By Mona Lange McCroskey

(This article is a continuation from last week's Days Past.)

Roy Hays shipped cattle from Congress and from Kirlkland where huge herds were gathered. A few in Peeples Valley and all the ranchers around Walnut Grove banded together, drove their cattle in to Kirkland and shipped them on the train to points in the east. Hays usually shipped to California.

The girls (Margaret and Elladean) went to school in a one-room schoolhouse in the pasture behind their house. The teacher boarded with them until a new school with a 'teacherage' was built across the road. (Years later, Margaret would marry substitute teacher and neighbor, Tom Rigden.) A little stove in the center of the schoolroom provided warmth for the pupils, some of whom walked three or four miles to school. Others rode a burro from several miles back in the hills, carrying lunches in lard pails.

The Kirkland Women's Club, founded in about 1915, provided the community with social functions. A monthly dance drew families and ranch hands from miles and miles away. They would dance until two or three o'clock in the morning or as long as they could keep passing the hat to pay the band. They would break for a big lunch at midnight! Then the 'hard-boiled bosses' would get the cowboys out at daylight the next morning and get them on their horses again. The dances continued into the 1950s, when they lost their spark to rock music, automobiles and television.

The ranchers were vitally interested in county affairs. They held elections at the Hays Ranch after gatherings at the Kirkland Dance Hall, where the candidates came and "pitched their lines" to the voters. Margaret still has the election box that sat under a bench with a slit cut in it to collect the ballots. Politicians continued to come, some in small airplanes in the later years when the Yavapai County Cattle Growers began the tradition of having a yearly calf sale and barbeque at the Hays Ranch.

Margaret attended the University of Arizona for two years after graduating from high school. She studied liberal arts, fine arts and some 'aggie' courses such as farm exonomics. She married Tom Rigden, who was working on the Navajo Reservation with the Soil Conservation Service. Although they had known each other all their lives, they did not date until she was in college. After their marriage, they lived in Tucson for a few years, and then moved back to Peeples Valley during World War II, where Tom helped Roy Hays manage the ranch. They eventually moved into the Rigden ranch house, built in 1876, a few miles down the road. Margaret's time in her mother's kitchen served her well when she became the cook on the Rigden Ranch. Her husband said, "On any ranch in the world, the cook works harder than anyone else. No one works with more love and care than Margaret Rigden when she's in the kitchen." The sign on her kitchen wall declares, "Barriaga Llena Corazon Contento" meaning, "a full belly causes a happy heart." She has a collection of cookbooks that she rarely uses. She doesn't go by a recipe. You can still stop at the Rigden Ranch and have a bowl of cowboy beans for lunch.

Elladean married and lived in Alaska for many years. She was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame as a ranch woman in 2002. She was running 150 sections of desert land, consisting of mostly contiguous small ranches along the Santa Maria River and down to the Alamo Dam, until the 1990s, when she sold the Tres Alamos. She opines, "It wasn't any harder to run 150 sections than it was to run 10. You have to do the same things: take out food, cook a lunch, carry it out and see that everybody has shod horses and all that stuff." Elladean still owns some cattle and a small piece of land near Congress, where she has round-ups and brands calves with the 'Quien Sabe' brand that she has owned since she was sixteen years old. Her great-grandfather bought the brand from General John Fremont in 1878, having acquired it from a Mexican rancher in California. Her daughter, Judy, comes to help. "And I still run things as near the old. I guess that's the cheapest way as possible." There is no chuck wagon anymore. Served from the back of a pickup truck are lunches in cooler boxes, water in containers and even brownies.

Elladean has been riding horses since she was three years old. "I had to be lifted into the saddle then and now (at 87) I have to be lifted again," she says.

John went to the Peeples Valley grammar school, Prescott High School and Brown Military Academy in San Diego. He attended the University of Arizona and graduated from the University of the Americas in Mexico City with a B.A. degree in Latin American Studies. He is married to Mary Greene Sharp, from an old Patagonia ranching family, and they raised three children. From 1952 until a few years ago, John was at the family ranch, operating a breeding herd and feeder cattle. He is the politician in the family and has been active in many cattle-related organizations, and has served in both the Arizona State House of Representatives and Senate from District 1 in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1940s, Jim Coughlin bought the east half of the ranch across Highway 89. Now both halves are holdings of Maughn Ranches. John continues to live at headquarters in Peeples Valley. Margaret is at the Rigden Ranch with her daughter, Cynthia, a noted Western artist. Elladean divides her time between her ranch on the desert near Congress and Alaska.

(Mona McCroskey is an oral historian and volunteer at Sharlot Hall Museum.) 

Note: Members of the Hays family will tell family and ranching history stories at The Gathering, at 1 p.m. Saturday, August 19, 2006, in Esther Hall at the United Methodist Church on the corner of Gurley Street and McCormick Street. All are welcome. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb020f37i3)
Reuse only by permission.
Mr. And Mrs. Roy Hays on their 50th wedding anniversary, with son John and daughter, Margaret Rigden, 1965. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb164f28i5)
Reuse only by permission.
Peeples Valley School, Christmas 1931. Elladean is the second from the right in the second row and Margaret is at the far right in the third row. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb164f28i6)
Reuse only by permission.
The Rigden ranch house, c1920.