By Kathryn Reisdorfer
There's an intriguing exhibit opening at the Phippen Museum on January 8 that looks back at 100 years of art in Arizona. Much of it originated in Prescott because artists have always been attracted to this region. What is interesting but not surprising is that Sharlot Hall was acquainted with many of them.
Maynard Dixon came to Prescott specifically to get to know her; Frederick Dellenbaugh inspired her adventures; Kate Cory was her life-long friend; and Lon Megargee wanted Hall to write publicity for him.
Dixon was working for the San Francisco Overland Monthly in 1900, when Charles Lummis, the editor of another California magazine, Land of Sunshine, encouraged him to expand his horizons. Lummis had been receiving contributions from a ranch woman living near Prescott. He asked Dixon to take a sketching trip and on the way, to get to know this woman on her home ground.
Dixon accepted and ended up staying for a week at the Hall ranch. Times were hard during that drought year. "The country looks like hell," he wrote to Lummis. "Dead cattle everywhere-punchers all gone out or gone to mining." Sharlot Hall, the woman he had been sent to check out, was too busy with ranch chores to spend much time with him, but he was still impressed. He made a sketch of a cowboy on a running horse and inscribed it to Sharlot. "Miss Hall," he told Lummis, "is one worth knowing. In her quiet way she is a heroine ."
The two kept in touch. Hall wrote Dixon in 1935, telling him that someone had tried to take one of the drawings he had done, and she joked that she would have to chain it to the wall. In response, he sent her poems, one of which began, "I am God-almost." When she did not comment on his poetry, he asked whether he had shocked her. Her answer was blunt: she was not interested in his poetry. He was a painter, and that was quite enough.
Frederick Dellenbaugh was another artist whose name has been associated with Hall's, though we are not sure about the nature of their association.
Dellenbaugh, an adventurer, artist and writer, had been exploring since he was 17. In a cheeky move, he finagled his way onto Major Powell's 1871 Colorado River expedition as a documentary artist. Historians refer to his renderings as the first done by a white man in the Grand Canyon. Dellenbaugh later turned his Canyon sketches into pure gold, producing paintings that achieved world fame.
Hall also went to the Grand Canyon and was photographed holding a book Dellenbaugh wrote about his adventures. These coincidences have led many observers to wonder whether the connection between the two was more than literary . Since Hall's papers were probably sanitized after her death, we can only speculate on the relationship. One thing is certain, however; the two shared an awe for Arizona and a desire to get to know it.
Kate Cory was also fascinated with Arizona, but she had something else in common with Sharlot Hall. Both Hall and Cory had chosen a way of life that put them outside the social conventions of the day. These women elected to remain single and pursue their professional careers.
Cory was already well established in the East when another painter, Louis Akin, urged her to join a colony of artists on the Hopi reservation. Cory discovered that Akin was not dishonest, though he was a dreamer. When Cory reached Arizona, there was no colony. But she stayed anyway, living in Oraibi and later Walpi, defying existing standards about what a woman should and should not do.
The Hopi accepted her into their community, which was very rare. They even allowed her to sketch and photograph them. When Cory moved into Prescott in 1912, she used her reservation work to create larger paintings that are now famous. Her reputation rests mostly on her Hopi work.
Lon Megargee's reputation rests on his cowboy art, and he knew Hall through her cowboy poetry. Commentators refer to Megargee as a real character. He loved to tell tales, and he told a few to Hall. He wrote to her twice asking that she do publicity for him. But there is a comic twist about the way his stories differed over the years.
In a 1925 letter, he asked Hall to write about his life. Oozing with flattery, he told her that her writing was far above the average "art twaddle." Then he listed the things he wanted her to include: "how I was held for ransom by [Poncho] Villa in 1913," and how he lived "all over the Navajo Reservation." In1935, he asked her to do similar work, but he changed his story in small amusing ways. "You know I . . . was with Villa in Mexico and have lived with the Hopi Indians." Since we don't have Hall's responses to these letters, we cannot be certain how she reacted. She probably chuckled.
The public can see the works of these four colorful people between January 8 and April 16. The Phippen Museum will honor them, along with scores of other artists who lived or worked in Arizona, in The Last 100 Years: Arizona History through Art.
Kathryn Reisdorfer is a Professor at Yavapai College and wrote the biographies for the Phippen exhibit.