The Moqui Trail

Yesteryear's THOROUGHF Tracing the ancient MOQUI TRAIL

WHEN THE MOQUI TRAIL CAME to be, no one can say. Even the circumstances leading to its creation remain lost in the mists of primordial time. Descending from the high mesas of the Hopi villages in northern Arizona, the ghost of this ancient path leads westward some 150 miles, wandering across red sand dunes and among towering sandstone pillars. Angling northwest, the dim track skirts the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, descends a tributary of Cataract Canyon and then drops precipitously more than 2,000 feet to the blue-green waters of Havasu Creek and the home of the Havasupai people.

First to break the trail, sometime in the distant past, may have been a group of Havasupais, drifting out of their territory in the depths of the Grand Canyon, bent on hunting. Pursuing game to the east, they may have met Hopi hunters who spoke a strange language and wore blankets woven in pleasing banded designs.

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Naturally curious, the Havasupais might have journeyed with the strangers back to their home on the Hopi Mesas, a vast highland. Here they would have found a friendly people who created fine ceramics, baskets and blankets a tribe eager to trade with the Havasupais, skilled leather workers.

The path trod by the hunters became the trade and communication route that would carry travelers between the lands of the two tribes for centuries.

Eventually, three branches of the Moqui Trail developed. (Early Spanish explorers referred to the Hopis as Moqui or Moki, probably corruptions of a Navajo term.) From Oraibi on the Hopi Mesas to Moenkopi, the main branch went west, then down Moenkopi Wash, skirting Shadow Mountain and following Hopi Trail Canyon. The path led northwest from the canyon past Lee Tank and through the Coconino Basin, south of present-day Desert View. From this point, the trail turned westward, passing Red Butte and Rain Tank.

Then angling northeast, the route entered Moqui Trail Canyon, and eventually reached Havasu Creek and Supai Village.

A variant of the main trail that crossed the Little Colorado River at Janus Spring, just east of Cameron, Went up Cedar Wash and joined the main trail east of Red Butte. Another variant went south from Oraibi following Dinnebito Wash and crossed the Little Colorado at Black Falls. It then turned northwest through the Wupatki and C.O. Bar Ranch areas to join the other branches north of Mesa Butte. With the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, the Moqui Trail, ancient even then, also became an important route for missionaries and explorers.

In 1540 the Coronado expedition discovered the Hopi villages from which a detachment under Garcia Lopez de Cardenas was led by Hopis to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, probably in the area of present-day Desert

MOQUI TRAIL

View. Although no diary of the Cardenas trek survives, it seems probable that the explorers were following the Moqui Trail on their journey of discovery. In 1776 another Spaniard, Padre Francisco Garces, a Franciscan who would later be killed in an Indian uprising, arrived at the Supai village from the south and traveled the Moqui Trail to Oraibi on the Hopi Mesas. He may well have been the first European to trek the entire course of the route. Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers never set foot on the trail, but was the first American to take note of it.

Commissioned to explore the Colorado River from its mouth to the head of navigation (see Arizona Highways, Aug. '92), Ives and his group traveled upriver by steamboat to Black Canyon in the area of today's Hoover Dam. There he abandoned the boat and set out overland toward the Hopi villages and the government outpost at Fort Defiance.

Reaching Cataract Canyon, the expedition deflected to the south, skirting Bill Williams Mountain and the San Francisco Peaks. Then continuing east, they reached the Hopi village of Mishongnovi on May 11, 1858.

During Ives' stay there, the chief of the village took him to a high rooftop and pointed to a network of trails radiating from the Hopi Mesas. Gazing far to the west, Ives traced the course of the Moqui Trail.

The first detailed description of the Moqui Trail came 24 years later, written by Frank Hamilton Cushing, curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.

Cushing had come to the New Mexico pueblo of Zuni to study Zuni culture. One winter night in 1880, the Zunis told him of a "marvelous country toward the sunset," inhabited by people "wiser than the Navajo," who lived in a "canyon so deep that a stone rolled from the top sounds like thunder ere it strikes the bottom."

Fascinated, Cushing set out with a Zuni guide to visit the canyon dwellers. Picking up the Moqui Trail at the Hopi village of Oraibi, he followed the track along a sunken stream in the middle of a great sandy plain. Climbing the eastern edge of the Coconino Rim, he found the country covered with "luxuriant grasses, flowers fresh as those of a valley, and grand piñons with blue stretches of vast pine forests in the westward distance."

Along the way, he encountered camping areas used by Hopi and Havasupai trading parties, littered with campfire debris, bits of discarded basketry and fragments of wooden and bone implements.

Arriving at the Havasupai village, Cushing recorded that buckskins manufactured into pouches, bags, coats and leggings were being traded to the Hopis for blankets and various "products of civilization." This trade was a distant echo of an older time when one large and one small buckskin could be exchanged for one large blanket; seven to eight buckskins for one horse; 10 buckskins for one fast horse.

While Cushing and other early-day scientists were capturing in print the life and times of the Moqui Trail and its impact on the Hopis and Havasupais, the forces that would soon bring about the demise of the trail as a viable trade route were already in play.

By the early 1880s, the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad puffed steadily across the grassy plains and high forests of northern Arizona, soon to deliver American civilization to the tribes. And hard on its iron heels came a latticework of roads and highways, linking the most distant outposts to the industrial cities of the East, tolling the death knell for the Moqui Trail.

By 1900 what had been one of the Southwest's most significant channels for exchanging goods and ideas remained only a dim track, and, in many places along its 150-mile length, would soon disappear entirely. AH An adjunct professor of history at Northern Arizona University, James E. Babbitt lives in Flagstaff.

While photographing this trail, Stewart Aitchison of Flagstaff was never really lost but often confused for a day or two at a time. His latest book is the Longstreet Highroad Guide to Arizona and the Grand Canyon.