Beale's Crossing


Beale's Crossing, was a river crossing of the Colorado River, near the head of the Mohave Valley, between New Mexico Territory and California along the along the 35th Parallel route of Beale's Wagon Road. The crossing was located at what became the site of Fort Mohave in what is now Fort Mohave, Arizona and west of Beaver Lake, Nevada. The crossing was named for Edward Fitzgerald Beale who lead the expedition that built what came to be called Beale's Wagon Road from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Beale's Crossing in California, then by way of the Mohave Trail/Old Spanish Trail, and another old route west from the Mojave River to Fort Tejon, California.

History

Beale's Crossing was at first just the place Beale's expedition swam his camels, horses, and mules west across the Colorado River and ferried their goods over on rafts. The first pioneer wagon trains that soon followed along Beale's road to the crossing, cut down trees along the river bank to make rafts. These trees were ones whose bark the Mohave people used for clothing, and these settlers cut them down without permission and provoked a retaliation that triggered the Mohave War.
During the Mohave War, Camp Colorado, later renamed Fort Mohave was established on the east bank of the Colorado at the crossing and a ferry operated there thereafter, serving traffic on the Mojave Road, the government supply route from Los Angeles that terminated at Fort Mohave. From there Beale's Wagon Road passed eastward through Union Pass, to Beale Spring and the interior of northern New Mexico Territory to Fort Defiance, Zuni Pueblo and Albuquerque.
The ferry at Fort Mohave appears still in use on a September 1911 reprint of a U. S. Geological Survey, Reconnaissance Map, Arizona, Nevada, California, Camp Mohave Sheet, Edition of March 1892, reprinted.