Stage travel through the Pass

San Antonio - San Diego Mail

In 1857, Isaiah C. Woods, making his first trip west with the mail witnessed tribal warfare between the Yuma and Pima-Maricopa Indians while resting near Maricopa Wells. That same evening they crossed Maricopa Pass for the first time. "At this place the river makes what is termed 'the big bend' of the Gila; the road lies nearly due east and west, while the river makes a horse shoe, probably four times as long as the distance from Maricopa to Tazotal [todays Gila Bend], at which place the road touches the river again."

Butterfield Overland Stage

1858 found the Overland Mail Company's stage line replacing the SA-SD. In the fall of that year Warren L. Ormsby, a special correspondent for the New York Herald, rode the first westbound stage through the Pass. "From the Maricopa wells, where we changed our horses for a mule team, we had a forty mile ride over the corner of a vast desert. The soil was coarse sand and gravel, and the road excellent. No water can be found the entire distance.. I here saw some of the largest cactus plants on the route; they tower up from twelve to fifteen feet in some of the varieties.

Now protected by inclusion in the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Butterfield Pass is clearly a historical treasure worth saving and remembering.

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