Arizona's Earliest Highways

Arizona's Earliest Highways Text by Stewart L. Udall Photographs by Jerry Jacka

When it came to trade and travel, the supposedly primitive natives of the 16thcentury Southwest had an abundance of curiosity and competence. Long before the first Spanish explorers penetrated Arizona in the 1530s, the Pueblo Indians and some of their contemporaries to the south developed networks of trails that enabled them to exchange goods and to maintain meaningful cultural contacts. This is reflected in the journals of the Europeans, wherein they recorded that on any important venture they were escorted along existing trails by Indian runners wellacquainted with the streams, passes, landmarks, and hidden springs that marked Arizona's earliest pathways of commerce. In the northern highlands, topography dictated the location of most of those routes. The processes of geology had erected three barriers to north-south movement across the landmass now known as Arizona: the stupendous chasm cut by the Colorado River through the surrounding plateau; the long, bold escarpment called the Mogollon Rim; and the rugged canyon system carved into Arizona's east-central mountains by the Salt River and its tributaries.

Off to the south lay another stern obstacle to travel: the heartland of the Sonoran Desert, stretching in a great arc from present-day Tucson to Casa Grande to Yuma. Deserts, too, are dictatorial-and the rigors that the parched Sonoran Desert imposes on human activity determined long ago that this region would be a stage for dramatic episodes of American history.

Today, by nature's command, the western Sonoran Desert contains Arizona's most remote, least populated area. One winter night in a lonely part of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, photographer Jerry Jacka and I lay watching the stars from our sleeping bags. No man-made light or sound intruded, and we realized that this was one of the few places remaining in the state where we could camp and know that the closest human beings were at least 25 miles away.

It is now more than 4½ centuries since Spanish adventurers, benefiting from the old Indian trails, began their exploration of Arizona. If one assumes that Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca crossed into eastern Arizona on his way from Florida to northern Mexico, that era began in 1536 and ended 240 years later when the Franciscans Dominguez and Escalante led their far-ranging party across the Colorado River at a ford known thereafter as the Crossing of the Fathers.

In the April 1984 issue of Arizona Highways, Jerry Jacka and I rendered a words-and-photographs account of the expeditions of Fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1539 and 1540. This month, we turn to explorers who sought to link New Spain's outposts in southern Arizona and northern New Mexico with the mysterious "Californias" to the west.

“Eusebio Francisco Kino was the most picturesque missionary pioneer of all North America - explorer, astronomer, cartographer, mission builder, ranchman, cattle king, and defender of the frontier.”

Father Eusebio Francisco Kino made his first survey of possible routes through the western Sonoran Desert in the fall of 1698. Although Coronado's scout, Melchior Diaz, had made his way across this arid expanse 158 years before, he had left no map or written record, and his discoveries had faded from memory. On this typical Kino trip into the outer reaches of “Pimeria Alta,” the tireless Jesuit priest traveled 800 miles on horseback in 25 days and bap tized about 400 Indians. His outing into the country inhabited by the Papagos, or Tohono O'odham, culminated in an excursion to the lava-strewn summit of Sonora's Cerro Pinacate, southwest of what is today Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southwestern Arizona. Here Kino the effervescent geographer studied the impassable sand dunes that domi nated the westward landscape all the way to the Gulf of California, whose waters he could glimpse in the distance.

His explorer's instincts aroused, the padre was anxious to learn if he could tie his Sonoran settlements to a location on the Pacific Coast that would serve as a port of call for the famous Manila galleons Plying between Acapulco and the Philip pines. More important, such a foothold might encourage the Roman Catholic bishops in Mexico City to send mission aries to settle the Californias. So motivated, three months later he mustered his trusty Indian vaqueros and set out to cross the desert north of the forbidding dunes he had marked on his maps. Kino was desert wise by now: he knew that the water holes to which his Indians would guide him might be dry, but he also knew that if he properly paced the gait of his horses, they could travel long distances without water during the winter months. With the foresight that marked all of his endeavors, the padre determined to establish a mission ranch at Sonoita as a base camp for his new roadway to the west. He envisioned that the 36 head of cattle his vaqueros drove to Sonoita (the caravan also included 80 horses, 90 pack animals, and a quantity of provisions) would “serve for beef in continuation of these explo rations of lands and nations of the North, as well as to succor the fathers of California if perchance they should sail to this latitude.”

Once he was ready to go, Kino decided

that a small “flying company” should make the first venture into this forbidding country. The first leg of the trip hugged the Sonoita River, passed by Quitobaquito Spring, then proceeded northwest about 15 miles to the site of an anticipated watering place in today's Cabeza Prieta wildlife refuge.

The water hole was dry, but his Indian guides assured Kino that there was a tinaja (natural water tank) in a rocky range that loomed on the horizon. The padre, ever confident that God was guiding his apostolic excursions, gave the command to move forward. His diary informs us that the group rode steadily in the moonlight for five or six hours across the Mohawk Valley and along the western edge of the Sierra Pinta to the mouth of a hidden gorge. Here the Indians pointed out “a watering place high up in the rocks and barrancas, where, after climbing up with difficulty, we drank, but not the animals....” Knowing we were following Kino's footsteps, Jerry and I, too, picked our way through a corridor of granite rocks to what the padre described as Aguaje de la Luna, Moonlight Pool (shown less poetically on today's maps as Tinaja del Corazon, Heart Tank). Gazing at the tiny catchment, we marveled again at the unwavering faith that guided Father Kino on his travels into the unknown. Before daybreak, ever mindful of his horses' thirst, the padre roused his com panions for a forced march due west to the next water hole. The Indians now took the party north of the Drift Hills, through

Where rain rarely falls, a miracle of wildflowers carpets the Pinta Sands along El Camino del Diablo. In 1698, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino crossed this unknown land in an effort to link Sonoran settlements with the Pacific Coast. A series of rockbound catchments proved his party's only water sources over much of the beautiful but inhospitable desert.

On February 19, 1699, Father Kino's party arrived at the Tinajas Altas Mountains and found the life-saving "high tanks" for which the range is named. "Even though Stewart and I had a supply of full canteens, it was a moving experience to come upon this source of precious water as we traced Kino's route," says photographer Jacka. The modest basins were carved in the granite slopes by nature over thousands of years.

Text continued from page 21 a pass in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, and across the Lechugilla Desert to a lifesaving water catchment called by Kino Agua Escondida (Hidden Water), and listed on modern maps as Tinajas Altas (High Tanks). These small basins, carved in the descending granite slopes by rainwater over many millenia, contain the most reliable, accessible water in this region of the Sonoran Desert. But Kino did not tarry at this oasis. The next morning, his party skirted the Gila Mountains to the northwest on a march that brought them at day's end to a dry arroyo where they found "among the rocks of its bed...some fonts of water...." To Father Kino, still in a poetic frame of mind, the exquisite basins nature had shaped in the flanks of this granite cliff resembled baptismal fonts. Today the spot is known as Dripping Springs. A march to the Gila River the following day ended the first recorded journey over Father Kino's shortcut road to the Californias. The point where his trail intersected with the Gila he named San Pedro. It can be observed today west of Wellton where the course of the river turns northward before it slices through the Gila range.

In the next three years, always traveling in fall and winter, Kino made three additional trips over this route. On one trek, in 1700, he climbed a mountain and used his telescope to verify that California was not an island, as long thought, but a huge landmass that stretched from the Colorado River many leagues in the direction of the Pacific Ocean. This discovery fired his imagination, and he outlined his California vision in a soaring report to the Father General of the Jesuit Order in Rome: "In a short time, with the favor of Heaven, we shall send cattle by land, and shall have ranches in California itself near the land passage... [and] if your Reverence and his Majesty, Philip V, God spare him, will give us workers and missionaries, all in good time they must go forward until they reach perhaps as far as Gran China and Japan."

In the mind and soul of Father Kino, until his death a decade later at Magdalena, the road he had pioneered across the desert was not the Devil's-as later labeled but truly God's Highway. In the 1770s, Eusebio Kino's dream became a reality when the viceroy adopted it as part of a strategy to forestall Russian or English claims to northern California by establishing a Spanish colony at the newly discovered Bay of San Francisco. The leader who executed this plan was a stalwart frontier soldier, Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza. The captain's first His assignment was to open a land route from Sonora to northern California. His second and more demanding task was to organize a colony of settlers and lead them and their livestock 1,600 miles from Culiacan to Monterey. Before he started on his first expedition in the winter of 1774, the peerless Anza asked Father Francisco Garces to be his companion on the journey. Father Garces, the one Spaniard who had followed Father Kino's footsteps over the old shortcut to the Yuma area, was a cowboypriest at San Xavier del Bac whose fascination with geography was apparently as intense as his interest in saving souls.

With Father Juan Diaz and 20 soldiers, the pair began their march across what is now Arizona in January 1774 by retracing Kino's road to the Moonlight Pool. Then, with Father Garces pointing the way, the party deviated from Kino's original trail. They traveled to some water pockets Kino had missed (now known as Cabeza Prieta Tanks), skirted to the north of the Tinajas Altas, and passed through a gap that led to a well on the west side of the Gila range, thence north to the Gila River itself. Anza opened this new route (which continued to present-day Calexico and on to the California missions) with such skill that, on his return, he was assigned the task of preparing for and leading the long march of the San Francisco company. It ultimately included 30 families with 118 children, and a thousand head of livestock. This time he elected the longer but safer Santa Cruz-Gila River route. It is a commentary on the foolhardiness of the 1850s gold-rush argonauts who lost their lives in summer stampedes across the Sonoran Desert (and who named that path the Devil's Highway) that in 1775-76 Captain de Anza moved 240 people from Sinaloa to northern California with the loss of only one life. Father Kino's shortcut road became a scene of human tragedy because those who sought a hasty passage across the desert he loved exhibited a reckless disregard for limits imposed by God and nature.

Text continued on page 29 In 1536, when Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's Indian guides brought his party up the San Simon River to a crossing of the present international boundary near Douglas, he was nearing completion of the first walk by Europeans across our continent.

In 1539, on a reconnoitering mission led by Indians to locate the rumored Seven Golden Cities of Cibola, Fray Marcos de Niza and Esteban the Moor-a veteran of Cabeza de Vaca's long journeybecame the first nonnatives to set foot on the Coronado Trail.

In 1540, the famed expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado followed this same route to the Zuni stronghold of Hawikuh. For more than three centuries, this paththe only north-south trail in eastern Arizona-would serve as the "road" used by Indians, Spaniards and, long afterward, U.S. cavalry troops to travel from the Colorado Plateau to the Gila Valley.

1536-1776: 240 Years of Spanish Exploration

The Coronado chronicles also inform us that in the summer of 1540, young Zuni runners led Pedro de Tovar on a tour of the Hopi villages, and other Pueblo Indians later guided Garcia Lopez de Cardenas to a viewpoint that distinguished him as the European discoverer of the Grand Canyon.

Also in 1540, Coronado's work as an Arizona trailblazer came to a climax when he ordered Capt. Melchior Diaz to return to Sonora and mount a search for a route to the Pacific Ocean. The objective was to intercept Hernando de Alarcon's support flotilla and bring supplies from his ships back to Sonora. Diaz, a magnificent frontiersman, became the first European to thread his way westward across the Sonoran Desert to the Yuma area. On this same journey, by crossing the Colorado River and traveling northward to the vicinity of present-day Blythe, Diaz became the discoverer of California two years before the navigator Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo touched land at San Diego.

tions, see the July 1987 Arizona Highways.) The founder and first governor of New Mexico, Don Juan de Oñate, also explored parts of Arizona. In the northern Rio Grande Valley in 1598-22 years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock-Oñate established the first permanent European settlement in what is now the American Southwest. In the winter of 1604-5, the governor led an expedition into Arizona in search of the "South Sea" (Pacific Ocean). In another major advance for Southwestern geography, his Indian-guided force climbed out of the Verde Valley north of Chino Valley, marched down the Bill Williams River, and followed the Colorado River to its terminus at the Gulf of California.

Nearly a century then elapsed before Arizona's first community builder, Eusebio Kino, put hitherto unknown areas of southern Arizona on European maps. Father Kino is the heroic figure of Arizona history. The Jesuit priest arrived on this "Rim of Christendom" in 1687, and for more than two decades he crisscrossed southern Arizona with his Indian brothers and worked with them to build the first churches and mission settlements in what would become our state. In the 1690s, the indefatigable stockman-explorermissionary traversed and mapped parts of the valleys of the San Pedro, Santa Cruz, and Gila rivers and eventually made his way across the heartland of the Sonoran Desert to establish a shortcut to distant California, a route dubbed El Camino del Diablo by later, poorly prepared adventurers.

The final chapter of Spanish trail-making across Arizona was written between 1771 and 1776, during the same period when other European colonists on the eastern seaboard were taking political action that would lead to the creation of the United States of America. The work of these last-wave explorers-Father Francisco Garces, Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza, the two brave friars Francisco Dominguez and Silvestre de Escalante-and Father Kino's pioneering thrust across the Sonoran Desert's expanses are the subjects of the main text of this photo-essay.

"They [Dominguez and Escalante] explored more unknown territory than Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, or Lewis and Clark."

The discovery by Europeans of a ford in Glen Canyon where horses and men could walk across the Colorado River in seasons of low water occurred on Novem ber 7, 1776. The finding of this crossing probably saved the lives of the members of the last great exploring expedition mounted by Spaniards in the American West.

The two Franciscan friars who led the entrada, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were dispatched by Spain's viceroy in Mexico City to find a trail that would connect Santa Fe with the new missions Father Junipero Serra was establishing in California. Though theirs proved an impossible quest, the effort became a major achievement when the tiny band of explorers observed and mapped a vast region known in our time as the intermountain West.

Thanks to an illuminating diary kept by Father Escalante and a historic map prepared for the King of Spain by Capt. Don Bernardo Miera, we have extensive knowledge of the travels of this party of two priests, three other Spaniards, and five Spanish-speaking Indians. Following the footsteps of New Mexican trappers and traders to the Gunnison River, they picked up a native guide, waded the main stem of the Colorado River near Grand Valley, and followed a trail to the north west that brought them to a ford on the Green River in what is now Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. Turning westward, they traveled along the Uintah Mountains and became the first Europeans to enter the Great Basin when they crossed a divide near Provo.

It was now October, and the pace quickened as the anxious horsemen followed their guides on a course that slanted southwest to present-day Cedar City. Here, after a vigorous argument, the search for a road to Monterey was aban doned, and the padres began looking for a path that would take them back to Santa Fe. Although various Indians provided conflicting reports about a crossing of the big river (called "The River of Mystery" by the natives), Father Escalante's faith that God was directing his endeavors never faltered. Some of his men were ill, and all were subsisting on horsemeat, but the Franciscan saw a silver lining in the appearance of a Mescalero Apache who reported he had made a crossing of the great river "a few days previously." Other diary entries indicate that the padres entered Arizona south of St. George on the western side of the Hurricane Cliffs, turned east through one of the gaps in that colorful escarpment, and continued across the Uin karet Plateau. Jerry's and my survey of the area south of Pipe Spring National Monu ment brought us to terrain that convinced us Escalante's horse trail converged with what a century later would become a Mormon wagon road known as the Honey moon Trail.

If this assumption is cor rect, Father Escalante and his companions rode eastward around the northern end of the Kaibab Mountains to a camp at Coyote Springs, which they named San Juan Capistrano. No doubt any Indian would have led them due east to the ford; but, unguided, the Spaniards turned south down House Rock Valley on a detour that led them into an unwanted adventure in survival. This path took them by, but not to, the hidden water of House Rock Spring, then along the base of the vivid Vermilion Cliffs to a dry camp just north of today's U.S.

Route 89A. The Bureau of Land Manage ment has commemorated this site and the expedition with an appropriate his toric marker.

The final leg of their side trip took them to a camp at the edge of the big river. This site was not a ford, but rather a potential location for a ferry that, 95 years later, would be entered on the region's maps as Lees Ferry.

When their two best swimmers nearly drowned in the deep, surging water, the explorers realized this was not the walk across ford described earlier by the Indians. After surveying the precipitous

Sunrise at Lake Powell. Gunsight Butte, center, marks the approximate location of the Crossing of the Fathers, the rare ford on the Colorado River found by Dominguez and Escalante 212 years ago. Says Jerry Jacka: “The weather-sculptured landforms and the great dome of Navajo Mountain on the horizon are little changed today from the wilderness landscape the missionaries viewed.”

Looking northeast toward Navajo Mountain from the vicinity of Navajo Canyon. After fording the Colorado, the friars and their party became confused, missed the trail, and spent several days retracing their steps. Finally crossing the steep defile in its southern reaches, they turned southeast toward the land of the Hopi Indians.

Text continued from page 29 2,000-foot cliffs that encircled their camp and confined them in a rimrock cul-de-sac for eight days, Father Escalante named the site San Benito de Salsipuedes (St. Benedict of Get-Out-If-You-Can). After an abortive attempt to cross the river on a crude raft, the resourceful Spaniards found a slope three miles up the Paria River where their animals could struggle up an improvised switchback trail along "perilous ledges of rock" to a notch the National Park Service identifies on its maps as Dominguez Pass. After climbing out of their slickrock "prison," they camped on the banks of Wahweap Creek where Escalante noted "little mesas and peaks of red earth which at first sight look like the ruins of a fortress."

The padres sent out scouting parties to locate the real ford. Standing on Romana Mesa, Jerry and I studied the superb vistas the Spaniards observed as they conducted their desperate quest for the crossing. The historic ford itself is now covered by the waters of Lake Powell, but the panorama of landforms they -and we-viewed included the graceful line of Kaiparowits Plateau, the oval shape of Navajo Mountain, and, to the south, the rocky outcrops of White Mesa. When Escalante's men found the ford four days later, on November 7, 1776, a 20foot ledge blocked their horses' descent to the river. By cutting steps in the sandstone with their adzes, the Spaniards created a stairway by which their mounts and packhorses could reach the water's edge. These steps in the wilderness marking the Crossing of the Fathers became one of the West's monumental landmarks before they were buried forever under the waters impounded by Glen Canyon Dam. I can personally testify that this crossing was a place to conjure up ghosts of our Spanish past, for on a congressional field trip in 1960 I was one of the last to have an opportunity to inspect the steps carved long ago by Escalante's soldiers.

At the ford, the explorers maneuvered to the widest part of the current where, Father Escalante observed, they "crossed with ease, the horses on which we rode not having to swim at all." When all of the packhorses had crossed to safety at the end of the day, the padres held a celebration of thanksgiving, "praising God our Lord and firing off a few muskets as a sign of the great joy we felt at having overcome so great a difficulty and which had cost us so much labor and delay."

There was a final stretch of difficult terrain through a "forest" of boulders and rock-strewn passages before the men of Spain crossed Navajo Creek and climbed onto Kaibito Plateau. The trail to the Hopi country took them up Kaibito Creek, past the battlements of White Mesa, and on to Oraibi where Father Escalante had visited 18 months earlier to inquire about trails to California. Now on familiar ground, the explorers bought food from their Hopihosts, then continued through a snowstorm on a five-day march to Escalante's home mission at Zuni Pueblo. After a three-week period of recuperation, the members of the expedition mounted their horses and rode to Acoma, Laguna, Isleta, Albuquerque-and on to the Villa of Santa Fe, there to report to the governor on the outcome of their great-circle tour of tierra incognita.

Escalante and Dominguez did not live to see their roadto-California dream fulfilled, but their ford was not forgotten. A half-century later, in 1829, a company of 60 traders from Santa Fe, led by Antonio Armijo, used the Crossing of the Fathers as a shortcut to establish a trade route over the Mojave Desert to the missions of southern California. The crossing later served pioneers entering Arizona from Utah. One leader of these newcomers was my great-grandfather, Jacob Hamblin. In 1858, on his first venture to cross the Colorado, Jacob was misled by a Paiute guide and repeated Escalante's mistake, following a long, roundabout route before arriving at the wading ford.

The Crossing of the Fathers was for horses, not wagons. For several decades after Spanish travel ended, its stair steps aided fordings by various Anglo, Ute, and Navajo horsemen-and by outlaws who sought haven in remote canyons of the region. The wilderness then reasserted its claim over the scene, and the steps remained as remote and silent sentinels of history until their surrender to Lake Powell in 1963.