by Parker Anderson

One of the best known outlaws in Arizona western history, and without question the least deserving of the notoriety, is the female stagecoach robber Pearl Hart. Her story has been told countless times, with very few versions that match each other.

According to interviews that Pearl herself gave, she was born in Ontario, Canada, and came to the American Southwest to flee an abusive husband. She moved around Colorado and other states, eventually winding up in southern Arizona, where she found work in various mining in and around Pinal County and Globe. It was 1899.

Pearl said that while in Globe, she received a telegram that alerted her to the fact that her mother was seriously ill, and that it would be advisable to come home. She did not have the money to make the trip, so after trying to raise funds by working a small mining claim owned by a male friend of hers, Joe Boot, she and Boot decided to rob the Globe to Florence stagecoach and split for Canada as fast as they could.

Later historians would deride these claims by Pearl without offering any proof of their falsity. Many after the fact accounts have contended that Pearl and Joe were bandits, or that they were partners in a brothel, or that Pearl was the leader of an outlaw gang, or, incredibly, that Pearl was a suffragette who robbed the stage to make a statement for women’s rights! None of these claims seem to have any documentation behind them, and this author has to wonder if Pearl’s own story might be the closest to the truth after all.

All that is known for certain is what happened next. As the Globe stage rounded a lonely bend, the two masked robbers fired their guns in the air and ordered the coach to stop. They robbed the passengers, but did not get very much. After the bandits had ridden off, the stagecoach driver reported the robbery in Florence. Even though Pearl was masked and wearing men’s clothes (unheard of for women in 1899), her figure gave her away as a woman. Pearl and Joe, inept as bandits, had not gotten very far when they were caught by the Pinal County Sheriff.

Even though it had just been a third-rate stagecoach robbery, unspectacular even by the criminal standards of the day, the Arizona newspapers had a feeding frenzy over the case. Contrary to what has been seen in latter-day western movies, there simply weren’t very many female bandits in America. The national press soon jumped on the bandwagon, and reporters were clamoring for interviews with the suddenly famous female stagecoach robber. Even the New York women’s magazine Cosmopolitan (then in its infancy, and much different than it is today) sought out an interview. Since Pearl remains a very prominent figure in pulp western magazines to this day, it can be safely said that the public’s fascination with her has never died.

Pearl Hart and Joe Boot were tried and convicted of the robbery, and sent to Yuma Territorial Prison. Contrary to a widely accepted myth, Pearl was not the only woman to do time in Yuma. However, the prison Warden liked the attention she brought to the prison, and accommodated her with a larger than usual cell as well as a few other perks. Joe Boot (whose only known name was almost certainly as alias) managed to escape from the prison in 1901, and was never recaptured or heard of again. It is likely he fled to Mexico and stayed there.

As for Pearl, the prison let her entertain visitors and reporters, and pose for pictures. She was eventually paroled in 1902, and for all intents and purposes, virtually disappeared after that. Some newspaper articles reported that she was planning to appear in a play based on her story, but this seems not to have materialized. I have read numerous, conflicting accounts of her fate, none of which seem to have any more documentation than the other stories of her life. The most popular legend of Pearl’s end contends that she later married a farmer in Pinal County and lived quietly under a different name until her death in the early 1950s, staunchly denying she was Pearl Hart. This may be true; it may not be. For those who want solid documentation for their history stories (and I am one of them), the exact date and location of Pearl Hart’s death is unknown.

On August 2-4 and 9-11 (call the Museum at 445-3122 or visit sharlot.org for exact times and ticket information), Sharlot Hall Museum’s Blue Rose Historical Theater is presenting LADY WITH A GUN, a play based on the story of Pearl Hart. In writing the script, I have tried to stay away from the countless bizarre legends that continue to be told about Pearl. I used as source material Pearl’s interview with Cosmopolitan, as well as some first-hand newspaper accounts of the story.

The story of Pearl Hart is interesting, and it should be remembered, but I find it undeserving of the legendary status it has obtained. At worst, Pearl was a poor soul who needed money and was desperate. Many historians disagree with me. Come to the play, and decide for yourself.

(Parker Anderson is an active member of Sharlot Hall Museum’s Blue Rose Historical Theater)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(t139p). Reuse only by permission.

Many after the fact accounts of Pearl Hart’s hold-up have contended that she and Joe Boot were bandits, or that she was a suffragette who robbed a stage to make a statement for women’s rights! This staged stage robbery is not Pearl Hart’s work, but it demonstrates our romantic notion of the Wild West, of which Hart was a part.

By Dr. Sandra Lynch

Early in the 1970s, the Forestry Department of Colorado State University teamed up with my department, Agricultural Economics, in a joint project with New Mexico State University. We compiled a feasibility study that recommended some Navajo and Ute Indians become Christmas tree farmers, thus providing a new industry using unemployed resources on the two reservations. The proposed development program was part of thinking by agricultural economists that a little fertilizer, improved irrigation, and massive inputs of capital would cure the miseries of poverty. Data were collected about planting distances, growth rates, soil, and rainfall. Tree species were plotted against market demand and transportation costs into key consumption areas. Seeding, planting, pruning, harvesting, and opportunity costs were factored against a ten-year history of Christmas tree prices in twelve markets. Private and public investment sources willing to invest in such a venture were found.

A thousand-page treatise with graphs, simulated econometric profit models, and recommendations was sent to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Presentations were made before the Navajo and Ute tribal councils. The extension service was commended, a couple of graduate students received master’s degrees, and a few professors were advanced to tenure. Ten years after publication, no Christmas trees grew on American Indian lands.

The little detail omitted from the beginning was the question: "Could Navajo and Ute Indians become Christmas tree farmers?" None of the economists considered the question: "What is possible with these people?" The Navajo economy has not responded well to delayed gratification (future profit) schemes. Among Utes, where so many government-inspired projects have been started and abandoned, there was little enthusiasm to plant trees.

Herein lies the distinction between the science of economics and the work of economic anthropology. Navajos and Utes did want the jobs and money the Christmas tree enterprise would bring to their reservations. The project stalled because it was not the task of economists to pursue a number of important questions such as: Who would be the farmers? How would their tribe choose them? Which Indian families living on the land would the trees displace? One of the most important questions was: How long will the BIA support this program when tribal and national elections change and upset Indian policy every four to eight years? All of these questions were embedded in the social and political institutions of the tribes and the federal government.

My recent dissertation, Chasing Midas’s Moccasins, is about American Indian artists and their relations with the market institutions surrounding their careers. It is an anthropological study attempting to find out how this part of the human world works. As anthropology, the study looks at how people respond to challenges posed by the environment-both natural and human-and how solutions are negotiated. The advantage American Indian art, as enterprise, has had over Christmas trees is this-it is a business embedded in the social fabric of southwestern Indian tribes. It also has more than a hundred-year history of being embedded in the national economy. That is why there is American Indian art virtually everywhere-but no Indian Christmas trees.

There are those who might say native art was carefully cultivated as both art form and industry by Anglo-Americans who had capitalistic as well as humanitarian reasons to improve the economies and lives of American Indians. The trading-post operator encouraged Navajo weavers to turn poor blankets into Arabesque rug designs to please the tastes of eastern American collectors. Wives of government officials encouraged use of native dyes to soften the appearance of foreign patterns. Dorothy Dunn’s art deco tastes promoted the Bambi School of two-dimensional drawing. All of these influences created an American Indian art history-or tradition.

What has often been overlooked is the fact that white social workers and technical instructors were not at the station when the first train pulled into Gallup. When the trains pulled into the station, brown hands offered upward the first tiny pot. No white Indian-art trader stood over the potter who made the first matched pair of Wee Willie Winkie candlestick holders copied from a book of Mother Goose rhymes. It was Indian enterprise that opened the church relief package and found the child’s book and grasped a market potential. Invisible Indian industry was hidden against the dry southwestern desert. The workshop was the adobe or stone house-block or hogan, and production came off the kitchen table, a tree-hung loom, or tree stump.

Indians saw and understood the opportunity and it fitted their technology, circumstances, and cultural heritage. Native arts improved by the standards of art historians and critics. The art improved because the Indian producer was motivated to receive better wages for his or her time across the kitchen table. Some artisans rediscovered their history in the shards and murals of Awatovi because there was a premium market price for art that looked different from others. Stimulated young craftsmen listened to the stories and songs of the elders so they would have stories to tell the buyers: the little extra that came with the art piece making it more interesting, more endearing to the buyer. That is not to say there were no cultural meanings embedded in artistic expression-only to say the story had market value beyond the native community. Anglos called the process of reproducing Awatovi pottery a "revival." Indians came to see it as an "identity" or "trademark" of their family or community-one they would eventually defend against other tribes, or other international suppliers.

Art was infinitely more profitable for the spirit than woodshop and domestic art schools. For some, art was infinitely more profitable than the wage work offered in the new cities or industries around the reservations. For one thing, art had almost no entry cost in terms of training or capital. The product had ample markets for the quickly done as well as the exceptionally made ones. It was no accident which native arts survived. American Indian art grew up along the major tourist railroads and highways. Where these arteries did not run, arts died. Western Apache and Yavapai weavers ceased their search for devil’s claw and willow. The nickel a day they earned cleaning Phoenix houses provided a higher return than the few dollars paid for baskets that required a year to complete.

Much of the literature about American Indian art history has a tendency to cast Indians as victims of a Euro-American market. The "victim syndrome" paints Indian artists in two dimensions: not clever and without agency. This thinking has ignored any intelligence natives brought to their own production. Indian artists adapted to the market as keenly as they had to natural environmental constraints such as drought and scarce resources. Hopi-Tewa potters understood the criterion of scarcity, and produced just enough wares to be short of demand.

It is coldly calculating to look at art in terms of economics, but economic studies have value not to be underestimated. Economics may even be as useful as studying rules of composition, content, design, and cultural expression, although the measures are expressed in terms such as price, demand, and product differentiation. Since price is not related to cost, the only determinant is demand. "Art," said economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner, "is the ultimate consumer good."

American Indian art is particularly fascinating because of its historical context, its legislatively defined ethnicity, and its ongoing controversies that arise from its embedded nature within the social institutions of both Indian and white cultures.

(Dr. Sandra Lynch is the Curator of Anthropology at the Sharlot Hall Museum)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(inn803pa). Reuse only by permission.

Indians artists saw and understood their opportunity and it fit their technology, circumstances, and cultural heritage. Native arts improved by the standards of art historians and critics. The art improved because the Indian producer was motivated to receive better wages for his or her time across the kitchen table. To see and purchase some fine examples of Indian Art, the Prescott Indian Art Market continues today at the Sharlot Hall Museum from 10-4.

She-DISK-ie, Che-DIS- kie, or CHED-is-KAI fire’s historic names

By Nancy Wright

Recently we’ve been hearing about the "She-DISK-y" wildfire. Radio and TV commentators new to the Southwest, and even those who’ve been here a long time, had not heard of this remote spot in Arizona until a devastating wild fire broke out there in June. Their guesses at pronunciation were sometimes wild and funny. Just as newly arrived newscasters have usually said "Mongolian" when talking about Arizona’s Mogollon Rim Country. Of course most of us forgive them because we also mispronounced these words (if we pronounced them at all) when we first came to Arizona.

Consulting Will C. Barnes’ Arizona Place Names, we find that the Mogollon Rim, pronounced, "Mug-ee-yown" may have been "named for Don Juan Ignacio Flores de Mogollon, Captain General of New Mexico, 1712 -1715." Barnes also notes that the word mogollon means "hanger-on, a parasite" in Spanish. Could the mistletoe in the junipers across middle Arizona have anything to do with the name Mogollon? At any rate, the massive Mogollon Rim which separates our state, north and south, is a two hundred mile escarpment which starts with the Grand Wash Cliffs in the west and slants in a southeasterly direction, clear across the state into New Mexico. In Arizona, it defines the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau

Byrd Granger, in Arizona’s Names; X Marks the Place, (her 1983 revision of Barnes’ book) spends considerable space trying to clarify the origin of the names in this region. She begins with Father Garces, who in the journal of his 1775 expedition, referred to the Sierra de Mogollon. Granger is amused at Frederick Dellenbaugh, the painter who had accompanied John Wesley Powell on his second voyage down the Colorado River a hundred years later. "Dellenbaugh," she notes, "apparently had more ability to write than to see, described the Mogollon Buttes as "swimming like ocean birds in the blue of the pure Arizona atmosphere . . ." On early maps the White Mountains, which we heard about so much during the Rodeo and Chediski wild fires, are actually an extension of the Mogollon Rim.

Most apropos of all, Granger closes this entry with, "Cowboys casually call The Rim by a name which might well apply to this entire entry: Muggy yawn." Enough said.

Now, back to Chediski. This Apache name for a small mountain on the Fort Apache Reservation means "long white rock." Barnes didn’t try for a pronunciation, but later editions of Arizona Place Names give a phonetic pronunciation which comes close to "tzedez-k’ay" So those who say CHE-dis-KI are closest to the original.

What about other place names on the Rim? Everybody knows that Show Low was named by the turn of a card. And some newscasters mentioned that Heber and Overgaard were named for Mormon pioneers.

Apparently Overgaard was not even there when Barnes’ book of place names was published in 1935. However, Granger’s 1983 edition says, "This location was named for the Overgaard family. Christ Overgaard served as postmaster in 1939."

Heber does have Mormon beginnings. First settled in the 1880′s by Mormon emigrants from Arkansas. Granger gives two possible sources for the name: either Heber C. Kimball, Chief Justice of the State of Deseret, or, according to a second source, for Heber J. Grant, President of the Mormon Church.

Eagar, the evacuation center which was so much in the news, was named not because it was enthusiastic, but for the three Mormon Eagar brothers who settled there.

The other evacuation center, Payson, was founded as Union Park, locally called Green Valley and eventually named after Senator Louis E. Payson, Chairman of the Congressional Committee on Post Offices, who helped establish the post office there.

Clay Springs was named for a clay tank and such names as Pine, Pinedale, Timberline, Forest Lakes, and Lakeside are self-explanatory.

Pinetop was first named Penrod for the Mormon family who settled there and still lives there. However, the soldiers at Fort Apache who frequented the saloon called the place Pinetop, which was their nickname for a saloonkeeper. The town is in the pines, near the top of the mountains, so Pinetop became its accepted name.

Place names certainly are intriguing–bet you can’t look up just one.

(Nancy Kirkpatrick Wright, retired librarian from Yavapai College, is active in Prescott Art Docents and Sharlot Hall Museum. She enjoys investigating the historic confluences of the arts and sciences.)

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb029a9n1). Reuse only by permission.

At the far right of this image one can see visitors enjoying the view of the Mogollon Rim county in 1903. The story behind the place names that have been appearing in the news with the Rodeo-Chediski the last two weeks have history reaching back to Mormon settlers, the Spanish explorers and possibly earlier.