By Captain Don Baier

Ever wonder why the airfield at Prescott Airport is named after First Lieutenant Ernest A. Love?  Maybe you’ve seen his statue outside the airport atrium. You may even know of Prescott’s Ernest A. Love Post 6 American Legion that supports and advocates for veterans in our community. Ernest and his mother demonstrate the best of humanity – the helping hand, hard work and the heroic heart.

Ernest Alexander Love was born in Raton, New Mexico, in 1895 to Allan Love, a Scottish immigrant who worked with the railroad, and his wife Louretta Love (also known as “Etta”). Ernest’s family moved to Prescott when he was three years old. By the time he was eight, he had heard about the Wright brothers and fell in love with the dream of flying. He formed a close bond with his neighbor’s younger children, looking after them and writing to them throughout his short life. Much of what we know about Ernest comes from his letters to neighbors, family, and friends. 

By Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D.

From 1945 to 1964, the United States, the U.S.S.R, the United Kingdom, France and China set off approximately 663 nuclear tests above ground into our world’s atmosphere, with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. respectively testing 356 and 212 nuclear weapons between 1955 and 1964. The U.S. alone, according to the “Baby Tooth” exhibit at the St. Louis branch of the Missouri Historical Society, “conducted almost 200 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1958, most of them above ground” at atomic blast sites in Nevada (the Trinity site in New Mexico was the first in 1945). Fallout from the bombs “showered the country with nuclear radiation.” The West and Midwest were both particularly hard-hit and “cancer causing radiation seeped into the air, water, and even milk supply, as cows ate contaminated grass.”

One woman, St. Louis physician Louise Reiss, led the formation of the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958. Reiss was inspired by Johns Hopkins University biochemist Dr. Herman Kalckar’s 1958 article on baby teeth in Nature, “The official public health agencies of every nation…should organize a large-scale collection of milk teeth…and conduct measurements of radioactivity on this material.”

By Gail Steiger
I grew up in the 60s listening to my grandfather, Gail Gardner, sing songs and recite poems he’d written about his favorite parts of life, most of which involved cowboying around Skull Valley in the 20s and 30s. “The Sierry Pete’s” or “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail” was his big hit. 
In the early 80s, I stopped by my grandparents’ house on Mount Vernon. 

“Hey Granny, where’s Papa?” “Oh, Big Jim Griffiths from the U of A and that nice young Warren Miller from Sharlot Hall hauled him down to the museum to sing some songs and tell stories to some school kids. He was giggling like a teenager when they wheeled him out to their van.”

Jim Griffiths, Warren Miller, Hal Cannon and other western folklorists were finding, interviewing and recording practitioners of what they feared might be a dying art, and one certainly unique to the west. They called it Cowboy Poetry. During the course of their research, they would meet at folklore conferences and discuss some of the colorful characters they’d encountered and some of the great poetry they’d discovered.

By Parker Anderson

In 1888 the small town of Prescott was planning a four-day July 4^th celebration and was looking for something to bring visitors to town and keep them there for the duration.  Ultimately, they decided on a “cowboy tournament” which would consist of bronc-riding and cattle-roping contests. This was Prescott’s first rodeo, which has been held over the Fourth of July every year since. Itis the world’s oldest rodeo. That fateful year of 1888, the “tournament” was held around where Forbing Park is today.

An excerpt of coverage from the Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner newspaper of July 11, 1888, stated: “The next and most exciting of all, was Juan Libas [sic]. His steer turned toward the herd, at break-neck speed. Libas made a beautiful throw with his rope, bringing the steer to earth so suddenly that it pulled his horse over, also throwing him to the ground, but quick as a flash of lightning he was up and again in the saddle, amid the loud and prolonged cheers of the audience, and was scored a record of 1:17 ½.”

By Marjory J. Sente 
Writing “Thoughts on Turning Seventy,” Cowboy Poet Bud Brown, in 1973, mused: 

“I couldn’t care less to find up there
That Heaven has no golf courses
As long as there’s a good supply of 
Well trained mules and horses . . .

I’d rather drive a six-mule hitch for an eternity…” 

Three years later, in 1976, as part of America’s Bicentennial Celebration, Francis Valentine “Bud” Brown drove his six mini-mule hitch for what probably seemed an eternity. Arizona’s wagon master, Brown, and his mule-drawn prairie schooner joined the pilgrimage on January 14, 1976, at Yuma for a six-month, 3,000-mile journey to Valley Forge for the nation’s July 4 200th anniversary activities. 

By Marjory J. Sente
Coming from La Paz, George Meacham Holaday arrived in Prescott on July 31, 1864. Two weeks earlier, he had been elected by the Second District to the House of Representatives of the first Arizona Territorial Legislature. Quickly growing fond of the area, especially the climate, he never returned to La Paz to live. 

Late September, the first session of the Territorial Legislature convened, and Holaday was elected temporary speaker of the House. By the end of October, he was appointed deputy postmaster. 

Reverend Hiram Walker Read, on June 10, 1864, became Prescott’s first postmaster. During fall 1864, he learned that his wife, who was living in New York City, had died, and he departed Prescott almost immediately. 

Prior to leaving, Read appointed Holaday to be Prescott’s deputy postmaster and Read’s agent, per a notice appearing in the October 26, 1864, Arizona Miner. Holaday was the deputy postmaster from Oct 26, 1864, to May 17, 1865, when Read’s appointment ended. The December 17, 1864, Los Angeles Daily News reported that Holaday was in Los Angeles. By February 1865, he was back in Prescott running a boarding house as well as serving as the local postmaster. 

By Thomas McColloch
Prescott once had a railroad that ran right through town. The Santa Fe, Prescott & Phoenix Railway (SF, P&P) was completed in 1895 and provided freight and passenger service to help open the Arizona territory to development. The SF, P&P connected to the Santa Fe mainline at Ash Fork, ran south through Chino Valley and Prescott, then west to Hillside, turning south to Phoenix. The railroad served small towns along the route; transporting dry goods, mining equipment and produce. This route was nicknamed the “Peavine” because of the numerous curves required as the track followed mountainous terrain. At Chino Valley, an interchange with the narrow-gauge railroad that served Jerome was built. In 1898 a branch line was constructed to Mayer to serve the mines in that area. A passenger depot was constructed in Prescott in 1907 on Sheldon Street, with a rail yard for servicing steam locomotives. In 1912 a branch line was built to Clarkdale.

By Kristen Kauffman
Sharlot Madbridth Hall was a remarkable woman, championing women’s rights during the suffragette age as an essayist and poet, lobbyist, and in her work as Arizona’s first female territorial historian. At the risk of overstating, Hall left many lasting legacies, most notably the Sharlot Hall Museum, which opened June 11, 1928. 

Hall had always been a woman concerned with the preservation of history. As far back as 1907, she accumulated both relics from the ruins of Native American sites and the possessions of the territory’s first pioneers as they were passing away. Much of what she treasured of those early pioneers was non-material: Henry Fleury, a personal secretary for both Governor Goodwin and McCormick in the 1860s and one of the first residents of the Governor’s Mansion, was a pioneer who told stories which fascinated her.

Hall became the first territorial historian of Arizona in 1909, and it was in that work, which lasted for well over a decade, that she collected more artifacts and gathered more stories of the glory days of the wild west. She had her eye on saving the Governor’s Mansion. It was originally built at the location it resides today, but in 1895 its last occupant, Henry Fleury, passed away and it turned into a rental property. It was with Hall’s guidance that the State of Arizona purchased the Governor’s Mansion for $7,000 in 1917, and the deal was completed with the agreement that the City of Prescott would maintain it in perpetuity. Hall signed an agreement with the city in 1927 to move her extensive collection into the Mansion. She conducted extensive restoration on the mansion, attempting to bring it back, as close as possible, to its original state. These two tasks took her a year to complete. She also moved into the Governor’s Mansion as a full-time curator.

By Andrew Somerville
How much of modern bluegrass music would be familiar to early Prescott pioneers? Bluegrass is a modern style of stringed instrument music, but its main roots come from older Celtic music played by the settlers in Appalachia plus African-American traditions of gospel music, blues and the banjo. The genre also contains other smaller, but important, influences. 

Amber Johnson, who authored her master’s thesis titled “A Most Enjoyable Evening”: Music in Early Prescott and Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, ca. 1865-ca. 1890 for Arizona State University, points out that stringed instruments were available for purchase in Prescott by 1869, therefore the necessary stringed element of bluegrass was present in early Prescott. However, Johnson's thesis indicates Prescott’s town brass band and Fort Whipple's brass band were very influential in Prescott’s early 1860s’ music culture because of their involvement in balls, dances and other social events. 

By Marjory J. Sente
Born in Pine in 1907, Mary Isabelle Fuller Brown recalled that Arizona was only a Territory. “I was old enough to remember when Arizona was taken in as a state. I remember it was a great day for rejoicing when we got the word,” 

Isabelle, the third of four sisters followed by five brothers, could ride, rope and shoot as well as any cowboy. She initially rode bareback. Then her father fixed up a pack saddle with rope stirrups and a sheepskin thrown over the saddle, making her ride soft. “I must have been almost out of grade school before I ever sat on a saddle,” she said. 

Her family spent winters in Pine and summers at their ranch in Long Valley. When Isabelle was 12, she decided to learn to play the organ. So that summer she rode to Pine to take lessons. 
“I went by myself, 20 miles each way. Rode down one day, took my lesson, spent the night with one of my aunts, and rode back the next day,” adding that she never became a good organist, but enjoyed the ride.