Cochise County Roads and Rails

The Last Wild Place Establishing Boundaries Indians & Boundaries Roads & Rails Settlements & Land Claims		Roads and Rails Long before American explorers or settlers ventured through the Cochise County area, there were Spanish explorers and travelers and there were also several attempts at establishing Spanish settlements. When the Americans began regularly traversing the area around the time of the 1849 California gold rush they probably found a number of established trails linking the few mountain passes and the scarce watering holes. In those early years travelers were probably infrequent. Apache hostilities made the area dangerous for travel and settlement. Considering the Geronimo statement, quoted in the previous section, that the first white men he saw were a survey team in the 1850s one might conclude that not many travelers found there way through Cochise County. Regular travel through probably began around 1857 when mail service was established between San Antonio and San Diego; it lasted less than a year. In 1858 the United States government appropriated funds to make improvements along two routes to California. One of them ran through Cochise County. That same year, with underwriting from Congress, the Butterfield Stage began making the trek across that trail and they built and staffed several stage stops in the county. While the Butterfield stage probably made a large impact on the eventual settlement of the area, it was a short-lived enterprise. This stage route ended in 1861 as the Civil War began. One of the main reasons why the United States made the Gadsden purchase in 1853 was with the intention of building a railroad through that area in order to connect California with the rest of the nation. It would provide a southern transcontinental route, free from snow. Soon after the purchase a survey team under Lt. John G. Parke visited the area to map possible routes.[1] The planned railroad was long in coming however. It wasn't until 1880, eleven years after the driving of the golden spike by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific connecting the first transcontinental route, was a silver spike driven in Tucson, Arizona connecting the southern route. The spike driving ceremony was slightly premature however. The line did not make it into Cochise County until three months later and the actual unification of this Southern Pacific line with the Santa Fe Railroad, making it the second transcontinental line, was not until a year later. Also if 1881 the Southern Pacific completed a second rail line that ran further South. Several more lines were added after 1887 to connect with the mining interests. Financing of these early railroad projects was through Congressional land grants. The railroad had reserved 40 miles on either side of the road from which they could claim a certain amount of lands. The General Land Office map of 1876 shows the intended route and denotes the eighty mile reserve which covered a large portion of Cochise County. This policy of reserving lands so that the railroad had first choice and they could not be homesteaded was challenged in the Supreme Court in 1875 in the case of Leavenworth, Lawrence and Galveston Railroad Company vs. United States where the Court ruled that the 80 mile limit could not be reserved.[2] Thus, this land could go back into the public domain. It is interesting to note that the rail line did not end up following the line drawn on the 1876 map but ran further south to reach the boomtown of Tombstone. Next »

		Footnotes 1. John G. Parke, Explorations for a Railroad Route, Near the 32d Parallel of North Latitude, Lying Between Dona Ana, on the Rio Grande and Pimas Villages, on the Gila (Washington, D.C.: The War Department, 1855). Available online at http://hdl.loc.gov/umich.dli.moa/AFK4383bk 2. Harold Hathaway Dunham, Government Handout: A Study in the Administration of the Public Lands, 1875-1891 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 94-5.