THE CALIFORNIA LUMBER MERCHANT
r8
July 15, 1937
Chris Totten is Author of Delightful
Book on Arizona Bv Jack Dionne Something new, unique, and to me very delightful, is the little 36 page and ,cover booklet on his fair state of Arizona, written by Chris Totten, of Phoenix, Secretary of the Arizona Retail Lumber & Builders Supply Association. It came to me under personal cover, has been read thoroughly twice, and goes into my library of private and precious volumes as a reading thing of charm and interest He calls it "The Land of Blue Sky, Sunshine, and Opportunity." The front 'cover, under the title, bears a pi'cture of a Ponderosa Pine forest in Arizona. The fronticepiece is a pen sketch of a man and a burro sleeping peacefully under the shade of a giant cactus. Then comes a two-page introdu'ctory overture of .Mr. Totten's telling why he decided to write the book. The next page is dedicated to Arizona as "A place to live and educate your children," gives a list of leading Arizona colleges, and adds: "All accredited schools, second to none, and if your kids ,can't make the grade after graduating from one of these educational institutions, it's on account of the breed and not the opportunity." He opens his book by quoting from a frequent Arizona visitor, J. B. Priestly, British novelist and essayist, as follows: "I felt a sudden warmth of gratitude for this strange new old country that had lent me all of its winter sun, its crystalline spaces, its amethyst mountains, its scarlet and blue birds,'its huge night of stars. I am too restless to settle down here or anywhere else, but I can always summon up patien,ce enough to write a book, and if I cannot be loyal, I can be grateful. Arizona possesses the best winter climate in the world, which is notoriously short of winter climates. The air is enchanting, quite unlike any I have known before, being crystal clear and faintly but persistently aromatic. It is this air strongly actinic, that gives Arizona landscape its enduring charm. Seen close at hand there is nothing very attractive about these hills, so prickll' with ca'ctus, or the savage rocky peaks behind them. The vast distan,ces do the trick. The air seems to act as a
powerful stereoscopic lens. Everything far away, and you can see scores of miles, is magically moulded and colored. The mountains, solidly three dimensional ranges and peaks, are an exquisite blue in the day time and turn amethyst at sunset, with shades ever changing with the coming of nightfall, but everywhere toward the far horizon rise chunks of color unbelievably sumptuous, and the nights are evelr more spacious than the days. No lid of darkness is clappecl over you. The spaces are wider than ever, and are lit, night after night, with all the stars of the northern hemisphere, as precisely defined as the stars in a planetarium." Then Mr. Totten "goes to town" on Arizona. Gives the reader a picture of the state from every angle, climate, health, 'crops, timber, beauty, resorts, scenery, economic possibilities, etc. He tells of the size of Arizona-as big as all the New England states combined-with only 600,000 population of whom ,{O to 50 thousand are Indians; of the great Pine forests of 18 billion feet, where the regrowth more than equals present cutting rate; of timbers taken from adobe Indian houses that were hewn with stone axes away back yonder, some of them (according to the educated sharps) cut in the year 1130; of the great supply of Cedar for posts; of the wonderful Grand Canyon where "the world breaks in two at your feet." He tells of other wondrous phenomena, comet fragments and holes, etc. Then he tells of the crops that grow in Arizona, such as the eight thousand carloads of lettuce shipped each year from the Salt River Valley at a price between six and seven million dollars; two and a quarter million boxes of grapefruit and oranges per year; 127,000 bales of 'cotton annually, so high in quality that it is used almost exclusively for auto tires, fire hose, and su'ch quality matters ; 310,000 ounces of gold annually; 8,125,000 ounces of silver annually; one-fourth of the world's supply of copper; 20,275,W pounds of lead annually; 7,900,000 pounds ol zinc annually; second in the nation in ,canteloupe production anel acreage; 800,000 head of cattle roam the state ranges; four
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