Five chiefs, and a road that was still a proposal
Amiel Weeks Whipple's preliminary report says the Mojave council agreed to help a railroad survey. He also guessed how much of their valley a farmer could use, and why they did not irrigate.
By C. V. Wooster · October 6, 2026 · A history essay. The novel is a separate thing, and this page says so where the two meet.
Whipple's preliminary report does not linger on ceremony, but it does not skip it. Entering the basin he calls the home of the Mojave, a valley several miles wide and probably forty long, the party met, at the villages in succession, five principal chiefs, each with his band, "with all the forms and ceremonies with which they are wont to dignify great events." Told why the Americans had come, the chiefs were greatly pleased. They met in council and determined to do all they could for the Pacific railway survey. They loaded the party with flour and beans in return for cast-off clothing, and they sent two guides, Ir-i-te-ba and Cai-rook, to conduct the expedition to where the Salt Lake road meets the Mojave River.
That is the government explorer's version, written to argue for a route. Bean and Vane, citing Sherer, put dates on it. The expedition had come to the river by Bill Williams Fork, near the ground where Parker Dam would later stand. Chemehuevi on the western side tried to get the party, which was going up the eastern side, to cross and trade. The western side was Mojave territory, and the expedition waited. On February 23, 1854, Mojave met them eleven or twelve miles up the valley. The party left Mojave country on March 2, after more than a week. A chief and some of his band offered a basket of maize for two strings of white porcelain beads, and after that exchange the general trading started. Indians were not allowed in camp at night. More than once the leaders were formally introduced to chiefs. Then the chiefs held what Sherer treats as a national council, and three decisions came out of it: they approved a road for travel and trade through their country, they decided to show Whipple a trail to the ocean along which there was water and grass, and they elected a high-ranking Mojave to guide the expedition. The overview says this visit stands out in Mojave memory as a meeting of governments, and that traders who had always traveled were optimistic about a route through their country. That optimism is Sherer's reading of the memory. Whipple's extract records the pleasure and the guides. It does not record a later sense of betrayal. Beale's road would supply that, and Stillman's memory of Beale belongs in the road essay, not as a sentence Whipple wrote.
Acres, and a guess about rain
The same extract is where Whipple becomes a booster, and the numbers need to stay attached to him. The Colorado bottom, he writes, is a large extent of fertile land, the soil far superior to that of the Rio Grande, and the valley at the Mojave "only three hundred and fifty feet" above the sea, so the climate is milder. Mojave, Chemehuevi, Cuchan, and Cocopa all cultivate without irrigation. From that fact he infers that more rain probably falls here than in New Mexico. The inference is his. A farming system that uses a flood is not the same thing as a farming system that uses rain, and Ives, four years later, would describe the annual overflow as the reason crops grew. Whipple saw fields and concluded the sky was wetter. Keep the conclusion in his voice.
He estimates 150 to 200 square miles of arable land in one tract the Mojave occupy, and about thirty square miles for the Chemehuevi, whom he calls a band of Paiute. Below, near Bill Williams Fork, another basin of about thirty square miles. He then adds valleys he has not seen, using Sitgreaves's map, and arrives at a regional total, sixteen hundred and sixty square miles, that this essay will not treat as a Mojave census of farmland. The figure that is his own observation is the 150 to 200, plus the Chemehuevi thirty. He lists what he says those farmers already grow, without irrigation, abundantly: maize, wheat, beans, and melons. Cotton, sugarcane, and rice, he thinks, would suit the soil and climate. "There can be no doubt that the valley of the Colorado is destined, at some future day, to be divided into plantations, supporting a numerous population." That destiny is a surveyor's advertisement. It assumes the farmers already in the fields will not be the ones deciding the division. Within five years the Army was in the valley. The plantation future he promised did not arrive on his timetable, and it did not arrive as a benefit to the people who had handed him flour.
The river he thought a steamboat could use
From the Mojave villages to near the gulf, he puts the average width at three hundred to five hundred yards. At the Gila junction in October and November 1849, a dry season, he had seen no change in the height of the stream and knew of no ford. From Bill Williams Fork up to the Mojave villages he found no place where the channel was less than five or six feet. The current seemed no faster than the Ohio's. At Bill Williams Fork he puts the river 270 feet above the sea, three hundred miles by the stream from the gulf, which he figures as about nine-tenths of a foot of fall per mile, a little steeper than the navigable Arkansas. Steamboats already reached the Gila mouth, eighty miles from the gulf, with supplies for Fort Yuma. Sitgreaves had reported a large rock in mid-channel at his camp 51. Whipple supposed that rock the principal bar to navigation up to the Mojave villages, and thought it could be blasted. Then, if the railroad followed the line he wanted, the river would carry "commerce of no inconsiderable value" to and from a Mojave depot.
Ives, who actually brought a steamboat, confirmed a different part of the same argument. Whipple's traveled route from the Big Sandy to the river north of the Needles was 180 miles of rough country. The railroad line Whipple had chosen without walking it was 80 miles, 35 of them nearly level and 45 at a grade of about seventy feet, with scarcely an irregularity. Ives says his examination verified Whipple's judgment. Read together, the two reports are a surveyor drawing a line and a later officer walking it. They are not a Mojave agreement to a depot.
Who else was looking
Bean and Vane note that the party included H. B. Möllhausen, a German topographer and artist whose drawings and diary Sherer treats as a store of information on the Mojave. This essay does not describe those drawings, because the diary was not opened. It is enough to know the official report is not the only record the expedition made, and that the pictures people later treat as the first widely seen images of Mojave villages come from that party. The short history on this site says so. The preliminary extract quoted here does not.
Whipple also writes the valley into a larger dryness. The Colorado, in his geography, receives the waters between the Sierra Madre and the Sierra Nevada. The region is barren hills, naked plains, and canyons, with fertile spots. He names the Gila, the Little Colorado, Bill Williams Fork, and the Mojave River as places with soil. Pima and Maricopa on the Gila grow cotton, tobacco, maize, wheat, beans, and melons, and have done so, he says, since Coronado. He is building a case that the thirty-fifth parallel is not a wasteland. The Mojave fields are his best evidence and, in the same pages, the ground he is offering to a future he does not imagine as theirs.
A proposal is not a treaty
Nothing in the extract is signed. The council "determined to do all in their power." Sherer's three decisions are a historian's reading of what the Mojave thought they had agreed. When Beale came in 1857, Mojave memory, as Stillman told it and Sherer recorded it, held that a wagon road fulfilled the Whipple agreement, and held that Beale crossed without asking. Whipple's report cannot settle that argument. It can show that in the late winter of 1854 a railroad survey was fed, guided, and encouraged, and that its leader went home with acreage estimates and a plantation sentence. The guides' names are on the page. The acreage is on the page. The consent of a nation to everything that followed is not.
Sources
These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.
- A. W. Whipple, extracts from the preliminary report in the Pacific Railroad Surveys, read from the Internet Archive text of volume 3 of Reports of Explorations and Surveys (reportsofexplora03unit_0).
- Joseph C. Ives, Report upon the Colorado River of the West (1861), letter to A. A. Humphreys, for the later measurement of Whipple's cutoff: 180 miles by the traveled route, 80 by the railroad line.
- Bean and Vane (2002), citing Sherer, Bitterness Road (1994), pp. 40-44 and 54, for the dates February 23 to March 2, 1854, the night rule in camp, and the three decisions of the council. NPS history copy.