe someday you'll pop out of bed in the morning to smack your lips over a bowlful of Cottonseed Crunchies, or something like that.

Anyhow, the Pimas grew cotton, ginned it by hand and ate the seeds. The womenfolk spun the lint, and the men wove it into cloth of which they wore almost as little as modern winter visitors who come to Arizona for a sun tan. (Note: Modern Pimas take their cotton to a gin, sell it to people in Massachusetts who make in into cloth, which is made into civilized clothes in New York, shipped back to Arizona where it is bought by Pima In-dians who dress like anybody else, only more so than peo-ple who come here to get a sun tan. So don't run out to the Pima Reservation expecting to find naked savages, ginning cotton by hand and chewing cotton seeds.) But in the old days, when the cotton had been picked and ginned by hand-and there's a job you might try sometime to learn what Ely Whitney's cotton gin did for the industry-the spinner and weaver was an important local character.

Spinning of cotton into a string was done by means of a slender stick that had a small slab on the end that was held between the spinner's toes while the cotton was twisted on the stick.

The weaver's loom frame was made most often of saguaro cactus ribs, tied together at the four corners and set horizontally on short stakes in the ground. It took the weaver-always a man and usually an old one-several days to weave enough cloth for an abbreviated costume of about the same extent as a Bikini bathing suit.

What we have said so far just adds up to the fact that Arizona may be the oldest cotton producing area in the U. S. in spite of the "old" traditions of the Deep South cotton belt.

But cotton as a commercial Arizona crop didn't get started until about 1912, when records show about 400 acres were planted in Maricopa County. That was the year Arizona became a state, but quite a few years be-fore cotton growing became a frenzied state of mind that pushed agriculture ahead of mining as a source of annual income for the Baby State.

Oddly enough, the man who became Arizona's first real cotton king wasn't a farmer at all. He was Paul Litch-field, chief of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., and it was the young, booming automobile industry that nudged him into the cotton growing business. Mr. Litchfield needed cotton cord for Goodyear tires, and Arizona was one of the few places in the U. S. where tough extra-longstaple cotton could be grown. So in 1916 he acquired a few thousand desert acres a few miles west of Phoenix and began growing cotton on a really big scale. The town of Litchfield Park became his headquarters for an operation that's still very much alive under the management of Kenneth McMicken.

Mr. Litchfield not only showed Arizonans what could be done with cotton, but in Mr. McMicken he has provided the State with its elder statesman of agriculture, and a founder of Arizona Cotton Planting Seed Distributors, an organization of farmers who guard with a jealous love the quality of seed supplied to all the State's growers.

Still, if I were to have to choose the most colorful cotton growing pioneer of Arizona, I think it would be the late Diwan Singh. Mr. Singh arrived in the New World in 1906, one man of a boatload of 900 Hindus from India.

He had no apparent future except that of a common laborer when he finally drifted to Casa Grande in Pinal County in 1924. He had no money and no friends, but a feeling for the good earth. Naturally he couldn't get hold of any land that anybody else wanted, so he took what he could get-hard, alkali-slick soil. With a horse and a mule he broke open eighty acres and planted cotton.

By 1932 Mr. Singh was able to buy the first Caterpillar tractor in the area, and when it got stuck in the mud he bought a second one to pull it out, rather than pay the County $150 to do the job. Pinal cotton growers have been doing things like that ever since. Twenty years after the penniless Mr. Singh arrived in Arizona he was farming 9000 acres of land.

But fabulous cotton careers are commonplace in Arizona, and the reason is less spectacular, though more important to the industry. That reason is the yield and quality of the cotton itself.

For the last eight years, Arizona has produced more cotton per acre than any other cotton-growing state. In 1954, for instance, when the national average yield per acre was 341 pounds, Arizona's average was 1,039 pounds -or well over two bales per acre.

That's the real miracle of the Arizona desert, but it has a natural explanation, and that brings us face to face with the quiet men-men like Dr. E. H. Pressley and Dr. Walker Bryan, plant breeders at the University of Arizona, and the late Dr. Robert Peebles at the Sacaton Field Station of the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, and many more who have detailed the development of better cotton varieties and better methods of cultivation.

In 1941 Dr. Pressley was handed the job of producing a better cotton for Arizona; ordinarily a chore that might occupy a lifetime. But Dr. Pressley and Arizona were in a hurry. In 1948 Arizona-44 cotton was unveiled for seed increase and has since become the standard upland variety over most of the State, incredibly fast work as plant breeding goes.

Small wonder it is that when a farmer once asked for a cotton that would gin itself in the field, the president of Arizona Cotton Growers Assn. warned that it might take Dr. Pressley two or three years to produce such a cotton, and it might not produce three bales to the acre without some special care.

For several years that three-bales-an-acre was the basis of an informal kind of cotton aristocracy in Arizona. Growers who could prove with gin receipts that they had produced three bales of lint per acre were the royalty of the breed. Those who claimed, but couldn't prove they had, were the unhappy middle class, and two-bale men were just miserable characters who probably never would amount to anything.

About that time, too, came a batch of canards based on the prosperity of Arizona cotton farmers. There was the one about the Pinal County grower who traded in his Cadillac whenever the ash tray got full. And another about a grower who bought a fleet of Cadillacs to haul his cotton trailers to the gin because his wife thought tractors were too undignified. The peak came in 1953 when Arizona planted 680,000 acres of cotton and harvested more than 1,000,000 bales, valued at $200,000,000-well over half the value of all crops produced in the State that year.

Then in 1954 came the cloud of world surpluses of cotton, marketing quotas and acreage allotments that cut a huge slice out of Arizona's cotton patch. Foreign markets-western Europe and Japan-upon which Arizona growers had traditionally depended to buy a large part of their crop, were curtailing purchases of American cotton. Some of the State's cotton growers had half their usual cotton acreage taken away in 1954. Most lost 30% of their acreage at least, for Arizona's cotton planting history was not as old as that of growers in the Old South. The U. S. Dept. of Agriculture doesn't recognize the history of ancient Indian cotton growing, naturally.

Again in 1955 the acreage was reduced under the U. S. government price support program, and from 680,000 acres in 1953, the State's cotton planting fell to a total of only 353,000 in 1955.

It was a serious blow of course, but Arizona growers were better off than others by a long stretch because they were so far ahead of those in any other state in per-acre yield. Had they been able to grow only as much lint per acre as the average U. S. grower-341 pounds-they would have produced only 120,473,000 pounds in 1955. But with a 1000-pound per-acre average, they produced nearly 353,000,000 pounds.

Dr. Pressley's A-44 variety, fertilizer, insect control, cultural research by the University of Arizona and by Dr. Peebles at the U.S.D.A. station at Sacaton, made the difference. And that difference was worth millions of dollars to all Arizona people, as well as farmers in particular.

Several things happened in 1954 and 1955. Jokes about cotton growers' Cadillacs became scarcer. Though as many new ones may have appeared on the farm, they weren't as gaudy, and their owners were busier with growing the cotton. Growers were thinking and wondering. They planted cotton on their best land only. They began worrying about the wisdom of selling their cotton to the government instead of to the spinners and weavers.

In 1954, growers of extra-long-staple Pima cotton actually sent Cecil Collerette and Clyde Wilson, board chairman and president, respectively, of Arizona Cotton Growers Assn. to Washington to ask Secy. of Agriculture Benson to reduce the support price on their lint from 90% of parity to 75%, so the mill buyers instead of the government would buy it.

By this lowering of their own price voluntarily, and by contributing $3.00 per bale to a promotion fund, they actually sold all of their 1955 crop of the specialty lint to manufacturers, whereas in previous years, all of it had been bought by the government for storage at public expense.

Arizona cotton growers were thinking-thinking in terms of use markets-apparently way ahead of any other cotton growers in the U. S.

And again their position was possible because of the quiet men-the plant breeders.

Maybe I had better explain that while Arizona grows only good cotton, it does produce two kinds: The A-44 short staple or upland cotton, and extra-long-staple cotton which is the luxury luxury lint of the cotton industry, and is grown only in Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas.

During both World Wars this extra-long-staple cottonton was a strategic material because the Army specified it for such things as parachutes and all threads. Until synthetic nylon came along, extra-long-staple cotton was also used for automobile and truck tire cord too.

While World War II lasted the government guaranteed growers a dollar a pound for all the extra-long-staple cotton they would grow. The price had to be high because this cotton produced only 250 or so pounds of lint per acre, and picking the crop cost twice as much as for short-staple.

But at the University of Arizona, Dr. Walker Bryan was working on that problem of low yields. By crossing various varieties he eventually produced a new variety which he called Pima-32. It increased yields by ten to fifteen per cent. Dr. Bryan was not satisfied, however, and about 1952 he was ready to announce another plant wonder-Pima S-1.

This variety-still imperfect-he handed to Dr. R. H. Peebles at the U. S. Bureau of Plant Industry at the Sacaton Field Station on the Pima Indian Reservation in Pinal County.

A geneticist with a genius for the painstaking work of purifying and stabilizing plant inheritance factors, Dr. Peebles chased the bugs out of the new variety and showed farmers how to grow it.

Pima S-1 added another 15 to 20% to per-acre yields of extra-long-staple cotton, and its spinning qualities were so wonderful that farmers licked their lips over it and wanted to grow it in abundance. But unfortunately there was no market for it at the government support price which had been established on the basis of the old lowproducing varieties. That was the sad situation until the growers got together in 1954, formed the Supima Association of America, and persuaded Congress to lower the support price from 90% of parity to 75%. They also assessed themselves three dollars a bale to collect a promotion fund.

The result is one of the brightest stories of American agriculture. Many mills jumped at the chance to use extralong-staple cotton for fine fabrics again at the new competitive price.

Supima cotton became high-style in 1956, and farmers sold their entire crop to the mills rather than to the government for surplus storage. And they could look forward to planting more and more acres of it as demand inevitably increases. They were allowed to double their planting under the acreage allotment program for 1957.

Thus Dr. Bryan and Dr. Peebles are the heroes of the reviving long-staple cotton industry of three Southwestern states.

And the success of Supima probably accounts for another courageous and unusual trend of thinking on the part of Arizona's cotton growers. They took a look at short-staple production in the light of what had been done with long-staple.

Early in 1956, the Arizona Cotton Growers Assn., to which all the State's growers automatically belong, held its annual meeting at the swank Westward Ho hotel in Phoenix.

Pres. Clyde Wilson had announced a thorough discussion of the price support program by Arizona growers. Even as farmers gathered for the meeting the Association's board chairman, Cecil Collerette, was in Washington waiting for Arizona growers to tell him what to say to congressmen who were debating the farm bill.

What Arizona's cotton farmers decided, after two hours of talk, to tell Mr. Collerette in Washington was typical of the kind of men who had made this State great.

OPPOSITE PAGE Cotton is an important agricultural crop in Arizona. Such favorable factors as climate, soil, controlled irrigation and the almost sensational work of scientists and technicians in developing better breeds combine to give Arizona an acre yield far above the national average.

They told him they wanted the present cotton price support system junked forthwith, and a plan adopted which would, with some minimum protection, permit cotton to sell at prices competitive with other fibers. "We want to sell our cotton to the mills, not to the U. S. Government," they said.

Only thinking men, with a great deal of courage could say that, and that's the kind of men who grow cotton in Arizona. And their courage is backed up by their faith in themselves and their kind of cotton know-how.

In 1955 the old three-bale aristocracy was shaken to its roots by the four-bale group, of whom two or three growers were the kings with official five-bale-per-acre records.

"We haven't yet begun to realize the full productive potential of our cotton or our soil," says Clyde Wilson. And who will deny that it may be so when a few growers have reached the five-bales per-acre mark?

Arizona's cotton industry has been centuries in the making, but what has been done with it in just the last decade is truly one of the scientific miracles of the desert country-one of the most important factors in making Arizona great and strong.

Pima and Supima Cotton

What's Pima cotton? Why, it's a very special kind of cotton that outwears a buffalo hide and is twice as pretty as silk, because its fibers are so long and lustrous.

Well, then, what is this new Supima cotton that's being advertised all over the country? Oh, that's ten times better than that wonderful Pima cotton.

That's the way Arizona long-staple cotton growers and some of America's most famous cotton mill men and fashion designers would answer those questions.

It's all true, of course, but Pima is the name given away back in 1912 to a variety of extra-long-staple cotton developed by U.S. Department of Agriculture plant breeders working at their experiment station at Sacaton, Arizona, which is on the Pima Indian Reservation, north of Casa Grande.

The variety has been improved many times since 1912, but the Pima name has stuck, and has become a symbol of topmost quality in cotton goods.

So, when growers of this wonderful cotton formed an association in 1954 to promote its use, they kept the name Pima, added "Superior" in front of it, and then shortened it to Supima. The new name was registered as a trademark to cover particularly the extra-long-staple cotton grown only in Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas, with maybe a dab in Southern California.

The Supima Association attempts to maintain top quality in all goods bearing the name Supima, in cooperation with mills that are putting millions of dollars into advertising and promotion of the fabric and articles made from it.

Half of the nation's production of this wonder cotton comes from Arizona's fertile irrigated fields, and the standard variety for the entire production area is Pima S-1, which was bred by Dr. Walker Bryan at the University of Arizona, and standardized by the late Dr. Robert Peebles in Arizona.

If fancier, better cotton is ever grown, it will no doubt be the great-great-great-great grandchild of the original Pima, and it will be on the quality market under the Supima trademark. Chances are more than half of the supply will come from Arizona, too.

A Southwestern Century

Continued from page one Report of an Expedition down the Zuñi and Colorado Rivers, 1861; Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872. These expeditions are described by Wallace in The Great Reconnaissance, cited later.

F. W. Hodge's Handbook of the American Indians North of Mexico, 1907-10, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology, is another of those monumental reference works now virtually procurable only in libraries, and which is listed here as an item hors concours. The shades of Hodge and Bolton hover over every Southwest work undertaken since their time, and this bibliography is no exception.

Several modern series are of an importance to warrant the collector obtaining them complete; they include the Quivira Society Publications, the Coronado Cuarto Centennial volumes, and the several western series published by the University of Oklahoma Press, a number of whose items I have included.

Rarity has not been among my criteria; rather, readability, fidelity to the region, and sincerity of presentation are the qualities I have placed above all others. When there are several editions of a work, I have chosen the modern one as being the most readily available to readers through bookstores and libraries, and have also referred to the original edition for those who wish to ascend the bibliographical stream to the source. The arrangement is alphabetical by author, or, in a few cases, by title. Strict classification by subject is impractical for works of broad coverage. Price is given when the book is still in print.

I have sought to make my choices representative of the entire culture of a region which has had many masters in a few hundred years, whose talismans are turquoise and uranium, and whose destiny reaches from the Great Drought of the thirteenth century to the Great Bomb of the twentieth, and beyond to what no one can foresee.

Yet whatever the fate of man, and barring a cosmic cataclysm, the land itself, the colored and configured earth we call the Southwest, will surely be there to the end, perhaps unpeopled, yet ever beautiful in itself.

Here then is one man's choice, a Southwestern Century, offered to those who believe that the reading of books will never end and who, in a respite from living, like to savor the experiences and thoughts of those who ventured widely, saw clearly, and wrote well.

JOHN ADAIR

THE NAVAJO AND PUEBLO SILVERSMITHS. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. [1945] 220 pp. $5.00.

Silver and turquoise are the twin elements of beauty and meaning which enthrall students of Southwestern Indian culture. This book is the fruit of the author's interest in the history, anthropology, and aesthetics of this craft, with an introduction by Clyde Kluckhohn, and many photographic illustrations of jewelry and its makers.

RAMON F. ADAMS (1889)

WESTERN WORDS; A DICTIONARY OF THE RANGE, COW CAMP AND TRAIL. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. [1944] 182 pp. $3.75.

Ernest Haycox, master writer of Western stories, said of this book that "has the pungency of an old campfire wet down byrain. Unquestionably it will go on the shelves of those who are professional students of the English language, and no doubt it will enrich the working vocabulary of many a writer of Western fiction." True.

CHARLES AVERY AMSDEN (1899-1941)

NAVAJO WEAVING, ITS TECHNIC AND HISTORY, foreword by Frederick Webb Hodge. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. [1949] 263 pp. $6.00.

First published in 1934 by the Fine Arts Press of Santa Ana, this is the book on Navajo textiles, scholarly, readable, significant, and beautiful. This posthumous second edition is slightly revised in the light of subsequent findings, and contains a foreword by the director of the Southwest Museum, where Amsden was employed at the time of his premature death.

MERLE ARMITAGE (1893)

OPERATIONS SANTA FÉ; ATCHISON, TOPEKA, AND SANTA FÉ RAILWAY SYSTEM. Edited by Edwin Corle, drawings by P. G. Napolitano. New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce. [1948] 263 pp.

Designer-author-traveler Armitage here found his perfect subject in the longest and most romantic of all American railroads, "The Grand Canyon Line," whose transition from steam to diesel power failed to diminish its glamor. In content and format the book is memorably Southwestern.

OREN ARNOLD

HOT IRONS; HERALDRY OF THE RANGE, by Oren Arnold and John P. Hale. New York, Macmillan Company. [1940] 242 pp.

In this indispensable work about cattle brands the authors had a twin goal: (1) to establish a reference work, an "authority," (2) to be entertaining about it. They succeeded.

MARY AUSTIN (1868-1934)

THE LAND OF JOURNEYS' ENDING. With illustrations by John Edwin Jackson. New York, Century Co, [1924] 459 pp.

Her land is Arizona-New Mexico, about which she has written a classic, in the same way that she achieved her earlier masterpiece about Inyo County, California, in The Land of Little Rain. Desert and mountain, myth and folklore, history and legend, are the stuff of this Southwest book about the region Mary Austin called home, after she was driven from the Owens River Valley by the consuming thirst of the Angel City.

HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT (1832-1918)

HISTORY OF ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO, 1530-1888. San Francisco, History Company. [1889] 829 pp.

Based on original documentary sources in his own collection and the Santa Fé archives, this massive work stands as one of the first and one of the best of Southwest histories.

ADOLPH F. BANDELIER (1840-1914)

FINAL REPORT OF INVESTIGATIONS AMONG THE INDIANS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES, CARRIED ON MAINLY IN THE YEARS FROM 1880 ΤΟ 1885. Cambridge (Mass.), Printed by J. Wilson and Sons. [1890-92] 2 vols.

Bandelier, the Swiss archaeologist, spent most of the 1880's on pioneer field work in New Mexican and Arizonan aboriginal sites and in corroborating research in the historical archives. "This, of course, led him to overthrow many generally accepted theories," wrote A. V. Kidder in the Dictionary of American Biography, "and resulted in severe controversies with less well-informed or less conscientious writers. His work resulted in the discrediting of the romantic school of American Indian research, and paved the way for scientific, critical research."

JOHN RUSSELL BARTLETT (1805-1886)

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF EXPLORATIONS AND INCIDENTS IN TEXAS, NEW MEXICO, CALIFORNIA, SONORA, AND CHIHUAHUA, CONNECTED WITH THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICAN BOUNDARY COMMISSION, DURING THE YEARS 1850, '51, '52, AND '53. New York, D. Appleton and Company. [1854] 2 vols.

"For me very little rewritten history has the freshness and fascination of these strong, firsthand personal narratives, though I recognize many of them as being the stuff of literature rather than literature itself." J. Frank Dobie.

Orrin G. Webb brought F. W. Hodge to the Southwest, as secretary of the Hemenway Expedition to excavate in the Salt River Valley. Ostensibly about the foodstuff (corn) of the Zuñis, this book is actually an encyclopedia of Zuñi culture, a work of profound meaning and beauty by one of the first and greatest Southwesterners. published in co-operation with the Huntington Library by the University of Oklahoma Press. [1949] 283 pp. $4.00.

EDWARD EVERETT DALE (1879-) THE INDIANS OF THE SOUTHWEST; A CENTURY OF DEVELOPMENT UNDER THE UNITED STATES. Norman,

Here in one scholarly, readable volume is the story, whether "development" or "deterioration" time will tell, of what happened when Indians were forcibly displaced by Whites. Personalities treated range from Carson, Crook, and Clum to Collier.

ROLAND F. DICKEY

NEW MEXICO VILLAGE ARTS; drawings by Lloyd Lózes Goff. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. [1949] 266 pp. $5.00.

Adobe, wood, silver, and wool are some of the artists' materials, whose products are lovingly described in this colorful book by the present director of the University of New Mexico Press.

J. FRANK DOBIE (1888)

THE LONGHORNS, illustrated by Tom Lea. Boston, Little, Brown & Co. [1941] 388 pp. $6.00.

One of the major works of American history, natural history, folklore, and the range, by a man who was born and bred in the Longhorn country, deep in the brush covered heart of Texas, and powerfully illustrated by his friend from El Paso.

J. FRANK DOBIE (1888)

THE MUSTANGS; illustrated by Charles Banks Wilson. Boston, Little, Brown & Co. [1952] 376 pp. 56.00.

The fact that the horse is a nobler creature than the cow raises this "sequel" to The Longhorns to the highest pinnacle of Dobie's art, in which he sees the wild horse as symbolic of all that is best in the free and individualistic American tradition.

SILVESTRE VÉLEZ DE ESCALANTE (fl. 1768-1779) PAGEANT IN THE WILDERNESS; THE STORY OF THE ESCALANTE EXPEDITION TO THE INTERIOR BASIN, 1776, INCLUDING THE DIARY AND ITINERARY OF

FATHER ESCALANTE, translated and annotated by Herbert E. Bolton. Salt Lake City, Utah State Historical Society. [1950] 265 pp. $5.00.

Less significant historically than the Anza expeditions, the Esca-

ALPHEUS H. FAVOUR (1880)

lante trek from Santa Fé through Southern Utah and back through Northern Arizona, short of the California Missions which were its goal, is one of the great explorations of the Southwest, to the treatment of which Bolton brought his prodigious archival and field scholarship. Escalante came within a few miles of discovering the cliff dwellings on the Mesa Verde.

OLD BILL WILLIAMS, MOUNTAIN MAN. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. [1936] 229 pp.

ERNA FERGUSSON (1888) DANCING GODS; INDIAN CEREMONIALS OF NEW MEXICO AND ARIZONA. New York, Alfred A. Knopf. [1931]

Born in North Carolina in 1787 and killed by the Utes on the upper Rio Grande in 1849, Bill Williams was the greatest of the Mountain Men-trapper, fur trader, guide, toughest of the tough, with the peculiar trail gait which did not see him "walk on a straight line, but go staggering along, first on one side and then the other"-whose name is preserved forever on the map by the Bill Williams Fork of the Colorado and Bill Williams Mountain, up in Coconino County, on whose aspened shoulders the Verde rises.

276 pp. The quality of Miss Fergusson's achievement in this beautiful book is evident in her conclusion, "Suddenly I knew how alien I was in that Indian world. It is a separate world. The white man sees it, he touches it, some even have the temerity to try to break into it, to change it. But they cannot. For this is a world apart, a brown world of brown people. They come out of their world sometimes to speak to us, for they understand our language; but when they withdraw into their world, we cannot follow. They

ERNA FERGUSSON (1888)

Live close to the earth. The mass for a pale god who died on a cross did not reach these people. They do not understand. A religion of an idea, of an ideal, is foreign to them. Their religion is of earth and the things of earth. I thought of all these brown people whom I had seen dancing their prayers, pounding them with their feet into the earth, which is their mother. Her ways are close to them, even when they are hurt. They understand the earth, they dance their prayers into the earth, and they pray for real things, for sun and rain and corn. For growth. For life.

Best of all introductions to every aspect of the Southwest, by the First Lady of the region, native daughter of New Mexico, learned, humane, and abundantly blessed with that quality in a writer valued by Dobie above all others-perspective.

HARVEY FERGUSSON (1890)

RIO GRANDE. Drawings by Colden Whitman. New York, William Morrow & Co. [1955] 296 pp. $5.00.

First published in 1933, this interpretative volume by a native son of New Mexico remains the most penetrating and illuminating of all books about the river valley which is the true heart of the Southwest. His sister Erna says, "His Rio Grande is the river he has swum in, hunted along, jumped when it was low, fought when it was high. He grew out of it as truly as did the cattails along its margin; he comes back to it as surely as a migrating duck."

His book of reminiscences, Home in the West, although not exclusively about the Southwest, contains memorable chapters about boyhood and youth in Albuquerque and its river environs.

FLOWERS OF THE SOUTHWEST

Southwestern Monuments Association Popular Series No. 4, 5, and 7: FLOWERS OF THE SOUTHWEST DESERTS, by Natt N. Dodge; drawings by Jeanne R. Janish. FLOWERS OF THE SOUTHWEST MESAS, by Pauline Mead Patraw; drawings by Jeanne R. Janish. FLOWERS OF THE SOUTHWEST MOUNTAINS, by Leslie P. Arnberger; drawings by Jeanne R. Janish. Santa Fé, [1952-53] 3 vols., 112 pp. ca. vol., $1.00 per vol.

These three volumes are grouped as forming a single set, as well as the best treatment of Southwestern flora. They are accurate, well written and illustrated, and easy to use, and should form part of every traveller's equipment, along with map and water bag.

FRANCISCO GARCÉS (1738-1781) ON THE TRAIL OF A SPANISH PIONEER; THE DIARY AND ITINERARY OF FRANCIS GARCÉS (MISSIONARY PRIEST) IN HIS TRAVELS THROUGH SONORA, ARI-

ARIZONA, AND CALIFORNIA, 1775-1776; translated from an official contemporaneous copy of the original Spanish manuscript, and edited with copious critical notes, by Elliott Coues. New York, Francis P. Harper. [1900] 2 vols.

One of the great source works on the Southwest. The entradas of Garcés, the Franciscan, from Sonora into the lands of the desert tribes, clear to the San Joaquin Valley in California, are among the most heroic of all Southwest travels, and his observa-tions en route are precise, lucid, and moving. Garcés was martyred by the Yumas in 1781. This translation was suggested by Hodge, and the ethnological notes signed F. W. H. are his.

LEWIS H. GARRARD (1829-1887) WAH-TO-YAH AND THE TAOS TRAIL; OR, PRAIRIE TRAVEL AND SCALP DANCES, WITH A LOOK AT LOS RANCHEROS FROM MULEBACK AND THE ROCKY

MOUNTAIN CAMPFIRE. With an introduction by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. [1955] 298 pp. $2.00.

First published in 1850 and reprinted several times, this narrative of a young man's adventures has a springtime freshness that places it among the very few indisputable Southwest classics. Garrard made the trip at seventeen and wrote the book soon after: thereafter he wrote nothing else of interest, making inevitable a comparison of him with R. H. Dana and his Two Years Before the Mast.

FABIOLA CABEZA DE VACA GILBERT

THE GOOD LIFE; NEW MEXICAN FOOD; drawings by Gerri Chandler. Santa Fé, San Vicente Foundation. [1949] 94 pp.

Flavorful essays and recipes about native cooking in a volume colorfully designed by Merle Armitage.

FRANCES GILLMOR (1903)

TRADERS TO THE NAVAJOS; THE STORY OF THE WETHERILLS OF KAYENTA, by Frances Gillmor and Louisa Wade Wetherill. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. [1952] 265 pp. $3.50.

First published in 1934, this remains the best book about Indian trading posts. Originally of Mancos, Colorado, the Wetherills were the discoverers of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and later of the Rainbow Bridge. If all traders were of the character of this family, our record of Indian relations would be brighter.

LAURA GILPIN (1891)

THE RIO GRANDE, RIVER OF DESTINY; AN INTERPRETATION OF THE RIVER, THE LAND, AND THE PEOPLE. New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce. [1949] 244 pp. $6.00.

To this chronicle of the Great River, Miss Gilpin of Santa Fé brings her talent as one of the Southwest's great photographers, as well as an able writer. During three years she made as many field trips the length of the river, from its source in the San Juans near Silverton to its debouchement into the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville, Texas, patiently seeking to be at the right place at the right time for the right picture. This book is a beautiful record of her success.

JOSIAH GREGG (1806-1850)

COMMERCE OF THE PRAIRIES; edited by Max L. Moorhead. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. 1954) 469 pp. 57.50.

First published in 1844 Commerce of the Prairies, in the words of the editor of this most recent reprint "has been recognized for more than a hundred years as the classic description of the early southern plains and as the epic of the Santa Fé Trail. What has set it above other personal narratives of early western travel more than all else is its genuineness. Josiah Gregg, though an amateur as a writer and a naturalist, was a professional trader, an experienced frontiersman, and a keen observer. To this day historians, botanists, ethnologists, and other scholars still find his descriptions inspiring and reliable, and their popular appeal seems only to have increased with the passage of time. J. Frank Dobie, the foremost exponent of Southwestern lore, names Gregg's narrative as his personal favorite."

J. EVETTS HALEY (1901)

JEFF MILTON, A GOOD MAN WITH A GUN; with drawings by Harold D. Bugbee. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. [1948] 430 pp. $5.00, Ranger, United States Marshal, Customs Patrolman in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, fearless Jeff Milton was anathema to bad men to the end of his 85 years on earth. This single biography has been chosen in place of shelves of bad-men books, of the writing of which there seems to be no end.

GEORGE P. HAMMOND (1806) ed. and tr.

DON JUAN DE OÑATE, COLONIZER OF NEW MEXICO, 1596-1628 [by] George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. [1953] $20.00. 2 vols.

Although Coronado came half a century earlier, it was Oñate who colonized the upper Rio Grande and left the first inscription on El Morro-Pasó por aqui. These two massive volumes, forming part of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial series, translate the original documents of the colonization preserved in the Archives of the Indies at Seville, as suggested to Hammond thirty-odd years ago by Bolton. Royal directives, reports, inventories of goods, lists and letters, notarizations and oaths-from these minutiae is made the mosaic of the past and our history meaningful.

ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON (1881-

BROTHERS OF LIGHT; THE PENITENTES OF THE SOUTHWEST; illustrations by William Penhallow Henderson. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company. [1937] 126 pp.

Brought to New Mexico in the sixteenth century by the Franciscans with Oñate, the custom of penitential flagellation, though no longer sanctioned by the church, has never died out. Deep in the Sangre de Cristos above Santa Fé, at Truchas, Trampas, and Mora, the Brotherhood survives, testified to by stacked crosses in back of their moradas and by such beautiful first-hand works as this book.

EDGAR LEE HEWETT (1865-1946)

ANCIENT LIFE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, with an introduction on the general history of the American race. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Company. 19301 392 pp.

Best of all introductions to the ethnology and archaeology of New Mexico and Arizona and adjacent cultures, this book weds learning and expression in a fruitful way.s WAYLAND

RICHARD J. HINTON (1830-1901)

THE HANDBOOK TO ARIZONA: ITS RESOURCES, HISTORY, TOWNS, MINES, RUINS, AND SCENERY. Tucson, Arizona Silhouettes. [1954] 431 pp.

This first attempt at an encyclopedic guide to Arizona, published originally in 1878, remains a basic work on the youngest state. It is the fifth in a series of facsimile reprints by George W. Chambers of Tucson.

FREDERICK WEBB HODGE (1864-1956) ed.

and HERBERT EUGENE BOLTON (1870-1953) ed. ORIGINAL NARRATIVES OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY: (1) Spanish explorers in the southern United States, 1528-1543: The narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, ed. by Frederick W. Hodge. The narrative of the expedition of Hernando de Soto by the gentleman of Elvas, ed. by Theodore H. Lewis; the narrative of the expedition of Coronado, by Pedro de Castañeda, ed, by Frederick W. Hodge; with maps and a facsimile reproduction. (2) Spanish exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. by Herbert Eugene Bolton, with three maps. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1908-1916] 411 and 487 pp. The latter title reprinted: New York, Barnes & Noble. [1952] $4.50.

These two volumes, treated here as a set, are the best source in English translation of Southwestern beginnings. To read these original narratives, edited by the two old masters, Hodge and Bolton, is to leave the muddy present and ascend the stream of history to its crystalline headwaters.

GENE MEANY HODGE

THE KACHINAS ARE COMING; PUEBLO INDIAN KACHINA DOLLS WITH RELATED FOLKTALES; foreword by Dr. Frederick Webb Hodge, with eighteen color plates of Kachina dolls from original drawings by the author. Los Angeles, Steller-Miller. [1936] 129 pp.

The folktales of the Zuñi and Hopi are from Cushing and others, the drawings are by Mrs. Hodge from Kachinas in the Southwest Museum, the whole forming one of the loveliest books of the Century.

PAUL HORGAN (1903)

GREAT RIVER: THE RIO GRANDE IN NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY. New York, Rinehart & Co. [1954] $10.00. 2 vols.

Fourteen years of study, in field and library, by Roswell's novelist, painter, and finally historian, went into the making of this labor of love and learning which, though attacked for its occasional errors, carried off the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes for historical writing. Packed with detail and written in sensuous, evocative language, the book succeeds in recreating the ebb and flow of human destiny up and down the Great River, from the time of the Basket Makers to that of the Bomb Builders.

W. H. HUTCHINSON (1910)

A BAR CROSS MAN; THE LIFE AND PERSONAL WRITINGS OF EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. [1956] 432 pp. $5.00.

This is one of the finest of Southwest biographies, written with skill, gusto, and sympathy about the best cowboy-novelist of them all, whose range was the Rio Grande country around Alamogordo and San Andreas, and of whom Dobie wrote, "He was not a world compeller. He was more big-hearted than great. He was not many-sided or 'infinitely various.' He had but one string to his fiddle, but he played it with infinite variations and got tunes out of it honest and old and plain like the ballads and they 'danced like a bit o' the sun.' This is something rare in American litera-ture. It is very precious."

EUSEBIO KINO (1644-1711)

KINO'S HISTORICAL MEMOIR OF PIMERIA ALTA; A CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT OF THE BEGINNINGS OF CALIFORNIA, SONORA, AND ARIZONA, 1683-1711, FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT IN THE ARCHIVES OF MEXICO, translated into English, edited, and annotated by