THE Apache Trail, closed while improvements were being made that perfected it as an automobile highway, is open again. This means that the westbound traveler may once more deflect from the railroad to marvel at Roosevelt Dam and the man-made inland sea which the earth has now taken to herself as though it were her own, and not her foster child. It means that the New Yorker, escaping for a time from inactive radiators and overactive gas meters, may roll up to the Tonto cliff dwellings and meditate upon those other apartment-house inmates who got along without any such annoyances only a few thousand years ago.
The Apache Trail has become, in the dozen years of its operation for the tenderfoot, something of a National institution. It is more than an agreeable link between Atlantic and Pacific; it is a pulse-quickening link between America’s yesterday and to-day. Stretching through the heart of Arizona—from Bowie past Roosevelt Dam, through the appropriately named Superstition Mountain and down across a mesa changed by irrigation from dull desert into a blossoming field, to Phoenix—it is a pathway on which men have set curiously enduring footprints through the ages. If Roosevelt Dam is a monument to the highest engineering skill of modern times, what shall one say as he regards those flourishing and impenetrable cactus thickets transplanted by crack military engineers in some day well back toward the stone age that enabled a few cliff-dwellers, with no weapons but boulders ready to roll down, to hold an invading host at bay? Endless chapters are written along this trail of how white men and red men can misunderstand each other. Mormon Flat holds record of how followers of Brigham Young suffered massacre in their fight for conscience and conquest.
One wonders, toward the end of the single day that he is out of the train and rolling along the Apache Trail, whether ancient man and ancient things were really so romantic and soul-moving, or whether they only seem so because the threads of their history are looped among some of the most colorful and inspiring peaks and gorges to be found on the continent.
Source: The Outlook, 27 October 1926