Alden C. Hayes - A Portal to Paradise

My first visit to southeastern Arizona was brief. It was the middle of a cold December night in 1936 when, with two other fellows from Albuquerque, I drove south on Highway 80 up the San Simon Valley, heading for Bahia Kino. Somewhere between Apache and the Bernardino siding, we pulled off the road and climbed into the back of my 1928 Model A Ford delivery wagon to get a little sleep. We were on our way again before daylight, and I never saw a thing but the cars light on the road in front of me.

The next time was more memorable. In April 1941 my bride and I drove tandem into Granite Gap, she in an open roadster and I in a pickup truck with all our belongingsthey didnt fill it. She was in the lead and stopped just west of the top of the divide. She had been here before and wanted to show me the view. The valley that spread out below us was a golden sheet of Mexican poppies, and beyond loomed the dark wall of the Chiricahua Mountains. Gretchen pointed out the gash made by Cave Creek Canyon, our destination and future home. Her father had just bought an apple orchard in the canyons mouth and had asked us to help him farm it. The prospect of spending my life in such a setting was exciting. More than fifty years later the grandeur hasnt diminished, though seldom have the flowers again been so rambunctious.

At the entrance to the canyon, Portal was strung out under sycamores and live oaks on the floodplain of the creeks left bank. It boasted two emporiums: white-painted Newmans Store next to thebridge and, facing it a hundred yards away, Cave Creek Grocery in a small stuccoed adobe. A little farther up the creek was a two-room school, each room in a separate building, with twin two-holer privies back-to-back in the rear. There were thirteen residences. Most were wood-frame structures, but two were adobe, two were built of creek-bottom boulders, and one was a tent over a lumber frame.

There were four households just below Portal, six more on up the canyon, and a couple of bachelors lived on Silver Creek three miles west. Farther up that road in Paradise, there were six occupied houses and about as many between there and Whitetail Canyon. The people in that country of the Cave Creek and Turkey Creek drainages, along with Whitetail, made up a community that kept the one-teacher-eight-grades school going, voted on election day as a single precinct, buried its dead in Graveyard Canyon, and held frequent potluck picnics at Sunny Flat. Much of it gathered at about five in the afternoon to pick up the mail in Portal.

Both stores had gas pumps, carried groceries, horseshoes, and work gloves, and each had a kerosene barrel for lamp oil. Newmans had a beer license and an attached dance hall, while Cave Creek Grocery had the post office. It was a standoff. They were in direct and unfriendly competition, but most of the populace felt it wasnt good policy to take sides. Playing no favorites, most of us split our trade.

Both stores had benches flanking their doors where, around mail time, observations were made about the weather, news was shared, and old-timers told stories. I wish now that Id made more time for those stories. I always cocked an ear, and I often scribbled a note when I got back to the house, because here the real West was being revealed. Though most of the genuine trailblazers were gone, several of the local old folks were born in, or had moved early to, Arizona Territory. Most of them had come west from Texas and other points east to locate around here between 1900 and 1910too late to worry about Indians but early enough to become well acquainted with many who had.

Dignified, white-mustached, and eighty-one, Emmett Powers in white shirt, open vest, and flat-brimmed cattlemans Stetson lookedlike hed stepped off the set of a Tom Mix moviethe sheriff or the grandfather of the girl who had ridden into the sunset with the hero. Daddy Powers introduced me to George Franklin when I sat down next to them in front of Newmans Store. Mr. Franklin, looking like the namesake of Rustlers Park, with his hat plumb and level on his head and his shirt collar buttoned up to his Adams apple, sat with his left leg over his knee and his foot pulled tight against the right calf. His back was straight, and his pale blue eyes flickered briefly in my direction and then stared ahead over the top of Stuart Mountain at something I couldnt see. He didnt say anything, but I was sure he was thinking, This country has gone to hell, filling up with dude kids like this.

I was a dude all right, but not a city dude. Id spent some time in the hardwoods of the Kishwaukee River bottoms in Illinois and in the hemlocks and maples of Michigan when I was growing up. I had considerable skill with a canoe, could hit with an ax the spot I was looking at, and could hold up one end of a crosscut saw. Two of those skills were fairly useful in the Chiricahuas. Canoeing wasnt one of them. I had spent two or three months on a gentle horse, but I wasnt a horseman. I had put in a couple of summers picking fruit on a Michigan farm, but I couldnt hitch a team.

When we settled onto Sierra Linda Ranch, we had to hire Pete Domnguez to milk for us. He was a good teacher. I learned to milk and he lost his job. We got a little bunch of Rhode Island Red hens for fresh eggs, and I was amazed to learn that hens didnt need a rooster in attendance but could lay eggs without having been bred.

Blackie Stidham and Sam Moseley were patient with me and taught me to shoe my own horses. Sam denied being a farrier.

A farrier shapes a shoe to fit. I just sort of whittle at the hoof till it fits whatever shoe I can find, he told me.