Driving through this landscape, now, 155 years later, I fell victim to a similar wonderment, that so many millions of air-conditioned, dairy-fed, white-sneaker-clad, well-fertilized, and well-irrigated Americans have come to live against all climatic sense amid the northern reaches of the great Sonoran Desert. I decided to take a detour. Nogales, a community that has loomed so large in discussions of border enforcement over the last several years, was not so far away, so I drove south from San Xavier del Bac.
On my way to Nogales, I stopped at the mission of San José de Tumacácori, where in Blood Meridian the scalpers stop and shoot a mad hermit out of the rafters. The mission was closed, so I drove on, through a beautiful countryside in the late afternoon.
At Nogales, I stayed at a bed and breakfast called Frida’s Inn. It had a Frida Kahlo theme. I slept in Frida’s room, next door to Diego’s room. There were some guests from the Mexican consulate who were cooking a carne asada outside.
In the morning I wandered around Nogales. The new border fence runs right through town, and both Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, nestle right up against it. The new fence, which was in the picket style but with flat solid panels across the top to discourage climbers, reminded me vaguely of a Richard Serra sculpture, and I decided it was far more attractive than the fence it replaced. The camera towers struck me as being more obnoxious.
I drove north, back toward Tucson, then west through millions of saguaro cactuses and cut down toward Ajo, just wandering now, avoiding the dullness of life on the interstate. I passed through the Tohono O’odham Nation, where I saw a bicyclist in a bright crumpled heap on the side of the road, a policeman and a border patrolman looking down at him, just standing there doing nothing. The man lay there, his body twisted together with his bike, staring up at the blue vault of a cloudless sky.
I passed a community college, miles from nowhere, surrounded by cholla cactus and mesquite. The brush grew right up against the road. There was no right-of-way, and I worried about wildlife darting in front of my vehicle, but I saw no animals. I passed a small concrete box, in the middle of the desert, miles from any settlement, covered with graffiti. I hadn’t seen a car in hours. Town names slipped by: Quijotoa, San Simon, Why. Then an ambulance, probably going to pick up that dead bicyclist. I could understand why they call this stretch of Arizona the Devil’s Highway.
Border fence and camera tower in Nogales, Arizona
The slag pile for the Ajo copper mine was monstrous. Pink slag to my left, white slag to my right—I felt as if I were driving inside the mine. When I arrived in Ajo, I pulled over and filled up with gas. The man at the counter used to work at the mine, which shut down in 1984. It was owned by Phelps Dodge.
By that point I was longing for the interstate, and I drove north through Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, a horrible, hideous, godforsaken wasteland.
—
During a favorable season the road from Tucson to Yuma might not have been so terrible. During a dry spell it was brutal, and I fear that was the case for Perry and Welmett and young T.A. and Bud. The trail led north to meet the Gila River, then west. There might be grass for the animals or not. After a rain the country was covered with what cattlemen called the Gila Lagoons, broad muddy puddles, trod in and soiled by cattle. Livestock fared well enough, but humans often sickened from drinking that water. The villages of the Pima Indians extended for miles along the Gila. Travelers often commented on the beauty of the Pima women, their well-formed figures, their modesty, their sweet laughter.
Once travelers reached the Gila, the water situation improved, for a time. But then came the great bend of the Gila and a jornada of some forty miles without water. The Butterfield more or less followed this route, and there was a mail station near a pictograph site known as the Painted Rock. This was a hard stretch of desert in the 1850s, though some fortunate travelers, such as John Russell Bartlett, the hapless boundary commissioner, reported good forage. Today it is still a barren, desolate wasteland, without doubt the worst country I have passed through yet.
Driving along Interstate 8, I marveled at how sorry the country was, when all of a sudden I was surrounded by lush green fields of what looked like alfalfa, thousands of acres of green, and what I soon recognized as a dairy in the distance. Legions of Holstein cattle, gorging themselves on grain and hay, in the middle of an artificial oasis. The dairy and its fields stretch for miles, maybe ten miles on one side, and when I exited the highway for Painted Rock Road, I saw that right next to the dairy extends a huge solar power plant, at least ten square miles of solar arrays.
I drove along a dirt road for several miles, the Painted Rock Dairy to my right, solar arrays to my left, and then I passed once more into the desert, approaching an outcropping of what appeared to be a mound of boulders. The thermometer in my car told me the weather was cool for this place, about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Faded information panels informed me that these petroglyphs, some of them, date back twelve thousand years. The oldest are in the Western Archaic style; others are in the Gila style. I see clusters of circles, grids, shapes that look like rakes or tridents, ladders and mazes and atlatls. I have seen similar shapes along the Lower Pecos and the Devils River. The Gila River–style images, five or six hundred years old, are anthropomorphic and zoomorphic—humans, snakes, scorpions, lizards, deer. Archaeologists think some of the round shapes might represent planets or stars. Thousands of figures cover the rocks, scratched (not painted) into the desert varnish covering this basaltic volcanic intrusion. Naturally, there are also more recent markings, including at least one from 1967, the summer of love and the year of my birth.
I was the sole visitor at this lonely place, radioactive green fields not far away, perhaps along the banks of the Gila.
On my way back to the interstate I stopped at the gate of the solar plant. A large sign identified it as the Solana Generating Station. A security guard stood near her vehicle, under a fabric sunshade. I approached and asked whether she thought there was something strange about having a dairy out in the middle of the desert. She said she didn’t think it was strange, because the dairies have to move out here because of the HOAs. I didn’t understand at first, but as she spoke I got it: homeowner associations. As housing developments expand outward from suburban Phoenix, homeowner associations begin to complain about the dairies. Because it smells bad? I asked.
“It’s not just that; it’s the flies. I don’t know if you noticed them, but when you get in your car again it’s going to be full of flies.”
I looked back at my car, the door wide open. It was 103 degrees as I drove down the interstate toward Yuma, my windows down, eighty miles an hour, trying to evict my hundreds and hundreds of stowaways.
Wandering around the city of Yuma, Arizona, I found myself unable to make historical sense of the city. It has been divided by highways that pass directly through the old historic areas of town. I stopped at the Yuma Quartermaster Depot State Historic Park and looked at some old photographs and maps in the displays, trying to figure it out. Fort Yuma was across the Colorado River, in California, on a hill. I walked outside, got in my car, and drove back around, up on the elevated freeway known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway. Now I could see the hill where Fort Yuma used to be, and then I noticed the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park, on a hill overlooking the Colorado, on the Arizona side. I pulled in to the parking lot and walked over to a kind of gazebo with an elevated perspective over the surrounding areas. A Border Patrol vehicle passed, reminding me that Yuma is a border town. From this point of view, I could see what looked like it ought to be the mouth of the Gila River, but I knew that the Gila, dammed and drained to transform the Sonoran Desert into dairies and such, no longer flows to this point, entering the Colorado as a narrow muddy stream several miles upriver. The Colorado itself, also diverted and dammed and exploited, no longer flows to the sea. Some kind of wetlands restoration has been attempted in the old Gila mouth, along with questionable municipal landscaping.
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Down below the old Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Bridge, the Yuma ferry used to carry emigrants and argonauts and soldiers across that river, under the puzzled gazes of the local Indian population.
Eventually, I saw how to access the riverside park and left my car in an empty lot. It was not particularly appealing, consisting of expanses of dirt, rare clumps of grass, random clusters of dried-up hay bales. Riprap sloped down from the prison museum parking lot. A long list of prohibitions greets the visitor: no four-wheel-drive vehicles, no ATVs, no hunting, no unauthorized vehicles, no camping, no fires, no barbecuing, no glass beverage containers, no alcohol. I saw a few solitary men lurking about on the dusty trails through the low brush, perhaps waiting for furtive sexual encounters.
The park was just sad. A little adobe-looking bathroom, some desert landscaping, a building that looks suspiciously like a refreshment stand, were put in by the Pecan Grove Garden Club in 2012. They were all so hopeful, with the pink gravel paths; they really thought people would use this place. A few scraps of cast-off clothing hung from thorny trees. I wandered through the park and read a full-color informational panel on hobos, which helpfully explained the difference between a hobo, a tramp, and a bum. A tramp, according to the park’s authorities, works only when he needs to; a bum does not work at all; a hobo is a “worker who wanders.” There were photographs of a hobo named Lucky, who was camping down by the river when the restoration of the Yuma East Wetlands began. Lucky the Hobo says he didn’t mind giving up his camp at the old train jump, because it was about time someone cleaned up this place. The placard says Lucky helped plant more than five thousand trees.
Yuma Crossing, Colorado River, Yuma, Arizona
I never did find any signage commemorating the old ferry.
—
In 1850, a scalper and outlaw named John Joel Glanton came into possession of the Yuma ferry across the Colorado River. Glanton, a former Texas Ranger and veteran of the Mexican War, led a gang of scalpers who, like James Kirker, received a contract from the governor of Chihuahua for a bounty on the scalps of Apaches. The historical sources are not by any means unanimous or reliable, but we do know that the Glanton Gang went on a meandering rampage through northern Mexico and the Big Bend. It wasn’t long before Glanton developed a deserved reputation for scalping anyone with black hair and fell out of favor in Chihuahua. Having exhausted one market for scalps, the gang went next door to the state of Sonora and exhausted that one as well. The gang was on its way to California, when a scheme concerning the ferry suggested itself.
According to Horace Bell, author of a compendium of tales titled Reminiscences of a Ranger, John Glanton was a young prodigy of a Texas Ranger, instructed “in all the mysteries of Indian fighting, hunting, trailing, lassoing mustangs, and scalping an occasional Mexican.” By age sixteen he was the captain of a ranger company, and as such he served in the Mexican War. Somehow this young desperado in training managed to marry “a most estimable and highly cultured lady” from one of the best families of San Antonio, but he left her behind. Arriving in Chihuahua at the head of an expedition of “desperate adventurers,” and discovering that the governor of that Mexican state had offered a bounty on Apache scalps, Glanton proposed a campaign, and a carnival of blood followed. Soon the Glanton Gang marched into Chihuahua under triumphal arches, delivered their gory prizes, and received two doubloons for each. After a monthlong orgy of fandangos and debauchery, the gang went out on a second campaign, which was concluded even more rapidly and productively.
To Chihuahuans it appeared at first that the long-sought extermination of the Apaches was at hand. But then the whispers began that Mexican villagers and rancheros had contributed more than a few scalps to the bounty harvested by the barbarians from the north. It was whispered that these Texans hated Mexicans more than they hated Apaches. Glanton and his scalpers cunningly slipped out of town, pursued, too late, by soldiers.
After committing outrages on various towns in northern Sonora, the scalpers appeared at Tucson, just then under siege by the Apache chief Mangas Colorado. Glanton held a parley with Mangas, who was surprised to find Americans willing to fight on behalf of Mexicans. The Apache chief agreed to settle the disagreement with a feast, if the Mexicans agreed to slaughter seven bullocks. Mangas and Glanton drank mescal in the plaza, Horace Bell tells us, and the Apache confided that he has always discouraged his men from killing Mexicans, because “if we kill off the Mexicans, who will raise cattle and horses for us?”
When the scalpers arrived at Yuma, they found the ferry under the command of a solitary American, whom they killed. The ferryman had been friends with the Yuma Indians, who were present in great numbers. The next morning, to avenge the death of their friend, the Indians attacked and slaughtered all but two of the party. Bell says he got the story from Dave and Charley Brown, two survivors, who had gone down to the river to fetch water when the Indians attacked, and so escaped detection, walking across the desert to San Diego and arriving “little better than walking skeletons.” Dave, Bell writes, was hanged in Los Angeles in 1854 by a mob of Mexicans, Dave’s personal friends, who wished only to prove that Mexicans could lynch a man just as well as gringos. Charley supposedly died in Nicaragua, attempting to vindicate the principle of manifest destiny.
John Russell Bartlett tells a hearsay version of the Yuma story in which a party of Americans led by a Dr. Langdon of Louisiana appropriated a ferry operated by the Yuma Indians in 1849. Langdon hired a man named Gallatin—obviously, from the details, Glanton—who abused the Indians and the passing emigrants, charging four dollars a head for the crossing. Langdon tried and failed to rid himself of Gallatin. After a trip to San Diego, Gallatin returned, amply supplied with liquor, in which he then indulged. The Yumas rushed upon Gallatin and his men when they were helpless from drink and massacred them with war clubs.
The most famous version of John Glanton’s legend appears in a novel, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Untroubled by the discipline of fact, McCarthy renders his scalpers as avatars of the southwestern holocaust, fiends from some borderland hellscape who rape, pillage, and philosophize along the way.
In McCarthy’s version of Glanton’s demise, he and his scalpers arrive at the Colorado to find a camp full of emigrants, survivors of cholera who had eaten all their horses and mules, and a number of Yuma Indians, tattooed of face, with beautiful naked women scarred by syphilis. An old man with a long beard tells Glanton that the ferryman, a New York doctor named Lincoln, charges a dollar for the crossing. Glanton and his men concoct a scheme to seize the ferry. He convinces the Yumas that they should be operating the ferry and profiting therefrom. He, Glanton, will arrange it all if only they will attack and take control. Meanwhile, he tells Dr. Lincoln that no sane white man would trust an Indian, and seeing as how there happens to be a howitzer lying about at the partially fortified hill above the ferry, would it not be prudent to shore up those fortifications and get that blunderbuss in good working order? Lincoln reluctantly accepts. When the Yumas attack, Glanton and his men naturally turn the howitzer on them in betrayal. A great slaughter ensues, and the scalpers take control of the ferry, immediately raise the fare to four dollars, and then begin charging whatever the market will bear. “Horses were taken and women violated and bodies began to drift past the Yuma camp downriver.”
It’s not exactly clear from McCarthy’s version of the story why Glanton felt the need to enlist and then betray the Yuma, unless he simply wanted to enjoy the sport of killing them. McCarthy takes details from various sources, from Bell, from borderland historians such as Ralph Smith, and from contemporary newspapers, which reported on the massacre with varying degrees of embellishment and accuracy, but his primary source is one of the most singular documents in American history, an illuminated manuscript, illustrated with vibrant watercolors, gouaches, and drawings, titled My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, by an adventurer from Boston named Samuel Chamberlain. McCarthy had access to a bowdlerized version, published in 1956.
Forty years later, the historian William H. Goetzmann published a beautiful new edition, with the complete text, a scholarly apparatus, and color plates of Chamberlain’s paintings, though unfortunately it is out of print and very expensive.
Born November 28, 1829, in New Hampshire and raised in one of the better neighborhoods of Boston, Sam Chamberlain grew up singing in a church choir and boxing in a gymnasium. He describes himself as a “muscular Christian.” He had long blond hair. He learned to paint and to dance and once beat up the church choirmaster. After his father died, in 1844, he went west to Illinois. Two years later, with the outbreak of the Mexican War, he joined a volunteer regiment and went south to San Antonio. Along the way he enjoyed multiple affairs of the heart.
Arriving in San Antonio, Sam found himself mustered out, so he began a career as a gambler. Here he claims he first met John Glanton in a saloon known as the Bexar Exchange. He describes a barroom filled with a variety of Texians: volunteers, regulars, Texas Rangers, Delaware Indians, and Mexicans. The rangers, he writes, armed with revolvers and bowie knives, “wore buckskin shirts black with grease and blood, some wore red shirts, their trousers thrust in to their high boots.” They were uncouth, swaggering, with beards and brawny forms and fierce wild eyes. He noticed one peculiar character playing poker in an oddly mild manner, strangely at odds with his appearance: “short, thick set, face bronzed by exposure to the hue of an Indian with eyes deeply sunken and bloodshot, coarse black hair hanging in snake-like locks down his back, his costume was that of the Mexican herdsman, made of leather, with a Mexican blanket thrown over his shoulder.” His opponent was a good-looking young ranger, tall and reckless. A dispute broke out, and the short dark character threw a glass of whiskey in the face of the taller man, who jumped to his feet, drew his gun, and pointed it at the breast of his adversary, demanding an apology. The dark-haired man did not move, but responded “shoot and be d——d, but if you miss, John Glanton won’t miss you.”
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