Thirty years and more in the San Pedro Valley have not lessened my sense of awe, as I return from a trip outside to crest the western rim and see the grandeur and color of thousands of square miles spread out before me. I had been an Arizona resident for a quarter of a century before I learned that the state has two scenic wonders carved out over millions of years by great river systems: the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and the San Pedro River Valley which was named for St. Peter by the padres and conquistadores who passed this way in 1540, eighty years before the Pilgrims landed. The Grand Canyon is out of this world. But the San Pedro Valley, although far from crowded, is peopled. For the most part its denizens are earthy ones, wresting their living from the ground, in some cases for four or five generations: farmers, ranchers, miners.
I came into it (sent sight unseen by the county school superintendent at Tucson) to teach a small accommodation school at Redington, about halfway the hundred-mile length of the river-the only one of consequence in the United States that flows north in is entirety. Redington School was the most remote in Pima County. It was seventy-five miles from Tucson, mostly over rough, two-wheel unkept roads that literally disappeared when it rained.
The isolation and limited enrollment were appealing. I had overworked audaciously for years while teaching non-readers in overcrowded rooms and earning a university degree simultaneously. Moreover, I had suffered severe emotional damage in my personal life. I wanted to hide far-off by myself to lick my wounds and have a go at writing. I would do my duty by the handful of little ranchers for the minimum hours a day, then uncover my portable and whack away at my creations secure from interruptions and the cares of the world. Then I met my pupils.
One fateful September morning I put on a new blue dress, walked the two hundred yards up the mesa to the little time-washed adobe school shack on a bench overlooking the river road and the wooded bottom land, and changed the whole course of my life. From that day forward I was hooked-not only by the little cowpunchers, but by their enchanting environment.
Those Redington kids were the biggest school challenge I ever had. There were seven boys and four girls that first year; the most advanced two were supposed to be in the fourth grade but they stumbled over simple words like yes and you. Nobody in the room could read, but all wanted to. They knew that they did not know the traditional subject matter common to their grades, and they wanted to do something about it. All but the two Anglos -second and third graders-had a language handicap (and in a way these also did) but they made it plain they wanted to overcome it. And they were the friendliest, most affectionate, most anxious-to-please children I ever met. As a group they had never saluted the flag, memorized a poem, had a book read to them, listened to music in the schoolroom, given a community entertainment, or gone on a school expedition to the outside world. The big world was only over the mountains. But for most of the Redington kids it might as well have been over the Pacific Ocean. The year before, their teacher had been an unhappy girl right out of the university with a degree in domestic science who was marking time until she could teach in high school. She was nice to the children and probably thought she was doing them a favor to promote them. Red-faced little Ike, statistically in the second grade, couldn't write his name or read a pre-primer. He said timidly: "The teacher never teached me nothing."
Did I have fun!
Within a few days the kids and I were hitting it off just fine, and the whole community opened its arms. I was oversupplied with fresh corn, string beans, and squashes; morning and night I received a bottle of milk delivered to my door by tiny hands of adorable pre-school little girls. A horse and saddle were placed at my disposal Everywhere I was met by glad smiles. From dismissal time until dark as I rode with the school children or the cowboys, up and down the river bottom I heard happy young ones singing the songs and singing-games I had taught them. Evenings I uncovered the little typewriter. I worked at it until bedtime: making lesson plans, individual worksheets, and daily lesson tests. The hours at school were so short. My little cowpunchers had to make up for lost time.
One must not get the impression that I was a city girl green to all the varying ways of the wilds. I was an exile, home at last. I was born, on another frontier, on my father's homestead and do not remember when I first rode horseback. I do remember a big streak-faced sorrel called Old Timber that I used to ride; and they tell me I was only three years old when we moved away. My first teaching job, when I was a teen-ager, was in the Verde Valley in Yavapai County at a most delightful farming-ranching place, Beaver Creek. (Strange to say, after more than forty years I now and then get letters from some who were pupils in that school.)
In early childhood and young womanhood cows and horses and what goes with them were integral parts of my existence. The saddest, loneliest years I have known were those when I taught and studied and beat my wings against the containing walls of the city. Redington gave me back freedom and joy and my birthright to space and privacy. It also introduced me to the San Pedro, the untamed, often ferocious river, and encouraged me to take root in its locale, to receive its comforts along with its hardships, its crises with its inspiration; and to give back to the demanding environment such strength, capacity, endurance, and hope as make up a fleeting human life.
It was at the beginning of my third year at Redington that I took the plunge and filed on a homestead, not fully decided that it was for keeps. There was no open land near the school, for the big Carlink Ranch which our school accommodated covered almost the whole valley both sides of the river for about twenty miles.
There is a dot on the map, in the extreme northeast corner of Pima County, marked Redington. But if you go looking for the town it isn't there. People "just riding around to see the country" would Stop at the school to inquire for a gas station, a cafe, a store. There were none.
"This is only a private ranch," I'd say. "Your next town is Oracle. To reach it you go fourteen miles down the river-which you may not be able to cross when you get to the ford-and thirteen miles up steep slopes and deep canyons to the divide. Or you can go back to Benson, forty-eight miles up the river."
Many of these trippers were disgruntled; some were seriously inconvenienced. They said harsh things about mapmakers. They were right. At the place called Redington, there is only the headquarters of the long-established Carlink Ranch. Except for the Big House and some sheds and storage buildings, when I went there the only other houses were the teacherage, perhaps fifty yards up the slope east of the Big House, and the school farther up on the mesa. Around the bend about a quarter of a mile from the ranch was a private home, one room of which was the postoffice. Rosa, mother of two of my little cowpunchers, was the postmistress. Mail was brought down from Benson three times a week.
A few years before, the place had been in charge of a woman who ran it mainly as a guest ranch. There were over twenty rooms in the Big House. The living room, with its huge fireplace and fifteen-foot ceiling, was like the great hall in a feudal castle.
I asked how the Spot got its name. Natives told me that many, many years ago a group of engineers and surveyors camped under the great cottonwood (the biggest I'd ever seen) on the flat below the ranchhouse while laying out a route for a railroad which was to traverse the Valley from Winkelman to Benson. The railroad never materialized. It seems the chief engineer was named Redington. And, to much confusion, his name lingers on.
Looking for a place to settle, I consulted with the neighbors, chief among them the one who appears in these pages as The Old Cowman, and finally decided on a hard-to-get-to spot in Pepper Sauce Canyon, twelve miles from Oracle, five miles above where the River Road crosses the canyon, and twenty-two miles from my school.
In fine weather the journey could be made in a little less than an hour and a half. If it was raining-which meant getting stuck in muddy dips and flats-or if the river was up, I had to drive around the Catalina-Rincon range through Oracle, Tucson, and Benson, a distance of 150 miles! The government was very touchy about a homesteader's being on the land every night and of course my venture began in an exceptionally wet year. The ranchers in the upper Pepper Sauce country, I heard later, resenting me as an intruding nester, were betting I could never stick out the three years required to prove up. They lost I stayed eighteen years and six months, before moving my whole outfit.
In the beginning I did not know that I was sidling into the cow business. My aim was to have a place to live during no-school months, a place to store my things so that I wouldn't be forever packing and moving. The site was chosen because it had available water. Frank Waters, an old Texas "mudhen" (a fellow who tends wells and windmills and pumps), kindly helped me salvage some pipes from an abandoned mine, open up a shallow well in the bottom of the canyon at the foot of a giant cottonwood and put in a water system. This he did, at great labor, for sixty dollars a month and his favorite food-"picked-out pecans"-which I took to him weekends with other supplies for his project and his cold wet camp.
One cold day early in December, as soon as there was water up on the sloping shelf above the danger of canyon floods, I pitched a small tent under a beautiful mesquite tree and took possession of one of the last grazing sections Uncle Sam passed out to homeless citizens. The next problem was a cabin. The Old Cowman found some very hungry Mexicans who came out to make adobes and lay the walls. My job was to keep them from freezing or starving to death, for the rain and snow delayed them so much they made nothing on their contract. They burned all the wood in the area trying to dry the adobes. But they did a good job. To this day the walls still stand without a crack. The Cowman got disgusted because I insisted on fancy stuff-a fireplace and a bathroom. Old Frank stayed with me and he and I did the carpenter work. In five months the one-room house, with bath, was liveable. One Sunday evening in April I made a big fire in the nice big chimney, piled my bedroll on the floor before it and for the first time in my life slept in a home of my very own. The cabin smelled of damp earth and new lumber. It was eight years before I could buy a can of paint. By that time the woodwork had mellowed to such natural beauty that I could not violate it. The white pine floor needed so much scrubbing that in the ninth year I "went for broke" and bought linoleum to cover it.
My Redington friends advised me to go to the land office at Phoenix and apply for some state leased land. I did. And, to my astonishment and the chagrin of my immediate neighbor whose public domain range I had butted into as a nester, I was allotted some leased sections adjacent to my homestead. Old Frank made a good cement pila (round drinking trough) on the rise above the house; and I made a stick and wire corral and a sheetiron shed for my horse. The stage was set. Lacking only were the four-footed members of the cast-the cattle.
It was a time when business had been allowed to go its own way-that is, downhill; when no regard was taken for social responsibility in the world of economics; when farm products were unsalable, and livestock was worthless. Nobody had ever heard of controls. War was merely a smudge on the horizon. We river people bumbled along with very little profit. Our standard of living was such that a teacher making a salary of $150 a month was considered a potential employer and a lender of currency. So I bought fifty cows, many of them of good ages, most of them bred, for fifteen dollars apiece. I was in business.
From the day I took delivery on the cows, life has been one grand crisis after another. The neighbor into whose open range (which he had used free of charge for many years, as had his predecessors-for it was government land) I had moved, apparently with the intention to stay, began to take action. He turned out a hundred mares to eat up my grass and drink the water pumped from my well He hadn't counted on his hostess. I couldn't afford a fence; but I had plenty of strength that summer. Each morning at daylight I saddled Buddy, one of the best cow horses that ever bumped a rock in this rough country, and took after those mares. I ran them so much that it got so my horse didn't have to work up a sweat. As soon as they sighted us atop a ridge, they took off down country, manes and tails flying in the breeze. They had to go all the way to the river-about ten miles-to water and were mixing with the wild horses, so he had to gather them and take them home.
Solutions have not always been so simple. If I make a mistake with my pupils, I can hope their next teacher will rectify it. When I default on a note, the banker can be persuaded to renew it. When I miss on the cattle, it is at once disastrous and often fatal.
With western ranch neighbors, no telling what may happen.
A cowboy of boyish winsomeness, so young he was easily enamored of horses, cattle, the countryside, and a woman's kitchen, took up a homestead five miles down my canyon and called it The Windmill Ranch. In time propinquity took effect and we merged our interests. He could stay to look after the livestock (he had a bunch of horses and mares, and a few head of cattle) and I could go off to school for money to run on. It wasn't such a startling arrangement: since the dawn of history small principalities have been joined by marriage to make more powerful ones.
For three years we fought together against the impossible odds. Then we fought each other. He heard the enticing call of the fast buck; also, there was a female voice in the siren chorus that called to him.
"You want to have something," he said. "I want to make something."
As they say in England, he shot the moon, although his soft heart grieved at leaving me holding the fort alone. "Sell the goddam place!" he said. But the goddam place was my Baby.
Cattle on their home range are fascinating creatures; and part of their charm-as with children or pets-derives from their constant need for supervision and assistance. Owing to drought, range depletion, pests, and other infirmities and calamities Nature arranges to plague the flesh, there is always something you can do for them.
All kinds of cattle interest me, but I have a special fellow-feeling for cows. They wear themselves out, suffer patiently, fight boldly, and develop shocking tenderness for the young who, usually one at a time, share such a small portion of their lives.
There was old New Mexico. (My cows, like Mrs. Wigg's daughters, have geographical names.) She causes me so much trouble and weariness when she had wooden tongue (a bovine disease about which little is known) and subsequent starvation, and I battled so long to save her, against her will, that I had a notion to quit and knock her in the head. Months later I rode up on her at a remote water hole in the canyon just at dark. She looked good. She was a cow once more instead of a bony caricature. By her side stood a little bull calf, the spitting image of her. She raises her head and looked at me with such pride, such fierce joy in life that I felt the glow of it myself.
In this land of little rain if you own your own water system, you lead with your chin. If you brand your calves in the summer you have to take a chance on losing them to flies and screwworms. If you don't brand them they'll get lost or they will be staggish. If you ride the range every day you neglect your housework and other duties. If you don't ride, some cattle will go blind with pinkeye or otherwise be fouled. Any time you turn your back the pump will break down and you must throw yourself on the mercy of an overworked mechanic miles away who would much rather not bother with you. And overshadowing everything else in this semi-desert is the worry about the uncertainty of rain.
But from the start there were compensations. Some of us are born to like animals that live free in wide uncluttered spaces; to enjoy riding out in the dawn in a crumpled land where the far hills and escarpments are touched with glory by the rising sun. And I had another love-teaching school. To me guiding children to learn was a natural endowment; I never had any training in the courses laid out by professors in charge of teacher's colleges. By the time I entered the university I knew by experience what was taught in education classes in my day. I enrolled in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. I had plenty to learn there.
Purely by chance I found my niche when I went to Redington to become a sort of governess to poverty-touched ranch children. I stayed with the vocation twenty-three rewarding years. Not rewarding, however, in the matter of money. That's where the cows came in. Teaching little cowpunchers and raising cattle are complementary like ham and eggs.
Those first hard summers when I was getting my "boot" training in cattle growing, after showers-and now and then a rain-had made green feed it was a pleasure to ride among the cows and see them so busy getting fat that they scarcely raised their heads to look at us. We had time to make a barn and some good mesquite corrals and put in a supply of hay. About the time we got the roads repaired from the flood damage it was time to go back to school.
Accommodation schools were emergency measures later wiped out by developing affluence. Now huge yellow buses pick up the Redington children (some of them sons and daughters of my original little cowpunchers) and drive them to departmental schools miles away. When I was no longer needed there I was sent, by my county superintendent, into other remote schools on the cattle ranges of Pima County. Children carry with them a built-in "welcome, and I loved other pupils and worked happily with them. But in my heart I took with me the Redington "Little Cowpunchers" as they were called throughout the state and beyond, for the mimeographed school magazine we published every month by that name. They were the models by which I tried-sometimes successfully-to mold later pupils.
My second cow-country school was Baboquivari at Pozo Nuevo, fifty miles south of Tucson. Monday mornings, bitterly cold in winter, I got up at three o'clock to warm the car engine, pack my things, and drive four hours including a stop in the city for errands: servicing the car, leaving the laundry, mailing letters, picking up a week's groceries, and checking on my old friend Lolita who was alone and needed help. I arrived at school at 8:30, disheveled, sleepy, tired; and met twenty-five or more young Mexican livewires of assorted ages and eight grades, all fresh and full of action. Together we rallied under our country's flag and made war, in our fashion, on ignorance, the greatest of all enemies.
In the pattern of Redington, we always had going some extra project to keep our spirits up: a Halloween party, a Christmas program, a rodeo parade, a folksong and dance festival. We even continued publishing "Little Cowpuncher" which won us considerable good publicity. And we went in heavily for art, particularly poetry-making at which my hand-talented pupils excelled. Neither teacher nor children had a moment for idleness.
Came Friday and I highballed it home to tackle the problems that had been cooking there for five days. On the way I had to suffer the wearisome task of shopping and doing ranch errands in Tucson.
At that time Saturday and Sunday was a fleeting period seeming to rate as one day. Then it was that I gave the growing things an extra-good watering, for the men, hoarding water, only sprinkled my plants. After the Cowboy left it was up to me to inspect the animals in the corral and pasture and see as many as I could out on the range. I had to haul hay down to the Windmill Ranch so that the Uncle could ride down and feed any sick animals we had shut up there, and have a bite for his "ole pony." I gave the house a lick and a promise, and did special cooking for the old "pardners" who bunked in the place I had built on to the cabin. Other activities over the weekend were catching up on the mail, having visitors-especially after the advent of the "daughters," mending the roof or the water tank, laundering my clothes, and getting ready for the next 100-mile dash.
Such was my routine in sickness and in health and in all kinds of weather for a long string of years, the last eight of them at Little Mountain School in the Sierritas, forty miles southwest of Tucson. There I found Faye McGee, mother of three of my schoolboys, who turned out to be just what I needed most-a lifelong friend and a first-class teacher's aide. She saw to it that the school had wood and water and fuel for the oil stove. She drove to town with me when I had to make after-school trips to get school supplies and library books, took me to a movie, bought me refreshments at a drive-in, and drove home that night while I slept. She understood what I was trying to do and pitied me, although I never felt myself an object worthy of pity. I enjoyed being superactive. If I had a second chance at life I would do it over. I have been lucky to have the chance to spend time and energy serving children and cattle. They can be grouped together, for as different as they are, caring for them seems to bring identical problems and satisfactions. Both are prone to all the ills that flesh is heir to. Most of the time none of them knows what is good for him. They all have minds of their own about what they want to do, and with more or less violence, they resent interference and authority. On the other hand, while they are young they are nice to look at and their youthful charms almost always outweigh their obstreperousness. Their possibilities are challenging. Most important of all, there is always something you can do for them.
Of course, if your aim is to get rich you had better not take up either kids or cows, or all the way you will encounter needs greater than your own. But money, say the Spaniards, is like fruit: no dura (it doesn't last). You can lay up better treasures. Years of working with children and cattle will bring you self-reliance and resourcefulness, and no day will ever be empty or dull.
When you come up against it, you find the impossible has been overrated. For all the weariness and dowdiness that go with the rush of holding down two jobs and living in two places, there are compensations. Calories or no calories, you never outgrow your clothes. Loneliness is just a word-you have no time to feel its crushing grasp. Activities used for killing time by those, in the words of Dorothy Parker, who like it better dead, have no appeal for you, no meaning. You're busy.
Your satisfaction, after months of steady, mostly cheerful effort, comes on the day of reckoning when you see your calves or your kids stack up well with their contemporaries.
Copyright © 1967. The Arizona Board of Regents.