PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

The "Boss" Directs First Improvements

The monument was one of many southwestern sites administered by Superintendent Frank Pinkley of Southwestern National Monuments, headquartered from October 1923 through August 1943 in Coolidge, Arizona. [521] Nicknamed "Boss" by the many men who served under him, Pinkley held this position from October 25, 1923, until February 14, 1940. He was in charge of general supervision of 18 national monuments in the Southwest, including serving as custodian for Casa Grande and Tumacacori. The appropriation for general repairs to historic and prehistoric ruins in all the monuments under his care was $5,000 for FY 1925; the same amount was requested for FY 1926.

By 1923, with the exception of three monuments that required a full-time custodian (Petrified Forest, Aztec Ruins, and Casa Grande), all custodians at other monuments served for the nominal salary of $12 per year. Their federal appointments and nominal salary gave them the legal authority to make arrests and otherwise enforce Park Service regulations. [522] During the 1926 travel season, visitation to the southwestern national monuments totaled just over 200,000. [523] With only a few full-time custodians and a dozen part-time and temporary men staffing the monuments, Pinkley reported in 1926 that the work force manning these sites was "totally inadequate." [524] Things would get worse. During the 1929 travel season, the number of visitors to the southwestern national monuments rose to nearly 300,000.

41. Southwestern National Monument's Superintendent Frank Pinkley
inspecting southwest corner of fort; undated, ca. 1923-1925
(Pipe Spring National Monument).

During the summer of 1925, Pinkley set about directing the landscape work at Pipe Spring to make the historic site and its setting more presentable to the public. Local laborers under the supervision of the monument's first caretaker, John White, did the initial work. [525] Work involved neither historical research nor an attempt to recreate the fort's historic period landscape. Rather, changes followed guidelines dictated by Park Service aesthetics and by officials' desire to provide unobstructed views of the fort and its two associated cabins. The fact that the fences, corrals, and troughs were an integral part of the fort's operations as an historic cattle ranch was not considered, only that they were "eyesores" and posed hazards for tourists. (But then, cultural landscapes as an historic resource would not even begin to be a Park Service concern for another 60 years.)

On August 1, 1925, Pinkley described to Director Mather the cleanup operations at Pipe Spring conducted during all of July:

We took out a hundred yards of fence on the line as one approaches from the west. This was a fence made of cedar posts planted as closely as they would stand some eight or nine feet high and they obscured the foreground as one approached the place. We replaced this with a barbed wire fence, which is quite inconspicuous as compared with the other.

We put in a cattle guard at the west entrance to the monument.

The main buildings at Pipe Spring, as you know, have long been used as headquarters for this whole cattle range and the place was all messed up with corrals and fences. We took out a cedar post fence just west of the spring which was spoiling the view to the southwest; a fence around the pools which was an eyesore and is no longer needed; two corrals to the east of the buildings which were in the foreground as one approached from the east; a fence and gate which connected these corrals with the fence around the pools; and the big corrals where the roundups have been held these last forty years and would have continued to be held if we had not removed them. We changed the line of about 200 yards of other fence, throwing it behind trees and bushes and hiding it almost completely.

We rebuilt 100 yards of rock wall around the two pools and graded two sites, one at the east and one at the west end of the pools for automobile campers. We built a terrace wall 30 feet long and from 1 to 3 feet high in line with the front of the big building and in front of the spring. [526]

An interesting aspect to the work revealed by Pinkley in the above report is that the removal of these ranch-related structures was needed not only to clean up the landscape, but also to change the habits of the local cattle ranchers. Given their practical nature and the site's historical use, the ranchers might have been inclined to continue to use any thing left standing. Probably as a concession to Charles C. Heaton, the two main corrals at the southwest corner of the monument were left standing. These had been used up to the time the site became a monument for branding and separating cattle during semi-annual roundups.