Beale's Trail

BEALE'S HISTORIC ROAD:

By Camel, from the Zuñi Villages to the Rio Colorado

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Nearly two million years of sporadic volcanic activity formed Mount Humphrey and the San Francisco Peaks. Sunset Crater (ABOVE), the most recent cinder cone of the 3000-square-mile San Francisco Peaks volcanic field, exploded into existence in A.D. 1065. The cinders and ash it spewed across about 800 square miles of northern Arizona and New Mexico provided fertile farmland for the Sinagua Indians who inhabited the area at the time.

BEALE'S ROAD

Imagine it is 1857. Across the rough, open country ahead a camel caravan suddenly appears traveling westward. The loads sway in a slow, plodding rhythm. Horses and mules, too, carry uniformed white men and native camel drivers. On their way to Sidon or Samarkand, burdened with rich spices and ivory from fabled Uphaz, led by a bronzed Arabian sheik of the desert? Not Sidon or Samarkand. The wilds of Northern Arizona. No sheik. A former U.S. Navy lieutenant. And forget the spices and ivory, too. These "ships of the desert" are loaded with fodder for mules and tools for road building.

The evolution of this improbable caravan was a curious combination of unrelated events. In its enthusiasm to support Western expansion, and excited about the possibilities of a direct, all-weather route to southern California along the Thirtyfifth Parallel, Congress, in 1857, appropriated $60,000 to construct a wagon route across Arizona Territory to Los Angeles. At the same time, the U.S. Army, its plans underway to use Arabian camels as military supply carriers in the southwestern deserts-they already had a number of the beasts in Texas-were looking for a way to prove the feasibility of their project...without too much risk and possible embarrassment to themselves. Congress' road-building venture offered a rare opportunity. Besides, the chosen expedition leader was a Navy man; the Army would be once removed from any failure that might ensue. In 1857, with all good humor, Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale went to Texas, gathered twenty-five camels, and, with little help and no instruction, loaded them and set off for Fort Defiance, New Mexico Territory, jumping-off point for the overland trek. Ahead lay an unknown roadless land little explored and only vaguely mapped, and populated by the warlike Navajo and Apache. With trepidation, Beale wrote in his journal August 17, 1857: "We start our journey into the wilderness. No one who has not commanded an expedition of this kind, where everything ahead is dim, uncertain, and unknown, except the dangers, can imagine the anxiety with which I start upon this journey...the next sixty days of good or evil fortune. Let us see what I shall say in this journal, if I live to say anything, on the day of my return...."

Beale rose to the occasion: of medium height, athletic build, and possessed of a strongly chiseled face with eyes that nailed you to the spot. An accomplished frontiersman and wilderness traveler, and son of a Navy paymaster, Beale went to sea at 14, and rose to a lieutenancy at 26. He served with valor at the Battle of San Pasqual in California during the 1848 war with Mexico. Two years later he brought overland to the nation's capital the first nuggets from the California goldfields. By 1882, he'd acquired a cattle and sheep ranch and was Indian agent for California and Nevada. On the caravan march, Beale and his men got their first chance to acquaint themselves with their hump-backed charges. They agreeably found: camels prefer greasewood and thorn bushes to grass; they carry 700-pound loads across gravel and sharp rock day after day with no sign of lameness. Such was their astonishing suitability for this wild land, at the end of those first weeks Beale confided to his journal: "Their perfect docility and patience under difficulties renders them invaluable ... my only regret at present is I have not double the number."

By the twenty-seventh of August, Beale's road work was underway westward from the Zuñi Villages (now Zuñi, New Mexico). They toiled from one water source to the next. Where wagons met difficulties, men cleared the path by hand. Where water was scant, they improved seeps and springs to increase yield.

BEALE'S ROAD

At historic Leroux Springs, in the shadow of the densely wooded slopes of 12,611-foot San Francisco Peaks (near today's Flagstaf) the party rested for a time. As they continued westward, water grew scarce and, to make matters worse, the guides lost their bearings; Beale, despairing, wrote in his journal: "We unfortunately have no guide, the wretch (José Saevedra) I employed at the urgent request and advice of every one in Albuquerque, and at enormous wages, being the most ignorant and irresolute old ass extant."

Then Beale's second guide, Leco, went in search of water and at nightfall failed to return. A search party found him the third day, exhausted, dehydrated, and nearly dead, riding west away from the camp. He'd spent twenty hours chasing his mule. Parched and worn out, Leco finally caught the animal and started off riding west, hoping to catch up to the expedition. Beale could only shake his head.

After that, the party experienced few difficulties in their slow journey west, finding water in hidden pools and depressions along the route.

With the aid of an Indian guide, the party crossed the dry, rugged Cerbat Mountains, near present-day Kingman, and reached the Colorado River on October 17, 1857-two months after departing Albuquerque.

Short on supplies, Beale swam his camels in gangs of five across the river, where the men traded with Mojave Indians for fresh melons. (This point came to be known as Beale's Crossing.) Once on California soil Beale dispatched most of the party on to his Rancho El Tejon (near modern-day Bakersfield) to rest and recuperate while the balance of the crew led the camels on to Los Angeles to demonstrate their worth.

On January twenty-third of the new year, Beale embarked on his return journey, leaving the camels behind for more experiments, particularly in mountain snowfields. Trekking to the Colorado, they rendezvoused with the General Jessup, a paddle wheel steamer carrying the group's soldier escort from Fort Yuma, 350 miles downriver. It was the first time a steamer had churned its way upstream this far, and Beale noted the extraordinary event in his diary, commenting it would probably mean dire changes for the Mojave Indians living along the river. He was right; within eighteen months, on a return journey, he would see Fort Mojave established at the crossing.

Beale retraced his trail back across Arizona within a month's easy traveling, finding no scarcity of water. A brief, sharp fight with hostiles was the only ruffle in the journey. On January 27, Beale, with typical reserve, wrote in his journal: "Indian skirmish at 2 A.M. Lost one mule killed with arrows, another badly wounded. Killed two Indians."

On Beale's thirty-sixth birthday, he and his party again reached the San Francisco Peaks, arriving at Zuñi February 2, formally terminating their wilderness journey. "This will eventually be the greatest emigrant road to California," Beale prophetically concluded in his report to Congress later. So well received was his information, he was immediately authorized to turn around and lead a second expedition, starting the road farther eastward.

In October, 1858, he would begin at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and work west to Albuquerque.

Even as Beale reported his success to Congress, wagon trains followed his blazes. Enthusiasm for the route ran high in Albuquerque, and several emigrant trains resting there in June of 1858 were persuaded to try it. The first train, the combined Rose and Bailey parties, numbered forty men, fifty women and children, twenty wagons, and 500 cattle and horses.

Their guide, for whom local support was so strong an immediate collection was taken up to help pay part of the $500fee, was José Saevedra, Beale's former guide. José was again to prove an unfortunate choice.

Voicing some doubt about the trail was John Udell, a sober, upright, but footloose lay preacher, who made three previous journeys to and from California. At 64, he was taking his 65-year-old wife with him to retire among his sons. His journal records the hopes, trials, and disasters of that first crossing.

Starting out, the train experienced no more than the usual difficulties and mishaps which farmers-turned-trail-hands bring upon themselves. Among the ill-luck Udell recorded: one drowning, a sudden mass sickness, lame and lost animals, and how he walked off a bank in the dark with a water cask on his shoulder. Almost paralyzed by the fall, he nevertheless went on, as did everyone else.

In mid-July, the party reached the San Francisco Peaks, where they rested...and quickly lost their nerve.

Facing uncertainty about water to the west, party leaders proposed to wait for rain. Press on or face starvation, Udell insisted. But few listened. When scouts far ahead found water, the leaders split the train into small parties to better use the limited springs and pools. Udell argued against stringing out the train in hostile territory. But again he was rebuffed.

Near Kingman, water again ran short and once again guide Saevedra failed. Only a providential rainfall saved them.

Indian harassment began as they drew near the Colorado River. Horses were stolen and returned. Gifts resulted only in greater demands. With Indians surrounding them, they pushed on, ignoring Udell's urgings to draw their wagons closer together.

At the Colorado crossing, the inevitable: the Mojaves struck, driving off the oxen and horses and seriously wounding half the men. Back along the trail, still trying to catch up with the main body-and completely unaware of what was happening ahead-one wagon of the train went on alone-and at night to reach their friends and safety at the river. The wagon was ambushed. Two children perished on the spot. The rest of the family were never seen again.

Horrified and thoroughly befuddled, the survivors began the long retreat. Nearly everyone walked, carrying on their backs what little remained of their belongings.

Within a day's journey, a large train from Iowa was met. Little convincing was necessary before they too joined the retreat. Then, several days more, and still another wagon train came into sight, this

Working on the Railroad: A Navajo Weaver's View

When the Atlantic and Pacific built their railroad across Arizona along Beale's road, it greatly influenced the lives of the Navajo Indians living along its route. Noted Southwestern author and ethnographer George Wharton James purchased the blanket pictured (RIGHT) in the 1880s, and in his book Indian Blankets and Their Makers, he interprets the unusual railroad design: "This weaver's summer hogan was not far from a siding on the main line of the Santa Fe Railway (successor to the A&P) some fifty miles west of the state line in Arizona. "One day, after she had set up her loom, she was aroused from her thought by the arrival of a train going west. That immediately suggested to her that she attempt to reproduce the engine and train of cars in her blanket. The sun was glistening on the rails, and this effect she reproduced by alternations of white and blue."

Reading the blanket from bottom up, "the train was of passenger coaches, and there was room on her loom for only two cars and these of rather compressed dimensions. To denote that they were only passenger cars she introduced two human figures in each. While this work was progressing certain birds appeared on the scene together with two women, one walking east and one west. A 'light' engine also came traveling east, and, as the sun happened to be shining upon it as it passed, it had a bright, glistening appearance, so she represented it by weaving it in white, while the windows of the cab are picked out in dark blue. A large and small rain cloud also appeared on the horizon, and these are duly represented."

"After getting ready for the next panel and no train appearing, she pictured six flying birds alighting on the track and five walking female figures. A rain cloud is at each end of the group of walkers. This panel is followed by one showing two engines together, going west, with flying birds and rain clouds above them.

"The next panel shows a sleeping car. The remainder of this panel is made up of fleecy clouds, flying birds, and rain clouds, while the last panel is her very effective representation of a poultry train going west."

The blanket is twenty-seven by forty-seven-and-a-half inches. Courtesy of the San Diego Museum of Man.

BEALE'S ROAD

Text continued from page 10 from Illinois, forty-three men strong, without women and children among them, and with a large herd of horses and mules.Witnessing the utter misery of the RoseBailey and Iowa parties and despite Udell's arguments to the contrary (...if twentyfive men could fight the Indians to a standstill, as they did at the river, he contended, then the combined strength of all three parties-118 men-could see them all safely to California!), the Illinois men voted to retrace their tracks the 450 miles to Albuquerque. There was little sharing of wagons or provisions. Arriving in midNovember, the parties disbanded. Udell hired on to herd Army stock for the winter. It was a momentary pause in his adventures.

In March, 1859, Lieutenant Beale once more appeared in Albuquerque, on his third journey through the wilderness. Eager for the road again, the Udells seized the possibility of safe passage with the party of road builders and signed up to accompany them.Early on, food shortages and minor problems plagued the party, but soon they reached a spring west of the San Francisco Peaks...just in time to cheer the arrival of Samuel Bishop, Beale's second in command, fresh from the California endurance trials, with camels, forty men, and provisions enough for all. By April 1, 1859, the joint expedition touched the shore of the Colorado River, improving the road and springs along the way.

As Beale foresaw, a contingent of soldiers was already at work at the crossing, completing construction of a military post to enforce a treaty with the Mojaves.

Beale's path had become a road!

The trail-weary Udells drove their teams through to California and a peaceful retirement, at last. Beale turned in his camels to the Army in southern California and sought other adventures, as war clouds darkened the horizon.

Unfortunately, in the storm of civil war, the camels were forgotten and afterward auctioned as surplus. Some came back to Arizona to work in mines, others to haul ore in Nevada and British Columbia. Eventually, many were simply turned loose, adding mysteries to a growing volume of legend and lore of the West.

With the conclusion of Beale's second expedition and the creation of a fort on the Colorado River, the gates to the West were officially opened, and emigrant wagons took to the road in increasing numbers. The ill-equipped and the well-supplied, the important and the obscure ate each other's dust.

By fall 1863, the Army constructed a cut-off from Beales Road near the San Francisco Peaks to the booming settlement of Prescott in the heart of the goldfields to the south. Traffic continued through to California on Beale's Road throughout the 1870s, the road's heyday, but now it was sheepmen and cattlemen who saw the waving gold of grass along the track. They drove vast herds and flocks into northern Arizona. The Arizona Miner in Prescott reported the traffic: 1800 head of cattle from New Mexico, 800 and 1700 head from Texas, all within a month's time. The Daggs brothers stocked the range with thousands of sheep and soon were fighting cowboys of the Hashknife Outfit over control of the sea of grass south of the road. By some accounts the Daggses triggered a classic dispute between cattle and sheepmen, the Graham-Tewksbury feud, in which scores of men were killed.

More typical of stockmen was John Elden, who traveled west on Beale's Road in 1875. So impressed was he with the area around the San Francisco Peaks, he bought sheep, got married, and hurried back to build his cabin at a spring at the base of the mountain that today bears his name. By the mid-1880s the vast grasslands were filled. "The whole country around is overstocked with cattle and horses," wrote old-timer William Hardy. "Game is rarely seen, but there is cattle on a thousand hills."

Beale's Road also served to open up central Arizona to colonization: Joseph City, Holbrook, Woodruff, Snowflake, Show Low, St. Johns, Eagar, and a halfdozen other settlements far up along the creeks in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona.

Beale's Road saw it all: Arabian camels, the tragedy and repulse of the first wagon trains, the flood of emigrants to California, the rush to the goldfields, great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, and the colonization and settlement of an area larger than most Eastern states.

Yet one dramatic chapter remained to be written. The coming of the railroad. Beale knew his route had potential for the iron horse. Only the Civil War delayed its arrival. Then, in 1866, came the first survey. Evidence of its passing can still be seen carved on a poolside rock at one of Beale's springs: UPRWED 1868, "Union Pacific Railroad, Western Engineering Division."

The Union Pacific didn't build the railway; it raced west along the Great Salt Lake to complete the first transcontinental railroad. The Atlantic and Pacific, fore runner of the Santa Fe Railroad, laid the track. Following Beale's Road, it reached Arizona from the east in 1881. Two years later it spanned the territory and bridged the Colorado River where Beale's camels once waded.

Later, towns like Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff, and Kingman sprang up to serve the rails; and each remained on or close to Beale's Road, now the mother road of famous "Route 66" and Interstate 40. Thanks to the latter, travelers today zip from Zuñi, New Mexico, to Bakersfield, California, in hours rather than the thirty plodding days required in Beale's time.

So Beale's Road was never a forgotten relic going nowhere. It managed to grow with the country, and remaining what it was always, the life-blood of northern Arizona, and, as Beale predicted, the greatest emigrant route to California, bar none.

Additional Reading

Beale's Road through Arizona, by Eldon Bowman and Jack Smith is reviewed on page 24.

The Road West: Saga of the 35th Parallel, by Bertha S. Dodge, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1980.

Uncle Sam's Camels, by Lewis Burt Lesley, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1929.

Journal Kept During a Trip Across the Plains (1859), by John Udell, N. A. Kovach, Los Angeles, 1946.

In addition to free-lance writing, Eldon Bowman makes his living as a guide and backcountry outfitter in Flagstaff.

THE RED GHOST

by Don Dedera One night a few of us curled up around a dying fire under a cloud-shrouded sky near the old Double Circles headquarters. We listened to an owl cackle and hoot. And just when we were about to drift off to sleep one old-timer of the Coronado country said: "It was out here on Eagle Creek that the Red Ghost killed the woman." The Red Ghost. Killed the woman! No more sleep for a while. Our venerable narrator told how, in the spring of '83, a ranch woman left her adobe house to fetch water from a spring. Her screams carried back to the house, occupied only by another woman and some children. They caught a glimpse of a huge red animal ridden by what seemed to be a human. The woman in the house bolted her door and waited for the menfolk to return that evening. When they did, they found the first woman's trampled body near the spring. She and the mud around her bore cloven hoofprints double the size of a horse. Long strands of red hair festooned nearby trees. A coroner, summoned to investigate, was baffled. His verdict: "Death in an unknown manner." In the same week, two gold prospectors were sleeping in camp on Chase Creek, north of Clifton. Amid screams and pounding hoofs their tent collapsed. They sighted an animal which they took to be a horse, unusually tall. Dawn's light revealed oversized hoofprints in the creek bed and long red hairs snagged on the chaparral. These true incidents, said our storyteller, gave birth to outrageous tall tales and practical jokes throughout Southeastern Arizona for years. A favorite prank was to whittle a wooden hoof for making gigantic prints, then summon the gullible with screams and commotion. In time the pranks tended to obscure the truth, which was bizarre enough. Historian Robert Froman, about twenty years ago, dug into the case and concluded the first two incidents did occur. So did a third, in which Cyrus Hamblin carefully observed a creature a quarter of a mile away across a ravine near the Salt River, about eighty miles northeast of Eagle Creek. It was a camel, Hamblin swore. And the load on the camel's back looked like a man. Scoffers at Hamblin's report were silenced a few weeks later when five prospectors sighted the Red Ghost on a flat near the Verde River, some sixty miles west of where Hamblin saw it. The miners shot at the beast, which wheeled and fled. The action dislodged a part of its burden: "A human skull with a few shreds of flesh and hair clinging to it." Fiction and legend mated to beget myth. But Froman winnowed more fact from foolishness. Before the Civil War the U.S. Army and private enterprisers had imported dozens of camels from the eastern Mediterranean and the Far East for use in the arid Southwest. The experiment might have succeeded if mule skinners had not been so mule-

Headed. Impatient, intolerant handlers assumed camels could be beaten and otherwise abused to produce more work. But the camels fought back, oftentimes spitting foul-smelling cud with great accuracy. More than one enraged camel driver was driven to camelcide. When attention of the brass was diverted by the war between the states, remaining camels were allowed "to escape." Several dozen were auctioned off by the Army in 1863 in California to find chores in Nevada. Hi Jolly (Hadji Ali) ran a string of commercially-imported Bactrian camels as water-bearers along the wagon road near Yuma. These, too, were turned loose, later in the 1860s. Froman speculates that among the desperate men who roamed Arizona in those lawless times were sadists fully capable of capturing a camel and lashing an enemy man on its back. This was the editorial position of the Mohave County Miner: "The only question is whether the man was tied on for revenge or merely as an ugly piece of humor by someone whohad a camel and a corpse for which he had no use."

Maddened by its macabre load, the derelict beast might have reacted violently to any human it encountered. It still bore part of its package when an Anchor-JOT ranch cowboy tried to lasso it east of Phoenix. At any rate, various sightings were reported until the Miner of February 25, 1893, carried a story:

The Phantom That Terrified All Arizona for a Time

Another ghost is laid. Another of the tribe of gaunt hobgoblins that keep the romance of the mysterious deserts is gone. Another of the unearthly dangers that the timid Mexican women used to pray against has departed. Mizoo Hastings of the mining camp of Ore was the priest that exorcised this phantom. Mizoo has a ranch a little above thegold camp on the San Francisco River. He woke up one morning and saw through the window of his cabin a big red camel, banqueting in his turnip patch. Mizoo took a dead rest on the windowsill and blazed away. He got the camel.When he went out to examine the beast, he found that he was all scarred up with a perfect network of knotted rawhide strips. They had been on him so long that some of the strands had cut their way into the flesh....

Camel tales hung around the Southwest for another half a century. When you're snug in your city house it is easy to be skeptical. But I'm here to tell you that when yourself is in a sack one black night on Eagle Creek, where the camel killed the woman, those owls sound a hell of a lot like the Red Ghost.