On the Borderland

 On the Borderland

Herein, Dear Reader, you will find:

1 - a listing of Dramatis Personae at the Borderland  -- 2.-A Towering Pillar of Fire -- 3. At the Barrio Queen and "a toda madre" -- 4.  Inside the Sundial -- 5. The Walking Dead in the Bright Blaze of the Sun -- 6. - A man whose esophagus was bad, locked toilets, and a profusion of deadly snakes -- 7. - Among innumerable massacres in the borderlands, here is a blood bath that was averted -- 8. Another ghost materializes -- 9. With Lucy and Desi Arnez in the Lift -- 10. -- The ghosts of Mummy Mountain -- 11. Another Mausoleum and More Ghosts in a ZOOM conference with Johannisberg -- 12.- Swine at a place erroneously identified as a hat factory -- 13. It's expensive to re-create at an elite Paradise Valley resort -- 14. The Sad Story of the War Hero, John Dunn -- 15. - Self-medicating on the road by the Wendy's leading to the Pascual (Easter) Yaqui Reservation -- 16. Resort kids and their trust fund fortunes -- 17. - The valley and industrial corridor linking Tucson to Nogales -- 18. - An Artist's Colony at old Tubac - 19. - Tuesday is a slow business day at the art's colony and fine-dining destination of Tubac -- 20. - The Tragic Tale of Cayetana  Andrade -- 21. - A short primer on the History of the Borderlands -- 22. - Forty Bald Hills with gringos, whores, and sons-of-bitches tormented by a great fucking wind - 23. -- Why the Sonoran city of Nogales has been accorded the appellation "Heroica Nogales" -- 24. Ruins at the Canyon of the White House -- 25. - A barking cry:  Co-ah! Co-ah! Co-ah! echoes across Madera Canyon  26. - The Elegant Trogon and its admirers -- 27. - A noble horse drinks from a hat and an error previously blemishing this text is corrected -- 27. - Presidio Museum and its exhibits including an account of the Boca Float #3 Land Grab - 28 - A Dramatic Account of a Duel fought at Tubac in 1859 -- 29. - The Ranch at Canoa -- 30. -- John Wayne and Irving Berlin  31. - A lively widow celebrates successfully crossing a dangerous river (or, perhaps, a desert) by dancing the fandango and improvising dirty lyrics -- 32. -- Near Patagonia, Arizona on the Harshaw Road and a crane as large as the Eiffel Tower -- 33.  - Bennu, the visitor for Outer Space -- 34. - A Roadside Shrine between Nogales and Patagonia -- 35. - A Famous Apache scout and, possibly, the model for Paul Newman's character in Hombre -- 36. -- On the way to a cow's breech-birth presentation. 

Dramatis personae

1.

Doctor Delmar Mock (“Doc Mock”) was a beloved country physician who lived in Patagonia, Arizona.  He was the only doctor between Nogales and Tombstone, Arizona for about thirty years and delivered 1500 babies in the area (as well as countless calves and sheep).  Doc Mock was a Seventh Day Adventist and, so, didn’t work on Saturdays, his Sabbath – but, otherwise, he was always on-call.  Laboring mothers recall him crawling into bed with them to catnap, remarking to his patient: “Wake me up when the baby is coming.”  He was allergic to latex and so couldn’t perform surgery since the gloves made his hands swell.  Nonetheless, he worked as an anesthesiologist at the hospital in Nogales for most of his career in addition to his vast practice as a country doctor.  He had too many patients, I suppose, and people recollect that some of his remedies were eccentric: he mixed up various potions for an injection that he called the “Mock Cocktail” – it produced a blinding headache but when that spasm subsided patients with all sorts of ailments claimed that the remedy worked; perhaps, the headache rendered their complaints inconsequential by comparison.  He was also famous for herbal concoctions that he peddled out of the trunk of his Pontiac.  (In the course of his practice, he wore out ten Pontiacs, driving as people recalled “like a bat out of Hell” across the desert; the sheriff’s department authorized him to use a revolving red light atop his vehicle – he called this his “red gumball.” Doc Mock claimed that he had driven more than a million miles attending to the sick.) Sometimes, he would meet patients at the Sonoita junction, about twenty miles north of Patagonia, a desolate crossroads where he would dispense medication, give shots to people, use his stethoscope to listen to hearts and lungs, and, under the blazing sun against cobalt blue mountains, issue prescriptions.  When he was a boy, he milked cows on his father’s ranch and so his handshake was bone-crushing.  Doc Mock was a pale soft-looking man with round spectacles.  He had flaming red hair until it all fell out and had to be replaced with a store-bought toupee purchased on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales, his wig also the color of fire, a hair-piece devised for aging Latin roues.   In Patagonia’s municipal park, there is a marker displaying his picture and an brief account of his life and adventures.  The modest monument is across the street from one of the nicest, and best maintained, public toilets in all of Arizona.  A wing of the Patagonia nursing home is named in his honor.

South32 is a globally diversified mining company that employs 9000 workers and the proprietor of the Hermosa Project, a 6000 acre mine producing silver, manganese (for batteries), and lead.  The Hermosa mine is near Patagonia on the Harshaw Road.  

Lucerna Pennington Page was kidnaped and tortured by the Apaches.  But she survived the ordeal.

John Ward’s step-son, Felix, was also kidnaped by the Indians, stolen from his ranch on the Nogales road.  This kidnaping triggered the so-called “Bascom Incident” and led to many years of war with the Chiricahua Apaches.

Cochise was an Apache war-chief who started by killing Mexicans, but, then, after the “Bascom Incident’ shifted his attention to killing Americans.

Maria Feliciano Arballa was a widow who danced to celebrate the successful crossing of a dangerous river and, then, was beaten by thugs encouraged to violence by a priest, Father Font.

Howell Manning Sr. was a rancher with an enormous spread of land south of what is now Green Valley, Arizona.  He planned for his son, Howell Manning, Jr. to take over his ranch but the young man was killed in a car accident just before Christmas in 1951.  John Wayne and Irving Berlin visited his ranch, but, on separate occasions.

John Dunn was a war hero who died after he was punched in the eye at the Harriet Island Park in St. Paul.

Cayetano Andrade was a constable in Santa Cruz county driven mad by injustice.  His family was evicted from their ranch near Tubac as a result of the Baca Float #3 decision in the United States Supreme Court.

Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit missionary, converted the Pima Indians to Catholicism in what is called the Alta Pimeria area of the Sonoran desert.  He founded more than 20 mission churches including the mission at Tumacacori (the Pima name means “place of the dry caliche mountains”).

Sylvester Mowry and Edward Cross were young men who fought a celebrated duel in 1859.  The duel didn’t kill them, but, nonetheless, both were dead before they reached 35 years of age. 

Bennu is an asteroid in an outer space with an eccentric orbit that threatens the Earth.

Baron Luis Gonzalez Cabeza de Baca was the proprietor of vast sheep herding territory in the area that Spaniards called “New Mexico” (now southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico).  After the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, his royal land grant was divided into five “floats”, including Baca Float #3.

When the Russians built a fort in the Sonoma Valley in what is now California, the Spanish Crown was concerned and sent one of its most skillful soldiers, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, the commander of the Tubac Presidio, west to find an overland passage to the Pacific.  Anza’s expedition crossed the Sonoran and Mojave deserts and established presidios (forts) at what is now San Diego and Monterrey, California.  (It was on this expedition that the Widow Arballa danced the fandango and sang lyrics said to be “not so nice.”)  Ultimately, Anza’s column of soldiers and settlers founded the Mission at San Francisco and the presidio at the Golden Gate, thereby repelling the Russian encroachment into the territory of northern California.

Margherita (“Rita”) Lotti was a pious Italian woman who lived in the town of Cascera.  Rita was married to a foul-tempered, abusive man named Paola Mancini.  He frequently beat his wife and was unfaithful to her.  Rita prayed for Paolo’s salvation and her intercession bore fruit: Paolo became a good Christian just before he fell victim to an ancestral vendetta – his enemies stabbed him to death.  Rita’s sons were duty-bound to avenge their father’s death but their mother remonstrated with them, pleading that they not lose their souls by committing crimes in the name of vengeance.  Both boys died within the year, struck down by dysentery, a fate interpreted either as God’s punishment for their schemes to avenge their father’s death or as God’s mercy, allowing them to die before they committed the mortal sin of homicide.  Rita joined a religious order and spent the last part of her life in a convent.  She mortified the flesh and developed a bleeding sore in the center of her forehead.  The sore did not heal and was regarded as a stigmata – that is, a representation of the wound in Christ’s brow gouged out by his cross of thorns.  When she died, Rita’s body stubbornly refused to decay, but, instead, withered to a desiccated mummy signifying that she was as incorruptible in death as she had been in life.  Saint Rita is the patron saint of abused housewives.  One hot afternoon, a Franciscan friar crossing the Sonoran desert saw, across the barren valley, a white outcropping on the slopes of a mountain.  The cliff of dazzling white stone reminded the Franciscan of the scar (“cicatrice”) on Saint Rita’s forehead.  (The Franciscan didn’t exactly understand Saint Rita’s story – the stigmata on her brow most notably didn’t heal into a pale white scar, but remained an oozing bloody abscess until the day of her death.)  Hence, the name of the mountain range near Tubac and Tumacacori in which Patagonia is located: the Santa Rita Mountains.

Charles Mingus was a jazz musician who played the upright bass.  He was a formidable figure, irascible, indignant, and brilliant.  He was born in Nogales, Arizona in 1933, a town where his father who was enlisted in the military was stationed.  It would be nice to claim that Doc Mock attended at his birth, but when Mingus was born, the future physician was developing his bone-crushing grip by milking cows on his father’s Kansas ranch.  I saw Mingus perform with a quartet at the Bronco Bar in Chanhassen, Minnesota in 1977.  He played with his back to the audience, didn’t say a word, and hustled off-stage to escape the place as soon as he could.

Jim Harrison was an American novelist and short story writer.  He is best known for his novella Legends of the Fall written in 1979 and, later, adapted as a notable motion picture.  Harrison lived in Patagonia, Arizona and died there in 2016.  Doc Mock never provided him with one of his hypodermic cocktails and never met him a Sonoita junction to prescribe medication for the writer.  The physician had been dead for six years when Harrison suffered his fatal heart attack.

Mickey Free was so nicknamed after a character in Charles Lever’s popular novel Charles O’Mallan, the Irish Dragoon (1840).  Mickey Free’s real name was Feliz Telles.  The playwright, Eugene O’Neill remarked that his family owned an edition of all of Charles Lever’s novels and that it sat on the book shelf at the family home next to Balzac and Nietzsche.  

John Beckmann was a lawyer in Austin, Minnesota who, with his wife Julie, traveled to Arizona in March, 2024 to attend the Board Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Underwriters Insurance (MAUI) company.   

Pillar of Fire

2.

Several wild fires were burning in the grasslands in the Texas panhandle.  The largest blaze, the Smokehouse Creek fire, has burned over a million acres of the staked plains north of Amarillo.  It is still burning as I write and could be burning yet as you read these words.  The grass fire is so enormous that it may well flare here and there in empty wastelands of ash until the end of time.   

I’ve driven through this part of Texas, a level treeless plain extending to all horizons, and there is nothing in the area.  Apparently, the wild fire raging across over a million acres (an area five or six times the size of New York City and larger than the entire state of Rhode Island) has destroyed about 150 occupied buildings and killed two people.  However, many thousands of cattle have perished.  

From 35,000 feet, as the plane from Minneapolis to Phoenix, passed over the flat brown expanses of eastern Colorado or, perhaps, western Oklahoma, I saw a fire burning on the barrens to the north.  The fire was invisible except for its plume of smoke.  Two puffs of white vaporous cloud rose over the brown terrain, each of them probably three or four-thousand feet high and, then, the smoke blown eastward coalesced into a column of black soot and ash high as a thunderhead, reaching about 15,000 feet into the sky.  Although the spectacle was impressive, it didn’t seem nearly large enough to represent the enormous Smokehouse Creek fire and, later, tracking the plane’s flight path, I determined that this blaze was somewhere in Colorado, possibly a hundred miles to the east of Pueblo.  The sky was blue and cloudless and, from the moving platform of the jet, I could see to the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains, a rim of blistered white curling along the hedge of the horizon.  The snow-capped peaks looked like a pale keloid scar, a slash across the land that had healed as a raised ridge of cicatrice.  A lens of haze seemed to dilute the colors of earth and air below the plane.  Possibly this was dispersed smoke leaking off the much vaster grass fires to the south, invisible from my vantage.

Barrio Queen – a toda madre

3.

Julie’s favorite restaurant in Phoenix is a Mexican place in Scottsdale called Barrio Queen.  The place  is located on Stetson Drive, a couple blocks north of the historic center of the town.  Scottsdale is very colorful and bright, a jewel in the desert sun, and covers an enormous territory as well stretching across a vast bowl-shaped valley between exposed anticlines of shattered pinkish rock.  An arrow-straight canal, always filled with sky-blue water in the early Spring when I visit cuts across the town.  The plaza at Scottsdale’s center is full of public art, two forty-foot tall tubes of aluminum hinged at their base with the slice between them marking the transit of the summer solstice.  When Julie and I went to Barrio Queen shortly after landing at the Skyharbor (Phoenix Airport), some sort of festival was underway in the park where the big sculpture was tethered by airline cables to the plaza; music wafted through the air and crowds of peoples stood between taco trucks and fry-bread vendors under canvas awnings.

The restaurant was crowded but we were able to sit at the bar to eat.  Barrio Queen’s trademark is a calavera girl with skulls entangled in a beehive hair-do, blue eyesockets, and lips painted chalk-white to simulate skeletal teeth.  The place’s motto is Comida a toda madre – that is, literally: “Food for every mother” a street-lingo phrase that means “Food that’s fucking awesome.”  Julie ordered a “Skinny Chola” – a kind of tequila martini.  Apparently, she mispronounced the word “chola”; the bartender corrected her pronunciation.  She said that she wanted a “skinny cholla” – that is a kind of crooked, zigzagging cactus.  A chola is Mexican gangster girl, usually dressed in black leather with her lips the color of blood and eyebrows penciled onto her forehead to simulate a Kabuki-like expression of perpetual, unremitting fury.  The bartender was burly and he shook the drinks in a bullet-shaped silver vessel; it was strenuous exercise and his forearms were muscular.  

Sundial

4.  

There’s astro-turf lapped up around the Sundial Hotel in Scottsdale.  The green carpet glistens as if wet with dew and it’s custom cut to fill the space outside the building between curb and wall.  Although the structure is built with soot-colored cinder-block walls stacked up four stories high, the hotel gives the impression of being a block of jade with green exterior corridors and solemn, heavy emerald-colored doors to each room.  The suites have wooden louvered windows to keep out the sun and the glass behind the slats is tinted green as well.  It’s like sleeping inside a jade mausoleum.

The Sundial Hotel stands next to a vacant lot tufted with sun-bleached buffalo grass scattered across of caliche field  A police station without windows hovers atop concrete stilts – squad cars are parked in the shadow of the suspended station house.  Scottsdale’s broad lanes are mostly empty in the twilight, but cries from some sort of mass gathering, either a protest or festival, waft through the air together with snatches of music.  Something is going on, but it’s invisible from the jade terraces of the Sundial Hotel.  Around midnight, the crowd noise swells to a crescendo and I can hear Cyndi Lauper’s song “The Girls Just Want to Have Fun” echoing through the empty plazas.  There are shouts of acclamation, some rhythmic chanting – but the entire sonic landscape is unreal, as if recorded with bad apparatus and, then, re-played at low fidelity for some occult purpose.  There was a crowd somewhere once, chanting and cheers in some place, but what resounds in the darkness here is just a dim recording of that gathering.

In the morning, I take note of the hotel’s ornamentation: branching patterns of metal bars in the frames of green opaque windows in the stairwells, a terrace with balustrades also adorned with this vegetal metal pattern, and, in a niche in the lobby, a statue of an Oriental goddess in a style that I recognize from Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.  The hotel is about six or seven miles from FLW’s Taliesin West and, perhaps, this explains the structure’s design and stylistic features.  However, there is no explanation for the strange cacophony of crowd sounds and pop tunes echoing down the streets in the middle of the night.  

The Walking Dead in the bright blaze of the Sun

5.

Early Sunday morning, I walk from the hotel to the old center of Scottsdale.  A canal running from mountains in the East across the arid valley-floor cuts a razor-straight course through the middle of town, slicing apart the plazas and running along the base of the luxury hotels with their scaly, columnar palm trees rooted in pink gravel overlooking the concrete brimming with water.  It’s not exactly a paradox that, in a place where there is no water, water-engineering is paramount.  The old Hohokom Indians who lived in this vicinity along the Rio Salada, that is, the Salt River, knew this and so do the modern architects and designers who have configured this landscape with an artificial stream flowing in its rigid corset of cement.  

The principal avenues in downtown Scottsdale are lined with art galleries and trendy restaurants.  Young people are waiting in line outside of places that serve brunch and the patios are decked with cast-iron tables surrounded by diners.  Floral drinks with garlands of hisbiscus sit next to platters heaped with eggs, fried potatoes, and bacon.  At this time of year, most of the fountains are silent and drained, empty basins littered with the flakes of leaves fallen from slithery-looking palo verde trees.

I walk past a place called ASAP Infusions.  Here you can hire someone to put a needle in your arm and pump fluids into your body intravenously.  It’s not therapy but a beauty treatment or, in some cases, a hangover cure.  Drink too much and, instead of suffering with a headache, you can get an infusion of aromatic fluids that will plump up your flesh and make your face glow with a ruddy radiance.  Nurses will come to you home and infuse you there.  It seems decadent to me, but what do I know?

Next to ASAP Infusions, I see the Face Bar.  “Walk-ins” are welcome.  In the “Face Bar” someone will smear your brow and cheeks with costly unguents.  The sun here is the enemy, its rays a cancer-causing devastation pouring out of the sky.  To keep your skin fresh and supple, you must hire someone to give you periodic infusions, adding rare and expensive ingredients to your blood, and, then, repelling the rays of the sun with balms massaged into your skin.  With these regimens conscientiously applied, it is possible to live forever and, on the sidewalks, you see perfectly embalmed men and women, marching to their destinations in Tommy Bahama fashions with only their ancient glittering eyes, embedded in their perfect flesh, signifying their true age.     

Polychrome wild stallions made from poured concrete lunge and rear around jets of water burbling up out of a fountain at the center of a traffic circle.  

A man whose esophagus was bad and rattlesnakes

6.

Phoenix didn’t exist to any real extent until the advent of air conditioning made life in the Valley of the Sun bearable.  (Before AC, the place was a cowboy crossroads, some Sonoran row-houses at Scottsdale, and scattered ranches whose houses were equipped with rooms in which the curtains could be dowsed with water to decrease the inside temperatures a few degrees by evaporation.)  Phoenix is a thoroughly modern city, a product of technology, and, therefore, organized as a great rectilinear grid superimposed upon the barren landscape – most of the city is planned to a lesser or greater extent; Phoenix doesn’t have old organic neighborhoods.  At half-mile intervals, broad arterial highways with four lanes and median cross the terrain, interrupted (also every half-mile or so) by traffic lights.  If you are in west Phoenix, you will often find yourself on McDowell Road or Camelback Highway or, in Scottsdale, Indian School Road.  These thoroughfares are, more or less, unavoidable.  

Julie and I set out for McDowell Mountain Park to the northwest of Phoenix.  Of course, the most direct route to that place was via McDowell Road.  It was midday and we stopped at a McDonald’s on McDowell Road.  The place was shabby and there were homeless men in the parking lot shoving stolen shopping carts heavily laden with their gear ahead of them.  The spaces between the commercial buildings clustered around the restaurant were treeless, naked heaps of gravel with dilapidated cactus growing at intervals – in this sort of landscape, structures stand naked, their pipes and vents and bare concrete-block walls all pitilessly exposed.  If there is garbage spilling out of a dumpster or a burnt-out car shoved against a parapet, all of this is visible.  Because of the lack of brush and trees, desert communities seem particularly disheveled and dirty – all of the mess is in plain view.

Prices at the McDonald’s were shocking.  An old man with his wife sat a table next to me.  The old men kept choking on phlegm in his throat and coughing and gagging, clearing avalanches of mucus out of his esophagus with a trumpeting sound midway between a gasp and a retching sound.  The noise was intolerable to Julie and she retreated from the dining room to eat her burger and fries in the rental car.  I wanted to use the toilet but the water closet was equipped with a key-pad lock.  Several little kids were pecking at the lock as if it were a type-writer and, somehow, they had managed to confuse the device so severely that no one could get it open.  At last, a manager had to be summoned from the back of the house to get the bathroom door open.  The old guy with the slime in his pipes gagged some more and but was courtly – he held the door open for several of the other patrons to exit into the parking lot.  Across the street, on a fan-shaped deposit of gravel, a Catarina calavera, a female skeleton wearing an old-time black gown with a bonnet and gloves over her bony fingers strutted along the edge of boulevard.

McDowell Road ends at the Bee-Line Highway, an arrow-straight freeway that crosses the empty sector of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation.  There is nothing much on the reservation – the Indians seem to be defiantly against any sort of development.  The Phoenix suburbs end abruptly at the Reservation’s border and the desert to the west is mostly empty, several small compounds of housing located off the highway at the end of neglected-looking asphalt roads.  A few cultivated squares of land break the monotony of sage and mesquite covering the flat plain and, on the slopes of some low mountains, really just heaps of sun-blasted rock, scattered saguaro overlook the highway.  The Indians aren’t hospitable and there’s nothing to invite the traveler into the reservation.  Every mile or so, there are gravel turn-offs from the Bee-Line so that a visitor can aim his or her camera at Mount McDowell, an imposing crag of pinkish sandstone conglomerate at the edge of the Reservation.  The mountain, it is said, glows bright red at dawn and sunset.  Mid-day, when we approached the peak, it was a slate-grey with veins of calcite shining overhead like bright patches of snow.  

The trail leading to the peak of Mount McDowell is said to be the best hike in Phoenix that you will never take.  In the eighties, vandals scatched graffiti on sacred Indian petroglyphs inscribed on boulders near the trail.  The Indians closed the path to the public and have never re-opened it.

The Bee-Line highway ends at some stoplights in a suburb called the Fountain Hills, a place on the east side of the Salt River Reservation.  The town consists of a couple of boulevards lined by housing developments all erected, it seems, within the last ten years – miles of flat-topped suburban housing with big windows, two-car garages and lots landscaped with ornamental rocks, raked gravel, and various kinds of cactus.  According to Wikipedia, the median cost of these houses is something like $400,000 and the population demographic is 40 to 1 White Caucasian.  The median age in Fountain Hills is 69 years old.  

The McDowell Mountain Park or Preserve is located about four miles to the north of Fountain Hills.  When we visited, diamond-back rattlesnakes were ubiquitous, although I didn’t see one during the half-hour or so that I hiked on one of the park’s trails.  (Dramatic warnings were posted at every trail head and at the park headquarters parking lot.)  If you see a dangerous animal, for instance, a scorpion or rattlesnake in this part of the world, you should say: San Jorge Benedito / Amarra tu animalito (“Saint George, dear / leash your critter here.”) Nice elderly men and women staffed the visitor center.  The mountain hovered overhead, rising over a crumpled landscape of barren foothills.  A cleft in the peak is called the Gunsight.  A few dusty-looking dirt roads meandered across the foothills and some of the ridges had sheer sides with columnar palisades of brown rock.  There wasn’t anything to do in the park and, so, we drove back to Scottsdale.  

Among innumerable massacres, here is a bloodbath that didn’t actually occur --

7.

On the road returning to Fountain Hills, the highway crests over the retirement community offering an excellent vantage on the Superstition Mountains.  Under the bright sun, the peaks seemed fused together in a continuous rampart of blue-grey columns.  Standing apart from the massif, an isolated pinnacle of rock, the throat of an extinct volcano, points skyward.  This is Weaver’s Needle, a landmark famous in legends associated with the Lost Dutchman Mine.  (The needle is not named for its shape, but in honor of its discoverer, a mountain man named Pauline Weaver who died at age 68 at Camp Verde in what is now Arizona in 1867; “Pauline” derives from “Paulino,” the Spanish version of Weaver’s surname, “Powell.”) Weaver’s Needle is so situated that roads skirting the base of the Superstition Mountains afford no vantage on the landmark, it is concealed by the upward thrust of the mountains’ principal ridge and, then, the sheer canyon walls enclosing the road closest to the pinnacle, the so-called “Apache Trail”.  I don’t recall seeing the Needle during previous trips to Arizona but the vista from the ridge overlooking Fountain Hills offered a spectacular view of the feature.

In some versions of the Lost Dutchman legend, Weaver’s Needle is a sort of gnomon at the center of a colossal sundial.  On a certain date, and at a precise hour in the morning (or is it the afternoon?) the shadow cast by the Needle points to the adit or shaft of the Dutchman’s mine.  It’s an engaging tale and explorers have expended much time and energy prospecting in the rugged gulches and jagged butte country rubbing up against the pinnacle.  But the mountains are igneous, a geological formation in which gold could not be formed and, so, it seems unlikely that there is any mine hidden in the area.  Commentators anxious to preserve the legend argue that the gold isn’t hidden in a mine at all but represents a cache of treasure, concealed in the wilderness by Pedro de Peralta, the governor of New Mexico territory (modern Arizona, parts of California, Nevada, and New Mexico).  While transporting a wagon-load of silver and gold across the desert, Apaches are supposed to have attacked Peralta’s convoy resulting in a massacre and the concealment of the treasure in the Superstition Mountains somewhere under the skeletal stone finger of the pinnacle.  The only problem with this story is that there was no Peralta Massacre – the event is supposed to have occurred in about 1840 that is more than a hundred and fifty years after Peralta was governor of the territory.  Lots of corpses are discovered in the Superstition Mountains – the range is extremely dangerous with hidden gorges and peaks prone to deadly rockfalls and hikers are often confused by the topography and either killed by the sun or the terrain.  People are always stumbling on headless or handless skeletons (there are coyotes and javalina in the mountains) and not all of these casualties are related to the mine and its legendary snipers, Apache marauders, and malevolent ghosts.

A ghost...

8.   

In the McDowell Mountain Park, I scrambled up a small knoll, shaggy with little, lethal-looking cacti.  From the top of the hill, the empty terrain spilled away from my vantage, rolling in jagged ridges to the Superstition Mountains and Weaver’s Needle.  From this point, many visitors have reported seeing a lone old-time prospector making his way up a draw, leading a patient, heavily burdened mule.  The prospector doesn’t stir up any dust because he is a phantom and, although he trudges in a mechanical way toward the viewer, he never seems to get any closer.  I watched the arroyos for the ghost prospector but didn’t catch a glimpse of him.  Perhaps, the Spring efflorescence of the diamondback rattlesnakes had deterred him from making an appearance.

With Lucy and Desi in the Lift

9.

The road back to Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, our destination, took a different route across the desert.  The highway, Shea Road, climbed over some high foothills largely encumbered with absurdly large houses, mansions perched over steep ravines with obedient saguaro lining driveways curled like pig’s tails. A cleft between two stony buttes leads over the saddle to Scottsdale, it’s city limit abutting the boundaries of Fountain Hills.  The Mayo Clinic’s white compound stands at the head of the big valley which rolls down to central Scottsdale.  On its west border, Scottsdale is bounded by Paradise Valley, an expensive Phoenix suburb built between Mummy Mountain, an inconspicuous dome of rock north of the much higher and more impressive Camelback.  Paradise Valley is Phoenix’s most prestigious address.  A rogue’s gallery of celebrities and politicians have maintained houses in this place including Barry Goldwater, Alice Cooper, Dan Quayle, G. Gordon Liddy, and the judges William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor.  There are also a number of luxury resorts occupying the trough between the mountains.  

Our group had rooms reserved at the Mountain Shadows resort, an oasis between the peaks with a well-known 18-hole short course – all of its holes are par three.  (The course was designed by Forrest Richardson, a famous golf course landscaper and architect).  This resort, now extensively remodeled, dates to 1959 when it was one of the first amenities to open its doors as a motel with pool and golf course in the swale between the mountains.  In the elevator, a photo collage shows Lucy and Desi Arnez grinning for the camera and Bob Hope receives golf lessons, it seems, from the course’s pro.  Lucy wears a stylish white hat with a sort of veil against the desert sun; the actress was, after all, a red-head known for her creamy complexion.  Desi looks like a cat that’s just swallowed his host’s pet canary.

The Ghosts of Mummy Mountain

10.

I asked the concierge at Mountain Shadows if there was a place in the neighborhood where I could walk.  The girl seemed concerned that I would hike on the par-three golf course.  “No, no, you can not go on the golf course.  Dangerous. People are shooting there.”  But I had not asked her if I could traverse the Three-Par on foot.  Her face was heavily made-up and immobile.  She said that I should cross the road and ascend the residential streets toward the mountain where there were trails.  Her directions were ambiguous and I didn’t exactly understand them.

It was midday with the sun very bright overhead.  The light was neutral and all-encompassing and the mountains were bleached to the color of pale, weathered cardboard.  Beyond the boulevard, Marriott’s Camelback Resort sprawls across a terrace under the steep ridge of the mountain.  I entered the resort, walking on sidewalk drenched in places by sprinklers concealed in the turf of putting greens.  The resort was immense and deserted, winding lanes lined with sepulchral cottages, casitas in the local nomenclature.  Reception was housed in a white building with stark, empty cantilevered terraces.  A hotel building with balconies cast a short shadow in vertical rays of sun overhead.  Pools behind staked fences decorated the hillside.  Now and then, a security guard driving an electric golf cart cruised by; the guards were on obscure missions, delivering messages, perhaps.  Under awnings on metal poles, a Hispanic maid trudged behind a cart heaped with dirty laundry.  There seemed to be no guests registered at the place, no staff except the security guards on patrol, and an occasional chamber-maid.  The tennis courts were unused and no one was practicing their short game on the putting greens.  

It took me twenty minutes to traverse this immense necropolis.  I passed shuttered cafes and coffee shops and spas with gloomy dark windows, saunas in white sheds, and, at last, a steep uphill climb by footpath to the Mummy Mountain Barbecue, a plaza under the barren escarpment lined by little shacks decorated to resemble a Wild West ghost town.  There was a jail, general store, several saloons, a saddle and tack shop, a cantina and bank and something called the Twilight Theater as well as  a place advertising candy for sale; one of the sheds was apparently supposed to be a brothel.  All of these buildings with their brightly painted false-front facades stood in two intersecting ranks around a town square in which there was an industrial-sized fire-pit, a facility comprised of metal rings encircling some rusty grills and a pyre of half-charred logs.  At one corner of the sun-blasted terrace, a small amphitheater had been built, some metal pews under aluminum bowers intended to cast cooling shadows over the audience facing a small concrete stage.  Presumably, guests were invited to gather in the simulated ghost town for barbecue and a hootenanny – I imagined well-heeled people in pastel garments and cowboy boots line-dancing in front of the stage with enthusiastic young people “pickin’ and grinnin’” as they sang and played their instruments.  But, now, it was completely silent and deserted; there was no music, not even bird-song and the artificial ghost town seemed abandoned, on the verge of becoming a real ghost-town with its sheds poorly maintained and falling into disrepair.  The grills looked less than hygienic.  At the place where the rows of fake buildings converged, a water-wheel was set in a wooden trough wet with stagnant water.  Shrouds of thorn bushes surrounded the BBQ terrace on the hill-side.  It’s always the case that there is nothing more desolate and gloomy than an abandoned place once intended for merriment.  On the cold rock shores of Lake Superior, at Thunderbay in Canada, I once walked along the edges of an old, bankrupt amusement park; in Utah, I saw the gaunt skeleton of an enormous dance-hall built on a pier extending into the dead grey waters of the Great Salt Lake; in Asbury Park, an empty boardwalk connected huge brick pavilions suspended over the Atlantic Ocean – all of these places were terrifying in their own ways and the Mummy Mountain Barbecue seemed equally sinister to me. 

I found a passage through the thorn bushes and, then, down a ravine to a residential street.  The lane tilted upward sharply, making several hairpin curves as it climbed the mountain.  At intervals, big yellow signs warned that this was a DEAD END road.  Vast mansions hung from hillsides, haphazardly tacked to cliffs.  Each mansion occupied an acreage that was fenced and protected by surveillance cameras nested in trees or set atop cairns of rock.  These places had nightmarishly steep driveways plunging down the hillside from house to lane.  The driveways were asphalt and looked like black tongues hanging from the jaws of the enormous villas.  Some of the iron gates were set in columnar stacks of petrified wood, harvested from the northern deserts near the Grand Canyon and, then, laboriously heaped around the entrances to these estates.  The gates were so heavy and immobile that I couldn’t imagine them ever being opened; presumably massive engines were hidden in the landscaping behind the pillars of petrified wood, contrivances powerful enough to pivot the metal walls forward onto the street.  Ferns planted among the barrel-shaped trunks of petrified wood cast shadows against the fossils; the wind was less than a whisper and the ferns trembled slightly in the hot breeze and their caterpillar shadows cast on the rock trembled.  

The homes along the crest of the ridge were linear, box-car sized modules linked together by enclosed arcades and walkways; the modular structures had huge picture windows showing black as cave openings overhead.  A colossal metal cross stood above a terrace at one of the houses.  An American flag, its pole stabbed into the top of the cross, drooped down, limp and disconsolate, untouched by any friendly puff of air.  Indeed, the hillside with the huge mansions disfiguring the spine of rock seemed enclosed in some bubble of privilege, so intensely defended from trespassers and so arrogantly elite that even the wind didn’t dare enter these enclaves – under the open sky, the estates seemed curiously airless and claustrophobic.  The garages dug into the mountain were like sealed tombs, entrances blocked by amethyst crystal.  Indeed, the mansions were too big for any individual family or any person no matter how important, too large for the living and, so, apparently the dwellings of the dead.  This was the embittered, sun-scarred realm of Pluto.    

The lane ended with a private drive that climbed diagonally toward yet anothe enormous and lifeless mansion.  I was afraid to venture up that road, even though the massy iron gate was rotated open.  Signs helpfully posted at the side of the gate showed the stick figure of an interloper being crushed to death by the iron bars; at the pinch-point, a jagged line signified pain and fatal injury.   It didn’t seem prudent to ascend beyond this point and, so, I turned around and made my way downhill.  I had come a long way up the side of Mummy Mountain and it took me a half-hour or more to reach the public highway running through the center of the saddle between the mountains.  On the empty putting greens, a several large black starlings with long tails hooted at one another.  At the entrance to the Camelback Resort, a wall was marked with words, all underlined by flowering bushes that were bright yellow, scarlet, and midnight blue: IN ALL THE WORLD THERE IS ONLY ONE.

Another Mausoleum and More Ghosts

11.

Our Board Meeting was improbably scheduled for 8:00 a.m. in a conference room at an office park about a half-hour from Paradise Valley.  I rose early and went down to the open-air café behind the resort’s hotel building near the first tee on the golf course.  The rising sun painted the Camelback in voluptuous flesh-tones, Rubens’ pink at the summit and, then, darker peach below where dawn’s rays were just beginning to probe the fissures and crevasses in the mountain.  Purplish-violet shadows oozed out of the canyons contrasting sharply with dawn’s paint on the mountains upper slopes.  

It was a half-hour drive to our meeting place.  The freeways were tranquil.  The sun cut through the passes of the mountains to the east and shot its long rays over a landscape of office buildings and empty parking lots.  In the financial sector, bankers and insurance brokers and realtors now work from home.  So do investment counselors and stockbrokers and most lawyers.  The result is that the office buildings that housed these professions before Covid are now largely empty.  Most of the big suites in the building where we held our board meeting were vacant.  When I searched for the toilet, I saw doors without lettered signs and empty rooms with expanses of carefully shampooed carpet extending through thresholds opening into yet more empty offices, the gloomy chambers lit by windows overlooking the equally empty parking lots.  At least, three-quarters of the offices were vacant and I wondered what this meant from an economic point of view.  How could buildings like this be sustained if they were mostly without tenants.

A young woman met us at the door to her offices.  She led us to a conference room with a long utilitarian table under a big TV screen on the wall.  There was no coffee brewing, no bottles of water, no fruit juice, no breakfast muffins or doughnuts.  In a crystal bowl, I found some stale candy left over from Halloween.  Beyond the conference room, there was an open space in which a half-dozen work-stations in cubicles were huddled together – all of the cubicles had been abandoned; a couple of them still displayed family photographs, pictures of people on the desert with Golden or Labrador retrievers among them – but the office machines and computer terminals had all been stripped away.  Larger, more prestigious offices lined the wall and they still showed name-plates on the doors but none of these people worked here any longer.  

The woman who convened our meeting in Phoenix, Arizona was teleworking.  She joined the meeting from Johannisberg in South Africa.  She could have been anywhere, appearing in a sort of glowing void on the TV set.  Eight o’clock a.m. in Phoenix is five o’clock pm in “Joe-berg” as she called her home.  

None of this made any sense to me: we meet in Phoenix because the captive insurance company is incorporated under Arizona law and domiciled in that State – thus, taking advantage of favorable statutory and tax law in Arizona.  But everyone involved in servicing the account is now working out of South Africa.  The last vestiges of the consultant company’s employees in Phoenix retired last year.  The girl who met us at the door is hired to lock and unlock the office and conference room.  When our meeting concluded after about two hours.  She ushered us to the empty corridor and locked the empty office behind us.

Swine

12. 

Our group took an Uber from the resort to a restaurant called Lon’s at the Hermosa.  The Uber driver was a beefy, robust woman undoubtedly older than she looked, a woman who had been a trauma nurse in Washington D.C. but was now retired to the Valley of the Sun.  She told us that every day in the Southwest was a joy for her.

Lons is a boutique inn with a sprawling restaurant built inside a renovated Stetson hat factory – at least, so we were informed.  The place was dark with wood timbers, surrounded by a mosaic of patios shaded by ancient trees.  The assistant chef at the restaurant is a young man who had worked as head chef at the Austin Country Club back in Minnesota.  Apparently, he had moved to the North from Phoenix, the city that was his home and to which he had now returned.  The young man was off-duty on the night that we ate at Lon’s but he came to the dining room from his apartment nearby and greeted members our group.  He looked remarkably young and handsome.  One of the ladies hugged him.  A little abashed, he hovered over the head of our table and, then, after a few minutes, vanished into the purplish night outside the restaurant.  

The waiter assigned to our table, shamelessly plugged the most expensive items on the menu, providing personal testimonials as to the excellence of the victuals.  His mantra was that you should order the best and most costly stuff on the menu and, then, add a lobster tail as well.  A rather dour, studious-looking Sommelier – he had the appearance of a disgruntled accountant – assisted the waiter.  I suppose he also made a pitch for our purchase of fantastically expensive wine, although one of our group is a certified Sommelier himself and, so, deprived the salesman of some of the profits, I suppose, that he hoped to earn.  (Of course, the most expensive is not necessarily the best.)  The wine expert in our group ordered the man to decant the wine, a task that he performed with obvious resentment and hesitation.  From that point forward, a twitchy, anxious steward with the haggard features of long-time heroin addict circulated among the diners keeping their glasses topped off with red and white wine.  

The waiter said that we should all order the “Oink” cocktail, a drink that retailed at $25 dollar per eight ounce glass.  Since there were meat packing executives from the pork industry at the table, this proposition was attractive.  I even sipped one of these drinks – it tasted a bit like a Manhattan made with expensive and acerbic cognac.  The waiter said that when we toasted with our “Oink” drinks, we should all grunt like pigs.  You know the feeling: are they laughing with you or at you?

Notwithstanding his unctuous delivery and stand-up comedian patter, the waiter wasn’t particularly competent.  Parts of the order were messed-up.  One platter of caramelized Brussel sprouts never arrived and the heroin addict responsible for pouring wine at the table grimaced in sheer agony as if he were enduring the pangs of withdrawal sickness as he served us.  (He had the rugged, ravaged features of Sam Shepherd, the playwright.) The head waiter never returned to ask if we were satisfied with our food.  Of course, everything was fantastically expensive and, although at functions of this sort, you have the sense that you are engaged in the most decadent kind of feasting, in truth, portions were very small and the impression of abundance arises from exuberance induced by alcohol.  I had scallops as my entree and estimated that each bite from the three large and spongy morsels cost about eight dollars.  The waiter mis-timed the table and returned too late to take dessert orders.  By the time, he got around to coming back to encourage after-dinner cordials or desserts, the Uber was already on order and speeding to the restaurant to return us to the resort.   

Shampoo

13.

At the Mountain Shadows resort, the shower stall, a crystal box of the sort in which Bela Lugosi, displayed trophy cadavers of beautiful women in The Black Cat, stands in the middle of the bed chamber.  A white curtain can be drawn around the stall.  Inside the shower, a teak shelf displays shampoo, hair conditioner, and body wash.  These soaps are made from Ayuravedic herbs organically grown and sustainably collected.  If you want to enjoy these fine products at home, simply remove them from the room and your account will be charged $28 a bottle. 

At a resort like this, a yogurt parfait with a glass of orange juice costs $48 not including gratuity.  Bottled water is seven dollars for 16 ounces.  A Kit-Kat candy bar goes for $4.50.  The sunshine is rented to you at the rate of a dollar per square yard and, at midday, if there is breath of cooling wind for respite from the heat, you are charged $19.99 for every fifteen minutes refreshment.  

The Sad Story of John Dunn

14. 

John Dunn, recently of St. Paul, Minnesota is all done, undone, finally done unto death itself.  According to his obituary, Dunn arrived in America from his native Ireland when only two years old.  He grew up in East St. Paul, joined the Army at 18 and fought in Vietnam (two tours), later, re-enlisting in the National Guard from which he was deployed to Kuwait, Haiti, and, then, Desert Storm in Iraq.  In late January 2024, at the age of 76, Dunn was strolling with his wife in Harriet Island Park in St. Paul when he noticed a teenage boy urinating in a pond on the premises.  Indignant, Dunn took a couple of photographs of the offensive act with his cell-phone.  The young man with two buddies observed Dunn observing them and confronted him.  An altercation ensued and Dunn was punched in the eye, resulting in serious injuries.  Surgery was required and Dunn developed an infection that, again, required his hospitalization as a result of pain and fever.  Things went from bad to worse and, after 23 days in the Intensive Care, Dunn perished.  The boy who punched him is charged with homicide and, currently, awaiting trial.

So, why did John Dunn perish?  Here are some of the causes: as a result of a punch to left eye that damaged his eye-socket and the eye within it; as a result of medical malpractice in his treatment, infection, and failure to arrest the progress of that infection; because the City of St. Paul has inadequate toilet facilities at its Harriet Island Park (I have always maintained that if people are pissing in alleys or park ponds this is because no toilets are available – humans urinate and defecate; anyone designing and maintaining public places should take this into account); because Dunn was a proud, quarrelsome old man, habituating to thinking he was immortal because he had survived two tours of combat in Vietnam and come back alive after 12 years in other war zones; because Irish poverty and a stagnant economy compelled his parents to immigrate to the United States; because, like many of his Irish countryman, John Dunn had a “gift for the gab” and a vitriolic tongue; because of the invention of the cell-phone equipped with camera; as a result of the institution of American slavery that has played a role in perpetuating social injustice resulting in gangs of feral youth roaming St. Paul parks – there is, a racial aspect to this assault; and, for a myriad of other reasons, ramifying out to the horizon of history and time itself.  

My essay’s subject, following below, now expands into history.  History, often, describes events in terms of cause and effect.  But, the sad tale of John Dunn suggests that one must be cautious in ascribing simple or singular causes to events.

Wendy’s on the road to the Reservation

15.

Julie and I drove south on I-19 toward the Mexican border.  We passed Tucson and the Mission Church, “Paloma”, the white dove of the desert, San Xavier del Bac.  Snow wreathed the brows of the higher peaks in the Santa Catalina and Santa Rita mountains.  Around noon, we pulled off the freeway at the highway leading to the Pascua (“Easter”) Yaqui Pueblo.  Several gas stations were clustered around the exit and there were some fast food places near the intersection.  We pulled into the parking lot of a Wendy’s hamburger place adjacent to a Walgreen’s pharmacy.  In this area south of Tucson, desert stretches out to barren mountains encircling the Santa Cruz river valley, a water-course that is a half-mile wide but with the stream bed clogged with mesquite trees and dunes drifted up against braided gravel-paved channels that are always dry – at least, in my experience.  The barren terrain seems to be empty but the highways are lined with businesses and there are, apparently, many thousands of people living in retirement communities concealed in arroyos and the canyons of the mountains.  

At the Wendy’s, the customers were dispirited, dressed in ragged, shabby clothing with dusty cowboy boots.  A Native man wearing a cowboy hat sat with a woman whose left eye had been knocked out of its socket.  She wore a concave patch over her eye-socket and walked with an ataxic shuffle.  Another Native woman entered the fast food place.  Her teeth seemed to be like those of rodent, perpetually growing, so that the length of her incisors exceeded the compass of her mouth, finger-long brittle tusks protruding between her lips.  The hamburgers were grey and tasteless and the french fries were limp.  

From where I was sitting, I could see across the alley to the corner of the Walgreens.  An odd pas de deux was underway in a niche occupied by an Arjencia bottled water dispenser.  A young man and woman were pushed together next to the blue and white Arjencia dispenser, noses to the corner, as if concealing themselves against the water-vending machine.  This effort to hide from the eyes of patrons of the Walgreens (for people were coming and going from the pharmacy) may have been partially successful as far as that business and its parking lot were concerned, but were wholly unavailing with respect to the customers in the Wendy’s.  I could look across the alley and, from my vantage, see quite clearly what was happening: the man turned slightly, holding a sliver of aluminum foil to his mouth and nose and, then, a little orange tongue of flame flared.  Some smoke coiled around the man’s head before he inhaled it.  The woman, then, took the tin foil from her companion’s hand, and lit the substance in the folded silver wedge.  She did a little dance in place, waggling her hips, raising a fist in the air.  They passed the foil back and forth a couple of times, using it against their faces when turned inward to the wall.  For desert dwellers, it was chilly, about 60 degrees with a raking wind sweeping across the parking lots.  Both the man and woman were clad in black training gear, covering their hooded sweat-shirts.  The young man slipped the foil in his pocket and turned to furtively look around, stepping out of the cranny that he and the woman occupied.  For a moment, he seemed to gaze directly across the alley into the Wendy’s where I was watching him.  I wasn’t sure whether the lighting and window reflections let him see into the restaurant.  I wondered if I shouldn’t use my cell-phone to take a picture.  

The young woman grabbed at the kid’s crotch and, then, walked away from the niche, crossing in front of the pharmacy.  She seemed to be skipping like a six-year old.  More slowly, and deliberately, the young man followed her and, then, they rounded a corner and the vast and barren land tilted up toward the stony mountains swallowed them.  

Resort kids

16.

Who are these well-groomed rich kids wearing polo shirts and white slacks at Phoenix’s luxury resorts?  Young women with perfect teeth sunbathe beside the pool.  Lean young men with movie-star smiles inset in their rugged jaws cruise on their golf carts between shots on the Par 3. The valet parking lot is crammed with expensive convertibles and Mercedes Benz SUVs, also all of them white this season.  (A couple of years ago, the Benz SUVs were all black.)  How can these young people afford to frequent a resort where the fees and room charges amount to more than $800 dollars a night?  (Reportedly, the Camelback Resort is pricier and there are spas in secret canyons in the mountains that cost three- to four-thousand a day.)  I imagine that this idle class of wealthy youth are the scions of families founded by grizzled prospectors who discovered lost Yaqui silver in the trackless desert or looted caches of Apache gold or, perhaps, old Spanish mines in the sky-island mountains that float on steamy, trembling beds of mirage.  

The valley: Tucson to Nogales

17.

When I was here last, a year ago, I drove from Tucson down to the National Historic Site at Tumacacori.  My impression was that south of Tucson’s suburbs, I-19, the freeway to Nogales, pierced desert slung like a hammock between the Santa Rita Mountains to the east and chains of smaller, but distinct, ranges along the western horizon.  Although the freeway maintained a constant distance between the road and the Santa Rita range, (about 12 miles) the jagged mountains to the west were scattered across the desert, at first remote hacksaw-blades poised against the horizon but, then, as I drove farther south, in the direction of the Mexican border, the treeless peaks on the right side of I-19 accumulated ahead of me, a system of barren ridges bulging with scorched rocky outcrops.  My sense, a year ago, was that the country became increasingly empty and desolate as one approached Mexico and that the arid terrain under the mountains, mostly perceived here as two-dimensional escarpments, a bit like stage scenery, was uninhabited, a desolate, tortured-looking wilderness.  

I now know that this rather melodramatic perception of the terrain and its population is incorrect, indeed, more or less, completely mistaken.  In fact, the I-19 corridor linking Tucson with Nogales, Arizona is industrialized and, if not densely populated, nonetheless neither isolated nor deserted.  It’s about 50 miles from Tucson to the border between Arizona and Sonora in Nogales.  In fact, retirement communities and light industry radiate from the freeway for most of that distance.  If you focus your eyes on the mountains which appear impenetrable and hostile to habitation, the land will look empty.  But in the foreground, between the freeway and the broad valley of the Santa Cruz river which parallels I-19, there are many retirement communities, gated compounds, strip-malls and industrial parks.  Gradually, Nogales and Tucson are expanding to form a continuous enterprise zone.  Immediately, south of Tucson, there are burgeoning retirement cities such as Sahuarita and the much larger Green Valley.  (Green Valley is comprised of three or four huge developments for retirees – before 2000, there was nothing here but an immense copper mine that, now, marks the western boundary to the town, a series of pale, marbled terraces of spoil from the open pit excavation that this formation conceals.)  During the Cold War, this area was, indeed, empty and remote – there were Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silos lining the road to Nogales.  (Today, all but one of these facilities are abandoned and have been rooted up out of the desert – the exception is a ballistic missile that remains in its silo in situ, a museum incongruously located today between golf courses and Walmarts north of Green Valley.)  Although a series of gated communities line the highway, with their attendant malls and fast food places, the more upscale restaurants located at the clubhouses for the numerous golf courses, the population thins and around Tubac and Tumacacori the desert is, more or less, uninhabited.  But Tumacacori is only 17 miles from the border at Nogales and, immediately, to the south of that place, Nogales’ suburbs appear on the hillsides and there are warehouses in the valleys and on the mesa-tops and factories and industrial parks again extend into the jumble of mountains and ravines where the border-city is built.  Nogales, Arizona has a population of about 22,000, but I would estimate there are another ten-thousand living in suburbs to the north of the border.  By contrast, Heroica Nogales, as the Sonoran city is called, boasts a population of about 270,000.  What I imagined to be remote desert wasteland at Tubac and Tumacacori is, in fact, just a five or six mile hiatus in a pattern of vibrant, if ugly, urban sprawl.  

Tubac

18.

Tubac is the oldest European settlement in Arizona, founded by the Spaniards in 1752 as a way station on the Camino Real from Mexico City to the Missions in what is now California.  The village is built on a terrace above the broad and mostly waterless Santa Cruz river valley.  Trees line the gravel and sand channel where water runs during the monsoons in August and December.  A Tohono O’odhom encampment occupied the western edge of the water course; this place was called Wutak, a word meaning “where there is black water”.   Julie and I stayed for three nights at an Inn in Tubac.

The large mission to the O’odham at Tumacacori (“mountain of caliche”) is four miles to the south, also on a prominence above the Santa Cruz.  In this area, the Jesuits planted orchards and crops, built workshops to employ the Indians, and grazed sheep and cattle on the grasslands in the valley.  These activities inevitably led to cycles of violence that periodically swallowed nearby Tubac and left it in ruins about every other generation.  

In the last decade, the Tohono O’odham (formerly known as the Pima or Papago Indians) have been designated heirs to the “ancestral Hohokam”.  The Hohokam were a sedentary people who lived in large villages built from adobe and stone.  The archaeological horizons for this culture are from 250 AD to about 1450 -1500.  Pre-classical villages date back to 300 BC.  In order to support their large fortified towns in the arid desert, the Hohokam developed sophisticated systems for managing water, large and complex acequia canals with which they irrigated their crop-lands.  Some archaeologists think that the Hohokam housed their water-engineers in Casa Grande, great houses, one of which still exists at Casa Grande, Arizona.  Trade routes connected the Hohokam to the urban cultures in central Mexico and their villages feature ball-courts, platform mounds, and facilities for raising exotic tropical birds such as macaws imported from the jungles of the Yucatan and Guatemala.  As with the Chaco canyon culture, some sort of inherent vice, a defect in the Hohokam’s social organization resulted in the abandonment of their villages between 1350 and 1500.  Various explanations for this phenomenon have been proposed: climate change induced flooding that wrecked Hohokam access to the rivers upon which their irrigation systems depended.  Further, intensive squash, beans, and corn cultivation depleted the soil.  But the Hohokam were ingenious people, skilled in the management of their desert resources, and it seems unlikely that agricultural or climactic events resulted in the dissolution of their culture.  Other social and psychological circumstances seem to have demoralized the villagers and caused them to slowly walk away from their elaborate towns with their turquoise workshops, sophisticated pottery production, and ball-courts.  The people who abandoned these villages are, now, thought to have dispersed into small clan groups, moving from place to place in the desert as water resources dictated – these are the Tohono O’odham, a tribe that regards the Hohokam as their ancestors.

Something about urban living offended the Indians and caused them to react against centralized authority (necessary, for instance, to manage the irrigation systems); the Tohono O’odhom were not village-dwellers and, in fact, defined themselves as radically independent – although the people spoke a common language, every clan operated as a free agent without centralized control.  The Jesuit missions founded in the first part of the 18th century in what is called the Pima Alteria – that is the territory of the northern Pima Indians – relied upon gathering the nomadic O’odhom around their churches, farming, and workshop enterprises.  This was inimical to the Indians and, in fact, Jesuit authority, establishing irrigation ditches and fortified church compounds, seemed to mimic the old Hohokam cultural system.  By and large, the Indians weren’t interested in reverting to village life and resented the Jesuit control over their people.  This led to a rebellion in 1751 with the slaughter of many priests.  The fighting had the character of a civil war since many O’odhom had become converts to the new religion and took the side of the missionaries.  O’odhom polities were unable to coordinate military action – each tribal group fought on its own – and, of course, the rebellion failed.  However, the settlements around Tumacacori were destroyed, the fields burned and the cattle and sheep butchered.  The Spanish army reacted by building a presidio (fort) at Tubac and governing northern Sonora from that place. 

 

Marauding Apaches, always a hazard in the Sonoran desert, menaced the settlements at Tumacacori and Tubac.  The Apache raiders were attracted by the relative prosperity of the Mission and the rancheros around Tubac – the industry founded by the Jesuits and their successors, the Franciscan Order, created wealth and, therefore, an incentive for the hostiles’ depredations.  Ultimately, violence escalated to the point that Tubac was again abandoned after 1840, the local O’odhom Catholics packing their wooden bultos or carved saints on mules that accompanied the congregation on their trek to San Xavier del Bac, “La Paloma” or the “White Dove of the Desert.”  Gradually, Tubac declined until it was reduced to few frame buildings, a chapel, and a couple acres where adobe walls gradually melted back into the landscape.  

In the Civil War, a motley collection of Confederate horse-soldiers allied with Apaches besieged the village.  At this point in time. after the Gadsden purchase of 1851, southern Arizona was an United States territory and, therefore, disputed between forces aligned with either the North or the southern Confederacy.  At Tubac, a desultory skirmish lasted for several days with the Union sympathizers, finally, abandoning their positions.  (This occurred in the context of a briefly successful Confederate foray against Tucson.)  The Confederate flag was raised above the hamlet.  But a few months later, Union cavalry reclaimed the place.  Apache raids continued unabated and town continued its decline.

Of course, the Apaches were defeated by General Crook and sued for peace in 1886.  After what appeared to be successful negotiations for a cease-fire, Geronimo and his band were advised by a whiskey trader that the cavalry intended to massacre them when they crossed into United States territory to implement their surrender.  Geronimo and his followers escaped the government cordon, a misadventure that cost George Crook his command.  A few weeks later, General Nelson Miles pursued the Apache leader and captured him.  The Apaches, including scouts loyal to the government, were deported en masse to Fort Sill in Florida where they were confined for the next 26 years.  General Crook was outraged that his faithful scouts were among the deportees and demanded, to no avail, their release.  Cessation of hostilities with the Apaches revived Tubac and Mexican families ranching nearby frequented the town and established businesses there.  But Tubac’s bad luck continued.  Land litigation arising from the so-called Baca Float #3 claims decimated the town once more and turned the place into a ghost again – the Baca Float #3 land dispute occurred in 1914.

Beginning in the thirties, artists bought abandoned adobe structures and ruinous commercial buildings in the town.  Gradually, more artists arrived and, after twenty years, the village had acquired the reputation of an artist’s colony.  In 2024, Tubac had a population of about 1100 people, most enterprises in the village catering to tourists and day-visitors from Tucson.  The north border of the village abuts an 18 hole golf course and resort with an expensive restaurant and galleria.  On the frontage road between the National Historic site at Tumacacori and Tubac, there’s a renowned local restaurant, the Wisdom Café.  The enterprise dates from the fifties and is famous for its deep-fried fruit burritos.  We drove by the place a half-dozen times morning, noon, and night and the parking lot was always crowded with cars; people come from the surrounding resorts, the suburbs at Green Valley and Rio Rico, just outside of Nogales, to eat at the Café.   

Tuesday is a slow day for business in Tubac

19.

We arrived in Tubac mid-afternoon.  Entering town, we drove past a cemetery filled with plastic flowers and candles and various brightly colored knickknacks.  The dead in Mexico –and Tubac is about 20 miles from the border – like cheap toys, candles in frosted glass decorated with decals of Virgin of Guadalupe, whirligigs and stuffed animals.  Even the elderly, who passed away in the fullness of time, seem to have the playful sensibility of a toddler; they keep tequila bottles and pictures of their prize hunting dogs on their tombs.  Near the little cemetery, a private lane led to a resort with hacienda spa and golf course.  Our Mapquest directions directed us to the inn where we were had a suite reserved by a back-road that is not the main tourist entrance to town.  So on arrival, the village seemed a little dusty, even, impoverished, a remote place by all appearances at least from this vantage. 

A vacant lot separated the inn from the some low-slung buildings congregated around an intersection of broad, empty roads.  Someone was patrolling the town in a silent, battered golf cart.  The Inn stood above a particularly slovenly-looking trailer court called the Tubac Tether.  A dirt lane ran between the trailers and hotel, stacks of rubbish maintained for salvage (car parts, fragmentary tools and batteries, panels of wood and coils of wire) in wire cages encroaching on the drive-way.  The parking spaces for the inn, only five rooms, were a little tight and the trailer court seemed hostile, with barking dogs, and people, who looked like characters from Beckett bickering over broken vacuum cleaners and piles of tin cans.  The Tubac Inn, itself, was nicely appointed with big rooms decorated with Navajo blankets and black and white photographs of vaqueros and Indian chiefs.  The design of the place replicates a Victorian era train station at Socorro, New Mexico with a hipped roof and two stories – why the architect decided to duplicate this barn-like building here in Tubac is mysterious to me.  Our room overlooked a small cactus garden with a gravel ditch to channel flashflood water through the property.  The little trough in the caliche was spanned by a vaguely Japanese footbridge and there were some benches in the tiny park, a glass-walled gazebo, and a padlocked tool-shed.  When we unloaded our car, a woman wearing a sort of black sombrero and serape was aiming her camera at a woodpecker on an unpainted fence edging the property.  The woman told me that she was taking a picture of road-runner, but the hostess, an attractive young woman with a pony-tail, told me later that, in fact, the bird was a crested woodpecker as I had surmised.  City people don’t know the names of the critters that they encounter out in God’s Country.  

After hauling the luggage up to our second story suite, I took a stroll through town.  A State Park, completely deserted when I walked along its fence, occupied a quarter of the town on the edge of the desert.  The park preserves the remains of the old Presidio and I could see a white-frame visitor center and, then, some excavations in the desert pavement near a few crumbling adobe walls.  The sign next to the empty parking lot said that the Presidio was open “five of seven days” – a puzzling declaration since nothing specified which days the place was closed or open.  A humble Catholic church was across from the park, a structure that looked like a remodeled one-room country school.  In the church’s yard, a brick grotto contained a pygmy-sized statue of the Virgin wearing a light blue cloak was next to the grave of some unknown traveler marked by a pile of rubble staked with an unmarked metal cross.  A sign advised that the grotto had been a roadside shrine on the highway to Nogales but when the freeway was built, it had been transplanted onto the grounds of the church.  A couple of long, narrow houses under ancient pale cottonwood trees lined the dirt road; little plaques with raised metal letters informed me that these were historic places, named after their original occupants.  One of the structures was called the “Pennington House”; I didn’t write down the name of the other buildings, most of them either concrete block or adobe varnished with plaster now weathered to the color of sandy mud.  

Beyond the Presidio State Park, a trailhead’s parking lot opened over a cattle-guard onto a path dropping down into the half-mile wide gulch where the Santa Cruz river is notionally supposed to run.  Ravines stocked with scrub and spidery-looking mesquite cut through the hillside and I couldn’t exactly ascertain where the location of the main channel of the river was located:  a number of parallel gravel grooves ran between islets covered in thorns, but there was no trace of water.  A sign told me that this was the historic Anza trail – but the name meant nothing to me.  

It was a quarter mile from the trailhead to Tubac’s commercial district, a warren of boutiques and galleries.  No one was around although most of the shops were open.  Artists sold javalina sculptures and Mexican Dia de los Muertos junk and there were bronze cowboys and Indians gesturing to one another in courtyards.  A dozen little fountains with turquoise-colored tiles occupied bus-sized plazas between the closely packed building and the air smelled of cilantro and garlic from a couple restaurants open, but doing no business.  The fountains were dry and the arcades between the buildings still and desolate.  Here and there, a dazed-looking tourist was wandering around.  A couple of locals on golf carts were engaged in enigmatic errands.  The sky overhead was grey and hot. 

An ad in the motel directory to the town said that there was an excellent delicatessen near the main entrance into Tubac.  I found the place.  Inside, it was shadowy, dim to the point that I felt that I needed a flashlight to navigate the narrow aisles between groceries.  Food prices were remarkably high – a pack of Ramen noodles that I could buy for 30 cents at an Austin grocery cost a dollar fifty here.  There was no deli counter just an opening into a gloomy kitchen with a chalkboard offering turkey and ham sandwiches for $12.95 apiece.  Later, when I inquired about the sandwiches, a girl told me that they didn’t have any for sale.  Four Indian girls from the nearby reservation were pooling their cash to buy a case of beer from a cooler.  Six dollar bottles of wine were on-sale for twenty dollars each.    

The sad story of Cayetano Andrade  

20.

The Andrade family once owned a ranch on the outskirts of Tubac.  The spread was called El Torreon, that is, “the Tower”.  In this part of the Sonoran desert, inhabited places had lookout towers from which to survey to terrain for Apache raiders.  These towers with massive adobe walls were also places of refuge during Indian attacks.  Ynez Andrade and his wife, Mariana, were owners of the ranch and they were prosperous people with many white-faced cattle as well as sheep and goats and a large acreage near their hacienda on which they grew corn, squash and beans.  Their status in the community was demonstrated by their son’s prestige as a local Santa Cruz county constable.  In a picture book containing historic images of Tubac, I saw portraits of the dashing young constable, Cayetano Andrade, with his handle-bar moustache and well as images of his parents, a formal portrait of the couple taken in Nogales – the woman wears a mantilla of Spanish lace and the man has spurs on his boots, a silver belt-buckle and a John B. Stetson hat.  

Cayetano Andrade was the local constable at Tubac from 1907 to 1914.  He resigned his commission when the Supreme Court decided the Baca Float #3 case and ordered the eviction of 39 families, including Ynez and Mariana Andrade, from their ranches.  Cayetano was not about to evict his own parents from their land and refused to execute the Court’s decree.  Indeed, his protest went beyond refusing to participate in evictions; he entered the garden at his parent’s ranch and filled up a dozen bushel baskets with corn, gourds, melons, and beans.  An armed posse arrested Cayetano, detaining him and his wagon of produce, on the road to Nogales.  He was thrown in jail in the border-town and charged with criminal trespass and theft.  While in custody awaiting his trial, Cayetano was fed his own vegetables, fried in “some kind of poison.”  He fell sick and almost died, and, when he recovered from his illness, something was wrong with his brain.  He was adjudged to be insane and transported to the Arizona State Hospital where he died in 1921.  

History

21.

Here are landmarks in local history: 200 to 1450 AD – Hohokam villages occupy the area, but are abandoned about a hundred years before the conquistadors appear in the region; 1691 – the Jesuit father, Eusebio Kino founds Tumacacori and another twenty or so missions in the Alta Pimeria (territory of the Northern Pima, now Tohono O’odhom, people); 1751 – Tubac Presidio built as a result of the Pima Uprising and governed by Juan Bautista de Anza from 1751 to 1757; 1757 – Jesuits expelled from their missions in the Sonora; 1775 – Juan Bautista de Anza leads expedition from Culican, Mexico north and west to California, an enterprise which results in the founding of San Francisco; 1820 – Spanish land grants made to settlers in the Sonora; 1840 - 1850 – under pressure from Apache raiders, Tumacacori is abandoned and Tubac becomes a ghost town; 1851 – United States acquires the Arizona parts of the Alta Pimeria as a part of the Gadsden purchase; 1910 - Mexican Revolution destabilizes the area in Sonora around the border; 1914 – Baca Float #4 decided with Hispanic families evicted from area around Tubac.      

Forty Bald Hills (“Cuaranta cerros pelones”)

22.

From the freeway, a mile or so south of the Tumacacori exit, the foothills to the eastern mountains display suburbs of white houses, arrayed like giant tic-tac-toe grids on the tilted grey slopes.  Because there are no trees, the skeletal design of these neighborhoods outlying Nogales can be clearly discerned.  These places are like bones whitening on the barren ridges.

Near the border, the valley of the Santa Cruz tightens and, then, becomes clogged with ragged hills spilling down out of the Mexico where the high ridge of the Sierra Madre obstructs the southern horizon.  The mountains in Mexico are mysterious, long dark ridges serrated with pinnacles and peaks shaped like wizard’s hats.  The freeway ends in a scatter of ten-story bluffs dissected by sheer ravines.  Signs warn that the border is imminent.  

On websites like Trip Advisor, Nogales advertises itself as a good place to see Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” although like much advertising this seems to be, by and large, false.  Descending a steep hill into downtown, the street divides with one branch leading to what signs call “The International Border”.  I can see some trucks loitering under a system of skyways over the road and red lights are flashing in that area.  From the sharply sloping roadway, for a moment I can see the wall, a bluish array of girders cutting through the cityscape, some tilted cyclone fencing wreathed in razor wire stuck into the top of the twenty foot tall structure.  It’s an ugly sight that reminds me of pictures of the Berlin Wall, although more ramshackle and porous-looking.  The border slashes through the downtown like a razor cutting the cheek of a whore.  The whole thing seems shameful and the city hides the border, concealing it among a labyrinth of streets in a city that seems completely without zoning ordinances.  Ready-Mix plants are nested next to small stucco houses and trucking companies that sprawl over the hillside with fenced compounds full of parked, and half-abandoned, semi-trailers.  The downtown area has a few commercial buildings dating from the twenties it seems, brick highrises, and, a couple of nondescript modern banks with glass walls and, here and there, the border wall peeps through the skein of stubby towers and offices.  The landscape is all vertical and, for some reason, it’s easier to see into Mexico than the Arizona side of the town; across the boeder, the shanties and trailer homes stud the dome-shaped hills, hanging precariously from the sides of the bluffs that are gouged with arroyos.  A thunderstorm would be a frightening prospect in this town; everything, it seems, would flood and from all directions since there is no rhyme nor reason to the array of hills; their slopes crisscrossing in a confusing vertical pattern of ascents and dizzying downhill alleys.  

A travel guide says that the best place to see the wall is from the parking lot at the Pimeria Alta Museum, a three-story brick structure evidently remodeled from its original mercantile design into a museum.  The place was closing when we reached it and the traffic pattern on the boulevard at its front was confusing, a tangle of one-way streets with blinking turn signals created, it seemed, by the proximity of the border.  At the rear of the museum there was a long squalid alley with a few parking spots, all marked with no trespassing signs, beside an iron fence with lance-tips pointing into the sky.  Garbage was strewn along the fence and there was a ruinous-looking Porta-potty standing amidst the trash.  Mexico was beyond the fence, perhaps – some empty terrain littered with rags and plastic bags, all cut up with inexplicable trenches and pits like open graves, extended toward railroad tracks.  On a siding freight cars were parked.  Julie took a picture of me posing against the fence, although whether this structure marked the international border was unclear to us. She captioned the picture: “Crazy old Mexican sneaking across border.”

We drove around the town, aiming in the direction of where I expected to find the border, but the town was confusing and the dense accumulation of interlocking dusty hills made it impossible to see for more than a block or two.  At the point, where I thought we were about to enter Mexico, instead I encountered the copper dome flanked by administrative wings of the Santa Cruz Courthouse.  This was puzzling, perhaps, the border was behind me somehow.  I couldn’t figure out the town’s directions and, then, found myself confronted with the option of waiting for a slow-moving train crawling along the right-of-way or, instead, driving away from the crossing, running parallel to the tracks in the hope of outrunning the locomotive, moving much more slowly than you could walk.  I elected to drive parallel to the tracks where we encountered a strange spectacle, twenty or more men wearing orange work vests, riding atop a flatbed car labeled “Trans Train.”  What this meant I didn’t know.  

After a dozen or so blocks, passing through neighborhoods with houses hanging eccentrically over dry gulches and ravines, I came to a viaduct crossing over the tracks and went in that direction.   The street led to Morley Avenue.   From articles that I had read I knew that Morley Avenue had something to do with the border and, so, happening upon that road, I drove in the direction that I thought might afford me a view of the wall.  (From old accounts, I knew that Morley Ave. may once have been the border – that is, one side of the street was in Mexico and the other side in Arizona.  In those days, there was no wall and people crossed the border by crossing the street.  This was in the forties and fifties.)  Indeed, Morley seemed to suggest that it may once have been a demarcation line in the city.  As I proceeded down the street, the right side was lined with American fast food places and small businesses such as law offices, realtors, and insurance agencies advertising good rates on Mexican insurance – apparently, many people on the US side had business in Mexico and had to cross the border and drive in the much larger, even more chaotic, city of Heroica Nogales in Sonora.  The left side of the street was lined with small, frail storefronts, painted in pastel colors and displaying hand-lettered signs in Spanish – it looked to me like Oaxaca City.  We passed the Pimeria Alta Museum again, from this vantage appearing to be a remodeled train station with a clock tower surmounted by a vaguely Moorish cupola and some Alhambra-style balconies hanging from the second floor.  I would have liked to have gone into the museum but it was locked, a Hispanic woman standing outside sweeping the sidewalk with a wide broom.  

The disconcerting aspect of Nogales is that the international border isn’t marked by a river as in El Paso which the town otherwise resembles.  Therefore, the border wall seems wildly improbable.  There is simply no reason for it to exist.  Old Mexico rises in terraces and hills of dirt and gravel to the south, a tangle of gorges and ravines ascending by steps into the Sierra Madre.  The mountains have cast their detritus into the town and everything looks as if it had fallen or slipped from the high slopes overhead.  Topographically nothing makes any sense.  People have dry gulches full of garbage cutting through their backyards.  

The town spooked me.  I had lost any intuitive sense of direction and had to use a map application to find my way back to the freeway.  

In the early part of the 20th century someone wrote an “Ode to Nogales.”  The poem reads: Cuaranta cerros pelones / Una calle pavimentada / Putas, gringos y cabrones / Y un vienta de la chingada.  Translated, this means: “Forty bald hills / One paved street / Whores, gringos, and sons-of-bitches / A great fucking wind.”

On the road out of Nogales, we saw a young Hispanic woman and her young daughter standing along the side of road in a field of gravel.  They were looking along the freeway toward some barren hills sprawling over the highway.  Julie said: “Just some Mexican murderers and rapists.”  Indeed.  

Heroica Nogales

23.

Nogales is accorded the status of a “hero” city on the basis of a skirmish fought there on August 27, 1918.  The historical record concerning this encounter between the American army and Mexican troops and civilians is incomplete and corrupt with lies and legend.  It is a sorry state of affairs for a historian to be compelled to cite as a source a corrida or popular ballad composed shortly after the fighting.  And, the corrida may be as accurate, or more so, than the official reports relating to the incident.  

The Mexican Revolution, the first great people’s uprising of the 20th century and a precursor to the Bolshevik and Chinese Communist revolts, began in 1910.  In 1913, fighting between the rebels in Sonora, mostly Yaqui Apaches, led by General Alvaro Obregon, and the Mexican Federales spilled over the border at Nogales.  At that time, there was no fence, not even a wire, marking the international border in the town.  Obregon’s forces, about 400 strong, attacked the Federale border garrison, forcing the government troops to flee across the border where they immediately surrendered to the American army units patrolling the border – this was a pattern along the Arizona and New Mexico border with Mexico.  Forces hard-pressed by their adversaries fled into the United States for refuge.  Further, rebel troops raided villages on the American side for provisions.  Once the First World War began, shadowy German military advisers appeared at the border and there was some suspicion that these figures were plotting an invasion.  The so-called First Battle of Nogales fought between Obregon’s rebels and the Federal troops resulted in casualties of ten deaths and a score or so wounded.

The situation remained tense until hostilities erupted in 1915 in the Second Battle of Nogales.  After Pancho Villa lost the battle of Agua Prieta in November 1915, a firefight involving several thousand soldiers fought across the border from Douglas Arizona, some elements of his command began raids into the United States.  The main body of Villa’s forces retreated to Nogales and seized the city. Small groups of Villista guerillas infiltrated Arizona north of Nogales and engaged in gun fights with ranchers and “Buffalo Soldier” cavalry (African-American soldiers) patrolling the area.  A Buffalo Soldier was wounded and the cavalry pursued the guerillas into Nogales.  There, snipers on both sides began firing across the border.  Some more people were wounded and, so, the American commander deployed a skirmish line on International Street, the thoroughfare marking the border, and prepared to advance into the Sonoran side of Nogales.  (I now know that Morley Avenue becomes International Avenue on the Mexican side of the border). Ultimately, the threatened attack was never implemented.  Both sides stationed snipers on rooftops and the “bald hills” and exchanged fire.  After a few hours of desultory cross-border gun battles, a cease fire was negotiated.  Neither side desired an international incident and, in fact, the American and Villista commanders issued mutual apologies for what they construed as a misunderstanding.  

By August 1918, the United States was embroiled in World War One after three years of ostensible neutrality.  Fighting persisted along the border with Mexico, spill-over from the ongoing chaos arising from the interminable Mexican Revolution.  The situation was complicated by the presence of German military advisors working, it was alleged, to foment, a cross-border invasion of the United States by Mexican forces, an advance that was supposed to distract the Americans from their war effort in Europe.  (In some ways, the third battle of Nogales was a part of World War One.)  American troops, particularly the “Buffalo Soldiers” were stationed in garrisons along the border, particularly in Nogales.  Pancho Villa’s forces had raided Columbus, New Mexico and General Pershing conducted a so-called “Punitive Expedition” to quell the three-party fighting – the border situation was complex, involving small groups of American infantry and cavalry, Villista factions, and the Federales.

On August 27, 1918, a bad hombre named Zeferino Lamadrid approached American border guards from the Nogales Mexican side.  Lamadrid was carrying a heavy box that the U.S. border guard thought contained guns.  The U.S. officials detained Lamardrid.  Some Mexican border guards approached and pistols were drawn.  It’s not clear who fired first, but there was a gun battle in the middle of International Street.  In the fracas, an American border guard was wounded and two Mexican officials were killed.  It’s not clear what Lamadrid was carrying in the box.  (Lamadrid wasn’t hurt in the affray, but died in barroom brawl 18 years later.)  Mexican Nogalenses took up arms and, expecting an American assault across the border, prepared for street fighting.  The American commander had seen the Mexican rebel forces, led by Obregon digging machine-gun emplacements on the hills near the international line.  The Buffalo Soldiers were deployed to positions on International Street and pretty soon everyone was shooting at everyone else.  No one had given an order to commence firing; the fighting erupted spontaneously.  (Obregon was not in the city; he was in desert nearby leading sorties against another rebel faction.)  Under heavy fire, the Buffalo Soldiers advanced across the border, apparently intending to kill the snipers on the hilltops in Mexican Nogales.

The Buffalo Soldiers attack led them through a large brothel conveniently located on the border.  The girls in the brothel were well-known to the advancing American soldiers and greeted them by name.  They were reported to say that they were happy to see the men “but didn’t have time to renew their acquaintances with them.”  By this time, everyone in the heavily armed city was shooting at everyone else.  The Anglos on their side of the border climbed up onto rooftops and began shooting across the border, indiscriminately firing on Mexican civilians and the Buffalo Soldiers advancing on the sniper positions.  Mexican civilians shot at the American troops as they struggled to advance on the hilltop gun emplacements.  Lots of people were hit and lying on International Street.  The whores wrapped themselves in sheets painted with red crosses and came under fire when they tried to drag the injured off the road and into their brothel. (Two of the women were wounded but continued to heroically pull the injured out of the crossfire.)

No one knows what happened next.  The Buffalo Soldiers reported that they seized some of the hilltop trenches and machine-gun nests.  The Mexicans, at least in the corrida, claim that they repelled the Buffalo Soldiers’ advance and drove them back across the border.  At last, the mayor of Mexican Nogales attached a white handkerchief to his cane and waving the emblem for cease-fire ran down International Street.  Someone shot him down.  The whores dragged the Mayor into their establishment where he died.  

The American troops surrounded the city hall in Mexico and the combatants sheltering there raised a white flag.  A shaky cease-fire was negotiated.  But throughout the night, both sides exchanged rifle fire.  In the morning, the corpses were gathered for burial.  Perhaps, 130 Mexicans were killed, many of them noncombatants including many women and a three-year old girl.  Official reports indicate three deaths on the American side, but this number is also unclear since regimental histories identify a total of six soldiers killed in the fighting.  There were many wounded on both sides.  The Mexicans claimed victory; the Americans claimed victory – it didn’t matter to the dead.  

After the battle, a border fence was built at International Street and through the city, dividing what had previously been a single town – prior to August 27, 1918, the border was marked by white-washed six- foot obelisks scattered at intervals through the town.  An American commander claimed to have seen two corpses said to be carrying letters in German – that is, German agents supposed to have encouraged the fighting.  But no one verified these claims, the German documents went missing, and the theory that European operatives caused the battle seems untrue.  Documentation of the affair was left to the composers of corridas.  One of the Buffalo Soldiers assigned duty in Nogales was the father of the famous jazz musician, Charles Mingus.    

In the Canyon of the White House

24.

In early Spring, migratory birds gather at Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains.  The itinerary of these birds involves hopping from “Madrean sky island” to “sky island” on their way north.  In the Sonoran desert, mountain ranges that are ten to fifteen miles long are separated by troughs of barren desert.  These so-called “sky islands” are extensions and outcroppings of the main range, the Sierra Madre, the mountains that comprise Mexico’s spine or backbone.  The parched desert affords few resources to migrating birds and so these creatures seek out the relatively cool canyons and alpine meadows surmounting the “sky island ranges” for food and water.  The result is that hundreds of species, mostly small colorful songbirds, have been sighted in these mountains during the migratory season.   Furthermore, many birds live year-round in the canyon and high country including 12 species of humming birds, Mexican jays, various types of owls, including the rare and tiny elf owl, and other creatures.  

I know nothing about birds, but, nonetheless, carried a monocular with me when I hiked in the canyon.  I arrived at the trail head early and the stony, forested defile of the canyon slicing downhill to the basin was melodious with bird song.  But I didn’t know where to point the telescope and, except for wings flitting away from me, glimpsed only from the corner of my eye, I couldn’t localize the liquid trills and warbling and, so, the birds eluded me.

Madera Canyon is about 12 miles from the freeway to Nogales, accessed through Green Valley, a settlement that seems to be without any center – it’s simply a group of large retirement communities radiating away from freeway exit ramps.  The individual compounds have office buildings at their core with recreational amenities (that is, meeting rooms, tennis and pickle ball courts, and pools) and are designed like resorts.  The only common area in Green River seems to be big, deluxe Safeway store and a strip mall around which some restaurants and fast food joints have been built.  To the west, the escarpment of spoil from the open pit copper mine walls off the horizon with pale, sculpted terraces.  

The road to the canyon crosses the trough occupied by the Santa Cruz River.  It’s slow going to the viaducts over the channel – the speed limit is twenty-five as the road winds between warehouses and trucking operations.  Then, the two-lane highway crosses empty desert, rising imperceptibly until the floor of the valley is dotted with black and contorted mesquite.  The mesquite gives way to stressed deciduous trees, growing in clumps around arroyos cut by flash floods and the road runs like a rollercoaster up and down over the ditches each marked with ominous signs warning motorists not “to enter when water is flowing.”  There’s a sense of palpable excitement driving this highway as it approaches the mountains that loom overhead.  The air is electric, charged with the promise of the heights and the ionized tingle associated with falling water.  A wall of jagged peaks runs along the east side of the canyon wall rising to pyramidal summits; lofty snowfields are clinging to pockets in the heights above. A strange bald outcropping called “the Elephant”, a pinkish mass of wind-chiseled stone extends from the side of the north-south running range.  At dawn and sunset, this huge rock face glows with a supernatural radiance.  As I approached the canyon outlet, the tattered deciduous trees ceded the hillside slopes to pinyon and fir and I could see ranks of evergreen ascending the walls of the gorge and marching along the canyon rim a couple thousand feet above the road. 

The canyon road is intricate with switchbacks and tight curves, running next to a creek that does gymnastics as it drops over rockfalls in its bed.  Some trailheads emanate from places where one-way lanes lead to small parking lots – already there are a few cars and vans parked here.  (The best time for birdwatching in the canyon is about an hour after dawn; I’ve arrived about ninety minutes after sunrise.)  At its upper reaches, the gorge tightens and the road is constricted between masses of rock studded with pine trees.  A picturesque lodge is tucked into one of the curving loops on the road and I can see dozens of hummingbird feeders dangling from pine trees near the redwood decking and porches of the inn.  Another mile uphill, the road dead ends at two large parking lots occupying a stony amphitheater where trails lead upward to picnic tables mounted on wooded hogbacks of stone above the path.  Another trail leads into the National Forest wilderness centered around the sheer knobs of rock hanging overhead.  A sign at the edge of the parking lot surprised me: the altitude was 5400 feet, at least 4000 feet above the basin but the gradual slope on the access road through the foothills was anything but precipitous and the only clue to the elevation gain had been the change in the foliage on the uphill climb.   

I parked, read some signs at the trailhead, and, then, walked up the slope to where the asphalt trail divided into two steep scrambles pointed up at the peaks.  In the vertex of gorge below, water splashed  from rock to rock and tree trunks stripped bare of bark hung aslant over the rocky cleft where the creek made its way downward.  There was still considerable snow in the high country and the creek seemed forceful, assertive as it lunged down toward the basin.

The skyline above the trail was castellated with peaks.  A lofty wedge of rock loomed ahead of me, curtains of hanging snow at its base and clearly visible from the path slanting across the mountainside. A higher stone steeple, nipple-shaped with webs of snowfields clinging to its sides was harder to see, blocked by the walls of the canyon that I was climbing.  I thought that I would hike uphill to a point where I could see that summit and take its portrait with my cell-phone.  The trail was steep with rocky patches over which I had to scramble and the ascent was arduous.  I was breathing hard and my fingers tingled and I felt a suspicious ache in my jaw.  I was the first hiker on the trail climbing toward the heights although I met several old men at 200 yard intervals descending.  People were behind me and they were more accustomed to the trail and the elevation and their dogs on leash pulled them up the side of the canyon.  Several times, I stepped aside to let the hikers pass.  It seemed that this was a popular trail and, as the morning advanced, more groups of people effortlessly climbing the slope appeared behind me, passed me, and, then, vanished around the twists and turns in the trail.  My objective was to reach a place where I could get a clear vantage on the central peak in the ridge, blocked by right side of the gorge that I was climbing.  Each time the trail bent, I paused to see if I could see the peak better, but, always, it seemed to me, that the view would be better and less impeded around the next turn in the path.  After a half-hour, I grasped, albeit with difficulty that my quest was quixotic and that there was no objective reason that I had to take a picture from the hillside of the mountain to my right.  In fact, the highest peak in the ridge, Mount Wrightson (9453 feet) was the summit that I had continuously before me as I climbed.  The strenuous effort seemed futile and, so, I reversed my path and walked down the canyon to the parking lots where falling water was singing and throbbing alongside the road.  I now know that I has ascended the so-called “Old Baldy Trail” in the direction of Josephine Saddle.

Three-quarters of a mile down the canyon road, I pulled into a parking loop at the White House trailheads.  Some people were grilling at picnic tables under timber-framed shelters. Here there was a nature trail accessed by a iron bridge that crossed the stream. The path climbed the western side of the canyon, curving up to a terrace about four-hundred feet above the creek and, then, looping back toward the peaks.  This side of the canyon was more arid, with fewer trees and afforded fine views from the ridge of the peaks rising over the eastern rim of the gorge.  Cactus studded the edges of the trail and, at intervals, there were signs identifying plants or trees or, even, conspicuous tufts of grass (“Bear Grass” according to the marker).  Across the canyon, an excrescence of calcite shone in the sun.  Where there is calcite, gold is often found.  The high country above Madera Canyon is pocked with old mines.  Mount Wrightson is named for William Wrightson, the superintendent of the Salero Mine, one of the first workings in this range dating back to 1858.  

At the point where I decided to reverse my path and descend to the creek, I paused between two fragrant bushes, flowering Manzanita.  The shrubs were adorned with thousands of tiny flowers, minute pink blossoms with balloon-shaped pouches choked off as if to deny flying insects access to their nectar pouches.  Notwithstanding the parsimonious physiognomy of the flowers, the bushes were thronged with hundreds of tiny, gem-like bees, prospecting from flower cluster to cluster.  The Manzanita hummed with the insects, a monotonous buzz that I could hear only when I stood on the trail between the shrubs.  In the valley below, some hikers, appearing ant-like from these heights, slowly climbed the opposing wall of the gorge, trekking upward to the bright flash of calcite outcropping under wall of peaks.  

Although the ravine cut through the ridge near Mount Wrightson has been called Madera Canyon since the first decades of the 20th century, the gorge was earlier identified by the white house that stood near the creek’s outlet into the desert basin.  A sheepherder named Walden built a ramshackle adobe dwelling in a meadow near the creek and, for many years, people stopped at that place to get directions to various gold and silver workings in the hills.  A network of paths radiated away from the white house and this was the ingress to the Santa Rita Mountains.  Later, a Tucson merchant acquired the adobe shack and used it for a summer house, patching and finishing the walls with white plaster so that the little structure shone in the sunlight at the base of the wooded canyon.  (The merchant ran a business called White House Mercantile in Tucson, that name probably referring to some famously photogenic ruins in the cliffs above Canyon de Chelly to the far northeast in Navajo Country.)  The house was never particularly sound – photos show its roof made from slender interlaced tree timber thatched with thorn and woven grass.  A Mexican family moved into the home around the time of the First World War.  In 1921, the family’s mother died in childbirth and she and her child are buried in a plot a stone’s throw from the house.  The Hispanic people lived in the structure until 1940 when it was abandoned.  Rain and wind dissolved the adobe and a picture made in 2004 shows a single wall about hip-high still standing in the dusty grass.  In the picture, the wall casts a dark shadow on the desert floor that looks far more substantial, then, the stack of crumbling adobe bricks from which it falls.  I don’t think anything remains today, but I couldn’t verify this.  I wasn’t able to locate the path leading to the site of the white house and the tiny plot with the two unmarked graves of mother and infant.  

The white house survives in the memories marked by roads in Green Valley.  A number of chiropractors and dentists and realtors have their offices on White House Road, the highway that crosses the barren land in the basin to the mouth of Madera Canyon, earlier called “White House Canyon.”     

Co-ah,Co-ah,Co-ah

25.

Larcena Pennington was born in Nashville in 1837.  When her mother died, she traveled with her father and half-dozen siblings (from a family of 12) to Texas.  Times were hard on the Texas frontier and, so, the family moved again, this time crossing the deserts and mountains in hopes of reaching the golden lands of California.  Larcena was 20.  Although the family didn’t understand the peril, war had inflamed the Arizona border country through which they were making their way.  The Apaches were raiding the settler trails west from their mountain strongholds and had attacked several wagon trains.  The Pennington family passed through a number of dangerous canyons controlled by Apache marauders and, miraculously, reached Sonoita Creek, a tiny village in the foothill valleys to the east of the Santa Rita Mountains.  Larcena was exhausted and ill with malaria, a sickness that would flare up periodically for the rest of her life.  Further, the pioneers had lost cattle and some of their horses, either due to midnight raids by the Indians or because the animals had simply wandered off into the desert.  Unable to proceed farther to the west, the way blocked by the imposing massif of the Santa Ritas, the party camped for a few weeks.  The men harvested hay in the chaparral foot hills under the mountains and the women used their sewing skills to repair tattered uniforms of the troops stationed nearby at Fort Buchanan.  With their provisions replenished, the Pennington family moved to Calabasas, where they took up residence in a large villa formerly occupied by the Mexican governor, fled south after the United States defeated his country in the war of 1848.  The family prospered in the governor’s mansion and Larcena Pennington received gentlemen suitors.  Ultimately, she married a man named John Page, an enterprising fellow who had established a lumber business at the mouth of Madera canyon at the base of the heavily forested Santa Rita Mountains.

Larcena lived with Page at the Canoa Ranch just east of what is now Green Valley.  Page’s partner, Bill Kirkland, was raising a Mexican girl as his ward; she was eleven and her name was Mercedes Sais Quiroz.  The Canoa Ranch is 13 miles from Madera Canyon where John Page and Bill Kirkland had built a small mill, powered by the waters flowing down from the peaks in the gorge of the canyon.  Page and Kirkland spent most of their time at the mill riding back to the ranch on the weekends.  

Larcena’s malaria flared again and Page thought it would be prudent for her to recuperate at the cooler, higher elevations near the lumber mill.  On March 16, 1860, Page and his partner, Kirkland, brought a wagon to the Canoa Ranch and Larcena together with Mercedes and their dog, began the trek across the dry basin to the mill.  Travel was slow over the rough country and the party camped for the night at a place called Big Rock.  Early the next morning, Page and Kirkland rode their horses to the mill; they had an order for sawn timber to fill and intended to check on the progress of that work.  About noon on the 17th, Larcena heard their dog barking and, then, screams from Mercedes.  Five Pinal Apaches had kidnapped Mercedes and were looting the wagon.  Larcena was captured as well and the Indians with their prisoners hustled along game paths northeast skirting the southern ridges of the mountains.  At first, things weren’t too bad.  The Indians paused now and then to rest and they melted some of the snow covering the ground for water.  Things deteriorated when the Apaches realized that they were being pursued across the naked, treeless country, their tracks clearly visible in the snow.  Page and Kirkland were following their trail, collecting clues left by Mercedes and Larcena – the two women had torn tiny pieces from their skirts and left them festooning cactus along the path.  

The country on the flanks of the Santa Rita was desolate, with deep flashflood arroyos gouged into the desert.  The trail climbed along ridges and, then, dived into stony ravines.  From the hilltops, the Apaches could see the rescue party approaching, miles away in the basin.  The Indians picked up the pace, trotting across the broken badlands at a pace that Larcena, who had been sick recently, couldn’t endure.  The Indians stripped her of corset and skirt, garments that they thought impeded her ability run with them.  Still, she lagged behind.  One of the Indians circled back behind her and began to beat her shoulders with his lance.  The stones underfoot were slick with snow and meltwater and Larcena fell, sliding down into a gully where her descent was arrested by a tree. The Indians skidded down the steep slope to where she was pinned among the branches.  There, they stabbed her 16 times in the back and buttocks with their lance points.  Then, someone threw a rock at her, knocking her unconscious.  The Indians panicked and dragged the unconscious woman out of the arroyo, concealing her body behind a tree next to the trail.

Stripping Larcena’s boots from her feet, the Apaches hustled to the northeast, crossing the desert between the Santa Rita and the Santa Catalina Mountains.  After dark, Page, pursuing the Indians with his posse, passed very close to where Larcena was lying in the trees.  She heard his voice, but was too weak to call to him.  With the rescue party, he hurried past where his wounded wife was lying, following the footprints in the snow left by the retreating Indians.

Larcena was too badly injured to move for three days.  But she realized that if she didn’t reach civilization, she would die in the desert.  So she set forth, crawling in the direction of a pointed peak, an outlier to the mountains, a landmark that she recognized from the encampment at the Big Rock.   Delirious, and unable to rest on her back because of festering wounds, she crept over the desert, dragging herself forward with her arms.  Sometimes, she heard an animal barking, a high-pitched yelping: Co-ah, Co-ah, Co-ah!  She thought the sound was a puppy or, perhaps, a coyote or fox accompanying her as she dragged herself across the badlands.  One night, she happened upon a bear’s den, all cozy with grasses and clumps of fur, a noisome warm nest, but she thought it would be too dangerous to rest in that place and so she continued her agonzing crawl toward the pointed knoll on the horizon.  

After ten days, Larcena reached the hill and could see, from that vantage, the Madera Creek Road.  Near the road, she observed the burnt out camp where the Indians had attacked and kidnapped her almost two weeks before.  She made for the camp and found some supplies in the wreckage, including flour strewn in the snow.  In the sooty debris, she made a gruel from the flour and was able to mix up some coffee in a pot.  The next day, she began to crawl along the Madera Road, heading toward the Big Rock and the mill in the mountain gorge.  

The workers at the mill saw a strange apparition writhing like an inch worm across the rocky hillside.  No one recognized Larcena.  She was skeletal, covered with gaping, infected wounds, her fingers and nose and feet blackened with frostbite.  Even when she said her name, one of the workers persisted in believing that she was some kind of monster or ghost.  This isn’t Larcena, the man said, but her tormented revenant.  The emaciated woman was put to bed and a man rode hellbent to Tucson to summon a doctor.  On April 2, 1860, Larcena was transported to Tucson where she gradually recovered.  A couple months later, Mercedes was found among the Apaches near Fort Buchanan where a prisoner-swap was arranged.  The eleven-year old girl was freed and returned to Kirkland at the Canoa Ranch.  (She later married and had four children, but died at age 26.)

Kirkland and Page continued to operate their lumber mill in Madera Canyon.  After the Bascom Affair, the Apaches under Cochise aligned themselves with the slave-state sympathizers and there was more warfare along the border.  Page and Kirkland had lucrative contracts for lumber with the Union forces at Fort Grant.  While Page was transporting a wagon load of sawn boards to the fort, he was waylaid by the Apaches and killed.  This was sometime in the Spring of 1861.  The body was found mutilated and torn by wild animals on a ridge above the road to old Camp Grant.  Larcena received his handkerchief, his hand-purse, and a lock of hair as last souvenirs of her husband.  

With several members of her extended family, Larcena returned to Tubac.  At that time, the town was abandoned due to the threat of Apache raids.  She stayed in the family house that had been built there near the deserted Presidio and the Catholic church.  Later that year, her brother, James Pennington was killed by the Apaches.  There were other casualties in her family, but, after a decade or so, things settled down.  Most of Larcena’s siblings moved back to Texas, but she remained in Arizona territory.

In 1870, Larcena married William Scott, a Scottish lawyer and judge.  She had two children with Scott who seems to have become disenchanted with the frontier and, probably, returned to his native country.  Larcena becames a staunch member of the Congregational Church in Tucson.  She was also one of the first presidents of the Arizona Historical Society.  She died at age 76 in 1913, the year after Arizona was admitted to the Union.  There is a street in Tucson named for her and her house in Tubac has been preserved; today, it is an artist’s studio. 

A photograph taken when Larcena was in her thirties shows a woman with sharp features.  She has sensible hair, small alert eyes, and a pointed nose like a bird’s beak.  

The Elegant Trogon

25.

“Elegant Trogon” sounds like the name of a creature in an old Star Trek episode: “the Elegant Trogons are besieging the Starship Enterprise; they come in fast spacecraft made from precious minerals that shine like gold and emerald.”  In fact, the Elegant Trogon is a bird native to central America that migrates long distances, flying over border walls and barriers, to dwell in the canyons of Arizona and New Mexico.  It is worth considering, perhaps, why birds are afforded free access to the United States while mere humans huddle in the shadow of walls wreathed in razor wire and are denied entry.

 

If you want to see this bird, a stately creature with a brilliant red belly girdled by white feathers at the breast, a flying armorial banner or flag, with cobalt blue tail feathers streaked with silver (this is the male of the species; the females are less colorful), you must drive up the Madera Canyon road to its end, leave your car parked against the great retaining walls that protect the lot from landslide, and, then, hike uphill, past the picnic tables on their stony knolls, to a place where the path splits into two ascending trails.  If you climb to your left, this route is the Old Baldy trail that rises fifteen-hundred feet to the treeless Josephine Saddle.  But veer right, the steeper way, that leads upward to the snowy heights, following the so-called Carrie Nation trail.  The path is named after a copper mine in the ravine a thousand feet above the trailhead and, for some reason, the mine was named after another sort of bird entirely, the rara avis of Carrie Nation, the late 19th century temperance crusader known to take her hatchet to barrels of booze in the saloons that she attacked.  About a half mile up the steep trail, there’s a bench where you can sit and watch a cottonwood tree across the canyon.  A nesting pair of Elegant Trogon live in that tree.  They are easiest to see when there is snow on the ground and frosting the branches of the cottonwood.

If you can’t see the birds because of mountain mist, or falling snow, or the glitter of leaves on the tree in Spring and Summer, you should listen closely.  You may hear their distinctive cry: a hoarse barking sound like “co-ah! co-ah! co-ah!” 

Guests staying in the lodge a three-quarters of a mile down the road to the basin often hear the birds at dawn.  And, sometimes, they have been known hunt for insects or, even, tiny lizards, in the desert ranging as far as the Madera road.  

Helpful Information for Travelers in Southeast Arizona

26.

Roadside markers and historic sites in southeastern Arizona frequently mention the so-called “Bascom Affair.”  However, this reference is rarely explained.  It seems assumed that all Arizona travelers will know enough about the Bascom Affair to understand the information provided.  (This is similar to references to the even more enigmatic “Baca Float #3 case”.)  As a helpful aid to my readers, and all traveling in the Sonoran border country.  I provide this precis of the affair.  

In January of 1861, Cochise was the leader of the Chiricahua Apaches.  His people had negotiated a treaty with the United States and were receiving annuity payments from the government.  Therefore, Cochise limited the raids of Chiricahua war parties to Mexican settlements.  (There had been war between the Apaches and the Mexicans for hundreds of years in the Sonoran desert and Sierra Madre mountains.)  Cochise and his warriors, however, couldn’t resist stealing cattle and horses from the Anglos south of Tucson and, at least on one occasion, he had been forced by military intervention to return livestock captured from the Overland Express.

On January 27, 1861, a party of Tonto Apaches on a cattle raid snatched 20 head of steers and a 12-year old boy Felix Ward from a ranch near Sonoita Creek on the eastern flank of the Santa Rita Mountains – this place is about four miles from modern-day Patagonia. (Ward was the son of Santiago Telles and Maria Martinez, two sixteen year olds whose marriage was opposed by their respective families.  Later Maria Martinez married the Anglo rancher, John Ward.  Therefore, Felix was John Ward’s stepson.)  John Ward rode to Fort Buchanan and demanded that the cavalry pursue the Apaches.  Since the Indians had been seen fleeing toward the Chiricahua Mountains, it was wrongly assumed that the raiding party was comprised of Chiricahua Apaches.  But Cochise and his people had nothing to do with the cattle raid and the kidnaping of Felix Ward.  An army officer named George Bascom led a column of cavalry in pursuit of the raiding party.  Bascom’s troops, with Johnny Ward riding with them, reached Apache Pass to the east of the Santa Rita mountains, a well-traveled saddle between mountain ranges where there was a year-round spring.  Bascom sent scouts to parley with Cochise whose people lived in the nearby Chiricahua Mountains.  Cochise seems to have seen Bascom’s mistake (believing that the Chiricahua Apaches were involved in the kidnaping) as an opportunity to extort additional payments from the government troops.  Therefore, he didn’t immediately disabuse Bascom of his mistaken belief that his band was involved in the affair.

With his brother, Coyuntera, his wife, and two nephews, Cochise cautiously entered Bascom’s encampment.  This was on February 3, 1861.  (From what I have read, Cochise’s decision to parley with Bascom in the company of the other Indians, including his own wife, is inexplicable.  Perhaps, there is an explanation somewhere, but I haven’t read it.)  After a meal provided by the military, Cochise and Bascom began negotiations.  Cochise implied that, for reasonable compensation, he could procure the release of Felix Ward.  Bascom invited the Indians into a large tent and, then, posted sentries around the canvas to imprison them. Bascom said that Cochise and his relatives would be released when Felix Ward was surrendered to the cavalry.  Bascom’s troops had inadequately disarmed Cochise and the Indian used his knife to cut a hole in the side-wall of the tent.  He escaped through that opening in a hail of gunfire.  His brother, Coyuntera, followed but tripped over one of the ropes tethering the tent to the ground and fell.  A soldier stabbed him with his bayonet, pinning Coyuntera to the caliche so that he was unable to flee.

Two days later, Cochise sent a message to Bascom demanding the release of his wife, Coyuntera, and his two nephews.  Bascom replied that he would release the hostages just as soon as Felix Ward was returned.  Cochise, of course, didn’t have Felix Ward in his custody and, so, he decided to take action to procure his own hostages to exchange with the cavalry.  Thus, Cochise and his raiders attacked a group of teamsters hauling freight over the desert.  They captured nine Mexicans and three Anglos.  The Mexicans were tortured to death.  Cochise, then, told Bascom that if he wanted the Apaches to release the three teamster hostages, he would have to surrender Coyuntera, Cochise’s wife, and his two nephews.  Upping the ante, Cochise, who had now gathered together a large war party, attacked Bascom’s troops when they were fetching water – this was February 7, 1861.  Cochise, then, retreated into Sonora with Bascom’s cavalry in pursuit.  Along the way, the Apaches tortured the three Anglo hostages and, then, left their mutilated bodies on the trail with the intent that Bascom would find the corpses.  This act of bloodlust also seems inexplicable – what did Cochise think Bascom would do to his hostages? 

Bascom came upon the mangled and fragmentary bodies of the Americans.  In retaliation for these murders, he ordered that Coyuntera and Cochise’s two nephews be hanged.  The three Apaches were killed on February 17.  Observers remarked on Coyuntera’s conspicuous courage as he sang his death song and boldly walked up to the noose that would kill him.  Cochise, then, declared war on the Americans, triggering a series of bloody encounters between the various Apaches bands and local settlers as well as the military.  These Apache wars lasted for 25 years; Geronimo was a Chiricahua Apache.  

When war with the Confederacy erupted on the frontier, Bascom with his command was sent to fight the Southern sympathizers at the Battle of Valverde.  There, he was ripped to pieces when a cannon ball struck him.  The Apaches, who were allied with the Confederate forces, rejoiced at his death.  Felix Ward was found living quite happily with the White Mountain Band of Apaches.  He was repatriated to Johnny Ward’s ranch but wasn’t happy herding cattle.  (This is a pattern in American frontier history – White captives of the Indians frequently preferred living among the Native Americans to the drudgery of farming or pioneer commerce.)  Felix later joined the army as a scout and became famous under the name Mickey Free – however, this is another story.

Desert with Visitors and the correction of an error marring an earlier section in this essay (part 12 as enumerated above) – Bandolero

27.

When we returned to Tubac from Nogales, the village had assumed a different aspect.  Cars and SUV’s were jammed together on Main Street and folks wearing sunglasses with white slacks and polo shirts  were sauntering between the galleries and restaurants.  In the center of town, where the boutiques were were clustered together in buildings designed to look like pueblos, crowds of shoppers were gathered.  The village was alive with visitors, apparently people who had driven here for the afternoon from Tucson and its suburbs.  The air smelled of chili and cilantro and there were taco trucks and ice-cream vendors parked among the galleries.  The village no longer seemed to be a remote desert hamlet but, now, was more akin to the shopping districts in Scottsdale.  

One of the galleries displayed flayed bronze angels outside of its shop.  The angels had cadaverous faces and their flesh was ripped into ragged bronze pennants dangling from thigh and rib cage.  The creatures were, more or less, life-size and made a grisly spectacle along the sidewalk that was otherwise adorned with ironwork javelinas, weary bronze Indians on weary horses, and cowboys on bucking broncos.  What was the purpose of these gruesome beings with raw, feathered wings like vultures?

In many of the less elite stores, tourists could buy a poster duplicating an iconic Western image.  This is Lon Megargee’s painting “The Last Drop from the Stetson.”  This image depicts a Vaquero kneeling to offer his horse a drink of water from the cowboy’s Stetson hat turned upside-down to form a sort of goblet. The original painting is flamboyantly signed and envelopes the cowboy and horse in a romantic impressionistically painted pinkish haze of desert sand; a locust tree offsets the composition, balancing the horse and cowboy occupying the composition’s center.  Although you can buy copies of Megargee’s painting in many of the shops at Tubac, in fact, this artist never lived in the village.  Megargee, who had been born in Pennsylvania, was trained as a painter at the Philadelphia Institute of Fine Art.  His uncle owned a ranch in Arizona and, for a time, he worked as a cowboy and, then, a firefighter in Phoenix.  He set up a gallery and began painting Indians and cowpokes for the tourist trade that was, then, flourishing in the Southwest.  (For a time, he loitered around Taos where he was associated with Mabel Dodge Luhan, the socialite at the center of the arts colony in that New Mexico town.  There are stories of him dancing with Mrs. Luhan, dressed like a vaquero with silver buttons and epaulettes on his shirt and dagger tucked into his cowboy boots.  It is nice to imagine that he met D. H. Lawrence, the novelist, who was a part of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s coterie.  There’s no reason to think that the two didn’t briefly cross paths – at least, this is what I would like to believe.)  Lon Megargee was a liar – he claimed he had been kidnaped by Pancho Villa – but was, also, famously attractive to women.  It was said that he was married seven or eight times and was negligent about keeping track of his divorces.  Accordingly, he may have had several wives at one time.

Megargee moved to Phoenix where he was commissioned to paint murals for the State Capitol depicting the transition from territory to statehood.  His paintings had made him famous.  “The Last Drop from the Stetson” was purchased by the John B. Stetson hat company and, in fact, remains a trademark – the picture is reproduced on the tags inside of the hats.  When we dined at the Phoenix restaurant called Lon’s at the Hermosa, someone told us that this elegant old building had been Stetson hat factory.  This information was garbled.  The restaurant was, in fact, Lon Megargee’s Casa Hermosa, his home in Phoenix.  The structure was built across from the Phoenix Biltmore resort and the heavy timbers in the building were supposedly repurposed from shoring in an old mine located nearby.  (This also sounds apocryphal.)  Megargee, like most wealthy Arizonans, acquired a ranch near Sedona and died there in 1960.    

A well-known Mexican song from the turn of the 20th century contains these lines: Beba para acaricia la sed / Bebe mi caballo alazon lucero / De esto copa, mi sombrero – that is, “Drink to satisfy your thirst / Drink my shining sorrel / From this cup that is my sombrero” .  The horse in the poem is called “Bandolera”. 

Presidio

27.

If you want to escape the mid-day crowds in Tubac, just walk (or drive) 2 ½ blocks to the east.  This is old part of the village with the humble and somber Catholic church, the long, low-slung house with its old shade trees where Larcena Pennington Page (tortured by the Apaches and left for dead) lived, and the crumbling walls of the old fort or “presidio” in the State Park.  Even though there is no place readily available to park among the galleries nearby, the lot at the Presidio is empty.  The Inn is nearby and the derelict trailer park with its piles of salvaged junk and, nearby, a trail leads backpackers downhill to the path along the Santa Cruz riverbed.  

The remains of the Presidio are unimpressive.  Some field-stone foundations have been excavated and there are a few adobe walls, slumped shoulders among the ancient locusts and cottonwood trees. Several pole barns on concrete pads house exhibits and, in fact, the museum at the park is excellent.  There are some interesting artifacts, many period photographs showing Tubac when it was merely a much decayed desert crossroads, and well-researched information about the Pimeria Alta, the Civil War in the Southwest, and, of course, the conflicts with the Apaches.  

There is also a large display stretched along a back wall in one of the metal buildings explaining the Baca Float #3 litigation.  A “float” is a tract of land without mineral rights associated – the concept is that the owner of the tract has surface rights that “float” over the precious ore that may be buried below the ground.  Because mineral rights don’t accompany the premises, a “float” can be exchanged for an equivalent amount of bare land elsewhere; at least, this was the legal premise applicable to Spanish land grants when they came to be governed by American law.  A Mexican grandee named Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca acquired about a half-million acres in 1823 (or 1821 accounts vary) in what is now called New Mexico in the vicinity of Las Vegas.  Cabeza de Baca claimed his lineage dated to the famous (inadvertent) explorer Ivar Nuez Cabeza de Vaca, the man who was shipwrecked in south Texas near the location of modern Galveston and spent eight years walking across the Southwest before reaching Mexico City around 1537.) Luiz Maria Cabeza de Baca was born in Santa Fe and seems to have been a land swindler from the outset of his career.  He was prosecuted for stealing land from the Cochita Pueblo near Santa Fe and, later, claimed squatters rights to a huge part of New Mexico territory on the basis of a couple of goatherders’ huts located in the desert to the south of the provincial capital.  Somehow, de Baca, who had 22 children, persuaded the Spanish governor in Durango to execute a land grant to him either in 1821 or 1823 – the year of the grant, which is disputed, is significant: if the grant were made by the Spanish crown in 1821, it would have been valid; however, a land grant from the governor at Durango (and not Santa Fe where the transaction should have been recorded) in 1823 would have been void – at that time, Spain no longer controlled the territory and the title to the land should have originated with the government in Mexico City, not the crown in Madrid.  In any event, under these suspicious circumstances, de Baca laid claim to a vast territory.  But, as it turned out, his land was basically worthless.  Of course, there were already native people on the land.  Apache attacks deterred settlement and made it impossible to maintain livestock on the land grant territories.  De Baca, then, petitioned the Mexican government for a decree allowing him to substitute an equal quantity of unsettled land in what is now Arizona for the property under assault by the Apaches in present-day New Mexico.

At the time of this petition, de Baca had five legitimate sons – apparently, most of the rest of his children were bastards.  The Mexican government consented to the transfer of de Baca’s property rights to vacant terrain in Arizona in five enumerated “floats,” each assigned to one of his heirs (by this point the old scoundrel had died).  Baca Float #3 was about 100,000 acres in the environs of Tubac.  

With the Gadsden Purchase, the United States acquired the territory in which the five Baca Floats were located.  The American government agreed to recognize the property rights established in de Baca’s sons with respect to these floats.  The owner of Baca Float #3, sometime around 1860, sold his rights in the land near Tubac to a consortium of East Coast land speculators.  For thirty or so, years, the land was, more or less, fallow as an investment and, of course, was inhabited by local families who operated ranches and gardens on the terrain.  Beginning in the latter part of the 19th century, the de Baca heirs with rights to Float #3 had engaged an Indiana lawyer to formally survey the land and offer tracts for development.  The lawyer made an error – his surveys seem to have been off by 14 miles.  (This seems suspicious and the implication is that the lawyer simply defined Baca Float #3 in such a way as to annex additional land to the tract more valuable than the desert near Tubac.)  When the East Coast investors began to develop the Float, a legal nightmare ensued.  The local people living on the property asserted squatter’s rights, that is, legal rights to continued occupancy on the basis of adverse possession.  Furthermore, title to the property was horribly confused by the Indiana attorney’s erroneous (and, possibly, intentionally inaccurate) surveys and abstracting.  Litigation ensued – the final decrees were not issued until 1917.  Efforts to evict ranchers claiming adverse possession began around 1914.  The East Coast consortium of investors hired armed thugs to drive people off their land.  At least one person was shot dead.  Another man, who was a county constable, was forcibly evicted and, then, poisoned in the jail in Nogales.  (I have told you this anecdote at section 20 above, The Sad story Coyetano Andrade).   The exhibit in the museum was replete with artifacts abandoned by squatters when they were driven off property on which they had lived for several generations.  Photographs of the hard-bitten local ranchers expelled from their homes and grazing ranges are posted and there is a picture of an elderly lady who was left in the cold and snow, standing on a muddy road with all her worldly possessions heaped up behind her. There was a butter churn on display and a large, rusty, and hideous-looking scythe.  The so-called “land-grab” on the Baca Float #3 tract hasn’t been forgotten.  People are still embittered about this event more than a hundred years later.  Much of the suburban housing at Rio Rica nearby, housing occupying the foothills near Nogales is built on the old Baca Float #3 land.  

The story is familiar. Legal title to every inch of terrain, whether arable or not, is evidence of crimes committed upon someone.     

Duel at Tubac

28.

The Presidio museum displays some firearms, ancient photographs of young bucks with extravagant facial hair, and an archaic printing press, a tool that looks like something for squeezing juice out of fruit.  These are the instruments relevant to a celebrated duel fought on the eve of the American Civil War.  

The antagonists in the duel were Edward Cross and Sylvester Mowry, both of them about 25 when the affair occurred.  Cross had been born in New Hampshire but came to the Southwest to the mining country in the Santa Rita mountains.  He made his base in Tubac and founded Arizona’s first newspaper, The Arizona Weekly (printed in Tubac as well).  Cross’ rival, both in business and politically, was Sylvester Mowry, raised in Providence, Rhode Island and, as an army officer, deployed to the Utah frontier.  Mowry was flamboyant and impulsive; he seduced one of Brigham Young’s daughters when he was among the Saints in the Deseret State and fled the enraged prophet’s posses into Arizona territory.  There he stood for election to the territorial assembly, won a seat, and began agitating for two things: Arizona’s admission to the Union but, as a slave state.  In those days, every prominent man was an author and Mowry wrote a book describing the wonders and resources of Arizona territory, advocating for Washington to admit the miraculous desert paradise as a new slave state.

Edward Cross, the newspaper editor (and rival mine owner), opposed Mowry’s political objectives; he was a staunch anti-slavery Union man.  He printed an editorial accusing Mowry of lying about the population of Arizona – Mowry had inflated the head-count to encourage the territory’s admission to the Union.  Mowry was outraged at the aspersions cast on his honesty and demanded that Cross fight him in a duel.  The two men agreed to exchange four shots fired from identical carbine rifles at a range of forty paces, that is about 120 feet.  The affair took place under festive auspices in July 1859.  The whole town turned out in the plaza at the Presidio and local ranchers with their families gathered together with a fair number of Mexicans and Indians.  Neither of the duelists were sharpshooters and the range was sufficient to assure that no one would be badly hurt.  Cross had the first shot and missed; Mowry then fired and missed as well.  After three more fruitless exchanges of fire, Cross was out of bullets.  Mowry was a gentleman and discharged his last shot into the air.  Everyone was pleased at the outcome.  A local saloon keeper had brought 42 gallons of whiskey to his tent pitched near the field of honor and pretty soon everyone was sloppy drunk.  Cross and Mowry embraced and declared that they were now fast friends.  

And, indeed, the relationship between the two men yielded business consequences.  The rivalry between the competing mining interests in the Santa Rita mountains calmed into a cooperative endeavor.  Mowry was more interested in Cross’ weekly newspaper that he had founded, The Arizona Weekly.  Mowry saw the paper as a platform for his political aspirations – he remained a delegate to the territorial assembly and had ambitions to represent Arizona in Washington.  Mowry bought the paper lock, stock, and barrel from Cross and moved the operation to Tucson.  The Civil War ensued.  Cross enlisted as an officer in the Union army.  Mowry published editorials demanding that the people of Arizona support the Confederacy.  Ultimately, after the fighting around Tucson and the Battle of Valverde near Santa Fe, the North prevailed.  Mowry was thrown into the pestilential territorial prison at Fort Yuma where he was in lock-up for half a year, under accusations of treason.  When he was released in 1863, Mowry discovered that his mining operations at Patagonia had been expropriated and, then, closed.  A series of futile lawsuits followed.  (A ghost town near Patagonia, the site of a few adobe walls and collapsing frame-built shacks around mine shafts now hidden in the chaparral, bears Mowry’s name.  Pressure from the Apaches made the town precarious and, after forty years or so, Mowry failed.)

After his adventures in Arizona, Mowry went to California where he began further political machinations.  These measures went awry due to another imprudent love affair.  Mowry courted the notorious “Firebelle Lil Hitchcock”, a San Francisco heiress who smoked cigars, swore like a man, and collected firefighters as her lovers.  Lil’s father didn’t like Mowry, whom he regarded as a sort of soldier of fortune, and ran him out of California.  Mowry, then, went to New York City to raise money to reclaim his interests in the mines near Patagonia, Arizona.  But he became ill with dropsy (kidney failure).  Local specialists despaired of his life and, so, as an invalid, Mowry traveled to London to seek more expert treatment.  His condition worsened and he died in the British capitol in 1871.  He was about 38.

Edward Cross died before Mowry. He went East and enlisted as an officer in the Army of the Potomoc.  He fought with distinction in several desperate battles.  In combat, Cross wore a bright red bandana so that his men could see him in their midst during the fighting.  On the second day of the battle at Gettysburg, Cross lost his red bandana and borrowed a black scarf as replacement.  While forming his troops into a skirmish line, Cross saw a row of ambulance wagons waiting in the rear.  He remarked to a friend that he didn’t think he’d have any need for a conveyance of that sort on this particular day.  Charging forward at the head of his men, Cross was shot down and died in a field hospital the next day.  (The anecdote about the ambulance wagons makes no sense because Cross didn’t die immediately but, in fact, had to be hauled back to the rear by such a transport.)

Edward Cross was only 31when he died at Gettysburg.  A photograph taken during the Civil War shows a bright-eyed man with a full, fluffy black beard.  The beard makes him look old, like a patriarch from the Bible, but, in fact, he was still youthful when the minnie ball cut him down.

Hacienda de la Canoa  

29.

The Canoa Ranch is a historic site just to the east of the interstate between Tucson and Nogales.  Cold rain was falling when I walked around the old buildings on the site.  Big puddles lolled outside the elegant-looking lime-plastered buildings and the old corral built from stacked mesquite wood was swampy with mud.  

Originally, the ranch spreading from Green Valley across the basin to the Santa Rita foothills was part of a Spanish land grant recorded in 1821.  After the Gadsden Purchase, the place was operated by various Anglo ranchers.  The structures on site, including a small, shallow lake impounding water from the Santa Cruz River, date from the so-called Manning occupancy of the hacienda, that is, from 1908 to 1970.  Levi Manning, a prosperous Tucson merchant, acquired the ranch.  He wasn’t a cowboy, but his son, Howell Manning, Sr., embraced that trade with enthusiasm.  The modest structures on the ranch were replaced with an elegant house, designed by a well-known Tucson architect, John Smith, and completed in 1935.

The ranch house was unlocked but entirely empty when I entered it.  Except for toilets and some storerooms, the interior design is open without doors; a long room with glass facade provides a spectacular vista of the Santa Rita mountains; smaller chambers, also bright with big windows, are assembled in an elegant array behind the big space with its panorama of snow-tipped peaks, canyons, and the prominent nose of the range, the pinkish Elephant Head protruding from the pine-clad sierra. The ranch house was chilly when I toured it and the picture-windows streaked with rain.  Howell Manning Sr. spoke fluent Spanish and his hands were all vaqueros.  He looked to old Mexico for culture and recreation.  Pictures show him honeymooning with his slender blonde wife (she’s as pretty as a movie star) among the canals and flower-islands and floating mariachi bands in Xochimilco, a  suburb to Mexico City.  Some boots on display were acquired in Mexico, exemplifying the craft of fine leather work.  The empty house has the feeling of Frank Lloyd Wright (Smith was a disciple) and, with the patter of rain on the flat roof, the hacienda reminded me a little of Wright’s Falling Water villa near Pittsburgh.  But the ceilings were higher than in Wright’s house and the vistas between rooms less complicated and the raison d’etre for the structure is the great room with its majestic view of the purple sage in the basin and the wild pinnacles of mountains.  

Howell Manning’s eldest son, Howell Manning Jr. seems to have been the hope for the next (third) generation of ranchers on the land.  When the young man married a Tucson socialite, Louise (Deezie) Lewis, his father built a new ranch house near the artificial lake for the young couple.  (This white plastered building, adobe with steel-framed windows, low-slung but somehow airy-looking was padlocked when I walked around the premises.  The place had a rather ghostly aspect, a lithe, sculpted rectangle with a dark, grotto-like interior near the long and narrow bunkhouse for the Mexican cowboys, that building surrounded by tack sheds, a cook house and some BBQ pits.)  Both of the Manning men, father and son, were handsome, beefy men with red faces, strong and squat – in photographs, they look like movie-extra straightshooters, cowpokes wandered onto the ranch from a Hopalong Cassidy movie.  The whole enterprise collapsed when Howell Manning, Jr., driving back home from Tucson in December 1951, was hit head-on by a drunk driver.  Manning, Jr. and his two passengers were killed instantly.  His father was grief-stricken.  (There was a second son, but he is a shadowy figure and it’s unclear why the ranch operation wasn’t transferred to him – my suspicion is that he was somehow impaired.)  Howell Manning, Sr. lost interest in the ranch, neglected his herds, and started drinking heavily.  At its height, the Canoa Ranch comprised over 300,000 acres; this was too much for the aging and alcoholic Manning to successfully mange. Gradually, he mortgaged or sold off much of the ranch.  A golf course adjacent to the Canoa ranch was once part of its open range.  Deezie remained associated with the property as it gradually deteriorated into ruins.  (She didn’t live at the ranch but spent summers in Vermont and resided, after the death of her second husband, mostly in Tucson proper.)  When she died in 2010, most of the structures were half collapsed and their adobe walls were slowly dissolving into mud and dust.  

The Duke and a Jewish Songwriter   

30.

Deezie and Howell Manning, Jr. were a picture-perfect couple.  American Airlines promoted flights to Arizona and the carrier’s calendars featured the husband and wife on horseback, surveying the blue waters of their reservoir on the Canoa ranch.  The horses were beautiful and Howell’s square jaw and blue eyes and his broad-brimmed Stetson hat made him look like a movie star, perhaps, a singing cowboy with guitar slung over his shoulder and, of course, Deezie was a thoroughbred as well, slender with sharp intelligent features and a witty and sardonic gaze like Lauren Bacall.  Before the deadly car crash, John Wayne visited the ranch and spent a few days on horseback riding the sage and, one Christmas, Irving Berlin was a house-guest and entertained his hosts by playing piano in the music room.  

After Howell, Jr. was killed, Deezie moved to Mexico City.  In 1955, she married Thomas Benton Catron IV.  Her new husband, a combat pilot from World War II, was a manager at McCormick & Company, the business that sells spices.  (McCormick de Mexico had been founded in 1947 as a subsidiary of its American parent; in Mexico, the business specialized in pickling and brining spices, but soon expanded into other products that were sold throughout Central and South America.)  Thomas Catron IV must have been exceedingly wealthy.  He was the grandson of Thomas Benton Catron, a lawyer and land-speculator who acquired an unsavory reputation in New Mexico for sharp practice in acquiring property subject to old Spanish and Mexican land grants.  Catron was the mayor of Santa Fe, then, a State Senator and he was integral to the so-called Santa Fe ring, a group of wealthy ranchers and businessmen who ran New Mexico in the last third of the 19th century – you can see them depicted on screen together with Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garret and Billy the Kid.  At one point, old man Catron controlled over three million acres of range and grazing land in New Mexico.  Deezie’s husband, Thomas Catron IV ultimately was promoted to vice-president of International Sales for McCormick.  He died in 1985 and is buried in Tucson.

Deezie was an accomplished water color artist and showed her works in various galleries in Tucson.  By the time of her death, Tucson’s art scene was vibrant and there were fine restaurants and all the amenities of metropolitan living.  Until her death, she remained beautiful, tense, alert, with the hardened classical beauty of a Greek statue.

The crossing of the Colorado

31.

The oldest structure at Canoa Ranch is a granary with tack room and blacksmith shop.  This row-house is built in a style called “Sonoran vernacular”.  In Sonora, houses were made from 15 inch wide adobe mud bricks stacked up as high as 20 feet to form long narrow rooms.  When additional space is required, another room will be added next to the existing enclosure.  The rooms don’t interconnect and there are no interior doorways or halls – to access an adjacent chamber, you have to step outside and enter the next room through its door.  Buildings of this sort are constructed so that cooling breezes can flow directly through the building.  The massive adobe walls insulate the interior and keep the structure reasonably cool in the Summer.  

The granary and its two side rooms was built around 1910.  The walls separating the rooms have been removed and a steel roof installed instead of the original timber joists and thatching with reeds harvested from the Santa Cruz river bed.  An exhibit now provides information about the Anza expedition.  

In 1774, the Spanish crown was concerned about the expansion of Russian settlements into the Pacific Northwest.  Spain had colonies in what is now southern California but those outposts were nearly inaccessible – they were a half-year from Mexico City by mule train and on foot or, otherwise, accessible only after sailing around the deadly and storm-vexed Cape of Good Hope at the polar vertex of South America.  Juan Bautista de Anza, then, governor of the Presidio at Tubac, proposed an expedition to California.  (At that time, most geographers believed California was either an enormously long peninsula or, perhaps, even an island.)  Anza’s plan was to trek north and west from Tubac to find a land route connecting the Spanish missions in the Pimeria Alta with California.  

In October 1774, Anza’s party set forth from Tubac.  (Soldiers and some civilians had come north from Culican, initiating the expedition.)  The governor had about 300 civilians in tow, 30 or so cavalry, and a thousand head of livestock.  On the second day of the trek, one of the soldier’s wives went into labor and delivered “a fine boy” as the diary of Father Font, one of Padres with the expedition observed.  The mother, however, died and was buried at San Ignacio de Canoa (the site of the present-day Canoa Ranch).  The expedition continued, reaching the Colorado River at the Yuma Indian villages on November 28, 1774.  After celebrating Mass, the expedition crossed the river, a dangerous undertaking, but one accomplished without loss of life or provisions.  The Indians proposed a feast, offering beans, squash, and corn to the Spaniards together with watermelons in abundance – de Anza recorded in his diary that there were 3000 melons consumed at this celebratory banquet.  

It was at this feast that the widow Maria Feliciana Arballo danced coquettishly, performing a fandango to the outrage of Father Font.  Spirits were flowing freely and everyone was drunk and the widow Arballo, who was tipsy herself, was encouraged by the applause of the others on the expedition.  She improvised lyrics as she sang, words said by Pedro Font to be “not nice at all.”  A couple days later, somewhere in the deserts of Alta California, Father Font sent three men to punish the widow for her audacity.  They slapped her around and, with her infant, and two small daughters, she left the expedition at the Mission of San Gabriel.  (Records show she remarried, another soldier, in 1776).

Widow Arballo is one of those indistinct figures who appear out of history’s fabulous, formless darkness, burn brightly for a moment, and, then, vanish into obscurity.  Very little is known about her.  She is a figment of other people’s imaginations, mentioned in a couple of diaries but without voice herself.  The exhibit at the Canoa ranch tells us that she danced the fandango to celebrate the Colorado River crossing.  But National Park Service brochures about the Anza expedition say that she performed her infamous dance only after a successful crossing of the Mojave desert, that is several weeks later – and, indeed, Father Font’s diary records her dance on December 17, 1774.  There’s no real evidence that Font’s disapprobation led to any physical violence – it’s more likely that he preached a sermon denouncing the “bold widow’s” importune fandango but nothing more.  

Maria Feliciano was born in Culiacan, Mexico near Oaxaca.  Birth certificates show her to have been a mulata libre – that is, freed woman of Mexican and African origin.  San Gabriel mission, where the “bold Widow” left the expedition is near present-day Los Angeles.  Anza’s expedition forged its way north and ultimately reached the Golden Gate in mid-March 1776.  Near the bay, de Anza founded the presidio and mission of San Francisco de Asis.  Ultimately, de Anza’s discovery of a land route to Alta California proved futile.  The hospitable Yuma Indians who had hosted the Spaniards at the Colorado River crossing decided that their guests had become too arrogant and greedy to be tolerated.  The Indian rose in rebellion against the Spanish in 1781, only five years after de Anza had crossed their land and the route from the missions in the Pimeria Alta to California became too perilous for travelers and closed until the 1820's.  

Patagonia and the Harshaw Road

32.

Although the mining district at Patagonia is only eleven miles from Tubac as the crow flies, the Santa Rita Mountains intervene and there are no roads that traverse the range.  To reach Patagonia, you have to drive to within three or four miles of Nogales and, then, cross the valley under the terraces of the mountains driving into north-south running canyons that dissect the foothills.  In this area, the sky-island mountains have lost their distinct identities and blur into one another, steep hills crowding one another on border.  It’s not clear where one Madrean range begins and another ends.

Patagonia was a rail center for mines in the hills.  The mines are mostly gone and the railroads rooted up and, so, the town has a hollow center, a long greensward of lawn about the width of a football field running between the two sides of the village.  Apparently, this park occupies the area where the trains once were switched between narrow-gage tracks running up into the mineral-rich hills.  Two parallel streets front the central park each lined with small real estate offices, taverns, and cafes.  Patagonia is a retirement community now and there are fit-looking old folks jogging in the park with dogs trotting obediently alongside the runners.  The town is clean and orderly and a little dull.  

The Sonoita Creek runs through the valley, meandering through a trough cut between the wooded mountains to the east and some stark, barren foothills rising up to the main ridge of the Santa Ritas. The forest next to the creek, apparently, drowns periodically and the low areas are full of potholes and drifted sand shadowed by bedraggled trees that spend the winter and summer monsoons battered by flashfloods.  You can park your car on a gravel lane at the edge of the wet-land woods and hike along the creek but it will cost you 8 dollars – you self-pay at a kiosk and hang a receipt from your rear-view mirror.  (The woods are a Nature Conservancy reserve famous for migrating birds.)  If you want to walk for free, you can hike on the west side of the road, a trail that climbs steeply to a vantage 150 feet above the gravel lane and, then, loops through the treeless hillsides and arroyos.  It’s a pointless walk under the sun that, even, in March is unpleasantly warm.  The trail winds over eroded hills and dusty gulches, skirting stands of prickly pear and agave.  After forty minutes walking in this desolate country, I turn around and head back to the parking place, scrambling up and down gravel filled ravines.  The sky over the eastern ridges is purplish and, sometimes, a fat, greasy raindrop splashes on my face – there seems to be rain overhead but most of it evaporates before plopping into the dust.  Higher in mountains, dark bars of rain shift back and forth.

The trail rotates around an elaborate desert villa mounted on a hill subordinate to the main ridge rising over the Sonoita Creek valley.  I wonder if the bestselling novelist Jim Harrison lived in that place.  I know that the writer retired to Patagonia and died here.  The redwood-colored decks and cantilevered roof of the house seem a bit eccentric, bespoke as it were, and the stance of the dwelling on the brow of a desert bluff is more than a little ostentatious.  Harrison wrote the novella Legends of the Fall, made into a noteworthy movie in1995 with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins.  I think of Harrison as an accomplished prose stylist (he also wrote poetry) in the vein of Ernest Hemingway – sometimes, he seems a bit like Cormac McCarthy, although less exuberant, or Thomas McGuane, that is, a western writer, although originally hailing from upstate Michigan (think of Hemingway’s “Big Two-hearted River”.)  The house in the hills reminds me of the place that Frederick Manfred built under the stony Sioux quartzite palisades at Blue Mound in southwest Minnesota – pompously set apart, it’s an elegant streamlined contraption of a house, a bit of a vanity project, as it were, and clearly a temple to a certain kind of embattled masculine aesthetics.  Of course, these observations are all fantasy – I don’t know who built the house overlooking Patagonia in its well-watered valley; for all I know, it was the dwelling of some local banker or retired rancher or the estate of a well-heeled financier from Tucson.  Harrison must have earned millions from his books and screenplays and, no doubt, his ranch was hidden in one of the cool canyons in the green range above town. 

After my walk, I took a detour into the mountains southeast of Patagonia, following the Harshaw road past the pink butte named Red Mountain.  The red is cinnabar, sometimes, the sign that there might be gold in “them thar hills” or, at least, extractable mercury.  The gravel lane was plenty wide, nicely graded, and pleasant enough, passing through some desert meadows where enormous, prehistoric-looking bulls with five-foot horns lounged like boulders, inert and placid, next to the road.  The sky was a jigsaw puzzle of grey and dark blue clouds, split apart sometimes between the joints, rain hovering over the hills and shafts of bright, hot sun falling through the clefts in the cloud cover.  Signs at the roadside warned me that smugglers frequent these wooded saddles between the mountains and that travelers are informed not to stop for hitchhikers since most of the people traversing this valley are undocumented immigrants.  At intervals, I encountered rows of orange cones funneling me to one side of the road or another.  In one case, a huge flat-bed trailer heavily burdened by a big crane was stalled out, one of the trailer tires half-slipped from the road bed and several white pickups, each flagged with twelve-foot high rods flying orange pennants, were loitering nearby.  The lane dipped ahead of the stalled-out trailer and crane and there was a semi grunting as it idled nearby and a bypass lane around a low flash-flood channel had been plowed through the nearby chaparral.

Beyond the trailer and crane, I met a half-dozen white pickups, all displaying orange flags, the vehicles creeping over the gravel road on obscure missions.  The pickups seemed to be carrying messages and I thought that, perhaps, they were patrolling the area on behalf of the border patrol, hunting for illegal immigrants.  The isolation, the forbidding signs, the strange dips and capricious hills traversed by the gravel road, the pickups delivering messages, it seemed, back and forth, sometimes ahead of me, other times behind in a solemn three or four vehicle procession – all of these things spooked me a little and I felt that there was peril in this lonely place, uphill from Patagonia under the naked pink knob of Red Mountain.

No trespassing signs warned me not to explore the ruins of Harshaw, a mining camp that once boasted a couple hundred people, a school, some taverns, and a church.  The mine, part of the operations founded by Sylvester Mowry, played-out around the time of World War I and the town died.  The no-trespassing sign stands beside a narrow lane running toward some dusty cottonwood trees on a crooked hillside.  Next to the Harshaw road (a private lane), there’s a humped adobe wall and, then, another facade roofless and missing its other three sides but with the splintery window frame still embedded in the eroded mud bricks standing sentinel at the intersection.  A thousand yards down the road, I came to the source of the white trucks, a bluff cut into pale terraces where machines were working and a broad place in the lane where some pickups with orange flags were parked.  I couldn’t identify the nature of the workings, but they had a sinister aspect and so I thought it prudent to keep my distance.  The hillside had something of the character of an earthen embankment dam and I wondered if there wasn’t water piled up in a reservoir  behind the steps and chutes of the slope.   I didn’t venture any closer.  The valley between the buttes seemed hostile:  at once, too empty and too crowded with the fleet of moving white trucks and most of the terrain seemed proscribed posted with frightening no-trespassing signs. 

I found a cemetery, surprisingly large for this remote place, upright stones and concrete slabs behind an iron fence on the small knoll next to the intersection with the private lane leading to the Harshaw ruins.  Artificial flowers made exclamation points next to the graves marked with metal crosses and cairns and knee-high pale chalk stones like broken teeth jutting out of the yellow desert pavement.  The cemetery was inaccessible behind a creek bed, flowing with bright, swift water apparently fallen out of the clouds tacked to the mountains overhead.  The path to the graves dipped into the ditch where the stream surged downhill, brightening the boulders in its course.  Across from the driveway to the cemetery, the gravel turn-around bordered by the rippling creek, a huge tree shaped like a tarantula spread out its root-legs, eight or more of them clawing at the gravel under naked buttresses of tree-trunk, the bark peeled away to display white, wind-polished columns.  

On the way back to town, I finally understood the meaning of the white pickups.  They were pilot vehicles, deployed around the distressed crane.  A big cab was now attached to the crane’s trailer and the huge, overwide conveyance crept forward, the metal cross-members of the hoist creaking as the tires turned below.  Rain in the mountains had brought enough water down off the heights to dampen the flash-flood channels cut through the road and the concrete aprons of those depressions were running with sunlit water about four inches deep.  Each time, I passed through one of the flood channels, I held my breath.  Signs warned me to not enter the dips when “water is flowing”, but, surely, this didn’t apply to these dark rivulets and freshets in the troughs of the road.  Apparently, the rain on the ridges had disheartened the teamsters hauling the crane and, so, the massive vehicle, now facing me, had dipped down into one of the gutter-like swales in the road and the nose of the huge cab was bent forward as if to sip from the temporary creek running under the vehicle’s bumper and headlights.  Pilot trucks were in front of the crane, splashing through the dip, and on all sides of the trailer, anxiously darting here and there like the nursery-insects attendant upon a queen termite laying 20,000 eggs a day.  

I splashed through the low place in the road.  The white pilot pickups on one side of the trailer yielded to me and, then, I was on the downslope to Patagonia, passing the lazy bulls with their bronze-colored burnished horns.   

A traveler from Outer Space

33.

Public Radio based in Tucson touted an exhibition at the Gem and Mineral Museum in the old courthouse downtown.  On display: a fragment from the asteroid Bennu, retrieved from the surface of that spinning carbonaceous rock by an unmanned spacecraft, the OSIRIS-REx.  Breathlessly, someone says on-air that this piece of black stone, estimated to be more than four billion years old, is “the oldest thing that you can lay eyes upon.”  A half-cup of debris chipped off the asteroid was brought back to earth, the retrieval capsule parachuting to earth in the desert 80 miles west of Salt lake City on September 24, 2023.  A chunk of this debris, characterized as regolith (that is, unconsolidated gravel and sand), can be seen in the courthouse museum.  I’m intrigued and the day is still young and, so, we exit the freeway on our way back to Phoenix, drive a dozen blocks beyond the Santa Cruz river bridge and park in the underground lot at the old courthouse.  The building above has a Moorish aspect with a dome encrusted with semi-precious minerals and the big monument to the victims of the January 2011 shooting at Oracle (a Tucson suburb) in which congresswoman Gabby Gifford was badly wounded rests like a bisected and beached whale amidst its fountains by the arched entrance to the museum complex.  The morning is bright and the grass surrounding the museum entrance is brilliantly green, a dewy hue and texture not seen (or, at least, appreciated) outside of arid climates where this color signifies water and, indeed, a local condition of water in abundance.  People are eating lunch on the grass and street musicians are singing and playing guitars.  Most of the universe (like Bennu) is void and lifeless and, so, we should regard it as a privilege to be present in a place with flowing water, chlorophyll, and a temperate sun spilling its radiance all across the vernal desert. 

Bennu is a spinning egg-shaped piece of space shit, 1800 feet across, and cleft with channels cut by running water on its parent planet before that body shattered into fragments.  Where the rotating asteroid isn’t grooved, the mass is abrasive with big boulders and serpentine jagged ridges.  The rock rolls over every 4.2 hours.  Veins of calcite crystal catch the sun.  The thing was discovered in 2007, named Bennu (as a result of a school competition) after an Egyptian sun deity portrayed as a sort of grim, stalking heron.  It’s thought that the name of this god, Bennu, morphed into “Phoenix” and the longlegged heron represents rebirth, rising from the flames that periodically consume the world – the god-critter was worshiped in Heliopolis, the Egyptian city dedicated to the sun.  Bennu sometimes sprays three and four-inch gravel from its surface, whirling around with a comet-like tail of ejected pebbles.  It’s orbit is eccentric and a threat to the earth – there is a one in 2700 probability that Bennu may collide with our planet in about four-hundred years; hence, the expedition to the asteroid.  Curiously, the sun-fractured stones on Bennu demonstrate (on spectrographic analysis) significant amounts of water.    

The Mineral Museum is full of wonders: there are crystals that look like textile fibers or bird feathers or amorphous calcite clouds, stones that glow when irradiated with black light, polished gems the size of eggs in every imaginable color, rocks that seem edible as candy or pillow-soft or radiant with strange internal energy, fang-shaped quartzite and cubes of translucent, glowing crystal, gold nuggets as big as your fist and silver ore in glistening, wet-looking veins next to copper embedded in green carbuncle matrices.  Several display cases offer meteorites with labels neatly advising when and where the stone fell from the skies.  But we can’t locate the Bennu fragment.  In fact, it’s conspicuously displayed but in cases that feature exhibits more astronomical and related to space exploration than mineralogy.  The exact characteristics of the Bennu space debris retrieved by OSIRIS-REx haven’t yet been established – after all, the samples have only been available for study for about five months.  

At last, I locate the asteroid-sample: it’s embedded in a small bubble of plexiglass or transparent acrylic, a minute black fleck the size of the graphite tip of a lead pencil.  In fact, the tiny stone speck looks a bit like a broken-off pencil led.  A facsimile of the fragment, scaled up a hundred times to the size of a baseball, flanks the actual sample.  The stone is black, so dark that it almost seems blue. The bubble of acrylic is set in a metal frame, a bit like a watch face, a window, as it were, into something approaching eternity.  Of course, it’s underwhelming, a distinct anti-climax after all of the hype.  Most of the museum visitors just glance at the display case, don’t exactly understand what it means – what is OSIRIS-REx? – and pass by on their way to more showy exhibits.  If you know a little about 101955 Bennu (provisional designation RQ36) you will understand that the little lance-shaped point of stone is a vista into the end of the world, an apocalypse that will result from an impact between our planet and an asteroid the size of five football fields, the end of everything including the brightly colored migratory birds, the snowy peaks of the Santa Ritas draped in cool evergreen forests, the golf courses at Tubac and Green River, Nogales with it’s “forty bare hills” and the ranch reservoir at Canoa, the Camelback Mountain and its resorts – I suppose that history would remain ineradicable since it signifies things no longer present to be destroyed: Micky Free and Doc Mock and Lurcena Pennington Page, Deezie Manning-Catron, and all the others couldn’t be ruined because they no longer exist.  The only thing that might survive may be this manuscript which I have arranged to have sealed in an iron box and deposited at the bottom of the deepest iron mine in Minnesota, amidst the white walls and tools for detecting neutrino radiation.  The world would be a charred lump of coal mindlessly spinning through space, although its history would remain.  But those who once remembered them would be gone forever...

A Roadside Capilla

34.

Where Highway 82 between Nogales and Patagonia passes through a gorge in the ridge of foothills, dark buttes looming over the two-lane blacktop, there’s a parking lot next to a historical marker and, also, an elaborate roadside shrine, built among some huge boulders cleft from the cliffs and fallen into the canyon.  The shrine consists of five capillas (chapels) embedded in the house-size rocks and a ladder-like flight of stone steps ascending to a grotto chiseled into the cliff about twenty feet above the parking lot.  The capillas are the size of the telephone booths that used to stand here and there in cities or train stations or, even, airports, constructed from white-washed concrete bricks – some of the stone sheds are open; others have glass fronts in iron frame doors padlocked shut to protect the shelves thick with religious statues, framed photographs, and Walmart votive candles resting on floral-looking fans of melted wax.  The steps climbing up to the niche cut in the rock are steep and have something of the irregular, perilous character of stone stairs on the side of Mayan or Aztec pyramids – you climb these things raising your knees high in the air, a ceremonial ascent leading up to a chamber for sacrifice.  At the top of the stairs, there’s a shadowy dent in the living rock of the mountain and more plaster figures about a quarter life-size wreathed in flamboyantly colored plastic flowers – more candles and the pictures of the deceased fading in cheap discount store frames, under glass: men with cowboy hats and old women with crucifixes beneath their withered chins, rosary beads and devotionals, and several images of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her almond-shaped colored mandorla, perched like a gaudy parrot on the rung of the crescent moon. 

The roadside shrine radiates waves of power out across the canyon, shimmering in Sonoita Creek passing under these ramparts of rock in a sheath of snaky palo verde trees.  A truck passes with a sound that echoes off the rock faces like thunder.  The little chapels and the plaster saints protruding from the stone have the aspect of water gushing from a rock – there’s profusion here, stone basins like bird baths, little gods pressing their faces out of the cliffside, dewy in the morning, as if lit by rivulets of falling water.

A sign says that this is the Telles Family Shrine, built in 1941 in fulfilment of a vow that a holy place would be erected on this road, in this pass between the high naked buttes, on the basis of God’s promise that a member of the Telles clan enlisted in the United States Army to fight the Germans or the Japanese would be spared death in combat.  The shrine guarantees the return of a son the family from Europe or the Pacific.  The members of the Telles family kept their promise and, as far as I understand, God kept up his side of the bargain as well.  

The shrine is pitched against the rock so that it remains in shadow for most of the day.  Perhaps, in the afternoon, a few rays of sunlight angle down on the chapels with their incumbent population of plaster saints.  It’s hard to imagine any direct sunshine ever penetrating into the grotto carved into the brow of rock above the steep and treacherous steps leading up to the niche.  

Mickey Free

35. 

Everyone is related one way or another.  This was made clear to me by the historical marker in the parking lot at the Telles family roadside shrine.  

    

Near the highway, an Arizona State marker explained that John Ward’s ranch on Sonoita Creek was once a few hundred yards away, house and corrals and outbuildings erected in the shade of the big fins of rock divided by the watercourse.  In 1861, Apaches kidnaped Ward’s stepson, Felix, triggering the Bascom affair and, almost, 30 years of war.  

An important figure in the Apache wars was the scout nicknamed Mickey Free.  (The soldiers serving with Mickey couldn’t pronounce his Indian name and so they used the moniker of a character from a popular novel published in 1840 and, apparently, still well-known thirty years later; the young man was said to resemble descriptions of Mickey Free in the book.)  Enlisting in the Apache Scouts in 1872, Mickey was rapidly promoted to sergeant, worked as an interpreter at Camp Verde, and was involved in many engagements with the hostile Indians.  He accompanied General Crook in the campaign against Geronimo and was a member of the force involved in the incursion into the Sierra Madre in Sonora in pursuit of the war chief.  With another celebrated scout, Chato, Mickey Free traveled to Washington D.C. where he was awarded several medals for valor.  A photograph of the scout shows an alert young man with shoulder length black hair wearing a Stetson and holding his rifle against his chest where he has a cravat stylishly tied around his neck.  Mickey wears heavy white gloves extending to the middle of each forearm.  (The gloved hands gripping the muzzle of the long gun are the center of the composition, durable-looking and extravagant – I suppose one would have to consult an expert in the history of military gloves and glove-making to understand the exact significance of these leather gauntlets.)  Mickey’s rifle seems to be about as tall as he is.  

Mickey Free was born out-of-wedlock to a teenage mother, Maria Jesus Martinez.  His father was Santiago Telles, also sixteen years old.  It was a love-match and historians surmise that family opposition thwarted the couple.  Later, Mickey’s mother, married the Irish immigrant, John Ward and Mickey, then, known as Felix Ward lived on the ranch on Sonoita Creek.  Felix was 12 when the Pinal Apaches kidnaped him during a cattle raid, the event that led to the Bascom affair.   He was later found living among the White Mountain Apaches to whom the Pinal band had traded him.  A prominent man among the White Mountain tribe had adopted him and, by all accounts, he was happy living with the Indians.  Members of the Telles family still lived in the vicinity of the old Ward Ranch in 1941 when one of the young men in that clan enlisted in the military, went off to fight in the World War, resulting in the vow to build the shrine next to the highway passing through the defile.  

An Apparition

37.

As I am reading the historical marker, I hear a siren on the highway.  The sound approaches and I see an old wood-paneled station wagon, a Pontiac “Torpedo” Special, speeding down the road.  The car has a red light mounted over its driver’s door issued by the Santa Cruz county sheriff’s department to Dr. Delmar (“Doc”) Mock.  The light flashes and the old station-wagon is covered with road dust.  Startling red hair blossoms behind the driver’s wheel.  

Doc Mock’s ghost is hurrying to deliver a steer in breech birth presentation or, perhaps, driving hell-for-leather to the bedside of a sick child.  Doppler-shifted down, the siren whines like pesky fly as the station wagon rounds the curve on the Nogales road and is gone.  

April 16, 2024