Black Canyon: Highway into History

THE OLD BLACK CANYON HIGHWAY

The historic roadway began as a stage trail between Phoenix and Prescott and gradually changed character when the automobile emerged as king of the road Among the mines were the Lucky Treasure, the Tip Top, the Brooklyn, and the Blue Bell. The creeks and rivers came by names like Arrastra and Big Bug, Black Canyon, and Agua Fria. The towns and stage stops were named New River, Cañon, Bumblebee, Cordes, Mayer, Humboldt, and Dewey. Those who came and settled were men and women, often immigrants, searching America for a new way of life, looking for a future or a fortune, or both. They were miners, shopkeepers, cattlemen, sheepmen, and lawmen.

Beginning in the 1860s, the road that linked them together, from the desert of Phoenix to the mile-high country of Prescott 140 miles to the northwest, would variously be known as the Woolsey Trail, Black Canyon Road, Black Canyon Highway, or simply State Route 69.

Crowned by a steep, winding, switchbacking climb up Antelope Hill between Bumblebee and Cordes, twisting its way upward from the spindly green saguaros of the desert to the rugged outcrops of the Bradshaw Mountains, the Black Canyon Highway was unpredictable, unforgiving, and often treacherous; perhaps best described with a begrudging tribute by Arizona Republic columnist James Cook as "unpaved and unloved."

Among those who used the northward trail to initiate a freight trade between

OLD BLACK CANYON HIGHWAY

Phoenix and Fort Whipple at Prescott were legendary Arizona pioneers King Woolsey, an Alabaman who settled near Dewey, and John "Jack" Swilling, who was among the first to propose a series of irrigation canals along the Salt River at what is now Phoenix (also a Southerner, Swilling is reported to have offered to name the new town "Stonewall"). Charles H. Orme, Jr., 76, a member of a pioneer Arizona family who spent much of his life traveling from the ranch and school that bears his family's name to Phoenix or Prescott on the Black Canyon, recalls his grandfather's days as a freighter on the original Woolsey Trail. John P. Orme was a Maryland-born civil engineer who caught malaria helping build the railroads in Louisiana and southeast Texas. Broke and in ill-health, he found his way in 1873 to the dry climate of Arizona, where he took a job as a mule skinner on the freight routes between Phoenix, Yuma, and Tucson. "My grandfather was quite a poker player," Charlie Orme remembers, "and one night he won $1,800 and bought all his employer's wagons and mules. He went into "A whole flight of Apache arrows came in. No one was hurt, but after that my grandfather figured he had better things to do than travel through Apache territory.' business for himself hauling grain between Phoenix and Fort Whipple by Prescott. "It took him two weeks for a round-trip. He normally had four wagons with eight mules to a wagon. When he got to those steep places in the road, he had to put all 32 mules on one wagon." John Orme's freighting career ended one day when, despite a military escort, "a whole flight of Apache arrows came in. No one was hurt, but after that my grandfather figured he had better things to do than travel through Apache territory." John Orme turned in his mules and began buying land in Phoenix. He was a member of the State Constitutional Convention, traveled to Washington to convince Theodore Roosevelt to build the dam that now bears the President's name, and served as a state legislator for 20 years. While it took freighters and their mules a week, at 20 miles a day, to travel the Black Canyon Road from Prescott to Phoenix, stages made the trip in a day and a half. The Arizona Stage Company left left Prescott for Phoenix every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (presumably return travel was Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday). Travelers departed Prescott at 8 A.M., arriving in Phoenix by noon the following day. Stops along the way included Four Mile Hill outside Prescott, Dewey, Mayer, Cordes, Bumblebee, and a crossing of the Agua Fria River at Cañon. Then it was on to New River and the hospitality of Lord Darrel Duppa, an English aristocrat who came west in the 1860s and is believed to have given Phoenix its name (for the legendary bird phoenix because the new city rose from the ashes of the ancient Hohokam civilization that once dwelled in the Salt River Valley). The last leg of the trip took riders into Phoenix. Stages coming north sometimes met those going south on the steep curves be-yond Cañon and sounded out one another's presence with long tin horns of the type used by New England fishermen in fog.

OLD BLACK CANYON HIGHWAY

Throughout the nearly four decades stages traveled the Black Canyon, there were numerous holdups but only two killings at the hands of bandits. The largest haul in a robbery was made by a highway-man named Dick Fellows, who, foiled by Wells Fargo detectives in an attempt to rob a stage of a $42,000 payroll, tried again the next day, making off with $17,000.

By 1917 the stagecoaches were making their final runs. For four years, and steadily growing in numbers, something new had been on the road to challenge the Black Canyon: the automobile.

"I still have the emblem off my dad's first car," Henry Cordes remembers. "It was a 1912 Studebaker."

His grandfather, John Henry Cordes, a German immigrant by way of New York and San Francisco, was lured to Arizona by a silver strike. He established the store and the town that would bear his name at thetop of Antelope Hill. The year was 1883. Henry Cordes, now 85, lives in the house that was the family's original store until a new one was built in 1910. Henry's father ran the store until 1937, when Henry, one of six children, took over and operated the business until it closed in 1972.

The Cordes store began to sell gasoline from a one-gallon pump in 1915. "We sold everything," Cordes says. "Just as sure as someone would come along with a flat tire or wanted gasoline and their oil checked and maybe their battery filled up, the next customer would want a round steak. My hands were washed to death."

Up the Black Canyon in Mayer, enterprising Joseph Mayer had established a stage stop and a saloon a year before the Cordes store opened for business. In time Mayer would become a stop on the branch line of the Santa Fe Railroad, and its citizens would soon prefer taking the train to Prescott rather than driving the Black Canyon. Nevertheless Emil Muller and his wife, Audrey, went into the business of selling gasoline, hardware goods, and candy to travelers on the Black Canyon. Muller, now in his 90s, a Swiss immigrant who came to Mayer in 1920, was often called to help motorists with flat tires. "In those days there was no spares," he recalls. "And if you had a tire that went 3,000 to 4,000 miles, you were lucky."

And, like Henry Cordes, he remembers the Model T Fords that could make it up Antelope Hill only by driving it backward. "Those days the gas tank was under your seat," Muller explains, "and if the hill was too steep, the vacuum couldn't push gas into the engine. You had to back up so the gas tank was higher than the hill."

Although the Black Canyon was improved in 1915 for the easier passage of automobiles, former U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater recalls his first trip up the road "took about 17 hours, and we had about 13 flat tires."

Like Joseph Mayer and the pioneering Cordes family, other merchants in other towns began catering to the automobile traveler as the mining, cattle, and sheep industries continued to prosper. Eight miles north of Mayer, the community of Humboldt None other than newspaper publisher Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. wrote, 'The dirt roads in Arizona today are without a doubt the best dirt highways in the United States.' (named for famed German naturalist Baron von Humboldt) was headquarters for the Ajo and Consolidated mines and boasted a population of 900. Nearby Dewey became the home of one of Arizona's leading ranching operations in 1917 when Dan Fain established his ML cattle ranch in Lonesome Valley. The Fain family had been in Arizona since the Civil War, when Dan Fain's father had traveled from Kentucky in a covered wagon.

(ABOVE) Henry Cordes stands proudly with his dog, Tinker, in front of the family homestead, which, situated about halfway between Phoenix and Prescott, was for more than a century the most important crossroad for travelers along the Old Black Canyon Road. JAY DUSARD (RIGHT) Along Big Bug Creek near Mayer, in June 1911, an auto traveler from Prescott seems to be pondering that a drive along the Black Canyon Road is a lot harder than just hitching horses to a wagon or taking the train.

OLD BLACK CANYON HIGHWAY

Upward of 300,000 sheep would make the journey to summer grazing up the Black Canyon Peace between cattlemen and sheepmen was fragile at best.

And down in the desert country, Bumblebee "moved three times," according to Henry Cordes, in order to keep commercially viable with changes in the road.

Farther south between Cañon and New River, 32-year-old Ben Warner gave up his job with the power company in 1922 and set up a tent store at Rock Springs. He soon built a permanent store, hotel, and a restaurant which continued to do a thriving business even after his death in 1957.

By 1925 a new stage line, this one using five-passenger Hudson automobiles to carry passengers on the Black Canyon, was in business. None other than newspaper publisher Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. wrote, "The dirt roads in Arizona today are without a doubt the best dirt highways in the United States." Even so, Cordes remembers, "It still took four hours to reach Phoenix in the late 1920s."

Still, with an absence of bridges, crossing the myriad creeks and washes, most particularly the Agua Fria River at Cañon, was often at the discretion of Mother Nature. When the river flooded, which was typical during summer rains, crossing it was a dangerous gamble.

"Old Jeff Martin kept a team out by the river when it run," Henry Cordes recalls. "It was a dollar if you hooked on before you got stuck and three dollars if he had to walk out there and hook on to you after you got stuck." Nevertheless throughout the years, the Agua Fria took its toll of automobiles swept away in its raging floodwaters as their drivers, who managed to make it to safe ground, looked on helplessly. It was to the edge of the Agua Fria at Cañon that D.J. Albins, a Serbian immigrant and a new U.S. citizen, arrived one night in 1930 and camped under a tree. Albins, suf-fering from the effects of bronchitis and other ailments, had come west for his health. "I feel better," he told his family the next day. "We'll stay here one more day." Three days went by, and Albins concluded, "We stay here." The tree they camped under is still there and so is the Albins family. "Someday this is going to be a town," D.J. Albins told his family. "Someday that road is a north-south highway."

From his appointment as a Yavapai County deputy sheriff in 1921 until his retirement in 1963, enforcing the law up and down the Black Canyon from Humboldt south to New River was the responsibility of Clyde Allen McDonald of Mayer.

"Clyde started out on a horse and ended up in a helicopter," says his widow, Irene McDonald, whose lawman father, Thomas Thompson, came to Arizona at the age of two in 1867. Indeed Clyde McDonald's first assignment was to keep the peace between the sheepmen and cattlemen near Cañon. Every spring upward of 300,000 sheep would make the journey to summer grazing up the Black Canyon, returning in The Old Black Canyon Highway faded unnoticed into history.fall. Peace between cattlemen and sheep-men was fragile at best. McDonald would make the ride in two days, changing horses in Bumblebee.

(OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW) Irene McDonald, whose grandparents built Palace Station, and her oldest son, Bruce McDonald, who was foreman of the Orme Ranch for more than 40 years, have seen their hometown of Mayer transformed from a bustling community center for mines and ranches to a quiet village caught between the Old Black Canyon Road and the new four-lane State Route 69. BOTH BY JAY DUSARD (BELOW) In 1946, just outside of what's now Black Canyon City, the Old Black Canyon Road is juxtaposed with the new highway being carved out of the sheer cliffs of Black Mesa, transforming the local route into a commerical lifeline connecting the state's largest urban area with interstates 10 and 40. NORMAN G. WALLACE An Oklahoman whose family roots go back to the Texas Rangers, McDonald married Irene in 1921. They raised six children in the house her father built in 1902. She still lives there. "We slept on the sleeping porch," she says, "so Clyde could always hear what was going on in town."

"My dad knew everybody," says Bruce McDonald, the oldest of four surviving McDonald children. "That was his business." Between 1963, when his father retired, and his death in 1966, the influx of people into the area was such that "my dad no longer could have the personal touch with people he'd prided himself on for so long."

Plans to bring people and tourism to Prescott from Phoenix on a paved highway had been in the lobbying and planning stages since 1940. It was to be a highway straight through to Flagstaff, with a "new" Highway 69 cutoff at what was to be called Cordes Junction, and pavement all the way to Prescott. By 1946 the first 10 miles north from Phoenix were completed. Ten years later, in 1956, a headline in The Phoenix Gazette reported: "Black Canyon Highway is Boon to Caterers of Motoring Public."

"The Black Canyon Highway is North Main Street for Arizona's Capital City," the story said. "State Route 69 will be finished within two weeks, providing easy traveling between the desert and the high timberlands of Prescott."

The dirt road called the Black Canyon Highway became "The Old Black Canyon Highway" and faded unnoticed into history.

Emil and Audrey Muller turned down a chance to relocate near the new highway. Their Texaco Station and store closed in 1972, the same year Henry Cordes closed his store in old Cordes. The Mullers continue living in Mayer. They hold many good memories of their town, including those of the Japanese families once interned outside Mayer, who often came to visit them after the war.

By the time he retired in 1963, Clyde McDonald was having to get used to the frequent, often tragic, traffic accidents that occurred on the pavement.

Charles Orme's school had its first high school graduating class in 1952 and has gone on to become one of the nation's leading college preparatory boarding schools.

Lord Darrel Duppa's stage stop at New River remains just off the interstate, operating these days as a store and cafe.

Farther up the interstate, Ben Warner's legacy, the Rock Springs Cafe, invites travelers to "Taste the Best in the West."

D.J. Albins' prophesy of a town and the north-south highway are a reality. It's Black Canyon City now. After surviving the Depression with Mrs. Albins teaching school in Bumblebee and the Albins' sons selling home-grown vegetables, the family prospered in real estate in their adopted town. So much so, that D.J. donated the land for the civic center, medical building, and community church. Since his passing, his son Philip and daughter-in-law Jeane have continued the generosity and have donated the land for the Lutheran church, the library, junior high school, and to Yavapai county for a sheriff's office and gravel pit.

"Immigrants," says Philip, "realized opportunity from daylight to dark."

While a new breed of gold hunters now combs through the hills around Bumblebee, Henry Cordes still lives at the top of Antelope Hill. Not long ago, the United States government honored him with the Thomas Jefferson Award for his years of keeping daily weather records, something Henry has done every day since 1937 and his family since 1925.

In Humboldt, just down a dirt stretch of the Old Black Canyon Highway where travelers can see King Woolsey's original home from the road, Millie Coulter hears the southbound traffic begin every weekday morning at 4:30 as she begins the day at her family's deli and candy store. "People from Prescott Valley on their way to work in Phoenix," she says.

Prescott Valley was once on the old Black Canyon. In those days it was called Jackass Flats. But that was in another time.

The old roadway is now entering another era. Construction has begun to complete the widening of State Route 69 between Cordes Junction and Dewey, which will make it four lanes all the way from Phoenix to Prescott.