The Lady in the Pyramid

The First Lady's Pyramid

After Traveling to Egypt, Governor George W. P. Hunt Built a Phoenix Monument to His Wife The father checks out the pyramid first, pushing his bike up the small hill in Phoenix's Papago Park. He reads the plaque. His young son follows. "This is the grave of the first governor of Arizona," he tells the boy. They both look at the rather unprepossessing structure with its sprinkling of cracked white tiles. They walk off, pushing their bikes. As they disappear down the hill, a gentle afterthought floats back. "His wife is buried there, too," he says. Ah, the wife Helen Duett Hunt she always did fade away in the limelight surrounding her husband, George. Even in the pyramid he built for her, George W.P. Hunt gets top billing. He led Arizona from Territorial days into the Depression years. He served not only as the first governor of the state, but as the second, third, sixth, seventh, eighth and tenth governor. He did his time in the Territorial Legislature and a stint as the United States minister to the kingdom of Siam. In any age, he would be considered a liberal. He strongly opposed capital punishment, believing, "It works as an example, true, but an example of blood and revenge and murder, and as it sows it reaps." He supported and put into effect

Duett [PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 34 AND 35] Duett's only child, Virginia, right, with her friend who traveled with the Hunt family in Siam. [LEFT] Helen Duett Hunt, called Duett, was acclaimed for her beauty as well as her ranching skills. [BELOW] George W.P. Hunt, pictured at age 24, was 44 when he and Duett married in 1904. [RIGHT] A rare photo of the Hunts Duett, Virginia and George taken in about 1920. George Duett, daughter Sirginia and George in Siam

prison reform, getting convicts out of stripes and into building roads. He was a friend of organized labor and environ-mentalism, and an early proponent of suffrage for women.

"HE CANNOT BE BOUGHT, HE CAN-NOT BE BLUFFED, HE CANNOT BE BUL-LIED," claimed Hunt's campaign brochure in 1926. A decade earlier, angry voters were signing recall petitions claiming he was simply incompetent. He survived.

The man definitely rose to lofty heights considering he arrived in the mining town of Globe in 1881, at 22 years old, with barely the clothes on his back and little education. But Hunt had a tendency to reach for the stars. Look at his choice of a lady.

Early photographs of Helen Duett Ellison, called Duett, show her to be the kind of beauty for whom a man might build a mon-ument. She had that soft generous mouth, those eyes touched with innocence.

She was one of the eight children of Jesse and Susan Ellison. A Texan who once rode the Chisholm Trail, Jesse Ellison came to Arizona in 1885 with his family and his cat-tle. Traveling first by rail to Bowie, he then trailed the herd up to the Tonto Basin. He wasn't moving a couple of hundred head. Heck, no, not a rancher from Texas. Ellison brought in thousands, as many as 3,500 head, the stories go. He would lose as many as half along the way.

"He was a hard man," says Lynna Deal, who is an Ellison descendant and great-grandniece of Duett.

"He was really hard on the girls," states Philip Smith, who heard the stories from his friend, the late Glenn Slim Ellison, grandson of Jesse. "Protective," Smith further clarifies the toughness of the Ellison patriarch.

Ellison had his two sons to carry his name, and his six daughters to carry the ranch he would build near Young, the massive "Q."

"It was the ladies who made the ranch," says Smith, and no one seems to disagree. "Good shots," wrote Slim Ellison of his aunts in his book Cowboys Under the Mogollon Rim. "Could work like men."

Ellison's motto was said to be, "Everybody works hard on this ranch."

"And they did work hard," wrote Robert Hiell, who delivered mail to the Q.

The women in the family more than carried their own weight.

"None of the men milked cows," says Deal. "That was women's work." However, nobody drew a gender specific line when it came to the backbreaking cattle-tending labor necessary to keep a ranch like the Q running smoothly. Ellison women did that, too.

When Jesse Ellison said that everybody worked on his place, he meant it. Even those who showed up at the Ellisons' for supper had to roll up their sleeves after the meal. Ellison could always come up with some wood to be chopped, some ranch ponies to be shoed.

He must have had the best-shod ponies in the Territory. The Q became a kind of rest stop for travelers. The ranch had a post office, a school taught by daughter Lena, and that groaning board of a supper table. According to ranch records, up to 4,000 free meals a year were served at the Q. Fifty pounds of flour lasted only about three days.

Of course something else drew travelers to the Qthose Ellison girls. In his memoirs, Hiell recalled how the mere existence of those young women had cowboys from one end of central Arizona to the other washing their necks and heading over to the Q for dinner, no matter what the old man might require.

Duett had to be a major draw with that lovely face matched by her ability as a rancher and her obvious love of the work. She sent letters to a family friend reporting on social events: "The girls at Payson are fixing for a Leap Year Ball," she wrote, but more of the lines are taken up with reports on the weather and the condition of her father's cattle.

"Looking very well," she assured the friend.

"She was as good a cowboy as all of the men," says great-grandniece Deal.

"She rode astride, wearing a divided skirt and riding boots," wrote a friend of Duett's about the early Q years. "She was adept with a 60-foot rope and she carried a rifle to protect her rights."

Then, somewhere along the line, she caught the eye of that rotund, balding glasses-wearing man who lived in Globe and ran the Old Dominion Commercial Company store. He also ran for public office, the first time in 1890 for city recorder. He lost, but that wouldn't happen often.

George Hunt traveled a great deal when looking for votes and may have stopped at the Q. But the portly Hunt did not ride horse-back. He would have had to walk partway to the ranch relatively inaccessible even today. However he met his future bride, thetrip would have been worth the effort. George W.P. Hunt fell in love with Duett Ellison.

"My dearest love," he wrote to her in 1903, one year before they married, ". there is not a day passes but what you are constantly in my mind."

He yearned for her love, he told her, and to call her his wife.

"Duett," he pleaded, "listen to my prayer." As to why she did, "You know that's a tremendous question," says Smith. "Might have talked her into it."

The process took some time. Hunt had certainly waited. He was 44 at the time of their marriage in 1904; Duett, 37. Some believe they may have courted for a decade, that the marriage may have been postponed at least once. Duett had responsibilities at the Q. In fact, within a month of her mar-riage, she rode back to the ranch, leaving Hunt to his work as she went about her own. "There were times it would even get her into trouble," says Deal of Duett's love of the Q.

"I shall not let you go back," wrote Hunt to the ranch-riding Duett. "I trust I will not be forced to use any stronger measures." A softer line followed: "You are my own sweet wife and life without you would not be tolerated for one moment."

"I really don't see him in any way being a loving husband," muses Deal.

Smith counters, "I think there was a deep love there."

Of course, no one ever really knows what goes on in a marriage. The years that passed in this one do not tell much of a tale of Duett and the governor. He ran the state.

She raised their one child, Virginia, and saw to the Phoenix home. In the Ellison tradition, the doors and the kitchen were open to any and all.

In 1915 Jesse Ellison sold the Q, telling his grandson, "I'm 71 and tired out." He and his wife, Susan, and the unmarried Lena moved to Phoenix and took up residence next door to Duett and the governor.

Susan Ellison, who had that same gentle beauty as her daughter, died in 1929 of pneumonia following influenza. The old rancher also failed, spending the next five years until his death bedridden. Governor Hunt did some traveling, saw those pyramids. Then, daughter Virginia gave birth to a baby boy.

Duett called Hunt and told him everything was all right with the delivery and the child. That was April 12, 1931. The good news turned bad. By April 17, Duett was seriously ill with appendicitis.

"Oh," Hunt wrote in his diary that day, "after 27 years of married life always so kind, considerate, faithful. It's a terrible blow."

Duett Ellison Hunt died on April 18, 1931. Her body was taken first to Jesse Ellison's home so, as Hunt wrote in a touching entry, that tough old man, now blind, could touch his daughter's face for the last time.

And then, her husband built her a pyramid.

The idea for a pyramid no doubt came from his 1930 visit to Egypt. Hunt recorded in his diary his trip to those "great monuments." The idea for a location matched his own aspirations for a resting place.

"I always wanted to be buried on a hill," he wrote following his wife's death. He found the location, a butte overlooking what is now the Phoenix Zoo. The site came with a problem. The United States government owned the land, and Hunt was warned it would take nothing short of an act of Congress to get the plot for Duett's pyramid. That's not something you tell an old campaigner like Hunt. By 1933, the state had the land, Duett had her pyramid and Hunt had a happy thought: "There is room for 7 more."

Jesse Ellison died in January 1934 at the age of 92. His remains and those of his wife, Susan, were interred in the pyramid.

Governor Hunt died in December 1934 at the age of 75, his death attributed to heart disease. He had also long suffered from diabetes. He went to rest on his hill.

Sister Lena died in 1953 and was buried in the pyramid. In 1985, the ashes of the Hunts' daughter, Virginia, and her husband, William Frund, were also brought to the small, white-tiled tomb. They always were, the Hunts and the Ellisons, hospitable folk.

Today, the locals and tourist information refer to the pyramid as "Hunt's Tomb," meaning always George W.P., the seven-time governor. But this place belonged first to Duett, that tough-as-any-cowboy, sweet-faced beauty who rode the Q, and caught the eye of that big fellow over in Globe.

"Yours, forever," he signed one of those letters with which he courted Jesse Ellison's lovely daughter.

"Your own Duett," she signed hers, as the bride who had heard his prayer. All