desert

THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY A Fortune in Gold — or a Lonely Death — Awaited Those Who Braved This Parched Track

I awoke in the blessed coolness of early dawn while the flat, barren Lechuguilla valley, which I crossed in the searing heat of yesterday, was still a dimly lit gray monochrome. As I watched, ocotillo cactuses and paloverde trees lost their predawn fuzziness and the wire-brushed mountains assumed their knife-edge sharpness. Just before the sun poked its first rays over the black silhouette of the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, a breathless moment when dawn and its precious bit of cool, moistened air paused, as if reluctant to surrender to the coming explosion of heat and light. Almost instantly it was day. Under the incandescent sun, the breeze no longer offered a cool promise, but a hot, arid wind that dried my lips and nostrils. Heat waves danced in the distance and all living creatures craved the shade. The harsh, unrelenting desert teaches one lesson water is life; if you have it you live; if not, you die. And uncounted hundreds of persons have died, probably as many as 2,000 or more, along the deadly El Camino del Diablo, the Devil's Highway, in southwestern Arizona.

I camped at what the Mexicans called the Mesita de Los Muertos (“small mesa of the dead”), where several hundred unfortunate fortune hunters were buried during gold rush days. They died of thirst when the Tinajas Altas water holes went dry. The water holes actually nine rock cisterns eroded into the face of a 500-foot cliff — provided the only reliable source of water along the entire El Camino del Diablo, which ran for 150 miles along the Mexican border between the present-day cities of Ajo and Yuma. Thousands of gold seekers took the old road because it saved them about two to three weeks traveling time over the longer Gila River route.

El Camino del Diablo began in Sonoita, the Mexican town just across the border from Lukeville, where the famous Spanish explorer Father Eusebio Kino founded a mission. Travelers filled their water barrels from the Sonoyta River or from the alwaysflowing springs at Quitobaquito, now within Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. They gambled that they could top off their water jugs at Tule Tank in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains. If those small tanks were dry, they had to find water in the Tinajas Altas.

The journey took five to seven days by horseback and longer for horse-drawn wagons. If their animals broke down for lack of water, the gold seekers were put afoot. And that usually meant death, for a man on foot cannot carry enough water to last the distance. The death toll along the Devil's Highway was horrendous with estimates varying from 400 to 2,000. The 400 number is said to be based on the graves counted along the road around 1900. By then the peak years of travel had passed, and many of the shallow, hastily dug graves had disappeared under the blowing sands. No one knows how many persons wandered away from the road in search of water and died unnoticed and unburied.

Mexicans, too, were infected with gold fever. More Mexicans than Americans died along the Devil's Highway because most were too poor to own wagons and horses, relying on small burros or just striking off on foot trusting to the Lord to find water.

The first European to cross El Camino del Diablo and the first to die - was the Spanish conquistador Melchior Diaz, who led a troop of Spanish lancers to the Yuma Crossing in 1540. On the return trip, Diaz tried to spear a coyote from horseback. He missed, the lance tip dug into the ground and the speed of the horse caused the wooden shaft to pass through his body. Other Spaniards Fathers Kino (1699), Francisco Garces (1771) and Juan Bautista de Anza (1774), founder of San Francisco - successfully crossed the road.

Pioneers who traveled over the road wrote accounts of arriving at the famed Tinajas Altas only to find the lower tanks dry. They were compelled to make a dangerous climb to the higher tanks and then lower water down the cliff with ropes and buckets. Other travelers told of finding dried-out cadavers at the base of cliffs. The victims died while climbing to the highest tanks. Slipping on the slanted rocks, they rubbed their fingers down to the bone in vain attempts to stop the fatal slides.

No one knows how many persons died at the Tinajas Altas tanks. But in 1911, long after the road fell into disuse, Kermit Roosevelt, one of President Theodore Roosevelt's sons, estimated the count to be more than 150 graves.

All the graves have vanished, most of them destroyed in the 1930s by heedless government employees. An outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in Mexican cattle caused the U.S. government to station a bulldozer and crew at Tinajas Altas to intercept and bury the alien cows. Business was nonexistent, and the bored men would crank up the bulldozer and drive it across the old cemetery, obliterating nearly all the graves.

Still, for all the death and suffering at the Tinajas, I have always found the area a singularly peaceful place to camp. In the evening, just before full dark, hundreds of doves sweep in for a last drink. Quail call to each other from the trees and brush as they roost for the night. Sometimes a lost coyote will sing his lonely song.

they roost for the night. Sometimes a lost coyote will sing his lonely song.

Prehistoric Indians, too, camped here. At the bottom of the cliffs are great, flat-topped boulders pockmarked with huge mortar holes that the Indians ground into the rock with stone pestles making flour from seeds and beans. The mortar holes are the biggest I've ever seen, big enough to stick your foot in almost up to the knee. Other rocks near the water holes are studded with grooves and rub marks made with stone hammers and arrow points.

I once climbed the first canyon north of the Tinajas and found a natural tunnel at the top overlooking the drainage that feeds the nine water catchments. For Stone Age hunters, the tunnel mouth offered an ideal hiding place to ambush bighorn sheep coming in to drink.

Thousands of Indian artifacts are scattered through the 4,000-square-mile area. Climb almost any rocky ridge and you're likely to see an Indian footpath leading across the desert floor. These trails parallel both sides of the individual ranges - the Tinajas Altas, Gila, Cabeza Prieta, Growler, Mohawk, Granite and Pinta Mountains.

I have hiked portions of these trails and found them amazing-smooth, generally straight and often slightly depressed from much human foot traffic. From a mountain perch, I have used binoculars to trace these trails far out on the flats until I lost them in the haze of Sonora's Gran Desierto, which stretches to the Sea of Cortes.

Scientists say the trails are at least 4,000 years old and were used by early Indians to travel to and from the seashore where they gathered salt and shells for trading purposes. The Indians crossed this inhospitable desert for centuries, but many Europeans died of thirst.

Indians hunted bighorn sheep that came to the water holes. These sheep have magnificent, sweeping horns that sometimes make a full curl or more. The horns from the slain animals were deposited in hidden caches as a kind of hunting totem. I have found two of these very rare horn piles, both near water holes. The horns, shrunken and desiccated by hundreds of years of exposure to the broiling sun, were almost weightless.

Every water hole has Indian-made petroglyphs: beautifully crafted sheep, lizards, snakes and other creatures as well as mysterious mazes, sunbursts, monster men and other symbols. Petroglyphs estimated at 4,000 years old line both sides of the mile-long trail to the Cabeza Prieta tank.

Forty-niners did not often visit this water hole located far off the Devil's Highway. Still, some Good Samaritan took the time to possibly save a life by embedding rocks into the ground spelling out the word "water" and, next to it, a 12-foot-long stone arrow pointing in the direction of the tanks.

The Cabeza Prieta range gets its name, "black head," from the striking dark-brown lava that has overtopped a pink granite mountain and run down the sides, much like hot fudge on a sundae.

Another lava flow, from the Pinacate vol-canos just over the Mexican border, crossed the Devil's Highway and present-ed a formidable obstacle to the wagon trains. But it was fairly level on top and if the horses or mules rested, the rocky, 5mile-wide flow could be crossed. Those who tried to go around the lava flow ran into the impassable Pinta Sands, which is home to a small herd of diminutive Sonoran antelope. The great tongue of lava has in times of a rare rain acted as a dam, creating two small, shallow lakes called the Pinta Playa. Still visible on the dry lake bed are the Indian campsites marked by hammer stones, cutting tools, pottery shards and stone sleeping circles.On the Pinacate Lava Flow itself lie the camping spots of the pioneers with litter now considered to be historical artifacts. I have seen some of the first tin cans ever manufactured, made of heavy steel and capped with hand-soldered lids. The cans are so old they have acquired the same desert varnish as the surrounding rock. Americans opened the cans with their knives. Can openers had not yet been invented. A man I knew found two whale harpoons on the lava. He figured some New England whaler threw them out to lighten his wagon. And, it is still possible to locate old graves. On the lava flow, a man named Nameer is buried under a stone cross, his name and the date of death, 1871, spelled out in lava rock. You'll find other, unidentified graves nearby as well along some out-of-the-way roads on both sides of the Camino. Some flat stone crosses survive to this day because the rocky ground hides them from casual view. One of the most sobering graves lies just beyond Tule Tank within sight of the Tinajas Altas water holes. Nothing grows within the large circle of stone, but in the middle is the numeral 8, said to represent the number of persons buried there a mother, father and six children. The passersby who buried them said the skeletons of their horses remained harnessed to the wagon. The desert continues to kill. In the last 50 years, hundreds of illegal immigrants died of thirst trying to reach Arizona cities and farms. Every year the Border Patrol rescues people who are near death and collects the remains of those who died. Because of the vast, trackless nature of the land, only a fraction of the bodies are found. Claude Lard, former manager of the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge, and I camped years ago at a desolate spot called Coyote Water in the Lechuguilla valley. The name comes from the holes coyotes dig in a nearby sand wash to get at the underlying water. I found some old human footprints nearby, and Lard and I decided to follow them. About a mile away, we found a man's homemade canteen, a plastic bottle wrapped in cloth. Another half mile and we found his shirt. Then a straw cowboy hat. Next a sandal, like the Mexican poor wear, made out of a car tire. The tracks, one made by a sandal and one by a bare foot, continued. It was getting dark, and we quit the trail. The tracks were old, as I said, and we had left our own water back in the truck. But I still wonder, did the man with only one shoe, hatless, shirtless and presumably waterless, make it to safety? Who knows?