ROADSIDE REST

This Bride Learned Enough about Her Home on the Range to Write a Book, So She Did

In legend it often seems that westering American women divide into diametrically opposite categories, to wit: Following a four-hour defense against Indians of her remote mountain cabin, Mrs. Lewis Stevens via courier sends a note to her husband away on business in the Territorial capital of Prescott: "Dear Lewis: I am might nigh out of buckshot. Please send some more." (Signed) "Your loving wife."

At the opposite extreme is Carole Naille, a Harvey Girl. The young, single, pretty hostess of Fred Harvey's posh-rustic El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon is so daring she sews a lace trim onto her regulation starched blouse. A reporter, poetically smitten, writes: "All dressed up in spotless linen, her hair all in a curl, so purely sweetly winning is the happy Harvey Girl."

Somewhere between the parapet and the pedestal abided women doing what the day brought. Among the first three dozen pioneers inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame were a civic promoter who bossed 200 bronc busters, the state's first public health engineer who championed pasteurization of milk, a cultural leader who built a Spanishlanguage opera house, a ranch manager who delivered three of her own babies, a white woman who inspired Hopi jewelers, and a Pima elder who recorded in English her tribe's oral heritage.

Then, Mary Kidder Rak. An Iowa native persuaded by her parents to pursue a degree in social studies at Stanford University, Mary was devoting her life to charity work in San Francisco when she met Charles Lukeman Rak. He was an Arizona cowboy studying forestry at Berkeley. Although Mary "didn't know a cow," he fell for her. They married in 1917. In a couple of years, they acquired a Cochise County ranch whose house and headquarters was the Old Camp Rucker Army post. Their 22,000-acre range embraced the tops of the lofty Chiricahua Mountains five hours, 56 miles, 13 gates, and 1,000 chuckholes by truck from the border town of Douglas.

Mary was leery of all the animate, and most inanimate, elements of the wilderness. And at first, Charlie was no help. He was like the little boy swimmer. "I didn't learn. I always knowed." Charlie's mild contempt for dude ignorance frustrated Mary's desire to learn. Then finally, "I hit upon a desperate ruse and it worked admirably. I would start for the telephone, saying to Charlie, 'If I can't find what I want to know about cattle from you, I'll ring up Mr. Moore. He'll tell me.'" Charlie relented. Mary learned from him, and by doing: driving, feeding, gathering, doctoring, and branding beeves. And as her knowledge expanded, she wrote it, just as it came to her, in a natural, clear, and believable style. She documented the struggle to nurture cattle against the onslaughts of pinkeye and blackfoot and wolf and drought and deer hunters and rustlers and blizzards. She described the OCR (Old Charlie Rak) livestock as individuals, as independently complex as her few neighboring humans.

Fire in 1921 destroyed the historic Rak home together with all of Mary's wedding presents and library. The Raks had to move into a cabin so small "you couldn't curse the cat without getting fur in your mouth."

Privately Mary poured out her grief in letters to friends, but never hinted that she would trade her country hardships for the comforts of town. During the worst of the Great Depression, which hit cattle ranching especially hard, in longhand she wrote the immortal A Cowman's Wife.

"We get up at 4 o'clock, cook and eat breakfast and do the indispensable chores of milking cows and feeding horses and chickens. Kettles of water are heated to warm the cockles of the truck's heart. A hind wheel is jacked up; motor oil is drained and warmed on the back of the stove until the whole house reeks like an engine room at sea. While I dress in my town-going garments, Charlie pours boiling water into the radiator and warm oil into the crankcase. Then he cranks, cranks, cranks! I dash out to sit in the car with my finger on the gas throttle, warming up the motor. Charlie lowers the hind wheel to the ground; then he goes inside to warm his half-frozen hands, put on a necktie, and his best shoes. We are on our way."

So popular was our Mary in Douglas, townswomen usually threw a party in her honor whenever she paid a visit. Her book was equally admired.

A national sensation for its stark reality and wry humor, Wife encouraged HoughtonMifflen to publish its sequels: Mountain Cattle, Border Patrol, and They Guard the Gates, all true-life Arizona stories. Mary's byline appeared often and widely in newspapers and magazines, including Arizona Highways. Then, for reasons she herself never fully explained, she turned her talents to fiction. But New York publishers rejected her novels and begged for more real-life ranch detail. Maybe Mary believed she had said all worth saying of non-fiction. Today her four novels survive as unpublished manuscripts in her papers at the University of Arizona library. Mary and Charlie died in early 1958, just 13 days apart. Fittingly, they left their considerable estate for scholarships to deserving students of agriculture and economics.