THE THREE-QUARTER MOON HAD CREPT INTO THE WEST when my nightmare arrived.
It was September 2, 2017. That morning my wife, Sharon, and I had left Santa Fe on what promised to be a six-week journey, following the fugitive trail of the twelve-man expedition that had passed this way 241 years before. Our voyage was one that would have seemed almost tame to me throughout my adult life—until two years earlier, when cancer had abruptly redefined all my notions of the possible. Now I knew that our forty days in pursuit of Domínguez and Escalante posed as stern a challenge as I dared to engage.
We had driven north on Highway 84, through the crossroads town of Española, along the Chama River, arriving after some 45 miles at the sleepy village of Abiquiu, famed for Georgia O’Keeffe’s obsession with cow skulls, local flowers, and the old mission church. From there we had headed south on a dirt road that climbed out of a tight canyon to emerge on a glorious grassy plateau—land still held by the descendants of the benefactors of an old Spanish land grant. After some 10 miles we had crossed into the Santa Fe National Forest. Around 5 PM we found the perfect roadside campsite, at 8,000 feet under the soaring ponderosas, with open views east to a far rim of the forest and west to Cerro Pedernal, the volcanic mountain from which the ancients had extracted chert and obsidian to craft their dart points and arrowheads. We set up our tent, gathered sticks for a fire, and sat in our ten-dollar Walmart camp chairs sipping Pilsner Urquells as the sun slipped toward the horizon. I was as happy as I had been in months.
It was Saturday night. The previous evening, an old friend who lives in Santa Fe, on learning about our plans, had warned us that Española was the center of opioid and alcohol excess in northern New Mexico. As she wished us well, she parted with that timeless admonition, “Be careful.”
I was inclined to dismiss our friend’s malaise, recognizing in it, along with statistical accuracy, an ancient bias against Hispanic lifeways promulgated by the Anglos who ran New Mexico after 1848. But Sharon was troubled. Unable to sleep during our last night in Santa Fe, she got up and Googled “Española–opioids–crime” on her iPhone. I slept on oblivious. In the morning, she haltingly shared her worries. I pointed out that we would pass through Española in the afternoon and that wherever we car-camped, it would be well beyond the range of the region’s most malevolent junkies.
Since we had set up camp, only a single vehicle had passed by on the dirt road, a pickup headed at dusk, I guessed, for home or some other civilized refuge. But paradoxically, when almost no cars pass your campsite, the advent of a single one, announced by distant engine noise, then by the beams of headlights bouncing among the trees, seems faintly ominous.
I had unconsciously absorbed Sharon’s fears. In the night, a dream delivered a black SUV that stopped just yards away from our tent. Instead of hiding or fleeing, I got up to greet the strangers. Several bearded men wearing camo stepped out of the vehicle. They carried their guns nonchalantly in their hands or slung across their backs. One of them surveyed our campsite. “We just need something to eat,” he said.
“But is it deer season?” I asked.
“No.”
I fought down a thread of panic. “I’ve camped out,” I said, “for sixty years now.”
“Not much left then, is there?”
The sun rose at its appointed hour over the far rim in the east. Bundled against the cold, I put a pot of water on our two-burner stove to heat for coffee. Slowly the pallor of the nightmare dissolved. But I didn’t tell Sharon about the visitation in the night until the next day.
TO ECHO MACAULAY, every schoolboy knows about the journey across the continent launched by Lewis and Clark in 1804, as the Corps of Discovery fulfilled Thomas Jefferson’s mandate to learn just what kind of territory the United States had bought from France the preceding year. Twenty-eight years before Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis, a pair of Franciscan priests led a much smaller cadre of men on a monumental exploration through some of the most spectacular and difficult terrain in the future United States, in the process actually discovering more land unknown to non-natives than Lewis and Clark did. Yet not even Macaulay’s brightest pupil today has more than the haziest grasp of the extraordinary journey led by Domínguez and Escalante in 1776. The journals kept by Lewis and Clark are disjointed, preoccupied with minutiae, and myopic about the shape of the great voyage, and Clark’s command of spelling, grammar, and punctuation is so shaky that his passages often verge on the illiterate. America’s most famous expedition of discovery is best absorbed today via such excellent second-hand narratives as Bernard DeVoto’s The Course of Empire or Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage. But Escalante’s journal—coherent, succinct, yet full of curious asides and observations—is far more readable than any of the several commentaries about the Spaniards’ journey written by latter-day historians. In the words of DeVoto, the journal is “a poem, dramatized against the backdrop of the rock deserts.” The expedition itself, despite its harrowing tribulations and a life-or-death denouement, seemed to DeVoto a “sunnily stupendous journey.” What’s more, the team’s cartographer, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, drew an extraordinary map that is an artistic masterpiece in its own right. It remained the best chart of the greater Southwest until the middle of the nineteenth century.
In 1951, Herbert E. Bolton became the first historian to engage Domínguez and Escalante at book length. About the padres as explorers, he wrote, “For the opening of new vistas they belong with Coronado and the splendid wayfarers of Mexico and South America. For their relations with the strange peoples encountered they stand in a class almost by themselves.”
No book yet written about the Domínguez–Escalante journey has gone beyond a paraphrase of the journal and a summary of the expedition’s results. My intention in Escalante’s Dream is to cross-examine the padre’s account at every turn, to wonder what was going on whenever the explorers made a strange decision or engaged in a puzzling interaction with Native Americans met along the way, and to dig below the surface of the conflicts among and characters of the twelve men on the team. And as Sharon and I retrace the 1776 journey through forty days in the fall of 2017, I intend to treat our own adventure as a parallel expedition 241 years later—a road trip through a world Domínguez and Escalante could never have foreseen.
Silvestre Vélez de Escalante was born in 1749 in Cantabria, a green, hilly province in northern Spain. He was a montañes, a highlander, and had he stayed in his native land he might well have whiled away his years as a shepherd or a farmer. We know very little about the man’s early life, but by the late 1760s he had arrived in Mexico City. There, at only eighteen, he became a friar in the order of Saint Francis of Assisi. From 1598 onward, it had been Franciscans who took charge of the religious life of New Spain’s northernmost colony, and their highest duty and keenest passion had to do with bringing the salvation of the Redeemer into the hearts and souls of the “benighted” natives the Spaniards found when they arrived.
Escalante was second in command of the bold expedition on which he embarked in July 1776—the same month that fifty-six ardent rebels convened in a hall in Philadelphia to sign a ringing declaration of their freedom from the tyranny of King George III. We know as little about the expedition’s commander, another friar named Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, as we do about Escalante. But because it was the latter man who wrote the official journal—virtually the sole primary document from the adventure to come down to us—we have something like a direct pipeline to the thoughts and feelings of the exploit’s junior leader.
As many commentators have pointed out, we should refer to Domínguez’s lieutenant not as “Escalante” but as “Vélez,” since the “de Escalante” of his name merely identified where he was from—as in Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt. Likewise, of course, with Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. But calling the conquistador who led the first great exploration of what would become the American Southwest “Vázquez” would simply confuse the reader. The name Escalante, like that of Coronado, has been attached to all kinds of places in the Southwest, and to insist on “Vélez” here would be to err on the side of pedantry.
As Sharon and I retraced the route of the long-ago journey, and read and reread the entries that dealt with each stage of the voyage, I often wondered what kind of role fear had played in the men’s lives. Because the expedition turned into a survival ordeal, reducing the twelve men to the most desperate conditions, I knew that terror and doom must have ridden beside them on their played-out horses. But the diary is for the most part laconic about their hardships.
On our own journey, the risks were minimal. A bad dream about creepy gunslingers arriving at our camp in the night bore only the faintest subconscious echo of the real threats that had shadowed travelers in the wilderness in previous centuries. Normally, Spanish expeditions crossing the badlands of the American Southwest—most notably the Jornada del Muerto between El Paso and Santa Fe, a gauntlet that invited attack by Apaches and Comanches—traveled heavily armed. Among the ten men who set off to the north from Santa Fe in 1776, there were no soldiers. And though Escalante never records what weapons the men carried, the few references to firearms surface only when the starving men used muskets to fell a bison here or celebrate a river crossing there.
The journal does not suppress the tribulations the men endured, especially during the second half of the journey. Terrible cold, even in September; grim trudges across prairies devoid of firewood or water; confusion in canyons and forests as the men suspect they’re lost—these and other depredations come to vivid life in the pages of the journal. But against the threat of even more insidious dangers, Escalante wore a suit of invisible armor: his faith.
In 1775, the twenty-five-year-old priest was assigned to the pueblo of Zuni far to the southwest of Santa Fe—in historian John Kessell’s pithy phrase, to Spanish minds “the Siberia of New Mexico.” Yet he decided, in the hope of making conversions among an even more remote community of natives, to make a journey to Hopi, 130 miles farther west.
Escalante’s mission was an utter failure. Not a single Indian was persuaded by his earnest sermons, translated by a local, to give up his allegiance to Maasaw and the kachinas and become a Christian. As he prepared to return to Zuni, a sympathetic Hopi told Escalante that he had overheard a group of Navajos plotting to lie in wait along the trail to ambush and massacre his small party.
Escalante was unfazed. “I replied that I was very grateful to him for the warning, [but that] . . . he was to tell them from me that even all of them were too few to carry out their intention; that if they liked, they might seek the aid of other tribes, but even if many went forth, they would have an exceedingly costly trial of their weakness and my safeguard.” The informant, thinking that Escalante had misunderstood the Navajo threat or given no credence to his words, called upon other Hopi to witness his warning. The friar doubled down, saying that “though I believed him, I was not worried, nor should he be, because I trusted in God Who is infinitely more powerful than all the men there ever were, are, or will be.”
SPAIN’S EXPLORATION OF what would become the western United States began with Coronado’s entrada, from 1540 to 1542. It is a measure of just how ambitious the conquistadors were, how hungry for new land, that only nineteen years after Cortés had completed his astonishing conquest of the Aztec empire centered around Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), the Spaniards were pushing the borders of terra incognita more than a thousand miles to the northwest.
Coronado’s adventure was launched in response to one of the strangest and most unlikely journeys ever accomplished by Europeans in the New World. One day in 1536, four Spaniards stumbled into the colonial outpost of Culiacán in today’s Mexican state of Sinaloa. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three weary companions were the sole surviviors of an expedition of some 600 men that had come to grief along the west coast of Florida in 1528. For eight years, the four survivors had wandered among Indian tribes, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as shamans revered for their magical gifts, as they made their way across 2,500 miles of unmapped terrain from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific.
Although at first they were suspected of making up their outlandish tale, the four vagabonds brought electrifying news of unknown lands and tribes that whetted the Spanish imagination. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for gold and silver, but also by a zeal to convert pagans to the true faith, the governors of New Spain sent out a scouting mission in 1539. The party was led by a Franciscan, Fray Marcos de Niza (a missionary model for Domínguez and Escalante two and a half centuries later), and guided by Esteban, a Moor from North Africa, originally a Spanish slave, who had been one of Cabeza de Vaca’s companions on that epic journey of survival.
All across the wilderness the four refugees traversed, Esteban spurred bewildered curiosity among the Indians. Who was he, this brown-skinned stranger traveling with his white-skinned comrades, speaking the same strange tongue as they did? The Moor had a remarkable gift for picking up native languages, so during their desperate journey it was he who best communicated with the Indians. By some he was treated as a servant to be starved and tormented, while to others he was a healer with occult and wondrous powers.
In 1539, his success among the “savages” must have gone to Esteban’s head. Impetuously he rode several days ahead of the cautious priest and the main party, and while he announced the coming of white men who would “instruct [the natives] about things divine,” he also demanded tribute in the form of turquoise and women. Somewhere in what is today the greater Southwest, Esteban rubbed his temporary hosts the wrong way. In the words of historian Andrés Reséndez, those Indians “deliberated for three days about what to do and finally chose to kill him.” Despite this setback, Fray Marcos de Niza rode in sight of some large native settlement, where he later claimed to have seen from afar buildings made of gold, festooned with precious jewels.
This doubtful sighting reinforced the enduring legend of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, or the Seven Cities of Gold. A persistent oral tradition has it that Esteban’s fatal encounter occurred at the New Mexico pueblo of Zuni, though some scholars doubt the connection.
On a warm September day in 2002, a Zuni woman named Lena Tsethlikai guided me to Hawikuh, the village in which, if the oral tradition has it right, Esteban met his doom. Though the site lies in ruins today, in the sixteenth century it was one of six villages that made up the prosperous pueblo of Zuni. No one knows how long those people have dwelled in their current location, but the fact that the Zuni language is an isolate—a tongue related to no other language anywhere in the world—suggests a geographic stability lasting 8,000 years or longer.
With Tsethlikai, I strolled across the furrows and swales of the ruin, which is normally off-limits to Anglos. The ground was covered with polychrome potsherds, and scores of crumbling walls, the purplish building stones scattered on either side, outlined the layout of the ancient town. The site lay open to the distant horizon on the southwest, the direction from which the Spaniards would have come.
I asked Tsethlikai what had happened here in 1539. As a young girl, she had been told the story by her father. “At first the Zuni thought he was a great man,” she said. “They liked the parrot feather plumes that he had. They thought he must be an important man.
“But Esteban came to look around and see what was here. He started demanding food and shelter. Then he started wanting our women. That’s why the Zunis got mad and killed him.”
THE EXPEDITION LED by Coronado amounted to a virtual army, as 400 armed men, more than 1,300 Indian allies, and four Franciscan priests, driving hundreds of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, marched slowly north beyond Culiacán toward the rumored lands in the north. In July 1540 the forces reached Hawikuh. When the Zuni forbade entry into the pueblo, Coronado attacked, in only days completing what he grandiosely called “the Conquest of Cíbola.” But the leader was disgusted to discover that Marcos de Niza’s golden walls were made of mud and stones.
During the next two years, Coronado ranged all over what would become New Mexico, frustrated again and again in his search for gold and silver. When Puebloans offered him their most precious substance, turquoise, he redoubled his disgust. In 1541, an Indian whom the Spaniards called the Turk filled Coronado’s ears with honeyed tales of a land called Quivira, far to the east, where the chief drank from golden cups hanging from trees. It is now clear that Puebloans invented Quivira in hopes of luring the despotic conquistador far away from their homeland. With the Turk as his guide, Coronado spent months marching across the Texas panhandle and western Kansas, discovering instead of fabled Quivira only a succession of “wretched,” nearly naked tribes. When at last he gave up the eastern quest, Coronado ordered the Turk strangled.
Among the expedition’s dubious achievements was the European discovery of the Grand Canyon, when a lieutenant, García López de Cárdenas, guided by Hopi men, came to the South Rim as he sought a route westward to the Pacific. At first glance, Cárdenas completely misjudged the size of the colossal gorge. Guessing that the river threading the canyon bends below was only waist- or shoulder-deep, he sent several men out to scout, expecting their return in hours. When they regained the rim after three days, exhausted, their clothes torn to shreds, with the news that the great river was unfordable, an exasperated Cárdenas gave up his mission.
(A trenchant footnote to the Spanish discovery of the Grand Canyon: 317 years would elapse before the first Anglo-American reached the edge of the great abyss. In 1857, in the vicinity of today’s Hualapai reservation, U.S. Army Lieutenant Joseph Ives gazed down at the river and the canyon below, before turning back in disgust as vehement as that of his Spanish predecessor. Wrote Ives in his government report, “Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality.”)
Coronado’s long foray through New Mexico decimated the native populations. In the Tiguex War, the Spaniards wiped out a whole complex of Pueblo villages, killing hundreds of inhabitants. Despite the conquistador’s savagery, his expedition was a monumental campaign of exploration and discovery. Historians today devote whole conferences to figuring out just what Coronado did and where he went.
But on its return to Mexico City, the expedition was castigated as an expensive failure. For his pains, Coronado suffered bankruptcy and prosecution by the government for war crimes. Though he was acquitted, he never recovered from injuries suffered on the expedition, and died in infamy in 1554.
In the aftermath of Coronado, an ambivalence about New Mexico lingered for decades. Not until 1582 did an expedition set out with the aim of turning that northern hinterland into a colony. The first five such attempts came nowhere near success. The last and most feckless of them ended bathetically, out on the eastern plains, after one of its two leaders stabbed the other to death—prompting Indians to wipe out the whole party.
It was not until 1598, fifty-six years after Coronado limped back to Mexico City, that an army under Don Juan de Oñate rode up the Rio Grande and forced one pueblo after another to succumb to Spanish rule. Oñate was at least as merciless and violent a conquistador as Coronado. His advent is seared into the collective memory of Acoma pueblo. In December, the proud residents of its mesa-top redoubt resisted the attack of Oñate’s lieutenant, killing him and ten of his soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. A month later, Oñate enacted his revenge. With a force of 70 armed and mounted men, he overcame the defenses of the pueblo fortress and set fire to the buildings. Between 600 and 800 Acomans—men, women, and children—died.
Even this rout was not punishment enough to tame Oñate’s rage. After the battle, he decreed that every Acoma man over the age of twenty-five should have his right foot cut off, at the onset of a sentence of twenty years of slavery. Women older than twelve and all the younger men likewise were to serve for two decades as slaves. Only girls and boys younger than twelve were spared, assigned to become “servants” in Spanish households. At least sixty Acoma girls ended up as slaves in Mexico, torn for the rest of their lives from their families.
Oñate’s conquest launched eight decades of colonial bondage for New Mexico’s Puebloans. From Coronado onward, the Spanish distinguished between two distinct species of natives in this new land. The indios de pueblos claimed a higher rung on the ladder of presumed ascent toward civilization, for in building permanent settlements—“pueblos,” or towns, of stone and mortar—they demonstrated a nascent aptitude for humanity. As such, they were viable candidates for conversion to the Catholic Church. Nomads such as Utes, Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, on the other hand, were indios barbaros, beyond hope of salvation (if indeed they even possessed souls), to be eliminated rather than brought into the Catholic fold.
Under Oñate’s rule, New Mexico imposed a pair of legal obligations on the Puebloans that often reduced their existence to a fight for survival. Encomienda entitled each Spanish colonist to exact a tribute from a designated number of Indians in the form of goods—usually the staple crop of maize (corn) or the hides of animals. Repartimiento granted the colonists a similar tribute in the form of unpaid labor. These twin burdens were not the invention of Oñate; they sprang from a tradition dating back even before the discovery of the New World, to Hispanic dominion over the Moors. In exchange for these subjugations, the Spaniards promised the Puebloans protection against nomad raiders, but so small were the numbers of colonists in and around Santa Fe, so poorly armed and trained, that Comanche and Apache attacks still took their regular toll.
From the founding of the new colony through the first eighty years of the seventeenth century, it was Franciscan friars, rather than Jesuits or Dominicans, who fulfilled the divine mandate to bring the word of God into the hearts and minds of natives who for centuries had gathered in their kivas and plazas to worship “foolish idols” and practice their “hideous rites.” From the start, the Puebloans were mystified and misled by the twin rule of church and state. For it was not at all clear whether the demands of the colony’s governor and soldiers were to be obeyed, or the exhortations of the priests.
Despite the apparent smoothness of Oñate’s conquest, New Mexico got off to a bad start. An air of demoralization quickly set in among the ranks of new settlers. Not only was there no gold or silver to be mined in the hills rising on either side of the Rio Grande, but crops and livestock suffered under the fickle climate of this arid land. Near starvation became the normal state of existence for the Indians and even for the poorer colonists, many of whom gave up and returned to the more fruitful colonies to the south. By 1608, the Spanish population of New Mexico had dwindled to about 200. In that year, one of the great historical ironies in the long pageant of European subjugation of the tribes of North America unfolded.
Chastened by the dismal reports of life in New Mexico that messengers carried south to the capital, in 1608 the viceroy in Mexico City sent a report to the Council of the Indies in Madrid summing up conditions in the new colony. On September 13, that body formally recommended the immediate and complete abandonment of Nuevo México.
How different the history of the American Southwest would have been had the Council’s recommendation been carried out! Might the first invaders to disturb the balance of power and territory among the many tribes who roamed and settled the canyons, plains, and mountains between the Rio Grande and the Colorado River have been the lawless, mostly illiterate mountain men of the 1820s and ’30s?
It was not to be. Alarmed by the Council’s declaration, the Franciscan friars of New Mexico thwarted the abandonment. A single fact-finding priest, Fray Lázaro Ximénez, returned to Mexico City in December 1608 claiming that no fewer than 7,000 Indians had been converted and baptised in the short decade of Spanish rule. (That total is highly suspect, even if scores of Puebloans may have submitted to the strange rituals of the catechism and immersion in water that the blue-robed magicians dispensed, with little notion of what such acts signified.) To leave a converted Indian without spiritual guidance, allowing him to lapse back into the sorcery of the kachinas, would be to commit a misdeed far more grievous than simply to turn Spain’s back on natives who had never emerged from their aboriginal ignorance.
So persuasive was this argument that the Council pondered a plan to transplant all 7,000 of the converted Puebloans to New Spain, where the Franciscans might continue to minister to their souls. Instead, the Crown declared the spiritual cost of giving up on the colony unbearable. No matter how marginal New Mexico remained, no matter the hardships the settlers must continue to undergo, the struggling colony must not be abandoned.
In theory, the governor of the colony, appointed by the viceroy of New Spain, was in charge. But the more ambitious Franciscan friars wielded powers that sometimes trumped those of their civilian rivals. The priests’ ultimate weapon was to threaten to send reports of treason or corruption back to Mexico City. Several of those prelates were infected by a grandiosity that verged on madness, such as Fray Isidro Ordoñez, who proclaimed to a Santa Fe congregation in 1613, “Let no one persuade with vain words that I do not have the same power and authority that the Pope in Rome has, or that if his Holiness were [here] in New Mexico he could do more than I.”
Throughout the first eighty years of the seventeenth century, power-hungry priests and governors attacked one another as they claimed supreme command of the unstable colony. The Puebloans who bore the brunt of this misrule observed it in stunned bewilderment. Although a few of the priests treated the Indians with kindess and curiosity, on the whole the Franciscans made demands on the natives that exceeded the most draconian requirements meted out by the governors. Centuries before even the first glimmerings of cultural relativism came into vogue, the men of God could muster only outrage as they beheld the workings of a religion based on a polytheistic cosmos whose supernatural emissaries—the kachinas—regulated human destiny. When impassioned arguments in the form of sermons proclaimed in the newly built churches failed to enlighten the Puebloans, all too often force became the last resort.
Perhaps the most notorious such treatment took place at Hopi in 1655. The resident padre, Salvador de Guerra, flew into a fury when he caught a man from the ancient village of Oraibi, whose Spanish name was Juan Cuna, performing “a sinful act of idolatry.” According to three witnesses who later testified in Guerra’s trial, the priest first gave Cuna “many kicks and punches, from which he was bathed in blood.” Next the padre tied the Hopi to a stepladder and “whipped him with much severity and many times on the back, belly, and all the other parts of his body.” As if this were not punishment enough, Guerra finally “scalded [Cuna] from head to foot with a large lump of turpentine, and burned him with it.”
Having doled out his treatment, the padre ordered Cuna to walk under guard 25 miles from Oraibi to Awatovi, the outlying village where Hopi’s penitenciados, or convicts, were sequestered. On the way, unable to take another step, “unconscious and speechless,” the wretched native died of his wounds.
This was too much for the chief custodian of New Mexico’s missions. Brought to trial, Guerra, who denied punishing Cuna more vigorously than by giving him a single slap on the face, was sentenced to deportation to Mexico City. Historians doubt whether that verdict was ever carried out. By 1659, Guerra was once more in the pulpit, first at Taos pueblo, then at Isleta, where he continued to wage his relentless battle against pagan idolatry.
Throughout the first eight decades of the seventeenth century, the Puebloans under the Spanish yoke, from Hopi to Taos, bore all manner of mistreatment and subjugation from both church and state. So silently did they guard their suffering that the authorities never suspected that anything was brewing. The twenty-sixth governor of New Mexico later swore, in utter consternation, that the colony of which he was in charge had been flourishing in a state of unbroken “peace and tranquility.”
Everything changed on a single day.
IN THE COLONIAL history of the Americas, there is nothing quite like the Pueblo Revolt. In near-total secrecy, a visionary shaman named Popé, from San Juan pueblo north of Santa Fe, concocted a brilliant plot with village leaders all the way from Taos to Hopi, a distance of more than 350 miles. Runners carried knotted cords to each of the far-flung pueblos, telling the village headmen to untie one knot each day until none were left. On that day, August 10, 1680, the grievances of eighty-two years of oppression burst into flame. Warriors in the pueblos killed 380 settlers, including women and children, meeting only token resistance. Of the 33 Franciscan friars stationed across New Mexico, 21 were slain. The rebels reserved their cruelest killings for the priests—as, for instance, at Jemez, where Fray Juan de Jesús was stripped naked, tied to a pig’s back, and paraded along a gauntlet of kicks and blows before he was dispatched with a sword through the heart.
The outrage that dictated such vengeance took shape in the destruction and defilement of the churches. In the wreckage at Sandia, for example, stunned eyewitnesses reported finding a statue of Saint Francis with his arms hacked off, as well as paintings of saints and the holy communion table smeared with human excrement. Many of the churches were burned to the ground.
Under the colony’s witless governor, Antonio de Otermín, nearly 1,000 Spaniards who had survived the initial attack took refuge in a stockade at the center of Santa Fe. After five days of siege by an army of Puebloan warriors, those colonists were allowed to retreat down the Rio Grande toward El Paso. Otermín bewailed his misfortune by declaring the revolt a “lamentable tragedy, such as has never before happened in the world.”
In the rebellion triggered by Popé’s apocalyptic vision, New Mexico was purged of Spaniards to the last woman and child. Never before had the famously autonomous pueblos collaborated in such a joint campaign, nor would they ever do so again. For twelve years the Pueblo world basked in a freedom it had not known since before Coronado’s massive invasion in 1540.
It is often said that history is written by the victors. But because the only languages the Puebloans knew were oral ones, that formula cannot be affixed to the events of 1680 to 1692.
In 2004, I published a book about the Pueblo Revolt, after more than two years of research among archives and libraries and on the ground in New Mexico and Arizona. By then, I knew how insular the twenty-one pueblos that survive today tend to be, how fiercely their people guard their sacred or secret lore. But somewhat naively, I assumed that the twelve-year span of freedom from Spanish rule ought to be the pueblos’ proudest accomplishment, and that testimony about that glorious liberation might be forthcoming from the descendants of the men and women who had carried it out.
Instead, I ran head on into a wall of bureaucratic avoidance. At one pueblo after another, whatever person I approached in the tribal headquarters about how to proceed with my inquiry responded with some variant of “You’ll have to bring that up with the tribal council.” Or with the governor. But a meeting with those officials seemed impossible to arrange.
I decided to focus my effort on Jemez, which before 1680 had borne afflictions under Spanish tyranny at least as dire as those endured at any of the twenty other pueblos. It took me two months to set up a meeting with the Cultural Committee at Jemez. During two hours in the conference room of the governor’s office, I was met with a reception that ran the gamut from stony silence to private exchanges in Towa (spoken only at Jemez) to overt hostility. Near the end of my trial by distrust, one member of the council leaned back in his chair, squinted at me, and demanded, “What’s in it for Jemez?” Another man explained, “We just don’t want to get screwed . . . again.” The first fellow added, “The thing that really bothers me is that you keep talking about ‘my book.’ This is all about you.”
Late that evening, I staggered out of the conference room with the injunction to put my request in writing in a letter to Jemez’s lieutenant governor. I never bothered.
By the end of my research, the fruit of my attempts to talk to Puebloans about the revolt was limited to interviews with five men and women who had gone beyond their home education to pursue graduate degrees at Anglocentric universities. They were, in a sense, historians and artists with one foot in each of the two New Mexican worlds. That, along with a few published works by Puebloans that touched on the Revolt and the weirdly skewed Spanish records of Puebloans captured during campaigns to reconquer the colony, who were compelled (often by torture) to explain what had brought on the blitzkrieg of the Revolt and how life in the pueblos had been led during the next twelve years, comprised the sum of my understanding from primary sources about what several scholars have called “the greatest event in New Mexico’s history.”
Popé’s vision had postulated that after the revolt, the people must forswear any taint of things introduced by the Spanish. But having grown accustomed to beef and pork and mutton, to cherries and peaches and chile peppers, to wool for weaving and horses to ride, Puebloans found it difficult to give up the Spanish lifeway altogether. Popé had gone so far as to decree that his people should wade naked into rivers and scrub their bodies with yucca root to undo the curse of baptism.
Rumors filtered down after 1692 that, rather than revert to Puebloan egalitarianism, the leaders of the Revolt had been corrupted by power and wealth, becoming, in the worst cases, “more Spanish than the Spanish.” And the brief unification that Popé had wrought with the knotted cords collapsed, as pueblos began to war with one another. So hazy is the record of the twelve-year interregnum in New Mexico that some scholars have wondered whether Popé even existed, except as the composite legend of the most forceful of the shamans and warriors who engineered the great rebellion.
Most surprising to me were the hints I gathered from one pueblo after another that younger men and women today really knew very little about the Revolt. If as children or adolescents they had shown interest in that long-ago upheaval of the Puebloan world, their elders discouraged their curiosity. It had been a bad time; bad things had happened back then. This veil over the past sprang in part from a deep Puebloan belief that strife and killing are inherently evil, that the Revolt had disturbed the harmony of the cosmos. But it seemed to derive as well from inklings that freedom and power after 1680 had bred their own corruption, had turned allies against one another, had sown chaos instead of peace.
In any event, the reconquest of New Mexico came at the hands of a general named Diego José de Vargas. In 1692, he marched up the Rio Grande at the head of a sizable army, winning the submission of one pueblo after another, aided by the recruitment of Puebloan warriors who were happy to attack neighbors against whom they nursed grievances. On September 13, Vargas erected a cross in the Santa Fe plaza and proclaimed the retaking of New Mexico complete.
From the relative ease of Vargas’s initial campaign has come down to us the myth of the Bloodless Reconquest. In reality, the pacification of the pueblos dragged on for four more years, during which Vargas attacked and later punished and executed the natives who dared to resist. All in all, his campaign was every bit as violent and cruel as Oñate’s.
Yet a pageant launched in 1712 still unfolds each September in the twelve-day Fiesta of Santa Fe, during which the myth is reenacted, complete with the knighting and coronation of a Vargas impersonator and a procession that carries La Conquistadora, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, through the streets before reinstalling it in the basilica of the cathedral. Beloved by many Hispanic descendants of the conquerors, the Fiesta is resented and abhorred by most Puebloans.
Thus the brilliantly executed liberation of New Mexico from its Spanish rulers lasted only a little more than a decade. The reconquest was inevitable, of course, given Spanish superiority in arms and wealth to the material power of the native people. The Pueblo Revolt might thus be viewed in some lights as a failure. But after 1692, Puebloans emerged from their new submission to Spanish authority with crucial improvements in their way of life. Gone for good were the hated burdens of encomienda and repartimiento. Even more important, though new generations of Franciscan friars were as determined as ever to convert their charges to the True Church, the religion of the kachinas was allowed to exist, rather than being punished with the torture and even execution of shamans who refused to convert.
Such was the world that Escalante and Domínguez entered when they rode north from Mexico City to take up their new posts among the pueblos in 1774 and 1775, respectively. Francisco Atanasio Domínguez was about thirty-six years old when he set off on the expedition he would lead with Escalante (his birth date is uncertain). Unlike the younger padre, Domínguez was born in Mexico City rather than Spain. At the age of seventeen, he had been admitted to the Franciscan order.
Domínguez’s charge in New Mexico was a demanding and important one: to visit all the pueblos and compile a detailed report of the condition of the church in each one, as well as a census of the Indian population. It was a mandate he would fulfill both before and after his daring journey into the unknown Southwest. The massive report he composed was filed, then forgotten, by the authorities for whom it was written. It was rediscovered only in the early twentieth century, among miscellaneous papers in the Biblioteca Nacional de México. Published in an English translation in 1956, it is now regarded as one of the most valuable primary sources on colonial New Mexico.
His eventual comrade, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, arrived in New Mexico a year earlier than Domínguez, and was promptly assigned to the remote pueblo of Zuni. From that outpost in 1775, at his own initiative, he undertook the dangerous proselytizing journey to Hopi alluded to in the early pages of this chapter. Despite his youth, and poor health that would dog him throughout his short life, Escalante was regarded by his superiors as a friar of great talent and devotion.
Even before the Pueblo Revolt, the leaders of New Spain had been ambitious to explore and settle other regions of the vast continent that stretched indefinitely north from Sonora and Chihuahua. In the eighteenth century, a chief motivation was paranoia about rumored encroachments on that terra incognita by Russia from the north and France from the east. But rugged topography, hostile tribes, and the nightmarish difficulties of maintaining supply routes to regions so far from Mexico City thwarted one effort after another.
No one pursued these goals more zealously than the missionaries who hoped to bring the light of God to the natives stranded in spiritual darkness in those frontier regions. Father Eusebio Kino, an Italian Jesuit, pushed far into what is now southern Arizona, founding the mission of San Xavier del Bac, a few miles south of present-day Tucson, in 1692. He tried to make peace with the semi-nomadic tribes he encountered in that hinterland, including the Papago, Pima, Yuma, Yavapai, and Western Apache, but the truces he forged were fragile ones.
Meanwhile, the shores of the great Pacific Ocean north of the dangling peninsula of Baja California, reconnoitered by Spanish navigators, promised a huge, fertile ground for settlement and conversion. A mission at San Diego, the first in modern-day California, was established in 1769. Its founder was the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra, as charismatic and industrious a man as Kino. Eventually Serra would found twenty-one missions in California, but the one that galvanized New Spain’s often desultory colonizing passion was Mission San Carlos Borromeo, planted at Monterey in 1770. Although it would take months for news—and orders—to travel from the Pacific coast south to Mexico City and then back north to Santa Fe, that foothold was what inspired the Domínguez–Escalante expedition of 1776. The viceroy in the capital, Antonio María de Bucareli, was seized with the bold idea of establishing a trading route directly from Spain’s oldest northern colony in Santa Fe to its newest at Monterey. Yes, that route would cross a vast region utterly unknown to Europeans, but the blank on the map cried out for exploration. Serra himself was the project’s most ardent booster, as he outlined the challenge that route would pose to its pioneers. “According to the best of my information,” he wrote to Bucareli in 1773, “if they start straight west from Santa Fe, with a slight deviation to the south, they will strike Monterey.” The opening of that route, he added, would assure “a harvest of many souls for heaven.”
In an age before any accurate means of determining longitude had been devised, no one could say even approximately how far apart Santa Fe and Monterey lay. Animated, however, by the successes of Kino and Serra, Bucareli hatched his plan. To launch it on the ground, the viceroy turned not to conquistadors in the mold of Coronado, Oñate, and Vargas, but to Franciscan padres.
Young they might be, and new to New Mexico, but Domínguez and Escalante were the men for the job.
JUST BEFORE NOON on September 2, 2017, Sharon and I drove north out of Santa Fe. From Hertz at the Albuquerque airport, we had rented a dark gray Toyota RAV4 SUV with Texas plates. Throughout our trip, good old boys at gas stations would ask us, in their Lone Star drawls, “Where ’bouts in Texas y’all from?” “It’s a rental,” I would answer, hoping to forestall chat about great high-school football teams or the legacy of the presidents Bush.
Domínguez and Escalante had planned their own departure for July 4, 1776, with no inkling of the momentous colonial unrest that was reaching its boiling point in a Philadelphia hall thousands of miles to the east. But logistical snafus and last-minute parleys delayed their launch until July 29.
On that Monday morning, the expedition members celebrated mass in the castrense, or military chapel, on the Santa Fe plaza. With the kind of flourish explorers of the day lavished on official reports, Escalante begins his journal with a grand evocation of the solemnity of their mission: “On July 29 of the year 1776, under the patronage of the Virgin Mary Our Lady conceived without original sin, and of the thrice holy Joseph her most blessed spouse, we, Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, current commissary visitor of the Custody of the Conversion of St. Paul in New Mexico, and Fray Francisco Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, minister and priest of the mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Zuni—voluntarily accompanied by”—he then named the other members of the team, with short identifying tags for most of them—“after the aforementioned had implored the protection of our thrice-holy patron saints and received the Holy Eucharist, set out from La Villa de Santa Fe . . .”
More than two centuries later, the Santa Fe plaza, though still a cherished locus of New Mexico history, bears scant resemblance to the hub of the capital from which Domínguez and Escalante set out in 1776. Only the much-remodeled Palace of the Governors, on the porch of which every Sunday Puebloan jewelry-makers sit before displays of their handiwork, as tourists from all over the world snap photos and haggle over prices, still stands from that early era. Even Bishop Lamy’s much-admired cathedral, at the southeast corner of the plaza, dates from only 1869. By the end of the twentieth century, the castrense was long gone; in its place stood a J. C. Penney store. In 2017, Penney’s was gone as well, but a kindred establishment, the funky Five and Dime General Store, fronts the diminutive plaza. There you can buy postcards, T-shirts, and souvenir gewgaws, or sidle up to the snack bar to sample the “World Famous Frito Pie—as seen on TV.”
For two years leading up to the 1976 bicentennial of Domínguez and Escalante’s epic journey, a band of fifteen scholars and historians under the leadership of David E. Miller divided the 1,700-mile route of the expedition into ten segments, then fanned out in pairs and trios to pin down each day’s path and campsite along the five-month itinerary. By vehicle, by foot, by horseback, and by airplane they cross-examined the countryside, trying to divine through travelers’ intuition the exact mile-by-mile progress of the journey, about which Escalante’s diary is often maddeningly vague. They also plumbed oral history by interviewing resident old-timers, both Anglo and Native American. Their report, The Route of the Domínguez–Escalante Expedition, 1776–77, is a masterpiece of exploratory rediscovery. Sadly, it was published only in a loose-leaf “edition” with a plastic binder, and remains a rare volume today. I bought a copy from Bookfinder, the cornucopia of old and out-of-print works, for 65 bucks. The manual, its cover spotted with food and wine stains, became Sharon’s and my bible on the road.
As a companion volume, the bicentennial commission issued a massive Domínguez–Escalante Trail Bicentennial Interpretive Master Plan and Final Report, which likewise survives only in a loose-leaf plastic binder edition. It was the goal of the commission to spur local chambers of commerce, highway departments, and historical societies to erect plaques and markers all along the expedition route. The dream of the 1976 enthusiasts was to create a Domínguez–Escalante Trail that devotees would retrace, as Revolutionary War buffs pursue the Freedom Trail in and around Boston (or as through-hikers throng the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails). One of the tasks Sharon and I assigned ourselves was to see how many of those wayside memorials had actually been erected.
Our first stop, then, was the DeVargas Center, a shopping mall on Guadalupe Street, not far north of Santa Fe plaza. In the hopeful words of the Interpretive Master Plan, “a free-standing historic information panel in the parking lot of the DeVargas Shopping Center would describe the beginnings of the Domínguez–Escalante expedition. . . . In addition the sketch ‘Leaving Santa Fe’ would be good.” In the parking lot on September 2, I could find nothing resembling a free-standing information panel, so I entered the mall and wandered past Great Clips and Elegant Nails, Starbucks and Subway, Señor Murphy and Panda Express. The only wall-mounted plaques that I could find ordered visitors not to smoke and to keep their pets on a leash. Vargas himself may have hovered ephemerally above the center, but D & E were nowhere to be found.
Once out of Santa Fe, we hummed along at 60 mph on U.S. Highway 84. The road felt cozily familiar to me from so many jaunts in the past, as I had headed toward Los Alamos to climb at the White Rock crag, or along the Rio Grande to prowl among the basalt boulders looking for petroglyphs, or on a drive to Taos almost twenty years before to visit the grave of Kit Carson, about whom I was writing a book. More than a dozen times I had traveled Highway 84 on the way to Bandelier National Monument, whose canyons and mesas had been home to Puebloans for centuries before the Spanish arrived. My first visit to Bandelier had come on a family outing when I was about twelve. My brother Alan and I had made a happy game of scurrying through the cavates in Frijoles Canyon—houses carved out of the soft tufa rock left by massive volcanic eruptions in the past—although our sister Jennie was spooked by the place, convinced that ghosts lurked in the pebbly nooks of the escarpment.
Even in the padres’ day, the road north out of Santa Fe was heavily trodden, and in his diary Escalante wastes no words on the first day’s journey, noting only that “at the end of nine leagues [about 24 miles] arrived at El Pueblo de Santa Clara, where we spent the night.” The Tewa-speaking natives of that ancient village called their home Kha’p’o, but Oñate, with a conqueror’s zeal to rename the landscape he had subdued, bestowed upon the pueblo the thirteenth-century identity of Saint Clare of Assisi, one of Francis’s protégées and the founder of an order called the Poor Clares. (In 1958, Pope Pius XII designated Clare the patron saint of television, based on a scrap of hagiography that claimed that when she was too ill to attend mass, she could see it broadcast on the walls of her convent cell.)
Domínguez and Escalante would emulate the practice of Oñate, naming virtually every one of their campsites after some Catholic saint dredged up from their encyclopedic knowledge of ecclesiastical history. The pueblo remains Santa Clara today, even among the Puebloans who live there, though as we drove through the dusty streets we saw “Kha’p’o” adorning signs and office buildings. In the 89° heat, no one was about, except the dogs lazing in the shade of trees and adobe walls. We stopped at the shop of Naranjo Pottery, where a husky young man wearing an MLB cap perched backward on his head and a T-shirt that read “Fist Pump All Summer Long” showed us his jars and bracelets. Sammy Naranjo turned out to be a relative of Tessie Naranjo, the sage Santa Clara writer and activist who had been one of my five articulate Puebloan informants for The Pueblo Revolt. I asked him if he knew of any memorial to D & E to be found in the pueblo. The 1976 commission had urged, “A trail marker near Highway 30 [today’s 84] would be appropriate recognition of the pueblo as a campsite of the expedition. . . . The message on the panel would be a general outline of the D/E story with the date that the group visited here.”
Sammy shook his head. But when the look on my face apparently betokened disappointment, he added, “There used to be a . . . a thing out on the highway.” With his hands he sketched some kind of shelter, perhaps a ramada, the traditional Spanish refuge from summer heat. “But the construction crews tore it down this year.” Sammy chuckled. “It’s been there so long I never read the writing. I don’t know what it was all about.”
0 for 2 so far, I thought, on the D & E memorial trail.
Domínguez himself had not been favorably impressed by the denizens of Santa Clara. In his mission report, he wrote about the Tewa carpenters who in 1758 helped build the mission church, no trace of which survives today, “And since these workers were very gluttonous and spoiled (in this land, when there is work to be done in the convents, the workers want a thousand delicacies, and in their homes they eat filth), the gravy cost the father more than the meat (as the saying goes).” Domínguez counted 67 Indian families at Santa Clara, comprising 229 persons. And he added a gratuitous sneer against the pueblo, as he sized up the village: “They have no true home, because hunger and the enemy [Indians] pursue them from every side as a reward for their levity, weakness, etc.”
From Sammy we bought a tiny black-on-black jar in the style reinvented and perfected in the 1920s by Maria Martinez, the legendary potter from the Tewa pueblo of San Ildefonso, 10 miles down the Rio Grande from Santa Clara, then headed back to our car, making a last pass through the streets. Nearly every house had an adobe horno, or beehive oven, standing in the corner of the yard. Brought to the New World by the Spanish, who had taken it from the Moors, the horno today is a standard appurtenance of Puebloan homes. Young women must master the art of using the oven to bake piki, a tasty, delicate paper-thin bread made of cornmeal, before they are considered fit for marriage.
The Pueblo world today is woven through with syncretism, the often strange hybrids wrought by centuries of Franciscan efforts to Christianize the Indians. The church standing in the center of Santa Clara is a prime example, its courtyard filled with row upon row of headstones, an inordinate number of whose dead were surnamed Naranjo, a thoroughly Spanish appellation. During Vargas’s reconquest of New Mexico, Lucas Naranjo, a warrior from Cochiti, was one of the boldest leaders of the last-ditch effort to resist the Spaniards. After his small band was defeated by Vargas, Naranjo’s severed head was presented as a trophy to the pueblo of Pecos, which had joined the Spanish as an ally against its fellow Puebloans at Cochiti.
On this Saturday afternoon, the Santa Clara church was closed. I used the smelly porta-potty just outside the churchyard fence, wondering when services were held and just what kinds of sermons might reach the ears of today’s half-acculturated Santa Clarans. As we headed out of town, I noted that the high school sports teams were named the Hawks.
We drove on north. In Española, we found the parking lot of the Richard L. Lucero Community Center. Here, the Interpretive Master Plan of the Bicentennial Commission had envisioned “a free-standing historic information panel and site . . . with a paved walk added for access. . . . A sketch of the padres would help.” My search among the parked cars came up empty again. In one corner of the lot, a Latino family was gathered around a grill frying burgers. In their weekend joviality, they did not look like the opioid addicts conjured up by our Santa Fe friend’s warning. Española is one of the most thoroughly Latino towns in the Southwest. For more than a century, Puebloans from Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and Ohkay Owingeh (formerly San Juan) have depended on the shopping plazas of Española to stock up on groceries and household goods, but the edginess of cultural clash persists. In 2003 Tessie Naranjo had told me, “When my mother, who is eighty-seven, and I drive into Española, and we’re in the car after dark, she says to me in Tewa, ‘Close the windows, the Spanish are all around!’ ”
The Commission’s fond plans for a string of commemorative markers seem to have fallen on deaf local ears. With the Lucero Center, they were batting 0 for 3—0 for 4, if you counted the memorial in the Santa Fe plaza that did not exist.
From Española north we stayed on Highway 84, leaving behind the Rio Grande as we ascended its tributary, the Chama River. In 1776, Española was still a century away from being founded as a railroad depot, but 22 miles up the Chama lay Abiquiu, then a collection of adobe houses that stood at the northwestern frontier of the colony. Beyond was the half-known territory dominated by nomadic Utes. “Abiquiu” is a Spanish mangling of the Tewa name Phesu’u, meaning “timbered point of land.” As a Spanish settlement, it dates from the 1740s, although it had been a Tewa pueblo long before that. By 1776, the trail to Abiquiu was already a regular run, and in his diary Escalante covers July 30 in a single long sentence, recording an eventless ride of “nine leagues, more or less” (about 24 miles).
In our RAV4, Sharon did most of the driving as I pored through my books and papers for clues to seeing the landscape through eighteenth-century eyes. Like me, she had become a cautious driver, almost never exceeding the speed limit, signaling diligently for turns and lane changes, keeping the headlights on day and night. (My Utah hiking buddy Vaughn Hadenfeldt liked to tease me for “driving like a Navajo,” as he invoked the elders on the reservation who trundled their pickups along the highway in no particular hurry to get anywhere.) We almost never turned on the car radio, for this far from Santa Fe NPR seemed not to exist, the available stations ranging from country ballads to Hispanic pop to Christian evangelists. Our SUV was equipped with a “lane departure warning system” whose annoying chirps I never figured out how to disable. We chatted about friends back home in Boston, but more often about the day’s logistics. I pointed out peaks and canyons I’d wandered among on other jaunts, and I read aloud from Escalante’s diary and the Bicentennial Commission’s route guide.
All the previous excursions by auto we had made over forty-nine years of marriage had been with the goal of getting somewhere—even the five mind- and body-numbing pilgrimages up the Alaska Highway in our baggage-crammed Saab on our way to unclimbed mountains. This journey, in contrast, felt more like a classic American road trip than any we had shared before. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson about his donkey ramble across the Cévennes in central France. But of course, I was indulging in an illusion. It was the ghosts of D & E that set our course.
In Abiquiu this late Saturday afternoon, the library and the community center were closed, but the church, Santo Tomas el Apostol, was open. Built in 1740, it is a gem of Catholic architecture softened by native ideas of harmony. The sinuous curves of its warm brown adobe walls that O’Keeffe so loved mute the sternness of the martyrs’ portraits that line the walls of the nave, whose ceiling is supported by stout, carved beams of dark brown wood. But the house of worship that so many tourists photograph today is not the one in which Domínguez and Escalante celebrated a “solemn high mass” and “once more implored the aid of our thrice-holy patron saints” before setting off into the little-known north, for today’s Santo Tomas was rebuilt from the ground up in 1935 after the old church burned down.
It would have been logical for the residents of Abiquiu to put up some kind of memorial to D & E, for the padres’ mission embodied the boldness of Spanish exploration at its most energetic. So the Commission believed, urging that “an appropriate site in Abiquiu pueblo is recommended for placement of an Indian interpretive marker explaining the attitude and role of the pueblo with respect to Spanish exploration.” I searched through the streets and managed to find two historic markers. One extolled the achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe; the other sang the wonders of the local geology—Chinle slate from the Triassic era. (0 for 5 for D & E along the trail.)
Domínguez had toured Abiquiu in 1775 as he took the measure of New Mexico’s pueblos. His estimation of the character of the Indians living there was as dim as his verdict on the Santa Clarans. “The lands are extremely fertile,” he wrote, “but their owners, the Indians, are sterile in their labor and cultivation, so that they do not yield what they might with attention, and as a result so little is harvested that the Indians are always dying. . . . There is little to be said about their customs, for in view of their great weakness, it will be understood that they are examples of what happens when idleness becomes the den of evils.”
Whether or not the padres found themselves surrounded by lazy Puebloans sunk in a morass of sin, they recognized that Abiquiu was the last outpost of civilization before their small team plunged into the wild. They stayed over for a second day “due to various circumstances,” as Escalante curtly records their delay. Annotating the 1976 edition of Escalante’s journal in English, Ted Warner heightens the drama of that last step on the threshold of the unknown: “Abiquiu was on the frontier and was the last contact which the explorers had with a Spanish settlement for the duration of the journey, and one can readily imagine the final rush to complete provisions and send final messages, and the anticipation with which the group prepared to move on.”
As the sun wheeled west toward a high forested ridge on September 2, Sharon and I drove dirt roads up toward our sublime campsite overlooking the waving grasses of the Abiquiu Land Grant on one side and the sharp square silhouette of Cerro Pedernal on the other. We hauled our gear out of the RAV4, set up our tent, cooked dinner on our stove, and built a small fire of ponderosa branches. In the wee hours my bad dream arrived. But when the sun pierced the horizon in the morning, I felt no trepidation about the long journey ahead of us—instead, a jittery impatience to get going, a hunger to move, a humming in the blood. During the two years before our trip, those were the emotions I had forgotten how to feel.