ON THE ROAD

A Year 2000 look back at stories of the state from the people and pages of Arizona Highways

Waiting for the Monsoon

BY MARILYN PATE This morning the air feels softer. Maybe the rain will come today. Yesterday I saw a flock of white sky-sheep grazing in their blue meadow. We who live here on the Mogollon Rim in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona wait every summer for our monsoon. We wait shrouded in a still, heavy quiet. No birds cheep, call or caw. Insect sounds are absent. The weeds along the road droop into the powdery dust. Windy the Wonder Dog, in his hot brown and white springer spaniel coat, lies panting on the porch.

A sudden breeze swings an open door wide, then slams it shut. I go to the window and look out between billowing curtains. The pine branches are dancing, the potted petunias bow and bob, the oak leaves twist and rattle against each other. Windy moves to the edge of the porch. His fur is ruffled by the breeze. He raises his head and sniffs the air. Does he smell a hint of rain?

The sky fills with gray, white and dark-blue clouds. I hear thunder rumbling faintly in the southeast. Shadows disappear. The sun is covered. We have waited for so long. It is mid-July and the rain is overdue. The forest, the four-legged animals and birds are all thirsty. Children and adults alike are dry-nosed, itchy-skinned and chapped-lipped. We wait for the relief of summer rains. our monsoon.

The thunder sounds louder as I go out and sit on the porch to watch the show. The birds display excitement by calling to one another. The red-headed woodpecker cries, "It's coming, it's coming!" Blue jays gather at the birdbath and chuckle as they dance from one foot to the other. Ravens swoop and glide on the rising air currents. Hummers zip around even more swiftly than usual. The temperature drops 5 degrees in 10 minutes. The breeze freshens and cools. I hear a deep roll of thunder from the south. I haven't seen any lightning yet. I hope we get rain before we get too much lightning. Fire danger is extreme. There have been fires down on the reservation. Several days ago, I walked a ways and looked south toward Fort Apache. In the far distance, slurry bombers were dropping pink foam, from tanks that hang on the underside of the planes, onto billows of smoke. The dog reacts to the thunder as the claps become louder and almost constant. Ears raised, he cocks his head to one side and looks quizzically at me. We wait together. It is getting cooler by the minute. There are goose bumps on my arms. I smell the rain. The wind blows the wet, earthy scent over the miles. It must be raining down at Sunrise, on Mount Baldy or over near the White River.

The light is distilled through the merging, darkening clouds. It is as if I see the yard through a series of camera filters. For a minute everything looks yellow, then blue and now gray. A strong gust of wind scatters pine needles and cones down onto the porch and blows the rubber doormat out into the yard. Windy and I wait. I sit with my arm around his neck and whisper into his long floppy ear. "Will we have to water the garden today, after all? Is this another false alarm?" He leans against me and groans with pleasure. He just likes me to take time out of my busy day and sit on the porch with him. A sharp clap of thunder rolls over the Mogollon Rim. Another rumble answers from the west. Has it passed us by? Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash and then hear a loud clap of thunder. The rumbling is continuous and close. The sky is inky black. The first fat drop splats on the porch. It startles Windy and he jumps up and moves over under the roof overhang. Other drops fall and the rain becomes a sheet of wonderful wetness. I raise my face and put out my hands to feel its blessing. The monsoon is here! I hear the drumming of the rain on the roof, the yard and the road. Windy and I go inside to watch and listen at the open window. The pine trees twist and bow as they sing to welcome the life-bringing water. "Come and wash our branches. Come and clean our trunks. Come and quench our thirst. Thank you, Brother Rain."

THE TRAIL OF PADRE ΚΙΝΟ

Eusebio Francisco Kino, who spent 24 years exploring and establishing missions among the Indians in the Southwest, didn't want to come here. Padre Kino was an outstanding mathematician and geographer. During his novitiate, he longed to go to China and continue his studies with the best mathematicians in the world. As he prepared for his first missionary venture, another young priest also was preparing himself the Far East was his goal, too.

Two assignments were open: one in China and one in Mexico. They drew lots to see who would go to the New World and who to the old. Father Kino drew Mexico.

His first post in the new country was in Baja, California. Lack of funds and supplies caused the abandoning of the rocky, barren soil of San Bruno, and Kino returned to the mainland.

His interest in the unknown country to the north mounted, and eventually he persuaded the higher-ups to let him go to Pimeria Alta, the outpost of civilization. In 1685, shortly after the landing of the Pilgrim fathers, Kino left for his work among the Pimas and Opatas.

ON THE STREET WHERE WE LIVE

Lewis Avenue, the street on which Arizona Highways is located, got its name from the late Perley M. Lewis, a civil engineer and hydrology expert with the Phoenix Water Department. His niece, Marilyn Pate, likes to tell this about him: "Uncle Perley was a unique man. He served under Gen. Joseph Stilwell in Burma during World War II. He helped lay out and build the Burma Road. Stilwell called him 'that man in the roaring jeep.' His jeep continued to be his favorite vehicle for the rest of his life.

"When he was a boy, his mining father brought the family to Tombstone from Colorado. Uncle Perley earned spending money by dressing up as a girl and dancing at the Bird Cage Theatre. There weren't enough young women around to fill out the chorus line, so they would hire slim young boys to do the job."

With his brilliant mind, dominating will, selfless energy and understanding heart as his only tools, he established a chain of missions along a trail that, today, merits retracing.

He worked with the Indians, inspiring them to do the backbreaking labor that the building of a church required.

In addition, he charted the new country in the most accurate, and in many cases the only, maps of the area. He brought the Indians the idea of irrigation and worked with them to make the desert bloom.

He started farms. He brought cattle-raising to a country that is now famous for its cattle. He gave the peaceful Pimas the courage and the character they needed to fight off the death-dealing Apaches.

When his missions were destroyed, he rebuilt them. When the Indians renounced the faith and returned to their ways of depredation, he won them back. With his devotion and faith, he inspired all who knew him and all who have since learned of his work, energy and ingenuity.

Kino died as he lived, among his beloved Indians, dressed in rags, humble, generous, ever kindly and forgiving. Behind him was an empire he alone had created.

Without the accomplishments of this pioneer padre, the development of the West would have been long delayed.

What a Gully

I must take issue with you on your "Golly, What a Gully" piece in your September issue.

Emory Kolb and I are perhaps the oldest living residents of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I crossed the Grand Canyon with Teddy Roosevelt on his last lion hunt in 1913, but the Grand Canyon was not made a National Park until 1919.

I was also there in 1907 when President Taft arrived on his private train and he made no such remark as, "Golly, what a gully." It was Irving S. Cobb who made that statement. There was a small gathering watching Cobb. When he walked up to the Rim, he seemed to be struck dumb by its beauty and vastness. Then he turned and saw we all were watching him. He knew that we expected some statement from him. He said, "Golly, what a gully."

Our thanks to Pioneer Jack Tooker for setting us straight on the "Gully."

Moo and the Hell's Hole Tom

Laughton Champie straightened up from the saddle he was mending and looked out from under the tack shed roof into the afternoon drizzle as the sound of a horse's hoofs in mud grew louder. A slicker-clad rider reined in his cowpony. Two hounds stood nearby, looking miserable.

"Hi George," Laughton greeted his brother. "This is a good day for being inside. Why are you out riding?"

"Got a little lion tracking to do. Thought maybe you'd come along. Louis and Hugh are goin'. We might need your dogs and Louis', too. We're goin' after the Hell's Hole Tom and we're not comin' back till we get him. He took half the calf crop right off the forest this spring. There's old kills all over the place and new ones, too. Lord knows how many deer he takes, but that cuss prefers veal."

"What makes you think it's one cat doin' all that?"

"He doesn't act like any other cat. He's careless, doesn't cover his kills well, and then to cinch it before he got my bluetick Anne last fall that hound marked his left front pad good. There is no mistaking his track. He signs every kill right personal like."

A pair of small cowboy boots appeared through an opening in the loft and dangled, then a girl of 8 dropped to the ground and ran all the way to the Champie Guest Lodge in the Bradshaw Mountains. "Mother, Mother!" she said, bursting indoors, "I'm going lion hunting." Cynthia, better known as Moo, told her mother all about the calves and the lion and the hunting party. This little girl, visiting from the East, wanted permission to at least ask Laughton to take her along, and finally her mother relented. Surely he would say no, thought the woman.

Laughton did his best to dissuade Moo, telling her about long hours in the saddle, possible snowstorms, and no chance to turn back.

"It's mean work, Moo," he said, "most of it at a full run, up mountains, over boulders, sliding and stumbling down almost sheer canyon walls and all the time limbs and brush beating at your clothes and hammering your knees and face."

Still, when the hunting party took to the hills, with hounds, pack animals and provisions for several days, the 8-year-old girl was along with her bewildered mother, who was keeping a bargain she'd unwittingly made. They followed the trail over miles of rolling desert, past great monuments of rock, through numerous canyons, always working toward higher country. The sky was overcast and a heavy mist gathered. In sight of the first pines, the mist turned into a slushy drizzle and then into snow. Wet trickles ran down Moo's neck. She stomped her wet boots in the stirrups and wiggled her toes. Her feet pained terribly with the cold. Yet in spite of her discomfort, she answered all inquiries with a cheery, "Don't worry about me, I'm doing fine."

It was Hugh who noticed she could hardly stand on her umbed feet, and it wasn't until after a half-hour's vigorous massage with snow that the feeling finally returned. "Why didn't you holler, gal, when you were in trouble?" he said.

Allen C. Reed, Artist — and So Much More

Arizona Highways Editor Raymond Carlson didn't wait to contact commercial art designer Allen C. Reed after hearing he'd moved to Phoenix in 1949. Reed's first layout featured an unknown artist named Ted DeGrazia, and he did a smashing job designing the story, which appeared in the March 1949 issue. DeGrazia went on to worldwide fame, and for more than a decade, Reed's relationship with Arizona Highways flourished. Once, a writer-photographer returned from an assignment with a batch of ruined film. Reed went out and shot another group of images to accompany the article, and his photography career was born. After that, Reed designed, photographed and sometimes wrote at least 45 features in Arizona Highways, and publishers around the country began requesting secondary rights to his work. Money wasn't what motivated Reed, though. He did what he did "for the good of the cause." He helped in the push for a Navajo hospital in Monument Valley, and his feature on the Orme School "put the place on the map," attracting students from all over the world. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart sent their kids to Orme.

Said Reed, "It was a real pleasure all those years, accomplishing so many good causes, while working with such a splendid staff giving the world the opportunity, access to and experience of enjoying, through these pages, our fabulous American West." Paula Marie Searcy Moo stubbornly replied, "I'll be okay. Laughton told me I could expect things like this."

That night she helped to clean tiny rocks out of the dried beans before they were put into a big pot to cook and simmer for the following day. And the next morning the hunters were back on the trail, but without any success. The sun was past noon and no one had remembered to pack a lunch, and Moo was hungry as she stood near a large rock overlooking Hell's Hole. Suddenly the unmistakable trail bugle of a hound drifted up from the rocky brush-choked abyss below.

"Here we go!" Laughton shouted. "Moo, you better wait here. If you couldn't keep up with the dogs, I couldn't wait for you."

"You, you mean ." Moo stammered, "after coming clear up here, I can't do what I came up here for?" Tears welled up in her big brown eyes and Laughton relented. "Oh, all right you and your mother come as far as you can, and I'll come back and get you after we corner the cat."

Riders and dogs descended the fierce ragged slopes of Hell's Hole at a run. Moo charged valiantly behind Laughton, ducking under branches and dashing between tight-fitting trees. Then a new sound reached her ears. Staccato barking. Her heart raced because she knew what this meant treed! she She gripped her saddle horn tightly and charged on didn't dare give up now, not after everything she'd gone through.

The barking was bedlam when Laughton halted his sweating horse where the other riders had converged, and looked back just in time to see Moo burst through the trees behind him.

"Well, I'll be darned, little lady! I thought I left you a couple of miles back there."

Moo smiled weakly. "Where's the lion?"

She stood quite close beneath the big cat to get a good look. He sprawled on a limb, glaring at the barking dogs below.

"He's a beautiful animal, Laughton. Do you have to kill him?"

Laughton looked down at Moo thoughtfully for several seconds before answering her. "He's killed a lot of our calves, honey, 30 or 40 a year, and deer, too. He's led us a merry chase for two years and he's a renegade even among his own kind. Seems like maybe he deserves shootin'."

It was nearly 4 o'clock on a New England fall evening in Moo's hometown, as she let the screen door slam and hollered, "Mom, I'm home from school."

"There's a package here for you from Arizona, Moo, and a letter, too," replied her mother.

Moo hurriedly tore the wrappings from the big box and out spilled a soft tanned fur robe, the hide of the great mountain lion. The fierce glass eyes gleamed at Moo from the head and white fangs were bared in a perpetual snarl. Sharp claws protruded from each paw. Moo spread it on the floor, sat down, and said, "Let's read the letter, Mother."

Her mother unfolded the paper and began to read.

It was short and to the point: "Dear Moo, Here's a little token from four Arizona cowboys. We have just voted you as the lady we would most like to take on a lion hunt. Laughton, Hugh, Louis and George."

A tear rolled down Moo's cheek and splattered on a lion's paw she was fondling. A left front paw, with a deep scar in the pad.

Excerpted from the March 1948 issue A Blind Man Sees

While poking around the Yaqui River near Soyopa, I stumbled across an American prospector, stone blind, unable to care for himself.

"Last night I could see," he told me. "When I woke up this morning, my eyes wouldn't work."

Putting the fellow on his horse, I led him to a doctor at Minas Prietas. The doctor skillfully removed a scale from the man's eyes, restoring sight. The scale, the doctor told me, was bat secretion and had fallen into the prospector's eyes from an ocotillo cactus roof while he slept. George H. Smally

Life and Learning on the Frontier

My mother went singing into the Grand Canyon Country. She sat on the front seat of our wagon, beside my father whose only sound was a recurrent tongue-click for the horses.

That first sunset in the Canyon Country on the Arizona Strip! Yellow blossoming and odorous, the cleome was a sea that billowed and lapped about the wagon-box, fingered the horses' hames, slid along their sides and bellies. We there were nine kids caught the pungent flowers in our hands. We forgot we were hungry. We looked at the cliffs towering in the ruddy light.

They threw back a trembling echo of mother's song, "Mark ye her bulwarks, consider her palaces. Cry out and shout, cry out and shout! Tell it to the generations following thee!"

Mother was a poetess. She was pretty religious, also. To her this new country was all tied up with God and dreams and idyllic purposes. Father had been a poet too in his earlier days, but somehow his writings had disappeared. Now his only religion was to bring water and land together. Poetry to him was a green field and trees and water flowing in the desert.

Father was a better promoter than farmer. The crops never turned out so good. Sometimes it was because the water kept breaking out of the ditch, or the rodents ate the young sprouts, or the range cattle broke through our fences and mowed the corn down. Mother blamed our ill-luck on the fact that he didn't pray and pay tithing. One day she was pounding at the churn fit to break it. Suddenly she shouted at father, "I'm going to pay this dab of butter in tithing, then I'm going to fast for three days and get a blessing on this (expletive) outfit!" Mother did all the swearing for the family, as a rule. She knew the Bible by heart. I never did read the Good Book, but I can quote it like a minister, just from hearing mother.

We were 30 miles from the nearest school. Mother and father had both been school teachers, so they taught us our elementary grades by the light of the fire in the fireplace father had built. We boys brought down the pitchiest logs we could find in the hills, as they made the best light for the long winter evenings.

In the summer we kids slept under the stars, on the haystacks when there was a haystack. The first year it was cornfodder. We had stacked it while it was still somewhat green and it had begun to heat. That made it nice and comfortable sleeping when the mornings began to get nippy in the autumn. Sometimes we would come in so steamed up that mother would think we had taken to bed-wetting.

We had a constant struggle to keep the water in the three-mile ditch. A half-dozen times we had to change the ditch line and make an entirely new channel. Every shower brought freshets down the hillsides, floods down the washes, to fill the ditch with mud or wipe it out. Luckily for father, mother had been enthusiastic about children and there were six sons, three of them old enough to do the work of men.

I was the fourth, and not so stalwart as the others, so they put me to work herding the flock of sheep we had accumulated. I didn't think much of ditching and farming, anyway. I liked to read books. I read all of Shakespeare and Tennyson and Browning. I read Les Miserables and David Copperfield twice each. I had decided to become a writer. I had had my first poem published at the age of eight. I never got over that first shot of drug.

We took correspondence courses in high-school subjects. I read Greek and Roman history, studied French grammar, English and composition and literature, algebra, etc., while sitting in sagebrushes in winter, or in the shade of junipers in summer. I would study 'til the bells of the sheep got out of hearing, then I would follow their tracks and round them up and sit down to study again. Out with the sheep at dawn, winter and summer, back after dark. I lost a good many sheep but I got my education that way. (With prices what they are now I think I would rather have the sheep.) Very few things are as exciting (and unpredictable) as leading a wild cow-brute. In case you ever decide to lead one, there is a happy medium between enough slack rope for them to tangle it around your horse's legs and snubbing it short enough to encourage them to climb up in the saddle with you. Both extremes are sincerely advised against.

To save time and men and horses, many of the larger mountain outfits keep a few gentle steers or burros for leading stock. But not having a big outfit or any lead-steers, I saddled Tony the next morning and went down to lead my steer in the hard way. He was still wrathy and during the night he had pawed the ground and fought the tree and sat back on the rope. He was tired and had a sore head and had discovered that the rope around his horns didn't bite unless he sat back against it.

Tony was disgusted. Leading is his pet peeve. He probably remembers the first one he led, an old cow with a nasty disposition. Before we got

LIFE ON THE FRONTIER A NAVAJO GRAVESITE

Excerpted from the April 1946 issue Once I had a trip into the Valley of Tsay-Bege [near Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border] with a man who is, you might say, a spiritual sexton of the place. He is a white man, a cowboy, but he belongs there because he has an old affinity with the valley, and with its spirits.

We walked across the sand, among the cactus and the desert bushes. Finally we stopped before a pile of brush. My friend said: "There is an old man buried under here, and he was a man I respected. He was a leader among the Indians. See what they sent with him."

We looked closely, and found the brush-pile littered with the utensils of man. There was a coffee pot with a hole in the bottom; an old saddle, hacked with an ax; the bones of a horse. Everything had been damaged in some way.

"They knocked the horse in the head," said my friend, "so its spirit could escape and go with the old man, to provide him with comforts in the next world. Everything was knocked in the head, so its spirit could get out. See the shovel there, with the broken handle. The old man might need a shovel, so they knocked it in the head."

FRONTIER REPORTER ON HORSEBACK

Excerpted from the March 1948 issue George Smally set out for Arizona in 1896 after winning a life-anddeath battle with pneumonia and began working for the The Arizona Republican, forerunner to today's Arizona Republic. As he traveled the state on horseback here, in his own words, is one of the things he found: I had met Captain Tracy Dearth, known to the Mexicans as El Capitan. A fugitive, wanted for murder in Wisconsin, he had lived in Yaqui country for 25 years. He introduced me to Tubatuma, chieftan of the Yaquis. At the Indian's camp, according to custom, we handed over our .45s, placing ourselves under the protection of Tubatuma. Had we kept our guns, we would have been enemies in the eyes of the Indians. In one of the Indian huts, a young girl lay writhing on the ground, deathly sick from a rattlesnake bite high on her thigh. When we approached, the girl's mother quickly covered her, true to Yaqui modesty. El Capitan prepared a At first it seems silly. And then, if you are not impatient with the past, there comes an understanding that this is truly real. This isn't a museum or a storybook legend. This grave is genuine. The time is the present. This is Navajo Country.

special mash of green potatoes to draw out the poison. The Yaqui mother applied it and the girl recovered.

PONY POSTMAN

From the March 1946 issue When progress, in the form of a stripped down 1928 Ford, rattled the death knell for the pony express, Shorty Neal thought it might make his job easier.

Shorty, who used to ride the mail between two small Arizona mining towns, Sombrero Butte and Copper Creek, is still the mailman. Time was when he rose at dawn, saddled his horse and started the long, hard ride over roadless country. Modern roadbuilding equipment made possible the hewing of a road between the two towns, and now Shorty coaxes his flivver over the rocks to deliver the important letters to the miners, ranchers and prospectors along the line.

But he is finding that automobiles have as much personality and temperament as his horse did, and now and then, when he hauls a heavy rock out of the road or tinkers with the mysterious block of metal that is an engine, he wistfully longs for his horse.

Shorty Neal is the last of a long line of illustrious riders of the pony express and he still functions as the chief contact with the outside world for the 18 people on his route.

Started she hooked him in the ribs and he whirled and kicked at her with both hind feet and then went to bucking. I slacked off on the rope and she wound it around his feet. We all went down in a pile tangled in the rope. Tony was trying to kick. The cow was trying to hook. And I was wanting to be someplace else. But it broke Tony from bucking with a cow tied to the saddle horn.

I looped my lass-rope around the steer's horns and snubbed his head up to the saddle horn before I untied the necking-rope from around the tree. At first he didn't want to leave. Then he remembered some important business in the wrong direction and lit out shaking his head and ringing his tail. We raced alongside of him for a hundred yards and started circling toward home. He slammed his feet in the ground and stopped. I gave him a little slack and touched Tony with my spurs. The rope gnawed at his sore head. He lunged forward and began lashing with his stub horns. I was glad I'd tipped them. We gained a couple of hundred yards with him gouging at Tony's hocks every time we hit the ground. He sulked and sat back. The rope tightened around the sore spot. He responded with a flying leap and landed on. Tony's rump behind the saddle and knocked the wind out of me. He rolled off backward and got up really on the fight. In time, I got everything straightened around and he quit hooking at my leg. We'd circle and mill toward home; the steer would take a few steps, then sulk a while, and then charge forward, hooking and slashing with his tipped horns. After a couple of miles he settled down and began getting the savvy about leading. By the time we got to the pasture I was leading him unsnubbed and he was following like a saddle horse.