The Gila Trail

Who first traversed the storied track will never be known. Archeologists infer human usage as early as 20,000 years ago. Spanish priests and soldiers, mountain men, gold seekers followed. Along the Gila Trail the destiny of much of America ebbed and flowed in the mid-1800s. General Steven Kearny, Kit Carson, and an intrepid band of dragoons dashed down the Gila to secure for the United States most of the Southern West in 1846. On their heels hustled the 400 volunteers of the Mormon Battalion, blazing a wagon road where no American wheel had ever turned. Emigrants, drovers, settlers, and Forty-niners followed. The Gila became the route of “The Jackass Mail” from San Antonio to San Diego. And along the Gila, John Butterfield launched his Overland Mail of 250 coaches, hundreds more of wagons, 1800 horses and mules, and 240 stage stations.

As sand in an hourglass, the aperture through which humanity poured was a natural river crossing now called Yuma. And so it is today—the paths of commerce and transfer fan in and out east and west from a midsize city with an unexampled tradition of hospitality.

He prayed much, and was considered without vice. He neither smoked nor took snuff, nor slept in a bed. He was so austere that he never took wine except to celebrate mass, nor had any other bed than the sweat blankets of his horse for a mattress and two Indian blankets. He never had more than two coarse shirts, because he gave everything as alms to the Indians..-Juan Mateo Manje, military companion of Father Francisco Eusebio Kino who explored along the Gila Trail At this time we perceived that the Yumas were crossing the river at some distance from us, and that in another place they had already raised arms against us. I commanded Ensign Don Manuel Antonio Arbizu to move against them with sergeants Miguel Palacios and Juan Franco and twenty-five presidial soldiers. They killed five of the Yumas and stopped the passage of the others. One soldado de cuera of the party was wounded by an arrow. We ourselves killed five Yumas from the bank of the river, and those killed in our sight numbered twenty-five in all, among them being the subchief José Antonio, son of Palma. The brother of Palma was badly wounded, and Palma himself was also slightly wounded, according to report....-Report of Lieutenant-Colonel Don Pedro Fages, Army of Spain October 20, 1781 (ABOVE) For many an adventurer, the way west was the Gila Trail, from Texas and New Mexico to California. But whatever source or destination, nearly all emigrants were obliged to cross the Colorado River at Yuma.

(RIGHT) An encampment overlooking the Gila Valley and the Estrella Mountains at Maricopa Wells en route to Yuma. By A. R. Campbell, from an early railroad survey.

Courtesy Arizona Historical Society-Yuma We thence returned down the Helay [Gila River), which is here about 200 yards wide, with heavily timbered bottoms. We trapped its whole course, from where we met it to its junction with the Red River [The Colorado River]. The point of junction is inhabited by a tribe of Indians called Umene [Yuman]. Here we encamped for the night. On the morning of the twenty-sixth, a great many of these Indians crossed the river to our camp, and brought us dried beans, for which we paid them with red cloth, with which they were delighted beyond measure, tearing it into ribbands and tieing it round their arms and legs; for if the truth must be told, they were as naked as Adam and Eve in their birthday suit. They were the stoutest men, with the finest forms I ever saw, well proportioned and straight as an arrow. They contrive, however, to inflict upon their children an artificial deformity. They flatten their heads, by pressing a board upon their tender scalps which they bind fast by a ligature. This board is so large and light that I have seen women, when swimming the river with their children, towing them after them by a string, which they held in their mouth. The little things neither suffered nor complained, but floated behind their mothers like ducks....

-The Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie, 1831

THE GILA TRAIL OVERLAND TO TEXAS! THE SAN ANTONIO AND SAN DIEGO MAIL LINE

Which has been in successful operation since July, 1856, are ticketing PASSENGERS through to San Antonio, Texas, and also to all intermediate Stations. Passengers and Express Matter forwarded in NEW COACHES, drawn by six mules over the entire length of our Line, excepting from San Diego to Fort Yuma, a distance of 180 miles, which we cross on mule back. Passengers GUARANTEED in their tickets to ride in Coaches, excepting the 180 miles, as above stated. Passengers are ticketed from San Diego to FORT YUMA, EL PASO, MARICOPA WELLS, FORT BLISS, TUCSON, FORT DAVIS, LA MESILLA, FORT LANCASTER, FORT FILLMORE, FORT HUDSON and SAN AΝΤΟΝΙΟ.

The Coaches of our Line leave semimonthly from each end, on the 9th and 20th of each month, at 6 o'clock, A.M.

An armed escort travels through the Indian country, with each Mail Train, for the protection of the Mails and Passengers.

Passengers are provided with Provisions during the trip, except where the Coach stops at Public Houses along the Line, at which each Passenger will pay for his own Meal. Each Passenger is allowed thirty pounds of Personal Baggage, exclusive of blankets and arms.

Passengers from San Francisco can take the C.S.N. Co.'s splendid Steamer SENATOR, Capt. Tom Seeley, which leaves San Francisco on the 3rd and 18th of each Month, and connects with our Line.

Passengers going to San Antonio can take a Daily Line of Four-Horse Coaches to Indianola, from which place there is a Semi-Weekly Line of splendid Mail Steamers to New Orleans.

FARE on this Line as follows, including Rations: Copyright 1915, 1943 by Seymour Dunbar. From the book A History of Travel in America by Seymour Dunbar. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

20/Arizona Highways Magazine Our guide Kit Carson, who passed over this route about two weeks ago, left two mules which had given out. They were found today, well rested, and in condition to commence the return march to California. Captain Johnston met with bad luck today in losing his pack mule with his bedding and some other effects. Would to God I could know at this moment how my beloved family is doing. Ignorance with respect to their condition keeps me restless and discontented. Could I hear from them occasionally, I should keep on my weary march with contentment. Could I take just a peep at my dear little family, see my children gathered around their beloved mother, and all well and happy.... God grant they are more cheerful than I am. The view before me is beautiful beyond description. Would that my little wife could be seated near me for a few moments, what infinite enjoyment we would derive from gazing at the scenery about me. But far, yes, far is she away from me, and in her absence I enjoy I only know that without thee the sun himself is dark to me....

Journals of Henry Smith Turner in Kearny's Army October 22, 1846 November 25-At the ford, the Colorado is 1500 feet wide and flows at the rate of a mile and a half per hour. Its greatest depth in the channel, at the ford where we crossed, is four feet. The banks are low, not more than four feet high, and, judging from indications, sometimes, though not frequently, overflowed. Its general appearance at this point is much like that of the Arkansas, with its turbid waters and many shifting sand islands....

The ford is entered at the lower extremity of the plateau upon which we encamped, and leads down the river, crossing three sand islands, which we sketched, but as they are constantly shifting, the sketch will perhaps afford no guide to the traveler, and may even lead him into error. They are, therefore, not furnished. The ford is narrow and circuitous, and a few feet to the right or left sets a horse afloat. This happened to my own horse....

Brevet Major W.H. Emory, Corps of Topographical Engineers. Report to the Senate of a military reconnaissance, November 25, 1846.

Marched eight miles to the village of the Indians who visited us yesterday, and encamped. Watermelons grow here at Christmas. This Tribe of Indians are called Pimos. Their villages occur along this river for twenty-five miles. Their huts are shaped something like beehives. They are built of wood and covered with mud. These people appear to be very civil in comparison to their neighbours, the Apaches. They cultivate the soil and produce very fine cotton, which they make into blankets. They are rich in horses and mules and have a fine agricultural country. They are a powerful tribe and number about 30000 [Editor's note: more likely 3000]. More children amongst them than I ever saw before. These people wear no other clothing than a breech cloth and blanket....

Diary of Robert W. Whitworth, 16, enlisted man with the Mormon Battalion, December 22, 1846.

THE GILA TRAIL

The river bottom here forms a great flat, which was, I think, once irrigated; at all events, it is cut up by a great many lagoons, nearly all muddy, but the water is not so salt in those that do not run, as to be undrinkable; in some places the water is so impregnated that as the water evaporates, a cake of pure salt is deposited, and the Indians, on being asked for it, brought us five or six pounds in a lump. It was pure white when broken, but on the surface a sediment covered it. The country is nearly flat, and on the light sandy soil there is found grass, in some places very sparse and thin, and in others pretty good.... -John W. Audubon September, 1849 A city on paper bearing the name of Colorado City has already been surveyed, the streets and blocks marked out and many of them sold. It is situated on the left bank, opposite Fort Yuma.... On the right bank of the Colorado, and in a bend opposite the mouth of the Gila, rises up a low irregular hill, from seventy to eighty feet in height. On the water side there is a perpendicular cliff; the other sides are less steep, but equally rugged. This hill is of Plutonic origin, and presents a bleak, dreary appearance. The surface is covered with sharp, volcanic rocks, cutting like glass under the tread and is destitute of every form of vegetation, except a euphorbia used by the Indians as an antidote against the bite of the rattlesnake. Such is the site of Fort Yuma.... The Colorado...is of reddish color, and carries down immense quantities of sand and mud. The water is sweet and excellent for drinking but does not bear keeping long. The Gila is clearer and its temperature warmer but somewhat brackish in its taste owing to large quantities of earthy salts held in solution.... There are only three kinds of fish that are at all palatable caught in the Colorado-the humpback, trout, and buffalo-all very soft and of an inferior quality.... The river bottom, varying in width, is generally broad and fertile-an alluvial deposit, covered with a thick growth of timber. Large cottonwood trees, different varieties of willow thickly matted together, and impenetrable thickets of arrow (weed) and greasewood, grow near the river; further back the mezquite (sic), of two kinds -the flat pod and the screw bean-thrive and flourish. The bottom is intersected by innumerable lagoons and sloughs which, during the annual rises, fill to overflowing and irrigate the soil. No vegetation will grow beyond the influence of these overflows, and when a white efflorescence (salt) appears upon the surface of the ground it is useless to plant, as nothing edible for man or beast will grow there.... -Lieutenant Nathaniel Michler Report on the Boundary Survey December, 1854 Last night two Mexicans vamoosed the camps, taking with them four of the best horses in the drove... Saw a new method for driving fractious steers this morning: the cartmen yoked in a new one; when ready to start, he would not move, so very deliberately put a chunk of fire on his rump. After it burnt through the skin, he traveled very well.... This is going to California with a vengeance; in fact, a man would not see the elephant with two tails, if he had more comforts than we have.... -Log of James G. Bell, Texas trailhand August 22-28,1853

THE GILA TRAIL

They are the best road makers in the world. They do not go out, as do the topographical engineers, with barometers and other instruments, to determine the altitude of mountains; nor do they care about the botany, mineralogy, or geology of the country; they take no other instruments than the ax, the shovel, the spade, and the pick-ax. Their only object is to locate a good road....

Yesterday two of our men, Randall and McCoy, had an encounter with a large cinnamon bear. They were cutting timber at the foot of a mountain close by, when they saw a bear on the side of the mountain feeding upon acorns. They crept up slighly (sic) within a hundred yards of him without being seen. When Mr. Randall raised his rifle, took deliberate aim, and fired, the monster dropped to his knees, roared with pain, but recovered himself in an instant and discovered his enemies and darted like lightning down the mountain. They saw him coming and knew their danger.

McCoy sprang into the fork of a low mesquite tree, and he had hardly done this before the bear was at the foot of the tree with his mouth wide open, ready to drag him down. McCoy snapped his revolver three times at him, but it would not go off, and the bear would certainly have "wiped him out" if he had not caught a glimpse of Randall making fast time down the hill. Randall could find no tree to climb and was forced to depend on his legs for safety. The trees here are few in number and very small-not more than ten or fifteen feet high from the ground to the topmost branch. The bear, attracted this time by a new object, left McCoy and pursued Randall. McCoy at this moment succeeded in firing off his treacherous pistol and gave him another wound, but he would have caught Randall in a few more bounds if his vitality had continued; but fortunately for both parties he had "run his race" and dropped dead....

The fare could hardly be compared to the Astor House in New York.... The heavy mail wagon whizzing and whirling over the jagged rock...in comparative darkness...to feel oneself bouncing-now on the hard seat, now against the roof, and now against the side...was no joke....

The breakfast was served up, consisting of beef, burned dough, and beans.... The sun was fairly upon us when, like cattle, we were driven forth to another day's travel. The roughest road (if road be a proper term) over which I ever passed in all my captivity was that day's route. Twice during the day, I gave up and told Mary I must consent to be murdered and left, for proceed I would not. But this they were not inclined to allow. When I could not be driven, I was pushed and hauled along. Stubs, rocks, and gravel-strewn mountain sides hedged up and embittered the travel of the whole day. That day is among the few days of my dreary stay among the savages, marked by the most pain and suffering ever endured. I have since learned that they hurried for fear of the whites, emigrant trains of whom were not infrequently passing that way....

I have the honor to report for the information of the Commanding Officer of the Department that the Chilicahua [Chiricahua] Indians have become insolent, and they are now in hostile attitude towards the United States; that they attacked a coach of the Mail Company between Dragoon Springs and Apache Pass sometime during last week, killing one of the mules, and capturing the driver whom they now hold as a prisoner of war; that they have wounded a sergeant of Company C, 7th Infantry belonging to the Command, now on detached service per orders No. 4 current series from these Head Quarters of which you have been furnished with a copy. The command under Lieutenant Bascom, consisting of Company C, 7th Infantry and a detachment of Company H, is now encamped at or near Apache Pass, and by their presence will doubtless intimidate the Indians from making further depredations. Under these circumstances I am left with but twenty-five effective men in a country infested with hostile Indians of other tribes, who are continually annoying the settlers with their presence and by their system of petty robberies. The distance to which the main portion of the garrison has been sent renders it inexpedient for me to do more than protect the public property here....

On the 3rd inst., about midday, the town of Tubac was attacked by a large body of Indians, numbering perhaps one hundred or more, killing two of the inhabitants and taking all the stock in that vicinity. The citizens, fighting from their houses, finally succeeded in driving them from the town, with a loss of some seven or ten of their number, when they retired to a distance of a few hundred yards, killed a beef and encamped for the night. As soon as it could be prudently done, after the Indians had left, a messenger was dispatched to Tucson with the intelligence, and to procure wagons and an escort of the citizens, to bring the inhabitants, who had determined to abandon the town, to this place. Our prosperity has departed. The mail is withdrawn; the soldiers are gone, and their garrisons burned to the ground; the miners murdered, and the mines abandoned; the stock raisers and farmers have abandoned their crops and herds to the Indians, and the population generally have fled, panic-struck and naked, in search of refuge. We think no man ever before saw desolation so widespread. From end to and its immediate vicinity, there is not a human inhabitation.... -The Arizonian, August 10, 1861 We rode fast through the pass to keep ahead of the Indians, but when we got in the open country we slackened our pace and rode along more leisurely for a mile or two when I dismounted to walk. The party soon got two or three hundred yards in advance of me when Indians fired on them from some rocks that were quite near to the road, wounding Jesse D. Maynard, his horse, and Keim's horse. The party stopped, looked back at me, but self-preservation the first instinct of nature getting the better of their valor, they galloped off, leaving me to take care of myself. The Indians then turned toward me. I had mounted and fired my carbine at them, they closed in around me, both mounted and on foot. The chief or commander of the Indians was armed with a citizen rifle but was unwilling to fire at me without a rest; so, after rallying his warriors, he ran for a rest and I after him, but on looking over my shoulder, I saw the mounted Indians to[o] close on my rear for safety, so I turned on them, and they scattered like birds. I turned again to tend to the old chief, but I was to[o] late, he had got to a bunch of Gaita grass [Galleta grass, Hilaria jamesii] and was lying on his belly on the opposite side of the bunch with his rifle resting on the bunch, pointed strait [sic] at me, which caused me to drop from the horse onto the ground, and the Indian shot the horse instead of me. The horse left, and I laid low, sending a bullet at them whenever I had a chance. We kept firing 'till it was dark, when a lucky shot from me sent the chief off in the arms of his Indians. I started for the train a few minutes after. I got to the wagons between 10 and 11 o'clock P.M. and was very thirsty, our captain gave me some whiskey, but still I was thirsty. The idea, or thoughts, of fighting for my life against eighteen or twenty Apache Indians, then travel eight miles to camp and find no water there would make stronger men than I am thirsty.... -Diary of Trooper John W. Teal, California Column, Apache Pass July 15, 1862

THE GILA TRAIL

Of Tucson: A city of mud boxes, dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth; littered about with broken corrals, sheds, bake ovens, carcasses of dead animals and broken pottery; barren of verdure, parched, naked, and grimly desolate in the glare of the southern sun.... Traders, speculators, gamblers, horse thieves, murderers, and vagrant politicians. If the world were searched over I suppose there could not be found so degraded a set of villains as then formed the principal society of Tucson.... Of Yuma: Everything dries: wagons dry; men dry; chickens dry; there is no juice left in anything living or dead by the close of summer. Officers and soldiers are supposed to walk about creaking; mules, it is said, can only bray at midnight; and I have heard it hinted that the carcasses of cattle rattle inside their hides, and that snakes find a difficulty in bending their bodies, and horned frogs die of apoplexy. Chickens hatched at this season, old Fort Yumers say, come out of the shell ready cooked; bacon is eaten with a spoon; and butter must stand for an hour in the sun before the flies become dry enough for use.... -J. Ross Browne, Traveling the Gila Trail in 1864 The discovery in 1858 of gold on the Gila River, about twenty miles from its junction with the Colorado, attracted considerable attention, and prompted the laying out of Gila City, but it was not until 1862 that emigration started up the Colorado. At that date the finding of rich placers at Chimney Peak, twenty miles above Fort Yuma, and at various points from eight to twenty miles back of the site of the present town of La Paz, one hundred and ten miles from the fort, drew a large number of miners and prospectors from California and Sonora. The subsequent discovery of multitudinous silver and copper mines upon and adjacent to the river, in what are now known as the Yuma, Castle Dome, Silver, Eureka, Weaver, Chimehuiva and La Paz mining districts, and the opening in 1863 of the interior country (Central Arizona) have given it an activity and importance second to that of no portion of the Territory. As yet its settlements are all upon the river. La Paz, the chief of these, is a busy commercial town of adobe buildings, with a population about equally American and Spanish. It has some stores that would not do discredit to San Francisco, and enjoys a large trade, extending up and down the river and to Central Arizona.... -Richard C. McCormick, Secretary of the Territory Letter to the New York Tribune on Arizona's Resources and Prospects June 26, 1865 Criminals who have chosen Yuma County as a base to hold high carnival in crime, have evidently made a mistake in their location. The prompt and efficient action of the court at the late session gives the good people some hope that their lives and property may be protected by the laws of the Territory. Let the good work go on, and when criminals understand that to a reasonable certainty punishment will follow the commission of crime, just in that proportion criminal business will diminish.... -Arizona Citizen April 1, 1873 (ABOVE) Early Yuma-adobe huts, mud streets, brush fences in the foreground, and the Pilot Knob Hotel, center, background. Courtesy Arizona Historical Society - Yuma (RIGHT) Stronghold during Apache wars along the Gila Trail was Fort Bowie, now a national historic site. Jeff Gnass photo (BELOW) Prisoners exercise in main yard of Territorial Prison. Despite its bleak reputation, the Yuma prison pioneered in rehabilitation of its inmates. Courtesy Arizona Historical Society-Yuma

THE GILA TRAIL

The Arizona Telegraph is completed. The lightning message of thought Obeys man's proud decree And mountains, answering, echo back The voices from the sea. Wire message through Yuma from Captain George F. Price to the editors of the San Diego Union. December 2, 1873 Went to Presidio and had a pleasant time, dined with Bailey [Joseph C. Bailey] and returned through the park. Went to church with Mr. Falls at night-Grace Church-returned through Chinatown.... Started at 7:30 A.M.; met troops at Lathrop at 1:30, had to lay over till 8 P.M..... At Yuma weather warm-with occasional violent sand storms.... While I was in Yuma I was the guest of Lieutenant King [James S.] and was most kindly and hospitably treated. Played whist nearly every night with the Misses Dunn who are pleasant girls. Gave King "a Good story...."

Violent sand storm preventing our baggage getting across river. Paid Lieutenant Touey ten dollars for our expenses on the road.... Started on the march to Fort Grant. Got into camp [Gila City] at 2 P.M., having marched twenty-two miles. Had sick call at 3 and had five patients, one man drunk and disorderly on the march was handcuffed. One man run over by wagon and ankle sprained.... -Diary of Contract Surgeon George Henry Roberts Moran February 10-21, 1881 The phone rang and MacBeth [the stage driver] said to expect about six besides himself for lunch-four men and two women. Burch [the stationmaster] said, "I bet they are fresh from the Old Country...."

Lunch was about ready when the stage drove up...I had set the table; nice tablecloth consisting of a lot of clean newspapers, then put a pile of potatoes with jackets on at each end of the table, two dishes of beans, a large platter of sliced roast beef, and two bowls of gravy....Burch came in and told the guests to take their places at the table, went to the oven and took out a pan of biscuits beautifully browned. Burch could make good biscuits, but oh! the service! He came in right from the corral without washing his hands, still smelling of the corral. Everybody those days smelled of the corral. I saw the women look. The men took it more philosophically; they began to help themselves, but the women hesitated. Urged on by the men, they finally took a few dainty helpings.... -William G. Keiser King of Arizona Mine, 1898 (OPPOSITE PAGE) Drifting sands in California, west of Yuma, impeded travel until well into the twentieth century. Kathleen Norris Cook photo (ABOVE, LEFT) Eventually a redwood plank road provided a hard surface. (ABOVE, RIGHT) First asphalt highway was subject to encroachingsand. Today modern Interstate 8 traverses the barren dunes.

The last time I came over the Old Plank Road was in the spring of 1924, coming from Los Angeles. It just happened that because of a hoof-and-mouth quarantine in Arizona I had the Plank Road practically to myself. And when I reached the Yuma bridge the sanitary board authorities would not let me cross into Arizona for three days. While waiting at Winterhaven the garage owner showed me a car that had practically all the paint scoured from it while crossing the dunes during a sand storm.... -Roscoe Willson, Author

Additional Reading

Early Yuma, edited by Rosalie Robles Crowe and Sidney B. Brinkerhoff, Yuma County Historical Society, Yuma, 1976.

Steamboats on the Colorado River, by Richard E. Lingenfelter, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1978.

The Original Journals of Henry Smith Turner, edited and with an introduction by Dwight L. Clarke, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1966.

Destiny Road, by Odie B. Faulk, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973.

The Gila Trail, by Benjamin Butler Harris, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1960.

The Gila River of the Southwest, by Edwin Corle, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1951.

YOURS SINCERELY

Comments and questions from around the state, the nation, and the world.

I particularly appreciated the article in the May issue on Mary E. J. Colter.

I worked at the Public Garage before World War II and knew this resolute woman. Almost everyone visiting the Canyon put their car in storage for the night, and we had Mary Jane's car whenever she was in town. Her automobile was always blue and had a hand wroughtiron hood ornament in the form of Paul Bunyan's great blue ox, "Babe." Her fixation with the legendary lumberjack dated back to her childhood in Minnesota.

Thanks again for another article on Grand Canyon history.

I just had to write and tell you what a wonderful time my husband and myself had on our Arizona vacation earlier in June of this year.

In your issue about the Bed & Breakfast homes in Arizona, we are happy and pleased to say that due to this issue, we stayed in a fine home in Pine and were treated to a most bountiful breakfast each of the two days we stayed, and we also became fast friends with our hosts. It is most accurate about this particular home that the host does give the departing ladies a rose from his own garden.

Our special thanks to our Pine hosts, Al and Jimmy Ruth Saraceno for making us feel like dear friends and not just temporary guests.

Your beautiful magazine has long been one of life's privileges to me.

One taboo: white or light print on any background, too hard to decipher. And one suggestion: the informative map of Beale's travels reminded me that, years ago, articles about a particular Arizona locale contained a small state outline with a star to mark the site of the story. That was a thoughtful custom.

The August issue arrived. Beautiful work. The outstanding piece was "War Revisited." It is poetry-harsh and vivid and realistic. The rodeo photographs are winners. This photo-essay type, stressing this superb photography, is the best I have ever seen.

Between 1958 and 1968, I drove several times the section of highway between Show Low, McNary, and Springerville. Although the weather was beautiful and the highway well paved, I always had serious trouble with my car. It refused to go faster than thirty-five miles per hour, and every five to ten minutes it came to a complete stop. The car would only start after I had spent five to ten minutes walking in the woods or cienagas. "Nature" truly called in that area. When I returned to Los Angeles, my wife always looked askance at me when I raved about "God's Country." When the beautiful June issue arrived, I showed it to her and said, "Remember? See, someone else also calls that area of Arizona God's Country." I remember, and wish I were back in God's Country again.Annual indexes for Arizona Highways Magazine are now avail-able directly from the magazine. For many years the task of indexing Highways was assumed by our friends at the Department of Library, Archives and Public Records. Now Highways carries forth this service-so important to scholars and col-lectors who use Highways as the "encyclopedia of the Southwest." Our price list follows that established by our predecessors:

ANNOUNCING...INDEXES!

Quantities limited. Prices include postage and handling. Send your check or bank card order today to: Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009. Please allow six weeks for delivery.

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ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

NOVEMBER 1984 VOL. 60, NO. 11

MARINES ARE YUMANS, TOO!

"I think there's a certain charm in a young woman spending a few days at a Marine base," a former Marineturned-editor told me. Charm wasn't the word my mother used.

"You're doing what?" she gasped.

"I'm going to the Yuma Marine base for a few days to spend some time with the Marines."

After a lengthy discussion-I swore I'd be staying off base-she agreed not to throw herself in front of my airplane.

Plans confirmed, I was Yuma bound. After a bumpy flight that made even the seasoned twin-engine passengers put their newspapers down and stare out the window, we landed safe and sound in Yuma.

Once through the gate, I claimed my bags and waited for one of the several Marines meeting people to claim me. A Marine who looked like Sidney Poitier and a young, slender female Marine made their way over to me. Lieutenant Robert Ross, the base public affairs officer and Corporal Toni Slusser introduced themselves.

Walking to Corporal Slusser's car, I insisted on carrying my heaviest bag. After all, I wasn't there to do a USO show. I was there to see Marine life firsthand and learn how they felt about Yuma and vice versa.

Lieutenant Ross arranged to see me later. Once inside her station wagon, Corporal Slusser dropped her hat on the seat besideher and started fluffing her hair, checking it in the rearview mirror.

"Boy, these hats really mess up your hair. That's the only thing I don't like about the Marines."

On the way over, she told me about life as a Woman Marine (their official designation) in Yuma. A history buff, she said there was plenty to see in and around Yuma, and that "the community makes a real effort to get Marines out into town to see the sights."

As I surveyed the desert landscape, she spoke of the town.

"The town and the base get along really well," she said. "Probably because they've grown up together. They seemed to grow at the same pace, and neither one overshadowed the other."

Lieutenant Ross joined us in the coffee shop at the Stardust Resort Motor Hotel where I was staying. Having missed dinner, I made my way through a taco salad as the two Marines discussed Yuma's pros and cons. Toni said Yuma treats Marines well.

"I remember when I first got here, and I wanted to cash a check for groceries. I told the lady all I had was my military identification card, and she said that was all she needed. That's rare anyplace else, but it's normal in Yuma."

Lieutenant Ross agreed.

"Yuma really is good to Marines. And I think Marines are good to Yuma. You don't see the kind of headlines here that you do at some other bases, like 'Marines Destroy Bar.'"

I was handed the next day's itinerary, neatly typed in outline form. I almost dropped it when I read the first line: 7:00 a.m.-Physical Training with the Public Affairs Office. I couldn't picture myself. exercising at that hour. Did they know I was cut from the same athletic cloth as Goldie Hawn's Private Benjamin? "We're sure getting our exercise out of the way early," I said.

Lieutenant Ross asked if that would be a problem for me. I assured him it wouldn't be. "Good," he replied. "Someone will pick you up at 6:45. We'll start with a threemile run. Do you run?"

Do I run? The last time I ran on purpose was for the President's physical fitness test we had to pass in junior high.

My hesitation must have given me away, because Lieutenant Ross suggested I run a mile and a half, the distance the Women Marines have to run in under fifteen minutes to pass their fitness test. I accepted.

That night in my room I read the base press kit. Acronym after acronym described the base's squadrons. VMFAT-101 flew F4 Phantom jets; VMFAT-102, A4 Skyhawks, and VMA-513 squadron flew Harrier jets or VSTOL's, which means Vertical/Short Takeoff and Landing craft. I read a little about the base's history. It all started in 1928 when President Calvin Coolidge authorized the leasing of 640 acres near Yuma for a flying field. During World War II, Yuma Army Airfield was "one of the busiest flight schools in the nation." But after the war, the station was left unused until the Air Force reactivated it in 1951. After being turned over to the Navy in 1959, the Marines became landlord in 1962. In any one year, 10,000 people, pilots and their crews, bring 1000 aircraft to train in Yuma's perfect flying climate (ninety-eight percent unrestricted flying weather; that means no rain, in civilian terms). With access to one-and-a-half million acres of maneuver and bombing ranges within ten minutes flying time, Yuma is a great place to train pilots.

At 5:45 a.m., seemingly only minutes after I had fallen asleep, the wake-up call came. I showered, packed my gear for the day, blessed my tennis shoes, and ran to meet my ride. It looked like rain.

Once on base, Lieutenant Ross, Sergeant Doug Weatherman, and I made our way toward the course. We passed groups of Marines doing calisthenics on a large grassy area outlined by the base roads. At the side of one road, several Marines with stopwatches clocked runners. They were preparing for their biannual fitness tests, when every second counts, I was told. We stretched a little, then took off at a comfortable pace and rounded the first corner of the field. We talked a little, but I was intent upon conserving as much energy as possible. We reached the quarter-mile mark with no problem. I was feeling pretty confident and like just another Marine as we ran past uniformed men and women heading to work.

I was getting tired, and contemplating quitting-but with a Marine on each side of me, my ego wouldn't let me when we reached the three-quarter-mile mark and turned around to head back. We caught up to a Marine who looked like he had already run ten miles. We passed him. Lieutenant Ross said he was probably on remedial physical training, the fitness program designed to toughen up Marines who don't pass their fitness tests.

Remedial P.T. or not, passing someone was a shot in the arm to my deteriorating determination. Back to the half-mile marker. My feet felt like lead weights, and I was sorry I hadn't worn lighter socks. Needing inspiration, I played the Marine anthem in my head, or at least the line I knew, "We are proud to claim the title of United States Marines." With two more corners left to turn, Lieutenant Ross said they'd show me the pace they usually keep, and they shot off Around the corner. All the time I was giving it my all, they were humoring my speed. I finally reached the finish line, and Lieutenant Ross punched a button on his watch. Fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds, he announced. Those twenty-two seconds would have earned me remedial P.T., but I was thrilled with coming that close my first time out. During lunch at the mess, I met Corporal Joe Boyer, who had been transferred to Yuma from an assignment in Okinawa. He said he didn't know anything about Yuma when he got his orders, so he asked around to find someone who'd been here. He discovered a few of his friends had been stationed in Yuma."They all liked it," he said. "They said the town was friendly." He'd also heard there weren't pawn shops and women of questionable virtue surrounding the base. "They were right. It's a clean-cut town," he added.

Later, Lance Corporal Jesse Gonzales said he liked Yuma because Marines aren't treated differently than other residents. "People don't say, 'Stay away from him, Martha! Keep the kids back!' when they see us. You're treated like you're just another person. Yuma's a friendly, quiet atmosphere. I kinda miss the night life, but it's a nice place to get your life together. That's really what I'm using Yuma for." I met another lance corporal that afternoon, Virgil Thomas. He said he'd been stationed at other bases where there was aggression between the military and the civilians.

A serene moment on the Marine Corps Air Station flight line. At dawn, the field again will echo with the thunder of Phantoms, Skyhawks, and Harriers blasting off to training maneuvers over one-and-one-half million acres of restricted range.

"They're nicer here. We get the red carpet treatment. If I reenlist, I'd like to stay in Yuma. For some reason, I like it here," he shrugged. "It's got good churches."

Well, I was certainly seeing a side to Marines I hadn't expected. What about all those stories about rowdy Marines? I was about to meet a few of them, Toni told me. We headed towards VMFAT-101, the student fighter pilot squadron that flies the F4 Phantom jets. We were taken to a small room filled with rows of airplane passengertype seats where six or seven young guys in green flight suits sat talking. A television screen above a counter flashed cryptic flight information.

Striking up a conversation with three student pilots, I got the lowdown on being a fighter pilot from a Marine whose flight suit patch read "Brian McManus-BMac." The latter was his call sign. A fast talker with an Eastern accent, McManus described Officer Candidate School and being split up to train on different aircraft. "We're the lucky ones," he said. "Fighter pilot is the most popular assignment."

Knowing I was in for a whopping response, I asked why.

"Because," he responded as if I should have known, "it's really a dynamic mission. It's like a street fight in supersonic aircraft. Nothing tops being a fighter pilot. Not Madison Avenue. You always travel; you're like a professional athlete. You can't be a wimp-there's no slack in the fighter community. It's second to none. It's the best thing a guy could imagine."

His fellow officers, John "Riff Raff" Rayder and John "Yank" Underhill, nodded in agreement at McManus' last statement. Riff Raff, a Southern gentleman to McManus' Al Pacino, gave Toni and me a tour of their hangar. The gray Phantom jets were lined up on the runway, the color of the sky.

Next, at the Officer's Club, B-Mac introduced me to other members of the squadron whose call signs were Kato, Grits (because he was from Georgia and likes them), Boone (real name is Pat, but swears he doesn't own white bucks), Gomer, Popeye, and Pappy. It wasn't long before I had been christened with my own call sign, "Fighter Writer." And in an informal ceremony, B-Mac bestowed upon me a "VMFAT-101 Party Animal" T-shirt. During the pilots' discussions of recentflights, they showed their combat maneuvers to each other using their hands as aircraft, swooping them through the air to show either their escape or attack and the results. I looked around the room. Navy pilots, flying aces according to their shoulder patches, mingled with the Marine pilots. Everywhere hands were slicing the air, tracing recent maneuvers.

Talking about their relationship with the town, one of the pilots said, "There aren't enough relationships."

They said they usually take weekend jaunts to San Diego or Phoenix to whoop it up because Yuma isn't a very exciting night spot. I was sure Yuma residents didn't mind.

Later, we decided to go hear Cosmo Topper, a Phoenix band, playing at the Stag and Hound. Everyone arrived, having changed into oxford shirts, jeans, and topsiders. They looked like fraternity brothers.

The band played to a full house as several couples danced and others enjoyed the music. With three young men at my table the dancing odds were in my favor. I felt like I was with friends back home. These guys weren't rednecks or uncouth, they were young men whose career was the Marines, and that was the only difference between them and the civilians in the room (besides the short hair).

Lieutenant Ross was right, no sensational headlines came of those Marines stepping out that night. After the band played its final song, we said good-bye. They were off to San Diego the next day.

That morning I had breakfast with my two favorite Yumans. Ted Day, my unofficial Yuma tour guide, was a friendly man who looked like Santa Claus and liked his town so much he was only too happy to show me all of it. And Beth, my favorite coffee-shop waitress, would've given Mae West a run for her money with her swanky walk and flirty ways.

After breakfast, Ted and I headed for the Yuma County Fair, stopping to talk to former Base Commander Colonel Ron Andreas. Like a lot of retired high-ranking Marines, Andreas stayed in Yuma. As we began to talk, jets roared overhead.

"The sound of freedom," Andreas said, more to himself than anybody else.

He and his wife, Kay, bought a home when he was first stationed here in 1970. When he was transferred, they decided to rent their home out, knowing some day they'd be back. Sure enough, in May of 1980 he returned as base commander.

To him, Yuma offers "country-style living. Yuma has been a part of my life for fourteen years," he said. "You'll never meet people as warm, friendly, and genuine. People are treated as people, not intruders."

Back on the road, Ted wanted me to meet the current base commander, Colonel Bob Savage. We pulled up to the Yuma Country Club and went inside to see if he had come off the course yet. We were told his party was taking a little longer than expected, and shortly I saw why. As Ted and I sat in the cool clubhouse sipping iced tea, I watched four men approach the eighteenth green. One of them, in a white fisherman's hat, prepared to pitch his ball from the froghair onto the green.

He lined up his shot, pulled his club back, and connected with the ball, which flew over the green and the sidewalk and hit the clubhouse window. (It didn't break.) This turned out to be Colonel Savage.

A calm man (who didn't mention his golf game), he talked of the Yuma he had come to know since becoming base commander. Yuma was unique, he said. "Bases are sometimes seen as 'necessary evils' and animosity exists within the town," he explained. "Or, there is mutual tolerance between them because the community realizes the money brought in by the base.

"But here there is an extremely positive relationship because the military's impact is significant, but the town would survive without it. The town and base grew up together (there that was again), and the base didn't overpower the town. It's not exclusive here, people are friendly."

At the fair that afternoon, I hung around the kitchen of the Rotary Club food booth and watched Mayor Phil Clark, Ted's son-in-law, struggle with a vat of cole slaw. His perception of his town's relationship with the base was old news now. The word he chose was cooperative.

"Most of the military lease their homes when they leave, you know. They don't sell," he said proudly. "They plan on coming back."

The Queen of

Yuma's history is a colorful one, boasting every element of what we like to call the Old West, but the most interesting chapter, without a doubt, is the one about steamboating. It spanned fifty years-transporting Yuma from the mid1800s, when it was nothing more than an isolated desert settlement, to the dawn of the 1900s as it stepped into the future, a firmly established community. It was the hinge on which swung the whole direction of Yuma history, but you cannot appreciate the story without understanding the Yuma Crossing area itself, and especially, the Colorado River.Today, visitors may find it hard to imagine boats 120 feet or longer steaming up the Colorado-the river looks so narrow, almost insignificant, with reeds and foliage seeming to choke its channel. But as you survey the scene, perhaps from the grounds of the Customshouse or the guard tower at the territorial prison, forget the bridges. Ignore the levees. Remember this once was a river with no dams, nothing to hold back the water's flow.The Colorado was a broad river, so broad that an early U. S. Army report described it as being 200 yards wide-at In the mid-1800s, gold was discovered in California, and that brought travelers by the score to Yuma, all trying to cross that shifting, often treacherous river. It also brought entrepreneurs and opportunists, who recognized the moneymaking potential of a good ferryboat operation, and outlaws, who preyed on the emigrants.

To protect the travelers, the Army established Fort Yuma at the confluence of the Colorado and Gila rivers. And immediately it was faced with the problem of supplying its new post. A big problem it was, too. In 1852, General George A. McCall reported that the "loss in subsistence stores" overland from San Diego by wagon or by water upriver from the mouth of the Colorado was about ten percent. But the cost was $333 a ton by wagon, as opposed to $75 a ton by water. The losses by water occurred when one of the flatboats overturned. "If a small steamboat were employed on this part of the route the loss would be nothing," he concluded.

That was the beginning, and for the next fifty years steamboats were indispensable not only to Yuma, but also to Arizona. They brought life-indeed, they were life to the territory. The river was the north-south thoroughfare, the route by which men and machinery traveled to the mines and settlements along the river and ore was shipped out. Yuma became the main receiving point for the Army's Quartermaster Corps in the Department of Arizona, maintaining a six-month supply of goods and munitions for all of the posts in the department. That area extended as far east as West Texas and north to southern Utah. Because of the Colorado and the steamboats, Arizona was settled not from east to west, as was most of the United States, but from west to east.

By the late 1860s, George Alonzo Johnson, one of the original ferryboat operators and the father of commercial steam-

the Colorado

boating on the Colorado, had four steamers on the river-the Colorado II, the Mohave, the Nina Tilden, and the Cocopah II. His boats carried approximately 6000 tons annually and earned about $250,000 a year. Yumeños of the time spoke of the steamers with pride...and some humor. The Arizona Sentinel of January 31, 1874, noted, “To Captain George A. Johnson and his associates...are we indebted for all the advantages that have resulted from the navigation of the Colorado River.... Not only have the necessaries that we received from abroad been vastly cheapened by the operation of this enterprising company, but they have furnished a cheap and luxurious mode of travel between Arizona and San Francisco.... The Colorado Steam Navigation Company is an institution. 'Long may it wave' and be appreciated by the people.” The humor was obvious when Yumans explained sandstorms to desert newcomers. The weather was so hot, the air was so dry, and the Colorado water was so muddy, they boasted, that the water splashed by the big boats' paddle wheels evaporated immediately, leaving only dust to be blown up in the form of dust devils and fierce, often damaging sandstorms. Johnson's company also built up its passenger trade, and, by the late 1870s, his boats carried more than 100 passengers monthly. The accommodations were good enough that some people even took the trip upriver for fun, but not in the summer. Steamboating in the summer definitely was not fun. Martha Summerhayes, writing in her book Vanished Arizona, described her trip on the Steamer Gila in late August, 1874: “We had staterooms, but could not remain in them long at a time, on account of the intense heat. I had never felt such heat.... The days were interminable.... In the dining room,” she said, “the metal handles of the knives were uncomfortably warm to the touch; and even the wooden arms of the chairs felt as if they were slowly igniting.” As Yuma and Arizona Territory grew, the need for better transportation grew, and on September 30, 1877, the first train crossed the Southern Pacific railroad bridge into Arizona. Johnson and his partners, realizing that it was only a matter of time before steamboating would lose out to the iron horse, sold their interests in the CSNCo. to the holding company for the Southern Pacific. From then on, though other steamboat companies put boats on the river and tried to hang on to the industry, the Colorado River's steamboats faded in importance.

by Rosalie Robles Crowe

The final blow came in 1909 when the Laguna Dam, the first phase of the Bureau of Reclamation's Yuma Project, was completed. The last steamboat on the river was the Searchlight, which continued to paddle along until 1916, operated by the Reclamation Service. Now, all that remains of those early days is a memory, some photographs and artifacts, and, of course, the Colorado River.

Rosalie Robles Crowe is a native Arizonan who grew up in Yuma. She has worked as a reporter for several Arizona newspapers, as a book editor, and is Southwest champion cook of green corn tamales.

Ferreting out material for a daily newspaper column isn't always a chore. Sometimes it can be a very frightening experience, as Ernie Pyle found near Yuma about two generations ago, on a back road jaunt through Arizona...

The Snake Farm Story by Ernie Pyle Illustrations by Bob Boze Bell

Rudy Hale and his wife lived alone back of their little store fifty miles east of Yuma, and there was no one else for miles. Three steps from their door and you were ankle deep in bare sand. The Hales caught live rattlesnakes for a living. To me that would be ten thousand times worse than death. But they enjoyed it. The Arizona sands were filthy with rattlers. Rudy and his wife worked the desert as a farmer works his land for crops. Rattlers built them a place to live, rattlers kept them in food and clothing, rattlers provided them the start for their little gas and grocery business.... Rudy Hale was born in Illinois of German parentage, and he still had an accent. He was brought up with the idea of being a surgeon. A relative sent him to school abroad, and he studied medicine in Austria for years. When the relative died, his schooling stopped.... He wound up in California, where he worked for twenty years as a master mechanic. Then carbon monoxide laid him out, and he went to the Arizona desert for health. It was after two years there that the Hales came right up against it and had to turn to snakes for a living. They started out by advertising in a San Diego paper. Before they knew it they were swamped with orders. They sold snakes to zoos all over the country, to private collectors, to medical centers for serum, to state reptile farms, to the Mayo brothers.

"They say there aren't any snakes in Ireland," said Mrs. Hale. "But I know there are because we've shipped snakes to Ireland."

They didn't even use forked sticks to catch snakes-just picked them up with bare hands and put them in a box slung over the shoulder. They usually hunted snakes for an hour after daylight and an hour before dark. In eight years, they had caught approximately 20,000 rattlers. Rudy had caught as many as fifty sidewinders in one hour's hunting. They had the desert cleaned almost bare of snakes for twenty miles around.

There are twelve species of rattlers in that part of Arizona. The sidewinder is the most deadly, and the Hales specialized in sidewinders. They used to get fifty cents apiece for them.

"I just wish I could get fifty cents again," Rudy said. "They're down to twenty cents now." The most he ever got for a snake was seven dollars; that was a rare Black Mountain rattler. He said the huge snakes didn't bring as much as the medium-sized ones. They were harder to keep in captivity, and the zoos didn't want them.

Hale had caught rattlers as big around as his leg. He'd caught them so big that they'd overpower him and pull his arms together, and he'd have to throw them away from him and then pick them up and try again.

"I'm careful not to hurt a snake," he said. "Any snake I ship is a good healthy snake."

Both Hale and his wife would let rattlers crawl all over them. She even carried them around in her pockets. Neither of them had ever been bitten, but her brother had. He was bitten five times, quick as a flash, by a nest of sidewinders. He didn't say a word-just went and lay down in the sand, flat on his back, stretched out his arms, shut his eyes, and lay there still as death for half an hour.

Then went back to work. Nothing ever happened. The Hales said that most people who died of snakebite really died of fright. Mrs. Hale's brother sat down on a rattler once. One time Rudy himself stepped right into the middle of a huge coiled rattler; his foot slipped, and he fell down.

among the coils, but for some reason he wasn't bitten.

"There's no danger if you watch your business," Hale said. "You mustn't be thinking about anything else when you're picking up a sidewinder."

He said the hand was quicker than a snake's strike; if you missed him the first grab you could jerk back in time. Lots of times when they saw a rattler coiled they would just ease up and slide a hand through the sand under it, and lift it up right in the palm of the hand, still coiled.

Rudy had only one sidewinder on hand the day I was there. It was in a roofless concrete tank behind the house. He took me out for a look after dark and turned on a dim little electric light. He took a stick with a nail in it and got the sidewinder hooked over the nail, and had it lifted almost to the top of the tank. Just then his little red dog stuck its cold nose up my pants leg. I let out a yell and landed somewhere way over the other side of Gila Bend, and never did go back after the car.

Editor's Note: CAUTION-rattlesnakes are poisonous, and if disturbed they will strike. Do not handle them! If you come across a rattler, move away slowly. If you are bitten, seek medical attention immediately!

Between 1935 and 1940 Ernie Pyle roamed America with That Girl (his wife, Jerry) for material for his daily newspaper column. His dry humor, simple style, and human touch carried him through the worst of World War II-to become the best read and universally revered correspondent. He was killed by machine gun fire on the Pacific island of le Shima in 1945. Arizona Highways, to which Ernie had been a contributor, joined America in national mourning.

Ernie Pyle's snake farm story was adapted from his book Home Country 1935 Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. Used with the permission of the Scripps-Howard Foundation.

This Dantean nightmare of blasted rock, 100 miles from Yuma, hides an anthropological treasure-trove, and its health is threatened. THE SIERRA PINACATE

by Charles Bowden How to begin a description of the Sierra Pinacate? As a cold-blooded impersonal listing of the spectacular features of the Sierra, the geology, the plants and animals, the climate...? No! For we who read are human, and humans like ourselves lived, loved, and died in the Sierra for tens of thousands of years.

-Julian Hayden, The Sierra Pinacate Julian Hayden sleeps on a cot by a campfire cold for maybe 40,000 years. His bunk faces east to catch the first light. He is an archeologist, and he stalks the wild people of our dreams.

For his stove he uses a gasoline model purchased in 1934. For a sleeping bag he favors a canvas sack stenciled: Engine Cover, B-29, Boeing, Property U.S. Air Force.

Hayden is a big man with big hands. The body stretches six foot two or three, the hair silver, the shoulders square, bearing erect. The eyebrows bristle, moustache flows thickly, the smile waits ready and wide.

The Pinacate has beckoned him since the 1950s because he thinks early humans in the New World left tracks here. Not many join him in these journeys. The Pinacate has no living water. Waves of dunes wall it off from the Gulf of California. For a decade drought has seared this place. First the rodents die out, then the hawk leaves for better skies, and the creosote turns brown with the caress of death.

"This is home down here," Julian explains, "this is where I like to be. I have no desire to travel. I don't have to go to Rome. I can read about it in the National Geographic."

Few come to this place, but all remember the ground. The black rocks blasted across the horizon by volcanos now drink the desert sun. Craters open to the heavens and swallow the sky. The saguaro, the ocotillo, the ironwood, and the brittlebush stud the roll of the land and whisper life among the stone silence. No one lives here now. But all imagine this place.

The Sierra Pinacate punches its volcanic fists across two million acres in northwest Sonora and spills black tongues through the fence marking national borders. The peaks, the craters, the malpais fields of slumbering basalt all stand as part of a Sonoran Desert tapestry that reaches from Puerto Peñasco north into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge-thousands of square miles of uninhabited desert where the rain amounts to maybe three inches a year or forgets to come at all, where the animals and plants of the dry world face their ultimate test in summer temperatures of 120 or 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.

We have been here in our dreams when the Earth becomes basic, the horizon endless, the sky a blue blanket, the sun a torch, the way simple, plain, and true. Scholars debate when our kind first found this place: 20,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago? Perhaps, even more. We left long ago; the campfires are all cold. Now we are coming back.

The Pinacate, barely separated from Arizona by a line on a map and joined to its deserts by the throb of life, has survived our ignorance to become our treasure. Some of the earliest archeological sites on our continent may be here. A piece of desert that beckons and frightens all in the same instant is here. What nations have broken asunder, soon nations may put back together. On March 29, 1979, President José López Portillo of Mexico declared the place a Federal Reserve, and now the land is entrusted to a federal department and studied intensively by the Instituto de Ecología. Soon the Reserve may be forged into a sanctuary with Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Cabeza Prieta under the United Nations' Man in the Biosphere Program.

The Pinacate teaches all who witness it that this is a unique place, haunted ground that speaks with the voice of ancestors. Mexico has heard these voices. And, in a country struggling with economic prob-lems, it has decided to try and save this place from the hungers of its people. This will not be an easy task. People press in on the Pinacate. Goats browse on its edges. The demographic ferocity of the twentieth century rolls toward this Stone Age wilderness like a storm.When Julian first entered the Pinacate in the '50s, birds flew up to his face, curious what this new animal might be. No man had lived here since 1912, when Juan Caravajales, a Sand Papago, left his camp at Tinaja del Indio for the Gila River. Caravajales echoed an entire world of humans who had raised families, wor-shipped gods, and created a culture in this dry desert.

Time is elastic in this place, and the past still walks and breathes.

Three hundred ninety years ago, on February 15, women look up and see a man fused into a beast....

Father Eusebio Kino, Jesuit explorer of this region, crosses the Pinacate on one of his many journeys. The women wear rabbit skin skirts and their breasts hang bare. Kino climbs down. Man and horse become two entities. The Sand Papago meet the first harbinger of European civilization....

Julian slams the truck door. He favors a Travelall built in 1957, and the old door bangs shut with a heavy clunk. He stabs his fingers at braided trails lacing the malpais.

"Here!" he says, "Right here!"

The trail is a foot maybe a foot and a half wide, and this is where Kino passed. Julian has tracked hundreds of miles of ancient trails. The yellowed journals note where Kino stopped and camped and visited.

We know, he explains, that Kino was at Tinajas de los Papagos, that he went to Quitobaquito, that this trail is thousands of years old, 5000, 10,000, and beyond. The sky overhead clouds up, and a light breeze brushes our skin. The path draws us on. Julian has walked this trail and found Stone Age tools, old Levi's, whiskey bottles all nestled together. A stone clock ticks beneath our feet.

"Here!" Julian repeats.

The past reaches up from the desert floor. Ensign Juan Mateo Manje, Kino's military companion, records, "the Indians went about naked, covering their bodies only with small pieces of hare furs.... We gave them a supply of food since they were poor and hungry, living on roots, locusts, and fish."

Kino tells them of the Cross and of other worlds across the ocean. The people listen. They are friendly, but they do not join.

In 1850 or 1851, yellow fever slaughters the Sand Papago, and the survivors walk north to the Gila River. Caravajales returns years later, claiming life on the Gila was "too crowded." He brings a bride and plants squash in a gamble with the summer rains. Sometimes he goes into Sonoita on Julian Hayden for nearly thirty years has explored the Sierra Pinacate on the border between Arizona and Mexico, uncovering clues to humanity's earliest existence in the Southwest. Here, trails, campfires, and tools 40,000 years old litter the ground, hinting of ancient life in this hostile land.

the border for a drink. The Pinacate creaks along as a sanctuary for wild men who once in a while rob a passerby. In 1890 a posse drives many Indians into the dunes to the west and kills them.

Then Caravajales' woman leaves him, and finally in 1912 he gives up on the ancient homeland, and the Pinacate hears no more human footsteps. When Julian arrives in the '50s, the birds show the innocence of the Garden of Eden and at Tinajas de los Papagos, he finds the scraps of Caravajales' hut, a jar sealed and hidden to store precious seeds. In a crevice, dried plants are arranged on the rock floor: Juan Caravajales' last bed in the Pinacate. Here the past waits to slap the present in the face. When World War II ended, Julian returned from the service and found he was the only man in Tucson with a jackhammer. He'd bought the tool from an old prospector around Yuma. He became an excavating business, lived in a tent for a while, raised a family.

And then in the '50s he turned to the Pinacates and walked into the past. His father was an archeologist, Master of Arts,

Harvard, Class of 1909, and Julian worked with some of the best. Before the war, he helped on digs at Keet Seel and Betatakin (now Navajo National Monument), at Ventana Cave where vanished beasts, mammoths, and giant sloths erupted from the bone piles of early Arizonans. During the 1930s, he worked at many jobs and learned to fashion silver jewelry based on prehistoric Indian designs. The Pinacate continued to bewitch him with old campfires and ancient trails. One thing made it possible for him to respond to the call of this wilderness.

He was fortunate in his marriage. He had met his late wife, Helen, in 1934 when she visited the Hohokam dig at Snaketown near Casa Grande, Arizona. Julian was a foreman on that job. They went to Mexico for their honeymoon in a Model-T Ford. He still keeps a photo over his desk of her coming out of the Sierra on muleback. Her face is serene, and all the trails promise to be happy.When the Pinacate beckoned him, Helen encouraged his hunger for the place. When he left his business to venture into the volcanic wilderness, she ran the business. Whatever he achieved in his archeological work she influenced and made possible.

He is not a self-made man. He says he is the product of a life spent with the right woman.

Weekend after weekend, he left his home and traveled here for two or three or four day's work. He met and learned from others entranced by the place and its questions, men like archeologists Malcolm Rogers and Ronald Ives. Ives is the authority on the Pinacates. Bit by bit he fashioned dead worlds from litter on the desert floor, and he did it without grants, university jobs, or subsidies. He does not belong to an institution. He belongs to the Pinacate.

Julian picks a brown stone from the ground and runs his finger along the serrated edge. San Dieguito I, he thinks. The stone becomes a chopper, the rock a human tool.

The hand wraps around it, and suddenly the arm can arc through the air into the beast; the bone splinters, the flesh rips, and blood runs. The stone edge licks the red.

He stands by a crater. Tools litter the ground. Here the ancestors camped, and trails radiate out celebrating the presence of life. Down below in the crater, trees die in the slow fire of the drought. Here on the rim, the dead worlds wait for a human hand to remember them.

The thumb traces the cutting face where a man flaked stone into use, into choppers, scrapers, hammers. Edges.

A calendar embraces all this hardware: Amargosan, San Dieguito III, II, I and, then, back of the beyond, the Malpais people. Julian thinks human beings have camped by this crater for 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 years, maybe more. These dates cause arguments in the academy. The debates will go on for years and years.

He does not care. He is the maverick, the man who loves the question and chases the answer. He does not shy away from argument, but the smile is always ready.

Around him are sleeping circles where early men and women and children cleared out stones for shelter from the night winds raking the lava beds. From the Gila River south into this area, 8000 sleeping circles have been found and 500 trails with twenty trail shrines. The bottle comes out, and a toast of mescal sears the throat. The fluid tumbles down with warmth. The crater says nothing. Gopher holes cave into the ground, abandoned by rodents fleeing the long dry spell. Nearby, the ashes of Rogers and Ives are scattered on a ridge of lava.

A carpet of stones reaches eastward, a formation called desert pavement. The wind blows the soil away leaving volcanic pebbles, and then the salt and clay seal the earth beneath them and nothing can grow. Islands of creosote await their doom on these carpets of stone, and Julian figures the mounds of soil may be 40,000 years old. Eventually, the dirt shrinks before the wind, the rodents flee the small islands, the ground compacts, the creosote and brittlebush languish and die. The island blows away and only the pavement remains.

Microorganisms feast on the manganese in the pavement and form a varnish, and Julian has created a dating based on these explosions of bacterial life. He takes out a trowel and scrapes away a little pavement, then uses a whisk broom to sweep away the thin soil over the clay. This is time in the Pinacate: one inch thick. Here dirt does not pile up to form strata; here everything blows away, and all the centuries and millennia lay side by side.

The surface displays everything, the tools of Malpais man, Kino's path, Julian, the bottle of mescal resting on the varnished stone.

Forty thousand years scream from underfoot.

Just look.

Fernando Lizarraga Tostado administers the Pinacate for the Mexican government. Raised on a ranch in Sinaloa, educated in Mexico City, he is now in his thirties and in charge of hundreds of square miles. He lives in Sonoita with his wife Veronica, three children, a Jeep, a car, a pistol, and square miles of problems.

People of the ejidos, collectives established by the government for the landless which border the Pinacate, plunder the place for wood. Ranchers drive in big herds when spring rain revives the desert plants. Miners haul out cinders. Poachers kill the desert bighorn sheep and the rare Sonoran antelope.

Lizarraga approaches his job with zeal. He has gorged on the literature of the region. He has fallen under the spell of the volcanic wilderness. But the job strains one man with a small budget. A clothesline runs from the Jeep's roll bar to Lizarraga's house.

The lip of the crater circles the deep hole. To walk the rim means a hike of two or three miles. The hole descends 750 feet. Craters punch through the desert, and 400 cinder cones pop up across the land. If nobody had ever come to Pinacate and left clues of ancient ways, the place would still draw the eye inward.

Silence can be total here, and noise of industrial life falls away until the only sound is the pounding of the human heart.

Five stone crosses inscribe the rim of Elegante Crater. Once Julian mentioned them to a friend in Sonoita. The friend grew excited. He said long ago an old Indian told his father of these crosses which, if sighted along to the north, point to a hole in the black rock filled with treasure. "Oh, Don Julian," the friend exclaimed, "we must go to those crosses." But Julian laughed to himself. The crosses point all different directions. The treasure is everywhere.

It is night now, and fire crackles against the quiet. Julian pours mescal into tiny clear glasses. Orange glow bathes his lined face, and the thick moustache flashes over his lip. In the endless time of the Pinacate, he savors his time. After high school, he knocked about for five years, and then in 1932 he tried college. It was not enough. He left for a semester, borrowed his brother's mule, threw on a bedroll, and headed into the mountains. He roamed and cooked in a hole in the ground like the ancient ones. He was gone ten days. The last trace of pink drains from the sky. Long gone campfires are near now. Out in the shadows the old trails wander off into the Pinacate, and the Travelall stands parked by the paths. The Pinacate echoes with so many journeys.... The year is 1910 and Alberto Celaya goes ahead. He is a twenty-three-year-old Mexican from Sonoita. Carl Lumholtz, a naturalist from Norway, follows him into the wilderness of Pinacate. They cross the dunes and come to the sea. Celaya finds a porpoise stranded in a pool by the receding tide. The pistol flashes, blood flares up like a fountain. Cranes pass overhead. Down the beach, the two men toss dynamite into the sea and then grab stunned fish for dinner. Lumholtz puts all this in his notes. They wander by Tinajas de los Papagos and find the hermit Caravajales. The old Indian is thin, bald, deaf, and healthy. His moves are the legend of this place. Lumholtz writes that the old man crosses the Pinacate at Quitobaquito on the American line. For two days he does not eat, and then he goes off into the dunes forthree days more without food and digs camotes, a root plant of the sands. Such things register with the man of science from Norway. Things far apart here seem to overlap and touch. Lumholtz met Caravajales, two years later Caravajales left. And then decades later, Julian comes and meets Alberto Celaya, now Don Alberto, and visits Caravajales' old camp. Julian is led into the Pinacate by Celaya, and the past rushes into new hands. Don Alberto is now dead. A few days before, Julian spoke with his granddaughter as she cradled a new baby in her arms.

Things overlap and touch in this place. Julian stares into the fire. Far off to the north, truck lights trace the highway between Sonoita and San Luis, Sonora. The Pinacate sleeps in darkness, an island in a world of engines and electric lines. Now it is parkland. Soon portions of it will beckon visitors. Fernando Lizarraga has put signs on the few good roads to guide people. Scientists study the life found here, and nations seek to find ways to preserve the land from our appetites. For now the Pinacate is a good fire, strong drink, a silent night.

At dawn the coyotes bark. Anyone considering a journey into the Pinacate should go from November through March to avoid the intense heat. Travelers must not leave designated roads and would be well advised to check in at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monumentjust north of the border and with Fernando Lizarraga Tostado in Sonoita, Sonora. Nothing should be taken from this place but memories.

Editor's note: Julian Hayden's book The Sierra Pinacate is being published by Sygma Grafica, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.

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

Arizona Highways Magazine/45

ARIZONI Being something of an almanac, a sampler, a calendar, and a guide to places

The opportunity to preserve Yuma's unique heritage and culture has given rise to the Yuma Crossing Cultural Alliance. This group of private, state, and local organizations lends support to various historic and cultural sites in Yuma:

Admission: fifty cents. Hours 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., Monday through Friday. Phone: (619) 572-0661

FUN IN THE SUN

Yuma is surrounded by a network of lakes and rivers, and only two hours south is the Sea of Cortez in old Mexico. Water sports abound-water skiing, boating, diving, inner tubing, wind surfing and fishing are enjoyed year-round thanks to Yuma's warm climate.

For more information call the Yuma Chamber of Commerce. Phone: 782-2587.

For a break on the long drive between Yuma and Phoenix, why not stop and peek in on Arizona's historic past at the McElhaney Museum, forty miles east of Yuma, near Welton. The museum exhibits antiques and over fifty horse-drawn vehicles, a collection begun by proprietor Sam McElhaney fifteen years ago. The museum is located off Interstate 8 near Welton. Take Exit 37 onto old U.S. Route 80, and drive two miles west and one-half mile north. Admission is free.

HOMES FOR THE HOMELY

Because of the overcrowding of formerly wild burros and horses in holding corrals in several Western states, the Bureau of Land Management is willing to strike a deal. They will waive the adoption fee (normally seventy-five dollars for a wild burro and one-hundred and twentyfive dollars for a wild horse) for those animals which are old, injured, or just plain ugly, that normally nobody will take. To adopt a wild burro or horse, hand-some or homely, you must be able to prove to the Bureau of Land Management that the animal will have adequate facilities and medical care. After a year you must show a veterinarian's certification that the animal has been well cared for. Then the animal is yours for good.

For more information on adopting wild burros or horses, contact a U.S. Bureau of Land Manage-ment office in Phoenix, King-man, Saf-ford, or Yuma.

QUES

And events unique to Arizona and the Southwest.

Yuma is the sunniest spot in the United States, averaging 300 sunny days per year; that's ninety-three percent of the pos-sible 4400 hours of sunshine in a year. It rains less than five inches per year, and the humidity level is one of the lowest in the country.

SELF-HELP PROGRAM

Residents of Somerton, south of Yuma, are building new $42,000-$45,000 homes for about $34,000-without any prior construction experience.

Under the federal Farmers Home Administration's Self-Help Housing Program, families contract to build their own homes in return for a thirty-three-year mortgage and varying payments, dependent upon government subsidy. Working under a construction adviser, a family can expect to sacrifice seven-and-a-half to eight months of forty-hour weeks completing a home. If the family gets too far behind in construction, they are apt to lose the house. Somerton officials say the Self-Help program will improve the city's housing situation. As families move into their new homes, other families quickly inhabit the empty houses, leaving vacant the poorest housing which can then be condemned. No one in the program has defaulted yet on a mortgage and officials attribute it to pride: "After all, they nailed every nail."

THE AMERICAN SAHARA

Yuma's rolling sand dunes bear an uncanny resemblance to the Sahara Desert of North Africa. In fact, many movie directors have filmed Sahara movies near Yuma. But you won't find any camels roaming across the Yuma desert. The creatures that brave these burning sands are known as off-road vehicles. Every year, thousands of all terrain cycle, dune buggy, and motorcycle enthusiasts flock to Yuma to enjoy the miles of shifting sands. Note: The desert is a fragile place, easily damaged and slow to heal. There are specific areas set aside for off-road vehicles. Please stay within the boundaries.

HERE'S THE BEEF

Arizona ranks among the top ten cattlefeeding states, with approximately 415,000 head in twenty-five feed lots. Although Arizona cattle provide for much of the West Coast's meat-packing needs, neither the bulk of the cattle nor most of the grain they are fed come from within the state. Arizona's herds consist mainly of Midwestern and Texas Panhandle cattle. But state feedlot operators hope to fatten more Arizona cattle in the future.

UPDATE: Inquiries about the Grand Canyon Railroad (Arizoniques, August, 1984) should be directed to Railroad Resources, 954-9410.

For a calendar of events listing the fun and fascinating goings-on in Arizona please write: Arizona Office of Tourism, Department CE, 1480 East Bethany Home Road, Phoenix, AZ 85014. Unless otherwise noted, all telephone numbers are within area code 602. which has new features at no increase in price.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS 1985 CALENDAR

Arizona Highways proudly offers its 1985 Scenic Calendar

For the last 18 years, Arizona Highways has set the standards for scenic calendars with top quality photography, graphics, and printing. The 13-month 1985 calendar starts with December of 1984 and for each month features a full-color scenic photograph the size of this page.

For your convenience, we've added a month-by-month listing of major events scheduled in Arizona in 1985, ranging from the Phoenix Rodeo of Rodeos to Helldorado Days in Tombstone. Convenient order forms enclosed.

Order two or more calendars, and we'll enclose envelopes for mailing them as gifts.

And on the back cover . . .

We've added a map of Arizona that shows locations of the scenic photography appearing in the calendar. And both front and back covers are sturdier and brighter than ever.