A Frontier Prison

 In the northeast corner of the city of Yuma lies a small, but heavily visited state park. This dimunitive state park only covers about 20 acres. Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park is the third most visited state park in Arizona and it is the most visited of the state historic parks. The two more visited Arizona state parks; Lake Havasu and Slide Rock, are water-based, recreational parks, although Slide Rock does have a few historic structures of interest but its primary focus is Oak Creek, which is literally jam-packed with swimmers on  every warm to hot day of the year.
 Anyway, Old Yuma Prison, as I will call it for short, lies on a bluff above the Colorado River. This is the spot I mentioned in the last edition of this blog where the Colorado River gets pinched between two bluffs, one on each side of the river. Old Yuma Prison is on the Arizona side of the river. It lies at the former confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers. Yes, I said "former confluence." Just below the bluff on which the prison sits is where the Gila River, which starts 652 miles away in western New Mexico, once flowed into the Colorado River. Now the Gila meets the Colorado about 10 miles east of Yuma. I have heard conflicting reports about the new location for the two rivers' meeting point. I have heard that the Gila carved itself a newer, straighter channel during a flood like rivers are known to do and I have also heard that the confluence was deliberately moved several miles outside of Yuma as a flood control project because, in its early days, Yuma suffered several catastrophic floods and the Army Corps of Engineers moved the confluence away from the city to spare it from the wrath of repeated floods in the future. I am not sure which story is correct, but, at any rate, the Gila River no longer meets the Colorado River just below the Old Yuma Prison. However, about 1,000 feet of the Gila River's old channel can still be seen at the site of the former confluence. Water from the Colorado usually backs up into the Gila's old channel. At the end of the old channel, there is a massive levee and the old channel has been obliterated at that point.
  The Old Yuma Prison today is only a fraction of the original complex. After the prison closed in 1909, many of the buildings were demolished. The Southern Transcontinetal Railroad came through Yuma in 1877, but in a different location. It was re-routed to its current location in the early 1900s and that is when many of the old prison's buildings were demolished. A new bridge was built at the narrowest point of the river, atop the bluffs on either side, right next to the old prison.   Now, with the main line of the railroad running right alongside the Old Yuma Prison, it makes for a noisy and bone-jarring visit to this fascinating place, but the old prison is still a worthwhile visit for anyone because it offers an eye-opening glimpse into the "Wild West Days" of the United States as this country continued to expand westward and become a coast to coast nation.