By Carolyn O'Bagy Davis

Goldie Tracy Richmond was an unconventional woman. Her size set her apart. She was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 331 pounds. In 1917, at age 21, Goldie married Marion Tracy, 37 years her senior. After ten years of marriage, Goldie and Marion moved to Quijotoa, a rough camp in the barren Arizona desert to mine for gold. A few years later Goldie and Marion opened Tracy's Trading Post, serving the Tohono O'odham Indians. Goldie became fluent in the O'odham language and earned a reputation of being one of the most trustworthy traders on the reservation.Because of her great size, Goldie always sewed her own clothes, and from fabric scraps, she stitched quilts to sell in the store. Goldie sat in an elevated chair, specially-made to hold her weight where she sewed and served her customers at the same time. She set up a quilting frame under a mesquite tree and spent the scorching summers in the shade quilting and visiting with passersby. Goldie sold many quilts and comforters. Individual quilt blocks sold for 15 cents each, and patchwork quilts were $25.
Marion died in 1938 and Goldie married James Richmond in 1941. Jim was able to help run the trading post and Goldie finally had some leisure time for her quiltmaking. One of her earliest surviving quilts was stitched during World War II. Wearing silk was then unpopular because of a perceived link to Japan. The O'odham men cut off their silk ties and gave them to Goldie who stitched them into a quilt top.
By the 1950s, Goldie estimated that she had made over 500 quilts. In 1954, she began creating quilts appliquéd with scenes of Indian life. Goldie used her scraps as an artist uses paints, stitching into her quilts the spiny saguaro cactus, craggy Baboquivari Peak, and blazing desert sunsets. She was soon winning blue ribbons at the Arizona State Fair. The Saguaro Harvest Quilt was the first, winning both Best of Show and the People's Choice. The selling price for her subsequent pictorial quilts rose to $500 apiece.
Goldie began to receive recognition for her quilted art and stories of her life and her remarkable quiltmaking were published in newspapers around Arizona. In the following years, her artistic legacy has endured. Goldie's last known quilt, the 1966 Papago Indian Activity's was honored as one of the 100 best quilts of the 20th century.
About 1966, Goldie sold her trading post and moved to Mesa, Arizona where she quilted each week with the Women's Relief Society. Goldie died in 1972 at the age of 76. As a tribute to her life and friendship, the O'odham held a service on the reservation in her memory. Though her life was harsh, Goldie created fabric masterpieces that captured the beauty of the desert and recorded traditional O'odham life, a stitched record of a time that has gone from this earth. Goldie was an artist and her quilts survive as a legacy of the Tohono O'odham People she loved and the rugged desert she called home.