The queen of Arizona.(Flashback)

Born in 1870 to a Kansas buffalo hunter and his Bohemian pioneer wife, young Sharlot Hall kept buffalo calves for pets and recalled watching her mother "wash the heads of men who had been scalped by the Indians? At age 11, Sharlot rode "a long-legged, dapple gray mare" along the Santa Fe Trail to her family's new ranch and its hopefully named but far from immaculate "Virgin Mary" gold mine near Prescott in the Arizona Territory.

Autodidactically literary, the ranch-girl's poems and articles, many published in the California magazine Out West, helped interpret the Southwest for the dudes and armchair tourists back East. Hall was contemptuous of Eastern cities, whose denizens "grow small in the huddled crowd." Only in the wide-open West could one stand with "his feet on the earth."

Her regional pride flared to a white-hot intensity when in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed Senator Albert Beveridge's proposal to grant statehood to Arizona and New Mexico only if they merged into a single state with the ridiculous name of Arizona the Great. (Arizona was too Democratic, and New Mexico too Catholic, for Protestant Republican tastes.)

Hall learned of Roosevelt's action while she was on assignment in northern Arizona for an Out West issue promoting statehood for her territory. She grew "more and more indignant" as she pondered the slight. Upon arriving home, she recalled, "I asked my mother, who thought I was coming down with pneumonia, to let me have a fire in the sitting room and have the family go to bed and let me alone."

By the time the fire went out, she had composed the poem "Arizona," a defiant assertion of Arizona's claim to statehood:

 
   No beggar she in the mighty hall where 
      her bay-crowned sisters wait; 
   No empty-handed pleader for the right 
      of a freeborn state; 
   No child, with a child's insistence, 
      ...