By Goodwin "Goodie" Berquist
(This is the first part of a two-part article. The second part will be published next week.)
The Prescott Chamber of Commerce held its first meeting November 18, 1910. Forty-one businessmen attended... and one woman, Grace Sparkes. The Chamber would change its name twice in the next twenty-eight years and sixteen men would serve as president, Grace Sparkes remained in one office or another forever, ... or so it seemed. Daughter of a local miner, she played a role in virtually every significant development in Prescott and Yavapai County for a generation. As one of her contemporaries put it, Grace was "a human dynamo...full of ideas, a person who welcomed new challenges, one committed to getting things done. To the press at the time, Yavapai County was "Grace Sparkes' territory."
Grace's interests ran the gamut from improved transportation to community welfare, from mines and ranching, to the preservation of archeological sites and the establishment of a first-class hotel in Prescott.
The many offices Grace held suggest the wide scope of her activities--Secretary of the Northern Arizona State Fair and Prescott Frontier Days Association, County Immigration Commissioner, Editor of Yavapai Magazine (1914-1932), Chair of the Yavapai County Board of Public Welfare during the early depression era, Secretary of the Arizona Good Roads Association, Secretary of the Yavapai Council of the Arizona Small Mine Operators Association, first woman president of the Arizona Association of Chamber of Commerce Secretaries.
Grace functioned as a booster and publicist as well as a catalyst for community action. She and her assistants answered thousands of inquiries about the city and county. She was the chief promoter of such tourist attractions as the annual Prescott Rodeo and the Smoki Ceremonial Dances. She helped write the "Prescott Rules" by which the local rodeo was governed, rules which were later adopted nationwide. She championed Prescott as a mecca for health-seekers, and glowingly described the mineral and ranching potential of Yavapai County.
Born in South Dakota in 1893, Grace moved to Arizona as a child. She was a graduate of Prescott's St. Joseph's Academy in 1910 and the Lamson Business College in Phoenix a year later. In an era when chamber secretaries were usually men, she stood out as a highly efficient woman activist. In fact, a Chicago columnist once described her as "the finest chamber of commerce executive in the United States."
Before examining some of Grace's varied activities in detail, we should first explain her role as county immigration commissioner. Usually, when we hear the term "immigration," we think of people who move from one country to another, but in Arizona, the term had a different meaning. A state agency described as an "immigration commission" was established in the Arizona Territory as early as 1881. Its purpose was to attract new settlers from within the country to the sparsely populated territory. Later, this work was undertaken by individual counties and in 1913, Grace was named Yavapai County Immigration Commissioner.
Specifically, she was expected to handle inquires and supply information regarding local living conditions and business opportunities. The law stipulated that the commissioner was to receive a salary "not to exceed six hundred dollars per annum." Grace was provided with a budget for stationery and postage.
In 1914, she published the first issue of The Yavapai Magazine (an illustrated periodical like the original Arizona Highways) in which she sought to place the assets of her community and county in their most attractive light. This publication was discontinued in 1932 due to the Depression.
The number and variety of projects to which Grace Sparkes devoted her attention is impressive. Consider the following examples. In 1911, the chamber purchased fifty acres of land adjacent to the western boundary of Prescott, land composed of "pines, oaks and massive granite boulders. Twelve acres were set aside, surveyed and developed for the Pine Crest Addition." Phoenix people and other outsiders were given lots free of charge if they would come in and build a house worth at least three hundred dollars. This experiment proved so successful that early in the 1930's, a contiguous Pine Dells subdivision was established. All the lots were quickly taken up in both projects.
Grace paid particular attention to those activities that would bring tourists to Prescott. Foremost among these was the July rodeo (known as Prescott Frontier Days), held annually since 1888. In 1921, the rodeo was in financial trouble. The postwar economy was depressed and there simply was not enough money to pay feedlot expenses for steers and broncos in Phoenix, and to fund prizes for the contestants. Grace suggested that a "Way Out West" show be added to the program to capitalize on the romantic notions of cowboys and indians, then popular.
One part of this program was devoted to the burlesque of a Hopi snake dance, using live bull snakes as part of the performance. The dancers were Prescott businessmen attired as native Americans. Thirty-two dancers participated before an audience of 4,000. The snake dance was an instant hit and so began the traditional dance ceremonies of the "Smoki People," an activity expanded to five dances in 1923 and continued for seventy years. In the second year of the Smoki dances, the focus shifted from burlesque to authenticity. Eye witnesses, both indian and white, were consulted. Ethnographic volumes of the Smithsonian Institution were studied, and in at least one case, dance directors contacted Harvard University for help.
Grace's role in this new Prescott tradition was to promote the Smoki Ceremonial year- round. She frequently reminded readers of the Yavapai Magazine of both rodeo and dance performances -- even her stationery featured these two events.
The dances quickly grew in popularity, attracting hundreds, and eventually thousands of visitors from both this country and abroad. The chamber office was flooded with inquiries. Grace's office handled Smoki publicity, registered rodeo entrants, distributed programs for both events and served as a clearinghouse for local accommodations.
In 1924, the chamber sent Grace to a national meeting in Washington, D.C. The Smoki People asked her to present President Calvin Coolidge with a distinctive hat as "honorary chief" of their tribe.
Smoki members and their families became seriously interested in Native American culture. They began to collect artifacts found in jaunts about the surrounding country. Grace helped organize an archeological committee, and through this group, scientists from the University of Arizona were invited to investigate three Native American sites in north central Arizona. Dean Byron Cummings, who headed this work, believed local artifacts should be preserved and displayed locally. It was this impetus, and the desire of the Smoki people to preserve and display their own artifacts, which led to the establishment of the Smoki Public Museum in 1935.
The Smoki people had constructed a pueblo meeting hall of their own four years earlier. But, it was Grace Sparkes who arranged for government funds to hire the unemployed to help in constructing the museum. Modeled after Native American structures, both buildings were later listed in the National Register of Historic Buildings.
During the Depression, a variety of public works projects were undertaken under Grace's aegis as county welfare officer; the construction of tennis courts, playground retaining walls, bleachers, etc. Unemployed men were registered at the chamber office, fourteen hundred in all, and rotated as a work force. They were put to work each month building roads, dams and bridges-improvements unlikely to be undertaken otherwise in a depressed economy.
(Goodwin Berquist is a volunteer at the Sharlot Hall Museum and has recently completed processing the Chamber of Commerce Collection. The collection is available for public research at the Museum's Archives)
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(po0637pb). Reuse only by permission.