The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [7]
The land had been haunted before Melchior died, and it remained haunted afterward; 150 years after his death, Catholic apparitions plagued the tribes. Various peoples had alarming encounters with meddlesome white women who flew above their heads. In the lands of the O’Odham, a white woman bearing a cross came drifting down the Devil’s Highway itself. The warriors who saw her immediately did the only practical thing they could: they filled her with arrows. They said she refused to die. Kept on flying. Her story was written down in 1699, but the scribe who wrote this history tells us it had happened so long ago that the tribe had already forgotten her.
Fifty years after this Blessed Virgin UFO, a female prophet came out of the desert. She was known as La Mujer Azul. The Blue Woman. They filled her full of arrows, too. This time, she died.
Jesuits rolled in. They made the People as unhappy as the mysterious spirit-women, and Pimas raided the town to bludgeon its missionary to death. Angry Yumas by the Colorado River dragged a Jesuit out into the light and beat him to death.
It was the nineteenth century, however, that really got the modern era of death rolling.
The Yumas got stirred up again and massacred the evil scalp-hunting Glanton gang by the banks of the river in the mid 1840s. Then, in 1848–49, the California gold rush began. Mexicans weren’t immune to the siren call of treasure. By now, the Cabeza Prieta/Devil’s Highway had been trod by white men and mestizos for 307 years. It was still little more than a rough dirt trail—it is still a rough dirt trail—but it was slyly posing as a handy southern route through Arizona. White Arizonans and Texans hove to and dragged their wagons. Thousands of travelers went into the desert, and piles of human bones revealed where many of them fell. Though the bones are gone, wagon ruts can still be found, and near these ruts, piles of stone still hide the remains of those who fell.
One writer who has focused on this desert, Craig Childs, tells of a pair of old bullet casings found out there. They were jammed together, and when pried apart, an aged curl of paper fell out. On the paper, someone had written, “Was it worth it?”
The Sand Papagos saw the endless lines of scraggly Mexicans as a rolling supermarket. Their strategy was similar to their approach to the floating virgin: shoot arrows. Wagon train after wagon train was slaughtered. Besieged Mexicans begged their own army to protect them, but the Sand Papagos and their leader, a warrior named Quelele, the Carrion-Hawk, were ready for them, too.
Just to make sure the Mexicans got the point, Quelele let it be known that his favorite snack was dead Mexican. “I don’t need the wagons!” he boasted. “Bring on the Mexican army! I am the Carrion-Hawk! I’m hungry for Mexican meat!”
Between Quelele and the harsh landscape, the numbers of dead soared beyond counting. Human skeletons were found lying beside the road, and eerie cattle and horses, reduced to blanched mummies, were reported to be standing out among the ironwood trees. Graves surrounded some waterholes, up to twenty-seven around one pothole alone.
A westerner named Francisco Salazar seems to have been the first to keep an eyewitness record of this phase of the killing fields. By 1850, he wrote, the Devil’s Highway was “… a vast graveyard of unknown dead … the scattered bones of human beings slowly turning to dust … the dead were left where they were to be sepulchered by the fearful sand storms that sweep at times over the desolate waste.”
In the following years, over four hundred people died of heat, thirst, and misadventure. It became known as the most terrible place in the world.
And it’s beautiful. Edward Abbey, the celebrated iconoclast and writer, loved the place. He chose to be buried there,