{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/v97zk57v6g/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["John L. Rhodes oral history"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/038/original/university-libraries-logo-2x.png?1711560609","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Source"]},"value":{"en":["Southern Arizona History Connection, Incorporated Oral Histories"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Rhodes, John L. (Interviewee)","Head, Linda (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2026-03-30 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Coverage"]},"value":{"en":["Arizona--Tucson (spatial)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eA video oral history interview conducted at the the home of John L. Rhodes, whose family was the Tewksburys of the Pleasant Valley Wars.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["mp4"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["University of Arizona Libraries"]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["MS839.008 (uid)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["John L. Rhodes, (1936-  )","James D. Tewksbury, (1823-1891)","John Tewksbury, (1856-1887)","Edwin Tewksbury, (1858-1904)","James Andrew Stinson, (1838-1932)","Thomas H. Graham, (1854-1892)","Mary Ann Crigger Tewksbury Rhodes, (1861-1950)","Elizabeth (Bessie) Pearl McKinney, (1883-1968)","James Arthur Mercer Sr., (1871-1914)","Arthur Virgil Mercer, (1900-1975)","Safford Lee Freeman, (1893-1968)","Caddell (Dell) Mercer, (1903-1997)","Molino Basin, Arizona","Mt. Lemmon, Arizona","Pleasant Valley War, (1882-1892)","Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS) Station","Vietnam Resistance Movement"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral Histories"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eA video oral history interview conducted at the the home of John L. Rhodes, whose family was the Tewksburys of the Pleasant Valley Wars.\u003c/p\u003e"]},"provider":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["University of Arizona Libraries"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["University of Arizona Libraries"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/038/original/university-libraries-logo-2x.png?1711560609","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/311/879/small/JohnRhodes.mp4_1780596254.jpg?1780596258","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - John_Rhodes.mp4"]},"duration":3373.53683,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/311/879/small/JohnRhodes.mp4_1780596254.jpg?1780596258","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-arizona.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/311/879/original/John_Rhodes.mp4?1780596173","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":3373.53683,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["John Rhodes transcript MS 839 [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: Good afternoon. I am John Rhodes. In six months I'll be 90, and I was born in St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, 1936 Okay, the reason of my families, and I have many families. I have about five families that raised me, and so it's kind of hard to separate them out, but there's a number of families because of the Second World War interfered when I was very young, and families got pretty broken up, but anyway, the reason they came to Arizona, and I'll take them one by one, the reason they came to Arizona, and the Tewksbury family was based on they originally settled in Maine, and they came across they were in the lumber business in Maine in the 1800s and in the late 1700s in the 1800s and James Dunning, the one of their sons, who was my great great grandfather, sailed around the to the Panama, down to where the Panama Canal is, crossed over, caught another ship, and ended up in Northern California, and when there he was in the lumber business, he was also raised fine horses, race horses, and he was married. We think he married. We assume he married. We don't. There's no record of it. There's no.. she was a Native American, and Native Americans don't keep records like that, nor do they allow the names of people after their deceased to be spoken, because it's religiously they'll compromise them, so there's no tracing her, but he married her and had four sons and a daughter. The Indian wars started about then, and caused them to have to move. They moved because two reasons, one of two reasons, or would obviously don't know why. One reason is that they dictated the dictated that the Indian Native American women who were living with, and not legally married in the American sense, had to go back to the reservation. Now, whether she fit in that category, and she had to leave, or whether she also, the family had a history of tuberculosis, and she may have died of tuberculosis. We don't know, but anyway, that caused James Dunning and his sons and daughter to move, and they went to a place called Battle Mountain, Nevada. And Battle Mountain, Nevada, was known for its race horses. They had races there, and it was a pretty wild town, but that was part of their, and it probably he took his horses there and ran them, and for a while they were fine, but the boys were restless, as I gather from talking to people, they were, they didn't, they didn't like being there, they would, they didn't have anything to do, so they left and came down to Arizona. They just went south and ended up, and how they ended up in Pleasant Valley, I don't know, because it's really an out of the way place, and I don't know how they ever found it, and they settled there, but they settled there and were raising horses, just the boys, the daughter and James Dunning stayed in Battle Mountain for a little while longer, but that's how they ended up in Pleasant Valley. So that's how the Tewksbury family ended up in Pleasant Valley. The well to continue on to the Tewksbury family. Then James Dunning, the father, did come down to Phoenix when James Dunning Tewksbury moved down from Battle Mountain with his daughter. They read he met a lady named Lydia, who also had a daughter named Mary Ann Krueger, and James Dunning and Lydia were married, and the Mary Ann and Lydia moved to Pleasant Valley because James Dunning. These boys had built a cabin for them to live in, a two-story cabin for them to live in, and they lived, they and Mary Ann moved down there. Well, Mary Ann and James Dunning's oldest son, John, fell in love and were married, and then after they were married, the other three boys somewhat moved out to different other cabins, and they stayed in their cabin, and that's where they lived, and they. I won't go into the Pleasant Valley War at this point, but that's to look back to where the people came from to Arizona, and then that's where the Tewksbury family got to Arizona.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=7.0,353.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: The Tewksbury family became the Rhodes family after the two after the Pleasant Valley War ended, John John Rhodes' family had moved from the Midwest, and they got involved in the Mountain Middle Massacre. I don't know if you've heard of that, but the Mountain Meta massacre, they were in a wagon train behind the one that was ambushed, and he, so they were involved in that, and then they, they went up and settled in Oregon. He later went down to ended up in southern California, and working for a rancher who owned cattle on land in Mexico, and he had John Rhodes take a herd of cattle from San Diego area and go across. He wanted them to take them to Mexico, where he owned some property, and they could run these cattle in Mexico. He got as far as the San Pedro River Valley around Reddington, when they found out that Pancho Villa had taken over the area that they were supposed to move to, and the guy that owned the cattle said, I don't want you to bring them back, I don't see if you can sell them. Well, so he was peddling these cattle all up and down the San Pedro River, Mammoth, Reddington area, trying to get rid of them, and he was working for E.O. Stratton. mr. Stratton is his family is very involved in the historical society, and he worked for the Stratton family, and while he was trying to sell these cattle, and then mr. Stratton finally bought, bought them out. Well, while he was here, he met a Hispanic lady, and again, we don't know if they were married or not, but they had three children, and they, he, the fellow that he was working for in the Mammoth area, was that's how he ended up in Arizona, which came across to go to the Oregon, and ended South in San Diego, but he, he had these three children, and he then was told take these cattle and take them to our land up in Pleasant Valley. So he took them up to Pleasant Valley and started to ranch. When he got up there, the Pleasant Valley war was still going on, and they challenged him when he got there, and said, \"Whose side are you on? He said, \"Well, I'm not on either side. He's, \"I'm just taking these cattle up here for this start this ranch. And he was one of the few people that they allowed up in the valley, and he was up there, and when he'd been in, when he was down in San Pedro River Valley, a fellow named Tom Horn had a was had a small ranch down in there, and was running a mine, and they were pretty good friends. And when he got up there, he invited Tom to come up and help him up in Pleasant Valley, and so they were up there and then he then got involved in the Pleasant Valley War only as a when he was a an outsider and he didn't take sides but he ended up in working with the Tewksburys, because he needed their horses. They were the Pleasant Valley War, was labeled pretty much as a cow, was a range war between cattlemen and sheepmen, and that's not necessarily true, because the Tewksburys were actually horse raisers, not cattle raisers. But anyway, I won't get. Into Pleasant Valley War, there's been books and books and books written about the Pleasant Valley War, many good and many very bad, but anyway, so he ended up at the Tewksbury cabin when John Tewkesbury, James Jennings' son, and Mary Ann's husband was ambushed and killed, and he was instrumental in helping bring the sheriff in to see what it tried to straighten it out, and he eventually he and Mary Ann got married. This brought an interesting family together, because John Rhodes, what then went down to back down to the Mammoth area, where he's where he had these three children, and he brought these three Hispanic children up, and Mary Ann had a daughter, and by and a month after her, after John was killed, John Jr. John Tewkesbury Jr. my great grandma, or my grandfather was born a month after his dad was killed, so she had two part Indian boys. He had three part Mexican children. They combined them, then later they had six Anglo children.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=354.0,692.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: So it was very mixed household, but he, they lived there, and they went to Pleasant Valley. Was getting, you know, people were still talking about it, and Mary Ann said, \"Let's change the names of my two children. My daughter Bertha will probably get married anyway and change her name. And John never was actually born, as you know, he's born in the Tewksbury family, and they had, they had lived there for several years, but she said, \"Let's change it to roads, so that he doesn't have to carry this burden on his back, because not only was he a Native American, he was also a Tewksbury. Neither the Tewksbury name was very popular. Neither was the being a Native American. Matter of fact, in a lot of newspaper articles, it was that black boys, and that was a black family. So to erase that, then she, they took the name Rhodes, and that's why we're no longer Tewksbury Rhodes, is that's why that's Tewksbury Rhodes family is to sell the same family, so that's why they ended how they ended up. Oh, and then then there was one, the Grahams, which is the opposite side of the Tewksbury feud, they was ambushed and killed down in Phoenix, and they were, they, he had a guy that was his bodyguard, and his bodyguard pointed out John Rhodes and says that's one of those Tewksburys, and John Rhodes notified Ed Tewksberry and said, Ed, the Tom Graham down here has got me pointed out, and I'm worried about it, while they came down, and Tom Graham was ambushed and killed, Ed Tewksbury did it. That's pretty common knowledge now. In those days, they said John did, but the interesting part of that was that John Rhodes, they arrested John Rhodes, and they put him on trial, and while he was on trial, he was in front of the sitting as on the table where the accused was sitting of being the killer, and during a break, Tom Graham's wife stood up, pulled a pistol out of her purse, put it in the back of his head, and pulled the trigger, but it caught on her scarf when she pulled it out, and the hammer didn't fall, and so it didn't shoot me? Judge dismissed the case, and so then John Rose decided he should move back down to the San Pedro Valley, where he knew, and they can, they went down there, and they homesteaded, so they were, they had a homestead down there, and they started ranching down there, so that's where the Tewksbury Grahams end up in Mammoth, the other side of the family, the McKinney side was my hope. Eventually married John Rhodes. My grandfather married McKinney, and then became my grandmother. They came, the McKinney family started out in New Jersey, and went in. It ended up in McKinney, Texas, which is in Collin County, which was her great uncle, and Colin McKinney was he helped write the Texas state constitution, but my grandmother, Bessie, her father, her father's brother went to the member of the family says we were, they were in Uvalde, Texas, at this point, and they had gone, they went to two members, his family went and said we need to go someplace else, and they said, well, go west, so, so they went west, and they got to the San Pedro River Valley, and it was a nice valley, had lots of land that they could homestead, and so they homesteaded there and settled in Mammoth, so that's where my grandfather and grandmother eventually met and were married. The other part of my, my mother's parents, the Freemans were not. They didn't end up in Mammoth, but they ended up in Tucson when they worked for the railroad, the Freeman, Saffron Freeman, the Freeman family and the Pyle family, there was two families, my grandfather was Freeman, grandmother was a Pyle, my mother's parents, and they came that started their romance started when they were when she was 12 years old, and the Freemans moved in across the street from him, and then they suffered. My grandfather took up with her and used to ride her to school on high the Lord with his bike, and I've got pictures that he used to paint and send to him. Well, her family got transferred to El Paso that works the railroad, and her family went to El Paso.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=693.0,1047.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: No, her family went, her family went to Springfield, Illinois. His family went to El Paso, and but the but the mothers kept in contact and one year finally he suffered my grandfather decided he'd go down to El Paso and visit, well, while he was there they got engaged and I and then he went back and I've got a copy of the letter that he wrote to my grandmother's father, saying I can't visit with you, I can't ask you for her hand, but I could write a letter and tell you that we're going to get married. So they got married in El Paso. Well, then my grandmother's father got transferred to Tucson. Well, to the Southern Pacific and Mexican Railroad, they had a branch that ran down into Mexico, and I've forgotten the name of the railroad that ran down it, but he worked for them, and so Safford had gotten a transfer to El Paso, he got transferred, then he and his new wife got transferred to where our father and mother were in Tucson, and there was that's how they ended up in Arizona, but how they got involved in the Rhodes family was the when my grandmother Bessie McKinney, her first husband was a Mercer, and they had, she, her mother died when she was 13 or 15, I'm sorry, and when she got passed away, there was my grandmother, was the oldest child, she had a sister and two brothers, and her father said, \"You're the lady of the house now, there's this 15 year old girl trying to take care of this, and, and this Mercer family, and that's. I won't go into their history, particularly, but there they ended up with one of the boys, a Mercer son, ended up by himself in Mammoth, and had homesteaded, and he ended up marrying this 15 year old girl, and this table that I'm sitting. One is sitting by is where they from the ranch, which they started, but Bessie, my grandmother, and Jimmy Mercer had all of a sudden, now she's got three children, born three boys, he was kind of jealous of the fact that they could take him, they could take them to the ranches, the Rhodes Ranch and the Parker Ranch. Parker Ranch was what was called the A seven ranch in the Utsey Ranch, which was up at the top of Reddington Pass and over into the San Pedro Valley, and that was his, and which was very close to the Rhodes Ridge. Well, the Rhodes and the Parkers knew each other, they were quite very good friends, and the Freemans kind of felt like an outlier. So they homesteaded on the over in the Rincon mountains, and they built a house and everything, and they had the homestead, but they still had to work. They worked in town, but they didn't, because they didn't have enough of a homestead that they could support themselves. But they allowed a rancher that was over there to run his cattle on their, on their 640 acres, so they could be, because you had to have to get the prove up on the homestead, you had to have it making being livable, so that they said, yeah, we can do that, because there's all these cattle that run here, and they built what's their homestead out on the base of the Rincon mountains, so they're, and they used to go spend a lot of time. I've got pictures of my mother and father when they were 1213, years old, riding horseback together and the fence at the ranch and things, and when my mother graduated from high school, they got married. The Freemans were they wanted a place where they could have people come and visit too. So they built this thing, and they built it from ground up. They made the adobes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=1048.0,1338.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: The kids talk about how they made the adobes to build the house with, and he built the house, and then they built there was, then they added a separate building, which was the kitchen, then they built a garage, they had a chicken yard with big chicken house, and and eventually homesteaded that it was this next to last homestead in Pima County and they ended up selling it back to the government after after everybody all the kids had moved, and they'd gotten older, and the Freeman family, Elder Freeman Saffords, my grand, my great-grandfather Freeman stayed there for a while, but they eventually, there was nobody else there, and the kids were all gone, so they wanted to sell it back to the government, because they wanted it to be part of the national monument that was being put up over there, which later became a national park, and so they held out, they had better offers than $15,000 I think that they got for it, but they ended up selling it back to the government, and and there's now a nature trail that goes down with their old what's left is nothing there but a floor. My mother, I don't think, was cut out for that kind of life. She ended up being pregnant. Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, my grandfather, John Rhodes, and my father, Tom Rhodes, got involved in rodeo, and my grand Bud Parker and my grandfather, who were very good friends, helped start the Tucson Rodeo, along with Ed Eccles, who was the sheriff at Pima County at that time, and also an old rodeo cowboy, and they got where they were rodeoing all the time, because they were very good at it, they were very good ropers, as a matter of fact, all three, Bud Parker, my dad, and grandfather, all three of them, Radio Hall of Fame, because my dad and grandfather were both four-time world champions, and they were so good at it that they spent a lot of time doing it, and that left Bessie and my mother, Mary. Running these ranches, and my mother had no idea what it was like being isolated up in the mountains, where she by herself, and at that point she was.. I hadn't been born yet. I was born while she was up there. Matter of fact, you look at my birth certificate, it says their home was Soborrow Butte, Arizona, which is where they got their mail, but I think that that played on both Bessie and her, and I think that just listening to my grandmother, my mother never spoke about it, and I never asked, but as, as I've pretty much gathered from their conversations, that was the straw that broke their back there, they both, they couldn't take it anymore, and Virgil Mercer and Dell Mercer, they were both, both ended up divorced also, and I think it was just the pressures of being there and not, not being exactly, you know, they just didn't mention, and then they were gone, particularly every all weekend, almost every weekend, there was a little rodeo somewhere in Arizona, but that I think contributed to their divorce, and so the Wiley ranch. My grandmother ended up with one ranch, the Wiley Ranch. They sold to settle the divorce case, so that both could keep the other two ranches. Well, I was the youngest grandson in all these families, and I lived out of a suitcase pretty much my whole life, because everybody wanted me to stay, wanted to wanted me around. Eventually, I just came back, and I lived with my grandparents in Tucson, Stafford, Viola, I lived with them, and, but my grandmother Rhodes, and my grandfather, and my father all wanted to see me too, so I'd get, I'd stay with them for school year, and then weekends, either my granddad or my dad picked me up, take me off to a rodeo someplace where my grandmother would take me, and I spent most of the summers up there with her, and I learned to got all kinds of stories from her, because that's all we did, we'd sit around, we'd play cards, you see, we wanted to play double solitaire, we played a lot of double solitaire, and because we had no electricity, no, there was no TV in Tucson, even till 1953 That's when I left Tucson.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=1339.0,1667.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: So we didn't even have TV in Tucson, and so in Tucson, when I was living with my grandparents, we played cards too all the time at night, and but that's where I got most of our, most of our, most of my stories about the family was sitting at Strasser's table from her playing cards, and she used to tell me all these stories about them, and one thing about the Mercers, she married Jimmy Mercer, who was pretty much an orphan at that point, but you'd call him a 20 year old young man an orphan, but his family had all gone, he had no family, but the Mercer family was pretty famous in Tucson, there was only Miss America from Arizona was was his cousin, and another cousin was Jay Mercer Johnson, who was on the Supreme Court of Arizona, and they helped found the town of Tubac that helped develop Tubac, the Mercers. So she was involved in all that, so she had all those Mercer stories, all the McKinney stories about Texas, and all the stories about she didn't get these Tewksbury stories, she had none. Mary Ann Tewkesbury, my great grandmother, who I knew when I was young, she died when I was 10 or 12, something like that, and but we used, she lived in Florence, and we used to go take Florence, being the county seat, we spent a lot of time there, going there to the county buildings to do things, and we always stopped by Mary Ann's place, and she didn't, but she never would talk to us, the I also have a copy of the letter that I had, the original, but of the letter that she wrote to my grandfather when he was in his 30s, telling a little bit about the Pleasant Valley War, that's as much as he ever really got. From the from her, so it was pretty interesting, but back to the back to the Mercer boys that were my grandmother and my uncles, there was three boys, they all contribute, they all contributed to these, the state of Arizona. A lot's been said always about cattlemen, and how they destroyed the land and stuff. Virgil Mercer, the oldest one, was a member of the first state parks board that stated that started the state parks in Arizona, and because he was interested in saving the land, and his, and they were the first ones, one among the first ones to start moving cattle to where the rains had had the grass growing and controlling the rains, and his son Virgil Ellis graduated from the university with a degree in range management. He had also been in World War Two, and he made his repair tuber, jumped into the Battle of Okinawa, and shrapnel took out one eye and part of the side of his face, but he had it reconstructed, and they gave him a glass eye, and he was, he was all right, but he, he used to teach classes in range management at the Cochise, not Cochise, but the junior college up in Aravaipa, and he taught classes there, and he also, he was a, he also had a pilot's license, and you asked, How in one eye, how could a guy with one eye get a pilot's license, and I, he told me this story, and I know I'm not sure which, how, how much of it to be believed, but he said that he went to the eye doctor to get his eye tested, and the doctor said, \"Okay, cover your left eye, and he gave him a paddle, so he covered his left eye, said, \"Read the chart. He says, \"Okay, not changing. So he changed hands and read the chart again. And the doctor, anyway, he got a pilot's license, and his son, his son Virgil's grandson, was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and they were the first ones to use Virgil or Ellis. Virgil Ellis flew an ultra light, and they used to round up using the helicopter and an ultra light. They were the first ones to ever do that, instead of having to run 60 horses for roundups, they could get by with about half a dozen people, mostly family, and conducted their roundups, and those old mountains are rough.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=1668.0,1991.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: How they did them and how they worked it, I never know, but they did, and they contributed, they believed in saving, and they were very careful about making sure they, he had people come out there and try and get choy choya cactus, as you know, if peace falls off, it'll grow, take root and grow, and you can look in those mountains and find huge cactus pets, he had, he made arrangements to have people come out and help clean those things out as best they can. Now it's buffel grass, which is the same problem of them. So they were very, he was very much into conservation. The and his brother Dell bought a ranch at the base of the Catalina Mountains, and he ran cattle, and this is those days it's open range that when there was no fences that you, you didn't all of them, you know, you ran them all together, and if he, he bought this ranch at the with Virgil and or with John and Bessie's help. He bought this ranch, and they stocked it with cattle off of John's ranch. They drove them from the San Pedro Valley over to where the Molina base, there was no road at that side. The road to Mount Lemmon was on the backside the mountain at that point, but people wanted a road on the other side. Well, they, they finally developed, and he had this ranch, he was running cattle in Sabino Canyon, and all along the side, old side. The mountain up there in Molina Basin, he'd stay at the range in the summer down in the valley. In the winters they'd go up, and I mean the other way around. In the winters they'd stay in the valley, in the summer they'd go up on where Molina Basin is, and there they had a hard side tent that they lived in, Del and his wife, and they had a daughter, and they had a son that was born there, and they would go up there and live in this hard side tent for the summer, and when they decided, when they were trying to find a way to put a road up the other side, they had two choices. The choice, their first choice would have crossed right in the middle of his ranch, and where the road is now, and it goes through his ranch. The second choice was to put running up Sabino Canyon and put the road up Sabino Canyon to Mount Lemmon, but they didn't want to do that. They'd rather have had the other one. Yeah, they had, they had two routes that they had planned, and they, they wanted their first choice was obviously the choice of where it is now, but the hold up was they had to cross this ranch, and of course they had, as most property, it had a lien against it, and they had to get the lien holder to allow them to do it well. This is a, the ranchers all got their liens from a company that was their specialty, and they weren't real crazy about splitting this ranch right down the middle with a highway, and they thought they were going to end up having to go, but they find finally made the deal, they, they made a deal with the county, or the state, not sure which one, but one of the governments to put it across there, and as long as it remained open range, they could continue to run their cattle on it, so anyway, the the government was the government in charge, and I'm not sure whether it was a county or the state, and the lien holder on the ranch finally got together and agreed that they would allow it, as long as they would allow them to run the cattle on both sides of the, so they could not lose, they would only lose the land that was in the middle, but they wouldn't lose to completely lose the use of the whole thing, and they pretty much guaranteed them that they could still run the same amount of cattle, that it wouldn't really cut into the cattle they could run, so their profit margin would still pretty much be the same. So they allowed them to start to build a road up there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=1992.0,2293.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: If you go to, if you go to Molina Basin, and I know how to find it, but I don't know whether anybody else can. They're still, oh, well, up there, and if you look at the map, some of them say Mercer Springs, that's named after Mercer, that's where they spent their, they spent their summers up there, and they tell the story about Dell and his wife's daughter was a baby when they first bought the property, and they brought her to up there on horseback, and she rode on a pillow in front of her mother to get up there, because there was obviously no road there, they don't, the only way they could get there, and when they were, if you know the road, it goes around and then it goes up over the hill along the side of the mountain above the Molina Basin, and so when they were putting the road in, they were doing the blasting up there to put that road in, they'd come down and warn them, and they'd all have to evacuate and go down into the canyon and get behind rocks to make sure that they didn't get hit by any of those explosions, and so they'd be doing something all said they get this some guy come and say you're gonna have to leave, you got about 30 minutes before we, but they, they eventually built the road, so they they contributed and saved that saved saves Sabino Canyon, because if they hadn't been able to do that, if the roads hadn't been in Mercers, if they hadn't been willing to make that concession, that road would have been up Sabino Canyon, where much farther than it is now, it'll go clear to the top of the mountain. Which was pretty much spoils Tomino Canyon, but the family was very oriented. The Freemans wouldn't allow hunting on the rain on their homestead. If they showed up with a gun, they'd chase them off, and they, they were very careful about maintaining the property. The McKinney family, T. Lilly, I'm sorry, mergers. The McKinney family is settled in Cochise County, and there's a lot of, a lot of them down there, Joe T. McKinney, and I'll tell you a story about him after a while, but Joe T, his son ran for governor, and his son also was a sheriff and a deputy, I'm not sure he's sheriff or just a deputy, I think he was a sheriff of Pima County, and made the last arrest of an of a of an Indian when the Indian wars met at the end of the, I think it's at Tohono Odoms are in cells, the Tohono nation wouldn't let their males be drafted in World War One, and he was the last one to go out there, and they said they'd shoot anybody that came out there and tried to arrest them, and he went out there and arrested a couple of them anyway, but funny story, though, about Joe T. McKinney, there was also a cousin of theirs, whose name was Tom Foleyard, and Tom Foleyard. If you go to New Mexico and see Billy the Kid's grave on the headstone, are three names: Tom Foleyard, Billy the Kid, and another guy. Tom Foleyard was a McKinney, his mother, his mother was a McKinney, and he was born, and after the Civil War, this is in Texas, though, in Texas, after the Civil War, Mexico invited displaced southern ranch farmers and ranchers to come through Eagle Pass, Texas, which is, and settle in Mexico, and settle a community down there, because he was trying to Maximilian was the emperor, and he wanted to settle the northern part, and he had these people, and he guaranteed them so much land, told them to bring their slaves, and after they'd worked as a slave, for they were free, but they could work for them, and they would give them land too, and they opened the border, and so the foley yards went down there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=2294.0,2603.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: They had this young man, young man named Tom, their baby, he was a baby, and they got smallpox, and both the mother and father died, and Tom was left with a, as a, an orphan, but when the family, when the word got back to the family in Ivaldi, Texas, which is where they lived, an uncle who had been in the Civil War, fighting on the Civil War, went down and got him and brought him back, and he stayed with Joe T. McKinney's grandmother, Joe T. McKinney, was a his father and grandfather had both been killed in Arkansas over after the Civil War was over with, and so the grandmother raised Joe T and Tom Follyard, and I've got a thing from Joe T. McKinney, or a letter that he wrote to his daughter. She gave it to me, a copy of it, talking about she, the grandmother, used to tell Joe T and Tom Follyard ghost stories and scare them so bad they couldn't sleep at night, and you think, and then this kid ends up in it's Billy the Kid's best friend that he got shot and killed, and along with Billy, and Billy the Kid who was killed by a McKinney by another couple. Cousin, who was raised with him, too, Kip McKinney. If you ever look and see who was the deputy that was with Pat Garrett, was Kip McKinney, but Joe T. McKinney was involved in the Pleasant Valley War, too. He was a deputy sheriff from a guy named Commodore Perry Owens. Commodore Perry Owens was famous for a shootout that he had up in Holbrook, where he killed four members of the family. Remember their names, and they, they were with the Graham faction, and he, he killed them, but Tom Joe T was the only guy, that only law man that could go into Pleasant Valley and arrest anybody. He arrested somebody who wasn't had nothing to do with Pleasant Valley Ward, had something to something else, and he arrested him, took him out of there, but he was the only law man they'd allow in there that could get in there, and they say that I've heard it several times, a lot of times that one of the reasons that Arizona didn't become a state any sooner was because they didn't have any control over the Apache Indians, and they didn't. They said you've got a war going on in the middle of your state, and you can't even go in there and stop that. And that was one of the things that inhibited their statehood. So it said that's just a story. I don't know, don't know the truth to it, but it makes sense. Politics probably had something to do with it too. I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps. I went in as a private high school diploma, joined the reserve unit here in Tucson, and everybody that was in that unit had just come back from Korea, because I joined just at the end of the Korean War, and they all had come back, and so I was kind of an outcast, because I was just a young kid, not didn't have the experiences that they all had, but I went to radio school, learned Morse code, and I was a radio operator and and I, when I got transferred to Okinawa, Japan, and I, they were looking for a radio operator to run what was called a Mars station. Well, a Mars station was military affiliated radio station, it was a ham radio station, but it was sponsored by the military, and they used it as backup communications all over the world to march stations, and because I'd gone to radio school and knew Morse code, I was qualified, so I ran the march station, and our real job was not only to communicate with other military stations and keep in contact with them, but we ran what we called phone patches. There was no, obviously, no phone. If you wanted to call home from Okinawa, you'd pay a pretty price, but we could call by radio, I could call from radio from Okinawa to Tucson if I wanted to talk to my mother, and I'd talk to her back and forth on the radio.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=2604.0,2911.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 1: The caveat was that the licensed person had to run the station, so I was licensed, and I ran, ran, and that's what we did all day long with the station, as when we contact the states was run phone calls for guys that wanted to talk to talk to their family and not have to pay this price, and unfortunately, if you had the license, you had to control the station. They couldn't talk like back on a telephone. You had to talk like military talk over, and when you were through talking, you'd say over. So I had to monitor the phone call, so I knew when to press a button. Some of those phone calls that I heard would curl your toes, but we had to be careful because you're not allowed to say a lot of things over the radio, so we'd have to cut people off. You can't see that kind of thing, but anyway, well, I came back from Sandy, from overseas, and I was sent to San Diego to the recruit depot and to run their Mars station there, and while I was there, my best contact in San Diego was a guy named Tony, so I went to see Tony. Me, when I got there, because I never met him, except on the air, I talked to him, and so I went to see him, and he had a daughter, and 66 years, she's still sitting here, I forgot about Tony pretty quick. I came back and was in San Francisco, and San Francisco was a terrible place. Then, because at the end of the Vietnam War, people were really mistreating the Vietnam veterans. San Francisco, they had the Haight Ashbury and the hippies, and I don't know if you remember any of those, and it was not a nice place to be. We was living on the base, had a nice house overlooking the bay, but you couldn't go in and out at night because kids were trying to roll tires down on the hillside and hit the cars, and they put bulletproof glass in the sentry booth because people were shooting at it periodically. It was, I told people later, I'd say felt safer in Vietnam than I did in San Francisco, but I went, and then when I went back to Vietnam and came back and went to the station at Camp Pendleton and I got several commendations for projects that would have fit in nicely now, because one of them was we had, we had to cut our funds down because the war was over and they cut back the number of people, and the number amount of money you had, you cut your budgets, and my one of my first jobs was cutting the budget for the base, and then the next job was to cut back the number of people on the base, so kind of a Elon Musk. Only I didn't have a chainsaw, but I was kind of.. I did self-serving. I did a pretty good job, and all of a sudden one day I got a call, and they said, 'You're getting transferred, you're going back to Washington, D.C. And I don't want to go to Washington, I want to stay here, I've got a house here, and I'm happy. No, you're going back, you're going to work for the Inspector General. And come to find out later that they had the Inspector General of the Marine Corps had nine inspectors, three three men teams, and he had his choice of any body of the foot, but they sent six names over to him of our records and everything, and he selected me to be one of his, on his team, and it was, it was kind of a feather in my cap. I mean, it was this whole country boy, this whole cowboy was people didn't like to see me coming, however, because I was, but I had, so I'd had that for three years. The bad part of it was any place in the world. There was Marines. We inspected them at some point, which includes all the embassies. Well, I was the lowest low man on the totem pole.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=2912.0,3211.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 2: I was a colonel, a lieutenant colonel, and a major captain, and I was the low guy on the on the team, and one of my jobs was setting up our, they tell us where we were going, I had to set up the itinerary and everything, and when we'd go to Europe and places to the embassies, I always made sure that the embassy in London was on Friday, my inspection, and Paris was on Friday, and Rome was on Friday, and off to Africa countries on the week there during the weeks, but I did that for a couple years. Unfortunately, that was not it, was a great job for me, but it was terrible for my wife. By then we had four children, and and she had to raise them pretty much by herself, I've been proud of everything that has gone on in Southern, and I've been more than happy. I've promoted it everywhere I've been.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=3212.0,3273.999"},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 3: Unfortunately, everything didn't come out like I'd like to, but I just, I can go to around and I can look at places and say I've been there, I've done that. After I retired from Marine Corps, I was a real estate appraiser, and I could say I had my own real estate appraisal business, and I could and. I've been in these houses, I know these neighborhoods. My family was out here, and tomorrow I'm going out and give a tour of what used to be the homestead to the rangers out at this park east, and because I know that, and then I go up Mount Lemon. I can remember my family would settle this. This is part of our bringing up. I go to Mammoth San Manuel, and that country over there. I know I've been every inch of that mountain range up there horseback, just I should have been born 20 years earlier.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879#t=3274.0,3276.0"}]},{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["English [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://arizona.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3195/collection_resources/172950/file/311879/transcript/95011/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"subtitling","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/file_transcripts/associated_files/000/095/011/original/John-Rhodes_transcript.vtt?1782945971","format":"text/vtt","language":"en"},"target":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/file_transcripts/associated_files/000/095/011/original/John-Rhodes_transcript.vtt?1782945971"}]}]}]}