It's all in the ruins ... at Casa Grande

Arizona is full of things to see, but I don’t usually linger when I’m here because it’s always in July or August, the hottest time of the year.  I melt and want to get out and back in to Phoenix as quickly as possible. 

This year has been way different.  Jaz and I were riding in March, which is mostly perfect T-shirt-riding weather, although we had times we had to wear jackets, too, and thought that 70-degree weather was freezing.  How quickly we become accustomed to the warmer weather.  I’ve been loving it.  I digress.

Anyway, there’s a place called Casa Grande Ruins, which I found on Arizona Roadside Attractions.  It’s amazing what you can find to go see on that site … coon hound grave yards, world’s biggest barbecue, to name a couple, and much of it is free. 

We were headed there, but also passed another piece of history … the Tom Mix Memorial, a black iron silhouette of a riderless bronco (Tony the Wonder Horse) that marks the site of his death.  The metal art was made by inmates at the Florence State Penitentiary and has had to be replaced at least three times as folks keep stealing it.  Tom Mix, and his wonder horse, Tony, were legends of that old western era that I love to read about and see. 

Words on the memorial.

Four-legged steed, iron steed.

Mix was a cowboy, the good guy, of course, mostly before movies became talkies.  He appeared in 300-370 movies, mostly westerns between 1909 and 1935 (all but nine were silent movies) and made as much as $10,000-15,000 a week, a lot of money for those days.  Mix may have worked as a cowboy, served as a soldier and been a Texas Ranger, so he could have been the real McCoy.  (There are opposing views on whether all of that is true, but it sounds good so I’ll use it.) However, once the talkies started being made he really didn’t do much after that. 

This was the auto that led to his death

A news account of what happened is posted on the memorial.

On Oct. 12, 1940, Mix was driving his custom-built, single-seat 812-supercharged Cord Phaeton roadster along a straight desert road, about 17 miles south of Florence, Arizona, where he had a ranch.  The bridge was out in a shallow gully, and under construction, when he apparently ignored or didn’t see and ran through construction signs and crashed.  Supposedly he walked away from the wreck but a heavy, unsecured suitcase on the rear shelf in the car fell and hit him, breaking his neck.  It’s a sad story.  He was a legend, and it’s always hard to lose someone to a tragedy like that. 

Tom Mix was a man of legends and many movies.

This photo of Mix and Tony is also attached to the memorial.

The memorial has photos of him and Tony and copies of the final news story about the crash.  The “suitcase of death” is preserved at the Tom Mix Museum in Dewey, Oklahoma, along with a life-size replica of Tony the Wonder Horse.  Mix was born Jan. 6, 1880, in Pennsylvania, and died Oct. 12, 1940, at the age of 60.  His horse, Tony, lived two years to the day past Mix’s death, when he had to be put down at the old age of 37 or 42, depending on whose account you read.  Either way, Tony lived a long life and a good one as a star, and a retiree. 

The Casa Grande Ruins were a find, though, unknown to me and a national park to boot so I got to use my Senior Park Pass again.  Even better, they weren’t too far from our final destination for the day, Sun City and the Peeps, other dear friends that I’ve known for more than 30 years.

I couldn't pass up a shot of another saguaro.

Casa Grande means “great house,” which is the name given to the ruins by early Spanish explorers.  By modern standards these ruins may not seem large, but at the time they were great.  The Great House is four stories high and 60 feet long.  This is the largest known structure of the Ancestral People of the Sonoran Desert. 

An old photo prior to the canopy.

The house is built of caliche, a concrete-like mix of sand, clay and calcium carbonate (limestone).  It took 3,000 tons to build the Great House and it has four-foot-thick walls at the base that taper toward the top.  Trees that were carried or floated 60 miles down the Gila River are anchored in the wall and timbers formed ceiling or floor supports.
 

The walls face the four cardinal points of the compass and a circular hole in the upper west wall aligns with the setting sun at the summer solstice.  Other openings align with the sun and moon at specific times. 

You can see one of the openings to the top left.

In 1932 a steel and concrete canopy was built to protect the Great House.  There are also other remains of an ancient Hohokam-era farming village.  Hohokam is a name incorrectly translated from the ancestors called Huhugham.  But today Hohokam is a term used by archeologists to define a cultural period.

The canopy costs more to maintain now per year than the original $28,000 cost of construction.

The origins of these people lay with hunter-gatherers who lived in Arizona for several thousand years.  The people also grew food and developed an irrigation canal system diverting water from the Salt and Gila rivers.  Like the Panama Canal system, the hydro system developed for Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley and this irrigation system, it’s incredible how smart people were and how they developed things to make their living easier, or just living in general.  It’s been a great trip, seeing, experiencing, learning.

Then we were hightailing it to the Peeps, Ken and Judi, where we spent a couple of nights.  We went to a spring training baseball game between the White Sox and the Mariners.  The final score was 7-6, Sox.

A few days relaxing, and me getting the compensator (and a whole lot of other parts) replaced (and thank you, extended warranty), and we were back on the road, heading to Kingman, Arizona, to meet Karl, Jaz’s friend from Lake Havasu, and Chuck from Alaska and Dewey from Yukon.

The nice thing about no real schedule is just that … you can do what you want.  We met up with the boys and decided to spend the night with Karl.  Dining in was just the thing with pizza and ice cream, two of my favorite foods.  We had such a nice, comfortable visit sitting out in Karl’s Arizona room, or patio, or whatever you call it.  I got cold, and he handed me a blanket.  It must have gotten down into the 70s.  Brrrrrr.