Beale's road, written at the campfire

On the morning of January 23, 1858, Edward F. Beale reached the Colorado River. His party had slept in a rainstorm a few miles back. His clerk, F. E. Kerlin, had gone ahead the day before to get a boat ready for the crossing, and now Kerlin was coming back toward the column. Beale wrote that the men started guessing at once. The news, when Kerlin was close enough to shout it, was that a steamer was already at the crossing.

The boat was the General Jesup, Captain Johnson. Beale's journal, printed that spring as a House document, keeps the sentences he wrote for people who might follow him, not for a later historian's comfort. "Here, in a wild, almost unknown country, inhabited only by savages, the great river of the west, hitherto declared unnavigable, had, for the first time, borne upon its bosom that emblem of civilization, a steamer." He then wrote the line that shows how he understood the people whose valley the road had just entered: the whistle of the Jesup "sounded the death knell of the river race." That is Beale's phrase. It is not a description this site uses for the Mojave. It is evidence of what the road builder thought he was doing.

A journal he refused to clean up

The report that contains that morning is House Executive Document No. 124 of the 35th Congress, 1st Session. Secretary of War John B. Floyd sent it to Speaker James L. Orr on May 10, 1858. Congress ordered it printed on May 12. Beale's own letter, dated Washington, April 26, 1858, tells Floyd what the packet is: "my daily journal of the survey made last summer and winter of a wagon road from Fort Defiance to the Colorado river or State line of California, near the 35th parallel," plus an itinerary from Albuquerque to California.

He is particular about the kind of distance he measured. The itinerary, he says, gives distances "as they exist, no air lines or imaginary curves, but every turn of our wheels recorded by the odometer attached." Latitudes and longitudes of almost all the camps are included. He also warns that his instructions made the road longer than it needed to be. Going by Fort Defiance and then to Zuni, the point he treated as the real start, was "an unnecessary loss of time and a very great increase of distance to no purpose." He obeyed the instructions anyway, and sent his train by the direct road from the Gallo River to Zuni, "saving not less than sixty miles."

Two thermometer tables ride with the journal, one for the outward trip in September and October, one for the return in January and February. Beale thought a comparison showed that a traveler could use the road in winter and in summer "without suffering the extremes of heat or cold." Anyone who has driven the high country north of the San Francisco Peaks in January can decide how far to trust a superintendent who wanted Congress to fund the road. He does, at least, attach the readings instead of offering a mood.

The method sentence is the one worth keeping beside the map. The journal was "a faithful history of each day's work, written at the camp fire at the close of every day." He says he did not alter it, because he wanted the country as it hit him on the spot. "You will therefore find it very rough, but I hope those who may follow in my footsteps over the road may find it correct in every particular. I have written it for the use of emigrants more than for show." He adds that he is not responsible for the seasons. More water or less, more snow or less, might meet the next party. "I am not responsible for the seasons, but I am for all my statements in relation to the country over which we passed."

That is a useful standard, and a limited one. A campfire journal can be honest about mud, grass, and a broken wagon and still be a bad account of the people who already lived on the grass. Beale's January 23 entry is both.

The camels, before the legend

The same document is the primary record of the camels on this survey. They were not a mascot added by later storytellers. They stand on the riverbank in Beale's own picture of the crossing. He had brought them. He sets the scene in one sentence: the camels on the bank, "surrounded by hundreds of wild unclad savages," mixed with the dragoons of his escort, and the steamer turning her wheels to leave. Again the word is his. The count is "hundreds," not a later round number. He does not name the people. From the place and the date, they are the Mojave of the valley where the road met the water, the people who call themselves Pipa Aha Macav.

Lieutenant White of the Army was on the Jesup with fifteen soldiers. Beale thought that escort, "as many rugged mountain men," and the steamer itself, "as a fort," made "a dangerous party to meddle with." The steamer came alongside, took the party and the baggage across, and the men swam the mules. Johnson headed downstream. Beale puts Fort Yuma "three hundred and fifty miles below." He says he felt jealous of Johnson's achievement and hoped the government would pay a citizen who had taken the risk. The same evening Beale started his own return, a winter trip meant to test whether the summer road would work in cold weather. He took twenty men and hoped to be home in March. The first days would be short. Grass, he wrote, was poor for about the first forty miles.

The cold-weather test of the camels is in that same entry, and it is easy to blur into the river scene. Beale says that on his arrival in California he had put camels in camp within a few hundred yards of the summit of the Sierra Nevada, to see what cold would do to them. "To this date they have lived in two or three feet of snow, fattening and thriving wonderfully all the while." In a recent snowstorm a wagon carrying provisions stalled. The camels "brought the load through the snow and ice to camp, though the six strong mules of the team were unable to extricate the empty wagon." That is the anecdote. It is about snow on the Sierra, not about the Mojave Desert floor, and it is Beale reporting a success he wanted Washington to hear.

The outward journal, earlier in the same printing, is less triumphant, which is why both ends belong in the same essay. Crossing Texas in the summer of 1857, he was already managing animals that had not settled into the work. Handlers who had come from the Ottoman Empire with the camels refused, at San Antonio, to continue. Beale writes that they said they had been badly treated and had not been paid since January, because the appropriation had run out and no one was authorized to pay them, though they had left home under contract with government officers. He put the camels under Mr. Breckenridge. Within a day or two, two of the animals were sick and could not keep up. Beale had no spare wagon ready for their loads. "Thus far the camels have not been able to keep up with the wagons," he wrote, and he hoped practice would harden them. Some had barely worked since landing and were soft.

A few days on, the tired ones were still coming into camp late, and when they were turned out they browsed on bushes and on a thorny shrub rather than on the best grass. Beale's tone shifts from doubt to interest. He notes that he sees, so far, no reason to think the experiment will fail. Farther along he is pleased to watch them eat a desert shrub, the creosote-type bush travelers were learning to use for fuel, "with the greatest apparent relish." The report is an argument for the animals and a log of their failures. Both are in it. A later picture of camels gliding across Arizona without trouble is a smoother story than the document.

What he asked the Army to do next

Beale did not stop at a road description. The National Park Service ethnographic overview of Joshua Tree, prepared by Lowell John Bean and Sylvia Brakke Vane in 2002, follows Lorraine Sherer's reading of the end of this report: Beale recommended a military post where the wagon road crossed the river, to protect emigrant trains from the Mojave. That recommendation sits a few months before the Rose-Baley party became the first emigrant train to test the road, and a year before Lieutenant Colonel William Hoffman planted Camp Colorado on the east bank. The fort was not an accident of the August 1858 fight alone. The road's own superintendent had already told the War Department that emigrants at this crossing would need soldiers.

Sherer's Mojave sources, which Bean and Vane quote, remember the survey differently from the whistle and the "death knell." Elder Frances Stillman, speaking long afterward, said the Mojave had wanted to be friends and that Beale "came right in and looked like he owned the place, and didn't bother to talk to anybody, or ask if he might cross." Bean and Vane, citing Sherer, place Beale's first arrival on the river in October 1857, the crossing on October 19, and trade in camp on October 20, after the Mojave had blocked the party from going downriver. The January 1858 entry above is the return to the same crossing, this time with Johnson's steamer already there. Two passages through one valley, one road survey, and already two memories of what the visit was.

Bean and Vane also note a coincidence that mattered on the ground. On January 22, 1858, the day before Beale's journal entry, Johnson had anchored the Jesup on the east bank at the place Beale had used in the fall. Lieutenant White's errand, as Sherer reconstructs it, included taking the mood of the Mojave at a moment when rumors of Mormon influence on the river were running through Fort Yuma. Beale's men appeared on the west side the next day. To the people in the villages, a private steamer and a government road party landing together did not look like an accident. Beale's journal records his surprise. It does not record theirs.

Where the novel may not follow him

When the Birds Go Silent is a novel of the war that began after emigrants used this road. Beale appears in it as a historical person, the man who laid out the road with camels. His campfire sentences, the unpaid handlers, the sick camels in Texas, the snow test in the Sierra, and the whistle he took for a death knell are documented. Dialogue put in his mouth, and any scene that makes him a character in someone else's marriage or council, is the novel. The Author's Note in the book is the place that sorts those. This page stops at the report.

If you read only one thing from the document, read the April 26 letter and the January 23 entry together. The letter says the journal was written for emigrants and left rough on purpose. The entry shows what "rough" included: a working surveyor's joy at a steamboat, a cold test of camels that is really about the Sierra, a riverbank crowded with people he does not name, and a prediction that their time was already over. The Mojave were still farming that floodplain when he wrote it. They are still on the river.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• Edward F. Beale, report to the Secretary of War, April 26, 1858, printed as House Executive Document No. 124, 35th Congress, 1st Session, including the transmittal of Secretary John B. Floyd, May 10, 1858. The public-domain text is reproduced, with the document's page numbers, by L. B. Lesley in Uncle Sam's Camels (1929) and online at the University of Chicago's Thayer site: transmittal letter and January 1858 journal.
• The same printing, read here from the University of Oklahoma digital serial-set copy, for the June 1857 notes on sick camels, unpaid camel handlers, and the animals' preference for browse. Indian serial set copy.
• Lowell John Bean and Sylvia Brakke Vane, The Native American Ethnography and Ethnohistory of Joshua Tree National Park: An Overview (Cultural Systems Research, Inc., August 22, 2002), the Mojave chapter, citing Lorraine M. Sherer, Bitterness Road: The Mojave, 1604 to 1860 (Ballena Press, 1994), on Beale's recommendation of a military post. NPS history copy.

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