Beale Opened Highways and Possibilities

Almost a century before John Steinbeck immortalized “The Mother Road,” its original 450-mile segment was known as “Beale’s Trail,” named for the buckskin-clad trailblazer who mapped it.

In 1857, the uncharted stretch of desert that would one day become part of U.S. Route 66, from New Mexico to the Pacific Coast, was opened up by a frontier courier and his band of four-legged “ships of the desert.”

Surveyor Gen. Edward Fitzgerald Beale had been ordered to lead the Army’s first Camel Corps--a caravan of 56 soldiers and camel drivers, 25 camels and Bactrians, eight covered wagons and 350 sheep--to survey the first wagon road West.

The four-year experiment created a route that would be famous and vital for more than a century, and tested the camel’s usefulness in the new West.

*

Beale had energy, wits and friends in high places. In 1828, as a boy, he was brawling in a street near the White House with another 6-year-old boy when a tall passerby grabbed them and asked why they were fighting. Beale said it was because the other kid had called newly elected President Andrew Jackson a “jackass.” The passerby, amused, told Beale to come see him in his new house. “Sir, who are you?” Beale asked. “I’m the jackass,” said President Jackson.

In 1836, Jackson appointed the 14-year-old to the Navy. Ten years later, in the Mexican War during the Battle of San Pasqual, Beale and more than a hundred others retreated to a hilltop in Escondido.

Beale and his lifelong friend, the scout Kit Carson, volunteered to sneak through enemy lines commanded by Andres Pico to summon the Marines, who marched to the rescue.

Later, when the U.S. military got early word of the January 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill, Beale was selected to smuggle an eight-pound lump back to Washington, D.C., as proof. He carved off a bit of gold for a wedding ring, married his fiancee, and took off on what would be a career spent shuttling across the West, exploring desert trails and mountain passes for the military.

In 1853, with a presidential appointment as superintendent of Indian affairs for California and Nevada, Beale set up California’s first federal Indian reservation, at the foot of the Tehachapis. More than 2,500 Yokuts from the San Joaquin Valley settled at Sebastian Reservation--diplomatically named by Beale for his patron, Arkansas Sen. William Sebastian.

*

The Gold Rush made California’s population boom, and “Grapevine Canyon” between Los Angeles and Kern County became a turnstile for newcomers heading north and south. Along the way, some rustled cattle and horses, prompting Beale to call for a military fort. Ft. Tejon became the outpost of military and social life in the 100 miles or so between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, and Beale was at its center.

By 1855, Washington cut the reservation’s funding (some things never change), and Beale resigned in protest. The Army immediately took him on as national surveyor general of roads. That same year, as Mexican land-grant families were selling off their vast holdings, Beale went on a buying spree. Eventually, he would hold 270,000 acres that he named the Tejon Ranch. President Abraham Lincoln would later refuse to reappoint Beale as surveyor general, saying, “I will not have a surveyor who becomes monarch of all he surveyed.”

Getting supplies to the fort was difficult; the heat killed packhorses and mules. Beale conceived the idea of using camels, and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis got Congress to appropriate $30,000 to do it.

So in 1857, the caravan, with Beale at its helm and the camels’ brass bells clanging rhythmically, started off from the New Mexico Territory for Los Angeles.

“This will eventually be the greatest emigrant road to California,” Beale wrote in his journal as he jotted down watering holes on a route that had been explored but only vaguely mapped before.

The trip ended at Ft. Tejon 60 days later. By then the 25 camels numbered 28; three had been born. Beale noted only a few problems: The camels terrified the horses and mules, and their lurching pace made some soldiers seasick. On the upside, the camels carried up to half a ton of cargo. Their feet could plod over sharp rocks. They fed on prickly pear cactus. And their water economy was legendary.

Thereafter, a team of camels often pulled Beale’s surrey into town. He learned Syrian so he could talk to them. “I look forward to the day,” Beale wrote, “when every mail route across the continent will be conducted . . . with this economical and noble brute.”

But it wasn’t to happen. Their chief booster, Jefferson Davis, became president of the Confederacy. California’s desert sand was too coarse, and their keepers fed and watered them too well.

In 1864, after the Army had laid off its camel drivers--including “Greek George” Caralambo and Hadji “Hi Jolly” Ali--it stabled the remaining camels in downtown Los Angeles. For a time, they were put to work transporting freight between the harbor and downtown. Some were auctioned off to circuses and ranchers for $1,500 each. Others were released to roam the desert, where they bred for a time. The few remaining were sold to the “happy little Turk,” Hi Jolly, for $1 each.

*

But the camels’ most enduring legacy is still visible today.

Realizing that even camels could barely make the steepest grades, Beale used soldiers armed with picks and shovels and $5,000 from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to hack a narrow cut through the Santa Susana Mountains.

It was 90 feet deep, 240 feet long and 13 feet wide. It opened up trade and transit between L.A. and the north. The toll was two bits for horse and rider, $2 for teams of a dozen or more, and a dime a head for loose animals. For half a century, until the Newhall Tunnel was dug with newer technology, traffic flowed through Beale’s Cut. It is still virtually intact.

Beale served as U.S. minister to Austria in 1876, and he died at home in Washington in 1893. His Tejon Ranch was sold in 1912 to a business group that still owns it today. Times Mirror Co. and the Times Mirror Foundation hold a combined ownership stake of nearly a third.

Beale wanted to build a road so others could follow. Now an eight-lane freeway bisects his rancho, and interstates have replaced Beale’s Trail.