THE OLD YUMA TRAIL 

 By W J McGee 



SOME three to seven centuries be- 

 fore Columbus, the country lying 

 south of Gila River, west of the 

 Sierra Madre, and east of the Califor- 

 nian Gulf was occupied by an agricul- 

 tural people, and the ruins of their vil- 

 lages, the remains of their irrigation 

 works, and the crumbling fortifications 

 of their places of refuge on adjacent 

 hilltops— mute witnesses of the rise and 

 passing of a people— still survive in 

 numbers. The finely wrought fictile 

 ware, shapely stone implements, and ob- 

 sidian blades from the ruins betoken the 

 culture commonly known as Aztecan 

 or Mexican, or better as Nahuatlan. 

 The location and extent of the house 

 remains, as well as the traces of great 

 acequias, betoken irrigation systems 

 more extensive and successful than 

 those of the Mexicans or Americans of 

 today. The vestiges of temples and 

 plazas combine with the symbolic dec- 

 oration of the pottery to betoken a com- 

 plex social organization resting on a 

 religious basis, while the corrals (each 

 with its water hole) in many of the vil- 

 lages, together with some of the picto- 

 graphs carved on neighboring cliffs, 

 suggest, if they do not attest, that a 

 llama-like animal, the coyote, the tur- 

 key, and perhaps other creatures, were 

 domesticated by the villagers. The 

 entrenched refuges ( " las trincheras ' ' 

 of the modern Mexicans) are among 

 various indications that the peaceful, 

 pastoral folk were displaced and nearly 

 destroyed by a predatory foe whose 

 ruthless energies were directed against 

 irrigation works as well as against farn- 

 ilies, farms, and flocks, and. the testi- 

 mony of the ruins is supported by the 

 traditions of surviving tribes, which 

 point to the marauding Apache as the 



spoilsman — and hence the hereditary 

 enemy— of the plains people. During 

 this early agricultural period the scant 

 waters of the region were where they 

 are now, and were probably little, if 

 any, more abundant than today, though 

 better conserved and distributed by 

 means of represos and low-gradient 

 acequias. The village sites were those 

 selected long after for aboriginal and 

 Mexican pueblos, with a few others 

 never again occupied, while the trails 

 and roads, as they were by watering 

 places and impassable sierras, must 

 have followed lines corresponding with 

 those of later travel. Among the nat- 

 ural routes fixed by water and mount- 

 tain, and still marked by ruins and 

 smaller relics, was that which long after 

 became the Yuma trail. 



THE TIME OF TRADITION. 



The ancient lore and modern customs 

 of the Papago Indians tell of descent 

 from the prehistoric irrigators— tell that 

 their tribal ancestors were among the 

 few survivors of the prehistoric pastoral 

 folk who, driven into the deserts too far 

 for foes to follow, were able to adjust 

 themselves to one of tlie hardest environ- 

 ments in America, to engage in a cease- 

 less chase for water singularly like the 

 chase for quarry in lower culture, and 

 to produce a unique combination of 

 crop-growing industries with migratory 



habits. 



One of the earliest havens of ^he an- 

 cestral exiles was a meager oasis already 

 occupied by some of them, though di- 

 vided from the customary Apache range 

 by a hundred miles of waterless desert; 

 here a tiny rivulet, fed by the subter- 

 ranean seepage from rugged granite 



