WaltersRail

If you go to Weatherspark.com [https://weatherspark.com/y/2266/Average-Weather-in-Yuma-Arizona-United-States-Year-Round], you will find that Yuma, Arizona, is an almost perfect location for outdoor photography, because the sky is almost always as bright and shiny as stainless steel. Winter is the cloudiest, but even then the sky is overcast only about twenty percent of the time. Days of complete overcast from dawn to dusk are almost unheard of, days when clouds press down on the desert like a coffin lid under the weight of six feet of dirt.

Union Pacific rules the rails in the 21st century, but this was Southern Pacific territory for over 100 years. Regardless of the railroad, Yuma is fascinating, as is the Sonoran Desert that surrounds it, like no place you have ever known.

An eastbound stack train is leaving Yuma and the valley of the Colorado River.

You will probably want to visit in winter. The average high temperature in mid-July is 107 degrees Farrenheit, as opposed to 70 degrees in mid-January.

Yuma sits in the broad flood plain where the Gia River flows into the Colorado River. Across the Colorado to the southwest lies Mexico:

In Mexico, you're close to death all the time. (Guillermo del Toro.)

To the northwest lies California:

When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states. (Will Rogers.)

The land along the rivers is green and fertile, but step beyond the bounds of irrigation, and you find yourself deep in the Sonoran Desert, a world that looks almost as barren and forlorn as images from the Perseverance Rover on Mars.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/image-of-the-week/week-141

Westbound at Mohawk.

In winter Yuma is transformed. Like a tropical island where birds gather to mate, Yuma is deluged in December and January with "snowbirds," sunshine seekers from cold climes who in some cases travel thousands of miles to escape sub-zero temperatures, ice, snow and the attendant depression called SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Though the acronym is mildly humorous, the condition is not. If you have ever spent even part of a winter in Wisconsin, where the sun may not shine for a week or more, you know.

According to "Dr. Google," symptoms of winter depression include:

oversleeping (hypersomnia);
overeating;
craving carbs;
weight gain;
social withdrawal or a desire to “hibernate.”

The snowbird crush is so heavy that the Arizona Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Land Management and various private entities have constructed huge lots along state highways where people can park their mobile homes and wait out the winter sitting in lawn chairs beside hundreds of other mobile homes and hundreds of other people sitting in lawn chairs. The scene looks a little like a mob's waiting to purchase tickets to Star Wars, or else refugees waiting "On the Quai at Smyrna."

https://roadslesstraveled.us/what-is-it-like-to-rv-in-quartzsite-arizona-anything-goes/

The first federal settlement in this area was Fort Yuma, California, established at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 to protect the newly settled community of Yuma, New Mexico Territory, on the other side of the river. From 1858 to 1861, the fort served as a stop on the southern route of Butterfield Overland Mail, which ceased service on that route upon the outbreak of the War Between the States when Texas began seizing the company's equipment and livestock.

During the war, the southern half of New Mexico Territory seceded (the southern half of the modern states of New Mexico and Arizona), becoming the Confederate Territory of Arizona on August 1, 1861. However, after the Battle of Glorieta Pass, portrayed in the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Confederates fled back to Texas, and by July 1862, the Union controlled all of what later became New Mexico and Arizona.

Having circled around the Gila Mountains this westbound has entered the broad flood plain where the Gila River enters the Colorado.

Beneath the Gila Mountains, westbound stacks have entered the flood plain.

The Texas Pacific Act of 1871 authorized construction of a railroad from Texas to Yuma, where the newly organized Texas and Pacific Company would cross the Colorado River and meet the Southern Pacific, which had conducted surveys from both Los Angeles and San Diego but had not yet started construction.

Beyond the valley where the Gila River flows into the Colorado, an eastbound stack train races across the open Arizona desert.

The route from San Diego would have involved some of the most rugged territory in North America, including a stretch dipping into Mexico, so the SP began building east from Los Angeles through San Gorgonio Pass toward the Imperial Valley. (The San Diego and Arizona Railway was incorporated in 1906 to connect San Diego with the SP at El Centro, California. Called the "Impossible Railroad" because of its torturous route through a moon-like landscape, the line operated until 2008.)

The Southern Pacific began running regular freight and passenger service to Indian Wells (today called Indio) in 1876, one of several high desert communities southeast of the Los Angeles Basin and a little over 100 miles from Yuma. However, the Texas and Pacific had not yet made it as far as Fort Worth, more than 1000 miles away.

Beyond Indian Wells, SP's route ran beside the Imperial Valley, an agricultural paradise sustained by artisan wells, flat and benign, surrounded by mountains as jagged as torn flesh. Between the valley and the tracks rose the Algodones Dunes, an immense pile of sand about 50 miles long from northwest to southeast, about six miles across at its widest and several hundred feet deep in the middle. If you have seen pictures of the Atacama in South America, they look exactly like these dunes at the southeastern edge of California.

The SP avoided the sand but just barely. Today you can follow the tracks along Ted Kipf Road, dirt and sand, where a few hardy souls will be camping a long way from anywhere.

The edge of the California sand dunes.

Rolling east in California toward the Colorado River.

Eastbound UP rolls across the California desert, with the snow-capped Chuckwalla Mountains in the background.

Without irrigation, the Sonoran Desert of far southern California is -- dry.

Past the dunes, the Colorado River flowed wide and peaceful through the desert. Moses might have been discovered here among the reeds, and at the river the Southern Pacific was required to stop, because Congress had given authority to the Texas and Pacific to lay track across the water.

This westbound has crossed the Colorado River. In the right foreground is the very northern edge of the California sand dunes.

At dusk, a Union Pacific eastbound rolls past the Imperial Valley.

The citizens of Arizona Territory, however, did not want to wait for the Texas and Pacific. The territorial governor told the Legislature that the Southern Pacific had almost reached the Colorado River and was ready to cross. At a public meeting, citizens of Yuma County passed a resolution instructing their delegates to support the bill of Estavan Ochoa, the mayor of Tucson, which would welcome the SP into Arizona with open arms.

As part of its construction in southern California, the Southern Pacific had acquired the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, including its president General Phineas T. Banning, who quickly became an ambassador at large for the SP empire. He visited Yuma in September 1867 and in one day secured Ordinance No. 7 of the Common Council of the Village of Yuma, authorizing the mayor to convey 100 acres of unoccupied lands to the railroad, plus allowing the SP to cross village streets. These grants were conditioned on the railroad's reaching the Colorado River by January 1, 1878, then constructing a bridge across the river and entering Yuma by July 1, 1878.

You must remember that in the 19th century, long before air conditioning, the Arizona Territory was virtually uninhabited. In 1870, the population of Tucson was about 3,500; the population of Yuma about 3,000. The Southern Pacific was widely believed to be the bearer of prosperity, of people, of culture, of water, of everything good under God's green earth.

This westbound manifest has circled around the northern end of the Gila Mountains.

Stack trains meeting in the Dome Valley on the east side of the Gila Mountains. The lush greenery surrounds the Gila River.

Eastbound climbing a short section of single track toward the Dome Valley.

General Banning was soon on his way to Tucson, where the Mayor, J.B. Allen, convened a city council meeting at his house to discuss the railroad's need of land to construct a switching yard. The general likely plied his audience with alcohol and visions of money, lots of money, and the council then voted to give the railroad, without charge, 200 acres of choice city property, provided that trains would arrive in Tucson within five years.

That the Southern Pacific was required to stop at the Colorado River hindered neither General Banning nor the owners of the railroad, the "Big Four" of Leland Stanford (1824–1893), Collis Potter Huntington (1821–1900), Mark Hopkins Jr. (1813–1878) and Charles Crocker (1822–1888). Dictates from far away Washington, D.C. had little effect in the Arizona desert. As Andrew Jackson is alleged to have said about a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." Though many dispute that Jackson ever uttered such a phrase, it still makes a good story.

Although the Big Four were audacious, not even their combined narcissism was enough to brave construction across Arizona without at least some semblance of authority, so General Banning was dispatched to the territorial legislature to shepherd House Bill No. 3, which would grant the Southern Pacific power to build across southern Arizona.

Representatives from the northern territory wanted a railroad closer to home and so opposed the legislation, and the bill was voted down three times, causing the local Tucson newspaper to decry the "human buzzards blackmailing the railroad." But the Southern Pacific was persistent. Also, no doubt, certain promises were made. The legislature granted a second route across the northern territory to what eventually became the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. On a fourth vote, the measure passed.

Westbound manifest coming down off the desert and circling around the Gila Mountains.

Eastbound stacks circling beside the Wellton Mohawk Canal.

In the dunes west of Yuma. About a half-mile behind the photographer sits a housing addition. This area was saved from development and today is home to hundreds of dirt bikes and the occasional Jeep.

On the single track through the gap in the mountains carved by the Gila River.

In March of 1877, the SP approached the northern limits of the huge dunes described above, about 40 miles from the river. Though navigating around the worst of the sand, construction nonetheless slowed as the railroad laid huge redwood ties upon the unforgiving terrain. If you have ever tried walking through sand, you know just how difficult construction must have been.

Construction materials were transported by railroad to the end of the tracks, which from time to time caused problems, because the newly built roadbed was not always settled and secure. Near the lonely desert station of Los Palmas, a work train broke apart at night on an uneven grade. About 50 cars then began to roll backwards into the darkness. The engineer put what was left of his train into reverse, miscalculated the speed of the escaping cars, and the two sections of the truncated train crashed together, killing the conductor and injuring everyone else on board, including General Banning. Your author has been unable to determine why the General was riding a work train in the middle of the night.

Dome.

These eastbound stacks have circumnavigated around the Gila Mountains and are climbing into the high desert.

Eastbound.

Over millions of years, the Colorado River flowed through the Imperial Valley, depositing fertile silt, periodically changing its course to run outside the valley, then back again, then outside, then back. When the water diverted outside the valley, it left behind a lake which, because of lack of rainfall, would slowly evaporate in the dry desert basin.

When the Southern Pacific built through in the late 19th century, the valley had been dry for centuries. However, in 1900, a canal was constructed to bring water from the Colorado River to the basin. In 1905, spring floods broke through the canal's head gate, diverting much of the river into the basin. In the two years required for repair, the basin once again became home to a lake, which would have dried up once the water flow was stopped, except farms in the valley allowed irrigation run-off to replentish the water.

Minerals in the soil and fertilizers from the run-off raised the saline level, causing the locals to name the lake the Salton Sea. The salt killed all the fish, as well as many of the water fowl along the Pacific Flyway. Tourist courts and other attractions along the water closed.

Today the lake is deserted and shrinking. Once the valley filled with water, the Southern Pacific relocated its mainline on dry land.

Stacks passing at Dome.

Eastbound beneath the Gila Mountains.

During initial construction, however, the basin was dry and so was the SP, and on April 29, 1887, the railroad met the Southern Pacific Rail and Stage Line which, in conjunction with a ferry across the water, provided daily service to Prescott, Arizona.

In far southeastern California, the Colorado River turns west such that California is directly north of Arizona and Yuma and then runs about ten miles before turning south again. Working along the northern bank on the California side, workmen came from the west and dug several deep cuts to bring the roadbed to a spot where Yuma could be seen across the water. The railroad established a station and named it California. Track layers were close behind, and the first train arrived May 22, 1877.

Workers then began grading a bridge approach on the Arizona side. In July, bridge timbers began arriving, cut to size in Oakland and transported south on the newly constructed railroad. Built entirely of wood, the bridge consisted of six spans, each 80 feet, and a swing span of 93 feet along the Arizona shore, the deepest part of the river, to allow boats to pass.

Westbound toward the river.

Dusk in the desert.

A "meet" beside the Gila River.

Construction proceeded slowly, as each pier included 17 piles driven to bedrock 30 feet below the riverbed. By the end of August, four of the seven piers were completed.

The Texas and Pacific, however, was not unaware of the SP's activities and was not inclined to concede defeat. Like two dogs circling the same meat, both railroads sought permission from the federal government to build across the military land at Fort Yuma in California -- and both received permission. To avoid what might become a serious confrontation, Secretary of War George W. McCrary, heavily influenced by the T&P, ordered the Southern Pacific to stop construction of the bridge.

The SP protested that the timber already delivered would warp in the sumner heat if not placed into the bridge, so the railroad was allowed to continue construction but was forbidden to complete the swing span or to lay rails.

As the SP moved ahead with construction, the T&P contacted the Secretary of War, advising that if the Southern Pacific entered Arizona, the Texas and Pacific would be foreclosed from proceeding further west. By this time, the Secretary was frustrated with both railroads and so in fine bureaucratic tradition, referred all future decisions to Major Thomas S. Dunn of Fort Yuma.

In the California desert, approaching the Colorado River.

Turning north around the mountains.

Sunset on the Arizona Desert.

Suspecting that the Southern Pacific might be proceeding with construction, Major Dunn posted a sentry on the Arizona side of the bridge. Nothing happened, so the sentry was taken off duty near midnight -- all the opening needed by the SP, which quickly began work again. All proceeded quietly until heavy rails were accidetally dropped, piercing the night's silence like a gunshot, awakening Major Dunn asleep across the river.

At that time, the entire garrison at Fort Yuma consisted of Major Dunn, one Sargent and a Private. All three marched to the bridge with weapons drawn and ordered construction to cease. The SP superintendent said he would comply.

Demonstrating that certain bodily discharge flows downhill, Major Dunn and the Sargent went back to bed, leaving the Private alone once again to guard the bridge. He stood quietly on the wooden structure, probably wondering what he would do if work started.

Then he found out. Through the silence of the night, he heard what sounded like a railroad car creaking across the water from the California side. The private had two options. Jump into the water or run back to the dry ground of Arizona. He chose the latter.

Sunset.

Trains meeting at Dome. Behind the trains are two of the canals that bring water to the Gila River Valley.

Same trains.

Work continued rapidly, and not long after the sun rose, the first Southern Pacific train rolled into Yuma, precipitating a furious debate not only among the residents of the small village but also among high officials of the federal government, including the Secretary of War. The dispute began to resolve itself when General William Tecumseh Sherman, who would soon gain fame (or infamy, depending on one's point of view) in the War Between the States, telegraphed the Secretary of War:

The Southern Pacific has been a little presuming in the matter of finishing their bridge . . . but the government and the people have so much to be thankful for anybody building a railway from San Francisco to Fort Yuma and across the Colorado, that some allowance can be made.

The Texas and Pacific, of course, was not pleased, but the political influence of the Big Four far outweighed anything the Texans could bring to the table. On October 9, Rutherford B. Hayes, by presidential order, authorized the Southern Pacific to continue using the completed bridge, pending Congressional authorization, which was forthcoming.

Original wooden bridge across the Colorado River--UP Archive Photo. (https://m.facebook.com/uprrmuseum/photos/southern-pacific-bridge-across-the-colorado-river-at-yuma-arizona-taken-in-octob/942486527923897/)

Once in Arizona, the land was flat as workers graded roadbed and laid track through the depression beside the Gila River. But not all of Arizona is flat. In fact, very little is. Ahead lay the Gila Mountains, not particularly tall at around 1200 to 1500 feet, but rising straight out of the ground like a prison wall.

Fortuitously for the SP, over the eons the Gila River had carved a channel through the mountains, so the construction turned north along the edge of the water to make a huge horseshoe around the rocks.

The map shows the river and the railroad, plus the old Butterfield Stage route, horseshoeing around the mountains, plus the various canals that irrigate the desert. Note that Interstate 8 plows directly through the mountains, a route unavailable to the Southern Pacific.

Once around the Gila Mountains, the tracks turn northeast and climb into the harsh Sonoran Desert, running straight without impediment about 30 miles to the Mohawk Mountains, a small ridge alinged northwest to southeast, about 2,700 feet at the highest (Mohawk Peak). The Southern Pacific crossed in a saddle only slightly above the desert floor. Today (April 2025) westbounds struggle slightly into the grade, while eastbounds cruise serenely toward the cut-off with the old passenger line to Phoenix (abandoned now many years, though the tracks still sit patiently in the sand).

Westbound stacks have crested the small grade in the Mohawk Mountains.

Another westsbound begins the short climb.

We end our survey at the Mohawk Mountains. Beyond, the tracks and Interstate 8 run virtually side-by-side to Gila Bend, where the river turns north to Phoenix. The tracks continue northeast and cross the Maricopa Mountains. [See https://www.waltersrail.com/2022/08/union-pacific-maricopa-mountains.html.]

Following are bonus images west to east from the California desert to the Mohawk Mountains. If you're tired of "rock shots," you should stop here.

Mid-trains on the California desert.

A California "meet."

Westbound approaching Yuma.

Eastbound turning north to circle around Gila Mountains

On the north side of the mountains.

Westbound.

Eastbound into the high desert.

The open desert.

Top of the grade at Mohawk.

The author relied on the following for much of the historical information in this article: Railroads of Arizona, Volume 1, David R. Myrick, Howell-North Books, pp. 16-69 (1975).

To see my other posts, go to waltersrail.com.

To see my photographs on Flickr, go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpwalters/.

WaltersRail

Friday, April 25, 2025

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