How the Apache Trail was built — a freight road blasted and hand-laid through canyon walls in 1903-1905, largely by Western Apache laborers whose mortarless stone work still holds up the road you're driving.
This road you're driving — I want to tell you who built it, because it's a piece of real, hard, honorable history that most folks roll right over without a thought, and it deserves better than that.
Picture it: the very start of the nineteen-hundreds. They've decided to build that great dam, way up the Salt River in the heart of these trackless mountains — but there's no way to get to the site. No road, nothing but wild canyon and cliff. So before anything else, they have to carve a freight road, twenty-some miles of it, through some of the most brutal, broken country in Arizona, so the mule teams can haul in the cement and the steel. They started cutting it in 1903.
And the crews who did the hardest of that work — who blasted the grade out of solid rock, who built up the road where it clung to the canyon walls — were, in large part, Apache. Western Apache men, hundreds of them, working these cliffs by hand. And here's the thing they were renowned for: the stonework. Where the road needed a retaining wall to hold it against a drop, they built those walls dry — fitted stone to stone, no mortar, no cement, just the eye and the skill to lock the rocks together so tight and so true that they'd stand. And listen to this — some of those very walls, laid up by Apache hands over a hundred and twenty years ago, are still standing under this road right now, still doing their job, holding the trail against the mountain.
There's a bitter irony in it you shouldn't miss, and I won't hide it from you: these were Apache men, building a road named the Apache Trail, through mountains their own people had been driven out of by the Army just thirty years before. The engineer who bossed the job, they say, started out doubting them and paying them poorly — and ended up rating their work above every other crew he had. Two years they cut and hauled and hand-set stone, until in 1905 the road went through, and up it came the makings of the dam. So when this trail carries you smoothly around a cliff on a neat stone shoulder, run your mind over who laid those stones, and how, and with what skill. It's their road, in more ways than one. Roll on.
Photo: Dougtone · CC BY-SA 2.0
