Along the Way

If you had asked the Chemehuevi Indian children living along the Colorado River in 1858, "What's the funniest thing you ever heard of?" they would have replied, "That man who paid us to bring him all those mice and lizards and bugs."

"That man" was Balduin Möllhausen, a naturalist who accompanied the Joseph Christmas Ives expedition on the Colorado River. He collected faunal specimens for scientific analysis.

But the children didn't know that. They thought he ate all those horned toads, beetles, and rats. As Ives reported, it tickled the children that the bearded naturalist had such an "eccentric appetite" and that they could gratify it "with so much ease and profit." (See Arizona Highways, August, '92) Anecdotes like this seldom reach history textbooks. That's one reason why history books trigger sour jokes like this one from my own college days: "Why do they require us to read these books?"

"Because otherwise no one on Earth would ever know what was in them."

We considered that too true to be funny. We couldn't imagine anyone reading history books for pleasure.

Later, when I started writing full time, editors began asking me for articles about Arizona history. I accepted the work willingly enough, but I dreaded it so much that I put it off for weeks, sometimes months. Once it took me two years to write a 2,000-word article.

But a funny thing happened at the history library and other places where I researched. I discovered some truly exciting history books: first-person accounts, written by people for whom our past was the present.

There were Diego Pérez de Luxán and other explorers' reports of travels in Arizona in the 1500s, missionaries' and soldiers' accounts from the 1600s and 1700s, the diaries and reports of Americans who came west to Arizona in the 1800s, and more. Such books evoked the tastes, sights, smells, sounds, tears, and laughter of the past. I stop ped feeling persecuted and started reading history for the fun of it and for its surprises and ironies.

Take, for example, German Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn's experiences with tobacco. Like other Arizona newcomers, before and since, Pfefferkorn believed that poisonous animals swarmed Arizona, hunting for people to attack.

How to avoid them? he wondered.

Just smoke every night before you go to sleep, a Spanish colonist urged. Tobacco smoke would drive out small animals and stun large ones, "so that they lie motionless and can do no harm."

"Faithfully and diligently I followed this advice," Pfefferkorn reported. Sure enough, no poisonous animals ever attacked him. "I ascribe this boon to tobacco," Pfefferkorn concluded, "and still thank the honest Spaniard who gave me this wholesome advice."

Or consider the question of fashions. You'd think the late 20th century surpassed all other epochs in shock value of clothing styles. Not so. Turn to John Russell Bartlett's mammoth Personal Narrative and read about the most fashionable men's wear in southwestern Arizona in 1850: "a scarlet coat trimmed with gold lace, with epaulettes of silver wire, and to crown all, green goggles."

THROUGHOUT HISTORY PEOPLE HAVE SAID THE FUNNIEST THINGS - ABOUT THEMSELVES

Green goggles?

That's not all. Or rather, that is all. Legs and feet remained bare. Then there's the inventiveness of Arizona's native women.

It's easy enough to transport a baby across a river in a boat or on a bridge. But lacking those conveniences, what would you do?

Trapper James Pattie, who roamed Arizona in the 1820s, answered that. When a Chemehuevi mother wanted to take her infant across the Colorado, she attached string to the large board used to flatten the child's head. With her teeth, she clamped down on the string. Then she swam out into the river, towing her baby behind her.

Wrote Pattie, "The little things neither suffered nor complained, but floated behind their mothers like ducks."

Pima women faced a different challenge: how to carry their babies while balancing baskets of corn or six-gallon water pots on their heads. Their solution: fasten the baby securely in its cradleboard, attach the cradle to the top of the basket or jar - and set out walking with all that balanced on their head.

And we thought we had a hard time combining work and child care.

Or what do you suppose 19th-century travelers did when they wanted to sleep and could find no trees or bushes to tie their mules to? They attached the animals to their own legs or waist and prayed that during the night the mules didn't bolt through a cactus patch.

Or guess what one southern Arizona blacksmith in the mid-1800s used for an anvil when he couldn't procure a suitable piece of iron. A 600-pound meteorite, about five feet long, dug from a meteorite-filled field near Tubac.

These days I still find it difficult to write about history. Recently it took me four months to produce 900 words. I'd like to pretend this is because I feel so burdened knowing that nothing we write about the past can match what the people of the past wrote about themselves. But the truth is, I get so busy reading, and that leads to so much chuckling, thinking, and dreaming, that I almost don't have time to write anymore.

It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.