A miner’s Christmas tale

By Arizona Historian Jim Turner and Pioneer Newsman George H. Smalley

Several years ago I had the good fortune to interview Mrs. Yndia Smalley Moore, born in Tucson in 1902, and former Director of the Arizona Historical Society. She told me many stories about her father, George H. Smalley, who was District Clerk in Globe from 1905 through 1912.

A typical prospector is shown here in "camp." Circa late 1800's about the same time period as George Smalley's article. Photo courtesy of Gila County Historical Museum

Lung problems forced Smalley to move to Arizona in 1896. Like many other authors exiled to the Southwest for their health, Smalley got a job as a reporter. He covered the mining beat for the Phoenix Republican, but wrote stories for St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco newspapers. Mark Twain and Bret Harte made Wild West stories popular, and Smalley kept up the tradition with down-to-earth stories of cowboys, prospectors, and even outlaws he met in his travels across Arizona and Mexico.

Interstate 17 from Phoenix to Flagstaff is full of interesting signs denoting our Old West prospecting past, with colorful names such as Bumblebee, Bloody Basin, and Big Bug Creek. Smalley’s holiday tale takes place in a silver mining camp about 20 miles southwest of Prescott in the Bradshaw Mountains. No need to change a word of it, this is how he wrote it more than a century ago, typed verbatim from yellowed newspaper columns pasted on faded construction paper at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson. … Continue Reading

Hanging Memory of Globe

Arizona Historian Jim Turner

“You have to ask me questions, or I can’t remember things.” That’s what Yndia Roca Smalley Moore told me after one of our first taping sessions. She was born in Tucson in 1902, but lived in Globe in its heyday, from 1905 until 1912. We began our Thursday afternoon oral history chats when she was 93, and for an Arizona historian like me it was a dream come true, like taking a Sunday drive into the past with your favorite grandmother, listening to Yndia’s eyewitness accounts of Arizona history in the making. … Continue Reading

Globe-Miami’s Place in History

By Jim Turner, Arizona Historian

Whatever happened to Globe? From prehistoric times to the 1960s, the mining towns of Globe, Miami, and Superior played an important part in Arizona’s history. In the months to come we will tap the history books, as well as diaries, memoirs, and even legends, to unearth these buried treasures from an area that used to be much more well known.

Getting down to basics, Arizona history is about water, minerals, and Apaches. In prehistoric times the most important of that trio was water. Anthropologists, like realtors, believe that there are three important items that make for a perfect home: location, location, location. Since much of Arizona is semi-desert, water supply is a key item in settlement patterns. The largest native populations in the state lived near water and it is no accident that the Hohokam and later the Salado cultures thrived in the Globe-Miami area. It would be hundreds of years before Europeans started to search the Southwest for something more valuable to them than water. … Continue Reading