Robin Capin Rivera-Ashford knows how hard it was to grow up Jewish in the Grand Canyon State. “In my generation, I may have been the only one who had a bat mitzvah,” says Rivera-Ashford. She grew up in Nogales, a town originally named Isaacson after a Jewish immigrant who discovered the settlement in 1880. She…
Two Southern Arizonan nonprofit organizations, Native Seeds/SEARCH and Tohono O’odham Community Action, are working to promote wild food sources and desert tolerant crops in the region. Before Arizona became known for its cotton and citrus, before farmers moved west to tame the land, before Spanish explorers first set their eyes on the Grand Canyon, the Tohono O’odham…
The clop of horses’ hooves and jingle of spurs on the wooden sidewalk peppers the dusty morning air of Tombstone. “First shootout at noon,” calls a man with a snowy white beard and sheriff’s costume as he wanders toward Allen Street, Tombstone’s historic district. In Tombstone, history is a part of the fabric of everyday…
The simple monument along the San Pedro River is only the beginning of a larger story. Along the river between Tombstone and Sierra Vista is the site of the only battle in Arizona during the Mexican-American War. The combatants: a Mormon battalion and a herd of wild bulls. It went down in history as an…
When people reminisce about the Old West, they think of air thick with the smell of blood, dust rising off the unpaved streets. They see men in black frock coats facing off in a corral, the pop of gunshots. For residents of Tombstone, such imagery is an inescapable part of daily life. “I wanted to…
