A one room Adobe house built on the bank of the seasonally flowing Polecat creek was home for eleven years Bert and Louise Huntzinger pioneered a unique life style in the Southern Wilds of Cochise County, Arizona. Homestead ammmenadees included a corrugated tin roofed lean-to kitchen cum children’s sleeping area, a rustic corral with attendant blacksmithing shed, a well and windmill some twenty feet from the creek which provided water throughout the year. Bert and Louise raised their family close to the earth, with the goal of self-sustenance in a location many considered ill-suited for the purpose.
A number of family members helped establish the homestead. Louise’s Uncle Solomon Sessions lived with the couple for the better part of a year. Her father, Edgar Sessions, her step-brother, Ralph Lucas, and his wife, Alva, all spent time during 1910 and 1911 getting the homestead established. House construction, well digging, clearing the land of mesquite trees and stumps was all hard work, but the ranch slowly took shape. Orchards and farming were to occupy thirty acres and the remaining 290 acres was for grazing.
In the summer of 1910 when Bert and Louise moved to the future site of Echo Ranch, as Bert called it, the family lived in rather fancy wagon and tent arrangement. The elaborate ‘travelling home’ was ready at hand as they had sold their home in Globe, Arizona, the previous year and had outfitted a the new wagon with Bert’s photographic gear and living quarters for travel though towns of Southern Arizona and Western New Mexico. Their two sons, four year old Hubert and Edgar who was almost two years old, were with them. Edgar was not well. He was born with a medical condition, hypoencephalitis, in which fluids build up around the brain. His illness had in fact prompted Bert and Louise to consider establishing a home far from the prying eyes of curious neighbors. Bert was familiar with the Northern foothills of the Dos Cabezos Mountains having worked a small placer claim in the area with his maternal uncles in the late 1890s.
Their third child, Ivon, was born in Thatcher, Arizona. Point Echo became his home eleven days after birth. Shortly thereafter a Mexican family moved onto the homestead to help clear the orchard land, removing heavy growths of Mesquite from the plowable land. They stayed for a number of years and their children coincided in age with the Huntzinger children and they all grew up together. For the Huntzingers, four children were born on the ranch, one every two years: first Irene, then Sylvia, next Ralph and finally Lucille. Neighbors were few and far between. A goat herder lived up the canyon above the homestead, and occasionally cowboys would drive cattle through the area. Extended family would often visit for a few days at a time, and monthly the parents would travel to town (either Bowie or Thatcher) for supplies.
The older boys lived with relatives for short periods so they could begin school: Hubert stayed with Grandpa and Grandma Sessions in Thatcher, and Ivon with Ralph and Alva Lucas in Pima. Bert, Louise and their neighbors decided they needed a proper school for the children. All together there were eleven children of school age. The final location selected was five miles from the homestead. The children rode either the horse or burro to school, though usually it was the burro.
Mother Louise raised the children, teaching, tending and mending, labored in the home. Food storage and preparation was difficult with no ice box or cold storage hole or cave. Father Bert worked the land, growing the garden and orchard and tended the livestock. Bee hives were moved onto the ranch. Bert had a lively correspondence and working relationship with the state university agricultural extension personnel, even receiving saplings to test in the desert soil. The association ended abruptly when after a couple years a visiting extension service representative wanted Bert to top-out all of the peach trees and graft in walnut tree branches. Bert wasn’t about to destroy his peach trees. To supplement family income, Bert opened a photography shop in Wilcox, Arizona.
Just eleven years old, Edgar died and was buried on a rocky hillside at the ranch in November 1919. His death and the remaining children’s educational needs prompted Louise to move the family to her parent’s home in Thatcher one year later in early December. Bert and Louise’s eighth child, Esther, was born 26 May 1921 in Pima, Arizona. Contributing to the decision to move was Bert’s “unreasonableness”, as characterized by Louise’s brother, Ralph. He was ill. He stayed at and continued to work the ranch, but by late summer jaundice and other increasing symptoms prompted him to disposed of the stock and seek medical consultation and possibly an operation in Southern California. First thought to be gall stones, later surgery disclosed terminal liver cancer. Staying at his brother Don’s home in Ontario, California, he died on 6 Nov. 1921.
After Bert’s death Louise made final proof on their place in the hills and later sold it to a cattle-man. Hubert, the eldest son, left for California around 1924 and was employed by Southern California Edison Company. Louise, her parents and the remaining six children moved to Los Angeles, California, August 1926.