Southwest 2003 Week 4

Mission San Xavier Del Bac	Mission San Xavier Del Bac - Altar	Mission San Xavier Del Bac	Tombstone - Gunfight at OK Corral	The Bad Good Guys
The Clanton/McLourys - the guy on the right is from Maine.	Tombstone Street scene	Tombstone - street scene	Tombstone - the Corral that is keeping the town alive	Tombstone - Boot Hill Marker

Day 26 - Friday, October 31, 2003, Tombstone AZ to Bisbee AZ to Eagar AZ, 335 miles driven

We started the day with a drive to the town of Bisbee which is about 30 miles south of Tombstone. Since we weren't going to spend all day at Bisbee, we decided to take the trolley/bus tour of the town and surrounding area. The county seat was initially in Tombstone but when the mines flooded there, the county seat was moved to Bisbee. Bisbee was also a mining town that went thru many changes and fires in its existence. Some of the unsavory characters moved to Bisbee from Tombstone. Big Nose Kate ran a sporting palace here after she left Tombstone. The seedy side of town here was called Brewery Gulch based upon the numerous breweries, saloons and sporting palaces that were in this area. It is now a street full of bars - one after the other.

The driver of the tour was full of facts about the history of Bisbee and was eager to point out that Bisbee has been voted as one of the top 10 places to vacation in the US because of all the activity and entertainment that is in the area. There is a theater repertoire group here and with the slowdown of the mines, the "artist" element has taken hold in the town as evidenced by the many art/craft shops in town. We saw many characters in strange dress and were told that they dress this way all the time - it was not because of Halloween. The driver explained that Bisbee has been described as the worlds largest open air asylum for the insane.

Bisbee was born out of the copper ore discoveries that were found here in the 1870's. Two military men found evidence of copper and silver and since they were in the military they couldn't file the claims themselves. They grubstaked a prospector who happened to be a great drunk who made the big discoveries. However he neglected to place any of his partners on the claim and himself lost all of his fortunes to drink. Eventually the large copper producers moved into the area - the primary one to outlast everything was Phelps Dodge. Phelps has extensive holdings in the area and has developed or leased a process which will allow them to recover much from the tailings and overburden that is heaped about the south side of town. As in Jerome, AZ the Douglass family was deeply involved in the activities of Phelps Dodge.

One of the competitors of Phelps Dodge a John Greenway had a strange history in Bisbee. He had presidential aspirations after World War I, being a war hero and also a brilliant businessman but one act kept him off the ticket. In 1917 the miners in Bisbee were being courted by the IWW (Wobblies). There was a call for a strike and to counter this Greenway organized a security detail which detained about 2000 of the troublemakers in a local baseball stadium. They were advised that they could return to work if they signed a pledge not to join the IWW an cease agitation. Of this number 1100 refused to sign. Greenway had arranged for cattle cars and shipped the 1100 in the hot weather to the Mexican Border where Jack Pershing was sporting with Pancho Villa. The train was stopped and left locked. Greenway's thought was that the curiosity of the soldiers would cause the release of the prisoners within hours of the arrival. It took two days and by that time many of the detainees were dead in the train. No charges could be made to stick in this affair but Greenway's reputation was lost. It was a very interesting tour and we would return to Bisbee to spend more time in some other trip.

After walking around town for a short while and visiting one of the open churches - Catholic, we drove back up to Tombstone as we had missed the "Birdcage Theater" in Tombstone as it was closing when we walked by last night. The Birdcage was the most notorious drinking, theater, gambling and sporting palace on the street in Tombstone. It had closed in 1899 and had been left unopened until 1935. It has all of the original fixtures and artifacts in place and has now been turned into a museum. The entry is in the bar and you can see bullet holes in the wall,through the windows and also in the floor and bar itself. At one time a famous bellydancer Fatima (to be known as Little Egypt) had appeared in the Birdcage and had sent a 9 foot tall picture of herself to be hung in the Birdcage. It is still hanging in its original location. However some of the patrons had used her for target practice and you can see a patched bullet hole at the knees and also she does have two navels. I was so taken that I never took a picture of her. But then she is not in a family style pose. Some of the other famous artists that had appeared here were Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore, Enrico Caruso, Lilly Langtry, Eddie Foy.

When you enter the theater you understand why it was called the Birdcage. On each side wall, suspended from the ceiling were small rooms with curtains that could be opened to look at the stage below. However these cages were occupied by sporting girls and the song "She is only a bird in a gilded cage" had its origins in the Birdcage theater in Tombstone. The original grand piano still stands on the floor. On the lower level below the theater was the poker room with a side bar. This was the site of the longest poker game ever in history - 8 plus years. The game was played continuously and it cost the player $1000 to get into the game. He deposited his $1000 put his name on a waiting list and then as a rule had to wait 3 to 4 days to be summoned to the table. He could then stay as long as he wanted to or as long as his money lasted. One of the other interesting artifacts was the glass sided hearse. It is the only one remaining of the original 8 that ware built in Rochester, NY. It had cost $8,000 when new because of the gold and silver in the hearse. The Ford Museum in Detroit had tried to purchase it and had been turned down. Their assessment is that the hearse is worth $750,000. It is in need of some restoration but I wouldn't dare to bid on it. The hearse had been used for every burial on boot hill except for 6. There were many markers on boot hill and it must have been a busy hearse.

We left Tombstone at !:00 Pm and after a short lunch in Benson AZ. Our original plan called for a drive to Las Cruces NM but I changed that yesterday to Eagar, AZ. We are planning to go see the Very Large Array in New Mexico tomorrow which is on US 60 and easier to get to from Eagar than Las Cruces. Our route took us up route 191 through Safford, AZ. The map showed a mountain route through the White Mountains and I didn't do much investigation before the ride other than motel availability in Eagar. We hit Clifton AZ and were confronted with a large hill with tortuous switchbacks. Halfway up the hill we noticed a large copper mill with the Phelps Dodge logo on it. It was a huge operation. At the top of the hill the Morenci open pit operation had a viewing station and you could see the large trucks hauling overburden out of the pit which was being pushed into a huge trench by a bulldozer. From the viewing station they looked like 6 inch trucks but there were some next to the road on the way up and my van looked like a 6 inch van in comparison to them. You couldn't see the bottom of the pit where the trucks were coming from but they were continuous. At the top of the hill the sign said that Springerville/Eagar was 113 miles away. Little did I know that I would repeat the effort to get to the top of this hill over and over along with the alternating downhill rides. The first 60 miles of the 113 took us 2.5 hours to negotiate and the last 53 took me an hour. The scenery was spectacular when you could take your eyes off the constant turning and there was only one viewpoint that we came across before it got pitch black. Signs also said there was a controlled burn going on which explained some of the smoky air. I believe the California fires were also contributing.  It was a hair raising ride for which I have earned no brownie points from mom. We will try to do better tomorrow.

Bisbee AZ	Bisbee AZ	Bisbee AZ - art car - we saw this on the road	Bisbee Inn	Bisbee AZ - display at Catholic church
Bisbee AZ, inactive Phelps Dodge open pit copper mine.	They were only birds in a gilded cage at the Birdcage Theater - Tombstone	The Hearse - Tombstone, AZ	Where the 8 + yr poker game took place. Tombstone	My last view of Tombstone
Clifton AZ seen from top of Morenci Hill	Phelps Dodge Open pit in operation at Morenci AZ	In the White Mountains AZ along route 191	Along the White Mountains AZ on route 191	Along the White Mountains AZ on route 191

Day 27 - Saturday, November 1, 2003, Eagar AZ to Santa Fe NM, 318 miles driven

Today was not going to be much of a sightseeing day other than the stop at the Very Large Array Radio telescope on US 60 between Pietown NM and Magdalena NM. Before I get into that I have to add one item about yesterday in Tombstone. When we were having our continental breakfast at the Tombstone Best Western prior to driving to Bisbee, mom and I struck up a conversation with the young woman who was tending to the front desk and the breakfast bar. She had an accent which I took to be British and asked her where she was from. She replied that she was Australian. I then asked her how she wound up in Tombstone from Australia or was this where her bus fare ran out. She replied that she was over here with her husband who is in the Australian military on a military exchange program. However her husband has now been deployed to Kuwait for 6 to 9 months as part of the Iraq events. she was a very pleasant woman and we wished her the best.

Upon leaving the motel in Eagar for Santa Fe we were greeted by gusting winds and a sun shower. The benefit of this was that we were blessed with a full arc rainbow across the sky. Two pots of gold were available for the searchers. I had my camera packed away so there it stood un-photographed. This scene would be repeated later in the day outside of Albuquerque when we hit another rain shower which produced another rainbow. Two rainbows in a day I had never seen before. While we were watching the second rainbow we drove past a police activity on the interstate where 2 males were sitting on the ground with their hands cuffed behind them. There were about 6 cop cars there and an ambulance. No mention of this on the radio at all.

The ride for the day was through some very pretty country with mountains in the distance and at no time did my car chase its tail around switchbacks or hairpin turns. What a difference from yesterday's ordeal. US 60 between Springerville AZ and Soccoro NM is a dream road. Mostly straight with some ups and downs but no sharp curves. I had heard about Pietown from a fellow volunteer at Millbrook and drove through it without blinking my eyes. It has a grocery store and a cafe and not much more visible from the road. The cafe is supposed to have good pie but it was early yet and I had no room for pie. We came upon the Very Large Array site a few more miles down the road and pulled into the visitors center to find out more about the site. The VLA is a series of parabolic dish antennas that are used as radio telescopes. The shape of the array resembles the letter Y and 9 antennas are generally lined up on each leg of the Y. The amazing part is that each of the legs has a length of 13 miles.  The antennas are transported to their configured site on railroad tracks that move the antennas from one foundation pier to another as required by the program schedule. The four basic configurations are cycled through in a 15 month period and it takes two weeks to configure the 27 antennas into the next cycle. The Antennas are operational 24 hours a day and there is a backlog of astronomers waiting for available time on the equipment. OK no more technical talk. At the present time, another VLA is being constructed in Chile in the Andes. One interesting display was of two small dish antennas set up approximately 50 feet apart and pointing at each other. If you whispered into the dish, the person standing at the other dish could hear it loud and clear. It was a good demonstration of the parabolic curve antenna.

After the VLA we drove through Magdalena which in its heyday had been a mining town and also a railhead for cattle shipping. This was a town blessed with two sources of trouble makers - cowboys and miners. However there were only 4 saloons in this town. I couldn't find out if any of these were sporting palaces. Driving though the town mom spotted a sign at a small shop that said Woolen yarn's - Open" We pulled in and found ourselves in a display room which was about the size of an average bathroom. Hanging on the wall were hanks of woolen yarn. a young man came out and explained that his business was to process wool into yarn in the shop behind the "showroom". Mom picked up a couple of hanks and then I asked if we could see his operation. He was glad to oblige. He receives raw wool from local sources as well as from his own sheep. He does not treat the wool with chemicals as the "big boys" do and thus some of his wool will have vegetative matter in the finished product with no detrimental impact. In a space of a three car garage he had all the necessary modern equipment to produce the yarn. One of his customers was a Navajo reservation from which he receives raw wool and turns it into the warp and yarn for the Navajo blankets. His operation does not include dyeing. It was a very interesting tour of a local enterprise. The owner explained that he had only been in business for a year and a half and he had all the business he could handle. I didn't have the nerve to ask him if he was making a profit or not. Didn't seem right.

We took lunch at the Magdalena Cafe where the food was good as was the pie I missed at Pietown. I had a hamburger which must have been a one-pounder. At the next table I was eavesdropping on a conversation between 4 men talking about their beef raising. Nice to eat at a local restaurant and hear working man conversations. We arrived at Santa Fe at 3:30 PM and took in a church service at 5:30PM. The church was built in the adobe style and looked beautiful inside. Being a Spanish area, some of the service parts were sung in Spanish. The strange thing we noticed was that only the first three rows of seats had kneelers on the back of the pews. The rest did not.

Very Large Array, near Magdalena NM	Very Large Array, near Magdalena NM	Very Large Array, near Magdalena NM	Magdalena, NM Museum and Library - a nice little town

Day 28 - Sunday, November 2, 2003, Santa Fe NM, 19 miles driven

When we checked in the motel last night we were using one of those travel discount books and the coupon said that we would get a deluxe breakfast. The lady at the counter said that a very nice breakfast would be served in the lobby. I didn't know if very nice was better than deluxe or vice versa. After the breakfast we decided that it was an above average motel continental breakfast but it certainly wasn't deluxe. I guess there is no truth to advertising.

Being Sunday and all the attractions not opening  until 10:00 AM we decided to go to the one item on the AAA book which was listed as open at 8:00 AM. The Cristo Rey Church is claimed to be the largest adobe structure in the US. In getting to the church we had to drive down Canyon Drive which was a street of low adobe houses and each one was an artists gallery. There was one after another. We got to the church at around 9:15 and sure enough it is a large structure. However there was a mass going on and the only thing we got to see of this church was the outside. I thought of going back later but we didn't make it.

From the Cristo Rey we headed to the Plaza area of Santa Fe where all the action is. The streets there are crowded and parking spaces on the street appeared to be tough to get. We were lucky to find a spot right in the thick of things. On Sunday there is no limit on the parking so we had no meter to feed and didn't have to worry about moving the car all day. Everything we wanted to see here was within a 10 minute walk. Our first item on the agenda was to go to the Georgia O'Keeffe art museum. Mom is a big admirer of her work and while I find some of it to be pleasing I do not relate well to abstraction. Mom took the audio tour gadget along to be able to listen to the interpretations of selected paintings. Off the first gallery was a small room with benches where a video about Georgia O'Keeffe was being shown. After we sat down, a group of senior, senior citizens showed up in the lobby and gallery next to the viewing room. I believe all of them were trying to talk louder than the next one and when they all tried to get into the small theater area it was a hoot. "I can't see a thing" was repeated by almost everyone as they entered the dark room. To top it all off the tour guide was standing in the doorway next to me and she was trying to catch everybody's attention by talking louder than the public address system which was churning away at the same time. I finally had to walk up to her and ask her not to shout. She apologized. It reminded me so much of the senior citizens at the Mission San Xavier del Bac  with their walkers all trying to talk while I was trying to read the write-ups in the museum.

The museum was filled with the works of O'Keeffe and also the photographs of her husband Steiglitz. At one time Steiglitz had taken some intimate nude shots of O'Keeffe and shown them in an exhibition. From then on all of O'Keeffe's work was interpreted as sensual. She then changed her style to recognizable objects but couldn't shake the impression given to her work by the critics. Not that sensual is bad. Mom recognized many of the works but her overall impression was that there were not enough of her most famous works. There were maybe 8 rooms of her work on display and some of them were of the photographs taken by Steiglitz.    

From the O'Keeffe museum we were heading to the Loretto Chapel. To get there we had to walk back through the Plaza to find it jammed to the gills with motorcycles of all shapes and sizes. Each of the bikes had a children's toy strapped to the back. Mom inquired what was going on and the explanation was that all the bikers rally in the square on the first weekend in November and then parade to the armory to make their donations to the Toys for Tots campaign. Good PR. There were all kinds of bikes and bikers. From businessmen to the other end of the spectrum. There were quite a few custom three wheel bikes sporting V8 engines. One man I talked said he was a car dealer but really liked his Honda three wheel conversion better than driving a car. He said his bike cost him $32,000 after the conversion.

The Loretto Chapel is famous for the spiral staircase which has no center support. The chapel was built without access to the choir loft as either a mistake or lack of funds issue. The nuns made a Novena praying for a solution to the problem. An unknown carpenter showed up with only simple tools and provided the beautiful staircase which seems to be a architectural impossibility. Only wooden pegs were used in its construction and there are no nails. In addition, the type of wood used by the carpenter is not native to New Mexico and has not been identified. The name of the craftsman is unknown. There was a TV movie about this staircase a few years ago. The staircase has two full spirals with 33 steps and was originally built without handrails. Two years after the original construction, the nuns requested the handrails and balusters which was no small feat in itself. Theoretically this staircase should not be able to stand but it was in use for 100 years. Now it is blocked off. Small alterations have been made to protect the staircase from the vibrations caused by the traffic outside.

From the Loretto Chapel we headed over to the San Miguel Mission Church which has its origins in 1610. It is known as the oldest standing church in the US. Parts of this church were destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and rebuilt after the Spanish returned in 1694. The bell of the church is on display in the gift shop and it shows that it was cast in Spain in 1356. The altar decorations have been restored to their original condition and reminded us of the Accoma Pueblo mission which we couldn't photograph. One family came in and the woman was complaining that the decor of the church was very primitive and needed upgrading. I guess she didn't think that 1610 was impressive. She also complained about the $1.00 admission charge. Some people are never satisfied.

After a lunch at the Pink Cafe we headed to the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assissi. The interior of this church is impressive and the altar front shows resemblance to the San Miguel Mission Church even though it shows modern touches. This church was built in 1610 fully destroyed in the Pueblo revolt of 1680 and then rebuilt in 1714. The Chapel of Our Lady, La Conquistadora is the only part of the 1714 church that was incorporated into the present structure build in 1886. The statue of LaConquistadora was brought to Santa Fe in 1625 and was removed by the Spanish at the time of the revolt. The statue was carried back by the Spanish when they re-captured Santa-Fe in 1694 and it is said that because of the statue, the casualties were minimized. She is called the Lady of Peace. Outside of the church is the beautiful statue of the first American Indian Saint - Kateri Tekakwitha. We need to do some research into her life. My interest in the Pueblo Revolt was kindled a few weeks ago when we visited the Accoma Pueblo. It has been rekindled here. I will need to do some reading on this subject.

From here we walked around and looked at the art work that is displayed in the stores as well as all over the street. I must say that Santa Fe is one large outside art museum in the old town area. it was a pleasure to window shop and look at all the eye candy. Santa Fe, a place I would definitely visit again given the chance.  I hope all the churches I visited today atones for all the sporting palaces I saw earlier this week. So ends week four of our trip.

Santa Fe - Cristo Rey Church - it is big.	Santa Fe - Artwork along the street	Santa Fe - its a motorcycle with a v-8 engine	Santa Fe - southwestern nativity scene in window	Santa Fe - Loretto Chapel - staircase
Santa Fe - Loretto Chapel - staircase	Santa Fe - San Miguel Mission Church Altar from 1610 with some restoration.	Santa Fe - San Miguel Mission Church	Santa Fe - Its a hotel but not ours	Santa Fe - this one is called "Repentance" and its price was $53k
Santa Fe - Cathedral of St. Francis of Assissi	Santa Fe - altar front of St. Francis of Assissi	Santa Fe - La Conquistadora - circa 1625	Santa Fe - Statue of St. Kateri Tekakwitha	Santa Fe - Artwork in store - impressive

 

 

 

 

  

 

 
 

2003 Southwest Adventure

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