AZ - Big Bend of the Virgin River: Significance

 By Mark Henderson and Rachel Preston Prinz

The Big Bend Route Segment Key Observation Point (KOP) is the topographic feature along which the Old Spanish Trail pack and livestock trail is indicated in historic accounts to have passed over starting with Armijo in 1829 and ending with Orville Pratt in late 1848, just after the last herd of horses and mules were driven back to New Mexico from California.  This topographic feature and the associated landscape compose the significant characteristics that travelers on the trail would have encountered between 1829 and 1848 when pack caravans passed through on the way to California and equine livestock was driven back to New Mexico. Significanct under Criteria A, the site is associated with the historic contexts for the Armijo and Main Routes of the Old Spanish Trail as defined in the The Old Spanish Trail, AD 1821-1848: A 19th Century Commercial Route Linking Hispanic Settlements in Northern New Mexico and Upper (Alto) California Multiple Property Documentation Form.  The site is representative of the areas of significance related to commerce, economics, exploration/settlement, social history and transportation. The areas of signficance for the site have been defined broadly for the trail in the MPDF.

Because of the paucity of first-hand accounts of the caravan traffic between New Mexico and California, there are only a few instances where specific events are associated with traffic along the trail.  The section of trail in the vicinity of Beaver Dam is one of the exceptions,

as the location where Frémont relates the disappearance of Baptiste Tabeau at the hands of Paiute Indians on the night of May 9, 1844. Tabeau’s disappearance while on night guard duty with the pasturing mules may well be directly related to the fact that Frémont’s party, while travelling up the east bank of the swollen Virgin River, missed the location at the Big Bend where the established pack trail ascended out of the river canyon on the west side of the river, thus avoiding narrow flooded river bottomlands.

This section of the trail is also associated Antonio Armijo and his principal scout, Raphael Rivera, who established the route of the trail in 1829 avoiding the impassible Virgin River gorge and following the Virgin River Valley, where it flattens out as the optimum passage through the initial section of the Mojave Desert.  While the Big Bend route segment is not the only section of packtrail that can be associated with Rivera and Armijo, it is an outstanding section that illustrates the principles these pioneering entrepreneurs utilized to establish a trade trail taking into account physical and cultural geography that are intrinsic to Armijo’s itinerary and brief summary of establishing the practicability of the route.

When Antonio Armijo reaches the Virgin River (Armijo’s “Rio Severo”) drainage in the vicinity of modern Hurricane, Utah, he frequently lays over at camps while reconnaissance detachments trek ahead to find the most expedient route for the pack animals.  Up to that point, Armijo was travelling through territory that had been traversed by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1776, and may have had the benefit of mountainmen and native guides who had been involved in fur trapping through this portion of the Colorado Plateau.  However,  when Armijo reaches the vicinity of St. George, he is traversing what appeared to be unknown territory to the New Mexicans (Hafen and Hafen 1993:109-140).  Jedediah Smith had explored the area in 1826 and 1827, but Smith’s connections were not with the New Mexican entrepeneurial community (as evidenced by the national identities listed for his crew [Brooks 1989:38]) so Armijo did not have the benefit of this geographical knowledge.  The trail, avoiding the Virgin River Gorge and leaving the Colorado River drainage north of the Mojave villages, had to be established independently by Armijo with the skills of what appears to have been his principle scout, Raphael Rivera.
 

As mentioned above, the Big Bend section of the Old Spanish Trail is associated with John C. Frémont and one of his ‘most valuable’ party members Baptiste Tabeau, who lost his life in the vicinity of Beaver Dam on May 9th 1844.  While the location of Tabeau’s disappearance is not exactly known, from Frémont’s account it was some distance south of the camp at Beaver Dam on the banks of the Virgin River.  There is no more fitting spot than the Big Bend bench to visualize the geography and the tactics which the native Paiute’s might have used to drive mules down to the Virgin River, with experienced Baptiste Tabeau in pursuit, until he was ‘bushwhacked’ by the people he was pursuing to recover the valuable, but lame mule.

By 1844, when Frémont purposely follows the well established caravan route up the Virgin River and applies the name “Spanish Trail” to it, thecaravan corridor down the Virgin River and Colorado River had been bypassed for a number of years in favor of a path that headed more westerly - intersecting the Muddy River and Las Vegas springs - as the only dependable water sources between lengthy waterless “jornadas” on hardpacked and rocky upland desert stretches.  The evolving geographic knowledge about the Mojave desert region, of how to transport “soft goods” on freight animals and provide adequate forage without producing tender feet (by too much water or too hard a surface) through native territory, is illustrated by the physical characteristics of the trail on the Big Bend bench.

While passing over the sandy terraces proceeding upstream on the “right bank” (east side) above the swollen Virgin River channel, Frémont lost the trace of the “Spanish Trail” in this section.  In November 1849, with the first wagon trains to follow the Spanish Trail, Orville Pratt points out that the route followed the high, dry, gravel covered bench on the west side of the Virgin for the first five miles from Beaver Dam before descending into the river channel (Hafen and Hafen 1998:44-45).

There are no constructed trail structures that historical accounts can associate with the Mexican period commercial use (1829-1848) of this or any portion of the “Old Spanish Trail,” except perhaps some enhanced steps carved into the Arizona and Utah slickrock Canyon Country on the Armijo route.  The packtrail and livestock driveway functions of the Mexican period commercial use of the network left so little imprint on the landscape that alignments surviving from the Mexican period are only discernable because of subsequent packtrail, livestock driveway (including cattle, sheep and goats) and particularly freight and emigrant wagon use of the treadway.  However, the way these surviving alignments, though altered by subsequent use, lie on the landscape reflects distinctive environmental and physical considerations of the expedition “captain,” “guides” (Marcy 1859), packers (arrieros) and drovers.  Though there are few period accounts of the “Old Spanish Trail,” (which was neither old nor considered “Spanish” during the period of significance), each period and later account indicates that daily travel objectives and routes were a result of coordination between journeymen specialists and their apprentices, depending on previous experience, expert guides, and daily and seasonal weather and encounters with indigenous societies.  Adjustments of the trail alignment could be radical - based on changing conditions, seasonal variation, and experience of the specialists in the caravan.  The braided and eroded routes in the corridor, rather than a constructed transportation structure (with embankments, ditches, bridges and retaining walls), become the vernacular “site” of the trail alignment.  The design criteria for the trail route segments are related to inferences in how the travelers “read the landscape.”  The major features of the Big Bend route segment are:

1) the pack trail descent from the calcrete bench vertically down a slope of 140 feet with a 20% grade, and

2) the hard packed calcrete surface of the bench top which is presumed to have been a preferable travelway to the sinuous, sandy and alternating muddy and overgrown river channel between Beaver Dam Wash and the Big Bend of the Virgin River, where the river widens out and has elevated natural overbank flood sections that would avoid an alignment in the wet channel.

The bench top would produce little or no lasting imprint as short strings of pack mules would have spread out across the bench, creating braided paths through the creosote with only transient seasonal visibility.

Is there anything else you can add to the narrative about the areas of significance that the site specifically speaks to.?

D- Property has yielded, or is likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history.

The Big Bend route segment, because of the relatively brittle nature of the landscape, presents opportunities to yield archeological evidence of packtrail and livestock driveway activities in the two decades of 1829-1848.  Opportunities exist at Big Bend to investigate, through replicate experiments the durability of short term pack animal trailing over a span of an hour or so in one day a year.  Archeological techniques such as soil chemistry, metal detection, ground penetrating radar, as well as traditional archeological techniques such as fine grained mapping and excavations will not be feasible unless the currently inferred alignments are protected from further erosion and if foot and motor vehicle traffic on the site are not channeled and monitored to preserve the landscape and site structure.  Monitoring of the existing livestock and OHV pathways on the Big Bend bench could be monitored through repeat photography, to establish the permanence of short term pack trail use and the time needed for vegetation to recover and aeolian sediment to be reworked so the short duration livestock trail becomes indistinguishable.