Life on the Colorado

U.S Army Major Thomas Dunn was furious. At 2 a.m. on Sunday, September 30, 1877, construction noise had wakened the commander of Fort Yuma in the Arizona Territory. Below the bluff on which the fort stood, Southern Pacific Railroad workers, violating Dunn’s direct order, had resumed bridging the Colorado River. The structure was to span the Yuma Crossing, an ancient Indian encampment that had become a bustling port.

Most of the fort’s 64 troopers were away fighting the Nez Perce, but Dunn, 55, mustered a medical officer, a sergeant, two privates, and a prisoner sprung from the stockade. He and his ad hoc force charged downhill toward the job site, 300 yards away. The Army had established Fort Yuma, now a five-acre motley of some two dozen metal-roofed adobe structures, in 1851. The fort’s role was to control local Indian tribes, protect settlers, and safeguard the Southern Emigrant Trail linking Santa Fe to San Diego and Los Angeles, California. In the late 1850s, the Army built a second riverside bastion, Fort Mojave, 200 miles north of Yuma.

In February 1877, Arizona’s territorial legislature granted the Southern Pacific, laying track east from California, a charter to build a line along the 32nd parallel in the territory’s southern reaches. That path ran through Fort Yuma. The War Department permitted the railroad to cross the military reservation and to bridge the Colorado, but barred laying tracks across the bridge until Congress had settled a right-of-way dispute. Dunn’s duties included enforcing that federal stop-work order.

Now, the major and his ragtag squad, wielding rifles with fixed bayonets, faced down the construction crew. Track laying stopped until a