San Simon Sub-Basin - Arizona Department of Environmental Quality

“One August night in the early 1890's, a hobo was put off a train at Stein Pass near the boundary of Arizona and New Mexico.
Across the San Simon Valley to the west a bright light could be seen. The hobo took it to be a light at some ranch house not
many miles away and struck out for it. In reality the light was a campfire at Dunn Spring where a party of cattlemen were
working and had camped for the night. It is nearly twenty miles from Stein Pass station to Dunn Spring.
The man had no water, and the night was warm, so he soon began to suffer from thirst. In time the light went out as the campfire
burned low, but the fellow kept the same general direction, drifting a little to the southward. There is no torture like that of thirst.
I know something of it myself and have brought in men with tongues so swollen that they could not talk, and in one case a man
who was unconscious. The hobo evidently suffered the tortures of the damned in that twenty miles. Just before daylight he
staggered into the mouth of Brushy Canyon on the east slope of the Chiricahua Mountains, a couple of miles from
Dunn Spring.
Here was running water, and his life was saved for the present.”
John A. Rockfellow in Log Of An Arizona Trail Blazer 30
Figure 1. Situated at the base of the Chiricahua
Mountains, Dunn Spring is denoted in the arid
landscape by thick riparian vegetation. Access to
Dunn Spring is through a tunnel dug into the hillside.
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