USA > Arizona > Arizona, prehistoric, aboriginal, pioneer, modern; the nation's youngest commonwealth within a land of ancient culture, Vol. I > Part 41
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An independent railroad system is that of the Arizona Copper Company, which controls a broad-gauge line, the Arizona & New Mexico Railway, from Hachita, New Mexico, on the Southwestern, through Lordsburg, to Clifton, as well as many miles of mining road to Coronado, Metcalf and Morenci, including the original "baby-gauge." The Arizona & New Mexico road was built as a narrow-gauge in 1883, at a cost of $2,265,000, soon after the Southern Pacific construction passed Lordsburg. It was broad-gauged in May, 1901.
The Morenci Southern is an eighteen-mile narrow-gauge, built in 1900 by the Detroit Copper Company from Guthrie, on the Arizona & New Mexico
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Railroad, to Morenci. It climbs up a narrow cañon, with very heavy grades and 40-degree curves, with three tunnels and with five remarkable "loops," several of which now are being eliminated. Within the past few years the Shannon Copper Company has built its own railroad from its smelter below Clifton to its mines near Metcalf.
The latest Arizona railroad is being built by Bisbee mining interests from Gila Bend on the Southern Pacific, southward forty-two miles to the old copper camp of Ajo, where the Calumet & Arizona Company is undertaking extensive operations ou low-grade ores and the erection of a large reduction plant.
RAILROADS THAT WERE LIABILITIES
In the Legislature of 1879 was passed a "gag" act, commanding the Super- visors of Maricopa and Yavapai Counties to issue bonds in subsidy of the Arizona Central Railroad, which was to connect Prescott with Maricopa by way of Phoenix. A survey of the line was made for the company by S. A. Henszey of Philadelphia, through Stage Pass in the Salt River Mountains and north out of Phoenix along the Black Canon Road. There was bitter opposition in Phoenix, where the Supervisors solemnly resolved to go to jail rather than approve the act, which, they declared, "would ever hang like a refulgent millstone around the necks of its perpetrators." Probably because of this opposition, no funds could be secured for the construction and the project died.
There was a time when subsidies seemed a necessary preliminary to rail- road construction. This understanding resulted in much tribulation for the taxpayers of Pima County and a load of debt, still carried, over a period of many years. In 1882 in Tucson was worked up a railroad boom. Right through the rugged mountains to the northward a narrow-gauge line, the Tucson, Globe & Northern, was to be built to Globe, and to northern coal fields, incidentally bringing riches to the point of departure. There was authority in the terri- torial statutes and, under a charter granted November 23, 1882, soon toward the county line was being built a poor apology for a railroad line, with even worse rolling stock. But it was enough to secure from the Supervisors $150,000 in 7 per cent county bonds. Then construction stopped abruptly, about ten miles out, and in time even the ancient rails disappeared. For years thereafter the taxpayers of Pima County had the nightmare of the possible forced collec- tion of this enormous sum. The holders of the fraudulently acquired bonds sold them to purchasers of a more or less innocent variety, who occasionally made demands upon the county for at least the interest.
In 1894, in the case of Lewis vs. Pima County, the United States Supreme Court decided the bonds void. In the Arizona Legislature of 1895 there was put through a memorial to Congress reciting the fact that Arizona did not wish to repudiate her just obligations, undoubtedly without reference in the minds of the legislators to the Tucson matter. Possibly on this basis, Congress, on June 5, 1896, amended the Arizona funding act, incidentally legalizing "all other outstanding bonds, warrants and other evidences of indebtedness . which have been sold or exchanged in good faith in accordance with the terms of the acts of the Legislature by which they were authorized." The holders of the bonds, understood to have been purchased at about fifteen cents on the dollar, at once made demand for the exchange of their holdings into territorial
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5 per cents. On the new basis of the later act of Congress, the courts then decided for the bondholders, who gained final judgment in the United States Supreme Court in 1902 and to whom later were delivered $318,000 in terri- torial bonds, charged to Pima County, though with interest thereon fixed at only 3 per cent. The right-of-way was not forfeited till in June, 1915.
Prescott's first railroad was the Prescott & Arizona Central, organized May 10, 1884, and completed in December, 1887, with the assistance of $291,000 bonds issued by Yavapai County to T. S. Bullock. The road issued its own bonds to the amount of $750,000. These were floated, but a second issue in the same amount was never realized upon. The road was about seventy-two miles in length, from Prescott Junction on the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad. It was built of scrap material throughout, with second-hand rails and with rolling stock of the most antique description. The P. & A. C. fell into hard days when the Santa Fe, Prescott & Phoenix Railroad was completed into Prescott from Ash Fork. Bullock had been offered a substantial sum to turn over his road, but is said to have observed that, inasmuch as he paid no interest on his bonds, he could make more money than the sum offered during the necessary building period of a new line. When the new connection was established, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé system, which had absorbed the Atlantic & Pacific, routed everything through Ash Fork, and even changed the name of Prescott Junction to Seligman. Bullock's road, known in sarcasm, as "The Old Reliable," con- tinued intermittent operation and then passed into the hands of W. N. Kelly, receiver, finally going out of existence, both the rails and the ancient rolling stock going on to still further use elsewhere. Some of the material is said to have gone into another speculative line built by Bullock in central California.
Though the Prescott & Arizona Central had vanished from the face of the earth, the county bonds still lingered, with interest to be paid annually by taxpayers, who could see little justice in the transaction. These bonds with accrued interest were funded into territorial 5 per cents, after their legality had been established in a series of decisions that began in the District Court at Prescott in September, 1887. The people of Yavapai County did their best to establish the illegality of the bond issue and the injustice of having to pay for a dead horse, but without success. September 17, 1897, the Loan Commis- sion of Arizona ordered the Territorial Treasurer to deliver 240 Arizona funding bonds of the issue of 1892 and eighteen funding bonds of the issue of 1896, to Kitchen & Co., of New York, in exchange for 203 Yavapai County bonds of the issue of 1886, with accrued interest thereon, amounting in all to $260,641. One- third of this debt had to be assumed by Coconino County, though that part of the county had received no benefit from the road's construction.
At the time of statehood, Congress acknowledged its debt in this regard by a land grant, especially to reimburse all Arizona counties that had issued bonds in aid of railroad construction.
In the Congress of 1889 was passed a bill permitting Maricopa County to vote about $300,000 in bonds in aid of the construction of a north-and-south railroad. This bill was vetoed by President Harrison, who appeared to have been protecting the people of the county against their own wishes. There was a high degree of popular excitement on receipt of the news of the vote. It was locally declared that Phoenix had been killed and there were suggestions
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for the burning of the President in effigy. Harrison, while in Congress was the author of an act, which prohibited special legislation in territorial Legis- latures and which likewise limited the indebtedness to which territories or their legal sub-divisions could subject themselves. It was this same limitation that at first defeated the attempts to collect the Tucson and Prescott railroad bond issues. After years of experience, there now can be no doubt that the limitations of the act were wise and that more than once they prevented a veritable orgy of legislative extravagance.
The Santa Fé Railroad Company has always used mountain time on the system in Arizona, at least as far as Seligman. The Southern Pacific used Pacific time as far eastward as El Paso. Late in 1911 the Southern Pacific changed to mountain time to include all of Arizona, the new time now embracing about all the railroad mileage of the state.
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CHAPTER XXIV THE MIGHTY COLORADO
Early Transportation on Arizona's Only Navigable Stream-The First Steamboats- Difficulties of the Pioneer Skippers-Explorations within the Grand Canon-Powell and Stanton Parties-How a Gorge Was Dug and the Material Removed.
The Colorado river, now blocked to navigation by the Laguna dam above Yuma, in the early days of Arizona Caucasian settlement was one of the prin- cipal thoroughfares of the Southwest. Today it is practically unused by com- merce, and there is little need of it. It may be different in later times, when great agricultural communities shall have arisen on its banks, with lands now unused made fertile by the diversion of the precious waters. The stream, classed as one of the Nation's greatest, has its origin very near the head springs of both the Missouri and Columbia and drains much of the western slope of the Rocky Mountain region. Thus it happens that in the early summer thirty-foot floods at Yuma, 100 feet deep in the cañons, come down through Arizona from the melting snows of Colorado and Wyoming. But for the rest of the year the lordly Colorado is relatively shallow, its reddish tide wandering southward around sandbars of its own creation till at last, through a delta it has thrust out a hundred miles or so into the primitive sea, it joins its waters with those of the Gulf of California. Of late history, though undoubtedly of frequent geologic recurrence, has been the creation of the Salton sea within a deep Cali- fornian basin that once held an arm of the ocean, before the silty Colorado itself dammed its western outlet. Deposited a thousand or more feet deep in the Salton basin, Imperial Valley and delta region are the Grand Canon's missing thousand cubic miles of earth (more or less), cut through æons of erosion, and transported in solution hundreds of miles till precipitated by the chem- istry of the sea. The minimum flow of the stream now is well appropriated in the Imperial Valley. Already plans are in the making for great dams in the Canon, where water will be stored for agricultural use and where the might of the stream will be harnessed in the generation of electric power to turn all the wheels of southwestern industry.
The discovery of the lower Colorado and its early exploration are too closely interwoven with the chronicles of Spanish times to be transferred thence and the story of the river may be taken up with the advent of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, less than 100 years ago.
Through an unhappy and perverse fate, it would appear that about all the early explorers of the Colorado River delta country got to the region in summer. Not only at that season is the climate almost unbearable from heat and humid-
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ity, but the Colorado in the early summer is at flood, fighting against the tides of the Gulf, and creating conditions of navigation perplexing and dangerous. It was under these conditions, in the summer of 1826, that the first Englishman since Pilot Strafort sailed to the head of the Gulf. He was Lieut. R. W. H. Hardy of the British navy, who, presumably for pearl fishing and his own entertainment, chartered at Guaymas a schooner, the Bruja (Witch or Owl). The Englishman's name still is borne by the side slough of "Hardy's Colo- rado," which he unwittingly entered in his efforts to stem the tide. He thought he had reached the mouth of the Gila, but he was mistaken. The stream from the east that he called by that name in reality was the main arm of the Colorado.
The first governmental exploration of the Colorado River after the acquisi- tion of Arizona from Mexico was by Lieut. G. H. Derby of the Corps of Topo- graphical Engineers, who had been ordered to find a route for water transporta- tion of supplies to Fort Yuma. He got to the mouth of the Colorado December 23, 1850, in the schooner Invincible and for the following week made progress up the river with the flood tide. Then recourse was had to a small boat. January 13, 1850, Derby was met by Major Heintzelman, who had come down stream hunting him and who brought wagons to receive the schooner's cargo.
More supplies for the new fort were brought in in 1851 by George A. John- son on the schooner Sierra Nevada, including lumber for the construction of river flatboats. Johnson later became distinguished as a river pilot and there is a bare possibility that it was he who handled the steamer, Yuma, spoken of by Hobbs.
ARIZONA'S FIRST STEAMBOAT
There seems a bit of doubt concerning the identity of the first steam craft that ever was floated on the waters of the Colorado. There is a story, on the authority of Capt. James Hobbs, who passed through in 1851, to the effect that, during his short stay in the Yuma village there came up the river a sternwheel steamboat, the Yuma. He is very definite about it, telling that the Indians were so frightened that they ran for their lives, yelling that "the devil was coming, blowing fire and smoke out of his nose and kicking the water back with his feet."
The steamer Uncle Sam, generally considered the first steam craft to navigate the river, reached old Fort Yuma December 29, 1852, when the post was under command of Capt. George H. Thomas, who later became famous as the com- mander of the Union forces at Gettysburg. The steamboat had been brought to the mouth of the Colorado on the schooner Capacity. She was a side-wheeler, with a locomotive engine of twenty horsepower and, with a load of thirty-five tons, drew twenty-two inches of water. In January, 1853, her commander, Captain Turnbull, was much perplexed by changes made in the channel of the river by an earthquake. This steamer sank at her moorings five miles below the post, June 22, 1854.
Capt. Geo. A. Johnston arrived in Yuma with the General Jesup, a boat about twice the size of its predecessor, January 14, 1854. She had a misfortune, for on August 25th her boiler exploded, with fatal consequence to one of her crew. It is told that at this period the Government paid $75 a ton for freiglit- ing up from the mouth of the river and that the military freight bill for four-
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teen months aggregated $94,000. Johnston then had a still better steamer, the Colorado, floated in the fall of 1855. It was probably with this steamer that Johnston made a notable trip far up the Colorado to the mouth of the Black Cañon.
An official exploration of the river was made in the winter of 1857-58 by Lieut. J. C. Ives of the Topographical Corps, the same who had been an engineer assistant in Whipple's railway survey along the 35th parallel. This Ives expe- dition was very valuable, mainly for the fact that its leader was an expert topographer and made careful maps of the river valley. From a point of exploration it was practically valueless, as waters were traversed well known to the navigators of the day. The work could have best been done by the employment of Johnston with his well-proven river boat. Instead, some depart- mental misconception of conditions loaded Ives down with a small and rather grotesque craft, fifty-four feet long and only partially decked, armed for some reason or other with a 4-pound howitzer. The craft had been built in the east and shipped around in sections to San Francisco, whence she was brought to the head of the Gulf on the schooner Monterey. She was put together at Rob- inson's Landing and was named the Explorer. Johnston had gone up the river to ferry the Beale party across, January 23, 1858, and, returning, passed the Explorer as she feebly worked her way up stream. The journey had been undertaken at the worst possible period of the year, when the Colorado was at its lowest stage. The little stern-wheeler butted into snags and mudbanks and sometimes became wedged in rocks, for it had been found necessary to run a couple of timbers along her keel to stiffen her wobbly structure. The Black Canon was reached finally and there was joy on board for a brief period as the boat moved swiftly through the smooth waters, then there came a crash, for she had run upon a sunken rock. Investigation found that the boiler was broken loose from its fastenings, the wheel house was torn away and the explora- tion of the upper river had ended far below the point that Johnston had reached only a few days before. While Pilot Robinson and the engineer worked on the steamboat, Ives and two men rowed np the stream as far as Vegas Wash.
The half-ruined steamboat was floated back to Fort Yuma and Ives, with fresh supplies, brought up by pack-train, and led by the well-known Mojave Chief Iretaba, struck eastward, much on the same route that had been pursued by Padre Garcés and, like the reverend traveler, penetrated the depths of Cataract Cañon and passed on to the towns of Hopiland. Later in the same year Fort Mojave was established.
OPENING NEW TRADE ROUTES
During the Civil War there was concerted action by San Francisco mer- cantile interests and the Mormon church to secure an alternative freight route into the Great Utah Basin from near the mouth of the Virgen, from which point, was a natural wagon road to Salt Lake City, only 350 miles distant. In- spector General Jas. F. Rusling recommended that military supplies be brought in by way of Collville. In 1864 the Arizona Legislature asked of Congress an appropriation of $150,000 for the improvement of the Colorado river, two-thirds of the sum to be spent above Fort Mojave, where it was told the blowing up of a number of rock dykes would permit navigation as far as the Virgen. In 1884
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a congressional appropriation of $25,000 was expended to good effect between Needles and the Colorado cañon.
For a while after 1864, Johnston had opposition on the river, offered by the Pacific and Colorado Navigation Company, managed by Thos. E. Trueworthy, a steamboat man from the upper Sacramento. In 1866 we find, spread upon the minutes of the legislative session at Prescott, a resolution thanking "Ad- miral" Robert Rogers, commander of the Esmeralda, and Capt. William Gil- more, agent, for the successful accomplishment of the navigation of the Colorado river to Collville, "effected by the indomitable energy of the enterprising Pacific and Colorado Navigation Company." The trip was made in October of that year, with a barge. About the same time the steamer Vina Tilden, commanded by Paddy Gorman and owned by the Philadelphia Mining Company, was brought around from San Francisco. Johnston later formed the Colorado Steam Navigation Company, with A. H. Wilcox and Beu. M. Hartshorn as associates, and employing more than 100 men, held control of river traffic till he sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in 1877.
This pioneer period along the Colorado was of keenest interest. Mining machinery and all supplies very generally came up the river, for distribution from the river depots of Yuma, La Paz, Ehrenberg and Fort Mojave and back along the same route came the rich surface silver ore of the period, shipped for reduction to the Selby smelter at San Francisco. Indeed, some of the ore went as far as Swansea, Wales.
Until the Southern Pacific had reached Los Angeles, about the easiest way to enter Arizona from the west, assuming that San Francisco was the initial point, was by steamer around Lower California, with stops usually at the Mexican ports of Mazatlan and Guaymas. The deep-sea boats would be met at Port Ysabal or some other up-gulf bay by light-draft stern-wheel steamers, to which transfer would be made of passengers and freight. If much freight there was, flat boats or barges would supplement the cargo space of the river craft.
Most of the traffic was with Yuma, which lies 175 miles from the Colorado's mouth. There in waiting were the long wagon trains that crossed the deserts to supply all the camps of southern and central Arizona. Prescott was more easily reached, over a better road, from Ehrenberg, the next important np-river stop. Hardyville, near Mojave, was considered the upper terminus of the river navigation, 337 miles above Yuma. Its principal inhabitant was W. H. Hardy, who maintained a ferry, a store, and a forwarding business, who served as post- master and whose pen ever was active in celebrating the wealth of his locality. Above Hardyville the difficulties of navigation increased, for the river was narrowed by the towering walls of box cañons; yet navigation there was through the canons, to reach isolated mining camps, and even into the Rio Virgen, to secure cargoes of salt, much used in the amalgamation processes of the small quartz mills of the period. Sometimes schooners were used in this mp-river work. It seems odd that such could have been the case, but, as ex- plained by Captain Mellen, "The wind changes on the river once a day at least. In the Cañon it simply had to be either up stream or down stream. Going up there was, of course, no room to tack, so we anchored till the wind was astern." At several rapids, it is told that "snubbing posts" were placed
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and iron rings were set, to be used in easing down or helping up the light craft of the period. Latterly, it might be noted, much fuss is made if some "hardy" explorer covers these same stretches in a row boat.
TROUBLE ON A SHALLOW STREAM
The steamers of the sixties and seventies were of light draft, but often went aground, even near Yuma. But this mattered little. Over the side, with poles and ropes, went the amphibious crew of Cocopah Indians and soon the craft was seeking a deeper passage, discernible in the opaque stream to the pilot's marvelous intuition. The journey up river, as made in 1874, has been well described in Mrs. Summerhayes' most interesting book, "Vanished Ari- zona." But it was her misfortune to make the trip in late summer, after three weeks of dreary waiting on ocean and river steamers at the head of the Gulf and her chronicle of how she entered Arizona, the bride of a junior infantry lieutenant, is one of much discomfort and woe. She wrote, "Our progress was naturally much retarded, and sometimes we were aground an hour, sometimes a half day or more. Captain Jack Mellen was then the most famous pilot on the Colorado and he was very skillful in steering clear of sandbars, skimming over them or working his boat off when once fast upon them. But he was always cheerful. River steamboating was his life and sandbars were his excitement. On one occasion I said: 'Oh, Captain, do you think we shall get off this bar today ?' 'Well, you can't tell,' he said, with a twinkle in his eye; 'one trip I lay fifty-two days on a bar,' and then, after a short pause, 'but that don't hap- pen very often; we sometimes lay a week though; there is no telling; the bars change all the time.' "
Most of the navigation on the Colorado has been superintended by Captains C. V. Meeden Isaac Polhamus, A. D. Johnson, William Poole, S. Thorn, J. H. Godfrey and John A. Mellen. One of the most interesting of all was the last- named, who came in 1863 and who for about fifty years remained on the river. For one period of ten years he was never a half-mile from its banks. Thoughlı his deck hands at all times were Indians and though he had seen much Indian trouble, he noted a curious fact that no steamboat was attacked by any of the Colorado River tribes. There was too much mystery about the operations of the puffing river craft. He also called attention to the fact that the Indians before the coming of the white men, though at home on the river, swimming or with rafts, had no knowledge of boating till taught by the whites.
SOLVING THE CANON'S MYSTERY
The mystery of the Colorado canon endures even to this day, for there are parts of the gorge that yet are unexplored. The canon ever has had a powerful attraction for the adventurous and for those who seek things that are out of the ordinary. Almost every mineral known has been found in the cañon depths. It has proven unsatisfying as a whole to the prospector, though there have been found great riches of copper and deposits of mica, asbestos and other minerals of value. However, the sheer cañon walls, set far within an almost waterless plain, have been factors that have discouraged effectually either mining exploita- tions or human settlement. Save for a couple of hotels along the brink, the
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