GILA COUNTY, ARIZONA, U.S.A.

Take it from the 30,000 proud and boastful folks who live there, Gila is Arizona's "has everything" county.

"We've got it all together from A to Z," said one long-time resident, "from the Apache Trail to Zane Grey's cabin.

"And we have a canyon that exposes 500 million years of geology in strata laid out like a layer cake. That's a wider age horizon than the Grand Canyon's and ours has a highway flat dab through the middle of it."

"Listen," said another old-timer, "you can drive 45 miles in this county and get yourself from a palm-lined river bottom to high alpine meadows and you'll pass through vegetation changes equal to a trip from New Orleans to the Canadian border.

"And history? Never mind what they tell you in Yavapai County, the glory hole of state history is right here."

These comments were just for openers before the pair got down to seriously romancing the bejabbers out of the county they're in. In fact, they could have you positively panting to get there before they mention the one thing Gila doesn't have enough of: Privately owned land.

Federally owned land (forests and parts of two Apache Indian reservations) account for 96 per cent of the county; the state owns another percent, and private land ownership accounts for only 3 per cent.

In the current copper mining boom centered around the Globe-Miami area, there are jobs to be had, but almost no housing. Or anyway, not yet. High rise buildings have been disdained.

Gila (pronounced HEE-lah) is roughly the size of the State of Connecticut 4,748 square miles of desert-to-mountain terrain dotted with cowboys, Indians, ancient cliff-dweller ruins, the sites of vanished villages plus a ghost town or two, gambling halls and brothels from the not-too-distant past, plus hundreds of miners who move mountains of overburden to extract thousands of tons of ore every day from open pit copper mines.

The countryside itself varies from the lofty, forested mountain country of the Mogollon (pronounced MUGGY-own) Rim in the north, to the cactus-clad deserts that roll away to the Gila River in the south.

Handsome purple mountains and massive swirling rock formations combine to form spectacular backdrops for the network of lakes, rivers and "cricks."

If you are a native to Gila, you find breath-taking beauty in man-made wonders that are also the economic lifeline the colorful layers of earth surrounding the inverted pyramids that are the open pit mines.

Water sports skiing, boating, swimming are big at Roosevelt Lake where there are two lodges offering resort-style accommodations. Lake fishing for bass, lunker channel cat and scrappy pan fish is a favorite sport at Roosevelt or at San Carlos Lake on the San Carlos Indian reservation.

The sparkling trout streams under the Mogollon Rim have magnificent rainbow and German brown trout.

By Maggie Wilson

Hunters find the state's greatest variety of game deer, elk, wild turkey, quail, dove, water fowl, rabbit, bear, lion, plus a larger javelina (wild pig) population than any other area in the U.S. More than 1,000 hunters from throughout the nation register for the annual Javelina Derby, sponsored by the Globe and Miami chambers of commerce.

Rockhounds, golfers, camera buffs, hikers, horseback riders and campers find their diversions, too, without hardly even trying.

The Salt River Canyon, a mecca for amateur and professional geologists, has a four-lane, high-gear highway that hairpins down to the canyon's bottom where the layer caking of strata begins with Pre-Cambrian granite. The drive from the palm-lined bridge at the river climbs then, on the highway en route to Show Low, to high mountain meadows and tall pines in less than 50 miles.

Sunday anthropologists and ruins-buffs can investigate well-preserved 12th Century cliff dwellings of the prehistoric Salado Indians at Tonto National Monument on the Apache Trail, which like Salt River Canyon, is another scenic spectacular.

Besh-ba-gowah, on the outskirts of Globe, is a ruin of some 200 rooms dating back to the 13th and 14th Centuries when it, too, was occupied by the Salados.

Other Indian ruins, such as Copper Mountain, Black Mesa and Pueblo Canyon, are accessible only by jeep, foot or on horseback.

Frontier history is reflected in such places as Pleasant Valley where the famed war (or feud) in the 1880s between the Tewksbury and Graham families was responsible for at least 19 deaths, and the Grahams were killed to the last man.

Or perhaps at Camp Reno, the gathering place for the cavalry troops of the 1860s who rode against the Coyotero Apaches in the battle of Big Dry Wash.

Or along the tortuous old Stoneman Trail which switch-backed up the 8,000-foot heights of the Pinal Mountains the route used by wagon trains and muleskinners to haul in supplies and haul out the ore before railroads connected the Globe and McMillanville area to the outside world.

Payson, the old frontier cow town still famous for its annual August rodeo, but now a booming "summer cottage" area. Ditto Pine, where the early Mormon pioneers settled. Or McMillanville, once a boisterous silver mining camp of the 1870s, where now only an occasional adobe crumbles in the blowing wind, dust and silence.

There's history, too, at San Carlos, the favorite stomping ground of the famed outlaw Apache, Geronimo, who begged on his deathbed at Ft. Sill, Okla., to be allowed to return to his native land to die.

Established a ranch on Seven Mile Wash, north of San Carlos on the reservation. That was about 1878. His brand was Cross Up.

"Cy Garlinghouse took up with Shawley's sons as a kid cowboy after he left the McMillan mine camp. One hot day George Shawley said, 'Damn, it's too hot to work stock. Let's throw a bed and some chuck on a pony and go up on them mountains. Maybe it's cool up there.' "So they topped out in tall timber and found a spring with some old maverick cows there that had liked it, too, and just located there. The boys branded the cattle and went back to the Cross Up with news that there was room for more cattle on top. They called it Timber Camp and established a ranch and built a cabin there. They called that ranch Cross S. (Editor's note: Ross Santee, the late cowboy-artist was a onetime cowpuncher for Cross S.) "Their range was 40 miles square at one time and they ran 25,000 head. But it all started with those $2 cows from Billy the Kid. Ed Shawley became a sheriff of Gila later on."

And then Slim Ellison said, "Say, I'll meet you at sunup at the forks of Bumble Bee and Cougar Canyons and we will pursue the wild ox, what say?"

Danko Gurovich, owner of Copper Hills Motel between Globe and Miami, tells these recollections of his childhood: "When I was a kid, Miami had at least 50 boarding houses and 90 per cent of the people here were single. There were a lot of Finns, Italians, Yugoslavs, Chinese and English we called Cousin Jacks.

"The Italians and Slavs had been imported to do the rock work on Roosevelt Dam. The Chinese were left over from the railroad building crews, and settled mostly in Globe because the Miami police chief wouldn't let them go into business in Miami.

"Slavs had a hard time getting jobs at Old Dominion Mine in Globe because the Cousin Jack foremen there hired other Cousin Jacks.

"There were three daily newspapers when I was seven years old the Miami Silverbelt owned by C. W. Van Dyke, The Bulletin owned by Inspiration Copper Co., and the Arizona Record owned by Miami Copper Company.

"Mom ran a boarding house. Oh, how hard the women worked in those days providing room, food and washing for miners at a $35 per month fee.

"I sold papers. You had to run or fight in those days and I never had sense enough to run. So I was fighting all the time with the bigger boys who tore up my papers. The toughest kid got his papers first.

"It was a real newspaper war. Not just between the publishers. It extended right down to us kids peddling papers on the streets.

"By 1920, after the killing flu epidemic, there were 20 gambling halls and 20 brothels in Miami. I wondered how there could be so many people left after that epidemic. People died like flies.

"Buster Ellis drove the ambulance for J. Ney Miles Mor-tuary and once when he was picking up corpses on Churchill Street, he had so many he had to prop one corpse on the front seat beside him. We were so used to death, we kids thought that was funny.

"Miami had 14,000 people in the 1920s. It has 3,000 now. But things really don't change much here in Gila County. The same buildings and same people are here now that were here 30 years ago.

"I say let's keep it that way."

And from an earlier day April 27, 1869, to be exact a second lieutenant in the 14th Infantry at Camp McDowell wrote to Lt. G. W. Chilson, the commander of Camp Reno: "You are respectfully informed that Gen. Alexander, commander of the Sub District of the Verde, has gone up the Rio Verde with two troops of cavalry and a party of Maricopa Indians on an expedition against the hostile Indians. A party of Pimas under Antonio Azul started yesterday from somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix and expect to cross the Verde tomorrow morning about 20 miles above this post and scout towards the north. You will use your own discretion about reporting this to the Apaches.

"In case the Salt River Indians should start on their proposed raid, Gen. Alexander wishes you to send in immediate information and troops will be sent out to report to you.

"This dispatch will be sent out with the Indians immediately after reveille tomorrow morning."