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knowtheextentofartisticlicenseemployedinmaking Hissecondforaywasfromacampsitemidwayalong
or printing the drawings.
Photographs
Theearliestknownphotographsfortheareawere takenin1867byAlexanderGardner.Gardneraccompa nied William Jackson Palmer on a private railroad survey (Babbitt 198 1)and leftsixphotographs neartheWhipple route. Three were taken in the study area. Gordon and others (1992) also repeated these photographs in 1989 duringastudyofvegetationhistory.TimothyO 'Sullivan, whoaccompaniedWheelerin1871,tookthenextseries of photographs in northern Arizona. O'Sullivan recorded t w o landscapes in the juniper-grassland habitats near the routethatSitgreaveshadtraversed.The fiveGardnerand O'Sullivan photographs were taken before the arrival of established ranches and railroads.
All subsequent photographs post-date grazing by livestock. The next landscape photographs were taken in 1911 by Fewkes (1912) in association with archaeo logical surveys, and King in about 1916 (Johnsen and Elson1979),documentingrangeconditionsfortheU.S. ForestService.Ialsouseda1927photographbyGus Pearson and a 1932 photograph by Arthur Upson, both from Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station files.
Retracing Whipple's Route
Partridge Creek ,westward to Picacho Mountain ,then up the center of Chino Valley to an unidentified mountain somewheresouthwestofpresent-daySeligman.Here j o i n e d t h e w a g o n t r a i n w h e r e it w a i t e d n e a r t h e s o u t h w e s t baseofPicachoMountain.Hisfinalreconnaissanceled southwesterly across Chino Valley, through the eastern foothillsofJuniperMesatoanunknownhillsidesouth ofWalnutCreek(calledPuebloCreekbyWhipple;see Appendix B for current names of features mentioned in historic documents), thence back to, and up Walnut Creek to a point beyond Aztec Pass. From here, he rode back down Walnut Creek and awaited the wagon train in the general area of the present Walnut Creek Ranger Station. While crossing the Verde watershed, Whipple traveled with the wagons only seven of 26 days. As Whipple explored ahead on horseback, the wagons came up slowly behind to campsites he had located, usually associated with water. Contact with the wagons was accomplished through couriers sent back from the reconnaissance party or, less successfully, by smokesignals.Membersofreconnaissancepartiesand the wagon train maintained diaries, so vegetation and terrain are described from the perspective of both.
I traveled on or near Whipple's route from Leroux
Springs to Aztec Pass at the head of Walnut Creek
(fig. 2). I concentrated on the area covered between
December 31, 1853 and January 22, 1854, when the
party was traversing pinon/juniper woodland and
grasslands of the upper Verde River watershed. While
on the Verde watershed, Whipple led three mounted
reconnaissances to locate the best wagon route and
locatewaterfortheexpedition.Bymakingthesewider
s o r t i e s ,h e w a s a b l e t o e x p l o r e a n d d e s c r i b e a m u c h l a r g e r
areathanifhehadstayedwiththewagons.Thefirstof
thesereconnaissance tripsstartedon December 30 ,1853
andlasteduntilJanuary6,1854,duringwhichWhipple
rode from Leroux Springs, around the northwestern
base of Bill Williams Mountain to the head of Hell
Canyon,offoftheMogollonRim'swestern-mostpoint
and across a rolling juniper/grassland savanna to the
approximate site of present Ash Fork, then northwest
intoaneasterlytributaryofPartridgeCreek.Fromthat Photo-pointsthatIrelocatedpriorto1995werere pointheturneasttorejointhewagonsataplacehe cordedontopographicalmaps(fig.3).Pointcoordinates hadnamedNewYear'sSpring. relocatedafterJanuary1,1995weredeterminedwith
I tried to retrace the reconnaissance groups and the wagons, locating as closely as possible the places the various m e m b e r s of the parties describe in theirjournals . Iphotographedordescribedtheseareasandkeypoints along the routes in order to relate present day conditions withthosedescribedin1853to54.Insomecases,Ifelt fairlyconfidentthatIhadclimbedthesamemountains party members climbed and photographed the same terrain they viewed. In other places, after several days of reading journals in the field, I still was not certain of their exact route.
To allow a better visualization of the early land scape and subsequent change, I repeated the Gardner and O'Sullivan photographs taken near the routes of the above expeditions. Gardner's photographs were taken 13 years after Whipple passed through the area; O'Sullivan 's 17 years. Ibelieve that itis safe to assume that juniper distribution or density had not yet been influenced by settlers' activities and that any significant impacts by livestock on grassland had not yet occurred w h e n t h e s e p i c t u r e s w e r e t a k e n .I a l s o r e p e a t e d a v a r i e t y of early post-settlement photographs that happen to matchparticularareastraversedbyWhippleorother diarists. These later photographs were taken after the grazing impacts of the 1880s and 1890s.
6 USDAForestServiceRMRS-GTR-177. 2006.