Local Stories in Arizona
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Nature·Mohave County
Black Mountain Burros
The wild burros of Oatman belong to the Black Mountain Herd Management Area, the largest in Arizona, about 1.1 million acres of Bureau of Land Management country running 80 miles along the Colorado River from Hoover Dam to the Needles bridge. The BLM describes the animals as descendants of burros brought in by miners and prospectors from the early 1860s, of North African ancestry, and Oatman sits in the centre of the southern half of the range.
History·Mohave County
Camp Beale Springs
Camp Beale Springs was a U.S. Army post at a spring in the Cerbat foothills west of Kingman, and from 1871 to 1874 it was the place where the Army held the Hualapai people. The spring takes its name from Edward Fitzgerald Beale, whose wagon road along the 35th parallel crossed Hualapai country in 1857, and by 1865 it was a stop on the toll road between Prescott and Hardyville on the Colorado River.
History·Yavapai County
Delgadillo's Barbershop
Angel Delgadillo, whose barbershop stands on Chino Avenue in Seligman, led the campaign to have Route 66 recognised as a historic road. Delgadillo, born in Seligman on 19 April 1927, opened his first shop in 1950 in the family's former pool hall and moved to the present building in 1972 to catch the tourist trade. By the family's account, his father taught himself barbering in the early 1920s because Mexican and Indian customers were often refused elsewhere.
History·Mohave County
Diamond Creek Road
Diamond Creek Road leaves Route 66 in Peach Springs and runs north about twenty miles down Peach Springs Canyon to the Colorado River, and it is the only road that reaches the river between Lees Ferry and Pearce Ferry. It follows the line of the first tourist route into the Grand Canyon.
History·Mohave County
Gold Road Mine
The Gold Road Mine was the big strike of the Black Mountains a decade before Oatman's boom. In 1900 a prospector named José Jerez found rich gold float several miles northeast of the future town of Oatman and took samples to Henry Lovin, the Kingman storekeeper who had often grubstaked him. Jerez traced the float to an exposed vein and staked two claims, naming them Gold Road and Line Road after nearby wagon roads.
History·Mohave County
Hackberry Silver Mine
The Hackberry Mine was found on 12 October 1874 by four men whose horses had been taken by raiders, while they were hunting for water on the northeast slope of the Peacock Mountains. Samuel Crozier, William Ridenour, J. D. Putman and J. A. Kile came across a silver ledge instead, filed the first claims, and named the place for a hackberry tree growing by a nearby water source. That tree is where the town of Hackberry got its name.
History·Mohave County
Hotel Beale
The Hotel Beale on Kingman's main street was built at the end of the 1890s, and it is best known as the place the actor Andy Devine grew up. Devine was born in Flagstaff on 7 October 1905. His father, Tom Devine, bought the hotel in 1906, by the Kingman tourism office's account with the settlement from a railroad accident.
History·Coconino County
Hualapai Reservation
Route 66 enters the Hualapai Reservation about three miles west of Grand Canyon Caverns and stays on it for some sixteen miles, through the tribal capital at Peach Springs, to a point just east of Truxton. The reservation was created by an executive order of President Chester A. Arthur on 4 January 1883, after General Orlando Willcox had set the land aside by a military order of 8 July 1881. It runs for about 108 miles along the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.
Education·Mohave County
Peach Springs School
Peach Springs School, the Hualapai community's elementary school, became a national model for teaching a Native language after 1975, when the Hualapai educator Lucille Watahomigie founded its bilingual and bicultural program in response to community demand. That year about 95 percent of the school's students spoke Hualapai. Watahomigie, born in 1945 at Valentine, about twenty miles west on Route 66, had taught at the school after graduating from Northern Arizona University.
Transport·Mohave County
Port Kingman
Port Kingman was the airfield Transcontinental Air Transport built at Kingman in 1929, on a site chosen by Charles Lindbergh, the airline's technical adviser, while he laid out its coast-to-coast route. TAT sold a 48-hour crossing of the country that flew passengers by day and put them on trains at night: an overnight Pennsylvania Railroad train to Columbus, a Ford Trimotor to Waynoka, Oklahoma, a Santa Fe train to Clovis, New Mexico, then a second Trimotor to Los Angeles with three stops on…
History·Mohave County
The Dam That Never Came
Truxton was founded in 1951 on the strength of a dam that was never built. That year Clyde McCune and Donald Dilts heard that the federal government would dam the Colorado River at Bridge Canyon, in the lower Grand Canyon north of Peach Springs, and put up a service station and garage near the head of Crozier Canyon to catch the traffic, adding a cafe soon after. The settlement took its name from the Truxton railroad siding.
History·Mohave County
The Hualapai Land Case
The springs that gave Peach Springs its name, some three miles north of the town, started one of the most important cases in American Indian law. In 1866 Congress granted the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, later the Santa Fe, a right of way along the 35th parallel and every odd-numbered section of public land beside it, while promising that Indian title would be extinguished only by voluntary cession.
History·Mohave County
The Mule Mail to Supai
The Peach Springs post office is the outside end of the mail route to Supai, the Havasupai village at the bottom of Havasu Canyon, where letters and parcels still go the last eight miles on the backs of mules. Mail leaves Peach Springs by truck along roughly sixty miles of Bureau of Indian Affairs road to Hualapai Hilltop, where the road ends and the trail begins, dropping more than a thousand feet in its first mile of switchbacks. No vehicle can use the trail.
History·Mohave County
Tom Reed Mine
The Tom Reed Mine is the reason Oatman exists. For some thirty years after the first gold finds of the 1860s the Black Mountains were nearly idle, until in 1901 the Tom Reed and Ben Harrison shafts were sunk 100 feet on what became known as the Tom Reed vein, the first general revival of mining in the district.
History·Mohave County
Truxton Spring
Truxton Spring, about three quarters of a mile south of Route 66 east of Crozier, is the spring Edward Fitzgerald Beale's party called Truxton's spring while laying out the wagon road along the 35th parallel in 1857 and 1858, and the source of the name Truxton carries today. Truxtun was a Beale family name: his mother Emily was the daughter of Commodore Thomas Truxtun, and his son, born in 1856, was named Truxtun Beale.
History·Mohave County
United Eastern Mine
The United Eastern Mine set off Oatman's 1915 gold rush with an ore body that never reached the surface. In March 1913 a prospector, J. L. McIver, took an option on ground at the north end of Oatman where no vein showed at all; he had noticed that the rock on either side of the suspected line of a vein was slightly different, and guessed at a hidden fault. With his partner George W.