Driving the Trail of Dreams

someone's front yard or looking down an abandoned mine shaft. After about a half-mile of twists and turns, the road begins its descent toward Turkey Creek and, farther down, the tiny settlement of Bumble Bee, 13 miles away on the old Black Canyon stage road. At Bumble Bee, you can loop back to Cleator by driving up the old Black Canyon road to its junction with the road to Crown King, or head south to get on Interstate 10.Lower Turkey Creek begins at the old concrete bridge on the Crown King road. Most travelers barely notice the bridge because they are looking across at the massive dump and full of out-of-work men living off the land and looking for enough gold nuggets to buy bacon and beans and maybe some .22 shells for the rifle. "My uncle, Don Van Tilborg, was one of them. During the Depression, he got tuberculosis and the doctor told him he just had a few months to live," Van Tilborg said. "Uncle Don said he might as well have some fun before he died, so he took off for the mountains to prospect. After three years out there, he decided he wasn't going to die, so he came back home and went to work."

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 38 AND 39] In this view from Silver Cord Mine, evening shadows blanket a nearly dry Turkey Creek in the Bradshaw Mountains, south of Cleator, where miners struggled in the 1800s and early 1900s to dig out the gold and silver that lured so many into the rugged hills. [ABOVE] A strawberry hedgehog cactus imparts a vivid color accent to a slope in the Bradshaws.

HIKERS WILL FIND THESE TRAILS AS RUGGED FOR WALKING AS THE ROAD IS FOR DRIVING.

mill foundations of the great Golden Turkey Mine, which produced more than $3 million in gold and silver between 1933 and 1942. "There were a lot of people looking for gold in the old days, as you can see by the number of wrecked buildings," said Grant "Butch" Van Tilborg, a Prescott National Forest employee at the time of our adventure. "They say that during the Great Depression, the hills werefull of out-of-work men living off the land and looking for enough gold nuggets to buy bacon and beans and maybe some .22 shells for the rifle.

Turkey Creek's long history of boom and bust gold mining ranges back more than 140 years. William Bradshaw, the star-crossed forty-niner who gave the area its name, first prospected here in 1863. Bradshaw, a member of the Paulino Weaver-Abraham Peeples party that found a bonanza at Rich Hill near the ghost towns of Stanton, Weaver and Octave, prospected the Bradshaws' edges with indifferent success until he started up Black Canyon and then Turkey Creek. Although credited for publicizing the find and giving his name to the mountain range, Bradshaw was not the first person to prospect Turkey Creek. Prior to his arrival, Mexican miners had placer diggings thereabouts before Yavapai Indians drove them away. Hearing of the Mexicans' finds, Bradshaw and a few dozen American miners headed to the site. They found some gold in their pans, but not enough to get rich on, and soon most left the area for richer grounds. Bradshaw took to drink and committed suicide the next year in La Paz, a Colorado River steamboat landing. Bradshaw's brother Isaac, or Ike, led another party of miners into Turkey Creek in 1868. They found gold, too, but it was not the mother lode everyone sought. That modest find, along with the ever-present Indian threat and the difficulty of transporting supplies across the extremely rugged terrain, discouraged mining. But every now and then someone would hit a rich placer deposit, and the hills would again ring with the shouts of expectant prospectors.

Bouncing along Turkey Creek Road below Cleator in Van Tilborg's four-wheel-drive vehicle, we looked down on a landscape of tortured canyons that bled off each side of the road. Each time we turned, a new view presented itself-cliffs, rocky slopes so steep they resembled cliffs, narrow side canyons and countless dry arroyos. Prickly pear, cholla and saguaro cacti dotted the country, and high up, on the mountain horizon, stood a scattering of ponderosa pines.

"On the left is Townsend Butte," said Van Tilborg. "It's named for a pioneer Indian fighter who had a homestead there. He was so good at killing Indians that the City of Prescott, in 1871, awarded him a brand-new rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition. But he got into one too many Indian fights." A couple of years later he was mortally wounded while trailing Indians who had raided his ranch.

We caught our first glimpse of Turkey Creek at its confluence with Poland Creek about 2.5 miles below Cleator. Both were running high with snowmelt, Poland Creek with slightly more water. It was the first of 10 water crossings on the road.

"Up Poland Creek is the old French Lilly Mine," said Van Tilborg, who was born in Crown King and whose relatives back to his great-grandfather worked mines and ran cattle ranches in the Bradshaws.

"Up there," Van Tilborg said, pointing

smiled and said, "Well, you're not going to get rich, but it's fun."

The area also attracts four-wheelers and hikers, said Van Tilborg. The road offers quite a few challenges for any four-wheeler. Creek crossings can be an obstacle. High water can stall out a motor and underwater boulders or holes can trap a vehicle. We had to probe one crossing with a long stick to see how deep the water was.

The Forest Service occasionally grades the road, but maintenance stops at the Prescott National Forest boundary 6 miles from Cleator. The road was pretty rough in the forest, but it was really rugged and rocky the last 6 or 7 miles on BLM land. Neither of these agencies allow off-roading, so stay on the paths already blazed.

"There's a number of hiking trails off Turkey Creek," Van Tilborg said. "The Bill Arp Springs and Mine trail, which takes you from the Howard Silver Mine and the R and H Mine and connects with the Twin Peaks Trail all the way up to the Twin Peaks [elevation 6,881 feet] and eventuallyout to Horsethief Basin. "The Castle Creek Trail goes from Castle Creek Cabin on the west side of Turkey Creek on up to the Kentuck Spring Campground road in Horsethief Basin. Plus there are any number of little trails and paths leading from one mine workings to another." Hikers will find these trails as rugged for walking as the road is for driving.

"Kentuck" was the nickname of William Bell, a Civil War veteran from Kentucky who was buried near his cabin there.

The hiking trails, because of the steep climbs, lack of drinking water and escalating elevations, offer a tough challenge.

As we continued down the road, we passed many ruins of mines and the remains of stone cabins, some of which were mine workings that had been shored up with rock walls. Along the stream, countless mounds of sand and gravel mark the location of old placer mining sites. Nature and the passing years have disguised the piles with brush and trees.

Each little side canyon we passed had running water from recent storms, which added to Turkey Creek's flow and depth, making every creek crossing a little bit deeper as we slowly four-wheeled our way down toward Bumble Bee. Finally, about 3 miles short of our destination, we decided to turn around rather than risk flooding out in the swift, muddy water.

"Maybe we could get through all right, and maybe we couldn't," said Van Tilborg. "But I don't want to chance it. Wading around in the cold water trying to push a stalled vehicle is not my idea of fun."

As we retraced our route back to Cleator, Van Tilborg said, "You know, with all the earthmoving and work that went into mining this area, it's still one of the prettiest places to visit in the whole Bradshaws."

humas WILLOUGHBY'S WEST

"You've made me what I am today. Now let's hear your side of the story." *

EARLY-DAY ARIZONA

"Why are you scratching your head, little boy?" asked the kindly lady.

"Cause I'm the only one who knows where it itches," replied the lad.

Unusual Perspective

Squaw Peak in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve draws hundreds of hikers each day. That's a lot of Odor-Eaters.

LOVE IS BLIND

Tucson acquaintance and lifelong bachelor always had his own thoughts on the subject of marriage, calling it an institution in which a man loses his bachelor's degree and the woman gets her master's.

So naturally, when word came of his recent nuptials, I was floored. He had finally caved in and tied the knot.

After the newlyweds' first quarrel, the wife said to her husband, "I was a fool when I married you." To which the husband replied, "Yes, dear, but I was in love and didn't notice it."

The Night Sky

We asked for night sky jokes from our readers. Here is a sample of what they sent.

This was in a letter written to me by my father, W.H. Schutte, who at the time worked as the manager of a food service in Tucson: "We sit out and watch the stars at night . wish I knew more about astronomy. I don't know Sautern from Chablis." TEDDY CARNEY Boca Raton, FL A little boy returned from school every day with a star on his test papers. One day a zero was on top of his sheet. His mom asked for an explanation. He said, "The teacher was all out of stars, so she gave me a moon."

Question: What do you get when you dine under an Arizona starry sky? Answer: An astronomical gastronomical delight.

I failed my astronomy class. Apparently, Ursa Minor is not the key of Beethoven's Fifth.

Question: What did the policeman star say to the speeding comet? Answer: Stop or I'll shoot!

I pointed out the Big Dipper and Little Dipper to my niece and nephew one evening.

I explained how a group of stars makes up a galaxy and that all the stars and planets together make up the universe, which is infinite and goes on forever.

My 8-year-old niece, Morgan, turned to her younger brother, Andrew, and explained, "Then the universe must be called Grandpa."

IDENTIFYING MOM

I am an Arizona police officer and one day responded to an accident involving two vehicles. I was getting information from one of the parties, who happened to be a mother with a 4or 5-year-old boy. He wanted to help and, as he stared at me, interjected several times, "That's my mom." When I finally asked him how he knew it was his mom, he wore a look of deep thought on his face for a moment and replied, "Because I've had her for a really long time."

TO SUBMIT HUMOR

Send your jokes and humorous Arizona anecdotes to Humor, Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009 or e-mail us at [email protected]. We'll pay $50 for each item used. Please include your name, address and telephone number with each submission.

Reader's Corner

Our topic this month is ghost towns. Ghost towns are big tourist attractions. Shoot, if I wanted to spend my vacation looking at something covered in dust, I would just as well stay home.

Send us your ghost town jokes, and we'll pay $50 for each one we publish.