On summer days Salome, Arizona was so hot, dry and shade free in the midday sun that its sand hills seemed to be populated only by greasewood and saguaro. The would-be town, which still had a population of less than two dozen people, sits in a valley framed on its northern edge by the Harcuvar and Harquahala mountains. Devoid of much vegetation, their orange, violet and grey contours changed by the hour as the sun moved across a cloudless sky. Clear air, inspiring vistas and above all precious minerals drew miners to the southwest end of the Harcuvar Range. Salome was near a railroad track but its residents waited expectantly for a paved road from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Dick Wick Hall fought hard for this road and he was sure that someday the town “will be Some Place.” His daughter, Jane, was far more convinced than her mother, Daysie, that it would be for she was captivated by the desert and by her father’s imagination.

Dick’s rustic office was a one-room adobe building with a mission-style desk and a Smith Premier typewriter that had “lost a Lot of Its Teeth.” There, when he was not writing to potential investors or urging Yuma County to improve the roads, he created unforgettable characters out of local personalities and creatures: horned lizards, Gila monsters, coyotes, jack rabbits, snakes, scorpions, and centipedes. A seven-year-old bull frog who could not swim and wore a canteen on his back would become the town’s mascot. (Even today the high school football team is “The Salome Frogs.”) When he had time, Dick used these characters in a compilation of local “news,” humor and philosophy spread out over two sides of a legal-sized mimeographed sheet and decorated with his rough sketches. He did this at first for his own amusement and certainly that of his children. His “Salome Sun” is full of anecdotes that poked fun at Eastern tourists, bankers, Wall Street, high society folks, Democrats, and even the town and its environs.

“Salomey Jane,” as he called her, often came into her father’s office to draw and write poems and stories of her own. She was delighted when her father brought her ink so she didn’t have to do all her work with a pencil. Soon he would teach her to use a typewriter and how to send out work that appealed to the editors of magazines and newspapers.

Outside in the sprawling desert landscape of the Arizona Outback barely a handful of buildings made up the town. One of these was a modest one-story wood house with a porch on one side and a postage-size patch of green in the front. This was home to Jane and her small family. Behind the house, stretching twenty-three miles up into the mountains was her father’s one-of-a-kind “Greasewood Golf Lynx” that took 46 days to play with caddies on horseback—if you were lucky. For Jane this make-believe course was primarily a place to ride “Sunny Boy,” aka “The Killer,” a Cayuse pony that belonged to Mrs. Lillian (“Mike”) Thomas who was her “best friend” in the desert.  When she’s not in the saddle, Jane played a fierce game of cards, excelled at miniature golf and loved to roast spuds and marshmallows. As a  little girl, Jane was fearless, at least fifty percent tomboy, and took great pride in a brown leather pencil case embossed with the words “Outlaw Jane Salome Arizona.”

Her father’s work had just began to take off ; excerpts from his small town news sheet and his stories were featured in The Saturday Evening Post. The magazine was one of the most successful in America. But “Little Jane” was not about to be outdone by the father she adores. She’s joined the Junior Club of The Los Angeles Times which brought out work by young writers every Sunday on “Aunt Dolly’s Page.”

That summer she sent in her first story,”Bill’s Greatest Victory.” The protagonist is an eleven-year-old boy who learns to control his temper. But Jane was impatient. As she tells it: “Picture a little girl who was always scribbling away on a piece of paper, trying to write a story; but hardly ever succeeding, then imagine her sending a story to Aunt Dolly” and waiting, and waiting” for months with no word. Then suddenly the “most thrilling moment” of her short life occurred. The train from Los Angeles brought a letter from The Times with a money order for $2.50. Her story came out on November 8, 1925. She was only ten years old and the possibilities seemed endless.

See the Gallery for images of Dick’s Frog and The Salome Sun. The town is in the McMullen Valley in what is now La Paz County.