Lucille and Carl Hamons, reunited in death, along with their only son.
I recently visited the Oklahoma grave of ‘The Mother of the Mother Road’, Lucille Hamons, not expecting that visit to be the start of another quest into times gone by. I was intrigued by the fact that she is reunited in the Hydro Masonic Cemetery with the husband from whom she had been divorced for over a quarter of a century. Of course, it could be that the plots had been purchased while they were still together and Lucille didn’t see the point of selling hers, but a nearby headstone made me wonder whether, even after death, they wanted to be in the same place. The stone reads simply, ‘CARL HAMONS JR, 1935-1962’.
Carl Jr’s headstone in the Masonic Cemetery in Hydro, Oklahoma.
Lucille and Carl Sr’s two daughters are quite often mentioned in articles about the Provine Service Station; it was the late Cheryl Hamons Nowka who persuaded her mother to write her memoirs, not only preserving those memories for posterity, but making enough money to bring the gas tanks underneath the station up to EPA standards and ensuring that Lucille could keep the place she had run since 1941, while oldest daughter, Delpha Dene Martin has operated a music store in Grants, New Mexico, for over 50 years. But, other than one comment that he was an ‘excellent mechanic’, few histories mention Carl Jr and not one explains his death at the age of just 27. When I started out, I thought the cause of his demise would be a car crash or perhaps illness. The truth was far more startling and dramatic. Unlike his father who was born and died in Hydro, Carl was almost a thousand miles from home when he met his death.
In this photo by an Arizona Republic photographer, Gila County Sheriff Jack Jones (left) and Coroner Clyde Shute bend over the body of Carl Hamons Jr. He was asleep on the bar stool when his ex-wife shot him nine times.
In his early twenties, Carl moved from Oklahoma to Globe, Arizona, where he found employment with the Magma Copper Co. Then he met Yetta Jean Aragon, a petite brunette who had four children and had run through three husbands by her mid-20s – by the time she was 16, she was on her second husband. If two people should have been kept far apart from each other, it was Carl and Jean. But they fell for each other and were married in August 1961. The marriage lasted just seven months and they were divorced in February 1962. Jean moved to New Mexico where she married her fifth husband in short order, but returned to live with Carl in the middle of 1962 because, she said later, “I couldn’t live without him”.
Yetta Jean Aragon had shot her ex-husband just minutes before an Arizona Republic newspaper man took this photograph in the Double-N bar.
Carl, who also had four children by a previous marriage, wasn’t the easiest man to live with; he’d been undergoing psychiatric treatment while married to Jean but he seems to have turned to alcohol as a cure. In the summer of 1962 the couple embarked on an epic two day drinking spree that ended at the Double-N Tavern in Globe on 29th August. Carl had passed out on a bar stool when his ex-wife drew a .22 calibre revolver and shot him – nine times. Eight of the bullets found their target and, with entry, exit and re-entry wounds, coroner Clyde Shute would find 13 gunshot wounds in Carl Hamons’ body.
Jean Aragon made no effort to escape. She told officers that night that she had decided to kill him because she was scared of threats he had allegedly made towards her and that that fear was, she said, “like a blue-flame whirlwind that kept getting bigger and bigger until the moment I shot him.” She added that she had been thinking about killing her ex-husband for some twenty minutes, and had drunk four glasses of beer very quickly in order to get up the courage. As she stood beside him, “he lifted his head from the bar, looked at me, then passed out again. That’s when I shot him.”
Jean Aragon behind bars following her trial. The photo was taken by Arizona Republic photographer Wade Cavanaugh who had also taken the image of Jean just after she had shot Carl.
Although it constituted premeditated murder, Jean’s defence counsel built his case on a plea of temporary insanity and that his client had been forced to this breaking point by Carl Hamon’s violent behaviour, claims against which, of course, Carl could not defend himself. This, along with the fact that Jean was, as one contemporary newspaper described her, ‘a trim, attractive brunette’, seems to have swayed the jury which, after deliberating for just six hours, convicted her of second degree murder, rather than the first degree murder with which she was charged. On 19th January 1963, she was sentenced to 12-20 years in the Arizona State Prison. On hearing the verdict, 29-year-old Jean said; “I’m glad it’s over. Now maybe when I get out of here I can live the life like I’ve always wanted.” For Lucille Hamons’ only son, that wasn’t an option.
Carl Jr was only six years old when his parents bought the Provine Service Station and he would grow up here.
It was the work of Seattle advertising man, Boyce Luther Gulley, who, in 1929, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The best hope of a cure then relied upon being in a warm, dry climate, so he moved to Arizona. The only problem was, he didn’t tell his wife, Frances, or his 5-year-old daughter, Mary Lou, where he was going. He simply said he wanted to pursue a life as an artist and drove off in his new Stutz Bearcat. They would never see him again.
It’s thought that Gulley did indeed believe that he had just six months to live and didn’t want to put his family though any suffering (although simply deserting them doesn’t seem to be much of an alternative). Six months passed and then another and he hadn’t died. So it was then that he started upon his life’s work; staking a claim on land close to the South Mountains, he began building what would become an incredible, meandering house with 18 rooms, 13 fireplaces, a chapel and a dungeon. It was built of all types of recycled material – adobe, stone, railroad tracks, telegraph poles, even parts of the Stutz Bearcat when it ceased to be of use – held together with cement, mortar, calcum and goat milk. Gulley, who had had basic architectural training, bartered for materials and also laboured and sold shoes when he needed cash.
And for the next 16 years the house grew and grew. However, even with his tuberculosis cured, at no point did Gulley send for his family. Some stories say they believed he was dead, but it seems likely that he did send the occasional letter to Seattle in later years, although without saying exactly where he was (other family members, however, did visit the house, as did many of Gulley’s friends). Then, in 1945, Boyce Gulley died, not of TB but cancer. He left the house to his wife and daughter, along with a mysterious locked trap door and the stipulation that they had to live there for three years before it could be opened.
Life magazine covered the opening of the locked compartment, as well as dubbing the place Mystery Castle, although it contained just two $500 bills, some gold nuggets and a Valentine’s card Mary Lou had made for her father when she was a child. Mary Lou stayed on and in fact lived in the house until her death in 2010, although it had no plumbing or electricity until 1992. The accepted story is that this was a labour of love for her on her father’s part, to build her the castle she had always wanted as a little girl. However, I suspect much of this may have been embroidered by Mary Lou to excuse why her father had deserted her; Boyce Gulley seems to have been a selfish albeit talented man who, even after his death, continued to manipulate his family. Mystery Castle is an amazing place, but also a rather sad one; that Mary Lou continued to live in the building seems to be the act of a sad little girl clinging onto an idealised image of her father. I can’t help thinking that, rather than some fantasy building in the desert, she would have much preferred to have her father in her life.
There is a rumour that the blaze was the result of an experiment in a chemistry class, but that’s clearly untrue for two reasons. Firstly, the school was closed due to failing attendances (along with another two local schools in the same year, 1956) not because it burned down, so it clearly didn’t happen while the school was open, and secondly, such a conflagration at a working school would surely have made the local newspapers – which reported just about everything back then. Yet there is nothing in any of those newspapers.
For its first few years, Ballarat thrived. Some 500 people made their homes in this desolate part of California and the town had seven saloons, a post office, school, jail, morgue, three hotels and a Wells Fargo station. But, apparently, no church. 
In the 1960s, Charles Manson and his followers moved into the Barker Ranch south of Ballarat, travelling through what was left of the town to get there. In October 1969, he and others were arrested at the Barker Ranch, Ballarat being the last place Manson was a free man. Today Ballarat has a small store run by Rocky Novak with irregular opening hours, the remaining building are mostly in ruins (a plan in the 1960s to make an RV park here failed miserably and finally petered out in the 1990s) and the only reminder of the Manson Family connection is an old Dodge Power Wagon. 
So, where did the Power Wagon now in Ballarat come from? One theory is that it belonged to Bobby Beausoleil and had been left at the ranch. When the arrests and trials were over, Kirk Barker, owner of the Barker Ranch, moved that Dodge down to Ballarat as a runaround. But no-one seems to know for sure. 
Over the years, the Vulture Mine produced $200 million of gold, although it’s likely almost as much simply disappeared into various pockets. The assay office was particularly prone to being burgled and thousands of dollars of gold was stolen over the years. 18 men are supposed to have been hung from the Ironwood tree which still stands (next to Henry Wickenburg’s cabins), all of them guilty of stealing gold or ore, although there’s no record of any such hangings actually taking place. It’s a good story though.
NEVER QUITE LOST 