For decades the crossing at Cameron hangs on a single suspension bridge built in 1911, and everything on this side of the river depends on it. Boone tells what that crossing means to the people who use it, and what happens on the day a flock of sheep puts it to the test.
Steel couldn't do it. Trucks couldn't do it. The closest anything ever came to bringing down the old Cameron bridge was a crowd of sheep minding their own business. The Little Colorado has carved a gorge across this country, and for years it kept the Navajo and Hopi reservations cut off from Flagstaff and the railroad. So in nineteen eleven the Office of Indian Affairs hired Midland Steel of Kansas City to hang a bridge, six hundred and eighty feet end to end, with the longest single span of its kind in the territory. They twisted seven cables into a bundle and gave each one its own anchor. And for all of that, the builders would only rate it at ten tons. Two brothers from Texas heard about that bridge. Hubert Richardson and his brother came to trade with the Navajo families close by it, and in nineteen sixteen they started in a small log place on a knoll, then a rock store with a tin roof. Hubert stood about five foot five, bald and freckled, with blue eyes a woman there remembered as always dancing, and he spoke Navajo. People came in from around Gray Mountain with wool and lambs, rugs and pinyon nuts. That bridge was the reason he was standing there at all. And it took whatever they gave it. In nineteen twenty-seven they laid a new deck so it could carry the steel for Navajo Bridge at Lees Ferry. In time it would handle twenty tons as a matter of routine, and once it took twenty-five. Then came early nineteen thirty-seven, and a drive of sheep started across. Trucks cross a bridge. Sheep don't always. You ever wait on one sheep in a road? Now fill a bridge. They packed in tight until the whole span was wool, and the federal form that records it calls this a sheep jam, and I can't improve on that. All that weight, and none of it going anywhere. The bridge slipped, one to five inches at every cable clamp. One report says it almost collapsed. The very trade that stood Hubert Richardson at that bridge was fixing to pull it down. In March they jacked every clamp back where it belonged and added safety clamps, and the old span went on working. What finally retired it was Glen Canyon Dam. The bridge couldn't carry that equipment, so Senator Carl Hayden fought for nearly a million dollars to build a new one. That's the same Carl Hayden who beat Ralph Cameron for his Senate seat in nineteen twenty-six. The bridge had carried Cameron's name, and Hayden got the last word on that, too. Plenty of heavy things went over that bridge before it was through. I still say the sheep came closest, a whole flock out in the middle of seven cables, every clamp creeping, each one waiting on some other sheep to go first.
Photo: Brian C. Grogan, Photographer, 1993, Historic American Engineering Record, HAER ARIZ,3-CAM,1--1, Library of Congress · Public domain (U.S. government work; LoC: no known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government)