Every town's origin story gets polished in the retelling, but Show Low's is stranger than most and stamped on its main street. The road through town is named Deuce of Clubs, after the card that, by legend, decided everything. In the 1870s Corydon Cooley and Marion Clark ran a ranch together up on the Mogollon Rim — a hundred thousand acres of ponderosa and grass — and concluded the country wasn't big enough for both of them. They settled it with a game of Seven-Up, low card wins. As the night wore on, Clark told his partner, "If you can show low, you win." Cooley turned up the deuce of clubs, the lowest card in the deck, and answered, "Show low it is." The town took the name and kept the motto: Named By the Turn of a Card.
Cooley is the more interesting half of the story. He had come west as an Army scout and interpreter, served under General Crook, and — unlike most men in that role — came to respect the Apache and married into the White Mountain band; he spent much of his time at Fort Apache, which is part of why Clark wanted him gone from the ranch. The man Show Low is named for lived with one foot in each world at the very moment those worlds were being torn apart.
Today Show Low is the largest town in the White Mountains and the practical hub of the whole high country — the place you gas up, sleep, and provision before heading for the trout lakes, the ski runs, or the trailheads up Mount Baldy. At 6,345 feet it sits right at the lip of the Rim, where the ponderosa forest covering this part of Arizona is the largest continuous stand of its kind in the country. It is less a destination than a threshold — the town where the desert state finally becomes a mountain one.
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