Courtland Young, an Iowa-born prospector, discovered copper ore deposits east of Tombstone in 1907, and quietly began raising capital for mining development. He named the town site Courtland, and within two years it was booming and a land rush had ...
Read More »Courtland Land Rush
An Arizona First
Sarah Herring Sorin claims the distinction as Arizona’s first female lawyer. She was born on January 15, 1861, in New York City, the first of Col. William and Mary Herring’s five children. Herring’s title of colonel appears to be an ...
Read More »Ida Jane’s Goat Cart 
At the turn of the last century, goat carts were all the rage among Phoenix’s youngsters, who used them to race up and down the town’s dirt roads. Ida Jane McClarty’s father made one for her seventh birthday, and she ...
Read More »Confine Your Pets
Elsie May Johnson was lucky to have a healthy pet for this portrait. An outbreak of rabies in the spring of 1912 had forced the slaughter of hundreds of dogs and had sent several Bisbee residents to El Paso for ...
Read More »Frank Luke Flying Ace
Frank Luke Jr. was born in Phoenix, one of nine children in a large and convivial family. In later years, people remembered attending ice cream socials and skating on the hardwood floors of the Luke house, which was located on ...
Read More »The Immigrant Priest 
The Territory of Arizona had been served first by Spanish and then by Mexican priests, but the revolutionary Mexican government expelled the Spaniards after 1822, and, following the Mexican War (with the United States) Mexican priests withdrew from the Arizona ...
Read More »Arizona Women in Medicine
Tuberculosis was the scourge of the early 20th century life in the United States. Health seekers always were searching for a good climate for recovery, and it didn’t take long for Tucson, with its dry, warm climate to attract them. ...
Read More »Play Ball
This ragtag group of unnamed boys poses on a porch in Bisbee with a glove, a bat and four sad-looking baseballs. Pick-up baseball was all the rage, and this team is a testament to the nation’s fervor for baseball at ...
Read More »Flagstaff’s Fast Car Race
The Eighth Annual Fast Car Race, sponsored by the Mark A. Moore American Legion Post, attracted West Coast driving sensations such as Bud Rose, Rajo Jack, Wally Schock, Earl Evans and Shorty Ellysen. They brought cars usually seen only in ...
Read More »Two Tucson Meteorites
The two meteor fragments were used as blacksmith’s anvils in the Tucson Presidio in the 1700s and were highly valued. Early Tucson visitors invariably commented on them as curiosities. All early reports say that the meteorites were found in the ...
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