Childlike in PrescottDuring the latter nineteenth century, immigrants from the Eastern and Midwestern parts of the United States, along with immigrants from around the world, invaded thehomeland of American Indians and took possession of over 430 million acres of land.Some of those immigrants settled in Prescott Arizona and the surrounding districts. Thechildren of those immigrants would become the first American-style Arizonians. On theridges and ranges in and around Prescott, harried parents struggled in cabins, shacks, andtents simply to sustain their families. Those overworked parents often left their childrento their own devices. The way those children occupied themselves and adapted their playto place, in this case the mountain frontier, articulated their attitudes towards conceptssuch as peer power and group identity. On the other hand, maybe they were just havingfun. In either case, the play of those mountain children differed materially from the playof their urban counterparts. However, in practice, they had at least one thing in common:they loved to be scared.In the 1880s, New York's kids were scaring themselves silly visiting P.T.Barnum's ghastly and ghoulish freak shows. In other cities, they were listening to popular Victorian era horror stories about werewolves, zombies, vampires, and other habitual denizens of children's nightmares. In Prescott Arizona, a group of youngsterswas listening to a miner tell a tale about a baby mummy. With his own eyes he had seenthe mummy hidden in a wall at some nearby Zuni ruins. The petrified infant waswrapped in silk-like cloth designed with diamonds and stars. Shredded bark was stuffedinto its mouth and ears, and the baby wore tiny sandals made of yucca, and decoratedwith turquoise and red clay beads. The man told the children that the mummy had toys,dolls, and bone ornaments too. Not surprisingly, upon hearing this story, the youngsters planned a trip to the ruins. They begged their schoolteacher, a young woman with a loveof adventure, herself an immigrant from Massachusetts, to accompany them. Sensibly,they packed a lunch and the little group of children ranging from age six to fourteen yearsold, accompanied by their young instructor, trooped off into the mountains.Part of the fun of exploring is the threat of imaginary dangers. That day, realdanger was waiting for one of the children at the Zuni ruins. Once inside the multi-tiered

dwelling, twelve-year-old Clara saw something in a dark corner...possibly a mummy, possibly something even more horrible. She ran across the dimly lit room to inspect, and promptly fell through the floor. Her friends scrambled down to the next level, lookedthrough a gap in the wall, and discovered the little girl crying and screaming hysterically.She had landed in a huge pile of chollas, a kind of cactus with long spiky thorns. Beingexperienced naturalists the children deduced that pack rats must have been collecting thechollas there for years, purpose unknown except to them. The only solution to Clara's predicament was for the little girl to crawl out by herself.Bravery was a necessity for Arizona's frontier children, so Clara took a deep breath, stopped crying, and crawled through the chollas to the opening. By the time thecourageous youngster emerged, thorns covered her clothes, skin, and hair. Immediately,her friends set about removing the needle-like spines from her face. After that, in a nodto female modesty, the girls helped her to an empty room in the ruins where they strippedoff her clothes. Some girls worked on Clara's body and hair while another pulled thethorns out of her dress. They rubbed her skin with some milk they had brought for lunch, bundled her up in their cloaks, and let her cry herself to sleep. One girl who had been atthe ruins before volunteered to stay and watch over Clara so that the rest could continueexploring. This matter-of-fact approach to calamity highlights the difference betweenurban and frontier attitudes. In the same situation in a city, a parent or guardian wouldhave hustled the child to a doctor or hospital. At the very least the adventure would havecome to an abrupt end and everyone would have been required to go home. Not so for these young people. The children of the frontier faced the accidents and hardships of mountain life with pluck and practicality.While Clara slept, the other children went into the Zuni "kitchen" and built a firein order to boil coffee and fry bacon. The food was simple but the explorers were hungryand their enjoyment was considerable. The diarist of the trip noted that though the foodwas plain, but that hunger was an excellent sauce. While they ate together, theywondered about the lives, hopes, and dreams of the children and grown-ups who hadlived there in the past. In one entry reads “people unlike us in appearance, but who hadknown joy and grief, pleasure and pain, same as our race of today know them, and whohad laughed, cried, sung, danced, married and died, mourned or rejoiced their lives away