Arizona republican., 1921-07-17
The Wonder Valley
By William Atheyton Dn PMy

kCS tOSt L<W ~ Il| one bare leg .akimbo, its foot on his knee.
 They were but friendly and curious man children come to visit these strange people who had settled in the midst of their favorite rabbit drive. In the years that followed I went with them on many a hunt and learned to ride and shoot a bow and arrow as one of them.
 In these swaddling days of the Wonder Valley we lived through | many an experience typical of the times that are gone. We had. for in- stance, a neighbor whose name was | Dildy, one of those instinctive de- fiers of the law who had been hur- ried into the West by the authorities | My father owned a highly orna- mented. ivory handled six-shooter such as inspired pride in the breasts of quick-firing residents of the bord- | CT. Becoming utilitarian on his homestead he traded his revolver to Dildy for shot gun for use against the chicken hawks.
 So, when Dildy got into eontro- versy with another settler over a claim and shot and killed that set- tier with the ivory handled six shooter, we felt some degree of re- sponsibility That feeling, was in
 tensified when the sheriff's posse
 went for Dildy and fathers pistol snuffed out two more lives. Western justice found its mark when the out law, pursued into the mountains, was
 caught and hanged to cottonwood
 tree in the public square of Prescott.
 Even more gripping to me was the
 experience of Rollie Harris. a neigh bor boy who at times worked for us.
 Rollies was six or eight years older than I and of such physical strength and prowess as to elicit my ardent admiration. But at eighteen he be- came a horsetl.ief and died in his saddle in full flight-a proof of the craftsmanship of the early guardians of the W.
 For the fifteen years that followed, the Wonder Valley. and those who lived in 1t, fought that long series of | intense and tragic battles that ever | falls to the lot of the pioneer. These I blazers of trails had but a gossamer | connection with that civilization that l lay beyond the rim of hills of their
 horizon. Their little oasis was sur rounded by great stretches where
 nature planted naught that was not adorned with a thorn and watered | the IIdlD SO. lildQtQudtCi| tHt | bones of the stoutehearted, dead of l thirst. became it's milestones. People | who never knew entertainment, com 1 fort, proper clothes or food: who 1 fought abject poverty on their claims l "a poverty of the plain more desper- ate than that of any tenement-lived here and clung with stolidctenacity to their strips of green. The Wonder
 Valley began when John Swilling l threw a dam of brush across the l river and dug his ditch leading on to
 the plain. It was followed by. another and yet another ditch at higher and higher levels, each covering more
 land than it's predecessor. The rail- road finally came and the. communitN evolved into an ever widening gar den like unto Damascus, the oldest
 city in the world, also a child of
 water wed to the desert.
 But Salt River in the summer time
 when crops were thirstiest was but a
 ribbon drawn through the sand
 wastes and men fought for its limited waters and for lack of it many home . steads parched and died. Yet al
 times the rain fell on it's vast water shed and the torrent flowed four | miles wide and swept all before it. At such times the dams went out | and the farmers came with their | i Ito replace them and often lost their crops before the task was performed 3 For twenty years the Wonder Val , ley flung about like young man un- r able to find his life work and failed , of success. Its first love was that
 king of the open country. the beei steer grown on the range and fat f tened on the alfalfa fields which
 thrive perennially. Once planted , such a field. unplowed and unferti-
 lized. will yield seven crops of ha, y a year to the end of time if it bu get water.
 . But this. the Nile Valley of Ameri; T ca, the nook of the nation with tn, s long est growing season. the settlins . pot of the ages for the sediment. from the chaos of mountains rounC | about. was born for more intensiv, t, purposes than cattle raising.
 Men came and planted orang'
 groves and they throve as in sum, T Italy. Date trees from Arabia wer, ' brought to yield their succulent fruit The fig. of Smyrna the apricot. tn
 grape, here found home. Soon soIi, trainloads of cantaloupes and water a melons were hurrying to Chicago a u the very opening of the season. But over all hung the pail of an un O certain and inadequate water supply IL Then in the days of Roosevel n came benign government and sai' = to these experimental pioneers: w $ will give you your hearts desire g water for all your available acre: k perennial inexhaustible.
 hi The pioneer listened ana was skep