Yuma: The Crossing That Built the Southwest

Yuma controls the most important river crossing in the American Southwest. The Quechan people, also called the Yuma, held the Colorado River ford here for centuries, extracting tribute from travelers because there was no other practical way across. Spanish missionaries arrived in the seventeen seventies; the Quechan killed the priests and burned the missions in seventeen eighty-one and held the crossing for another seventy years.

After the Mexican-American War, the United States Army built Fort Yuma in eighteen fifty to secure the ford for the Southern Overland Trail. The Territorial Prison, opened in eighteen seventy-six and now a state park, housed three thousand sixty-nine inmates over its thirty-three-year run, including twenty-nine women. Yuma sits in one of the hottest, driest places on the continent, where the Sonoran Desert meets the Colorado. Its sun shines about ninety percent of daylight hours, which has made it the winter vegetable capital of the United States.