A Saguaro Diary

Eighty years ago, deep in the Saguaro National Monument twenty miles east of Tucson, stood a park ranger’s cabin. There Judith Wilder lived for a brief time with her husband and infant son. In the tradition of pioneer women’s diaries of the West, Wilder, an amateur botanist and young mother, kept a journal of her life and work.¹ The following consists of a curated and edited version of this diary—“South-Facing Porch”—and a retrospective essay on the diary—“Desert Timepiece”—written by her granddaughter.

Judith Carlock Wilder (1910–1995) and her husband, Carleton Stafford Wilder (1911–1986), lived in the small cabin in Saguaro National Monument East during most of 1938–1939, where Carleton was given a temporary assignment as ranger by the National Park Service. They lived there as caretakers, guiding visitors and maintaining park trails and services, while navigating their first year together as parents of a new baby. During these months, they also undertook what became early ecological studies of young giant saguaro cactus. Their publications based on this research contributed to new insights into saguaro establishment and longevity in the Sonoran Desert (see the publications listed below).

Judith was an inveterate writer; while the bulk of this work is a journal, she also jotted notes on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper, which she later—in what became a sustained project to which she returned over the years—turned into annotated typescripts, indicating her interest in publishing the diary in some form in the future. For this reason, the dates given in the diary correspond to the day an event occurred, but not always the date on which the entry was written. For example, the introductory part of the diary—dated October 23, 1938—was written in January 1939; some other sections were written or edited (by the author herself, or by the editor here) retrospectively.²

The cabin was torn down decades later and the footings of the cabin are only barely visible now. A National Park Service sign marks the spot on the Cactus Forest Trail in Saguaro National Park East. This diary is the journal of a significant year in the quotidian life of a young family; yet it also provides a window onto Saguaro East of over eighty years ago, its relationship to the city of Tucson, its attraction to visitors (such as renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski), and the role of one family in the park’s distinguished history and their small contribution to emerging knowledge about saguaro population structure and dynamics.³

Judith Wilder was a native Arizonan born in Globe, Arizona Territory, in 1910.⁴ She was a self-taught botanist and a secretary and research assistant for many years at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill in Tucson. Her family had moved to Arizona from Kentucky in 1906 and settled in Globe, where Judith’s father worked in management for a copper mine.

Judith and her twin sister, Frances (who died at the age of about two years old), were the eldest of five children, all of whom left their mark in the region’s history. Judith’s brother, John K. Carlock (known as “Dom” in her journal), was a law school graduate and World War II veteran who later served as under-secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Another brother, Robert H. Carlock, also a veteran, went on to be a rancher who owned or managed several ranches in northern Arizona. The youngest child, George Read Carlock (known as Read), went on to study law and became a founding partner of the Phoenix law firm Ryley Carlock & Ralston.

Judith’s husband, Carleton, was a young man from upstate New York who developed asthma while in his freshman year at Bowdoin College in Maine. In 1932, he came out to Tucson to continue his education at the University of Arizona. Lining up to register for classes at the start of the fall term, he spotted an attractive girl in an adjacent line for an archaeology class; he decided to join that line instead...