Echoes of a Wild West that was

I can still remember my amazement when I learned in fifth-grade geography class that Arizona didn’t become a state until 1912, a year my grandparents could remember. Arizona’s rowdy frontier days, I learned, lasted well into the 20th century.

As I got older and allegedly wiser, I no longer pictured scenes of six-guns and stagecoaches here, but even so, finding such names as Cochise, Ft. Bowie and Apache Pass on the state’s official 2003 highway map made me start dreaming again. It sounded like a road trip waiting to happen, so last May, my husband, Kevin, and I embarked on a three-day drive in the eastern part of the state.

Bypassing the booming cities (and 325 golf courses), we followed U.S. 191 from Springerville south to the Mexican border, seeking out what one old guidebook calls “the sunburnt West of yesterday.”

Springerville, our starting point 220 miles northeast of Phoenix, has long been a crossroads for travelers. Nineteenth century pioneers trekked through this town of 1,800 on the way to California, and a local tourist brochure features the 1928 statue called the “Madonna of the Trail,” a haggard-looking pioneer woman striding purposefully forward with her children. We found her still forging ahead in a McDonald’s parking lot, her huge sunbonnet shielding her from the modern world.

South of town, U.S. 191 climbs into the Blue Range as the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway. It’s named, of course, for Francisco Coronado, who passed this way in 1540, seeking the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. He never found gold but instead mapped out a wildly beautiful territory for the Spanish crown.

How wild? Just south of town, a sign warns motorists, “Elk crossing next 15 miles.” Mexican gray wolves prowl the backwoods. The highway winds through stands of dark pine and bright aspen, crawls along ridgelines and nearly loops back on itself.

A drive south takes travelers from alpine meadows to open desert within a few hours, a range of climate zones equivalent to driving from Canada to Mexico. At Hannagan Meadow, the road reaches 9,100 feet, and a marker here commemorates the opening of the Coronado Trail in June 1926. I marveled that anyone could wrestle a Model T up here, but Hannagan Meadow Lodge, a rustic red wooden hotel with a steep metal roof, has been welcoming travelers since then.

Driving the Coronado Trail’s 120 miles of blind curves and snaky switchbacks would take about four hours if a traveler were willing to skip the overlooks -- but who could?

At Blue Vista overlook, we were mesmerized by line upon line of mountains, shading green into blue and finally melting into haze. A sign identifies dozens of such summits as Raspberry Peak, Sunflower Mesa, Heliograph. Forest stretches unbroken to the horizon.

The trail’s southern end plummets 5,000 feet in dizzying hairpin bends, and we reentered the real world with a shock, staring down into a huge open-pit copper mine. The Morenci Mine has turned miles of mountains into a poisoned canyon. Morenci, we read in an old guide, began as a mining town so steep that children allegedly had to be tethered to keep them from falling out of backyards. A few miles east, the once-rich mining town of Clifton is still alive but not exactly kicking. In the town’s prime, its main street ran through a canyon. Today the opulent storefronts along Chase Creek Street are boarded up, and buildings are crumbling. As we drove slowly, three men sitting on the curb noticed our out-of-state license plate. “Hey, Kentucky!” one yelled.

We stopped to talk. One of the men, Paul (“just Paul”), told us he had paid $6,000 for a building here eight years ago and had worked on it ever since, rewiring the building and repairing its walls. He said the purpose of the building would be revealed to him when it was finished. He He took us through the lumber-strewn shop and into a cavelike room carved into the cliff. It felt 20 degrees cooler than outdoors.

About 50 miles south of Clifton, a brief stretch of Interstate 10 brought us near the site of Ft. Bowie, one of Arizona’s most historic patches of ground.

It was originally a railroad surveyors’ camp and in 1858 became a station on the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach route between St. Louis and Los Angeles. For two years the Apache let wagons cross their homeland undisturbed. In 1861, Apache leader Cochise was wrongly accused of raiding a ranch, and the U.S. Army tricked him into a meeting to arrest him. Furious, he escaped and led his warriors on a bitter 10-year campaign against settlers.

In 1862, the Apache ambushed Union troops marching to fight Confederates in New Mexico, a half-forgotten footnote to the Civil War, and Ft. Bowie was built to guard Apache Pass. Today the peaceful landscape belies its bloody past. A gentle half-hour walk through a blooming desert of cholla cactus brought us to the remains of the fort. We passed a cemetery with replicas of the long-vanished markers (“In memory of Col. Stone. Supposed to be”).

Twenty-five miles southwest, the town of Cochise resembled a deserted Wild West movie set. I passed an old adobe hotel and a long-closed store with an imposing false front. Sally Bartley, manager of the Cochise Hotel, spotted us and invited us in for a visit. The hotel opened in 1882, when the Southern Pacific Railway ended at its door. Little seemed to have changed since then. The front room, once the Wells Fargo freight office, still contains its enormous safe, and the kitchen shelves are a jumble of old china.

The guest rooms have antique brass beds, rag rugs and patchwork quilts. The only concession to the 21st century is modern bathrooms. The adobe walls are 2 feet thick and built “the right way,” according to Bartley, with blocks laid crosswise to form a thicker wall. Doors and window frames were made from California redwood.

“The only noise here is what you make,” Bartley told us, and when we quit talking, I heard only birdsong and lots of ticking clocks. It’s an eccentric vision of a century ago; doors are propped open with old flatirons, and the dining room chairs are mismatched. The hand-cranked phone still works, although Bartley seemed irritated that the phone company had made her stop using it.

Blast from the past

The town was hardly sleepy in its heyday. In 1899, a pair of bandits robbed a train here and dynamited its safe, sending Mexican pesos flying in all directions. “People still find gold coins out there sometimes,” Bartley said.

Cochise himself is buried nearby in a canyon, now known as Cochise Stronghold. From here he led attacks on trains, ranches and towns for a decade, keeping the Army at bay and hindering settlement, until a peace treaty was finally brokered in 1873.

Exactly where Cochise is buried is unknown. Legend has it that when he died, his followers raced their horses up and down the canyon all night to cover any trace of his burial place. Wandering back through the steep, craggy canyon, I could easily see why he was never captured, and I could imagine his spirit soothed by this wild resting place.

U.S. 191 ends in Douglas, on the Mexican border, but we detoured 14 miles east on a gravel road to one of Arizona’s great 19th century cattle ranches. Here, in 1884, a Texas Ranger named John Slaughter found spring water and realized its importance. This land became the cornerstone of his ranch, 100,000 acres stretching deep into Mexico. It had its own border crossing, complete with customs officers. Today the low, spreading buildings of the Slaughter Ranch Museum paint a vivid picture of ranch life. The cool wings of the adobe house contain Sears Roebuck catalog furniture, Navajo rugs and a separate dining room for cowboys.

Slaughter’s operation was like a small city, with up to 500 people living and working here. It had vineyards, fish ponds, vegetable gardens, an icehouse and a granary, and it operated its own school. One of Slaughter’s first projects was digging a huge spring-fed pond for irrigation and surrounding it with now-enormous cottonwood trees.

The pond is on a major flyway, so it’s a prime destination for bird-watchers. Kevin kept shouting names such as “vermilion flycatcher” and “Western tanager” and “Gila woodpecker” to an elderly couple with binoculars.

Back in Douglas, we decided to overnight in the historic Gadsden Hotel, a grand cream-and-brown edifice stretching almost a block. I gasped when I walked into the lobby. We were surrounded by two-story marble columns gilded at their tops, vaulted skylights, a carved ceiling and a sweeping marble staircase. The highlight is a glowing 42-foot Tiffany glass mural of cactuses, sand and brilliant desert sky. The Gadsden has hosted Arizona governors, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and even, some say, a ghost.

The Gadsden, built in 1909, burned down in 1928 and was rebuilt and reopened May 30, 1929, a heartbeat ahead of the Great Depression. It remains the town’s social center. Its coffee shop is a breakfast hangout for locals, and all afternoon, groups of old-timers sat in the lobby’s brown leatherette armchairs, solving the world’s problems. The Saddle and Spur bar was packed that evening.

The decor in our room looked more like that of a quirky mom-and-pop motel, with mismatched stripes and strange light fixtures and a tiled bathroom straight out of the 1920s.

We had one more surprise. In the wee hours of the morning, I was suddenly jolted from a deep sleep by something colliding with the bed. I sat up. It was quiet, it was dark and Kevin was sound asleep next to me. A dream? A ghost?

Sometimes, in eastern Arizona, the past seems very, very near.

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On the path to the past in Arizona

GETTING THERE:

From LAX, nonstop service to Phoenix, which is about 220 miles from the Springerville starting point, is available on America West, Southwest, United and US Airways, and connecting service is offered on Delta and Frontier. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $58.

WHERE TO STAY:

Hannagan Meadow Lodge, P.O. Box 335, Alpine, AZ 85920; (928) 428-2225, www.hannaganmeadow.com, offers both lodge rooms and log cabins in a lush green setting halfway down the Coronado Trail. From May to October, lodge rooms are $80-$150 (including breakfast), and cabins of different sizes (some with full kitchen) run $85-$175. Rates are lower November-April.

Cochise Hotel, P.O. Box 27, Cochise, AZ 85606; (520) 384-3156. This hotel has no Web site, fax machine or other newfangled contraptions, but its turn-of-the-century rooms are beautifully authentic, and Sally Bartley is an entertaining hostess. A double is $50.

The Gadsden Hotel, 1046 G Ave., Douglas, AZ 85607; (520) 364-4481, fax (520) 364-4005, www.theriver.com/gadsdenhotel. Despite the splendor of the hotel, rates are reasonable: Doubles are $50-$65. (And don’t worry; ghost sightings are not a frequent occurrence.)

WHERE TO EAT:

Hannagan Meadow Lodge (see above) has the only actual restaurant along the 120 miles of the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway. It is open to lodge guests and visitors for dinner daily, and also for lunch on weekends. Entrees are $9.95-$16.95. Soup and sandwiches are available in the lodge’s general store 10 a.m.-4 p.m. daily.

For guests at the Cochise Hotel (see above), Sally Bartley cooks up old-time steak ($10) and chicken ($8) dinners.

El Conquistador, next to the Saddle and Spur bar in the Gadsden Hotel, is a local hangout that serves Mexican favorites and interesting daily specials. Dinner entrees $5.95-$15. We especially liked the lamb burritos ($5.95).

TO LEARN MORE:

Arizona Office of Tourism, 1110 W. Washington St., Suite 155, Phoenix, AZ 85007; (888) 520-3434 or (602) 364-3700, fax (602) 364-3702, www.arizonaguide.com.

-- Kristin Johannsen