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Yuma is one of those iconic towns of the west, like Tombstone. If Tombstone has its OK Corral, Yuma has its 3:10. Situated along the once mighty Colorado River, baking in the Sonoran desert, it is at the southwest tip of Arizona, just a few feet from the California border. According to Guinness, the area surrounding the city is the sunniest on earth, although NASA scientists say that this distinction is held by a Sahara Desert site in northern Niger. The sun shines in Yuma for 4,050 hours of the 4,456 hours of daylight during a year, or about 90 percent of the time. All that sun and the desert terrain make it hot, with an average daily high in July of 107 degrees Fahrenheit. On July 28, 1995, the temperature reached 124 degrees!
We drove into Yuma on Interstate 8, which begins as a split with Interstate 10 north of Tucson. It’s all desert, all the time, although there are many lovely mountains, and the day we went, we saw brilliant bouquets of wildflowers, alongside the road and in the distance. The best scenery is on that part of the road that goes through the Sonoran Desert National Monument. It is always surprising to me to see how many mountains there are in desert regions, or that while you are driving, you begin to climb and might actually go through a pass. We noticed that the saguaro cactuses out our windows looked beaten down, almost all of them charred and scarred at their bases. Perhaps these sentinels of the desert had lost the battle to survive the modern human assault on their habitat.
We passed the town of Gila Bend, about sixty miles from the Interstate 8/10 split, named for a sharp bend in the Gila River, which empties into the Colorado near Yuma. When I was a boy, I checked the newspaper every day for the lowest and highest temperatures in the United States. Gila Bend was a frequent winner for the high, as was its neighbor Yuma.
Yuma is in a wide river valley, and the original inhabitants fished, hunted, and planted crops. Before it was defiled by so many dams, the Colorado was a rushing river, prone to massive flooding. This made crossing it a dangerous venture. Here, however, there are two large rocky mounds, one on each side of the river. "Indian Hill and Prison Hill narrowed and calmed the river just a few miles south of the confluence of the Gila, at the present location of Yuma, Arizona. " The Prison Hill in the quote is where the famous territorial prison was located. Parts of it are still there, and what is left is part of the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historical Park. When the prison closed in 1909, it fittingly became Yuma Union High School, perhaps like my high school, a prison for the mind. Indian Hill is on the California side of the Colorado, on part of the Quechan Indian reservation. The Quechen and the Cocopah Indians occupied the Yuma region when the Spaniards came calling. They were farmers and hunters, taking advantage of the river and the natural crossing. Spain and then the United States saw the usefulness of the crossing too, though they had different objectives in mind: military expansion, commerce, a place to build a bridge for settlers, prospectors, and the like. Though the Indians were friendly, they soon came into conflict with the Europeans, a conflict they eventually lost, along with their lands. We walked across the one-lane bridge, which is flanked by a railroad span, along which there is a steady flow of train traffic, and looked at the old mission church and the Quechan tribal buildings. A few hundred feet down the road, we saw a casino. Inside, there was the usual depressing sight of people losing money who cannot afford to do so, smoking and looking generally unhealthy. Indian casinos are often not owned directly by the tribe, and few native people benefit from them.