ALONG THE WAY

Historic Butterfield Stage Trail Now an Easy Half-day Outing

STOOD AMONG THE GHOSTS at the high point of Butterfield Pass running through the billion-year-old rock of the Maricopa Mountains and strained my ears against the silence. Perhaps, if I had listened long enough, I might have heard the stirrings of centuries of stragglers who trekked past this jumble of granite and saguaro cacti years ago. A high, haunted lament braided the silence of a landscape little changed in 1,000 years of fitful human occupation that included Hohokam Indian hunters, Spanish explorers, trappers, warriors, soldiers, forty-niners, doomed settlers and now a few off-roaders and history buffs. I heard them cry out, although I knew it was only the yearning of the wind through the saguaro spines-the oldest of which may have watched Juan Bautista de Anza and his army of settlers pass through here in 1775 following a new route from Tubac to California.

"So much history," said Elissa, my wife, in a hushed voice.

We had set out from Phoenix that morning for a jaunt on the rutted dirt trail, possible with a high-clearance, two-wheel-drive vehicle. We drove south out of Phoenix on Interstate 10, and turned off on Maricopa Road, or State Route 347, at Exit 164. At the town of Maricopa, we turned right, or west, onto State Route 238. The dirt Butterfield Stage trail veers right (north) off State 238 just short of a mile west of marker 18 into the North Maricopa Mountains Wilderness. Although it is not named at the junction, the Bureau of Land Management marks the road with a sign indicating access into the recently established Sonoran Desert National Monument, which includes the wilderness area.

The road meanders along the base of mountains made of some of the oldest exposed rock in Arizona. The Gila River runs just west of the Maricopas, which accounts for the historic role of Butterfield Passthe funnel for many centuries of human history.

Hohokam hunters chased bighorn sheep through these mountains until the Indian civilization mysteriously scattered in the 1400s. They regularly traveled the desert highway of the Gila River, which means they journeyed often through this pass to the river some 10 miles west.

In the mid-1770s, Francisco Tomas Garces, an adventurous Franciscan priest, set out from Mission San Xavier del Bac near Tucson to find a route west to missions in California. He traveled through the pass a few times. After establishing friendly relations with the Yuman Indians along the Colorado River, Garces in 1775 led Anza through the pass along with a large group of settlers intent on colonizing the remote outpost of San Francisco. The route was traveled peacefully until misunderstandings and broken promises of gifts to the Indians provoked a Yuman uprising in 1781, which resulted in the murder or enslavement of every Spaniard living along the Colorado River-including Garces.

Only hunting and trading parties of Yumans, Apaches and Yavapais used the pass extensively for most of the next century as the Spanish Empire faltered. American trappers and trailblazers traveled warily through the pass starting in the 1820s; some sought the route to