By Stan Brown 

(Last week we left General Crook and his small detachment of soldiers heading west over the Mongollon Rim towards Fort Verde on their way to Fort Whipple, blazing the General Crook Military Road through Central Arizona.)

Upon reaching Fort Whipple, Crook ordered work to begin, even though winter would soon be setting in. The road from Fort Whipple and Fort Verde needed improvement and re-routing in places. Late in 1871, a crew from Prescott began working on that section. When the snow melted in the spring of 1872, two larger crews began approaching each other from Verde and Apache, planning to meet half way at a place called Deadshot Canyon. Today this is on the border of the Coconino and Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Back at Fort Apache, Crook enlisted a number of friendly White Mountain Apaches as scouts, and hired two local mountain men to survey and supervise the building of the road west. The two men were Corydon Eliphalet Cooley and Henry Wood Dodd. They used the existing trail north onto the Rim, and at a point forty-seven miles north of Fort Apache they began blazing a new trail westward. 

At Fort Verde, Crook hired two seasoned men, Al Sieber and Wales Arnold, to plot and supervise the building of the road east. The two construction crews, consisting of Apache scouts and infantry troops, had fifty-seven and fifty-six miles respectively of new trail to develop. A number of the soldiers working on the road had been recruited in the East. They were young European immigrants who used this opportunity to become United States citizens. They were fearful in this uncharted land, and rather than become lost they blazed nearly every tree along the trail. Their mark was an upside down exclamation point. Two blazes were put side by side if the trail went straight ahead. One blaze meant the trail turned, and the second blaze would be found on another side of the tree facing the new direction for the trail. 

By the summer of 1873, Fort Apache could be supplied from Fort Whipple by this route. The work continued during the summer of 1874, widening the trail with hand tools to accommodate mule or horse drawn wagons. It was late September 1874, when the first wagon train crossed Crook's Road, and with it were Captain John W. Summerhayes and his New England bride Martha. They had been married the previous spring and she was pregnant with their son. Husband 'Jack' had taken her on this long journey from San Francisco to Fort Apache, a trip that took two months. Along the Crook Road the wagon containing many of their possessions, including her prized china, lurched over the side of the Rim, mules and all. She recounted the journey and this loss in her book, "Vanished Arizona." 

During the subsequent years of the Apache War, this military road became a primary launching pad for army units going over the edge of the Rim and into the Tonto Basin, putting an effective pincer on the Apaches when combined with detachments from the surrounding posts. The military advantage of Crook's Road was demonstrated supremely in July 1882, at the Battle of Big Dry Wash. A band of one hundred renegade Apaches bolted from the San Carlos Reservation and left a trail of blood as they traveled through Pleasant Valley, west on trails under the Rim and then up the East Verde trail. They were driving stolen cattle and horses, crossed Crook's Road and camped briefly at the General's Spring. In the canyon of East Clear Creek, they lay in ambush for the pursuing cavalry units, coming together from all the surrounding posts. After a daylong engagement nearly all the Indians were dead. One soldier and a scout had been killed and buried near the battleground, and the wounded were taken over Crook's Road to Fort Verde. 

The primary purpose of the Crook Road was military, but was soon to be outmoded. By 1879, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad had reached Bernardo's Post Office (Holbrook) from California. It was easier to supply Fort Apache from there than to take the ten to fifteen days over the Crook Road. By the next year, 1880, the Southern Pacific Railroad had reached San Simon from the East, providing yet another approach to Fort Apache, albeit more dangerous than the road from the north. Civilians began to take advantage of the Crook Road, moving freight and herds of sheep and cattle east and west. However, most east-west travel followed routes to the north, across the Colorado Plateau, or to the south along the Gila River. The Rim Country was condemned to obscurity for a generation. 

Decades later, in 1928, the portion of Crook's Road along the edge of the Rim was renovated by the Forest Service and became Forest Road 300. As the use of private automobiles came into prominence, this "Rim Road" became a popular tourist attraction, with its lovely camping areas and magnificent vistas. 

In the 1970s, to commemorate the centennial of Crook's Road, a history buff and political science professor from Northern Arizona University, Eldon G. Bowman, retraced the original trail from Fort Whipple to Fort Apache. The National Forest Service, The Boy Scouts of America, his own students and several grants, assisted him. Searching old maps, aerial photographs, old-timer's memories, and primarily by walking mile after mile to locate telltale signs, Bowman reconstructed the trail and marked it with cairns in the open spaces and chevrons on the trees in the forests. The white V-shaped symbol represented Crook's original symbol for "Verde." Beginning at Fort Verde as mile '0', the road was originally marked at each mile by a number blazed into a tree or chiseled into a stone. A memorial marker can be seen along State Route 260 at mile 13 from Camp Verde. 

There was an original plan by the Arizona Highway Department to pave this scenic road all the way from Camp Verde to Show Low, and call it the Zane Grey Highway, in honor of the famous author whose books brought notoriety to this region. History buffs were up in arms over such a plan, since Zane Grey did not come to the Rim Country until 1918 and left for good in 1929. A counter movement by local citizens and the Arizona Historical Society to call State Highway 260 "The General Crook Highway" was defeated by pressure from several Chambers of Commerce and The Arizona Highway Department named it "The Zane Grey Highway." The Rim Road, FR 300 from State Route 87 to Woods Canyon Lake was graded and slightly realigned in places. It is not maintained in winter or in early spring. 

For today's wilderness lovers, the isolation of the Mogollon Rim remains a blessing. Much of Crook's Road is just as it was in the 1870s and 1880s, and while the yet pristine sections are not fit for automobiles, one can hike them and return in imagination to those days past. 


Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(map 0766) Reuse only by permission.
From an Arizona Territorial map of 1881, the General Crook Road runs from Fort Apache in the White Mountains south of Hondah to Fort Verde at Camp Verde and ending at Fort Whipple in Prescott. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(mil159pb)
Reuse only by permission.
General George Crook, c.1885. 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(ina142pa)
Reuse only by permission.
Apache scouts and U.S. soldiers, c.1870s.