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Historic Trails of Arizona

Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail
In 1775, the Viceroy of New Spain authorized Juan Bautista de Anza, commander of the Tubac Presidio, to lead a group of settlers to establish a presidio and mission in the San Francisco Bay area. Anza enlisted volunteers in Culiacán, Mexico, and the recruits gathered at the Presidio of San Miguel de Horcasitas, Sonora’s provincial capital. Anza chose José Joaquín Moraga as his lieutenant. Father Pedro Font, a Franciscan missionary, was picked as expedition chaplain. Fathers Garcés and Exiarch, also, were to accompany the group as far as the crossing of the Colorado River at Yuma.

The final staging area was Tubac. Just three weeks prior to the expedition’s arrival there, Apaches had driven off the entire herd of 500 horses, forcing the group to continue with no fresh mounts. Food supplies included six tons of flour, beans, cornmeal, sugar, and chocolate, loaded on and off of pack mules every day. Materials from cooking kettles to iron for making horseshoes added more tonnage.

Some 240 people set out from Tubac on October 23, 1775. The first night out, María Manuela Piñuelas died from complications after childbirth, the only death en route. Her son lived. Two other babies born on the trip brought the total number of settlers to 198. Of these, one-third were children 12 years old and under.

The expedition continued north along the Santa Cruz River to the Pima Villages on the Gila River, then followed the Gila to its junction with the Colorado. They were assisted in crossing the Colorado by Salvador Palma, chief of the Quechans (Yumas), whose tribe had befriended Anza on his 1774 exploratory trek. Nearly five months after leaving Tubac, the colonizing expedition arrived at the presidio of Monte Rey. They had survived a most difficult trip, endured “lack of water and food, life-threatening weather conditions, debilitated and dying animals, and roads almost impassable due to rain, mud, sand, or snow.” After selecting the sites for a presidio and mission, Anza left the colonists in Monterey to begin a long ride to Mexico City where he would deliver news of his successful venture to the Viceroy. Lt. Moraga, Anza’s second-in-command, led the settlers on to their final destination, and in June 1776, they occupied the site of what became the City of San Francisco. The epic journey is memorialized today as the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, established in 1990.

Old Spanish National Historic Trail
The Old Spanish Trail, “the longest, crookedest, most arduous pack mule trail in the history of America,” (1829-1848) was best-known during the Mexican period of southwestern history. The trail started in Santa Fe and terminated in Los Angeles, and had several variants--the Armijo Route, the Main Branch, and the mountainous North Branch with East and West Forks.

For almost two hundred years, a primary concern for Spanish authorities was finding a supply link between the provincial capitals of northern New Spain and the Pacific Ocean. El Camino Real (the Royal Road) existed--Santa Fe to Chihuahua, and on to Mexico City, but the round trip took many months. Early in the 19th century when independence from Spain was achieved, Mexico began to allow in trade goods from the United States, over what came to be called the Santa Fe Trail, opened in 1821 from Missouri to New Mexico. But the need continued for a connection with California and the Pacific Ocean.

Rivers and streams, and mountain passes were already known to fur trappers and traders whose guiding services were employed in the 1830s and 1840s, as Mexican territory became fair game to Americans pushing west. Antonio Armijo, an enterprising merchant, had succeeded in 1829 in taking his pack train almost due west from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, a direct though difficult route that rewarded him with unbelievable profits. Entrepreneurs who followed him over the next twenty years preferred the longer, but easier and more familiar, trails that twisted north from Santa Fe through western Colorado and southern Utah, across the extreme northwest corner of Arizona, into Nevada and on to southern California. This “Spanish Trail,” became a profitable commercial route and was the means for thousands of New Mexico sheep being driven to unlimited markets during the California Gold Rush. Mormons who were settling in Utah journeyed both east and west between Salt Lake City and California; a number of southern California’s early families migrated over the route.

In 2002, the Old Spanish Trail was recognized as the nation’s 15th National Historic Trail, worthy of study, preservation, and protection

Southern Trail Complex
The southern overland route to California and the Pacific Ocean through present-day Arizona, has been in use for centuries--first by American Indians, then by Europeans throughout the 16th to the 19th centuries. In late 1877, the Southern Pacific Railroad followed some of this corridor as it connected California, across Arizona, to the rest of the United States. Travelers on modern Interstates 8, 10, and 19 see, generally, the same terrain. This was not a single road, but a complex of transportation corridors that entered the state from east and south, traveled through passes, and along west- and north-flowing streams. The trails converged at the Pima Villages on the Gila River, then traversed the flood plain of the Gila River in a westerly direction to its confluence with the Colorado River at Yuma Crossing. This braided trail complex became nationally important in mid-19th century when the Mexican War and subsequent gold discoveries in California set off unprecedented westward migration. Thousands made their way over the various routes of the Southern Trail Complex.

Kearny’s Route and Cooke’s Wagon Road
Several of these historic routes across southern Arizona are associated with the Mexican War of 1846-48. General Stephen Watts Kearny, Commander of the U. S. Army of the West, was concerned with getting to California by the most direct route. In 1846, he and 100 soldiers, guided by Kit Carson, followed the Gila River across the state, utilizing a trail well-known to earlier trappers and traders, but one that was completely unsuited for wheeled vehicles. There were several nearly impassable canyons along the course of the river. Kearny put the army’s supply wagons under the command of Lieut. Colonel Philip St. George Cooke and his “Mormon Battalion,” a large number of volunteers hired by the U. S. government to augment the Army of the West. Following six weeks behind Kearny’s unit, late in the year, Cooke and his men entered Arizona through Guadalupe Pass in the extreme southwest corner of New Mexico, then worked down the San Pedro River and to the small Mexican presidio of Tucson. From there, the road followed the Santa Cruz River to the Pima Villages on the Gila, then down the Gila flood plain to Yuma Crossing. The Mormon Battalion and Kearny’s Army of the West were by far the largest groups to cross Arizona at that time. Kearny’s Gila River Trail upstream from the Pima Villages was never heavily used, and then only by pack trains.

Graham’s Santa Cruz Route
After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War, in early 1848, a battalion of Second Dragoons under the command of Major Lawrence P. Graham marched from Chihuahua to Fronteras, Sonora, south of the present U. S.--Mexican border, went north along the Santa Cruz River to Tucson (today’s Interstate 19) and the Pima Villages, then followed Kearny and Cooke’s route along the Gila. This Santa Cruz River route and Cooke’s wagon road became the two major passages through Arizona as Forty-Niners streamed west to strike it rich in the gold fields of California.

Apache Pass and the Butterfield Mail Route
In 1849, gold seekers first began to use a quicker route through Apache Pass, a trail that went from Soldier’s Farewell Hill in western New Mexico to Tucson, snaking through a narrow defile between Dos Cabezas and the Chiricahua mountains. Starting in mid-1857, this corridor was kept open by the couriers and mail coaches of the San Antonio & San Diego Mail Line, nicknamed “The Jackass Mail,” an enterprise described as “running from nowhere, through nothing, to no place.” John Butterfield won the coveted mail contract in 1858, and his Overland Mail continued using the shorter route through Apache Pass until 1861 and the advent of the Civil War. Today, Interstate 10 enters Arizona in this vicinity.

Beale Wagon Road
As the American population of the new state of California grew, settlers began to call for better roads to connect them with the rest of the nation. In 1856, Congress appropriated the necessary funds to construct three wagon roads. One of these was to be built along the 35th parallel (explored in 1853-54 by Captain Amiel W. Whipple), from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River where it would connect with the Mojave Road in California. The man selected to build this road was Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who was nationally renowned for his record-breaking trips to and from California, and other exploits during the Mexican War. In addition to the usual livestock and equipment, Beale used camels recently imported from Syria to test their usefulness in the deserts of western America. The camels passed with flying colors.

Construction on Beale’s route began in August of 1857 and reached the Colorado River in October of the same year. Beale made another trip in 1859 to improve the road, this time from Ft. Smith, Arkansas, to the Colorado River. The Beale Road became popular with the military and with Arizona and California settlers, from 1858 until the coming of the AT&SF Railroad in 1882. Historic Route 66 and our modern Interstate 40 were built in the same general corridor as the old wagon road, but the original road can still be traced across most of the state and some of it is used for local travel today.

Overland Road
In 1863, prospectors found gold in the headwaters of the Hassayampa River, about five miles south of where Prescott lies today. Military officials in New Mexico wanted to find the shortest route to these mines. They also wanted to establish the first Arizona territorial capital near the mines.

At the time it was most used, this road extended approximately 85 miles from Flagstaff (called “Antelope Spring” before 1876) to Prescott (Fort Whipple) and served as the major way of travel between these two communities from 1863 to 1882.
The United States Army used the road extensively during those years, primarily to transport men and supplies from as far away as Fort Wingate and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Settlers in the region, and for a brief time, private stage coach enterprises, also, made use of it.

There is cause to believe that prior to the road’s Anglo use, the area’s indigenous people used the trail. This path served as an important trail route for the Hopi Indians. Certain segments of the Overland Road today make up part of the region’s primary and secondary road system.

havez Trail
During the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century, an important and well-used, east-west trail crossed the southern part of central Arizona’s Verde Valley, linking Winslow, on the Colorado Plateau, with Prescott, in the Central Arizona Highlands, where Fort Whipple was also located. Established in 1864 by Colonel J. Francisco Chaves, the Chávez Trail, despite the general rough and rugged terrain through which it passed, enjoyed a relatively even and straight 125 miles from Winslow westward to Prescott.

At the time the trail was initially established, Winslow was known as “Sunset Crossing.” Leaving Sunset Crossing, the trail followed an old Hopi Indian path, the “Palatkwapi Trail,” going westward through Chávez Pass, past Stoneman Lake, and down the Mogollon Rim to the Verde Valley. From here it continued by way of Montezuma Well to Camp Verde. It then ascended the Black Hills up and through Copper Canyon to Ash Creek, and went on to the Agua Fria River and Prescott.

While it primarily served the needs of settlers in the immediate region, the trail also provided an important section of a much longer road that In 1863, fifteen ye afte r the war with Mexico ended, the Territory of Arizona was created. In response to the threat of Confederacy occupation, President Lincoln divided the Territory of New Mexico with the western half becoming the Territory of Arizona. A year later, the town of Prescott was created, the site chosen for its proximity to a new military post, Fort Whipple, and the rich mining claims recently discovered in the area. Prescott became the capital of the new Territory. The only other option, Tucson, was considered sympatheti

The main supply route to Prescott and Fort Whipple, serving both military and civilians, was over two freighting roads from the Colorado River. Each road was about 150 miles long, over rough, unsettled Indian country. These toll roads were laboriously constructed from the river ports of La Paz and Ehrenberg to the south, and Fort Mohave and Hardyville (now Bullhead City) to the north. The ports were supplied by shipping from San Francisco and Los Angeles around the tip of Baja Peninsula, up the Gulf of California, to the mouth of the Colorado River, and then upstream by paddle steamers. In addition to carrying freight, these roads were used by travelers, initially on their own steeds, and later, in commercial stage coaches.

The freight-wagons were often linked together like a train, with up to four wagons in tandem. Mules, four to twelve pairs per team, usually pulled them, though, occasionally, slower oxen were used instead. An iron “tire” strengthened the huge wood-spoked wheels of the heavy wagons. Even today, a keen eye can find traces of their passage in some of the remoter regions of Arizona--ruts and swales, and even the occasional rock with rust marks from iron, ground from the metal tires of the many loaded wagons that passed along the route.

General Crook Road
In 1871, General George Crook came to Arizona Territory as Commander of the Department of Arizona. His orders were to subdue the Indians of the Territory and place them on reservations. General Crook realized at once that in order to accomplish this goal he must be able to move troops and supplies into the haunts of the Indians with swiftness and surprise. In August of that year, General Crook left Fort Apache with a unit of cavalry troops to locate and mark a supply road from Fort Apache to Fort Whipple in Prescott. As they moved westerly across the Mogollon Rim, then called Black Mesa, Crook realized quickly that he must stay close to the edge of the escarpment, otherwise, when he moved north, he encountered deep and rugged canyons. It was rough going but the trekkers found water in small lakes. Crook pushed on, and in early September of 1871, he reached Fort Whipple in Prescott. Actual construction of a road started in the spring of 1872. By 1873, supplies began moving by pack train from Fort Verde to Fort Apache. One year later in September 1874, the first wagon supply train left Fort Whipple for Fort Apache. Martha Summerhayes, the first woman to travel over the road, was on that trip. She later wrote the book, Vanished Arizona, telling of her experiences on the road and describing her travels in Arizona Territory.

During the next twenty-two years, Crook Road was used by troops patrolling across the Territory and the northern boundary of the Apache Reservation. The road was in continual use for thirty-two more years, until the Rim Road was built in 1928.

Mormon Honeymoon Trail
For the Mormon colonizers of Arizona in the nineteenth century, the closest temple in which a marriage could be made eternal, or “sealed,” was in St. George, Utah. Mormon couples from central and eastern Arizona made a long journey by wagon or buckboard or on horseback through rugged and inhospitable territory to St. George. The route became known as the “Mormon Wagon Road.” Travelers making this long trek used a trail system that crossed a rocky, sandy, arid region. Lee’s Ferry on the main trail became the most feasible place to cross the Colorado River, the most challenging obstacle. South of the river, the main road headed almost due south, much of it alongside the Little Colorado River, to Sunset Crossing, where Winslow is today. From here, branches led to Mormon colonies in the Tonto Basin and the upper Little Colorado River Valley. An important part of this trail system also continued from Show Low southward to the Upper Gila River Valley. The distances of the various branches combined amounted to more than 450 miles.

In the 1880s, Arizona historian Will Barnes lived on the Little Colorado River. He talked to the people going past his ranch, to and from St. George, Utah. In 1934, in an article he wrote for Arizona Highways Magazine, Barnes referred to the Mormon Wagon Road as the “Honeymoon Trail.” The name stuck, and everyone, including the Mormons, themselves, began to refer collectively to this network of trails as the “Honeymoon Trail.”


With the establishment of the Territorial Capital at Prescott, stage transportation from San Bernardino, California, first over the La Paz Road and soon thereafter over the Hardyville Toll Road, became a high priority. When the Vulture Mine was opened just south of Wickenburg, that town, also, became a transportation hub for the Territory. The Arizona and California Stage Company, headquartered in Wickenburg, provided passenger, mail, and light freight service to the capital from points west.

Phoenix was founded in 1867 in response to supply needs for the population of Central Arizona. The Vulture Mine, Camp McDowell (a military post at the confluence of the Verde and Salt Rivers), and the towns and mines of Wickenburg and Prescott provided ready markets for crops produced in the Phoenix area. Originally, Maricopa Wells, also known as Maricopaville, was the destination of southbound stages . There the coaches made connection with John Capron’s stage line from Los Angeles to Tucson, and later with the Southern Pacific Railroad that entered Arizona in 1877. As Phoenix developed, attention turned to the Valley as the major stage destination from Prescott.

Just as today, road realignment to provide shorter, faster travel between points in the Territory was a high priority. The route from Prescott to Phoenix through Wickenburg was improved often by implementing cutoffs. Eventually, the Black Canyon provided a better route, suitable for stage and for horseback travel. Freighters still preferred the flatter route through Wickenburg.

Indian raids on the stage routes were rare, but highwaymen, known as “Knights of the Road,” caused havoc. Stage holdups occurred at the rate of nearly one per month, for at least, a decade from 1879.

(Disclaimer)
The map and accompanying text is produced by the Historic Trails Subcommittee of ASCOT (the Arizona State Committee on Trails), a group of volunteers, professionals in many fields of endeavor, all interested in preservation and protection of Arizona’s notable historic routes. Each trail has its own unique story. There are many others. For example, we have made no attempt to tell of the first users, Arizona’s Indian tribes, who were here for millennia before Europeans arrived. That perhaps, is another project.

We thank you for your interest and invite you to learn more about Arizona’s colorful past by thoughtful use of this map and brochure.

Arizona State Parks thanks the ASCOT Historic Trails Subcommittee for its investment of time, effort, dedication, and expertise in the development of this brochure. We would also remind the reader that some of these trails pass through restricted zones such as private property, Indian and military reservations. Permits to use these trails may be necessary. Please contact the Trails Coordinator at Arizona State Parks (602-542-4174) for more detailed information.

Suggested Further Reading

Allyn, Joseph P. The Arizona of Joseph Pratt Allyn.
Baley, Charles. Disaster at the Colorado: Beale’s
Wagon Road and the First Emigrant Party.
Bolton, Herbert E. Coronado, Knight of Pueblos and
Plains.
Broyles, Bill. “The Devil’s Highway.” Arizona Highways.
February 1993.
Byrkit, Jim. Lt. Col. J. Francisco Chaves and the ‘
‘Chavez Trail’.
__________. The Palatkwapi Trail.
Calvin, Ross. Lieutenant Emory Reports.
Clarke Dwight L. The Original Journals of Henry
Smith Turner.
Crampton, C. Gregory and Steven K. Madsen. In
Search of the Spanish Trail: Santa Fe to Los Angeles,
1829-1848.
Etter, Patricia A. To California on the Southern Route,
1849: A History and Annotated Bibliography.
Hague, Harlan. The Road to California: The search for
a Southern Overland Route, 1540-1848.
Hanchett, Lee J. Catch the Stage to Phoenix.
_________. Crossing Arizona.
Hartmann, William K. Desert Heart: Chronicles of the
Sonoran Desert.
Heckethorn, Ada Fancher. The Toll Road: Prescott to
Fort Mojave.
Hinton, Richard. The Handbook to Arizona.
Lesley, Lewis Burt. Uncle Sam’s Camels.
Pourade, Richard F. Anza Conquers the Desert: The
Anza Expeditions from Mexico to California and
the Founding of San Francisco, 1774-1776
Ricketts, Norma Baldwin. Arizona’s Honeymoon Trail
and Mormon Wagon Roads.
Robrock, David P., Ed. Missouri ‘49er: The Journal of
William W. Hunter on the Southern Gold Trail.
Rozum, Fred A. “Buckboards and Stagecoaches:
Establishing Public Transportation on the Black Canyon
Route,” Journal of Arizona History. Summer 1989.
Sanchez, Joseph P. Explorers, Traders, and Slavers:
Forging the Old Spanish Trail 1678-1850.
Smith, Jack Beale. Guides to the Beale Wagon Road.
Summerhayes, Martha. Vanished Arizona:
Recollections of my Army Life.
Walker, Henry P. and Don Bufkin. Historical Atlas of
Arizona.
Web de Anza. http://anza.uoregon.edu/. A multicultural,
bilingual, interactive website, operated by University
of Oregon at Eugene, Oregon. Eight expedition
diaries, each in both Spanish and English, are
enriched with links to other primary sources.