Flagstaff: The Skylight City Was On the Beaten Path

This northern Arizona city in the pines exists because it is on a convenient transportation corridor spanning the continent. Between 1857 and 1859, Army troops under the command of Lieutenant Edward F. Beale built a wagon road across the Colorado Plateau following the “middle route” between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. Staying close to springs and abundant grass for animals, Beale’s road was shorter than the Old Spanish Trail through Utah and safer than the Gila Trail through the blistering desert frequented by Apache raiders. Travelers on the road would have sight of the landmark San Francisco Peaks for more than 75 miles in either direction and could water at Leroux Springs at the southwest base of the mountain.

Even before completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 plans called for two more, one to follow the Gila Trail and another taking the 35th Parallel middle route with Beale’s road. Knowing the Atlantic & Pacific railroad would build close to Leroux Springs a few sheep ranchers and two immigrant parties from Boston arrived at the base of the peaks in 1876. The second Boston party arrived in Antelope Valley on July 4th and made a pine tree into a flagpole to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Finding the clearings between the copious Leroux Springs and the meager Antelope Spring 12 miles south a disappointing location for farming the Boston parties moved on, but their patriotic flagpole was the talk of the territory. When a government surveyor arrived two years later he found one of the sheep men living at the “Flagstaff” ranch not far from Antelope Spring.

As soon as it became clear that rails would pass by Antelope Spring, very early in 1881 a Prescott merchant and his nephew established a store on the side of the hill where water trickled out of the ground. That April Atlantic and Pacific Railroad surveyors staked out curves along the hillside and a group of Mormon entrepreneurs settled close to Leroux Springs to grade roadbed and cut ties all along the line. By the time rails were laid to Canyon Diablo west of Winslow the following year, a Chicago businessman was already hauling a complete steam powered sawmill by wagon train to Antelope Spring with a contract to supply the A & P. A primitive line of tents, log cabins and board buildings soon graced the hillside with a post office named Flagstaff in the general store.

This is a small portion of the 20-30 commercial buildings that first lined the single street of Flagstaff, pictured by Albuquerque photographer Ben Wittick, probably in March 1883. There is a telegraph line and across the street out of view, railroad tracks and the spring. In the center is a sign that says “Monarch (Mercantile?), P. B. Brannen (Prop.?).” Next door is the “Arizona News Depot” with a canvas roof. Then another store, then the two-story Beal’s restaurant and Pioneer Hotel and finally John Drain’s saloon. To the left of Brannen’s store is the Log Cabin Saloon and then another saloon and dance hall. These buildings would burn 22 July 1884 and be replaced only to eventually become “Old Town” as commercial development moved east.



After struggling to bridge the devil’s canyon, the railroad arrived at Flagstaff August 1, 1882 and 18 days later the sawmill boiler was fired and its steam whistle echoed through Antelope Valley. But the silence had already been broken by more than a dozen saloons serving railroad workers 24/7. Like every other town on the railroad front, Flagstaff was a dangerous cauldron of male exuberance supported by hefty railroad paychecks. “Cattle rustling was rampant and only conquered by stringing the culprits to a limb of a tree and riddling the bodies with bullets. Many were the shootings in the town. . . . They write about Tombstone and other early settlements, but Flagstaff was as bad as any of them” (p.37, Charles C. Stemmer, A Brand From the Burning, 1959).

The railroad put a water tank for their thirsty steam locomotives and a couple box cars for a depot in a relatively flat part of the valley about a mile east of the town on the hill. The general store and the larger saloons moved to a site opposite the depot in 1883 and built substantial buildings. This was “New Town” and Antelope Spring became “Old Town Spring.” Most of the money flowed into the orderly stores and rowdy saloons, giving their owners almost total control over the community.

Another Wittick photo likely taken in late summer 1883 documents the first buildings in New Town, down in Antelope Valley about a mile east of the spring. P. B. Brannen has moved his store and the Post Office into a masonry structure on the NE corner of what would soon be Railroad Avenue and San Francisco Street. Across SF Street is the new home of Black’s Bar owned by James Vail. Both of these buildings burned in 1886 and 1888, but the masonry walls of Brannen’s store survive today, while a brick replacement for Vail’s saloon is also still standing. Like almost every other town along the A & P railroad, there are no buildings across the street, only railroad tracks and the depot.

If anyone tried to make Flagstaff a nice town, they were plagued by too much fire and too little water. Old Town burned down in 1884, then New Town burned in 1886 and 1888. The sawmill, despite a supply of water pumped from a spring, burned in 1887. Then the business district burned again in 1889, taking the railroad depot too. The town had to ban wooden structures downtown, opting instead for sandstone cut at a quarry about three miles east. Soon after it opened in 1887, the quarry was shipping rail cars of stone all over the west.

Looking northwest toward Flagstaff and the San Francisco Peaks around 1893, the sandstone railroad depot built in 1889 is at left, with the commercial district behind it. You can see the steeple of the Methodist-Episcopal church completed in 1888 and the Babbitt Brothers store with awnings open over its first floor windows. At the right edge of the photo, sandstone walls are going up for the new courthouse completed in 1894.

Water supply has always been a problem for Flagstaff. Beginning in 1883, the railroad and sawmill pumped water from O’Neil Springs over eight miles to the south. What Old Town Spring couldn’t provide was hauled in barrels from Leroux Springs and sold on the street at exorbitant rates until 1896. It took a lot of money and much work to finally lay a pipeline in 1898-99 from springs high on the Peaks. Surface water had to be added from upper Lake Mary reservoir in 1941, followed by an ever increasing number of deep wells beginning in 1954.

Workers are stacking rough-cut lumber for air drying at the Arizona Lumber and Timber company mill in the 1890s. Chicago lumberman Edward E. Ayer sold his sawmill established in 1882 to D. M. Riordan in 1887. Rebuilding after several fires, it continued production under a number of owners until 1954. Old Town is behind the mill on the hill seen at left, while New Town is in front of the trees in the distance at right. Behind New Town is the hazy outline of Mount Elden.

In 1886, Flagstaff got a second big sawmill built about five miles east of town by the Greenlaw family. Then a third sawmill was located in 1910 on the southeast side of town called the Flagstaff Lumber Manufacturing Company. The “City in the Pines” had become the biggest forest products manufacturer in the state by far. This postcard view from about 1912 shows the Santa Fe Railroad mainline in the foreground, successor to the old A. & P. railroad. And the dirt road along the rail line is the National Old Trails Road, a major highway across the USA that would become Route 66. Today, Flagstaff has no sawmills and the county jail has been built on the site shown here.

Five Babbitt Brothers came to Flagstaff from Cincinnati beginning in 1886 and started the CO Bar cattle ranch, and a mercantile and Indian trading business organized in 1889. The locally quarried cut sandstone building had been greatly enlarged in 1891 and then again by the time this photograph was made in the early 1900s. By the 1960s, the business had expanded to include trading posts, a supermarket chain and lumber yards in towns across northern Arizona.

Flagstaff’s livelihood expanded over the years to include more than stone, cattle, sheep and lumber. By the 1890s the small town was publicizing its sunshine, pure air and mountain spring water. It became a lodging and outfitting point for tourists going to the Grand Canyon. The local cycling club blazed a trail and stages were making the trip three times a week by 1892. Silent film production crews came in the 1910s with Zane Grey scripts. When tourists started driving automobiles in addition to taking the train, Flagstaff’s middle route became a major cross-country highway, the National Old Trails Road beginning in the 1910s which became Route 66 in 1926. Arizona Snow Bowl ski runs opened in 1939, and expanded after the war. By 1957, the Black Canyon Highway connected Phoenix with Flagstaff, bringing more visitors for winter snows or cool summers.

A large sandstone building to house a reform school was constructed on the far south side of Flagstaff with a state appropriation in 1894. Money ran out and the community had to wait until 1898 before the building could get windows and doors. By then, community objections sent the reform school to Benson, giving over the Flagstaff building to the state’s third institution of higher learning, a Normal School to train teachers. When this photo was published as a postcard about 1910, the main building (at right), had been joined by a men’s dorm (Taylor Hall, 1905, center) and a women’s dorm (Bury Hall, 1908, at left).

The Sisters of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross were assigned to teach a parochial school in Flagstaff from 1899-1966. A small building for St. Anthony’s Academy was built on Cherry Street in 1895, with a convent added in 1899. Increased enrollment led to the addition of a larger school building on the block in 1903, then an addition shown here in 1911. The 1903 building is seen attached to the rear and then farther behind is a separate building, the 1899 convent which became the rectory from 1903-1958. The parish church was also in the 1911 addition until 1930. Everything seen here was torn down in 1956, replaced by a modern school building which is still in use. It’s now called St. Mary’s School.

An early promotional nickname was “The Skylight City,” referring to the 7,000-foot elevation. In 1894 Percival Lowell, attracted to the thin air at that altitude, picked a site on the hill above Old Town Spring to point a telescope through the skylight at the planet Mars. His observatory became an important scientific institution, and the site of the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Other scientists came to Flagstaff too. Fort Valley Experimental Forest was established near Leroux Springs in 1908 and is still teaching rangers how to care for trees. The Museum of Northern Arizona was created in 1928 to study the landscape and cultures of the Colorado Plateau. US Geological Survey established an astrogeology laboratory in Flagstaff in 1963 to train astronauts how to walk on the moon. There is a US Naval observatory to the west and a couple of university telescopes to the south.

Here is the same corner of Railroad Avenue and San Francisco Street seen above in 1883, this time photographed about 1920. Prohibition had been enacted in 1914 in Arizona, forcing Black’s Bar on the corner to become a pool hall and barber shop. Next door used to be the Senate Saloon, now a restaurant, next to Bender’s All-American Café. Next is Robertson’s News Stand that sold newspapers, magazines, postcards, tobacco products, candy and soda pop. The newsstand was the last surviving wood-frame structure downtown after an 1896 ordinance required fire-proof construction. The Ford sign points to Babbitt Ford two blocks north.

Along with the rest of the state, Flagstaff experienced a growth spurt after World War II. Sawmill production increased in the 1950s and the railroad built a marshalling yard in 1957 on the east side to ship materials to the Glen Canyon Dam construction site at Page. The population of the “City in the Pines” increased 138% in the decade of the fifties, helped by the annexation of 48 square miles in 1957-59. It had become a college town with increasing enrollment at what had been the normal school. In 1966, the college became Northern Arizona University. Through the sixties and seventies, Flagstaff struggled to attract higher paying jobs as the timber industry collapsed. Nor could it accommodate the increased automobile traffic that came with growth. In the eighties it had a makeover, closing the old cowboy saloons and creating upscale neighborhoods and trendy art galleries, boutiques and bistros downtown. But racial tensions and income inequities persist.

The Beale Road was eventually replaced by an automobile highway and Flagstaff became one long strip development of filling stations, motels, restaurants and parking lots. Tourism and the hospitality industry eventually made more money for the community than manufacturing forest products. The Texaco station seen here about 1948 used to be on Santa Fe Avenue (now renamed “Route 66”) at Humphreys Street. Lane Sharber operated the motel, which is still in business as the Parkside Town House, and I think Norman G. Sharber operated the gas station.

Route 66 was two lanes of concrete when this postcard was published by the prolific Bob Petley (1912-2006) of Phoenix about 1955. This particular section survives, though overtopped with asphalt, leading from Interstate-40, Exit 204 (Walnut Canyon) to Flagstaff Mall. That’s Mount Elden on the left with the snowcapped San Francisco Peaks on the right. There are a few billboards visible (click on picture to see large size). Motorists were greeted on either side of town by dozens of billboards advertising locally-owned small businesses. After a great deal of effort most billboards were removed. Now they are back, bigger ones advertising big nationwide chains.

This agfachrome by Bob Petley shows downtown Flagstaff in the 1960s. The turquoise blue, 5-story Valley Bank building is in the center. The 1889 railroad depot has a bright white roof, while the 1927 depot is the brown building at the left edge of the photo. Route 66 is the street paralleling the railroad tracks. You can see how the city is built up in Antelope Valley (name no longer used) between Mars Hill, the site of Lowell Observatory on the left and McMillan Mesa on the right. At left, below Mars Hill is a little blue pond in the trees, close by where the 1878 Flagstaff ranch was located.

Some sources:
Platt Cline, Mountain Campus (1983)
Platt Cline, They Came To The Mountain (1976)
Marie D. Jackson, Stone Landmarks. . . (1999)
Richard & Sherry Mangum, Flagstaff Past & Present (2003)
Russell Wahmann, The Historical Geography of the Santa Fe Railroad In Northern Arizona (1971)

Five “C’s” Supported The Arizona Economy

“For decades, school children in Arizona have been taught the five C's: Copper, Cattle, Cotton, Citrus and Climate. That's what I studied when growing up in St. John's and that's what my children learned growing up in Tucson.
“The five C's have been the driving force behind Arizona's economy. They have traditionally been what made our towns and communities grow. They provided jobs and opportunities. The five C's gave economic security to past generations and real hope to future generations.
"All that, however, is changing. Arizona, like the rest of the country, is undergoing an economic transformation. Whole new industries are being created, while others die or struggle to survive. Business as usual is changing. Arizona is moving from a mining and agriculturally oriented economy, to a high-technology and service based economy. This is changing the patterns of where Arizonans live and work."
-- Congressman Morris Udall, "Arizona--Where We Came From, Where We're Going", April 1984 report to constituents.

That was 1984. Change continues in Arizona, across the nation and the globe. But historically, Arizona’s prosperity was rooted in the “C’s.”

Postcards for tourists have documented the Five “C’s” over the years. This photo by Hubert A. Lowman published by Fred Harvey shows a group just off a Fred Harvey tour bus at Hopi Point gazing in awe at the colorful erosions ca. 1956. Preserved by the dry climate, Grand Canyon National Park has long been a popular Arizona attraction.

The First “C” Was Copper and Mining

Beginning in the twentieth century Arizona has always been the leading copper producing state in the nation. Arizona mines produce over half the country’s copper, and the metal generates more value than any other mineral mined in the state. As inflation increased its value, copper made $1.1 billion in 1981, a recession year, then $2.2 billion by 1988. From 1860 to 1938, Arizona mines extracted 8.6 million tons of pure copper.

Arizona used to be nicknamed The Copper State when this photo by Jim Sexton was published around 1960. Since then it’s been The Grand Canyon State. The photo shows part of the Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company operation at Miami, Arizona, including part of the tremendous waste pile.

The Second “C” Was Cattle and Sheep

Native Americans in the southwest did not domesticate animals until Spanish missionaries taught the Pima and Tohono O’odam peoples to raise cattle about 300 years ago. Mexicans became skilled vaqueros and cattle ranchers. After Arizona became part of the US, Texas cowboys moved longhorn herds to the territory. Despite early setbacks from northern Arizona snow and widespread drought, the number of cattle increased from nearly 169,000 in 1883 to more than 491,000 ten years later. Herds peaked at 1.75 million head in 1918, falling to 750,000 by 1940 and then increasing again to 1.02 million in 2009. But Arizona still ranks only 31st in the US for numbers of cattle.

In the 1880s Texas cowboys really did rope Arizona mavericks for branding. Then cowboys competed in rodeos, and finally the rodeos and roping lessons came to the dude ranches in the 1920s when this postcard was made.

Sheep ranching used to be popular in Arizona and even a few cattle ranchers crossed over to shepherd the wooly animals. By 1917, the number in Arizona peaked at 1.42 million head, then fell off during the depression years. After the 1960s, most sheep, and goats too, roamed the vast Navajo reservation. Total number in the state was 125,000 in 1997 and 150,000 in 2009. In 2007, Arizona ranked 11th in the nation for numbers of sheep and lambs.

Americans have long been fed both comedy and drama based on stereotypical portrayals of cowboys herding Herefords. If you want to ride a giant concrete rabbit, stop at Jackrabbit Trading Post on Interstate-40 a few miles west of Joseph City. Most color postcards from 1900 to 1940 were heavily “retouched” and colorized black & white photos, often at variance with reality.

The Third “C” Was Cotton and Agriculture

The third “C” for Cotton really represents all agricultural production, including the next two “C’s,” citrus and climate. Abundant sunshine in Arizona makes trees and flowers blossom in winter and crops flourish throughout the year, as long as you irrigate the thirsty desert soil. Virtually all crops in Arizona are irrigated from storage reservoirs or deep wells. With increased water production over the years, Arizona now ranks second in the country for acres of lettuce, second for lemons, third for duram wheat and third for both acres and value of vegetables grown, including melons and potatoes.

This postcard shows a lettuce harvest in the Salt River Valley in the 1960s. Iceberg and leaf lettuce is grown mostly in the west valley and around Yuma and picked by Mexican migrant workers.

“Cotton does well here,” reported an 1897 Phoenix Chamber of Commerce promotional booklet, “but owing to its low price and the fact that there are so many other crops that pay better, no attempt is made to grow it.” In just a few years that changed. The country moved to wearing more cotton clothing and driving on cotton cord tires. When boll weevils attacked the crop in the southeast, Arizona farmers turned to resistant Egyptian varieties, especially long-staple cotton. Prices went brutally up and down from 1916 to 1935, but mechanical pickers and crop dusters continued to boost production. By 1939, cotton provided $12.5 million to the state, more than 23% of the total cash income of Arizona ranch and farm production. It had become the largest industry in the Salt River Valley and the biggest cash crop in the state.

Children were along side parents in the fields when this view was photographed about 1939 in southern Arizona. In the 1930s, growers advertised widely for migrant hand pickers who sweated both in the fields and their tents or rude shacks. (Hope you don’t mind—I colorized this card to fit the mood. The original is a black & white “Real Photo Post Card.”)

And the best years were yet to come. Cotton planting peaked at 690,000 acres in 1953 but yield per acre continued to grow. Production peaked at 1.6 million bales in 1981, with the most per acre of any field in the US. By 2008, Arizona cotton farmers grew 2.24 million tons of fiber on 260,000 acres with a yield again leading the nation at 8.6 tons per acre. The state produced half the long-staple cotton in the US in 1969. In 2007, Arizona ranked ninth in the nation for value of cotton and cottonseed. In the 1960s, cotton was the number one crop in Arizona, but alfalfa grown for feed was second. By 2008, acres in alfalfa exceeded acres of cotton, returning to the ranking in Arizona of a hundred years ago.

The Fourth “C” Was Citrus

For the citrus industry in Arizona by the 1930s grapefruit was king, then oranges and finally lemons. In 1938, Arizona shipped the equivalent of 4,536 rail car loads of grapefruit, 672 carloads of oranges and 11 carloads of lemons to other states. Production of grapefruit peaked at 8.2 million crates during the 1946-47 season. In 1991-92, 5.6 million cartons of grapefruit were shipped, but by 2008 only 200,000. In 1940 only 600,000 boxes of oranges were sold, compared to a 1968-69 peak of 10.5 million. By 2008 the number was back down to 760,000 boxes. More than twice as much money is made growing oranges now as grapefruit ($2.7 million vs. $1.2 million in 2007). But 25-times the income from oranges is realized by sales of lemons ($49.1 million in lemon sales in 2007). Arizona ranks second in the country for production of lemons and fourth for oranges and grapefruit. Lemon production peaked in 1974-75 at 14.4 billion cartons, dropping to 3 billion in 2008.

The Arizona Grapefruit Program Committee in 1951 was not above using sex appeal to sell its produce. The back of this Genuine Curteich Colortone card noted shipments began early in November and lasted well into July from two or three pickings.

Ranked by market value, beef cattle production was the top agricultural product in Arizona in 2007. The same year, Yuma County exceeded all other counties in the state for cash receipts from farm commodities, both crops and livestock combined. Pinal County was second with Maricopa county third. Both of those counties made more money than Yuma from livestock, but Yuma County earned more than twice the amount earned in Maricopa County from crops. Agriculture is still big business in Arizona, though less golden than in years past.

This postcard published by J. Homer Smith of Yuma and mailed from that city in 1915 shows orange trees interspersed with ornamental palms. I’m not sure how common this was at the time. The citrus groves I’ve seen around Yuma are monocultures.

The Fifth “C” Was Climate, For Health and Recreation

You would think the blistering desert heat in summer would make climate a liability for the Arizona economy, but such is not the case. Before the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines many tuberculosis patients were cured by living in tents, open huts and sanitariums with wide screened porches in the dry air around Phoenix and Tucson. Believing that much sickness was the result of polluted air in congested cities, many pioneers found the cold, dry, crystal clear air in northern Arizona “bracing” and “invigorating.” Natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, saguaro forests and ancient ruins were available to tourists not just because the railroads and highways brought them here, but also because the warm arid climate preserved these landscapes. Whether for health or recreation, climate attracted people to Arizona, supporting a significant portion of the economy. After the beginning of the Twentieth Century visitors started coming to explore, experience dude ranch life or soak up the winter sun at a resort. After World War Two trailers and RVs began bringing significant numbers of winter visitors, “snow birds” as they say. And with the development of air conditioning, permanent residents began to flock to Arizona for the southern suburban lifestyle.

The Climatic Hotel in Yuma was famous for promising free meals if ever 24-hours were to pass without a glimpse of the sun. They didn’t give away many meals. This card is postmarked 1912; another from 1908 shows it was the “Pilot Knob Hotel” then. I’m not sure about the “moving stairway.” (To fit the climate, I’ve added some more yellow tint to this yellowed black & white original.)

The Jokake Inn (pronounced “joe-CAULK-kee,” meaning “mud house” in the Hopi language) has been a popular winter resort since it opened in 1928. This 1946 postcard shows the pool and the main building of adobe bricks which survives as part of the massive Phoenician resort on East Camelback Road in Scottsdale.

The Five “C’s” Have Been Eclipsed by a Big “M”

Another “C” has been Computers and the high-tech electronics industry. Maybe Communications is another “C,” recognizing Arizona’s role as a transportation and communications corridor spanning the continent. Military “camps” might be considered another “C,” recognizing the role that military spending has played in the Arizona economy over the years, beginning with the first four forts in 1860, booming during the two world wars and finally spurring the manufacturing of weapons beginning in the 1950s. Following World War Two, Arizona retained three Air Force bases, a Naval Air Station, two Army bases and an ordnance depot, adding 18 underground nuclear missile silos in the 1960s.

This is an artist’s depiction of an intercontinental ballistic missile in its underground blast-proof facility at a once secret location in Arizona. The technology was replaced by submarines and cruise missiles. Now visitors can tour a silo near Green Valley preserved by the Pima Air Museum in Tucson. (I colorized this card red to fit the mood. The original is black & white.)

Ironically, the “growing” of trees and “harvesting” them with a permit from the US Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service is considered “manufacturing,” some say the earliest manufacturing sector in the state. With the largest continuous ponderosa pine forest in North America, the lumbering industry was an Arizona cash cow. Even after years of significant decline, the 19.4 million acres of forest in the state produced nearly 19 million cubic feet of wood harvest in 1998.

Many first-time visitors to Arizona are surprised by the amount of snowfall in winter. About a third of the state is high in elevation, especially the Colorado Plateau in the northeast corner. Pine and fir forest covers about 25% of land area, supporting in years past a thriving timber industry. This is the Arizona Lumber and Timber sawmill in Flagstaff about 1937, when there were 21 similar establishments in the state, employing 1,527 people and paying $1.3 million in wages out of a value of $3.8 million in products.

During that post-war boom that transformed Arizona, manufacturing grew to surpass the Five “C’s.” A concentration of aerospace and electronics factories, mostly in the two largest urban areas, blossomed in the 1950s and 60s. By 1980, the value of manufactured products from Arizona factories amounted to more than twice the total value of mining, agriculture and forest products ($2.05 billion vs. $896 million). Moreover, the income from transportation, communications and utilities ($897 million), retail and wholesale trade ($1.2 billion), the service industries ($2.2 billion), and government revenue ($2.7 billion) each alone exceeded any of the Five “C’s” by 1980.

Sources of statistics and rankings of the Five “C’s”:
Arizona Agricultural Statistics(annual)
Arizona Historical and Biographical Record(1896)
Arizona, its people and resources(1972)
Arizona’s Forest Resources, 1999(USDA, Forest Service)
Arizona Yearbook(1991-92)
A Survey of Phoenix. . .(1941)
The Arizona Atlas(1981)

See also:
http://www.azsos.gov/public_services/kids/five_Cs.htm Arizona Secretary of State, Kid’s Page.

ABC Arizona Communities

Eagar: “The Home of the Dome”
Was a Late Bloomer.

Shortly after the creation of Arizona Territory Hispanic families from New Mexico moved to what is now southern Apache County to sell grain and hay to the military at Fort Apache and Fort Defiance. Freighter William R. Milligan built a small non-military fort in 1871 on the Little Colorado River in a valley once inhabited by a mysteriously vanished indigenous tribe. Hispanics settled nearby and named the place Valle Redondo (Round Valley), though it was also known as Milligan Valley to Anglos. At the same time, Mormon families from Utah were colonizing the Little Colorado downstream. William J. Flake, one of the LDS founders of Snowflake, purchased ranch land in Round Valley in the spring of 1879 and by Christmas turned it over to a few families from Utah, including Will, Joel and John, the Eagar Brothers.

Their church was organized into wards to serve individual communities. As the new town of Springerville quickly fell into a violent battle between outlaws and law and order, industrious Mormons retreated to the southwest end of the valley, first splitting the Round Valley Ward into Omer and Amity in 1882, then coming together at a new location as the Union Ward two miles south of Springerville. There, in 1888 the Eagar brothers established a town site that would soon go by the name of Eagarville and finally just Eagar.

Of course, Eagar homes like that of the William W. Eagar family shown here in 1891 ate mostly locally grown grains, vegetables, meat and dairy products from fields irrigated by several ditches from the Little Colorado River and tributaries, Nutrioso Creek and Water Canyon. Water Canyon, at the highest point at the southern rim of Round Valley actually sheltered many of the first settlers in 1879 and 1880. At least 15 men and boys in this photo are threshing wheat hauled in from the fields by wagon teams and carefully piling the straw in stacks to protect it from wind and rain. The grain would then be taken to the local grist mill to have the bran removed and the whole wheat ground into flour.

Around the turn of the century the community was a peaceful collection of farmsteads with a population of 300 on a flat irrigated plateau, with a post office (established 1898) and store near the junction of roads from New Mexico, St. Johns and Fort Apache. About a mile west, brothers Fred and Bert Colter established the headquarters of a large cattle ranch with its own post office carrying their name and school (the former Amity School). In the mountains farther west, Edwin M. Whiting set up a sawmill after 1901 that would eventually expand to Eagar. But for decades to come, life in the southwest part of the valley would remain rural and inwardly focused while Springerville developed a thriving business district on a major transcontinental highway just two miles away.

The Arizona Co-Operative Mercantile Institution store in Eagar was about half the size of the ACMI in Springerville. Still, like most general stores it provided nearly everything a shopper needed. It had a hardware department that sold gasoline for automobiles, a common practice before filling stations built on every corner. The usual practice was for the hardware clerk to turn a hand crank that would pump gas up through the floor from a tank in the basement and into a motorist’s 2-5 gallon can. The store also housed the Eagar post office.

Interior of the Eagar ACMI. The photo is cracked, faded and poorly reproduced in the Bi-Centennial history of Round Valley, but it identifies Joe Udall at the cash register with County Supervisor Joseph Udall leaning on the counter and next in line, Mark Haws, William F. LeSueur, manager of the Springerville ACMI, and Mike Hale. There’s a display ad for Post Toasties cereal on the glass shoe case at right. Electricity didn’t come to Round Valley until 1927, so the deep store front illuminated only by large windows at the front is rather dark. Nevertheless, the cooperative venture was an enlightened solution to the problem of farmers with only produce to trade for needed manufactured goods. Short on cash, some of the ACMI stores issued tokens so a farmer could return later to shop. Other stores sold on credit. And unlike some co-ops they were open to all residents.


Between world wars Eagar slowly progressed. A large dance hall and ice cream parlor constructed about 1916, called The Grape Vine Hall after its window decoration, was purchased in the 1920s by the church, renamed Arvazona and continued to host dancing and social gatherings. After the ACMI store burned and the cooperative chain was dissolved in favor of private for-profit business, Eagar farmer John C. Hall established the Modern Store in 1935 on the same site. The LDS church placed importance upon education, art and music, if relatively conventional. So it was to be expected that Eagar would develop it’s school system and become the site of a high school serving the entire valley and outlying areas. In 1942, Eagar mothers led a campaign to replace unhealthy well water with clean spring water piped to homes. By 1948, Ed Slade opened the first furniture store in Apache County, the same year Eagar incorporated with a town council government. Arizona’s population was booming after World War II and tourists were now visiting the forests of the White Mountains from Springerville to Show Low to Heber.

This quiet view of Eagar in 1934 appears to be Main Street looking south. Most streets were lined with trees. W.B. Eagar’s Sinclair service on the left advertises “cold drinks,” while there is a Texaco station farther down the street on the right with a grocery next door. This is an Arizona Dept. of Transportation photo held by the State Library and Archives.

Round Valley High School was organized in 1921 as a free public tax supported institution after LDS church leaders abolished the system of Stake Academies. This building was constructed in 1924 and occupied in 1925 after students had been attending classes in the Eagar chapel building. The school building was demolished around the end of the 70s, replaced by a large structure with an imposing profile.

With a population around 1,200 in 1951, Eagar was completing a new chapel building and enjoyed a small business district with the furniture store, one auto repair garage, a couple filling stations, two general stores, one with a soda fountain the other offering a meat market, and a single “club,” the V.F.W. Hovell-Norton Post 8987. Living at the edge of the forest, Eagar’s economy had always profited from logging. Milligan used water power to grind wheat and saw timber. Records show two sawmills in Eagar in 1912. In the mid-1930s, the Whiting brothers built a large sawmill below the mouth of Water Canyon. That mill operated for many years before it was acquired by Southwest Forest Industries, sold again, and finally closed in 1999.

Beginning with a store in St. Johns, the Whiting Brothers built a commercial empire that by 1951 included 14 sawmills, six lumber yards, four garages, 28 gasoline stations, a grocery store, furniture store, two theaters and cattle ranch. Over the next two decades they would acquire a chain of motels and nearly double the number of service stations. The Whiting garages were Ford dealerships, explaining why every truck pictured is a Ford, the newest from the 1951 model year. This widely reproduced photo usually lacks identification of location, but Cameron Udall (Images of America – St. Johns,2008) captioned it “taken at the Whiting Brothers sawmill in Eagar” and provided names for some of the men pictured.

Tucson Electric Power located a large coal-fired electric generating station 20 miles north of Springerville in 1980, recently expanding the original two units to four. Fifty years after its post-war growing spurt began, with a population of 4,033, Eagar had bloomed to more than twice the size of Springerville. After a long period as a bedroom community to Springerville, in this century Eagar has its own thriving commercial district and a well-equipped high school with an indoor football field, under the fifth largest geodesic dome in the world.

”Only High School Domed Football Stadium in the United States” boasts this postcard image of the architect’s drawing published by Norm & Russell Mead of Mesa. Originally called the “Round Valley Ensphere” but commonly called “the dome,” it was largely funded by property taxes levied on Springerville Generating Station power plant. President George W. Bush visited in 2002 when it provided shelter for evacuees from Show Low during the Rodeo-Chediski fire. It seats 5,000 spectators in front of a full-size football field surrounded by seven basketball, volleyball, or tennis courts.

see also:
http://www.roundvalleyaz.com/index.html featuring historical documentation compiled by Jack Becker (1942-2007)

Douglas: “The Smelter City” Cleaned Up To Become “The Premier Southwestern Border Community.”

After 20 years smelting ore at Bisbee, the Phelps Dodge Copper Queen mine realized that Mule Pass Gulch “is not a desirable location for a smelter. The ground is rough, the water bad, and it is difficult of access for transportation.” (Douglas Chamber of Commerce booklet, 1908, Univ. of Ariz. Institutional Repository.) A site for a new and larger smelter right on the border with Mexico was selected in the wide flat prairie of the Sulphur Springs Valley that had long been used by cattle ranchers. Nearby, private developers with an inside tip bought up range land and laid out city streets in 1901, selling lots to smelter workers and businesses cheaper than the going rate in the Salt River Valley. The town was named Douglas, after Phelps Dodge President Dr. James Stewart Douglas (1837-1918).

In this view of G Avenue looking south about 1907 the street cars are at 10th Street. Douglas was one of only five cities in Arizona to enjoy electric street railway transportation (Bisbee, Phoenix, Prescott and Tucson were the others). G Avenue and 10th Street was the center of the commercial district. The building on the right is the Copper Queen company store or Phelps Dodge Mercantile, with First National Bank across 10th Street. On the east side of G Avenue is a corner drug store, Douglas Drug Company in the Meguire Building.

Phelps Dodge created the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad to haul ore from Bisbee and connect Douglas with El Paso. The Arizona & Southeastern railroad connected Douglas with copper mines at Nacozari, Sonora and Deming, New Mexico. Construction of a new Copper Queen Smelter began in 1900 and an enlarged operation was complete by 1904, after which the Bisbee smelter was closed. Meanwhile in 1903, Bisbee’s Calumet & Arizona company built its own smelter next to the new Copper Queen works. The valley filled with smoke and pockets filled with money.

Two blocks east of the above view, adjacent to “church square,” was this upper middle-class residential section as it appeared in the 1910s. The camera is looking south down E Avenue just east of the old library. Douglas was laid out in a classic grid pattern with numbered streets running east and west, crossed by avenues named by letters A through J. Lots were large with front sidewalks separated from the street and service alleys in back.

Contrasted with a residential street in Douglas, this is the Hispanic community of Pirtleville in the 1910s. Homes are smaller, and lack trees, lawn, paved sidewalks, curbs and separation from the street. Hispanic workers at the smelters were paid less than whites. One hundred years later, substandard housing is still a problem in the community.

At first, Douglas was a rowdy town like Bisbee, but many residents were determined to make it “clean, modern and healthful,” as it would soon boast in 1908. The Arizona Rangers moved their headquarters there from Bisbee in 1902 to join with the Cochise County Sheriff in a war on crime and vice. Peace officers would also be available to break union strikes. A lot of effort was put into making Douglas a prosperous and comfortable community and that work paid off for generations to come. By the 1920s, there were eight miles of paved streets, 150 miles of drinking water lines, 27 miles of sewer lines, electricity, piped gas, and telephones, three city parks, 10 schools and seven churches.

And, unlike other Arizona mining towns, job prospects were diversified early on, with a gypsum block factory and a brewery much larger than the one at Bisbee. When the last smelter closed in January 1987, Douglas turned to clothing manufacturing. Several Maquilladores set up production with cheap labor in Agua Prieta, Sonora just across the border. After a slight decrease in population, Douglas added more than 5,000 residents in about 15 years.

Here is G Avenue looking south again at the intersection of 11th Street about 1960. The 5-story Gadsden Hotel is at right, with the Phelps Dodge store to the south. Across G Avenue is the Western Auto store. The Gadsden was built in 1907 but burned February 7, 1928 with extensive damage to exterior walls. It was rebuilt by the following year. Amazingly, interior marble survived and the interior now looks much as it has since 1907.

Typical of Arizona mining communities, before 1950 many Hispanic workers and their families lived in a separate town a mile to the northwest called Pirtleville. While Douglas incorporated in 1905, today Pirtleville is still unincorporated and without the infrastructure that city government provides. Raul Castro, Arizona’s first Hispanic governor, grew up in Pirtleville and graduated from Douglas High School.

Relations with Mexico have gone through periods of peace and conflict in southern Arizona. For decades there was no fence along the border with casual access available to both sides. Smelter slag piles extended across the border and when Douglas residents built an international airport in 1928 the runway extended into Mexico. But during the revolutionary period in Mexico from 1910 to 1920 a large number of US troops were stationed at Douglas to protect the border and invade Mexico as the need arose. When quiet returned, Douglas became a tourist destination. Upscale couples could reach Douglas via American Airlines after 1929 and escape both cold weather and prohibition by soaking up the “Douglas sunshine and Agua Prieta moonshine.” A transcontinental highway, first called the Bankhead or Bankhead-Borderland Highway and later Highway 80 went from Bisbee through Douglas and on to New Mexico.

Named for an army corporal killed guarding the border at Douglas, the camp was constructed in 1911 a few miles north of town when revolution flared in Mexico. In 1915, Pancho Villa tried to capture Agua Prieta, then raided Columbus, New Mexico the following year. The US Army pursued him into Mexico from Camp Jones. When soldiers had to leave to enter the World War in Europe, National Guard forces continued to man the post, as many as 25,000 in 1917.

Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing arrives by car at Camp Harry J. Jones, probably in 1916 when he commanded a punitive raid into Mexico against Pancho Villa. Troops at Douglas were among the first to use automobiles, trucks and airplanes. An army biplane out of Douglas flew what some claim to be the first US military bomber mission.

The collapse of copper prices and economic depression led to population declines from 1919 to 1923 and 1931 to 1938. Phelps Dodge purchased Calumet and Arizona in 1931 and abandoned the Copper Queen Smelter. By the beginning of World War II miners were back to work and the remaining smelter was in full production. Douglas profited from the war effort. In 1941, the military built Douglas Army Air Field eight miles north of town for advanced bomber pilot training. Among the 5,500 servicemen stationed there was a group of African American WACs, including Anna M. Clarke who led a protest that resulted in desegregating the base theater. Now the former military airfield is a county facility, Bisbee-Douglas International Airport. A state prison was built in 1987 where barracks, service buildings and theater used to be. The other airport on the east side of Douglas is a municipal facility with runways now entirely inside the US.

The Phelps Dodge smelter at Douglas is pictured about 1938. A string of railroad ore cars is seen behind the automobiles. At left is a small motorized locomotive with a slag pot that probably needed repair. Electric locomotives running under an overhead catenary took slag pots to the dump.

After the Copper Queen smelter was abandoned in 1931, Phelps Dodge continued to operate the enlarged Calumet & Arizona smelter, seen here about 1943. When both smelters were operating, with ore coming by rail from Ajo, Bisbee and Nacozari, Douglas produced half of the copper in the state. Before 1917, payroll amounted to $500,000 a month. Then, economic depressions in the early 1920s and the early 1930s hit the industry hard. During World War II and the postwar economic expansion copper was needed and workers had good jobs. But industrial globalization beginning in the 1980s brought an end to copper production at Douglas. The smelter closed in 1987 and smoke stacks were finally demolished January 13, 1991.

see also:
Border Air Museum, located at 3200 E. 10th Street, Douglas, AZ
Slaughter Ranch Museum, 6153 Geronimo Trail, Douglas, AZ 85607 (mailing address) “Texas John” Slaughter’s (1842-1922) historic ranch and museum is located in the San Bernardino National Wildlife Preserve 15 miles east of Douglas.

ABC Arizona Communities

Chandler: “A Modern Eden,” “The Five Star City,” and a “High Tech Oasis in the Silicon Desert.”

In addition to mineral riches, Arizona has produced great wealth through land development and agriculture. Inspired by the ancient tradition of an Eden-like oasis in the forbidding desert, Arizona developers have created a number of planned communities over the years, each with its unique center-piece drawing shoppers to landscaped arcades and homebuyers to pleasant abodes set in a fabulous dreamscape.

Dr. A. J. Chandler (1859-1950), a Canadian veterinarian recruited to head Arizona’s first Livestock Sanitary Board in 1887, was one of those developers. And his Chandler Ranch, subdivided in 1911, became one of those dreamscapes. The real estate office opened in the barren desert south of Tempe May 17, 1912 and sold $50,000 worth of parcels that first day.

Chandler Ranch begins selling residential and commercial lots and small farmsteads.

The one square mile townsite centered around a landscaped park just below the intersection of Arizona Avenue and Chandler Blvd. (Cleveland street at the time). And within a year a world class desert winter resort in the popular Mission Revival style opened on the west side of the park. Called the San Marcos, it was the first cast-in-place reinforced concrete structure in Arizona. The remaining sides of the town square were fronted by business blocks tied together by a continuous colonnade that shaded sidewalks.

Designed by California architect Arthur Burnett Benton, the San Marcos offered guests a number of detached bungalows west of the main hotel set in a paradise of fountains, pools, flower beds, palm-lined walks and fragrant citrus trees. This view of bungalows is from a penny postcard colorized by the Albertype process about 1915. Remodeled in 1954 and then restored in 1986, the Crowne Plaza San Marcos Golf Resort remains the centerpiece of the historic district.

By 1914 there were 40 businesses serving a population of at least 1,000. The Basha family opened its first store close by in 1920. But agriculture was the foundation of the economy in those days. With irrigation, farmers grew fruit, vegetables and alfalfa. An Ostrich farm, providing feathers for ladies hats, boomed until styles changed in the 1920s. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company leased land a few miles south to grow the new variety of Egyptian long staple cotton used in auto and truck tire cords and fabric covering of airplanes. There was a small community named Goodyear located at the present day intersection of Alma School and Ocotillo Roads. The community was renamed Ocotillo just before World War Two when the rubber company created a new Goodyear to serve a naval air field at Litchfield Park.

Dr. Chandler was an expert on animal nutrition for the Ferry seed company before coming to Arizona. He noticed that the desert in the Salt River Valley bloomed upon the application of water. For his real estate development he organized the Consolidated Canal Company and supported the effort to build Roosevelt Dam as a year-round source of water.

The Chandler Heights Citrus District was established in 1928 fifteen miles southeast. But it was the buildup for war that brought a growth spurt to Chandler. The US Army Air Corps opened Higley Field 10 miles east of Chandler in 1941 to train pilots, renaming it Williams Field the following year. By 1950 the population of Chandler had more than doubled to 3,800, still a small oasis surrounded by irrigated fields and desert.

Here’s a bird’s-eye-view of A. J. Chandler park looking southwest in about 1955, published as a postcard by Petley Studios. At right is the front of the San Marcos, with a colonnade front business block in center. After Arizona Avenue became Highway 87 to Tucson, in 1940 the town square was divided in two by a new four-lane highway.

Beginning after the war, the Salt River Valley attracted manufacturing plants, a workforce looking for a comfortable southern California inspired suburban lifestyle and retirees seeking relief from cold Midwestern winters. More recently, aggressive real estate marketing populated Valley cities like Chandler with upwardly mobile dreamers settling under the palms often on the shoreline of a sparkling man-made lake. Chandler gobbled up most of the farms and the desert, passing a population of 100,000 in the 1990s and then 200,000 early in this decade to become the fifth largest city in Arizona.

A 2008 entrance design by Lamb Architects for a $3.7 million office condo located at Chandler Blvd. and Kyrene Road in Chandler.

The Arizona Gold Rush

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"There’s gold in them thar hills"

In Arizona, copper has proven a more valuable metal than gold. And much of the gold produced since 1900 has been recovered from copper sulfide ores as a byproduct of the copper concentration and smelting process. Spanish conquistadors came to Arizona searching for gold and found silver instead. Mexican prospectors began mining the gold missed by their former Spanish rulers. But it was silver mining in the mountains south of Tucson that lured the first Americans to Arizona. Soon, they too discovered the more valuable yellow metal. And a gold rush along the lower Colorado and Gila rivers initiated settlement in the western part of New Mexico Territory, an area that would soon become the Territory of Arizona.

“By 1858 prospectors had located placer beds on the Gila River. There they started Arizona’s first modern gold rush, which resulted in the establishment of Gila City. In a few years perhaps 1500 people were living there on the banks of the Gila, panning gold and defying the heat and perils of an unknown desert. In a land of almost perpetual drouth, their city was finally swept away by an unexpected flood, and the first gold rush was over.”
- - p.227, Frank Cullen Brophy, Arizona Sketch Book (1952)

Gila City was established at the end of 1858 and had a population of 400 by the spring of 1859. The placer deposits apparently played out shortly afterward and the flood came in 1862. By then, prospectors had already hit pay dirt along the Colorado River, at El Dorado Canyon in April 1861 and at La Paz lagoon in 1862.

This map by Norton Allen appeared in the April 1953 issue of Desert magazine. Gila City was located on the river about 12 miles east of the McPhaul placer (16). The town of La Paz was located close to the upper placer (14), while Ehrenburg was near the lower La Paz placer. This map also omits a good placer stream southwest of Payson.
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“More than 5,000 people worked the placers of La Paz and moved the freight and supplies which came by boat up the Colorado River from distant San Francisco.” (Brophy, p. 228) The bustling town of 155 adobe houses and numerous saloons and stores, missed becoming the capital of the new Territory of Arizona in 1864 by a single vote in the legislature. More than one Arizona family of merchants got their start in the gold camps of La Paz and Ehrenburg.

Throughout the history of Arizona Territory, San Francisco was the principle source of information, goods, machinery and financing. The gold rush city by the bay was the largest city in the West and an important financial, publishing and higher education center. San Francisco sent miners to the new gold rush in Arizona and by 1877 sent the first railroad line to Yuma.

Gold has been mined throughout the central mountains and low lying deserts of the state. While the soils and clays of the Colorado Plateau region commonly hold very fine particles of gold, extraction has proven unprofitable. Instead, gold is sought in underground veins of quartz and sulphide deposits or the surface sand and gravel of placer deposits.

A model of an Arizona gold mine displayed at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History in 1922 showed how underground mining of pyrites or chalcopyrite sulphides enclosed in quartz could produce as much as $40 in gold per ton of iron sulphide, “a value that well repays working.”

“If the sulphides are worth forty dollars a ton and it is necessary to mine three tons of quartz with each ton of ore, then the material mined is worth only ten dollars a ton, a value that is so small a mine in so remote a region will barely pay expenses of mining and treatment, although larger mines find such ore very profitable.

“When, as is the case here, the ore can be so mined that with each ton of sulphide only one ton of quartz must be mined, the material hoisted is worth twenty dollars a ton and yields a good profit.”
- - p. 4, Model of an Arizona Gold Mine (1922)

The solitary prospector wandering the mountains with his train of burros became an icon of the desert southwest. It appears this guy has a dry washer loaded up, along with several five-gallon square steel cans of water. He must have camped with few bedding comforts and little food.

A solitary prospector passes over sulphide ore in search of free gold in quartz outcrops or placer deposits. He may use a dry washer, wet washer or panning to recover the coveted mineral. “Gold is a very heavy metal. . . .it is the high specific gravity of gold which causes it to settle in the bottom of your pan, or to be caught in the riffles of your sluice, instead of being carried away with the lighter rocks and gravel by the water.” [Walter J. Robertson, Gold Panning For Profit]

Tourists pan for nuggets during the annual Wickenburg Gold Rush Days in February. This postcard was published by Petley Studios in the early 1960s, using a photo by H. H. Raab. Someone censored faces, probably because a model release had not been obtained, though at a public event permission is not required.

The Arizona Gold Rush Continues

With the price of gold now floating around $1000 an ounce, pans are again dipping sand and gravel from streams like Lynx Creek and Turkey Creek near Prescott. While gold is a very useful metal in electrical circuits, plating and even as a pharmaceutical, historically it has garnered extrinsic worth in jewelry and as a currency. When money became limited by the supply of gold, governments about 200 years ago invented paper currency as an alternative to simply sending galleons and conquistadors to seize a weaker government’s treasury of bullion. But it quickly became clear that paper currency would still have to be backed up with the promise of redemption in gold or silver.

To protect paper currency, banks in the United States began regulating the value of gold early in the nineteenth century. In response to the economic depression of 1873-1875, Congress adopted a “Gold Standard” whereby currency would have a value in gold, at the already established market price for gold of $20.67 a troy ounce. This policy may have had the effect of limiting gold fever, but mining the precious metal in Arizona remained lucrative.

The Gold Standard did not prevent periodic economic recessions, notably in 1893 and 1907. Congress responded with the Federal Reserve act in 1914, which among more powerful provisions also established a price control on gold at the $20.67 figure which had held steady since 1879 in the United States. When the Great Depression hit after 1929 big changes were made. A law which took effect in 1934 dropped the Gold Standard for currency and raised the official price of gold to $35.00 an ounce. Gold mines were able to continue to operate until the L-208 order in 1942 closed them to divert production to war materiel. After the war, however, most gold mines in Arizona were unable to restart operations through the 50s and 60s.

This postcard from around 1909 shows an unidentified gold mine near Phoenix. It appears to be the Congress mine 16 miles north of Wickenburg which hoisted underground sulphide ore to produce gold from 1884 until the mid-1930s. Using the new cyanide process, with a new railroad for shipment, after 1895 it became one of the greatest gold mines in Arizona, recovering $11.81 in gold and silver per ton of ore, plus another $1.20 recovered from tailings according to one source. (pp.143-144, Dunning, Rock To Riches,1966)

Emerging from World War Two as the richest and most powerful industrial country on earth, the United States saw no need to return to the Gold Standard and by the end of the sixties financial speculators were eager to trade in gold like any other commodity. Price controls on gold were dropped in 1971 and soon economic turmoil driven by globalization and restricted oil supply sent the value of gold soaring. It reached a high of $850 an ounce at the beginning of 1980, slowly deflating over the next two decades only to rise again in 2002.

See also:
Galbraith & Brennan, Minerals of Arizona (Univ. of Ariz., 1970)
Vicky Hay, “Gold’s There To Be Found If You’ll Just Pan For It.” Arizona Highways, September 1992, p.51.
Eldred D. Wilson, Gold Placers and Placering in Arizona. (Univ. of Ariz., Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology, Geological Survey Branch, Bulletin 168, 1961) .pdf file available