The Adventuresome Sykes Family
July 1, 2008
Is the adventurous engineer (naturalist, scientist) a lost calling? Today those types are few and far between. One such person was Godfrey Sykes, whose life story is worthy of a movie, and yes, it has been documented in a book.* Godfrey’s son, Gilbert, was the Nogales District Forest Ranger for many years, so he had a local connection to Arivaca.
Godfrey Sykes was born in England in 1861. He studied engineering as they did in those days in a “public” school but a lot of what he knew was self-taught. He said that in school he learned Cricket, Classics and Convention, but his independent spirit felt stifled. He caught the adventure bug early and at a very young age, inspired by the novel, “The Headless Horseman,” he was off to the United States with two other “embryonic engineers.” After a short while in the City, he left New York and found a farm to work on while he planned the trip west. Carrying a convenient introductory letter, he met Thomas Edison who gave him several hours of his time. On the farm he made enough money to go West where he punched cattle in Texas, Wyoming and Kansas; he just generally had a good time. He kept moving, joining up with various interesting companions, learning various useful trades like printing, building construction and well digging. He punched cattle all the way to Flagstaff, then decided to make a trip home to England. There he picked up his younger brother Stanley and returned to the U.S. and Arizona.
Godfrey was always interested in geographic exploration, so he spent a lot of his time while cowboying in the observation of the countryside, much of which was “blank space” in terms of mapping or description. He kept notes and made drawings of pertinent things and later took photos. He made trips overseas to Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong. In the early 1890s he built a boat and found a companion to set off down the Colorado River. Sad to say, an accident caused a fire on the boat, leaving them stranded. During this unhappy interlude, they ate oysters (which saved them) and at one point tried to eat coyote, which they found difficult to swallow even in a state of starvation. Some hunters provided a pot of beans, but they had to walk themselves back to Yuma. Godfrey lost the boat, but never his interest in this part of the country. Many visits and years later, in 1937, he published his scientific treatise, The Colorado Delta.
When it came time to “settle down” he put his engineering skills to work building the telescope dome at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. After he had married an English wife, Emma, and had two sons, Godfrey moved to Tucson where he became the Superintendent of the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill. The Desert Laboratory was home for many biologists. Shortly thereafter his wife passed away, leaving him with the two boys, Glenton and Gilbert. Godfrey frequently went on long expeditions; he once he left the boys alone in a tent with the nuns across the street at St Mary’s hospital to provide meals. The nuns thought it was horrible that they had been left alone, but their father probably thought they would learn to be independent—a valued trait in his book. Apparently they did, because both lived to be successful citizens and died in old age.
Godfrey became associated with Daniel MacDougal at the Laboratory, who organized the Pinacate expedition to study the lava fields of Mexico with William T. Hornaday. Hornaday’s book, Campfires on Desert and Lava, is a classic. Godfrey put out rain gauges along the border with Mexico to establish some records for that arid area. In 1912 MacDougal and Godfrey crossed the Libyan Desert. In the early 1920s he designed the dome for the telescope at Steward Observatory on the U of A Campus. Godfrey built a house at the foot of the hill at 1 Anklam Rd., where he lived till he died at the age of 87.
After their adventuresome youth, Glenton and Gilbert visited the ancestral home in England, ostensibly for a good education, but just in time to enlist in the military and fight in World War I. Back in the U.S. after the war, Glenton joined the Forest Service; he later became an engineer for the City of Tucson.
Gilbert joined the Forest Service. At first he was on the lookout on Mt. Bigelow, where all the supplies had to be hauled up on burros. In the days before roads, he and Glenton climbed Mt Lemmon as if it was a tree in their backyard. For a while, Gilbert had a radio repair shop in Tucson, but in his spare time he learned how to fly and also did parachute jumping (packing his own chute). Gilbert was one of the first pilots in Tucson, as he had been in the Royal Flying Corps during the War. Gilbert’s wife, Irene, also a pilot, was one of the first women pilots in the Tucson area. So they had his and hers planes, many adventures, and a few exciting moments that turned out all right.
Back in the Forest Service, he served as ranger all over Southern Arizona until he was transferred to the Nogales District in 1939. Gilbert always had a British manner, including a slight accent, which I remember well. He was good friends with most of the ranchers in the area who had grazing allotments on the Coronado National Forest, but remained professional in those relationships.
After Gilbert retired, he and his wife made trips back to England, where Gilbert contracted pneumonia and passed away. He was survived by Irene, their daughter Jocelyn and son Corky.
The Sykes family includes one character that may be familiar to readers of epic novels: the writer Diana Gabaldon is the great-granddaughter of Godfrey’s brother, Stanley Sykes, whose family had remained in Flagstaff. Diana’s characters may seem almost unbelievably adventuresome until you realize that the Sykes family is just like that!
*A Westerly Trend: by Godfrey Sykes, available at the Pima County Public Library.
References: Arizona Daily Star articles, including a Bonnie Henry article on the Desert Laboratory from 1989; reminiscences of Fred Noon.
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