Desert on the March

Desert on the March RAYMOND M. TURNER On the morning of November 2, 1907, a group of adventurers gathered at a small house near the corner of East Second Street and Park Avenue in Tucson, Arizona, to begin a month-long trip to the little-known Pinacate region of northwestern Mexico. The seven-man team was led by zoologist and unexcelled raconteur William T. Hornaday. The group also included Daniel T. MacDougal, at whose home they had assembled. MacDougal was a botanist and director of Tucson’s Desert Botanical Laboratory. Other group members were Godfrey G. Sykes, geographer, engineer, and buildings and grounds superintendent at the Desert Laboratory; John M. Phillips, entrepreneur and Pennsylvania state game commissioner; Frank Cole and Jesse Jenkins of Tucson; and Charlie Foster, a Mexican from Sonoyta, Sonora, who had come to town for the express purpose of guiding the expedition to Sonoyta. Hornaday kept extensive notes from which he wove a classic book-length tale chronicling the group’s adventures on this historic trip (Hornaday 1908). As noted by Hornaday, the seven men and all their gear were loaded into a White-Water Touring Car drawn by a bay team and a pair of small mules, and a Runabout by Callahan drawn by a lazy horse and a beautiful young mare. Their first major objective was to reach Sonoyta, Sonora, 140 miles to the southwest, where they would be joined by Jeff Milton , employee of the U. S. Immigration Service, and his friend George Saunders from Philadelphia. Another friend of Jeff’s, Rube Daniels from Quitobaquito, Sonora, was to join them later. Jeff and Rube, both closely A westerner by birth, RAY TURNER taught botany at the University of Arizona (1954–1962) before joining the U.S. Geological Survey, where for many years his office was at MacDougal’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill. His interest in desert vegetation dynamics has resulted in studies of long-term permanent vegetation study plots as well as in his use of repeat photography for documenting landscape change. He is co-author of Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas (with Janice E. Bowers and Tony L. Burgess), The Changing Mile Revisited (with Robert H. Webb, Janice E. Bowers, and James Rodney Hastings), and The Ribbon of Green: Long-term Status of Riverine Riparian Vegetation in the Southwestern United States (with Robert H. Webb and Stanley A. Leake). He retired from the U.S. Geological Survey in 1989. Journal of the Southwest 49, 2 (Summer 2007) : 141–163 142 ✜ JOURNAL OF THE SOUTHWEST familiar with the region, would guide them across the remaining miles to their final destination.1 The scientific bent of these men, leaning as it did toward the natural sciences and geography, provided Hornaday with abundant observations about their natural surroundings, and he incorporated these shared observations into his book. These observers’ keen insights were dramatically expanded by their photographic activities. Hundreds of photographs were taken by Phillips, MacDougal, Hornaday, and Sykes. These serve as accurate records of landscape conditions in 1907, augmenting and refining their field observations. In March 1959, a little more than half a century after the Hornaday expedition, I found myself in that intriguing country joined by Rod Hastings, Charles Lowe, Tad Nichols, and Robert Dubois (see Turner 2007). We were bent on recapturing on film the scenes that our predecessors had first recorded. Thus began an infatuation that has persisted to the present and has resulted in numerous repeat photos at some of the original camera stations. On the day of our 1959 departure, we gathered at the University of Arizona, just a few blocks from MacDougal’s former home and the point from which the 1907 expedition started. All of the gear for the five-man expedition was loaded into one travel-all and Hastings’ open, military-surplus Jeep. The road to the Pinacate region was now well paved, except for the final section of Mexico’s Highway 2 between Sonoyta and our turnoff to MacDougal Pass and points beyond. This was a rough gravel road that many travelers would abandon, using instead the smoother borrow pit running alongside the raised roadway. Even so, our travel time to our destination was...