The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  In many ancient religious texts, fallen angels were bound in chains and buried beneath a desert known only as Desolation. This could be the place.

  In the distance, deceptive stands of mesquite trees must have looked like oases. Ten trees a quarter mile apart can look like a cool grove from a distance. In the western desert, twenty miles looks like ten. And ten miles can kill. There was still no water; there wasn’t even any shade.

  Black ironwood stumps writhed from the ground. Dead for five hundred years, they had already been two thousand years old when they died. It was a forest of eldritch bones.

  The men had cactus spines in their faces, their hands. There wasn’t enough fluid left in them to bleed. They’d climbed peaks, hoping to find a town, or a river, had seen more landscape, and tumbled down the far side to keep walking. One of them said, “Too many damned rocks.” Pinches piedras, he said. Damned heat. Damned sun.

  Now, as they came out of the hills, they faced the plain and the far wall of the Gila Mountains. Mauve and yellow cliffs. A volcanic cone called Raven’s Butte that was dark, as if a rain cloud were hovering over it. It looked as if you could find relief on its perpetually shadowy flanks, but that too was an illusion. Abandoned army tanks, preserved forever in the dry heat, stood in their path, a ghostly arrangement that must have seemed like another bad dream. Their full-sun 110-degree nightmare.

  “The Devil’s Highway” is a name that has set out to illuminate one notion: bad medicine.

  The first white man known to die in the desert heat here did it on January 18, 1541.

  Most assuredly, others had died before. As long as there have been people, there have been deaths in the western desert. When the Devil’s Highway was a faint scratch of desert bighorn hoof marks, and the first hunters ran along it, someone died. But the brown and red men who ran the paths left no record outside of faded songs and rock paintings we still don’t understand.

  Desert spirits of a dark and mysterious nature have always traveled these trails. From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace—those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O’Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don’t work out here. “You need a new kind of prayers,” she says, “to negotiate with this land.”

  The first time the sky and earth came together, Elder Brother, I’itoi, was born. He still resides in a windy cave overlooking the western desert, and he resents uninvited visitors. Mountains are called do’ags. In the side of one do’ag can be found the twin caves where the spirit of the evil witch, Ho’ok, hides. The coyote-spirit of the place is called Ban, and he works his wicked pranks in the big open spaces.

  Everywhere, red shadows. Tiny men live underground, and they are known to the Yaqui Indians hereabouts as Surem. In the past, before the first white man died, Yuku, the devil, controlled all the corn until the crows stole it from him and let some of it slip so men could eat. Mexico’s oldest hoodoo, La Llorona, the wailing ghost, has been heard rushing down nearby creek beds. And its newest hoodoo, the dreaded Chupacabras (the Goat Sucker), has been seen attacking animals, lurking in outhouses, and even jumping in bedroom windows to munch on sleeping children. An Apache witness said the Chupacabras was a whispering kangaroo. It said, “Come here.” He swore it did.

  The plants are noxious and spiked. Saguaros, nopales, the fiendish chollas. Each long cholla spike has a small barb, and they hook into the skin, and they catch in elbow creases and hook forearm and biceps together. Even the green mesquite trees have long thorns set just at eye level.

  Much of the wildlife is nocturnal, and it creeps through the nights, poisonous and alien: the sidewinder, the rattlesnake, the scorpion, the giant centipede, the black widow, the tarantula, the brown recluse, the coral snake, the Gila monster. The kissing bug bites you and its poison makes the entire body erupt in red welts. Fungus drifts on the valley dust, and it sinks into the lungs and throbs to life. The millennium has added a further danger: all wild bees in southern Arizona, naturalists report, are now Africanized. As if the desert felt it hadn’t made its point, it added killer bees.

  Today, the ancient Hohokam have vanished, like the Anasazi, long gone in the north. Their etchings and ruins still dot the ground; unexplained radiating lines lead away from the center like ghost roads in the shape of a great star. Not all of these paths are ancient. Some of the lines have been made by the illegals, cutting across the waste to the far lights of Ajo, or Sells, or the Mohawk rest area on I-8. Others are old beyond dating, and no one knows where they lead. Footprints of long-dead cowboys are still there, wagon ruts and mule scuffs. And beneath these, the prints of the phantom Hohokam themselves.

  In certain places, boulders form straight lines, arrayed along compass directions on the burning plains. Among these stones are old rock piles in the shapes of arrows. They were left by well-wishers in 1890, aiming at a tinaja (water hole) hidden among crags. Cairns that serve as mysterious signposts for messages long forgotten mix with ancient graves. Etchings made in the hardpan with feet or sticks form animals centuries old and only visible from the air. Some of these cairns have been put in place by Border Patrol signcutters (trackers), and they are often at the junction of two desert paths, but the cutters just smile when you ask what they mean. One more secret of Desolation.

  When the white men came, they brought with them their mania for record keeping. They made their way across the land, subduing indigenous tribes, civilizing the frontier. Missionaries brought the gentle word of the Lamb. Cavalrymen bravely tamed the badlands, built military outposts, settlements, ranches, and towns. Cowboys rode like the wind. Gunslingers fell. The worst bandits you could imagine drank rotgut and shot sheriffs, yet lived on in popular mythology and became the subjects of popular songs and cheap fictions. Railroads followed, and the great cattle drives, and the dusty range wars, and the discovery of gold and silver. In the great north woods, lumberjacks collected the big trees. The Alamo. The Civil War took out countless citizens in its desperate upheaval.

  Every Tijuana schoolkid knows it: it’s the history of Mexico.

  If the North American continent was broad (“high, wide, and lonesome”), then Mexico was tall. High, narrow, and lonesome. Europeans conquering North America hustled west, where the open land lay. And the Europeans settling Mexico hustled north. Where the open land was.

  Immigration, the drive northward, is a white phenomenon.

  White Europeans conceived of and launched El Norte mania, just as white Europeans inhabiting the United States today bemoan it.

  They started to complain after the Civil War. The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese. In the 1880s, American railroad barons needed cheap skilled labor to help “tame our continent.” Mexico’s Chinese hordes could be hired for cheap, yet they could earn more in the United States than in Mexico, even at cut rates. Jobs opened, word went out, the illegals came north.

  Sound familiar?

  Americans panicked at the “yellowing” of America. A force known as the Mounted Chinese Exclusionary Police took to the dusty wasteland. They chased the “coolies” and deported them.

  And today?

  Sinful frontier towns with bad reputations. Untamed mountain ranges, bears, lions, and wolves. Indians. A dangerous border. Inhabitants speak with a cowpoke twang, listen to country music, dance the two-step, favor cowboy hats, big belt buckles, and pickup trucks. That ain’t Texas, it’s Sonora.

  January 18, 1541.

  Sonoita (also known as Sonoyta) was perhaps not much more than sticks and mud, but it was a stopping point for a Spanish expedition in search of, what else, gold. Even in 1541, Sonoita was the unwilling host of killers and wanderers. The leader of this clanking Spaniard patrol was a firebrand known as Melchior Díaz. He didn’t especially want to spend his holidays in the broiling dust of Sonoita, but he was deep
into hostile territory. It was commonly believed that the natives of the Devil’s Highway devoured human children. The Spaniards weren’t planning on settling—spread the cross around, throw up a mission, and hit the road in search of better things.

  Melchior Díaz was trying to reach the Sea of Cortez, lying between the Mexican mainland and Baja California. Perhaps he knew that ahead of him lay the most hellish stretch of land in the entire north. The dirt paths he rode his horse down on that day are now the paved and semipaved barrio lanes of modern Sonoita. Some of the hubcap-popping boulders in Sonoita’s hillside alleys are the same rocks on which Melchior’s horse’s shoes struck sparks.

  He died trying to kill a dog.

  He probably didn’t have anything against canines—his troop had dogs that they used to hunt down game and humans. But there were also the feral creatures that dashed in from the outskirts of the settlement to slaughter his sheep. Melchior Díaz kept his sheep in small brush corrals, attended by his Indian slaves. But the wild dogs had a way of sneaking off with lambs when nobody was looking.

  And Melchior was cranky. He had spent his holidays far from home, among the savages, and even Tucson was only a small scattering of huts and lean-tos. He couldn’t have been farther from Mexico City or Spain. Sonoita was the end of the world. A Christmas in this outpost did not inspire joy. Besides, conquistadores were notoriously short on joie de vivre.

  Melchior rode well, and he rode well armed. He certainly carried a sword and a fighting dagger. He probably carried a harquebus and a long metal-tipped lance, the M16 of the day.

  Melchior was a strong man and a powerful fighter. In the narratives of the Coronado expedition, we see him plying his trade: “… the horsemen began to overtake [the Indians] and the lances cut them down mercilessly … until not a man was to be seen.”

  This rout of natives serves as the preface to the story of death that begins with Melchior Díaz.

  We know that he was riding his horse down one of the settlement paths. We can project the smells swirling around him: horse, dirt, his own stink, chickens, smoke, dung. Not all that different from the smells of today.

  He was approaching his sheep pen, perhaps where the Así Es Mi Tierra taco shop, or a Pemex station stands today. Melchior squinted ahead and—Damn it to hell!—those lazy slaves of his had allowed a dog to get in the pen!

  Perro desgraciado!

  No record states how Melchior entered the pen, but it doesn’t seem likely he stopped to open a gate. Not Melchior. He jumped over the fence, and in jumping, somehow he bobbled his lance throw and missed the dog entirely. You can see the dog yipping and sidestepping and making tracks for the horizon, casting wounded looks over his shoulder. And here is where Melchior Díaz died.

  The record states that Melchior, somehow, “passed over” the lance. Did he fall from the horse? No one knows, but the lance managed to penetrate his gut and rip him open.

  The desert ground must have seemed terribly hard as he hit it. As Melchior died (it took twenty gruesome days) on his stinking cot, he burned and howled. Flies settled in his entrails. Maybe the very dog that killed him drew near to sniff the rich meaty scent. The fallen angels of Desolation came out of the Cabeza Prieta, folded their hands over him, and smiled.

  The land had been haunted before Melchior died, and it remained haunted afterward; 150 years after his death, Catholic apparitions plagued the tribes. Various peoples had alarming encounters with meddlesome white women who flew above their heads. In the lands of the O’Odham, a white woman bearing a cross came drifting down the Devil’s Highway itself. The warriors who saw her immediately did the only practical thing they could: they filled her with arrows. They said she refused to die. Kept on flying. Her story was written down in 1699, but the scribe who wrote this history tells us it had happened so long ago that the tribe had already forgotten her.

  Fifty years after this Blessed Virgin UFO, a female prophet came out of the desert. She was known as La Mujer Azul. The Blue Woman. They filled her full of arrows, too. This time, she died.

  Jesuits rolled in. They made the People as unhappy as the mysterious spirit-women, and Pimas raided the town to bludgeon its missionary to death. Angry Yumas by the Colorado River dragged a Jesuit out into the light and beat him to death.

  It was the nineteenth century, however, that really got the modern era of death rolling.

  The Yumas got stirred up again and massacred the evil scalp-hunting Glanton gang by the banks of the river in the mid 1840s. Then, in 1848–49, the California gold rush began. Mexicans weren’t immune to the siren call of treasure. By now, the Cabeza Prieta/Devil’s Highway had been trod by white men and mestizos for 307 years. It was still little more than a rough dirt trail—it is still a rough dirt trail—but it was slyly posing as a handy southern route through Arizona. White Arizonans and Texans hove to and dragged their wagons. Thousands of travelers went into the desert, and piles of human bones revealed where many of them fell. Though the bones are gone, wagon ruts can still be found, and near these ruts, piles of stone still hide the remains of those who fell.

  One writer who has focused on this desert, Craig Childs, tells of a pair of old bullet casings found out there. They were jammed together, and when pried apart, an aged curl of paper fell out. On the paper, someone had written, “Was it worth it?”

  The Sand Papagos saw the endless lines of scraggly Mexicans as a rolling supermarket. Their strategy was similar to their approach to the floating virgin: shoot arrows. Wagon train after wagon train was slaughtered. Besieged Mexicans begged their own army to protect them, but the Sand Papagos and their leader, a warrior named Quelele, the Carrion-Hawk, were ready for them, too.

  Just to make sure the Mexicans got the point, Quelele let it be known that his favorite snack was dead Mexican. “I don’t need the wagons!” he boasted. “Bring on the Mexican army! I am the Carrion-Hawk! I’m hungry for Mexican meat!”

  Between Quelele and the harsh landscape, the numbers of dead soared beyond counting. Human skeletons were found lying beside the road, and eerie cattle and horses, reduced to blanched mummies, were reported to be standing out among the ironwood trees. Graves surrounded some waterholes, up to twenty-seven around one pothole alone.

  A westerner named Francisco Salazar seems to have been the first to keep an eyewitness record of this phase of the killing fields. By 1850, he wrote, the Devil’s Highway was “… a vast graveyard of unknown dead … the scattered bones of human beings slowly turning to dust … the dead were left where they were to be sepulchered by the fearful sand storms that sweep at times over the desolate waste.”

  In the following years, over four hundred people died of heat, thirst, and misadventure. It became known as the most terrible place in the world.

  And it’s beautiful. Edward Abbey, the celebrated iconoclast and writer, loved the place. He chose to be buried there, illegally, among the illegal Mexicans he despised.

  A young Tucson man stops at a table in a Mexican restaurant and addresses the gathered eaters. He has overheard their conversation about the desert. He pulls up a chair and launches into his tale.

  He is a warlock-in-training, studying with one of the many shamans plying their trade in the area. He smiles and confesses that a certain aspect of Tucson is bothering him. That empty dirt lot? Over on the corner of Fourth and Speedway? Like, a couple blocks from the Yokohama Rice Bowl?

  The master has shown him that the lot has always been vacant, empty since the 1600s. Nobody has ever dared build upon it, and the houses around the lot are plagued by ghosts and poltergeists. But they’re not really ghosts. Dude, they’re demons. It’s one of the seven open gates of hell. A magus can sit in his pickup and summon the Beast while eating a teriyaki bowl and Diet Coke.

  Thus, this small narrative is also about Tucson, the civilized part of Desolation, a city with its own secrets and holes. A desert can be a scrape of land or a small gravel lot. You can imagine the spirit of the empty places. The places named for the devil himse
lf.

  Route 86 begins its life in Tucson as “Ajo Way.” Here, a source close to this story once saw the actual Cabeza Prieta.

  Beyond the O’Odham village of Sells, near the Coyote (human-smuggler) pickup point of mile marker 27, there is a dirt bank beside Highway 86. A few concrete houses sit behind it, about one hundred yards from the road. On the top of the bank is a single mailbox, on a crooked white pole.

  It wasn’t even at night when the Cabeza Prieta showed itself. It wasn’t dawn, or the gloaming of sunset. It was in the heart of a brutal desert afternoon. The sun was bright, and the temperatures were hovering at about 104. Not a cloud in sight.

  Suddenly, the ground split. Just a little hole, more of a slit, really. Maybe an ant hill, gravel scattered around the edge. Dirt welling up out of the hole like water.

  Out of the small hole rose a black human head. It glistened, either wet or made of coal, some black crystal. Its eyes were burning white. Its teeth were also white. Its face was narrow, and it sported a sharp beard on its chin. It rose until just the tops of its shoulders were visible. It cast a shadow. And it turned as it watched the traveler pass.

  It was laughing at him.

  The men walked onto the end of a dirt road. They couldn’t know it was called the Vidrios Drag. Now they had a choice. Cross the road and stagger along the front range of the mountains, or stay on the road and hope the Border Patrol would find them. The Border Patrol! Their nemesis. They’d walked into hell trying to escape the Border Patrol, and now they were praying to get caught.

  In their state, a single idea was too complex, and they looked upon it with uncertainty. They shuffled around. It was ten o’clock in the morning, 104 degrees. Dust devils, dead creosote rattling like diamondbacks, the taunting icy chip of sunlight reflected off a high-flying plane. Weird sounds in the landscape: voices, coughs, laughter, engines. It was the desert haunting they’d been hearing all along. When they heard the engine coming, it sounded like locusts flying overhead, cicadas, wind. And the dust rising could have been smoke from small fires. The flashes of white out there, heading toward them, popping out from behind saguaros and paloverde trees—well, it could have been ghosts, flags, a parade. It could have been anything. They didn’t know if they should hide or stand their ground and face whatever was coming their way.