BEALE WAGON ROAD ~ February 11, 2007

We were driving down Route 66 from Kingman to Seligman, through the little towns of Hackberry and Valentine. Just before Truxton, we got off on a side cattle road to have a picnic lunch. It was a grassy area with rolling hills, and we didn’t see any cattle although a herd of pronghorn was grazing nearby. The railroad runs parallel to Route 66, and we stopped just before we got to the track. While we were there, several freight trains passed by. After lunch we walked down to the tracks and waited for another train to come by. We waved at the engineer, and he blew his whistle and put his hand out the window to wave back at us.

The dirt road that we were on ran alongside the railroad tracks, and we decided to drive that way for a while because we thought it might lead us to Truxton. It didn’t, but we made an exciting discovery. Along the dirt road there were BLM markers that said “Historic Beale Wagon Road 1857-1883 BLM AZ Heritage Project 1993.” Suddenly it all made sense! The modern-day roads and development followed these historic trails, of course, over which people had traveled through the centuries and built up towns along the way. So if you go all the way back to its original beginnings, Route 66 was even more historical than we thought. It was so cool to think we were traveling on the same path that wagons had traveled on in the 1800’s.

After we got back home, I did a little research on the Beale Wagon Road. In the late 1850’s, Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale and his party of men set out on a route along the 35^th parallel to construct a wagon road from Fort Smith, Arkansas to the Colorado River. Beale’s road roughly followed Lieutenant Amiel Whipple’s trail west across Arizona. They took a detour around Canyon Diablo, continued on through the Flagstaff area, headed northwest through Peach Springs and Truxton Wash (named for Beale’s son), then through Kingman and on to the Colorado River. Portions of this historic trail are still visible near the Navajo community of Leupp, at Laws Spring northeast of Williams, and between Valentine and Peach Springs.

This wagon road was once the major “interstate highway” across the northern Arizona Territory during the 1860’s - 1870’s. It traversed deserts, forests, and prairies. Deer, elk, and pronghorn antelope were commonly seen along the way – and they’re still there, as we observed. Modern roads, most notably Route 66, indeed followed the Beale Road alignment. Two of the best preserved original stretches of the Beale Wagon Road are northeast of Williams - the open grasslands of Government Prairie and dense pinon-juniper woodlands near Laws Spring. From Laws Spring, hike about 1/4 mile south and east along the marked trail to discover a segment of the original road that appears as two rows of rocks about a wagon-width apart.

http://www.southwestexplorations.com/bealemap.htm - Beale Wagon Road Navigation Map. (See also: http://www.tomjonas.com/swex/beale.htm)

http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/kai/recreation/trails/wil_beale.shtml - Printable map of Beale Wagon Road Historic Trail #31, from the U.S. Forest Service.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rse/riordanrt66.htm - Route 66 and Northern Arizona: Presented at the Riordan Mansion Brown Bag Lunch Sessions on June 13, 2000.

Did You Know…? Beale is most remembered for using camels in his road-building expeditions. Camels can travel for days without water, they eat more types of forage than mules do, and they can also carry heavier loads than mules. Beale’s camel driver, Hadji Ali (Hi Jolly), later lived in western Arizona. Ali's grave in Quartzite is marked by a stone pyramid topped by a copper camel.