"Across North-Central New Mexico and Arizona along the line of Route 66, now Interstate 40, there first ran a little-known wagon trail called Beale's Wagon Road, after Edward F. Beale, who surveyed it for the War Department in 1857. This survey is perhaps best known for its introduction and use of camels in the American West. Not so well known is the fate of the first emigrants who the next year attempted to follow the surveying party's tracks.

The government considered the 1857 exploration a success and the road it opened a promising alternative route to California, but Beale and the government considered such improvements as military posts and developed water supplies to be needed before it was ready for regular emigrant travel. Army representatives in New Mexico were more enthusiastic about the road's readiness.".

"In 1858 there was a need for an alternative. Emigrants avoided the main California Trail because of a U.S. Army expedition to subdue Mormons in Utah. The alternative Southern Route through southern Arizona ran through Apache territory, was difficult for the army to guard, and was long. When Missouri and Iowa emigrants who combined into what is now known as the Rose-Baley wagon train arrived in Albuquerque, they were encouraged to be the first to try the new Beale road.

Their journey became a rolling disaster. The route was more difficult to follow than expected; water sources and feed for livestock harder to find. Indians along the way had been described as peaceful, but the Hualapais persistently harassed the emigrants and shot their livestock, and when the wagon train finally reached the Colorado River, a large party of Mojaves attacked the emigrants' camp. Eight of the wagon party were killed, a dozen more were wounded, and the remainder decided to undertake a difficult retreat to Albuquerque.

Their flight, with wounded companions and reduced supplies and made more urgent by the specter of starvation and dehydration, became ever more arduous. Along the way they met other emigrant parties as well as drovers driving livestock to California and convinced them to join the increasingly disorderly and distressed return journey.".

"Charles Baley, a descendent of the Baley branch of the ill-fated emigrant train, tells this dramatic story and discusses its aftermath: for the emigrants, for Beale's Wagon Road, and for the Mojaves, against whom some of the emigrants pressed legal claims with the federal government.

His historical contribution includes a detailed examination of the course of that Indian depredation claim by members of the Rose-Baley party, which provides a case study of the rarely examined nineteenth-century federal Indian depredations claims process."--BOOK JACKET.