IT WAS MIDMORNING ON SEPTEMBER 4 WHEN WE DROVE into Dulce, the headquarters of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. On Labor Day all of the government offices were closed, but the Wild Horse Casino was open, its parking lot mostly full. The day before, as we passed through Canjilon, Tierra Amarilla, and Los Ojos, the only houses of worship we had seen were Catholic ones, as was the wayside shrine in Los Ojos whose statues of the Virgin were bedecked with flowers and rosary beads. In Dulce (population 2,743 in 2010), on the other hand, I spotted a pair of Baptist churches. An Internet search later fleshed out the picture with the Jicarilla Apache Reformed Church, the Dulce Assembly of God Church, and a sole Catholic enclave dedicated, I thought appropriately, to Saint Francis.
I had also noticed the slender white spire of Dulce’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. All over the West, Indian reservations embrace well-attended churches dedicated to the Mormon version of Christianity. Their presence always bemuses me, for the Doctrine of the Lamanites translated by Joseph Smith from the golden plates decrees that Indians are the descendants of the Lamanites, the bad guys among the believers who sailed to the New World from the Holy Land only to wipe out the Nephites (the good guys) in all-out war around 400 AD. For their perfidy, God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin. But if they converted to the church and led lives untainted by sin, the Lamanites might become in the afterlife “a white and delightsome people.”
What could possibly be in it, I often wondered, for a Native American (or an African-American) to become a Mormon? I got one answer some years ago when I interviewed a Navajo man in Roosevelt, Utah, who was an elder in the church. As a kid growing up in Leupp, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, he had watched a string of missionaries ranging from Seventh-Day Adventists to Jehovah’s Witnesses fail to convert his father and mother. “The Mormon missionary was the only one who had taken the trouble to learn our Diné language,” the man told me. “And then later I read the Book of Mormon, and it all sort of made sense.”
From Dulce we headed west on Jicarilla Highway J44, still following Amargo Creek, barely a trickle as it entered the winding canyon. The old D & RG railroad tracks paralleled the paved road. Five and a half miles out of Dulce, Amargo Creek joins the Navajo River, and J44 expires in a junction. J9 pushes on northwest along the banks of the Navajo, while J39 veers southwest up an unpromising gulch called La Juita Creek. (“Amargo” is Spanish for “bitter.” “La Juita” is a family name, original meaning unknown. Both appellations postdate D & E.)
Here, on August 5, 1776, the padres’ party got very confused, then effectively lost. When they struck Amargo Creek the day before, somewhere near today’s semi–ghost town of Monero, they mistook it for the Navajo River—whence their puzzlement that the streambed “carried less water than the Chama.” Even so, as they followed Amargo downstream, they must have run smack into the true Navajo River, which had been the object of their day’s itinerary from the start. (If only Escalante had bothered to explain the deceit—the engaño—that had divided the team the night before, we might better understand their perplexity on August 5.)
It is here that the chronicler grumbles about the “experts” losing the trail. Still, the obvious course ought to have been to follow the sizable current flowing downstream through the canyon toward the northwest, whether or not the team recognized it as the Navajo River. Sharon and I would have needed no map to make that obvious choice on September 4. But instead the Spaniards turned up La Juita Canyon.
The text of Escalante’s journal covering the team’s struggles in this dead-end canyon epitomizes confusion, and is impossible to correlate with today’s maps with any certainty. The tone, though, betrays the exasperation that must have ruled a day of bashing through thickets and woods and climbing slopes in hopes of an orienting view. “And so,” the friar records, “to avoid going farther down, we took to the northwest [actually southwest]. We traveled without a trail for about three leagues [eight miles], going up a high mount but without a steep grade, and we caught sight of the said arroyo’s sunken channel [apparently the Navajo River, even though the team must have already skirted that stream for half a mile before turning up La Juita Canyon]. We went over to it down slopes which were rather rough but negotiable . . .” Then, at last, “we crossed it at a good ford and halted on the northern side.”
Only, to the team’s chagrin, the river they had just forded was not the Navajo. It was the San Juan. Thus they discovered that except for the half mile before the team headed up La Juita Creek, they had missed the Navajo River altogether. “The experts,” Escalante writes, “said that these two rivers came together a little farther up”—meaning that the Navajo was a major tributary of the San Juan, but by following the advice of the “guides” the team had missed the confluence completely.
As Sharon and I drove along Highway J9, following the Navajo all the way, I wondered: Were the guides so incompetent as to choose a blunder through the hills over the obvious track along the river? Why did D & E not follow the lay of the land, instead of blindly taking a route urged by the guides—only to complain later about the poor advice given them by the “experts”?
In September 1975, two members of the Bicentennial Commission trying to rediscover the padres’ route ran into “no trespassing” signs on J9 at the Colorado border. Instead of blithely motoring on into the Southern Ute reservation, as Sharon and I were able to do forty-two years later, W. L. Rusho and Brad Smith set themselves the challenge of finding the precise path of the errant detour the Spaniards had executed on August 5. Rusho and Smith headed up La Juita Creek in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, then parked at a three-way fork between the hills to the west. On foot they hiked west, then scaled the “steep, wooded mountain” they thought the padres’ party must have climbed to get their reorienting view of “the said arroyo’s sunken channel.”
In the late 1990s, I got to know Bud Rusho as I researched a pair of articles and later a book about Everett Ruess, the romantic idealist and wanderer whose disappearance near the Escalante River in 1934 inspired a cult that shows no sign of attenuating today. It was Bud’s compendium of Ruess’s letters and journal entries joined to his own commentary, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty (1983), that had launched the cult. Until his death in 2011, Bud and I exchanged friendly but contentious memoranda about our various theories as to how the twenty-year-old met his end. Bud was a relentless and diligent sleuth when it came to hunting down clues to the past on the ground. At his funeral service in Salt Lake City, fellow historian Steve Gallenson testified, “Bud Rusho knew as much history of every square foot of the West as any man who ever set foot on the planet.”
Above La Juita Creek on September 26, 1975, Bud and his partner reached the summit of a nondescript hill at 7,753 feet above sea level, and declared it the mountain from which the Spaniards had gotten their bearings on August 5. Sharon and I didn’t take the time or trouble to retrace Bud’s scramble, but when I later studied the USGS topo map of the area, I wondered how my friend could have been so sure about Point 7753, versus points 7698, 7830, or any of another half-dozen rounded peaks in the area. The only primary source, after all, is Escalante’s journal, which is quite vague about “going up a high mount without a steep grade,” a description that could fit most of the hilltops in the area.
The urge to be more exact than is reasonable is a foible that afflicts all kinds of historical sleuthing, especially when it pertains to the wrinkles of topography. Schliemann was sure that he had dug up the one and only Troy. I thought for half a year in 2008 that I had found Everett Ruess’s grave. (I was wrong.) Bud Rusho’s certainty about Point 7753 was only the first of an inordinate number of over-positive declarations that Sharon and I would run into in the coming weeks along the Domínguez–Escalante trail.
As I imagined the 1776 party pushing their way through the forest on August 5, I realized that I tended to picture them only as a string of ten men on horseback. But of course the Spaniards were encumbered by a pack train carrying all their gear and food for a journey the leaders knew would last for a minimum of several months. Among the many omissions in Escalante’s admirable journal is any record of gear, provisions, or beasts of burden. We are left to guess how much baggage the men brought with them, on how many and what kinds of animals, and what exactly their saddlebags contained.
A pair of photographers who, like Sharon and me, retraced the route by automobile published their own account in 2011, in a handsome coffee-table book titled In Search of Domínguez and Escalante. Greg MacGregor and Siegfried Halus tried to extrapolate the logistical details from comparisons with other Spanish colonial journeys. They write, “Based upon previous expeditions and adjusting for the size of their entourage, it is assumed that [D & E] started with thirty horses, ten mules, and twenty head of cattle.” Steven G. Baker, the perspicacious historian of the two Rivera expeditions in 1765, is forced to guess the size and makeup of those parties themselves, for Rivera’s journal, far more vague and cursory than Escalante’s, does not even give a roster of his companions. Baker estimates a team of fifteen or twenty men, implying that “there could well have been upwards of sixty or more animals involved.” MacGregor and Halus thus propose a ratio of four horses and mules per man, Baker a ratio of three to four beasts of burden per voyager. Since there is no mention anywhere in Escalante’s journal of cattle, or of eating beef, even when the men were starving, I ended up doubting that D & E had brought any cattle at all.
Still, taking only the low-end ratio of three animals per man, I needed to recast my mental picture of the team as it thrashed its way through the forests and hills of such rugged country as their detour west of the Navajo River on August 5. Every man on horseback, and interspersed among them some twenty horses and mules, each with saddlebags and duffels strapped to its haunches and back. No wonder bushwhacking could turn into such an ordeal. It is a testimony to how tough the men were that on difficult terrain they could still cover distances as great as 15 to 25 miles a day.
As mentioned above, in Escalante’s journal, there is likewise no record of the firearms or other weapons the men carried. In only a few passages does the friar report the firing of a musket to procure game—most notably, a pair of bison much farther along in their arduous journey. Not once does the chronicler indicate that a gun was brandished to confront a hostile native, much less fired. Yet MacGregor and Halus confidently assert, “Each person would have had one musket and possibly a lance.” Baker is more skeptical. As many as four of D & E’s ten men may have been genízaros, succinctly defined by Baker as “Indians who had been taken from their own peoples and reared among the Spanish settlements, where they served as slaves, servants, and herders.” With their dual cultural backgrounds, genízaros were useful to expeditions in the roles of guides and interpreters. Andrés Muñiz was a genízaro, as were, in all likelihood, the last three members of the team named in Escalante’s first entry on July 29: Lucrecio Muñiz, Juan de Aguilar, and Símon Lucero. (Indians raised by the Spaniards were invariably given Spanish names.) Escalante’s constant use of “guides” and “experts” in the plural hints at the roles of those three men, otherwise faceless in the padre’s record, in claiming a knowledge of the route through Indian country. And apropos of Rivera’s teams, Baker states unequivocally that “The genízaros would have carried only bows and arrows as primary weapons.”
About the food the men ate each day along the trail, Escalante is also mute. Passing allusions among scattered entries refer to corn, flour, sugar, and chocolate. Those items were indeed staples of all the Spanish expeditions, but it is hard to imagine the mules and horses carrying sufficient quantities of each to satisfy ten men for three or four months, or even longer. Yet for D & E, Franciscan purism dictated a policy never to trade with the Indians along the way, not even for food, and only extreme hunger would eventually force them to relax that resolve. The other staple, mentioned a number of times in the journal, was tobacco. All early expeditions swore by the essential value of nicotine, and many a rueful diary passage over the centuries curses the fate of men deprived of anything to smoke.
In Escalante’s journal there is no record of the men’s clothing, camping gear, or other equipment. Writing about Rivera’s two expeditions eleven years earlier, whose baggage was most likely similar to D & E’s, Baker dismisses any notion of armor, obsolete by 1765. The men’s garb would have been “simple cotton or woollen clothing and some buckskin items,” as well as “some woollen blankets or sarapes.” Blankets would also have served as sleeping bags. We know that Rivera’s teams carried a tent, as the padres’ entourage almost certainly did, but as for such supplemental gear as cots and camp chairs, the spartan style favored by D & E probably precluded such luxuries. As early as September, Escalante complains about the cold, and we can be sure that compared to any modern expedition, the Spaniards were ill-equipped to deal with plunging temperatures or prolonged rain or snow. Cooking each morning and night would have been accomplished in pots and kettles over the campfire. Perhaps each man had his bowl, spoon, and knife.
It’s evident that the padres carried with them a copy of Rivera’s journals. If those documents are the same as the manuscripts that have come down to us—first translated into English by historian Rick Hendricks in 2015—they would have served only as the most cursory guide to the first leg of the wilderness journey Domínguez and Escalante undertook in 1776. (The translated journal occupies only thirteen pages of Baker’s Juan Rivera’s Colorado, 1765.) Though punctuated by occasional vivid episodes, as a trail guide Rivera’s journals would have seemed maddeningly vague and unhelpful. Not once in his own journal does Escalante report that he chose his day’s route from anything Rivera had written, as opposed to the advice of the “experts,” whom the friar constantly castigates for leading the team astray. Yet as they traveled, D & E kept looking for signs of their Spanish predecessors. On November 20, 1765, at his point of farthest penetration into the unknown, on the banks of a river he mistakenly identified as the Tizón (the Colorado), Rivera carved a memorial in the trunk of a cottonwood tree: “a large cross with a ‘Long Live Jesus’ [Viva Jesús] at the top and my name and the date at the bottom, so that our arrival there may be verified at any time.”
In 1776, the padres searched in vain for Rivera’s memorial. Since cottonwoods seldom live longer than 150 years, we can assume that the explorer’s inscription for eternity has long since crumbled into the soil—if the Indians did not cut it down before that for firewood.
UNCONSTRAINED BY “no trespassing” signs, Sharon and I sailed down Highway J9 into Colorado. A few miles beyond the state line, the road ended in a T junction with a state highway running east–west. Here was the junction, also, where the Navajo River flowed into the San Juan, the confluence so eagerly sought by Domínguez and Escalante. The place was occupied by a winsome ghost town called Juanita, named perhaps after the river. Even after the trip, I was unable to learn much at all about the history of this settlement. The wood-frame houses and stores had a gold-rush look, and an old rail car left stranded on a siding sported a faded D & RG logo. But there were indications that the town had harbored hangers-on until relatively recent times. The gates to one spread bore a tin plaque with the name Gallegos, above a family crest of two bears rampant. The little cemetery, enclosed in its wire fence, blazoned a titular signboard with the advice “For information call . . .” and a southwest Colorado phone number, as if still welcoming applicants who might choose this patch of ground for their eternal resting place. Bouquets of artificial flowers rested against gravestones, one of which memorialized Juanita Gallegos, born in 1931. Either she was still alive somewhere in her eighty-seventh year, or she lay buried elsewhere.
Juanita’s architectural anomaly was a Catholic mission that overlooked the town from a hill to the north. The paint on the handsome wooden building—white for the walls and three-story bell tower, red for the metal roofs—had only just begun to peel. But when we headed up the driveway that leads to the church, we were stopped cold by a sign sternly forbidding access.
On August 5, having forded the San Juan River, the Spaniards called a halt and named their campsite Nuestra Señora de las Nieves (Our Lady of the Snows) in honor of the peaks thronging the horizon to the north, rising to 14,000 feet, still snowcapped toward the end of summer. Vexed by the lay of the land, Escalante set off solo that evening up the banks of the San Juan to find the confluence with the Navajo River. As far as we can tell, this was the first time on the journey that any of the men rode off alone. Were the others too tired to join him, after a day’s march of 21 miles, including the strenuous detour through the wooded hills? The friar was back after a further jaunt of 16 miles, reporting that at the site of the river junction “there were good prospects for a moderate settlement.”
Escalante was even more enthusiastic about the meadows surrounding Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, where “there was good land with prospects for irrigation and everything needed for three or four settlements, even if they be large ones.” He noted the abundance of trees on both sides of the river: “leafy and extremely dense thickets of white poplar [aspen], scruboak, chokecherry, manzanita, lemita, and gooseberry.” Sharon and I drove across the old bridge that spans the San Juan, only to be met by Ute reservation “no trespassing” signs and locked gates. Beyond lay another ghost town marked on the map as Carracas, about which later I could learn no more than I had about Juanita.
Throughout the journey, Escalante had a keen eye for places where future generations of Spaniards might build towns, and by implication where he might return to found missions. About the bend of the Chama where Juan Pedro Cisneros had plunged up to his neck when his horse stepped into an underwater sinkhole Escalante had been prescient, as the fertile fields and herds of livestock in Los Ojos testified. But here, along the San Juan, by 2017 his crystal ball had clouded up, for only the failed outposts of Juanita and Carracas bespoke the promise he had envisioned.
On August 6, the Spaniards traveled only six and a half miles down the San Juan, forging their way through “bad terrain,” before halting for the day. It was not rough travel that stopped the team; instead, “Don Bernardo Miera had been having stomach trouble all along and this afternoon he got much worse.”
Except for the roster on the opening page of his journal, which identifies Bernardo Miera y Pacheco as “retired captain of militia and citizen of La Villa de Santa Fe,” this is Escalante’s first mention of the man. Yet the “retired captain” cut a large enough figure in eighteenth-century New Mexico that today we know more about him than we do about Domínguez or Escalante—enough, in fact, about this gifted polymath that in 2013 historian John L. Kessell was able to write a full biography of Miera y Pacheco, a distinction that the two expedition leaders will probably never earn.
Born in 1713, Miera y Pacheco turned sixty-three during the first month of the expedition. Across the trajectory of his rich and varied life he was, in Kessell’s pithy summation, “ ‘engineer and captain of militia’ on Indian campaigns; explorer and cartographer of lands never before mapped; merchant; luckless silver miner; debtor and debt collector; district officer, or alcalde mayor; rancher; craftsman who worked in metal, stone, and wood; and prolific religious artist.” As a member of the Domínguez–Escalante expedition he did not travel as a soldier, but he had trained as a military engineer and had fought in five Indian campaigns, three against the Comanches, one in an attempt to force the Navajos to settle near Mount Taylor in western New Mexico. Like Escalante, Miera y Pacheco was a native of Cantabria in northern Spain. When he emigrated to New Mexico is unknown, for despite tireless research Kessell was able to find no record of the man’s existence between his baptism in 1713 and his marriage in 1741, which took place at the presidio of Janos in today’s Mexican state of Chihuahua. According to Kessell, the Soldado Distinguido, as he was formally styled toward the end of his life, stood a smidgen under five feet, had blue eyes and “a straight nose.”
Miera y Pacheco’s lasting fame rests on his talents as a cartographer and religious artist. The map he drew after the 1776 expedition is a crowded masterpiece, on which he plotted not only the path of the team’s wandering course through 1,700 miles of mostly terra incognita but indicated with little circles marked with crosses every single campsite (of the more than ninety) along the way. One ponders with astonishment just how the cartographer kept track of all the details of the landscape even as he rode his horse through storms and into cul-de-sacs. As a map of the American Southwest, Miera y Pacheco’s was not superseded until well into the nineteenth century.
The altar screens and statues of saints, carved out of wood and stone, that the artist produced in the 1760s and ’70s are likewise masterpieces. Many of them no longer survive, their glory captured only in faded drawings executed by Miera y Pacheco himself or his later admirers. Yet one altar screen, which Kessell calls “the most inspired religious icon of New Mexico’s colonial period,” has survived almost by accident into the twenty-first century despite being taken apart, moved, and reassembled twice by workers who probably had little idea of its value.
The altar screen rests today in Cristo Rey church on Upper Canyon Road in Santa Fe. Before we set out on our long drive, Sharon and I paid a visit one afternoon in August. The details of the densely configured composition are impossible to grasp on first viewing, but the power of the screen arrests anyone who pauses to look. Measuring 19 feet wide by 25 feet tall, it celebrates five saints, including Santiago (Saint James), who regularly appeared on battlefields to turn the tide against the enemy, as well as two “Our Lady”s, patrons of the colony’s governor, who had commissioned the screen. The niches devoted to each figure are surrounded by ornate decorations in the form of vines, cords, grapes, and obelisks topped with human heads. All this carved out of a soft white volcanic stone and painted with colors (mostly blue and reddish brown) that have not entirely faded more than 250 years later. According to Kessell, the blocks of stone were most likely carved in place, at the quarry near Nambe pueblo north of Santa Fe from which they were dug out of bedrock.
As Sharon and I sat in the front pew in Cristo Rey that afternoon, churchgoers entered to pray. Without exception, they paused before the screen, bowed toward it slightly, and crossed themselves.
Escalante got to know Miera y Pacheco sometime after 1774, when the artist was commissioned to paint another altar screen for the mission at Zuni, where the Franciscan ministered to the natives. As Governor Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta began negotiating with Escalante (and, separately, with Domínguez) about the expedition to link Santa Fe with far-off Monterey, the young padre recommended his friend Miera y Pacheco as “someone clever enough for this affair.” Apparently the governor mistook that remark as a nomination for the role of expedition leader. For some reason, Escalante got cold feet about his enthusiasm for Miera, clarifying in a letter to the governor that “he would be useful . . . not to command the expedition, but to make a map of the terrain explored. . . . [O]nly for this do I consider him useful.”
Whether or not he was aware of this lukewarm vote of confidence, Miera y Pacheco signed on to the expedition without hesitation. From my first reading of Escalante’s journal onward, I wondered about the imbalance this arrangement must have forced on the team. At thirty-six, Domínguez had only his journey up and down the Rio Grande as he compiled his survey of the colony’s missions to qualify him as an explorer. At twenty-seven, Escalante had even less—only the jaunt from Zuni to Hopi and back in 1775. On both journeys the Franciscans had other men along in charge of logistics and route-finding. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that both Domínguez and Escalante were woefully underqualified to lead a grandly ambitious expedition into the unknown.
Miera y Pacheco, on the other hand, was vastly qualified not only as an Indian fighter but as an explorer of the plains east of Santa Fe and the mountains west of the capital. As we traveled the route of the 1776 expedition, I kept wondering how the sixty-three-year-old veteran had borne the often misguided orders of the two unworldly priests so much younger than he, and so much less wise when it came to traveling across difficult, unmapped terrain.
Like most journals written before the twentieth century, Escalante’s is lamentably reticent about conflicts within the party. His account, moreover, was compiled as an official report to the governor and to the Franciscan custodian of New Mexico, and was intended to convince them that an overland route to Monterey was still worth pursuing, not to mention to promote the establishment of towns and the founding of missions along the way. Strife within the party would hardly boost the officials’ faith in the ultimate value of such an ambitious campaign.
So I was keen to read between the lines of the journal, to sniff out episodes in which it seemed likely that Miera y Pacheco simply got fed up with taking orders from his green and hopelessly naive juniors. The engaño of August 4, for instance: who deceived whom, and what was it all about? Miera’s stomachache would trouble him throughout the expedition, and two and a half months from that first upset, with the team in dire straits, his decision to take into his own hands an unusual cure for the malady would provoke from Escalante the most indignant outburst against a teammate in the whole journal—a tirade of righteous fury that must have riven the depleted party to its core. But of that debacle, more in good time.
At the campsite of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, for the first time the Spaniards made a celestial observation to determine their latitude. The instrument they carried for the purpose was an astrolabe. The device, whose origins date back to the second century BC, is used to measure the angle between the horizon and some heavenly body—in D & E’s case, usually the sun—thereby determining latitude. The observer (probably Miera y Pacheco) took his reading at noon, when the sun reached its highest point in the southern sky. The only problem, in an era before accurate clocks had been invented, was knowing exactly when noon arrived.
At Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, the team came up with a latitude of 37˚ 51' N. The actual latitude of today’s ghost town of Carracas is 37˚ 01' N, so the Spaniards were off by a matter of 50', or 57 miles. Nowhere does Escalante state the latitude of Monterey, which is 36˚ 36' N. But implicit in the whole idea of the journey was the plan to push north from Santa Fe to a latitude roughly equal to that of the new colony in California, then head straight west to close the gap.
We should not assume, however, that Escalante knew the latitude of Monterey with any precision. To appreciate just how hard it was for news from the California coast to reach New Mexico, consider the following facts. The resupply wagons that traveled the 1,200 miles from Mexico City to Santa Fe, even along a well-beaten trail, routinely took six months to arrive. Even the fastest couriers on horseback required one to three months. The lag between Monterey and Mexico City was of comparable duration. (By 1776 New Spain still took its ultimate orders from the king in Castile; the communication of a single question and response between the New World and the Old could take three years to complete.)
Even if Domínguez and Escalante knew the exact latitude of Monterey, they had no idea of how far away it was, for the simple reason that by 1776 no accurate means of gauging longitude had been perfected. In 1714, the British parliament had passed the famous Longitude Act, offering a reward of £20,000 for the solution of a problem that had vexed navigators since antiquity. Although John Harrison claimed the prize in 1773 after inventing a chronometer precise enough to solve the problem, no practical knowledge of the answer to the conundrum had reached the remote colony of New Mexico by the time D & E set out. That crucial unknown—how far away was the phantom colony of Monterey?—would hang over the expedition throughout its wandering course.
By August 5 the party had covered, by their own reckoning, 145 miles on the ground since leaving Santa Fe. If the men had any idea of how small a portion of the journey they would ultimately make that stretch represented—not even one-tenth of the distance—Escalante’s journal gives no hint of that gloomy truth.
On the morning of August 7, Miera y Pacheco’s stomachache had relented—or, as the chronicler put it, “God willed that he got better . . . so that we could continue on our way.” And here, at last, the landscape opened up before the men on horseback. That day they came in sight of La Piedra Parada, or Standing Rock, the striking pair of pinnacles near today’s Pagosa Springs that Anglos would name Chimney Rock. There, in the eleventh century AD, the Anasazi built a small but important village whose alignment with the towers was tied up with Chacoan priests’ mastery of the arcane astronomical phenomenon called the lunar standstill. No Europeans, however, would discover the ancient ruin beneath the pinnacles for another century and a half. But the twin towers were a landmark so well known to Spaniards that, three days earlier, Escalante had vowed that the team was following “the said trail of La Piedra Parada.” (Why Standing Rock as a marker, I wondered, and not the Brazos?)
Now it seemed as though the party, so bewildered as it had sought to follow the Chama and Navajo rivers, knew at last where it was going. Through that day and the next, the men crossed, successively, rivers whose names they already knew—the Piedra, the Pinos, the Florida, and at last the Animas—names first bestowed by Rivera in 1765. Here, as we drove across cultivated plateaus on back roads linking the towns of Arboles and Ignacio, Sharon and I gave up trying to follow D & E mile by mile. For one thing, the first part of their route on August 7 had been obliterated by the Navajo Reservoir, another dam-building boondoggle from the glory days of the Bureau of Reclamation. It was the third place on our drive where artificial lakes drowned the lost trail of the pioneers. And there was no point trying to suss out exactly where the Spaniards had bisected the corn fields and alfalfa pastures of today’s Ute and Hispanic farmers and ranchers. As the Bicentennial surveyors had confessed about this stretch, “they could have camped anywhere,” and “they probably would have gone” somewhere, while “in all probability, they paralleled” such-and-such latter-day road.
Yet as if to compensate for this fuzziness, the surveyors decided that they knew exactly where the team had crossed the Animas and camped on the evening of August 8: “four miles south of the city limits of Durango.” As if even that specification were too vague, R. W. Delaney and Robert McDaniel fixed the spot for eternity as “a level place directly west of the livestock sale barn.” Of course the livestock barn of 1976 is no more, while the banks of the Animas south of downtown Durango swarm today with Walmart and Home Depot and Target and half a dozen motels.
Once again, the vagueness of Escalante’s journal goads modern-day scholars to claim a certainty they cannot justify. All the chronicler says is, “We crossed [the Animas] and halted on the opposite side.” Throughout the previous two days’ travel, Escalante had waxed enthusiastic about “very good land for farming” and “extensive and good lands . . . with all that may be desired for a goodly settlement.” But on the banks of the Animas, he was not impressed: “There is no good pasturage here,” where the river “runs through a box channel.” Poor Escalante! He had envisioned thriving settlements along the San Juan where today Juanita and Carracas crumble toward oblivion, but on the site of Durango, population 18,503 in 2016, by far the largest town we had visited since leaving Santa Fe, he saw only an indifferent bivouac site.
Instead of camping out on the night of September 4, Sharon and I stayed in a motel. The next day we met John Kessell for lunch at his favorite Durango restaurant, Ken and Sue’s, where I grilled the historian, who knows as much about colonial New Mexico as any man or woman alive, for his insights into the Domínguez–Escalante expedition. It seemed, however, that he had drawn the same blanks that had stumped me. “Where were the Indians?” I asked, referring to the strange fact that all the way from Abiquiu to Durango (and beyond), the Spaniards had met not a single Navajo, Apache, or Ute. Kessell could only shrug. How much did D & E know about the country before they set out? “The key to all this,” said the historian, “is Andrés Muñiz, who had been with Rivera. But we know almost nothing about Muñiz.”
I praised Kessell for the tenacity of his research into the life of Miera y Pacheco: traveling to Spain to hunt down obscure documents in parochial archives just to find, buried in the mountains of paper about long-forgotten lives, the barest mention of Miera’s family, or infiltrating the musty vaults of the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City to sort out Franciscan hierarchies. (The list of archives plumbed in Kessell’s bibliography runs to twenty-six institutions in four countries.)
As always in the company of a true scholar, I felt both admiration and—what? Something halfway between envy and pity? A book like Kessell’s Miera y Pacheco might sell a thousand copies, a fair portion of them going to libraries. The university press that published the book would pay the author zero dollars as an advance, subjecting him instead to the often nasty process of peer review. You couldn’t make a living writing such books, so you became a professor for your day job, as Kessell had at the University of New Mexico. I had decided, at age thirty-six, that if I wanted to make a living as a writer, I had to quit teaching. Yet all of my books and articles that touched on history or archaeology depended critically on the deep arcana I’d gleaned from the Kessells in their fields. I could only be glad that they had done so much of my homework for me.
If lunch at Ken and Sue’s was Sharon’s and my Durango pleasure, we also had a Durango chore to perform. The forty days we planned to spend on the D & E trail were a span almost three times as long as any trip away from home I had taken since July 2015, when I learned I had cancer. Among those five or six shorter forays, two had ended in medical crises, when I collapsed and had to be rushed to emergency rooms. It was sheer luck that I had been stricken only a few miles away from excellent hospitals in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Mammoth Lakes, California, rather than off in the boonies or camped in the wilderness.
It was Sharon who had borne the burden of getting me to safety in every one of the ten or so hospitalizations I had needed to stay alive in the last two years, either when she called 911 for an ambulance or drove me groaning in the back seat to the emergency room. She had agreed to our D & E extravaganza only on two conditions: that we buy Global Rescue insurance, which would cover the cost of an airlift, if necessary, all the way from some trail in Colorado or Arizona to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; and that we rent a satellite phone.
On all my Alaskan expeditions, I had relished the purism of cutting ourselves off from any prospect of outside rescue. There was a bracing freedom in the realization that if we got in trouble on a big wall or a remote glacier, we would have to get ourselves out of it. Toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, adventure had been corrupted by the pathetic need of climbers on Everest or sledgers in Antarctica to be in almost hourly contact with the outside world by sat phone, radio, and Internet, and to count on rescue by plane or helicopter if things went wrong. But now, because of the cancer, I agreed to the sat phone Sharon demanded, which we carried in the back seat of our SUV every mile of the way. I could only hope that we never had to take it out of its plastic case except to charge the batteries.
There was also the matter of the Pembrolizumab I was taking every three weeks, which was all that stood between me and death by metastasis. At the last minute, my oncologist at Dana–Farber had decided it was safe to go six weeks without Pembro, since its carryover effect seemed to have worked wonders already. But on the eve of our flight from Boston to Albuquerque at the end of August, my latest blood draw gave a sodium level of 125—dangerously low. Sharon wondered whether we should cancel or postpone the whole D & E trip. I couldn’t bear the thought. I agreed to swallow my 6,000 mg of salt pills a day and to sprinkle salt on all my food and drink salty V8 juice and put drops of electrolyte in all the water I drank, but we had to arrange for a blood draw in the first decent facility we came to on the road. That turned out to be the Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango.
For some reason, the center refused to tell Sharon and me the results of the test. That classified information would have to be relayed through Dana–Farber. (What was the risk? That I would, metaphorically speaking, rip out all my tubes and stomp out of the hospital to get back on the road?) We waited through an anxious day and night until we got the news from my oncologist’s assistant. Somehow, as we had camped in the national forest and sorted out the bends of the Chama and Navajo rivers during the previous week, I had jacked my sodium level up to 130. That still wasn’t in the “normal” range of 135–145 but it was good enough for me—and for my wardens back in Boston.
Not that it had ever been hard for us to hang out in Durango. It was Sharon’s and my usual gateway to Cedar Mesa, where we bought groceries for as much as three weeks, camp chairs and coolers, beer and wine. There are no liquor stores in Bluff or Blanding, the towns closest to my favorite Anasazi wilderness; you can buy 3.2% Bud Lite at the K & C convenience store in Bluff, while Blanding is as dry as the staunchest Mormon could desire. I had always been told that it was illegal to import more than a six-pack of beer and a single bottle of wine from Colorado to Utah, and had heard many a tale of college boys on spring break busted on their way to their Lake Powell houseboats, so we always stashed our Tecates and cabernets under piles of foodstuffs from City Market or Albertsons as we drove west on the McElmo road. Sometimes in Durango we stayed at the Strater, a gem of a gold-rush hotel, which looks much the same as it did in 1887.
In town we’d always had our choice of five or six really good restaurants and a dozen serviceable ones, a perk that meant a lot more to me before radiation killed access to all my favorite foods. Maria’s Bookstore is one of the best in the Southwest, and up on the mesa east of town, Fort Lewis College has a strong anthropology department and library. Four or five times I’d ridden the old coal-chugging narrow gauge train up spectacular Animas Canyon to Silverton, and way back in 1963, six of us had hiked down the tracks from Silverton on the day before Christmas on our way to making the first winter ascents of five sharp peaks in Colorado’s most serious range, the Grenadiers.
Before the trip, I’d casually noticed Dominguez and Escalante Roads, a pair of intersecting streets south of downtown Durango, not far from where the Bicentennial folks insist the expedition camped in 1776. Now I made local inquiries. None of the clerks I talked to whose businesses stood on Dominguez Road had ever heard of the Franciscan, and the Toyota dealer even denied that his address was on a street named after the explorer. But on Escalante Road, I had better luck. There proudly stands the Escalante Middle School, founded in 1995, and inside a glass case in the foyer I read that the school’s name had been chosen by a vote of students, teachers, and unspecified community members. The brief résumé of the expedition even got the essential details right. (The school’s team name, the Eagles, reflected a constituency that “identifies with endangered animals.”)
Durango was founded in 1880 as a shipping depot by the D & RG Railroad, as if snubbing the company nose at hard-drinking Animas City two miles up the valley. The Colorado governor named the town after Durango, Mexico, though nobody seems to remember why. If the Eagles had their way, though, Escalante would be recognized as the town’s founding father.
On the morning of September 6 we headed out of town on U.S. Highway 160 and after two miles turned left up Wildcat Canyon. The Spaniards took something like this route on August 9, and though Escalante grumbled about the climb out of the Animas canyon as “quite difficult, consisting of plenty of rock and being very steep in places,” soon he was pleased with Wildcat’s “narrow valley of abundant pastures.” About 10 miles on, after cresting a low divide, the party came to another river that they identified as the La Plata.
For the first time in his journal, Escalante explicitly tips his cap to Rivera. The river, he writes, “rises at some western point of La Sierra de la Plata and descends through the same canyon in which there are said to be veins and outcroppings of metallic ore. However, although years ago certain individuals from New Mexico came to inspect them by order of the governor, who at the time was Don Tomás Vález Cachupín, and carried back metal-bearing rocks, it was not ascertained for sure what kind of metal they consisted of. The opinion that some formed previously, from the accounts of various Indians and from some citizens of the kingdom, that they were silver ore, furnished the sierra with this name.” Plata, of course, is Spanish for “silver.”
The great disappointment of Coronado’s massive entrada was that in two years of dogged searching and cross-examining the natives, the Spaniards never discovered workable deposits of gold and silver in the Southwest. Inca and Aztec gold had so dazzled Pizarro and Cortés that they laid waste the two greatest empires in the New World to seize the precious metals. Even as late as 1776, the quest for treasure in the ground still stirred Spanish blood.
According to Steven G. Baker, Rivera’s twin thrusts into the Southwest were launched as much as anything by the arrival in Abiquiu sometime in the early 1760s of a Moache Ute man bearing a single piece of rock he had dug out of the ground in a mountain range in his homeland far to the northwest. The Abiquiu blacksmith smelted the stone, from which he extracted enough pure silver to cast a pair of rosaries and a crucifix.
In 1765, guided by a pair of Utes, Rivera spent much time panning the La Plata up to its headwaters in the mountains where, he reported, “We saw such a variety of veins of different colors that they are innumerable. It can be said without exaggeration that the whole sierra is pure ore and there is much to see.” Alas, Rivera’s men had no picks or shovels for mining, but they carved enough ore out of the ground with their knives to carry it back to Santa Fe, where the precious stuff further whetted the appetite of the governor.
Eleven years later, under a different governor, the two Franciscans looking for a route to California, forbidding their men to trade with the Indians (none of whom they had yet encountered), and scouting for the sites of future towns and missions, nonetheless caught silver fever on La Plata Creek. Their ardor was dampened when it rained heavily for two days and the temperature plunged. Escalante concluded that the whole region was always “excessively cold even in the months of July and August.” Here Domínguez caught a bad cold, with “a rheumy flow in his face and head.” The journal for August 10 and 11 is a litany of misery: the ill-fed horses grew weak, the “trail” turned to mud, the cold depleted everyone, and at last Domínguez “got worse, the trail became impossible, and so, after very painful traveling another two leagues to the west, we found ourselves obliged to halt.”
When Domínguez awoke on August 11 exhausted, with a high fever, the team gave up all hopes of mining silver. Escalante’s regret is palpable: “For this reason we could not go over to see the sierra’s metallic veins and rocks mentioned, even though they were a short distance away, as one companion who had seen them on another occasion assured us.” A little more than a century later, the La Platas and the San Juans would become the center of a frenzy of fortune-building in gold and silver matched by only a handful of bonanzas anywhere in the American West.
At the small village of Hesperus, we regained Highway 160, which I had driven countless times before. More or less on the D & E trail, we headed west. Six miles along, we pulled over at the Escalante Wayside, a memorial I had often perused, but never as carefully as we did now. Here was the first tangible fruit of the Bicentennial Commission’s ambitious campaign to install commemorative markers all along the 1776 loop, the only salute to the daring expedition we had found in the 240-odd miles we had driven since Santa Fe.
It was handsomely done, a bronze plaque mounted on a conglomerate boulder that happened to have come to rest at this place sometime after the last ice age. The scene depicts Domínguez and Escalante walking in their robes, rather than riding. One of them holds a small cross in one hand, a string of rosary beads in the other. Behind them in the distance, three teammates feed and adjust the loads on four horses, while another four men look on. The text pins down the date of the expedition’s passage as August 10, and explains their goal as “seeking a route to link the long established missions of New Mexico with Monterey, the recently founded capital of California.” An adjoining panel hails the party as proto-peaceniks: “Throughout their journey they encountered a dozen native tribes, yet they never resorted to violence against their fellow men.”
A separate panel commemorates the Spanish Trail, which became a trading route only some fifty years later, and singles out the French mountain man Antoine Robidoux as one of the pioneer traders to the Utes. Some passerby had gouged a vicious “X” with a knife across an 1843 painting of Robidoux. I wondered what particular deed or character flaw had so angered the slasher, who spared the gentle Franciscans. Perhaps it was Robidoux’s penchant for buying Ute pelts and blankets with bottles of rotgut and firewater.
We drove another ten miles west to the town of Mancos. I’d spent time here twenty-five years before, when I first got interested in the Anasazi, for this was the home of Richard Wetherill, who with his four brothers and assorted cronies was credited with the Anglo discovery of the ruins of Mesa Verde, and who dug antiquities out of the ground all over southeast Utah. Back in 1992, I had come to Mancos with Tom Wetherill, Richard’s great-nephew, to visit the family’s Alamo Ranch, with its stately Pennsylvania Dutch barns (zinc-plated roofs, wooden-pegged joints, ventilator cupolas) still intact. In the 1880s, from a frontier settlement living in daily fear of a Ute attack, the Wetherill brothers rode unarmed into the canyons west of the ranch, won the friendship of Ute chief Acowitz, and began to unlock the prehistoric secrets of the great mesa that looms over Mancos.
On August 10, after their miserable ride through rain and mud, with Domínguez plagued by his “rheumy” head, the expedition camped on the east fork of yet another river, which they referred to as both the San Lázaro and the Mancos. Rivera had called the small stream the Rio del Lucero, but it was Mancos—apparently D & E’s coinage—that stuck. It is a very curious appellation, for in Spanish it means “one-armed” or “one-handed.” No one today seems to know what the name referred to. One source, vaguely citing “unverified lore,” would have it that the party’s horses, crippled by their “traverse” of the San Juan mountains, regained their health by chowing down on the lush green grass along the river. This is nonsense, for by August 10 the team had barely skirted the southern foothills of the San Juans, and for all his complaining, Escalante makes no mention of crippled horses or of lush streamside grasses.
At Mancos we left Highway 160 to take state road 184, which trundles northwest for 17 miles to reach the Dolores River and the town of the same name. In 1976 the Bicentennial Commission, not content with proposing the Escalante Wayside, urged renaming Route 184 “the Domínguez–Escalante Memorial Highway,” for “the highway approximates the route of the expedition through this area.” Forty-one years later, the blacktop is still known only as Colorado Highway 184. As on our jaunt through Arboles and Ignacio two days earlier, Sharon and I made no attempt to divine the precise path the Spaniards had taken through this gently tilted plain, sectioned into fields and pastures today. About the ride on August 12, Escalante specifies only a 22-mile ramble through “leafy tree-growth” and “a sagebrush stretch.” Delaney and McDaniel, the surveyors responsible for this passage in 1975, concluded only that “the expedition probably took a more direct route than does Colorado Highway 184.”
Throughout the whole of our own retracing journey, Sharon did most of the driving, as I shuffled maps and reread (usually out loud) the day’s entry from Escalante’s journal, as well as the commentary in the Bicentennial report. In recent years, Sharon has become a devotee of Google Maps on her iPhone for unearthing driving directions. In unfamiliar cities, as we try to find a restaurant or a medical center, I have to admit that the system works pretty well, though when the smirking disembodied voice orders, “In two hundred feet, turn right on Narragansett Street,” I have to resist the urge to argue back, “Yeah? How do you know?” Always, though, even in the most convoluted urban mazes, I’m not happy unless I have some kind of paper map in hand as backup. All my life I’ve needed to know, every waking moment, no matter where I am or how far indoors, which way is north. Every day on our D & E pilgrimage, I had a map in my head that precisely marked where we were on the long circuit the padres had imprinted on the land. Sometimes, as Sharon was driving switchbacks up a mountain road, I would ask, out of the blue, “Okay, which way is Santa Fe from here?,” and when she pointed 130 degrees in the wrong direction, I would cruelly snicker.
I like to think that my sense of direction was honed on my Alaska expeditions, when in a blinding snowstorm it was vital to know where the col leading to the next cirque must lie, but I’m pretty sure I had maps in my head from the age of six or eight onward. I know that by now I’m a hopeless reactionary, pining for the good old days when you could pick up a free highway map at every gas station, or, to hark back to childhood, when you could figure out just by looking around that if you took the alley between Columbine and Mariposa Avenues and then cut across the vacant lot, you could save thirty steps on the hike home from Uni Hill School.
Reactionary or not, I actually feel a thrum of low-level anxiety each time I surrender to the GPS in Sharon’s iPhone, relieved only by the miraculous arrival at the intended destination. Whenever I read one of those stories about some hapless boob blindly following a GPS into disaster, I feel a surge of righteous amusement. The woman in Brussels, for instance, who went to pick up her friend at the train station and ended up in Zagreb. (“I was distracted,” she claimed.) Or the Japanese tourists trying to drive to a destination east of Brisbane, Australia, who had to abandon their car, stuck up to the windows in water, because they didn’t realize that nine miles of ocean intervened between the mainland and North Stradbroke Island. Or, closer to my home, the woman in Massachusetts who got her car stuck in a sand trap on a golf course when she followed the GPS order to turn left into an apparent cornfield. (The investigating officer reported, “Mrs. Maione stated that she did not even like golf.”)
I’d like to think that Magellan had some kind of map in his head as he tried to circumnavigate the globe in 1519–22, even before any real map existed. And that Domínguez and Escalante had a mental chart of where they were, even when they wondered if they were lost, and that surely Miera y Pacheco was drawing a comprehensisve map in his head every mile along the way, from which a year later he would sit down with his quills and inks and draw the astonishing map that would remove so much of the incognita from the terra the expedition had explored.
In 2016 I read a remarkable article in the New York Times Magazine about how for centuries before first contact, the native canoers of the Marshall Islands had perfected the arcane art of “wave-piloting” to navigate vast ocean distances between tiny islands. In the article, Kim Tingley referenced a neuroscientific study that found that people who navigate only by GPS never activate the hippocampus, causing that part of the brain to shrink, whereas those who eschew GPS, like London taxi drivers who memorize the labyrinth of the city streets, have their hippocampuses enlarge. Some researchers were trying to figure out “what effect, if any, the repeated bypassing of this region of the brain might be having on us.” The hippocampus, after all, is, in Tingley’s words, “an evolutionarily primitive region largely responsible for our emotional lives.”
So far, though, on the D & E trail I wasn’t worried about Sharon’s hippocampus. I just wished she could point a little more accurately across the mesas and mountains toward Santa Fe.
ON AUGUST 12 the Spaniards reached the Dolores River, crossed it, and camped on its northern shore. Most students of the journey think that their campsite was about where today’s town of Dolores stands (2016 population: 997). The padres knew the name of the river from Rivera’s expedition eleven years before. Their predecessor must have been in a gloomy mood as he traversed this lovely corner of Colorado, for the full name he gave the stream is Rio de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, or River of Our Lady of the Sorrows, and the full name of the Animas is Rio de las Animas Perdidas, or River of Lost Souls.
To give Domínguez a chance to recover from his cold, the team stayed in camp all day on August 13. They took their second reading by astrolabe, coming up with a latitude of 38˚ 13 ½' N—once again too far north, this time by 44½', or 51 miles. The friars were pleased with the site, finding “everything that a good settlement needs for its establishment and maintenance as regards irrigable lands, pasturage, timber, and firewood.” Founded in 1891 as yet another railhead of the D & RG, Dolores soon became a ranching town. The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado remarks that the town “periodically lives and dies with the cattle industry.”
Not many readers of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita realize that his heroine is named after the town, which the author fell in love with on one of his butterfly-hunting excursions in the late 1940s. Lolita’s given name is Dolores Haze, and her other nickname is Dolly. In the climactic scene, when Humbert Humbert confronts Claire Quilty before shooting him, he taunts his rival with a line that embeds one of Nabokov’s many secret clues to the origins of his fable. “Do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze?” Humbert demands. “Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?”
In his August 13 entry, Escalante further notes, “Upon an elevation on the river’s south side, there was in ancient times a small settlement of the same type as those of the Indians of New Mexico, as the ruins we purposely inspected show.” When the Bicentennial retracers came through in 1975, a team from the University of Colorado was in the process of excavating an Anasazi ruin on a hilltop two miles west of town. Since it lay on the south side of the river, the archaeologists decided to call it Escalante Ruin. At the time, a museum near the site was under construction. Founded only in 1988, the Anasazi Heritage Center is today one of the finest small archaeological museums in the West, with vibrant changing exhibits and a hands-on approach to making prehistory accessible to students and children.
By 2017, the Heritage Center had taken full possession of Escalante Ruin, with a zigzag half-mile trail leading from the museum to the fully restored grid of roomblocks surrounding a large central kiva. From the ruin you get a lordly view down to the Dolores River, though yet another dam, creating McPhee Reservoir, has turned the current into a placid lake. In 1975 the surveyors reserved their judgment about the excavators’ claim to have found the ruin Escalante visited, for a sketch map drawn by two longtime residents located two other ruins that could have fit the bill, since bulldozed out of existence by local ranchers. The museum’s proud hilltop ruin, wrote Delaney and McDaniel, “may or may not be the one mentioned by Escalante.”
The Heritage Center’s brochure also claims that Escalante’s observation was “the first record of an archaeological site in present-day Colorado.” This claim, unfortunately, is not true. On the Los Pinos River in 1765, Rivera stumbled upon other Anasazi roomblocks, and he showed a keener curiosity about those relics of antiquity than Escalante would about his—though for all the wrong reasons. Wrote Rivera in his journal,
We began to see along [the river’s] banks the ruins of old buildings that provided evidence of having been a pueblo. There are still many burnt adobes as though from the bottom of a smelter. Carrying out the necessary investigations with greater reflection and care, we found among the ruins of the pueblo something like a smelter in which they smelt ore, which appeared to be gold. We gathered some burnt adobes from it to show them to the governor.
Since the museum brochure was so certain about Escalante Ruin, I sought out the chief ranger for further elucidation. After all, Escalante’s entry is pretty generic about the ruin’s location: “upon an elevation on the river’s south side.”
“How do you know the ruin CU excavated is Escalante’s?” I asked the man.
“We’re 99.9 percent sure it’s the one he discovered,” the ranger answered. I waited for further clarification, but in the time-honored tradition of scholars confronted by skeptics, the ranger merely alluded to “further researches” and “documents” that he unfortunately didn’t have right at hand.
It was the pattern Sharon and I had already come to expect along the D & E trail. Most of the way, the 1776 expedition drew a blank in locals’ memories. But where it lit a bulb instead, our informants appealed to deep insider knowledge, to a connection with the past that transcended the narrow margins of the padre’s diary. At the Anasazi Heritage Center, at that moment the whole museum resembled a country inn on some hallowed historic roadway. I could almost see the shingle hung above the front door: “Escalante slept here.”