Yuma Yesterday

Two tall Quechan women stood on Yuma's granite bluff, staring at the Colorado River in puzzled disbelief. Their homeland was known for its mysterious mirages fantasy lakes and villages that disappeared with the sun - but these strange things on the river were real, and they were coming closer by the minute.

The women raced down the steep hill, shouting the news for all to hear. When the Spanish dories pulled up on shore, an excited crowd was waiting to greet the slender, pale-skinned stranger who had told the neighboring Cocopahs that he was the Son of the Sun.

The disembarking was spectacular. Captain Hernando de Alarcón was magnificently swathed in blue cloth and gold braid, a sparkling contrast to the naked Quechans. The drummer, who noisely announced his presence, wore a gorgeous feather cockade. The trinkets they lavishly doled out were magical mirrors that captured Quechan faces; beads that turned sunbeams into rainbows.

That night, around a mesquite fire, the generous visitor revealed that he was seeking a great captain, who, dressed all in silver and astride a spirited horse, was in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola!

The Yuma chief and his advisers eyed their guest suspiciously. Was this jaunty fellow with the sweet-smelling beard truly all he claimed to be?

The coolness of the Quechans (or his concern for the men and boats he had left at the mouth of the river) eventually persuaded Alarcón to return downstream without finding Coronado. But this dapper, flashy Spaniard would be long remembered as the first of many glittering Colorado River personalities.

The Indians of Yuma, themselves, were no dullards, with their brightly painted faces and jingling strands of bone-and-shell tinklers. And their imaginations could be as whimsical as their jewelry, as Chief Otate proved one summer night in 1605.

Sixty-five years had passed since the visit of the self-proclaimed Son of the Sun, but for Otate it was not too late to revenge Alarcón's ruse. When a conquistador named Oñate arrived to explore the river, the chief spun him a series of yarns that made Alarcón's sun story seem modest.

"California is an island," asserted the chief; "and to go there is folly, my friend. The isle is ruled by a horrible giantess whose subjects are bald as the egg of a quail!" Otate touched his long,mud-dressed hair and rolled his eyes in horror. As the interpreter repeated the strange tale, the conquistador felt his own scalp tingle under his helmet. He may not have swallowed the ugly giantess story, but he did unquestionably accept the idea that California was an island.

It wasn't until almost 150 years later that Padre Eusebio Kino, one of Yuma's most noble personalities, firmly discredited the island myth and drew the first map to prove it. From the heights of an Arizona mountaintop, the hardy explorer-priest had looked over unbroken miles of land to the purple hills of California and realized that it was not an island after all and it could be colonized by fording the gentle waters of the Colorado just above Yuma. Padre Kino's new knowledge sealed Yuma's importance in history. There at the point where the willowy Gila joined the swashbuckling Colorado was the only natural river crossing to California for over 150 miles. Just upstream from two giant rock outcrops, a ferry would be built and later a town would grow up. The town would be known as Colorado City, then Arizona City and, finally, Yuma.

(Left) A group of Yuma Indians (Hamilton, 1884). from the book The Image of Arizona by Andrew Wallace, University of New Mexico Press.

(Bottom, left) Entryway to the main cell block of the old Yuma Territorial Prison.

(Bottom, right) Aeriel view of Yuma today. Scene is looking southeast with the river and the prison in the immediate foreground.

Yuma Yesterday...

Captain Juan Bautista de Anza and Padre Francisco Garcés pioneered the ford in 1774. Yuma seemed to draw colorful characters to its shores, and these two explorers were no exception. De Anza was brisk, bold and aristocratic a lofty hero almost too noble to be real. Garcés was warmhearted, direct, and boyishly enthusiastic a man who shared meals with the Indians and spoke to them man-to-man. Together these two formed the perfect exploration team.

On their first visit, Anza and Garcés befriended the Quechans and wisely acknowledged the authority of Palma, their chief. With an instinctive flair for the dramatic, Anza pulled out a medal embossed with the head of the Spanish king and ceremoniously hung it around the startled leader's neck. “This medal invests thee with the authority of Carlos III of Spain,” he declared in a deep theatrical voice. “Henceforth, thou shalt be known as Captain Palma!” As Anza stepped back, the people cheered wildly, throwing sand into the air and dancing gleefully on the riverbank. When the pandemonium subsided, Anza delivered a short speech, further clarifying the Quechans' new diplomatic ties with Spain: “His Majesty Carlos III will give you gifts and teach you to be Christians. All he asks in return is your obedience and your most esteemed help in crossing the river.” To the Quechans this seemed like a fine arrangement. In the morning, they guided the Spaniards across the Colorado without wetting so much as a biscuit. Never a man to pass up a chance to appear impressive, Anza fired a bang-up salute to commemorate his passage.

Things had never seemed so promising in the village, which the Spanish would later come to call Garces' mission or Purisima Concepción. Yuma Crossing, it seemed, would soon become one of the great cities of New Spain.

Tragically, Spanish and Quechan politics eventually butchered the dream. And, in the end, the friendly, exuberant Padre Garcés, three fellow priests, and a small garrison of soldiers and colonists died under the blows of Quechan war clubs.

For more than 40 years thereafter the countryside along the Colorado was quiet. Other white men ignored Yuma, while the empire of New Spain crumbled and the fledgling domain of the United States took on tentative form. The man who broke the silence, however, was characteristically spectacular.

Mountain man James O. Pattie described numerous adventures in his ghost-written best-seller of the 1830s, but none was so titillating as his meeting with the native ladies of the Colorado River.

“If truth must be told,” Pattie disclosed, “they were as naked as Adam and Eve in their birthday suits . . . Many of the women were not over 16, and they had the most beautiful figures I have ever seen, perfectly straight and symmetrical, and the hair of some hanging nearly to their heels. . . .” Mountain men like Pattie were forerunners of a new breed of Yuma personality the Yankee. First came a trickle of tattered bluecoats who forded the crossing on their trek to California. Then, in 1846 . . .

The river-wise Quechans must have snickered as they watched General Steven Kearney's half-naked Army of the West slosh through the crossing on foot, dragging two hulking howitzers through pools four-feet deep. Later, they must have positively split their sides at the antics of Colonel Philip St. George Cooke's Mormon Battalion, following in their wake, as the men fashioned clumsy rafts from wagons and awkwardly launched them at an inauspicious fording place.

Colonel Cooke stands as Yuma's most hard-driving history-maker. When their makeshift rafts finally touched the California shore, his men were soaked and ravenous. But the colonel would still not call for a rest. “Up, you sluggards!” he roared. “Load those wagons, hitch those mules, and hit the trail! We've got three good miles to go before sunset!” Compassionate, decent and sensitive, Lieutenant Cave Couts was the direct opposite of the obdurate leader of the Mormon Battalion. His destiny seemed oddly tied to Yuma, for circumstances repeatedly put him there, despite the conviction he recorded in his journal: “Fellow citizens, this is a barren waste!” Couts, of the 1st Dragoons, shared a dunking with a detachment of fellow soldiers when their raft ponderously sank in 1848. His Colorado crossing was more successful some months later, when he accompanied Lieutenant Amiel Whipple on his boundary survey of the vast new lands that Mexico had recently ceded to the United States.

In 1849, Couts built a rough shelter called Fort Calhoun “to aid gold-seekers,” among the ruins of Padre Garces' mission. From here the young lieutenant patiently administered to a bedraggled hoard of ill-equipped, goldcrazed forty-niners.

As they gorged themselves on the army's beans and bacon, the cheeky fortune-hunters pleaded for supplies for the road. In his journal, Couts voiced his dismay: “Oh the emigrants, begging sugar, flour, molasses, port, a little fresh beef, rice, coffee & c. God only knows how they have the face to push entreaties as they do! They give me terrible accounts of others they have passed without an animal of any kind or morsel to eat. These are probably one-fourth of the thousands who will come to the Colorado in distress.” To get these beggars out of his hair, Couts built a sturdy raft and launched the first ferry to California. Soon after, other craft began to ply the river, one of which brought an accused murderer and hunter of Apache scalps. John J. Glanton pressured Able Lincoln into

Yuma Yesterday...

taking him on as a partner in his ferrybusiness. Later, thanks to the exorbitant rates Glanton was charging passengers, the Indians were able to enter the ferry business in direct competition. Retaliation followed. One dark night someone wrecked the Indians' rafts, killed the ex-army sergeant they had hired to run the ferry service, and carried off several Indian girls. When the Quechan chief ventured to discuss the matter with Glanton, the villain hit him with a club. Leaning on the doorframe of his shack, he sneered a drunken threat: "If ya ever again carry folks 'cross this rotten river, I'll kill at least one Indian fer every lousy passenger! Now git!"

On April 23, 1850, the Quechans, under Chief Naked Horse, attacked their rival, killing Glanton and his partners. A short time later, Fort Yuma was established to quell similar uprisings. The new log citadel was commanded by Major Samuel P. Heintzelman, one of Arizona's most successful pragmatists. Heintzelman was not only deft at handling problems between Indians and settlers, but his practical mind also got him into a number of profitable mining and business ventures and eventually helped him secure the admission of Arizona as a U.S. Territory. While he was in Yuma, he bought shares in a busy river ferry operated by a promising young German immigrant.

Muscular, tireless and imaginative, Louis J. F. Jaeger was the essence of the up-and-coming Yuma pioneer. He furnished beef to Fort Yuma from his ranches, ferried soldiers during the Civil War, operated an inn and stagecoach station, managed a blacksmith shop, speculated in silver mining, owned shares in a steamboat company, and financed an ill-fated scheme to harness the Colorado for irrigation. "Don Diego" Jaeger soon became one of the richest men in Arizona Territory and earned a reputation as a humanitarian.

Another self-made Yuma tycoon also began as a humble ferryman - the fabulously affluent farmer José María Redondo. One of thousands of penniless forty-niners who rushed from Mexico to California in search of gold and adventure, boyishly enthusiastic Redondo returned to the Colorado to open a bakery and general store, operate a ferry and prospect for placer gold.

Like Jaeger, Redondo was a hardworking visionary. He eventually built Hacienda San Ysidro, a vast river-irrigated agricultural kingdom which supported some 500 cowboys, farmhands and household workers.

He presided over this lush domain with a just but iron hand and also dreamed of entering politics. When he was elected to the Territorial House of Representatives in 1873, he put his imagination to work for the city of Yuma. Among other benefits, he brought his town its famous penal facility.

Just as determined as Redondo and several inches taller, rough-and-tumble Sarah Bowman opened the first restaurant in Yuma in 1854. She was in her forties at the time, as lusty and bighearted an Irishwoman as ever boiled a potato. Folks called her "The Great Western," after a huge ocean-going steamship. The Great Western's trade expanded considerably when shrewd Captain Isaac Polhamus became manager of the Colorado Steam Navigation Company, and his well-organized fleet of trim river steamers began to churn the muddy Colorado. Loaded with settlers, supplies and rich ore, the spunky paddle-wheelers opened Arizona to booming development. Yuma was soon a bustling port city.

Among many romantic riverboat personalities, Captain Jack Mellon reigns supreme. Well-mannered and shrewd, he'd run away to sea at the age of 10 Then, for almost half a century, he'd outwitted the Rio Colorado, dodging its snags and sandbars with uncanny skill.

Martha Summerhayes, who had accompanied her soldier-husband to Yuma, was smitten with the gallant Captain Jack during her 13-day trip on the Gila, in August, 1874. She deplored the flies, heat, boredom, and terrible food, but her memories of the captain made up for it all: "Brave, dashing, handsome Jack Mellon! What would I give to see thee once more, thou wizard of the Great Colorado!" Mellon helped carry supplies and workers to build railroads, which soonforced the old sternwheelers into dry dock. Trains brought hoards of optimistic homesteaders, who managed to dam the headstrong Colorado and convert the Imperial Valley of California into one vast field of farms. By 1876, on a rocky outcrop on the eastern bank of the Colorado, high above the pastoral expanses of hay and cotton, the austere form of the Territorial Prison was taking shape.

As Yuma grew into a principal Arizona city, its river of personalities grew with it. There was the impudent outlaw Pearl Hart, who doublecrossed a wouldbe prison escapee; strict but well-loved Mary Elizabeth Post, who spent her life-time teaching in the city's first school; and visionary Dr. Oliver Wozencraft, who fruitlessly pipedreamed large-scale irrigation years before its time.

A latter-day counterpart of hardboiled Colonel Cooke, Ed Boyd ramrodded a plank road to carry Model-T's across the rolling sand dunes west of Yuma. Ingenious garage mechanic A. J. Eddy invented the evaporative cooler, and a fast-talking Englishman named Norman Hindle manufactured and marketed it. Bonanza-rich miner Felix Mayhew lit cigars with $20 bills when he bought drinks for crowds of his friends in Yuma saloons. His ostentatious hospitality paled, however, beside thelegendary luncheons of self-made business magnate E. F. Sanguinetti.

Every important visitor to Yuma enjoyed lunching with Mr. Sanguinetti, whose elegant menus rivaled those of Paris restaurants, with oysters on the half-shell, duck a la orange, and sherry bombé.

Yuma was changing dynamically, but its power to attract remarkable personalities was unfailing. Sarah Bowman, The Great Western, neatly summed it up: "Sure me lad, sometimes in summer it's so hot me thinks there's jest a thin tissue paper of sand 'tween this place an' the fires of hell but it sure do got some damned good folks!"