By Carolyn O'Bagby Davis

Born in 1885, Willard J. Page grew up on a small farm in Whiting, Kansas. He had a talent for art and was awarded a scholarship to study painting at the University of Kansas. After school, Page found work as a performing artist, traveling with the Redpath-Horner Lyceum and Chautauqua. At this time in America, the Chautauqua circuit brought culture and entertainment to thousands of people in small towns who may not normally have had access to nationally known speakers, lectures, musicians, showmen, artists and preachers.
 

By Heidi Osselaer

Wayne Brazel was catapulted to notoriety on February 29, 1908, when he walked into the Doña Ana sheriff’s office in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and announced, “Lock me up. . . . I’ve just killed Pat Garrett.” Prior to that moment, Brazel was a nondescript cowboy living in the Tularosa Basin in the southern part of the territory, but the man he killed, Sheriff Pat Garrett, had left his permanent mark on history in the summer of 1881 when he gunned down Billy the Kid.

By Shane Murphy

Today, John Hance is widely remembered as the Grand Canyon’s famous storyteller. Even President Theodore Roosevelt called him the “greatest liar on earth.” But he also built the first road to the Grand Canyon where he constructed the first trail to the river, becoming the Canyon’s first permanent white resident and tourism entrepreneur. Not so well known today, but certainly as industrious, energetic and witty, John’s 11-years-younger half-brother George Washington Hance was the acknowledged “informal mayor” of Camp Verde for nearly half a century. Both were the patriarchs of their respective communities.

By Brad Courtney

Anyone who has lived in Arizona knows that eventually two topics are bound to come up: the heat and drought. In the early summer of 1900, these two subjects were more than just talk. When summer rolls into the central highlands and forests of Arizona, dry spells come with it. In 1900, several years of drought preceded it. Water was obviously needed for drinking, plumbing, irrigation and watering plants and animals. It was also needed to extinguish fires if they occurred. There was not a surplus of this precious element available.

By Dave Lewis

In an era when people use DNA kits to trace their origins, consider this:  All of us, regardless of ancestry, are descendants of Neolithic cultures that made and used clay pottery. How many times you put  “Great” in front of “Grandma” or “Grandpa” to go far enough back to find a pottery-maker or pottery-user depends on your ancestors’ culture and on geography, but go back far enough and you find relatives shaping clay into bowls, cooking pots and storage jars (or using pottery in their daily lives). Pottery-making marks a major step in human progress.