Goldie Richmond, angel to the Papagos, Part II

Goldie Richmond stood 6’4” and weighed about 350 pounds. She wore a man’s size 13 shoe. She lamented leaving her sewing machine behind when she left her temporary home in California, but continued to sew her own clothes by hand because of necessity and her size.

However, probably her size and great strength saved her life and that of her husband’s during one of their many hunting trips. The two were crossing the desert sands toward the mountains of Quijotoa when a “furry streak hurtled through the air off an overhanging rock” and latched onto her husband’s back, ripping him with its claws and viciously chewing on his back. Without a second’s hesitation, Goldie lunged onto the huge ferocious lynx cat with her hands tightly wrapped around his throat. Even though the animal clawed her arms into ribbons (one scratch was eight inches long) and ripped off her clothes and flesh in the fierce fight, she never stopped squeezing until his lifeless body went limp. 

After finishing their trap lines and returning the long distance across the desert to their home, Goldie mixed 6 tablespoons of salt into a cup of vinegar and boiled it. Washing their wounds with water, she dipped a cloth into the hot vinegar mixture and applied it repeatedly for an hour onto their wounds. Next, she sprinkled sugar onto the open wounds. 

While mining and trapping in the Quijotoas (twelve miles long and six miles wide) Goldie and Marion camped out overnight. It was here during their trapping days that she followed the sounds of the Gambel quail, the most beautiful of all quails, to the base of an ocotillo plant. She sat quietly observing about a thousand quail with the males furiously fighting one another while about five hundred hen quails watched. Something seemed to spook them, and they all flew away in “hen-male pairs.” She loved the Quijotoas and the beautiful desert and wonderful creatures in all their glory.

Once when she and her husband were trapping about seventeen miles from their camp, the connecting rod went out in their old Model T Ford. They had no way of fixing it and were far away from civilization. Goldie took a piece of bacon rind left over from their traps and used it in place of the bearing, and it got them home okay. The next winter found them with the same problem, but 25 miles from camp. Starting home on foot, they found a piece of broken pottery. They took tin fruit jar lids from their toolbox and melted them in the pottery. With the help of mud for a mold, they made a bearing for the car. 

Law dictated these trap lines be checked daily, and the distance was frequently 30 or more miles. When it rained, it was difficult to cover this area because of impassable muddy and washed out roads. When her husband was sick, she was forced to make the overnight trips alone, retrieving whatever was in the traps and resetting them for the next day. 

One day Goldie met a dark-complexioned man who spoke broken English by the name of Goldstein. Goldstein was a German-Jew and a scientist who lived in San Francisco. He noted her traps and said he would buy all the creatures she could trap and would return every six months to pick up the bounty. Goldie, thinking she had died and gone to heaven, was ecstatic. 

During the off-season of May to October, the trapping season closed because the pelts had to be at their best. During this time, Goldie hunted Gila monsters that brought fifteen dollars a dozen, and a wide variety of other desert creatures such as scorpions, centipedes, horned toads, tarantulas, butterflies, etc, for 25 cents each. One time, Goldstein paid her three dollars for a thirteen-inch centipede.  Another time, he paid her fifteen dollars to show him a crestate on a tall saguaro, and a double crestate on a prickly pear earned her five dollars. To her amazement, the scientist offered her one dollar for every pound of rattlesnake she corralled for him, and one dollar for bull snakes. Goldie set about making a butterfly type of net, broke off a saguaro rib, grabbed a gunnysack and found a loop of wire. She roped the snake when he coiled and gave the sack a twist with the pole to trap him. Before long, she had a snake box full of rattlers worth more than fifty dollars, and was ready to collect her money. 

Out hunting for creatures of worth without much luck one day, she encountered a huge seven-foot bull snake and decided she might as well throw him into the box, too… another dollar. The next morning when she checked the box, she discovered she had only one snake…the bull snake!  She was furious and eliminated him, too. 

In 1932, Marion and Goldie opened the Tracy’s Trading Post in San Simon, Arizona, and ran it together until Marion Tracy’s death in 1936. Goldie continued to operate the trading post for years, sending advertisements for the beautiful baskets made by the Papagos from California to New York. The sales were great, and the Papagos sold the baskets as fast as they could make them, teaching others this fine work of art. Her many Papago friends went out of their way to trade with Goldie, and an assortment of government officials and visitors constantly came into the shop. Eventually, Goldie married Jim Richmond and they operated the post until 1966. 

One day a caravan of gypsies came by and filled their tanks full of gas. The lead car assured her the man at the end would pay for all of them. Not comfortable with this arrangement, she allowed them to fill their tanks anyway. The last car drove away without paying, but the police eventually caught up with them, and they paid their bill.    

Goldie kept an assortment of medical remedies stocked on the shelves and knew their medicinal purposes. One man had deep sores all over his legs and was in pain. She took a five-pound bag of Epsom salts from the shelf and a five gallon can without a top. She advised him to fill the can with water, dump in the Epsom salts and bring to a boil.  When the mixture cooled enough to bear the heat, she told him to put his leg in until the water was no longer hot. It worked. Later, the man was stiff in the leg, and she advised him to rub his ankle with olive oil for several months. She recommended olive oil as cures for many things, including a tablespoon taken before meals to relieve gall bladder trouble.  Some of her medicinal remedies she learned from the Papagos, but most were handed down through the years by her family. 

When Goldie died in 1972, the O’odham had not been able to go to her funeral and held a service on the reservation in her memory. She was a gifted artist, and her hundreds of beautiful quilts became her legacy to the Tohono O’odham people she loved and the rugged Arizona desert that became her home.

Photo courtesy of Maricopa Historical Society

Editor’s note:  Maricopa factoids are a regular feature on InMaricopa.com. They are provided by the Maricopa Historical Society, a branch of the Friends of the Maricopa Public Library. Most information comes from “Reflections of a Desert Town” by author and historical society chairperson Patricia Brock. 

Gift Cards are available for Brock’s the new book: “Images of America: Maricopa” along with a short story of Maricopa. Contact Brock at 480-821-0604 or [email protected] to purchase a gift card or to reserve a copy of the book.