And Then, They Weren’t in Kansas Any More

The name of the road intrigued me from the first time I saw it, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that it means just what it sounds like. Pioneers came by train in February of 1909 from Paola, Kansas, and stepped off the train in Willcox, Arizona, fourteen families hungry for farmland of their own and willing to work up homestead claims that would give it to them. 

 

…The land was not the gentle hills they were used to. The terrain was flat, and in the distance, there were mountains. 

 

      The land that had been opened for homesteading in December was twelve to seventeen miles east and south of the town. 

 

-      Marsha Arzberger One Hundred Sixty Acres of Dirt: A History of the Pioneers of Kansas Settlement, Arizona Territory, 1909

 

Author Marsha Arzberger read through homestead claims, journals, letters, and scrapbooks, government material and that shared with her by descendants of the original pioneers from Kansas. Those descendants, who included her own husband, also told her stories passed down in their families, and from these various sources she has put together a highly readable and entertaining history of life in a very concentrated area of Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley over a hundred years ago. Find it here. 

 

The immigrants from Kansas, as I say, came as homesteaders. Claims registered, most families’ next order of business was to hand-dig a well, after which could come the house (many originally only 12’x12’), corrals, chicken coop and barn. Neighbors frequently exchanged labor and worked together to get wells down and buildings up, and by 1909 the Kansas Settlement had its own school and teacher, with 24 pupils enrolled. the town of Willcox only a wagon ride away meant that building supplies, as well as food not supplied by family gardens, was within fairly easy reach.

 

--Which is not to say that life was, in general, “easy” for these pioneers. For example, when Fred Arzberger’s young wife and children arrived at the Kansas Settlement, no house awaited the young family. Instead, a wooden lean-to sheltered husband and wife, children, Gertrude’s piano, and all of their other belongings, as well, until a two-room wood-frame house could be erected with neighbors’ help. The exterior of the original family house on what is still known as the Kansas Settlement Road was adobe block, i.e., typical Southwest vernacular architecture. The second Arzberger house, its skeleton still standing today, was built on the road that has since taken its name from the Arzberger family.

The Kansas pioneers were farmers, but while everyone came to Arizona with the dream of “a farm of our own,” not all could hold out against the realities of soil and climate in the Sulphur Springs Valley. The Arzbergers, like other pioneers, worked hard. They planted gardens and raised livestock and poultry enough that they had vegetables and meat to sell, along with sauerkraut, pickles, cheese, and molasses, but in 1910, drought rather than rains arrived, and many homsteaders were forced off the claims they had hoped to farm and own. Some left Arizona altogether. Others remained close to their Kansas neighbors, working in the mines in nearby Dos Cabezas. The Arzberger family flourished on the land by turning to ranching and expanding grazing acreage that supported cows better than crops. In southeast Arizona in the 20^th century, ranching could succeed where farming could not.

 

Marsha Arzberger’s history is at once detailed and intimate. She presents historical and genealogical facts without losing sight of the humanity that gives them meaning. Photographs tie together ancestors and descendants, frequent maps keep the reader oriented in geographical space, and stories bring the past alive on the page, while lists of individual claims are kept separate from the narrative – there for those who want them but not cluttering the story for more casual readers. 

 

From our winter ghost town cabin, the Artist and I drive the Kansas Settlement Road a couple times a week. Once last year we ventured from Rancho Sacatal, just east of Dos Cabezas, over part of the old Butterfield Stage road and down into the Kansas Settlement, coming out on Arzberger Road from an unfamiliar direction and giving me my first up-close look at the old house I had noticed so many times from the KS Road. The house fascinated me, and I made inquiries to one of our neighbors (a retired third-generation rancher), which is how I made the connection to Marsha Arzberger and learned of her book. 

 

The Sulphur Springs Valley is, for me, just about the right amount of territory for intense historical focus, and zooming in on the Kansas Settlement, with occasional forays to Dos Cabezas, Willcox, or Pearce, lets me look at the land now and picture its past. The author notes that while much is still the same in the valley, much else has changed in the past hundred years. Perhaps most obviously, farming has not disappeared but has become very different from what the first pioneers imagined for themselves.

 

Most farms became larger as irrigation became more sophisticated. By the 1990s, circular “pivot” sprinklers became the favored method of irrigation, which required more capital. Some large farm operations expanded to thousands of acres. … [At the same time] [r]anching continues in the surrounding mountains and throughout the settlement and the valley.

 

Originally, wells in the Kansas settlement were dug between 20 and 40 feet deep to reach water. In the twenty-first century, today agribusiness wells easily plunge 1,000 feet, and intensive irrigation for 12 cuttings of hay a year or to grow pistachios or pecans often means wells going dry for neighbors with smaller, more modest holdings. In the Sulphur Springs Valley, a valley without a river running through it, what will the future hold for residents and for agriculture as the water table continues to drop? 

 

It’s no secret that the history of the area goes back beyond the pioneers from Kansas. Before homesteaders came, this was Apacheria, this whole open valley between the Chiricahua Mountains to the east and the Dragoons to the west (and beyond in all directions). Only after the death of Cochise, Geronimo’s final surrender (of several), and the removal of the Chiricahua Apaches (first – forcibly -- to Florida, then to Oklahoma, and ultimately -- for those who had survived and chose to return --  back to White Mountain in northern Arizona) did the U.S. government open the territory to homesteading.

 

And before the Apaches came south from northwestern Canada and eastern Alaska and ran the Spanish out of what became Arizona and New Mexico, who lived here? “Change,” as my freshman high school earth science teacher told our class so long ago, “is the only constant.” Even the mountains are not eternal. They were not always here, either. But they and we are here now.

 

Would You Believe Saskatchewan?

Not in the picture above, no. That’s Northport on Saturday, with the fourth annual Leelanau UnCaged street festival blessed with perfect weather. Early on Saturday as booths and displays and stages for bands were being assembled, the town had the happy atmosphere of a county fair but dedicated to arts and music rather than livestock and home canning. So my photographs in today’s post have nothing to do with what follows and everything to do with Northport on Saturday morning. These are the photos I have – what else can I say?

We did not take to the road for a third September road trip and would have been very unlikely [no one caught this typo earlier?!] to go as far as the western Great Plains if we had. Michigan was our vacation ground this year, in the two short forays (#1 begins here and continues in subsequent posts; #2 here) we made away from home. So what’s with Saskatchewan?

Well, you know I am an avid armchair traveler, so you might guess a book was my passport to Canada, and you’d be right. Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow, part-memoir, part-history, with a couple chapters of gripping fiction thrown in, kept me spellbound in the wee, sleepless hours of darkness and into the morning light. One of the big problems with this book – well, the first, often-noted problem is classifying it and deciding where to shelve it in a library or bookstore, but the second problem, the one that stumps me now, as I try to decide what to say about it and how to choose a few representative quotes, is that just about every sentence and every paragraph of the book begs to be quoted. What a magnificent writer! So maybe I should just open at random and see what I find.

Here, page 28 –

In general, the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places. It would not have seemed reasonable to any of the town’s founders to consider any of their activities history, or to look back very far in search of what had preceded them. Time reached back only a few years, to the pre-homestead period of the big cattle ranches.

What an innocent, thoughtless time, when people were not focused on their own importance! Not like the present day, with its constant personal documenting of every minute! But in retrospect Stegner found the innocence of his childhood years irritating.

The very richness of that past as I discover it now makes me irritable to have been cheated of it then. I wish I could have known it early, that it could have come to me with the smell of life about it instead of the smell of books....

I’m sure Stegner loves “the smell of books.” What he wishes was that he could have known the colorful local past of that ground he walked as a child at the same time he was discovering the world for the first time. And he does not regret everything about his boyhood innocence.

I have sat many times all alone just inside the edge of one of the aspen coulees that tongued down from the North Bench, and heard the soft puffs of summer wind rattle the leaves, and felt how sun and shadow scattered and returned like disturbed sage-hen chicks; and in some way of ignorance and innocence and pure perception I have bent my entire consciousness upon white anemones among the white aspen boles. They were rare and beautiful to me, and they grew only there in the dapple of the woods—flowers whose name I did not know and could not possibly have found out and would not have asked, because I thought that only I knew about them and I wanted no one else to know.

We the readers have all the luck. We have at one and the same time what Stegner wishes he had had together. We have his childhood memories, the sights and sounds and smells of the frontier, descriptions of boyhood scenes and pasttimes, along with a succession of earlier ways of life and waves of inhabitants to the region that the author only collected long afterward, as an adult. Surveying the scope of Saskatchewan’s border history and situating within it the little town he knew, Stegner comes to certain conclusions. He would never want to return to that boyhood home but values having grown up there and sees in the pioneer dream, a few years of success, and the dream’s ultimate disappointment not only his family’s story but a larger arc of North American cultural history.

One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course. He may lack a thousand things that the rest of the world takes for granted, and because his experience is belated he may feel like an anachronism all his life. But he will know one thing about what it means to be an American, because he has known the raw continent, and not as tourist but as denizen. Some of the beauty, the innocence, and the callousness must stick to him, and some of the regret.

I am stopping my quote halfway through a paragraph, imposing restraint on my impulse. Are you interested in small town life? In the history of the North American continent? In the pioneer experience? In writing of the highest caliber? If so, you cannot do better than to read Wolf Willow, by Wallace Stegner. The lines of this book will haunt you even as you read them for the first time.

Musings on a Book: THE SNOW CHILD

I don’t want to call this a “book review,” but I do want to write something about this lovely first novel, written by a bookseller colleague up in Alaska. We’ve never met. I know her only through her book, and not until I reached the end of the novel did I read “A conversation with Eowyn Ivey” and learn that she is a bookseller. There, when asked to tell a little bit about what energizes her, the author replied:

One of the reasons I left the newspaper business and joined Fireside Books [in Palmer, AK] is because I wanted more time and energy to write. What I didn’t expect is how stimulated I would be by the actual work of bookselling. To be constantly surrounded by all these ideas and stories and art!

The “more time and energy” part comes from being an employee, I guess, rather than the business owner, but I can certainly relate to the stimulation a bookstore atmosphere provides.

The Snow Child is a mysterious book. As readers, we are not sure, early on or even by the last page, whether we are meant to understand it as a fairy tale or realistic fiction, that is, a fantasy or a story with characters who could be real people in situations that life might present us with ourselves, were we to be transported through time and space to an Alaska homestead in 1920. The place feels real enough.

The morning was so cold that when Jack first stepped outside and harnessed the horse, his leather boots stayed stiff and his hands wouldn’t work right. A north wind blew steadily off the river. He’d have liked to stay indoors, but he had already stacked Mabel’s towel-wrapped pies in a crate to take to town. He slapped himself on the arms and stomped his feet to get the blood flowing. It was damned cold, and even long underwear beneath denim seemed a scant cotton sheet about his legs. It wasn’t easy, leaving the comfort of the woodstove to face this alone. The sun threatened to come up on the other side of the river, but its light was weak and silvery, and not much comfort at all.

The author’s inspiration for her novel was a used paperback she ran across by chance at Fireside Books, and what initially captivated her in the book was the role of place in the story. (Shades of Lynn Kimball!)

...Black spruce and dark winters spoke of lonely isolation, and the fresh, sparkling snow brought hope and magic. 

Growing up in Alaska, I’ve at times felt a foreigner in the pages of my country’s literature. All the books I had read and loved, but not one of them told of my home. The characters didn’t live the way we did. ... But the setting of the old Russian fairy [tale] was hauntingly familiar.

The paperback book led her to a fairy tale telling of an elderly childless couple who fashion a child out of snow. The snow maiden comes alive – and from there various versions of the tale spin out differently, but all somehow involve joyful childhood, love, marriage, and death.

In Ivey’s The Snow Child, the homesteading couple at the center of the story are in their fifties and childless, the sole pregnancy of their marriage having ended in a stillbirth. It was the loss of that infant that ignited Mabel’s desire to leave familiar surroundings, family and friends, to make a life in the wilderness that would encompass just the two of them. When Jack meets their nearest Alaskan neighbors, Mabel is initially reluctant to socialize. Making new friends and becoming known again is not why she came to Alaska. But somehow meeting George and Esther begins to thaw something in Mabel, providing an opening for fun and joy. Thus when that winter’s snow comes, she and Jack, at her suggestion, fashion a girl of snow.

In time the snow girl disappears, but so do the scarf and mittens. Human footprints, the size of a child’s feet, lead into the woods. Jack follows the trail but does not immediately share his discovery or his search with Mabel. He is uneasy.

As readers, we hardly believe the girl is real even after she comes to be a regular part of Jack and Mabel’s life. She comes to their cabin again and again, but she never stays, and no one else sees her. No one else believes a child could survive alone in the wilderness. Esther thinks winter’s isolation has made Mabel a little bit crazy. One day Jack and Mabel and the girl, like three children at play, lie in the snow and make snow angels. That will prove the girl’s existence to Esther, Mabel thinks, but by the time Esther gets around to visiting, the angel prints in the snow are no longer discernible.

Is Faina real, or have Jack and Mabel imagined her? We read on, expecting to receive a clear answer in time. As the girl comes to seem more and more real, however, the author somehow continues to keep us in a state of uncertainty, suspended between belief and doubt.

I love books, fiction or nonfiction, with women characters surviving in nature and pitting themselves against wilderness. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River; L. E. Kimball’s Seasonal Roads; Down the Wild River North, by Constance Helmericks, and so on. In the early chapters of The Snow Child, while the girl (real or imaginary) was a creature of the wilderness, the role of Mabel, the homesteading wife, was pretty much restricted to housework. Then Jack meets with an accident while plowing, and while he is laid up their neighbors come to help Mabel with the spring planting. From then on, throughout and following Jack’s recovery, Mabel takes her part in the hard work of the farm.

...She had never understood how Jack could fall asleep in a chair without washing up, talking to her about his day, or even removing his filthy boots. Now she knew. Yet for all the sore muscles and monotony, the days of working in the fields filled her with a kind of pride she had never known.

They became true partners in the farm. As for the snow child, she grows up into a young woman, but what are we to make of her?

I don’t want to give any hints about Faina’s evolving role in the homestead and neighborhood world of this bit of wilderness Alaska, because you should not be deprived of discovering her world as I did, page by page. In the end, one thing you will know for sure is that you have been transported, carried on story’s wings to another world. Do you need more certainty than that?

And how delightful that the author is a bookseller! For me, that is icing on the cake!

Return to Chiricahua

So beautiful. So nearby. No excuse is needed to go back again and again. Despite my fixation on current fixation on geology and deep time, however, our agreed-upon destination for this trip was Faraway Ranch, which would mean getting out of the car and walking but neither an arduous hike nor a frightening drive high into the mountains.

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The name of Faraway Ranch should require no explanation. The name says it all. It was the first ranching homestead established in the Chiricahuas, and I believe the rancher was Swedish or Norwegian, but I’ll have to follow up on that question another time. What struck me more forcibly than his story was that after he died his wife lived on there – and she lived a long time. One of the signs at the trailhead gives this long quotation from her:

“The only sure thing, Lillian Erickson Riggs wrote in 1954, in the early days of her widowhood, “is that I love my home. And there is a feeling of safeness and security in the very walls and in the length and breadth of the spacious rooms.... Death will be far preferable to giving up my Faraway home.”

She lived on into her 90s, and this is her beautiful home as it appears today. I especially love the second-story veranda looking up into rocky hills.

But I also love the little cabins and outbuildings and corrals and windmill, everything about the place saying that all who lived here were well cared for, the cattle and horses as well as the humans. Above the saddle trees in the tack room are painted cans, each with the name of the horse whose saddle would be stored below. Were bridles looped over the cans?

And here are a couple of shots he suggested, the first for its composition, the second because it made him think of a fellow Michigan painter friend who winters in Florida. If that painter sees this, he will understand.

After soaking in the atmosphere of Faraway Ranch, including following the Bonita Canyon trail (trod very recently by horses, I observed) far enough to see evidence of a tree struck by lightning (above) and burned from the inside, we went on to find a shady picnic table for our late morning shack of nuts and dates and raisins. It was a surprise to find that the beautiful, elegant mountain bluebird is as greedy a beggar as blue jays back home in Michigan. The explanation came later, when I checked Peterson’s Western Birds and realized that the little beggars were gray-breasted jays, a species of jay lacking a crest. That identification made much more sense of their behavior.

(The pair I saw idown n the wash at home last week, however, were mountain bluebirds, I'm sure)

Leaving the park, we decided to follow 191 south by Turkey Creek ranch. Turkey Creek is an important name in the Chiricahuas, as the highest peaks in the Chiricahua National Monument are remaining sections of what geologists call the Turkey Creek caldera, formed during volcanic eruptions about 27 million years ago, depositing ash over an area of 1,200 square miles. The ash slowly compressed to form welded tuff that is 800 feet thick in the Monument.

The cooling ash deposits contracted, joints developed, and cracks in the rock became accessible to running water, frost, plant roots, and organic acid. It was this erosion that created the monumental pillars. It was after that, between five and twenty-five million years ago, that changes in the movement of tectonic plates pulled and stretched the earth’s crust, tilting fault systems to create the mountain ranges and basins we see today. The Chiricahuas, Dos Cabezas, and Dragoons were all formed in this way.

But that was long, long, long ago. What interested us more as we drove south through ranchland was the absence of water. We crossed one dry wash after another, dry, rocky streambeds nothing but dips in the road and empty meanders off through the trees, the trees a clear sign that water does sometimes flow here.

And then – and then – can it really be? Running water! It is amazing how one’s heart leaps at the sight of running water in this arid region. The joy is almost beyond belief. We shout and laugh and smile – and we imagine how the sight would have appeared to dusty pioneers in awkward wagons pulled by tired horses or oxen.

Turning west and then north, we crossed the huge basin bordered by the Dragoons, the Chiricahuas, and the Dos Cabezas. Farther north a bit later we had the huge Willcox Playa on our right (more about that another time), and ahead of us the snow-capped Pinalenos. A combination of constant map-reading, ever-present landforms, and long sight distances has oriented me pretty well to northern Cochise County, with the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas always leading home.