Arizona republican., 1909-02-18
Timely Subject For Serious Consideration.
  LEGISLATURE SHOULD ACT
Sharlot M. Hall Contributes the Following Article on What an Arizona State Mu- scum Might Be--Opportu- mites Fast Disappearing.

Something like fifty years ago
 when Richard Mccormick was secre-
 tary of Arizona he organized a terri
 torial historical society looking to
 the preservation of historical data
 and relics and objects of historical
 interest and value. Governor Mo
 COrmick, as he later became, realized
 the great importance of preserving
 the record of the new state while the
 story was still fresh in the minds of
 its founders, and of safe guarding its
 historical and ethnological relics be- fore they were scattered beyond re-
 call; but though appropriations of
 public money have been made from time to time, up to the present no adequate provision has ever been made for gathering such records and
 objects. or for taking proper care of them after they were gathered. and while Arizona has been the rich field from which every American museum and many foreign museums have
 drawn large collections of the greatest human interest and considerable money value, she has not herself one moderately representative collection.
 For many years the prehistoric ruins of Arizona were located systematically by unscientific relic hunters who sold their find to whatever source offered the most money, and who, in their reckless search, dynamited and other wise destroyed some of the most in- teresting cliff and cave houses in the southwest and gutted prehistoric graveya-ds to furnish wares for the shelves of any curio dealer who chose to buy. In one valley noted for hay ing the most perfect type of excavat- ed cliff village in the United States, it was the Sunday pastime of the young people to picnic at the ruin, dig over the graves for whatever might be found, and cave in the dwellings with powder or otherwise
 This careless or greedy destruction was only stopped by the United States law forbidding any disturbance of a prehistoric ruin without a per init. Some of our people have mis- understood and resented this law, not realizing that it was designed to pro tect our ethnological field from care less and dishonest relic dealers. A few years before the law was passed a collector for a foreign government shipped out of Arizona a collection the money value of which would have come near to paying for our territo- rial capitol building. Enough objects of definite money value have been | sent out of Arizona in the past forty l years to have built and maintained a | very respectable state museum. The i collections of some importance and i value that still remain in Arizona | are here by accident and good luck | and the few sections not gleaned of | their richest harvest by collectors | from the outside are safe only be- | cause they are remote and known to only a few people.
 It is not only our relics of Arizona's | prehistoric people that have been lost. 1 We have let the valuable relics of | our pioneer days slip away from us forever; we have made no sufficient | or systematic effort to gather or pre- serve the record of our own early history, and what is now available to us has been collected privately and the most valuable records are owned outside of Arizona and can never be returned to us. Each year sees some little collection scattered forever by the death of the last member of some pioneer family, and objects of price less historical value go to the hands of strangers or are destroyed. In the past two years we have lost more such things than ever before, and largely because we had no place to house these scattering collections and no competent person to care for them
 But since we have lost so much that is beyond recall, what can we do? What beginning might we hope