Yuma crossing

There are valleys and mountain passes and rivers, along which the tides of history have risen and ebbed for centuries. Many of them are used today but others are forgotten. One of those forgotten is at Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River, and this book carries the hope that by bringing together the records of what men did here over a span of four hundred years, the importance of the Yuma Crossing will be understood and preserved in Southwestern history. Some of the personalities one finds in these pages have been subjects of other books, but few lovers of history connect them with Yuma Crossing. Libraries are rich in accounts of Coronado's search for the seven jeweled cities of Cibola. How many know that Coronado's sea captain in that adventure was the first white man to see the Colorado and the ancient Indian ford just below the Gila River? Captain Melchior Diaz was one of Coronado's ablest conquistadors. Who remembers that he won a battle with the Yumas at this far away spot of that his dust lies somewhere along a trail near the Colorado? Padre Francisco Garces built the first mission on the Colorado at the crossing and died there under Indian clubs in a Yuma uprising. He is remembered principally as a Franciscan martyr. But with Captain Juan Bautista de Anza he has helped lead the first Spanish expeditions over the crossing to the shores of the Pacific before he died. After them came the westward migration of Americans hungry for gold and lands of California. The river steamers of the Mississippi and the Missouri have been immortalized. Why forget the romantic years when ships steamed up and down the Colorado and whistled for a landing in the desert. There are many such chapters in the history men wrote at this spot.