Hunters of Lost Trails

A raven flies overhead, making a faint whooshing sound, and a subtle breeze drifts through the filigreed fingers of the juniper trees near the boundary between the Kaibab and Prescott national forests. Otherwise all is silent: no cars, no airplanes, no voices. A gray lizard scurries, soundless, across a weathered piece of wood.

The pathfinder observes the familiar activity. He has been here many times before and knows the terrain as few men do. Yet there is something that eludes him. He is in search of an early-day freight trail, and a small section of it defies discovery.

Jim Byrkit, the pathfinder, takes a drink from his canteen, wipes the perspiration from his forehead, and considers his options. He knows that in the 1860s somewhere near here, probably within a few hundred yards, wagons bounced over the rocks in the ruts of a road, carrying passengers, freight, and supplies between Flagstaff and the Prescott-area settlements. And, he suspects, for centuries before that Indians used virtually the same route among the prickly pear, yucca, and piñon as they headed south toward Granite Dells.

So far, Byrkit, a 58-year-old professor of interdisciplinary studies at Northern Arizona University, has plotted 30 miles of what he labels the Overland Road through the Kaibab National Forest, marking it with line-of-sight cairns. But a one-mile stretch still stumps him.

"The old maps don't agree on this section here," he explains, scanning the rocky ground for a clue, such as a rusting 19th-century mule shoe, a faint depression in the landscape, a line of lichen-covered stones, a telltale scatter of centuries-old obsidian chips, or something unusual in the lay of the land. "This is rough terrain. I've walked up and down all the gullies and ridges across here, and it's clear to me there's no logical place at all for the road to go. But I know it passed through here

trail system. Look at the path here," he says, pointing to a deeply worn trail through the brittle gneiss. "This has seen intense use for 5,000 years, at least."

To illustrate dating techniques, Johnson finds a stone chipped into the shape of an ancient scraper. "See how dark the desert varnish has grown over the area where this rock was chipped? It takes about 5,000 years for the patinization process to turn it this color."

Walking dozens of miles along both sides of the Colorado River in his effort to document ancient trails, Johnson has found hundreds of similar artifacts, as well as trail shrines, prayer circles, dance circles, and more than a thousand ancient home sites called "house circles." He also has spent innumerable hours talking with local Indians about their myths and legends (see Arizona Highways, April 1989). "It was from the Indians that I learned the original purpose of these trails," he explains. "They led north to Spirit Mountain [in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area] - Avikwaame, the place of creation and the home of Mustamho, the creator. And that's what I find so exciting about working with these particular trails. They deal with the things that were important to the ancient people, that helped give them a sense of the present, past, and future and the meaning of life and death."

Much work remains for skilled pathfinders before a definitive picture of Arizona's early Indian trails emerges. But even so, in many cases researchers can speak far more authoritatively about those ancient trails than about the sites of more recent journeys: the travels of Spanish explorers, merchants, priests, and soldiers who rode through Arizona for nearly three centuries, beginning in the 1530s.

"In general, we know that early Spanish travelers followed the old Indian trails, except at points where the trails were impassable to horses," says Charles Polzer, Arizona State Museum curator of ethnohistory. "The problem is, we can't say for sure which trails. True, we have the historical record. But historical interpretation of the documents has completely outstripped any kind of archeological verification. The winds of people's theories have blown these trails all over the map."

Largely because of funding problems, virtually no archeological work has been done on Spanish trails to date. But in spite of such a significant handicap, many pathfinders continue to piece together what they can of the story of Spanish explorations and travels in Arizona.

Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, for instance, is only one of many pathfinders outside Arizona interested in the state's historic trails. He has studied numerous Arizona paths, including Coronado's trail, which he believes passed near his boyhood home in St. Johns (see Arizona Highways, April 1984 and July 1990).

Jim Byrkit, probably the best known pathfinder living in Arizona today, has studied the travels of Antonio de Espejo in 1583 and Marcos Farfán de los Godos in 1598, and has concluded that they and other Spanish travelers passed along a 1,000-year-old Indian route he calls the Palatkwapi Trail, which ran between the Hopi mesas and Jerome.

But few living pathfinders have worked more zealously than 81-year-old cartographer Robert Lenon of Patagonia, who has produced more than 10,000 historic and contemporary maps of Arizona. He has studied the 17thand 18th-century travels of Father Eusebio Francisco Kino so closely that he can boast, only half in jest, "I can pretty much say, Kino camped under yonder bush.

"One big problem for early scholars," observes Lenon, "was that they often didn't have very good maps, and even when they knew the countryside fairly well, occasionally they put those old exploring parties in places where no one would go."

Problems with names and name changes plague those who try to reconstruct the paths of more recent travelers — the Anglo pioneers, miners, soldiers, and adventurers from the eastern United States and Europe who began flocking to Arizona in the mid-1800s. When Byrkit was studying the old road between Flagstaff and Prescott, for instance, he discovered that the water holes now called Pomeroy Tanks aren't the same ones known by that name 120 years ago. And since 1860, Dow Spring, another important stop on the road, has been called Snively's Hole, Snyder's Spring, and Cañon Spring. In spite of such difficulties, Byrkit and a trio of other Flagstaff-area trailchasers have added considerably to our knowledge of the roads and trails of Anglo newcomers of the last century - and to the field of trails scholarship in general.

"One of the biggest challenges I've encountered," observes Byrkit, "is to get other scholars to take trail work seriously. The general attitude seems to be, 'You're not doing real research. You're just having fun." He laughs as he bends down to pile another rock on a cairn beneath a pine tree near the original Pomeroy Tanks. "Of course I'm having fun. But that's partly because this is a whole new way of looking at history. It's exciting to find a road you've heard about or read about and have always thought of in the abstract, and then make it concrete. And it's also excit-ing to be the first scholar in this century who has given a thought to a particular road or trail."

However, Byrkit cautions, sometimes people assume they have proven the site of an early path or road on the basis of far too little evidence. "It's like the emperor's new clothes - people just think the trail is there when it really isn't." In fact, this is part of what makes trails research a scholarly endeavor and not just a pastime for hobbyists. "You can't find a trail without doing your homework," says Byrkit.

Probably no Arizona pathfinder has done more homework on one single trail of the Anglo period than Flagstaff's Jack Smith, who has spent much of the past 15 years tracing the Beale Wagon Road. Built near the 35th parallel across Arizona in the late 1850s under the direction of Lt.Edward Fitzgerald Beale, the road was the first federally funded highway in Arizona. Much of its course followed earlier Indian trails, and it generally ran within 20 miles of modern-day U.S. Route 66 and Interstate Route 40. But neither the later highways nor the ancient trails mark the exact path of the Beale Road, and Smith, who in 1986 changed his legal name to Jack Beale Smith, has made it his life's work to plot the old route precisely. In one recent five-year span, Smith logged 115,000 miles in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, documenting and marking a road that stretched less than 400 miles across Arizona Territory.

Establishing the exact path of an old trail is an art as well as a science, says another Flagstaff-area pathfinder, Eldon Bowman.

He spent five years identifying and marking 135 miles of the General Crook Trail between Prescott and Fort Apache. "You have to learn to think like the people who made the trail in the first place," he says. So he tried to imagine himself among the soldiers who carved the road up and down hills and along the Mogollon Rim in the 1870s. "They were just kids," he says as we walk along the original rocky roadbed near Thirteen Mile Rock. "Most of them hadn't been in the West very long, and many of them hadn't even been in the U.S. very long. I figure they must have been afraid of getting lost because they blazed practically every tree in sight." They generally stuck to the high ground, Bowman learned, and they carved mile-markers on the trunks of huge trees and rocks.

The biggest challenge Bowman encountered as a pathfinder was "convincing people the blasted trail existed in the first place." That accomplished, his next concern was how to mark the trail "indestructibly" for future generations. On horseback, Bowman pounded line-of-sight aluminum V-markers 10 feet above the ground into trees along the trail. But already some of the marked trees have been logged in error, and would-be sharpshooters have used the markers for target practice. "I've seen as many as six high-caliber bullet holes through one V," he reports.

In spite of such frustrations, Arizona's pathfinders dream of finding more trails. Jim Byrkit hopes to establish the paths of the old road from Prescott to La Paz and the cluster of trails commonly called the Gila Trail. Both Jack Beale Smith and Eldon Bowman would like to work on Arizona's first toll road, the Hardy Toll Road, built in the 1860s to transport freight between Hardyville and Prescott.

What keeps confirmed pathfinders coming back for more? Partly, they say, it's the pleasure of spending long hours alone in the outdoors. Partly it's the joy of discovery, the satisfaction of solving a complex puzzle or doing an intricate piece of detective work. But more than anything, it's the excitement of bringing the past into the present, of making history come alive.

Andrew Wallace, a Northern Arizona University history professor who has spent most of his adult life studying the explorations of the Colorado Plateau and is particularly noted for his work on the expedition of Capt. Lorenzo Sitgreaves in 1851, knows that excitement. Standing in Fort Valley meadow near Leroux Spring north of Flagstaff, Wallace speaks enthusiastically about the party of 51 men who passed through here 139 years ago.

"They'd been searching for water for days. Sitgreaves had sent Juan de Dios and the other muleteers ahead and told them to fire a shot if they found anything." Sitgreaves was just thinking of abandoning the mules when, as he wrote in his diary, "a shot from one of the Mexicans on the flank inspired us with hope." Juan de Dios had discovered Leroux Spring, and the relieved explorers soon made camp.

Wallace gestures out across the grassy meadow. "Can't you just picture it? They Probably set up their big white canvas tents about here. And they must have watered all 120 of their mules over there, and turned the sheep out in the meadow to graze..

For a moment, while Wallace talks, the years disappear, and the ground on which we stand becomes a bridge to the past.

Selected Reading

To the Inland Empire: Coronado and Our Spanish Legacy, by Stewart L. Udall. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Available for $30.00 (plus $2.50 in the U.S. and $6.00 outside the U.S. for postage) through Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; telephone (602) 258-1000.

A Guide to the General Crook Trail, by Eldon Bowman. Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press and the Boy Scouts of America, 1978.

"The Palatkwapi Trail," by James W. Byrkit. Plateau, vol. 59, no. 44, pp. 1-32.

A Guide to the Beale Wagon Road through the Kaibab National Forest, by Jack Beale Smith. Flagstaff: Tales of the Beale Road Publishing Company, no date.

"Across Arizona to the Big Colorado: The Sitgreaves Expedition of 1851," by Andrew Wallace, Arizona & the West, Winter 1984, pp. 325-364.

Susan Hazen-Hammond and Eduardo Fuss, a writer-photographer team based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed the story on the Chavez Trail to Arizona Highways in January, 1990.