Hear the Rattle and the Clatter

Freight Train Nostalgia Hear the Rattle & the Clatter

The railroad starts 10 miles north of Why. That's a good question, but it's also a settlement and highway junction on the western flank of the Papago tribal reservation. The first inhabitants of Why merely lumped the question and their junction into one.

Actually, the tracks of the Tucson, Cornelia and Gila Bend Railroad Co. originate in Ajo, a company-owned town whose name means "garlic" in Spanish but has taken on the secondary meaning of "copper" for the mother lode harvested hereabouts. Actually, Ajo's mines date back to Spanish domination, when raw ore traveled by mule to ports on the Gulf of Baja California; thence around the Horn to smelters in, of all improbable places, Wales.

The route to world markets is neither so long nor so storm-tossed today. Reddish-orange, 700-pound slabs of copper anode also containing small amounts of gold, silver and platinum are hauled northward from Ajo for 43.3 miles along the tracks of the Tucson, Cornelia & Gila Bend, there to meet the mainline of the Southern Pacific Company. For $1.94, round-trip, the T.C.& G.B. accepts a maximum of 18 passengers to ride along behind those copper slabs in a 30-year-old wooden-slat caboose, with ice water provided out of a galvanized bucket in paper cups. In this part of the world, that's luxury.

These mixed freight and passenger trains once linked small towns of America, but here we see the last of the breed. Make no mistake of it. The T.C. &G.B. does not trot out a gaudy, semiretired steam engine bound only for a summer frolic with the tourists. This is a businesslike, sweating diesel, hauling nearly 500,000 pounds of partially refined copper, along with a crew of three and up to 18 paying passengers. The hot, dusty 87-mile round trip from Ajo to Gila Bend starts at 7 a.m. each weekday, and conductor Tom Wiley thinks there is no virtue like leaving on time. It has been his custom for 25 years.

The line's passengers are usually numbered among that new breed of hobo the rail buffs who follow the disappearing track of the fare-carrying train where they may find it, even across this desert land. Searching for nothing more than the forgotten clatter of rolling stock, they find as a premium that between the New Cornelia mine's slag heaps and the Great Bend of the Gila River lie 43 miles of pristine desert, where one can be alone with a long-dead telegraph line, itself blindly following the track to the horizon.

Spring of the year is an opportune time to observe Arizona's low desert. Blooms of white crown the giant saguaro cactus. Green beans dangle from the arms of the mesquite. A lavender lace covers the ironwood, more a bush than a tree. Yellow blossoms variegate the palo verde. Subtle hues for such a vastness, and the low buttes on the horizon rise in as many as seven overlapping ranges, each a distinct shade of blue in the early light. Under the sunshine of midday these same mountains will turn as black as asphalt, if they be volcanic cones, or as white as bleached bones, if composed of weathered rock outcropping.

The Spanish arches of the Ajo depot home office of the T.C.&G.B. - form the east side of a grassy quadrangle in the center of town, a manicured settlement of 6000 that also happens to be the largest city in the 225 miles as the crow flies across southern Arizona, from Yuma to Tucson. On other sides of the square stand such landmarks as the Phelps Dodge company store and the Copper Coffee shop, where sheriff's deputies as well as travelers take their early morning cup.

The three iron steps leading up into the green caboose of the T.C.&G.B. line are steep for many riders, but conductor Wiley hoists himself aboard with practiced ease gained from a quarter-century of experience. It is 7 a.m. and Wiley abandons the traditional "all aboard" for a statement of fact:

"Nothing like leaving on time," he proclaims, at the same time waving a go-ahead to engineer Ray Phillips at his post, 13 car-lengths ahead.

Now comes the moment that oldtimers have forgotten and youngsters never remembered: that sound, resembling thunder, echoing down a line of freight cars which becomes a bonerattling lurch as the locomotive moves out and the slack is taken up in the linkage, jerking our caboose forward.

The cupola of the rolling caboose accommodates eight passengers in vista-dome comfort. Others stand at the open side doors, or upon the rear platform, in order to watch the mining panorama of Ajo disappear. Engineer Phillips urges his Engine No. 53 across Ten Mile Wash, sometimes a river but at the moment merely dry sand outlined by the hugging line of ironwood, mesquite and palo verde. A coyote, scampering to beat the midday heat, runs toward the Batamote Mountains far to the east. Riders are given complete freedom of the caboose, and they soon exchange places in the cupola for a vantage point nearer the rails, perhaps on the rear platform or out front, where the wind is cooling but the dust is fierce.

Wiley carefully logs each passenger into his daybook and distributes the two-page inked over "Time Table No. 37," which admonishes one and all to "destroy former time tables," and pinpoints by Mountain Standard Time (105th Meridian) our arrival in such outposts as Childs, Rocky Point, Midway, Black Gap, Stout Spur and, ultimately, Gila Bend. Posted behind Wiley's desk are all those yellowed notices expected of a quarter-centuryold caboose, along with a calendar from the P-D company store. Six miles out of Ajo, at the Childs way-station, we make our first stop to deliver 50 pounds of much-appreciated ice to a section gang.

The lore of the railroad is setting in: travelers now know what the bumping thunder means as the linkage expands. No. 53 is on the move. They brace for the whiplash jerk that will soon reach their caboose.

The Tucson, Cornelia and Gila Bend Railroad Company opened for business in 1916 and has been running on schedule ever since, as the world demanded more and more copper. Ajo was omitted from the original company name in favor of Cornelia, who was the wife of the "big boss" at that time, as we discover in conversation with Wiley. He also tells us that trackage was never laid

Hauling copper anodes to Gila Bend, with Engine No. 53 at flank speed and the clatter of steel wheels meeting high iron... it's a railroad buff's delight.

P. K. Weis Into Tucson, 128 miles eastward across the breadth of the Papago Nation, itself twice as big as the state of Delaware; and that steam engines rather than diesels hauled the copper to Gila Bend until the late forties, about the time Wiley came aboard.

"Yessir... junked those beautiful old steam engines right down to the steel and sold 'em for scrap in nineteen and forty-eight," recalls Wiley with a faroff cast in his eyes. "Now they'd give anything to have 'em back."

Near Stout Spur, another way-station shortly before Gila Bend, Wiley points out a hawk's nest on the cross-arm of a telephone pole, not 15 feet from our passing cupola. Perched in a military row, four red-tailed hawks salute the trainmen, completely unafraid.

"Those three babes are near as big as their mother now," reports Wiley, who has followed them from fledglings. He pictures for the passengers how winter winds whipping across the desert had the mother bird hanging onto her perch for dear life as she incubated the eggs. The family was still in place when we returned two hours later.

The rails cross a section of the U.S. Air Force gunnery range south of Gila Bend, where we watch delta-winged jets strafe a target area far to the west. And suddenly we are entering Gila Bend. The stop normally lasts 50 minutes, just enough time to switch cars and have a cup of coffee at the Space Age Motel, where autographed pictures of the astronauts decorate the walls, but nothing commemorates the daily stop of Engine No. 53 and its veteran crew. Because the railroaders faced a balky switch at the Marvin Avenue crossing in Gila Bend, they arrived late for coffee and our departure was delayed for an additional 20 minutes. Wiley's "all-aboard" came at 10:25, and proved to be as unorthodox as his earlier one.

"Let's take off, men," he yells to the rest of the crew, while the flurry of activity sent a lizard speeding away from the shade of a fat oil car, which we had acquired for the inbound run. "Everybody hang on tight now. . . . We're going back fast enough to stir up a little wind so it won't be so hot inside."

That now-familiar bounce follows the linkage clatter as we begin moving past the trailer-home outskirts of Gila Bend, where channel catfish loll on the bottom of an irrigation canal, safe from the 100-degree heat. Gaining momentum, Engine No. 53 traverses the interstate highway. Now we are reaching flank speed on the edge of the desert, with our caboose bouncing like a sea-tossed destroyer in the wake of the fat oil car. Under a stated capacity of 20,867 gallons, stenciled on the rear bulge, the oil car merely sways at our present speed, resembling a contented sow.

Wiley's timetable sets a high-noon arrival time in Ajo. Speed remains a relative matter, heightened in one's imagination as the flowery desert marigolds lean back away from the tracks to allow our passage. The Space Age Lodge and Gila Bend switchyards lie in our dust, forgotten.

Our century has suddenly evaporated into the almighty clatter of 36-inch steel wheels meeting high iron across the Sonoran Desert.

Later when we are slowed by the upgrade into Ajo which rests a thousand feet higher in elevation than Gila Bend a previously unseen notice on the conductor's bulletin board tempers the supersonic euphoria. The message notes simply that, effective immediately, "crews will observe a 20-milesper-hour speed limit due to the condition of certain bridges."

(Right) Trouble ahead or just cows on the track? - conductor Tom Wiley, a 25-year veteran of the road, at his post. P. K. Weis (Below) Main terminal of the Tucson, Cornelia and Gila Bend Railroad faces Ajo's beautiful town square. Wes Holden

Bookshelf by Donald M. Powell

Inquiries about any of these titles should be directed to the book publisher, not ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

Indian Silverwork of the Southwest.

Volume II. By Dale Stuart King. Dale Stuart King, Publisher, 2002 N. Tucson Blvd, Tucson 85716, 1977. 242 pp. $11.50, cloth; $4.95 paper.

This is a continuation of a work by archaeologist Harry P. Mera, a longtime student of Indian crafts, which was published posthumously by King in 1959 and which covered developments in Indian silverwork to approximately 1940. King, himself, is a collector and student widely and deeply knowledge-able, and in this book he brings developments in the craft to about 1970.

Changes have occurred in the 30 years covered. As King points out, the number of silversmiths has increased, and with better tools and materials Southwest craftsmen are producing much jewelry of outstanding quality and beauty. Unfortunately, the recent nationwide surge of interest in Indian silver jewelry has resulted in a flood of shoddy, mostly machine-made imitations. About this rather sleazy trade he writes with a sharp indignation. At the same time he attempts to provide a helpful guide to prospective purchasers.

This is an informative book, a study of forms, techniques, motifs and materials. It is meant to be used, to be studied, and the reader who wishes to acquire genuine good pieces and to avoid imitation, not always inexpensive, will profit from it. It is copiously illustrated with black and white photographs which are not always reproduced with the clarity one might hope.

From the Heartland: Profiles of People and Places of the Southwest and Beyond.

By Lawrence Clark Powell. Northland Press, Flagstaff, 1977. 167 pp. $9.50.

In From the Heartland Lawrence Clark Powell, who has been called Tucson's writer in residence, once more celebrates the Southwest and that part where “my love burns brightest here in the arid Southwest Arizona has inevitably become my heartland.” But in this book he also wanders farther afield than in some of his recent volumes.

Actually it is a book in two parts, first places then people. The places include not only the desert north of Tucson, where he and his wife, Fay,now live, but southern California where he grew up, the Big Sur, and a side excursion to the country of Prince Henry the Navigator, south of Lisbon.

Part II, people, also departs from previous work by including among the people of whom he writes George Augustus Frederick Ruxton of the Rockies, who does not quite qualify as a Southwesterner, and Frank Waters, Edward Abbey, and Jake Zeitlin, Southwesterner manqué and Los Angeles bookseller, all of whom are still living. And there are others who qualify as Powell heroes, engineer, explorer, Tucsonan Godfrey Sykes, and the painter of luminous southwest landscapes, Maynard Dixon.

Admirers of Powell essays - and they are many will take keen enjoyment in this new collection and from the book itself which has been handsomely printed by Arizona's Northland Press and illustrated with portrait sketches by Bettina Steinke.

Friar Bringas Reports to the King:

Methods of Indoctrination on the Frontier of New Spain, 1796-97. Translated and edited by Daniel S. Matson and Bernard Fontana. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1977. 177 pp. $12.50, cloth; $6.50, paper.

This is the second volume in the exciting and important new series “The Documentary Relations of the Southwest and the first of the Franciscan Relations.” The first was Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, edited by Charles Polzer and reviewed in the July, 1976, Bookshelf.

In 1795, Father Diego Miguel Bringas de Manzaneda y Encinas, to give his full name, a brilliant 33-year-old native student of the Franciscan College of Santa Cruz at Querétaro, was sent by his superiors on an official visitation of the missions of Pimeria Alta, then under their control following the Jesuit expulsion of 1767. One of the results was this lengthy report addressed to the King of Spain, a report which never reached its intended readers and has only recently been rescued from obscurity and translated and edited in full for the first time. Bringas' report, the editors remark, reads today like a grant proposal. Knowing that the king, the potential grantor, was ignorant of the background of the missions and of the land, he sketched in the history, ethnography, geography and other circumstances of remote northwest New Spain before outlining his plan for the reform and expansion of the missionary frontier to the Gila and the Colorado, an expansion which had been hoped for since Kino's time. He urged the establishment of two new presidios and six new missions. But what he did not understand was the march of history far across the Atlantic, that the day of missionary expansion was over and that the mother country's hold on her American colonies and particularly Mexico was growing ever more tenuous.

In a full, scholarly, and excellently written introduction editors Matson and Fontana place Bringas and his report firmly in the ecclesiastical and historical setting of the Southwest at the close of the 18th century. They point to the fact that Bringas' recommendations for Pimeria Alta are not so very different from the cultural conflict which still goes on in a somewhat altered form today. We do not, after all, act so very differently from the Europeans two centuries and more ago.

This is an important document that enlarges our knowledge of the southwest frontier and the peoples who lived there. We eagerly await the next volumes in the series.

The 1977 Arizona Yearbook, a Guide to Government in Arizona.

Edited by Richard Yates, Charity Yates, and Steve Bahre. Arizona Information Press, P.O. Box 589, Yuma, Arizona 85364, 1977. 159 pp. $5.00.

New off the press as this goes to the printer.

Previous editions of 1972 and 1974 were known as the Arizona Blue Book. It supplies, as the subtitle indicates, a wealth of vital information about the state government, its national representatives, elected state officials, the legislature and the many branches of government, school districts, incorporated cities and towns, the media and other helpful items. All the information people need to know, and which the state, itself, has grudgingly refused to supply since 1932.

This does not duplicate, it supplements the Statistical Abstract of Arizona reviewed in Bookshelf this past February. It should prove equally useful.

Yours Sincerely MAGAZINE BEAUTY

Editor: My family has been receiving your magazine for the past few years as a gift from some very dear friends of ours in El Paso, Texas. Each issue is a beautiful monument to our glorious Southwest.

I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time in the Southwest, and every time we receive the next issue of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS it takes me back to the section of the country that I have come to love and respect. At one time I was given skeptical glances when I told people I spent over three hours sitting on the hood of a car alone. They would ask me why in the world anyone would want to waste their time doing that, and that I must have done something there to pass my time. I said yes I did. I watched the sun set and the desert come to life. They would walk away shaking their heads and mumbling "to each his own." Then one time I brought them a few issues of your magazine to look through. They looked at the photographs with wide-eyed amazement. Their first reaction was total disbelief followed by envy that I had seen it first hand.Your magazine can only be described as the eighth wonder of the world, for never before have I seen such magnificence brought to life in any other publication. I have promised myself that one day I would return to your section of the country to live, and each issue makes me more determined to keep that promise.

All I can say is thank you. Thank you for helping me relive my precious memories of the Southwest, and for showing people that the United States still has some unspoiled regions.

In closing I just want to say that ARIZONA HIGHWAYS is truly a study in beauty and perfection.

A RUN FOR LIFE

Editor: In ARIZONA HIGHWAYS article "Prescott's Tournament of Cowboys," (June issue) Jim Tallon needs to go see a few more rodeos.There is no rescuing pick-up man in the bull riding event. At the end of the ride, if he's still on top, the cowboy gets off the best way he can . . . Then runs for his life!

You're right, Buck. Our good friend, Jim Tallon, slipped. Maybe one of his three cameras obscured his vision . . . anyway, He is now running for his life! - The Editor Regarding the April article "The Yaqui Today: A People In Transition," it was brought to our attention that there are three particular points which, either because of omission, error or misunderstanding, require some clarification.

(1) The article mentions only the villages of old and new Pascua. There are, in fact, two additional major villages: Barrio Libre in South Tucson and Guadalupe near Phoenix. Altogether, the total Yaqui population approximates 5000-6000 people.

(2) The ceremonial group known as the Fariseos may be conveniently broken down into two sub-groups: the masked and the unmasked. The term Chapayeka especially applies to those who are masked. The picture on page 8, therefore, should be more correctly identified as Chapayekas rather than Fariseos.

(3) The Pascola dancer on the inside front cover was referred to as "representing the son of the devil." This is one of the modern interpretations of this very important ceremonial host at all household fiestas. In his role of ceremonial host he also acts the part of a deer hunter, tells funny stories, dances, and entertains. - The Editor

A LINK WITH HOME

Editor: Being born and raised in Arizona is tantamount to being born and raised with your magazine. All the time I lived in Arizona, I must confess I took your magazine for granted with all that beautiful scenery just outside, your magazine was just so much frosting on the cake.

However, now that I'm living in Honduras and working as a Peace Corps volunteer, your magazine has become truly a treasure. Besides anxious letters from Mom, your publication is the best link with "home" that I have! I get homesick every month when I receive your issue, but it's good homesickness.

Honduras is a beautiful country, and my two years here will be well spent. However, your magazine proves to me that there's no place like home or Arizona!

Thanks so much for the love, work, and care that you put into every issue. You are appreciated!

Mooney Falls in Havasu Canyon. Two hundred and twenty feet high, it is one of five cataracts in this beautiful valley south of the Grand Canyon. Dick Dietrich A quiet summer stream reflects the slow passage of countless ages. Red Rock Crossing near Sedona. Ed Cooper

35mm COLOR SLIDES

This issue: 35mm slides in 2" mounts, 1 to 15 slides, 40¢ each, 16 to 49 slides, 35¢ each, 50 or more, 3 for $1.00. Allow three weeks for delivery. Address: Slide Department, Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.