ABOUT THE BOOK
The Yuma Territorial Prison occupied ten acres on a hilltop just east of the town of Yuma, where the Gila and Colorado Rivers met and flowed past Prison Hill on two sides. Yuma was surrounded by hundreds of miles of sweltering desert with Mexico to the south, the Los Algodones sand dunes to the west, and miles of inhospitable sand and sagebrush to the east and north. Those who escaped the prison walls found it was only the beginning of their adventure.
In its prime, the compound had adobe walls eight feet thick and eighteen feet high with a catwalk all along the top and guard stations spaced at regular intervals. The guards were armed with repeating rifles, and there was a Lowell Battery Gun in the southeast tower. This version of a Gatling gun was able to fire six hundred .50-caliber rounds a minute with accuracy up to one thousand feet and was a formidable deterrent to escape attempts. The inmates occupied cells that were seven feet by nine feet by thirteen feet, each totally encased in an iron grating (walls, floor, and ceiling) that was then plastered over and painted white. Digging out of this enclosure with your tableware was not a viable option. There were beds for six prisoners in each cell, and as inmate numbers swelled over the years, they were often filled to capacity before additional cells could be constructed.
In its thirty-three-year existence, the prison hosted more than three thousand inmates, including twenty-nine women, and was home to some of the most dangerous and bloodthirsty criminals in the Southwest. The average occupancy was between 150 and two hundred prisoners. Much is said about the heat in Yuma—the summer temperatures would easily surpass the one-hundred-degree mark—but when compared to the permeating damp and freezing cold of other prisons, the overall climate was quite temperate.
