Pauline Rodgers Young

b. March 20, 1887 Brookville, Pennsylvania
d. March 28, 1975 Tucson, Arizona

  Fifteen year-old Pauline with her younger sister, Helen, and their parents, Robert Rodgers and Anna Eason, arrived by train in Tucson from Pennsylvania in February, 1903. They bought squatters rights in what became the Huachuca Forest Reserve and several years later, homesteaded in Turkey Creek Canyon. Her father became one of the first Forest Rangers and was responsible for a large part of the area, first assigned to the Rosemont Station in the Santa Rita Reserve, and moved in 1907 to the Huachuca Reserve near his home; he and her mother were also the first and second postmasters from 1904-1910 for the newly established Canelo Post Office.

 She married Arthur Benjamin Young from Astoria, Oregon at her parents' home in Canelo in 1912. Arthur was a mining and civil engineer for the U.S. Forest Service building roads and bridges on federal land in Arizona. His father, a Swedish immigrant, had established large salmon canning operations at the mouth of the Columbia River and in British Columbia. Pauline and Arthur built a home near her parents' home and had two children, Virginia Eason Young Smith and Sig Rodgers Young, both of whom are buried at Black Oak, as are her parents and sister. Arthur worked often in northern Arizona, and the family spent several summers at Mormon Lake near Flagstaff.

 Pauline and Arthur divorced in about 1925 and by 1930, she and Sig and Virginia had moved to Tucson. Arthur died of a scorpion bite and cirrhosis in 1934. She never remarried and lived in Tucson for the rest of her life, returning often to the Rodgers ranch in Canelo until her father died in 1947 when she sold the ranch and her mother moved to Tucson to live with her. In 1954, Douglas Whitney bought it, left it to his children when he died, and it continues to be known as the Whitney Ranch.

 In the 1920s, she wrote several short stories and submitted one of them, "The Queue and the Lariat", about a Chinese immigrant cowboy in Southern Arizona, to Sunset Magazine which rejected it but told her she had a knack for storytelling. One of her poems, "Desert After Rain" was published in Vol. 1, No. 1 of the University of Arizona's The Manuscript in 1925:

Clean sweet, fresh washed, stormswept, fragrant;
Still but panting life in fitful passionate gusts,
the desert lies in fine wide stretches
striped by glistening streaks of moonlit sand;
Gaunt cactus-studded;
Etched in fairy fancies where the greasewood "shadow-dances;"
Flanked by range on range of rockfaced, age-poised, wind-
wrought peaks
that stand in guardianlike enchanting line at varied distance;
Haze tinted, mystery wrapped, cold shadowed, sealed,
above vast intenseness.

 She was an active member and for a brief time treasurer of the Tucson Saturday Morning Musical club which organized concerts in Tucson, sometimes by artists traveling from the East Coast to Los Angeles by rail, and she was a friend of artists Marylka Modjeska Pattison, Ted de Grazia, Gerry Peirce and Frank Patania, among others.

 Pauline loved music, books, Navajo rugs, cats, art, and turquoise jewelry; she had a modest collection of Navajo cuffs, some of which her daughter Virginia inherited and then passed on to her son Corbin. She was 'Nana' to her grandsons, and her birthday presents to them as they were growing up were books from her small library. She was a Tucson real estate agent. She drove a dark-turquoise-green colored 1950 Studebaker Commander. She was short in stature, cared about what she wore, and always kept her hair styled. For a few years in the 1950s, she owned a contemporary mostly Scandanavian housewares shop on Broadway in Tucson called 'Trifles and Elegancies'.

 For her burial at Black Oak, she asked for a reading of a favorite poem by Francis C. MacDonald called "To All Friends"; the last stanza is...

Spend not your money on the stones
to set above my mortal bones,
but give a party. Let the air
ring with it. I shall be there..

 For a more complete biography with sources, click here.


Virgina, Pauline, and Anna

written by her grandson Sig Corbin Smith

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SCS 10/7/2024