Tombstone, Arizona

“ A bad man, there is no doubt about it; and big in his badness, which made it all the worse.
There came a blazing day in the late summer, one of those days when the Arizona sun flays the wide, arid valleys without surcease, when the naked rock on the mountain heights is cloaked in trembling heat-waves and the rattlesnakes seek the darkest crevices among the cliffs. Deputy Sheriff Breckenbridge on his way back to Tombstone from some errand in the eastern end of the county was riding through Middle Pass in the Dragoons. ”

“ The women and children of the settlers were left to bear the brunt of the anger of the Apaches. It was too much for even the Tucson journalist. He turned from denunciation of the [Pg 180] military, for one moment, and applied his vigorous adjectives to the Tombstone Toughs.
Arizona had its full share of murder and sudden death. But New Mexico had more than that. Spring passed on there, with warmth for the snow-wrapped mountains, and blistering heat for the dead plains, and her way was marked with lifeless and mutilated forms.
Landor's troop was stationed at Stanton, high up among the hills. ”

“ Northward Trend of the Ancient People; The Great Reavis Land Grant Fraud.
Chapter Twenty-one NEAR THE MEXICAN BORDER—Location on the San Pedro River; Malaria
Overcomes a Community; On the Route of the Mormon Battalion; Chronicles
of a Quiet Neighborhood; Looking Toward Homes in Mexico; Arizona's First
Artesian Well; Development of a Market at Tombstone.
Chapter Twenty-two ON THE UPPER GILA—Ancient Dwellers and Military Travelers; Early Days
Around Safford; Map of Southeastern Arizona; Mormon Location at
Smithville; A Second Party Locates at Graham; Vicissitudes of Pioneering ”

“ That these ancient peoples went north there can be no doubt. North of the valley, nearly fifty miles, on the Verde, is a great stone ruin and beyond it are cavate dwellings of remarkable sort. In Tonto Creek Valley, a dozen miles north of the Roosevelt dam, is an immense ruin built of gypsum blocks. To the eastward, Casa Grande, most famed of all Arizona prehistoric remains, still stands, iron-roofed by a careful government, probably of a later time of abandonment, but still a ruin when first seen by Father Eusebio Kino in 1694. ”

“ That is the way the old-timers speak of it, and there is a fond pride in their voices when they allude to the subject; the same sort of pride one betrays when he tells of the wild oats sowed by a gray-haired friend during his lusty youth. For Tombstone has settled down to middle-aged conventionality and is peaceable enough to-day for any man. ”

“ These people had no pottery, and probably had no permanent houses or farms. The only objects recovered from their campsites have been their crude stone tools. One such site was discovered and investigated a short distance north of Montezuma Castle National Monument in 1949.
Shortly after A. D. 600, the Verde Valley attracted another group of people. They were farmers who came from the south, near the vicinity of modern Phoenix. We call these people of southern Arizona, who were the first known permanent settlers in the Verde Valley, the “Hohokam.” ”

“ Archeologists have dug up some unusual burials from this period. One was a male who, presumably after death, had been cut in two at the waist and then sewed together again. Why this was done, nobody knows. He was also wearing a pair of leather moccasins, an item not often found among the Basketmakers. Another burial, from the Canyon del Muerto in northeastern Arizona, consisted of only a pair of forearms and hands, lying palms up, side by side on a bed of grass. Wrapped around the wrists were three necklaces with abalone shell pendants. ”

“ A few have open courts in which the people could gather for social or ceremonial purposes. None of the pueblos in the valley contain kivas, the ceremonial chambers so common in northeastern Arizona and adjoining districts of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Conversely, ball courts are found in the Verde Valley and around Flagstaff but not in other Pueblo areas.
Two miles east of Clarkdale, Ariz., is Tuzigoot National Monument—an Indian pueblo of more than 100 rooms. Tuzigoot was occupied by Indians similar to those of Montezuma Castle, but they lived under somewhat different circumstances. ”

“ To get to that pin-prick on the map called Monument, Arizona, you drop off the railroad at Defiance, which is somewhere east of the water tank named Phantom, and then follow an old post road across the lofty plateau in the direction of the mountains to the southwest. After something more than twenty miles, the trail strikes a deeply sunk river bed that winds like a gigantic serpent over the desert toward the declining sun. In one of the coils of this dead river serpent lies what is left of the mining camp of Monument. ”

“ It has a fascination that every one feels who crosses its border. Paradoxical as it may seem it is both the oldest and newest portion of our country--the oldest in ancient occupation and civilization and the newest in modern progress. In natural wonders it boasts of the Grand Canon of Arizona, the painted desert, petrified forest, meteorite mountain, natural bridge, Montezuma's well and many other marvels of nature. There are also ruins galore, the cave and cliff dwellings, crumbled pueblos, extensive acequias, painted rocks, the casa grande and old Spanish missions. ”

“ Indeed, at every stage of the road we had seen evidences of hard travel, exhausted cattle, anxious teamsters, hunger and thirst, despair, starvation, and death.
However, Stoneman's Lake remains a joy in the memory, and far and away the most beautiful spot I ever saw in Arizona. But unless the approaches to it are made easier, tourists will never gaze upon it.
In the distance we saw the "divide," over which we must pass in order to reach Camp Verde, which was to be our first stopping place, and we looked joyfully towards the next day's march, which we expected would bring us there. ”

“ Of the frontier cemeteries whose dead came to their ends, shod in accordance with the grim phrase of their times, there remains one just outside the town of Tombstone to the north. Here straggling mesquite bushes grow on the summit of the ridge; cacti and ocatilla sprawl over the sun-baked earth hiding between their thorny stems the headboards and the long narrow heaps of stones which no man could mistake. Some of these headboards still bear traces of black-lettered epitaphs which tell how death came to strong men in the full flush of youth. ”

“ Children were often buried near the dwellings or under the floor. We learn from modern Pueblo Indians that some prefer to bury a child near the home. This comes from the belief that the child’s spirit will remain until the death of the mother and can then be guided safely to the hereafter; or, that it will return in the person of the next baby to be born in the family. Occasional child burials were found in wall cavities in the pueblo ruin at Tuzigoot National Monument. Tuzigoot is a few miles northwest of Montezuma Castle and was occupied during the same general period. ”

“ That beauty, from the Grand Canyon in the north to the Saguaro National Monument in the south, will forever epitomize the scenic majesty of the American West. Because the pioneer spirit of the people of Arizona continues to epitomize the American spirit, it is most fitting that every American celebrate the 75th anniversary of Arizona statehood. ”

“ There are many canyons, but the Grand Canyon of Arizona is the Mecca of the traveling world; and El Tovar always has the housing of the choice spirits who have run the gamut of tourist delights in other lands. This home-like inn shelters men of letters, scientists, geologists, artists and business men. Any night, in the year, on the rim of this wonderful abyss, there will be found a miniature city, with its life and sparkle, its fellowships and social converse, its bustle and abandon, and, best of all, the simon-pure democracy inherent among traveled men and women. ”

“ At either end the chain of ruins between the Tusayan towns and the Gila ruins was unbroken, but middle links were wanting. All conditions imply former habitations in this untrodden hiatus, the region between the Verde and the Tusayan series, ending near the present town of Flagstaff, Arizona; but southward from that town the country was broken and impassable, a land where the foot of the archeologist had not trodden. Remains of human habitations had, however, been reported by ranchmen, but these reports were vague and unsatisfactory. ”

“ Could you be lifted from the midst of civilization, and "let down" in Tucson over night, you would know at once what the rest of Arizona is.
How like a fata morgana it looks when you first see it in this enchanted atmosphere: the intensely blue sky overhead, the plain about it covered with sparse grass and fantastic cactus, that hide the sand and make the earth look verdant; the low, white dome and the picturesque buildings clustering about it; the adobe garden-walls, with arched gateways, sometimes whitened, sometimes left in their native mud color, toned down by age and the glare of the sun ”

“ The Americans are indebted to the Pima Indians for provisions furnished the California emigration, and for supplies for the early overland stages, besides their faithful and unwavering friendship.
The habitations of these prehistoric people form the most unique of all the anomalous dwellings of Arizona, and a more minute investigation than has hitherto been made will show the earliest habitations of man. There are similar edifices in Egypt and India, but they are mostly temples. These Arizona cliff dwellings are the only edifices of the kind that are known to have been inhabited by mankind. ”

“ In 1540 Pedro de Tovar, one of the officers who accompanied Coronado through his great expedition, passed through Arizona. Even then an extinct civilization was already old. The ruins of the dwellings of those prehistoric people abound near Flagstaff. In the recesses of Walnut Cañon there are found cliff-dwellings in great numbers. "Some of these are in ruins, and have but a narrow shelf of the once broad floor of solid rock left to evidence their extreme antiquity. Others are almost wholly intact, having stubbornly resisted the weathering of time." ”

“ The fable of the Quivira, the golden city marked now by the ruins of the Piro pueblo of Tabiri, south of the salt-deposits of the Manzano, is still potent in Arizona and New Mexico to lure the treasure-seeker. Three hundred and fifty years ago it inspired a march across the plains that dwarfs the famous march of the Greeks to the sea. It led to the exploration of the Southwest and California before the Anglo-Saxon settlers had penetrated half a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast. The cities are forgotten to-day. ”

“ The petrified forests of Arizona are a most extraordinary spectacle, with its acres of utter desolation in its giant masses of dead trees lying prostrate on the ground. Arizona is a land of the most mysterious charm. The Grand Cañon alone is worth a pilgrimage around the world to see,—a spectacle so bewildering that words are powerless to suggest the living, changing picture. ”

“ Alone—unrivaled in her weird, wild grandeur stands Arizona where spiry rock-ribbed giants stab an emerald, opal-tinted sky, and terraced mesas of wondrous amber hue form natural stairways, that grandly wrought were carved step after step, through successive epochs of erosion, affording thus an easy ascent to the rugged profile of this land of the Western Hemisphere. All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the age of man. ”

“ This something was a proclamation by President Roosevelt on December 8, 1906, declaring the area to be a National Monument.
Prehistoric Dwellers
Throughout Arizona can be found traces of a vanished people. In and around the Petrified Forest, prehistoric dwellings and “picture writings” are plentiful, and of great antiquity and high development. Probably nowhere have such pictographs been so well preserved. The soft smooth sandstone was an ideal surface for the artist to work upon, and nowhere in the world, in that age, could such suitable tools be found to work with. ”

“ We also buried about fifty axes and two or three hundred arrow-heads, and half a dozen nice specimens of Indian pottery, which we burned up good and black.
"After we had 'salted' the cave to our satisfaction, we partly sealed up the entrance and returned to Flagstaff."
"Was that acting quite fair?"
"Fair? Why, how do you think that poor man would have felt if he had come all the way out to Arizona, and gone to all the expense of his car-fare and outfit, and then [Pg 83] found nothing? It was philanthropy, my dear sir, the height of philanthropy."
"Was he pleased with the mummy?" ”

“ Manifestly, the purpose of a national monument is the preservation of important objects contained therein, and a primary object of archeological work should be to attract to it as many visitors and students as possible. As the country in which the Navaho National Monument is situated is one of the least known parts of Arizona, first place will be given to a brief account of one of the routes by which the important ruins included in the reserve may be reached. ”