Writing Arizona, 1912-2012: A Cultural and Environmental Chronicle
308
Writing Arizona, 1912-2012: A Cultural and Environmental Chronicle
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Overview
From the year of Arizona’s statehood to its centennial in 2012, narratives of the state and its natural landscape have revealed—and reconfigured—the state’s image. Through official state and federal publications, newspapers, novels, poetry, autobiographies, and magazines, Kim Engel-Pearson examines narratives of Arizona that reflect both a century of Euro-American dominance and a diverse and multilayered cultural landscape.
Examining the written record at twenty-five-year intervals, Writing Arizona, 1912–2012 shows us how the state was created through the writings of both its inhabitants and its visitors, from pioneer reminiscences of settling the desert to modern stories of homelessness, and from early-twentieth-century Native American “as-told-to” autobiographies to those written in Natives’ own words in the 1970s and 1980s. Weaving together these written accounts, Engel-Pearson demonstrates how government leaders’ and boosters’ promotion of tourism—often at the expense of minority groups and the environment—was swiftly complicated by concerns about ethics, representation, and conservation.
Word by word, story by story, Engel-Pearson depicts an Arizona whose narratives reflect celebrations of diversity and calls for conservation—yet, at the same time, a state whose constitution declares only English words “official.” She reveals Arizona to be constructed, understood, and inhabited through narratives, a state of words as changeable as it is timeless.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806159188 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 308 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Defining a New State, 1912
ON FEBRUARY 14, 1912, after waiting fifty years, Arizona Territory became the State of Arizona. Its citizens had spent those years advocating for their region, describing its virtues and potential in written narratives, often countering visitors' and nonresidents' narratives that expressed views of the limitations of the place. Both boosters and critics described the characteristics of the landscape and its people as they perceived them, engaging in the work of defining Arizona in words. The written narratives about and coming from Arizona at the time of statehood portrayed an Anglo perspective, written from Anglo experiences, and created an image of the place for Anglo consumption, for English speakers and readers.
At the time of statehood, Arizona was remote and in some ways inhospitable, a space to travel through, not a destination. The population of Arizona in 1910 was just over two hundred thousand. Until railroads were built through the territory, it was accessible only by horse and wagon and on foot. The railroads opened the territory to the nation by making travel easier, and Arizona towns along the rail lines began advertising their districts as destinations rather than simply as stops along the way to somewhere else. The railroads participated in regional boosterism as well, advertising Arizona to travelers in the eastern United States and in Europe. The Southern Pacific Railroad magazine Abroad, for example, intended for a European tourist audience, devoted its March 1912 issue to the new state. "Phoenix is cosmopolitan, representatives of every state in the union being here," the guide declared. "We venture to say that the charm of the desert, the sense of freedom out-of-doors, the large spaces, and the beauty of the environing mountains will steadily bring to this entire center men of culture and of original ideas." The descriptions employed here to describe Arizona became familiar phrases in a variety of publications about the place.
Arizona at the time of statehood boasted few roads, and the roads it had were local, surfaced with dirt and gravel, and connected mines, ranches, and small communities with larger towns. Funding for roads was limited. The federal government restricted borrowing by territorial governments, therefore most of Arizona's roads prestatehood were financed and built by the counties. In 1909 the territorial legislature established a two-road highway system. The east-to-west road began in Duncan near the border with New Mexico Territory; it traversed the mining country of the southeast, passed through Clifton, Safford, and Globe on the way to the Roosevelt dam site and the future Roosevelt Lake, then on to Mesa, Tempe, and Phoenix, ending the long trip across the southwestern desert in Yuma. The north-south route began in Flagstaff, ran through Prescott, turned southeast to Phoenix and Tucson, and culminated at Douglas on the Mexican border. None of the roads were paved.
On the eve of statehood, then, the Arizona that most nonresidents knew was one created in words and pictures; and in 1912, before color photography was widely used, written narratives would have reached the largest audience. Residents of the territory wrote about the place in stories, poems, and newspaper articles. Newspapers outside Arizona covered the state with a much different perspective, those reporters writing with an outsider's view. Writers of fiction created an Arizona in their stories that became a familiar Wild West place. Indian people became part of the written narrative landscape of Arizona just as farmers, the desert, and Grand Canyon did. At the time of statehood, however, Native Americans did not have the same access to place-defining and creating words, to the language (English) or the means (publication) that these non-Indian poets, novelists, and newspaper editors possessed. The barriers of language and access, and a bias against oral narratives, meant that the literary Arizona written for the majority of Americans in 1912 was an Anglo Arizona, a place viewed through the eyes of white, English-speaking writers and readers.
As settlers worked to manage the unique yet challenging landscapes, to gain physical control, writers endeavored to define them, to impose an intellectual control, to gain an understanding of the place. In defining Arizona's landscapes, writers employed phrases that became familiar and almost sacrosanct over time. Words described the dichotomy of the state's miraculous growth — an instant civilization juxtaposed against rock-exposed natural features dating from the dawn of time, temporal extremes that continued to define the state for over a century — and of the natural landscape extremes characterized as lush forests and desert wasteland. Natural landscapes cannot be confined within political boundaries, and as writers sought to define Arizona's physical borders, the space that it would encompass within the nation, they found that canyons and deserts overlapped these invisible lines. Descriptions of Arizona's people were as recognizable (and stereotypical) as those defining most western dwellers at the time: the independent pioneer, the rugged cowboy, the motivated businessman, and the subdued yet mysterious Indian. All of these words defined Arizona, characterized it, and gave it meaning.
Sharlot Hall, Cactus and Pine
As citizens of Arizona grappled with the process of defining the new state, Sharlot Hall had been defining the place in verse for decades. In 1882, as a twelve-year-old child, she traveled on horseback with her parents from Kansas to northern Arizona, where they built a ranch near Prescott. Hall witnessed the growth and development of the territory and its people. She knew ranchers and merchants, schoolteachers and families, who had emigrated to the place years before the Halls arrived, and she recognized the importance of the pioneer stories, histories that connected the settlers to their place but also defined the place for the rest of the country.
Hall's first published work was an Arizona story; a Hopi creation story, it appeared in a children's magazine in 1891. She wrote essays, poems, and historical sketches and published in venues as varied as the journal Archaeology, the magazine Land of Sunshine, and Arizona's newspapers. Hall's poetry portrayed the natural landscape of her homeland, and her essays described the history of its people and emphasized their strength and fortitude. In the first decade of the twentieth century Hall put her writing skills to work as associate editor of Charles Lummis's Out West magazine and used her familiarity with and knowledge of early Arizona pioneers to begin collecting their oral histories. In 1909 Hall was appointed to the newly created Office of Territorial Historian by Governor Richard Sloan and became the first Arizona woman to hold public office, a position she held until 1912. In addition to oral histories, she collected documents, books, and other written records of Arizona history, creating an accessible past and providing stories defining the place by its own people.
Initially Hall defined the West and its people for readers of Out West magazine. Originally published by Lummis in Los Angeles as Land of Sunshine, the magazine's name was changed in 1902 to Out West, and Lummis commissioned Hall to write a poem to appear on the first page of the first issue. The poem was typical of the verses she would write about Arizona, with larger-than-life landscapes populated by hardier-than-average people. Titled "Out West" to introduce the new magazine, the poem described the landscape as a cliché of extremes, just as Hall's verses would come to define Arizona. She wrote, "The silence of utmost desert, and canyons rifted and riven / And the music of wide-flung forests where strong winds shout to heaven." Hall described the residents of the West as a different breed of fellows (in this poem the place is female, the settlers are male), sturdier because of their western pilgrimage. "And she cried to the Old World cities that drowse by the Eastern main: / 'Send me your weary, house-worn broods, and I'll send you Men again!'" Hall would soon describe Arizonans in similar fashion, in verse and in the essays published in Out West.
Hall defined Arizona in the first round of its statehood fight in 1906, when Congress determined that the territories of Arizona and New Mexico should be admitted to the union as one state. Arizonans had waited over four decades to become a state. Designated as part of New Mexico Territory in 1848, Arizona was given its own boundaries and name in 1863. The enabling legislation of 1906 once again joined the two southwestern territories, this time as one state, but the citizens of Arizona would have none of it. Capturing that indignation, Hall wrote, "No beggar she in the mighty hall where bay-crowned suitors wait; / No empty-handed pleader for the right of a free-born state." These words form the opening lines of her poem "Arizona," a tract printed on broadsides and placed on every congressman's desk, words that were read into the congressional record from the floor in both houses of Congress and published in Arizona's newspapers, Out West magazine, and newspapers around the country.
In words mirroring her "Out West" poem, Hall defined Arizona for the citizens of Arizona, the U.S. Congress, and the nation. "The men who from trackless forests and prairies lone and far / Hewed out the land where ye sit at ease and grudge us our fair-won star," she wrote, leaving out the Native Americans who had inhabited the place for centuries and instead creating an Arizona that did not exist until Anglo explorers and settlers arrived. Hall defined the territory's natural landscape in words evoking the description of the West in "Out West" and proudly proclaimed Arizona's untamed land and people. She compared what some began calling "The Baby State" to the complacency of older states, writing, "The song of the deed in the doing; of work still hot from the hand; / Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land." Her words captured the strength, independence, and determination of the people and characterized the place they had forged into a home. Arizona's citizens believed they deserved statehood, on their own, unattached to and unencumbered by another territory's people with whom they may have shared a past but would not share a future.
"Arizona" appeared again in 1911, as Arizonans took up a second fight for statehood, in Hall's collection of poetry Cactus and Pine: Songs of the Southwest. The publication of Hall's poems, most of them about or set in Arizona, in one volume that was nationally distributed, defined Arizona for readers who may not have read her magazine articles. Edwin Markham, poet and editor of the New York American morning edition's Book Land, described Hall's poetry as "full of the feel of the Far West, its dare and its dream, its color and its glamor, its vastness, and its valor." He encouraged his readers to buy the volume, declaring, "Everyone will note the fervor of her spirit and the freshness of her attack." The first edition sold out quickly; "None could be had a year later," according to Hall in the introduction to the second edition.
Along with the essays about Arizona published in Out West magazine, the poems in Cactus and Pine defined Arizona with the authority of one who had advocated for the place for a decade and provided a tool for English-speaking and reading Arizonans to define themselves. The themes of Arizona's dualities are present in Hall's writing, showing the extremes of the temporal (oldest natural landscape and newest settlements) and natural landscapes (forest and desert) and juxtaposing the Old West with the modern. Readers of Hall's articles and poetry would be unaware of Arizona's large Native American population. Indian people are nearly nonexistent in Hall's narratives, mentioned only as a hindrance to settlement. Her Arizona, the one she writes into being, is distinctly Anglo. Instead, Hall readily employs booster language in the articles, using words and tone rooted in the existing literature about the territory.
As Arizonans engaged in their first battle for statehood in 1906, Out West magazine devoted nearly an entire issue to Hall's article about the place. The sixty-four-page article reinforced the theme of the stoic, independent, hardworking settler introduced in Hall's poems. "But if [Arizona's] isolation, her transportation difficulties, and her years of strenuous Indian warfare have been to some extent obstacles in the path of Arizona's advancement," Hall declared, "she has been more than repaid by the character they have bred in her people. They have given her a race of 'stayers'; the congenital 'quitters' came and saw and went on in search of easier lands." Hall ignored the contemporary presence of Native Americans, instead placing them in the past, as obstacles to "Arizona's [read Anglo Arizona's] advancement."
Much of the article is of the boosting type, and large sections are devoted to the wonders of Arizona's agriculture, ranching, forestry, and mining. Hall introduced her readers to Arizona's forests and boasted about the territory's farming potential, stating it had "the largest and most valuable forest in the United States — possibly the largest unbroken forest area in the world, covering ten thousand square miles. ... Nearly one half of the land in Arizona is capable of cultivation, and with water would be immensely productive." As with William Smythe a decade before, for Hall and the readers she was addressing, the promise of Arizona's natural landscapes lay in the usefulness of their resources: wide plains for farming and ranching, mineral-filled mountains for mining, thousands of miles of forest for harvesting. The idea that Arizona's natural landscapes should be left wild, that value existed in undeveloped land, would not be advanced for several decades.
However, even as she wrote about the natural resources available for extraction and harvesting, Hall recognized the beauty inherent in the places she described. Arizona has often been represented as both harsh desert and lush forest in literature, underscoring the dichotomy of extremes, stark and verdant, and the contradictory descriptions of the natural world both as inspirational and as raw material for industry. While much of Hall's writing depicts the possibilities for development, she also describes the beauty of Arizona's natural landscapes.
Of the desert, defining the part of Arizona that most readers would recognize, Hall described the location of Phoenix as being "where the mountains run / Naked and scarred and seamed up to the face of the sun; / His place — reaches of wind-blown sand, brown and barren and old." But she also wrote about the place in words that might have surprised her readers, describing spring in the desert in both essay and verse. In an article for Out West, Hall described the scene when the season of rain arrives, writing, "If it is rain in any quantity, the very drops seem to turn into green leaves as they fall; and, almost before the shower is done, a faint, gauzy film of green, like a scarf blown from the hands of Spring, lies on the canyon slopes and along the wide, low sand-washes." While this image does not conjure desert landscapes, Hall made sure the reader was still firmly fixed in the idea of the desert as she added the ever-present cacti to the picture. She described budding and blooming saguaro flowers and the outwardly dead ocotillos suddenly covered with leaves and sprouting flames of orange flowers at the ends of their long branches. "Whole mountainsides are yellow at once with the deep, rich, velvet-textured prickly pear," Hall explained, and she declared, "No other desert growth is more impressive than a great yucca in full bloom," with its "white cluster of waxen bells" on flagpole-like stems.
Hall's poetry also described spring in the desert, creating a life-filled place in what was often portrayed as a lifeless, life-taking landscape. "Every shrub distills vague sweetness; every poorest leaf be gathered / Some rare breath to tell its gladness in a fitter way than speech," she wrote. "Here the silken cactus blossoms flaunt their rose and gold and crimson, / And the proud zahuaro [sic] lifts its pearl-carved crown from careless reach." In both the article and the poem Hall described the texture of cactus flowers — rich, velvet, and silk — and calls to the reader's mind the iconic image of the saguaro cactus that symbolizes the desert.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Writing Arizona 1912–2012"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Prologue: POINTS OF ENTRY,
OVERLOOK: Arizona Territory: Prelude to a State,
CHAPTER 1. DEFINING A NEW STATE, 1912,
OVERLOOK: Booms, Busts, and Borders: World War I and the Great Depression,
CHAPTER 2. CREATING ARIZONA, 1937,
OVERLOOK: Mid-century Growing Pains: World War II and Postwar Arizona,
CHAPTER 3. BECOMING ARIZONA, 1962,
OVERLOOK: Water Rights, Civil Rights, and State's Rights: The 1970s and 1980s,
CHAPTER 4. REALIZING ARIZONA, 1987,
OVERLOOK: A Twenty-First-Century State,
Epilogue: POINTS OF DEPARTURE, 2012,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,