Feb. 6-7
Wednesday we went to the Presidio San Agustin del Tucson Museum.
This is a reconstruction of the fort where Tucson got its start in 1775. The town was kind of laid back at the beginning.
Money to fortify the place was mismanaged. So there was only a small wooden stockade for a time.
The locals decided to get serious after a determined Apache raid in 1782. They built high walls and blockhouses, and put several cannons in.
The last part of the old Presidio, or fort, was torn down in 1918 to make way for a parking lot. Now the parking lot is gone and the Presidio is back. Well, a partial replacement is back.
It would have been destructive to rebuild the whole thing. Part of the Presidio grounds are occupied by another relic historic in its own right, an adobe house built in the 1840s. That now has museum exhibits about the history of the place.
One of the rooms of the old house seems to have a packed dirt floor.
The area around Tucson has been occupied for millennia. When the site was studied for the rebuild, researchers found the remnants of an ancient Indian pole house. The find is preserved under a shed roof.
The post holes have been emptied and form a ring maybe a dozen feet across. Remains of a fire site are in the middle of the ring.
The courtyard of the replacement Presidio includes a soldier’s dwelling, a large mural of life in the old Spanish West, an oven, and lots of plants, many species imported from Europe, that were grown in the area in colonial times.
We drove downtown from the fort and had only gone a little way when we came to a large colonnaded building with a blue tiled dome. First I thought it was a church.
When we came out of the underground parking garage, the elevator opened onto a park behind the same building. It can’t be a church; there’s no cross on the dome.
It’s the former Pima County Courthouse, now under renovation to become part museum and part office space. It was built in the 1920s to look like a Spanish palacio.
The Spanish colonial look was very popular then. I don’t know why. Maybe it was an influence of early movies. In any event, there are several houses built in that style as far north and east as Montclair, N.J.
But this was no mere house. It may have been modeled after a wing of the Escorial, but of course, I can’t be sure of that.
For dinner later we went to a restaurant called Scordato’s for pizza.
They had Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and a Ruffino Chianti on the menu. It had been a long time since I was able to get either one. So I had both.
Thursday was another good day.
We took state highways most of the way to Scottsdale.
Arizona 79 North was like a gold strike.
For people from the East Coast, the Great Sonoran Desert is clearly a misplaced section of another planet. As far as you can see the sand is covered by saguaros, prickly pears, barrel cacti, creosote bushes. mesquite trees, and lots more I can’t name.
Then there’s Tom Mix Wash. Yes, this is the highway where he crashed his car through the construction barrier to land in a dry creek bed.
He died by luggage. A suitcase behind the driver’s seat sailed forward on impact and broke his neck.
I’ve read that story many times without ever expecting to be on the actual spot where it happened.
We stopped about a quarter mile farther along the highway to take snapshots of the Tom Mix Monument. It has much the same feel as the Carranza crash site in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Lonely, curious, largely forgotten, but maybe significant.
I walked down the highway and got a shot of the wash itself.
A little farther along we came to Florence, Arizona, and saw signs for Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.
As the previous few paragraphs indicate, I’m a sucker for monuments of all kinds. And this one was in ruins, too. Does it get better than that?
So we turned left off our route and went in search of Casa Grande.
It was easy enough to find. There just aren’t all that many roads to confuse you out here. The grounds of the monument are on a corner, and the entrance is across from Wal-Mart.
We stopped in the museum and found that Casa Grande isn’t the remains of an early hacienda, but instead is part of another vast settled community of Mississippian mound-builders.
We came outside just as a ranger was beginning a tour, so we tagged along.
The Big House itself is a two-story adobe structure with several windows that align with astronomical phenomena—the solstices and equinoxes that guide planting.
It is under the protection of a huge metal canopy that also houses roosting barn owls
Near it is a labyrinth of low walls, the exposed tops of houses and other buildings. The lower part of the walls are buried for protection from the elements. The exposed parts have to be replastered every year with new adobe to keep them from dissolving away.
The Casa Grande is dated to the 13th century A.D. Structures that are evidently much older are also still there. One of them is a ball court, one of the oldest features in the ruins. Similar ball courts are found at Maya sites in Central America.
The people dug large canals to carry water, and the dwellings covered a larger area than originally thought. Before the Wal-Mart could be built, the ground had to undergo an archaeological examination.
The study identified remains of an early form of Indian habitation at the site, so the store had to be built farther back from the highway than originally planned.
The last leg of the ride was a treat for me because I used to watch all the 1950s Western shows on television. Several of them involved a legend of the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona.
Oh, how I wanted to go to those mountains and find the lost mine.
The road into Phoenix is U.S. 60, which we picked up a short way past Florence. It is also called the Superstition Freeway. There’s even a Lost Dutchman State Park just off the highway.
I know the gold isn’t in the park because the mine is still lost. I was checking out the mountains as we drove down the road. I didn’t see any gold there, so I know the mine must be on the other side of the hills.
I’ll look there next time.
We made it to Howard Johnson Scottsdale Old Town in the afternoon.
Scottsdale is a very interesting place.
A Google search found plenty of places to eat within walking distance of the hotel.
We went to Rehab Burger Therapy.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Pattie’s for a beer.
We were at a table when a guy in a bride dress and two loaded friends step up. One of them says his friend “is going through a difficult transition.”
If this was working up to a punchline we didn’t get to hear it. The guys were called to the next table. I couldn’t hear everything they said there.
At one point, though, the bride was mooned by a woman who stood up from the table to do it. And then the bride mooned her back.
As I said, Scottsdale is a very interesting place.
Here’s wishing you great days and interesting places.
Good night all.
Harry
Feb. 10
Living in NM, these discoveries are almost everyday occurrences. It's sad & shameful that so much of the history of the indigenous peoples was cruelly obliterated by Europeans ... often with the connivance of us Anglos.
JackT
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