Arizona Legends and Lore

by Dorothy Daniels Anderson

  She wrote about everything she saw and knew concerning what life was like in the West. She wrote about living on a ranch. She began to write poems in earnest for publication.

  Then Sharlot heard about a new magazine from Los Angeles called Land of Sunshine edited by Charles Lummis. She started submitting poems and articles to Mr. Lummis. For the first time, Sharlot had an editor who took a personal interest in her as a writer. He encouraged her to write for his magazine. He carefully critiqued her work, demanding rewrites for material that was not yet acceptable. Her work for the magazine brought her national recognition as a fresh vital voice from the West. Her relationship with Lummis as her editor was to last for years.

  Isolated as she was on her secluded ranch in the Territory of Arizona, continuing still to do all the gardening and bossing of ranch hands, Sharlot was now a published writer. Suddenly it was her turn to receive letters from people who had read her work. On one occasion, a man wrote to her to inquire how a mere woman could have acquired such a marvelous vocabulary as her writing revealed. Always one to find humor where she could, Sharlot wrote back that one winter on the ranch the only new book in the house that she had to read was the dictionary.

  Charles Lummis invited Sharlot to visit him in Los Angeles, where she met many of his literary friends and associates. It was an exhilarating time for a young ranch woman to travel to the coast and to meet so many prominent writers and artists. Her unblinking, clear-eyed ranch woman’s vision let nothing slip by her. These were indeed the high-toned people of her childhood wonderings. The quiet Sharlot found herself welcomed and accepted. People began to refer to her as the Western poet who knew how to write about her colorful life in Arizona.

  Besides her writing and poetry aspirations, Sharlot began to set other goals for herself. She wanted to record the lives of the early Arizona pioneers before the information about them was lost. She would write their stories. She would preserve their tales. She would try in every way she knew to see that these pioneers would be remembered.

  Mr. Lummis wanted Sharlot to move to California. He wanted her to become a permanent member of the staff of his magazine, now called Out West , newly named after the title of a poem she had written. Here was an offer of a chance at freedom, to finally get away from the incredibly hard labor of the ranch, away from the constant, persistent responsibility. How she yearned for that freedom. All those isolated years on the ranch, when she dreamt of that almost impossible dream. Here was the opportunity to be free, to travel, to meet people, to do all the wonderful things that dreams are made of.

  Several times Sharlot went out and worked on the staff of the magazine. She even began to look over various parcels of property with an eye to purchasing. But her mother had no love for California, her father wanted only the isolation of Lonesome Valley. Somehow each opportunity to remain in California always ended with a return to the ranch. She began to realize that she was after all an outdoors woman. She could not bear to stay away for too long before she had to see those pinyon pines, the stark but beautiful mountains and desert, the freeing, untamed wilderness. Possibly she was more of a dutiful daughter than she had been willing to admit to herself. Her parents were frail. They needed her help. She had to stay.

  Sharlot did continue to visit Charles Lummis and his family in Los Angeles whenever she could. Those visits were for her a window to a wider intellectual world more varied in color than the reading of her precious books could give her. During one of those visits, she met with a group of people who were trying to establish an archaeological museum in Los Angeles in order to collect and preserve artifacts from the early days of California.

  With a flash of insight, Sharlot realized that their objective gave added direction to her life’s ambition. Not only would she record the stories of these pioneers who lived in Arizona, she would collect the artifacts used by these early peoples. These artifacts, from the homespun pioneer possessions to rare and ancient Indian objects, would add a dimension to the stories. To conserve these things would give future generations a compelling sense of the people who walked, lived and loved on this land so long ago. Sharlot decided then that she must work toward the creation of a museum for Arizona artifacts.

  Once, returning from a California visit, her mind busy with new plans for achieving her goals, she found Arizona’s very existence threatened. A bill had just been introduced into Congress, called the Hamilton Bill, which proposed that the territory of Arizona and the territory of New Mexico be once again joined and come into the United States as one state. The citizens of both territories, recognizing an imminent identity crisis, were outraged. Petitions and strong arguments fell on deaf congressional ears. The motives of Washington were simple political expediency. To sustain a balance of power toward eastern states the Senate wished to limit the number of new western states. The desires of a small population in a sparsely settled area was of little interest to the powerful forces that ruled Congress.

  Sharlot felt she had to do something to help keep the Hamilton Bill from passing. She decided to interview as many people as she could to garner opinions about the feelings of Arizonans for the Hamilton Bill. She would then write an article expressing the results of her interviews. She knew that Charles Lummis would publish such as article in the Out West magazine. In fact, he wished to devote an entire issue to this crisis. This would give the nation an opportunity to listen first-hand to the voices of the people living Arizona.

  With a surge of frenetic energy, Sharlot spoke out against the Hamilton Bill at the annual convention of Arizona women’s clubs. She traveled around the territory amassing interviews and information. She worked so hard, missing meals, losing sleep, traveling in bitterly cold weather, that she became quite ill. Alarmed that she was coming down with that killer disease, pneumonia, she felt she had no option but to return to the ranch and try to get well.

  While on the train back to Prescott, she happened to notice the headlines of a newspaper being read by a fellow passenger. “Joint Statehood Ordered, President Teddy Roosevelt Directs Congress To Annex Arizona.” She was stunned. How could the President make such a recommendation in the face of so much opposition from citizens in both territories? Her thoughts and emotions were wild and jumbled on that cold and tedious train ride.

  She didn’t arrive back at the ranch until ten o’clock that night. Adeline Hall took one look at her daughter and became frightened by how ill she looked. “Sharlot, my dear, you must go to bed at once.”

  But Sharlot was a-tremble with emotions, arguing words, indignant words, fighting words, struggling to come out.

  “Mother,” she said, “make a fire in the sitting room for me. Please make me some tea and go to bed and leave me alone. Please, Mother, I’ve got a poem to write before I turn in. The opening lines have been singing in my head for hours on the train home. I must write. I simply must write.”

  Sharlot grabbed some paper. She had to write of her feelings about Arizona losing its hard-won identity. She had to somehow express the emotions of all the people she had interviewed who felt as passionately as she did.

  Arizona is no beggar in that mighty hall where her bay-crowned sisters wait,

  No empty-handed pleader for the right to be a free-born state.

  No child, with a child’s insistence, demanding a gilded toy

  No! But a fair-browed, queenly woman with land too strong to destroy. 2

  She wrote like a fury all through the night. Her poem was eight stanzas long. By morning it was completed. Instead of feeling drained and exhausted as well as weak from her illness, she discovered that she felt fine. Further than that, her cold was gone. She wondered with an inward chuckle if all those germs simply could not survive in a body so charged with anger and indignation.

  As soon as Sharlot had taken a rest, she typed a good copy of her poem on the Blickensderfer, and went back to Phoenix. She showed the poem to Dwight Heard, publisher and owner of the Arizona Republican newspaper.

  A delegation of tw
elve prominent men had been chosen to go to Washington and argue for Arizona. Mr. Heard, one of the delegates, read Sharlot’s poem and published it in the editorial section of his newspaper. Many people wrote to the paper praising the poem for expressing their anger at what was about to happen to the territory.

  “Sharlot,” Heard inquired, “may I make extra copies and take your poem with me to Washington?”

  “Of course, do anything that could help,” she replied.

  Dwight Heard decided to give a copy of the poem to every member of Congress to read and, he hoped, begin to understand the feelings of the people living in the territory. Sharlot’s poem was even read into the Congressional Record.

  But things looked hopeless. The Hamilton Bill was rammed through the House of Representatives, 192 to 165 votes. Surely the Senate would follow suit. It appeared as if it were all over. The territory of Arizona was to become a part of the state of New Mexico. Sharlot wondered if anyone in future years would even remember that there had once been a place called Arizona. The Out West magazine finally came out with an entire issue devoted to the Hamilton Bill and its effect on Arizona. Sharlot had written a sixty-four page article expressing the potential of the territory.

  Whatever influences finally convinced the senators will never be fully known. But the part of the Hamilton Bill pertaining to joint statehood for Arizona and New Mexico was stricken from the Senate version. Arizona and New Mexico were allowed to remain separate territories until such time as it was deemed appropriate to grant each the right to enter as an individual state. Sharlot Mabridth Hall had made a significant contribution to the continued existence of Arizona as an independent entity.

  Back at the ranch once again, Sharlot felt she could now return to her twin ambitions: to create a museum of Southwest artifacts and to collect for history the stories of those early pioneers.

  One such pioneer was Charles Genung, an old-time rancher. Sharlot had met Mr. Genung and began, through an exchange of letters, to learn about his life when he first arrived in Arizona. She was particularly interested in his descriptions of his first year, when he and two companions had located a small gold mine and were busy taking out ore.

  Charles Genung invited Sharlot on a sentimental journey by traveling wagon to trace the route he had originally taken when he entered Arizona from California. Sharlot thought such a trip would be an excellent opportunity to meet some of his old mining and sheepherding buddies and listen to their stories and experiences about Arizona during those early days. And so she went with this grandfatherly man who loved Arizona enough to undertake a rugged journey for remembrance sake. His wife and their seven grown children and their families chose to stay home.

  When Sharlot wasn’t traveling around the territory gathering information for articles, she was often speaking at women’s clubs, sharing with women her pioneer stories, reading to them her poems and always asking them to take on the task of helping to finance a museum for the collection of Arizona artifacts.

  On January 7, 1907, Prescott’s Monday Club hosted a gala Hassayampa Evening at the Opera House. Sharlot told the audience about Arizona’s earliest history when the first territorial governor, John Goodwin, established the capital at Prescott. “There still stands one rare monument of those early days,” she said. “It is the old Governor’s house.” That night she proposed that funds be found or set aside to preserve that priceless relic for future generations who would want to know what it was like in those olden days.

  Many of the women in those clubs gave Sharlot invaluable help. But there were the other women who frowned on her free ways. Here was a woman without a husband, no older woman companion or relative to accompany her, who traveled around the territory with various men, interviewing men, camping out in rough, wild territory with no one around but men. A newspaper in Agua Fria once wrote an article of her visit to the community’s society for women by stating that Miss Harlot Shawl had given a speech that week. The paper said that it was just a typographical error.

  Little did these women understand. For them the only possible reason Sharlot would leave the proper sphere of a woman, the home, would be to fling herself at every male that she met in the territory.

  Sharlot was glad that God had let her be an outdoor woman. She gave thanks for her eyes that could see the beautiful, the glorious things of this land. She knew deep in her heart that she could never be a tame house-cat woman spending those wonderful sunny days that Arizona is so blessed with giving card parties and planning dresses. Not that she didn’t love pretty clothes, good dinners and friends. She did. How she would have loved a home where only true and worthwhile things had a place. But in the meantime she had a vision, a dream that needed doing and she would do it as best she could.

  Perhaps those women would have been satisfied had Sharlot been married. But she had lost the great love of her life when she was in her twenties. His name was Samuel Porter Putnam. Samuel had come to Prescott when twenty-five-year-old Sharlot was a young aspiring writer. Son of a congregational minister, he also became a minister. Later in his life, he became an advocate of the principles of freethought. Considerably older than Sharlot, Samuel Putnam had come to Prescott to give a series of lectures on this popular philosophy of the time.

  Freethought espoused the concept that people should be free in every aspect of their lives and in particular in the relationships between men and women. In Prescott at that time, as in most frontier environments, women were still considered virtual slaves of their fathers, brothers and husbands. Samuel Putnam spoke of bringing the Republican spirit into the home by creating an equality between man and woman, between husband and wife. To freedom-loving Sharlot, it was like glorious music to her ears to hear a man talk of equal rights for men and women in all walks of life. How she cherished his words when he said that “if there is to be real love between a man and a woman there must be liberty. The moment authority of one over the other occurs, liberty disappears and is lost forever.”

  Samuel and Sharlot struck up a close friendship while he remained in Prescott. They continued their friendship by corresponding to each other for several years. Sharlot felt that their letters revealed an ever-deepening relationship that would one day blossom into a blessed union. But then Samuel died unexpectedly under dreadful circumstances. She was devastated by this loss and mourned him for years. To help overcome her grief, Sharlot worked even harder at writing than ever before, consoling herself with the thought that perhaps their companionship had been too perfect, their hopes, plans and happiness too great to be realized on this earthly plane.

  Because of Sharlot’s ever-increasing publicity as a writer and her help in blocking the Hamilton Bill, she was eventually offered an opportunity to receive a clerkship in the Arizona Territorial Legislature. Since Sharlot was interested in history, Charles Lummis suggested that she take the job because it would give her a chance to catch history alive while it was happening. She was paid three hundred dollars for the two-and-a-half months she worked during the legislative session. That was good money in those days. That was wonderful money for a ranch woman from Lonesome Valley.

  With the support of the various women’s clubs and many friends from the territorial government, she was appointed by Governor Richard E. Sloan to become the territory’s state historian. She was the first woman to hold a public office of this stature.

  Sharlot took her position of territorial historian with great seriousness. She was determined to use this opportunity to travel the length and breadth of the territory gathering information to compile into a systematic set of files as sources of reference for people who wished to have explicit knowledge of the area during the early pioneer times. She soon became extremely busy, as no one had attempted to do anything of this dimension before.

  She personally interviewed many of the survivors from those first days when the area was opened up for settlement. She felt that these interviews, coupled with the facts and figures about the area, would give future generations a
multi-layered sense of a by-gone time. She spent nearly two months traveling in southern and eastern Arizona.

  During her tenure in public office, Sharlot undertook one of the longest and most exciting expeditions of her life. She took a wagon trip north of the Grand Canyon into an unknown area isolated from the rest of the territory by the then-impassable barrier of the Colorado River. This land was known as the Arizona Strip. The few Mormons who had settled there felt closer ties to Utah than to Arizona and they had petitioned Congress to allow the section to be annexed to Utah. Sharlot hired a guide to take her there in order to see if there was anything of value in the area for Arizona, before such an action should be taken.

  Sharlot was an outdoor woman used to rugged conditions, but this was the hardest trip she had ever undertaken. In places there were no roads and trails were often a mere figment of the imagination. They had to carry not only their own supplies on just one wagon, but most of the feed for the horses. Much of the time she walked in front of the horses to guide them, as well as to lighten the load of the wagon through the sand.

  She was bitten by swarms of mosquitoes. She slept on earth that was as hard as a bed of iron. When, with her special sense of amusement, she recalled those nights, Sharlot always said she had no need of a professor of anatomy to tell her how many bones she had. The bones themselves gave her a complete listing through the long and sleepless nights. Yet in spite of the hardships, she fell in love with that silent, mystical, vividly colored, unearthly land.

  On the trip, she steeped herself in the history of the place and its stories. She visited the graves of the men killed in the Indian wars. She learned about James White’s voyage through the Grand Canyon in 1867. She pored through records in the Kingman courthouse. She wrote a book about her trip, describing the country and indicating the vast resources that were there waiting for Arizona to develop.