Mohave County miner and our mineral wealth., 1920-01-10
4 R IZO W 4


 before recent meeting of Thursda! Afternoon Club, on Arizona, will bea, repeating:
 ARIZONA
 l feel as Mrs. Warren and Mrs. De vine did that anything about Arizona will no more go into fifteen minutes than an oak tree will go into flow CT pot, so I am only going to take tht time to echo the sentiment of the mar who said:
 Thousands who to-day are toiline and moiling in the cramped-up life o1 the cities would speed, with joy un. speakable to the great wide, free open life of God in the mountains forests, plains, canyons, valleys ot Arizona if they but knew what they would find there"
 If they knew!
 How will they know if we more for tunate ones never tell them?
 Sometimes I think that we who are here in Arizona don't appreciate all We have, and it isn't a bad idea to considerable matter a few minutes for there are more misconceptions prevalent about Arizona than about any other region on the continent.
 When MT. Cowper said so many years ago that "man made the town, but God made the country" He did not know anything about California. The people there have made the country as we'll as the towns, and made wonderful one, and the people in Arizona are doing the same thing, with a god deal better material, in other words-"chopping a path to to- morrow from the land of yesterday"
 The unpleasant person who made that scornful remark that Arizona was the place where one could look farther and see less, where there were more rivers and less water and more cows and less milk than any other place in the world was very superficial observer and exceedingly limited in his intelligence.
 First, we are at the beginning of things,-we have everything before us. Our wonderful foundation is all solidly laid for us by the people who bore the hardships of the earliest days, but these are still early days, and there is plenty to do, and one of the things it seems to me is to let people who do not live here know a little more about it. They know that we have mines here, but when you tell them that we have ten national forests, comprising a gross area of approximately thirteen million acres { or six thousand square miles) that with irrigation four-fifths of the state is fitted for agriculture, raising ev- from alfalfa to yams", that our fruit ripens a full month in ad- vance of California products, they simply don't believe it.
 In this connection I want to give an abridged account of two visits of an Fastener to our state. He says "It wasn't much of a country, was Arizona the first time I set foot in it, a dozen years ago. A bowling wilderness was what the old Testa- ment would have called it, l suppose, and it wouldn't have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses and his Is- raelites could not have wandered through region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple mountains in the distance, and in cloudless sky, sun pit iless as fate. Cattlemen and sheep men still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro players still drove a roaring business in the mining camps and sowtowns; mems coats screened but did not altogether conceal the omnibus six shooter. AS building adobe and corrugated iron still predominated. In those days, and they were not so very long ago, if you please, ARIZONA spelled frontier with a capital F.
 recall little incident of that first visfs, insignificant enough in itself, but strangely prophetical of the changes which were to come. Rid ing across the most desolate and in country had ever seen, written notice, nailed over the door of ramshackle adobe ranch house standing solitary in the deser:, riveted my attention. The ill-formed letters, scrawled apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar, read:
 40 miles from wood
 40 miles from water
 40 feet from hell
 God bless our home!
 After a description of his visit to the rancher, he says: Recently, af- ter lapse of little more than a de- cade, I passed that way again. So mazing were the changes which had taken place in that brief interim, that just as my optimist rancher had I needed a 'econd intIo- duction to the land. Where had left a desert, arid, sun-baked, forbidding, I found fields where sleek cattle graz