“Dancing with the Dead” Excerpt

The classic movie about Tucson’s frontier history would be directed by John Ford, with a screenplay by Claude Binyon (“Arizona”), Frank Nugent (“Fort Apache”), and Felix Jackson (“Destry Rides Again”). 

The ideal screenplay about the modern city would require collaboration between Elmore Leonard, Isabell Allende, Harold Ramis and Wallace McDonald, who wrote Gene Autry’s 1935 surrealistic science fiction-singing cowboy serial, “The Phantom Empire.” But who would direct? Only someone as skilled with contemporary westerns as urban film noir (Raoul Walsh, perhaps, or Clint Eastwood) who understand the complex interactions between history and myth, injustice, violence and corporate greed; families and faith, selfless kindness, courage, sacrifice; surrealism and humor, savage, sardonic, boisterous, irrepressible.

Dancing with the Dead is not a comprehensive history of Tucson, or an objective analysis of the modern city. A book intended to be truly objective, conclusive and definitive would never be finished. There will always be another mystery to solve, more stories to tell.

For generations, local politicians, business leaders and the Chamber of Commerce--working relentlessly to transform the city into a docile suburb of Phoenix--have promoted a cheerful, tourist-friendly image of the “Old Pueblo” by sanitizing, re-writing or suppressing some of its messiest, most embarrassing, inconvenient and fascinating history.

The Old Tucson Studios and Theme Park, (“Experience what life in the Old West was really like!”) offers stunt shows, gun fights, musical revues, shopping and restaurants, as well as the opportunity to learn “...the ways of Native Peoples in the Native Village.” 

At the downtown reconstruction of the 18th century walled Presidio, people in period costumes take part in historic reenactments and demonstrations of traditional crafts. Discreetly absent are free-roaming farm animals, the stench of raw sewage, church bells tolling for the victims of smallpox, typhoid and cholera--and Apache heads displayed on spikes along the walls. Tourist brochures do not mention the whipping post in front of the town’s first jail, or the lynching gallows that once stood in the Plaza de las Armas, now El Presidio Park. Despite the dramatic possibilities, reenactments will never include a sight once common in the Old Tucson: the sale of captive Apache children. 

Opposition to the Phoenix cabal and the Existing Order includes the Tucson Underground--also known as Bajazona--a motley alliance of artists, mystics, scientists, old Hippies and military veterans, writers and musicians, eccentrics, Wiccans, nuns, aging cowboys, prospectors, and retired professors wearing bowties. Home base is the Desert Rat Cafe, where stories are told, news passed, rumors shared, tactics and strategy plotted.

On fine spring mornings when the cafe’s doors and windows are wide open, or humid thundery Monsoon afternoons when the desert smells like rain, and dust storms erase the mountains and the modern skyline; on cold winter nights when logs in the cafe’s fireplace burn down, crack and send sparks up the chimney, ghosts gather to listen as people debate, argue and speculate about where it all began, and how we got here.

“I don’t know whether you joined us or we joined you, but it’s good to be together.” (Abilene Town, 1946).