history

BY: Leo W. Banks

death in the desert THE TRAGEDY AT BEALE'S CROSSING

TEXT BY LEO W. BANKS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PHIL BOATWRIGHT

JOHN UDELL KNEW HE WAS MAKING A GRAVE MISTAKE. He said as much in his journal, writing that it was preposterous for a wagon train to attempt to travel 900 miles from Albuquerque to the Pacific Coast, across what is now northern Arizona, following a route discovered only the year before. The 63-year-old Missouri farmer was a veteran of three trips across the West in the 1850s, including the great California gold rush. He described the country through which the new route passed as "altogether savage and mountainous," marked only by "the trails of a few explorers." But Udell's suggestion of an alternate route was rebuffed by everyone else in the party, even his wife. So eager was Udell to spend his final years with his sons in California that he swallowed his objections, and the caravan rolled out of Albuquerque in June of 1858. The story of the wagon train's fate, told in abundant detail in Udell's journal, offers a real-life parable about the infallibility of a frontiersman's instinct. The dispute over which route to take was one of several quarrels between Udell and L.J. Rose, the imperious young German who organized and financed the expedition in

Iowa that spring. The two clashed again over hiring a guide to lead the 200 men, women, children, numerous heavy wagons, and 400 head of livestock.

Udell expected to have a say in the hiring, but was told by Rose to butt out. “Such an insulting expression from a German aristocrat caused the blood of a free-born American to rankle in my bosom,” Udell wrote.

Even without the bickering, the trip on the primitive wagon road surveyed by Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale in 1857 proved difficult. The party's first casualty came June 29, a drowning in the Rio Grande. Less than two weeks later, Udell himself fell from a cliff while hauling water back to camp.

But the work did not stop. Men muscled boulders out of the way of the wagons, climbed mountains to hunt game, and went to extreme lengths to obtain drinkable water. At one point, Udell wrote of having to roll two 10-gallon water kegs up a halfmile-long hill, one keg at a time.

Even those troubles seemed minor compared with what was coming. On August 20, in what is now northwestern Arizona, Mohave Indians started pestering the caravan, showing up in camp, begging for food, and scaring the women.

Their brazenness progressed with the days. They made off with a horse and mule, then boldly returned to the emigrant camp offering to return the stolen animals in exchange for blankets, tobacco, clothing, and beads.

Rose provided the materials, and fed 20 to 30 of the Mohaves a day, hoping to buy their cooperation. But the harassment worsened. From hiding places in the rocks and brush, the Indians fired arrows at the wagons, often wounding the stock. “We were constantly in imminent danger,” Udell wrote on August 23, after warriors stole several of Rose's work oxen. “If our teams should fail, we should be sure prey for the merciless Indians.” From the peak of the Black Mountains, west of Kingman, the party saw the Colorado River in the valley below. The water gleamed along with their hope that the worst was over. The wagons descended the western slopes, and they set camp 20 miles from the river. But the animals could go no farther without water.

Younger men from the wagon group headed by Gillum Bailey released their stock and drove them forward to the Colorado, while Udell and the older men stayed behind with the women and children.

Rose's wagons had gone to water earlier that day, intending also to cut logs for a crossing raft. Bailey's men figured on helping with that project while their animals replenished themselves.

The decision to split the party drew another protest from Udell. He reminded his fellows of admonitions heard in Albuquerque against diminishing their numbers in hostile land, but once again he was argued down.

Two nights later, one of Bailey's men returned from the river with news that Indians were stealing animals and driving them into the Colorado before the startled eyes of the wagon men.

Suddenly on the morning of August 30, the Mohaves seemed to vanish. The wagon train's guide saw their disappearance as a portent of evil. “We're going to have trouble with them Indians,” he warned. “And we'll have it before night.” As the guide feared, the Mohaves struck that very afternoon, rushing the camped wagons amid a shower of arrows. With their appearance came a chilling war whoop that 12-year-old Sally Fox, stepdaughter of wagon boss Alpha Brown, said she'd hear until her dying day.

The men ordered the women and children to hurry to the center wagon, which they vowed to protect to the last man. Little Sally took an arrow through the fleshy part of her belly while helping her mother rig a protective feather bed over their wagon's canvas top.

Sally's mother jumped to her daughter's side, pulling the arrow all the way through the wound. Then Sally's sister broke it in two.

The beleaguered defenders sounded a hearty cheer when wagon boss Brown came galloping toward camp from the river. "Here comes Captain!" the men shouted.

"Yes," responded Brown. "But I'm full of arrows." He looked like a pincushion. As soon as he alighted from his horse, Brown collapsed in the dirt, dead.

The Minneapolis Journal for March 28, 1915, published an account of the fight, based on the recollections of Ed Akey, who was at the river with Brown when the raid occurred. Akey jumped on his horse and beat it toward the wagons, revolver in hand. As he neared camp, Akey rounded a clump of brush and came face to face with an Indian poised with an arrow on the bow.

"The ready revolver sent its bullet into the [Indian's] breast," The Journal reported, "and as he fell backward his arrow went feebly into the air."

On an open strip of ground between that spot and the wagons, Akey saw Lee Griffin half-dazed and swaying on his feet. "What are you standing here for?" Akey asked.

Griffin extended his right arm. It had two arrows in it. "That's what for," he said. One arrow had gone almost through the arm just above the wrist, and the other had entered near the same place and ranged up almost to the elbow.

Akey gave Griffin a shove and hollered, "Run!" The two men, one mounted and the other on foot, fled with arrows whistling at their backs.

The fight raged for three hours. To save ammunition, the wagon men made every shot tell, firing only when an Indian exposed himself in the act of letting fly an arrow or darting across some open place.

The end came, according to The Journal, with the bravery of an unnamed Missouri preacher, known to be a good marksman. He was summoned by comrades to shoot the Mohave chief who had stepped boldly into the open, some 200 yards distant, and thumped his chest as though inviting the riflemen to take him down.

"My gun won't carry that far," the preacher protested. But near him was a man who had been hit in the eye by an arrow and blinded by flowing blood. "Here," the man said, "take my gun. You can hit him with it."

The heavy weapon wavered as the weary preacher rested it against a wagon and took aim. "At the crack of the rifle," reported The Journal, "the chief measured his length upon the ground."

The fight left eight of the wagon party dead and 13 wounded. The fate of the Bentner family led the list of horrors. They had departed the rear camp and gone ahead intending to join Rose's group. Udell begged them not to travel alone, but they ignored his pleas.

Along the way, the seven-member family was set upon by the Mohaves and massacred. Only one corpse was found. It was the eldest child, a girl about 12. She'd been stripped of her clothing, and the body was brutally mutilated. Udell and others in the rear group were dis-traught on learning of the disaster at Beale's Crossing. "Pen cannot describe the awful sensations that pervaded every breast on hearing this news," Udell wrote.

Most of the wagon train's cattle and oxen were driven off in the attack. With only Rose possessing a team sufficient to pull a wagon, the group decided to return to Albuquerque. Stores of supplies and several wagons were abandoned, and most of the party, including children and women car-rying infants, traveled on foot.

That night as the greatly diminished caravan retraced its steps, the Mohaves plun-dered the battle site, clanging pots and kettles and letting out triumphant yells that carried through the night. It terrified everyone.

Udell remarked that he expected the Mohaves to burn the bodies of his dead comrades at the river, and he envied them. "A heart like Pharaoh's would have been melted into sympathy to have beheld our condition," Udell wrote.

But surely the most pain was felt by Mrs. Brown. Not only did she suffer the burial of her husband in the mud of the Colorado River, thus hiding the body from warriors who might mutilate it, and the dangerous arrow wound to her daughter, but her youngest child, a son, took sick and died on the retreat.

Years later Mrs. Brown said she kept from going crazy on the sad return journey by unraveling and reknitting a stocking, over and over, hour after hour.

With the Mohaves still raining arrows, and Udell writing that he expected his "earthly tabernacle would soon be dissolved," luck intervened. The caravan encountered two more emigrant parties on the Beale Road, and the groups combined to set a safe course back to Albuquerque.

Udell, his wife, and another couple from the Rose train attempted the very same route to California the following year, this time under the guidance of Edward Beale, himself. By then the Army had sent troops from California to quell the Mohaves and establish a post on the river.

The military presence meant the wagon train could pass without a fight, a bitter disappointment to Udell. "We were prepared and willing to punish those savages for their outrages," he wrote.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Before Udell could accomplish his long-sought crossing into California, the Beale party was forced to camp at the Colorado River for a full month, beginning May 3, 1859, awaiting the arrival of supplies from Los Angeles.

Not only did the camp swarm with chastened Mohaves, but it was within sight of the Rose battleground. What a profound torture it must have been, sitting day after day amid the wind and heat and dust of that camp with Mohaves everywhere to bring the troubled mind back to the blood and desperation of the previous year.

Udell finally crossed the Colorado June 2, his hope of evening the score gone forever, the memory of an instinct ignored tormenting his days.