Saint David and Cascabel: Two Ways to Live by the River
Near Benson, Arizona
Two communities along the San Pedro River near Benson illuminate the pull this desert valley has exerted on people who chose to settle here deliberately. Saint David, eight miles northwest of Benson, was founded in eighteen seventy-seven by Philemon Merrill, a veteran of the Mormon Battalion that had marched through this exact valley during the Mexican-American War in eighteen forty-six. Merrill and the settlers who followed remembered the San Pedro as one of the few reliable water sources they had encountered in the desert and returned deliberately to farm it.
Their community logged the Huachuca Mountains, selling timber to help build Tombstone and Fort Huachuca, and developed the artesian wells that still irrigate fields in the valley today. In nineteen seventy-four, Benedictine monks established the Holy Trinity Monastery at Saint David, adding an adobe chapel, a bird sanctuary trail along the river, and a retreat center that drew visitors from around the country until the monastic community formally dissolved in two thousand seventeen. Cascabel sits about thirty miles further north along the river and took a more austere path.
The community of roughly seventy-five people has no post office, no paved roads, and no service station. Its name comes from the Spanish word for rattlesnake rattle, bestowed in nineteen sixteen by a local postmaster who encountered a man carrying a dead snake down the canyon road. The Cascabel Conservation Association holds four hundred acres in the valley and operates a desert hermitage program offering solitary retreat in a place most visitors can only reach by choice.
