October is American Archives month and the Cline Library Special Collections and Archives is excited to share several of its treasures with you throughout the month.

Special Collections and Archives has two major collecting areas: the human and natural history of the Colorado Plateau and the institutional history, or University Archives. The department will make selections from each area of our collecting scope to highlight a few of our collections.

To kick off the month, we selected a 1936 travel journal of a gentleman named William “Wully” Wares to highlight an example of our Colorado Plateau collections. This exceptional photo-journal chronicles a 1936 motor trip which began in Butte, Montana and covered much of the Southwest. William Wares describes excavating a site at Awatobi, hunting mountain lions in Utah, and the beauty of numerous geographic landmarks such as the Grand Canyon and Goosenecks of the San Juan country.

The journal also mentions Yellowstone National Park and the Teton mountains. An Anglo, Wares made cultural observations about the Navajo and Hopi as well as the inhabitants of Mormon towns. Some of the pages in this journal contain images of culturally sensitive material. The culturally sensitive material remains part of the original diary; however, Special Collections and Archives has elected not to provide online access to the culturally sensitive material out of respect to the Native American communities those images document.

The entire journal can be viewed online via our Colorado Plateau Archives here. The finding aid for the collection can be found at the Arizona Archives Online here.

Cline Library Special Collections and Archives will be partnering with three other institutions in Flagstaff to celebrate American Archives Month: The Arizona Historical Society, Northern Division; Lowell Observatory; and the Museum of Northern Arizona. Please feel free to visit their sites to learn more about the history and archives of northern Arizona.