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.
On a hot afternoon in 1849 not far from the Yuma River Crossing, a small party of Army Topographical Engineers came upon a young Indian girl wandering in the desert. She was nearly dead from exposure, hunger and thirst. Many would have left the youngster to her fate. It was a tough, unforgiving land where the strong survived and the weak perished.
The officer in charge was a kind, thoughtful man from Massachusetts, named Amiel Weeks Whipple. He’d only been in the Southwest a short time but had already developed a deep respect for the customs and culture of the native residents.
Whipple shared his canteen with the youngster, then gave her some food. Before she departed he presented her with a small mirror—a simple token of friendship and also something any young lady would surely cherish. She smiled and left to return to her people. Lieutenant Whipple went back to his job—that of surveying a boundary between Yuma and San Diego, marking the new land won in the recent war with Mexico.
It’s not as big as the Taj Mahal in India, but a little church in the desert north of Yuma was also built for the same reason — in memory of one man’s beloved companion. The Taj was erected between 1632 and 1654 near Agra, India, as a mausoleum for Mumtaz-I-Mahal, a favorite wife of Mogul emperor Shah Jahan. It stands about 330 feet tall at its highest points and features a massive double dome sitting atop a 260-foot pinnacle. An estimated 20,000 men worked on the project.
Yuma area farmer Loren Pratt’s tribute to his late wife, Lois, is a tiny wooden chapel that sits on a flat spot in the middle of his cotton and lettuce fields. The building stands about 15 feet tall and can seat six to eight people. With the help of friends and relatives, Pratt constructed it in a few months in 1966.
Most communities adorn their water towers and tanks with either the town’s name or first initial, but in Yuma they opted for something more artistic — a giant tryptich that spreads across the city’s three huge water tanks. The city council received gallons of flak when it approved the $50,000 project in 1999, but the criticism died down a year later when the work received an award from the Governor’s Pride in Arizona Committee.
