ROADSIDE REST

Frontier Travel along the Gila Trail Before I-10 Seemed a Foolish Gesture for Many Immigrants

Now an automobile can cross Arizona between New Mexico and California at legal speeds in about five hours of driving time, weather permitting.

Not one stationary traffic light slows the flow on Arizona's leg of Interstate 10 - nor, for that matter, anywhere along the freeway from the Atlantic coast at Jacksonville, Florida, to the Pacific surf at Santa Monica, California.

I-10 in Arizona generally parallels part of the Old Gila Trail, so dangerous in frontier times that many a Forty-niner opted instead to sail around the southernmost tip of South America on his way to the California goldfields. Of the Argonauts who risked the Gila, 300 died of thirst, heat, and exhaustion.

When Americans in force traversed the Gila in 1846-47, a hundred dragoons (elite troops trained both as infantry and cavalry) under the command of Brig. Gen. Stephen W. Kearny starved and suffered for five weeks. They ate their mules. In his diary, their sympathetic surgeon cursed the country: "Utterly worthless . . . the cactus is the only thing that grows . . . every rock you turn over has a tarantula or centipede."

On Kearny's heels came the Mormon Battalion, nearly 400 strong, to open a wagon road where no wheel had ever turned. It took them four months to cover a thousand miles of "unremitting struggle with the rude barrenness of a rainless wilderness." So complained the commander, Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke. The desert was the enemy, to be conquered.

Despite the harsh early military reports, word of the expeditions set loose a regular river of livestock from cattle-rich Texas to beef-hungry California. In 1853 cowboy James G. Bell kept a log of his summer of driving 500 longhorns on Arizona's southern route. A man in his 20s, Jamie was a my-cup-is-half-full-not-halfempty kind of guy, and he must have provided welcome comic relief for his fellow Texan drovers. A few of his entries: July 16 (about rations of roast venison) - "If Goodyear and Day could see a piece of this, they would immediately add a new article to their manu factures; that is, India rubber meat for prairie travelers, and recommend it as being more easily masticated as well as more economical."

Aug. 22 - "Saw a new method of driving fractious steers this morning; the cartmen yoked in a new one; when ready to start, [the steer] would not move, so very deliberately put a chunk of fire on his rump. After it burnt through the skin, he traveled quite well."

Aug. 28 (about a water hole) - "By taking a piece of coffee sack, I managed to strain out the tadpoles; the larger-sized animalculae I did not care about although very perceptible to the eye."

Sept. 1 (concerning a lightning bolt)"Made a report like the explosion of a thousand cannon, struck a white steer, glancing along the belly, and scorching the hair off, then to another white steer he showed no marks - about 50 yards distant, and killed them both, knocking down all intervening, some 20, on the line of the stroke."

Sept. 2 (of an Arizona sunset) - "With what few words I possess, and such poor powers of description, it would be like daubing a superb painting over with mud."

Sept. 9 (deep inside Mexico) - "The most unpalatable article of aguardiente [brandy] is sold by the pound at the rate of $1. Tobacco is sold at $5 a pound."

Sept. 20 (arriving in Tucson) - "We are using the water that the cattle are running through."

Sept. 29 (describing Pima Indian girls) - "They are goodlooking and pregnant, and one had a very sweet laugh that any city belle would be proud to have."

Oct. 9 - "Horse flies is not the proper name in this country, for they preferred man flesh to horse flesh."

No detail is too small for Jamie's notice.

He admires pomegranates and grapes in perfect ripeness. He chronicles a raid by cattlemen upon a band of Indians in which all but nine are slain, and alas, they were the wrong Indians. Young Bell also leaves a little mystery regarding the saguaro cactus. He notes that many of the giants were shot through their tops with arrows. Why? Target practice? Attempts to harvest fruit?

Likely we will never know. Giant saguaros by the tens of thousands still stand in irregular ranks in the remaining vast spaces along the Gila Trail. Vehicles zip along at 75 per, and all but forgotten is the trailhand's accelerator - an ember applied to a stubborn rump.