ON THE WAGON ROAD

ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1857, when Edward Fitzgerald Beale dropped into the spacious, undulating grassland of Government Prairie in Northern Arizona, he likely was consumed with practical concerns. He was traveling through uncharted territory and needed to find food and water for his 50-man crew. He also had an ambitious mission: to establish a new migration route west to California. Beale was bent on maintaining a punishing travel schedule and looking specifically for reliable springs, large game, firewood and the path of least resistance. But the unexpected beauty of the landscape that unfurled before him stopped him in his tracks.

“The view was so grand and extensive,” Beale wrote in his journal, “that we sat on our horses for a long time in silent admiration.”

Beale’s party camped that night at Breckenridge Spring on the edge of Government Prairie. They found pronghorns plentiful and killed several for dinner. In the old-growth forest just east of the prairie, Beale encountered a towering ponderosa that measured
19 feet in circumference. Well into the party’s nine-month, 4,000-mile survey expedition, Beale was ecstatic that his theory about following the 35th parallel as the best route across the Western frontier was proving correct. “It is the shortest, the best timbered, the best grassed, the best watered, and certainly, in point of grade, better than any other line between the two oceans with which I am acquainted,” he later wrote in a report to the U.S. secretary of war.

In the mid-1850s, after the United States acquired vast Southwestern territories from Mexico, Congress wanted to encourage settlement and approved funding for the exploration and construction of a wagon road along the 35th parallel. When completed, the road would stretch for 1,240 miles from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the Colorado River. And Beale, a 35-year-old retired Navy lieutenant with a reputation for endurance and bravery, was appointed by President James Buchanan to lead the project. It was the first federally funded road in the Southwest. It was also the first expedition in U.S. history to use camels for carrying supplies. Beale had joined the Navy at 14 and had already traveled the world. He theorized that camels would be ideal for exploring the Arizona desert. As part of what became known as the U.S. Camel Corps, about two dozen camels were transported from the Middle East for Beale’s expedition, and an expert camel driver named Hadji Ali (nicknamed “Hi Jolly” by Beale’s crew) was hired to manage the animals.
 

Some 150 years after Beale first crossed Government Prairie with his strange camel caravan, I am traipsing through knee-high grass, searching for signs of the famous wagon road that bears his name. It is mid-September, and Government Prairie is flush from a wet monsoon storm. The grass is thick, green and dappled with orange and purple wildflowers. Cotton-ball-shaped clouds drift across the blue sky and cast puddle-like shadows on Antelope Hills and the distant San Francisco Peaks. I am with photographer Shane McDermott, who is enthralled by the sublime scenery but also is being attacked by swarms of mosquitoes.

We are attempting to follow the section of Beale’s route across Government Prairie that has been designated by Kaibab National Forest as a recreational trail. There was an impressive “Historic Beale Wagon Road” monument at the parking pullout along Forest Road 100, but now there is no sign of a trail and certainly nothing that would meet the modern definition of a road.

“Could this be wagon ruts?” McDermott wonders as he slaps mosquitoes on his legs.

“Maybe,” I say. “But could it also just be ATV tracks?”

We follow the barely distinguishable ruts into a small grove of pencil-thin pine trees. On the other side of the woods, we come upon a 4-foot-tall weathered wooden post. From a distance, it looks like any fence post, but upon closer inspection, I see it bears proof that we are on the right track.

We have managed to stumble upon the wagon road. The post is branded with a camel symbol and was installed by Kaibab National Forest staff as a way to help hikers find Beale’s route. About 50 yards
distant, we spot another post and walk toward it. The camel brand on this one is weathered and barely visible in the late-afternoon sun. From there, we will come upon the ruins of a homestead in the middle of the prairie, and then, after being unable to spot another camel post, we will lose the wagon track altogether.

When Beale successfully completed the survey and construction of the wagon road in 1859, he had hopes that it would become the primary pioneer highway across the Western frontier and rival the Oregon Trail. But the start of the Civil War a few years later brought immigrant traffic in the Southwest to a halt, and Beale’s request to build bridges and further improve the road was put on hold. After the Civil War, Beale’s surveys proved crucial during the construction of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad (now part of the BNSF Railway), which generally followed the same east-west route along the 35th parallel. And that paved the way for Historic Route 66 and then Interstate 40, both along the same path.

Many sections of the original Beale Wagon Road across New Mexico and Arizona have literally been paved over by the highways that followed. But in the still-undeveloped and wide-open country of Northern Arizona’s Coconino and Kaibab national forests, some places where Beale traveled and camped remain untouched, like whispers from the past. The trick is being able to find them.
 

“Going out on the road, anywhere, anytime, it just gives you a good feeling,” says Jack Smith, 70, who has devoted much of his life over the past 40 years to researching the Beale Wagon Road. I talked to Smith after my Government Prairie hike to get more information about the route. “I know every inch of it,” he said of the 1,240-mile road. Smith currently lives in Oklahoma City and has most recently been searching out Beale’s forgotten wagon path across the Plains.

Smith got started with his obsession in 1973 while earning his master’s degree in history at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He was researching an 1853 railroad survey conducted by Amiel Whipple when he came across some vague accounts about Beale’s expedition. While there were all kinds of historical records on
Whipple’s survey that had been archived by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, Smith found very little about the federally funded wagon road. Beale’s route had vanished almost completely by the 1970s, but Smith vowed to make the rediscovery of the wagon road the subject of his master’s thesis.

“My professor said: ‘You’re wasting your time. There are no historical references to work from,’ ” Smith recalls. “But I thought if the United States government funded Beale’s survey, the road must have been completed and used. So I just started going out in the field to collect my own data.”

After poring over Beale’s journals and getting the compass bearings that Beale recorded for every campsite, Smith embarked on his own expedition across Northern Arizona to identify what he simply calls “the road.” Eventually, his methodical field research began to bear fruit.

“Whenever I would get off work, I’d go out on the road and look for sites,” says Smith, who worked for 30 years as a grocery-store clerk in Flagstaff. Smith verified the location of Beale’s campsites by unearthing cans and glass from the 1800s, as well as lichen-covered rocks that had been pushed over to make way for wagons. “I found evidence that the Beale Road was actually very well-used,” Smith says. Although official tallies were never kept, Smith estimates that between 1857 and 1882 (when the railroad to California was completed), several thousand families in large wagon trains migrated west on the Beale Road. Plus, uncounted soldiers traveled the road, and an estimated half-million head of cattle and sheep were driven west on the route. As a result of his detective work, Smith found places where wagons had scooped out the roadbed and formed permanent ruts in the soil.

After completing his master’s thesis on the Beale Wagon Road, Smith wrote guidebooks about the route through the Coconino and Kaibab national forests. And he became so enthralled with the 19th century wagon-road pioneer that Smith changed his middle name to Beale.

“I found Beale to be an inspiration,” Smith says. “He was a great American and outstanding in every area of his life.”

In the 1980s, Smith’s dogged fieldwork caught the attention of U.S. Forest Service archaeologists, and he was hired to mark Beale’s
route through the Kaibab National Forest for the creation of a 23-mile recreational trail. In addition to the mapping, Smith also did the backbreaking work of marking the trail by building large rock cairns that were wrapped in chicken wire. Then a Forest Service staff member decided to install the wooden camel posts to add some flair.
 

On an unusually warm day in late October, McDermott and I are following those camel posts once again. But this time we have two history experts from Kaibab National Forest to show us the way: archaeologist Neil Weintraub and heritage-program manager Margaret Hangan. We are hiking to Laws Spring, a natural water catchment that is located along the Kaibab’s Beale Wagon Road Historic Trail and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. When Beale was surveying the wagon road, he identified a route that went from one watering hole to the next, all conveniently spaced about a day’s ride apart. From Breckenridge Spring at Government Prairie, the road came here to Laws and then on to a verdant spring called Russel’s Tank, located just north of present-day Ash Fork.

After an easy half-mile walk, we arrive at the top of sheer, 20-foot-tall basalt cliffs holding a still pool that is full and muddy from recent rains. We scramble down the rocks to get a closer look at the many petroglyphs and inscriptions carved into the black rock just above the water. Ancient spirals, lizards and bighorns are next to 19th century initials of wagon-road travelers and Beale’s survey party. Most noticeable is the inscription “Laws Spring” in large block letters. It is believed to have been carved in 1859 by Peachy Breckinridge, who was a tombstone engraver, the son of then-Vice President John Breckinridge and a member of Beale’s expedition.

Weintraub bends down and picks up a pottery shard. “There are thousands of these around the spring,” he says. “This one probably dates to 1,000 years ago. It shows people brought their pots down here to collect water.” Weintraub says Beale’s road along the 35th parallel was simply connecting Native American travel routes that date back as far as 10,000 years, to the hunter-gatherer period: “This has always been a major east-west thoroughfare.”

Back at the parking area, Hangan says she wants to teach us a few things about “can technology.” We gather around what looks like your average car-camping trash heap. Hangan pushes some rocks aside and digs out a rusty can. “This is from pre-1870s. You can tell by the lap seam on the bottom,” she says. “It could be from Beale’s party or railroad survey crews or immigrants going to California.” Near the heap, Hangan picks up a small white chip from the ground: porcelain. When families headed west in covered wagons on the Beale Road, women brought their family china.

After our visit to Laws, Hangan and Weintraub escort McDermott and me along a section of the trail crossing Government Prairie. We start walking near the spot where McDermott and I got off course before. Weintraub takes us right to a camel post and then points out a 3-foot-tall pile of rocks installed by Smith to signal to hikers that they are on the Beale Road. In a few spots that match Beale’s exact compass readings, Smith placed 5-inch-tall pipes with brass caps that read, “Historic Beale Wagon Road.”

The summer mosquitoes and wildflowers are gone now, and the grass is yellow with autumn. We fan out as we walk east, high-stepping through the grass and around prairie-dog holes. Weintraub stops at a shallow trough in the ground. “This is from heavy wagons,” he says. “And here are the best of the best ruts.” The grooves in the earth are clear and about 6 feet apart, the width of a covered wagon. Some 100 feet beyond the ruts is a place where two parallel rows of rocks are lined up about 8 feet apart. “Beale’s crew moved these rocks aside to make it easier for wagons to pass,” Weintraub explains. “Back then, constructing a road just meant moving rocks and building water catchments around springs.”
 

After Beale’s first expedition, from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River in 1857, he turned his party around and went back the way he came, always on the watch for ways to improve the route. In 1858, he received more government funds to “construct” the road, and in 1858-59, he traveled the route with a crew of up to 100 men, all the way from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to California. And on every trip, he took at least 20 camels. “My admiration for the camels increases daily with my experience of them,” he wrote in his journal. “No one could do justice to their merits or value in expeditions of this kind.” However, other members of Beale’s party disliked the way the camels spooked their horses and strategically spit in their faces.

Following the Civil War, the Camel Corps was retired and the animals were sold to zoos and circuses. Beale bought several from the government and kept them on a ranch in California. Beale’s success with the wagon-road expeditions led to presidential appointments as surveyor general of California and Nevada, then as ambassador to Austria-Hungary. He died at his home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 71.

On a Saturday in mid-November, I feel the irresistible urge to visit Government Prairie and, as Jack Smith described, “go out on the road.” The first big snow of the season is forecast to move into Northern Arizona in a few days, and I want to finish hiking the entire wagon road across the Kaibab before I am shut out by winter.

This time I am alone and driving across Government Prairie on a winding, rocky four-wheel-drive track that is not the forest road I thought it was. Once again, I am off course and running out of daylight. Then I see it: a camel post. I park the truck and head toward the post. Soon I am walking along the same ruts that Weintraub showed me a few weeks earlier. Following the wagon road feels almost instinctive as I head east. I recognize Jack Smith’s rock cairns and brass caps. And I understand the passion that drove him to erect these markers.

When I asked Smith why he devoted so many years to documenting the Beale Road, he paraphrased a verse from the Old Testament. “There is a scripture that I live by,” he said. “Whatever you decide to do, do it with all your might.”

When I reach the sloping rise of Wild Bill Hill on the east end of Government Prairie, I turn around and relish the view. The vast sweep of uninterrupted grassland appears much as it did when Beale first looked upon it in 1857. He described it as a view that is “unsurpassed in the world.”

In the sideways light of late afternoon, the grass is bowed down and golden. A bright-blue sky meets the horizon. From my high vantage point, I can clearly see dozens of wagon tracks. The ruts are side by side, 6 feet apart and cutting straight lines through the open grassland. I imagine a whole party of covered wagons rumbling across this prairie, carrying hopeful migrants and the family china. Perhaps they paused like Beale to take in the beauty and felt relief that they were on the right track. Then they continued west toward a new life and the setting sun.
 

IF YOU GO
About the route: The 23-mile Beale Wagon Road Historic Trail extends through the Kaibab National Forest’s Williams Ranger District from Russel’s Tank (Forest Road 142) on the west end to Government Prairie (Forest Road 107) on the east. About half of the signed route follows forest roads, which are suitable for driving or mountain-biking. The best sections for hiking are across Government Prairie and on either side of Laws Spring.
Information: For more information and a map of the route (including directions to the Government Prairie and Laws Spring access points), visit www.fs.usda.gov/r03/kaibab.
GPS: To download GPS trail markers for use with smartphones and GPS units, visit www.bit.ly/bealeroad.