Since 1870, when stories about the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains became a standard item in Arizona folklore, some 40 people have either disappeared or been found dead in and around the suspected location of the mine. The stories about the fabulously wealthy cache of gold supposedly hidden in the mountains are many and varied, but there’s always once constant — Weavers Needle.

Paula, an Arizona Oddities reader, recently inquired about the history and creation of Roosevelt Dam. While that’s quite a long story with several sides, we’ve done our best to summarize a few key points in a short blog post.

Whenever I have questions like this about Arizona history, I go to Arizona Oddities contributor and all-around-AZ-expert Marshall Trimble. I asked him for the story behind Roosevelt Dam, and this is what he told me:

Roosevelt Dam was the first major Reclamation Project in the West and was probably the most significant event in the entire history of the Salt River Valley because it provided a reservoir of life-giving water that would make it possible for people to live here. Up until then, the settlers would have to leave during times of drought.

Q: What happened to the SH Mountains? I can’t find them on any maps anymore.

A: Nothing happened to them. It’s not like they disappeared or something. It’s just that over the years they got renamed, and rightly so. They are now known as the Kofa Mountains, located about 70 miles northeast of Yuma.

The SH Mountains were so named back in the 1800s either by miners or soldiers who noticed that from a distance they resembled outhouses. I will leave it to you to figure out what SH stood for. Suffice it to say, it is not a word one would expect to read in this newspaper.

In the interest of delicacy, the SH range was also known over the years as the Short Horn or Stone House mountains until the mapmakers finally settled on Kofa.

Q: Why don’t palm trees blow down in strong wind as often as other trees do?

A: I thought this was going to be an easy one, and I was prepared to pad it out with a lot of cheap jokes about my masters.

Instead, it got kind of complicated, so I had to cut out the jokes, which is just as well because I would have had to explain them to my masters anyway.

This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots.

Kim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, went to some pains to explain the differences to me. He is a very patient man.