| JAN CLEERE Author & Freelance Writer |
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Amazing Girls of Arizona: True Stories of Young Pioneers by Jan Cleere Publisher: The Globe Pequot Press ISBN:978-0-7627-4135-9 $12.95 ORDER NOW |
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In 1851, thirteen-year-old Olive Oatman and her eight-year-old sister Mary Ann were
abducted by Indians after their family was massacred along the banks of the Gila River
deep within Arizona Territory. The girls survived a year in captivity with an unknown
tribe who beat and starved them before selling them off to a party of Mohaves who lived
along the swift-flowing Colorado River. Although the Mohaves treated them humanely,
Mary Ann died, probably from starvation. Believing she would remain with the Mohaves
the rest of her life, Olive wore their clothing and learned their language, customs, and
beliefs. In 1857, the Mohaves traded Olive for a horse and turned her over to
authorities at Fort Yuma where she discovered her brother had survived the massacre
of her family she had witnessed five years before. For the rest of her life, Olive bore the
tattoo marks the Mohaves embedded into her chin and arms.
As a child, Atanacia Santa Cruz lived just outside the walls of the Mexican presidio of
Tucson. Orphaned by the time she was eight-years-old, the remnants of her family
chose to stay in Tucson rather than return to Mexico in 1854 after the Gadsden
Purchase placed the dusty, desolate town within United States territory. Atanacia
received no formal education since there were no schools in Tucson during her
childhood. However, the little girl mastered both English and Spanish, and was known
to sew the finest seam in town. She was still a child when Confederate troops marched
into town. She then watched as Union soldiers usurped the fleeing Southern army. At
the age of eleven, she married twenty-nine-year-old Sam Hughes, considered one of
the founding fathers of Tucson. During Indian uprisings, Atanacia made bullets in her
parlor to help defend her home and the people of early Tucson.
Born with one leg four inches shorter than the other, Laurette Lovell compensated her
lack of mobility by painting her way to fame. In 1882, the thirteen-year-old artist moved
with her parents from California to Tucson where Laurette found a new source of
inspiration in the ollas, or clay pots, crafted by the Tohono O’odham people. Each pot
she painted contained intricate scenes of ancient ruins and missions, Apache warriors,
Indian women cradling their children, detailed desert scenery. She presented one of
her beautifully decorated ollas to General Nelson A. Miles in reward for his part in the
surrender of the Apache warrior Geronimo. Laurette also painted designs on fine china
and drafted drawings for wallpaper. Her work is scattered across the country but much
of it resides in the archives of the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Tucson.
Annie Box, born on the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma Territory, traveled with her
parents to Tucson sometime between 1876 and 1879. The trip was rife with hardships,
fear, and uneasiness as the threat of Indian attacks kept fires at bay when evening
chills crept into their camp. Water was in scant supply as the family struggled with
chains and ropes to pull wagons up steep inclines. Annie’s ancestry was a mixture of
Caucasian, African-American, and Cherokee. Attending St. Joseph Academy in
Tucson, she acquired a taste for cooking, a love of dancing and music, and a talent for
riding high-spirited horses. Before she fell ill and had to leave school at the age of
fourteen, she wrote several musical interludes including one poignant piece entitled
“Oklahoma March,” maybe reminiscent of the hard journey she endured along the trail
from Oklahoma to Tucson.
As Edith Stratton’s birth approached, her father sought out the doctor but found the
physician drunk and playing cards in the back room of a saloon. Fortunately, Edith
survived without the doctor’s tender mercies but later nearly succumbed when her
mother laid her down on a saloon bench and someone almost sat on her. The family
home in Florence, Arizona, consisted of a lean-to with two rooms, a floor about eight
inches below ground, and a ceiling made of cloth. Later, the family homesteaded on the
Pandora Ranch near the town of Oracle, initially subsisting in a dugout burrowed into
the side of a hill. Everything was made of dirt: walls, floor, roof. From an early age,
Edith wrangled horses and cattle, rode bucking calves, and tracked branded livestock
before sending them to slaughter. She learned to shoot before she was ten-years-old,
and once tried to outrun raging floodwaters careening out of rain-soaked mountains.
Millie Back was born in the Verde Valley in the heart of Indian and outlaw territory. The
oldest of seven children, she was responsible for the care of her siblings on the family’s
Montezuma Wells Ranch, a centuries-old watering hole. When her uncle fell ill before
he could deliver the proceeds of a cattle sale to his neighbors, little Millie saddled up,
pinned $5000 inside her skirt, and took off for Oak Creek to pay off the cattlemen.
Stopping to water her horse, she warily watched as a group of men camping nearby
approached. The little girl quickly assessed the situation, grabbed her horse’s reins,
and hightailed it away from certain danger. She escaped with her life for the men at the
creek were horse thieves with a posse hot on their trail.
Three-and-a-half-year-old Edith Bass took the reins of her horse and headed down the
steep incline into the depths of the Grand Canyon. At the age of nine, she and her
brother regularly brought up horses from the bottom of the Canyon to the rim, assisting
their father with a new venture–showing tourists the delights of the Canyon. Edith held
no fear of the majestic gorge and learned all aspects of the tourist industry including
wrangling mules as efficiently as the most proficient cowboy. She is considered the
Grand Canyon’s first female wrangler. Supposedly possessing physic abilities—finding
lost objects and anticipating the arrival of guests—she was unable to predict her
untimely death at the age of twenty-eight.
Eight-year-old Dowawisnima and her family were forced from their Hopi home in Oraibi
in 1906 when conflicts arose between Hopi “Friendlies,” those supporting white ideas,
and the “Hostiles,” who preferred to raise their children at home without assimilation
into white society. After her father was jailed for hiding her from authorities,
Dowawisnima was forced to attend white boarding schools where she acquired the
name Helen. Education opened up amazing vistas for Helen, so much that at one point
she asked school authorities to lie to her parents so she could remain in school rather
than return to the reservation. She attended Phoenix Indian School where she was
subjected to racial strife and constant turmoil among children from differing tribes, plus
harsh treatment at the hands of white school administrators. Helen became a guiding
force for her people, lighting the way for them to excel while remaining true to their own
culture.
Arivaca Valley is only a short distance from the Mexican border and the Wilbur Ranch
jumps back and forth across the boundary as blissfully as a skipping rock tossed into
nearby Arivaca Creek. By the time she was five years old, Eva was branding cattle
alongside her father and grandfather. At the age of ten, her father put her in complete
charge of the ranch when he was away on business. He was a strict disciplinarian and
when she failed to gain the respect of rowdy ranch hands, her father chastised the little
girl for her lack of management. Day after day, Eva rode out to check on the Wilbur
cattle, clean out watering holes, round up strays. She was as untamed as the land and
her sensory skills were as keen as the hawks she sang to and the prairie dogs she fed
by hand. When sent away to school, she reacted like a corralled wild horse: skittish,
trusting no one. She valued the customs and traditions she learned from her Mexican
mother, Anglo father, and the Tohono O’odham children who were her first playmates.
She was a girl of the earth, wind, and sky, unable to relate to the rest of the world.
The girls of summer came from across Arizona and took the town of Phoenix by storm
in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, bringing home numerous softball championship titles,
including the first national championship of any Arizona athletic team, men or women.
Girls as young as eleven-year-old Dottie Wilkinson and thirteen-year-old Billie Harris
played for the PBSW Ramblers, while fourteen-year-old Charlotte “Skippy” Armstrong
and seventeen-year-old Rose Perica suited up with the A-1 Queens. After her stint
playing softball, Rose Perica (Mofford) rose through Arizona's political ranks to become
the state's first woman governor. The rivalry between the two teams heated up every
summer as quickly and as intensely as the desert temperatures.
In 1942, six-year-old Ruth Okimoto waited in line eagerly anticipating her first day of
school. But when the doors of the schoolhouse opened at the internment camp in
Poston, Arizona, nothing greeted her but a vast empty space. There were no desks, no
chairs, no paper and pencils, and absolutely no books. For three years, Ruth and her
family, along with about 20,000 other Japanese Americans, lived at Poston Internment
Camp in the middle of the torrid Arizona desert, victims of hate and prejudice after the
Japanese nation attacked Pearl Harbor at the beginning of World War II. She stood in
line to bathe, to eat, even to use the bathroom. Ever resourceful, Ruth learned to pull
apart little cotton balls to make yarn, and made pets of the poisonous scorpions that
scurried throughout the hastily built, drafty barracks. Ruth would later paint a portrait of
herself as a little girl standing behind barbed wire clutching her doll whose mouth is
silenced by the American flag.
| Olive Ann Oatman (Fairchild) 1837-1903 Indian Captive |
| Atanacia Santa Cruz (Hughes) 1850 – 1934 Child of History |
| Laurette Lovell (Francis) 1869 - 1936 Desert Artist |
| Anna Magdalene Box (Neal) 1870-1950 Mixed Blood |
| Edith Stratton (Kitt) 1878 – 1968 Pandora Rancher |
| Mildred Back (Fain) 1879 – 1967 The Ride of Her Life |
| Edith Bass (Lauzon) 1896-1924 Grand Canyon Wrangler |
| Dowawisnima “Helen” (Sekaquaptewa) 1898-1990 "My Hands Were Never Still" |
| Eva Antonia Wilbur (Cruce) 1904 – 1998 Listen to the Silence |
| The Girls of Summer 1933 - Present "Play Ball!" |
| Ruth Okimoto (Lipofsky) 1936 – Present No Play to Call Home |
| An important resource for western history students and aficionados. |