Of Note is an occasional series in which we share items that have caught our eye.
In June 1910, a few days after President William Howard Taft signed legislation allowing the Arizona and New Mexico territories to draft constitutions and move toward statehood, a strange telegram arrived in the White House. “Hassayampers unite in thanking you for Statehood,” the message read. “They knew you would secure this for them when at Prescott you drank water from above the crossing of their famous river.”
The author of the telegram was Robert E. Morrison, a lawyer and Yavapai County district attorney, who had personally welcomed Taft to Prescott, Arizona, during the president’s whirlwind 75-minute visit there the year before. On that day, on a platform before the town’s gathered citizens, Morrison had gotten right to the point: he had some water from the Hassayampa River, and he wanted Taft to drink it. As the Arizona Republican reported, the president’s quaffs elicited “prolonged cheering from the crowd.”
Clearly, this water was meaningful to the people of Prescott. In fact, as geographer Jamie Linton suggests, Americans across the country once found a great deal of meaning in the water around them. Modern water, Linton writes, has become “deliberately non-social and non-historical in a way that the waters of other places and other times are not.” Viewed through the lens of scientific practice, he continues, most Americans now see water as “timeless, natural, and unaffected by the contingencies of human history.” Whereas citizens once spoke of waters in the plural, traveling long distances in search of healing springs or sanitariums with special “water cures,” today water has become singular and demystified.
Not so of the Hassayampa in 1909. Then, the river buzzed with legend and the notion that one who drank its waters above a certain crossing would be “ever truthful.” Drink the waters below and be “lost to truth” forever. WPA folklorists attributed the story to Indians, or cowboys, or pioneers. A poem of the time attributed it to early Spanish settlers. Perhaps the river’s unique ecology had helped promote this mythmaking. Flowing mostly underground from the Bradshaw Mountains to the Gila River, the Hassayampa rises to the surface only briefly – for about 14 miles – and when it does it creates a “rich biological oasis,” a small paradise within the arid desert.
For his part, being a good politician, Taft was happy to accept the town’s endorsement of his honesty. He did joke, however, that he had nearly missed the mark, filling a canteen from the wrong part of the river. Would that water really cause someone to tell lies? Taft aimed to find out, by experimenting on a member of his entourage. “I expect to try it,” he declared, “on some of the company.” The president’s papers contain no indication of the result.
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“The author…” Arizona: Prehistoric, Aboriginal, Pioneer, Modern, vol. III (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1916), 355-356.
“Jamie Linton suggests…” Jamie Linton, What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 74.
“WPA folklorists…” Works Projects Administration, Arizona: A State Guide (Flagstaff: Arizona State Teachers College, 1940), 356.
“A poem…” Andrew Downing, “The Hassayampa,” in The Trumpeters, and Other Poems: Including Arizona Verses (Boston: Sherman, French & Company, 1913), 187-188.
“rich biological oasis…” Methea K. Sapp, America’s Natural Places: Pacific and West (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2010), 29.