The man who earned the nickname "Hualapai Smith" did so the hard way: by venturing into the Hualapai Valley of Arizona before any other prospector had dared. That feat of exploration — obscure even in its own time — became the name by which his riverside outpost on the Sonora bank of the Colorado was known for a decade. Today there is no trace of it. Farmland covers the ground where steamboats once docked.
J. L. Smith established his ferry and farm somewhere in the mid-1860s, during a period when the Colorado River below Yuma was threaded with small landings serving the mining country upstream. His site stood 20 miles overland from Yuma — about 30 miles downriver from Fort Yuma — on the Mexican side of the border in what is now the ejido La Grullita, southwest of San Luis Río Colorado.
The name stuck because the story stuck. Smith had been the first prospector to explore the Hualapai Valley, deep in the Arizona highlands far from the river. That distinction, remarkable enough to earn him a lasting sobriquet, tells you something about the competitive culture of the frontier mining world: firsts mattered, especially when they involved going somewhere nobody else had gone.
Before Smith arrived, this stretch of the Colorado had supported two earlier crossings — Gonzales' Ferry (also called Mariposa Ferry) and Paddock's Old Ferry — both predating the Civil War. Roads from Baja California led southeast from the Southern Emigrant Trail to these crossings, making them vital links in an overland route to Sonora.
The Civil War ended those crossings abruptly. On orders of Lieutenant Colonel West, commander of Fort Yuma, the Gonzales' Ferry boat was destroyed on November 21, 1861, to prevent Confederate forces from crossing. The adobe house at Paddock's Old Ferry was already in ruins.
Smith's window came from the subsequent period of violence: hostilities with the Hualapai and Paiute beginning in 1865 shut down most of the northern Colorado River mines for years. Smith, apparently having accumulated a mining stake, acquired the abandoned landing and established his farm and new crossing.
By December 1872, Smith's Ferry had become established enough to generate local news. The Arizona Sentinel of Yuma reported that forty Mexicans had taken possession of Smith's property — he lived on the Mexican side of the line, the paper noted, about 20 miles from Yuma. What came of that dispute is not recorded.
The ferry's end came not through conflict but through technology. When the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Yuma in 1877, it purchased the Colorado Steam Navigation Company and shifted river operations to a new port and shipyard at the Yuma railhead. By 1878, the old river landings below Yuma had no economic reason to exist. Smith's Ferry, like the others, simply ceased.
The site of Hualapai Smith's today lies under farmland and buildings along a former course of the Colorado — the river having shifted its channel since the nineteenth century, as it did repeatedly before upstream dams brought it under control. Nothing remains of the settlement: no foundations, no earthworks, nothing to mark where the steamboats tied up and the prospectors crossed.
The only surviving image of J. L. Smith is a tintype from the 1870s, preserved in the Sharlot Hall Museum photograph collection in Prescott. In it, a man with a story the frontier barely recorded looks into a camera, his nickname the only thing that kept him from complete obscurity.
Located at approximately 32.41°N, 114.84°W on the Sonora bank of the Colorado River, southwest of San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico. The site is now under agricultural land with no visible surface features. Nearest airport: Yuma International Airport (KNYL), about 20 miles to the northeast. The Colorado River is visible as a navigation reference.