Augustine Chacon was one of the last of the hard-ridding desperados who rode the owl-hoot trail in Arizona around the turn of the century. Chacon was a resident of Sonora but did most of his mischief in Arizona, leading his gang on far flung forays of pillage and plunder. One time Chacon and his pistoleros robbed a stagecoach outside Phoenix. On another occasion they held up a casino in Jerome and killed four people.
Geologists like to say this vast land of dramatic salmon hued sandstone spires was once buried 3,000 feet beneath ancient seas. Over the next several million years, layer after layer of sediments were deposited, then hardened, followed by an uplifting of the land. It’s difficult to imagine, but the tops of these mountains and spires were, at one time, ground level. As the land continued to rise and the sea abated, the forces of wind, rain and time, or simply said, the rough hand of nature etched and sculpted the spectacular sandstone monoliths that we call Monument Valley.
Anthropologists generally agree that the people we call Navajo came to North America some 6,000 years ago over a land bridge on the Bering Strait. They go on to say these people drifted down from Canada and began to settle in Monument Valley about 500 years ago.
In a small park in Sacaton on the Gila River Indian Reservation, a bronze statue of a young man wearing a military uniform stands next to a bas-relief plaque affixed to a tiled wall. It is a replication of Ira Hayes. He was a U.S. Marine. And a reluctant hero. The plaque depicts six men raising a U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, a small island in the South Pacific, during World War II. Ira Hayes was one of the six men.
The moment was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, and when it was published in newspapers across America, it gave a war-weary nation a much-needed surge of hope and pride.
According to those who search for buried treasure in Arizona, there’s a fortune hidden beneath the floors of Tumacacori, the old mission near Tubac. The legends say that the church was once not only a place of worship, but also a mill and smelter for a gold and silver mining operation run by Jesuit missionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The prospectors’ hopes hinge on two scenarios. In one, the missionaries learned they were being exiled back to Spain so they loaded nearly 3,000 burros with precious metal, carried the treasure to the mine, then buried the entrance in the hope that they’d come back and retrieve it. But they were never allowed to leave Spain, so now an estimated $25 million in gold and silver may lie hidden beneath the sacred ground.
Most folks believe the art of pullin’ legs attached to tenderfeet began with the arrival of windjammin’ mountain men, prospectors and cowboys. But it seems that Arizonans have been tellin’ whoppers to newcomers much earlier.
Latter-day liars would be hard pressed to match the native raconteurs who greeted the Spanish explorers. Legends of golden cities provided the inspiration for the great Coronado Expedition into this area in 1540-42. The dashing Spaniard and his hard-riding conquistadores rode roughshod over the local natives in their quest for the mythical golden boulders of the madre del oro. Naturally, the natives quickly learned that the fastest way to rid their villages of the unwanted newcomers was to direct their search elsewhere.
