Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz

2. Sources: The San Rafael Reach

2 Sources The San Rafael Reach Headwaters: February, 0 River Miles Karen and I drive over Canelo Pass and suddenly San Rafael Valley drops away to the southwest. Before us opens a broad rolling plain, crisscrossed with ropes of green where oak and juniper line wrinkled drainages. The wind cuts northeast, strumming a rhythm in knee-deep grasses as blond as Karen’s hair; the bent stems sound like rushing water. Mountains shoulder the valley—the Huachucas on the east, Patagonias on the west—their peaks blue-gray above tan-flecked flanks. Clouds of multiple configurations slip out of Mexico to lay stains across a rangeland where white-crowned sparrows call from beyond barbed-wire fences. On my topo map, the headwaters we’re looking for lie across the upper San Rafael Valley like a giant cottonwood leaf, its veins all tributaries flowing into the leaf’s petiole where the gathering river spills south into Mexico before changing course and returning to Arizona. We’re seventy-four miles from our home in Tucson, the place we last crossed this dry river on its way north. I park our minivan in a rock-studded drainage. A weathered sign reads: “Santa Cruz River.” We both look “upstream,” and Karen says, “Let’s follow it from here.” But I know from the map that it must still be half a dozen miles to the headwaters, so I drive on. Near Saddle Mountain, northwest of the valley, the two-track I’m negotiating slips under a fence and vanishes in the grass. We get out to walk. Somewhere I’ve read that the “official” source of the Santa Cruz River lies beneath this fifty-eight-hundred-foot granite outcrop, but I’m not sure where, and I haven’t bothered to ask anyone. The river should 12 chapter two be on my right, but the whole landscape drops sharply away on my left, forming a canyon country whose ridges and drainages corrugate the southern flank of Saddle Mountain and sweep southward into the Patagonia Mountains. Karen and I stay on the high plain, swishing through the grass or taking one of the beaten paths used by Mexican immigrants identifiable by the sunken bags of Bimbo bread and torn cans of tuna we find along the way. Mexicans are only the most recent wave of immigrants here. Humans probably first trickled into the San Rafael Valley at the end of the Pleistocene between ten thousand and twelve thousand years ago when groups of hunters now known as Clovis people stalked now-extinct megafauna across this landscape. Only thirty miles to the east of here, at a place called Murray Springs in the valley of the San Pedro River, erosion has exposed a butchering camp where Clovis hunters eleven thousand years ago killed an adult female mammoth and a dozen bison. Looking southward into the past from the head of this valley, its entire length swept with dappled cloud-shadow, I imagine nomadic bands of Paleo-Indians following the folded-grass trails of fattened mammals. As the Ice Age drew to a close and the land relaxed under warmer skies, these interconnected valleys like the San Rafael with their high stalks of wild grains may have helped these people settle into a more hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and possibly even form communities that shared social and religious customs. At the Lone Mountain Ranch, ten miles east of the river in the southern foothills of the Huachuca Mountains, anthropologist Charles Riggs and his team have uncovered human occupations spanning more than eleven thousand years. “Through time,” he writes in his report about the digs, “this upland zone appears to have formed a special ecological niche, first for mobile groups and later for sedentary groups using or occupying the lower riverine and grassland environment.” Today, a gerrymander of oak woodlands and grasslands drapes hills cut by riparian drainages with names like Joaquin Creek, Bear Creek, and Cave Creek, ephemeral streams reduced in the dry season to chains of stagnant pools. Lone Mountain Ranch is a museum display-case of prehistoric artifacts: Boulders show etchings of human figures, lizards, double helixes, and spirals; fire-cracked rocks circle roasting pits; smooth fists of stone and grinding metates litter the ground among flakes of chert, mudstone, and The San Rafael Reach 13 obsidian, decorated and unpainted pottery sherds, and small, triangular Elko and Pinto projectile points. The San Rafael Valley...