Yuma Crossing and Associated Sites

About this property

Yuma Crossing is a site in Arizona and California that is significant for its association with transportation and communication across the Colorado River. It connected New Spain and Las Californias in the Spanish Colonial period in and also during the Western expansion of the United States. Features of the Arizona side include the Yuma Quartermaster Depot and Yuma Territorial Prison. Features on the California Side include Fort Yuma, which protected the area from 1850 to 1885. The history of the Yuma Crossing began at the formation of two massive granite outcroppings on the Colorado River. The narrowing of the river provided the only crossing point for a thousand miles, thus making it a focal point for the Patayan tribes, and later the Quechan. In 1540, well before the British Europeans touched Plymouth Rock in 1620, Yuma's European history began here with the arrival of Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcón. It was not until after the 17th and 18th century explorations of the padres Kino and Garcés that the crossing came to be used by the Spanish expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza and others along this route from 1774. This route, sometimes called the Sonora Road, ran from the Spanish Tubac Presidio, in Sonora to Alta California. An attempt to establish missions and colonize the area of the crossing was made by the Spanish soon after but it failed, when the formerly friendly Quechan were angered to the point of a violent revolt that ended the missions, the colony and the use of the land route until the 19th century. Mexican expeditions mollified the Quechan and persuaded them to allow the use of the crossings, reopening the Sonora Road to Alta California from the later 1820s. Much later the Yuma Crossing became the focal point for travel to the Wild West, from the 1840s California Gold Rush era to the arrival of the railroad in the 1877, and finally the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge, which linked the East coast and the West coast in one land route. Immediately after the Mexican–American War in 1848, the U.S. Army built Fort Yuma here to protect travelers from Indians raiding the area. It was the center point of conflict in the Yuma War of 1850–53. From 1864–1890, the fort and nearby facilities was the main army base to support the US Army's efforts to control the Indians throughout the greater southwest. At about the same time, the Butterfield Stage established a stagecoach station here for their main line coming from the east to California. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966, under the name Yuma Crossing and Associated Sites. The Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area is a U.S. National Heritage Area. It was the only lower Colorado River crossing point in the 18th and 19th centuries for non-Native American travelers and immigrants. The Heritage Area is part of the Yuma Crossing and Associated Sites on the National Register of Historic Places and a National Historic Landmark, in Arizona and California.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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