Extraordinary recognition

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS NOVEMBER 1984 VOLUME 60, NO. 11 CONTENTS

In sports argot, Arizona Highways Magazine in 1984 has been on a roll. Maybe we didn't win an Olympic medal, or the World Series, or the Boston Marathon. But within our own field, we are pleased and proud to review a year of extraordinary recognition. To heighten our delighted gratitude, much of the recognition arrived as surprise! Unsought praise. The best kind. As Adlai Stevenson, the Elder, observed, "I really don't mind a little praise-so long as it's fulsome."

(FRONT COVER) Trading on the American Nile, by Bill Ahrendt, 30 by 36-inches, oil. (INSIDE FRONT COVER) Sunrise sparkles on cholla and barrel cactus, Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, north of Yuma. Willard Clay photo Arizona Highways (ISSN 0004-1521) is published monthly by the Arizona Department of Transpor tation. Subscription price $15 a year in U.S. and possessions. $18 elsewhere; single copies $1.50 each. $2 each outside U.S. Please send subscription correspondence and change of address information to Arizona Highways. 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009 or call (602) 258-6641.

Second class postage paid at Phoenix, Arizona. Postmaster: Send address changes to Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009. ©Copyright 1984 by the Arizona Department of Transportation. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited materials provided for editorial consideration.

The Lower Colorado River area near Yuma could rank, some estimate, as one of the more densely populated sections of Arizona by the start of the new century. Today it is a verdant, irrigated empire, thanks to the reclamation dams north of the city. In the cool season, approximately October to March, Yuma's population jumps with an influx of thousands of winter visitors from as far north as Canada and Alaska. Alan Benoit photo Annually migrating southwest, snowbirds succumb to the desert, the sun.and Some months ago, in New Times, a weekly Phoenix newspaper with a predilection for satire, a cartoonist named Bob Boze Bell dedicated his not inconsiderable talent to a double page put-down of Yuma. He took off on a report in the media that the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce had hired a public relations firm to improve Yuma's image. The PR firm had come up with a slogan: "Experience our fun sense of Yuma." So Bob Boze Bell offered his own slogans for Yuma, which he said Yuma wouldn't even have to pay for: "To imagine life in Hell, all you need is a sense of Yuma." And: "Join the YUMAn race-out of town." And: "You don't live in Yuma, YUMArinate." And on and on. (The temptation to wring puns out of the name of the town as exemplified in the public relations slogan, Bell's good-natured sallies, and the title of this article-is, quite simply, overpowering.) Well, the fact is that Yuma does have an image problem. A. M. (Jim) Bjornstad, president of the chamber of commerce, admits it. Yuma, he says, is perceived by a lot of people as a very hot place mainly useful for getting gas and a cup of coffee on the way to San Diego. Talk, though, as I did, to some of the 40,000 or so snowbirds who descend on Yuma in a typical winter, and you'll wonder what Jim Bjornstad is worried about. I strolled through several of Yuma's 160plus recreational vehicle (RV) parks. One hundred sixty-plus RV parks? And at least half of them with signs reading, "Drive slowly. Senior citizens at play." I picked snowbird couples at random and asked them why they chose Yuma over, say, Phoenix or Tucson. The Fred Yerians of Everett, Washington: "The weather. And Yuma's smaller. And it's friendly." The Harvey Reids of Unity, Saskatchewan, Canada: "Because it's small." Edna Reid: "We don't like huge places." The Vern Leischners of Helena, Montana: "Mostly on account of the weather. Nicest winter weather we've found." Bill Bos, Calgary, Alberta, Canada: "The weather. You can't beat this weather." Grace Bos: "The desert grows on you." Bill: "And the people-they're very nice."

The Yuman Spirit

...But Yuma puts considerable effort into seeing not only that tourists come and enjoy the sun but stay and enjoy the fun. And there really is a fun sense of Yuma.

(CLOCKWISE, FROM BELOW) Miss Arizona (Jennifer Nichols) introduces Governor Bruce Babbitt at the 1984 Garcés Festival, a spring celebration of regional arts and sports. Garden party at Century House Museum. Yuma's winter visitors create entire villages which disappear with the arrival of summer. No Great White Way for Yuma; rather, the quiet small town life is the major attraction for both residents and tourists. Alan Benoit photosGrace: "They're so friendly." Bill: "You don't have the stress and pressure of a big city here. It's so relaxed." Grace: "We go for walks twice a day through the orange groves."

Note that two of the four couples quoted above are from Canada. That's no happen-stance. A study shows the proportion of Canadians coming to Yuma in the winter-time rose from less than four percent in 1976 to nearly thirteen percent in 1983. When you lump all fifty states with all twelve Canadian provinces, British Columbia ranks fourth among the states/ provinces in numbers of Yuma winter visitors. Alberta ranks eighth and Sas-katchewan, thirteenth.

Vonne Nicklaus, chairman of the board of the chamber of commerce (a distant relative of the golfing fellow), says Yuma has two big things going for it: "Friendly atmosphere and the weather." And that's not all. "People who'd never see a big league ball game otherwise can see sixteen games for three dollars a head." The San Diego Padres do their spring training there. And, says Nicklaus, you "can be anywhere in twenty minutes"-north along the Colorado River to bass-fishing waters, west to the famous sand dunes on the California side, south to Mexico. (Well, all right then, forty minutes.) Another attraction: Price. Yuma's motels and hotels (twenty-eight of them) are pre-dominantly middle class. Its restaurants are predominantly middle class. There are more than eighty fast-food places in the city. Most of them are elbow-to-elbow, or hamburger-to-hamburger, as the case might be, along a five-mile commercial strip known as 4th Avenue. It starts at the Big Curve, where U.S. Route 80 bends into the city, and ends at the Colorado River. And you can still get a space in a very decent RV park, complete with pool, Jacuzzi, and recreation hall, for $150 to $175 a month (although you'd best make reservations six months in advance). "It costs that much to stay in Montana and pay the heating bill," Bill Lyman of Helena said to me during my conversational mean-dering through the RV parks.

But something new and significant is happening. Class RV is coming to Yuma, with monthly rentals on the order of $350 and $400. Vonne Nicklaus' engineering firm was designing one such place when I visited him. It was to be called the Country Roads RV Village Subdivision, located east of Yuma along Interstate 8 in what folks call the "foothills area." Thirteen hun-dred lots, two-and-one-half million dollar recreation complex with a ballroom, poolroom, fourteen shuffleboard courts, ten horseshoe pits, indoor-outdoor spas, etc., etc. Myron Scammons of Paradise Valley, Arizona, who's big in trucking, was the developer. And Ron Thayer of Mesa, Arizona, held a ground breaking, while I was there, for the Sun Vista, a 1230-place park which he said would be even bigger and nicer than his Val Vista in Mesa. Two thousand people came to the ground breaking, many of them pleading with Thayer to take their money for a deposit. He said he'd prefer to wait until the park was in.

... Agriculture brings even bigger bucks to Yuma, thanks, of course, to the Colorado River.

"People want something better," said Thayer's assistant, Joan Taylor, "and sometimes they've passed Yuma by because they couldn't find an RV park with the right amenities. We believe this is the beginning of a trend for Yuma."

"It's a breakthrough," echoes Vonne Nicklaus. "In the last twenty years all kinds of mom-'n'-pop RV parks-little Podunk things-have popped up in Yuma. Now we have parks that are beginning to bring in people who are more affluent-people driving $400,000 motor coaches. Palm Springs and Florida have parks like this. Now we're getting 'em."

Obviously somebody-Vonne Nicklaus, Ron Thayer, the chamber of commerce, the San Diego Padres, or all of the above -is doing something right. Not only is Yuma getting more winter visitors than ever before-its population is up from 9145 in 1950 to about 70,000 in the met-ropolitan area in 1984. Not a few of them come to visit and stay to live.

"We came from Michigan," said Arthur Jennings of Kalamazoo. He used to be in ready-mix concrete; his wife is Margaret. "We saw people swimming in December. That was something. So we went out and bought a mobile home and put it in. During the summer we go back to Michigan, but we've sold our property. We worked back there in that snow and mud long enough. We decided we wanted a different way of life."

The tradition of coming to Yuma to visit and staying to live goes back a good many years. Mayor Phil Clark tells of two German soldiers being held in a prisoner of war camp between Yuma and Somerton during World War II. Along with their fellow prisoners they were put to work helping in the farm fields. Even that didn't turn them off. When the war was over, both of them came back to Yuma, and one went into business for himself.

Five of the six most recent commanders of the Marine air base at Yuma, all retired from the Corps, have put down in Yuma. The latest is Ron Andreas. His wife, Kay, is sales director for the Stardust Resort Motor Hotel.

Originally she had the same impression of Yuma that Bob Boze Bell and the coffee-drinking folks bound for San Diego seem to have.

"When we found we were coming here, I said to Ron, 'You can stay. I'm going.' I hated Yuma. Then, after three years, I never wanted to leave. We've lived in Virginia, California, Hawaii, and we were never stationed anyplace where people opened their arms to the military like they do in Yuma."

Manifestly the military brings big bucks into the community. The cynic would say that folks in Yuma simply know what side of town their bread is buttered on. Yet-as the Andreases and a good many other Marines might well testify-there are military towns around the country where GIs get treated with considerably less kindness.

In any case, agriculture brings even bigger bucks to Yuma, thanks, of course, to the Colorado River. And agriculture doubtless will always be a major part of the economy. But here again something new and significant is happening. RV parks are beginning to take over some of the citrus orchards. That's partly because Yuma citrus is in trouble. A bad case of over-production.

Citrus came on strong in the '40s and '50s. Orchards sprouted all over. Yuma citrus was popular, especially for tax shelters.

Says Jim Bjornstad, "We used to pick up the phone, and it'd be somebody from Ohio or somewhere. 'Tell us about the citrus,' they'd say. It was a tax write-off, of course, only now some of those folks have had to write off their whole investment."

Tourism is running number three on the Yuma economic track and coming up fast. The inflow of winter visitors grows at an annual rate of nearly ten percent. The post office says that 18,500 people live in that newly-developing "foothills area" east (CLOCKWISE, FROM BELOW) Cotton reigns as a major crop in agricultural Yuma County. Dick Deitrich photo 4-H Clubs serve well as training grounds for future Arizona farmers. Alan Benoit photo A lettuce harvest near Yuma. Alan Benoit photo Alfalfa fields stretch to the horizon, thanks to a plentiful supply of irrigation water from wells and river. Alan Benoit photo

(CLOCKWISE, FROM BELOW, LEFT) U.S. Route 95 north from Yuma leads to recreation adventure: at thirty-five miles, Martinez Lake and Fisher's Landing offer fishing, boating, and sight-seeing. Alan Benoit photo At seventy-five miles, Arizona's only native palm trees are in Palm Canyon in the Kofa Mountains. Jack Dykinga photo At twenty-five miles, see wildlife up close at the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge. Alan Benoit photo

... Yuma can boast - and does - that it has ninety-three percent of the possible 4400 hours of sunshine annually.

Of town for five months out of the year and 16,000 live there for six months of the year. A few years ago the "foothills area" was just desert and citrus.

Nature helps, of course. Yuma can boast -and does-that it has ninety-three percent of the possible 4400 hours of sunshine annually. Winter temperatures range up into the eighties.

Summers? Well, sure it's hot. The thermometer has hit 120 no less than four times. And one of the chamber of commerce's own publications makes the unabashed admission that an "absolute high" of 123 degrees Fahrenheit was registered on September 1, 1950!

Even so, Ted Day, chairman of the chamber's convention and visitors bureau, says-impressions to the contrary notwithstanding-that Yuma isn't as hot as Phoenix in the summer. I asked a guy at the Weather Bureau, and he said (sorry about this, Ted) that Yuma is about a degree hotter on the average in the early part of the summer and two or three degrees hotter by the end of August.

But when the mercury mounts into the upper reaches, who's counting? And, anyway, it's the winter temperatures that are making economic history in Yuma.

Some winter tourist towns would be content to let Nature do their work for them. But Yuma puts considerable effort into seeing not only that tourists come and enjoy the sun but stay and enjoy the fun. And there really is a fun sense of Yuma. Vonne Nicklaus says he has counted up no less than 600 winter visitor programs per year: Square dancing. Round dancing. Senior citizens' covered dish luncheons. State picnics (Fred Yerian, my RV friend from Washington, told me that 999 Washingtonians turned out for the Washington State Picnic this year, held, appropriately, on Washington's birthday). And concerts and travelogs and art auctions and air shows at the Marine base and book reviews and (it had to happen, the "Yuman spirit" being what it is) even a Winter Visitor Appreciation Dinner.

Culturally, Yuma isn't quite the New York City of the Southwestern desert. But it tries. There are a dance theater and a chamber orchestra and various dramatic groups. Yuma has organized a cultural council, currently headed by Paul Garrett, manager of the JC Penney store in the Southgate Mall at the Big Curve. Thecouncil sponsors the annual Garcés Celebration of the Arts, named for Father Francisco Garcés, an explorer-priest who came this way in the eighteenth century. It's a five-week festival of everything from theater and ballet to a walking tour of historic riverfront places, a Cinco de Mayo Fiesta and, of all things, a bicycle race.

council sponsors the annual Garcés Celebration of the Arts, named for Father Francisco Garcés, an explorer-priest who came this way in the eighteenth century. It's a five-week festival of everything from theater and ballet to a walking tour of historic riverfront places, a Cinco de Mayo Fiesta and, of all things, a bicycle race.

Lately the cultural council has been trying to find what Paul Garrett calls "homes for the performing arts people" and, at the time of my visit a short time ago, was looking at two old theaters in town-the Gondolfo and the Yuma.

"What we're really all about," says Garrett, "is to get all the cultural groups together to accomplish things they can't do alone."

And this from Gwen Robinson, administrative assistant to the Yuma Art Center: "There are many people here who care about the cultural atmosphere, and it's starting to show."

You really ought to take in that art center while you're moseying around town. It's quite something, for a community whose cosmopolitanism is pretty newly minted. It has a presentable permanent collection and gets good traveling exhibitions, as, at this year's Garcés festival, the works of the famed Sedona sculptor, John Waddell.

The art center is located in what used to be the Southern Pacific depot, which, logically, still looks like a depot and is located a few feet from the SP tracks. Gwen Robinson remembers the time when a fellow rushed in with his suitcase and went right on out the back door and up to the railroad tracks. Turned out he wasn't really interested in art. He was from Italy, and when he was a kid he'd seen the Glenn Ford Western called 3:10 to Yuma, and he simply wanted to visit the depot and the railroad where it all happened.

Yuma has, besides the art center, some places well worth seeing:

But in the final analysis it's not a grungy old pool hall or a prison or a museum that brings tourists to Yuma and keeps them there. It is, first and foremost, of course, the weather. Almost as important, it's the attitude of the people of Yuma toward their visitors. The snowbirds in the RV parks keep using the word "friendly." Ted Day likes "accommodating." Kay Andreas says Yuma is a "well-kept secret that everybody is finally finding out about." And one of my new-found friends in the RV parks spoke what could be called the last word as he and his wife sat luxuriating in the sun beside their motor home on a benign winter's day.

"We're coming back here," he said, "until we find something better. And we're not liable to find it."

A longtime Highways contributor, Joseph Stocker's credits include Reader's Digest, Parade, Family Circle, and National Wildlife.

Headline calligraphy in this story is by Sharon Singley, a professional calligrapher. She works with her artist-husband in their Phoenix studio.

YUMA CROSSING: Williamsburg of the West

San Francisco is a suburb of Yuma. Historical architect Gerald Doyle maintains that the Yuma Crossing, the point where the Colorado and Gila rivers once met, was the key to the exploration and settlement of Arizona, California, and the great Southwest. The Yuma Crossing is to the Southwest what the Cumberland Gap was to the Midwest and the expansion of the United States after the Revolution. Indeed, few realize that America was being shaped at Yuma Crossing in 1540, nearly seventy years before the founding of Jamestown and eighty years before the landing at Plymouth Rock.

You may ask, why haven't I heard of this significant place in America's development? The answer is simple-the original confluence at the Yuma Crossing no longer exists. Dams built in the early 1900s for irrigation changed forever the course of the rivers, and the course of history. The Yuma Crossing National Historic Landmark Park will change all that. It will illustrate in ten historic themes the growth of the Yuma area from the 1500s to 1912, letting visitors become time travelers in this "Williamsburg of the West."

By 1985 the first curiosity-seekers will have their chance to trace the steps of prehistoric Quechan Indians, Spanish missionaries, rawboned rivermen, and more by participating in Doyle's living history exhibits, painstakingly researched by his team of architects and historians. A journey back into Arizona's past may go like this.

THE QUECHAN PEOPLE: Tending the Crossing

In those days, the rivers were swift and wide, flowing down between vertical bluffs that resembled a small canyon. The foliage was verdant; the wildlife-deer, beaver, fox-abundant.

Along the banks of the mighty Colorado, just near the Gila confluence, the Quechans made their villages. A society of strong farmers who raised maize, beans, pumpkins, and melons in the fertile river loam, they lived in small family clusters at river's edge until floodwaters forced them each spring to higher ground overlooking the Yuma Crossing. Communal shelters, camouflaged with earth and built against the sides of the bluffs, housed up to 100 villagers and afforded a sheltered lookout for enemies.

Believers in the spiritual power of dreams, the Quechans developed physical prowess by swimming the river, primarily to transport supplies from one side to the other. Muscular, with many of the men over six feet tall, they adorned their broad bodies with shell necklaces and earrings, mineral paints in vermilion, white, yellow, and blue, and fashioned elaborate peaked coiffures of their waist-length hair with dried mud.

Soon after the arrival of the first Spanish conquistadors in 1540, the Quechans began altering not only their style of dress, donning buckskin and woven bark clothing, but also their fundamental ways of life. Crude rafts built to operate as ferries at the Crossing replaced swimmers pushing supply baskets, and earth-covered longhouses gave way to squarish single-family huts of sticks and mud.

Friendly at first, the Quechans became increasingly hostile as more Spaniards arrived, interrupting their protected existence. Wander the village at the river's edge while a Quechan guide describes life centuries ago. Explore the Indians' living quarters and artifacts, the changes that came with Spanish and American influence, and the state of the Quechan culture today.

THE SPANISH EXPLORERS: Seeking Riches and Souls

Legends of ancient cities brimming with treasure and a crusading desire to expand the influence of the Roman Catholic Church propelled Spanish conquistadors and missionaries into the New World.

Soldiers and missionaries first arrived by boat at the Yuma Crossing in 1540. But they didn'tin't initiate settlements in the region until 150 years later, when a land route to the Baja California missions, first established in 1697, was sought.

Five major expeditions snaked across the desert before 1800, but it was a gentle Jesuit priest, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, who is credited with befriending the Quechans whom the Spaniards called Yumas, "sons of the leader." He mapped the confluence, and, with the help of Indian guides, discovered the land passage that, once more, proved California was not an island.

Seventy-five years later, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, head of the Tubac presidio, a frontier garrison in Sonora, retraced Father Kino's route to La Junta de los Ríos (The Joining of the Rivers). Upon meeting the Quechan chief Olleyquotequiebe, Anza decorated him with a medal bearing the likeness of the Spanish viceroy, assuring his explorers safe crossing-and a continuation of their journey into California, which culminated in the founding of San Francisco at the same time that the Continental Congress declared Independence in 1776.

Across the Colorado, Father Francisco Garcés, a missionary from San Xavier del Bac and one of Anza's party, founded Mission La Purísima Concepción along with a presidio, the future site of Fort Yuma.

The encroaching presence of several hundred Spanish settlers, predominantly soldiers who beat the Quechans into obeying their Catholic practices and allowed their stock to forage neighboring Quechan farmlands, led to a vicious Indian uprising in 1781. Father Garcés, the soldiers, and settlers-all but women and childrenwere killed, ending forever Spanish domination of the Yuma Crossing.

Father Kino's monumental cross crowns a hill rising above the Spanish camp pitched along the Colorado banks. A mud and brush chapel, no more than a portal of poles and mats, houses a crude altar. The conquistadors' primitive shelters huddle close to their tethered wooden boats at the river's edge.

(ABOVE) Yuma, on the Colorado River. Concrete bridges have replaced yesterday's ferryboats, and railroad trestles have spelled the end for steamboating.

(RIGHT) St. Thomas Mission overlooks the Colorado River from the California side. It was originally Mission La Purisima Concepción, founded by Padre Francisco Garcés not long before he was killed in the Indian uprising of 1781. The mission was later renovated and in 1923 dedicated to St. Thomas. Alan Benoit photos (FAR RIGHT) With face paint and a headdress of human hair braided with mesquite gum, this Yuma brave prepared himself for an early portrait. Courtesy Arizona Historical Society - Yuma The handcolored historical photographs in this story are by Eileen Roth.

THE MOUNTAIN MEN: Blazing the Trail

The love of beaver hats in 1800-and four to six dollars per pelt-pushed trappers farther into the frontier and served as the catalyst for the American discovery of Yuma Crossing.

James Ohio Pattie, a colorful Kentucky trapper, was among the first of a series of scruffy mountain men who found the wildlife plentiful along the Colorado basin. The waters were difficult to navigate and the cliffs along the river formed a natural fortification, so they made their camps amid the thick mesquite and cottonwood trees near the Crossing.

Kit Carson, perhaps the most famous of mountain men, and a member of a party of trappers who in 1829 traveled west from Taos, New Mexico, for beaver, noted in his autobiography that some 2000 pounds of pelts were collected on the trip through Yuma Crossing.

The hardships, however, were greatIndian attacks, starvation, wild animals, dehydration, and harsh weather took their toll. But it was these sturdy frontiersmen who blazed the Gila Trail, documented their expeditions in crude diaries, and served later as the guides who would leadother settlers and the United States Army to a vantage point from which to fight the Mexican War.

Be a mountain man lookout, peering from behind the breastworks of rocks and stumps atop a bluff facing the Gila River. Note the wooden horse corral, canoes, and piles of beaver pelts awaiting transport to St. Louis.

THE MEXICAN WAR SOLDIERS: Opening the Crossing

Fighting essentially a war to establish borders, the Mexican War soldiers won from Mexico vast tracts of land that were to comprise the great Southwest-Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California-and extend the United States boundaries from coast to coast.

Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny's orders were to occupy the territory from Santa Fe west to San Diego; in 1846 Kit Carson led Kearny and 100 soldiers from the New Mexico territorial capital through Yuma Crossing. Kearny was disappointed at the difficult passage for supply vehicles but noted its potential as an ideal spot to harbor steamboats before pressing on to California with a few pack mules. Left behind in New Mexico to find a route for supply wagons was Colonel Philip St. George Cooke.

Cooke departed Santa Fe with the Mormon Battalion, 397 men and five women who agreed to serve in the United States Army in return for a place to settle and practice their religion in peace. This weary assemblage blazed a southern route along the Rio Grande River and up through Tucson, finally reaching Yuma Crossing on a bitter cold January day with dwindling supplies, sick mules, and little to eat.

Soldier Robert S. Bliss recorded that they “marched about twelve miles down the Colorado to the crossing and encamped; this is a very rich bottom and the river bed is as wide as the Missourie (sic)....” Rest was short-lived; the Mormons had to forge on, fording the mile-wide river. At the end of their trek, they had opened the first transcontinental road across the Southwest-Cooke's Wagon Road -a trail that would soon be worn by thousands of emigrants headed for California's gold fields.

Another camp, this distinguished by munitions, Mormon soldiers in army garb, and a flurry of activity. Imagine the bleak starkness of the winter day when a frigid river made crossing perilous for the weary battalion.

THE EMIGRANTS: Trekking Westward

On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall stumbled across gold as he inspected his employer's sawmill near Sacramento. When the news had spread to New York twelve months later, opportunists were envisioning large chunks of gold scattered across California, ready to be gathered like fallen fruit.

Yuma Crossing was now a destination point for the flood of fortune seekers. In one year, a steady stream of nearly 60,000 emigrants crowded Cooke's Wagon Road, creating a need for military protection and regular ferry service.

Many emigrants were ferried across by Louis J. F. Jaeger, a Pennsylvania transplant who found his fortune on the frontier and made Yuma Crossing his home.

A more difficult journey could not have been imagined. In the words of the Forty-niners: "We eat dust, drink dust, breathe dust, and sleep in dust. I never was so worn out with dust in my life." Intense temperatures heated tempers; horses and cattle perished from lack of grass and water, and wagons and gold seekers collapsed.

"If the Sierra Nevada Mountains were made of gold, they cannot repay us for what we have endured on this journey...."

Yuma Crossing was not to become a permanent stop for the prospectors. A few returned to try their luck-legend has it that boomtown Gila City, northeast of the Crossing, generated two million dollars in gold-but most trudged on into California where they eventually settled.

Mr. Jaeger barters for fares while ferry-ing across the Colorado. Covered wagons circle in a makeshift camp for a brief respite. The banks of the Crossing are littered with pack animals, log rafts, and jettisoned possessions, no longer important as the emigrants concentrate on easing their burden however possible.

THE BOUNDARY SURVEYORS: Marking New Lands

As the gold rush traffic descended upon Yuma Crossing, a military escort accompanied a team of government surveyors to the confluence. Their mission was to mark the official border between the United States and Mexico as prescribed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848 at the close of the Mexican War.

With a party of forty surveyors, astron-omers, and laborers, Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple and U. S. Surveyor Andrew B. Gray began charting the Gila River west toward the Colorado in the fall of 1851. For the first time the Crossing was mapped officially by the United Statesindeed, the international boundary line was based in part on a benchmark located near Yuma Crossing.

YUMA CROSSING

Although the industrious Quechans also launched a thriving ferry business, the emigrants who followed the surveyors began crossing the river in their own crude conveyances and pilfering food and sup-plies from the Indians. Angry tribesmen took to drowning the Americans' animals. Additional attacks by nomadic Apaches east of the Crossing prompted the Army to establish Fort Yuma atop the crest of a hill on the California side in 1852. Now the beginnings of a real settlement began taking shape.

On the California shore, Lieutenant Whipple's surveying instruments are visible. This military camp houses the niceties of junior officers, notably Whipple's umbrella and white gloves. Rough maps mark the boundary surveyors' journey west from Texas.

THE FORT YUMA SOLDIERS: Securing the Crossing

The first permanent military detachment arrived at Yuma Crossing in November 1850. Major Samuel Peter Heintzelman with ninety-two men took immediate charge, commandeering the civilian ferry and building the beginnings of a fort. Living quarters and storage sheds were constructed of wattle and daub, simple frameworks of poles and branches plastered with mud. Getting adequate food and supplies to the Crossing was a constant problem; when shipped from California by ocean steamer to the mouth of the Colorado, Indians repeatedly harassed the overland supply wagons. Desperate soldiers, waiting in vain at the fort, ate their mules.

In retaliation, Major Heintzelman subdued the Quechans once and for all by ravaging their villages and fields, a tactic much more successful than confronting them in battle.

With the supply situation alleviated, soldiers could work on Fort Yuma in earnest. The complex of adobe structures, along with the Quartermaster Depot on the opposite shore, was to become the distribution center for the entire Arizona

Arizona Highways Magazine/13

(INSET) In the early 1900s, the Southern Pacific Hotel and Depot offered the finest accommodations in territorial Yuma. Courtesy Arizona Department of Library, Archives and Public Records (BELOW) Present-day Madison Avenue in Yuma is envisioned as the gateway to the new Yuma Crossing National Historic Landmark, where visitors will ride a horse-drawn wagon into the past. Sketch by Julian Clark Territory fort system and the foundation of a permanent civilian settlement.

Frontier forts had no walls. Bastions of rocks piled high conceal cannon on Fort Yuma's fringes. The traditional parade ground divides enlisted men's barracks from the officers' quarters (separate dining halls also were customary); with storehouses and workshops lining the border.

THE RIVER MEN: Navigating the Colorado

The lower Colorado had its share of romance and colorful characters. First came the ferrymen, drawn by the promise of wealth at the height of the gold rush. Dr. Abel L. Lincoln, who launched his ferry operation in 1850, wrote his parents that "(D)uring the three months that I have been here I have taken in over $60,000." Pennsylvanian Louis Jaeger dug a saw pit to cut cottonwood boards for his ferries, building a lucrative business with his flat-bottomed scows. Providing the area with supplies was the chief reason for boat travel. Flatboats laden with goods and staples poled from the mouth of the Colorado gave way to sailboats and, finally, steamers, the only successful mode of transport.

Captain George Johnson piloted the Colorado, the first stern-wheeler on the river, which he attempted to navigate north to the confluence with the Virgin River (now drowned by Lake Mead). He never made it that far. Civilization finally had a toehold at the Crossing. With this efficient and faster means of transporting supplies for survival, the soldiers at Fort Yuma were able to sustain a territorial fort network, and life was much less harsh for civilian settlers. A system of overland shipping by wagons fed interior settlements. The river men helped bring a period of rapid expansion to the frontier surrounding the confluence.

Steamboats heavy with supplies dock on the Arizona shore. Soldiers, using a system of carts and pulleys, hoist the cargo up the bank to the storehouse at the Quartermaster Depot. Workers at the opposite end of the storehouse load covered wagons, ready to embark for the interior.

THE MULE SKINNERS AND ENGINEERS: Linking East and West

With the Yuma Crossing settlement finally established, travel to and throughsouthern Arizona Territory increased dramatically. By 1856, half a million people resided in California, heightening the need for better transportation and communication with the Mississippi Valley and the industrial Northeast.

Improvements in Cooke's Wagon Road made stagecoach travel easier between El Paso and Fort Yuma; it became the principal trade route from the east to Arizona and southern California.

Mule skinners still dominated the road, driving team-drawn Conestoga wagons, but mail delivery was relinquished to the quicker and more daring stages. In 1858, John Butterfield began semiweekly mail runs from Missouri to San Francisco by way of El Paso, Tucson, Fort Yuma, and Los Angeles, crossing the Colorado on Jaeger's ferry. The military even experimented with camel mail service!

But frequent Indian attacks and difficult desert travel made it clear that rail travel, rapidly expanding westward, would be far superior. In June, 1877, the Southern Pacific Railroad linked San Diego with the Yuma Crossing, bridging the Colorado and eliminating the need for steamboat shipping. Yuma was now a major train depot. By 1883, the track stretched all the way to New Orleans, bringing with it the first tourists, who marveled at how raw and

YUMA CROSSING

(LEFT) The owners of the Pilot Knob Hotel, a famous hostelry frequented by many who used the Yuma Crossing on their way West, put a lot of faith in the reliable Yuma sunshine. Courtesy Department of Library, Archives and Public Records (RIGHT) The Laguna Dam dedication in 1909 celebrated the completion of the first phase of the Yuma Reclamation Project and spelled the end of Yuma Crossing. Courtesy Arizona Department of Library, Archives and Public Records Uncivilized this Southwest land really was.

The reconstructed Southern Pacific Hotel and Depot provides the best example of comfort to be found in territorial Yuma. The depot wing houses the ticket office, baggage and waiting rooms, overlooking the steam locomotive still belching smoke. Restaurant and bar service is available to those needing refreshment. Billed as a yearround health resort and sanitarium, proprietor Henry Weaver promotes Yuma as having "the dryest climate known anywhere in the Temperate Zone in America...."

THE TOWNSPEOPLE AND CONVICTS: Building a City

An original townsite, christened Colorado City, was mapped in 1854 on the southern shore across from Fort Yuma. Later known as Arizona City and, finally, Yuma, the fledgling town had a reputation that sticks today: "This is the hottest place in the world; so hot in the summertime that wings melt off mosquitos, and flies die in the excessive heat of the scorching sun...."

In spite of itself, Yuma continued to grow, boasting 1144 residents by 1870 and stature as the territory's second largest city (Tucson was the leader with 5000).

The first building in town was inhabited by Yuma's first businesswoman, Sarah Bowman, nicknamed the "Great Western." Married first to a Mexican War soldier, this robust Earth-mother followed the Army to Yuma as a laundress, cook, nurse, cartridge-maker, but primarily as a comforter of men. Husband number one was lost along the way; she remarried a carpenter with whom she opened an adobe bar and bordello, capitalizing on the talents she had practiced with the Army. The Great Western died at age fifty-four and was buried in Fort Yuma cemetery with full military honors and the rank of brevet colonel, a tribute to her great Army "service." The Yuma Territorial Prison became the town's first major construction project in 1876. A federal prison serving much of the Southwest, it grew to include 400 cells, with separate quarters for women, rehabilitation workshops where the prisoners acquired trade skills, a library, and school. Critics called it a "country club," but prisoners quarried granite, reconditioned city streets, constructed buildings, and rebuilt the town levee. Housing nearly 3100 inmates in its time, the complex outgrew Prison Hill and was relocated to Florence in 1909.

The Yuma Crossing had served its purpose. The need for irrigation took priority, and in 1909 Laguna Dam, the first phase of the Yuma Project, was completed, erasing the Crossing as the rivers were diverted. The townspeople celebrated wildly-now the fertile valley would really flourish-but no celebration of the Crossing, key to 350 years of historical development, has been held until architect Doyle created the "Williamsburg of the West."

and in 1909 Laguna Dam, the first phase of the Yuma Project, was completed, erasing the Crossing as the rivers were diverted. The townspeople celebrated wildly-now the fertile valley would really flourish-but no celebration of the Crossing, key to 350 years of historical development, has been held until architect Doyle created the "Williamsburg of the West."

Phoenix free-lancer Dana Cooper has been fascinated with living history since visiting Williamsburg, Virginia, as a child. This is her first article for Arizona Highways.

THE GILA TRAIL

Haunted by legend and paved with disaster, it remains a major Southwestern land route