Stories of people the author interviewed in the 1970s, lives of pioneers, hunters, sheriffs, entertainment, cowboys and ranchers, dude wranglers, individualists, and How to Cater an Endurance Horse Race.
The people did what they had to do to get by. They were successful in their lives. You'd want to know most of them. Pleasant read. Black & white photos. Author has written FROM THUNDER TO BREAKFAST about storyteller Hube Yates; WIDOWHOOD HAPPENS and a children's book, JAVELINA! Have-uh-WHAT? (Have uh-LEE-nah). See xlibris.com. She is also a magazine article writer, having had more than 550 articles published.
Excerpt
Hot, sweaty tired dam workers, with paychecks in hand, couldn't wait to get to the Cave Creek Corral.
In the 1930s the Horseshoe and Bartlett Dams were built up the road apiece from Cave Creek, Arizona. I guess it WAS a corral then, furnished with picnic tables placed under mesquite trees. Nostrils sat up and took notice of the sweet smell of mesquite smoke, and ears homed in on the sound of sizzling steaks — huge chunks of beef, mostly, sometimes venison. A man named Johnny Walker owned this long-for spot on the Sonoran Desert.
Camaraderie was as warm and fuzzy as the atmosphere on the Cheers TV series make-believe bar, the fights dead-on.
Professional Reviews
Marshall Trimble, Official Arizona Historian, Head of Southwestern Studies, Scottsdale Community College, Scottsdale, Arizona
Cave Creek is a one-of-a-kind town. In a Valley whose cities are becoming more homogeneous with each passing year Cave Creek has retained its unique character. In time it too may become more like Scottsdale, Carefree, Tempe, Mesa, and the other cities down below, but if and when that time comes the old stories will keep the memories alive.
My earliest memories of the town are of the mid-1940s. My uncle and aunt, Russell and Jeffie Talbott, owned the Golden Reef Mine north of town. Later, my brother Dan opened an equine veterinary practice in the area. Soon after, my parents retired and joined him and his wife Mary. I spent many hours traveling around with Dan on his calls to the ranches north of town and many more sitting on a bar stool at Harold and Ruth Gavigan’s Cave Creek Corral. It was here I met many of the people in Gene Garrison’s book, including George Mileham, Jim Hardy, and Logue Morris. There were others too, with colorful names like O. K. Charlie, and Leadpipe.
Cave Creek is home to folks with wide interests. Geoffrey Platts was a desert preservationist who gave his life to save a friend in a flash flood, and Catherine Jones was a colorful pistol-packin’ deputy sheriff who once shot a piece of the ear off a troublesome bootlegger.
Cave Creek has produced some of the West’s best cowboys. Anyone who’s ever chased a wild steer down one of those cactus-strewn, steep-sided canyons north of town can attest that anyone who cowboyed around Cave Creek could cowboy anywhere in the world. George Mileham was one of the best. Jim Hardy was one of the first to be born in the little town of Phoenix and he was still spry when Phoenix celebrated its 100th birthday. And some say Logue Morris was the inspiration for the great western song, “Man With the Big Hat.”
Gene has pulled these stories together into a wonderful book about the characters and places that made Cave Creek one of the state’s most colorful towns. It may change some in the future but the people have left an indelible mark on the area.
Margaret Kohel Evans invites her mother's grandchildren to a delightful visit with their grandmother, sharing charming memories of her across eighteen life themes.
This book has been eight years in the making. It is mostly a jumble of thoughts written down in old spiral notebooks and hidden in the bottom drawer underneath various manuals for software packages and hardware long since turned obsolete.
The experience of a young adult trying to figure out what they want to do for employment or education can be overwhelming. My book will give them insight to what it means to be a carpenter. And the progress unions have made in discrimination.
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