By Jody Drake 

A friend introduced me to her. She was a petite woman in her nineties who still wore the beauty she had been born with. Her stories were full of the realness of life that strikes humor in all of us. For too few Thursday mornings I sat at her feet, looking up into those sparkling eyes, enchanted with the stories she was telling. "I changed the names," she said, "to protect the innocent." When I asked who the innocent were, she replied, "Why, me, of course!" 

She and her husband had come to Arizona from back east during the Great Depression. He, as so many before him, had been struck with gold fever. When she thought of gold her mind fixed on an image of an old prospector with whiskers leading a burro, lost in the desert and dying of thirst. As destiny would have it, they settled in one of the many canyons in the Bradshaw Mountains southeast of Prescott. The life they lived was the cloth from which her stories were made.

She met "Mammy" and "Pappy," both too old to live but too tough to die. Mammy "shore could make good bear-fat biscuits." Pansy, their daughter, was as wild as the canyon they called home. They hadn't always been bad off. At one time they had owned a big cattle ranch-till a snow storm wiped them out. Mammy and Pappy were living proof that the human spirit will always find a way. They lived in an old burro barn, and felt it right that the burros should be able to come and visit..."iffen they wanted to." 

Then there was "Wildcat." It was his mission in life to outsmart the game warden. After all, hadn't God put animals on this earth for a man to hunt? And, of course, the rest of the inhabitants had to join in and help him. Everyone sticking together made the hardness of life a little easier. 

Of course there were visitors. She fondly remembered the singing, tap-dancing, accordion-playing city woman, who gave a performance in the canyon. The scene was as intoxicating as liquor. She stood there on a big flat rock in the moonlight and took everyone away from the harshness of life for just a little while. Just as she finished, a lone coyote wailed in the distance, a memory planted for life firmly in the mind, especially for old "Cactus Jack." You see, he left the canyon with that singing, tap-dancing, city woman. Why, I couldn't tell you the things she showed him. Not in the newspaper anyway. But he would come home to the canyon when she was through with him. He was never quite the same man after that....always had a funny little smile on his face! 

From the first time I heard these stories I wanted to share them. They were too special not to. But privacy is important to my storytelling friend. Talk as I might, she wished to remain anonymous. She finally agreed to let me tell her tales and share her memories in the form of a play, as long as I didn't name the source. 

The "History Under the Stars" series and the Sharlot Hall Museum will be pleased to share the life experiences of this wonderful woman in the play ALL THAT GLITTERS on Sunday, July 6, 1997, at 8:15 p.m. The show will be performed by actors ten to sixteen years old in the Museum's summer Youth Theater Tenderfoots program. At the end of the summer, more true stories of this delightful woman's experiences will be presented in the play, GOLD IN COYOTE CANYON, performed by the Blue Rose Players. Tickets are available at the main desk of the Sharlot Hall Museum. For more information call 445-3122. And to my storytelling friend, may God bless and keep you. Thank you for sharing your life. It has made mine richer. 

Jody Drake is a member of the Blue Rose Players and a volunteer at Sharlot Hall Museum.

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (m189p)
Reuse only by permission.
Children like Eddie and Walter Boblett helped their parents with mining chores. The two are pictured near their home on Lynx Creek in 1895. Struck with gold fever, many families searched Arizona for riches.