Weaver’s Needle and the Deadly Gold of the Superstitions</h1> <article> <h1>Weaver’s Needle and the Deadly Gold of the Superstitions</h1> <p>SamLowe — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:44:42 +0000</p> Since 1870, when stories about the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains became a standard item in Arizona folklore, some 40 people have either disappeared or been found dead in and around the suspected location of the mine. The stories about the fabulously wealthy cache of gold supposedly hidden in the mountains are many and varied, but there's always once constant -- Weavers Needle. 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The Arizona kind is shorter and fatter. It doesn’t fit on the butter trays I bought years ago in Connecticut. A: We have to confess that sometimes, in our darker hours, we sit alone under the light of a single naked bulb here at the shabby but genteel headquarters of Valley 101 and pull a bottle of root beer out of our battered desk and wonder if it’s time to give it up. Have all the great questions been asked? All the great mysteries solved? Are there no mountains left to climb? And then a question like yours arrives, and our faith in the essential oddness of our readers is restored. A new day dawns. Wiping the root beer foam from our lips, we turn our chiseled visage to face a new challenge. And we learn, yes, indeed, butter is different here. Who knew? As it turned out, the exceedingly helpful Harold Metzger, sales purchasing manager for the United Dairymen of Arizona, knew.<div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ArizonaOddities?a=plzZQ96xATg:b26Zl51BmJQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ArizonaOddities?a=plzZQ96xATg:b26Zl51BmJQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ArizonaOddities?a=plzZQ96xATg:b26Zl51BmJQ:qj6IDK7rITs"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ArizonaOddities?a=plzZQ96xATg:b26Zl51BmJQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"></img></a> </div> </article> <article> <h1>Roosevelt Dam Key to Valley Population Boom</h1> <p>Andrea Aker — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:11:54 +0000</p> Paula, an Arizona Oddities reader, recently inquired about the history and creation of Roosevelt Dam. While that's quite a long story with several sides, we've done our best to summarize a few key points in a short blog post. Whenever I have questions like this about Arizona history, I go to Arizona Oddities contributor and all-around-AZ-expert Marshall Trimble. I asked him for the story behind Roosevelt Dam, and this is what he told me: Roosevelt Dam was the first major Reclamation Project in the West and was probably the most significant event in the entire history of the Salt River Valley because it provided a reservoir of life-giving water that would make it possible for people to live here. Up until then, the settlers would have to leave during times of drought. 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Most of the bonafide gunfighters were gone and Hollywood took up the chore of telling how it really was. Tom Mix was earning over $17,000 a week performing super-human feats from atop his famous horse, Tony, and the public loved it. Nobody seemed to care much for the way it really was out in lotus land, so Americans were fed a heavy dose of tight-trousered, fast-drawing, hard-riding heroes. As late as 1928, a few of the real straight-shooting lawmen of old still walked the beat in Arizona and one of them was Jim Roberts. Uncle Jim, as folks called him, was almost 70 and walked with a stoop. The older folks around Clarkdale remembered him as the deputy sheriff in the rough and tumble town of Jerome nearly 40 years earlier. Singlehandedly, he'd tamed the town taking on all trouble makers with fearless abandon. 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They stand along the main thoroughfares as reminders of the city's heritage as one of the last vestiges of the Old West. They never move, never blink, never mind posing for tourist cameras. They can't because they're bronze sculptures, strategically installed in front of business places and tourist attractions. 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What used to be the World's Tallest Fountain in Fountain Hills has been usurped by the Gateway Geyser in East St. Louis, Illinois, but the Arizona gusher is still the World's Tallest Fountain sometimes. The Illinois fountain shots a geyser 627 feet into the air, the best the one in Arizona can do is 560 feet, when operating at full capacity. 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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. 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When he left about four months later, he had turned a single ponderosa pine log into a 30-foot tall Indian head, and he left it there for posterity. The work was one in Toth's series of giant heads that he carved in every state and four Canadian provinces. He called the effort "The Trail of the Whispering Giants," and dedicated it to what he considered the mistreatment of Native Americans by early settlers and the federal government. 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A: I thought this was going to be an easy one, and I was prepared to pad it out with a lot of cheap jokes about my masters. Instead, it got kind of complicated, so I had to cut out the jokes, which is just as well because I would have had to explain them to my masters anyway. This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots. Kim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, went to some pains to explain the differences to me. He is a very patient man. 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Don’t scroll down too quickly. The answers are posted shortly below the questions. When you’re finished, leave a comment with your score. Did any answers surprise you? 1. Name one of three Arizona dams named after U.S. Presidents. 2. What mountain range is north of Tucson? 3. What Indian reservation is located completely within the boundaries of another? 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