Rhymes and Jingles
Los Angeles: Arroyo Guild Press, 1910.
First Edition. Softcover. Very good. 9" x 6", 48 pp, in original printed wrappers. A very good copy, with mild toning to wraps, ownership signature of San Dimas, California resident Genevieve R. Walker, dated 1910, on title page, with "Complimentary. July 3rd 1910" written below Bass' name, presumably in his hand. William Wallace Bass (b. 1848 in Indiana) was one of the earliest settlers and guides at the Grand Canyon. He arrived in Arizona in 1883 and located a camp on the south rim of the Canyon in 1884. "Realizing the Canyon's great tourist potential, he constructed a stage road to his camp, first from Williams, then from Ashfork, both approximately seventy miles distant. He began advertising for the tourist trade in 1885, although at this time his principal activities in the Canyon were mining and prospecting. From 1885 until 1926, when he sold his interests to the Santa Fe Land and Improvement Company, Bass played an important role in the evolution of the mining and tourist industries at the Grand Canyon. He traced and built over 140 miles of roads and more than forty miles of trails, connecting his mines, camps and scenic viewpoints. He built cisterns and dams to collect and preserve rain water and established first a boat, then a cable ferry, across the Colorado River. He was also a photographer and built a darkroom below the Canyon rim to accommodate the photographers who frequented his camp. He was instrumental in starting a school at the Grand Canyon in 1911....William Wallace Bass was endowed with great intellectual curiosity. He was a self-taught geologist who had his own theory of how the Grand Canyon was formed. He also wrote poetry, though he was too modest to call it that, referring to his verse as "rhymes and jingles" instead."... Bass' wide ranging interests, intellectual curiosity and desire to learn were qualities unique among the early tourist operators at the Grand Canyon. He was called a "visionary" by some of his contemporaries, and, indeed, with justification. He not only foresaw some of the later developments at the Canyon but took the necessary steps to adjust to them. This was characteristic of his entire forty-two years at the Canyon" (Arizona Historical Society Finding Aid). This book includes a four-page prefatory poem about Bass by San Francisco Mayor Edward Robeson Taylor and 17 poems by Bass, nearly all relating to the Grand Canyon and/or Arizona. Bass writes in a brief preface "I am neither so foolish nor presumptuous to assume that my crude and simple rhymes are worthy any serious attention as poems....My jingles have given pleasure to my guests around my campfire and merely to extend the sphere of that jolly and unique experience I have presumed to insert them in these unpretentious pages."
Item #24336
Price: $350.00