Middle America in the Desert

Middle America in the Desert: Safford and the Gila River Valley

We are holding court on plow fenders in the cavernous repair shop of the local John Deere emporium: several Gila River Valley cotton farmers and the city guy, conspicuous in his moccasin loafers and almost immaculate ignorance of agriculture. Over a radio in the background, a country singer weeps a ballad of soured love, while the farmers talk of endangered species."

"We built a cooperative gin down the road in '82," says Eden farmer Bob Colvin. "Of the farmers who started it, half are no longer in business."

"When we had that high inflation a few years ago, prices for farmland increased, and at first the growers benefited from higher collateral," explains county extension agent Ron Cluff.

"They borrowed right up to the top. Now they're trying to pay back that debt, along with borrowing on the current crop, and it just eats them up."

Marco Palmer, a Thatcher farmer, discerns that it's time for a joke.

"A journalist was interviewing a farmer, asking him the secret of his success. 'Is it diversification?' No, says the farmer. 'Computerization? Nope. 'Well, then what is it?' "My wife got a job in town at the courthouse."

We all laugh, and I sense no pain in it: this is not gallows humor but the sanguinity of men whose families have been farming in this valley for four generations and who now draw strength from that thread of continuity. That evening, Palmer tracks me down at a Safford motel to confirm it.

"I'm worried we might have given you the wrong impression today," he says over the telephone. "We joke about how tough it is, but the fact is that we're all in this business because we enjoy it and believe in it, and we're basically optimists.

"I think we have to be. Because this isn't a job. It's not like you can say, 'Well, I'm tired of farming; so I'll go do something else now.' The farm and the life are pretty much one package."

The Gila River Valley has supported farmers for more than two millennia, but they never have had it easy.

The abundant water-from the sinuous Gila River, lowland springs, and runoff from the Pinaleno and Gila mountainsattracted a string of agrarian Indian cultures, beginning with the Mogollon (about 300 B.C. to A.D. 1200), extending through the Hohokam (300 B.C. to 1250), and ending with some mysterious transients called the Salado (A.D. 1300 to 1350).

They cultivated beans, corn, and squash. They suffered floods and short-ages of wood for fire and building. They persevered for more than a thousand years, but nature, in the end, blew them out of business.

After the Salado, centuries passed before settlers tried again. Mexicans began farming around what is now Solomon in the early 1870s. In the late 1870s came the first Anglo colonists, looking for promising land. They found it.

E. G. Curtis, an early settler, described the valley like this: "The country is found entirely covered with poppies, one of the most beautiful sights I ever expect to see. The grass was high, and when the wind would blow it down in great waves, you could see great bunches of antelope."

The land, however picturesque, did not yield an idyllic life. The Chiricahua Apaches, herded downriver onto the infertile San Carlos Indian Reservation, swept into the valley on frequent raids. Later, around 1910, the copper mines up-river at Clifton and Morenci dumped tailings that coursed downstream and into the irrigation canals and fields. Mit Simms, a farmer who also served as secretary of state and several terms as state treasurer, later recalled that the tailings dried into a lamination over his fields that could be broken, like glass, with a hammer. It took the Arizona Supreme Court to rescue agriculture in the Gila River Valley.

Look at the valley today, and you can read the crests of prosperity and the troughs of hard times. The average isn't high; few have made fortunes here.

The river has given, and the river has taken away. When the water is low, it looks benign and oddly indecisive as it follows a snakelike path of S-curves joined end to end. When the water is high, it caroms around those curves, eating farmland in acre-sized bites. The farmers do not find the river picturesque.

The surrounding mountains are the valley's scenery. The massive Pinalenos, their gruff profile softened with forests, sometimes wear snow as late as May. The smaller Gilas are of different character. Stark, with serrated ridges, they look twodimensional, like paper cutouts pasted against the sky.

Drinking all this in, devout settlers in 1883 named one of the valley's towns Eden. The promise failed: Eden today is corroding into a ghost town. Others have fared better. Pima has lost its movie theater but maintains a core of municipal pride by trumpeting its state basketball championships on a sign at the city limits.

Thatcher, the second largest town in Graham County (with an official 3,374 people), is its cultural nexus. Eastern Arizona College, now part of the state community college system, was founded as St. Joseph Stake Academy in 1888. Faculty members such as Dave Lunt, head of the choral music program, talk about the college in terms not often heard around one of today's giant universities: "We really have a strong feeling for the students here. Some people are embarrassed to say this in the classroom, but not me: I love these kids."

Safford, population 7,010, is the county seat and the only valley community cursed with traffic lights. This is not to say it aspires to be a city. The marquee at the Pizza Hut congratulates Jim and Debbi on their first anniversary. The Mexican restaurants serve immense meals at prices left over from 1970. The store windows in the four-block business district carry fliers advertising the Methodist Church's Spring Salad Luncheon and tonight's Gila Valley Repertory Company production, Arsenic and Old Lace.

On a Saturday morning, the townmost of which lies within a grid about a mile square-feels like middle-Americain-the-desert. Country music leaks from open doorways and mixes with the rasp of power saws spilling from back-porch workshops. At the softball field, a couple of fathers delicately pitch batting practice to a preteen girls' team. People live here not to chase adventure but to do precisely the opposite: to pursue their lives in an environment that is manageable, where change is gentle and slow and understandable.

But it is not boondocks. The first time I came to Safford was to judge the Eastern Arizona Music Teachers Association's annual piano competition. I had judged similar playoffs in Phoenix and Tucson, and I trudged into Safford High School auditorium that night anticipating a procession of ham-fisted farm kids gracelessly plucking out sonatinas. Surprise: the average level of playing was better than I'd heard in either city.

"Don't seem so surprised," one of the teachers told me. "Out here, when we tell the kids to practice, they practice."

These towns have a history of excellence in education. On an April morning, I drop in on Safford's second-grade computer lab and watch 16 munchkins attack a row of Commodore 64s, writing and Illustrating stories of space battles and castle sieges. The school district's goal is computer literacy for all students. Already they are getting more than expected.

"We're seeing the logic learned in the computer lab carry over to the playground," says Ramona Wedding, assistant superintendent. "Normally, children don't anticipate the consequences of their actions. But the computer analogy is teaching Jason that if he pushes Cindy into a

Archeology along the Gila: a Valley of Questions

It was from horseback three years ago that retired miner Lee Krider spotted a smooth round auburn form protruding from a bank of an arroyo half a mile from his Thatcher home. “I thought, well, I'll go see what that rock is,” he recalls. “It doesn't look quite right.” It wasn't a rock. It was a kitchen 700 years old. There was a two-gallon bowl with a one-gallon companion inverted over it. Stored between the two was a spectacular gourd-shaped polychrome pitcher decorated with ziggurat-like triangles. Archeologist Pamela Rule says it is a remnant of the Salado, a mystery culture that settled in the Gila River Valley around A.D. 1300 and vanished only 50 years later.

Rule, 35, is director of the Museum of Anthropology at Eastern Arizona College. She is a city product from Washington, D.C., and her friends say that she still suffers occasional episodes of culture shock here in the Gila River Valley.

She says she is ecstatic to be here, to be the custodian of an archeological treasure all but ignored by the rest of her professional world.

“When you walk over this land, you're walking over a pavement of artifacts,” she says. A pavement? We head into the creosote forests of the Pinaleno foothills in her wheezing four-wheel-drive International Scout, itself nearing artifact status, and look.

We alight. Her trained eyes pick up the “pavement.” “This is a shard of glazed ware, definitely 1300s. This is probably an agave knife. They would cut off the leaves to get to the heart, which is high in sugar content, and steam it. Here's a piece of human cranium, heavily calcined. Probably cremated.” This is 20 square feet of the Gila River Valley, one random tract that has not yet been cultivated or excavated or plundered by pot pirates. There are thousands more like it. The valley nourished Mogollon, Hohokam, and Salado Indians, and served as a crossroads for trade between the northern Anasazi and tribes of what is now northern Mexico.

“Eight hundred years ago,” Rule says, “the valley's population was greater than it is now.” Why isn't the archeologist population swarming? Well, most archeologists work for universities, and most universities subscribe to the “publish or perish” doctrine. Professors tend to invest in a dig that will yield answers. This valley only throbs with questions. Where did the Hohokam go? Who were the Salado? Rule, who works for a community college that isn't obsessed with publishing, could cheerfully spend the rest of her life chipping away at these questions.

So could the pot pirates, who aren't concerned with knowledge but with profit. Rule says the average painted vessel from a prehistoric Southwestern culture today sells for $15,000. Booty like this has already led to high-tech treasure hunts in the Gila River Valley despite stiff fines and federal laws.

Pamela Rule's face clouds with frustration as we pick through “bulldozer mounds”—20th-century excavations of 14th-century Indian settlements, performed not by archeologists but by treasure hunters, who destroy everything they can't sell. “The kinds of sites that could help us solve some of the mysteries have been badly impacted,” she says sadly. “It makes interpretation pure hell.” If mud puddle, X is going to happen. It's a very good thinking skill that I don't know if we could teach any other way.” Something unusual is going on in these schools. Take athletics: Safford High School has won the state girls' volleyball championship 17 of the last 18 years. The boys' basketball team has won its last 46 games. In all, Safford has brought home 42 state titles since 1968!

At practice I ask volleyball coach Norma Bellamy why. She starts to say something about the weight of tradition. “You want the real story?” interrupts a sweatdrenched athlete. “She tries to kill us in training.” The valley's adults exult in these accomplishments. But they worry about continuity. “Our problem here is that our biggest export is our kids,” says Safford Mayor Gov Aker. “Since the mines cut back across the river at Morenci, there's not enough industry to keep them here.” Safford is working on the problem with a small nucleus of high-tech manufacturing. A promising venture is Jim Allen's photovoltaic water pumps, a local invention that even in the prototype stage is attracting customers from third-world countries. Hytech Identification Products Inc., which manufactures labels for computers and other electronic devices, has grown from 5 employees in 1983 to 28 today. Also important are tourism and retirement. The valley offers pristine air, small-town ambience, golf in the scenic vise of two great mountain ranges.

But the farm, even in difficult times, is what promises most.

Marco Palmer wants to talk more about farming. Yes, he will be happy to suffer my company for a day, show me his crops, his budgets. There's nothing in it for him; a story in Arizona Highways hardly will help sell his extra long staple cotton, which at 90 cents a pound is currently undercut by Egyptian competition at 80 cents. He just worries that the city guy, hearing the talk of floods and foreclosures and the drain of the valley's children, will miss something important. and then watched beef collapse to 30 cents. Net profit, zero.

"It's been a roller coaster ever since." A grin of resignation creases his face.

The trouble with farming is easy to explain. Almost everything is out of the farmer's control. He can't influence the weather, interest rates, or the prices of feed, fertilizer, insecticide, or tractorsthe latter now running $50,000 a crack. Nor, in a global economy, can he set the prices for his crops. If the President decides to chop wheat sales to the Soviet Union, or if cheap Egyptian labor spills cheap cotton onto the world market, what can the Gila River Valley farmer do?

He can persevere.

Palmer lives in Thatcher, a block from the house in which he grew up, and farms 600 acres of land scattered throughout the valley. Most is cotton, but he is experiment-ing with onions. And he has learned how to make money on cows. Every fall he buys a hundred head of old cattle, grazes them through winter, and sells them when beef prices rise in spring. His gamble is that the animals won't die of old age while he owns them. "Usually I do pretty well," he says.

But like most farmers, his life is built on a mountain of debt. Every year he draws up a budget, takes it to the bank, and asks for a line of credit secured against what his crops should bring in the fall. This year he has borrowed $206,000. Only $19,000 is for his family's living expenses; the rest goes into seed, fertilizer, hired labor, insecticide, water. If at the end of the year there's a profit, the lender will take it and apply it to next year's budget.

"I don't know whether it's courage or stupidity," he says, "but it's common for a farmer to put half a million dollars into his operation and at the end of the year make two or one percent or just break even."

At the wheel of a pickup lurching between furrows that stretch in geometric grace to the mountains, Palmer volunteers his philosophy on a way of life he is determined to maintain.

"People worry about the disappearance of the family farm. I don't think it's that they're worried about the country producing enough food. I think it's that the family farm has been the source for a lot of values in American life that are important things like integrity, honesty, hard work, offering an honest product at a fair price. People are concerned about what'll happen to this country if we lose that and everybody's just trying to make as much money for himself as he possibly can."

In the Gila River Valley, these values will not be lost. Even in adversity they endure. They always have.

WHEN YOU GO.... Gila River Valley

Getting there: Safford is 127 miles northeast of Tucson on U.S. Route 666 and 166 miles southeast of Phoenix via U.S. 70. Both highways are two-lane but usually lightly traveled. No airline serves the valley, but Safford Municipal Airport, six miles northeast of town, accommodates general aviation with two 4,800-foot blacktop runways. The valley's elevation of 2,900 feet offers a benign climate that seldom disrupts travel plans.

Where to stay: Safford has eight motels. Roper Lake State Park, six miles south of Safford on U.S. 666, is increasing its 15 campsites to 100, all with electrical hookups (fee required).

What to see and do: Mount Graham, the highest mountain in southern Arizona at 10,717 feet, is accessible by a 35-mile road to the summit. The U.S. Forest Service has provided picnic tables and campsites along the way, including a campground at 13-acre Riggs Lake not far below the summit. The road is usually closed in winter, buried under deep snow.

Winter is ideal for golf, however, at the Mount Graham Golf Course, owned by the City of Safford. Nestled at the foot of the snowcapped mountain range, the 18-hole course is among Arizona's most scenic.

Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher is among Arizona's smallest community colleges with 1,432 full-time students, but it offers an ambitious schedule of concerts and theater. Its Museum of Anthropology, which displays a stunning permanent collection of Indian artifacts from southeastern Arizona and western New Mexico, is worth a special trip.

Visitors converge on the valley for several annual events. The Old-Time Fiddlers gather for their regional convention the third week in February. Horse racing occupies the Graham County Fairgrounds the last weekend in March and first weekend in April, and the Gila Valley Rodeo follows in August. The Mount Graham Hill Climb, a festival of agony for hundreds of bicycle racers pumping to the summit, is in September. The Graham County Fair, in the second week of October, usually draws 18,000 people.

Nearby attractions: Aravaipa Canyon, a 6,699-acre wilderness area, 35 miles west of Safford (Bureau of Land Management use permit required); Bonita Creek Cliff Dwelling, 25 miles northeast of Safford in the Gila Mountains; the Coronado Trail, U.S. Route 666, climbing to the highlands of Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.

For more information: Safford-Graham County Chamber of Commerce, 1111 Thatcher Blvd., Safford, AZ 85546; telephone (602) 428-2511. Coronado National Forest, 301 W. Congress, Tucson, AZ 85701; telephone (602) 629-6483. Arizona State Parks, 800 W. Washington, Phoenix, AZ 85007; telephone (602) 255-4174.

Supplemental reading: Outdoors in Arizona: A Guide to Fishing and Hunting, an Arizona Highways book ($12.95). Available by writing or calling the magazine: 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; telephone (602) 258-1000.