Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Bill Broyles (bio) He told me that at the age of six he read William Hornaday's Campfires on Desert and Lava. The book, a popular account of a scientific jaunt to the terra incognita Sierra Pinacate lava field, appeared in 1908, a year before Ronald Lorenz Ives was born. For most of Ronald's life the Pinacate and its surrounding Sonoran borderlands were his focus. He traveled its ground, met its people, studied its riddles, and logged its answers. Of the over 600 technical articles he published (not to mention his 230-some "popular" articles), a full quarter of them concerned this desert region. In 1934, at age 24, he wrote "Excursionando en los Pinacates," an essay that essentially mapped his life's work. He extolled the region's mysteries and vistas; he sketched its face and then probed its character. His last project, The Life and Times of José Velásquez, was published posthumously. It was his only book, though his friend Jim Byrkit later mustered an anthology of his papers. He left a list of 36 unfinished papers "in preparation." Ives was a spare man of legendary energy. He never weighed more than 142 pounds at a height of 5 feet 9 inches, but desert animals are lean and wiry, and so was he. His health was never very good, as asthma, injuries, bad habits, hypertension, and poor lungs plagued him. His eyes weren't strong and during World War II a test-range bomb blast cost him much of his left ear's hearing.1 He survived bouts with frostbite, losing one toe and having cold-sensitive feet thereafter. He survived [End Page 223] several car accidents and perhaps plane crashes. He endured severe dehydration on several of his desert hikes. He was not an armchair explorer. He wrote to a friend in 1962, "My doctors say that if I don't heal soon, I'll have to cut down my workdays to something less than the 14 to 16 hours I usually work." He'd punch in for the "company" all day, and then after work begin his own play of research and invention. He published on geography, electronics, geology, history, archaeology, meteorology, cartography, folklore, and horology. I knew him the last couple years of his life, but as I interviewed acquaintances and family following his death, I came to realize that in some ways I knew more about the sum of his life than anyone, even his family or selected friends. This has become a burden that I can lay down only with publication of this biography. Because he and I never talked directly about his innermost feelings or personal life or motives, I can provide only glimpses of his own thoughts. Much of what others saw is what he wanted them to see—the quiet scholar in khaki work clothes, the mysterious technician who was sent by the military on secret assignments, the man who befriended priests and wrote about padres but tacked a "No missionaries" sign on his door, the mechanical genius who swapped funny stories with shopmates but relied on sarcasm and a sharp tongue to deal with foremen, the lonely eccentric who engaged strangers in long discourses about wind patterns, glaciers, and obscure Spanish explorers, the curmudgeon who relished search and rescue missions for lost hikers, the soldier who spoofed the army but was patriotic to a fault. He told some people that his father invented television and his grandfather invented color film, and those stories are largely true, but he also told some people that he had survived airplane crashes in the Arctic and he implied that he was an espionage agent operating in Mexico, stories that may be spoofs to cover his own insecurities and deep privacy, or just a quirky sense of humor. Some details will remain forever unknown, but no matter. What is known underscores that above all, he was a man worth knowing, for few men better knew the Southwest desert borderlands and their history, and his trail of articles is cited in nearly every serious publication written about the desert Southwest. In 1928 the Gran Desierto of northwestern Sonora could be traveled only...