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Article Excerpt
Godfrey Sykes did not keep a diary while on the 1907 Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory expedition to the Pinacate. At least that was what his son Glenton maintained throughout his life (interview by Bill Broyles, November 30, 1984). While Glenton was a skilled storyteller, he was also self-deprecating, never feeling a need to be on center stage in his own tales, so it was not surprising that he would place his father in the same modest light. Glenton speculated that his father deferred to William Hornaday as an author and trip leader, so did not bother with a journal. He noted the absence of entries in Godfrey's daily diary from November 1 to December 6, and the presence of a smaller, pocket notebook which contained Godfrey's survey notes on the expedition, but no narrative. Hornaday's book, the classic Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava, contained that whole story, and that was plenty, as far as Glenton knew.
As it turns out, Glenton was wrong. After Godfrey died on December 23, 1948, his two sons, Glenton and younger brother Gilbert, split his possessions, including his many diaries. Both Glenton and Gilbert were busy with their careers and families, and had neither the time nor the emotional energy to read through the thousands of pages of documents their father had created; it was difficult enough just to divide them. In the 1970s, both sons loaned their sets of Godfrey's diaries to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which microfilmed them and returned the originals. Gilbert died in 1983, Glenton in 1986. In 1990, I purchased from the Huntington a copy of one of the microfilm reels of diaries Gilbert had owned, interested in an 1892 diary that it contained.
But it wasn't until 2005 that I got around to looking at the rest of the minimally labeled reel. Much to my surprise, it contained Godfrey's Pinacate diary of 1907, included as part of a daily diary for the year. Evidently in 1907, Godfrey maintained two such diary books, possibly intending to send one to relatives in England. The copy that Glenton inherited lacked the Pinacate entries. When I tracked down Gilbert's original copy, I also discovered a thin red leatherette memo book that documented, in smeared and faint pencil, two 1907 trips, one to the Salton Sea and the other to the Pinacate. This is almost certainly the original document that Godfrey carried with him to the Pinacate. It is smaller and more worn than his bound, neatly written-in-ink diary, and includes a sketch of Molina Crater along with a note on the "circumference of Coles' wagon wheel with odometer." Whether Gilbert knew of the existence of the Pinacate diaries I do not know. I prepared the transcription that follows from the easier-to-read ink copy, then checked it against the pencil original. The two were nearly identical; where there were differences (and all were minor), I used the more complete version.
But before we get to the diary, let's take a brief look at the life of Godfrey Sykes.
Godfrey Glenton Sykes was born in England on May 25, 1861. His father, also named Godfrey, worked as an artist for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Godfrey the artist died of tuberculosis in 1866, and his widow, Ellen Palfreyman Sykes, and two young sons moved to Wolverhampton in Yorkshire. Godfrey grew up observing the town's many tinkerers and acquired the knack of tinkering himself; he also studied engineering in school. When his mother died in 1879, the eighteen-year-old Godfrey decided it was time to head to America, taking a boat to New York. He traveled around the country, trying his hand at cowboying and construction. Godfrey's younger brother, Stanley, also an "embryonic Engineerling" (Godfrey Sykes 1944:143) joined him in America in the early 1880s. In 1886 the brothers rode into Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, on their reliable horses, and set up a cow camp a short distance east of town at a spot called Turkey Tanks. A lost botanist named Daniel T. MacDougal happened to wander into their camp one day in 1891, and the men became friends, staying in contact throughout the years (Glenton Sykes 1977).
During the 1880s and early 1890s, Godfrey alternated working in northern Arizona with globetrotting. In exchange for passage, he volunteered to work on ships going around the world, acquiring skill in both oceanic navigation and engine repair. He worked as a hydraulic and mining engineer in Japan and Australia (Cattell and Cattell 1927:961). He occasionally ran Thomas Keam's trading post on the Hopi Reservation. He began exploring the lower Colorado River and delta, a region that would captivate him (Boyer 2007). He befriended people of all classes and education levels, a skill that would serve him well throughout his life.
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In 1895, Sykes, by this time a part-time Flagstaff town resident with a fix-it shop called Makers and Menders of Anything, married Emma Mary Walmisley, his English sweetheart of many years. Emmie--a petite, forty-year-old woman with dreamy eyes, yards of thick hair, and a trained contralto voice--was as devoted to her husband as he was to her. Their sons, Glenton and Gilbert, were born in 1896 and 1900, respectively. Emmie suffered from rheumatic heart disease, which was probably exacerbated by two pregnancies in her forties, as well as Flagstaff's 7,000-foot elevation. The family left Flagstaff in 1905 for the medically mandated lower altitude of Pasadena, California. In the meantime, MacDougal...
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