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Yuma is one of those iconic towns of the west, like Tombstone. If
Tombstone has its OK Corral, Yuma has its 3:10. Situated along the once mighty
Colorado River, baking in the Sonoran desert, it is at the southwest tip of
Arizona, just a few feet from the California border. According to Guinness, the
area surrounding the city is the sunniest on earth, although NASA scientists
say that this distinction is held by a Sahara Desert site in northern Niger.
The sun shines in Yuma for 4,050 hours of the 4,456 hours of daylight during a
year, or about 90 percent of the time. All that sun and the desert terrain make
it hot, with an average daily high in July of 107 degrees Fahrenheit. On July
28, 1995, the temperature reached 124 degrees!
We drove into Yuma on Interstate 8, which begins as a split with
Interstate 10 north of Tucson. It’s all desert, all the time, although there
are many lovely mountains, and the day we went, we saw brilliant bouquets of
wildflowers, alongside the road and in the distance. The best scenery is on
that part of the road that goes through the Sonoran Desert National Monument.
It is always surprising to me to see how many mountains there are in desert
regions, or that while you are driving, you begin to climb and might actually
go through a pass. We noticed that the saguaro cactuses out our windows looked
beaten down, almost all of them charred and scarred at their bases. Perhaps
these sentinels of the desert had lost the battle to survive the modern human
assault on their habitat.
We passed the town of Gila Bend, about sixty miles from the Interstate
8/10 split, named for a sharp bend in the Gila River, which empties into the
Colorado near Yuma. When I was a boy, I checked the newspaper every day for the
lowest and highest temperatures in the United States. Gila Bend was a frequent
winner for the high, as was its neighbor Yuma.
Yuma is in a wide river valley, and the original inhabitants fished,
hunted, and planted crops. Before it was defiled by so many dams, the Colorado
was a rushing river, prone to massive flooding. This made crossing it a
dangerous venture. Here, however, there are two large rocky mounds, one on each
side of the river. "Indian Hill and Prison Hill narrowed and calmed the river
just a few miles south of the confluence of the Gila, at the present location
of Yuma, Arizona. " The Prison Hill in the quote is where the famous
territorial prison was located. Parts of it are still there, and what is left
is part of the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historical Park. When the prison
closed in 1909, it fittingly became Yuma Union High School, perhaps like my
high school, a prison for the mind. Indian Hill is on the California side of
the Colorado, on part of the Quechan Indian reservation. The Quechen and the
Cocopah Indians occupied the Yuma region when the Spaniards came calling. They
were farmers and hunters, taking advantage of the river and the natural
crossing. Spain and then the United States saw the usefulness of the crossing
too, though they had different objectives in mind: military expansion,
commerce, a place to build a bridge for settlers, prospectors, and the like.
Though the Indians were friendly, they soon came into conflict with the
Europeans, a conflict they eventually lost, along with their lands. We walked
across the one-lane bridge, which is flanked by a railroad span, along which
there is a steady flow of train traffic, and looked at the old mission church
and the Quechan tribal buildings. A few hundred feet down the road, we saw a
casino. Inside, there was the usual depressing sight of people losing money who
cannot afford to do so, smoking and looking generally unhealthy. Indian casinos
are often not owned directly by the tribe, and few native people benefit from
them.
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