As a historian and archivist, I do my research in the usual places: libraries, archives, photo collections. But when I was the company Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. (1989-2014) “research” took on a whole new meaning.

In July of 2003 I left the air-conditioned comfort of the corporate Archives in San Francisco for the sweltering desert air of Yavapai and Maricopa counties in Arizona to track down a missing piece of Levi’s history. The reason for my pilgrimage will take a bit of explanation (and a long blog post), but it started with a beat-up pair of jeans.

Buying vintage clothing for the Archives was a big part of the job (and still is for Historian Tracey Panek). But the jeans, jackets, and shirt usually came into the collection without context or history.

However, there is one pair of Levi’s 501 jeans in the Archives that does have both a place and a name. In 2002, in preparation for the company’s 150^th anniversary the following year, the Levi’s designers took a close look at a pair of jeans that had been at the headquarters since 1920 but had begun their life on a store shelf in Arizona in 1917.

Sometime during that year, a man named Homer Campbell walked into the Brayton Commercial Co. in Wickenburg to buy a pair of work pants. (Wickenburg is about 50 miles northwest of Phoenix.) Brayton’s had opened in 1906 and was eventually so essential to the supply needs of local miners, ranchers, dude ranchers, and the Wickenburg community that it was able to boast, “We have dynamite to diapers, and hay to hairpins.”

Wickenburg as it looked when Homer bought his Levi’s.

On that day in 1917 Homer bought a pair of Levi’s jeans, known at that time simply as “overalls.” Three years later, he wrote a letter to Levi Strauss & Co. Headed “Constillation Ariz” and dated February 9, 1920 the letter said:

I purchased these overalls in the early part of 1917. And I have worn them every day except Sunday since that time and for some reason which I wish you would explain they have gone to pieces. I have worn nothing but Levi Strauss overalls for the last 30 years and this pair has not given me the service that I have gotten out of some of your overalls in the past. I know that it is your aim to place a Superior article on the market and consider it my duty to help you in any way that I can. Please consider this and let me know if the fault is mine.

He put the pants and his letter into a box and took it to the post office in Constellation, a mining region just outside of Wickenburg. The box arrived later that month in the mailroom of the LS&Co. headquarters on Battery Street in San Francisco. 

The immediate fate of both the letter and the jeans is a mystery, but by the mid-1970s the pants had been framed and hung in the lobby of the company’s home office on the San Francisco waterfront. The original letter disappeared sometime after its arrival, but someone had taken a photo, and this hung on the wall next to the pants. 

By 1989, when I was hired as company Historian, the firm had moved to its current location at Levi’s Plaza, a few blocks up the street, and the framed jeans and letter were hanging on the wall of the small museum in the San Francisco factory at 250 Valencia Street. 

Even in their frame you could see that the pants had gone to pieces, to use Homer’s description: the legs were covered with inexpertly sewn patches, also made of denim.  The fly buttons had all been replaced, and a piece of sturdy cotton string took the place of the missing top button on the waistband.  The jeans had been cuffed and the cuffs sewn onto the legs. Homer had also made a tool pocket out of denim and sewn it onto the left thigh, and there was a very big hole in the right back pocket.  He had taken the time to sew up its edges, giving it the appearance of an overlarge buttonhole. 

Courtesy Levi Strauss & Co. Archives

Courtesy Levi Strauss & Co. Archives

Homer’s jeans were very popular with the museum’s visitors, and were an object of fascination to the company’s designers. Knowing that the 150^th anniversary of the founding of Levi Strauss & Co. would be celebrated in 2003, the Levi’s Vintage Clothing team decided to recreate a pair of jeans from the Archives as a special limited edition to celebrate the big event. And the jeans they chose were Homer’s.

The long process to reproduce his jeans began with an analysis of the pants themselves. The company Conservator, Stacia Fink, took them out of the frame and immediately noticed something: Homer didn’t put patches on his jeans because they were full of holes – there weren’t any. The patches were actually padding, placed deliberately in multiple layers on the upper thighs and the seat. After this review, the replica was made, dubbed the “Celebration Jean,” and packaged in a drawstring muslin bag. The 501 pairs went on sale in March of 2003 and quickly sold out.

In May of that year, I began a press tour as part of the anniversary activities.  Every two weeks I flew to a different city to help set up display cases of clothing and advertising materials in Levi’s stores. I also hand-carried four very old pairs of jeans with me, which I showed to the newspaper, magazine, and television reporters I talked to. I always took Homer’s pants, and they were just about everyone’s favorite pair, because they had a story.

I talked about Homer and his jeans so often that I became obsessed with finding out more about him and his life. So, I posted some queries on various genealogical web sites, but didn’t discover anything useful.

Then I found the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona.  The museum invited researchers to ask questions about the history of Prescott and Yavapai County. Well, Constellation was in Yavapai County, so I decided to give this avenue a try.

Two days after emailing my query I was thrilled to see a note from the Sharlot Hall museum in my inbox.  Their archives intern was pleased to let me know that they had Homer’s obituary from the January 7, 1944 issue of the Prescott Evening Courier and would I like a copy? You bet I would!

Homer’s death was also covered in the Phoenix paper, the Arizona Republican. Turns out he was a hard rock miner, which explained the condition of his pants. He needed that extra padding to protect him while he navigated the rocky conditions of whatever mine he was working.

Arizona Republican, January 8, 1944

My next step was to locate the Walnut Grove cemetery, and in my search I discovered a website called Saving Graves.com. This non-profit group researches and publishes reports about historic cemeteries and they had a report on Walnut Grove.  It looked pretty remote – nearly fifty miles from Wickenburg, well up in the mountains past Kirkland Junction, off Hwy. 89. 

There are few things that can get a historian’s blood pumping like the prospect of an old cemetery.  I had to find Homer’s grave – it was the final piece of the puzzle to understanding him and his life.  I downloaded some rather vague directions to Walnut Grove and made a plan to stop over in Phoenix on my way home from anniversary events in Dallas.

I booked a couple of nights at a Wickenburg motel and contacted curators at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum (now the Sigler Western Museum), which was coincidentally located on the site of the old Brayton Commercial Co., where Homer had purchased his jeans.  The museum had a photo collection on local mining that I wanted to see, and I made an appointment to stop by on the Monday after my arrival. I landed in Phoenix on Sunday, July 13. That’s right; this native Californian decided to visit the desert in the middle of summer during a heat wave considered appalling even by Arizona standards. The thermometer at the airport registered 114 degrees.

It was a little more than an hour’s drive to get to Wickenburg, and I took the Carefree Highway, passing through scenery that took my breath away. I had never been in the Sonoran desert and I nearly drove off the road when I saw my first saguaro.

I made it to Wickenburg, checked into my motel, and put on clothing appropriate for a ramble through overgrown brush in snake and scorpion territory: jeans (Levi’s, of course), long-sleeved cotton shirt, socks, hiking boots, hat. I hit the road about 1:00 p.m. armed with two large bottles of water I’d picked up at the airport, as well as another very important item: Homer’s jeans, wrapped in muslin in my airline carry-on bag, which I placed on the passenger seat of my lipstick red Mitsubishi Outlander.  

I turned off the highway past Kirkland Junction and headed up into the Wickenburg Mountains, where, according to SavingGraves, the final twelve-mile leg of my trip would take me across some dry washes, up a couple of inclines, past a ranch and through a gate, which would then lead to another road and then the cemetery itself.  In just a short while I’d be there.

More than an hour later I was still in my car, fuming and lost.

I drove past a ranch house which sounded like the one on the SavingGraves website, but the side road led onto the property itself and that didn’t seem right. I kept going. There were other small, rickety trails leading up a variety of hillsides and I started up each one, hoping I’d hit paydirt. At the crest of one small hill, I came upon a kind of construction equipment graveyard, filled with rusting tractors, backhoes, and even a couple of refrigerators. Well, that wasn’t it.

The next narrow road led up a precarious slope to a small house. I figured someone was home, as I could hear a television somewhere inside. I hoped there was a local who could give me directions, and went up to the front door, passing a couple of horses grazing a little further down the hill. I rang the bell, knocked, and waited in vain.  No one came to the door.

So, I gave up, turned around, and found that one of the horses had wandered down to investigate my vehicle. It was a very big horse. He was completely blocking the door to the car, as well as the road, and all I could do was wander around, throw a few encouraging comments his way, and wait for him to lose interest. He finally did, and I drove away quickly before he changed his mind. Or someone in the house pointed a shotgun at me.

Up another road, where I found two men clearing brush (in this heat??). I stopped, rolled down the car window, got their attention, and asked if they could give me directions to the cemetery. “You got loved ones up there?” one of them said. (Yes, I replied.) He then told me that the path I’d seen next to the ranch house was the right trail and it was OK to drive on it.

Back I went, turned onto the road, and bounced along until I came to a gate with a “No Hunting” sign on it. (I wasn’t hunting for anything other than the cemetery so I didn’t worry about trespassing.) After opening and then relatching the gate I drove for more than a mile up roads that were even more steep and rocky than the others I’d been on. Then, I crested a hill, looked to my right, and saw the dull sheen of marble behind the gray of a chain link fence.

The owners of the nearby Gold Bar Ranch help take care of the Walnut Grove cemetery.

Elated, I pulled up, jumped out of the car, put on my hat, grabbed a bottle of water, and opened the creaky gate. Closing it behind me, I took a breath, hoped there weren’t any rattlesnakes lurking in the area, and started walking.

I wandered off to the right, noticing that there were a few graves with the name of Campbell in that direction.  But no Homer.  I walked past the headstones, which were shaded with overgrown native plants.  Behind these was a slight rise and I could see that there were three stones set together: two flush with the ground, and one large and upright. The name on this one was “Mitchel Campbell” and my heart started to pound because I knew that was Homer’s brother’s name.

I zoomed up the hill and there it was, the first flat marble slab on the right:

I’d found him at last.

I went back to the car, grabbed Homer’s pants, and took them up to the gravesite.  I put the cloth near the headstone, laid the pants gently on top, and took a number of photos for the Archives (and for me).

I spent another half hour or so exploring the rest of the cemetery, enjoying the quiet and the solitude, until I suddenly felt like somebody had hit me on the back of the head with a two-by-four. I turned around to see if I was being mugged, and then noticed something else: I was feeling shaky and slightly nauseated. This was not good. Time to go.

I said a reluctant farewell to Walnut Grove and Homer, got into the Outlander, and made my way to a mini-mart on Hwy 89 to replenish myself with liquid, salt and potassium. Armed with a soda, a bag of potato chips and a banana, I took off again for Wickenburg to spend the rest of the afternoon in the motel pool.

The next day I went to the museum, and the wonderful staff helped me find photos and documents about the area’s mining history. Once I was home, I found I couldn’t get Wickenburg and the desert out of my mind. I’ve written two books about Wickenburg and its famed Vulture Mine since that day, and I’ve also had the honor to serve as a guest curator at the museum. I go back to town regularly to see my Wickenburg friends, give lectures, and trek up to Walnut Grove to say howdy to Homer.

Wickenburg is still the place where I restore myself, in the desert that took such hold of me on that hot July day in 2003.

And all because of a long-dead miner who decided to complain about his jeans.  

Thanks, Homer.