Apache Trail

The dry dock at Port Isabel was used to keep the river boats going.

Trade of seven seas arrived by boat at Yuma in this pioneer epoch.

The ferry boat "Aztec" made a lot of noise as it went up the river.

The Apache Trail STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLEN C. REED

IN THE WORDS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT ON A TRIP TO ARIZONA WHEN HE WAS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, "THE APACHE TRAIL COMBINES THE GRANDEUR OF THE ALPS, THE GLORY OF THE ROCKIES AND THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE GRAND CANYON, AND THEN ADDS AN INDEFINABLE SOMETHING THAT NONE OF THE OTHERS HAS. TO ME IT IS THE MOST AWE-INSPIRING AND MOST SUBLIMELY BEAUTIFUL PANORAMA NATURE HAS EVER CREATED."

Among the profusion of colorful, carved rocks and canyon walls that pierce the skyline along the Apache Trail in south-central Arizona it takes but little imagination to pick out a manlike face or figure here and there high on the crest of the cliffs above the twisting Salt River Canyon. Manlike forms with stony sightless eyes fixed ceaselessly on the passage of the ages through the lonely labyrinth of corridors below where man arrived only a comparatively few short centuries ago. If these silent, sculptured witnesses of time could speak what stories could be told: stories to enrich decades of patient archeological research and supply missing pieces of a perplexing past. With "THROUGH FISH CREEK CANYON" BY ESTHER HENDERSON. The Apache Trail cuts a dramatic path through up-and-down scenery. Few highways in Arizona equal this spectacular road through the rough edges of the Superstition Mountains. Time: early morning in May. Camera: 5x7 Deardorff View. Lens: Goerz Dogmar. Exposure: one-half second at f.32. Four Peaks are in the background.

But a few words they could verify or discredit much present-day theory. But until some greater hand lights their council fire, their stony-lipped silence will endure and dissolve into the dust of the abyss below chip by chip through the centuries as nature's strong hand drives home the chisel of time with alternate frosty, windy, wet, and heated blows of the hammering elements.

However is it not just a little thrilling to raise one's eyes to their lofty height and conjecture what human dramas they have beheld in the chasm where the Salt River Canyon has served as a natural passageway from the low desert lands to the upper mountains of the Rim Country? These rock-men of the mountain were old when short, stocky, nomadic hunters camped in their shadows many centuries ago and left meager signs of their existence for archeological classification. They saw the pace of man change as more agrarian characteristics developed and the little cop-per-skinned inhabitants crudely tilled the river flats and lived in brush and mud pit houses by their irrigated squash and corn fields. They saw many crafts develop: the improve-ment of basketry, the evolution of pottery, and even the weaving of cotton cloth. They saw the sinew-backed bow and hard-tipped arrow come to replace the atlatl and dart. They saw marauding tribes arrive on the scene, as the cen-turies rolled by, forcing the sedentary inhabitants of the area to take to the protective cliffs where they walled up multiple-decked community dwellings of many rooms in great cavi-ties at the very crown of the rimrock, high above the talus slopes.

There were years when the relentless clements failed to pelt these stony sentinels with rain: dry years, many in a row. From 1276 to 1299 there were 23 sun-searing, wind-parching years joining other natural causes to decimate and drive away the pueblo dwellers who occupied the Salt River country. Even after the great drouth came to a close the Numbers on the photographs are keyed to the numbers on the pins of this Apache Trail map.