Frontier Trades and Crafts

HOW THE PIONEERS LIVED FRONTIER TRADES CRAFTS

A block from the main street of Patagonia, a little town in the hills of southern Arizona, stands a rambling adobe building, built piecemeal between 1910 and 1930. Doug Thamert has been restoring the place for nearly a decade. He repainted the words “Lopez Pool Hall,” which were faintly visible on its facade. The interior, though, is as far from a poolroom as you can imagine. It contains thousands of old wagon parts and hundreds of old tools, hardware for Thamert's Southwest Wagon and Wheel Works. Thamert is a wainwright, a craftsman who builds and repairs horse-drawn wagons. He is also a blacksmith, wheelwright, woodworker, upholsterer, and painter.

He is among a hardy band of people who have painstakingly learned the crafts of the early day settlers and who carry on those pioneer trades.

You would think the mass-produced Model T Ford and its successors made such craftsmen as Thamert obsolete, but he does a surprisingly good business. He and four employees restore, repair, or replicate wagons for museums and individuals. One Arizona history buff, who recently restored a horse-drawn ice wagon to donate to a museum, says he paid Thamert $3,300 to build four fancy woodspoked wheels.

Thamert began to learn blacksmithing 17 years ago while he was running a feed and tack store in Taos, New Mexico. Gradually he acquired the other skills of a wainwright, although, he adds, "On the day I die, I still will not consider myself a master."

Thamert's great-grandfathers were blacksmiths in Minnesota and Kansas. In a way, he follows in the wagon tracks of Arizona pioneer Fred Ronstadt, grandfather of pop singer Linda Ronstadt. Ronstadt had the largest blacksmith works in Arizona Territory. His wagons were much in demand, and he pioneered an idea that is popular today: he hired workers in Mexico to build the wagons he sold in the United States.In addition to consulting, teaching, and writing about American horse-drawn vehicles, Thamert usually owns a half-dozen wagons, which he measures, studies, and perhaps refurbishes. "Then if someone comes along and likes a vehicle, it just might go out the door." Customers seldom kick the iron tires.

He and one hired blacksmith are wheelwrights. They built a machine to shape the wooden spokes, perhaps the most vulnerable part of a wagon. Pioneers periodically had to drive their wagons into ponds or irrigation ditches so spokes, sapped by the dry desert air, could absorb moisture and expand; otherwise the wooden parts shrank away from the iron tires.

For too long, Thamert says, museums dared not use their vehicles or let people touch them. Now they are ordering replicas in which visitors can ride.

If a man with blacksmithing skills and the proper tools set up shop at a crossroads, other pioneers beat a path to his door. A century later, when the Model T introduced mass production

TRADES & CRAFTS

and interchangeable parts, blacksmiths became auto mechanics, but a few continue to practice the ancient trades.

The public seems more fascinated with how pioneers made do than with the monumental battles and achievements of history. Twenty miles north of Phoenix, the Pioneer Living History Museum is dedicated to "the material goods and spiritual values of an era in American history that is fast becoming a fading memory."

John Cochran, who presides over the blacksmith shop at Pioneer, says the number of modern blacksmiths is increasing. Commercially produced wrought iron is hard to find, so they do a good business in decorative and protective ironwork. "And they custom-make fireplace furniture, gate hinges, and so on for people who want their homes to have a special flavor."

All day, families and groups of schoolchildren visit Cochran's shop, where a huge, traditional bellows of leather and wood hangs from the rafters. A coal-fired forge softens the iron so Cochran can shape it into useful tools and gimcracks.

Cochran uses new tools and new materials when necessary, but he also relies on scrap metal. "Every blacksmith has a scrap pile of old iron and old parts," he says.

Many a cowboy burned his mouth drinking strong boiled coffee from a tin cup. Tinsmiths fashioned those cups, as well as pans, buckets, and the tin storage boxes on a cow outfit's chuck wagons. They also built canteens and bread boxes and ladles.

In the 1880s, Charles Fredericks had a tin shop in Prescott, the territorial capital. Later, Samuel Hill took it over, and the Hill family ran the tinsmith shop, hardware store, and household furnishings store until recently. Now the tin shop is located in a false-front building next door to the blacksmith shop at Pioneer. Until a recent illness slowed him, Charles Hartwell worked there, shaping flat tin on cast-iron forms. Hartwell now interprets the historic evolution of tin shops, which often became hardware stores. His exhibit of antique tinware, tools, locks, keys, and firearms is one of the museum's best.

"Tinsmithing is a new trade compared to other crafts," Hartwell says. "Tin was not produced until about A.D. 1400."

Tinware was handmade until after the Civil War, when machines were devised in the North to press flat tin into utensils. But handwork lingered in the South and West.

"Tinware was used on the frontier because it was affordable and resilient," Hartwell says. "A tinsmith was a very important person in territorial days. Many were also gunsmiths and considered mechanics."

Hartwell is all of the above. For years he

and his wife Marcia spent winters in Arizona and summers at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he demonstrated his crafts.

Marcia Byrom Hartwell is a food historian and writer. She collects old recipes and studies early American methods of cooking “from scratch.” While she does not always recommend those old ways of cooking, she has tried them all. Now executive director of Pioneer Arizona, she occasionally demonstrates cooking in the restored Victorian house and in the rustic log “northern Arizona ranch house.” Unlike today's homemaker, she begins by chopping the kindling wood to build a fire in a cast-iron stove.

Much of the cooking in early Arizona was done over open fires or in fireplaces. The cast-iron wood-burning stove was heavy and expensive and had to be delivered by freight wagon.

Most frontier families had a few staples: coffee, sugar, flour, salt. They grew, hunted, or fished for the rest of their food. There was no refrigeration, and ice could be purchased only in the larger towns that had ice-making plants. Homemakers preserved some foods in cellars and improvised evaporative cooling boxes.

Not all the old skills are demonstrated in museums. Ed Bacon's saddle shop on north Broad Street in Globe is part adobe and part brick. It has stood there in the middle of ranch country more than a century and has housed several enterprises, including a bordello. Today the shop smells of saddle leather, and the wood floor creaks underfoot. At a workbench with hundreds of hand tools, Bacon shapes the seats for the cowboy's most critical extremity.

A traditional cowboy song talks about riding a $10 horse and a $40 saddle. Prices have changed. A factory-made saddle starts at $600 and goes to $1,200; Bacon's saddles start at $1,200 and go up.

Bacon has built maybe 700 saddles in the last 35 or 40 years. “Sometimes I've had my doubts as to why I do it,” he says. “You're fighting the price of leather, competition from factory-made saddles, and the number of hours it takes to build one.” Bacon was a fifth-grader in Phoenix when a teacher introduced him to leatherwork. Later, he apprenticed himself to Brown's Boots and Saddles, a Texas chain that competed with the better known Phoenix-based saddlery, J. Porter. Bacon was managing Brown's Globe outlet when the company went out of business, and he bought the branch.

He buys his saddletrees from a master craftsman in Utah. Bacon, his wife, Doris, and their son, Earl, cut their leather components, hand-tool designs on them, and hand-stitch the finer parts of the saddles. They also make belts, bridles, and other leather products to put together a living.

Bacon has been a team roper, and his son still ropes for pleasure. But Ed Bacon's feel for saddles goes back much further. "My family had ranches around [the area of present-day] Roosevelt Lake and the Tonto Basin in the 1800s," he says.

Another Arizona bootmaker is Jesse Bogle, who owns a boot shop in Phoenix. No visit with Bogle is brief. He wants customers to understand fully his personal philosophy, based on 76 years of living as a rugged individualist, and the things he has learned about boots in half a century of making them. He worked without wages for bootmakers in Oklahoma just to learn the trade and opened his own shop in Phoenix 48 years ago.

He has made boots for attorney Melvin Belli, performers such as Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal, and members of several prominent Arizona families.

The shop's walls are lined with shelves of boot casts, hundreds of them in every size and many subtleties of foot shape. Acres of leather hang here and there: calfskin, ostrich, South American anteater, and others. "I charge more than any other bootmaker in the country," Bogle says, "but I can't supply the demand. I'm 14 months behind right now."

He begins his task by measuring the customer's feet, and he has learned a lot about feet along the way. He can correct for people who wear their heels off on one side or the other, and compensate for crippling changes in aging tendons.

Bogle does his own cutting, shaping, pegging, and stitching. He has tried assembly-line methods, training as many as seven employees to handle the various steps in boot making. But lately he has done it all himself, turning out expensive custom-made boots for those who can afford them.

When the land that is now Arizona still belonged to Mexico, the first Anglos to explore it were the mountain men of Taos and Santa Fe. They trapped beaver to supply fur to the hat trade. Then hats of cloth killed the fur trade and mountain men became guides or eccentrics.

Hats, like boots, are formed using old European skills that have survived mechanization. Hatmaker Rich Glisson has custom-made hats for many clients, including former President Ronald Reagan and advertising's "Marlboro Man." He learned the ancient trade from the late Steven Speros, a Phoenix craftsman who built, cleaned, and blocked felt hats. Glisson has one store near Jesse Bogle's shop in Phoenix and a second in suburban Cave Creek. Prices begin at $145.

TRADES & CRAFTS

His felt is a composition made of compressed rabbit fur, most of it from England. "We start with a cone of felt," he says.

Working with 100-year-old wooden forms, Glisson shapes the felt to the size and style required by the wearer. Some of the chemicals he uses have to be handled with care, he says. "The term 'Mad as a hatter' came from the erratic behavior of hatmakers who were exposed for a long period of time to highly toxic chemicals."

Hatmakers were uncommon in frontier towns. Factory-made Stetsons and other brands of hats were more affordable. Glisson thinks he's doing it the way it might have been done for a wealthy clientele in San Francisco or St. Louis. "As far as I know, I'm the only one who has done it around here for years," Glisson says.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS 1991 SCENIC WALL CALENDAR

Our 1991 scenic wall calendar is your window to Arizona's most colorful scenery. Each month an eye-pleasing photograph capturing the season is accompanied by a calendar page with generous space for jotting appointments and reminders. Ideal for any kitchen, study, or office wall, the wirebound 9" x 12" calendar includes a map pinpointing locations of the monthly photographs. Mailing envelopes are included with orders of two or more calendars. $4.95, plus shipping and handling. (Available after September 20, 1990.) Order your wall calendar today through the attached order card, or write or visit Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009. Place telephone orders by calling toll-free nationwide 1 (800) 543-5432. In the Phoenix area, call 258-1000.