By Rhonda L. Tintle

(Note:  This article was not published in the Sunday Days Past column for May 13, 2007.)

During the latter nineteenth century, immigrants from the Eastern and Midwestern parts of the United States, along with immigrants from around the world, invaded the homeland of Indians and took possession of over 430 million acres of land. Some of those immigrants settled in Prescott and the surrounding districts. The children of those immigrants would become the first American-style Arizonians. On the ranges in and around Prescott, harried parents struggled in cabins, shacks, and tents simply to sustain their families.

Those overworked parents often left their children to their own devices. The way those children occupied themselves and adapted their play to place, in this case the mountain frontier, articulated their attitudes towards concepts such as peer power and group identity. Or, on the other hand, maybe they just wanted to have fun. In any case, the play of those mountain children differed materially from the play of their urban counterparts. However, in practice, they had at least one thing in common, they loved to be scared. 

In the 1880s, New York's kids were scaring themselves silly visiting P.T. Barnum's ghastly and ghoulish freak shows. In other cities, they were listening to popular Victorian era horror stories about werewolves, zombies, vampires, and other habitual denizens of children's nightmares. In Prescott, a group of youngsters was listening to a miner tell a tale about a baby mummy. With his own eyes he had seen the mummy hidden in a wall at some nearby Zuni ruins. The petrified infant was wrapped in silk-like cloth designed with diamonds and stars. Shredded bark was stuffed into its mouth and ears, and the baby wore tiny sandals made of yucca, and decorated with turquoise and red clay beads. The man told the children that the mummy had toys, dolls, and bone ornaments too. Not surprisingly, upon hearing this story, the youngsters planned a trip to the ruins. They begged their schoolteacher, a young woman with a love of adventure, herself an immigrant from Massachusetts, to accompany them. Sensibly, they packed a lunch and the little group of children ranging from age six to fourteen years old, accompanied by their young instructor, trooped off into the mountains. 

For children, part of the enjoyment of exploring the frontier came from the beauty of the scenery, and part of the enjoyment came from the ever-present possibility of danger. That day, real danger was waiting for one of the children at the Zuni ruins. Once inside the multi-tiered dwelling, twelve-year-old Clara saw something in a dark corner. Possibly a mummy, possibly something even more horrible. She ran across the dimly lit room to inspect, and promptly fell through the floor. Her friends scrambled down to the next level, looked through a gap in the wall, and discovered the little girl crying and screaming hysterically. She had landed in a huge pile of chollas, a kind of cactus with long spiky thorns. Being experienced naturalists the children deduced that pack rats must have been collecting the chollas there for years, purpose unknown except to them. The only solution to Clara's predicament was for the little girl to crawl out by herself. 

Bravery was a necessity for Arizona's frontier children, so Clara took a deep breath, stopped crying, and crawled through the chollas to the opening. By the time the courageous youngster emerged, thorns covered her clothes, skin, and hair. Immediately, her friends set about removing the needle-like spines from her face. After that, in a nod to female modesty, the girls helped her to an empty room in the ruins where they stripped off her clothes. Some girls worked on Clara's body and hair while another pulled the thorns out of her dress. They rubbed her skin with some milk they had brought for lunch, bundled her up in their cloaks, and let her cry herself to sleep. One girl who had been at the ruins before volunteered to stay and watch over Clara so that the rest could continue exploring. This matter-of-fact approach to calamity highlights the difference between urban and frontier attitudes. In the same situation in a city, a parent or guardian would have hustled the child to a doctor or hospital, at the very least, the adventure would have come to an abrupt end, and everyone would have been required to go home. The men, women, and children of the frontier faced the accidents and hardships of mountain life with pluck and practicality. 

While Clara slept, the other children went into the Zuni "kitchen" and built a fire in order to boil coffee and fry bacon. The food was simple but the explorers were hungry and their enjoyment was considerable. The diarist of the trip noted that though the food was plain, hunger was an excellent sauce. While they ate together, they wondered about the lives, hopes, and dreams of the children and grown-ups who had lived there in the past, "people unlike us in appearance. but who had known joy and grief, pleasure and pain, same as our race of today know them, and who had laughed, cried, sung, danced, married and died, mourned or rejoiced their lives away in this once populous town or castle or whatever one would call it." It was night when they packed up, faced with a hike through the dark and desolate mountain range and with one companion injured, they repeatedly assured each other that they were not afraid. When they arrived home around midnight, Clara's mother, undoubtedly exhausted and worried, rubbed her daughter's skin with more milk and homemade salve. 

The story of the trip to the ruins illuminates many aspects of childhood on the early Arizona frontier, before civilization had made its way up into the mountains. For a brief time Prescott's children were free to explore the unexplored, to experience danger, excitement, survival, friendship and fun without the civilizing influence of urban society. Conquering their fears and navigating their environment allowed those children to claim the mountains as their home. Exploring the ranges and engaging nature for those children was not a means to prove that they were rugged individualists, which was a matter of fact, they were rugged individualists. The next morning, despite being sore, little Clara, hardy trailblazer that she was, declared that she was glad she had gone on the trip. 

(Rhonda L. Tintle is a doctoral student and fellow in the History Dept. at the University of Oklahoma and was the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives Intern during the summer of 2006. She has spent many happy hours researching at Sharlot Hall Museum. She is indebted to Ryan Flahive, Scott Anderson, and the volunteers for their extensive knowledge about the collection, and to Mona McCroskey for her generous internship funding.) 

 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(po0760p)
Reuse only by permission.
Group of Prescott school children on an outing in the Bradshaws, c.1890 "Prescott's children were free to explore the unexplored, to experience danger, excitement, survival, friendship and fun without the civilizing influence of urban society"