James Madison Quote by Jeff Flake

““Brigham Young himself had sent my great-great-grandfather, William Jordan Flake, and others down from Utah to colonize the area. Legend has it that after experiencing Arizona’s rugged and unforgiving terrain, some colonizers returned to Utah and told Brigham Young that there was nothing worth settling down there. But Brigham Young had instructed William Jordan to sell everything that he owned—including all of his land holdings in rich Utah bottomland. His exact words were, “Leave nothing to come back to.” And so he did, and he eventually would purchase the valley where Snowflake is today. Shortly thereafter he met up with Erastus Snow, the Mormon apostle who was overseeing the church’s colonization efforts, and they combined their names to give my town its name. My great-great-grandfather was a rancher, and he passed some of the land down to his son, James Madison Flake, and James Madison passed some of it down to my grandfather Virgil Maeser, who passed it down to four of his sons, the eldest of whom is my father, Dean Flake. And that land—the F-Bar Ranch—””

— Jeff Flake