Arizona Highways, August 1956

              WITH A CAMERA
From tim e to time in the past, we have offered for our r eaders' pleasure,
and especially for t h e edification of those of our readers acutely interested
in p hotography , essays on the su b ject b y so m e o f our outs t anding contri b­utors.
Chuck A b b ott, Esther Henderson , H ubert A . Lowman and Jo sef
M ue nch have a ppeared herein w ith v alu able an d informative d iss e rtations on
t he art of t a ki ng p ictures ( and an art it is , too, the w onder fu l and sa t isfying
art of translating in to and capturin g on film t he im p e rish ab le beauty of t he
wor ld abou t us) .
The beginner has found t hese photographic ess ays invaluable and , w e
feel, even experi e nced pract itioners have fou nd t hem worth w hile . T he p ho ­tographers
w e h ave featured in the past , to say the leas t , k now th eir cameras
tho ro ughly and are adept in their use . vVitness t heir consisten tly fi ne c on­trib
utions to t hese pages year after y e ar.
Our youn g man w ith a cam era this mont h is one of our fa vor ite pho­tographers
a nd on e w h ose nam e often appears h erein- Ray Manley. A ll o f
our photographs in color this issue are his and he adds further light on his
p rnfessio n wit h an inte r esting article enti tled A riz ona ls M y S tudio . Some
of h is first pub lished phot ographs appeared in AR IZONA H 1c 1-1 w AYS b efore
vVorld War II. H e has b een t hroug hout the years a consist e ntl_v de penda ble
cont ributor and so me of the fine st st ud ies we have been priv ileg ed to pre­sent
h ave b een the resu lt of his skill with t h e c amera . A s he p oints out, it is
d iffi c ult to make a living and support a fa mily b y scenic p h o t ography alone.
That he does b y commerc ial photogra p h y. H e is still abl e , ho wever, to get
out enough to accep t the cha llen ge that Ariz ona o ff e rs t o a ll p hotogr aphers.
A gain, as he points ou t, the subj ect d oesn' t change. T h e interpretation is
w ha t coun ts .
We hope y o u enjoy R ay Manley's co ntributions t o our pages this
m o nth. In s peaki ng of him , we mig ht a dd p arenthetically for t h e bene fit of
anyo n e interested in the services of a photographer: have c amera, will travel.
FRO NT COV E R
"MOONEY FALLS TN SUP A ILA N D " BY R AY iVlANLEY. T h is is on e o f few pla ces
whe r e one can sti ll get a wa y fro m the rush of this mo dern world an d view one of our
most spect acular scen ic w ond e r s, S upai, t he home of the H avasu Indians, deep in t h e
G ran d Cany on. O f the t h r ee lar ges t falls, this one offers more pi cture possibil ities. Sum ­m
er's s un illu m in ates N avajo a nd M ooney fa ll s fro m about one o'clock to three o'clo ck,
t he fa lls b eing deep in th e cany o n gorge, shadowed ea rly i n the day. T he model is o ne
o f Havasu's young In dians, w h o serve as guides a nd p ackers to t he I ndian commu nity .
T he nine mile trail from Hill top is a n easy horse b ack t r a il tak in g about 2 ½ hours down
a nd s l ightly longer ridi ng out. The day a fter t h is picture was made a summe r clo udbu rst
fill ed Catara c t C reek, w all t o w all, changing the c r yst a l c lear w at er to a surging mud
co lored torrent. A fe w days later a ll was back to normal, the fl ood havin g left i ts m ark
on one of th e fa lls, cha n gin g th e scene a bit b ut not its everlasting bea uty . C amera: 5x7
D eardorff; Ektachrome; Lens : 8 ½ " Commercial Ektar; Shutter : f : 12 at 1/ 2 5th se c.
OPPOS IT E P AGE
" STONE A V E NUE, T U CSON" BY RAY iVIANLE Y. There is a t im e in t he e,·e nin g
w he n t he sun h as set an d its afterg low gives eve n the c ommonplace a new feeling o-f
b eauty. Tho u gh T ucson's manmade monuments are not compara b le in size w it h those of
lar ger c ities, they are t h e landmarks that identif y t he cit y as the O l d Pu e blo. H ere, too,
busy people h ead for home at sundown, advertising lig h ts come o n a nd offi ce lights go
o ut. To portray this scene it was necessary to obs en·e th e scene se veral even in gs . .It
w as discovered tha t t here is a precise p eriod of only se 1·eral minutes when a lo ng expos ure
th at w ill s how car l igh t streaks, t he sky a nd gen eral illu min at ion of signs a nd buildings
w ill bala nce. Ca m e ra : 5x 7 Dear d o r ff; E k tachrome; Lens: 12" Commercial Ektar; Shutte r :
f: 22 at 15 seconds ; D ecember, 1955; 5 :45 P.M ., 20 minutes after sundow n.
PA GE ONE • ARI ZONA H IG HWA YS • AU GUST 1956
V OL. X X X II N o . 8 AUG U ST 19 56
R AYM OND CARL SON, Editor
G EORGE M . A VEY, Art E d itor
LEGEND
" 1\ilooN EY F ALLS IN
SuPAI LA ND" F RONT C ovER
STU) Y OF A SCEN IC JE WEL DEEP IN
THE HEA RT OF A CANYON PARADISE.
Sou, C ONS ERVA TI ON IN AR IZON A 4
f ARMEl (S AND RANCHERS CO MBI NE TO
IMP RO VE THE LAND , IN CREASE YIELD.
ST. D AV ID
P ORTRAIT OF A FR IENDLY COMM UNITY
ON THE BANKS OF THE S AN P EDRO.
AR IZON A Is MY STUDIO
R AY MANLEY DISCOURSES AT LE NGTH ON
EXACTI NG ART OF THE PHO TOGRAPHER .
IO
ARI ZONA'S HAUNTED W ILDERN ESS 32
A GLI MPSE OF AN ISOLA TED FO REST
AREA FEW TRAVELERS EVER VISIT.
BooKs , P 1£:0N N u-rs AND SHADO WS 36
A NOTED SCHOLAR DISCUSSES BOOKS
HE FE ELS ARE OUTSTAND ING IN FIELD .
ERNEST vV . McFA RLAND
G ov ernor o f A riz ona
A R IZO N A HIGHWAY COMMISSION
Frank E . Moore, C hair man . D ouglas
G rover J . D uff , V ic e C hairman • • T ucson
W m . P . C oppl e , Me mber . . . Yuma
J ames R . Heron, Me m ber . • • . G lo be
F r ank L. C hr istensen, Mem ber . . . F lagstaff
W m . E. W illey , State Hwy. Engineer Phoenix
Justin Herm an, Secr etary P h oe ni x
R. G. Langmade, Special C ounsel . . P h oenix
A RIZONA H IGHWA YS is p ubli s hed mon th ly by t h e
A rizo na H ig hway D e partment a fe w miles north
o f t he confluence of t he G ila and Salt in A ri­zona.
A ddress : ARI ZONA HIGHWAY S, P hoenix,
Arizona. $3.50 p er year in U .S. and possessions;
$4 .50 e lsewhere; 35 cen ts each. Enter ed as sec­ond-
class matter N ov. 5, 1941 at P o st O ffi ce in
P hoenix, under Act of March 3, 1879 . C opy­righ
ted, 19 56, by Arizona H ighw a y Departm ent.
Allow five weeks for c ha nge of addresses. Be
sure to send in th e old as well as new ad dress.
"Chino Valley" RAY MANLEY PAGE THREE •
IN THE SUN
AUGUST CALENDAR IN THE SUN: 11-SMOKI
CEREMONIALS, PRESCOTT. The Smoki Tribe of
Prescott stage these authentic Indian dances. This
group is composed of business and professional peo­ple
of Prescott. Visitors are assured pleasant summer
weather for this colorful annual event.
13-15-71st ANNUAL RODEO, PAYSON. This fa­mous
cattle town in Gila County stages one of the
most authentic western cow shows in the country
each year. Payson, in the cool forest below the Rim,
is an interesting western town.
LAST TEN PAYS-HOPI SNAi{E DANCES.
HOPI VILLAGES. The Hopi Indians, on their high
mesas, make their annual prayer for rain in their
primitive and impressive Snake Dances generally dur­ing
the last ten days in August. Dances this year will
be held at Walpi and Mishongnovi. Readers interested
in the exact dates of these dances can receive the infor ­mation
by writing direct to ARIZONA HIGHWAYS,
Phoenix, Arizona, shortly after August , , when tribal
. leaders announce exact dates. Additional information
is available at the Chamber of Commerce in Winslow.
• NORTHERN ARIZONA MUSEUM. FLAG­STAFF.
Interesting Indian exhibits stages throughout
summer months.
NOTES IN THE SUN: The year 1955 was a record
breaker as far as Arizona travel was concerned. The
travel figures for the year is described in this fashion
in Arizona Progress, monthly publication of the Val­ley
National Bank:
"In spite of television, aviation and radar patrol cars,
American motorists continue to cover a lot of gTotmd
in the family automobile. A total of 2,347,554 passen­ger
cars entered Arizona last year. Carrying an aver­age
of three persons per vehicle, it means that about
seven million people arrived in this manner alone.
Another three million or so came in on trucks or
busses last year and two or three million entered or
crossed Arizona via the airlines and railroads. This
makes a grand total of more than twelve million
tra velers visiting Arizona in one year."
Incidentally, a total of 3,121,951 motor vehicles en­tered
Arizona during 1955, an increase of 320,367 ve­hicles
over 1954. This year travel is exceeding last
year's figures. The first three months of the year
totaled an all-time high for similar periods at Grand
Canyon.
COLOR CLASSICS FROM
ARTZONA HIGHWAYS
THIS ISSUE
35 111111. slides in 2" mounts, 1 to Is slides, 40¢ eacb;
16 to 49 slides, 35¢ eacb; 50 or more, 3 for $1.00.
HA-6 Mooney Falls in Supailand, Cover , ; TC-6
Stone Avenue, Tucson, Cover 2; iVIN-1 Arizona
Copper: Converter Aisle, Ajo Phelps Dodge, Cov­er
3; HA-7 Cataract Creek, Supailand, Cover 4;
TA-15 Fall Sentinel- near Show Low, p. 17; SH-5
The Grazing Sheep, p. 18; TA-16 Autumn Pat­terns,
North Rim, Grand Canyon, p. 18; IH-9 The
Smiling Hopis, p. 19; CR-8 Cattle Drive: White
Ri ver, Apache Reservation, center spread ; DS-29
Desert and Mountains: Santa Catalinas, p. 22; SX-
14 Cemetery at San Xavier Mission, p. 22; GC-43
Autumn Color- Grand Canyon, p. 23; S-16 Wind­mill
at Sunset: Cottonwood, Arizona, p. 24.
ARIZONA HIGHWAYS • AUGUST 1956
Soil conservation practices in Arizona restore range lands.
BY D. A. DOBKINS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLEN C. REED .
Arizona, fifth largest State in the nation, is a land of
extremes-rugged mountains, cactus deserts, broad mesas
and deep canyons, far reaches of cattle and sheep ranges,
irrigated va lleys and dry farms.
To many visitors it is a country of blue skies, clean,
dry air, intense sunshine, clear mountain streams and
lakes, fishing and hunting. To others it is the land of
Cochise, "Doc" Holliday, Indian hogans, cowboys, Grand
Canyon, Painted Desert, and Oak Creek Canyon.
To the consumers of agricultural products, it is a
state of plentiful production in a wide variety of their
foods and fibers-citrus, cottons, cantaloupes, and many
kinds of fine vegetables from the tropic-like irrigated val-leys
of southern Arizona; beef and wool from its grass­lands,
and lumber from its high mountains and plateaus.
To its 10,400 farmers and ranchers, Arizona is all of
these things and more ... a new frontier in conservation
farming and ranching. They are daily confronted with a
multitude of complex and sometimes difficult soil, water,
plant, and animal problems.
It seems paradoxical that the state produces large
amounts of foods, fats, and fibers, has the highest average
cash income per farm in the Nation, and at the same time
has numerous widespread land, water, and plant problems
of which the limited supply of irrigation water is prob­ably
the most important. Pueblo Indians recognized the
PAGE FOUR • AR IZONA HIGI-IWAYS • AUGUST 1956
necessity of irrigation and used it quite generally long
before the white man arrived.
The watersheds on high mountains in the north pro­duce
most of the gravity flow water for irrigation. Water
y ields have been reduced by invasion of brush and juni­per
in many areas which originally was in grass. High
water-using trees and brush along channels also use an
estimated 1,280,000 acre-feet of water annually. Venture­some
farmers drilled wells to expand their water supply.
Continued drilling resulted in more than twice as much
land irrigated from wells as from streams and reservoirs.
In recent years many farmers have seen the watertable
drop lower and lower in the same pump areas, thus add­ing
to their costs of pumping. "How much deeper can we
pump and still stay in business?" Arizona farmers ask.
Flash floods coming out of the mountain streams, can­y
ons, and gulches cause water problems. These local
floods usually come during the July and August rainy
season often damaging canals and other parts of irrigation
systems thus interrupting irrigation schedules. Floods
spread rock, sand, and other debris over farmlands valued
at $400 to $ JOoo per acre. Rushing water causes gullying
and scouring of these high-producing lands and damage
crops.
Another problem of considerable magnitude is the
loss of water in transit from reservoirs, streams, and wells
and the excessive depths to which irrigation water some­times
penetrates into the soil. Irrigation canals and ditches
crossing sandy or gravelly soils may lose as much as 40
percent of the flow by seepage. In addition, some farmers
lose up to one-third of their irrigation water on rough,
steep, or uneven fields by penetration of the water below
the root zone of the crop and by runoff of "tail water"
at the lower end of fields.
Most irrigated land, or about 1,300,000 acres, has soils
of desert origin, high in mineral content but inherently
low in organic matter. Here farmers constantly face the
job of adding organic matter to soil to maintain good
tilth, building it for taking and storing irrigation water
for crop use, and establishing good habitat for soil bac­teria
and other life essential to crop production. Some
soils puddle or crust when improperly farmed. Each con­dition
is detrimental to crop production.
Heavy soils are compacted by weight of farm
machinery. Others are sealed by downward passage of
irrigation water. Twenty -five percent of the cultivated
lands are alkali or saline. This problem is severe on 3%,
moderate on 1 3%, and slight on 9%. On steeper slopes,
of which there is only a small percent, rapid flow of irri­gation
water causes erosion. Decrease in soil fertility by
leaching, caused by over-irrigation, is common on uneven
and rougher lands.
There are about 60,000 acres of dry cropland, all of
it being located in higher elevations of central and north­ern
Arizona. These soils are low in organic matter.
Eighty-five percent have received slight to moderate
damage by gully and sheet erosion and declining fertility.
Fifteen percent has been severely eroded. Some of this
land is too shallow or too steep to be used permanently
for crops and eventually will be used for grass or timber
production.
On range lands within the last 70 to So years, compo-
Heavy and costly equipment is used for land leveling.
Proper preparation of soil means higher yields per acre.
s1t1on of vegetation has changed significantly. In many
instances less palatable and less useable grasses, weeds,
brush, and shrubs have replaced original high quality
forage. There has been a severe encroachment of brush
on about 500,000 acres of private and state land tha.t was
once high beef and wool producing grassland. Estimates
of the condition of private and state-owned grasslands
are that one percent is excellent, 16 percent good, 43 per­cent
fair, and 3 8 percent poor.
The result of these changes in vegetation is an
increase in gully and sheet erosion and considerable
decrease in pounds of beef and wool produced.
Farmers and ranchers, many of them pioneers or
sons of pioneers, have long recognized their land, water,
and native plant problems. In search for a solution it be­came
evident that they needed a local organization that
would allow them to work together to plan and carry
out their conservation programs. Various business inter­ests
joined with them and in March, 1941, the state legis­lature
passed an enabling act providing for the organiza­tion
of soil conservation districts in cropland areas.
Under this law, a soil conservation district (SCD) is
an organizatioi1 of farmers within definite established
boundaries. It constitutes a legal subdivision of the state
similar to incorporated towns. These districts are initiated
by petition of landowners and become established by law
if 65 percent of the votes cast by landowners within the
proposed area are favorable.
District affairs are conducted by three elected super­visors
who are empowered to assist farmers and irriga­tion
and drainage companies in making and applying
conservation plans. The program is entirely voluntary.
Districts do not have powers of assessment or power to
force any landowner to carry out a conservation program.
Soon after passage of this legislation, farmers began
organizing soil conservation districts so that they could
get their conservation programs underway. On December
15, 1941, Camp Verde SCD and Bridgeport SCD, both
near Cottonwood, were voted into existence as the first
two soil conservation districts in the state. On the next
day, farmers northeast of Flagstaff voted to organize
San Francisco Peaks SCD third in Arizona. On the fol­lowing
day, December 17, 1941, similar action was taken
to organize Navajo County and Apache County SCDs.
Within five years, 38 SCDs had been organized. This way
of planning and carrying out their local conservation pro­grams
proved so popular that Arizona farmers now have
46 soil conservation districts containing 8 5 percent of
Arizona's farms and ranches.
The soil conservation division of the Arizona State
Land Department has been a major factor in SCD organi­zation
and operation. Wayne Kessler, head of the division
under the direction of Roger Ernst, state land commis­sioner,
has rendered valuable assistance to farmers by
supplying information about how SCDs can be organized
and managed under Arizona laws.
Farmers and ranchers provide the leadership by elec­tion
of district supervisors who work without pay in the
conduct of their district's business. They make district
programs and work plans, arrange for assistance from
federal and local agencies, and help farmers and groups
of farmers plan and carry out conservation programs on
farms and develop irrigation and drainage systems.
Many district supervisors have traveled to neighbor­ing
soil conservation districts to advise in organization
and management problems. Frank Gyberg of Cornville,
PAGE SIX • ARIZONA HIGHvVAYS • AUGUST 1956
H1 ater conservation:
Lining irrigation ditches with concrete
Moroni Larsen of Solomon, David Lee of Safford, Wm.
R. Bourdon of Snowflake, Orval Johnson of Short Creek,
C. R. McGee of Casa Grande, and Frank McElhaney of
Wellton are among these conservation leaders.
Each soil conservation district obtains technical assist­ance
from the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) of the
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) which
supplies assistance to help prepare farm, ranch, irrigation,
and drainage system plans and lay out the practices on
the land.
Under the local farmer leadership, Arizona SCDs
have done an amazing job in the 14 years since the first
district was organized. Soil, water, and plant conservation
is big business in a state where the first wagon road was
cleared to the west coast only 1 10 years ago.
Soil conservation district cooperators have expended
more than 37 million dollars in putting conservation on
their croplands; are currently spending at the rate of
$5,200,000 per year. To complete the program on crop­land
in accordance with present day thinking, they will
spend, based on present costs, an additional $100,000,000.
Federal cost sharing through Agricultu..r al Conservation
Program and loans by Farmers Home Administration for
conservation work have provided significant help to farm­ers
in the application of conservation practices.
Arizona SCDs have cooperative agreements with
4,640 farmers; have assisted 3,200 of them in the prepara­tion
of basic conservation farm plans. These plans are
tailor-made for each farm, designed to fit needs of land
and farmer.
Prior to the making of farm plans, soil surveys are
made to obtain basic information essential to determining
land use and conservation treatments needed. These sur­veys
have been made on 1,092,000 Arizona acres.
SCD cooperators have applied nearly 30 percent of
the needed conservation practices on their croplands. Fol­lowing
is a list of the major conservation practices estab-lished
to date: of total
Conservation crop rotations
Contour farming ( dry crop-land)
Crop residue utilization
Tree planting
Improved application of irri­gation
water on fields
Irrigation reservoirs on farms
Land leveling ( for better
irrigation)
Terracing ( on dry cropland)
Irrigation canals and ditches
lines
Irrigation ditch and canal
structures (flumes, siphons,
needed
550,000 acres 30%
11,500 acres
807 ,ooo acres
5 10 acres
400,300 acres 30%
735 resvrs. 55%
429,000 acres
285 miles
2,400 miles
drops, turnouts) 220,000 struc. 30%
In addition, SCD cooperators have applied other con-servation
practices, including cover cropping, rough till­age,
deep tillage, stubble mulching, leaching of alkali and
Windbreaks:
For the protection of irrigated fields
salts below the root zone of crops, irrigation to ,vet the
ground to depth of expected root growth before plant­ing,
and fish pond improvement. They have developed
wi ldlife areas, farm p onds, waterways, improved and
stabi li zed stream channels, construct ed or improved irri­gatio
n ditches, and installed irrigation pipelines.
One of the m ost sp ectacula r co nservatio n develop­ments
since 1950 is the extent to w hich irrigation ditches
have been lin ed w ith concrete. This is due lar gely to the
development of a s lip form mac hin e that lays concrete
w hil e moving along th e ditch. It lines a mil e of ditch in
four hours at a cost much less than any other method yet
devised. Length of Arizona farm ditches lin ed to date,
m ost of it w ith the slip form m achine, is equal to the
distance from Los Angeles to New York .
A no ther vital d eve lopment is the return of stubble
and stalks to the soi l. Fifteen years ago clouds of sm oke
covered agricu ltural areas from burning stubb le fields.
Now farmers protect t heir harvested fields from burning
and work the stubb le and stalks into their soil.
Most con structi on works, chiefly land le ve ling and
ditch linin g, is done by contractors; some by farmers us­ing
their own equipme nt. G il a Va lley SCD owns and
operates equipment va lu ed at more than $200,000.
Why are Arizo na farmer cooperators of soil con­servation
d istricts planning a nd applyi ng conservation
programs so rapidly on t heir farms? Frank Gyberg, presi­dent
of the State Associatio n of Soi l Con servation Dis­tricts,
says: "The so il con servatio n district movement is
the bes t program this or an y other nati on has devised to
ac hi eve conservatio n. Tt works at t he grass roots leve l.
D istricts a re freedom of action in its purest sense. You
e lect your own superv isors and a di strict can be disso lved
just as readi ly as it was organized. A ll we ask of the
fed era l government is the scientific aid and knowl e dge of
so il s men, e ngi neers, and other sp ecia lis ts. The so il con­se
rvation district is the America n way of getting the
nation's No. 1 job done. We must and shall get it done
because soi l, water, and pl ant conservation is basic to
everything on earth."
Adolph Mongini, dairy man in the V e rde-Oak Creek
SCD poin ts up hi s experie nce like t hi s: "By adopting a
sou nd soi l and water conservation program, I honestl y
be li eve we have saved $3,000 a year in feed . For t h e past
1 2 years that m ea ns a saving to us of $36,000. W ithout
t he h e lp of Soi l Conserva t ion Service technicians working
with m e on my co nservation prob lems, we would not
know w hat the answers are today."
"Due to technica l aid I have received from my dis­trict,"
Robert Cockrill, Pi nal County cooperator in Seven­E
ight SCD, dec la res, "I h a ve much better use of irriga­tion
water. I am able to irrigate more land economicall y
after receiving the h e lp of SCS tec hnicians."
"After we releveled t h e la nd a nd put in n ew co ncrete
headgate s, " Cla ude Neal of the Big Sandy SCD says, "the
same la nd could b e irrigated in less t han one- ha lf the t ime
and we got a more eve n penetration of irrigation water.
This gives us increased y ields at less cost."
Dr. Lavell S. Hoopes of T hatch er has bee n a coop era­tor
w ith G il a Va ll ey SCD about ten years. His program
ha s been more a lo ng soi l m a nage ment lines than mechan ­ica
l practices. Land leve ling and ditch linin g are planned
for t he futur e so he ca n handle irri g ation water more
efficiently. " I have concentrated first o n building up m y
so il t ilth and ferti lity by rotating irrigated pastures with
my cotton," Dr. Hoopes comments, "and I feel that this
has been ver y profitab le. Because my soil w ill take water
more rapidly and hold a lo t of it for use by the plants, I
d o n' t ha ve to irrigate as often as many fa rmers do and my
y ields are high. This y ear my cotton w as irrigated only
twice. If I had n ' t built up soil structure and organic matter
content, I would have h a d to irrigate five or six times and
fertilize hea vily to produce as good a crop. It looks like
abou t t wo and a half ba les per acre."
These statements are typical of Arizon a farmers.
They like to plan a nd conduct their co nservation pro­grams.
T hey know that their programs give them sus­tained
and efficient use of land and water and that con­servation
pays.
Originall y o nly cultivated croplands could be in­cluded
in Arizona SCDs. Many Arizona ranch ers for years
wanted the law amended so that ra nge a nd timber land
a lso would be eligible for inclusion in their districts. They
saw t hat the program was highly successful on Arizona
cropland as well as on the grasslands of adjoining states.
U nder an amendment obtained 'in 195 4, r anchers may
voluntarily add their la nd to existing soil conserva tion
di stricts or organize new districts. As in the case with
farmers, their participation in their district program is
entirely voluntary., They lose none of t h eir freedom to
operate their lands and gain by having the assistance of
t heir local district in p lanning and carry ing out their own
programs on t heir ranches.
A rizon a ranchers h ave been quick to take advantage
of this opp ortunity, over r 6,000,000 acres of grassland
and timber land ha ving a lready been ad ded to existing
SCDs. The USDA Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management, both in the
U .S. Departme nt of the Interior, and the Ariz on a State
Land Department, have joined with lo cal ranchers who
have grazin g permits on federal and state lands and peti­tioned
sta te and federal lands into distr icts at the same time
that ranchers added their privately owned lands. The San
Carlos Apache Indians added their reservation lands to
Gila Va ll ey SCD in 1955 . Administrators of these public
land management agencies, SCD superviso rs, and r anch­ers
are developing conservation plans for entire ranching
units including publi c and private lands. District super­visors
are leaders in getting ranchers and public land
management agencies together in making of these plans.
This coordination on t h e ground, where the problems
are, resu lts in a m ore practical and workable conservation
program on the public and private property.
SCD grassland programs are d esign ed to improve
soi l, moisture, and plant resources of range and watershed
lands and to promote further development and economic
use of increasing amounts of high quality forage for pro­duction
of beef and woo l. More specificall y, the SCD
grasslands conservation program s provide for:
Uniform and proper u se of forage by obtaining
satisfactory distribution of range stock and provid­ing
periodic rest periods for forage p lants by a
properly applied system of rotation and deferred
grazing . This permits better forage plan ts to increase
and replace less desirable growth.
Control or eradication of low value weeds a nd
brush; artificia l seeding of native or introduced grass­es
w here prac ti cal; construction of fences for estab­lishm
e nt of rotation and deferred grazing systems ;
and di stribution of salt on ranges to avoid heavy
PAG E EIGHT • A RIZONA HIGHWAYS • AUGUST 1956
con centration of li vestock and too heavy grazi ng o f
certain areas.
With assistance o f grassland conservationists, r a nch­ers
have prepared and are beginning to carry out ranch
cons ervation p lans in Willcox, Santa Cruz, Pima C ounty,
Winkelman, an d S a n Francisco Peaks SCD s.
T h e grassla nd program of Arizona districts will pro­duce
more fora ge an d more pounds of beef and w ool at
a lowe r cost per p o u nd, reduce soil _ losses on range land
t o a p ractical mini mum, and reduce floo d d amages to r ich
fa r m lands, towns, and cities i n the valleys . Ano ther bene­fit
of considerable value to va ll e y people w ill be an in ­creas
e in usable i rrigat ion water due to the fact that hi gh
produ c in g range forage uses les s water than undesirab le
brush and shrubs "·hich r anchers propo se to replace wit h
g rass.
T he conser va tion program ca rried o ut by farmers on
A rizona croplands is a significant factor in record- break ­ing
average y ie lds of severa l important crops. Arizona
leads all states in yield per acre of c o tton, barley, and
g ra in sorghum . L ast y ear, according to the USDA A gri­cultura
l Marketing Se r vice, Arizona farmers had an a ver­age
y ield of 1 ,0 .3 9 pounds of lint c o tto n per acre. T he
n atio n a l average was 3 7 5 pounds. T he Arizo na yie ld per
acre w ill make 1250 men's shirts. T he national ave ra ge
yield w ill make only 450 s hirts. T he y also h ad a n average
of 5 2 bus hels of barle y per acre as c omp ared wit h t he
n ational ave rage of 2 8 . 5 bus hel s and 45 bus hels of grain
sorghum per acre as c omp ared w ith an average of 19
bushe ls in the n ation.
M an y o ther crops, su c h as citrus fruits, alfa lfa, me l­ons,
and vegetables are high p roducers. T h ese big yie lds
per acre are due to a combination of facto rs, including
t he conservation p rograms o f farmers th roug hout t he
state. C ontinued increases in y ie lds will c ome as farme r s
p rogress wit h thei r conservation work which will be
near ing completion within t w enty y ears if they apply it
at t he current rate.
More than 400 y ears ago C oronado and o ther con­q
uis tadores fa iled in their se arch for gold in Arizona. Its
fa rm ers and ranc hers have made a disc ove ry t ha t is much
m ore valuab le. By team w ork t hey have learned how to
cooperate w ith nature in use and t reatment o f their lands.
E ven t hough there remains m uc h to be done to get more
irrigation w ater, they are well on their way in the estab ­li
shment of a more permanent high er produ cing agri­culture
t hat will provide fo o d and c lo thing fo r an ev e r
expan ding population i n this p rosperous state . Conserva­ti
on farmers and r anchers are d oing their pa rt in the
development of A rizona 's resources- and doing it well.
R unofj' irrigation '"uJctte r zs sav ed for reuse.
U. S. 80 is the main street of St. David.
ON THE SAN PEDRO
BY JACK CARY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WESTERN WAYS
Lt. Philemon C. J\lerrill, as a member of the Mormon
battalion during the Mexican war, wearily helped blaze a
wagon trail through the Southwest in I 846.
Little did he dream that he would return to the "Land
of the Fighting Bulls." But 29 years later he received a
"call" to return to the San Pedro River valley of Southern
Arizona. It was as leader of seven Mormon families from
Salt Lake City, to establish a new agricultural community
in 1877.
One thing Lt. Merrill remembered very well about
the area. It was here that the Mormon battalion fired its
only shots during the long trek from Council Bluffs, Iowa
to San Pedro, California.
The shots were fired in self-defense-against hun­dreds
of charging wild bulls. They were probably long­horns.
The Mormons were victors in the battle that lasted
from early morning and continued until noon. Reports of
casualties on both sides vary.
Sgt. Daniel T yler, a member of the battalion and
author of its history, tells the story of their only engage­ment
on the long march.
"The animals, congregated on the line of our route,
on hearing the rumblings of our approaching wagons,
were startled, and some ran off in afright. Others, how­ever,
to gratify their curiosity, perhaps, marched toward
us ... Their terribly beautiful forms and majestic appear­ance
were quite impressive . . .
"The roar of musketry was heard from one end of
the line to the other. One or two pack-mules were killed.
The endgates of one or two wagons were stove in, and
the sick, who were riding in them, were of course, fright­ened.
Some of the men climbed upon the wheels of the
wagons and poured a deadly fire into the enemy's ranks
Some of them threw themselves down and allowed the
beasts to run over them; others fired and dodged behind
mesquite brush to re-load their guns, while the beasts kept
them dodging to keep out of the way. Others, still,
climbed up in small trees."
Sgt. Taylor says a dozen or more men were
PA GE TEN • ARI ZO N A HTGH"WAYS • AUGUST 1956
wounded, some seriously; estimates of the number of the
enemy vanquished varies from 60 to 89 killed outright
before they suddenly retreated and were seen no more.
There are those who say nothing exciting has hap­pened
in the area that became St. David since this battle
with the wild bulls. And its staunchest supporters like it
for its peaceful quiet, and are mighty proud to report
that while it is an agricultural community, its chief prod­uct
is children.
St. David is an unincorporated town with a popula­tion,
including nearby Apache Camp, of between 800
and 900 people. Roughly half of them belong to the Lat­ter
Day Saints church, the only church in the vicinity.
There are few businesses in the town, and no shopping
district. There are no tourist accommodations, and per­haps
never will be. A lot of cross-country travel goes
through St. David, since it is on U.S. Highway 80, "The
Broadway of America," just before this highway joins
Highway 86, about 50 miles slightly southeast of Tucson.
But there's no reason for travelers to stop in St. David­although
it's a delightful place to spend the winter, if
you can find a house. Every house is occupied, however,
with the few vacancies being gobbled up by Ft. Huachuca
personnel.
The community is essentially one of homes, and agri­culture,
and its founders planned it that way. John K.
McRae, at 8 5, still lives in St. David with four genera­tions
of his descendants. He was one of the original com­pany
that settled the town in I 877. The group from Salt
Lake City split up in Arizona, with many of them set­tling
in the Salt River Valley. Seven families moved on to
the San Pedro River, between Benson and Tombstone.
Their first project was to construct an L-shaped fort
for protection against Indians-and against possible mob
violence by other settlers who were opposed to the Mor­mon
religion. Each family had a room in the fort, and
food and equipment were on a communal basis.
The San Pedro Valley of those early days was a
vastly different place from what it is today. Old-timers
remember the San Pedro as a swift-flowing, narrow
stream, well-stocked with salmon trout. There was plenty
of deer, antelope and other wild game. Tall grass grew
in swampy areas near the river-tall enough to be baled
for hay.
The swampy area, where the first town was started
three miles southwest of its present location, was also a
first-rate mosquito breeding place.
In I 884 there was an outbreak of malaria, and nearly
everyone was stricken. The settlers became so discouraged
they wanted to pack up and head for Salt Lake City.
When the home church heard of the epidemic they dis­patched
Elder Snow to St. David, to lend the settlers
encouragement.
Elder Snow prophesied the dampness and illness
would disappear, and good health would return to the
community. He urged the settlers not to give up.
Elder Snow's prophesy came true, in dramatic fash­ion.
On May 3, 1887, an earthquake changed the face of
the earth near St. David. Many houses and buildings were
destroyed-and St. David was no longer a swamp area.
New sources of water opened up; the settlers dug artesian
wells, the first ever developed in Arizona. John McRae
and his brother dug the first well. Artesian ponds, sur­rounded
by tall trees, produce a surprising appearance
Latter Day Saints Church
Old schoolhouse built in 1902
Hay barvest near St. David
Artesian wells supply water fo r fa rms around St. D avid.
t o the traveler as he comes upon t h em suddenly, after
crossing m il es of rugged desert country. St. David is a
real oasis .
The earthquake not o nly r id St. Davi d of the mos­qui
tos and provided it with artesian water. It changed
landm arks in m u ch o f A rizona, and is credited wit h
being t he reason for so many "lost mines," including t he
L ost Dutchman in the Superstition Mountains near
Phoenix .
T he li ttle community was one of the earliest estab­lished
towns in the Territory of Arizona. It was named
for a Mormon apostle, David W . Patton. He was kill ed
by a mob in Missouri d uring intense opposi tion to the
new religion.
Religion and agriculture have been the key notes of
its res idents. A peaceful people, t he Mormons had li ttle
trouble with t h e Apaches, even during t he days when
Geron imo terrorized the area. Residents of St. David
feare d the wild ones of boomtown Tombstone more than
they did the Indians.
But they capitalized on t he famed silver strikes in
their neigh boring "Town Too Tough To Die," alth ough
they cared little about prospecting . They hauled supp li es
for the miners, worked in the lumber mill s. They tim­b
e r ed in the Huachaca 1Vlountains, and they u sed to say
the whole forest from the Huachucas went underground,
to kee p the si lver mines from caving in at Tombstone.
Ed Schieffeli n, founder of Tombstone, was a regular
visitor i n the little Mormon communit y. He was always
welcome for a meal and a night's lodging, and swore by
"those h ome cooked vittles" served by the women of the
town.
Men of the community have worked for wages, as
well as worked t he land, a lmost from t he beginning.
Today many of t h em are employe d at Apache Power
Company. The plant is about three miles south of tow n,
on the west side of the San Pedro River.
Called Apache Camp, the plant has around 200 work­ers,
many of them residents of St. David. It produces
nitrog lycerine, dy namite a nd related p roducts, and is said
to be one of the country' s largest TNT manufacturers.
Home gardens provide most residents with fresh vege­tables
and fruit for their tables and for canning. R abbits
and cattle are raised, and there are two small w ho lesale
dai r ies. Barrow Poultry Farm, operated by Dick Barrow,
turns out from 1 ,ooo to 1,500 fryers a week w hen it is in
fu ll operation.
And if you think this quiet little community, nestled
at 3,595 feet and surrounde d by mountains on all sides­and
W hetstones to the west, Dragoons to the east, the
Huac hucas to the so uth, and the Winchesters to the
northeast, is a place w here "nothing ever happens, " you
should follow Marg uerite N . J ennings around for a cou­ple
of days.
Mrs. J ennings and h er hu sband moved to St. David
ten years ago, and bough t a place. She knew the town
PAGE TYVELVE • ARIZONA HIGHWA YS • AU GUST 1956
well, since she was born on a r anch a fe w miles w est of
Benson, and atte nded Benson schools . Sh e took her bache­lor's
degree at Arizona State Co ll ege, Tempe, and worked
on a master's at Northwestern University. After a stint on
a w est coast magazine, she resigned du ring the w ar to
become a navy welder first c lass . -
In I 949 she a nd her h usb and st arted the San Pedro
Natural Gas Servi ce. It shoved o ut w ood and butane, a nd
se r ves the peop le w ith natura l gas. They late r expanded
their gas se rvice to nearby McNeal w here they serve irri­gation
farmers and h ou se ho lds.
They are co- owners of the business. J ennings handles
all outdoor work such as meter r ead in g, installa t io n s,
repai r s. Mrs . Jenn ings is business m anager, hand ling all
b illing and bookwork.
This wasn ' t enough to keep her busy, so three y ears
ago she started a weekly newspap e r, ca l le d the V all ey
Sun. It now has a paid circu lation o f ne arly a thousan d,
and a heavy newss tand sale . In three y ears it has won fo ur
awards in stat ewide Arizo n a Newspaper Association con­tests-
second best small weekly in t he st ate i n 19 5 3 and
again in 1954, first in community service i n 195 4- the on ly
newspaper t o wi n two awards . Mrs. Jennings se lls and
w rites all her own advertising and news, does her own
photography, bi lli n g an d boo kkeeping for the paper. Sh e ' s
al so correspondent for Associated P r ess and the Arizona
Daily Star, and turns out some free lan ce writi ng, often
illustrated with her own photographs.
Mrs. Jennings, a blonde, is about as big as a bar of
soap . She h as a business and ed itorial office in Be nso n,
but has little time t o sit a t a des k t he re. Most of her day­time
hours are spent in her second offi ce, a weather beaten
little blue Studebaker t hat sees a lot o f mil es . H er third
office is where she puts in the n ig ht s hift- her home in
St. David.
"That is w here I do most of my writing," Mrs. Jen­nings
says, "generally after m y four kids have gone to
bed. "
Her oldest c hi ld is 1 r, her youngest ju st p ast three.
She started the paper w hen the baby was 1 r months ol d.
S he h as a bab y si tter t h r ee days a week, h a nd les t he
y oungsters he rself oth erwise . Three are n ow in school­and
St. D avid has a n ex cellent school system.
In addition to the paper and the gas company, M rs.
J e nnings bel ongs t o and is a c tive in the Benson Art
League, Southeastern Soci ety of H istory and Sciences
and t he Benson Chamber of C omme r ce. And early in
December she was o n e of fi ve judges (three were men ) of
the Ben so n R odeo Parad e .
That, perhaps, was the d ay sh e sh ould have stood in
bed. Instea d , she proved beyond all d oubt that the "Wild
O l d West" isn 't dead, as fa r as St . David is c oncerned ­but
it sure has c hanged.
A n u ni d entifi ed 2 50-pound male didn' t like the w ay
the judges n amed t he winners of the parade. A p p a ren tly
he took p articu lar exception to the way J\1rs. Jenni ngs
voted.
On the front page of the V all ey Sun of D ecember 9,
the following b oldface box appeared :
A ttention: T he heavy- weight male f rom Pomerene ( a
small town 11ear S t. D avid) wh o threatened to " beat the
hell out of" me.
S aid t hreat w as m ade before the justice of the peace
an d truJo oth er w itnesses, but not in my presen ce, in t he
B ema n Chamb er o f Commerce buildi ng at ab out noon
S aturday , D ec ember 4.
If sai d heavy - weight w ill meet m e at 10 rt.7n . W ednes­day,
D ecember z 5, in front of that building , I will be gla d
to let him see if he can do it .
S igned, M arguerite N . J e1111 ings
E ditor and Publisher, V alley Sun
T he follo wing day the p aper c arried a rep ly t o a
wire from Judge F r ank T hom as , in whic h t h e judge aske d
for "outcome of bloody encounter IO a.m. Wedn esday. "
M rs. J ennings r ep orted that althoug h sh e .-waited for
her 2 50- p ound opponent fo r an hour, h e fai le d to ap pear.
S he al so reported on much intriguing advice given her on
how to beat the stuffin ' out of him.
Mrs. Jennings confes se d she h es itated to expo se her
ignorance of t he way of fig hting men by asking qu estions.
But in spit e o f the proffere d ad vi ce, sh e was bothered by
wonderi ng what would sto p her opponent from whali ng
the tar o ut of her while she followed the advice: 1) p ull ­ing
hi s ha ir wi t h one hand; 2 ) g oug ing h im in the eye with
t h e other ; 3) kicking h im in the shins wit h o ne foot and
4 ) landing a haymaker on him w ith the oth er h and.
She als o underw ent cons iderab le free instruct ion in
judo hol ds while she awai ted the fatal hour.
A fter she won the fight by default, which she admit­ted
was no fu n, she confessed that the advice with the
greatest appea l was given by her t h ree - year- old so n. I n
most ma tter of fact tones, he sai d, " J\!Iot h er, j ust take a
knife and skin him."
W hi le it is t rue that a chal lenge of a woman b y a
man to a "figh t to t he finish" is a turnabout on traditions
of the O ld West , at least the accounts of i t prove one
thing.
W he n y ou say "nothing ever happens" in a sleepy
little A r izona agricultural t own like St. D av id, broth er,
you'd better smile, an d mea n the smi le.
Becau se the re seem s to be no doubt ab out i t. R es i ­dents
of St. D avid are gear ed t o the ,p roduction of ba b ies
- and of lau ghter.
Bu sy editor .at ruJork
The challenge of
Ariz o11a is the r eward.
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAY MANLEY
I'm a very fortunate fellow . That's what people tell
me often, and that's what I of ten tell myself, althoug h
" e may not be looking at my profess ional activities as a
sce nic photograph e r in exactl y t he same way . "My, but
_v ou must lead an interesting life," folks wi ll comment.
" Just trav e lin g around taking pictures of beautiful scen­er
y and getting paid for it."
"Yes, indee d," I agree, r em embering the time I
wa ited out a 3- day w ind-and-rain storm in Monument
Va ll ey to take a , / 10t h second exposure, and t h e time I
traveled se ven hundred mil es to shoot a round-up of
t hree thousand H e r efords for a breed er's j o urnal a nd the
picture co uldn 't be u se d beca u se there were three or four
Brahmas in the herd, and t he tim e .. .
No, there are just as many disap pointments in sceni c
p hotog rap hy as in an y ot her creati ve profess ion; p erhaps
more, s in ce so many of the elements in t his work- li g h t
:111d sh adow, weath er and t emperature-are variabl e a nd
beyond human c ontrol. I am not surprised t hat fewer
than a dozen p eople in the entire country make t h eir li v­ing
solely from scenic photography. But y ou can judge
ho w I weigh the disa ppointments against t he rewards
\v hen I say that I hope so me day to be one of them. So
far, I h ave had to rely on commercial photography t o
fi nance the scenic expeditions.
One of the biggest r ewards of my work in the fiel d
li es in the ver y elements that make it unpredictable- the
cha ll enge of Arizona itself. This is a land t hat m ight b e
measured in terms of infinity and e terni ty . It can glare
w ith primary colors intens ified b y the sun, and it ca n
shade off into nu ances of the spectrum for which even
artists have n o name. It takes n erve, I ad mi t, eve n t o h ope
to catc h either the reality or the spirit of this count r y on
a sh eet of film . But w ho would b e content to work
always und er the controlled condi ti ons of an i ndoor
studio with this ch allenge at his doorstep ? Certai nly n ot I.
Tak e, for in stance, that trip into Monument V alley,
five hundred mi les north of Tucso n , my home b ase . My
S an X avie r M ission : the clou ds 'we r e rig ht that day .
wife Rut h and I drove to H arr y Goul ding's T rading P o st
on the Navajo R ese rvat ion and from there H arry took
u s and a three-day supply of food a nd water for four
ab out sixt y - five miles b y jeep over Arizona's roughest
t errain to the South Rim of t h e valley w here he left u s,
unde r instructions not to ret urn unti l t he then prese nt
clo udiness had cleare d. Meanwhile W illy and H appy Cly ,
a Nava jo coup le w ho had agreed to appear in th e picture
I had in m ind, h ad r idden their horses forty m iles from
their reser vation hom e to t he rend ezvou s. On ea ch of th e
three days that we waited out the w ind a nd rain, they
had to ride off for som e six h ours to water t heir h orses.
Our own fo od and water were ab out exhausted w h en
at last t h e clou d s cleare d enough so that th e late evening
ligh t illuminated the fa ntastic landscape. Happ y sa t d ow n
at t h e edge of the cliff to my right as Willy reined h is
wh ite horse i nto positio n beh ind her, a nd I made my
exposures . S ixteen m on t h s later the p ict_ure a pp eared as
th e ce nter spread of th e D ecembe r, 19 54, iss u e of AR rZ O :'\A
H IG HWAYS, and the reader c ould gaze out with the t wo
I n dians on the vast area of Monument Valley stretching
below and beyond them into infinity.
I was by no means the first to bring a camera into
the magni fi ce nce of M onument V all ey and I sha ll no t be
the last. T h e scenic variety of A riz ona attracts top-n otc h
a mateurs and professionals from all over the w orld and
their coun tless pictures appear on calendars and in books,
magazines, sc ienti fi c publicati ons an d trade journals as
i llustrations and advertisements. AR IZONA HIG HW AYS
itself ha s u se d t housands of color i ll ustrati ons in the past
fifteen y ears.
M oreove r , Nature does n ot go out of sty le, and a
sc enic picture, provided there is n othing as transitory as
this year 's motor car or a hi g h fashion mo d el in the vi ew,
is never dat ed. The fi rst shot of the G rand Canyon may
be as saleable today as the latest.
All this presents a very rea l chall enge t o the pro­fe
ss ional photograp her who must b r ing ba ck marketable
PA GE FIFTEE N • AR l Z O '- A H I G 1-1 \V .\ Y S • AUGU ST 19 5 6
results from each trip. The scene, as far as the placement
of natural features is concerned, remains the same for all
comers. Cameras, lenses, and fi lms are essentially alike
and the techniques of handling them may be mastered
by anyone. Obviously, the difference must lie in the inter­pretation.
How can one interpret a sub ject differ ently that has
been photographed many times before? It is in his answer
to this problem that the photographer places himself
alongside the creative artists w ho are making something
different out of the same old elements. Look w hat authors
do with the same twenty-six-letter alphabet, and painters
with the same red, yellow, and blue'
Success, I believe, depends upon two factors-granted
mastery of the mechanics of the trade: t he willingness to
plan and prepare and the ability t o anti cipate the unusual
and take advantage of it.
Perhaps an unusual weather condition will change a
commonplace view into a striking illustration. Most of us
who have been at it a long time can count instances of
such luck on one or possibly both hands, and even here
the successful shots are more often the result of pati ent
planning and ·waiting with an idea in mind than of the
fortunate coincidence of timing and exposure. A prof es­sional
can't count on t he unexpected for his livelihood.
He must, however, be prepared always to take advan­tage
of an unusual condition an d, most important of all,
to anticipate what may happen, w hether it be in the
action of people or in extreme . ligh ti ng effects brought
on, for instance, by a summer storm or a w inter sunset.
As a case in point, there is t he sunset view of mine
that appeared in t he December, 1955, issue of ARIZONA
HIGHWAYS.
T had Jong felt that a silhouette of a cowboy against
a blazi ng evening sky, in addition to the usual saguaro
that identifies the scene as South ern Arizona, would
make a saleab le picture. T here is no tr ick to selecting a
saguaro sett ing around Tucson, and being on hand myself
for the sunset could be managed, but arranging for a
cowboy and horse to be t here, too, at the proper moment
complicated the problem. However, I arrived at an under­standing
with an obliging cowpoke w ho agreed to shO"w
up with his horse on call. Of that under standing, more
later.
I scouted around for the grouping of cactus that
would suit my need and found it within a distance th at
would allow me with my paraphernalia and t he cowboy
with his horse to dash into the desert and get set u p in
the twenty minutes or so I could count on between the
time t he sun might show promise of a spectacle and the
time it would sink.
Only one thi ng was lacking. I wanted the rid er to
the left of my picture w here he would balance the giant
saguaro at the right. But w here there should have been a
rise to lift the horse into line, the desert uncooperatively
showed a depression. So w hat:i A cameraman can move
more than a cable release if a good shot is at stake. I
proved this by heaping a mound of earth five and one­half
feet high, and long and wide enoug h to support
horse and r ider. W hen Nature at last co nformed to my
ideal, there was nothing I could do but wait.
I haunted the western windows each af ternoon for
days, then weeks, before at last t he r are cloudy day gave
promise of a spectacu lar ending. I phoned t he cowboy
to hop to it and raced my equi pment to the location.
Photographer at work: a very fortunate fellow
NOTES FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHER
BY RAY MANLEY
OPPOSITE PAGE
"FALL SENTINEL-NEAR SHOW LOW." Fall color is found
in strange places. My traveling companion, Howard Beestons,
Tucson's expert camera repairman, and I had been to Grand Can­yon.
Later at the San Francisco Peaks we discovered that the aspens
had lost their leaves without turning color due to a blight. We were
early for color in the White Mountains near McNary. In despair
we headed for home but deliberately took the longest way back
finding a lonely patch of yellowing trees alongside a cattleman's
reservoir. The sun was low on the horizon and would soon dim in
the western sky. High clouds were fingering into the sky and by
the time the picture was composed, time was about to run out.
We made but one color exposure before the light was too flat and
grey. Camera: 5x7 Deardorff; Ektachrome; Lens: 8½" Commercial
Ektar; Shutter: f: 16 at 1/ 5oth sec. October 8, 1955.
FOLLOWING PAGES
"THE GRAZING SHEEP." During summers, in warm weather,
large flocks of sheep are driven north to Arizona's cool plateau
areas for grazing, but when fall comes these flocks are brought to
pasture in the Salt River Valley; lambs are born and they begin
their life without severe hardship. This scene is common along
Base Line Highway, south of Phoenix and north of Chandler.
Camera: SX7 Deardorff; Lens: 8½" Commercial Elnar; Shutter
1/1oth sec. at f:zo.
"AUTUMN PATTERNS: NORTH RIM, GRAND CANYON."
Each fall about October 5th to 10th, aspens, maple and other trees
and brush turn brilliant yellows, orange and red. The side canyons
opening into Grand Canyon are filled with splashes of violent
color, adding another highlight to that everchanging spectacle.
Camera: 5x7 Deardorff; Daylight Ektachrome; Lens: 8½" Com­mercial
Elnar f: 18 at 1 / roth sec.
"THE SMILING HOPIS." Dressed in the likeness of their elders,
these Hopi children perform the tribal dances taught at an early
age. The Hopi people religiously. perform their many ceremonial
dances throughout the year. As the older performers retire the
(Please turn to page twenty-five) -~---- ----------
PAGE S I XT EEN A RI ZONA Hl GH \VAYS • AU GUST 1956
C EN TER PANEL
" Cattle Drive"
" Autumn Patt erns"
OPPOSITE PAGE
" The Smiling H opis"
" A u tumn Col or , G rand Canyon"
" Ceme tery at San X avie r"
C O NTINUED FROM P A G E SlXTEEN
younger ch il dren are taught t he meaningful chants, r hy t hms an d
costuming. T h e se ceremonies o ccur frequently in t h e H opi villag es
b ut it is only by ch ance that the v isitor m ight be t h ere at t he righ
time. Each year on t h e 4th of July w eekend , the H opis and some
25 o ther dance tea m s p erform at t he F lagsta ff all-Ind ian P ow Wow .
C a m era: 4x5 D eardor ff; Daylig ht E ktachrome; Lens: f: r, , e ffecti v
p eed 1/ 3ooot h with S hutter at 1/ rooth second; 3 lig h t 1000-w attl
t robe lights .
C E NT E R PANE L
" CATTLE DRIV E: WHlT E R IVE R , A P A CHE R E. SE R V A
T lON." I feel this scen e is the clima x to over seven y ears of c h as­ing
c attle driv es for that on e m ass picture sh ow in g the large herd
that still graze the rangelands o f A r izona. Bad weather, lack of
elevatio n and dust ha ve often foi led my attempts o n num erou
o ccasi on s. C oop eration h as al w ays been t he b est by t he cat tlemen
but time of d ay and location are the determin ing factor w hen i
comes to photogra p hi n g . t he l arge d rive scenes . In t his scen e, there
are a b out 101 6 high quality f-~e re fords headed for M cNa r y, som e
40 mi les north . T his w ater in g · spot washes down t he red d ust 0£
t he long tra il to F ort A pache on the W h ite River , a historic al land­mark
in Arizona's histor y. . T h e driv e was delayed one day and
jnscead o f t he cattle arriving at the r iv er at mid-afternoon a s
scheduled, they came at abou t 10:00 o ' cl o ck in the morning. F rom
past e xperience I'd lear n ed to be r eady and p repar ed to w ai t lon g
for t h e u npredict able timing in cattle drives. As t he c attle hit th
w a t er, they spread bey o nd the camera's vi e w s but as the 30 cow ­boys
b u n ch ed t hem ther e was about sixt y se c ond s ·when all h ad to
work right. E x posure, focus, film handling, etc. O n ly fa miliarity;
wit h one's eq ui pment c an guarantee accuracy in such a tiglit si tu a­tio
n . Camera : 5x7 D eardorff ; L ens : 8 ½ " E lnar; F ilm: D ay Elna­cl;
irome; Shutter: r / 35th sec. at f : 11. D evelo p ment was c hanged t o
two sto ps ov erdev elopment b y C o lor Classics L aborat ories to
com pensate for the necessary shutter sp e e d and l ens o p ening un der
backlit cond itions.
"DESE R T AND M OUNTAINS: SANTA C A T ALINAS." Tuc­s
o n ' s mountain lan dm ar k offer s t he climatic variet y that makes it
p ossible to live in t he desert wit h its p rotectio n from winds. A
var ie t y of activities and ch ange from desert to m o u ntain gives our
valley chang ing sc enery. The picture was made fro m the picture
win dow of some friends, w h o have cho sen t he C at alina foot hills as
the ir A r izona home. Camera : 5x 7 D ear d or ff ; Lens: 8 ½" Elna r ;
Film: 5x7 Ektac hrom e; Sh utter: 1/ 1oth sec . at f:18.
" CEMET E R Y AT SAN X AVI E R M ISSIO N ." D urin g l at e
A ugust, 1955 , Arizona had h ad m o re than its u sual rain; skies h ad
b een cloudy mu c h o f t he mo nth and were n ot too clear from t he
m oisture in t h e air. A s t h e summer ra ins ended, came one day w hen
a p hotographer c ou ld p o int hi s c am era in any d irection and t he
t owering cumulus clou ds wou ld be ther e to c ompli m ent any scene.
1 c h ose the D o ve of the D esert w here I soon exh aust ed m y sup ply
o f fi lm . Because the cl ouds, missi on an d gener al area is ligh ter than
n ormal, an e xposure ·o f nearly 50 % less than us u al w as nec essar y.
Cam er a : SX7 D eardorff ; Len s: 8 ½ " E k t ar; Film: E k t ac h rome; Shut­ter
: 1/ roth sec. at f:25 .
" A UTUMN COL O R : G R AND CAN YON." T hough fall col or ­fog
is a bundant in the m e ad ows and c an y ons abo ut the G rand
Cany o n's N orth Rim, t here are few spots w h e re one may see both
t he colo r an d th e cany on. It w as l ate af ternoon w hen hazy clou ds
passed to t h e sout heast. Camera was p la ced on a 10-foot steplad der
so t hat t he s cene c ould be fr a m ed in t he aspen's autumn color s .
C a mera: 5x7 D eardorff; Fi lm: Ektac hrom e; Lens: 5" w ide fi eld
E kt ar; Shutter : 1/ 1oth at f : 16.
" W INDMILL: COTTONWOOD, A RI ZONA." Distant fro m t h e
Verd e Riv e r , this win dm ill p ump s w ater fo r r ange cattle sh orten­ing
the ir walk for w ater. Stilled on occasio n, it stands sentinel of a
l a n d m ark, a sil houett e of a u sefu l m ec h anic al d evice t hat has help ed
make our west a place in which to live. T his scene was made near
my h ome town o f C o ttonwood al ong the V er d e R iver, a p eacefu
v all e y not c h an ged m u c h by our atom ic age, restful an d with a
y ear -round climat e eq ualled n owhere in the world, se ldom fre ezing
an d seldo m does it get w ar m er than 95 d egrees , w h ich in Arizon a's
d ry clima te is quite b earabl e c ompare d with ev e n 85 d egr ees in
the humid sections of t h e United S tat es. C amera: 5x 7 D eardor ff ;
Film: E ktachrome; Lens : 8 ½" Elnar ; S h ut ter: 2 sec. a t f: 22, sum ­mer,
1954. To m e, the windmill is a true landmark of the W est.
T hat w as the fir st of four fruitless dashes as the sun­sets
fizz l ed out in insipid p astels or the clouds hung do g­gedly
to t h e horizon. But the fift h attempt paid off in the
scene that was displayed in this mag azine a nd later w as
selected by a top calendar company as the lead picture
in it s executiv e line.
The picture of an Apache cattle drive in this iss u e
is another illustration of the need to plan for months and
still be ready t o sh oot in a fraction of a minute.
For seven years I had been trying to record such a
scene, and in that time I had crisscrossed Arizona for over
nine tho usand miles in search of it. Yet, for this view,
whic h m os t n early li ves up to m y expectations, I had to
shoot into a backlit scene w hen my expo sure calculations
had been based on flat li ghting, and without a m eter
reading.
From previous contacts, I knew the general date of
movement and approximate line of t he sev enty-mil e drive
betw een t he White Mou ntains and the auction yards at
McN ary in the fall of r 9 5 5, and wrote t h e tribal chief for
permission to take pictures. Permission r eceived, I d rove
with an assistant to W hiteriver, headquarters for the
Apache cattlemen, where I learned t h at the driv e w as
under way in inaccessible country and ,ve w ould ha ve to
wait another d ay t o join the her d . I spent the time r ec on­noitering,
and found a cliff some three hundred feet abo ve
the river where I c ould positio n my camera so as t o see
an d photograp h the entire h erd of on e t housand and six­t
een cows. ( Unless on e has adequate elevation , the large
herd might just as w ell be only a fe w hundred head .)
T hen w e went out to meet the drive, and I persuaded the
driv e boss to change his route by about a mile to bring
the cattle down stream to drink across from the cliff. A
cattleman figur es the loss of a pound of w eight per cow
fo r every mile; so I was v ery apprecia tive of his cooper a­tion.
He agreed, also , to have his c owboys bunch the
animals into the stream instead of letting them string out
along its banks.
Suppos edly the sc ene w as set. But somehow the herd
made much better ti me than the boss had estimated, and
I hear d the bawling and shou ts in the distance almost six
hour s befo r e the time on w hich I had c alculated for my
exposures. As I scrambled u p t he lava cliff to m y camera
the cloudi ness that had prevailed disappeared. T he sun
was in front of me in stead of behind, as I had planned, so
I co uld n ot even take a m eter reading. It was now or
never, however, so I relie d on past experience for the
proper tim e and len s settings and, as the cattle swirled out
into the stream , made six color exposures in two minutes.
Bac k in t he studio darkroom, I found th at I had
judged my exposures c orrectly. Moreover, t he sun that
I thought might be m y undoing had cas t a purp le shadow
into the center of the swirl of cattle and bu rnished their
hides t o give the p icture dramatic c omposition and color
effectiveness t hat the lighting I h ad planne d on wou ld
not have achieved.
It was with real gratitude for t h eir bringing the herd
in ahead o f time as w ell as for their cooperation on the
scen e that I sent prints back to t hose A paches.
This brings up the sub ject of m o del fees. It i s never
amiss to se nd a print to the persons w ho supply incidental
life to a camera study, and many think this is adequate
compensation for their t ime , and are willing to sign a
rele ase permittin g me to sell the picture if I can.
O thers w ill pref er to pose for a fl at hourly or d aily
PAGE T \V E N TY - F TVE • AR I Z ON A HIGffW' A Y S • A U GUS T 195 6
Apache Devil /)mic e: Indians are a very proud people.
fee. Willy and Happy Cly, for instance, received so nm~h
a day and an additional surn for their hor~es for that tnp
into Monurnent Valley. On another occasion, ,vhen I had
accepted an assignrnent frorn a colllmercial account to
illustrate the slogan "the pause that refreshes" and. asked
Happy to lift a bottled soft drink to her mouth ,1 hde the
horse she was riding lowered his head into a pool of water,
she was quite ,1,illing to take a lump sulll, with neither of
us watching the clock.
Another alternative is to give the model a percentage
of the gross sale. This was the arrangement the cowboy
and [ made for the sunset scene, which ,1,as purely spec­ulative.
vVe mig,ht have finished the picture at once or,
as it turned out l could h:1ve gone broke pa_ving hirn an
hourly fee while we wai~ed. The ,1,hol_e thing :vas a galll­hlc
and the cowboy offered to let his bets nde on 1nv
throw. We agreed that he would get fifteen per cent of
the gross sale, if an:', and it has alread:' netted hilll mm:e
than a straight hourly fee would have paid. Of course, It
could have worked the other way, but well-executed
ideas seem to find a ready market.
I have found it very interesting to photograph
Indians, their crafts and costumes and activities. My pay­n1ent
for their cooperation depends on what I intend to
do II ith the picture as well as on the tirnc they give me.
If it is to be a docurnentary pictnre storv of their prob­lems
of livelihood, I do not feel obligated to pa:' them
as much as if they arc supplementing :1 scene as anv other
professional model would. Either overp:1:·ment or under­pa_
vment ,1,ill create hardship for photogr:iphers ,1 ho
come alorw later. I have worked with Navajos, Apaches,
Hopis, and Papagos, and find that the local trader will
evaluate the situation and help photographer and models
to arrive at an arranuement satisfactory to all. And it b
makes me feel pretty good to be greete_d warmly when
I return to the reservation on another tnp, and to find a
picture I have sent by way of "thank you" tacked up on
their \\'alls.
Parentheticallv, I have a word or two of caution for
those 11 ho may w;nt to photograph our Arizona Indians.
They are a proud people-the Navaj?s _in particular-~nd
you can offend them deeply by offermg them chanty.
Happy Cly, for instance, will, accept clothes from Ruth
and me after she's done her 10h 1f they are dresses she
can make over for her grandchildren or pass around to
mothers in the tribe, but she won't take anything for her­self
except the cash payment decided upon in advance.
The men are grateful for warm pants and jackets, but
they like to feel they have earned them.
And it is neither polite nor prudent to go around
taking it for granted that nobody on the reservation
understands English. I learned this with some embarrass­ment
on another trip into Monument Valley that resulted
in the cover for the January, 1953, Holiday. I had spent
quite a lot of time drawing ·a map in the sand and gestur­ing
\\ 'ith both hands on a previous visit to get a sheep­herder
to drive his flock around a monolith and under a
,1,ind-drilled "window" which I wanted to feature in
the scene. So this time, when I saw a youngster and his
little sister in the s:1me vicinity with their flock, I started
l'AGTc TW ENTY-S I X • A I( I Z O '\ !\ 11 I G H \ V A Y S • AUGUST 1956
the same rigamarole. The ?OY watched me dra,~ and
po_int and wave for a few mmutes and then broke mto a
gnn.
"So you want a picture of our sheep," he said. "Good.
We will bring them now."
I don't know how many of those who read these
words may be moved to hop off at once for Arizona to
take pictures-for money or for fun. I d_o kno,~ that
many photographers have already found pictures ~n my
own backyard I've failed to see ( and I mclude 111 my
"backyard·" the Hoover Dam area, the ~rand Canyon,
l\ilonument Valley, and Canyon de Chelly 111 the n?rtl:ern
part of the state; Oak Creek Ca~1yon, the :'7hitenver
Apache Reservation, and the Whi~e Mo_rn~ta111 country
ncross the middle; the San Xavier M1ss10n, Saguaro
National Monument, and the Chiricahua "Wonderland
of Rocks" in the south). I, for one, welcome this compe­tition
as a stimulus that keeps me alert and on the lookout
for the new approach to a familiar subject. One of the
few advantages of the professional over the amateur,
ability in handling the equipment involved being eq_ual,
1s that because he has to try harder, the results are a little
more significant to him.
So perhaps I can share here with the an:atem: some
of the things I have learned since I began tak111g pictures
at the age of fourteen for a Boy Scout merit badge.
Experience is going to be your best teacher, but a few
supplementary suggestions may be helpful.
Lesson One is certainly this: Don't be a gadgeteer!
Select the best equipment you can afford that :will s~rve
the kind of work you wish to do, and then qmt buy_mg.
The commercial photographer may need as many as eight
different camera,, many kinds of light sources and lenses,
and several thousand dollars worth of miscellany from
voltaue controls to props. Documentary photography, on
the ;ther hand, requires little equipment: a 3 5 mm. or
2 ¼-inch reflex type camera with several lenses and acces­sory
filters, a light tripod, and a few flood- or flash-bulb
reflector extensions.
The scenic photographer can simplify to a degree if
he is only interested in pictorials, although mo~t- of. us
in this field also fall into the documentary classification
by doing feature stories a1~d pl~nned situation ph_oto­graphs
as well. The everlastmg view camera and tnpod
are a must for scenics, with about four first-rate lenses
of varying focal lengths, a filter asso_rtment, a l_ight meter,
basic flash equipment, and a sufficient quantity of film
holders to make frequent reloading unnecessary.
Of prime importance (unless you stick to black­and-
white and so miss the thrill of modern photography
as well as a chance at the best-paying markets) is a large
supply of good color film e~1rnlsion. It can b_e very disap­pointing
to spend months 111 the field makmg hundreds
of expensive exposures and find on processing the check
film that the emulsion is greenish, magenta, or yellow. All
serious workers purchase their film by the case in one
emulsion number, and test expose it. A slight correction
by filter may be necessary, but results will thereafter be
consistent. The quantity of film should be sufficient for
your entire trip. Naturally, it should be kept cool, and
in an insulat:ed box painted white or aluminum. The
holders must be cleaned extremely well to prevent dust
from settling on the film, particularly when you leave
the pa\fed highway in search of scenes.
One of the biggest savings anyone can make who
vVhite 1Vlountains: color after a long journey
Verde Valley pasture: look in your own back yard.
W alpi: the professional tries harder.
Desert sunset: the cowpoke was obliging.
H llywood production
Desert campfire: not a o
Old Tucson: don't stare into the camera.
uses color film is to have his shutter speeds checked for
accuracy. The actual speeds are seldom as indicated, and
most of us re-calibrate the shutters correctly and use only
one or two slow speeds for most conditions. It is possible
to detect a change in these slow speeds by ear.
Bracketing the correct exposure is important, even
at $2 each with 5x7 color. It is fa lse economy to skimp on
exposures, as any veteran photographer will tell you. Bet­ter
to over-shoot and bring back sure results than to econ­omize
on film and have nothing to show for the trip but
near misses. There aie extremes, of course, and this rule
depends on the importance of the picture and its avail­ability
in case you need a re-take.
The size of film transparencies is of interest to those
who wish to sell. Many fashion publications and those
that feature picture stories are prepared to use 2 ¼" and
35 mm. film and do a remarkable job of reproduction.
Pictorial publications like ARIZONA HIGHWAYS, scenic cal­endar
manufacturers, and advertising agencies in search
of illustrative material prefer as large a transparency as
they can get which is consistent with the other factors
involved. Of two identically exposed scenes, tho larger
transparency will more often be chosen because of its
visual impact and because its enlargement will hold up to
a greater size in the engraving.
New color films have recently come on the market,
however, which give sharper results than heretofore, so
that a 2 ¼-inch transparency of the new material will
yield an engraving of equal clarity with a 4x5 transparency
made on the older type of film. As faster color films of
smaller size are introduced, less bulky equipment will be
required and, as the action photographer will enjoy the
use of faster speed, the scenic photographer will find
satisfactio~ in the greater depth of field that brings fore­ground
obJects and the frame of his compositions as sharp­ly
in focus as the distant subject matter.
Just keep it in mind that the editor who examines
your transparencies will not be very interested in how
long it took to get the picture, or the tribulations you
Western fence: carefully select the models.
suffered for the shot, or what make of camera you used,
or how much you paid for the film. The r esult and its
application to his plans are alone significant to him.
There are two courses open to the would-be profes­sional:
to submit direct to the magazines and other mar­kets
on approval, or to turn his material over to an agent,
who usually charges about forty per cent of the gross.
This fee sounds like a lot, but it will insure more sales and
usually at a better price than the inexperienced individual
can command for himself. As the photographer's work
becomes known and his file of scenes grows, he will be
able to count on increasing requests and assignments from
the national market to make his vocation self-sustaining
and profitable.
Although the photographer does not have an author's
opportunities for subsidiary sales ( there is not as yet a
Picture-of-the-Month Club, nor a clamor for TV, radio,
and movie adaptations of the scenic photograph), it is
not unusual to sell the same picture or similar exposures
to various media, providing they are not competing mar­kets.
It would be professionally suicidal, as well as un­ethical,
to off er the same view to two pictorial calendar
companies or, for instance, to both Life and Look. I men­tioned
earlier that both ARIZONA HIGHWAYS and a calen­dar
manufacturer used the "Cowboy at Sundown." Going
back again to that view of the Indian and his wife look­ing
out upon Monument Valley: after it had appeared in
ARIZONA HIGHWAYS my agent placed it with Trans World
Airlines for use on a scenic calendar and on the strength
of the ARIZONA HIGHWAYS display, the National Geo­graphic
bought a similar view taken the same day. This
picture will continue to have a market value for years to
come, after the provisions of the "first rights" sales have
been fulfilled. A calendar company bought a picture of
mine of San Francisco Peaks in \Vinter three years after it
appeared in ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. This was my first mag­azine
sale, by the way-made in 1940, published in 1944.
Perhaps I should say here that references to my own
sales do not so often mention ARIZONA HIGHWAYS because
Monument Valley panora1na: an additional fee for the horse
Apache artist: a print was sent in appreciation.
PAGE TWENTY-NINE • ARIZ ON A HIGHWAYS • AUGUST 1956
I am being polite to the hosts of this piece. In the past ten
years my work has been accepted by just about every
American publication that use~ photographs, but even if
ARIZONA HIGHWAYS did not give the photographer such
consideration and so superb a showcase for his wares, I
would still follow my rule of offering its editors first re­fusal
on any shot of mine they can possibly use. This
magazine not only stood godfather to my professional
career when it accepted the view of San Francisco Peaks,
but without its unwitting aid at a turning point in my
life, photography would probably be just a sometime hob­by
instead of my absorbing interest and means of liveli­hood.
The point came in the late summer of 1944 in San
Diego, where I had just finished boot camp and was wait­ing
with the other recruits to be classified and sent about
the Navy's business. I had been the yearbook staff photog­rapher
in both Clarkdale (Ariz.) High School and Ari­zona
State College at Flagstaff, but as yet I had no clear
idea of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, in or
out of uniform. But the officer in charge of classifying us
saw my credit line under several pictures in the current
issue of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS and presto!, I was in Pensa­cola
as a photography student and, three months later,
Instructor of Still Photography for the duration-seven­teen
months. I have no doubt that if I had been assigned
to duty in some other field for this length of time, I
would not be where or what I am today.
* * ,r.,
So now let's have a try at turning an idea into a sale-able
picture. To make it really complicated, we will fore­go
the straight scenic to tackle a story-telling documen­tary
that involves atmosphere, props, and people as well
a~ the physical setting and the mechanical- elements of the
trade-camera, lights, exposure formulas.
Our idea is a campfire scene out in the desert: cow­boys
hunkering down beside the chuck wagon, Apaches
or Navajos preparing their evening meal, or dudes on one
of our guest ranches listening to the wrangler sing to his
guitar. These are natural situations you may come upon
by chance, but they will not show up in a snapshot as they
appeared upon the eye's retina. How do we accomplish
the picture in all its veracity without going into a Holly­wood
production or to a lot of expense?
Since we are going to have to take several time ex­posures
in the space of a few minutes while the fire burns
bright, we will use the 5x7 Deardorff View camera on a
tripod. We hope to sell the results of this night's work
. to a calendar concern or a pictorial magazine (if all goes
well, to both); so we will be using SX7 color film.
We have worked out our basic lighting and exposure
formulas in advance, knowing from experience that we
will need about two seconds at f:22 on current color film
to record the gaseous flames of the campfire. And we have
made our arrangements with the folks who will be our
models, under one of the working agreements mentioned
earlier.
The location has long since been chosen, and the fire
has been laid and the props are in place when the models
arrive at the site at the time we have stipulated according
to whether we wish to show the scene at sundmvn or un­der
the light of the moon. The camera is already focused
and a #3b blue flashbulb has been inserted in a reflector
high above and a little behind the lens where it will give
the scene overall clarity without casting undesirable
shadows.
To give sufficient lighting to foreground subjects, an
extension cord and socket are carefully concealed behind
the log or coffee pot, waiting for the clear flashbulb that
must be placed just a few seconds before it is to be fired,
and protected from the direct heat lest it explode. The
two bulbs will fire simultaneously at about 1/ 3oth of a
second while the open shutter is recording the flaming
embers.
We have already planned how we want the people
grouped as a part of our composition. We place them in
position, coach them in their parts with a warning not to
look at the camera or distract from the general effect of
implied action, and view the general arrangement on the
ground glass as the fire leaps up.
Too late now for any radical changes. The clear bulb
is snapped into its socket, expressions are checked, "Hold
it!" -and the shutter is tripped. Then another round of
bulbs, another check-up, a slight shift of the lens open­ing,
another exposure-and repeat.
If the project includes a sunset or other sky effects,
the time of exposure may be varied slightly without affect­ing
the foreground models who are illuminated only by
the controlled light of the flash. The fire itself is too weak
to give more than a warm glow to objects within its
radius.
If this is a night picture, the moon may be included
by making an additional half-second exposure at f: 16 on
the same sheet of film, focusing this time on the moon it­self
with a lens of longer focal length. It is well to mark
the desired position on the ground glass with a grease
pencil at the time of the original composing.
This may all sound like a complicated procedure to
record a situation that occurs each night on round-up or
as our Indians chant around their evening fires, but it
illustrates the fact that the activities of a traveling profes­sional
photographer require the cooperation of many peo­ple,
a technical know-how, and a planned series of condi­tions
if he is to accomplish even a seemingly simple scene.
* * * I don't propose to settle here the question of whether
photography is an art, or the photographer an artist. I do
believe that the published work of a good number of pho­tographers
shows a feeling for composition, balance, light
values, and atmosphere that cannot be captured by a
mechanical device alone. Indeed, the photographer has
to overcome optical and mechanical obstacles unknown
to the artist in oil and, however much he plans and pre­pares
in advance, the final product of his labors must be
the work of an instant. I know that the photographer
can become inspired, and reflect his mood in his work
just as surely as those who choose brush and palette to
vent their feelings.
Certainly, the photographer is like the artist in that
he receives satisfactions beyond financial award. There
would be far fewer of us if this were not true. First comes
the momentary elation when, after long seeking and much
planning, he sees the composition on the ground glass. A
second feeling of triumph comes when he views the fin­ished
transparency and finds there, captured in an instant,
the scene he had sought so long. And finally-nourish­ment
for the ego-the handsomely printed reproduction
and the credit line. Here is true compensation for effort
and expense, even if some of us have found we can't sur­vive
on credit lines alone.
PAGE THIRTY • ARIZONA HIGHWAYS • AUGUST 1956
The Arizona desert: we can't survive by credit lines alone
BY CECIL CALVIN RICHARDSON
S11 r.R IFF OF CocomNo CouNTY
Less than t\1 ·cnty miles from Flagstaff is the begin­ning
of Arizona 's on ly wi lderness area. It li es between
Sycamore Ca nyon, the Verde River, and Oak Creek
Canyon. Herc arc miles of thick fo rest and rough cou n­try
·penetrated by only a few good-weather trails and
dim forest roads, as \\'i ld a strip of co untry as can be
fo und any\1·hcre in the Southwest.
lt is· a land of sludows, wild animals, and the
"ghosts of yeste rday." A few ranches an d homesteads
cling to its outer fringes, hu t the interior is no p lace
for amateur hikers and explorers. Each year there are
those w ho wander into this area and become lost, to be
plucked out by a hardened and cynical bunch of Coco­nino
citi;:cns whose one hope is that the "damfoo ls will
just sit do\\'n some place and build a fire w hen night
comes." Planes, horses and jeeps have been used to find
lost hunters, amateur exp lorers and hikers.
During the ear ly days of Arizona Territory this
wilde rn ess area was an outlaw paradise, w ith a p hantom
popu lation of horse-rustle rs, robber hideo uts, and rest­c1mps
for travel-weary "owl-trailers" beset by hard-rid­ing
posses. On the lllap of Arizona it is plainly marked
"vVild crn css Arc,1," and it lies some twenty mil es south­,,
·cst of Flagstaff and U .S. I-lighway 66. Part of it is in
the Coconino National Forest. But as one o lcltimer stated,
"it belongs to Goel, the govcrnlllent, and the ghosts of
yesterday 1"
ln this area you wi ll find such descriptive names as
Secret i\ lountairi, Lost Mountain, Maroon Mountain,
Bear Mountain, Bear Sign Canyon, Sycamore Pass, Rattle­snake
Basin, Winter Cabin, Secret Cany on, Bl ack Moun­tain,
Turkey Butte, Doe Mountain, and many others.
Today the population consists mostly of roving
mountain lions and brown bear that prey on the deer,
antelope and elk that feed along dim forest aisles, and
the g hosts and legends of yesterday.
One of the earliest legends tells of a lost mine,
variously ref erred to as "The Lost Padre Mine," "The
Phantom Spanish Village," and "The Lost Arrasta Mine."
Although scoffed at by some of the oldtimers w ho have
spent a life-time prospecting in parts of this area,
rumors persist that it has been found and lost again in
recent years.
The main points of the legend state that the Span­ish
fathers established a small arrasta-ty pe mine in an
iso lated canyon in this area many, many years ago, with
a small sett lement of rough cabins. T he mine was
worked on ly a short time, the Spaniards withdrew, and
by nmv nature has :111 but ob literated traces of their
occupancy. A bout all t hat remains are crumbling cabins,
parts of the mine shaft and workings, all but engulfed
by new growth of timber :ind lesser vegetation.
T he canyon itself is but a small one, isolated and
all but hidd en in rough, hea vily timbered country . But
despite the scoffing of some res id ents, there are those w ho
sti ll believe in the legend and wi ll patiently continue the
search. Lost mines seldom become "lost" in the minds
of many.
.l' AC f,: TI [ I I( TY -T \ V 0 • ARIZONA JIIGll\VAYS • AUGUST 1956
At any rate more than a century after the Spaniards
came, hardy American pioneers followed in their foot­steps,
but they did not tarry long in this wilderness.
And then came the land-hungry settlers w ho took one
look at its rough terrain, and then went on around it to
find more suitable locations. But the outlaw took a sec­ond
look at this wild country and liked w hat he saw. It
was about halfway between sett lements in the north
and south, and the1:e was enough of it to satisfy the most
finicky and modestly retiring "gentleman of the hoot­owl
trail." Here he could lose himself for days, weeks,
or even months from impatient lawmen.
It was here that the "Phantom Band" of horse-rus­tlers
had a more or less permanent camp. Stolen bands
of horses were brought in from the south and kept hid­den
in a secret canyon until it was safe to move them
on up north to Utah, Colorado, or even New Mexico and
Nevada. In the meantime brand experts changed the
brands on them so cleverly that they fooled even the
canny eyes of astute livestock inspectors.
This band of horse-rustlers was the "elite" of the
West, and got its name from the fact that the main mem­bers
were for the most part respectable citizens who had
but one thing in common, the love of horseflesh and a
quick dollar! They raided the southern ranches and set­tlements
with clock-work precision that showed canny
planning and execution. Although these men took part
in the raids, and in the selling of the horses afterwards,
they did not linger for long in the wilderness hideout.
Hired help took care of the camp and horses for them
there. But these men did all the expert details such as
planning raids, changing brands, and selling the horses.
Like phantoms, they disappeared in the night, to appear
in some far-off place to sell " legitimate" horses. So
shrewd were the ring-leaders of this band that most of
them later retired w ith only the shadow of suspicion
clinging to them. They, of course, lost some horses and
men in the natural course of events, but even the hired
help could not put the "finger" on their bosses. If there
is such a thing as a successful horse-thief, these men
cou ld have laid a very good claim to the title.
The vVilderness was also the hideout for many
years for other tra velers of the "hoot-owl trail" going
either from north to south, or vice-versa. Here they could
rest up for as long as they needed to, get a change of
horses, and then slip away in the night to distant parts.
For over half a century many outlaws used this wil­derness
area for a hideout. Some of them were only lone
drifters wanted for serious crimes in other states, but
for the most part they came in small groups or bands,
used its sanctuary for a w hile, and then disappeared into
the limbo of whispered legends.
I have been into most of this area, along dim trails,
and over the many pronged forest paths that lead into
this part of the wilderness, and I have seen hundreds of
deer, antelope, turkey, and even bear and mountain
lions there, but I can safely say that I have not seen any
ghosts, not even that most prolific one, the "lost hunter."
This story p ersists to the present day. If you can
believe them, m:1ny people have seen the Lost Hunter.
But it is always someone who is also lost at the time,
usually another hunter. The Lost Hunter is usually seen
in the mists of early morning, after a 'Wearying night. He
glides silently from tree to tree, always just out of speak-
" ... It is a land of shadows, wild animals, and 'the ghosts of y esterday' . . "
Map of rJJilderness area
ing range. Once he rea lizes that he is being observed, he
will raise his rifle and point it toward the other lost
hunter. But for some unexplained reason he never fires.
While hi s victim is shivering in awful fear of the
crashing bullet, he lowers the rifle and disappears into
the surro unding gloom of the forest, and a high, derisive
laugh fl oats back, to echo about his paralyzed victim.
Occasionally he has been seen at dusk, on some
high, roc ky ridge near the badlands of Sycamore Can­yon,
but he always disappears, leaving no trace of his
footsteps. So far as is known he has never taken a shot
at anyone, but fa ncy tales of his presence persist with
each hunti ng season, and probably will for years to come.
T he deer here have a peculiar habit of standincr
very still for a moment, gazing at you in dumbfounded
amazement, but t he moment you move, they disappear
with amazi ng ra pidity . Even the squirrels have a trick
a!I their own. They dash in front of you and di sappear
nght before your eyes although you'd swear you saw
one go right up a tal l pine just in front of you. But don't
you believe it! After a couple of days of acute observa­t
ion I solved that riddle; it's only an illusion. A squirrel
darts toward a tree at full speed, but his color blends
with it, and at the last moment he disappears around
the trunk and races on to the next tree, safely out of
-----­.
I
your sight! It's a neat timing trick if you can do it, and
believe me they are past masters at the art.
The paths and trails are not safe for the unwary;
they twist and turn about on themselves in such utter
confusion that you are soon lost. Even the sun is of little
help; it seems far away and disappears above the trees,
to reappear in some unexpected place. After that you
are lost. It is best then to find a well-marked trail, or
an open space, build a fire and make yourself comforta­ble.
If you live long enough someone will find you; it
won't lengthen your life a bit to run around in circles.
Such people always die of exhaustion and exposure­at
least that's what the Coroner's jury says!
High on a ridge that separates the Sycamore Canyon
area from the forest there is a narrow defile. Over this
comes the mountain lions and big lumbering brown
bears. They may hole up in the rocky gorges of the
Sycamore, but the forest area is their hunting ground.
This was easily proved by a game department trapper
who used only one trap and one place on this narrow
ridge. In a short time he caught four mountain lions
and four bears, all in the same trap and at the same spot.
It would certainly be no place to pitch your camp for a
few days. A camp is fair game to a lion or bear, and
the odds are all in his favor. Only a fool will take a shot
at either one in the darkness at close quarters. The best
chance is that you won't hit him and wound him.
The ghosts of the outlaws of yesterday are real in
many ways today; they have left their marks on the dim
trails, in the silent canyons, and on all the high points
in the rough country. Lonely men playing hide-and-seek
with the law-abiding citizens have been known to do
strange things when left to their own devices.
There is the totallv unconfirmed story of the oTizzle-
- b bearded murderer who crept out of the Wilderness to a
home?eader's cabin on the outer fringe, one cold
mornmg, hungry and desperate. No doubt he came to
rob, and perhaps to kill, but he found only a very sick
family, most of ~hem ill with smallpox. He stayed, took
care of them until they were on the way to recovery, and
then disappeared, back into the wintry wilderness, to
die of the disease, alone and untended.
Then there is the story of the mean, lazy outlaw
who stole the tame, pet horses from widow women and
~hi ld~·en. While I do no~ vouch for its authenticity, I
like 1t-at least the endmg! It seems that this male
honzbre and a couple of pals of his ilk, while holed up
in the wilderness, were frowned upon by the other out-
PAGE TH lRTY-FOUR • ARIZONA H IG 1-n VAYS • AUGUST 1956
laws. In the words of an old outlaw, it was considered
all right to rustle horses from the big "spreads," as these
ranchers would run your hide off for a couple of days,
then give up. But if you stole horses that were the pets
of some nester's widow and kids, that was a "horse of
another color!" All the nester neighbors around for miles·
would gather like a flock of hawks on your trail, and
when all the signs played out they didn't quit. For days
they would hang around and snoop here and there like
blood hounds.
And so, after an especially bad-smelling raid by
this onery bunch, the other outlaws took matters into
their own hands. They sent an "innocent dude" out to
contact the leader of the nesters trying to trail the stolen
horses south of the wilderness, who advised him that the
self-respecting outlaws were fed up with the lowdown
oneriness of these three who stole from widows and
orphans. And that at daylight these same three bad
hombres would be escorted to the boundary with all the
stolen horses, with the place of emergence specified in
detail.
Sure enough, at daylight, the "odorous three" came
out of the wilderness at this place, driving the stolen
horses. Nor was there any fight to the death; the other
outlaws had thoughtfully removed the shootin' irons
from the thieves!
Then there is the story of the "outlaw preacher."
He was a man of some integrity despite an apparent
weakness of the flesh. He was a member of an outlaw
band given to traffic in stolen horses, the unlawful rob­bery
of banks, stages, and other miscellaneous places
where cold, hard cash was kept. But he was not wholly
happy in either profession, nor all bad. The man at least
had a conscience of sorts.
He would descend into the valley to the south from
his outlaw hideout, in frock coat, stove-pipe hat and a
long, mournful face. A tall, gaunt man in his fifties, by
his own words he always came to preach "but stayed to
rob."
In a few weeks his preaching chores would pall
on him although by all accounts he was an exc ellent
"hell and brimstone preacher." His black eyes would
take careful note of all that ,vent on in the community,
and a restless spell would set in. Finally he could stand
it no longer. At last he would "get another call to
preach some place else," and take tearful leave of his
faithful flock.
. A f~w days later an outlaw band would gather near
this particular place, and that night the leading citizens
would lose either livestock or cash, and sometimes both.
For a week or two the "preacher" would remain in
the outlaw hideout, and then he would become restless
again. His manner of leaving was always the same; he
would get drunk, but always intersperse his drinks with
quotations from the Bible until he could no loncrer talk
intelligibly. Next morning he would saddle up his roan
horse and,_ without a ·word of goodbye, start out to
preach agam. -
Finally on one of his trips down south he failed to
send word to his outlaw brethren, to summon them to
rob a community. The outlaws grew worried as the
days passed and no word came from him. Then finally,
late one night, he came into camp and staggered into
the cabin bunkhouse "drunker than a lord!" From his
frock coat he pulled out a roll of bills "big enough to
choke a cow" and divided it equally with all present.
There was a queer look in his eyes, and he was silent to
all questions. As soon as he finished handing out the
money, he turned without a word and staggered through
the open doorway into the shadowy moonlight.
They heard him mount his horse, and then his
voice rose in a hoarse chant, "There's an old coyote a
howlin' at th' moon-far away-far, far away ... " until
his voice died away in the distance.
The worried outlaws hunted for him the rest of the
night, ~ut ~lth'.rngh several of th~m stated that they
heard him smgmg this same song 111 the distance, they
never were able to find him.
And that was the last of the "outlaw preacher"
althougl: the:·e ?.rere others afterward who claimed they
heard him smgmg that same song on many a moonlit
night deep within the wilderness.
It may be that he, like so many others, lies in an
unmarked grave somewhere in the "haunted wilder­ness,"
or that he just simply "went over the hill" to
better things in a new life. I have never heard him sin er
on a moonlit night in the wilderness, but perhaps, lik~
one old timer said, I "just didn't listen long enough!"
I
The body of wntmg about the Southwest is
immense. Much of it is as dry as the desert itself, and
less nourishing. First of all, there are the Spanish diaries
and chronicles, then the pioneer narratives and subse­quent
histories, the government reports, pamphlets,
almanacs and frontier newspapers, and finally the aca­demic
dissertations, most of them merely factual and
bare-boned, yet indispensable for writers who seek in
novel, poem or play to re-create a past they personally
can never experience.
This is one of the most fascinating, frustrating, and
sometimes rewarding experiences a novelist can have;
to take a period and its historical personages and attempt
to re-create in words the way things were, or to seek in
a poem to evoke the spirit of a time or a place, so that
the reader is swept backward up the stream of history,
far from the muddy present to the crystalline headwa­ters
of truth.
There are two ways of doing this, by research into
the printed past and by field work in the tangible pres­ent.
With plenty of imagination a writer could write a
good work about the past by using either one or the
other methods; or, given enough imagination, by using
neither. Some years ago a professor of law in an east­ern
university wrote an imaginative novel about a non­existent
country called Islandia, in which he meticulously
created the history, geography, customs, language, even
the climate of a continent, which in the book attained
a reality of absolute conviction. ..
Arizonans will of course be skeptical of a Cali-
BY LA WREN CE CLARK POWELL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHIRLEY REED
fornian who crosses the River and writes of ways he can
never know as a native. And yet an outsider can often
see them clearer than an insider. The best novels about
Southern California-Ramona, Merton of the Movies,
A Place in the Sun, for example-were not written by
Native Sons of the Golden West. It does not seem really
important where a writer was born, but it is essential
that he put down roots in the land of which he writes.
The deeper the root-system the more nourishment
absorbed; and the more nurture a writer can stuff a
book full of, the more and longer will readers be drawn
and in their turn nourished by it. It is about some of
these nourishing Arizona books of the recent past that
I am writing here.
I read books for several reasons: the dictionary in
order better to write and speak our difficult language.
The encyclopedia and handbooks for definite informa­tion
on various subjects. Mysteries and romances for
entertainment, so-called escape from the cares of the
present. Books of travel and history either to learn more
about a region I have visited or something about a land
I am going to visit. A few novels, based on history, true
to regions and peopled by lifelike characters, combine
all of these qualities, and more completely satisfy me
than any other books.
Although I am a District of Columbian by birth
and have lived in Europe at different times, most of my
forty-seven years have been spent in that part of Cali­fornia
whicn lies southeast of the Tehachapi Mountains,
and which during all the years of my growing, until the
expansion of Los Angeles motorized and industrialized
it, had more in common with Arizona than with north­ernmost
California. I know the way of life in a semi­arid
land where water is a god and should be adored.
I know heat and drought and thirst and cloudburst too
-and this is more the language of Tucson than of San
Francisco.
So although I have never lived in Arizona, I find
mysel~ in sympathy with its cultural problems, and
sense 111 the Flagstaff-Phoenix-Tucson rivalry one simi­lar
to that of Sacramento-San Francisco-Los Angeles.
And although my living is made chiefly as librarian of
t~e Un~vers_ity of Calif?rnia at Los Angeles, my home
city with its enshroudmg atmosphere and thickening
traffic, holds less and less spiritual nourishment for me,
as I find myself drawn ineluctably by the lands east of
the River.
These lands do not fit within the borders of the
48th state, but extend eastward through New Mexico
and northward into southern Nevada, Utah and Colo­:
ado-the ~acific Southwest, its waters flowing ultimately
mto the R10 Colorado and the Gulf of California-a vast
region of which Arizona is the heartland. Books are
one key to it, increasing knowledge, widening under­standing,
deepening appreciation. And here now are a
few key books which have done these things for me.
There is Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Arch­bishop,
already well on its way to becoming a classic
American novel since its publication in 1927. Written
in bare and unadorned prose-qualities I like to think
of as Southwestern-this imaginative "biography" of
that great pioneer churchman, Archbishop Lamy of New
!Vlexico and Arizona, was inspired by the statue of the
French ecclesiastic which stands before the cathedral in
Santa Fe. It was documented by an obscure biography of
Lamy's colleague, Bishop Machebeuf, published in the
19th century at Pueblo, Colorado, and was backgrounded
by Miss Cather's visits to the Southwest through the dozen
years before she felt impelled to write the novel.
There is need for more such inspirational monu­ments
and fountains to the memory of Southwest
pioneers. Two of the greatest were ·the Spanish Ari­zonans,
Fathers Kino and Garces, who traversed this dry
and wrinkled land long before the time of the auto club
and the thermos jug. Tucson's City Hall Park contains
a stone relief of Kino by Mahonri Young. On the
grounds of the Yuma Indian School is a heroic statue
of Garces, by the Fleck brothers of Fulda, Germany,
erected in 1929 near the spot where Garces was mar­tyred
by the Yu mans in 178 r. The most beautiful of all
Southwest monuments known to me is also of Garces,
a noble limestone statue in a traffic circle in Bakersfield,
carved on a W.P.A. project by John Palo Kangas, and
commemorating the discoverer of the lower San Joaquin
Valley.
As for novels about the Indians of the Southwest,
1 lack statistics. There are many of them. Ramona was
certainly one of, if not the earliest, and it remains one
of the best. It has probably never been out-of-print since
first published in 1884. What accounts for its long life?
I think it is the vitality that animates it. Helen Hunt
Jackson imbued her book with the passionate indigna­tion
she felt at the fate of the Mission Indians. In spite
of the fact that her Ramona and Allcssandro act and
talk more like Castilians than Indians, the novel is essen­tially
true to life and is a thundering conscience-voice
of the white man's g·uilt.
Twenty-four ye;rs ago when I was a bright young
college graduate, loaded with book learning and certain
that all human problems could be solved on paper, my
first job was the lowly one of shipping clerk in one of
the Southwest's largest bookstores, V roman's of Pasa­dena
.. I worked in the cellar and a sweet-smelling place
it was, fragrant with pinewood packing boxes and the
paper-and-ink perfume of new books. Shipments came
sliding down the cellar chute from the alley above, and
my job was to leap upon them, armed only with a nail­puller,
unpack and stack and check in their mint-fresh
contents. It was a good year for American publishing,
that year 1929, producing A Farewell to A rms, Dods­worth,
Look Homeward, Angel, The Sound and the
Fury, and an Indian novel which I read then and have
just reread now, Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge, and
find it to be nearly perfect in conception and execu­tion.
This Navajo 5tory did not make a great impression
on me at the time. I was only twenty-three then, and it
takes more years than that to give a man the measuring
sticks to place a book in relationship to life to other
books.
Like Willa Cather's masterpiece, Laughing Boy is
classical in its freedom from overstatement, overwriting,
and all those slick devices and synthetic emotions that
spell Hollywood. From residence with the Navajos and
library research La Farge became familiar with the
tragic conflict between the two ways of life, Navajo and
White. Into the love story of Laughing Boy and Slim
Girl he imbued the essence of Navajo religion and ritual,
family life and marriage, economic subsistence by sheep­herding,
silversmithing and ,veaving-those rich facets
of a native culture contrasted ,,,ith the synthetic White
life along the railroad strip. I think this Laughing Boy
will nourish a good many generations of readers, for in
Navajo words
In beauty it is begun.
In beauty it is finished.
Once upon a time the Navajos and the Apaches
were one people, the Athapascan tribe said to have
come down into the Southwest long ago from the
Canadian wilderness. At some point they separated, the
Apaches probably representing the predatory wandering
element in the people. Southeastern Arizona and adjoin­ing
Mexico and New Mexico-the vast province of
Sonora before it was shrunk to the present Mexican
state-became Apache land, which they dominated
until the migratory Whites wrested it from them. All
the primitive cruelty of this savage people was accen­tuated
by the perfidy of the Whites, the chronology and
details of which have been set forth by Paul Wellman
in Death in the Desert.
Geronimo is popularly regarded as the greatest of
the Apaches. He was actually the least of the warrior
chieftains. The greatest was Mangus Colorado-Red
Sleeve-who rallied all the Apaches against the invad­ers
a century ago. He was a natural leader, possessed of
intelligence, strength and integrity, in every way superior
to the riff-raff miners and trappers and all the frontier
scum, rootless, greedy, and perfidious. Red Sleeve's
tribe was the Mimbreno or Mimbres Apaches whose
base was in the Pinos Altos Mountains at the headwaters
of the Gila, overlooking the copper country which mag­netized
the Whites and led to the ruin of the Indians.
The great American warrior inspired a novel, first
published in 1931, which in the ripe judgement of
J. Frank Dobie "remains for me the most moving and
incISive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest
that I have found." It came from the most unlikely of
sources-a writer of popular magazine fiction, best-sell­ing
philosophical novels, and inspirational essays, a
native of Detroit and resident of Los Angeles. I ref er
to Will Levington Comfort who died at fifty-four, only
a year after the publication of his masterpiece, Apache.
In his quest for truth and man's best way of life
Comfort had travelled through the Southwest and had
written one adventure novel called Somewhere South
in Sonora. \Vhen his son John took a job with a Bisbee
newspaper, Comfort came more frequently to Arizona,
and there in the heart of the Apache country he became
fired with the plan to write a fictionized biography of
Red Sleeve. Field work first-talk with old-timers and
traders and trips to the upper reaches of the Gila in
. order to get the lay of the land-its colors and cloud
shadows and the kinds of green growing things in the
mountains and brown dry growth on the desert below­and
then library research to establish the historical and
ethnological details.
Comfort was fortunate in having at hand, just
across the Arroyo Seco from his South Pasadena home,
one of the two great collections of Arizona books­in
the Southwest Museum, high on the hill in Los
PAGE THIRTY-EIGHT • AR IZONA HIGHWAYS • AUGUST 1956
'
Angeles's Highland Park. It was originally the collection
formed by Dr. Joseph Amasa Munk of Arizona and it
was offered by him to the University in Tucson on condi­tion
that a fireproof room be provided. Year after year
the University delayed and Dr. Munk finally lost patience
and gave his books and pamphlets to the Southwest
Museum, founded and headed then by Charles F. Lum­mis,
the great eccentric who first gave our region the
name "Southwest" and who originated the phrase "See
America · First." So accurately did Comfort document
his novel with Apache customs and lore that the pres­ent
director of the Southwest Museum, the venerable
Dr. Frederick Webb Hodge, greatest living authority on
the American Indians, has declared Apache to be utterly
true to the Indian way of !if e.
Like Laughing Boy, Comfort's Apache is written in
precise and evocative language, free of padding, techni­colored
emotions, and lengthy nature descriptions, and
as the former is the prototypical novel of the northern
Navajo so is the latter the classic expression of the south­ern
Apache. Arizona has never inspired two finer books,
published within two years of one another.
It should be apparent by now that my preference
in literature is for works of essence, for books which
distill truth from the bulk of human error and which
smelt a handful of metal from a carload of ore. This
supreme goal of the writer is attained by very few. It
took Will Comfort a life's work of twenty books before
he reached it in Apache. Not many historians or chron­iclers
of the Southwest give us essences. Too often they
write of surface events, whereas the changes of history,
the great decisions, are reached below surface, in the
hidden places of the human heart. Women are often the
clue to men's actions. Frank Dobie wrote in a recent
letter to me, "Take all the pioneer women in the chron­icles;
not a single one of them has a breast, or a flank,
or a perfume in the mouth; there is nothing of what
passes in the heart of one of them in the darkness of
illimitable space."
My wish for essential writing and Dobie's for
insight into a Southwest woman's heart are wonderfully
answered in an Arizona novel published in 1942. It is
Tacey Cromwell by Conrad Richter, and in its 208 pages,
each word of which was chosen with skill and fitted
with love, there is more of the essence of human nature
than in a hundred histories and a library of academic
dissertations.
It is a Bisbee novel, laid there after the turn of this
century. I have never been in Bisbee, but from reading
Richter's book I know the lay of that steep and narrow
~op per town before and after the big fire, and I sense
m a deeper way what a woman's love is and does.
For Tacey Cromwell is a woman, a former "sporti1w
house madam" who tries to leave the old ways in Socorr~
and start straight and new in Bisbee, and the story is
of what the so-called respectable citizens did to her­and
of her final triumph. It is a fruitful and mellow
book, destined I am sure for long life. The lore of
childhoo?, of mining and gambling, of frontier marriage
and bunal, the very feel and look and smell of the
Southwest in a raw time of prejudice and violence, are
inseparable from the story itself.
Perhaps Conrad Richter grew up in Bisbee. I am
not acquainted with his personal history. Whatever his
origins, I would bet that his background reading was
largely in the files of old Bisbee newspapers. Next to
personal experience and observation, no . other source
pans richer in the writing of historical novels.
These then are a few of the Southwest books of
recent years that I have found as good to the tooth as
a bagful of pifion nuts. I hope it is not too fanciful also
to see them as oasis springs for those who thirst, or as
shadow-makers for Southwesterners who sometimes find
too much sun a wearying thing.
~- .. _ .... !)..-:::::-
OPPOSITE PAGE
"ARIZONA COPPER: CONVERTER AISLE, AJO, ARIZONA, PHELPS DODGE MIN ­ING
CORP" BY RAY 1\IIANLEY. Copper is one of our most important sources of income
and at the present more of-it is produced in Arizona than any other state in the Union. This
picture was made commercially on assignment for Phelps Dodge. Gasses give the walls, columns,
etc., a grey surface dimming the interiors overall reflective surface making it a very difficult
subj ect. However, the challenge was there and to be truthful, it was welcome-something
I'd long wanted to photograph, for it was in a similar converter aisle in Clarksdale, Arizona,
CAMERA DATA BY RAY MANLEY
where I first worked for steady employment. Here, on the chip gang, laborers who shovel
the chips of matt that had ,pilled on the convener aisle floor , was my first taste of earning
my livelihood, in June, 1940. This picture r equired cooperation with the craneman, his swamper
and the converter foreman who directed the pouring of the partly smelted copper matt.
Lighting consisted of available light (existing light) and 60 #3B flashbulbs. Camera : Sxrn
Calumet; Lens: 12" Elnar; Film: 8x10 Ektachrome; Shutter: Open 2 seconds at f : 16.
BACK
"CATARACT CREEK, SUPAILAND" BY RAY MANLEY. The scene was taken just aboYc
first of four beautiful waterfalls in Supai, the home of some 250 I-L1rnsu Indians. Supai is a
branch canyon leading into the Colorado River. Accommodations are ava ilable for those who
COVER
do not wish to camp out, but reservations should be made in advance. Address: Supai, Arizona.
Basic canned foods arc ava ilable. Bring your own meats, or fresh ,·egetablcs with you. Camera:
;x7 Deardorff; Film: 5x7 Ektachrome; Lens: 8½" Ektar; Shutter : 1/ 25th at f : 12.
Yours Sincerely
OLD BRAVE AT MOVIE~ RAINY NIGHT ON THE HIGHWAY
vVhen fifteen whites,
with ancient guns,
Killed fifty brave
Apache sons,
He got the drift
and smiled to see
What must, he judged,
be comedy.
REn E SPE:--1<:ER Kn.LEY
BETWEEN SHOWERS
With the rain 's gray danger
Still hanging over him,
And the unseen menace of wind
Not yet gone away,
A lone cricket tries to reassure the day
vVith nothing more than one sm,1 1! song
Rcpe,1ted oYer and over again.
ELIZABETH-ELLE'.'< LONG
GIFT DAYS
T hey cannot be bought- those unseen days
Entr usted to the new year's care.
One by one in orderly sequence,
The year ,1pporrions our rightful share
Gift-\\-rapped in bright, bewitching hours
T hat quicl, cn all our latent powers.
GRACE /\lcLEAN BROWN
FR[EDO,\'I OF THE AIR WAVES
The lark broadcasts hi s summer song,
His joy accelerating.
H e isn 't bothered by mike frig ht
Or by his hoopcrating.
THEUlA IRELA~'D
LETTER FROM BEIRUT:
. .. We immensely enjoy every number of ARI ZONA HIGHWAYS. Until recently our
knowledge of Arizona was only Colorado Ri,·er and Grand Canyon. Vle knew
nothing of its fauna and flora, of its climate and other scenic spots, industrial develop­ments,
and life in general. ARIZO'.'<A H 1G1-1w AYS has a unique and attractive way of
spreading knowledge, inviting the interest of people even beyond the oceans. Your
colored photographs arc first-class and highly informative. Dr. Wyman of Boston
UniYersity has been, indeed, very thoughtful in selecting the right gift for his
Mid?le East friend , and I thank him for every number of ARIZONA HrGI-IWAYS we
receive.
It was a great pleasure for me to meet here in Beirut during a reception last year,
two citizens of Phoenix, Mr. and Mrs. Mehagian, who generously donated $25,000
to the Armenian Evangelical College in Beirut. In a community meeting they spoke
highly of Arizona and were surprised to find out th at some of us knew so much about
the state without Yisiting it, just through ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. Mr. and Mrs. Mehagian
were very much pleased and wanted to send more gift subscriptions to fri ends abroad
than they used to.
Ohannes Tilkian
American University of Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon (Syria )
• It is a pleaS11re to learn of our reception i11 Beirut mid to know ·-we are spreadi77g t/.ie
Aric:.o77a story so far from /.io7Jle. It is a pleaS11re to learn, too, of t/.ie good -works of
1Ylr. and Mrs. Me/.iagian, t·wo distinguished Ariz.onans.
WITH FRIENDS IN GERMANY:
... Issues of AR1zo:-.A HIGHWAYS ha,-e been used here in nrious lectures and talks in
our schools, both in the Padagogische Akademie at Worms/ Rhine and in the Geogra­phisches
Institut of the Uni,·ersity of i\Iainz . . .\lso I had the occasion to show them
in projectors at se,·eral local meetings of town people at Ems, Nassau, Frankfurt,
\Vicsbaden, etc. \Vhenever people ask me for a little talk on America, I select your
picture material for an underlining as my fayored sources of illustration. As someone
told me on one of these ocosions, they make one feel th,1t the globe is smaller despite
the fact that the painted Arizona desert tru ly is so different from any regional fea­ture
" ·c ha,·c dm\'11 here. Besides, si nce \ Vair Disnev sho\\·ed his famous "Die \\ -usrc
lcbt" (Li,·ing Desert' ) Arizona's features arc bc;oming n rv popular in Luropc.
unspcak the ,·arious mo,·ic-backgrounds " ·hich I am not particul.1 rlv fond of.
PAGE FORTY • ARI ZOXA HIGH,VAYS •
Hans Rosenbe rg
Bcrg-?\'assau, Germany
AUGU ST 1956
The car is like a snug cocoon
Holding us safe and warm and dry
While small Niagaras flood the glass
And other traffic s\\·ishes by.
Our hea dlights cut the night in wedges,
Like yellow cheese, that stab the dark
T o show the roadway satin-black
Framed by the windshield wiper's arc.
And tight beside you on the scat,
Hearing the wheels wash through the rain,
This moment holds security-
Our own small world, the right hand lane.
BETTY ISLER
NIGHT ROAD
A ribbon of concrete with sequins of light,
A glittering trail down the canyon of night.
CLE!L J. TURKl'.'<GTON
WINGS OF TIME
Across the desert's bluebird sky,
Like homing birds
In flight,
The hours ,\·ing by :
Do,·c dawn ... Canary noon .. .
Red rob in sunset ...
Then starling night.
VADA F. CARLSON
L\ '-1D-PA TTERN
Steadfast the hand that tends with coil
T he seasons and the "·aiting soil :
Harvestmen by earth-d ial know
Time to reap and time to grm\-.
P.\TR!CI.\ BE:\'TO'-