Here is what I have said about Williams and Jerome, Arizona:
Williams, Arizona, is located on U.S. Highway 40, about 160 miles east of the California border town of Needles—where the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath first see the promised land of California and take a swim in the Colorado River—and about thirty-five miles west of Flagstaff, Arizona. It is the closest gateway town to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. We rented a motel room from Mr. Patel and spent four days there, restocking our larder and making the first of several visits to the "world’s most beautiful scar." The drive from Williams to the south rim, on the gently sloping Coconino Plateau, gives no indication of the wonders you are about to see.
We had been to Williams before, but this time we noticed that it had changed for the worse. There was still a vintage train tourists rode to the Grand Canyon and a number of old buildings typical of towns in the West. But the caf? we used to visit for good coffee and homemade sweet rolls, run by a motorcycle aficionado with a lust for the open road, was now a combination espresso bar and Chinese restaurant. Many other places were closed or were for sale, and most of the remaining businesses appeared to be counting on a continuation of the nostalgia for Route 66, the famed "mother road" where, as Nat King Cole sang, you could "get your kicks." The old highway, which began in Chicago, Illinois, and ended in Santa Monica, California, still goes through Williams, as it does through Gallup and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Flagstaff, Arizona, all of whose main streets are the great road itself. Route 66 memorabilia shops abound but nowhere more than in Williams.
Like many other western towns, Williams trades on its past. Every evening in the summer there is a cowboy "shoot-out," complete with bank robbers and damsels in distress. As in Cody, Wyoming, the participants are often people who are down on their luck, heavy drinkers, trying to put a few dollars in their pockets. The only one of these events I saw that had any character was in Jackson, Wyoming, where there was a cowboy poet who read a clever poem. At that shoot-out, the dogs in the audience howled when the bandits started shooting and a young boy almost fell off his father’s shoulders. In Williams, an entire "Wild West" village had been constructed for the edification of the tourists. When we were there, the employees were practicing various routines with lassos and guns, while two singers gave the worst rendition of "Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds" I have ever heard. The Sons of the Pioneers must have cringed in their graves. There were only a few visitors in early May, most of them Japanese, who seemed fascinated with anything Western, no matter how pathetic. It is remarkable how towns try to capitalize on their histories, in a completely distorted way, after these have been destroyed. Jerome, Arizona, fifty miles south of Williams, used to be a copper mining town controlled by the Phelps-Dodge company. It sits dramatically on a hill so steep that there is an elevation difference of one thousand feet between the beginning and end of town. Bitter and heroic struggles took place there when the miners tried to organize against the killing work regimen that is the lot of miners everywhere. Now there are mine tours, shops, and bed-and-breakfast inns. All-terrain vehicles ride the dizzying dirt road that used to be the route of the trains that hauled the copper out of the town (we drove this road from Williams to Jerome, the most harrowing drive of my life). Tourists are probably unaware that the beautiful rainbow of stripes that marks part of the mountain is the result of copper waste dripping from the mine. A few miles from town are ancient (reconstructed) Indian ruins at Tuzigoot National Monument. In front of the ruins there are what appear to be terraced dirt fields, seemingly indicating land that the Indians once planted. However, these comprise waste from the mines, piped from Jerome. Periodically they have to be watered down to prevent poisonous dust from contaminating the surrounding townspeople.