The original Verde River Sheep Bridge, also known as the Red Point Sheep Bridge, was built here in 1943 by Flagstaff Sheep Company, which had grazed sheep in the area under a Forest Service permit since 1926. Sheep ranchers had long used Bloody Basin, where crossing the Verde River was a dangerous obstacle that forced herders to swim flocks across several times a year and lose animals to the current. Ranchers first tried temporary bridges at Red Creek and Tangle Creek before building this permanent suspension bridge high above the river. Built during World War II with hand tools, a few mules, and largely salvaged materials, it allowed 11,000 sheep wintering on three nearby Forest Service grazing allotments to cross safely from one side of the river to the other. The structure measured 691 feet from cable anchorage to cable anchorage, with 568 feet between the towers and a walkway 476 feet long and three feet wide. Its towers and walkway were originally wooden, though the towers were soon reinforced with concrete buttresses, and its main suspension cables came from an abandoned tramway that had carried copper ore from the Blue Bell Mine west of Cordes to a railroad siding south of Mayer. For nearly 40 years, from the fall of 1943 until the spring of 1979, the bridge was central to sheep ranching in Bloody Basin, carrying flocks between river pastures and stock driveways leading to summer ranges in northern Arizona, while Basque herders also used it during lambing and shearing seasons between east-side pastures and ranch headquarters on the west side. Only the towers of the old bridge remain. When it was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, it was the last bridge of its kind in the Southwest. Weakened by years of service and floods, it was disassembled in 1988, and the bridge standing here today was erected in 1989, recalling the ingenuity of pioneer sheepmen and a way of ranching that has virtually disappeared from Arizona.