Ed. Note: Gary Fillmore’s’ new book Shadows on the Mesa explores the interactions of artists who visited the Wetherill-Colville Guest Ranch in Arizona in the early 1900s. Among them are painters who also worked in the Coachella Valley: Clyde Forsythe, Carl Eytel, Ferdinand Burgdorff, Maynard Dixon, Guy Rose and others. Many artists made regular pilgrimages from the California desert to the Arizona Navajo lands. In this excerpt, Gary Fillmore looks at two such pilgrims: Jimmy Swinnerton and Bill Bender. James Swinnerton spent every year from 1906 until the late 1950s in much the same fashion. In 1938 his fifth wife,…
