A Journey on the Gila

SEARCHING FOR YESTERDAY ON A Haunted River

Clinging grimly to the gunnel of our 18-foot canoe, I pulled the craft through a barrier of tamarisk branch-es angled like spiked breastworks defend-ing a medieval fortress. At the back of the unwieldy aluminum craft, Gil Shaw grunt-ed and shoved, forcing the loaded canoe forward another two feet across the cob-bles armoring the shore of the Gila River just below Painted Rock Dam. At the water's edge, bracing myself, I continued pulling the canoe through the underbrush toward a ghost river, resur-rected for the moment by a record-break-ing season of rain. The Gila, which drains half of two states, once nourished ancient civilizations and provided a highway for history. But decades ago, the impassive dams, insatiable crops, and the arrogance of technology turned part of the ancient Gila into dry riverbed.

But in the spring of 1993, floods ram-paged down the Salt and Verde rivers and the Gila converted the normally dry Painted Rock Reservoir into a lake containing more than 2.5 million acre feet of water. The Army Corps of Engineers opened wide the out-flow gates, saving the dam but drowning thousands of acres of farmland between Gila Bend and Yuma. The Gila below Coolidge Dam rose with a liquid gurgle from its dusty tomb and flowed unhin-dered to the Colorado River for the rest of the year.

The revived river roused other ghosts for me. My great-grandfather and his brother rafted the Gila from Florence to Yuma in 1906, before the construction of the dams on it and the tributary Salt and Verde rivers so utterly changed the character of the great stream. They committed themselves to its waters to reach San Diego, where two other siblings waited. Katherine and Nettie, teen-age Basque sisters, had promised faithfully to marry Richard and Earle Jennings if they would forsake Florence and come to the golden California coast.

Sons of a mining engineer who had been killed by the flu when they were infants, the Jennings brothers worked the mines near Florence, specializing in fashioning the beams that shored up the dark, dank tunnels. All they had to do to seize a new life was cross some of the harshest history-laden spectacularly desolate desert in the world. So they constructed a raft, determined to ride the spring high water to Yuma.

I'd heard secondhand bits of family lore about that journey. They had hauled huge fish from the turbulent waters, become lost in side channels, discovered scattered remains of wagons and human bones, and happened upon a cliff covered with Indian petroglyphs on which they'd left their own imprint.

They finally reached Yuma, bought bicycles, and toiled on to California. There they married the sisters, built a tuna boat, fished far out to sea, fought wars, reared children, and set in motion the wonderfully complicated human chain of cause and effect that 87 years later brought their distant heir to the banks of that self-same river.

Now helpless to resist the lure of the completed circle, I hauled again at the gun-nel of a recalcitrant canoe, a middle-aged man afflicted by a flickering sense of adventure and a suburban estrangement from histories of hardship and loss.

Gil Shaw, who joined me in this search for the lost heart of a ghost river, sometimes rode inner tubes down the tumbles of the upper Gila, but had dreamed about trying his luck on the historic lower Gila. So he jumped at my invitation.

Haunted River

the upper Gila, but had dreamed about trying his luck on the historic lower Gila. So he jumped at my invitation.

Wading out into the water ahead of the canoe, I guided the bow through the grasping tamarisk branches, inundated by the rise of the river in the great embayment just below Painted Rock Dam. Gil hopped into the stern as the canoe settled into the water, and I clambered, perilously, into my spot in the bow. In a moment, we were through the screen of branches. Several hundred pelicans rose from a sandbar 100 yards to the south and wheeled in a great white-winged mass above our heads. Farther down the sandbar, a huge squadron of gulls regarded us with suspicion but held their ground. Our delight rebounded when a great burst of long-legged, long-necked egrets exploded from a stand of partly submerged tamarisks 100 yards north.

Beavers, otters, and a host of other animals made their living all along the Gila, as did a succession of ancient cultures, which left behind pottery, arrowheads, and strange geometric designs etched into the sunbronzed surface of rocks.

The first European explorers reported a thriving succession of groups living all along the Gila. Most were farming cultures, who greeted the early Spanish explorers amiably enough. Outriders for Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored the Gila, searching for the fabled and completely fictitious Seven Cities of Cibola. Spanish explorer-priests such as Father Francisco Hermengildo Garces and Father Eusebio Francisco Kino traveled often along the Gila, for the most part winning the admiration of the Indians.Many of the great names of Western history connect at some point with the Gila River. Early trappers quickly converted the Gila's beavers into hats; mountain men like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, Pauline Weaver, and John Walker passed repeatedly along its banks; the famous Mormon Battalion hacked out a wagon road; and Gen. Stephen Kearny's Army of the West lugged cannon along its inhospitable banks in an effort to conquer California during the MexicanAmerican War. The 49'ers rushed along its length toward the goldfields of California; the fabled Butterfield stage plied its banks until shut down by the Civil War, and assorted detachments of cavalry chased the elusive Apaches up and down its broad valley.

The bluff overlooking the Gila River perhaps 20 miles below Painted Rock Dam also provided the setting for one of the most famous massacres in Western history, when a party of Tonto Apaches killed Royse Oatman, his wife, and four of their children. They left Oatman's eldest son for dead (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 4 AND 5) Canoeists make their way along the Gila River as a new day dawns, not knowing what adventure lies around the next bend.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Author Peter Aleshire paddles near the eroded banks of the Gila on a trip of discovery that yields insight if not his final destination.

(TOP AND ABOVE) Birdlife abounds along the river. Here mud swallows make their home under a bridge that now spans the Gila, and a red-tailed hawk nests in a secluded spot.

Haunted River

and abducted his two young daughters, Olive, 16, and Mary Ann, 10. Mary Ann succumbed to the rigors of captivity, but Olive was recovered five years later, having been sold to a band of Mohaves. The sensational case made national headlines and provoked at least one tabloid-style book, fixing a lurid image of the Gila River in the nation's psyche.

This rich mixture of national and personal history overlay the somnambulant flow of the present-day river, as we paddled down the Gila on our own small journey of discovery. Sometimes we paddled at a brisk pace, savoring the sound of the bow sluicing through the dark waters. More often we ambled, gradually adjusting our internal chronometers to the river's pace.

I'd hoped that the floods and the months of reservoir releases would revive the cottonwoods and willows and bulrushes. It did, to a degree. But mostly the sandbars and shoreline had been claimed by millions of tamarisk seedlings, that bane of Southwestern waterways. Tamarisks grow like weeds, spring back after fires, thrive in soils rendered salty by upstream flood control, drive out competitors, and spread like chicken pox. They've mostly elbowed the native willows and cottonwoods aside, and laid long-term claim to the Gila.

We slept where sunset found us, generally covering 20 to 25 river miles daily. The floods had left the banks littered with uprooted tamarisks, providing plenty of grist for campfires. We developed a certain languid routine, beaching the canoe on a likely sand dune, spreading our gear, gathering up wood, then watching the last light fade from the river's surface. After wolfing down thin soup, hot dogs, or some other campfire concoction, we would wander down to the river and listen to it mumble secrets in the dark. In the blackness, we could imagine the robed Father Garces lying without a blanket, listening to the murmur of the river, and we could almost sense the Apaches somewhere just out of earshot, listening, like us, to the coyotes. But I didn't come face to face with any ghosts until we wandered off into the tamarisk forest.

It seemed a sensible enough notion at the time.

The river swirled around a bend and entered a narrow pass with rearing black volcanic cliffs on both sides. We decided to hike up to a mesa, hoping to get a glimpse of the river ahead. The base of the cliffs looked to be no more than a quarter-mile from the river's banks.

Dumb idea.

We immediately plunged into a tamarisk forest, not knowing that the line of trees along the bank extended all the way back to the bottom of the cliff.

Crawling on our hands and knees to get through snarls, we finally reached the base of the cliff, only to find ourselves blocked by a deep, swampy channel filled with fetid water. Turning, we struggled upstream through the undergrowth until we found a place to cross the channel.

"Look at that," Gil said, gesturing through a break in the trees.

I looked up the slope, tumbled with gigantic sun-bronzed boulders. Ancient hands had almost completely covered the surface of a huge boulder with an astonishing assemblage of petroglyphs. The rock contained several enormous hands, a wel-ter of abstract designs, a series of concen-tric circles, snakes, several seemingly human figures with elongated fingers and enormous sexual organs, several sheeplike animals whose horns curled in the wrong direction, a coyote, and a strange figure that looked like a gigantic ant with antlers. Some of the glyphs appeared relatively fresh, some had nearly faded back to the color of the unmarked rock, suggesting that they could be thousands of years old.

"Wonderful," whispered Gil.

I stared, open-mouthed, for some while before I noticed the initials.

On the uppermost section of the rock, someone had twice etched the initials K.J. To the side, appeared a date. It looked like 1916. But it might have been 1906.

We scrambled up the slope toward the rock, as I calculated the odds. K.J.? Katherine Jennings? A declaration of love, left alongside pleas to the spirits of the bighorns and a lost cosmology?

We reached the base of the rock panel, breathing heavily. Looking upslope, I could see that the rocks along the base of the cliff were covered with petroglyphs.

Then I sat in the sun on a rock and stared out across the Gila River where the Hoho-kam prayed to forgotten gods; Father Kino sought a treasure in souls; Kearny cursed his ponderous cannon; the Oatmans met their bleak fate; the Butterfield stage outran the Apaches; and two brothers gambled on the next bend of the river.

And all at once, the ghosts thronged about me, whispering my name softly in an unknown tongue.

Afterword: In the end, we duplicated only a small section of my ancestors' journey, partly because of the deadlines and de-mands of modern life, and partly because of the changes in the river.

We continued on down the river for several days after finding the rock art and the initials carved in stone. The river spreads out once it leaves that canyon, braiding into many small channels. We wandered back and forth across the flood-plain, trying to keep to the main chan-nel, but often grounding out and pulling our canoe down shallow inclines. We fi-nally elected to give up the struggle where the road from Dateland crosses the river. We were weary of the shallows - which also exasperated Kearny's column and everyone else who ever tried to move freight up the Gila.

Besides, our brides were waiting back home in Phoenix, not at the end of a long journey toward an unguessed future.