Walt Whitman once said that the secret of “making” the best person was to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. The original settlers of Oak Creek Canyon, Sedona and the Verde Valley would certainly agree with him. Caves and tent houses were early shelters for the hardy pioneers. For some it was a seasonal home; for others a permanent dwelling. “My grandmother Biuse lived in a tent house all her life in Sedona,” recalled Mary Wyatt in an interview. “And the Brewers at the end of Brewer Road [in Sedona] lived in a tent house for years.”
Tent Houses: Half Frame, Half Tent
Tent houses were simple, inexpensive structures—half frame, half tent. They had a wooden shell, and the bottom three or four feet were horizontal boards. The rest of the dwelling was covered in canvas that could be removed if work or the weather forced one to move on. Then when it was time to return, the canvas could be easily tied down for the season. These structures were widely used as summer homes well into the 1940s and by early forest rangers and road builders.
Tent houses were usually one-room structures, although a few were larger with two or three separate rooms. Some floors were made of wood; others were made of earth packed so tight that it was like cement. Windows were optional. The entrance was either a wooden door or a flap cut into the canvas. Those with a deep love of the outdoors put up awnings so they could sit outside even in the rain and enjoy a cup of coffee.
Most tent houses were primarily sleeping huts. Sometimes they had a cast iron stove for warmth with a stovepipe that came up through the roof. If the family was large, mom and dad slept on an iron bed in the tent house, and the youngsters slept outside on bed rolls or in a homemade trailer.
Cooking was usually on a campfire, and often there was a type of evaporative cooler by the back door. In some cases one of the tent houses was turned into a cooking shack.
Historian Janeen Trevillyan, the former president of the Sedona Historical Society, has studied the home-building patterns of Sedona’s pioneer families and believes that tent houses were fairly prevalent in the early years. Other historic documents indicate they were also found up and down the Verde Valley.
Roe and Myrtle Smith lived in a tent house in Munds Park in the 1920s, recalled their daughter Katherine Bradley during a conversation, and in the 1940s they summered in a tent house on Oak Creek.
Some Settlers Preferred Caves
Not everyone was a fan of tent houses. Certainly not the Purtymans. According to Lois Purtyman Carpenter, they preferred caves. During an interview she said: “The first winter they came from California they lived in a large cave in West Fork. My dad used to say that his mother and dad didn’t know how they survived the cold and deep snow.” For many years after, Jesse Purtyman loved to make his moonshine in clandestine caves in the canyon.
When she was a teenager, Carpenter visited her 80-year-old grandmother in Castle Hot Springs, outside of Wickenburg. She lived in a cave with her two widowed sons while they were panning for gold. They slept on cots and kept groceries in fruit crates. Their water came from the pristine stream nearby and their warmth from a fire they built at the mouth of the cave. “My grandmother lived in caves all her life. It wasn’t strange to her,” recalled Carpenter.
Miners Preferred Skunk Boats
Young miners from Jerome enjoyed coming to Oak Creek and setting up a more temporary camp under the Cottonwoods. They didn’t bother with tent houses either; they preferred skunk boats, tying corners of tarp high above ground to the conveniently located tress. These “boats” were enclosed, making a snug place for bedrolls, and the out-slanting surfaces kept out skunks and other wildlife.
“Oak Creek sang to us in the hours of darkness and furnished us with clear cool drinking water,” recalled one man in a historic recounting archived by the Sedona Historical Society. “We also found trout willing to thwart our awkward efforts to put them in our skillet. Hunger spurred our skills and [we had] many a meal of trout fried in bacon grease, served with baked potatoes raked from heaped glowing coals with a hooked stick.”
These early outdoor living arrangements have pretty much gone by the wayside in Oak Creek Canyon, but the Sedona Historical Society has built a replica of a tent house to add to its permanent collection at the Sedona Heritage Museum on Jordan Road in Uptown Sedona. It recreates tent houses as they might have been during the early 1900s, using historic photos as a guide.
Sylvia Somerville - Since 1976, I have been writing and editing books, feature articles, news columns, newsletters and business materials. My credits range ...
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