Cowboys, Farmers, and Others: The Early Blue Community PDF

2 Cowboys, Farmers, and Others Copyright 2016. University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. The Early Blue Community The first white man or pioneer, looking...

2 Cowboys, Farmers, and Others Copyright 2016. University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. The Early Blue Community The first white man or pioneer, looking for a home site and a place to raise cattle, must have thought [the Blue] paradise indeed! Lush feed and plenty of water. They moved in, brought their families and built cabins and schools, all without the use of roads. They probably brought their few possessions in on their backs or horseback or perhaps on burros. Who knows? Families increased, a wagon road worked out to nearby towns. The river part was easier, it just wove in and out and around rocks or any obstacle. One wagon followed the tracks of another, and tracks washed away with each flood. Very little was done to improve it at first. Maybe for the lack of funds. Supplies could then be brought in easier. A post office and a mail route were established. More settlers came in. They built homes, mostly of logs, and built fireplaces. Meals were cooked on these or on fires outside. I doubt if anyone knows when the first cook stove was brought in. They ran their cattle and horses on the forest land. They raised some crops, a garden, planted orchards, milked cows, raised chickens, canned and dried their fruit and vegetables. There was some fishing along the river and wild game was plentiful, especially deer and turkey. There were also bear and mountain lion. Some people probably trapped the fur bearing animals for ready cash. LULA MAE BROOKS (Down on the Blue 9–10) THE SETTLING OF BLUE, ARIZONA, can be viewed as a late extension of the cattle-ranching frontier into the American interior.1 Early pioneers—Fritz, Cosper, McKeen—who came to the Blue out of Texas, had previous experience working as cowboys for large outfits. Most likely, their imaginations took inspiration from the great cattle boom that swept over the western states in the second half of the nineteenth century. Toles Cosper, after finding God’s Country on the Blue, mustered his own and his family’s resources and put together “a herd of around 500 head of herefords and longhorns,” which he eventually took onto the Blue (Cosper 1940:3). Fritz and Whittum started their “ranch” in a different manner, by building their log cabin, and strong corrals; they fashioned their own branding irons and went to work. The wild cattle and horses that roamed this rugged wilderness may belong to anyone who had the strength and courage to master them, and there was no “law” to contend with.... [Then] they took up the idea of establishing a cattle ranch for themselves, realizing there was little local market for beef and that the Eastern markets were flooded, prices down to practically nothing. “But,” they reasoned, “by the time we have anything to sell, perhaps the market will up a little.” And that set the wheel of the cattle industry in motion along the Blue River. (Fritz 1985:iv) In addition to branding “mavericks” as his own, Fritz bought “a few cows (about 60 head)” in Silver City and moved them onto the Blue (Fritz 1978:66). Up until 1890, Fritz shipped and sold around three or four hundred head of beef stock at eight to twelve dollars per head, and the prices were still going down. Fritz decided it best to try to build up his herd to better beef stock and hold them for better prices. Cosper had brought in thoroughbred Herefords and Fritz proceeded to buy ten Hereford bulls from Cosper, paying $100 each for them; then he set to really raising cattle. (Fritz 1985:xi) Hugh McKeen owned five or six mares, and worked for the W.S. Ranch near Alma, New EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY AN: 1197193 ; Jack Stauder.; The Blue and the Green : A Cultural Ecological History of an Arizona Ranching Community Account: s0000075.main.ehost 22 Mexico. That ranch had a number of wild cattle which had strayed into the Blue country. Due to the Indian raids, it was difficult to get cowboys who would go into that wild county. It took a full-fledged Texan to take that chance. Hugh was offered a good price for every head of stock he could gather and return to the W.S. range, so he took the chance. And, thereby, his livelihood was earned until he could get into a business of his own. (McKeen 1982:166–167) In a few years, McKeen had bought some cattle and was working for himself, ranching on the Blue. He would ride hard all day and then come in and cook his dinner, which most of the time was lunch and dinner combined. After dinner he would go out and cut trees down and build fence or do some farming until bedtime. In other words, he, like others who made their start on Blue River, made it the hard way. (McKeen 1982:168–169) No large cattle outfits came onto the Blue: in every case, ranching was started by young men who built up their enterprises. Cooperating as neighbors, they rounded up their cattle every fall to take to market. A trail drive of ten to eleven days brought the cattle to the railhead at Magdalena, New Mexico. With their proceeds, the ranchers would buy supplies to bring back to the Blue (Down on the Blue 63, 145; Fritz 1978:79). Most Blue ranchers during the early years apparently practiced what historians have called the “Texas system”: cattle were left mostly to care for themselves on a free, unfenced range, with little or no supplementary feeding or protection (Jordan 1993:210). (Ranchers today speak of the “Columbus” method—you let the cattle out at the beginning of the season, and at its end you go out to “discover” where they are.) Blue herds prospered in these early years, how much by natural increase and how much by purchase is unclear, but soon the biggest “outfits” were each running cattle well into the thousands. Toles’s son James Cosper later estimated that at their “peak,” presumably in the 1890s, the Cosper Y Bar Y had 6,000 head; the Fritz’s XXX, about 2,500; and Hugh McKeen’s HU Bar and Charlie Thomas’s Flying Diamond each somewhere between 4,000 to 7,000 cattle (Cosper 1982:186; Hanrahan 1972). Mr. McKeen ran cattle from Blue River, Arizona to Mogollon, New Mexico. At one time the records show he owned 5,277 head of cattle and 40 horses. Mr. McKeen once said that after he had accumulated a little and had a good herd of cattle, he would sit and watch those big steers come in to water and just wonder what he would do with all that money. (At that time they were worth from ten to fifteen dollars per head!). (McKeen 1982:163–164) To which his wife, May Balke McKeen, commented that, “after 1902 he was relieved of the above anxiety; he had acquired a wife. Then he was kept busy working and wondering where the money was coming from to pay his bills. Of course, I felt sorry for him, so I got out and gave him a hand on the range.” (McKeen 1982:169). Although cattle ranching was important in pioneering the Blue, it is not the whole story. The first settlers, the Castos, as noted earlier, “cleared some land and raised a little hay and vegetables to live on and sold some to other people. Later on Granddad put in a vineyard and raised grapes and made wine to sell... ,” which hardly sounds like “Texas system” ranching. In fact, Casto was born in Illinois. His wife, “the first white woman on the Blue,” was born in Maine. And while they may have acquired cattle eventually, there is no evidence they were in the ranching business. They appear to have been farmers (Down on the Blue 158). A clearer case emerges from the “life story” written by Mattie Jane Johnson Graham, “the first unmarried white girl on Blue River,” in the words of Katy Fritz (1985:vi). Her parents, John and Susan Johnson, hailed from Texas, and Mattie Jane always speaks of their home as a “ranch.” But cows originally played only a small part in their household economy. In May, 1887, Dad went over on Blue River and settled on some land. He cleared the brush and trees off and EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 23 put in a crop and a garden. He had only one horse, Old Joe. He was a white horse and Dad rode him and also worked him to the plow when he put in the crops. Dad built a one-room cabin and the next June he came back for his family. He borrowed a horse from a neighbor to hitch with Old Joe to the wagon, to move us down to our new ranch home.... We had a cow and calf and a heifer and a few chickens. Dad loaded us and all our belongings into the wagon and we started for Blue River.... For two years we sure had it tough, but we took pop corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, pumpkins and all the other vegetables we could raise [to the store in Luna] to pay on our grocery bill. Some times the cowboys would buy some of our corn to feed their horses.... The cowboys in the country were very kind to us. They told my father that when he found a mother cow dead, to take her calf and raise it for ourselves. Often this way we got a very good calf and we gradually got together a few head of cattle, but we had no milk cow so we started catching wild cows, ten or more at a time. We girls roped them and got them gentle so we could milk them. When Mr. Johnson accumulated a little money for livestock, he bought not cattle but hogs to drive back from Clifton. He grew sugar cane to make molasses to sell, and bought a gristmill he ran by water power. As Mattie Jane tells, “We ground meal for everybody on Blue River, and ground wheat to make graham flour. I was the miller but how I hated that mill.” The Johnsons were a farming family, even though Mr. Johnson called his “outfit” the “Rattlesnake Ranch.” (Fritz 1985:vi; Graham 1953: 25–30)2 Other oral histories also mention “farming, “farms,” and “homesteading” on the Blue in the period around the turn of the century (Cosper 1940:9–10; Fritz 1978:71). Of course, people who spend most of their time farming can also raise cattle to sell, and ranchers who run cattle for a living can also farm to provide feed for their cattle and food for their families. Later, they all did. Economic records no longer exist to classify the relative occupational emphasis of each family that moved onto the Blue, but it is clear some (mainly Texans) were ranchers by modern definition, while others were not at all in the cattle business; they were trying to make a living through farming and other pursuits. The two did not form antagonistic or socially exclusive groups: Mattie Jane Johnson married into the Graham family, who appear to be ranchers (Graham 1953:31); and Hugh McKeen the rancher married Mae Balke, the daughter of a German immigrant who was the first postmaster and justice of the peace for Blue and who “also had a small farm” (Fritz 1978:71). During the 1890s and early 1900s a national discussion occurred over the differences between ranching and farming. Many advocated farming in the West to strengthen the country’s agrarian base, replace “the barbarism of cattle ranching,” and supplant the open range with the “civilization” that would come with large-scale homestead farming, irrigated or dry (Merrill 2002:40–43). In his famous Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, John Wesley Powell held that twenty inches or more of rainfall is necessary for successful agriculture without irrigation. But there were experts who believed dry farming was possible by certain methods with rainfall as low as ten or twelve inches per year. Without a record of measurements, they often failed to anticipate the large annual fluctuations common in the West. But thirsting for land, many homesteaders were willing to try dry farming, and Mormons in Utah had been successful at it. (Webb 1931:353, 366–68) During the twentieth century, measurements indicate the Blue has received an average of about twenty inches per year, just at Powell’s limit, with the upper Blue getting a little more, the lower Blue a little less. The summer monsoon concentrates most rainfall from July through October.3 The Blue River also offers many opportunities for irrigation on a small scale, as the Mogollon native people apparently practiced it there. So it is not surprising that the Blue attracted settlers who meant to make their living by farming and maybe raise cattle too. It is unlikely they saw any contradiction between the two. Cattlemen farmed too. According to Aldo Leopold, “Orchards and alfalfa fields were started at each ranch” (Leopold 1921a:270). The national debate over ranching versus farming was irrelevant to the pragmatic concerns of people on the Blue. Open range or not, “ranchers” as well as “farmers” meant to settle and build homes, own animals, and grow crops. In the end, homesteaders ranched and ranchers homesteaded. THE 1900 CENSUS EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 24 Yet the distinction between farming and stock raising remained, and emerges in U.S. Census Data. Unfortunately, the population schedules for the 1890 Census for the Territory of Arizona are unavailable, having burned in a fire.4 But the 1900 Census data is available and provides the earliest picture of the Blue Community not drawn from oral history (U.S. Census Bureau 1900). This invaluable information is revealing, if sometimes puzzling. The data that includes most of the Blue is found under “Precinct No. 15, Enumeration District 19.”5 No map of this district is provided, but it probably left out any settlement near the mouth of the Blue where it enters the San Francisco, for at the time these people were served by a wagon road from Clifton, separate from the one that entered the Blue near Fred Fritz’s ranch. It appears to be this latter road along which the enumerator, Charles B. Keppler, recorded the population as he proceeded northward from Clifton, August 7, 1900. The beginning of the enumeration includes 24 people who by occupation appear to be living close to Clifton and not on the Blue: 5 teamsters, two cooks, a machinist, a mill man, a washerwoman, and their families. From where the census arrives at the Fritz ranch, 245 people are counted as living up the Blue River and its tributaries. Of these 245 people on the Blue, the great majority are children: large families were the norm. Of children over seven, most are recorded as attending school four to six months of the year. Some are not attending school, but of these some nevertheless are said to read and write. The great majority of the adults are literate. Only 54 individuals have listed their “occupation, trade, or profession.” Wives and other females working in the home and on the farms and ranches do not have their “occupation” recorded—with one exception, a widow noted as a “housekeeper,” though no lodgers are listed in her household. The remaining 53 persons with occupations are male. The occupations recorded may be those volunteered by the men themselves or by others speaking for them; but based on information given him, Mr. Keppler may also have helped determine the categories assigned to people. Interestingly, no one is recorded as a “rancher.” (This term would appear in the next Census of 1910, on voting lists beginning in 1912, and come to dominate in 1920 and after.) But 17 men are listed (or list themselves) as “cowboy,” “cowman,” or “stockman.” At this time, “cowboy” did not have the connotation it later acquired of a hired hand. On the other hand, 24 men are recorded with the occupation of “farmer,” “farming,” or “granger” (one person). Twelve men give other occupations. The 1900 Census thus supports the view that farming played an important role on the Blue, which at that time was more than a “ranching” community. The Census also allows us to look at households. There are 11 heads of household identified as “cowman, “cowboy,” or “stockman.” Fred Fritz is a “cowboy.” So is his wife’s brother, Fred Knapp, who worked in conjunction with Fritz. Another younger relative, Joe Fritz, is also a “cowboy” but is listed with people on the upper Blue. His name appears next to an older woman, A. L. White, who is “married” and has three young sons and a nephew, but whose husband is absent from the census. She is counted as “head” of the household, but no occupation is listed for her. Has her husband gone to work elsewhere? Is Joe Fritz working as a “cowboy” for her? He is also listed as a “head” of household but is single. Similar juxtapositions occur on the Blue census, tempting one to speculate on the practical arrangements necessary when a woman, for whatever reason, needed male help with stock raising and farming or a male needed female help to run a household. For instance, Joseph Mangano, a fourteen-year-old “cowboy” is listed as a “head” of household. His name appears next to twenty-six-year-old Olive Rogers, also a “head” of household who has 5 small children, is married, but whose husband is not in the census. Another Mangano, recorded as a “teamster,” and his wife are old enough to be Joseph’s parents, but they apparently live at a distance. The supposition arises that Joseph is being hired to work for Mrs. Rogers. Leaving aside these small puzzles that cannot be solved, we can consider a better-documented early ranching family found together in the census: the Jones brothers, Henry as a “cowman” and Samuel as a “stockman.” They were from Texas (see chapter 16, under “Bill and Barbara Marks”). My dad, Henry, and his younger brother worked their way across West Texas. Dad worked for cattle companies and Samuel or Sam took care of a small herd of cattle that belonged to them.... Henry worked EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 25 for big cow outfits during the sheep and cattle wars [between Magdalena and Socorro, NM]. Henry was a line rider or hired gunman. Dad told me that killing between sheep and cattlemen got so bad they moved their camp beds every night to foil anyone slipping upon them and killing them in their sleep.... Dad also worked for a while at a livery stable in Magdalena. His brother, Sam, as I understand, went on West into Arizona, looking for a more suitable place to settle and found the Blue River. They then moved to the Blue in 1890 and homesteaded what is now known as the Marks Ranch. (Jerry Jones, writing about his father, Down on the Blue 119) Next to the Jones brothers and their families in the census is a single “cowboy” who possibly worked for them. There are 5 other male heads of families on the Blue denoted in the census as cattlemen. 1. [Illegible] Jackson. “Cow Man.” Birthplace: Texas. 2. Charles Thomas. “Cowboy.” Birthplace: Texas. (He is the one mentioned by Toles Cosper as running a very large herd in these years.) 3. J.M. Jones. “Cowboy.” Birthplace: Texas. (Presumably unrelated to the other Jones, as no one with his initials appears in their family history. He does not own but rents his house, so may be a hired cowboy.) 4. M. Baldwin. “Cow Man.” Birthplace: Utah. 5. Charles Adair. “Cow Man.” Birthplace: Utah. What stands out is that of the 11 heads of households identified with cattle raising, eight are from Texas. Two are from Utah, and the young Mangano was born in Arizona. From family histories and where their children are recorded being born, we know many of these Texan cattlemen had range experience in New Mexico. Scholars have differed on the influence of West Texas in the early cattle industry in Arizona (Wilson 1966–67; and Jordan 1975, 1993:230), but certainly Texans predominated on the Blue. The four largest ranching outfits at the time on the Blue (cited above by Jim Cosper) were all established by men from Texas: Fritz, McKeen, Thomas and Toles Cosper. Hugh McKeen is not in the Blue census, because his headquarters was in New Mexico, but Toles Cosper? His occupation is listed as “farmer.” This is odd, since the only testimony of anyone on the Blue having an animus against farming comes from Toles. By this time his family had practically all grown up, married off and began building homes of their own; his sons following the cattle business and his daughters becoming the wives of cattlemen. None of Toles Cosper family seemed inclined to revert to the farming industry [Toles’s father had pursued], which pleased Toles very much. He had endeavored to teach his children that “It is good to be a son of the soil—if you like it—but there is nothing in life that can be more soul-satisfying than the call of the open range.” (Cosper 1940:9) We do not know how much Toles’s valuation is a product of later reflection; nor do we know if Toles told the census taker in 1900 that he was a “farmer” or whether someone else (his wife Lou Ella?) applied the term. We do know that the Y Bar Y had a big apple orchard and a variety of crops. Toles raised sugar cane and made his own molasses. He raised peanuts and melons on the east side of the river. There were cellars built into the side of the hill back of the house where apples and other food were kept.... Though they were cattle people they also raised chickens and hogs. Lou Ella always planted an immense garden.” (Down on the Blue 203) Twenty male heads of household on the Blue were recorded as “farmers” or “farming.” Only 3 of these were born in Texas, though at least 3 others (including Toles) appear to have lived there. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 26 Other birth states include Tennessee (3); Alabama (2); Missouri (2); Pennsylvania (2); and North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Illinois, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Germany (1 each). Four other “farmers” appear to be sons working under their farmer fathers. Two farmers had sons listed as “cowboys”—whether taking care of the family livestock or working for hire for others is unclear. And 3 “cowboys” listed as renting, not owning their homes, appear to be hired hands of the Cosper Y Bar Y. The 13 other occupations listed in the census reveal economic diversity in the early Blue community. There is a logger born in Utah, and a “millman” (lumber or grain?) from Virginia. Men cut timber on the Blue to send down the river to the mining operations in Clifton. The census records 3 teamsters, 2 from Utah and 1 from New Mexico; the latter is the only person with a Hispanic surname in the Blue census. Also included are a merchant, C.B. Martins, born in Mississippi; a blacksmith (Texas); a carpenter (Tennessee) who lived with his son, designated a “musician”! There is a “livery man” (Ohio) who presumably kept a stable, and a “common laborer” (Texas) who may have worked for him. There is a “miner,” the son of a “farmer,” who since there is no history of mining on the Blue might have worked in the Clifton/Morenci mines but kept a home for his family at his father’s farm. Finally, there is Mrs. Ford from California, the “housekeeper.” BLUE COMMUNITY LIFE “Blue” was never an actual town—only a community of people scattered along the Blue River. “Blue” appears on maps of Arizona due to the post office of that name. But the original post office on the Blue, established in 1894, was named “Whittum” after the unlucky pioneer slain by the Apache. The first postmaster was Isaac Casto, and the post office was located at his home. In 1897 Max Balke, the German immigrant, became postmaster, and moved the post office to the lower Blue near Hugh McKeen’s ranch, a place named “Benton,” after another of the slain pioneers. Benton showed some sign of developing into a small town around the turn of the century. It had a sawmill. It had a school. It had a small store run by Mr. Balke (identified in the 1900 Census as a “farmer”) that doubled as the Post Office. Balke was also Justice of the Peace. He was law and order on that part of Blue River. He held court, buried and married people. He performed the wedding ceremony for his two oldest children, Mae and George. He married Mae, who was the second child, to Hugh McKeen. Both families lived on the same flat. At that time quite a few other families lived in the near vicinity and about 25 children attended the school.... (Freddie Fritz Jr., Down on the Blue 219) George Balke married a daughter of Toles Cosper. In 1898, the Post Office name was changed to “Blue,” to reflect what everyone called the region. And in 1900, the location was moved back again to the upper Blue to the general store of Charlie Martin. By the turn of the century, “a number of people had located in around the junction of the Blue River with the Frisco.” They comprised another nascent settlement with a store, saloon, and post office, first called “Carpenter” after the owner. After some killings at the saloon, Carpenter left in 1904, and the Boyles brothers, cattle raisers, took over, closed the saloon, and renamed the post office “Boyles.” There was also a school of “over 40 pupils” to serve the large families living at that end of the Blue (Fritz 1978:71–72). As noted, the 1900 Census shows most children on the Blue attending school four to six months of the year. On the upper Blue the earliest school appeared in the 1890s. Blue residents organized the schools and chose the teachers, who were paid by the county. Home schooling also took place. “Many of the ranchers hired teachers to live on their ranches to teach their children. A few young people went out to live with relatives or friends in various towns in order to attend school.” (Cleo Coor, Down on the Blue 99) Fred Fritz Jr. describes his experience. It was 12 miles to the Boyles School and 8 to Benton. When my sister and I became of school age, my parents hired a private teacher for six months of each year and we stayed home at the ranch until we passed EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 27 the exams for the eight grade.... I am grateful to those private teachers for what they taught me. Much of it was at night as father’s health wasn’t too good and he needed me [to work]. (Fritz 1978:76–79) His father’s health “wasn’t too good” because he had been mauled by a grizzly bear. Fritz also describes each of his teachers through eight grades, or years: all were young women from outside the Blue who came to live temporarily at the ranch. His last teacher had him memorizing recitations, “like Longfellow’s Barefoot Boy, Whittier’s School Days, Gray’s Elegy, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and many others. Through this practice I gained confidence in myself in trying to solve the problems and challenges I faced.” After eight years of schooling, his mother took him to the Blue School thirty miles up the river where he passed the exam for grade school. He never attended high school (Fritz 1978:76–79), but his home schooling was the foundation for a later, eminent career as a public leader and state legislator. Ben Tenney recounts another experience. He was seven when his family moved near to the Benton school. We went to school there that winter of 1900 and 1901. We had a school of about thirty-two students from one to eight grades. The thing that stands out in my memory then was Bob Phillips, who was about seventeen years old and he wore a.45 six shooter strapped to him all the time. As I think back now the teacher, Mr. McGinnin, was afraid of him and gave him a wide berth at all times and seemed to be very careful not to cross his path. (Ben R. Tenney, Down on the Blue 54) Bob Phillips did end up killing, not his teacher, but a man who had whipped him with a rope. Mr. Balke held an inquest, but “Bob was turned loose and was back in school.” The Phillips family appear as “farmers” on the census. If schools were present from almost the beginning of the settlement of the Blue, churches were not. Cleo Cosper Coor later summarized religion on the Blue. There never has been a church on the Blue, but from time to time they have held Sunday School in the schoolhouse, and at other times a minister has held church services every other Sunday or once a month.... Some people on the Blue are very devout and feel the closeness of God through a constant contact with nature. (Down on the Blue 235) A Sunday school met at times in the 1910s in the school building Toles Cosper had donated on his property (Down on the Blue 103). But the nearest churches were in Luna or Alpine or Clifton, places that took hours to reach by horse and wagon. People on the Blue appear to have had diverse denominational allegiances, if they had any at all. There appear to have been a few Mormons and Catholics among a larger number of Protestants. Information, however, is mostly lacking. For whatever reason—perhaps because it was seen as divisive or too personal a topic—religion is rarely mentioned in the individual Blue histories. Important as it may have been to some individuals, religion played little role in community life. The very privation and semi-isolation of the pioneer households stimulated people to create social occasions to enjoy. Katy Fritz gives some examples. Despite the dangers of ranch life in a wilderness such as this, the ranchers managed to enjoy life to a certain extent. Social activities consisted of log rollings, quilting bees, apron parties, picnics and barbeques, and sometimes a dumb supper. The log rollings: When someone wished to build a new house, barn or corral, the neighbor men would gather in to help, while the womenfolks came along to prepare a feast. Then after the work was finished, fiddles were tuned, banjos and guitars strung, and the dust knocked out of harmonicas, and the dance began. Quadrilles, square dances, polka, schottish, rye waltz, and Spanish mazurka were the most popular dances of the time. Apron parties were a lot of fun: All the ladies would make an apron—leaving the hem unfinished—and fashion a necktie like each apron; the ties were drawn from a box by the men, blindfolded, and the tie matching the apron determined the ladies’ escort for the evening; the men must hem the apron by hand. (Fritz 1985:xv–xvii) EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 28 “Dumb suppers” (in which people maintained silence) were also a way of pairing up “unmarried folks.” But all the old accounts of life on the Blue mentioned the big parties Toles Cosper threw as the most memorable entertainments. The week-long dances at the Y Bars are legend. The family cooked for about a week before the party started.... They pit-barbecued beef. They fed the guests’ horses.... They had two orchestras, one to play at night and one to play during the day.... People for fifty miles around rode their horses to attend these annual fiestas. The Cosper ladies (and men, except Toles) would, days beforehand, begin to cook and bake in preparation for the big event. Long tables were set up in the large hallway. Here one could find meats of various kinds: beef, venison, bear, wild pig, ham, grouse, turkey, and real mountain trout. Such a display of home-baked breads, cakes, cookies, and pies I had never before witnessed.... But I must not neglect to mention the famous Western Cowboy Sour-Dough biscuit. Only very few could excel the quality of the biscuit built here. The pot with beans and ham-hocks could be detected by nose at all times. Surprisingly, high-kicking spirits played a very minor role on these occasions as men did their imbibing aside in respect to ladies.... The children were allowed to stay up and dance a little while then we were all put to bed in one bedroom. There were wall to wall kids! Kids lying cross ways like cord wood, kids on the floor, kids on chairs, kids everywhere.... Toles always loved to make a speech to his guests on these occasions. He called his wife to his side and said, “This is my quail.” There he stood in his cowboy Levis with the under drawers turned down over the top of the Levis.... (various accounts, Down on the Blue 102, 201, 206) There was an orchestra from Clifton—five Spaniards—and they were good, too. He’d get them up there. They would dance from sundown to sunup, sleep part of the day, and get up and eat and go rodeo or start dancing again. And of all the parties that were there, I never knew anyone to get out of line. I never knew a quarrel, even, from any of them. There would be a hundred people there, sometimes. [Toles] would feed them all and bed them down; usually find beds for at least part of the women and kids. During the daytime, men would get out in shade or sun, whichever they wanted, and stretch out and sleep. (James Cosper, Toles’s son, Cosper 1982:137) With his relative wealth in cattle, his sponsorship of one of the first schools, and his large family—six children and a raft of grandchildren who intermarried throughout the Blue and neighboring communities—Toles became a patriarch of local society, known in his later years as “Uncle Toles.” Geographically as well as socially, his Y Bar Y Ranch on the “middle Blue” between what people called the “upper” and “lower” Blue, was the center of the community for many years. According to Toles, in 1898 he sold a good number of cattle and for the first time made a large profit. “I reckon it sort of went to my head.” He built a new home, and bought a status symbol typical of the era [H]e decided that now he had money, his daughters needed a musical education, and promptly sent an order to Sears & Roebuck for a piano to be shipped to Silver City, N.M. That was the first piano to be brought into that neck o’ the woods. He had “the devil’s own time” getting that music box out to his ranch. Part of the trail was so steep and narrow that even a burro pack train had difficulty getting through; the piano was hauled part of the way by wagon, part by burro-pack, and carried by hand part of the way. Apaches on a hunting party were overcome by curiosity, and helped to carry the piano to Toles’s ranch. They “were anxious to ‘hear music from the big box’ and Uncle Toles admits that there wasn’t a person on the place who could really play the thing.” But always able to improvise, Toles “did his best with what few cords he had learned on the organ, back in Texas” (Cosper 1940:7–9). A few years later, with similar shipping problems, the Jones family kept up with the Cospers and brought a second piano onto the Blue. NOTES 1. See Jordan 1993:7–9. “Ranching,” however, can be an ambiguous term. Sayre (1999:240–244, and 2002:51–54), following Ingold (1980), distinguishes “ranching” from “pastoralism,” the latter marked by common EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 29 access to land and the appropriation of the natural increase of the animals, while land in “ranching” is individually allocated, and livestock production is dominated by market inputs and considerations. In this view, the early stage of Blue “ranching” is better seen as “pastoralism” in transition to “ranching.” 2. To appreciate how elastic the term “ranch” can be, one should know that W.R. Hearst always called San Simeon, his art-filled villa/castle on the California coast, (without irony) his “ranch” (Travel Channel special on San Simeon, July 10, 2003). See also the discussion in Sayre 2002:106–07, 120–25. 3. According to the website of the Western Regional Climate Center, www.wrcc.dri.edu, the average annual precipitation of Blue, Arizona, from November 1903 through August 1989 was 20.73 inches with over half, 11.99 inches, falling in the four months from July through October. A more recent measurement on www.usclimatedata.com (2015) records 21.18 as Blue’s yearly average. 4. Communication from Karen Compton of the Regional Office of Census in Denver, Colorado. The manuscripts perished before the time when microfilms could be made of them. 5. The 1900 Census schedule listed people by name, relationship to head of household, race, sex, date of birth and age, marital status, number of years married, number of children living and deceased, and “nativity”—state and country of birth and parents’ birth—as well as citizenship. Also asked are the “Occupation, Trade or Profession of each person Ten Years of age and over;” “Education” in terms of school attendance and whether the person can read, write, and speak English; and if the person owns or rents their farm or home. Sometimes spaces are left blank, and sometimes blotches on the old microfilm obscure them. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/11/2024 6:28 PM via NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 30