Tea, clotted cream and criminals

Yuma, AZ – Just for telling Arizona State Parks what we thought of one facility we saw today, they gave us free admission to a second.  Mind you, we had to answer a fairly detailed survey, but it was clear they intended to use the information.

The Yuma Quarter-master Depot State Historic Park was our first sightseeing stop today.  It’s a big mouthful for the historic site where goods destined for forts across the southwest were received, stored and distributed in the early 1800s.  The Colorado River that flows past the depot was the conduit for materials that originated in California.

It was too hazardous to bring the goods overland, so ships brought them south along the Pacific coast, around the tip of the Baja Peninsula and up the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Colorado River. From there they were loaded onto steamboats and brought to Yuma.  When the shipment arrived, it was put into a big storehouse until it could be loaded on carts and driven to military posts as far east as Texas and as far north as Oregon.

Dealing with the capricious nature of the Colorado River was a major challenge at the time – and in the years before and since.  Indian tribes grew crops near the riverbed when the waters ebbed, but at other times they endured floods.  The state park had a display describing the seven dams (including the Hoover Dam) that were built over the years to manage the tributary, with positive and negative consequences for people and ecosystems. There is still a lot of strife up and down the river regarding who gets to use the water and who gets short-changed. In places the riverbed is almost dry.

Yuma clearly had a vital role in the development of the west, and we pondered what we’d learned when we stepped into the Back in Time tea house on the Depot grounds for lunch. We were charmed with our tea, scones, clotted cream, dainty sandwiches and crisp salad, brought on tea trolley by a costumed server. I resisted the urge to crook my baby finger as I sipped from my teacup.

The next venue, for which we had free tickets, contrasted greatly with our genteel mid-day repast; it was the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park. “The ‘3:10 to Yuma stops here’”, says the brochure. The first seven inmates of the prison were locked into cells they had built themselves in 1876. Murderers, thieves, adulterers and polygamists were incarcerated in the prison during its 33 years of operation. This included 29 women, one of whom – Pearl Hart – was Canadian born.  After it closed as a prison, vagrants and homeless people found shelter there, and it even served as a high school for local students for four years while a proper building was constructed for them.  More recently, Yuma citizens contributed funds to refurbish the facility as the park it is today.