Archive of Documents

On this page, we share various historical documents that we have archived for the public. If you are looking for past issues of CCHS Journals, please visit our Past Journals page.

Chiricahua Bullsheet

Carson Morrow wrote and published his amusing history-and current-events bulletin of northeastern Cochise County in 38 editions of the Chiricahua Bullsheet. He and helpers mimeographed the editions at the American Museum of Natural History, Southwestern Research Station, up-canyon from Portal, between May 7, 1957, and July 17, 1959. Fellow author Alden Hayes wrote in A Portal to Paradise, “Carson was a great storyteller and didn’t slow down to dot his i’s or pick nits. . .”

A retired Border Patrol agent, Carson was born on May 28, 1896, at Roswell, New Mexico. His Texan parents, William K. and Eva R. Morrow, and siblings settled in Paradise, Cochise County, in 1903 after residing for a year in Douglas. Carson married Leona Pettit on July 22, 1925. They were the parents of two daughters, Ila Pearl and Hazel. He lived his later years in Whitetail Canyon, not far from the now-vanished lead-mining town of Hilltop. He died on December 5, 1959, and is buried in the Paradise Cemetery.

Eric Hayes, Alden and Gretchen Hayes’s son, created the illustrations for the Bullsheet. Eric attended school in Portal, starting the first grade there in 1947. He was injured in a helicopter crash during the Vietnam War and spent his career designing and building homes that are aesthetically pleasing to behold. He died in 2016 and is buried in Paradise as well.

After creating an index and using his copies for research, retired game warden Kimrod Murphy (now deceased) gave his collection of the newsletters to Craig McEwan. In the summer of 2021, Kathleen Talbot, librarian of the Myrtle Kraft Library in Portal, scanned the collection, for which we are most grateful.

1. — Chiricahua Bullsheet Index

2. — Vol. 1, May 7, 1957

3. — Vol. 2, May 13, 1957

4. — Vol. 3, May 20, 1957

5. — Vol. 4, June 15, 1957

6. — Vol. 5, July 4, 1957

7. — Vol. 6, July 24, 1957

8. — Vol. 7, August 19, 1957

9. — Vol. 8, September 2, 1957

10. — Vol. 9, September 13, 1957

11. — Vol. 10, September 23, 1957

12. — Vol. 11, October 16, 1957