A Last Ride on the Peavine

HEAR THE RATTLE AND THE CLATTER ABOARD THE OLD PEAVINE RAILROAD

Mary Kukal worried about rehanging the old photograph for fear vibrations from a passing train would shake it off the wall. The photo is displayed inside the train depot that sits a few hundred yards from the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad in the town of Skull Valley. Pinned to the lapel of Mary's blue pantsuit jacket was a button that read "I Skull Valley." She and fellow members of the Skull Valley Historical Society run the depot as a museum dedicated to the legacy of railroading in this tiny burg 18 miles southwest of Prescott. The cheery red and white building is not the original Skull Valley depot. Mary says she's not sure exactly what happened to the first one. It may have been torn down or parts moved elsewhere. This one, brought from Cherry Creek in 1926, served as the Skull Valley station until the 1960s.

Since retirement, the depot has been refurbished to house railroad memorabilia. Along with the old photos, there's a wooden bench where passengers waited for trains, a black chalkboard showing the time schedule, and a Sears Roebuck hand-crank telephone. On the wall hang hoops on which the station agent would extend messages to the passing train so it wouldn't have to stop.

For Skull Valley and towns all along the route, the Santa Fe, Prescott, and Phoenix Railroad (SFP&P) was a lifeline of civilization and commerce for nearly 60 years. People, cattle, honey, barley, and minerals moved out on the railroad, while food, equipment, and newcomers moved in. Early on it earned the nickname Peavine Line when someone observed that the tracks wound like a vine among the canyons and hills.

The Peavine was built to serve the mines of Congress, south of Skull Valley. The story of the mine and the railroad involved the major power brokers of Arizona Territory: Thomas Bullock, head of a group of capitalists called the New York Syndicate, and Frank Murphy, Prescott businessman and co-owner of the Congress Mine with St. Louis millionaire "Diamond Joe" Reynolds.

In 1886 Bullock built his Prescott & Arizona Central Railway from Seligman south into Prescott. But poor planning, hasty construction, and deficient operations sent the line into a financial tailspin.

Murphy tried to buy out Bullock's line, but he refused to sell. So Murphy and Reynolds proceeded with plans for another spur off the mainline Atlantic & Pacific (soon to be the Santa Fe, now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe) from Ash Fork to Congress and into Phoenix. It would be called the Santa Fe, Prescott, and Phoenix Railroad.

By late spring 1892, 600 men were grading south from Ash Fork; others had started north from Phoenix. Men, mules, horses, plows, scrapers, black powder, and diamond drills run by steam built the SFP&P. Each mile consumed $40,000 and 2,000 wooden crossties. More than 300 soaring trestles of Oregon pine and California redwood bridged defiles such as Limestone Canyon south of Ash Fork. Standard gauge56-pound iron rail was shipped in from mills in Pueblo, Colorado. Following an extraordinary expenditure of effort and blasting powder in Granite Dells, a jubilant Prescott greeted the arrival of the Peavine in April, 1893. In 1894 workers pushed the line on to Congress. Desert heat took a toll on men and mules, but at last, in March, 1895, the line was joined to Phoenix. The Peavine was officially open.

The original route of the SFP&P ran 197 miles from Ash Fork, south through Cedar Glade (now Drake), into Prescott and over Iron Springs, down through Skull Valley, Kirkland, Hillside, Martinez (now Congress Junction), Wickenburg, to Phoenix. It passes through a remote and stunning piece of Arizona - juniper forests and rugged basalt canyons in the northern stretch, the shrub-by chaparral and golden granite of central Arizona, and saguaro cactus and creosote bush in the southern reach.

Through the years, the SFP&P has changed. No longer does steam billow from the engine's bonnet. Sharp curves like the oxbow of a river have been abandoned. Prescott has been bypassed to the west. And passengers haven't boarded for nearly 30 years. But the Santa Fe still runs trains, four to six a day, now hauling coal, copper, cars, packages, and hazardous materials.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 10 AND 11) It hasn't carried passengers for years, but for decades after it was built in the early 1890s, the Santa Fe, Phoenix and Prescott Railroad was a lifeline for those who lived along its route between Ash Fork and Phoenix.

(TOP) Retired in the 1960s, the old - but not original - Skull Valley depot now greets visitors as a railroad museum.

Michael Collier and I climbed into the nose of a red and yellow Santa Fe engine, Locomotive 950. Entering the bowels of this snorting, heaving behemoth was like entering the hold of a battleship. Attached were three other diesel-electric "units," as locomotives are known in railroad lingo, pulling a string of cars nearly three-quarters of a mile long and weighing 7 million pounds. We left the Santa Fe mainline at Williams Junction, switched crews at Ash Fork, then headed south on the Peavine. Six hours running time to Phoenix; speed, 15 to 50 miles an hour. Nearly every move was cleared through a dispatcher in faraway Chicago. But a "real" engineer still runs the controls of every train. Ours was Richard Prevo, skillfully easing the throttle forward then backward to adjust power and take up slack between the cars, blowing two longs, a short, and a long on the whistle at each crossing. When the train stopped, conductor Ray Ianni hopped down and muscled switches, beside the tracks. The view of the world checked couplings, and looked for from the cockpit of a locomoany smoke coming from tive is inspiring, a wide-angle, hot wheels. Ray was born looking-down-from-above and raised in Winslow, and vantage. his grandfather was a "crew As we passed each caller," who went door to landmark, I thought of the door calling the railroad people I had met along crews to report to work. the Peavine. People like South of Ash Fork, we rumMary Kukal's neighbor, bled through thick junipers. About 20 Hulda Christopherson. miles down the line, at Hell Canyon and Granddaughter of original Skull Valley Drake, the trees grew more sparse, the settlers, Hulda recalled how water was ground drier. Mingus Mountain presided piped down from her family's ranch on to our left, Granite Mountain rose ahead of Skull Valley Creek to the then steam-powus. Prickly poppy and penstemon bloomed ered train. Her mother took in boarders

and "At one time," said Hulda, "we knew all the agents and operators of the train."

Then there's Bob Curry, whose father, "Doc" Curry, staffed the Skull Valley station in the mid-1920s. Bob pointed to a photo of some youngsters seated on the front steps of the schoolhouse. "That's me," he said, smiling, along with the other firstthrough eighth-graders of the Skull Valley class of 1925.

And Tom Rigden, who's been cowboying on his family's ranch near Kirkland for most of his 80-plus years. As a boy, Tom kept a horse in a corral by the tracks. Arriving in Kirkland on the train, he'd hop on and ride home bareback. To flag down the train, they'd light a bundle of newspapers and wave it around. When the train whistled, they knew the engineer had seen the signal.

As we passed Date Creek, I thought about the Sunday afternoon I'd spent with Elly Loftin and the folks of the 24 Karat Gold Club. I met them at Elly's 150-acre ranch, where club members competed in gold-panning contests. The one who retrieved the five "salted" nuggets in the shortest time won. There's an art to it, as I soon discovered. "Shake, tip, and dip," Elly coached. But it wasn't as easy as she made it sound. It took me nearly two minutes to retrieve the nuggets, while the winner got hers in 35 seconds.

As we were leaving, Elly gave us another bit of advice where to see the best sunset on the granite-knobbed mountains. "You haven't seen a sunset until you've seen one here," she said. She was right. It was the most beautiful gold I'd ever cast eyes upon.

Down near Congress Junction, our train had to pull onto the siding until we heard that the Phoenix yard would be clear for us to unload. We took advantage of the wait by eating an early supper at El Tecolote. Not far away, perched on the hillside, are the remains of the original Congress Mine. Abundant gold ore, and the existence of the Peavine, brought a boom to Congress in the late 1800s. The town boasted 2,000 souls and was so famous that President McKinley rode the Peavine to visit the mine in 1901. By 1910, though, the gold had played out, and most of Congress transformed into a ghost town.

But hope springs eternal when gold is involved. Today Jim Sullivan staffs a skeleton crew at the Congress Mine. Jim is vice president of Republic Goldfields, a Canadian company that bought and reopened the mine in 1989. They were up and running for a while using a cyanide leaching process, Jim explained, but have gone on standby Until operations become more profitable. The morning we visited, Jim led us into one of the original shafts that slants down into the rocky hillside. With stick in hand, he batted at the ground to alert any snakes snoozing at the entrance. Inside, the low-ceilinged tunnel was cool and dark. Wooden timbers, splintered by the weight of settling earth, propped up the walls. In some places, miners had to lie on their stomachs to chip deeper into the vein. I couldn't help thinking of the headstones in the Pioneer Cemetery down the hill, where the hopes and dreams of so many hard-rock miners lie buried.

At Wickenburg the Peavine passes through a beautiful gorge along the Hassayampa River. As we rolled by, I noticed desert willows hung with thick white blossoms and then saw a fox darting across the streambed. Here, the Hassayampa threads aboveground for five miles, a Nature Conservancy preserve that's home to hawks, mountain lions, and big cottonwood trees. Preserve manager Val Avery, a woman of contagious energy and enthusiasm, had led us through the preserve one pleasant winter morning.

I recollected all these earlier acquaintances as the train moved south toward Phoenix. By late afternoon, the hot desert wind held the acrid smell of the diesel fumes. I had grown accustomed to the various pitches of the train's voice: sighing, snorting, whining, and chugging as it slowed down and sped up. We arrived in Phoenix just at sunset, passing trailer ranches, Sun City condos, and tall skinny palm trees. Slow miles. We waited while the piggybacks were unloaded in a huge asphalt wilderness on Glendale Avenue. The idling train ticked and creaked peacefully, as if glad to finally slow down.

A few hour's sleep, and we were back on board at 4:30 A.M. for the trip north on the Peavine, with softspoken, mustached Tim Frahm at the controls. I waved as we passed Skull Valley in midmorning. Maybe Mary Kukal saw me.