1913 Arizona Tour Book Republished

ARIZONA GOOD ROADS ASSOCIATION ILLUSTRATED ROAD MAPS AND TOUR BOOK

CONTAINING PHOTOS OF ROADS, LANDMARKS, RESORTS AND POINTS OF INTEREST AND DETAILED INFORMATION OR EVERY PART OF

THE WONDERLAND.

ACCOMMODATIONS, SERVICE, SCENIC ATTRACTIONS AND RESOURCES Those who wrote Arizona's first Road Maps and Tour Book in 1913 used the delicious, uninhibited style of the day to describe the one-year-old state as a land flowing with milk and honey.

The 200-page book deeper than wide, a hardcover bearing a four-color Grand Canyon scene tells how fertile land awaits new plows, how business opportunities lure entrepreneurs.

Adjectives march like soldiers to suggest how Mother Nature has blessed Arizona in every respect to make it a heaven at best and a paradise at worst.

Dozens of pictures show scenes across Arizona, including mining activity, horse drawn wagons, and delightful highwheeled cars traveling the narrow dirt roads.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS has faithfully reproduced the book this Bicentennial Year, and it is a collector's item which will enrich homes, schools, libraries, and offices.

It will escort readers to "the baby state" whose future was as limitless as the copper deposits appeared to be 63 years ago, whose life style was as brash as the miners toiling in Globe for $3.50 to $5 a day (a magnificent wage in those days).

Mesa, the book declares, had a "class

Roosevelt Lodge

and enjoy the splendid accomodations we offer in the heart of great mountain ranges

Oils, Gasoline, Hardware

and a full line of General Merchandise is found at the

Roosevelt Mercantile COMPANY

NAVAJO BLANKETS of citizenship . . . of an especially high order of intelligence and morality," and Thatcher was Eden with "no poverty, conditions of equality . . . no rich, no poor."

There's nostalgia aplenty in this charming and interesting little book.

Arizonans who craved a shot of Old Redeye one year after statehood no doubt avoided Snowflake and Thatcher. The Road Maps and Tour Book stressed that although Snowflake had been settled for over 24 years in 1913, it had ". . . not tolerated a saloon within its boundaries."

What's more, a writer warned: "There is not a saloon within 60 miles of Thatcher."

A hosteler in Tucson boasted the only hotel elevator in the town, and hostelry ads in the book listed steam heat, hot and cold running water, and other comforts. Minimum charge? $1 a day!

New State Theatre of Prescott ("Where Everybody Goes" according to an advertisement) showed "High Class Vaudeville and Motion Pictures." The Alaska Hotel in Bouse bragged about having the only two-story concrete building in town.

Old-timers and auto buffs will find familiar auto names in the ads: Overland, Velie, Case, Stanley Steamer, the Kissel Kar. The Sam'l. Hill Hardware Co. (still doing business on Prescott's Whiskey Row) announces they are agents for Ford motor cars.

Memories will be stirred by symbols and abbreviations on the excellent route maps H.C., denoting high center on a section of axle-high road; a symbol indicating a gate across the roadway, requiring, after rains, uncertain stopping and re-starting in the mud; H.S., when shown near a series of dots, indicated heavy sand, the bane of the narrow-tired cars of 1913; arrows paralleling stretches of route, indicating an uphill grade which in steeper places remember? required the gravity-fed T-Model Fords to be backed up the hill!

Arizona in 1913 was large hopes, great dreams, magnificent adventures Kismet, Brigadoon, and Nineveh all rolled up into one breathtaking package. The writers of the day told it the way they saw it (or imagined it), coining gorgeous phrases, sparing no superlatives.

The book's cover calls Arizona "The Wonderland" and surely in all truth it was just that in those halcyon days when "Westward Ho!" was still heard to excite the adventurous, to challenge the pioneer spirit of men and women alike.