Cochise Section 8: Fill & Download for Free

What is the length of the shortest route from coast to coast in the United States?Surprisingly, this is a very complex question!I actually drove this shortest route just for fun many years ago. My brother and I drove it in the span of two days. One of my 300 ridiculous travel goals was to stand in the waves of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the United States on back-to-back days without the use of any air transportation, and I figured I’d take the mathematically shortest path while I’m at it!Tricky answer: When we drove this route in the 1990s, the shortest distance was 2,345.18 miles. However, because of a road closure and I-8 construction in Arizona, the modern-day shortest route is unfortunately a little longer at 2,348.08 miles. This figure includes walking between the car and the ocean on both coasts.Start point: 30.324663, -81.395006 (Neptune Beach, Florida)These are the GPS coordinates where Atlantic Boulevard changes from pavement to sand. Why start in Florida and end in California? Because we hate the beaches in Florida and we LOVE California! We wanted to end on a high note!We parked the car here, stood in the waves at 5:00 a.m., and made the 361-foot sprint to the car to begin the journey. This is what it looks like (below) at those coordinates.End point: 32.752546, -117.252055 (San Diego, California)These are the GPS coordinates where the parking lot across from 2111 Spray Street has the closest access to the beachfront. From there, it was a 245-foot sprint to the waves at 11:32 p.m. This is what it looks like at those coordinates.So, to accurately answer your question, if you add 2,347.96 miles of driving as far as you can on the modern-day path, plus 0.12 miles running on foot at both coastlines (between the waves and the car), the grand total is 2,348.08 miles from waves to waves. There exists no shorter path today than this. Most of the route stays on I-10, you’ll use I-8 in California and Arizona, and you’ll have some deviation off the interstate at times.After requests for more detail on the shortest route, and how we did it, here are the painstaking specifics (in case you’d like to attempt this feat):Day 1-The starting point is Atlantic Boulevard (Neptune Beach, Florida).In Jacksonville, Florida, we departed Atlantic Boulevard by merging right onto State Route 115, turning left on North Main Street, right on W Beaver Street, left on N Davis Street, right on W Ashley Street, merged onto I-95 South, and then joined I-10 West.After 800 miles on I-10, only departing the interstate to stay straight on I-12 from Slidell to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we took exit 855 in Beaumont, Texas, and passed through downtown on U.S. Highway 90, staying on it for 84 miles into Houston.In Houston, Texas, we took I-610 around the north side of the city, took exit 13 onto U.S. Highway 290, and rode that all the way into Austin.In Austin, Texas, we exited onto East Cesar Chavez Street traveling west, turned left on Congress Avenue to cross Town Lake, right on Barton Springs Road, and left on South Lamar Boulevard which becomes U.S. Highway 290. After 78 miles, 290 passed through the town of Fredericksburg, Texas, where we spent the night exhausted.Day 2-U.S. Highway 290 continues 40 miles west to Junction, Texas, where it rejoins I-10.In El Paso, Texas, we took exit 11 onto Route 20, continued straight on Country Club Road in New Mexico, took a right on Route 273, a left on Route 9, a left on Route 136, and a right on Route 9 (which passes within 2,000 feet of the Mexican border). You’d better get fuel in Animas, New Mexico, because there will be no gas stations for at least the next 2 hours (i.e., Pearce, Arizona, if that little station is even open).THE TWIST!As you travel west on State Route 9, it terminates at Route 80 north of Rodeo, New Mexico. This is where things get weird. On our journey, we actually stayed straight at this intersection which took us onto a dirt road for 3/4 of a mile until hitting the Arizona border and a slightly better unpaved road. However, that was over two decades ago. Looking at Google Maps now, that 3/4-mile connecting road no longer exists! So I guess no one will ever be able to match our 2,345.18-mile jaunt from ocean to ocean.THE MODERN-DAY ALTERNATEThis will add an extra 3.34 miles onto our record-setting drive, but it’s the only possible path now. You have to take Route 80 south and make a right on Route 533 which takes you into Arizona. Crossing the New Mexico-Arizona border, the road becomes dirt. And thus begins a 33-mile off-roading odyssey! You won’t see pavement for at least 1.5 hours! Be patient!You bear right on Portal Road which rejoins our original route in Portal, Arizona. It becomes Paradise Road, winding its way through rural sections of the Coronado National Forest. This unpaved forest road (see picture below) eventually terminates at 42 Forest Road, which takes you to Pinery Canyon Road, a remote stretch that finally returns to pavement at Route 181.East of Pearce, Arizona, Route 181 joins U.S. Highway 191 where you can really make good time. A shortcut down Dragoon Road south of Cochise, Arizona, will cut over to I-10, and it’s almost exclusively interstate to the end. I-10 takes you to I-8 West in Casa Grande, Arizona, which will take you into San Diego.One final side trip:Take exit 16 off I-8 in El Cajon, California, onto West Main Street to take a few feet off your journey. Main turns into Murray Drive and then Amaya Drive. Make a left on Fletcher Parkway which takes you back to I-8.When I-8 ends, you’re very close! You’ll take Sunset Cliffs Boulevard southwest, then a right on Voltaire Street, and a left on West Point Loma Boulevard which becomes Spray Street. When Spray terminates at Brighton, make a right into the parking lot, ignore the DO NOT ENTER sign, and park as close to the sand as possible for your sprint to the waves!SECRET:If you’ve read this far, you get to enjoy some secret information. The east to west route I’ve just described in detail measures 2,348.4 miles. If you take the journey west to east instead, you’ll actually save 2,323 feet because of a newer, rerouted portion of I-8 East in Arizona! That’s how you accomplish the shortest modern-day path of 2,347.96 miles (plus 0.12 miles combined walking on the sand on both coasts to touch the ocean with your feet)!You might also find these interesting:Can a professional speed walker walk across America in one month?What’s on the other side of the world from your house?Most remote place in the 48 statesFarthest point from any road in the 48 statesCenter of U.S. Population drifting through MissouriMost remote fast food restaurants in the worldLeast known city in the U.S.America’s most populated towns beginning with X

First of all, apart from Texas (which was, of course, Confederate), there were, at the time the war broke out, exactly three states west of the Missouri River: California, Oregon, and Kansas. (Nevada was rushed into statehood early, in 1864, to safeguard the wealth of the Comstock, but in 1861 it was still part of Utah.) Everything else was Territories--primarily Nebraska (which then included everything from the Kansas line north to Canada and west to the Rockies, including Colorado), New Mexico, Utah, and Washington. (Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota--which included both North and South--were created later that year, Arizona and Idaho in '63, Montana in '64, and Wyoming not till '68.) Territories were not required to raise regiments for the Front; most did recruit militias, but these generally stayed home or near by,. primarily to stand in for the Regulars after they were ordered East, and fight Indians. Thus if you were living in, say, Wyoming or Colorado (and people were), and you felt obliged to take part personally, you had to go East and enlist from a state that shared your views.Second, as Joe Roberts has observed, the West was thinly populated, and the population that existed was very busy building up the country. (Yet there were many more inhabitants than you might think. In future Nevada alone, by the time of the Comstock strike, several thousand farmers, ranchers, and trading-station personnel had located along the emigrant trails--and that doesn't count the mob scene at Virginia City and the neighboring camps--while the country reaching a hundred miles or so out from the Missouri River was thickly settled.) Towns were few except within 100 miles or so of the Missouri and around Denver and Salt Lake and Virginia City; but every military post quickly attracted a civilian population, ranging from licensed sutlers and operators of trading posts to contractors selling wood, hay, grain, cattle, and vegetables to... ahem... providers of more intimate services. Most Westerners probably felt that it was much more important to stay home and run their ranches, or businesses, or mines, or ferries, or farms, or whatever it might be.This doesn't mean there wasn't partisanship. In Virginia City, Nevada, it got pretty warm. There were Secessionists and Unionists, both vocal, both stockpiling weapons. One of the most prominent citizens of the place--Tom Peasley, who owned the sumptuous Sazerac Saloon, was chief engineer of one of the volunteer fire companies (which comprised the social elite of the town), and a genuine gunfighter who insisted on nothing but the classic walkdown--was a firm supporter of the Northern cause, and took a major part in the confrontation over which flag was going to fly over the center of the town. Yet VC increased from a population of 4000 in 1862 to 15,000+ in 1863!People continued to trek westward throughout the war years, both in organized companies (such as emigrant trains) and as individuals or small groups. Pemberton's army, captured and paroled when Vicksburg fell, almost all migrated to Montana to try their luck in the gold fields which had recently been discovered there. Union deserters and draft-dodgers also made their way west, on the sensible theory that the Provost-Marshal's office wasn't going to chase them that far. The Homestead Act, which went into effect as of January 1, 1863, was first taken advantage of in Nebraska, which was then still a Territory.There was also a great deal of Indian trouble. At first, nobody thought the war was going to last as long as it did, and the troops weren't completely withdrawn from the Western posts until '62; but once they went, the tribesmen, not unreasonably, took advantage of the situation, even unto attacking and destroying the town of Julesburg, Colorado, and placing Denver effectively under siege (supplies couldn't get through). Unfortunately, one Colonel John Chivington, commanding the Colorado militia, struck at the wrong Indians in his effort to stop the attacks: the village he hit, at Sand Creek, was composed of peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos led by Black Kettle and the Arapahoes' "big chief," Left Hand, who had insisted for years that he wasn't fighting the white man and never intended to. This attack, which killed many women and children and was accompanied by a good deal of barbarism on the part of the militia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre), only served to stir the Southern Plains tribes up to greater efforts. The Apaches in Arizona, too, were especially busy during these years. Cochise, the great Chiricahua chief, had declared bitter war on the Americans after a botched parley in 1860, and was able to weld all the divisions of the Apache people into a single concerted anti-white effort which practically isolated the town of Tucson for a decade. (Elliott Arnold's excellent historical novel, "Broken Arrow," tells the story of this period.) And it was during the war that Kit Carson, the well-known mountain man, who had settled in Santa Fe after the beaver boom bottomed out, was commissioned to lead a military expedition to end raids by the Navajo. (He succeeded; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo.)Mining continued unabated, particularly in the Comstock, where people were actually much more interested in what was being found under their feet than what Grant and Lee were up to 3000 miles away. Moreover, disappointed treasure-seekers continued to fan out from the older strikes and find new ones, including those of Idaho and Montana. The telegraph linkage between the Missouri and the West Coast was completed in 1861, and preliminary work for the transcontinental railroad (surveying, grading) went forward, but the chief means of getting across the "Great American Desert" remained wagon-trains and the stagecoach. Because of the Indian activity, particularly the troublous Sioux, the wagons and stages shifted their route south, and instead of going up the North Platte and across South Pass, they began following the Cherokee Trail, which had been in use on a limited basis for some 20 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Trail).Though the Plains were still chiefly a highway, they had been so for 18 years--ever since the beginning of the great overland emigration to Oregon in 1843--and by 1850 not only were there settlers in sufficient number as to warrant a demand for hired help, but people were actually beginning to head west with the view in mind of stopping short of the Coast. Not until the Kansas and Nebraska territories were organized in '54 had it been possible for them to get legal title, but under the Distribution-Preemption Act of 1841 "squatters' rights" had been officially recognized: its provisions allowed a man to file a claim upon any 160 acres of land not yet opened for sale by the Federal Government and still have the first chance at the tract he claimed when surveys were made. Thereafter, if he had lived on it for six months, he could purchase the land directly from the Government at $1.25 an acre, one-quarter of the total payment being due during the first year of residence, the rest to be paid any time before it was surveyed or offered at public auction by presidential proclamation; a down payment of 10% would hold the title. To many people, particularly those without large amounts of money to spare, this was still out of reach, which was why the Republican Party supported the concept of a law that would make homestead tracts free for the claiming. But, in the meantime, the law had come along just in time to make the plains attractive. Military land-bounty warrants were also used to acquire land, in part because there was no residence requirement attached to them; these had been distributed to veterans of every war since the old French ones of a hundred years ago and more, and although they hadn't become legally "assignable" till a Congressional act of '52, enterprising speculators (including several of the Founding Fathers) and big land companies had been buying them up in wholesale lots since the 1770's, usually at about fifty cents to the acre, acquiring huge areas of the public domain. This scrip had been awarded on a graded basis, with higher ranks getting more of it: in the Revolutionary era the bounties typically ran from 200 to 1000 acres for privates, five to ten thousand for officers; under one system by which North Carolina veterans were to be compensated, a private was awarded 640 acres, a brigadier general 12,000. For most trading it was valued at the same price as the land, $1.25, but the price varied from eighty cents to $1.50, and it was sometimes even taken for gambling debts at a heavy discount. Other such scrip had been distributed to Indian tribes like the Sioux and Chippewa or to some halfbreeds, obtained by the states as a result of Federal swampland acts, granted to them to support common schools, or given to wagon-road and canal companies, all of which promptly turned around and sold it for operating capital. Frequently it changed hands two or three times before the land was actually claimed, but even so it was likely to be cheaper than the going government price. One way and another, the settlers acquired holdings that ranged from a mere quarter-section to 1800 acres (and used the contiguous range as their own). They also worked out private treaty-lease agreements with whatever tribe of Indians lived in their area (several early cattlemen had done this in the region of future Dodge City by this point); totally illegal, but even when the Army was present it had enough to do chasing hostiles, so it left them alone.Many early settlers of Kansas and Nebraska were disappointed California gold seekers or Pike's Peak '59ers who turned back and established ranches; others, themselves bound for the treasure strikes, were met by such seekers and persuaded to stop and squat in a favorable location. Some, compelled to tarry by the long sickness of a member of the family, learned the value of the country and decided to stay; or, having buried a child on the "lone prairie," couldn't bring themselves to leave the little one there alone, and decided to remain and make their home nearby. Some of these settlers confined themselves to small-scale farming, but many set up trading posts, which came to be called "road ranches," and of these in turn a goodly number sold hay, grub, and liquor to freighters and immigrants (for whose convenience they usually abutted on creekside campsites) or went into the very profitable business of exchanging sound for worn-out cattle, mules, and horses, on the basis of one road-ready beast for two footsore ones; they also picked up stock wandering loose on the range after stampedes, or bought it from the Indians. Such traders sometimes accumulated large herds of a mixture of cattle--mostly shorthorns from Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois, but a considerable number of Texas longhorns trailed north to Independence and Westport, often as work oxen; those of the latter that were fertile willingly crossed with the larger, beefier Eastern animals, and their hardiness and self-sufficiency produced a get of tough, sturdy, good-sized cattle ideally suited to free-ranging life, as settlers in Oregon had likewise discovered. This traffic had been given impetus around 1852, when one Seth E. Ward, a Fort Laramie freighter, being prevented by unusually early fall storms from driving his oxen back to the Missouri River for wintering, was forced to turn them out in the Laramie Valley, hoping at least some would survive. Much to his amazement, when he went searching for them in the spring, he found that all were not only still alive, but in better shape than they'd been the winter before. Once word of this fact reached the East, the practice became widespread among all freighting concerns, owing in part to its economy: Russell, Majors & Waddell, who dominated the carriage of supplies to military posts, alone wintered 15,000 head over the winter of '57-8. After stagecoaches began to ply the plains, the early settlers were very naturally approached by the line owners to furnish relay stations, since that spared the companies the expense of building such facilities a-purpose.The boom in settlement had been ended abruptly by the Panic of 1857, though the discovery of gold around Denver the following year kept a steady trickle of newcomers arriving. Many of the settlers were Mormons, who cannily realized that emigrants would be in the market for food and supplies as they got further west. By the '50's these people, who knew and used irrigation and efficient crop rotation, had some of the most prosperous establishments along the overland route, raising hogs, cattle, chickens, corn, wheat, and all kinds of garden truck, selling grass hay to passersby or allowing them to graze their lush fenced meadows for a fee. Others were mountain men caught by the collapse of the beaver boom; often they had done interim work guiding emigrant trains west, and observing the greenhorns' cattle becoming lame and footsore, they set out to provide replacements; frequently these had Indian wives. Most of the ranches were in pleasant spots along streams, where the softer, less equipped emigrants began to drop off too, with an animal dead, overdriven, sweenied, lamed, stolen, or too heavy with young to go on, a woman sickened in body or heart, a man very ill or crippled--or sometimes dead: though the widow was expected to soldier on and make a new home for her children, and the laws of Oregon and California provided that she could claim land in her own name once she got there, some felt that the conquest of the mountains and desert was more than they were up to facing alone. And there were also, increasingly, those who set out, from the beginning, with no real intention of going all the way, seeking only the first likely quarter-section of public domain; sometimes several of these came together. They kept close to the trails for "protection," even if it was just an occasional detachment of troops passing by, and found ready markets in gold camps and frontier forts, both of which required a steady supply of foodstuffs. With the capture and breaking of wild horses, the shipment of barrels of frozen ducks and grouse and of roasted, salted, or pickled passenger pigeons to jobbers in Omaha, Kansas City, and Chicago, and the sale of small furs, buffalo robes, and dressed deerskins, apart from the food a family could raise for itself or obtain from the land, it was possible to make a very decent living.Under the Pre-Emption Act, the claimant had to swear that he had never obtained a pre-emption grant previously, that he didn't own over 320 acres in any other state or Territory, that his intention was not to sell the land, and that he had no commitment to transfer it to anyone else. But there was no practicable means of checking up on any of this, so abuses were common, and the vast distances which separated many claims from any government land office (even in the East) made it highly inconvenient for officials to verify that a dwelling had been constructed and the claimant was actually living on the land. Over the last couple of decades, enterprising speculators had originated a number of tricks, hiring dozens of rascals to pre-empt the land and later deed it back to them, using portable houses on wheels and even miniature foot-square houses that allowed the claimant to swear to the existence of a "twelve by twelve" dwelling. (Many of these dodges continued to be used in later years, by cattlemen and others, which argues that they worked.) In fact there was no real legal limit to the amount of land that could be acquired. Meanwhile, settlement was spreading out from the overland routes, with cattle going from Fort Hall into what was to become western Montana since the mid-'50's.The Confederacy understood that capturing the gold fields of Colorado (and later of Idaho and Montana), the Comstock, and California would lead to its victory, but its attempts in this direction were chiefly by way of irregular and guerrilla troops. Major exception: the New Mexico campaign (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/go-west-young-confederacy/?_r=0 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_Campaign).