OLD BARRACKS (1912) ON NORTH SIDE OF ALAMEDA STREET, NEAR MAIN, WHERE Co. C, 1st U. S. CAVALRY, CAMPED IN 1866 ON ITS ARRIVAL IN TUCSON[ToList]
Through San Jose, too, came those of the gold-seekers, bound for the high Sierras on the border of the desert, who had not taken the Sacramento River route and had decided to brave instead the dangers of the trail through the fertile San Joaquin, up to the Feather River and thus into the diggings about Virginia City. Gold had been found by that time in Nevada and hundreds of intrepid men were facing the awful Mojave and Nevada deserts, blazing hot in day-time and icy cold at night, to seek the new Eldorados. Since this is a book about pioneers, and since I am one of them, it is fitting to stay awhile and consider what civilization owes to these daring souls who formed the vanguard of her army. Cecil Rhodes opened an Empire by mobilizing a black race; Jim Hill opened another when he struck westward with steel rails. But the pioneers of the early gold rushes created an empire of immense riches with no other aid than their own gnarled hands and sturdy hearts. They opened up a country as vast as it was rich, and wrested from the very bosom of Mother Earth treasures that had been in her jealous keeping for ages before the era of Man. They braved sudden death, death from thirst and starvation, death from prowling savages, death from the wild creatures,—all that the works of man might flourish where they had not feared to tread. It is the irony of fate that these old pioneers, many of whom hated civilization and were fleeing from her guiles, should have been the advance-guard of the very Power they sought to avoid.
The vast empire of Western America is strewn with the bones of these men. Some of them lie in kindly resting places, the grass over their graves kept green by loving friends; some lie uncared for in potters' fields or in the cemeteries of homes for the aged, and some—a vast horde—still lie bleached and grim, the hot sand drifted over them by the desert winds.
But, wherever they lie, all honor to the pioneer! There should be a day set apart on which every American should revere the memory of those men of long ago who hewed the way for the soft paths that fall to the generation of today.
What San Bernardino is now to the west-bound traveler, Wilmington was then—the end of the desert. From Wilmington eastward stretched one tremendous ocean of sand, interspersed here and there by majestic mountains in the fastnesses of which little fertile valleys with clear mountain streams were to be discovered later by the pioneer homesteaders. Where now are miles upon miles of yellow-fruited orange and lemon groves, betraying the care and knowledge of a later generation of scientific farmers, were then only dreary, barren wastes, with only the mountains and clumps of sagebrush, soapweed, cacti, creosote bushes and mesquite to break the everlasting monotony of the prospect.
Farming then, indeed, was almost as little thought of as irrigation, for men's minds were fixed on the star of whitest brilliancy—Gold. Men even made fortunes in the diggings and returned East and bought farms, never realizing that what might be pushed above the soil of California was destined to prove of far greater consequence than anything men would ever find hidden beneath.
The march to Arizona was both difficult and dangerous, and was to be attempted safely only by large parties. Water was scarce and wells few and far between, and there were several stretches as, for instance, that between what are now known as the Imperial Mountains and Yuma, of more than sixty miles with no water at all. The well at Dos Palmas was not dug until a later date. Across these stretches the traveler had to depend on what water he could manage to pack in a canteen strung around his waist or on his horse or mule. On the march were often to be seen, as they are still, those wonderful desert mirages of which so much has been written by explorers and scientists. Sometimes these took the form of lakes, fringed with palms, which tantalized and ever kept mockingly at a distance. Many the desert traveler who has been cruelly deceived by these mirages!
Yuma, of which I have just spoken, is famed for many reasons. For one thing, the story that United States army officers "raised the temperature of the place thirty degrees" to be relieved from duty there, has been laughed at wherever Americans have been wont to congregate. And that old story told by Sherman, of the soldier who died at Yuma after living a particularly vicious existence here below, and who soon afterwards telegraphed from Hades for his blankets, has also done much to heighten the reputation of the little city, which sometimes still has applied to it the distinction of being the hottest place in the United States. This, however, is scarcely correct, as many places in the Southwest—Needles in California, and the Imperial Valley are examples—have often demonstrated higher temperatures than have ever been known at Yuma. A summer at the little Colorado River town is quite hot enough, however, to please the most tropical savage. It may be remarked here, in justice to the rest of the State, that the temperature of Yuma is not typical of Arizona as a whole. In the region I now live in—the Sonoita Valley in the southeastern part of the State, and in portions around Prescott, the summer temperatures are markedly cool and temperate.
Yuma, however, is not famed for its temperature alone; in fact, that feature of its claim to notice is least to be considered. The real noteworthy fact about Yuma from a historical point of view is that, as Arizona City, it was one of the earliest-settled points in the Territory and was at first easily the most important. The route of the major portion of the Forty-Niners took them across the Colorado River where Fort Yuma was situated on the California side; and the trend of exploration, business and commerce a few years later flowed westward to Yuma over the picturesque plains of the Gadsden Purchase. The famous California Column ferried itself across the Colorado at Yuma, and later on the Overland Mail came through the settlement. It is now a division point on the Southern Pacific Railway, just across the line from California, and has a population of three or four thousand.
At the time I first saw the place there was only Fort Yuma, on the California side of the river, and a small settlement on the Arizona side called Arizona City. It had formerly been called Colorado City, but the name was changed when the town was permanently settled. There were two ferries in operation at Yuma when our company arrived there, one of them run by the peaceable Yuma Indians and the other by a company headed by Don Diego Jaeger and Hartshorne. Fort Yuma had been established in 1851 by Major Heintzelman, U.S.A., but owing to scurvy (see De Long's history of Arizona) and the great difficulty in getting supplies, the Colorado River being then uncharted for traffic, it was abandoned and not permanently re-established until a year later, when Major Heintzelman returned from San Diego. The townsite of Colorado City was laid out in 1854, but floods wiped out the town with the result that a permanent settlement, called Arizona City, was not established until about 1862, four years before I reached there.