The University of Arizona Press
December 13, 2024
This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!
In its earliest iteration funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, titles published in Open Arizona explored the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. In June 2022, thanks to a grant from the NEH, the Press was able to expand offerings in Open Arizona by adding twenty backlist titles in archaeology to the platform. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology. In Spring 2023, the Press published its first simultaneous print and open-access frontlist title.
On a Trail of Southwest Discovery, edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, examines the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, directed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, through the diaries of two participants who fell in love on the expedition: the field secretary, Fred Hodge—who became a major figure in early twentieth-century anthropology—and the expedition artist, Margaret Magill. Divided into three parts, the book’s first two sections chronicle the field operations of the expedition, while the third part describes the anthropological career of Hodge after the end of the expedition. This book is the third installment of a multivolume work by Hinsley and Wilcox on the Hemenway Expedition. The second installment, The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing, and the first, The Southwest in the American Imagination, are also available on Open Arizona.
Read an excerpt from the first chapter of On a Trail of Southwest Discovery below.
“Terrible nightmare. Were the oysters to blame? Falling over precipices and facing revolvers all night and hollowing to the top of my voice (at least so the porter tells me).” Thus twenty-two-year-old Fred Hodge recorded the night of December 5, 1886, on the train from Baltimore to Rochester. The following day he traveled on to the family homestead of Frank Hamilton Cushing near Albion, in western New York State, where he met up with Cushing and his wife, Emily Tennison Magill Cushing (1859–1920), her sister Margaret Whitehead Magill (1865–1935), and three prominent Zuni men, Palowahtiwa, Waihusiwa, and Heluta. Less than a week later the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition—named for its Boston patron, Mary Tileston Hemenway (1820–94)—departed for Arizona Territory, with Hodge employed as personal secretary to director Cushing. Hodge had no way of knowing that the next two years in Arizona and New Mexico would become his introduction to the Southwest, to archaeological fieldwork, and ultimately to a half-century career at the institutional centers of American anthropology. He would also learn the risks of life on the edge in America—and the dangers of falling over personal and professional precipices.
Frederick Webb Hodge (1864–1956) was blessed with ninety-two years of life. Born in Plymouth, England, toward the end of the American Civil War, he passed away quietly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ten years after the end of World War II. He arrived in America with his parents, Edwin and Emily Webb Hodge, and four siblings in 1872. His father (1831–1919) worked briefly as a coachman before finding a permanent position as a watchman with the U.S. Postal Department; the family soon settled in downtown Washington. Mr. Hodge became a naturalized American citizen in 1882, thereby conferring the same on his family. Emily Hodge (1833–1924) had been trained as a seamstress and taught her first-born daughter, Emlyn, that trade as well. Of the six Hodge children, only the youngest, Charles, was born in the United States. Emlyn and her sister, Evelina, eventually established a real estate and insurance office in the capital. Edwin fils went to Yale and Johns Hopkins Medical School, later becoming an army physician and working on yellow fever with Walter Reed. Charles attended Swarthmore and became a businessman. We know nothing of son Ernest. Third-born Fred grew up as a child in the middle, surrounded by family.
When he was fourteen Hodge went to work for the summer at the offices of Henry N. Copp, a Washington lawyer who specialized in the public lands of the American West. His publications—Copp’s Land-Owner: Real Estate and Land Law and The American Settler’s Guide: A Brief Exposition of the Public Land System— served as legal guides for investors and settlers regarding the operations of the General Land Office and the Department of the Interior. With his constantly updated manuals Copp stood at the center of the vigorous, often corrupt disposition of the nation’s public lands during the swashbuckling post–Civil War decades.
At the end of summer 1878, Fred expected to return to school, but Copp—who was also his school principal—advised him to drop out and continue working: “I think you’ll learn just as much in my office here as you would in school. . . . All you’re going to have [in school] is word analysis, or something like that,” he told the boy. Hodge ended up staying with Copp for five formative years (1878–83). Beginning as an office clerk, he was soon gathering information from federal bureaus for Copp’s magazines, editing and proofreading materials, and seeing publications through the entire printing process. In the course of his work the teen also was getting his first close-up look at the daily intricacies of business, publishing, and government practices. But he was developing higher ambitions too. While he never entered high school or finished any formal schooling, Hodge enrolled in night classes: first at Arlington Academy, a one-man operation, then in the “science course” at Columbian University (later part of George Washington University). His main interest was topographic drafting, because he dreamed of fieldwork under John Wesley Powell with the new U.S. Geological Survey, formed in 1879. But he also made time to study the skill that would open his career: stenography.
