Stampede

STORY BY STELLA HUGHES DRAWINGS BY JOE BEELER

A really good night horse was always prized, as he had to be surefooted while running in the dark. The best one I ever rode was called Biscuit, branded R S on his left thigh. I had him up for my night horse the time the Hashknife had a stampede of 1800 steers. It was in the fall of 1923, and Bill Jim Wyrick had the outfit camped down by the Clear Creek dam out of Winslow. There were at least twenty cowboys and the horse wrangler. Ernie Burkett was cookin' for the outfit that fall, 'cause for some reason or other Clair Haight couldn't. Ernie couldn't hold a candle to Clair's good cooking, and I don't know why he hired out for the job, because Ernie had cowboyed all his life. It turned out he was a hell of a lot better cowboy than he was a cook. Burkett had the chuck wagon parked around a point, near a red bluff, so as to get out of the wind. That fall the wind never let up, blowing clouds of red dirt into the sky to where you could barely see the sun. Bur-kett had stretched a canvas fly over the chuckbox, and the wind flapped it so much that it was soon torn to shreds. We'd been camped on Clear Creek for a week, working that lower country, branding and cutting out steers to sell. There were eight men on day herd, holding the steers on the best grass we could find. The range was pretty well eaten out, and trying to keep them steers from drifting out of the country was hard work. Each night we penned the cattle in two big corrals hooked together. One was made of smooth wire and the other of cottonwood poles. Two men at a time were assigned to night guard. Their job: ride around outside the corrals and keep the cattle awake. We didn't have any trouble other nights, as the cows, bawlin' and milling kept the steers awake and on their feet. But this last night we'd finished working the herd and had turned the cows back onto the range. We penned all the steers in the two corrals.

Albert Crockett and a cowboy called Rio Bravo had first guard. Rio was a halfMexican middle-aged cowboy who was usually well liked, but he'd been bowed-up for a week over a rimmin' out Bill Jim had given him. He hadn't said three words to any of us for days. A sulled-up cowboy can put a damper on any good spirits in camp, and I sure pussyfooted around Rio for I had him figured as the kind that would take his spite out on a kid. In any case, if me and Jeff or Dell Cooper done any hoorahin' or horsin' around, we did it when we were away from the older men. All was quiet in camp. Pat kept a little smoky fire chunked up with water-soaked cottonwood logs while he and some of the men visited and played the coffeepot the cook had left on the coals for the night guards. The wind had died down to nothin', and the steers had bedded down early and weren't makin' a sound. Pat said it was a bad sign and that they were liable to run.

Stampede! Recollections of a Hashknife Cowboy

Excerpted from the book Hashknife Cowboy: Recollections of Mack Hughes, published by the University of Arizona Press, September 1, 1984.

Arizona Highways Magazine/3 It was no more than a few minutes later when all 1800 of them steers jumped to their feet and stampeded. The corrals were laid flat, and the cattle poured through like a dam busting. Back in camp we heard the roar of runnin' cattle, and we started mounting our night horses.

"They're runnin' boys; they're runnin'!" I heard Bill Jim yell. He didn't have to tell us, for the roar of their hooves sounded like a tornado.

Most of the cowboys hadn't gone to bed yet, and we had our saddled horses tied to a fence not far from the chuck wagon. I was right on Pat's heels, as he'd tied Ner-vous Nat next to Biscuit.

"Take it easy, son, an' be careful," Pat warned as he swung into the saddle. "Just stay with 'em till they quit runnin', an' turn 'em back when you can," were his parting words as he melted into the darkness.

"They're runnin' boys; they're runnin'!" I heard Bill Jim yell. He didn't have to tell us, for the roar of their hooves sounded like a tornado.

This was my first stampede, and I guess I was pretty excited. My brother Jim was working that fall, and he had a creamy buckskin horse called Bacon. Bacon was a pacer, an' I don't know why Jim picked him for a night horse because the son of a gun couldn't even stand up in the daytime, let alone run in the dark. By the starlight I made out Jim on Bacon, and as I ran past him he yelled, "Slow down!" I didn't take his advice, and soon Jim and Bacon were out of hearing.

I wouldn't admit it afterwards, but I spent most of the night tearing around in circles. When I came onto a bunch of steers, I'd start them back towards the river, but little good it did, 'cause the minute I turned away they'd turn, too, and head back for the mountain where most of them came from. I finally came across Jeff, and we threw in with Dick Snyder, and when it got daylight we headed our horses up-country, where we knew the leaders would be.

There were a lot of things that happened that night we all laughed about later when we got to comparin' notes. Bill Lovelady was ridin' an old flea-bitten white horse called Hendotomi. Somewhere out there among the running cattle ol' Hendotomi stubbed his toe and fell. In the wreck, the horse scalped both himself and Lovie. Hendotomi had all the hide from between his eyes, plumb down to his nose, peeled like a banana-it hung down in a strip a foot long and had to be trimmed off with a knife. And Lovie had scalped his bald head, only not as bad.

Another thing that happened was Bill McKinsey chased one old spotted steer all night. He came in the next morning driving just this one old steer. And Hebe Petty rode herd on a bunch of chamiza brush all night long. He thought it was steers lying down, an' even sang to 'em. But I guess the damndest thing of all was what the cook did.

When the steers first broke to run, the cook was getting ready for bed under the wagon. When he heard the roar of the stampede, he jumped up and ran out and climbed on Bulldog, Ben Page's night horse. The cook took off, whipping over and under, in the opposite direction from the running cattle. Page saw his horse disappear in the dark, and he threw a fit. Page was a hell of a good cowboy, and here that damned loco cook had set him afoot.

About ten o'clock that morning men began drifting in with bunches of cattle from different directions. The leaders had been turned back about ten miles out on Chevelon Creek. When we all got in, it was discovered the cook was missing. Meanwhile, Page had cooked up a big batch of grub, and was bitchin' his head off because Burkett had stolen his horse. Page said he'd be damned if he'd help hunt for a lost cook.

It didn't take long to find the cook. He hadn't gone far, as he'd run Bulldog over a twenty-foot bank into a wash not over three hundred yards from camp. Bulldog had broken his neck in the fall, and the cook was crawlin' around on his hands and knees, having been knocked silly. It took Burkett a day or so to recover.

A little after we'd located the cook, me and Pat were tryin' to repair part of the smooth wire corral that had been torn down, and Pat stooped down and picked up a can. The can was flattened out, but it still had some rocks in it.

"This is what probably started the run," Pat said, and gave me a knowing look. He tossed the can out of the corral.

I didn't understand. "You mean someone throwed that can in here last night?" I asked.

"It sure as hell wasn't here when we penned 'em," Pat said. I had to think about this for a minute, and it came to me finally that Rio would have been the only man there that would have reason to cause a thing like that. But, a stampede-why, men could have been killed! The thought gave me goose bumps.

Pat was always close mouthed, and he warned me to be the same. "Don't you open your trap about this to anyone. It'll just cause trouble, an' it ain't none of our business. Besides," he added, "we ain't got any real proof."

As far as I know, me and Pat were the only ones who ever suspected the stampede might have been started by someone tossing a can full of rattlin' rocks among the steers.

After we'd re-gathered all the steers, and took a good count, Bill Jim said we weren't out more than a handful. He cut out three head that had gotten crippled in the run, and let them go. Then he told us he'd decided to cross Clear Creek, so the steers could be day herded on better grass until we were ready to ship.

We had to cross the cattle over the Clear Creek bridge, as there was no way we could go below the dam and cross that awful marsh where the creek ran into the river. I'd seen cows that got out there, and in just a few minutes all you could see was the tips of their horns going out of sight.

Steers or cattle, for that matter-are edgy after a stampede and anxious to repeat the performance. Under ideal circumstances it was hard to make cattle take to the narrow bridge, but Bill Jim was an old hand at this, and he knew exactly what to do.

He sent Pat across the bridge to stand guard in the middle of the road, so he could stop any traffic that might be going out from town.

Several of us helped Bony Duran bring up the remuda. Once the horses were onto the bridge, the rest of the men would crowd the steers and force them to follow. But before this plan could be carried out, a car speeding out from town passed Pat, who was waving his hat tryin' to stop them. If Pat hadn't jumped his horse out of the way in the nick of time he'd have been run over. The car, never slowin' down, headed onto the bridge, an' we barely got the horses off the road before it roared by, scattering steers every which way. The car / never checked its speed and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Bill Jim was fit to be tied. "I know that guy," he yelled at Pat, who came gallopin' across the bridge. Two or three other men swore they recognized the driver as a store-keeper in Winslow. There were four or five men in the car, an' none of them were kids out on a spree. We all decided they were either drunk on some pretty potent moonshine or had gone crazy, to have pulled a stunt like that.

We didn't have time to discuss the loony actions of town men, and helped Bony get the horses back into position to start the parade once more. The steers were gathered in a tight herd so they could be forced to follow the remuda onto the bridge. Just then we saw the car returning, with this crazy merchant driving like a drunk and honking his horn. He soon became herd bound, though, and came to a stop. That's when Bill Jim and about six cowboys swarmed all over that car.

Bill Jim was the first off his horse, and I saw him jerk open the door on the driver's side and reach in and get a handful of hair. Then he got the storekeeper by the neck with both hands and tried to drag him out of the car. The frightened man had his arms and both legs wrapped around the steering wheel, and Bill Jim couldn't pry him loose. I'd always heard it was hard to put a man out of his own house, but I saw it was impossible to pull a man out of his car when he was scared for his life.

The car was a Dodge sedan, an' the merchant's friends had locked the doors. I saw Lovie, snarling like a mad dog, drive his fist through a window, and glass flew in every direction. Dick Snyder had his rope down and had just tossed his loop over one of the headlights. Several more riders had their loops cocked, an' I guess that's when Bill Jim seen things were getting out of hand, and someone might get killed.

Bill Jim stepped back, but not before I saw him gouge his thumb into the driver's eye. "Hold it, boys, hold it!" he yelled, and when Ben Page swung his rope onto a fender Bill Jim lost his temper, again. "I said stop it!" Page slowly got down and removed his rope from the fender.

Some blood was flowing, but nothing serious. I'd watched from a safe distance and stayed on my horse. I think if Bill Jim hadn't called a stop when he did, some of those boys would have torn that car apart, a piece at a time. And if Bill Jim had given them the go-ahead, they'd have gotten the men out and beaten them half to death. Some of the cowboys carried pistols in their chaps pocket. I knew Lovie did 'cause I'd seen it. But I doubted, as hot headed as Lovie was, if he'd have used it over a matter no more serious than failing to observe a cow-country law that gave the right-of-way to livestock being driven on a public road.

Stampede!

The whole thing only proved what I was just beginning to find out-town people just didn't understand country people. The daily fights me and my brother Bill had with the town boys proved that. They sneered at our clothes and called us "hicks" and "hillbillies," and we called them "dudes" and "city slickers," and we sneered at their clothes.

Bill Jim mounted his horse and turned to the driver of the car. He pointed a finger at him, "Now, you don't move that car until every last steer is across the bridge." Bill Jim's face was as red as his hair, and his voice sounded strange to me. I'd never seen him that mad before, an' the merchant and his friends never let out a peep.

This little incident sure gave the cowboys something new to talk about. Lovie said he'd seen a jug of liquor in the car, and Hebe Petty asked Lovie why in hell he hadn't confiscated it.

The next few days we day herded the steers a few miles out of town until the stock cars were spotted at the shipping pens. Then we drove the steers into the corrals, an' I sorta hated to see the last of 'em crowded up the loading chutes, 'cause it meant back to milking ol' Sookey an' spending the winter on that windy alkali flat. I'd miss the excitement of the roundup, the long days in the saddle, an' the evenings around the campfire. It would be five long months before the spring roundup, an' to me that might as well be five years.

Dick Snyder had his rope down and had just tossed his loop over one of the headlights. Several more riders had their loops cocked, an' I guess that's when Bill Jim seen things were getting out of hand, and someone might get killed.

Horsewoman, rodeo rider, ranch wife, and author, Stella Hughes has written for many Western journals and published a book of Western lore and recipes called Chuck Wagon Cookin'; available at $9.50 from Arizona Highways Magazine.

Mack and Stella Hughes

Joe Beeler, the youngest founding member of the Cowboy Artists of America, got his start illustrating books for the University of Oklahoma Press. Beeler now lives in Sedona, Arizona.

Joe Beeler

September in Navajo is Bini' ant' dááts' ózí, the month for the matur-ing of late crops. As the sixth and final month of summer, and the last month of the Navajo year, it marks the begin-ning of harvest and preparation for the winter.

DESERT SURVIVAL

The desert is a beautiful and varied land and a pleasure to hike and explore, but it can quickly become a hostile, lifethreatening environment for those who don't know or ignore the rules of desert survival. A fun and safe way to thoroughly learn how to live in arid lands is from experts who have made it their life's work. Arizona has several topnotch desert survival organizations offering everything from short classes to full week wilderness survival treks. For an informational booklet, write: Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, 120 South 1st Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85003, Attention Deputy Molina. For classes, contact: Special Operations Division, Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, 3455 West Durango, Phoenix, AZ 85009 (602) 256-1895; Arizona Outdoor Institute, 6737 North 18th Place, Phoenix, AZ 85016; Reevis Mountain School of Survival Education, 4218 North 49th Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85013.

FLY THE CANYON

Hiking, river rafts, and mule rides aren't the only ways to see the Grand Canyon. You can get an eagle's-eye view of this wonder of the world by booking a flight with Grand Canyon Airlines. Instead of the Ford Tri-motor planes the airline began with in 1927, passengers now fly in luxurious nineteen-seat DeHavilland Twin Otters modified with extra-large picture windows for unbeatable views and sheepskin seat covers for extra comfort. Grand Canyon Airlines also flies a speedy shuttle between the South and North rims saving the five-plus hour drive around the Canyon. For information, call (602) 638-2465.

TESTED IN ARIZONA

How do Ford, General Motors-and now Chrysler-know their cars will cruise across superhot deserts during midsummer, race along effortlessly atop the highest mountains, plow right through choking dust storms? They know because they test their cars in Arizona for the effects of heat, high altitude, and desert conditions. Chrysler Corporation recently announced plans to build a proving ground at Wittmann, Arizona, northwest of Phoenix, which will make them the third American automaker in Arizona. Ford has a proving ground in Kingman, in the northwestern part of the state, and General Motors' is in Mesa, in central Arizona.

ARIZONA'S ONLY EARP

Wyatt Earp and his brothers Virgil and Morgan blazed their way into Wild West history in Tombstone. They either left or were carried out of Arizona. The only Earp brother who remained was Warren. His remains lie in a dilapidated cemetery in Willcox, northeast of Tombstone. Warren, the youngest of the Earps, arrived in Arizona a month late for the shoot-out at the OK Corral. He never served as a lawman and during his ten years in Arizona, stayed mostly in Willcox. There he was considered a bully rather than a hero. Although Warren Earp was unarmed when he was gunned down in a barroom brawl July 5, 1900, a coroner's jury set his murderer free the next day. The people of Willcox so disliked Warren they never placed a headstone on his grave. Today Willcox plans to renovate the old cemetery as a historic attraction with Warren Earp's grave as the focal point.

NIQUES

A guide to places, events, and people unique to Arizona

GOING NATIVE

What plants best help the desert return to its natural state after heavy construction? How can you plant a flower garden that seldom needs watering? What's the best way to prevent erosion in arid lands? The answer: native desert plants. And now you can buy the seeds of 140 different native plants from several Arizona com-panies that gather them legally right from the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of southern Arizona. The plantsmen who collect the seeds claim the plants can return a damaged area to normal appear-ance in two years, control erosion better than imported plants, generally need less water, and are hardier and better adapted to arid conditions than non-native varieties. The seeds might seem expensive (from forty to 300 dollars a pound) but when some seeds are so small it takes five million of them to make a pound, that's a lot of plants per dollar.

DESERT CHRISTMAS TREES

For years desert dwellers have driven to high country national forests in Arizona to choose and cut their own Christmas trees, but now they can cut trees closer to home. Christmas tree farms are springing up near Tucson and Phoenix, thanks to the eldarica pine, an evergreen recently imported from the Middle East. The eldarica is a desert tree with a broad, shallow root system similar to other arid land plants, and a tight cell structure that retains water better than other pine trees. It can withstand hot days, cold nights, and periods of drought, surviving on as little as six inches of rain annually. Under optimum conditions the eldarica grows to a height of eight feet in three years.

RODEN CRATER, ARTWORK AND OBSERVATORY

On the high, windswept plain of the Painted Desert, the Roden Crater, a 500,000-year-old dormant volcano, rumbles and dust rises from its reddish cone. The activity does not presage an eruption. Instead, it signals the begin-ning of Skystone, an earth and light sculpture by well-known artist James Turrell. When finished it will be a "unique observatory of the heavens" within the crater and its bowl.

The visible parts of the observatory will be constructed like a Japanese garden in the bowl of the crater and will not appear man-made. In fact nothing of the project will be visible from the plain surrounding the crater 600 feet below. Several rooms in the subterranean observatory tunnels will be aligned for viewing summer solstices, lunar events, and other celestial phenomena. The project, headquartered in Flagstaff at the Museum of Northern Arizona, features plans and models of Skystone. Funding for the initial phases has come from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dia Foundation. The Skystone Foundation currently is seeking donations from the private sector. For more information, contact the Skystone Foundation, P. O. Box 725, Flagstaff, AZ 86002, (602) 774-5908.

WEEKEND WANDERING

9/1-2, COCONINO COUNTY FAIR, Flagstaff, (602) 779-6631.

9/5-9, NAVAJO NATION FAIR AND RODEO, Window Rock, (602) 871-4941.

9/6-9, MOHAVE COUNTY FAIR, Kingman, (602) 573-2636.

9/14-16, SANTA CRUZ COUNTY FAIR, Sonoita, (602) 455-5553.

9/20-22, APACHE COUNTY FAIR, St. Johns, (602) 337-2000 9/20-23, COCHISE COUNTY FAIR, Douglas, (602) 364-3819.

GILA COUNTY FAIR, Globe, (602) 425-7611.

YAVAPAI COUNTY FAIR, Prescott, (602) 445-7820.

9/27-10/7, LAKE HAVASU CITY: LONDON BRIDGE DAYS (602) 855-4115

THE TURQUOISE

Ivan Sidney, chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council, was using a blue-green Magic Marker to chart one of several new roads. “When we were talking about it, I’d call it ‘the turquoise one.’ Later on, when we were talking with the Navajos, we came up with the name Turquoise Trail.” A simple beginning for a dynamite symbol. As Sidney points out, turquoise jewelry is significant to both Hopis and Navajos. Now the two tribes, uneasy neighbors and frequently foes, are getting together to build a highway. The fifty mil-lion dollar, fifty-mile route will traverse a beautiful, controversial area whose disputed ownership has hampered progress by either tribe for more than twenty years.

Sidney and lifelong friend Peterson Zah, Navajo tribal chairman, have seized on the Turquoise Trail as a chance to quiet the conflict. The road will mean a better life for members of both tribes, and offer trav-elers a dramatic new option when crossing the Southwest.

The story might begin with Navajo and Hopi stories of creation, which are not marked in white men's years. Since the Hopis came to this world, they have congregated in stone pueblos on the edges of three mesas in northern Arizona. Their farms and holy sites are off the mesas in the broad flatlands and washes.

Navajos prefer not to cluster in towns, but scatter across a reservation the size of West Virginia. Although Navajos may appear nomadic to outsiders, they have a firm sense of where their sprawled communities are centered. They too have shrines and strong family roots. The Hopi mesas are in the center of Navajoland. About 9000 Hopis live surrounded by 160,000 Navajos.

The story more properly begins in 1882 when President Chester A. Arthur signed an executive order creating a two-and-ahalf-million-acre Hopi reservation. It had square corners, Anglo style, which must have caused some consternation to two cultures who had a pretty good idea where they lived.

Almost immediately there was conflict.

TRAIL

The Turquoise Trail (see map above, dotted line) is a planned fifty-mile highway across dramatic Indian lands of northeastern Arizona. (LEFT) View west of Moenkopi. Jerry Jacka photo Spanning two cultures, a new Arizona Highway will offer travelers a fresh view of Indian Country

Diverse cultures live on opposite ends of the planned Turquoise Trail.

(ABOVE) The Whitehorse family at their summer hogan on the Navajo Reservation.

(BELOW AND BELOW, RIGHT) Vivian Mumzewa bakes bread in her Hopi Reservation home at Shipaulovi, on Second Mesa. Jerry Jacka photos Some Navajos already lived within what is known colloquially as "the Executive Order." By 1890, the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs was receiving an increasing num-ber of complaints about Navajos moving into the Hopi Reservation. That incursion continued into the 1940s.

In April, 1943, the Bureau of Indian Affairs set aside a 600,000-acre area known as Grazing District Six for exclusive use by Hopis. In effect, the rest of the Executive Order became Navajo land. In 1958, the Hopis sued in federal court to have the land returned. In 1960, the court gave the Hopis executive title to District Six, but ruled that the other 1.8 mil-lion acres belonged to both tribes, share and share alike. The court also said it had no jurisdiction to partition the Joint Use Area, leaving the tribes with a fine tangle of legalities.Navajos still occupied and used most of the land, and Hopi attempts to expand into the Joint Use Area were not very successful. In turn, Hopis rarely gave a Navajo permission to build or improve their hold-ings in the JUA. For more than twenty years, the JUA has been frozen.

In 1974 Congress set up the Navajo and Hopi Relocation Commission to deal with two painful, emotional issues: dividing the JUA, then moving several thousand Navajos from ancestral homes that are now in Hopi territory, and moving a fewhundred Hopis from Navajo lands.

Conflict between Hopis and Navajos is not all-out war, although there has been some violence. Individual members of the two tribes are frequently friends, and the fortunes of the two peoples are somewhat interlocked. State Route 264, the main east-west route across the reservations, serves both tribes. As Sidney explains, "Either way we leave here, we have to drive through Navajo land. Likewise, they have to drive through Hopi land to get across their own reservation."

The JUA lies between State Route 264 and U.S. Route 160, the road from Flag-staff to the Four Corners area. But travel north and south is confined to dirt tracks that are treacherous and rutted in dry weather, impassable when it storms. Most of the several thousand residents of the JUA live more than five miles from even a graded road. Getting to a job or a store or a hospital is chancy business.

The JUA lies north of the Hopi Mesas and runs up the flanks of Black Mesa. By agreement with the Navajo Tribe, Peabody Coal Company operates a major strip mine operation on Black Mesa. There are jobs at Black Mesa for both Hopis and Navajos, but getting to work is sometimes impossible.

Ivan Sidney, tribal police chief frequently enmeshed in the more violent aspects of the land dispute, became Hopi chairman in 1981. In 1983, Peterson Zah was inaugurated as chairman of the Navajo Nation.

Zah was reared at Low Mountain in the Joint Use Area. He and Sidney got acquainted as boys when Sidney's grandfather went to Low Mountain to buy firewood from Zah's father. Later, both attended Phoenix Indian High School.

The chairmen got together and decided they would use their friendship to try to ease the animosity that has gripped the tribes. They began looking for likely issues.

The Turquoise Trail seemed a logical starting point. Sidney explained, "We can't accomplish much when we go at the hard issues first, like land use. The dispute is too longstanding, and land means too much to us. So we figured, let's address those needs we both agree on jobs, education, this road. By then [when the road is completed], we'll know one another and have a sense of respect."

Zah and Sidney had breakfast with President Reagan in Albuquerque in the summer of 1983. Reagan put his support in the form of suggestions to the BIA and the Federal Highway Administration that they get right on it. The chairmen also began working with the Relocation Commission, Arizona's congressmen, the BIA, and the Arizona Department of Transportation. The road will someday become an extension of State Route 87, which extends from Phoenix to the Hopi Mesas.

Sidney said, "This would be a very scenic route from Monument Valley through the Indian country to the Mogollon Rim and down to Phoenix. It would bring a lot of trade to the reservations."

The new segment of highway begins beside the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa. It must cross some formidable barriers, such as Oraibi and Dinebito washes, and find a firm base across the sandy red terrain sloping gently up to Black Mesa. Late in 1983, Senator Barry Goldwater found four million dollars for the BIA to begin paving the first seven miles. That will take the road from Second Mesa to the Navajo community of Rough Rocks at the south edge of the Joint Use Area.

The most optimistic projection is that the road will be finished in five years. "With congressional assistance, that is not far-fetched," Sidney said.

With a concept like the Turquoise Trail, and the promise of easing old conflicts, it's the kind of project a congressman might find glamorous.

Grand Canyon Discovery Buried 300 Million Years, An Ancient River System Surfaces Again by Carle Hodge

Humming languidly down the Colo-rado River, the two boats seemed dulled by the color and dwarfed by the enormity that engulfed them. Even as chilled snowmelt from the Rockies rippled beneath them, the river runners were scorched by the summer sun.

George Billingsley, winter geologist and summer boatman, remembers that Grand Canyon heat well: about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. The day-late in August of 1976 -he will never forget. Although the Canyon is bereft of road signs, Billingsley, an old hand at this, knew that he was at about River Mile 266-below the last big rapids, not far from the Lake Mead backwaters. On his left, indiscernible from the rest of the cliffs, lay the boundary of the Hualapai Indian Reservation.

That reach of the sandy stream was placid as the day wound down. Piloting a thirty-seven-foot motorized raft, as he was, required no strict concentration at the moment.

So, his practiced eyes swept, like a windshield wiper, the kaleidoscopic palette of the cliffs above him. Suddenly, his scanning stopped. High up toward the South Rim, perhaps 3500 feet above him, something struck him as odd.

Probably the thirteen paying passengers in front of him in the boat would have noticed nothing. But Billingsley was eight years past a master's degree in geology from Northern Arizona University. When he wasn't taking people down the river, he was mapping the Canyon's geology for the Museum of Northern Arizona.

He is as sensitive to the subtleties of the great gorge as a chemist is to the scent of a strange compound. Thus, he thought he saw that day "an unusual rock I'd Never seen before, darker than the rocks around it. "I couldn't figure out where it belonged," he recalls.

That night, he mentioned the "unusual rock" to his wife, Susan, who was pilot-ing the second boat. And after the trip, when the group was being flown to Kanab, Utah, he persuaded the pilot to fly low over the area.

Just as he suspected, stone of a differ-ent color, perched atop the gray Redwall limestone, was sandwiched between two famous geological formations. It was almost rusty in hue, darker red-brown than the Supai group above it. From the air, it also appeared the stone had filled a broad, lens-shaped channel cut by a primal stream into the Redwall and below the Supai.

"But it was only in one spot, just an isolated outcrop," he recalls.

Four months passed before Billingsley could return, this time by foot, to the strange stone. He hiked about two miles from the nearest road and scrambled down a deep side canyon to reach the spot. He measured the channel fill and determined it was 400 feet thick in places. More important, he came upon unfamiliar fossils in the rock: sharks' teeth, corals, fish bones, and mollusks, the legacy of ancient seas.

Because these were fossils he had never witnessed in the Grand Canyon, they must have been of a different age. His heartbeat quickened. For the first time, he realized that amid some of the most studied geology on Earth, he might have discovered a previously unknown rock formation.

Like many Arizona natives, George Billingsley, reared on a ranch near Wickenburg, was so young when he first visited the Canyon that he cannot remember when. Still, he will never look at it again the same way.

Billingsley, at thirty-eight a slim sixfooter, is given to boots and big hats, with brims that curl up like potato chips. Taciturn, his manner is low key. Well, was he excited when he found those fossils? "You bet," he says. "I still am."

Billingsley also is not a man to be hurried. He moved from the museum to the U.S. Geological Survey but continued mapping the Canyon. Meanwhile, he had found more outcrops, nearby, of his "different rock."

In 1981, finally he took some of the fossils to his former professor at the university, Paleontologist Stanley Beus. Their reunion is engraved on Beus's mind. "George said, 'What do you think about these?' And I said, 'They look different from anything I've seen in the Grand Canyon.'"

The two sent samples off to the Smithsonian Institution, where experts confirmed that the plant and animal relics were of a kind and age not seen before in that area. In other words, Billingsley indeed had found a new formation.

With characteristic understatement, he says: "It turned out to be a buriedriver system that had been hidden quite a long time."

"Quite a long time" is correct. The fossils were embedded in limestone and sandstone over a period of perhaps ten million years, 300 million years ago. The Colorado's carving of the Canyon did not begin until five million to six million years ago.

With funds from the National Science Foundation, the two will study the new formation, which Beus describes as "a new chapter in the Earth's history," for several more years.

Billingsley's theory is that they will never really finish. "The more you study the Canyon," he observes, "the more you realize there's not that much known about it. There's no way you can study it all in a lifetime."

GRAND CANYON TREK A Personal Journey Through a Vertical World

My head rests on the 1200-millionyear-old stone next to the roar of Bright Angel Creek. I am on my third day of vacation, and all the poisons seep from my body as it bakes in the seventy-twodegree sun. It is 4:10 P.M., March 20, 1984, at Cottonwood Camp deep in the stone heart called the Grand Canyon. For weeks I have talked to crime victims and taken their pain and poured it into a newspaper. I am sick, my body a reservoir of hurts I cannot seem to touch or cure.

Cottonwoods (Populus fremontii) strike at the sky with green buds firing from the limbs. Stones stare up from the creek bottom: red stones, orange stones, amber, brown, black, white, rust, silver, pink, gold stones. The water dancing down the Canyon splashes, swirls, roars, thrashes, babbles, crashes, tinkles. Red drains from the sandstone walls. I have never been in the Canyon before, and I am marching with a backpack toward some dream of peace.

My eyes drift across the water, the heat washes over my back. A hawk screams, and then a raven flaps downstream with something hanging limp from the black bill. I turn over just as the shadow rolls across my body. I fall asleep on the old stone in Bright Angel Creek.

NAME: Paul Sacks HOME: Manchester, lowa PROFESSION: Druggist "The awesomeness of it. I realize down here we don't mean a thing. You toss a rock 300 feet down hill, and you may have moved it 20,000 years. Coming out here someone asked me why I was returning a second time. It's a ridiculous question."

I avoided the Canyon for a long time. The park had too many rules, the gorge sliced too deep into the earth, the stone walls stared from too many calendars. There was no shortage of reasons. The first time came when I was fifteen. My father and I pulled into the South Rim after dark. Generators purred in the night air, and the campgrounds rumbled with life. We showered and ate and, with the dawn, walked to the South Rim. We looked at the canvas called the Grand Canyon, a wallpaper of a stone layer cake under a blue sky. My father shrugged and asked, "What can you do after you've taken a look?"

And we moved on. The names poisoned the place for me: wonder of the world, awesome, grand. And it was too big, a giant maw gaping with stone gums. I kept going elsewhere and left the Canyon to the Park Service and the tourists. The numbers coming to the Rim kept growing and growing. And I was puzzled by this devotion.

"I really don't know what to say. The reason I go to the Canyon is it's the best place I know. I must have been there fifty times."

I step off Yaki Point at 11:40 on March 19 and walk through stone to Cedar Ridge 1500 feet below. Signs tout the names of layers, but all the geology blurs as I plod along. The junipers cling to the ridge and hikers clamber up to the red knoll with the depth of the Canyon written across their faces. Ravens twirl on the thermals, the wings whirr, the voices scream gwawk, gwawk.

I hurry and yet go slow as the Canyon pulls me in, and the strangeness of being on the trail slows me down. I am a refugee from the steel desk, the exploding phone, the soft shadows cast by ceilings of fluorescent lights. My lungs react to fresh air like an exotic, unproven gas, and my feet revolt at contact with the earth. Within an hour, blisters appear because laces have been tied too loosely and the hike undertaken too casually.

I sit down and put moleskin on my feet, adjust the boots, and stare off into the Canyon, a tapestry that seems impenetrable. A cavalcade of fellow voyagers passes me by: boys in shorts, a man in a trench coat, a couple from Beloit, Wisconsin, with packs and an eleven-month-old child. Below the Rim, the sounds are voices laughing, and wind, the rush of air across the stone empire.

I cannot see the colors: the reds seem faint, the greens bleak smudges.

By 2:20, the lip of the Inner Gorge reveals the Colorado River, a green ribbon thrown carelessly against dark rock. A bighorn crosses the trail five minutes ahead of me, and a high school girl from Oklahoma shakes with excitement. "I'd like to spend a day," she confides, "as each of the animals in the Grand Canyon."

By 3:40 I am at the bottom and in camp. The air temperature is seventy degrees, and women lie on the beach drinking the sun.

I am 4600 feet below the Rim.

I stretch out and sip Scotch from my Sierra cup and look at the stone wall across Bright Angel Creek.

One world falls away and sleep coaxes me toward another one.

NAME: Jack Huppler HOME: Midland, Texas PROFESSION: Oil industry "I came to the South Rim twenty years ago and looked. You walk down it because it's there to walk down. It's the bigness."

The second day takes me through gigantic walls 2000 million years old: Vishnu schist. The creek rips along as if the stone were butter. Then the Canyon widens, and the trail wanders through thickets of sawgrass and cottonwoods. The ground turns to muck and canyon wrens trill on all sides. I look back and see the South Rim rising up like the wallpaper of the day before. Except now, I am in the wallpaper, and it is no longer flat. The bands of color become stone, and the stone is texture rubbing across my fingers. The air sags with scent off the meadow and lizards dart. From time to time, a red squirrel watches my progress.

Off the stream a desert of blackbrush, agave, prickly pear cactus, and mesquite hems in the thread of water racing from the melting snows of the North Rim.

It is sixty-seven degrees in the shade, and, as I climb, the summer of the Inner Gorge gives way to springtime. Green slime slides down the hard cone. Water topples from a high ledge and splashes down. I sit behind a torrent tumbling off the cliff and dancing in the light: Ribbon Falls. A small stone hollow behind the falls offers the perfect view. A high school boy looks at me and asks, "Ain't you going to go for it?" And then he steps out under the waterfall and stands on the massive stone cone created by calcium deposited from countless years of runoff. Green moss blazes between his toes and the sun sparkles on his soaked body. The boy becomes a swatch of blue jeans and tan skin under the white molten cascade of water. He bounds back into the cave and says, "Feels great." He calls down to a friend: "This...is ...awesome!"

A couple of dozen people sit at the base of the falls eating lunch, watching the water tumble, and devour the quiet of the Canyon. The cone covered with moss stands against the muted tones of the terrain like an emerald thumb. No one speaks of the sight; they nestle within the calm. The high school science class from Jenks, Oklahoma, rests on a sandstone bench. One boy pans for gold in the stream. Down the creek, a delegation of the Iowa Mountaineers suns on a big rock. They are part of a party of thirty-two who have driven west for five days in the Canyon. The forty-four-year-old club has been coming here a long time, and they demonstrate a point that is easily forgotten. The Grand Canyon may be in Arizona, but it is claimed by the whole nation and much of the planet. So far I have run into Chinese, Britons, and Japanese. One man from Iowa

NAME: Frank Duncan HOME: Tulsa, Oklahoma PROFESSION: High school science teacher. Leading eleven students from his class at Jenks, Oklahoma. "Where else could you get more science than right here? Geology, botany, ecology, you name it."

(CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP) Hiking the South Kaibab Trail in the Inner Gorge. Ribbon Falls plunges 148 feet to a travertine pool. Phantom Ranch has food and lodging for hikers, one mile below the Canyon's rim. Jack Dykinga photos figures half the people in the Canyon are foreigners. He says they always tell him they have three goals in the United States: New York City, the Mississippi River, and the Grand Canyon.

Three college girls from California sun on a cliff overhead. Everyone talks but no one remarks about the stone and the water and the splatter of light off the falls. This place has moved past the words into a better country.

The water hits the rock with a roar and inside the roar live brighter sounds that pierce the din like flashing daggers.

NAME: Marcia Baker HOME: Humboldt State University, Humboldt, California

PROFESSION: business major

"God, I love it. You get a good tan-that's the only reason we came here. Sun, water, rocks."

At Cottonwood Camp, the trees are barely in bud at 3900 feet. Spring has just brushed this place. Rufous-sided towhees dart through the brush, and green peeks from the brown mat of the meadow. There are four people here tonight.

I finally move past my ideas about the Canyon and enter the Canyon. My boots have come through meaningless tons of time. Vishnu schist, Bass formation, Hakatai shale, Diabase Intrusive sill, more Hakatai shale, Shinumo quartz, and now I stretch out in my sleeping bag in the Dox formation. My hand constantly runs across the rock feeling dead fires, dead seas, dead lives whispering from the trapped molecules. The waters of Bright Angel Creek have ripped open the tomb, and a past I cannot comprehend swallows me as the sun dies behind the cliff. A breeze brushes my skin, the trees scratch the sky with bony fingers.

The moon comes up and pours white over the stone like spilled milk. A satellite slips through the stars, and I listen and look and then fall into the tunnel that leads to dawn.

The sun cracks the hold of night, and it is forty-two degrees.

"I am a rock nut, and there is no better place to look at rocks than the world's best hole in the ground."

I swallow black coffee and spoon a meal of instant oatmeal. The birds fire salvos of song, and the creek moves from dark thunder to a swirl of light. The trail above Cottonwood Camp follows a gentle climb through the rock. A quarter-mile up the path, the cottonwoods have no buds, and spring is still a dream. Rainbow trout thrive in the cool waters, and in the morning light I see forms facing the drive of the water.The sun washes over the riffles like pressed leaves of gold, and I become hypnotized by a nineteenth century romantic painting suddenly emerging from the stone and quiet of the Canyon.

I have been below the Rim now for more than two days and remembering this fact requires effort. Day of the week, month of the year become facts empty of information. Like the digital watch flashing on my wrist, the bits of data tell me nothing.

The Grand Canyon is a subject that has snacked on the photographs, paintings, and prose of thousands of visitors. It has sent writers ransacking dictionaries and artists scrambling through their palettes. The place probably does not exist.

I am standing on a path a foot or two wide at about 4200 feet on the North Kaibab Trail in the early morning as swifts ride towers of air and the stone shakes off the cold as the sun comes on. The sounds available are the drive of water, the whisper of air, the songs of birds, and the bang of my heart. I can see part of the Canyon framing Bright Angel Creek and glimpse the top layers of the North Rim standing against the sky. I cannot see the Grand Canyon. That one is for the big books and aerial photographs. This place is for me.

The trail wrenches left and crosses a bridge to enter Roaring Springs Canyon under the North Rim. A small house with a picket fence sits among the trees. Chicken wire protects a garden from the deer.

Mary Aiken fled Seattle one day years ago when it was fifty-six degrees there and she climbed from an airplane in Phoenix to a sun throwing down 112 degrees. She realized two things at that moment. One, she had been cold all her life. Two, she had found home.

Eleven years ago she and her husband Bruce came to Roaring Springs. He had jumped at the chance to man the pump house which supplies the water for facilities in both the North and South rims. (Arizona Highways April, 1981) Mary, a young mother with a child under a year, was not so sure about making a home five miles by trail from the top of the Rim.

At first, she wondered about living eight months of the year in a giant stone hole. And then for a decade she wondered if she could ever leave.

Bruce took the job so that he could pursue his career as a painter, and now he does very nicely selling oils of the Grand Canyon. The family has grown to Mercy, eleven, Shirley, nine, and Silas, six.

Bruce's training for running a pumphouse amounted to going to fine art school in New York City. He fuzzed his background a bit on the application and did a fast study of a pump manual. Now he is the local expert on the plumbing.

The previous master of the pump stayed twenty-four years and raised five children.

Bruce is not real sure when he will leave. At first the job was a way to finance the painting. Now the painting has succeeded, the galleries call and the canvasses sell and Bruce has to face the fact that he simply does not want to leave the Canyon. Mary teaches the children.

"It's really hard teaching your own kids," she sighs. "Besides, I've forgotten how to do things like fractions." A chalkboard by the kitchen table holds an English lesson. A quote runs across the top: "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God."-Matthew 4:4.

The water crashes over the rocks out the window, the sun eats its way down the cliff, and Mary pours black coffee into the cool china cup.

NAME: Silas Aiken

HOME: Roaring Springs,Grand Canyon

PROFESSION: Schoolboy "I lived here before I was born. It's pretty, and we go hiking a lot and swim in the creek. And we go fishing."

Now the stone becomes mine as the trail crosses the Tapeats and enters the Bright Angel shale. I move up into the golden Muav limestone, and at about 5500 feet reach the Redwall with its sheer cliffs. The trail becomes a rock ledge hanging over the giant hole of the Canyon. Ice and snow cover the shadows, and I finally believe I am in a monster wound reaching deep into the planet. I cross another bridge and enter the Supai Formation, and the climb becomes a steep trudge to a tunnel that takes me to the Hermit shale. I am 7000 feet in the air, and oak gives way to pine and pockets of Douglas fir. A stone tower leads me up and up into a world that looks like Canada if I stare straight ahead. Behind and below me lie layers of oak, layers of juniper, layers of desert, successive waves of winter, spring, and summer.

At 8200 feet I top the Rim in a grove of aspens. The ground is snow and ice, and I look back to see the San Francisco Peaks eighty miles away, lording it over the canyon.

I make a cup of hot cocoa, pitch the tent, and wait for dark to change the blaze of white snow into the shimmer of silver.

First clouds roll in, then the thunder and lightning begin, and a spate of showers. The temperature sinks below freezing, and the rain goes to ice, the ice to snow. I listen to the tent shift under the fists of wind and finally let sleep take me.

At 12:49 A.M. a slash of lightning fol-lowed instantly by a clap of thunder pulls me from my dreams. I look out the tent door at moonglow caressing the fresh snow. Two screams shred the night air. A lion moves along the Rim to my left. Stars search through the drift of clouds on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. At first light the mercury stands at eighteen degrees. My feet crunch against the clean flakes. I walk the forest of fir and spruce, black fangs raking the deep blue sky minutes before dawn. The Canyon stretches before me, a black stone throat. My body is sore from twenty-two miles of hard trail with a heavy pack. I cannot say that this walk is for everyone. But everyone should dream about taking this walk through stone worlds and seasons and life decorating vertical walls. Behind me the roads of the North Rim lie buried under the winter snowpack. I will descend the Canyon to the Inner Gorge where it will be in the 70s or 80s, and in two days I will climb over the lip of the South Rim and be out. I will take a second look at the pockets of flower and rock and stream and waterfall. Perhaps, I will understand. No matter. I will be back.

Charles Bowden, winner of the Arizona Press Club's Virg Hill Award for newsperson of the year in 1983, is a newspaper reporter with the Tucson Citizen, a book author, and an avid outdoorsman.

NAME: Charles Bowden HOME: Tucson, Arizona PROFESSION: Newspaper reporter "By the third day I gave in to the messages two billion years old. I relearned what I must have been born knowing a long time ago. I remember looking at a small five-petaled flower on the trail near Ribbon Falls. The flower had orange daubs in its throat. Above me swifts spiraled chasing insects. I don't know what the moment meant, and I don't care. I just remember."

(ABOVE) The Grand Canyon, from Bright Angel Point on the North Rim. Ed Cooper photo (RIGHT) Down the North Kaibab Trail. The path is hacked out of the 550-foot-thick Redwall Formation, a limestone layer containing fossilized marine life 300 million years old. Jack Dykinga photo

Is a Grand Canyon Hike in Your Future?

Plan to:

If you're not trail-wise, consider a guided Canyon hike, from half-day to four-day adventures. For information, contact: Grand Canyon Trail Guides, P.O. Box 2997, Flagstaff, AZ 86003. Phone (602) 526-0924.

Additional Reading

The Story of Man at Grand Canyon, by J. Donald Hughes, Grand Canyon Natural History Association, Grand Canyon, 1967.

The Colorado, by Frank Waters, Rinehart and Company, New York, 1946.

The Man Who Walked Through Time, by Colin Fletcher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1968.

Grand Canyon, by Joseph Wood Krutch, Doubleday, Garden City, 1958.

Explorations of the Colorado River and its Canyons, by John Wesley Powell, Dover, New York, 1961.

Time and the River Flowing, by Francois Leydet, Sierra ClubBallantine, New York, 1964.