Old Tucson…

It’s a rainy day at the RV Park today so a perfect day to write the blog.  A few days ago, Jim and Helene, friends from Castlegar who are visiting the Tucson area for the winter went with us to Old Tucson.  It was a perfect day to visit this famous tourist attraction as the weather was warm but not hot and it wasn’t crowded.

We got there just in time to hear part of the Traveling Medicine Show…a fellow trying to sell elixirs and potions to cure all your illnesses.  He was pretty entertaining in a slap-stick kind of way. 

We walked on through the town past the old schoolhouse which was very interesting.  I can’t imagine going to school in an old adobe building like this one but I guess some students did.

Further on down the road we came to The Grand Palace Hotel and Saloon.  Inside we watched a film tribute to Marion Morrison, aka, John Wayne.  If you are a western movie buff, you might recognize this hotel from some of those movies.  John Wayne was a very important part of the Old Tucson history.  At one point in his career he was looking for a location to make movies and offered to build more old time buildings in what was at that time only a small cluster of buildings.  He ended up making many movies here…Rio Bravo, McLintock, and many others. 

On a personal note, there has always been rumours in my family that John Wayne was related to us since our family name is Morrison…it’s possible...who am I to dispel a rumour so intriguing. 

Another landmark you might remember from cowboy movies is the Mission at Old Tucson.  It really is a neat looking building.  I remember this from the movie Three Amigos when they rode into what was supposed to be a Mexican village and met with the villagers in front of the Mission.

Many other tv shows were shot at Old Tucson…The High Chaparral, Big Valley and parts of many other shows like Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie were shot in Old Tucson.  Not only were there all sorts of buildings to wander through here, but also a museum of movie history.  The clothing belonging to many movie stars is displayed in this museum along with movie posters, newspaper clippings, stories and photos.  It was really interesting.  The clothing in this picture belongs to Hoss and Ben Cartwright.

We took a fun little train ride all around old Tucson…we were able to see all sorts of interesting sites from that vantage point.  There was an old still hidden out in the desert with great old jugs and bottles arranged around it.  A couple of covered wagons that looked like they were on their last legs…and the road to Rattlesnake Mine!

 
I can’t imagine travelling too far on a covered wagon like the one below but we all know that people lived in these while they rode or walked from one side of the country to the next.

 


 

The story that follows may or may not be true…the names have been eliminated to protect the innocent…of which there were none!

 

In the spirit of the old west, I now want to tell you a story about a crime of dangerous proportions committed in the year 1876.  A couple of murderous female outlaws robbed a bank at gunpoint!  To make their escape easy they had hitched two horses to a post outside the bank.   One of the horses, scared by gunfire, had gotten loose and galloped off down the road, so the shorter of the two robbers grabbed another horse from outside the saloon.  Unbeknownst to her, that horse was the sheriff’s favourite pinto pony.  The sheriff formed a posse immediately, tracked down the culprits and threw them both in jail.  As you can see from the picture, the shorter bank robber showed no remorse whatsoever!  This drove the Sheriff to take justice into his own hands and shoot the horse thief before they could bring her to trial.  The body was put on display as was the custom at the time.  One might say that this particular horse thief died with a smile on her face.  What became of the other bank robber, nobody knows.  It is known that she escaped the hangman’s noose at the last minute and fled through the desert.  Some say she ran all the way to Canada and worked at a College until she retired and began to travel.  In her travels it is said she would often visit Old Tucson and the scene of the crime committed all those years ago!

 

The End.

The Desert…Everything is Prickly!

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted a blog and thought it was time to get back to it!  We had a nice Christmas here at the RV park…it certainly isn’t like being home with family and friends, but still it was nice.  They had a few pot luck dinners, a gift exchange and a fun New Year’s Eve bash (of course us old folks celebrate midnight New York time so we didn’t have to stay up so late!!)  They New Year came in a bit chilly down here…our water hose froze one morning and we had to wait till we had water for showers.  That’s about the extent of the cold weather though…it’s warmed up now and is very nice. 

I’ve been doing a bit of painting lately.  They have a really nice room that they are going to turn into an art room here.  It’s large with wall to wall windows on two sides.  It has good light and though it’s not renovated for an art room yet, they let me go in there and paint.  They’ve also got a clay studio in the works with pot-throwing rooms built and a kiln being put in place.  It will be really nice when it’s done…they might even attract some art retreats or something.  Anyway, I started painting rocks.  We went for a drive through the mountains a while back and I was so taken by some of the rock formations that I decided to try it.  What I ended up with look more like river rocks or beach rocks but I’m fairly happy with them.  The process I used is was quite exciting to me (maybe not to anyone else but I was excited to see the results.) The sand was time consuming but worth it in the end.  I covered the rocks with contact paper and then splattered a liquid rubber substance called frisket on the paper.  After that was dry I painted a wash of gold over the sand area and let the painting dry.  Then I spattered darker gold and brown/black paint over the sand using a toothbrush.  When I was happy with the way it looked I uncovered the rocks and painted them.  Once I got the colours in place and while the paper was still wet, I put wax paper over the rocks.  When uncovered the wax paper left those markings on the rocks.  Pretty exciting!  I put in the shadows and the painting was done.  Photos never do artwork justice…these are not bad but the originals do look a bit nicer.

Yesterday Tom, Oso and I went for a drive out into the desert to retrace our steps of an adventure one night after dinner.  It was about six o’clock and we’d just finished dinner and I said to Tom “let’s take a drive because the sunset is so pretty”…well, two hours later we found ourselves in pitch darkness driving through the desert on a road that was pretty much a cow path.  I was worried we might not find pavement and our way home but we did, thank goodness.  Anyway, we wanted to see the desert in the daytime so packed up Oso and a picnic lunch and off we went.  It was actually a lot of fun.  We saw about six mule deer and found some “ruins” that were kind of neat.  There are two old homesites out there and both have been abandoned years ago.  Both were made with adobe bricks and the newer of the two had plaster walls and a wooden roof.  The newer one was at what I think was probably a cattle station years ago.  The corrals are still in use but the fences are definitely old style.  The main corral had walls about two feet thick made by stacking meskite wood in between the fence posts. 

As we walked around we found bottles of water hidden here and there.  I expect they are for mexicans traveling north through the desert to what they hope will be a better life.  I still can’t believe there are about 1000 people illegally  crossing the border each day from Mexico to the US in the area just south of us.  It seems unreal but those are the numbers quoted by officials and there sure are lots of border patrols around.  I find it difficult to know just how to feel about them coming into the country illegally.  I know the US can’t continue to support all of these people but I wonder if I might not do the same thing if I was unlucky enough to be born on the wrong side of the border.  These people come from such intense poverty that you can’t help but feel for them.  The drug smugglers however, should be caught and dealt with severely!

The desert here is brimming with cactus…everything from saguaro to occatilla.  There are barrel cactus, chollas and one roundish cactus called a compass cactus…it always points south.  Kind of interesting.  Everything in the desert, including the meskite trees, are prickly.  The bushes that look as if you could just brush them aside and walk through are covered with long thorns that sting when you get poked…I know from experience!  The chollas are quite interesting.  They have a wooden skeleton that is really cool looking once the flesh has died off of it.  There are lots of dead ones out there so we cut a few and cleaned them up…hopefully we can turn them into some sort of yard art.  Chollas are the ones on the previous page that look like trees with cactus growing where branches should be.  The one below that looks like a bouquet of flower stems is an occatilla.

I’ll leave you today with this picture of a huge grasshopper we saw one day when we drove out to a town called Patagonia.  He posed very nicely for me…I love the shadow he cast.