The Marvin Bennett story concludes.

Late one night Grand Canyon’s head wrangler sent Marvin down to Phantom Ranch to bring out a couple who had hiked down but didn’t have the strength to hike out. The man wanted to walk, but wanted a mule for his wife who wasn’t doing very well. Marvin saddled two mules and headed down the trail in the dark. “It was as dark as the inside of a cow,” he recalled. “Well, honestly, I’ve never been inside a cow, but I imagine it must be pretty dark.”

After a short rest at Phantom, he loaded the woman on a mule and started out, her husband walking behind. Within a few miles, Marvin took pity on the man and gave him his mule. Marvin led the way on foot. Back on the rim, the transportation manager handed the couple a bill for $10. They had no money; “If we had known it was going to cost so much, we would have just laid down there and died,” they said.

Marvin managed to pay the $10 himself. Then he bought them food, gave them $20, and sent them on their way to California where they, like so many others in the Depression, were hoping to make a new start. Marvin didn’t think more about it.

Two years later, near Christmas, Marvin was back in Prescott, nearly penniless as usual. The an-nual President’s dance was coming up and he and his brother Eugene badly wanted to go. One morning they rode their horses up to the post office. Marvin was surprised to receive a letter postmarked California. The envelope showed it had been sent to the Grand Canyon and for-warded to Groom Creek. Inside, he found a thank you note from the couple he had helped, and $65. They had found jobs and were doing fine, thanks to Marvin. “My brother and I had the biggest time at that dance,” he recalled. “Just goes to show, you help somebody else, maybe someday they’ll help you.”

In those early days at the canyon, Marvin and a few friends formed the Grand Canyon Cowboy Band. They wrote some of their own songs, and adapted some by wrangler Ed Steele, Prescott’s Gail Gardner, and the Sons of the Pioneers. They learned to tell stories and to write and recite some of the first cowboy poetry. By 1935, the band broke up and the boys drifted in different directions.

Later, Marvin, his brother Eugene, their father Grant, and Marvin’s pretty wife Margaret per-formed as cowboy singers in Prescott and hosted cookouts for guests at the ranch in Groom Creek. A wealthy woman from New York, who was among their guests, invited them to her home to sing for her friends back East. The event was covered in the Mt. Vernon Daily Argus society pages with the headline: “Hill-Billy Twangers Play Rooty-Toot Tunes.” The paper re-ported that the Bennett family enjoyed their first trip east, but: “The smoke of such low altitudes gets into their throats and instruments. Give them the wide open spaces of the West any day.”

This was probably as close as they came to catching a big break, but their musical career reverted to occasional performances back home. Marvin settled into a life of varied work: cattle breed-ing, road and dam construction, and the joy of raising four step-children. He was active in church and civic associations in Prescott, Dewey and Mayer, and mostly gave up performing in his middle age.

In 1985, 50 years after the Grand Canyon Cowboy Band broke up, Marvin and friends he hadn’t seen for that long reunited for a performance at the Elks Theater. The boys cautioned the audi-ence that they hadn’t played together since 1935 and might be a bit rusty. Their first number was a slightly off-key, off-tempo instrumental of guitars and fiddle, after which they told the audi-ence: “If you didn’t like that one you might as well leave now, ‘cause it ain’t gonna get any bet-ter.” Well, it did get better. For an hour and a half, the band played and sang like they were young again. They thrilled a sell-out audience with cowboy songs, stories, jokes and cowboy po-etry. Their material covered little dogies that needed to get on down the trail, faithful dogs, steady mules, bewildered dudes, beloved friends, loves lost and found, canyons and streams and cowboy dreams.

Marvin passed away in 1999. He is remembered by family and friends as warm, caring and gen-erous. Those of us who never knew him wish that we had.

Marvin left an oral history recording of his stories, and there is a recording of the 1985 Elks The-ater concert in the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives. The Museum has more than 1000 oral histo-ries that chronicle the lives of the people of Prescott and Yavapai County.
 

“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at www.sharlothallmuseum.org/library-archives/days-past. The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles to dayspastshmcourier@gmail.com. Please contact SHM Library & Archives reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at dayspastshmcourier@gmail.com for information.