Huachuca Illustrated - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

tent, and frequently reduced to short allowance of bare necessities of subsistence, the men
engaged in the work...suffered much and endured privation and exposure of the severest
character. 19
Another topographical engineer, Lieut. Joseph Christmas Ives, launched an exploration of
the Colorado River and northern Arizona on 11 January 1858. The New York City-born Ives
would become an aide to Jefferson Davis when Davis became president of the Confederate States.
In a stern-wheel steamship named the Explorer, Ives churned up the Colorado from Fort Yuma to
the confluence of the Virgin River at the Black Canyon.
Ives left some of the most effusive descriptions of the grandeur of the Southwest. About
Black Canyon he said, “Stately facades, august cathedrals, amphitheatres, rotundas, castellated
walls, and rows of time-stained ruins, surmounted by every form of tower, minaret, dome, and
spire have been moulded from the cyclopean masses of rock that form the mighty defile. The
solitude, the stillness, the subdued light, and the vastness of every surrounding object, produce an
expression of awe that ultimately becomes painful.” 20
From here he and an escort party numbering twenty men marched overland, visiting along
the way the Little Colorado and the Moqui villages. In the Grand Canyon Ives was moved to
surrealistic prose: “The increasing magnitude of the colossal piles that blocked the end of the
vista, and the corresponding depty, and gloom of the gaping chasms into which we were plunging,
imparted an earthly character to a way that might have resembled the portals of the infernal
regions. Harsh screams issuing from aerial recesses in the canyon sides, and apparitions of
goblin-like figures perched in the rifts and hollows of the impending cliffs, gave an odd reality to
the impression.” 21 He arrived at Fort Defiance in May 1858. The illustrations of the impressive
and unique scenery made by artist H. B. Molhausen were some of the most striking prints to
survive the southwestern explorations. The Ives expedition had covered ground that no Anglo
had visited before.
A survey was authorized by Congress in February 1859 to map the lands of the Pimas and
Maricopas and along the Gila. Ten thousand dollars were appropriated to distribute among these
traditionally friendly Indians in the form of tools and clothing. The survey was conducted under
the command of Colonel A. B. Gray later in the year, while Lieutenant Sylvester Mowry was put
in charge of handing out the gifts.
From 1850 to 1860 the U.S. Army Topographical Corps built thirty-four roads in the far
west, and sunk experimental artesian wells along the Llano Estacado in Texas and the Jornado del
Muerto along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, at a total cost of $1,116,000. This was a major
contribution to the settlement of the west. In New Mexico alone the network of roads would
become the pattern for future lines of communication, a point made by historian William T.
Jackson:
...For example, El Camino Militar from Santa Fe to Taos is today a main highway from
the New Mexico capital northward into Colorado at Fort Garland. The tracks of the Atchison,
Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad follow in the general route of the old Fort Union military road
from Las Vegas across the Sangre de Cristo Range into Santa Fe. This railroad’s route
southward to Albuquerque on down the Rio Grande Valley, across the Jornada del Muerto to
46 HUACHUCA ILLUSTRATED