Bundyville, the Wind-grieved Ghost

There was never a paved road to Bundyville. No municipal electricity or water. Only a single small store in later years. And the town's population never rose above 200.

It existed on the Arizona Strip, one of the most remote and inhospitable regions in the United States, a place of winter snow, spring mud, and summer wind and dust. In the wild 8,000 square miles that sur-rounded the community, there was no lake or permanent stream. Yet virtually all who lived there recount treasured memories.

Abraham Bundy, 51 years old and the father of nine children, migrated from Mexico, settling in Nevada's Muddy Valley. But even to the hardship-resistant Bundy clan, earning a living in Muddy Valley was more than discouraging. So one day in the summer of 1916, Abe and his sons climbed to a peak across the Arizona border and surveyed the terrain. To the west of 8,020-foot Mount Trumbull and Hurricane Valley on the Arizona Strip, they saw what appeared to be a land of promise. Immediately they planned their move.

A few months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Bundy and his son Roy staked out homesteads in Hurricane Valley, known as Cactus Flat, and began building Bundyville that same day. Their shelter, scarcely more than a cave, would serve as a first home for Roy, his wife, Doretta, and their children.

Today this lonely and vast northwest corner of the state remains cut off from the rest of Arizona by the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. The only Arizona entry is a two-lane bridge at Marble Canyon.

Forlorn Ghost of the Arizona Strip Bund

Bundyville became the only town in the interior of the Strip.

When Abe, his wife, Ella, and their family first came to the area, cattle and sheep grazed the land, and a few cowboys and sheepherders lived in remote line shacks. A couple of small sawmills operated for a time in the higher pine country, and a hermit lived in the forests of Mount Trumbull.

Through the winter, Abe made forays into his new homeland. Then, in March of 1917, he and four of his sons Roy, James, Chester, and Pat moved in with wives and children.

Water was the immediate challenge. None existed near the settlement. So the women and children collected washtubs full of snow from the surrounding hills, melted it, and hauled it home.

As the weather warmed, the snow and the Bundy's closest water supply disappeared. The snowmelt turned the tiny settlement into a sea of mud. Chloe, James Bundy's wife, later recalled how difficult it was to go outside, as the mud built up on her shoes until her feet became great balls of goo so heavy she could barely walk.

New arrivals found a small seep about a mile up the mountainside. The women and children camped beside it, and for the first time clothes could be given a proper washing. The men remained in the mud below, building fences, a

reservoir, and crude dwellings that would become Bundyville's first houses.

In the emerging community, every day had its trials: a toddler was snatched from a rattlesnake's range. A prize cow gorged to death in a field of green corn. Doretta was trampled by a herd of stampeding hogs. Roy lost part of an ear in a wagon accident. And a washed-out reservoir, built with backbreaking labor, had to be rebuilt. But when the summer rains came, the women and children moved back from the mountain, and the first dry-farmed crops of corn, beans, and squash did well.

In early September, 10 members of the Martin Iverson family arrived, swelling the local population to 31. And on September 29, the first baby was born in Bundyville. In time the Vanleuvens arrived and later, the Alldredges. Others followed, looking for a new home, a new opportunity, and a place to raise their families no matter what the price in labor and personal sacrifice.

Naturally the increases in population added to the water problem. Estella Iverson recalled, "Sometimes, right after it rained, the water was so muddy the clothes looked worse after washing than before. When water got low in the catchments, what was left would be like soup: thick and green. My mom would boil it and strain it and set it out to air."

Yet with all the hardships, others chose to make the move to the Arizona Strip: by 1925 approximately 30 families lived in Bundyville.

A growing town needs a church, of course, so the residents built one. A school, too. The first classes in Bundyville started in the home of Roy and Doretta Bundy in 1917 (they had moved out of the dugout in the hillside). Then in 1918, a one-room frame schoolhouse was completed. Six years later, a larger facility was built. Attracting teachers to the area proved no easy task. At least one, traveling from Montana to her new assignment, almost turned back after hearing about snarling cougars and learning that the residents lived in dug-outs and the women dressed in gunnysacks.

Bundyville

But one teacher, Dorthy Young, eventually fell in love with the country and the people of Bundyville and in time married one of the Alldredges and gave birth to four children.

By the early '30s, the community had a post office and a population of about 200. But bad times still plagued the residents. In 1928 Roy Bundy, the earliest settler of Bundyville, had developed rheumatoid arthritis, and he could get around only with the aid of a crude version of a rickshaw.

In 1931 Roy's 22-year-old son, Iven, drowned while attempting to swim the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Then in 1932, the James Bundy home burned to the ground, and, while waiting for the house to be rebuilt, the entire family contracted scarlet fever. Three times the Albert Snyder family lost houses to fire. Young Claud Hallmark and his horse were carried away by a flash flood. In the winter of 1936, came subzero weather and deep snowdrifts which killed nearly all the livestock on the Strip. Seven-year-old Helen Bundy accidentally set off a dynamite cap that tore off several fingers just as little Spence Eslin experienced a ruptured appendix. Both children had to travel 60 miles over rough dirt road to St. George, Utah, for medical attention. The people of Bundyville endured in the face of such adversity partially because of the richness of family life and the closeness between neighbors. But there also were diversions such as dances and parties. "With everyone participating," recalled one resident, "we got the social life we needed. And we put on plays and had dinners and programs on the holidays. Christmas was always a wonderful experience, even though most of the gifts were homemade. Summer was baseball time, and everyone in town attended. We enjoyed homemade ice cream and listened to battery-powered radios."

There also were wild pig hunts not with guns but with ropes. "They were big rascals," recalled Bud Bundy, "nearly 500 pounds with three-inch tusks as sharp as razor blades." The idea was to corner one of the giants, throw a noose over its head, and tie it down without getting slashed to shreds.

Others took their ropes after cougars. Lincoln Bundy once followed a big cat into a deep fissure where the animal was denned. The cougar turned around in the narrow passage, and the result was a face-to-face encounter so close "that if we had stuck out our tongues, they would have touched." Young Bundy made a breakneck retreat.

Some of the youngsters mounted horses and chased eagles, trying to rope them.

Others explored the underground caverns along the Hurricane Cliffs and the deep gorges that went into the Grand Canyon.

But perhaps the main reason Bundyville lasted for half a century can be found in the remembrances of four former residents: "I remember sleeping out of doors when I was small. The clouds sailing over made it seem like the moon was racing across the sky."

"I remember the newborn lambs running up and down the washes like a bunch of children playing hide-and-seek."

"We weren't in such a hurry out on the Strip. I wish I could go back. There is no other such place where the stars seem so close."

"I remember how I loved to ride horse-back, and how I could jump on a horse and ride like an Indian, racing with the wind in my face and blowing my hair."

But even in those halcyon days, the end was already in view. Several factors conspired to drive Bundyville toward ghost-town status. The Taylor Grazing Law, passed in the 1930s, restricted the use of public land for livestock. Then the nation's entry into World War II took men away from the community. Later, construction of a pipeline that would bring good water to the town was canceled because of the war effort.

And finally, the lack of a local high school prompted families to move to larger communities. In 1968 the last family, that of Ben and Beatrice Bundy, moved out. The same year, the school closed, and Bundyville, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

Afterword: Since 1970, members of the Bundy family and other former residents have returned to the site of Bundyville for an annual reunion among the tilting frame buildings, fallen fenceposts, rusted barbed wire, and the shell of the old schoolhouse.

Abraham Bundy, the founder of Bundyville, died in 1946 at the age of 87. He is buried in Bundyville's small cemetery along with his wife and other relatives.

Special thanks to author-historian Nellie Iverson Cox of St. George, Utah, for permission to use material from her book, now out of print, Footprints on the Arizona Strip.