Road Trip 2017 - Intro

My plan for this year, after a week in Phoenix for some spring  baseball, is to do a little exploration of the area and routes where Spanish (Mexican) traders traveled  north and west from Mexico in the 18th and 19th Centuries and ended up in Southern California. The details of the plan are still a little vague. Various maps I have referred to show a number of different routes, many of which are inaccessible and the ease of access of those that are potentially accessible is uncertain. The roads, and this year's weather  may get in the way. My little Chevy HHR is not up to much heavy going,  so I'll have t check on road conditions when I get near where there are roads that trace the routes, and at least go to point overlooking the original trails.

I have been in Phoenix for 6 days enjoying nice weather, baseball games a few history sites.  The first history site a ran across was even before I left California. On IS8 between San Diego and El Centro. I stopped at a rest stop and noticed plaque on

 a boulder that announced that the site was a stop for the DeAnza expedition in 1775. The rest stop is called he "Jaime Obeso Sunbeam" rest stop. Jaime Obeso, according to a CalTrans web site that I found, was a highway worker for Cal Trans who was killed by a reckless driver in 2011.  I am not sure why the word "sunbeam" is appended to his name  maybe t was his nickname or a place name. I was interested, and distressed, to see on the CalTrans web site that there are a long list of highway workers killed on the job over the past few years.

Once I got to Phoenix I made a couple of visits to history sites: The Sharlott Hall Museum in Prescott and the Museum of the Horse Soldier in Tucson.
 
The Sharlott Hall Museum is a collection of buildings in downtown Prescott that includes some historic buildings that were moved there and some that were built on the site and some new buildings. It s an interesting place with some connections to California History.  The Museum is a product f the Civil Works Administration and work program that was stated early in the Great Depression: "The CWA was a project created under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The CWA created construction jobs, mainly improving or constructing buildings and bridges. It ended on March 31, 1934, after spending $200 million a month and giving jobs to four million people."  [ see Civil Works Administration accessed 3/25/2017]
ne wonders if the jobs that the current president is promising to create will be like the C.W.A. projects.
One of the houses is the first governor's mansion which was built for John C. Fremont who was appointed governor by President Rutherford Hayes.  The docent on duty in the house explained that the appointment was made to provide a sinecure for the destitute Fremont who had lost all of his money in business ventures, and Hayes wanted to recognize Fremont's contribution by withdrawing from the Republican nomination for president in the election  of 1860 in favor of Lincoln. Fremont continues in his ways as territorial governor by spending "[so] little time in the territory; eventually he was asked to resume his duties or resign, and chose resignation. Destitute, the family depended on the publication earnings of his wife Jessie." [John C. Fremont accessed 3/2217]

The second site I visited in the Phoenix area was the Museum of the Horse Soldier in Tucson. A small but very impressive museum with a collection of uniforms, firearms, and other accoutrements of the horse soldiers that existed in the area in the 19th century. Their history, of course, is complicated and controversial. That they were, at least in part, responsible for the genocide committed on the Native American in the area is certainly true. But the failure of the Federal government to honor treaties negotiated by the army with the NAs cannot be ignored. And the desire of other people to immigrate into and through the Natives lands is something that certainly did not occur for the first time in the 19th century. There are ruins in the area that date back more than 10,000 years are were occupied by people who probably replaced, and were replaced, by one means or another for thousands of years.  The fact that the current occupants of the southwest have survived for 150 years should not be used to presume that this is the last time populations in the area of been replaced, or absorbed, by newcomers.

This is one of several cases in the museum which displays pretty complete uniforms of cavalry soldiers.  Unfortunately there is no descfriptions of the dates or other information about the uniforms, but it is an impressive collection none the less







I will be leaving Phoenix area today, after watching a final day of A's baseball, and proceeding to Gallup, New Mexico. Tomorrow I will drive north to intersect with the route of the Old Spanish Trail that was one of the complex of routes from Mexico up to California in the late 18th Century.  The map below from the National Park Service shows the routes that have been more or less documented. I will be following the southern most of the routes as shown on the map.

 
Check  back on this blog over the next few days as I drive in 4 days what probably took the Spanish mule rains at least two months.