Clifton News

>>> A Voyage Long and Strange Rediscovering the New World By Tony Horwitz Henry Holt and Co. / 445 pages / $27.50 In Clifton, Ariz., an old mining town, Walter Mares, the editor of The Copper Era, sometimes dons a conquistador's helmet and talks to school kids about Francisco Coronado. 'Who are you supposed to be - Columbus?' they ask. 'They have no idea about their own history,' Mares concluded. Descended from Spanish colonists who followed Coronado, he dismisses the Pilgrims as 'boat people, Johnny-come-latelies.' On Thanksgiving, Americans 'should be eating chili, not turkey.' Despite an expensive education at an elite university - as a history major - Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Confederates in the Attic, discovered on a chance visit to Plymouth, Mass., that he, too, 'had a third-grader's grasp of early America.' He decided to do something about it. Horwitz gave himself a crash course in North American history and archaeology. Since, like John Smith, the savior of the Jamestown Colony, he preferred to 'beleeve my own eies, before any mans imagination,' he took a 'pre-Pilgrimage,' making landfall wherever the European explorers had, to 'meet the Natives, mine the past and map its memory in the present.' Instead of beginning his journey at Plymouth Rock, he ended it there. By turns history and travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange is instructive and charming. Horwitz sure can spin a yarn. He re-creates the wonder - and the horror - of the explorers' encounters with exotic creatures. And his thumbnail sketches of the first-comers are tight and bright. Christopher Columbus, he reveals, was not 'a farsighted modern, battling medieval darkness.' By 1492, even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged that the earth was round. But cosmographers did not agree about its size. Columbus was 'the most wrong-headed of them all.' Buttressing his argument by citing the scriptural passage indicating that six-sevenths of the world is land, Columbus convinced Ferdinand and Isabella that he could reach India 'in a few days with a fair wind.' An incompetent administrator, Columbus died in 1506, 'alone, desolate, infirm.' In the ultimate irony, Horwitz writes, two continents were named for his fellow Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, a self-promoter whose claim to have reached South America in 1497, a year before Columbus arrived there, was almost certainly spurious. Horwitz's account of the legacy left by the Spanish adventurers - Coronado, de Soto and de Leon - is more likely to 'affright than delight.' After all, they cut a devastating swath through the ancient civilizations of the 'New World.' At Mavila, an Indian village along the Alabama River, on Oct. 18, 1540, de Soto's men killed about 2,500 natives and torched their houses. The long-forgotten massacre, Horwitz observes, rivals the battle of Antietam as the deadliest day of combat ever recorded on 'American' soil. Mesmerized by the 'gilded hopes' of gold and an Orient express, Horwitz implies, the conquistadores never learned that 'America's true promise' lay in timber, game, fish and fertile land. The settlements the Spaniards established in North America, from Ponce de Leon's 'discovery' of Florida in 1513 until the English arrived at Jamestown in 1607, were precarious outposts, 'beset by mutinies, pirate raids, plague, fires, Indian hostility, and other woes.' They remain dreary destinations. Following the Mississippi flood of 1927, Arkansas City, which may have been the place where de Soto died, is barely a city at all, with no commercial establishments except a liquor store, laundromat and grocery. 'History's all we got left,' an old man tells Horwitz as he sits by the levee. And not much history at that. No coffin with de Soto's remains has ever been found. 'Young man, I do believe you've been led on,' declares 95 year-old Dorothy Moore. 'Just like those Spanish, always chasing their gold.' Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American studies at Cornell University. via Baltimore Sun

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“Thank you for serving our country!”

In addition to my weekday afternoon, "Red, White and Blue Minute," at 5:30, we will be posting a lot of information, including audio and video on this page. via KOOL-FM Phoenix

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“By 1902 saloons, bordellos and gambling houses flourished in the dusty boomtown, and hoodlums from two countries gravitated to Douglas”

Jan Phibbons, a second lieutenant in the Tucson company of the Arizona Rangers, directs a driver past roadblocks in place for the Festival of the Arts in Tubac. via The Arizona Daily Star

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“I don't think we have any more issues with the Gila”

Sunday's rainfall results in the Gila and San Francisco rivers in Duncan and Clifton rising dramatically Monday. via Eastern Arizona Courier

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Statement as of 9:19 am MST on January 28, 2008 ... The Flood Warning remains in effect until 330 PM MST Monday for small streams in central Greenlee County... At 911 am MST... the Blue River upstream from ... via KTVK Phoenix

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“Hey, this is the first time I've been at my running weight in years”

There is an adage about someone not complaining about not having any shoes after he sees someone with no feet. via Eastern Arizona Courier

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“Our financial policy will be reviewed on an ongoing basis and will be designed to maintain a strong balance sheet, enable financial flexibility to invest in organic growth and provide strong cash returns to shareholders subject to market conditions”

Prior to Freeport-McMo-Ran Copper & Gold Inc.'s acquisition of Phelps Dodge this spring, industry analysts questioned whether FMI was biting off more than it could chew because of the large debt it assumed to ... via Eastern Arizona Courier

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“I live rent-free, I don't pay utilities and they give me $65 (44) a day to live here. I don't fuss about it”

CLIFTON, Arizona : As economies boom on the other side of the world, echoes resound in the scrubland around this desert town - and in the makeshift homes of families like Stacie and Tim Boardman and their ... via International Herald Tribune

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“If you're not paying attention and you miss the signs, smile”

Do not count on the photographer asking anyone to smile, nor does one need to consider buying wallet-sized copies to pass out to the relatives. via Eastern Arizona Courier

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