A Pocket of Paradise

JOSEPH MULHATTON MONARCH OF MENDACITY

Then one day, the Yuma Sentinel reported the startling news that had just come into Algodones, Lower California. A tremendous slaughter of wild hogs had taken place in the tule marshes along the Colorado River by the renowned band of hunters being led through the country by Thomas Silsbee, a fictitious Frank Buck of his day. Silsbee, knowing every foot of this country, was able to direct the party into the very heart of the boar country.

One morning they came upon thousands of hogs. In the lot were many ugly boars with monster tusks. At first the party was on horseback, but when the first boar was wounded it gave a snort of agony, and instantly thousands of other hogs came to its rescue. The story went on: “It is true that the hogs ripped open the horses and dragged them to the ground, but soon the animals were so massed that they presented a solid and comparatively smooth surface of hog backs on which the hunters mounted, and from this vantage conducted the campaign of the slaughter. Some of the hunters received slight bruises, and all were exhausted with the excessive labor, but when the end of the battle came a count was made, and it was found that 9,642 hogs lay dead, having an estimated combined weight of 1,400 tons.” Efforts were being made, Mulhatton's story said, to charter a steamer to take the carcasses to Yuma.

On another occasion, Eastern newspapers carried the story that a passenger train coming into Tucson from the east encountered grasshoppers so thick on the track that the engineer could not stop the train until it reached Maricopa. News editors in the East, unaware that the distance between those two points was some 100 miles, asked for more details.

Then in 1899, Mulhatton reported on a magnetic belt of Earth within a 50-mile radius of Florence, Arizona, caused by vast beds of copper or some other source underlying it all. The giant saguaro, acting like a telegraph instrument, received and discharged the Earth's vast surplus of magnetism not required by the moon and sun's magnetic attraction. All the magnetic cacti in this neighborhood were either positive or negative. One attracted, the other repelled.

Mulhatton had led up to the story of his magnetic cacti by earlier reporting on the death of two tramps near Florence. One man, he said, had been SO MULHATTON CARRIED ON, WRITING HUNDREDS OF STORIES FOR NATIONAL AND LOCAL CONSUMPTION. HIS NAME WAS KNOWN IN EVERY NEWSPAPER OFFICE IN THE UNITED STATES. BUT IN THE WINTER OF 1900, THE HOAXES CAUGHT UP WITH HIM.

drawn up to and impaled on the sharp blades of the cactus, while its octopuslike arms folded around him, crushing him. The cactus lost its magnetic power while digesting its victim, hence Mulhatton was able to look at this gruesome sight. The other tramp's body was repelled by a negative cactus and thrown about 100 feet against a positive magnetic cactus, and this poor creature went through the same fate as his companion.

Mulhatton kept the local folks at Kelvin, Troy, and Florence on their toes as well. He reported on the “oil gushers” struck two miles from Kelvin; said he could prove that the Spanish explorer-hiker Cabeza de Vaca camped at Casa Grande in about the year 1530; and reported regularly on the Arizona Scientific Society, which met weekly at Florence.

This organization, readers were told, was made up of scientists living near Florence who gathered together to discuss the latest scientific discoveries. One such invention, credited to Simon Angulo, was a magnetic machine for making love to young ladies even at a distance - a sort of thought wave mechanism with which Simon could sit in his parlor in Florence on Sunday, turn down the light, and hold sweet converse with his best girl in Tucson.

The machine was not completely successful, but Angulo was to do more work on it. The Arizona Scientific Society also invented an artificial hot spring that aided in the treatment and cure of scurvy. And it worked to head off the seismic disturbances that prophets reportedly said were expected to wipe this portion of the Earth off the map sometime in June, 1899.

So Mulhatton carried on, writing hundreds of stories for national and local consumption. His name was known in every newspaper office in the United States.

But in the winter of 1900, the hoaxes caught up with Mulhatton. Hard work, and the long hours of stretching the mind, caused his first visit to a Phoenix mental hospital. At the time of his admittance, offers of help came from all over the country, from his former employers, from his friends, and his family. Locally he was praised and lauded as beloved member of the community. The Louisville-Courier paid tender tribute to him to interest capitalists in the worthiness of investing in the Kelvin and Troy mining areas. On one occasion, a Phoenix newspaper commented that he had gone to the “Hub” and had checked his imagination through as extra baggage.

He continued to live at Kelvin, but was in and out of the mental hospital at Phoenix. The census registers for Pinal County, Arizona, carry his name from the turn of the century until 1911. During this time he continued to give his age as 56.

What finally happened to Joseph Mulhatton? In 1913 he was drowned while trying to cross the Gila River at high tide during a flash flood near Kelvin. The stream was swollen and he was powerless. Onlookers were unable to help him. He was found downstream shortly afterward and buried a few hours later.

It's just a guess, but many think that Mulhatton headed straight for Lucifer's to put into operation an invention he had suggested 12 years before his demise.

In the Tombstone Prospector he described this simple apparatus by saying that his experiments with compressed heat showed that the surplus heat of an Arizona summer could be stored away for use in winter or utilized for generating power for machinery and electric plants by compressing 382° F. above zero into a cake of heat that dwindled down to 281° F. below zero.

The expansive power of the compressed heat was enormous, also slightly dangerous, he cautioned. This heat could be packed in four-inch cubes. The purpose then was to store this summer heat and transmit the mighty force to the Alaskan regions where one could open up a winter garden at Circle City. And wouldn't it be like him to have Lucifer out on the road somewhere peddling his heat pellets right now even though the climate there must be pretty warm.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS HISTORY LADY LEE

FIRST PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 1940 TEXT BY GREY ENSIGN ILLUSTRATION BY KEVIN J. KIBSEY My father was riding me on the saddle before him as we got near Miller Valley. "You help Lady Lee with her chores, hear? No ropin' hogs and creatin' hell like last time," he warned me. He left me at Lady Lee's when he'd get a day's work in the valley during a roundup or something like that. I was turning 11 or 12, I reckon. We lived in Prescott. Dad mostly got odd jobs or went hunting or hired up with the scouts or did a bit of placer mining and he'd never know just what to do with me at such times. Not that there weren't a dozen families who'd have taken a boy like me in, but Dad liked to keep his eye on me and I guess he was scared that a lot of these families who thought he wasn't bringing me up right would try to get me away from him or something. Anyhow, he'd only set me down for a day with any nabor, from sunup to sunset, and then he'd call for me and we'd go back to our cabin and set the beans on the stove. I never could eat much after one of these days he'd leave me with a nabor to be taken care of because the woman would feed me up to the teeth figuring I must be starving with only a man to look after my upbringing and education. What's more, no matter if it was the middle of summer, they'd pile clothes on me, and give me stuff to wear and for bedding and all, so Dad would always have a heavier load to take home than he had when he set out with me in the morning. Sometimes I'd be fed so much I'd almost be sick jogging in the saddle on the way home. And Lady Lee was a great hand at feeding anybody who happened along to her homestead. Lady Lee wasn't her right name. She was a Simmons, an English woman who had married a Southerner, and after the Civil War her husband got some homestead rights under the new laws that were being passed, borrowed some money, and came west with her. All the West was being made by capital raised in the East for expansion out here, brand new clean towns were springing up but about Lady Lee.

Her name was Mary. I hear they called her "Lady" because of the way she spoke and held herself. Her husband had left her and there she was, homesteading by herself, feeding the hogs, manuring her garden, doin' the chores, helping at calving and such, and all the time carryin' herself and acting as if she was Lady Bountiful of Old World Manor with servants and lackeys within call. Lady Lee was round the back when we rode up. My father dumped me on the porch. When he hollered, she came around and my father told her how I'd promised to help her this time and let the hogs alone and keep off ructions generally. She laughed and said I'd be a great help and she was glad I'd came because this was her busy day. She looked very old to me but I guess she wasn't much over 40 and not very big. In fact she was kind of skinny. She had light blue eyes, a wide mouth with lips that weren't very big and her cheekbones showed up kind of clear. She tilted her head so she could look up at my father from under the big bonnet she wore and said something I

Arizona Highways Classics 7

I got onto the floor in my stockinged feet, Lady Lee having made me take off my boots when I lay down. I was standing there, looking first at the window and then at Lady Lee's gun standing there in the corner. When the door opened, the man stood swaying a bit on the threshold.

He was a tall man and his dark eyes and hair and brows were in shadow. He had a long jaw, a cleft chin, a loose working mouth, but there was a kind of handsomeness about him. When he swayed forward, he plunged into the room, looking at me, and his black eyes seemed to spark or burn. I wished my father had been there. My father was stocky but I'd seen him whip a fellow twice his size. My father was very strong. Strong and quick. But although I tried to think what my father would do, and how he would fight a fellow like this, I stayed right there by the window. I wasn't trembling anymore. I felt no fear or anything. Just watchful.

Right behind the man was Lady Lee. She looked very small. Her face was dead white, but two pink spots burned on her high clear cheek bones. She had another red spot on her chin.

"That child's been left in my care," she said in a curious flat voice. "Don't you lay a finger on him."

"I'll mash the little . . ."

Now I don't know what happened because as he reached for me, I ducked as I did when scrapping with fellows about my own size, and I slid under his fist and shot under the table and came up to the other side of the pantry. I heard the table crash over and Lady Lee's high voice. Then there was a slap, like a blow on flesh. I took a quick look back into the room but couldn't see Lady Lee at all. The man was coming for me. I turned and ran and as I cleared the kitchen, I banged into the shelf and brought the candle molder down with a crash and the pot of grease which was like water in the heat. It spread all over the floor, I guess, for I slipped and fell and bumped my head. And then as sparks flashed in my eyes, there was a big crash, like the roof had blown off, and things spattered all around the kitchen.

When I got up the man was lying on his face and blood was pouring out of the back of his neck and turning into a jelly almost at once in the hot room. Lady Lee was turning away from the corner where the gun was. Her face was still white but the pink spots were gone. She and I looked at each other over the dead man.

"Don't stand staring like that," she said sharply. "Fill a bucket of water and bring it here. First of all help me to move this. We'll now do the chores."

There wasn't a sign of anything in the house when Dad returned at night to take me home, but Lady Lee took him out by the well and they talked a bit and then Dad got a spade and it was dark before he came into the house. Lady Lee was quiet when she kissed me goodbye and told Dad she hoped he'd bring me again one day to help with the chores. Dad said he would. We didn't get home till after midnight for Dad stopped at several places to tell the story how Lady Lee had worked so hard getting jams and jellies ready for her husband's homecoming and how he had come home and right away gone round to draw some water from the dry well and, leaning over to see if he could dig it out some, had fallen in and broken his neck.

Everybody allowed it was very sad although some folks said right out that Lady Lee had good riddance of bad rubbish. My father said how he'd buried the body, the weather being what it was, and stuck up a wooden headstone but I never did see that headstone next time I went to Lady Lee and I didn't like to ask where it was. Nor did Lady Lee ever actually let me do any chores around the place. Anyway she didn't stay much longer. They say she went to California. I believe Dad asked her to marry him but she wouldn't. Anyway that was the time Dad got drunk and we hit for Utah. I didn't come back here till long after he'd died. I visited Lady Lee's homestead then, but it looked just about the way you see it now. Those old logs weather well when they're off the ground and in dry country.

DINÉTАН, IF I FORGET YOU...

Beside the streams of Babylon we sat and wept at the memory of Zion. Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right arm wither.. Ballad of the Exiles, Book of Psalms Now I am just like a woman, sorry like a woman in trouble, I want to go and see my own country. Barboncito Proceedings of the Peace Commission May 28, 1868 On this dusty night in August, my old friend Alex Etcitty and I have been watching the 10 P.M. newscast in our motel room at Kayenta on the Navajo reservation. The principal topic has been terrorism and tribulations in modern Israel. That and the wind whining around the Holiday Inn have made Etcitty pensive. He remembers that when he attended the Franciscan boarding school at St. Michael's, the Bible History teacher compared the captivity of the Jews in Babylon with the exile of the Navajos to Bosque Redondo. "He made it real for us," Etcitty recalled. "He'd relateMoses and the Ten Commandments with Changing Woman and the rules she taught us. He told us no one could understand the Jewish culture without understanding Zion any more than they could understand us Navajos without knowing what Dinétah means."

What Dinétah means, when translated more or less literally to English, is "among the people." (Navajos call themselves Diné which means "The People.") In practical terms, Dinétah means the Navajos' reservation, an expanse larger than all of New England and twice the size of Israel. But Etcitty was talking of still another meaning. Like Zion, Dinétah involves more than geography. It, too, is tied to ethnic identity, the supernatural, a system of values, and a sense of identity. Like Zion, Dinétah is the Holy Land of its people. It is also a way of life for the Navajos. Etcitty is "born to" the Taadii Dinée, or Slow Talking People - the clan of his mother. The clan's mythology, like that of all Navajos, is tied directly to the specific landscape of Dinétah. After an evolution through the Black, Blue, and Yellow worlds under the earth, the Holy People of the Navajos emerged at last on the Earth Surface World (or Glittering World, or Fourth World, or Fifth World, depending on clan and version). The point of emergence was near Huerfano Mesa in New Mexico, but the exact place is as hard to find as the Garden of Eden. Once upon the Earth Surface World, some of these Holy People (yei'i) began preparing a place for the yet-to-becreated human Navajos to live. First Man (who was not a human but, like all the Holy People, a sort of concept of humanity) hung out the stars with the help of Black God and Coyote and brought up from the underworld the material to build the four Sacred Mountains. He built Sis Naajini("the Mountain of the East," which we call Mount Blanca, in southern Colorado), Dook o' ooshid (San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff), Dibe Nitsaa (La Plata Mountains in northern Colorado), and Tsoodzil (Mount Taylor in New Mexico). On each, First Man posted a yei (spirit) to live and guard the Navajos from harm. Thus Mount Blanca is forever the home of Dawn Boy, and the spirit of Turquoise Girl abides in Mount Taylor's Mosca Peak until the end of time.

DINÉTAH: IF I FORGET YOU

With scores of other epic deeds establishing the landscape, the stage is set for the serious business of teaching a way of life. Now one of the most remarkable personages in the mythic literature of any civilization appears. Her name is Changing Woman.

First Man and First Woman hear someone sobbing atop Gobernador Knob, an almost unclimbable volcanic throat in New Mexico. On top they find an infant girl and adopt her as their own. The infant, called White Shell Girl, grows and becomes Changing Woman. Asleep beside the San Juan River, she is impregnated by Sun and River Mist. After a gestation of four days, two sons are born. They are Monster Slayer and Born of Water, the Hero Twins. The boys steal magic weapons from the sun and launch a heroic odyssey to make Dinétah safe for the Navajos. Meanwhile their mother creates the 65 Navajo clans from skin rubbed from her body. She teaches them the Navajo Way.

Changing Woman's instructions are as detailed as those revealed in the Torah or presented to Islam by the Prophet Mohammed. They cover how to build a hogan, how to cope with death (remove the body through a hole knocked in the north wall of the hogan, place the moccasins on the wrong feet, avoid speaking the name of the dead, and so on). They list hundreds of things that are bahadzid ("taboo"), from lightning-struck trees to looking into the eyes of one's mother-in-law, to eating raw meat, or marrying into your own or your father's clan, or combing your hair at night. They cover how children should be named, how girls should be welcomed into puberty (including even the recipe for the cake to be baked for the puberty ritual), and the fantastically complex formula for scores of curing ceremonials by which persons out of harmony with their world are restored to "beauty."

A strong thread of philosophy runs through all of this. Man is not presented as Lord and Master of the natural world. He is an equal part of a great interrelated system, no more important than corn beetle, creosote bush, the mole, the wind, or the mountain. When this relationship is in proper balance, the Navajo lives in h'ozRo a concept for which we have no exact word. We usually translate it as "beauty." "Harmony" or "contentment" are as close.

It works something like this: when there is drought, the Zuni and the Hopi and the white rancher will pray for rain. The traditional Navajo prays for nothing. If the drought troubles him, he holds the appropriate curing ceremony to adjust himself into harmony with a land without rain. Navajos I have known have been impressed with the way the Zunis can call the clouds (which are, after all, the kachina spirits of their ancestors). But the Navajo asks nothing of the yei spirits. His metaphysics are without supplication, humility, or penance. The yei are, at best, neutral. If the Navajo is unhappy, sick, out-of-tunewith-time, it is because he has broken a rule and is out of harmony. Perhaps he has allowed himself to become infected with ghost sickness.

If so there are at least four specific cures. If a Red Ant Way is needed, a medicine man will be hired to perform this beautiful ceremony, and his relatives In the ritual is done exactly as Changing Woman taught, the trouble will be ended and the patient restored to beauty. No penitence or plea is involved. The ritual is compulsive. The evil is eliminated.

Significantly, in several versions of the origin myth, witchcraft is called "the way to make money." Thus the desire to possess material things, unless kept in harmony, WHEN THE NAVAJOS WERE FIRST CREATED, FOUR MOUNTAINS AND FOUR RIVERS WERE POINTED OUT TO US. THAT WAS TO BE OUR DINÉTAH, AND IT WAS GIVEN TO US BY CHANGING WOMAN.

Is the source of the ultimate evil for the Navajo.

"I was taught it's a good thing to have what you need," Etcitty told me. "But if you start getting too much, it shows you're not looking after your relatives right. If you get rich, you've taken things that belong to somebody else. Saying 'rich Navajo' is like saying 'dry water.'"

The late W.W. "Nibs" Hill, foremost authority on Navajo culture and a member of the faculty at the University of New Mexico, illustrated the same point by quoting an old Navajo rancher: "I've been a poor man all my life. I don't know a single song."

The tribe had a unique opportunity to choose between a fatter life and the sometimes hungry beauty of Dinétah in 1868. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman headed the Peace Commission negotiating with the 7,304 who had survived General Carleton's scorched earth campaign and five years of dismal captivity along the Pecos River in New Mexico. Sherman offered three choices: the Navajos could remain at Bosque Redondo. Or they could occupy a reservation in Oklahoma Territory, an expanse of fertile farmlands and timber which was aswarm with game. Or they could return to Dinétah.

Sherman told President Andrew Jackson that he had doubts the tribe could support itself on the arid expanse of canyons and deserts in northeastern Arizona, but, he said, it was totally worthless and therefore should be safe from the greed of white men. It was, he said, "as far from our future possible wants as it is possible to determine."

Then as now, Navajos disagreed with white values.

The Navajo spokesman was Barboncito ("Little Whiskers"). He was noted as a fighting man not as an orator. But listen to his words: "I hope to God you will not ask us to go to any country but our own. Our grandfathers had no idea of living in any other place . . . When the Navajos were first created, four mountains and four rivers were pointed out to us. That was to be our Dinétah, and it was given to us by Changing Woman. It was told to us by our forefathers that we were never to move east of the Rio Grande or west of the San Juan, and I think that our coming here has been the cause of much death among us and our animals. This woman I spoke of, when we were created, gave us Dinétah, created it specially for us.

Barboncito, away from Dinétah, said, "Whatever we do causes death." The foreign land was hostile to them. The Pecos drowned them when they went to wash in it. Lightning killed them. Even their old friend, the rattlesnake, struck them here without warning. And away