Two Arizona sites listed as oddities have fallen victim to wind, rain and fire.
The little church that Loren Pratt built to honor his late wife – the Mini Taj – was severely damaged by an Arizona thunderstorm. It stood in the open fields at Dome and welcomed visitors and curious passersby since 1996, but succumbed to the storm in early September. The winds tore the roof off and left only a couple of walls standing.
YUMA — This city is so proud of its sunshine that it has always been willing to be on it. According to the Guinness World Record book, Yuma is the sunniest place on earth, with bright skies prevailing an average of 4,055 hours out of a possible 4,456 hours every year. That’s 91 percent of the time. Or 350 days per year.
More than a century ago, Yuma hotels backed up the sunshine boast by offering free board to visitors every day the sun didn’t shine. Times have changed, but there are still freebies.
Bill Downing was one of the most disliked fellows in old Arizona. He was moody, morose, bad-tempered, sullen and surly. That was when he was sober. He got downright mean and ugly when he was drinking ol’ red-eye.
He was so unpopular that even members of his gang couldn’t stand him. It’s a historical fact that one time when Bill and several other members of the Alvord gang were languishing in the Tombstone jail on a train robbery charge, a crony broke in and freed the other outlaws but left Bill locked in his cell.
He was so bad that the only thing good one could say about him was he wasn’t as despicable sometimes as he was usually.
If I seem to have painted ol’ Bill with a jaundiced brush, it’s because he likely would have wanted it that way. If he had any good qualities history has mislaid them like some old lost gold mine.
One of the most colorful ladies who ever rode the old West was Sarah Bowman of Yuma. She didn’t fit the common frontier stereotype woman—calico dress, sunbonnet and a youngster hanging on each arm with another tugging at her skirt. In fact, there wasn’t anything common about Sarah. They called her the Great Western, after the biggest sailing ship of her day. Since she stood 6′ 2″ that didn’t seem to bother her; in fact, she liked the comparison.
The red-haired lady with blue eyes was a Southwestern legend in her own time. She could literally sweep men right off their feet (and did on more than one occasion). Because of her bravery during the Mexican War at the battle of Fort Texas, the soldiers affectionately dubbed her the American Maid of Orleans.
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.
