Box Canyon

The road here exists because someone insisted on wagons. Kearny had crossed this desert seven weeks earlier by abandoning his, going on with pack mules that needed no cut rock. Cooke's orders were the opposite: bring wagons through and leave a road. On January 19, 1847 his guide reported a dead end, and the Battalion chiselled a passage with what tools it still had, most having been lost on a raft on the Gila. Cooke took an axe himself.

What the plaque says

Box Canyon The old way variously known as Sonora, Colorado River or Southern Emigrant Trail and later as Butterfield Overland Mail Route traversed Box Canyon just east of here. January 19, 1847, the Mormon Battalion, under command of Lt-Col. Philip St. G. Cooke, using hand tools, hewed a passage through the rocky walls of the narrow gorge for their wagons and opened the first road into Southern California. State Registered Landmark No. 472 Marker placed by San Diego County Board of Supervisors and the Historical Markers Committee. Erected 1953

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Anza-Borrego Desert State Park — 9.9 mi
  Six hundred thousand acres of badlands, slot canyons, and palm oases, and the biggest state park in California.
• Borrego Springs — 17 mi
  A dark-sky town ringed by state park, with 130 metal beasts loose in the desert around it.

More markers nearby

• Pedro Fages Trail — 5.9 mi
• Vallecito Stage Depot (Station) — 6.0 mi
• San Felipe Valley and Stage Station — 6.5 mi
• Palm Springs — 15 mi