EULALIA (SISTER) BOURNE

"SISTER'S BOOK OUT THIS FRIDAY"

So read the headlines of the San Manuel Miner, on Thursday, April 20, 1967. The Miner is the weekly newspaper that serves the tri-communities of Mammoth, Oracle, and San Manuel in eastern Pinal County, Arizona on the lower stretches of the great San Pedro Valley. The book is Woman in Levi's and Sister, the book's author, is Eulalia Bourne.

As children, her younger sisters could not pronounce her given name, so they called her “Sister.” The name became permanent and Sister she is to everyone who knows her. When Woman in Levi's was published, many people long acquainted with her learned her given name for the first time.

The autograph party held, on the Friday mentioned, in The Mammoth Lion's Club building, was attended by an estimated six hundred people from Arizona, California, and some from the eastern states. The author was kept so busy signing autographs that there was no time to visit with old friends, former pupils, or to get acquainted with strangers who had come to meet her.

Representatives of her publisher, the University of Arizona Press, the book's illustrator, Vic Donohue, and the strangers at the party were amazed at the turnout. But the people who arranged the party, the friends, and former pupils accepted all with quiet pride. They knew it would be a success for they knew Sister. She was the legendary woman who had a little ranch up in the hills, the woman who drove the familiar green pick-up truck with the wooden rack. She was the retired school teacher who for the past several years has kept an office in Mammoth where she makes out income tax returns. They were less surprised than proud that she had written a book. For, according to local legend, Sister can do anything.

Sister was born near the end of the last century on a frontier homestead in the cedar break country under the Caprock rimming the Great Staked Plains of the Texas Panhandle. While still a small child, she moved with her family, in an early style camper (a covered wagon, with trailer, pulled by a four horse team) to the high mountains of New Mexico. (Sister says it was the coldest place on the face of the earth.) From there they migrated to Arizona, where Sister has lived ever since. Her westering parents moved on to California, but Sister, having made an unfortunate marriage, remained. With her prospector husband she spent two winters on the Humbug Creek in the Bradshaw Mountains of Yavapai County.

When her husband died, ending her short-lived marriage, a kind neighbor who was teaching school at Walnut Grove and spending the summer with her own prospector husband on the Humbug, encouraged Sister to go to Phoenix and take the teacher's examination. When the test was passed with flying colors, the good woman asked the Superintendent of Schools in Prescott to give her protege a job.

The job was teaching at the one-room ranch school of Beaver Creek in the beautiful Verde Valley. Sister had found her niche. She often says, “I was born at the age of seventeen teaching school at Beaver Creek.”

Eulalia (Sister) Bourne SISTER'S BOOK WOMAN IN LEVI'S By Eulalia Bourne. THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS, 1967. 208 Pages. $4.95

A casual reader, browsing through a bookstore and coming by chance upon this book, will be intrigued by the title, and, with interest aroused, will glance over the first few lines. That glance will be rewarding: Thirty years and more in the San Pedro Valley have not lessened my sense of awe, as I return from a trip outside to crest the western rim and see the grandeur and color of thousands of square miles spread out before me. I had been an Arizona resident for a quarter of a century before I learned that the state has two scenic wonders carved out over millions of years by great river systems: the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and the San Pedro River Valley, which was named for St. Peter by the padres and conquistadores who passed this way in 1540, eighty years before the Pilgrims landed. The Grand Canyon is out of this world. But the San Pedro Valley, although far from crowded, is peopled. For the most part its denizens are earthy ones, wresting their living from the ground, in some cases for four or five generations: farmers, ranchers, miners.

Here, the reader will say, is a person who knows and loves the country in which she has been a teacher and rancher for many years. But what kind of a person is the author, the reader will wonder, and then will skip to the last few lines in the book to learn more about her. Those lines are revealing: I am pretty far out, but Progress will catch up, some day. When I am bumbling around in a wheelchair, a sharp real estate salesman will drive up to offer to buy and sell my outfit. Not for cash, of course. Who would want to give an old woman cash? How about trading for peace and comfort in some nice clean house in town with a porch and a rocking chair?

"Young Lady," he'll say (that's what you get called when it no longer applies) "you can't make it here any longer. Your fences are down. Your corrals are falling to staves. Your pipeline has rusted away. Your trees are dying for lack of care. Your house is too much for you. You cannot cope with a place so large. I'd like to see you resting easy. You could have a little house in town and be comfortable. No hard work to do. No insoluble worries. Let me have your little ranch for my client and you . . ."

"Just a minute," I'll interrupt. "This nice quiet home you want me to trade for. Is it located where I can hear a cow bawl?"

"Oh, no. It's near the doctors and the hospital and . . ."

That's the moment I'll lower my ear trumpet and sic the dogs on him.

In between the beginning and end of this remarkable book is a lot of living, shrewd observing, humor and humanity, reflecting all the wonderful qualities of the woman behind the pen who finds living good in a land she loves and in doing the things she wants to do.

WOMAN IN LEVI'S can be purchased at your book store or can be ordered direct from the University of Arizona Press, Box 3398, College Station, Tucson, Arizona 85719. The price is $4.95, most book for that money you'll ever buy. . . . R.C.

THE STORY OF "THE WOMAN IN LEVI'S"

Her NEXT MOVE was to the mining camp of Helvetia, in the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson. Again, it was a oneroom school, and while there, her Mexican-American pupils taught her Spanish. She learned enough Spanish during her years in Helvetia to minor in that language at the University of Arizona with twenty-eight units of top grades and not having to study for them.

She moved to Tucson to enroll as a student at the University of Arizona. A teacher by day and a student by night and by correspondence and during the summer sessions, she graduated from the University with highest honors.

After graduation, she accepted a job at Redington, an accommodation ranch school in the San Pedro Valley between the Santa Catalina and Galiuro Mountains. The year was 1930. Her moving days were almost over. She has lived in the San Pedro Valley ever since.

YEARNING FOR a permanent home and feeling the pull of pioneer blood for the great outdoors, Sister took up one of the last grazing homesteads Uncle Sam offered for the purpose of filling up empty spaces. It was located in Pepper Sauce Canyon in the foothills of the Catalinas near Oracle. Still teaching, she bought fifty cows for fifteen dollars apiece. One she named "Old Brownie," one "Dog Harness," and the other forty-eight were, of course, named for the forty-eight states. She was in business. This part of her life became Woman in Levi's.

SHE BUILT a one-room adobe cabin, with the luxury of a bath, dug a well, and settled in. Her cowmen neighbors, who were used to using as much free grazing as they were big enough to control, resented her as an impertinent nester moving onto their private domains. They made bets that she would not stick the three years it took to "prove up" on her land. They did not know Sister. She is still on a ranch, still raising cows.

One neighbor, determined to see the last of her, turned out a big herd of mares onto her grass, taking the food from the mouths of her cows. Each morning, Sister would saddle her pony and drive the mares down the long ridge toward the river, away from her land and far from the home range of the determined neighbor. He gave up. It was too much trouble to bring them home.

ON LONELY EVENINGS at the homestead Sister, who had majored in English at the University of Arizona and won acclaim from her instructors in this field, began to write. At first she wrote unsigned articles for The Arizona Cattlelog, official publication for the Arizona Cattle Growers, about the extraordinary occurrences on a cow ranch, as seen through the eyes of a lone woman. The editor, Abbie W. Keith, encouraged Sister to write a book of her experiences. It took some time to get all the material down into literary form as there were so many interruptions. She estimated that the actual writing time for Woman in Levi's was about a year. Continued on page 36