Late 19th century homesteaders pose in front of their adobe dwelling.

Had an innovative seamstress possessed the courage to lower necklines, raise hemlines and shorten billowy sleeves, the women posed at this late 19th century Yuma homestead would have led more comfortable lives. And that’s not to mention the long johns surely worn by the young man, nor the bulky unmentionables worn beneath the women’s dresses.
Not everything was as inefficient as the cumbersome attire of that era; the adobe used to construct this desert dwelling was an effective insulator against excessive heat. Helpful, as well, were the covered porches. Note the promise of cool water from an olla resting atop a cabinet between the door and glassed-in window at forefront.
Easterners, not acclimated to the desert, found it difficult to pen positive words about Yuma. J. Ross Brown, who journeyed across Arizona Territory in 1864, wrote: “Everything (in Yuma) dries; wagons dry; men dry; chickens dry; there is not juice left in anything, living or dead, by the close of summer.” Ross added: “The Indians sit in the river with fresh mud on their heads, and by dint of constant dipping and sprinkling manage to keep from roasting, though they usually come out parboiled.”
Twenty years later, writer William Henry Bishop lamented: “The thermometer ranges up to 127 in the shade.” For reasons he failed to explain, Bishop claimed that “there is no sunstroke here” — never mind the “formidable” sunshine. He noted as well what he called “distinct sanitary properties in Yuma’s “well-baked air.”
Rarely did adobe strike travel writers as praise-worthy. A man who took the byline E. Conklin wrote of Yuma as “a mass of one-story buildings, built of adobe, and roofed with mud… Some are whitewashed and present a cleanly appearance; while others are the embodiment of filth…”
Apparently, adobe without whitewash was an eyesore to the traveling literati. “The town is a collection of inferior adobe houses,” wrote Bishop, “a few of the very best being altered from the natural mud-colored by a coating of whitewash…”
Not only was Bishop a snob, the writer was a committed racist who warned readers about the “highly miscellaneous character” of waiters at a Yuma hotel. “You are served,” he wrote with a cringe, “in the same dining-room by Mexicans, Chinamen, Irish, Americans, and a tame Apache Indian.”
He might have added that, more likely than not, the waiters lived in un-whitewashed mud adobe dwellings. And, if so, they were considerably cooler than the writer’s overheated prose.
Yet Yuma survived the weather and the criticism. In fact, it was counted among a dozen cities named in 1999 as America’s most livable.
— W. Lane Rogers. Photo courtesy of the author.