Arizona has always been a land of rugged terrain. Today, we travel across this diverse landscape on paved roads, in air conditioned comfort and with radios blaring, unaware of the early pioneers who braved Arizona’s roughest land to lay trails. In remote and untouched areas of Arizona, the old trails remain, where the history of the pioneers’ experiences are remembered.

One of them is the General Crook Trail in the Arizona rim country. In August 1871, General George Crook led a small party west from Camp Apache along the Mogollon Rim (pronounced “mow-go-YONE” in Spanish, but anglicized to “muggy-OWN”), dropping into the Tonto Basin, through Camp Verde to Fort Whipple near Prescott.

In On the Border with Crook, Lt. John G. Bourke describes the trail-blazing expedition:

“It is a strange upheaval, a strange freak of nature, a mountain canted up on one side; one rides along the edge and looks down two and three thousand feet into what is termed the ‘Tonto Basin,’ a weird scene of grandeur and rugged beauty…so cut up by ravines, arroyos, small stream beds and hills of very good height, that it may safely be pronounced one of the roughest spots on the globe…”

The following spring, soldiers and Indian scouts backtracked the area east to west, clearing a wagon trail to supply troops during the Apache conflicts. Troopers chopped their way through the thick ponderosa pine country, blazing trees with a V and marking the distance from Camp Verde.

In 1874, another group of pioneers made there way across Crook Trail. In Vanished Arizona (1904), Army wife Martha Summerhayes, pictured here, recalls her travels along the trail:

“The scenery was wild and grand; in fact, beyond all that I had ever dreamed of; more than that, it seemed so untrod, so fresh, somehow, and I do not suppose that even now, in the day of railroads and tourists, many people have had the view of the Tonto Basin which we had one day from the top of the Mogollon range.”

“…It did not surprise us to learn that ours was the first wagon-train to pass over Crook’s Trail. For miles and miles the so-called road was nothing but a clearing, and we were pitched and jerked from side to side of the ambulance, as we struck large rocks or tree-stumps.

By the late 1920s, the Crook Trail fell into disuse with construction of the Rim Road, located north of Payson near FR 300 (between AZ 87 and AZ 206).

Through the combined efforts of the Arizona Historical Society, the National Forest Service, Arizona State Parks and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, plans are being made to give the Crook Trail a National Historic Trail designation.

For information about traveling the Crook Trail, please call Fort Verde State Historic Park, (928) 567-3275.

— Jim Turner, Arizona Historical Society