TOURING ARIZONA'S YESTERDAYS

Lava dikes dammed the flowing foothills back from the narrow ribbon of road that reels west into the Black Mountains from U.S. 66 in Mohave County. Skewed mesas and truncated stone columns on each side of the road projected the profound impression of an ancient estate, long abandoned and in ruins. Even the loose rock, fallen from the steep hillsides over the course of centuries, supported this curious impression of gigantic, ancient ruin, for they rested in tumbled piles, the color and texture and shape of crude outsized brick.

Near the summit these stones have been gathered into puny man-made roadside retaining walls and small foundations. At the very top of this charred-red, jumbled landscape, at the side of the road, there stands an unexpected piece of whimsy: a very old, very small, bone-white abandoned gas station with a single hand-powered pump cocked in mock hello.

I parked for a few minutes in the driveway of the old station, savoring the delicious anticipation of a full week's travel through Arizona. For, while there are as many ways to enjoy traveling in Arizona as there are travelers, my own particular pleasure is in traveling the state's colorful past. And just ahead of me, down the western wall of the Black Mountains, lay the first destination of my tour through Arizona's yesterdays, Oatman.

Until fifteen years ago, streams of transcontinental traffic had looped up the narrow, twisting road I had followed to the summit of the Sitgreaves Pass to wind slowly down the other side through Gold Road and Oatman before striking off toward the Colorado River and California. But in 1952 U.S. 66 was realigned to follow the easier lowland route around the mountains, and now only the curious and knowledgeable choose the old Sitgreaves Pass route. They are rewarded with one of the most compelling landscapes in Arizona.

Two miles down the canyon from the desolate anthill of Gold Road lies Oatman, a ghost town on a ghost highway. The highway forms the single street of the town from which lanes branch off to poke into narrow canyons and climb the knobby hills that press in against the small community. I parked in the shade of one such hill and climbed it past a row of genteelly dilapidated cottages with screens torn and porches sagging. The loudest sound in Oatman was the crunching of loose porphyry under my shoes. Sitting on a rock overlooking the trafficless highway through the heart of town, I paused to listen for the minor sounds of Oatman's pulse: a cactus wren dislodged a miniature avalanche of seed-sized pebbles, a strolling pair of booted feet scraped against the rough paving at the edge of the road, a screen door slammed, a broken measure of radio music drifted up. One after another these fragile noises tiptoed up to where I sat, accentuating the limitless silence of Oatman's bankrupt hopes. Rising behind the homes of the fifty residents who still remain, the Black Mountains have loosed all geologic restraint, rising up in fluted peaks, in tusks and knuckles of Immediately below the summit to the west lies Gold Road, where Jose Jeres, working with a $12.50 grubstake in 1900, uncovered ore assaying forty ounces of gold to the ton. A few months later Jeres and his partner had sold their claim for $50,000, and by 1931, when the richest ore had been exhausted, the Gold Road mines had produced more than seven million dollars.

In 1949 the mining properties were razed to save on taxes.

Today Gold Road is a thin, worn fabric of ruins spread down the convoluted canyon slope like alluvial debris. The road slips lower in pinched curves past scores of tiny miners' cabins, while the western landscape reaches out one hundred miles through the still, clear air past the adobe ruins close at hand, past the massive stone columns and platforms of the middle distance and into the empty deserts lying beyond the placid Colorado River.

Fifty years ago Oatman was on the verge of becoming one of the largest cities in Arizona. Mining production had begun in 1909 on claims staked by prospectors wandering down from Gold Road. When the first forty thousand tons of ore through the mill yielded over a million dollars in gold, a rush to Oatman began that lasted ten full years. By 1916 mining operators had blocked out six million dollars in rich ore underground, and Oatman's hotels were jammed to the rafters, her streets a flowing mosaic of automobiles, of twelveand twenty-four-mule teams and milling pedestrians. In 1920 the Mohave and Milltown Railroad, two banks, seven hotels and twenty saloons served a population touching twenty thousand people.

ravaged rock that push up into the sky with such raw force and magnitude that Oatman's remains seem like scattered toys in a setting of pinkish-hued mining tailings which are eroding with age.

Many of Oatman's busy thousands were transients drawn to the mines by the dream of quick and easy wealth. They moved on when the rough reality of pushing a muckstick at three dollars a shift became unbearable. Production slowed with the gold depression of the 1920's, but was going as strong as ever by the midthirties and settling down into a straightforward, businesslike matter of dragging up rock from deep underground, extracting the gold and lesser materials and meeting the payroll. That cycle came to an abrupt, anguished stop in 1942, when the War Production Board classified gold mines as nonessential to the war effort and ordered their shutdown. Sixty families moved away the day the last paychecks were handed round. Then the movie theater closed, and the banks soon after, and many of the stores. Yet despite the fact that Oatman's population was decimated almost overnight by the calamitous closing of the mines, those who stayed never doubted that mining would resume once the war was over. They were wrong. It never did. Labor costs had more than doubled during the war years, and mine operators were forced to concede reluctantly that extracting the gold was too costly. Oatman struggled along on the trickle of highway trade funneled through town along U.S. 66 while waiting for technology to catch up again. And then, in 1952, the highway was rerouted around the Black Mountains to bypass Oatman altogether. Most of her remaining people departed, leaving their homes and businesses boarded up and vacant, including the little white gas station at the Sitgreaves Summit. But don't count Oatman out. A small firm has begun reworking the old mine tailings with an Australian extraction process, and they anticipate a steady payroll of as many as forty men if the process proves out. Just before I left Oatman the lone remaining hotel keeper told me, "My family has been here for a hundred and five years in the mining business, long before there was any Oatman at all. We've seen the mines boom twice now, and there were fortunes made both times. I think she's about due again." I wouldn't bet against him. He and the others in Oatman are keeping the schoolhouse maintained in good repair and ready for use, despite the fact that at present there is not a single child in Oatman to attend it.

From Oatman I returned to Kingman and followed U.S. 66 east to Flagstaff before turning south on U.S. 89 Alternate, to the largest ghost city in America. The road from Flagstaff meanders through the unforgettably beautiful Oak Creek Canyon, its surface littered in autumn with parchment leaves, and then sweeps through Sedona to the floor of the Verde Valley. Thirty miles across the valley floor Mingus Mountain stretches up, and a little to the north protrudes the 6,050-foot hump called Cleopatra Hill. Around the hip of this naked knob of earth, in uncertain order, are scattered the buildings of Jerome. Across much of the valley's breadth Jerome is clearly visible as a large city many times the size of Oatman and I approached this metropolis on the eminence with almost feudal expectations. I wasn't disappointed. Over the last two miles leading into Jerome, beyond Clarkdale, the city itself is hidden behind a promontory that rises steeply alongside the ascending highway. Perched along the lip of this peninsular foothill, easily a hundred yards above the surface of the road, eight or ten brilliantly painted houses are cantilevered into space and silhouetted like jolly bright flags against the sky. The gaps between them give the first intimation of the losses Jerome has suffered to the years.

ESTERDAYS from page 15

Despite these losses, the first close view of Jerome is that of a major city. Her buildings are commodious, important major structures, not the narrow-shouldered, false-fronted frame tenements of a frontier settlement. Her streets are paved and lighted, her residential sections are extensive. But her streets are also spangled with shattered windowpanes and broken shingles, her walls sag and swoon against one another, a vacant, brooding urban ghost built for fifteen thousand people and housing barely three hundred. And to intensify the mystery of Jerome's empti ness, the city clings to a thirty percent slope, so that the big boned old buildings have been at the mercy of decades of wind and rain and snow and the force of gravity. Some of them have slipped and sprawled downslope, ending in a tangle of tumbled walls, mammoth piles of wood and concrete junk.

The best first stop in Jerome lies below the city proper The Jerome State Historic Park is located in the remodeled mansion of one of the city's copper mining millionaires. Here a brief but solidly informative introduction to this unique city is presented, beginning with the prehistoric Indians who first mined the blue-green outcrops on the barren hillside, through development of the vast copper deposits beneath them by the mining corporations, of the twentieth century. My second stop was in the center of the city, and it was my last stop, for Jerome is a walker's city, and an automobile is superfluous. I strolled up a steeply slanting cobbled street leading away from the heart of town. Past the Catholic church a dense neighborhood of close-built homes and apartments gives way in the course of a single block to a line of substantial porched-and-screened twoand three-story houses enthroned on the uphill side of the street. They seemed peaceful and quiet as I approached, but not ominously so rather as if their families were due back any minute from a weekend away or from a trip to the grocery store. But as I drew closer the details of abandonment leapt one after another to my eye: peeling paint, wind-ripped roofing, doors hanging crookedly by a single hinge. These had been the homes of Jerome's professional men, empty now for nearly twenty years. One of them, otherwise as expansive as the rest, has been gutted by a flash flood that ripped from back to front through the house as if the walls had been built of paper. It has left behind a splinter-lipped tunnel floored with rocks and dried mud through an otherwise stately old home. At the end of this row of houses the city suddenly ends, with only the hillside beyond.

Another fascinating hour of rambling leads down the main street of the city, where empty stores and offices drop intricate (and almost certainly misleading) hints about their former tenants: a dusty, nibbled pile of leather-bound law books barely visible through a boarded window; a map, torn from a contemporary magazine and tacked to a rain-stained wall, that shows the Nazi advance into Russia. At the fork in the road I took the right-hand turning to follow the tight whorls described by the street in its climb around the hill. I ambled past homes with two flights leading up to basement entrances, walked on to round a wishbone curve, and passed the same homes from above to see three flights of stairs leading down to attic entrances. I saw a huge hospital locked and empty and a multistoried elementary school, its play yard stippled with clumps of brush. It was a pleasantly exciting walk punctuated with quiet surprises and quite enough to endear Jerome to any visitor.

But when I returned to the center of the city, feeling satisfied but a little tired from the walk, I fell totally in love with this lonely, gaunt, old provincial city on Cleopatra Hill. I had stepped into the Jerome Candy Kitchen to rest at a small table by the front window. When I had settled myself and started to sip at the cup of coffee I'd bought to justify my sitting there for a few minutes, my eyes fell on one of the magnificent landscape views in America.

Directly across the street, Cleopatra Hill falls abruptly away. Downslope chimney tops rise barely above the level of the curb. Beyond them, framed in the close foreground by the weathered walls of the big city buildings, the broad sweep of the Verde Valley lies like a textured green carpet, bounded at its far edge by a barricade of red and white sculptured stone bluffs. Fringing the tops of these painted rock cliffs, a distancepurpled pine forest retreats into the infinite distance where the San Francisco Peaks, powerfully printed in black against the blazing blue sky, keep slumbering watch over the serenity of the land. Never have I received so much return for a single dime: that incredible view and a cup of coffee one of the great bargains of the world.

Not all of Jerome's old buildings have been abandoned. In addition to the candy shop there are a handful of interesting stores offering a variety of merchandise, including one that seems to have on its shelves every toy made anywhere on earth, a definite convenience to traveling parents. Several attractive cafes and restaurants, an art gallery, and the Mine Museum of the Jerome Historical Society cater to thousands of vacation visitors to the derelict city on Cleopatra Hill.

Though less than a half dozen of Jerome's three hundred residents are now employed in mining, there are many who say that the Phelps Dodge Corporation will one day reactivate the huge workings that closed finally in 1953, after seventyseven years of production, and that shifts of miners will return to the hundreds of miles of shafts, stopes, tunnels and winzes snarled in a three-dimensional maze below the city's streets. But, even if they are wrong, Jerome's place in the ranks of American cities is secure. There's not another like her.

From Jerome I fled south through the modern cities of Phoenix and Tucson, pausing for the briefest taste of metropolitan civilization before humming on again.

About thirty miles south of Tucson on U.S. 89 the small community of Amado huddles at the edge of the highway. Almost hidden alongside one of the hamlet's humble buildings is a lane leading west to Arivaca, ultimately describing a long, looping 50-mile crescent before rejoining Ú.S. 89 a few miles north of Nogales and the Mexican border. It is one of the West's great Sunday drives.

At its beginnings the paved surface of the Arivaca Road crosses the brushy bottomland of the Santa Cruz River, then rises slightly to enter rolling fields of grass. After a few miles the pavement ends, and for the majority of the drive the surface is well-graded but unpaved. Away from the highway and the river the road curls over a folded, gently wrinkled landscape that looks like a green-tufted yellow blanket tossed and carelessly straightened over the surface of the earth. Golden grass, stippled with dusty green oaks, ripples like liquid in the breeze. The road swoops lazily but efficiently over the easy side of the humpy hillocks.

There are hawks here. Like totems they perched on fenceposts, broad wings folded intricately against warm feathered sides, watching through glittering eyes as I slid past. One took flight when the road brought me too near him. He lunged forward to thrash his powerful wings, thump them powerfully against the still, dusty air and glide for a hundred yards in a yawning curve above me.

Arivaca is a lively little town, despite the impression derived from the adobe buildings melting into the earth along its single street. Its twice-monthly newspaper, Arivaca Briefs, is often quoted by other editors in the vicinity, and its business houses provide gasoline, groceries and refreshments.

Yet this is an ancient place, far older than Jerome. Originally a Pima Indian village, Arivaca was a prominent rancho under Spanish and Mexican rule. After the Gadsden Purchase, Americans arrived in increasing numbers to begin the mining and cattle ranching that still continues. At the far end of town a road strikes off to the right to link with Arizona 286. Beside what must have been one of Arivaca's original structures, a low, slope-roofed adobe shaded by upreaching, outstretching cottonwoods, the road leading back to U.S. 89 points off again into the rolling grasslands. Across it, at the back of the ancient building at the crossroads, lies a clear, black pool that the trees have speckled with brown-red leaves. A second pool had formed a few feet away, stiff as gelatin and quivering at the touch of the leaves falling from the two immense cottonwoods towering above it. The air was motionless as I passed by, and the trees, muscled black limbs raising up in a timeless stretch from their knotted roots, were a blaze of shimmering, rich autumn yellow. I'll always think of this tiny, remote corner of Arizona as the perfect expression of dignity, age, and a simple, too-seldom-achieved harmony between mankind and the land.

The countryside retains its rolling, veldt-like quality part of the way back toward the highway as the road passes at respectful distances the ranches nestled in shallow valley bowls. The Arizona of picture postcards is a raw, bold, masculine place of enormous geologic wonders: the immense colorsplashed Grand Canyon, the majestically architectural Monument Valley, the starkly populous saguaro forests of the Sonoran deserts. But, as powerful as the impact of these regions is, their mystery is ultimately a surface mystery, for all that is hidden at one moment, from one vantage point, is revealed at another. Along the Arivaca Road, in contrast, the landforms generate the excitement of the swelling sea rather than that of the pounding surf. The mystery of this landscape is not so easily discovered for, while it is as rich in texture and quality as any in the state, it is soft and gentle and feminine.

About ten miles beyond Arivaca the road begins climbing easily into a deep canyon pass, slowly and without urgency but with the promise of excitement, as if my car were being casually ingested by a reclining dinosaur. Narrow washes and gullies glance off to the sides of the road, their silted bottoms cobbled with boulders. Some of the smooth-faced cattle from the lower grazing lands wandered sleepily through the thickening oak forest, but the character of the land had changed from the pastoral to the gnarled and twisted look that always suggests mining in the West. Soon I glimpsed small gallows frames and an occasional cabin through the trees. It was the work of a very minor kind of imagination to conjure up the picture of the Arivaca-bound stagecoach as it clattered down the dusty road from Nogales and paused a moment to deliver

passengers when the Chiricahua Apaches suddenly broke out eighty-seven years ago. HTA also operates Lookout Lodge, a forty-unit motel on U.S. 80, and the 26,500-acre Lucky Hills Ranch. They have also drawn plans for the reconstruction of the vanished Gird Block on Fremont Street.

HTA is not the only concern celebrating Tombstone's riotous past. Most of Allen Street's saloons, stores and cafes hark back to the rowdy days of the camp's beginnings, and every fourth door opens into a museum. The Wells Fargo, a cavernous labyrinth of three buildings and thirty-one rooms, contains 50,000 artifacts and is by far the largest. The former Cochise County Courthouse, built in 1882 and abandoned when the county seat was moved to Bisbee in 1929, is now a state-operated museum. The Wyatt Earp Museum houses an unrivalled collection of materials relating to Tombstone's most famous citizen. I might have alternately browsed and daydreamed for weeks through Tombstone's quiet, sunny streets if I hadn't been urged to make a pair of side trips.

The first of these took me nine miles west of Tombstone to the San Pedro River, where I parked and threaded my way on foot through the man-high catclaw to where the melting walls of Millville loom up from mammoth stone foundations. Across the river is Charleston, a larger town equally ravaged by the passing years. Beyond Charleston the lights of Fort Huachuca and Huachuca City began to blink on in the fading afternoon as shadows slithered toward me through the brushy riverbed. The doorway I rested in once opened into the mill office where Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds murdered M. R. Peel eighty-five years before.

The next morning I drove east of Tombstone to Gleeson, where Willard and Shirley Mayfield keep a small museum in what was once the residence of the local constable. Unlike the polished restoration of Tombstone, the Mayfields' exhibit overflows quarters in which paths have been worn in the wooden floors, and the warping old door frames have been patched and repaired and repaired again. I drank a cold bottle of soda pop at the felt-covered table in the front room and felt transported back sixty years in time before I had finished.

A few miles beyond Gleeson is Courtland, a handful of brick Victorian storefronts huddled in the notch where two hummocky hills rub shoulders. Nothing now suggests the two railroads that once served this community, and the lone remaining resident is renowned for his unfriendliness to visitors.

At Pearce, the last community on the road connecting Tombstone with U.S. 666, is the famous Old Store, a genuine landmark of Arizona's yesterdays. Six clerks once quick-stepped through the Old Store's aisles at the beck of customers in from the Commonwealth Mine and from the ranches around. They climbed its roller-mounted ladders to the high shelves and rang up purchases on the same ornate six-drawered cash register still in use today.

After a long rambling day to the east I returned to Tombstone to stroll a final stroll down Allen Street and chat one last time on the sun-splashed benches with the oldtimers and with the Johnnie-come-latelies who have been in Tombstone fifty years or less. And as we talked about the old days I was struck again, for the fiftieth or sixtieth time since I had set out, with the sincere regret that Arizona's past was truly gone except for what wispy traces remained behind in the out-ofthe-way corners like those I had visited. And as I prepared to return home to the everyday world of here and now, I reflected that this would truly be a tragedy except that Arizona is still vitally alive with challenge and excitement.

Touring ARIZONA'S YESTERDAYS is an account of a journey I made with David Muench to a few of those places where the past has remained to be an important part of the present. But is far from a complete account, for it says little about the people we met along the way.

Because I was constantly striking up conversations and gathering information, and because David was forever asking people to move or stand still or avoid looking at the camera, we met many men and women we will not soon forget. There was Lloyd Moss whose grandfather made the first big gold strike in the Oatman district. A grandfather himself now, Moss is a big, smiling, silver-haired extrovert who serves up a lively mixture of good-humored joshing and gold-price lobbying with the drinks he sells in the small, wood-paneled bar of his Gold City Hotel. There was gentle voiced Jimmy McCarthy for whom mining has been such a consuming passion for sixty years that he has never married. Jimmy sat with me on a bench alongside the highway through Oatman and talked for an hour in the lingering dusk of the mines he'd worked in all his life: "At the Tom Reed Mine they sank a shaft to three hundred feet without a sign of ore. But they kept on drilling, and at 465 feet they struck a vein of gold sixty-five feet wide. The stock went from ten cents a share to better than nine dollars and paid dividends of a hundred percent a month and more for five years ." There was Tony Lozano, the witty, articulate mayor of Jerome who invited us to his home on the lower slope of Cleopatra's Hill and fed us with burro jerky and reminiscences of thirty years spent in the mines. At Tombstone we chatted around the Wyatt Earp table at the Wells Fargo Museum with tourists and local folks. We drank beer at the Crystal Palace with Sid Wilson, the flint-and-oaken 88-year-old who had driven one of the last stagecoaches into Tombstone sixty-three years before and then gone off to tour with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show for eleven seasons --a proud, powerful man with an invigorating talent for living. But of them all, the most memorable was an old man whom we saw for only five minutes, whose conversation was almost unintelligible, and who refused totally to co-operate with us.

We met him in Gleeson, near the end of our trip. David was loping up and down the overgrown, empty streets looking for strong camera angles and I was standing with Willard Mayfield in the graveled turnaround in front of his museum, listening as he pointed out the mines on the hillside opposite. Before long David had focussed on a small frame building near the museum. I asked Mayfield what it had been.

"That used to be one of the Chinese restaurants in town," he told me.

Mildly interested, I asked him when it had closed down, but he could not recall exactly. "Nearly forty years ago any how," he said. We watched David setting up his photograph. The building sat alone at the back of a square of ankle-high grass ripling and golden in the slight breeze. Around the square a fence had sagged and reeled and fallen flat against the ground in a few places. The paint had been scoured from the warped wooden walls long ago except on the front wall where an overhanging porch roof had preserved it in unexpected lus"Shirley, when did Yee Wee close down, do you remem-

ΕΠΙΤΑΡΗ FOR A PIONEER

David and I passed the yawning basement of what had once been the Taylor store, crossed the dirt street leading away toward the old town of Turquoise, and picked our way through the tangles of wire and piles of warped and curled lumber that had been tossed into Yee Wee's yard from the back doors of long-vanished Main Street buildings. The yard was two feet high with brush and carpeted with thirty years of autumn leaves with only a vague path leading to the mail box at the street. The cabin itself was as worn and sagging as the restaurant, but it had been patched with odd lengths of board and corrugated galvanized sheeting to keep out the wind. We knocked at the grimy, paint-flaked door and waited. After a minute we knocked again. Again we heard no response. We knocked a third time and a fourth. "He must be asleep," I suggested to David, my voice unconciously dropping to a murmur. "Let's try again later." Reluctantly we retraced our steps.

At the edge of the yard we turned for another look at the old cabin and stopped short. In the shadow cast by a spindly tree at the corner of the cabin we saw the door now standing slightly ajar. And in the doorway was a figure whose outline we could barely make out, a deeper shadow, silent and motionless, that stared back at us.

We hurried back. In my anxiety to put the old man at ease, I began stuttering out a long involved sentence referring to the Mayfields, to our interest in old Gleeson, to anything under the sun I could think of that would identify us as friends. My sentence trailed off as I got a good look at the old man, who stood watching us expressionlessly.

He was incredibly ancient, stooped as if the weight of his narrow shoulders were almost too much to support. He wore a canvas jacket, its seams split from age, the cloth shiny with years of smoke and dirt. His tan trousers, stuffed half in and half out of a pair of badly cracked and split rubber boots, were spotted and stained. On his head a greasy wool cap had been pulled across his cropped white hair like a bandage. His white beard was worn full, but carefully trimmed. His face was surprisingly unlined, underscoring his fragile, ageless appear ance as if he had been carved from some fine, luminous wood. And his eyes, blinking up at us as my questions trailed off into silence were like a pair of glittering black agates.

"No lie still aunt," the old man murmured.

With a deep breath David asked if he could take a photograph. The old man's reply was unintelligible, but David streaked back to get his camera anyhow. I asked another ques tion or two, but he did not reply. Instead he began to shuffle slowly back into the cabin with tiny steps. As he did so I saw that he was gripping a willow cane with his left hand, which had been concealed by the partially opened door. And I began to realize how difficult it was for him to stand erect.

"No pitchah!" he snapped as David returned with the camera.

"It will only take a minute," David pleaded.

"Nononono!" the old man replied. Behind him I could see the interior of the cabin, smoke-smudged, piled high with reams of old newspapers and tangles of clothing. David asked again for a minute in the sunlight, and he was quivering, nearly weeping with frustration at the prospect of missing the photograph. I had given up any thought of learning about the old days in Gleeson.

"No, no! Na pitchah! Too col ou'side. Go way. Goway now!" And he edged further back into the cabin to slowly close and bolt the door in our faces, holding us spellbound as he did so with a grim and disapproving look. We knocked several times again be he simply stood quietly on the other side of the door waiting for us to leave.

At the museum once again Willard Mayfield told us we were lucky he had been feeling poorly that day. "Usually he starts shouting 'nonono' at thirty yards and shooting off his shotgun at ten. He's just not much on people he doesn't know."

David and I talked about the old man often over the next few days, and when I had returned home I found myself describ ing the encounter to friends. The image of the tattered, digni fied, unflinching old man had been powerfully imprinted in my memory.

David must have felt it as deeply as I, for early in March, five months after we had passed through Gleeson, he drove many miles out of his way to ask after the old man. I received a note from him a few days later: "Yee Wee," he wrote, "our silent friend at Gleeson, has passed away. The Mayfields were quite moved when they told me about it, for they had buried the ancient only a short time before. I was quite sorry to hear it." I, too, felt an unexpected sense of personal loss at his passing. Because of it, I wrote to the Mayfields and to others whose names they gave me, in the hope of learning more about Yee Wee. The picture that emerges is hopelessly fragmentary, built of fading memories, but curiously satisfying.

No-one knows when Yee Wee arrived in the U.S., or where in China he had been raised, or even how old he was when he came here, but it is known that he reached San Francisco well before the turn of the century and came to Arizona shortly afterward. He worked in Tombstone for a while at the famous Can-Can run by Quong Kee, thought to have been a relative. He also worked at a Fairbank's restaurant.

He moved to Gleeson in about 1900 and soon established his reputation as an excellent cook. His Sunday dinners, several courses capped with home-made ice cream for dessert and all for 50c, were famous for miles around Gleeson, and his lemon cream pie was praised all the way to the Territorial capital. Even more familiar than his cooking was his generosity. "After I was married," Mrs. Faye Wade wrote from Whittier, Cali fornia, to tell me, "Yee would help me out every Christmas by cooking my turkey. He was never reluctant to lend a help ing hand to anyone." People say that he fed as many custo mers who couldn't pay him as those who could and would never allow anyone to leave his place hungry, money or not. One oldtimer now living in Tombstone remembers riding with his father on a wagon. Yee Wee hailed them from the restaurant and hurried out to hand up a piece of pie to the boy. For more than two decades, hundreds of men and women were beneficiaries of his kindness and consideration.

Yee Wee stayed on when the mines closed down in the 1920's and he stayed on as most of the population packed up and drifted away. Times were hard for him, and during the depression he closed his restaurant briefly to cook for a CCC gang working in Rucker's Canyon. While he was away someone burglarized his restaurant and set it on fire. He never reopened.

Instead he planted a vegetable garden on a small plot of ground. He hauled the water to irrigate it in a pair of buckets suspended coolie-fashion from a yoke across his shoulders. For meat he hunted small game. "Owls," he said once, "him awful good chicken." He had retired and lived self-sufficiently for more than thirty years.

Five years ago, however, his well dried up and he gave up his vegetable patch, relying on his old friends who brought him food, water and wood enough to get by on. He spent much of his time sitting quietly in the sun on his back porch.

Last summer, nearly seventy years after Yee Wee had first arrived in Gleeson, Mrs. Wade visited there for the first time since she had left with the closing of the mines. "When he answered my knock, I wondered if he would remember me after all these years. At first he did not, but when I mentioned my father's name it all came back to him and he began asking questions about my father, my mother and my husband. As we talked the tears were streaming down his face, but he was glad to see me and I him."

One morning last February Danny Christianson, a neighbor of Yee Wee, who had taken to looking in on the old man, discovered him fallen in the cabin and unable to rise. He bundled the frail old body in blankets and rushed him to the hospital in Douglas. There the old man rallied briefly and died early in the morning of the twentieth, at an age variously estimated between 110 and 120 years. He lies buried in the old Gleeson cemetery.

David and I were immensely lucky. We might have decided that the uncommunicative old man in the ramshackle old cabin was simply a solitary and cantankerous old so-and-so. Instead, we met a unique and irreplaceable individual, one of Arizona's pioneers.

Goodbye, old man, and God Bless you.

Dr. and Mrs. Robert Brock Skipton, our hosts and guides to the Arizona National Livestock Show this issue, could be described as newcomers to our state, but really they are not. They are Missouri folks by up-bringing, but when you come to know them you'd think they were Arizonans from the time they first wore shoes.

Arizona's enchantment began for Mrs. Skipton when she was a small girl accompanying her parents on trips to Phoenix to visit her grandparents who came here in 1945. Dr. Skipton became Arizona-oriented after his first vacation here in 1955.

Graduates of the University of Missouri (she from the School of Nursing, he from the School of Medicine) they established their first Arizona residency when Dr. Skipton chose Maricopa County General Hospital for his internship (1964-1965). Following that period, in which they saw a lot of Arizona, Dr. Skipton served in the Army Medical Corps as the physician for a Paratroop unit stationed in Panama, his duties taking him practically all over South America. Because of his paratrooping ability, he also served on the medical coverage for several Gemini flights.

After that: Arizona! here we come! Dr. Skipton has started medical practice in the Scottsdale area as a Family Physician and it looks as if Missouri's loss is Arizona's gain. We feel they are well qualified for doing the Livestock Show for us. Both their parents have farms in St. Joe's and on those farms have been lots of cows... R.C.

THE AUTHORS ARIZONA NATIONAL from page 12

The accent last year was on youth on the Junior Division. Anyone discouraged with the much-publicized, minute representation of youth made by hippies and delinquents nowadays must see this show and see these young Americans.

The Junior Division is made up of Future Farmers of America (high school age to 21) and 4-H members (9-19). Last year there were participants from eight states and all counties of Arizona. They came with their parents, they came to compete, and they came to learn. They are young businessmen and women who have their own bank accounts, have confidence in their ability, and have assumed the responsibility of seeing a project through.

When the Arizona National was first opened to Juniors, in 1951, there were only six calf entries, the quality of which left something to be desired. At first the division included only Arizona Juniors. When it was decided to open it for any qualified entrants, there was some controversy about whether it would be fair to Arizona youths because they had the problem of fattening a calf in a different environment.

But it was opened, and the Arizona youth were brought into contact with those from many other states, to all kinds of cattle and to helpful hints on how others handled their projects. And they learned fast. Through the years Arizona youths have increased their share of the prizes and have made a great showing for their state. For instance, last year the Arizona Feeder Junior Division Steers accounted for the highest dressing percentage or usable beef after grading by the packers.The events for Juniors included competition in almost all breeds; a livestock judging contest, requiring a written and oral statement containing their reasons for their selections; a sale of fat steers; the calf scramble; and the Junior Rodeo Association events. These young people have the total responsibility for their animals from the time they are born. The animals shown must have been a project of the Junior exhibitors with records kept at least three months prior to the show. They are responsible for feeding, medical care, grooming and when the time comes for showing and selling the animals. They are counseled and given advice by their parents, their clubs and the various breed associations such as the American Angus and American Hereford Association.

These young men and women we saw and talked with know the sting of the sun's rays, the taste of salty perspiration, the smell of fresh clover and the inner joy and contentment that comes with the physical tiredness after a day's work. These young people take pride in themselves, their education, their cattle and horses, their homes, farms, ranches, their state and their country. We saw an impressive quality of animals at the show, but nothing compared to the quality of this breed of young Americans.

The highlight and cumulative event of the show was the Parade of Champions. As presented by the Arizona National it is unequalled at any other national show. The setting was the colorful outdoor show-ring. To add spectacular color, the parade was heralded by the Wickenburg Posse, "The Yellow Shirt Gang," who had ridden fifty miles by horseback to carry the flags of the states represented.

The show-ring was a kaleidoscope of color. It was filled with the winners of each breed and classification, their owners and their trophies. Here was represented many hard hours of work by owners and their families; some of the finest beef cattle and quarter horses in the nation, the labors of the members of the board and their committees of the Arizona National, the community spirit and hospitality of Arizona, the hopes, dreams and the reality of success.

We were sad it was over. We had met warm and friendly people and had gained some insight into their important domain, the beef industry. We were thankful for what we had seen and learned and as we left the Fairgrounds we looked forward with anticipation to the Arizona National Livestock Show coming up Dec. 31, 1968, through Jan. 5, 1969.

BOVINE BEAUTY SHOP

What beautiful animals! And well they should be. Neither French Poodle nor human being receives better care and attention. I was fascinated by the grooming details that took place before and during the big show.

Included on the animals' dressing tables were such items as a hoof parer and chisel, cocoa soap, emery cloths, rice root brush, curry and dressing comb, circular lining comb, roaching shears and horn weights.

The cattle were being shampooed in loads of lather (with special attention being given to the white areas of course). Following this luxurious sudsing, they were rinsed, combed and fluffed dry. In most In instances, drying and fluffing were done by electric dryer! Then comes more brushing and grooming until every hair is in the perfect place. Their hair was so soft and silky, the very sight would be enough to make any woman envious.

This lovely hair is clipped and cut in distinctive styles with the same precision and care as one would receive in a barber shop or beauty salon. Some of the animals were given an overall body spray to make them glisten in the sun. Tips of the tails were back-combed to fluff up like cotton candy. Then spray net was used to hold it in place and to manage other "unruly" areas.

Even a manicure!! Cloven hoofs are painted or polished and buffed to shine like a pair of brand-new boots.

This care is not reserved for the feminine creatures alone, no sir. Even the brave bulls received the same treatment, The patient brushing and combing is a continuous task throughout the entire show. Brush, brush, brush, comb and curl, comb and curl. I think I'll switch beauty shops.