Benson, the San Pedro Valley Crossroads

Benson sits where desert, history, and geology converge in ways that few small Arizona towns can match. The town occupies a wide bend of the San Pedro River at an elevation of about four thousand two hundred twenty-nine feet, and while the Southern Pacific Railroad put it on the map in eighteen eighty, the valley around it has drawn people for more than eleven thousand years. The earliest known inhabitants were Clovis hunters who stalked mammoths and ancient horses along the San Pedro about eleven thousand years ago.

Agricultural peoples followed. The Hohokam built ball courts and irrigation canals along the river around the year five hundred and sustained complex communities here for eight centuries. The Sobaipuri Pima were farming the valley when the Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino arrived in sixteen ninety-two, the first European to document what he found: a green corridor threading through the brown desert.

By the mid seventeen hundreds, Apache pressure and waves of epidemic disease had emptied Sobaipuri villages. The Chiricahua Apache became the dominant power in the region under their leader Cochise, who maintained a mostly peaceful relationship with Americans through the eighteen fifties. That ended in February of eighteen sixty-one, when a young Army lieutenant named George Bascom falsely accused Cochise of kidnapping a rancher's child and attempted to arrest him at a Butterfield Overland Mail station in Apache Pass, about thirty miles southeast of Benson.

Cochise escaped by slashing through a tent. A quarter century of war followed. Cochise County, which surrounds Benson today, still carries his name.

The railroad imposed a new order on the valley. Benson was platted in eighteen eighty, named for a California judge who was a friend of the Southern Pacific's president. Within a year it was the freight hub for Tombstone and Bisbee, with wagon lines hauling ore out and supplies back in over unpaved roads.

The Apache Powder Company, established south of town in the nineteen twenties, grew into one of the largest explosives manufacturers in the United States, employing hundreds of workers who never saw a layoff even during the Depression. Today Benson is home to about five thousand three hundred residents, surrounded by working cattle ranches, a celebrated cave state park nine miles to the south, and one of the most important bird migration corridors on the continent.