Editor’s Note

A quick perusal of the shelves in the U.S. history and biography sections at most bookstores will invariably lead one to find biographies of Founding Fathers, Civil War generals, World War II heroes and villains, and major political figures from Alexander Hamilton to Lyndon Johnson and beyond. Such biographies of Great Men are rarely, if ever, based on new sources or offer new interpretations. Yet, based on their ubiquity in bookstores, biographies of presidents and generals are still incredibly popular with many Americans. Although it is certainly important to know about the decision-makers from the past, it can often be just as interesting—if not more so—when a historian digs deep into the historical record, uncovers long forgotten sources, and then uses those sources to reconstruct the life of an unknown, ordinary individual (or individuals).¹ The three articles in this issue of the Journal of Arizona History do just that.

In our first essay, author Paul Nickens carefully reconstructs the life story of José María Mendívil, who was born in Sonora, Mexico, in the late 1840s. On his way to school one day, a group of mounted Apaches abducted nine-year-old José. Mendívil was assimilated into Apache society and lived with his captors into his late teens. On the other side of the continent, a conflict that began because white southerners wanted the right to hold people in perpetual captivity and take their captives to western places like Arizona ultimately led to Mendívil’s escape from his own captivity. In 1864, U.S. soldiers from California crossed into Arizona. While in the Arizona Territory, members of the California Column began fighting Apaches. It was during one such skirmish that a company of Union soldiers happened upon José Mendívil. After the war, Mendívil moved to California, eventually briefly reuniting with his father. He learned a trade and spent the rest of his life in the lower Colorado River Valley. He also told his captivity story—many times, to many people. It was written down for both official U.S. military reports and for newspapers across the region. As Nickens notes, thanks to those sources, we know more about the life of José Mendívil than we do about most captives in the mid-nineteenth-century borderland region.

In our second article, Will Moore also reconstructs the life of an ordinary person—in this case a lifelong civil servant named Charlie Steen. After spending his childhood in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Massachusetts, Steen’s family moved west when he was teenager. During the early years of the Great Depression, Steen attended and eventually graduated from the University of Denver with a degree in anthropology. After a brief struggle to obtain gainful employment, the young anthropologist eventually landed a job with the National Park Service (NPS). Moore’s essay focuses on Steen’s career in the 1930s and early 1940s, as a young park ranger who served in the Southwestern National Monuments division of the NPS. During these early years of his career, Steen bounced from monument to monument across the Southwest, but especially here in Arizona. He was part of a cohort of young park rangers seeking to professionalize the service and stabilize the remarkable structures that were designated as national monuments. In the process, he also found stability in both his professional and home life. Moore recounts in detail the ups and downs of life as a park ranger in Depression-era Arizona. There were days of loneliness and quietude and then there were days of excitement and joy. Many young professionals can no doubt identify with Steen’s experiences.

While the first two authors took a deep dive into the historical record to uncover the life of an individual, our third author, Priscila J. B. M. Costa, offers more of a collective biography of one of Arizona’s marginalized communities. In the 1980s, the Arizona Daily Star ran a series of articles about the ongoing impact of a toxic substance—trichloroethylene (TCE)—on the southside of Tucson, which was home to a large Hispanic population...