Verde River Days

a very encouraging thought since that whip is going 750 to 900 miles per hour, but Carl knows what he's doing, I tell myself. Even so, I close my eyes and cringe as he cracks the whip and the spaghetti disappears.

Having had enough of this adrenaline-charged entertainment, I follow the sounds of country music to watch the Mingus Mountain Cloggers, feet and ponytails bobbing in time to "Louisiana Saturday Night." When they call out for volunteers to learn the "chicken scratch," I'm up on stage, ready to flap my arms and scratch my feet. I may look foolish, but this feels a lot safer than messing with the Whippersnappers.

I spend $5 to enter a pink rubber duck in the Rotary Club benefit duck race. All 2,500 of these brightly colored toys float down the Verde, with the winner receiv-ing $1,000. My duck is a loser, but it's worth the $5 just to watch the Scouts try to scoop the ducks out of the river without getting dunked themselves.

As the day wears down, I round up my husband and head over to the nearby Blazin' M Ranch for a chuckwagon dinner and a Western variety show. Richard and I get a chance to brush up on our Old West skills when Jerry Compton, one of the Blazin' M's performers, instructs us in the mechanics of a single-action Colt .45. I take aim at a paper target and my first shot goes wild, but after two or three tries, I'm at least hitting the target. Richard steps up and puts his first shot directly into the bull's-eye, quickly puncturing my ego.

At the roping area, I climb on a plastic horse and swing my lasso at the plastic calf sliding past me on a rail. When my loop settles over the "calf's" head, I whoop and holler like I've roped the real thing. Richard turns in his gun, I surrender my rope and we head indoors for a great steak and some of the best country singing I've ever heard.

All in all, we've had a great time. From fishermen to cowboys, Verde River Days offers everyone a jam-packed fun day to welcome in the fall. AH Janet Webb Farnsworth of Snowflake enjoyed the Western flavor of this event. She also wrote the following story.

Queen Creek resident Bernadette Heath remembers the largest fish she ever caught a whopping 2-pound catfish. She was mighty glad her dad took it off the hook.

UNCOVERING family roots

Visiting her pioneer family's ranch, our author feels a sense of belonging and of returning to a place she's never been Text by JANET WEBB FARNSWORTH Photographs by BERNADETTE HEATH Sunlight brushed 9,453-foot Mount Wrightson in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson. As soft light spread over the Santa Cruz Valley, 30 miles north of Mexico, I realized why my great-great-grandparents, David and Aury Dowdle, settled in this valley more than 120 years ago-grass. Vast acres of it, enough to feed thousands of cattle. Tawny and golden in the rising sun, the grass reached above my knees, its drooping seed heads softly rustling in the breeze.My cousins and I were visiting the cattle ranch the Dowdles established in 1878. It felt almost unreal to walk in their footsteps, to see where they'd lived and watch the sun top the same mountains they'd watched. We felt a sense of belonging and of return to a place we'd never been.

You won't find the Dowdles in history books, but our family pioneer history tells the land's story. Eager to improve their lot in life, they leapfrogged across America from South Carolina to Tennessee,then on to Texas, California and Arizona. When 21-year-old David, driving cattle from his father's ranch near Paris, Texas, first passed through southern Arizona in 1845, the cluster of adobe buildings called Tucson belonged to Mexico. He noticed the grass, the Santa Cruz River and the beautiful Arizona mountains, but kept on, his cattle bound for markets in California.

By 1847, David returned to Texas and married Aury Nidever, a pretty 18-year-old. Aury's life had been hard. Indians had scalped her father, a mountain man, in Colorado when she was 3 years old, so the family moved to Texas to live near an uncle. When Aury was 16, a handwritten marriage license from the Republic of Texas recorded her union with Henry Twell. She had a daughter, but that is all we know about her first marriage. By the time she married David, Texas was part of the United States.

Several times between 1852 and 1878, the Dowdles drove cattle to California, where a cow purchased in Texas for $5 to $15 brought $60 to $150 in the goldfields. Aury drove a wagon with an eightspan of oxen, bringing the children along. Records show one child born in California, the next in Texas. They then ranched near Visalia, California, and David tried gold mining, but he learned he could make more money selling beef to hungry miners. Arizona changed with each trip. The 1854 Gadsden Purchase