By Norm Tessman. Updated by Bailey Cacciatore

Mastodons were on the brink of extinction when one died in a shallow watering hole fifteen miles southwest of today's Prescott. The last major ice age had ended, and the climate was similar to today’s. There have been many questions about this creature’s passing,, including the cause of death and the possibility it was killed by human hunters.

A research project in spring of 1999 by Sharlot Hall Museum hoped to answer some of these questions. A team of professional paleontologists, anthropologists and volunteers reopened and extended a site near a prehistoric water hole where a mastodon died. They searched for more of its bones and those of other animals, for evidence of who or what killed them and for clues about prehistoric Arizona’s environment.
 

By Parker Anderson

In 1957, a former ASU English professor named Richard Kenneth Snodgrass formed a new business called Counterpoint Productions, with which he hoped to foster arts and humanities in Arizona and Yavapai County in particular. Among his partners were area photographers Art Clark and John Ludwig. After publishing two historical booklets, “The Prescott, Arizona Story” and “Ballad of a Laughing Mountain”, Snodgrass and Counterpoint set their sights on independent filmmaking.

Snodgrass was influenced by European “New Wave” cinema, which was starting to make its way into American art house theatres in the 1960s. He envisioned a multi-part film he would name LEGACY, to be filmed entirely in Prescott. It is no longer known who his investors were, but it is presumed they were local residents excited about a home-grown movie being filmed in Prescott. The actors were all locals who volunteered their services, and it is believed the Prescott city government volunteered to shut off city streets without charge so scenes could be filmed. Everyone was excited about the new movie!

By Stuart Rosebrook
[Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D., Executive Director of Sharlot Hall Museum, discovered he is related to Sharlot M. Hall through a shared relative on his father's and Sharlot's mother's Boblett-Deardorff side. He adapted this article from Margaret E. Maxwell’s “A Passion for Freedom: The Life of Sharlot Hall” republished by the Sharlot Hall Museum and for sale at the Museum’s gift shop.]

From her childhood days in Kansas to her home at Orchard Ranch, Sharlot Hall grew up with a Western work ethic and love and appreciation for all the family’s animals.

Sharlot Hall Museum’s founder, Sharlot M. Hall, was born in James “Jim” and Adeline Hall’s homestead cabin in northeastern Lincoln County, Kansas, on October 27, 1870. Sharlot recalled her birthplace was adjacent “a small stream thickly lined with oak, elm, walnut and hackberry trees, and with thickets of tall wild alum bushes all along in which the poles forming the framework of the Indian tepees [sic] were still standing when I was old enough to play in the abandoned teepee shelters.”

By Bradley G. Courtney

If any early Prescott saloon was cursed, it was Cortez Street’s Keystone Saloon, located north of the Plaza on the west side of that street. Its first proprietor, Gotlieb Urfer, came to America from Switzerland before the Civil War. He arrived in Prescott in 1874, opened a lodging house on Cortez in 1877, and eventually added a saloon, naming it the Keystone Saloon and Lodging House. He married Ellen Dunn of Ireland in 1878.

On Wednesday, December 16, 1885—one day before his fiftieth birthday—Urfer was found lying senseless on the floor behind the Keystone’s bar, bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to his head. According to a December 18, 1885, Courier report, a lodger sprinted into the saloon after hearing a gunshot and saw Urfer with “a great ghastly hole in the right side of his head, from which his brains and blood were oozing.” Several others  nearby also ran in. They saw the bleeding Urfer and “near his right hand, lay a pistol of the bull-dog pattern.” All concluded this was suicide.