Antoine Leroux

For a week, the 50 explorers led by Capt. Lorenzo Sitgreaves had found so little water they couldn't fully quench their thirst. Their dehydrated mules refused to eat and brayed loudly in complaint.

Every day, the guide, tall robust Antoine Leroux, scouted ahead for a seep, a spring, a stream, or runoff puddled in a scooped out rock. Leroux had trapped on nearly every stream between the Gila River and the Great Salt Lake, but not even he knew every hill and arroyo in this vast land.

"Should Leroux return without news of water we will have to leave everything... and try it afoot," one explorer, artist Richard H. Kern, despaired in his journal on October 28, 1851, west of present-day Seligman, Arizona.

But the next day, near what is now Truxton, Leroux and his men spotted a string of cottonwoods. Beneath the trees, a spring-fed stream ran briefly aboveground. Men and mules were saved.

Nearly forgotten now, Antoine Leroux was, in his day, the second most famous guide in the Southwest, after Kit Carson. His range encompassed Utah, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Between 1846 and 1854, he led four major expeditions across Arizona, and he has long been credited with discovering the Indian ruins of the Verde Valley.

Our knowledge of Leroux comes mainly from the writings of the men he guided across Arizona and from a few paragraphs of his own. In glimpses and fragments, they reveal Leroux as a gentle multifaceted stoic. His life also reminds us how little human nature changes and how much our world today contrasts with that world of not so long ago. Born about 1801 in St. Louis, Missouri, which was still under French control, Leroux came from a French or French/Canadian family. The young Missourian moved to Taos, New Mexico, in the early 1820s, soon after what is now the United States Southwest passed from Spanish to Mexican rule. There he married into a prominent Spanish-colonial family and fathered nine children. As one of numerous trappers and mountain men, many of them French, who came and went in Taos, Leroux trapped, hunted, farmed, explored, and learned all he could about the Southwest's peoples and geography. Fluent in French, Spanish, and English, he also learned Ute.

We know just enough about Leroux's early adventures in Arizona to make us long to know more. He probably traveled to Arizona first in 1827, when he and other hunters traversed the Gila River. There he nearly died in a battle with Maricopa Indians, including one named Blanco.

By the early 1830s, he returned to southern Arizona, visiting the thriving hacienda at Calabasas, south of Tubac. The year 1837 found him working beaver streams in western Arizona, where he encountered another noted trapper, Bill Williams, at the mouth of a tributary of the Colorado River. Their meeting gave the Bill Williams River its name.

Leroux may have explored the Verde Valley in the 1830s, too. Once he reportedly rode from Albuquerque, New Mexico, through the Verde Valley to near present-day Phoenix in 14 days. But his real involvement in Arizona history began in 1846, after the U.S. obtained much of what is now the states of New Mexico and Arizona from Mexico. That winter Leroux helped guide Capt. Philip St. George Cooke and his Mormon Battalion across southern Arizona to California. On November 2, Cooke noted in his journal, "Of the guides sent me by the general, only Leroux joined me this afternoon; the others have come more or less drunk."

Moving ahead of the main party, Leroux scouted for water, campsites, and wagon routes. To communicate with Cooke, he sent back messengers, lighted signal fires, and attached notes to poles.

He also parleyed with Apache. Near Tucson, Leroux and his fellow guides ran into Apache still loyal to Mexico. To avoid confrontation, the longtime trapper contended he and his companions were just going about their business. The Apache let them go.

Leroux's next major Arizona expedition occurred in autumn 1851, when he led Capt. Lorenzo Sitgreaves and his party of 50 men and 137 mules across northcentral Arizona, searching for a wagon route between Zuni Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, and California.

Sitgreaves' orders were to follow the Zuni River to its confluence with the Colorado. But, as Leroux warned Sitgreaves, the Zuni River doesn't join the Colorado. Leroux suggested they follow the Little Colorado River awhile, then cut cross-country to the Colorado. Sitgreaves took his advice.

The rainy season lasted late that year. Streams swelled to torrents. South of what today is the Petrified Forest National Park, the men named an island in the Little Colorado after Leroux, not realizing it was a temporary landmark created by high water.

As they traveled, Leroux shared his knowledge of the countryside. Once, Sitgreaves reported, Leroux interpreted "Indian hieroglyphics" traced on the ground as a warning from the Indians to turn back. Other times he told the party's surgeon and naturalist, Dr. S.W. Woodhouse, about animals he had observed on previous trips. At Chevelon Creek, he explained that a French trapper named Chevelon had eaten poisonous wild parsnips there and died.

Between the Little Colorado and the lower Colorado, Leroux had to search constantly for water. One morning near the San Francisco Peaks, he awoke with chills and a fever but went out scouting anyway - the need for water was urgent.

Three weeks later, in the Cerbat Mountains, Leroux climbed a hill alone, hoping to sight the Colorado. As he recounted, "When I had got within five-and-twenty yards of the top, a whole shower of arrows came whistling about me." One struck behind his left ear, another near his right wrist. Dr. Woodhouse easily removed the arrowhead fragments from Leroux's skull, but the other arrowhead had embedded itself deep in the bone. Finally Woodhouse cut open the guide's wrist and used dental forceps to extract the stone. The wound became badly infected, causing Leroux "to suffer considerable pain," Woodhouse wrote. Leroux himself observed only, "I could not use my arm again during the whole journey, for wounds made with sharp stones are more difficult to heal than when made with iron."

With no accurate maps available, Leroux had to rely on memory, hearsay, and intuition to find both water and the right path. When those aids failed him, thirsty mules, unwashed bodies, and anxious travelers ensued. But when Sitgreaves' explorers finally viewed the Colorado, on November 5, artist Kern wrote enthusiastically that he had never doubted Leroux's knowledge or judgment, pointing out, "Leroux said positively we would find it where we did."

The Frontier Guide History Forgot

By the time they reached California, Leroux had become a minor celebrity. In San Diego, John Russell Bartlett, the commissioner in charge of surveying the new boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, hired Leroux to accompany him back across southern Arizona in the summer of 1852. Often traveling at night, Leroux guided wagons, servants, cooks, and mule drivers through the heat. Once they rode 45 miles in 13 hours. On July 12, near what is now Phoenix, the afternoon temperature reached 119° F. in the shade. The next day, they left camp at 4:00 P.M., hoping to reach Picacho Peak, 45 miles away. As night fell, a thunderstorm developed. Through lightning, rain, and violent wind, Leroux rode his milk-white mule across the desert. “His animal could be seen, and all followed him,” Bartlett wrote. They finally arrived at the base of Picacho at 11:00 Α.Μ.

By now Leroux knew this route well, and his travels with Bartlett triggered memories of past journeys. One day the old Maricopa chief, Blanco, rode into camp. We don't know what they said, but we do know that he and Leroux reminisced about their youthful battle 25 years before. Bartlett also tells us that the ruins at Casa Grande reminded Leroux of ruins he had seen along the Verde River. At Calabasas, Leroux found the bustling hacienda he had visited 20 years earlier abandoned and crumbling.

Early in 1853, the peripatetic guide traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify about the best railroad routes across the West. When Lt. Amiel W. Whipple received orders to explore along the 35th parallel for a railroad route from the Mississippi to the Pacific, he asked Leroux to guide him. Following a near-fatal attack of pleurisy, Leroux joined Whipple in Albuquerque that autumn. Wrote one of the expedition's chroniclers, German artist/naturalist Baldwin Möllhausen, “The confidence which he inspired - a confidence that had been earned by 30 years' toil in primeval wildernesses - made us all rejoice not a little at having secured his services.” Whipple showed his faith in Leroux by offering to pay the guide a whopping $2,400, six percent of the large expedition's entire budget. West of the Petrified Forest, Whipple named a tributary of the Little Colorado Leroux's Fork. It is now Leroux Wash.

Guiding Sitgreaves, Leroux had traveled north around the San Francisco Peaks. But Leroux feared Whipple's wagons would break their axles on that route, so he and others searched for a pass around the southern slopes. On December 17, they discovered their pass, through today's Flagstaff, and northwest of that a spring where Leroux had camped with Sitgreaves. Gratefully, Whipple named it Leroux Spring.

Soon the whole party moved westward through falling snow and deep drifts, camping just east of Flagstaff in time to celebrate Christmas Eve. An officer concocted a pail of eggnog and invited the men to bring their tin drinking mugs. With the campfire searing them on one side, and the 16° weather freezing them on the other, the men sang, joked, and drank.

Leroux sat and smoked his pipe. His face grew “considerably redder than the fire alone would have made it,” Möllhausen reported. Finally Leroux remarked, with a combination of irony and caution that seem to have been his lifelong traits, “What a splendid opportunity it would be for the Indians to surprise us tonight!” A month later, Indians did surprise them but not with an attack. On January 29, near the Big Sandy River, two Indians entered camp and announced they recognized Leroux as the As night fell, a thunderstorm developed. Through lightning, rain, and violent wind, Leroux rode his milk-white mule across the desert. 'His animal could be seen, and all followed him.' Antoine Leroux man they had ambushed and wounded two years before. The two Indians were unarmed, alone, surrounded; Leroux could easily have killed them or demanded that they die, in revenge. Instead he pretended they had confused him with someone else. According to Whipple, Leroux blushed and pulled his hat down over his scar, and “the subject was quickly changed.” In May, 1854, returning from California, Leroux again traveled along the Verde River. On May 21, he wrote in his journal, “We were struck by the beauty of some ruins, very likely those of some Indian town, and being in the centre of an open valley. The walls of the principal building, forming a long square, are in some places 20 feet high and three feet thick, and have in many places loopholes like those of a fortress.” Were these the walls of Tuzigoot? We may never know. Maps of the era purport to show Leroux's 1854 route; however, they conflict with both his journal and geography. Moreover, as Verde scholar Jim Byrkit explains, “There are so many ruins along the lower Verde, in the Verde Valley, and along the tributaries, that it's impossible to say where Leroux was.” We do know that 19th-century writers, unaware of earlier trips by Leroux and others along the Verde, reported that Leroux discovered the Verde Valley ruins in 1854, and his journal that May suggests that he did indeed travel far enough up the Verde to reach the Verde Valley. On May 22, still on the river, he wrote, “Our camp is on a ridge of a most delightful valley, having the river to our left, gigantic rocky mountains on both sides, and under centenary trees.” Drama and adventure filled Leroux's remaining years, but his 1854 journey along the Verde marked the end of his major explorations in Arizona. In June, 1861, at about 60 years of age, the complex multicultural guide died at his ranch near Taos, reportedly of “asthma complicated by spear wounds.” Reflecting his social prominence, he was buried in the nave of a church.

In 1965 an informal biography of Leroux appeared, Forbes Parkhill's Blazed Trail of Antoine Leroux (Westernlore Press; Los Angeles). However, Leroux still awaits a meticulous sleuth/biographer, someone who might, for instance, uncover the old pathfinder's lost journals, the only known portions of which are those fragments from May, 1854.After pondering his contemporaries' accounts, I see Antoine Leroux not just as a stoic, but also as a pragmatist and realist, a man who quietly accepted good fortune and bad: Indian attacks, fame, water holes missed and water holes found, the disruptions of summer storms and winter snows, and the many changes in his world.

And I like to remember Leroux as Möllhausen portrayed him, “a man grown grey in journeyings over mountains and deserts.” But most of all, I like to visualize this: when Leroux said goodbye to Whipple in the spring of 1854, the guide “shook hands with us all, with hearty good wishes, but like a man accustomed to find acquaintances on every steppe, to remain with them for awhile, sharing all hardships and privations like brothers, and then say good-bye forever.”

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Susan Hazen-Hammond is the author of a history book and numerous articles about Southwest bistory. She also wrote about Interstate Route 40 in this issue. Dallas, Texas-based Phil Boatwright especially enjoys illustrating stories about the frontier Southwest.