The Patagonia Museum members meeting will be held on Wednesday, March 18th at 2 PM in the Patagonia Library. Our guest speaker will be Mary Noon Kasulaitis who will speak on the history of Arivaca.

Mary Noon Kasulaitis is a cattle rancher and retired Pima County Public Library librarian. She has been researching Arivaca history since the early 1980s. Her great grandparents, Dr A.H. and Emma Noon, came to Southern Arizona in 1879 to do some prospecting and started a cattle ranch at Oro Blanco, which is still in the family. Her father, Fred Noon, was on the Board of the Arizona Historical Society and wrote articles on Oro Blanco and Arivaca history in the local papers. Mary has published in the Journal of Arizona History and the Tucson Corral of the Westerners’ Smoke Signal. She is involved in historic preservation and is President of Friends of the Arivaca Schoolhouse & Historic Townsite, Inc. She lives on her grandfather’s homestead at Arivaca.

The Museum board will be holding our annual members meeting on January 18th at 10:30 AM in the Patagonia Public Library meeting room.

Following a short business meeting, you will hear from our guest speaker, renown local author, Nancy Valentine. She will speak about passages from her historical novel—”J.R. Bartlett and the Captive Girl”.

The book is based on a true U.S./ Mexico Borderlands story of the perilous and heartwarming journey of John Russell Bartlett, head of the 1850-1853 U.S. Boundary Survey Commission, to return a rescued Mexican Apache captive girl, Inez Gonzales, to her family in Santa Cruz, Sonora Mexico.

We will meet in the Patagonia Public Library at 10:00 am on Saturday, May 11. Following a brief business meeting, award winning author, cowboy and horse lover Alan Day will discuss his latest book, “Cowboy Up! Life Lessons from the Lazy B”.

Mr. Day and his sister Sandra Day O’Connor co-authored the New York Times bestselling memoir “Lazy B”, which chronicles the story of the Day family and growing up on a harsh yet beautiful southwestern ranch.

Alan Day’s upbringing branded him a cowboy from the day he was born. To this day, he claims that he has soil running through his veins. He was part of the third generation to grow up on the 200,000-acre Lazy B cattle ranch straddling the high deserts of southern Arizona and New Mexico. The ranching and cowboy lifestyle appealed to him so greatly that after graduating from the University of Arizona, he returned to manage Lazy B for the next 40 years. During his career, he received numerous awards for his dedicated stewardship of the land. In 1989, Alan purchased a cattle ranch in Nebraska and soon after, a ranch in South Dakota. The latter became the first government-sponsored sanctuary for unadoptable wild horses. He developed and successfully used a herd modification-training program for his 2000 head of cattle and 1500 wild mustangs. Now retired from ranching, Alan divides his time between Tucson and Pinetop, AZ.

The Museum board will hold the annual members meeting on January 26, 2019 at 10:30 AM in the Patagonia Public Library meeting room. The brief agenda will include the election of the board members for the upcoming fiscal year.

The candidates are: German Quiroga, President; Bob Ollerton, Vice-President; Maureen De La Ossa, Secretary; Bonnie Maclean, Treasurer; Linda Shore, Curator; Bob Bergier, Member-at-Large; Ralph Schmitt, Member-at-Large.

The business meeting will be followed by a presentation by one of our favorite speakers, Dr. John Langellier. is topic will include the life and times of the Apache Kid, Army Scout and renegade.

The author of dozens of books and scores of articles, as well as a consultant to film and TV, Dr. Langellier shared this preview of his talk with us:

Geronimo’s long bid for freedom had ended. Now he and many fellow so-called Chiricahuas were prisoners of war in far off Florida.  Three of the men who had trailed him and his followers were U.S Army scouts known on their enlistment papers as the Apache Kid, Massai, and Rowdy.  The trio, once comrades in arms, would follow very different paths resulting in one of Arizona’s longest manhunts. Join military historian Dr. John Langellier as buffalo soldiers, Indian scouts, and a host of other military men and civilians attempt to round up the usual suspects criss- crossing the border between Mexico and the United States on this deadly mission.

Please join us for our next member meeting on December 7th at 7 PM in the Patagonia Public Library meeting room. Our guest speaker will be Doug Hocking.

The Patagonia Museum will hold our annual meeting on Saturday, September 15th at 10:30 am. The business meeting will be followed by a presentation by Mike Anderson on the “Bisbee Deportation” which was one of the most important events to take place in the U.S. during the First World War.

Background: Mike Anderson has been interested in history for as long as he can remember. A resident of Arizona since 1961, he taught Arizona history, world geography and world history as a high school social studies teacher. The author of “Warren Ballpark,” Mike is also a catcher for the Bisbee Black Sox Vintage Base Ball Club. His articles on southern Arizona pioneer peace officers have been published in the Journal of Arizona History and he has had numerous articles appearing in the Cochise County Historical Journal. Mike has also worked as a newspaper reporter and managing editor. In 2017, Mike participated in the centennial commemoration of the Bisbee Deportation, tasked with researching the 1,186 men who were deported from Bisbee in July 1917.  He was a cast member of the documentary “Bisbee ’17,” the movie that was filmed in Bisbee during the Centennial and scheduled for release in Sept. 2018. Along with two friends, he produces and performs on The Farm and Ranch Report, a half-hour radio comedy program that airs each week on KBRP-LP, Bisbee’s community FM radio station. He lives in the Warren neighborhood of Bisbee with his wife Judy.

Our timing is perfect because the new movie “Bisbee ’17” is opening the day before at the Loft in Tucson and the Uptown Theater in Sierra Vista.