They Bought a Ghost Town

What are they going to do with it, and why did they want it in the first place?" That's the sort of talk that's buzzing, not only up at Bumble Bee these deys, but more or less all over Arizona. It concerns the purchese by casters magazine publisher Charles A. Pean and his wife, Helen, of this century-old ghost town sixty-three miles north of Phoenix, nestling in its own little "besuty bowl of a valley (as Helen Pean phrases it), thres miles west of Black Canyon Highway, in Yavapai County.

Perhaps the determined old town echoes its own answer, out of its own rich, romantic past, when it rang to the brawling of prospectors and soldiers, placer miners and cowboys. For in its dry, Bumble Bee has been a thumbasil slice of Old San Francisco, and yet a typical tiny Americas hometown, too. Take a few phases ont of Emuble Bee's history: Concord coaches hurtling scross Bumble Bee Flot, wich the U. S. mail, Wells Fargo shipments, and pioneer passengers. Hor biscuits and black coffee, to the age of rags dipped in gresse at the Bumble Bee stagecoach sa tion. Indians on borvos selling dried saguaro fruit and live and artificial birds, to the gold-happy Bumble Boo citizens. Rattlesnakes coyotes... barancalas... scorpions... and wildcats in abundacce Cowboys riding the ranges of flourishing nearby ranchos, with more than ample water and grazing. Gold mines providing good yield, with sach colorful veins the Gloriana, Blue Bell, Hidden Treasante, Dead Mκει, DeSoto. And children forever playing in the little old Bumble Bes playground, beside the palo verde trees.

From an ancient, yellowed letter of a pioneer comes perhaps this most touching summation of the charm of this multifaceted old Arizaca town: "There were prospect holes all over the hills, though nothing ever amounted to much. But we had doors opening toward the stars,"

Such was the Bumble Bee of yesterday, and trac-ing down the corridors of a score of lives, it's easy to understand why Bumble Bee folks, wherever they are, look back with warmth and nostalgia, with gratitude and affection, to the flat and the cruck and the town-by-theroad.

Today, restored, renovated, but with its spirit kept intact by its appreciative new proprietors, Bumble Bee is a "hometown which natives can remember with pride.

There is nothing of the "picture-postcard" perfection about Bumble Bee, Arizona, as compared with old-model Williamsburg, Virginia; Bumble Bee is Bumble Bee. And it is to perpetuate this American way-of-lifesays Proprietor Penn-to bring "yesterday up to today," that he and his wife decided to install all possible modern comforts and convenience in Bumble Bee for themselves, their guests, and their tenants; to insure the late town against decay, and yet to preserve the atmosphere of smoking guns, whooping Indians, rousing cowboys, as well as the gentle family life of this early Western settlement Penn confirms that the must-asked question about his sole ownership of Booble Bes-the only only exclusive, one-man ownership of an entire township, every inch and every nail of it, in the U. S. today-is "What on earth are you going to do with it?"

He has learned, he says, to counter with a practically unananswerable question of his own: "Do you own a dog?" Well, yes, the questioner admits. "Well, when you got the dog, did people ask you, What are you going to do with its

"To me, this town is something of a pet. I kind of

the bulkdings in town, these must be kept in good repair. And belleve it or not, we get just about as much comespondence that has to be answered as the municipal heads of say other U. S. city or town.

"We have to answer questions on police, public health, library, cemetery, and other such matters. Fact is, I'm making a collection of the various hats I have to wear -mayor, police chief, firs chief, and so forth. Helen should have a ráckful too, as chief librarian, public health director, maybe even J.P., if we had such an office."

"But seriously, we get a big kick-a never-ending enjoyment-out of exploring the nearby treasures of Arizona antiquity-ancient ruins, ald mines, abandoned towns, forgoten Indian camps, and we hope some day to have an accurate pictorial map, as a guide to the early days of the Bumble Bee Basisu. You'd be surprised to know how many people from all over the U. S. and many forcign countries come to see the robes in our museum, one person telling another, for we do no so-called promotion.

Penn added that the "proprietorship" of a whole town, seems to rum in his blood because one of his ancestour was William Pean, Proprietor of Penn's Woods, like the idea of owning a whole town, not for self-aggrandizement, but I have always Eked small towns, and I have some ideas as to how people should be enabled to enjoy them. We-my wife and I think the town one lives in should be clean zod set to blend with the beantiful sering of the Arizona landscape. It should be an agreeable place where people get along with each other, somewhat on an equal basis all around, whers no one's a big shot, no super intellects, and no character assesins, Like the mythical dog (and the Peuns do have a real, live dog, dhirteen-year-old Gus, who really rules the rulerel), we just enjoy it, and we like other people to share it who can enjoy it in the same manner that we do. No, we are not going to make a commercial proposition out of it. We have no plans for subdividing, offering free factory sites, or starting an artists and waters colony."

The second mow-asked question, according to Penn, is "What do you do all day?

"Well, owning a town," he tells inquirers, "has its obligations as well as a certain amount of fun. For instance, we have a waterworks-the Bumble Bee Watar Works-that must be maintained to provide good and sufficient water for our citizens. Inasmuch as we own all Pennsylvania, and his great-grandfather founded Sadicville, Kentucky, which he named after Penn's great-grandmother.

One further question which the Peans are often asked, he says, is "How'd you ever hear about it?" On the funny side, he relatos, a realnor whom he had long known, met him in a Ramsey, New Jersey, tavern several years ago, and cried, "Charlie Peant Just the man I was looking fort Nobody but you would be foul enough to buy a whole "Seriously," he says, "after serving a sentence of more than forty-five years in the publishing business-on newspapers, writing, advertising, publishing, and as an exective with several of the country's largest publishers, including McFadden, also including a 16-year-hitch as head of my own company with as many as seven Graphic Arts Award-winning magazines and many books in the hobby building field (Pesa Publications, Inc., less o current magazine, Railroad Model Craftonas) my wife and I decided to look forward to enjoying a carefree Efe togochar."

Retirement? No, definitely not, says Bumble Bee's boss. "I still supervise my publishing company in the East by tape-recorder, telephone, and the U. S air mail

In Bumble Bee Trading Post

From a 6'xg' office in my home in Bumble Bee. I haven't retired, I don't believe in 'retiring.' Running a town is both a stimulating and a full-time job in itself, several jobs in fact. Managed properly and kept on a sound business basis, who knows what will happen? Anything is possible in 'Amazing Arizona,' and we have no intention of hogging it for ourselves.

Arizona Republic columnist Don Dedera, an ardent Bumble Bee fan for some years, who has frequently datelined news-stories from this Yavapai County metropolis, has reported that the Penns expect to set up an authentic model-railroad museum-since this has been one of the principal interests of Penn Publications' magazines. And the Penns have in mind to develop a miniature scale working model of the whole of early-days Arizona, to preserve 'in actuality the way-of-life of the pioneer State.

In history, Bumble Bee is certainly not lacking: as well as, often, in saturation news-coverage. As the Yavapai County Messenger reported as far back as 1950: This little mountain town has been in the news many times in the last year. First on a nationwide radio broad-cast as a ghost-town, and more recently it was advertised for sale-lock, stock, and barrel.

"Bumble Bee," the newspaper went on to say, "is one of the oldest communities of northern Arizona. It was first settled by a small detachment of U. S. soldiers, under a Colonel Powers, which was stationed there on outpost duty against the Indians in the 1860's."

The first white settlers, it is said, located at Bumble Bee because of the water at Bumble Bee Creek, and the grazing land. At that time, the settlement was called Snyder's Station after W. W. Snyder, a pioneer horse and cattle breeder. It received the name still used about 1870.

There are a number of different versions of the origin of the name Bumble Bee. One was that some early settlers came out second-best with bumblebees over "water rights." Another credits the name to a U. S. Army scout sent out from Prescott to look for Indians, and who later reported that they were "thick as bumblebees" over the waterholes there.

Still another has it that a company of soldiers, recon-noitering onto Bumble Bee Flat, heard Indians having a powwow, thought the noise was caused by a host of humblebees, beat a hasty retreat, and called the spot Bumble Bee. Still a diffrent legend is that, along about 1863, a party of prospectors stumbled onto a nestful of honey in the cliffs along the creek, and some of the. greedier members got badly stung. Perhaps as a warning to future gold-and-honey-seekers, they named it Bumble Bee Creek.

But before the first American settlers came, the Spanish passed by on the trail on their way to Tucson and Yuma. There are still indications around Bumble Bee of mysterious old trails leading over the Bradshaw Mountains and through the desert to the Hassayampa.

Indeed, the town of Bumble Bee, now dozing happily in its authentic restoration, in its gem-like little valley, has lived through manifold exciting phases. The first settlers stayed on to establish permanent homes because of the ample water supply and the abundant grazing lands. Then came the day when the cry of "Gold!" rang out..

For valuable ores were discovered in the washes and canyons of the Bumble Bee area. At one time, it is said, placer gold claims were sold for as high as $150 per claim. The claims were no larger than the size of an ordinary bed blanket and were known as "blanket claims."

A good placer miner-according to records of early Bumble Bee prospectors could make from $100 to $150 a day from these washes, using only hand tools. Many pioneer claims were worked in Black Canyon, when Bumble Bee buzzed as a gold-mine town; and from the old diggings still visible today, they evidently paid off.

The most notable ones were the Chinese Bar, the Portuguese Bar, and the Dead Man.

About the turn of the century, placer mining began to play out, and was not revived again until the depression years of the '30's, when a handful of prospectors made "beans" out of the old diggin's.

Bumble Bee has had quite a time, throughout the years, managing to stay on or near the main road, now known as new Black Canyon Highway. It moved three times in a radius of one mile during a quarter of a century. Every time there seems to have been an improvement made on the Black Canyon Highway, alignment of the road somehow was readjusted to bypass Bumble Bum Bee.

But Bumble Bee refused to stay bypassed. Pioneer, thirty-year resident Jeff Martin appears to have been the main "town-mover," a man "as determined as the next." Every time the road skipped Bumble Bee, Martin moved Bumble Bee to stick to the road. However, the Highway Department for reasons of grading and other modern requirements, finally routed Black Canyon Highway away from Bumble Bee.

The first planned road through Bumble Bee was laid out about 1879. For many years the settlement was one of the principal stagecoach stops between Phoenix and points north and west. Along it also rolled ore wagons from Crown King, Turkey Creek Station, and other early mines of south Yavapai.

As to climate, says Proprietor Charles Penn: "Without benefit of blurb, since we have no Chamber of Commerce (yet!), Bumble Bee it seems has long laid claim to the best winter climate in all Arizona. And since also we aren't 'selling anything' other than the antiques and oddities and commodities in the Bumble Bee General Store, we can add with genuine personal enthusiasm that we think that this is true. Why not?

"Just look at our location, forty-five miles south of high, pine-topped Prescott, sixty-three miles north of the warm Salt River Valley, 3,000-foot-high Bumble Bee enjoys the tempered balance of the best of the earth's three largest Isobel belts. As a local poet once phrased it, 'Bumble Bee's air is as soft and warm as a water-worn stone in the sun.'"

Penn explained that Isobel belt is his own invented expression for the Salt River Valley and thin adjacent strips which-according to the new global sunshine projection-together with small areas in Egypt and Chile, enjoy the most possible sunshine hours of any areas on earth.

Old Bumble Bee frequently made the headlines, such as they were, and those largely by word-of-mouth, in the good old days of killings by renegades from the Pleasant Valley War, brawls in country speak-easies during the tempestuous '20s of Prohibition, violence in the gold-town saloon, and, of course, run-of-the-mill domestic unpleasantries.

But the little old town has also proved itself newsworthy through changes of ownership and through the novelty of being offered for purchase in the East as "a whole town for sale, lock, stock, and barrel." The Associated Press and United Press-International have both carried several Bumble Bee stories, and a national network personality frequently signs off his show with the weather reports from metropolitan centers, tagging them with "... and in Bumble Bee, Arizona, it's... degrees!"

Yours sincerely

HILTON: John Hilton wrote a singularly moving piece in your March issue. The deep beauty and meaningfulness of his article, rich with years of intimacy with the desert, falls upon one's inner ear like a message of hope and promise, indeed, of salvation.

I am not entirely convinced of his thesis that the desert burns away "all of the waste and unimportant things in people who live here long." For it seems to me that it sometimes burns away some very important things. The desert is a demanding master. For those who cannot confront it with matching moral stamina and control, it can, indeed, become a tyrannical master. Never-theless as one who is relatively new to the desert's mystery I agree that it holds "a real message for our troubled, hurrying world." I have lived long enough in that world to know whereof Mr. Hilton speaks.

It was with almost tears of jealous pain I read John Hilton's "This Is My Desert.' Although being absent from "home" many years, I still have the conviction the "sky-full desert" is selfishly mine.

Mr. Hilton has discovered and portrayed that Spiritual Exaltation in his paintings so difficult to re-create-that wide, wide peace-ful space of blue ever present above the desert country. Where, as Mr. Hilton says, one has only to listen to hear and know His presence.

My deepest regards to Mr. Hilton, but deeper regards to "his" desert.

SCENES PORTRAYED:

For the past four years ARIZONA HIGH-WAYS has been a visitor each month in our home. Not only have I read each issue with pleasure, but I have framed many of the wonderful reproductions of matchless scen-ery shown in the pages of this superb pub-lication. Last autumn we took a trip to Greece and Italy, and aboard ship I showed some of the copies of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS to fellow travelers and they looked upon the various scenes shown in the pages with almost unbelieving eyes. In Italy where the world famous Amalfi Drive attracts people from all over the world, and which we visited, I can truly say that many scenes so beautifully portrayed in ARIZONA HIGHWAYS made the Amalfi scenery look tame by comparison. While I have been a writer of many years, and for the past twenty four years have been an historical columnist for the Copley papers of Southern California, I say that I have never, at any time of my life, looked through a magazine so beauti-fully illustrated as ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

Guy Allison Glendale, California

COLOR CLASSIC SLIDES:

What absolutely marvelous people you are! There is hardly a subject in our library to which ARIZONA HIGHWAYS has not con-tributed some of the very best of the slide repertoire. Tropical fish and fluorescing minerals we have tried to get everywhere; consequently they were high on our demand list, but little did we expect that ARIZONA HIGHWAYS would turn out first-class slides of both in ONE issue. Astonishing! Amaz-ing! Incredible! What a super-duper maga-zine!

F. A. McKay, Film Secretary Bonar Presbyterian Church School Toronto 4, Ontario, Canada

OPPOSITE PAGE

UPPER-Photograph was taken with a 4x5 Linhof Technika camera; Ektachrome; f.22 at 1/10th sec.; Eastman-Ektar 127mm f.4.7 lens; August; mid-afternoon. Montezuma Castle, part of Montezuma Castle National Monument, is located five miles north of Camp Verde turnoff just east of Black Canyon Highway. Montezuma Castle is presumed to have been built about the same time as Tuzigoot. Pottery found shows it was occupied in the early Pueblo III area (1050-1300) and that the latest occupancy was well into the Pueblo IV area (1300-1700) perhaps as late as 1425. No definite age can be given for the ruins as dendrochronology (tree ring study) has not yet devised a means of dating sycamore and juniper timbers.

LOWER-Photograph taken with a Burke & James Press camera; Ektachrome; f.18 at 1/25th sec.; 90mm Schneider Angulon lens; early spring; bright day; Meter Reading 400; ASA rating 12. Montezuma Well, shown here, is south of Oak Creek Canyon and seven miles north of Montezuma Castle. In 1947 the Well and 261 acres around it became part of Montezuma Castle National Monument. The deep blue waters of this unusual limestone sinkhole always make an interesting picture, particularly when the nearby tree wears a fresh crop of bright green leaves. Montezuma Well is 480 feet in diameter, with the limestone cliffs encircling it rising 80 feet above the water. The Well, 55 feet deep, has a flow of 1,000 gallons a minute. It is one of Arizona's scenic and scientific treasures.

BACK COVER

"IN THE SHRINE OF ST. JOSEPH-YARNELL" BY ELLIS BOONE. 4x5 Speed Graphic camera; Ektachrome. Photograph shows one of the stations of the cross in the Shrine of St. Joseph of the Mountains at Yarnell. The Shrine was financed by the Catholic Action League, with sculpturing by the late Felix Lucero of Tucson. The fantastically beautiful and imposing rock formations here made the area a perfect place for the Shrine.

Today The clouds, In uniforms of gold and gray, Went marching by In time and tune to whistling wind. On dress parade, They marched As though a master did review, Maneuvers old yet ever new, With faultless eye and perfect mind.

"It isn't raining rain to me"These lines once seemed quite silly. In fact at seventeen or so I thought them "daffo-dilly." But now that Junior goes to school And finds spring rains inviting, It isn't raining Rain to meIt's even stopped my idling. With mud-tracked floors and muddy shoes And my old mop a-groanin'It isn't raining Rain to me, It's raining Pandemonium!

Hear the westward wagons rollSmell the dust and taste the tears, Feel the quest of other yearsAs the phantom wagons roll See the circling vulture sail, Argus of the spectral trail; Race the taunting tumble weed, Lost in avarice and greed; Mark the fierce Apache cry As the train goes thundering by Gold is yellow, blood is red, And those valiant ones lie deadLust to dust and gold to mouldCrumbling dust and yellow gold.

He bounces on a broomstick mount, A fractious, bucking steed. But he does not let it throw him, A buckaroo indeed. The broncho plunges, bucks and rears. He puts on quite a show. All this performance takes place in Our backyard rodeo.

The drowned face of the moon Looks out with unseeing eye From a backwash of the sky, From the tarnished silver lagoon Where tattered clouds half hide That pale lost visage adrift Where seaweed streamers lift, Loosed by the sluggish tide.

Needle by needle, the pines grow tall; Drop by drop, the great rains fall; Moment by moment, our lives progress; Thought by thought, we build happiness.