Arizona’s Shangri La

When one imagines pristine Arizona’s dry, desolate, sun-baked deserts in the 1850s it’s difficult to picture any of it as being a utopian Shangri La but for a brief period, in a beautiful green valley at the foot of the majestic Santa Rita Mountains, there was just such a place. In his twilight years Charles Poston, recognized today as “The Father of Arizona,” wrote glowingly of it. "We had no law but love and no occupation but labor, no government, no taxes, no public debt, no po