The Road Builders

YIELD The Road Builders

Eighty years ago, tourists eager to get a view of Roosevelt Dam construction had to jostle by stage over the bonejarring road we now call the Apache Trail. When ready to start down fearsome Fish Creek Hill, the driver would fire three rifle shots, signaling a teamster to come to the top with two mules. Hitched to the rear of the stage, the team backed downhill, restraining the vehicle from careening down the steep grade.

Arizona roads were only a little better by the 1920s. When Russell Byrd was driving one of the first tour buses over the new U.S. Route 66, his passengers got out and walked while he negotiated a steep curve near Oatman. "Sometimes," he later recalled, "I had to back my bus up that hill to get enough traction." Today we tool along Arizona's divided highways in comfort at 65 mph over the same routes our grandfathers so laboriously traversed. We take our highways and their builders for granted.

Undaunted by Arizona's rugged terrain, pioneering engineers and construction crews laid the foundations of a modern highway system.

Who were those men whose dreams and sweat built this marvel of a modern highway system? How did they work their miracles, stretching ribbons of asphalt or concrete across deserts and through forests, bridging canyons and scaling lofty mountains? Surely they have earned places of honor beside Arizona's other illustrious achievers: pioneers, statesmen, scholars, artists, builders. But we know them not.

Historians have acquainted us with a few of the earliest roadmakers: Philip St. George Cooke, whose Mormon Battalion in 1846 carved out the first wagon route across southern Arizona; Lorenzo Sitgreaves, whose 1851 path across northern Arizona later was followed by the Santa Fe Railroad; and George Crook, the famed Indian fighter who in the early 1870s laid out a scenic military road connecting central Arizona forts. But these were little more than trails. By 1885, when the famed "Thieving Thirteenth" Territorial Legislature convened at Prescott, our roads were still so atrocious the Tucson delegation took the train via Los Angeles and back to Ash Fork, continuing to Prescott by stagecoach through a snowstorm-a trek of 1,100 miles.

The beginnings of our modern highway system awaited the arrival of the automo-bile, in the years just before statehood was achieved in 1912.

At first, motoring on Arizona roads was only for the brave. "We usually blew out three or four tires just driving from Flagstaff to Winslow in 1909," early-day auto dealer Ed Babbitt often related. Few drivers ventured out without a toolbox and some knowledge of mechanics. Driving was a thrilling adventure in those days, with no real assurance that one would get back home at all.

Until statehood, and for some time thereafter, roadwork in Arizona was done by the individual counties. Our first state highway engineer (territorial engineer until 1912), Lamar Cobb, served chiefly as an adviser.

Oscar Lyon, Sr., used prison labor and primitive equipment to build some of the first drivable highways in eastern Arizona. Among these was the road between Superior and Globe. In 1946 his son, Oscar Jr., joined the highway department and rose through the ranks to become state highway engineer. This father-son team deserves the gratitude of those who take our highways so matter-of-factly today.

Shortly after World War I, the state highway department wisely hired a half-dozen locating engineers who had plotted the routes of early railroads through the Southwest and Mexico. Among them were Ray Lawrence and Percy Jones, pioneers in the routing of famed U.S. 66, and R.E. (Pop) Allison, who located much of the Phoenix-to-Yuma highway route over some of the most desolate land in America.

But the most celebrated of all the early locating engineers was C. C. (Daddy) Small. Born on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1874, Small came west and spent his early life finding feasible railroad routes in Texas and southern Arizona as well as Mexico and South America. In 1919 he was appointed chief locating engineer by the Arizona Highway Department, and served during the era when most of the state's major highway routes were laid out.

"Mr. Small was a man of commanding personality, but a kind person and a visionary one," declares H. H. Brown of Phoenix, still vigorous at the age of 90. Brown was hired by Small in 1922 and served the highway department as an engineer for 46 years. "My only regret is that Mr. Small died in 1932 and didn't get to see all his dreams of a great highway system come true."

In recognition of Small's enormous contribution to the development of Arizona, a bronze plaque honoring him as "Father of Arizona's Highways" was dedicated in 1933 at Lookout Point on Yarnell Hill, between Wickenburg and Prescott.

It's still there, although now pocked with bullet holes.

One's first thought upon driving through some of the state's seemingly impassable mountain areas, canyons, or desert might well be, "How did they possibly find a way to put a highway through here?" The intrepid men who worked those wonders were romantic figures with high boots, khaki pants, pith helmets, and surveying transits, who camped out for weeks and learned to know the terrain like the backs of their well-tanned hands.

Jim Oxley, now an assistant state engineer, knew some of them. "Today's locators have aerial photos, radar, helicopters, and computerized equipment," says Oxley. "Sixty years ago, they went into the field with little but a contour map and intuition." Several considerations went into their routing decisions, a major one of which was grade limitations. Those 10 and 12 percent grades of earlier roads so steep that bus passengers had to get out and walk were all but taboo by 1930. By then 6 percent was about as steep as a new roadbed was allowed to go. (A grade's "percentage" is the percent of rise in elevation over a measured stretch.) Curvature was another. Too tight a mountain curve could cause accidents and certainly could send timid souls into hysterics. Economy was still another. Anybody can route a highway through a mountain and over a canyon if he has unlimited money to spend. Obviously the early road builders did not. Instead, they followed contours and went around major barriers, minimizing the need for blasting and filling.

Whenever feasible, they used construction materials available in the area gravel from subterranean beds in one location, red cinders in another.

Old-fashioned power politics played a major role in locating Arizona's early roads. In the days when counties were in charge of road-building, mining and cattle inter-ests used their economic power to get roads routed to or near their diggings and ranches.

Former State Highway Engineer Bill Willey says that influential Phoenicians with summer homes at Iron Springs, near Prescott, were able to speed the building of the road up Yarnell Hill. Not surprisingly, legislative leaders had considerable clout; the late Senator Harold Giss of Yuma was credited with the building of a paved road, Route 95, between Yuma and Parker. According to contemporaries, John Jacobs, a politically potent vegetable grower, got the Black Canyon Freeway curved west from 25th to 27th Avenue to avoid bisect-ing his Deer Valley farm. Even more important, Jacobs talked the highway department into placing interchanges a mile apart for 17 miles along the Black Canyon Freeway, giving great impetus to northwest Phoenix development.

And then there was the legendary infighting among the highway commissioners. The Arizona Highway Commission was created in 1927 with five members representing geographic districts of the state. Competition for appointments to that board was fierce. With big money to spend, jobs to dispense, and the power to influence the routing of highways, a commissioner was a big man, indeed.

Sometimes a highway commissioner got a highway started in his district only to lose his seat and find that construction was soon halted on the project. That resulted in a highway leading nowhere.

Such a road, sponsored by Commissioner Stan Coon in 1962, is the abortive Coronado Trail relocation which now goes three miles north of Clifton — and ends out there. Commissioner Pete Wilharm's unsuccessful bid to build a highway from Benson to San Manuel is a similar case.

Getting a road was the first step; paving it was the second. "Everybody in the mid-1920s wanted to see paving on all of our state highways," recalls Brown. "Aside from some narrow concrete roads connecting towns in the Salt River Valley, almost the only paving at that time was on certain streets in the bigger communities. Full-fledged paving was either concrete or asphalt, costing $30,000 to $50,000 a mile. It would have taken 150 years to come up with enough money to pave the state system at those prices, so we had to find an alternative."

Finding it they did: a technique of laying gravel on a roadbed, penetrating it with oil, and applying a seal coat. For a fraction of the cost of concrete, roads were effectively capped with these surfaces, and some are still in use. This method was a precursor to that summertime bane of Arizona drivers: chip-sealing.

Percy Jones, one of the early highway engineers, loved to relate the hardships encountered in building a stretch of U.S. 66, the first highway to cross Arizona, in 1923. The men braved the northern Arizona chill between Winona and Winslow, living and eating in tents until they found a long-vacant stone barn on a Babbitt ranch in the area. Once they had evicted the rattlesnakes and shoveled out the manure, they elatedly used the barn as their mess hall.

On the spectacular Mule Pass road northwest of Bisbee and on many other mountain highways, horses and mules provided the only motive power until the early 1920s. They dragged such equipment as "fresnos" and "Mormon scrapers" to level the roadbed after the dynamiters had blasted away the solid rock.

Blasting was the most dangerous of the operations. "Powder monkeys," often fresh from the mines, drilled five-foot-deep holes through rock with hand-held drills and hammers to plant their explosives. When explosions came prematurely, as they sometimes did, bodies were blown to kingdom come. Because of their dangerous and romantic trade, the drillers and dynamiters considered themselves an elite corps and usually ate together in the mess hall. The lower caste teamsters, muckers, and earth movers were excluded from their company.

Women waited for their powdermen to return home as anxiously as did whalers' wives in the era of the great sailing ships.

A blaster named Lyons was killed in an explosion near Superior more than a half-century ago. Bob Jones, later governor of Arizona, learned of the tragedy in his Superior drugstore not long before Mrs. Oscar Lyon, Sr., came in. "Have you heard who was killed in that blast?" she asked. Jones, who mistakenly thought the victim was her husband, could not bring himself to tell her, but retired in confusion to the back of the store.

Blowing sands obliterated many of the early desert roads, necessitating such heroic measures as the famed wooden plank road near Yuma. But no caprice of nature was more puzzling than the one encountered on the Virgin River Gorge project (Interstate 15) in the northwest corner of Arizona, one of the most challenging highway jobs ever attempted. One afternoon in 1964, workmen drove a 50foot pile down to what they thought was bedrock. Next morning, they returned to find the huge pile had miraculously disappeared-probably into subterranean quicksand.

The Virgin River job chalked up another distinction: the first Arizona highway project to lose a helicopter, which crashed while transporting surveyors to a remote perch. Mercifully, none of the passengers was killed.

Everybody who has driven through Oak Creek Canyon has experienced the hairpin switchback ride down the almost vertical north end of the canyon. From the top, you can see 13 distinct sections of the highway as it twists and plunges down some 1,500 feet in less than four miles. A narrow Forest Service road in the early 1920s, it was improved and paved over a period of 15 years by the U.S. Bureau of Roads. Now, as U.S. Route 89A, it is one of the most spectacular highways in Arizona.

From the beginning, our highway engineers have been working to devise ways to make motoring safer and more enjoyable. Brown recalls that, in 1927, the only highway markers along U.S. 66 were some mileage signs that had been erected by the Southern California Automobile Club. So he put up signs showing speed limits, road conditions, and other useful information.

Willey, who started working for the highway department in 1933 and became state highway engineer in 1955, added such innovations as passing lanes and runaway truck ramps on mountain highways, road shoulder stripes for added safety, and numbered mileposts to ensure exact reporting of trouble.

Paying for our highways has never been easy. The First Territorial Legislature in 1864 provided for the building of toll roads, and several were built. The first property tax for highways, 5 cents per $100 valuation, was imposed in 1909. In 1913 Arizona started licensing vehicles-from $5 to $15, depending on value. Finally, in 1921, the legislature reluctantly voted the first gasoline tax-1 cent a gallon. It has been rising ever since.

Engineers agree that the basic Arizona highway system is pretty well in place, with only a few new routes on drawing boards. Most future work will be in improving that system.

The pioneering era is over, and the last of the grand old men of that era will soon pass from our midst. But the memory of their achievements should never die.