IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT. THE NEXT DAY, SHORTLY BEFORE noon, the Yuta returned, bringing with him two women and five children, “two of those at the breast . . . all of good features and very friendly.” Unfortunately, the family plainly expected to trade with the Spaniards, for they brought with them manzanita berries, a delicacy the men had already sampled as they rode up the Chama on August 2, finding them “like grapes, and very tasty.” Now the friars had to explain that they weren’t interested in trade, a claim that bewildered the Ute.
But after a preliminary parley, the family sat down with the Spaniards, and when the wife offered the travelers jerked venison to go with the berries they accepted, offering flour in exchange. In due time, the Ute man proposed a price for his services as a guide, to which the Spaniards agreed, handing over “two big all-purpose knives and sixteen strings of white glass beads.” What was this barter all about, if not trade?
Some uneasiness must still have lingered about the meeting, for Escalante was concerned “lest they took us for scouts intending to conquer their land.” To allay the Ute’s fears, the friar told him a story that must have turned the man’s confusion to utter bafflement. He explained that “a certain padre, a brother of ours,” had recently made a trip of his own into the vast territory on the New Mexican frontier, during which he came into contact with quite another tribe of Indians, the Cosninas, know today as the Havasupai. The homeland of these natives lay on the downstream end of the Grand Canyon, at least 500 miles to the west and south of the present conversation. It’s entirely likely that the man the Spaniards had just hired to guide them was completely unaware of the existence of the Cosninas.
Escalante babbled on. News of the journey of this brother, this fellow padre, might have passed on to the Payuchi Utes (the Southern Paiutes, still hundreds of miles away), and thence perhaps to the Tabehuachis and the Sabuaganas. To make matters more urgent, Escalante was worried about his far-off brother. Had he come to harm? Had the Ute sitting here with his family, kids and all, heard any news?
Reading this bizarre entry in Escalante’s journal, one wonders just what sort of answer the Ute tendered. Whatever it was, no matter how thoroughly Escalante misunderstood, his words put the padre at ease. No, the man hadn’t seen the long-lost brother, but “fully sharing our worry,” he was reassured thereby that this strange Spanish team was not bent on conquest.
In this journal entry on August 24, for the first time we hear about Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés. And therein hangs a tale.
Father Garcés, a Franciscan born in Aragón in Spain, had been posted to the mission at San Xavier del Bac in what is now southern Arizona in 1768. From that base he ministered to the Pima and Papago as he tried to bring them into the Christian fold, and a restless spirit drove him to an extraordinary career as an explorer.
It is unlikely that Escalante and Garcés ever met. But from Hopi on July 3, 1776, the thirty-eight-year-old Garcés wrote a letter to his fellow Franciscan, as the missionary posted to the nearest other pueblo, at Zuni, detailing his most recent expedition. In January 1776, Garcés had set out from San Xavier del Bac on a far-ranging reconnaissance that would last eleven months, taking him all the way to California, then back beyond San Xavier to Hopi. It was a mark of Garcés’s courage and adaptability that he traveled with only two Indian companions. Along the way, he survived meetings with several tribes considered to be deeply hostile to Spaniards, and rumored to be cannibals—including the Cosninas, or Havasupai.
As he traveled, Garcés developed the conviction that a northern route through the homeland of the Yutas would best link Santa Fe with Monterey. Writing to Escalante on July 3, still in mid-journey, he was addressing a fellow believer in the northern route, on which the younger Franciscan would set out with Domínguez before the month was out.
By traveling in roundabout fashion from California to Hopi, Garcés might have demonstrated a southern alternative to the northern route directly from Santa Fe to Monterey that D & E hoped to discover, and in which Governor Mendinueta had put his faith. But Garcés’s own encounters with the many hostile tribes he passed among in southern Arizona and California, not to mention at equally hostile Hopi, made that itinerary a shaky proposition. Only a few years later, Father Garcés would pay with his life for his trust in those southern natives. The fact that in his letter to Escalante, Garcés voiced his belief that a northern route would be faster and safer than the meandering path he had so bravely pioneered underscores the danger and impracticality of the southern route. Almost fifty years later, the Spanish Trail that would finally link Santa Fe to Monterey followed D & E’s reconnaisance far more closely than Garcés’s zigzagging route.
By early July, Escalante was no longer at Zuni, having traveled to Santa Fe to prepare for the great expedition. Somehow Garcés’s letter caught up to him just before he left on July 29. Throughout the long journey into the unknown land of the Yutas, Garcés’s remarkable feat was very much on the younger friar’s mind. As to why Escalante apparently believed that by late August, when he met his first Ute near the San Miguel River, Garcés might still be in the wilderness, much less far enough north for the Tabehuachis or Sabuaganas to have gotten wind of him, let alone perhaps lost or in harm’s way—all that is yet another of the many mysteries that haunt Escalante’s journal.
So on August 24, the padres signed up their Tabehuachi Yuta guide to lead the party onward. If he and his family were to accompany the Spaniards, he needed a name. His Ute name, perhaps unpronounceable, would never do. So D & E dubbed him Atanasio, after Domínguez himself. As Atanasio, the new guide became more than another misnamed native. He emerged, in effect, as the team mascot.
Musing upon this enigmatic passage in Escalante’s diary, I fantasized about the exchange, as the padre heard what he wanted to hear.
Escalante: “We’re worried about Brother Garcés. Have you seen him hereabouts? Or heard any word about what he’s up to?”
Atanasio: “No, my friend. Not a word. But we’ll keep an eye out.”
Escalante: “The last we heard from him he was hanging out with the Cosninas. And as you know, they are a very dangerous bunch.”
Atanasio (to himself): In the name of Sinauf and all the other gods, who are these Cosninas? I think this fellow wearing his blue blanket is a little crazy. (Out loud): “Yes, very dangerous. That’s why we have nothing to do with them. And now, should we get on our way?”
ON THE AFTERNOON of September 18, Sharon and I left Nucla and drove east on Highway 90. We knew that the Spaniards, guided now by Atanasio, had crossed the Uncompahgre Plateau, taking four days to complete the rugged traverse. There’s no telling today just where the party traveled on that trackless upland, but the Bicentennial Commission, relying as usual on their tendentious judgments about “likely” campsites and water sources, concluded that the expedition had more or less paralleled present-day Route 90. That road, rising through a badlands of scrub oak, was Sharon’s and my only choice. In his journal Escalante complains about the “encumbered terrain” as the team ascended through “dense clumps of scruboak.”
We were checking the pullouts along the highway, hoping to find a campsite with a view to the western horizon. It was still a day or two before bow hunting season opened and the pullouts were all empty. Somewhere along the road we passed the site of a ghost town called Ute without recognizing it. It’s marked on the AAA “Indian Country” map (everybody’s cartographic bible to the Southwest), but even after the trip I could find no information about that fugitive settlement.
In my teens and twenties, I’d climbed a lot in the Elk Range and the San Juans, but I’d never visited the somber and summitless Uncompahgre Plateau, named after the same Ute band that Escalante referred to as the Tabehuachis. We took the drive slowly, with Sharon at the wheel of our RAV4. It was another warm afternoon with clear skies and a gentle breeze, and I relished every bend in the curving highway.
Exactly thirteen years before, on September 18, 2004, with my fellow devotees of all things Anasazi Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt, I’d come to the end of our eighteen-day, 125-mile traverse of the Comb Ridge in Arizona and Utah. The Comb is a massive monocline created by the cataclysmic slippage of tectonic plates 65 million years ago. We decided to try that marathon backpack partly because, as far as we could learn, no one else had ever done it, but mainly because the Comb was riddled with hidden sites that had once been numinous places for the Anasazi, then for both Navajos and Utes. That September we blundered into a heat wave, and nearly every day we sweated and suffered under loads as heavy as 80 pounds in temperatures above 90˚ Fahrenheit. But it had been a rich and gratifying mini-expedition. Now, in 2017, I looked back on our Comb traverse as the last major backpacking trip I would ever undertake. Forty days along the Domínguez–Escalante trail, almost entirely by auto, would hardly be the equivalent. But on this thirteen-year anniversary, I was supremely happy to be exploring with Sharon, and to be still in quest of some kind of discovery in the limitless Southwest.
We found an ideal pullout at about 7,000 feet of elevation, where a dirt track trickled 50 yards off the highway to an abrupt end in a shelf of sandstone thrusting clear of the scrub oak. We parked our folding chairs on that perch, settled in for dinner, and spent an hour watching the sun slide toward the rim of the world. A solitary piñon defied the bedrock, climbing in tortured asymmetry toward the sky like one of the cypresses in Everett Ruess’s woodcuts from the Monterey coast. Far to the south, the graceful pyramid of 12,618-foot Lone Cone stood as Colorado’s last sentinel before the Utah desert, and even farther to the west, beyond the La Sals, we glimpsed the thin blue silhouettes of the Henry Mountains. After dark we built a small fire of piñon branches and stayed up late.
Even blissful car camping had become something of a trial for me, thanks not so much to cancer as to its side effects and to the nuisances of advancing age. Since January I’d been afflicted by lower back pain on the left side. The best guess of a parade of doctors was spinal arthritis; on the X-rays I could see where a couple of vertebrae had given up the struggle and hung slumped in wobbly defeat. Over the months I’d been dosed with physical therapy, massage, acupuncture, trigger point and lidocaine injections, painkillers ranging from morphine to fentanyl patches to Oxycontin, and an electric gizmo that sent a zapping shiver through my back, all to no avail. In the car I kept a small Therm-a-Rest pillow tucked between my back and the seat, and I carried the pillow into restaurants to mitigate the assaults of plastic and wooden chairs. Bending over and picking up things turned the pain up a notch, so pitching our tent, gathering firewood, and even tending the fire increased my discomfort.
The SIADH I’ve lived with since June 2016 meant that I had to pee many times each day. Crawling out of my sleeping bag, slipping on boots or sandals, unzipping the tent, getting to my feet, and going out in the night amounted to a routine a lot more aggravating than padding from bed to bathroom at home. That night I had to get up and go five times, but at least each trip outside the tent gave me another chance to survey the sky full of stars. Yet mornings were rough. The worst my back hurt during the whole trip was in the early hours after a camping night, and I was so sensitive to cold that a 50° morning, like ours on September 19, felt arctic.
Yet those nights in the tent and by the fire put us in closer communion with Domínguez and Escalante, and the pleasures of camping sauvage in the dry but aromatic Southwest had been for decades one of my chief joys in life. The silence of those nights, pierced at dusk by the whirr of bats, or in the morning by birdsong, or at any hour by the distant yips of coyotes, put me back in touch with the wanderlust that had driven me to Alaska so long before, and that had given my year its vernal and autumnal azimuths with every trip into Anasazi country for the last quarter century.
As the fire dwindled, I asked Sharon why this trip had so pleased her thus far, for it was clear that despite all her apprehensions about my illness flaring into crisis, she was savoring each day as keenly as I was. She thought for a moment, then said, “It’s wonderful to drive all these back roads. To go slowly, and not have any place we have to get to. And to read Escalante’s journal, and see what they saw, and search for the things he writes about that don’t make any sense.” She took my hand in the dark. “And you know,” she went on, “I could never go on those hard climbs with you. And when I was working full-time, and you were off on assignments . . .” She left the sentence unfinished. “This is the best thing we’ve done together in a long time. I feel that I’m as important a part of it as you are, even if you’ll end up doing the writing. That the way I see the country matters, that I can help you rediscover whatever we’re looking for.”
As far as I could tell, not a single car drove by in the night. The next morning we pushed on up Route 90, finally cresting the divide at around 9,000 feet. Here, though it was unmarked on the map, some sort of ghost town was fading gracefully into ruin: the bleached wood of barns and buildings, old wagons and ranch tools rusting among the tall grasses. The San Juan Range stood boldly against the southern horizon. We saw Mount Sneffels, already touched with autumn snows, a proud fourteener that Sharon and I had climbed in dead winter in 1971. On Route 90, we had left behind not only the scrub oak thickets but the piñons and junipers. Here the open forest was dominated by dark spruce and willowy aspen, the leaves just starting to turn yellow. I read in The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado, “According to a Ute legend, the continuous quivering of aspen leaves, even when there is no appreciable breeze, is due to the Great Spirit who once visited earth during a full moon. All living things awaited him, trembling with anticipation—all save the proud aspen, which stood still, refusing to pay homage. The deity, angered, decreed that in the future its leaves should tremble whenever eye looked upon them.” Well, maybe. In the WPA telling, the legend smacked of Edwardian pieties—Sara Teasdale out of Sir James Frazer?—as much as Numic cosmogony. As we stopped to take photos, I laid aside my literary baggage and absorbed the still, sharp clarity of the place.
Domínguez and Escalante topped the Uncompahgre Plateau near midday on August 25. They too were taken with the loveliness of their surroundings, as Escalante salutes the “very good pastures and pleasing scenery” he credited to “beautiful poplar [aspen] groves briefly spaced from one another.” (Briefly spaced, I thought—a nice observation.) Nearby they stopped to camp at a copious spring they named El Ojo de Lain, after one of the well-born members of the team, Don Joaquín Lain, identified in the July 29 roster simply as a citizen of Santa Fe. It’s one of only a handful of mentions of Lain in the whole journal.
Here the men reached the highest elevation so far on their long, wandering circuit. If the August night was cold, Escalante never complains about it, even though just before camping the men had gotten soaked in a heavy downpour. The next day they rode down from the high divide, still headed northeast. Sharon and I drove the winding road, losing 3,000 feet in an hour, and met the Uncompahgre River on the main street of Montrose.
Escalante identified the team’s campsite along that river, which they called the San Francisco, as “next to a big marsh greatly abounding in pasturage.” Montrose is a town that cares about its history, so I was hopeful that here we might scare up some local knowledge about D & E. My first stop was a washout, however, for I discovered that the promisingly named Museum of the Mountain West was a reconstructed frontier town from about 1885, no doubt authentic in all its details but a monument to Western kitsch. Among the buildings were the Miner’s Delight Saloon, a scary-looking dentist’s office, and a “Tonsorial Emporium.” I didn’t stay for the reenacted shootout with cowpokes biting the dust in front of the saloon.
I had better luck at the Montrose County Historical Museum. There, when I asked about Domínguez and Escalante, the docent on duty beamed and said, “I can tell you exactly where they camped.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Right there at Target.” I must have done a double-take before I realized she meant the Target store, at 3530 Wolverine Drive on the south side of town.
“How do we know that?” I wondered.
“Because that’s where Chief Ouray’s lodge was.” If anything, the woman’s confidence had soared another notch. Ouray was her QED. I didn’t have the heart to remind her that the Ute chief had been born some fifty-seven years after D & E had come through this country, and then in far-off Taos, New Mexico, rather than Colorado. Instead I parried, “But they were here for one night only—”
“Yes, but there were so many of them.”
“They were only twelve.” That seemed to slow her down. I thanked the woman, then Sharon and I got back in the car and drove south on U.S. Highway 550 past a shopping mall or two to the bridge over the Uncompahgre River. The Bicentennial Commission had concluded that the campsite of August 26 was very near this bridge. Sure enough, bordering the river on the far side was a small swamp, thick with cattails and tall grasses. Mentally I cut the Historical Museum woman some slack. The Target store, after all, stood only about a third of a mile north of the swamp. Chief Ouray notwithstanding, some echo of the Spaniards’ passing must still be pulsing in the streets of Montrose.
I was curious how the town, founded in 1882, got its name. The WPA Guide came to my rescue. It turns out that the founder, one Joseph Selig, had plucked the name from Sir Walter Scott’s novel A Legend of Montrose “because the country resembled that in Scotland where Montrose fought.” Selig? Zelig? I mused. Highland chieftans on the Uncompahgre? It was too much to take in.
Just across the Highway 550 bridge stands the Ute Indian Museum. It’s a handsome building, with tall exhibits cased in glass scattered like islands through the ample interior, and massive painted teepees (rather than wickiups) strewn across the front lawn. Here, I thought, at last the threads that stitched the padres to the Tabehuachis and Sabuaganas would be sewn together. But I was disappointed. The backward reach of the institution’s history seemed to end with the nineteenth century. The place was all about Chief Ouray (1833–80), who tried to broker peace with the U.S. government, foreseeing doom for his people as the only alternative, but who ended up signing away the rich mining lands of Colorado for a reservation in desolate Utah. To this day, Ouray is sneered at by Native American activists as a sellout. I was bemused to learn that Ouray was only half Ute, his father having been a Jicarilla Apache. The museum also celebrated Ouray’s wife, Chipeta, who lived until 1924.
But the museum had nothing to tell me about Utes in 1776, when Atanasio guided the Spaniards through western Colorado. A volunteer named Maureen apologized for the oversight, but she was eager to let me know that the small spring out back, marked by a mortared well on top of which a teepee had been pitched (its charm diminished, alas, by a large “keep off” sign), was the very water source the Domínguez–Escalante party had used on August 26. I nodded wearily, reminded of the ranger at the Anasazi Heritage Center insisting that Escalante Ruin was verifiably the one the padres had so offhandedly noticed as the team first rode along the banks of the Dolores. In the journal on August 26, Escalante says nothing about the spring, mentioning instead only the swamp that served as a campsite, which the party named La Ciénega de San Francisco.
Just across the street from the museum, however, the Bicentennial Commission had finally achieved its ambitions, with the elaborate “commemorative ramada” envisioned in the 1976 Interpretive Master Plan and Final Report. Four tall plinths in white stone held up the bare wooden beams of the ramada. A skillful bas-relief portrayed the expedition as a rather desperate stumble through the wilderness, but the motifs of the four panels sang an anthem of uplift: “In Behalf of the Light” (“The Franciscans’ mission to spread Christianity and care for the people”), “So Bold, So Beautiful a Land” (“It took bold men to ride into a bold land”), “Building an Empire,” and “Pageant in the Wilderness” (the last a crib from the valedictory 1951 tome of the great historian Herbert E. Bolton, the first chronicler fully to engage the saga of Domínguez and Escalante and the first to retrace their route).
For all my skepticism, I had to admit that the memorial was very well done, even though the despair etched in the bas-relief clashed with the march-of-progress tone of the texts. The ramada, in fact, would turn out to be the most impressive memorial to the expedition that Sharon and I came across on the whole 1,700-mile loop. It made me wonder, though, why the woman at the Historical Museum had been so adamant about her Target campsite. All she needed to do on her lunch break was drive a couple of miles down Route 550 to visit the ramada and get the local chapter of the D & E story straight.
The complete blank about eighteenth-century Ute history in the Ute Indian Museum could be attributed in large part to the wholesale resettlement of the Colorado tribe under Chief Ouray to an arbitrary reservation 100 miles away in northeastern Utah in the early 1880s. Since the first time I read Escalante’s journal, I’d realized what a gold mine it would be to get stories from living Utes about the strange expedition led by the blue-robed padres that had passed through their homeland in 1776. Those explorers (along with Rivera) were surely the first Europeans the Utes had ever seen. In the early 1990s, when I researched the Chiricahua Apache war against the U.S. Army from 1861 to 1886, I had met with the direct descendants of Cochise and Naiche, who shared with me priceless stories about the Apache tragedy.
But the Spanish disruption of the Ute heartland had occurred a century before the Chiricahua war. And my experience at Jemez, when I had failed utterly to gain any Puebloan testimony about the great revolt of 1680, left me pessimistic about a kindred mission to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. In the end, though, it was cancer that won out. In 2017, I just didn’t have the energy to set off on what I feared would be another cultural wild goose chase.
SINCE HIRING THE no doubt perplexed Atanasio on August 24, Escalante hadn’t said a word about their Ute guide in his journal. On the 27th, the team packed up camp and followed the Uncompahgre downstream on its west bank, crossing the river somewhere north of where Selig and friends would found their Scottish-looking settlement a century later. Near the river the Spaniards ran into another Ute, whose name translated as “Left-Handed.” (I thought again of Mancos. Was left-handedness—in Spanish zurdo—as sinister as one-handedness?) The long powwow with this other Indian ended up, in the padres’ view, a waste of time: “We tarried a good while with him, and after a lengthy conversation drew forth nothing more useful than that we had suffered from the heat, which was indeed very fiery . . .”
At the end of a day’s ride of 16 miles, the party camped on the east bank of the Uncompahgre, where Escalante again reported excellent pasturage. The Commission locates this camp as about two miles north of the small town of Olathe.
On Highway 550, Sharon and I headed northwest out of Montrose, following the Uncompahgre. At Olathe, we turned west on a small street that dead-ended shortly after recrossing the river. Sharon pulled over while I studied the map. A man came out of the small clapboard house with a stone chimney in front of which we were parked. He wore a cut-off T-shirt bearing the message “Seasons After.” I guessed that he was at least part Ute. I rolled down the window as he squinted in the sun. “You folks okay?” he asked. I launched into my recital of D & E, short version. Nothing registered on the man’s face. “Just wanted to make sure you folks were okay,” he repeated. I thanked him as Sharon prepared to make a U-turn. “You have a nice day,” Seasons After said as he waved goodbye.
It was obvious that few of the travelers bombing along 550 between Montrose and Grand Junction bothered to check out the streets of Olathe (population 1,573 in 2000). So far from the norm was our little detour, it seemed, that it might have signaled that we were in trouble. A couple of weeks earlier, when we had turned off the highway at Monero, New Mexico, the fellow at the Carrillo Ranch had voiced the same sort of concern. All through the West, as I’d learned often before, though never so vividly as on the trail of D & E, small-town life just beyond the U.S. highways and the “destination” cities ran on its own hermetic track.
I wondered about the name Olathe (pronounced “Oh-layth”). Later I learned that the Colorado hamlet was named after Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City that likes to tout itself as the fourth-largest city in the Sunflower State. It was named by its founder, one Dr. John T. Barton, in 1857, after he asked his Shawnee interpreter what his people’s word for “beautiful” was. Barton and his cronies were abolitionists, and only five years later Quantrill’s raiders came by, killed a half dozen citizens, and laid waste to the fledgling town. What all this had to do with Olathe, Colorado, I never found out.
Eleven miles farther north along Route 550 we came to Delta, where the Gunnison River joins the Uncompahgre. The stone wall of a two-story building beside the highway had been painted with an arresting tableau under the Chamber of Commerce rubric “Gateway to the Canyons.” The scene depicted the meeting of Domínguez and Escalante with the Utes. On the right, one padre rode his horse as he held a small white cross thrust forward in his right hand. Behind him the other friar walked as he led his horse by the reins. The faces of both men beamed in joyful greeting. On the left, three Utes, wearing only leggings and headbands, rode toward the strangers. Four teepees behind the riders adumbrated their camp. The Utes, too, were beaming. One stretched out his left hand in greeting. Signed by the artist, one Seth Weber, in 2012, the composition blazoned the fevered dream of missionaries in all times and all places—of natives overjoyed to emerge from heathen darkness to embrace the Word.
On August 28 the expedition left the Uncompahgre River to cut across relatively level land, taking a bearing slightly east of north. After 10 miles, the men came to the new river running east to west across their path. Atanasio told them that his people called it the Tomichi, but D & E already knew it as the San Xavier. The team halted at a bend in the river to decide what to do next. The San Xavier was a powerful waterway, bigger than the San Francisco (the Uncompahgre), comparable in size, Escalante claimed, to the Rio Grande as it flowed from north to south through the Spanish colony centered around Santa Fe.
Ever since August 24, when the expedition decided to forgo for a while its western push and submit to the guidance of Atanasio, it would seem that the men were entering terra still incognita to the Spanish. But Andrés Muñiz swore that this was precisely the way he’d come with Rivera on the second expedition in 1765—which was why he knew the river already as the Río de San Xavier. And here, on the south bank, Muñiz further swore, Rivera had carved his name and date and a cross with the motto “Viva Jesús” in the cottonwood tree. Domínguez and Escalante searched for the tree but never found it.
Before Steven Baker devoted decades of careful research to the Rivera expedition, that earlier Spanish reconnaissance of the greater Southwest lingered in a kind of historical limbo. Baker eventually proved that Rivera had reached the Tomichi (or San Xavier, or Gunnison) not where D & E halted and searched for the engraved cottonwood, but some 10 or 11 miles farther west. Rivera had followed not the Uncompahgre River to reach the Gunnison but the much smaller Robideaux Creek, which flows almost due north off the Uncompahgre Plateau. And in a tour de force of confirmation, some 15 miles up Robideaux Creek, in a remote canyon accessible only by foot or horseback today, he had discovered an inscription carved in the ruddy sandstone wall by Rivera’s team on October 15, 1765.
My friend Fred Blackburn, who first introduced me to the Anasazi country in 1992, and who is the finest decipherer of all-but-illegible historical inscriptions I’ve ever met, made the definitive reading of the badly faded script. All that could be positively identified was the name Juan María Rivera. Four undecipherable lines of characters etched below the signature might well have given the date (later determined to be October 15 from Rivera’s journal), perhaps the team’s home base of Santa Fe, and maybe the formulaic “paso por aqui”—“passed by here.” Blackburn, Baker, and the rest of the sleuthing team made their analysis on September 5, 2004. That very day Greg Child, Vaughn Hadenfeldt, and I were on the fifth day of our Comb Ridge traverse, camped in a beautiful oasis of wildflowers and prickly pear just below the ridge crest on the west. The day before, a violent wind and rain storm had swept across our corner of Arizona, filling the potholes on the Comb with drinking water that supplied all our needs for the following week of parched cloudless days under the 90° sun.
The Tomichi–San Xavier–Gunnison marked the end of exploration for Rivera. He did ford the river, albeit anxiously, for the water came up to his horse’s saddle, and scouted a little beyond (Baker could not ascertain exactly where), before deciding it was time to head back to Santa Fe. In his sketchy diary, Rivera covers the return journey in a single sentence. The voyage home, across a distance he estimated at 395 miles, took him only fourteen and a half days.
So from their camp on the Gunnison on August 28 onward, Domínguez and Escalante would finally be exploring a wilderness completely unknown to Europeans. There was still time enough and will enough to find a way to California.
As Sharon and I studied the big painting on the wall of the building in Delta, the Gateway to the Canyons indeed beckoned ahead. I knew the map, of course, but the route looked obvious. The combined waters of the Uncompahgre and Gunnison surged northwest. Fifty miles on they joined the mighty Colorado at Grand Junction. And the Colorado carved its way west across Utah, linking one canyon after another. Standing there, I could feel the tug of the Gateway ahead.
But Domínguez and Escalante had other ideas. The whole agenda of the expedition seemed to have shifted. On August 28, after fording the river, the party headed not northwest but northeast, along the banks of the Gunnison. In the journal Escalante explains the team’s “intention of . . . continuing upstream until we came upon some encampments of the Sabuaganas, which yesterday we heard were around here, and in them some Indians from among the Timpanogotzis, or Lagunas, into whose country we were already planning to go.”
Why did the Spaniards now want to find the camps of the Sabuaganas? And who were the Timpanogotzis, or Lagunas? Why did the team need to forge on to the homeland of that even more distant band of Utes? How long had this been the plan, since this is the first time Escalante mentions it?
What, indeed, was going on?
VIRTUALLY EVERY HISTORIAN who writes about the Domínguez–Escalante saga, even if only glancingly, assumes that the whole purpose of the expedition was to blaze a trading route from Santa Fe to the new colony in California at Monterey. On the very day the team left Santa Fe, Domínguez wrote to his boss, Fray Isidro Murillo, the Provincial, or head, of the Franciscan Custody in New Mexico, confirming that the journey to Monterey had been ordered by Murillo himself. Getting the approval of the colony’s governor as well was merely a bonus, and both D & E were delighted when Governor Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta “not only applauded our plan but also opened his heart and his hands, giving us supplies and everything we might need for the journey.”
Of course, as Escalante’s frequent observations that such-and-such a campsite might be a good place for a Spanish settlement make clear, the idea of building towns along the way and thus expanding the New Mexico colony across the wilderness occupied by Navajos and Utes had a strong secondary appeal. And where there would be towns, there would be missions to the Indians. Later during the journey, Escalante would promise the natives he befriended that he would come back the next year and build churches to minister to their souls.
Yet there were several other primary purposes embodied in the great voyage, and teasing them out of Escalante’s journal, with all its vexing lacunae and blink-and-you’ve-missed-them asides, becomes a tricky exercise in historiography. These secondary goals help explain the mystifying detours and changes of course the padres took, starting with their abandonment of the Dolores River on August 19.
To unravel this tangled skein, one must reexamine the two 1765 expeditions of Rivera. Establishing a trading route to California played no part in those earlier trips’ goals, for the founding of Monterey still lay five years in the future. Rivera was no Franciscan, and he took orders not from Governor Mendinueta but from his predecessor, Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín, an ambitious expansionist who nonetheless believed in making peace with the colony’s Indian enemies.
Cachupín sent out Rivera in June 1765 primarily to look for silver deposits in the La Plata Mountains, after the Ute trader had brought his “silver nail” to Abiquiu, reigniting the old conquistadorial dream of bonanzas of gold and silver that must lie hidden in all the Indian lands of the New World. But Cachupín was just as curious about the legendary Río Tizón, a waterway whose size reportedly dwarfed even that of the Rio Grande. The Tizón was supposed to lie many leagues to the northwest of Santa Fe, way up in Yuta country.
On his first expedition, Rivera got as far as the big bend of the Dolores River, somewhere near where the University of Colorado archaeologists would later excavate and restore Escalante Ruin. But when he asked his Ute informant, a certain Chief Chino, about the Tizón, he got a pretty discouraging reply. As Rivera recorded in his journal on July 16, Chief Chino told him that
the Spaniards should not be stupid because that river was very far away and in bad land without pasturage or water. There are many sand dunes that would tire our horses, and the sun that shines on this route would burn us, for it is very strong and insufferable. Not knowing the route, we would suffer much hardship or we would die of hunger, and if not, one of the many nations there are before we arrived at that river would kill us. We should return to our land.
As if that were not warning enough, Chino went on to describe the kind of treatment intruders might suffer at the hands of the strange tribes in the badlands between the Dolores and the Tizón.
Among these nations there is one that kills people with just the smoke they make, but they do not know what it is made with. It is so strong that as soon as it is smelled, a person dies without lingering. Beyond this, there is on the route a very deep cellar in the care of a man. In it is a great variety of animals, one in particular that tears to pieces those who come or go without giving a pelt when they pass by.
That was enough for Rivera. He turned back to the La Platas to hunt down Cuero de Lobo (Wolf Hide), the Ute who had promised to show him the limitless deposits of silver that had evaded all previous Spanish explorers of New Mexico. But when he got back to Santa Fe at the end of July, Governor Cachupín, infatuated by the mystery of the Río Tizón, sent Rivera back out on a second expedition. It was on this journey that Andrés Muñiz served as interpreter, establishing his credentials for the Domínguez–Escalante expedition eleven years later.
By mid-October, Rivera had pushed far beyond the Dolores and reached the Gunnison, where he would carve his “Viva Jesús” in the cottonwood tree. The Utes he had fallen in with told him that this river was indeed the Tizón. Initially skeptical, for the current flowing east to west across his path looked no bigger than that of the Rio Grande near Santa Fe, Rivera eventually gave in, recording in his journal that he had indeed discovered the mighty Tizón. But his private doubts outweighed his token acquiescence. From the Indians he learned that there was yet another great river ahead—the “real” Tizón, perhaps. So Rivera was still of a mind to push farther north and west, but once again his guides warned him about the disasters that would engulf the party should they persist:
A short distance from having crossed the river, about a day’s walk, there was a kind of people who, when the hunting is poor, eat their children for sustenance. At another day’s journey, one finds other people who are very white with hair the color of straw. These are very much enemies of all the other nations. One must travel two days among them, but it must be only one at a time and at night. Then one goes to the foot of a small sierra where there is a very large lake. There are people who live there like rocks and more than rocks. . . . When we arrived at the red people, as a sign of peace they would take each one by the hand. We would never meet again or return to our land, and they would kill [the guides] because they brought us.
So, once again, Rivera turned back.
Puzzling over these strange passages in Rivera’s account, I toyed with four possible explanations. The most likely seemed to be that the Utes had their own good reasons for not wanting Spaniards to thrust their way into a territory as yet unspoiled by Europeans, and so the guides made up their scary stories to dissuade the pushy Spaniard. The second was that there were indeed several tribes between the Gunnison and the Tizón, all at war with one another. The tales of Indians living like rocks and of a beast demanding pelts could well be rumors passed from one valley to the next, like the warnings Ulysses’s sailors heard on their way home from Troy.
The third explanation sprang from the usual confusion introduced by interpreters. Perhaps what Rivera heard was only a badly garbled version of what the guides reported. And the fourth explanation laid all the blame on Rivera. It may be that by October 1765 the man had had enough of the Yuta country and wanted only to go home, and so, to save face with Governor Cachupín, he made up horror stories to justify his prudence in not pushing beyond the river that the Yutas, after all, swore was the Tizón. Of course, in doing so he would risk contradiction by his own men, by Andrés Muñiz in particular. But no governor in Santa Fe was going to take the word of a genízaro over that of the stalwart Spaniard he had entrusted to lead two expeditions into the unknown.
At a distance of 253 years, there’s no sorting out these alternate theories. The whole business becomes even more complex when we plumb the origins of the Spanish obsession with the Tizón. How, in fact, by 1765 did Rivera—or Cachupín himself—even know that a massive river by that name lay somewhere off in the incognita of the northwest?
Tizón is a Spanish word meaning “burnt stick” or “firebrand.” Way back in 1540, an explorer name Melchior Diaz, a lieutenant of Coronado’s on the grand expedition in quest of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, was dispatched westward somewhere near today’s border between Arizona and Sonora to try to make contact with a Spanish fleet sent north along the Pacific coast, ostensibly to add a naval wing to Coronado’s campaign of conquest and empire. Diaz never rendezvoused with the mariners, but as he sought the ships he became the first European to discover the Colorado River, at a place well south of the Grand Canyon, where it flowed in its sluggish course down to the Gulf of California. Diaz named the river the Tizón because the natives in the vicinity used burning sticks to ward off the cold of winter.
How could it be that 225 years after Diaz, another Spanish explorer would search for the same great river, under the same name, some 900 miles upstream, across titanic stretches of unexplored land? Given that the Colorado River runs from north-central Colorado to the Gulf of California through a series of rugged canyons, none of which had yet been traversed by Europeans—Glenwood, Cataract, Glen, and Grand, to name only the most spectacular—how could Rivera have known that the Tizón lay somewhere beyond his carved cottonwood tree to the northwest?
Did the Indians themselves know the full course of the great river? What communication might the Utes of western Colorado have had with the Yumas who roamed near the delta where the river emptied into the Gulf of California? And even if we could divine the answers to these questions, we would still need to understand why reaching the Tizón was so important to Rivera and to his governor, as well as, a decade later, to Domínguez and Escalante and their governor.
The August 28 entry in Escalante’s journal, announcing the team’s intention to find the main encampment of the Sabuaganas and then to push north and west to reach another tribe, the Timpanogotzis or Lagunas, offers an answer. But as a clue to the complex, mutually conflicting goals of the whole expedition, it requires the opening of another Pandora’s box. The name of that mishmash of myth and native history is Teguayó.
INSTEAD OF SETTING OUT at once to look for the Sabuaganas, the padres sent Atanasio and Andrés Muñiz ahead to scout, while the team rested in camp beside the Gunnison River. The next day, about 10 AM, the Spaniards were surprised by five Indians who appeared on a high hill to the north and started yelling at the tops of their voices. None of them, it turned out, had been recruited by Atanasio, but D & E coaxed the boisterous strangers into camp. The padres offered them food and tobacco, then began “a long parley”—how, one wonders, with both the interpreter and the guide absent? For quite a while, according to Escalante, all the Sabuaganas wanted to talk about was the “quarrels” they had been having all summer with the Yamparica Comanches.
When I first read this passage, I did a double-take. Comanches? In northwestern Colorado? I had always thought that the vast domain ruled by those masters of raiding and warfare was the Great Plains. As far as I knew, there were no Comanches anywhere near the Gunnison River in 1776. To be sure, Puebloans and Spaniards dwelling along the Rio Grande lived in constant fear of Comanche attack, but it always came from the east.
Whoever those unpleasant antagonists of the Sabuaganas were, and however the dialogue may have been sabotaged by mistranslation, the five Yutas vehemently warned the Spaniards not to push on to the north. As Escalante irritably dismisses the Sabuaganas’ advice, “We refuted the validity of these pretenses, by which they were trying to stop us from going ahead, by telling them that our God, who is everyone’s, would defend us if we should happen to run into these foes.”
The next day Atanasio and Andrés Muñiz returned, bringing with them five more Sabuaganas and a single specimen of that other tribe, the Lagunas. Whether these more distant peoples were Utes at all seemed in doubt, for “the Yutas told us that the Lagunas dwelt in pueblos like those in New Mexico.” Once more the Spaniards “regaled” these new visitors with plentiful food and tobacco, then settled in for a discussion even longer than the one of the day before.
Something monumental was at stake for the expedition at this point, though it is hard to uncover just what. Escalante’s lengthy journal entry for August 30 offers hints. The Sabuaganas now intensified their warnings about the dangers posed by Comanches ahead:
They replied that to go to the place we were trying to reach there was no other trail than the one passing through the midst of the Comanches and that these would impede our passage and deprive us of our lives—and finally that none of them knew the country between here and the Lagunas. This they repeated many times, insisting that we had to turn back from here. We tried to convince them, first by arguing and then by cajoling, so as not to displease them.
As soon as the padres offered the Laguna man a woollen blanket, a big knife, and glass beads to serve as their guide, the Sabuaganas caved in, admitting that they knew the way to Laguna country after all. The padres rather cynically attributed the Sabuagana change of heart to jealousy, compounded by their fear of losing “the kindnesses we were doing them.” Before the expedition charged on to the northwest with their Laguna guide, the Sabuaganas demanded that the Spaniards visit the main encampment of their own people, high in the forest on the southern slopes of the plateau now called Grand Mesa.
For three days, led by the Laguna guide (whom they had promptly renamed Silvestre, appropriating Escalante’s Christian name), the team rode through forests and along streams, leaving behind the scrub oak thickets as they climbed into a landscape of stately blue spruces and aspens interspersed with grassy clearings, traveling 46 miles beyond the Gunnison. The padres—or more likely Miera y Pacheco—calculated that the men had now traveled 523 miles from Santa Fe during the thirty-five days they’d been on the trail. At last, at an elevation of about 8,500 feet, the twelve-man team of Spaniards was met by an impressive force of eighty Yutas on horseback. “They told us,” Escalante wrote, “that they were going out to hunt, but we figured that they came together like this, either to show off their strength in numbers or to find out if any other Spanish people were coming behind us or if we came alone.” After a brief exchange of courtesies, the Spaniards followed the mounted Utes another three miles until they came to the grand encampment of the Sabuaganas, “which had numerous people and must have consisted of thirty tents.”
It was the most important event to occur in the five weeks since the team had left Santa Fe, and Escalante lavished on it by far the longest entry up to this point in the written record he kept. In the Sabuagana encampment, California was far from the padres’ minds. But as Franciscans, they could at last carry out a duty that meant more to them than any agenda assigned to the expedition back in Santa Fe.
From Delta on September 20, Sharon and I turned east on State Highway 90, which parallels the Gunnison River. Seven miles on, we came to the forlorn little town of Austin, which bravely bills itself as the Orchard City. (All of Colorado’s Western Slope is a cornucopia of fruit, and as a kid growing up in Boulder I had gorged on apples and pears and peaches grown in towns such as Fruita, Paonia, and for all I knew Austin.) Just east of today’s town the Spaniards had camped on August 28, as they sent out their guide and interpreter to look for Sabuagana camps. As we continued along Route 90, following the North Fork of the Gunnison, we were driving in D & E’s footsteps. Sure enough, at Leroux Creek, a wayside sign identified the spot where the Spaniards had camped on August 30. The marker was the work not of the Bicentennial Commission but of a local outfit called the North Fork Historical Society. In the next few miles, we paused at five more such signs, pinpointing the humblest incidents in the D & E campaign. It would be the only stretch on the entire 1,700-mile loop where a local group had bothered to mark the passage of the long-ago expedition.
At one of the markers I struck up a conversation with a trucker who was idling his rig in the pullout. I told him about our plan to follow Domínguez and Escalante across four states, which the man took as his cue to hold forth about the route of the Donner Party on their way to death and cannibalism on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada in 1846. I’d run into Donner aficionados before and I knew how relentless they could be. Within minutes, the hefty fellow had turned red in the face as he cursed Lansford Hastings, author of the Hastings Cutoff, the purported shortcut across the Great Basin that some historians blame for the party’s demise. I’d never been very interested in the Donner saga myself, as it seemed like a classic case of sheer emigrant bungling, as well as a disaster hashed over so thoroughly that no new details were ever likely to come to light. I made a half-hearted attempt to bring Escalante back into the conversation, but the trucker was 400 miles off in Nevada, trying to fix what had gone wrong 172 years ago, if only George Donner and James Reed had listened to him. I suppose to a third passerby we might have sounded like a pair of Hyde Park zealots each on his soapbox trying to straighten out the world. I touched my forehead in a farewell salute and retreated to the refuge of our SUV.
At Paonia we turned off Route 90 to follow Forest Road 701 north, traveling close to the trail along which Atanasio led the Spaniards to the Sabuagana encampment. A couple of miles in, we stopped on an ugly gravel pullout for a picnic lunch. The temperature was dropping, and a harsh wind blew out of the west, so we put on our parkas and huddled over our cheese and crackers and oranges. But from the pullout there was a lordly view of the West Elk Mountains, 20 miles off to the east. Over there, fifty-four years before, as a gung-ho twenty-year-old fresh off my first Alaskan expedition, I had taught at the Colorado Outward Bound school in the second year of the program’s transplantation from Great Britain to the United States. I managed to ignore the school’s dubious rationale of character-building via the morning dip and the 200-foot rappel while I nursed my incredulity that I was getting paid, however meagerly, to hike and camp in my beloved Rockies. How unimaginably long ago that seemed now, as we stared at the dark green silhouettes of the Elk Range.
Four miles farther up Stevens Gulch Road, we entered the Grand Mesa National Forest, and a winding 13 miles beyond we came to the grassy, open basin of Hubbard Park. Bow season was upon us, and nearly every pullout was occupied by hunters wearing camo, their flatbed trucks loaded with ATVs. At our picnic spot, I had puzzled over a Colorado Wildlife Division sign that announced “Attention Hunters. Moose in Area! Be Sure of Your Target.”
On the northern edge of Hubbard Park stood the Electric Mountain Lodge. A big wooden shingle at the driveway entrance proclaimed “Open Year Round” for “Horse—Snowmobile—ATV—Rentals,” and small cartouches promised lodging, meals, cocktails, and wheelchair access. At the end of the driveway, a skillfully rendered bronze statue of an elk bugled at the sky. Next to it a flagpole displayed the Stars and Stripes and the Colorado state ensign. But the lodge was closed. An electrified fence and video surveillance warning signs gave the place a creepy vibe. Later I looked up the lodge on the Internet. Visitors as recently as 2014 had left reviews, but one of them hinted at problems that might have signaled the resort’s demise: “OMG! This place was horrible. There were dead flies, moths, and other assorted flying things on every windowsill in the place. They were even hanging on the curtains like they were trying to get out but never made it.”
Electric Mountain woes notwithstanding, Hubbard Park would have been a lovely place to camp. But the growing cold disheartened us, and all the best pullouts were taken. On a whim, I said to Sharon, “Let’s stop and talk to one of these guys.”
She frowned. “I don’t know. Men in camo with their guns just give me a bad feeling.”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” I teased her. “They’re not gonna shoot us.”
“Okay, but—”
We drove up to a gigantic white canvas tent nestled among the aspens, in front of which a fellow with a trim white mustache and beard sat in a lawn chair catching the late afternoon sun and reading a book. I got out of our car and said hello.
Rich was from Colorado Springs, though he’d grown up in Gallup, New Mexico. He seemed happy to have company. I told him about our journey along the route of Domínguez and Escalante. Gallup, after all, lay very close to the last leg of their loop, as they rode from Hopi to Zuni.
Rich had never heard of the expedition but, unlike others we had met along the way, he was eager to learn more. He even wrote down the title of the University of Utah edition of Escalante’s journal I was reading every day. I pointed out the passage that covered the team’s entry into Hubbard Park.
Rich invited us inside the big tent, where he proudly showed off the folding cots that could sleep six and the pot-bellied stove that kept the men warm at night. The place was big enough to hold a town meeting. Somehow, though, it reminded me of gloomy roadhouses in Alaska.
“What game are you allowed to hunt with a bow?” I asked.
Touching each finger, he listed the prey: “Deer, elk, bear, and turkey.” (Apparently moose were spared.) The other guys were out on their ATVs at the moment, scouting distant ridges. “We keep ’em within radio contact, though,” he said, hefting a walkie-talkie.
“Got any game yet?”
“Nope. Seen some, but not to shoot.”
“It’s gotta be hard with a bow.”
Rich smiled. “Not to be chauvinistic,” he said, “but it’s sort of manly.”
Back in the car, I said to Sharon, “See, that wasn’t so bad.”
“He seemed like a nice guy,” she admitted. “But did you see the revolver on his hip? Why does he need a gun even in camp?”
“It’s sort of manly,” I jibed. “Maybe I should wear one.”
“If you do . . .” Her scowl, as she got behind the wheel, dissolved into a grin.
AT THE BIG CAMP of the Sabuaganas on September 1, Domínguez took Andrés Muñiz with him and sought out the “chieftain,” then entered his tent. At once, “after embracing him and his children, [Domínguez] asked him to gather there the people who were on hand.” Escalante must have been present, for the scene he narrates has the immediacy of first-person witness. It also defies credibility—at least according to my own skeptical grasp of what might have happened on that late summer day. Writes Escalante,
When those of either sex who could attend had been assembled, he announced the Gospel to them through the interpreter. All listened with pleasure, and especially six Lagunas who were present, among whom our guide and another Laguna stood out. As soon as the padre began instructing them, the new guide mentioned interrupted them so as to predispose the Sabuaganas as well as his own fellow tribesmen “to believe whatever the padre was telling them because it was all true.” In the same way, the other Laguna relayed the pleasure and eagerness with which he heard the news of his eternal salvation.
This was what the padres had come on their long, dangerous journey to do. This meant far more to them than the blazing of a trading route to Monterey. Yet from all their experience among the New Mexico pueblos—especially from Escalante’s utter failure with the Hopi in 1775—surely both men knew that converting Indians of any kind to Catholicism was a difficult and even perilous business.
One of the Sabuaganas was befuddled by the exchange. According to Escalante,
Among those listening there was one a bit deaf who, not grasping what was being treated, asked what it was the padre was saying. Then this Laguna said: “The padre says that this which he shows us”—it was the image of Christ crucified—“is the one Lord of all, who dwells in the highest part of the skies, and in order to please Him and go to Him one has to be baptised and must beg His forgiveness.” He emphasized this idea by beating his breast with his hand—a surprising gesture on his part for his never having seen it made before, either by the padre or by the interpreter. When the padre saw the evident joy with which they heard him, he suggested to the chieftain now in charge of the encampment that if, after he had conferred with his people, they would accept Christianity we would come to instruct them and set them in a new way of living that would lead to baptism.
So for the first time on the voyage, Domínguez promised to return to this high meadow and build a mission. Flush with success, not content to have won the promise of the Utes to convert, he now went on to give the Indians their first lesson in Christian ethics:
Filled with joy by the open declaration of the Lagunas mentioned, the padre asked how the latter one was called (the guide we had already named Silvestre), and on learning that they called him Red Bear he instructed them all by explaining to them the difference existing between men and brutes, the purpose for which either of them were created, and the wrong thing they did in naming themselves after wild beasts—thus placing themselves on a par with them, and even below them. Promptly he told the Laguna to call himself Francisco from then on. When the rest saw this, they began repeating this name, although with difficulty, the Laguna joyfully pleased for being so named.
Now that Domínguez had set the natives straight about the one true God, the prospect of salvation through baptism, and the proper way to name one another, everybody settled in for a feast of jerked bison meat, for which the Spaniards offered more glass beads in exchange. D & E also wondered if the Utes would trade the Spaniards’ horses with their worn-out hooves for fresh Sabuagana and Laguna mounts. The Utes said they’d think about it.
What could possibly have been going on that September 1 in the Sabuagana encampment? Except by the most devout of Franciscan apologists, Escalante’s account simply cannot be taken at face value. Not only that day among the hunting camps in Hubbard Park but before and after our trip, as I reread the passage in the padre’s diary, I tried to come up with a plausible explanation.
One possibility is that the entry is pure fiction, a set piece made up by the friar to please his superiors to whom the journal would be presented at the end of the expedition—not only Governor Mendinueta but, even more crucially, Fray Isidro Murillo, the head of the Franciscan custody in New Mexico, whose orders had sent the team into the field in the first place. But dissembling just wasn’t Escalante’s style. His very humorlessness is a badge of his honesty. When the party is in trouble, he admits it; when they think they are lost, the confusion creeps onto the page.
It’s more likely that the Utes had no idea what Domínguez was talking about when he started sermonizing. As he held out his crucifix and told his magical tale, they might have thought they were listening to a shaman from some alien tribe spin out an incomprehensible but vivid parable. The 178 years of Franciscan efforts to convert the Puebloans in New Mexico prior to this meeting with the Utes were full of comparable “conversions” that the priests were only too glad to take credit for.
What was in it, after all, for the Utes to be so acquiescent? When I later raised this issue with Matt Liebmann, my Harvard anthropologist friend, he pointed out that the arrival of a team of Spaniards in Sabuagana territory held the promise of all kinds of trading possibilities, from glass beads to guns, from tobacco to cotton cloth. Why else had generation after generation of Ute entrepreneurs traveled all the way to Abiquiu with goods to barter?
To be sure, the lightly armed and woefully provisioned squadron of a dozen Spaniards led by their blue-robed medicine men hardly betokened a commercial bonanza, but perhaps these strangers were merely the vanguard. Why not strike up friendly relations and see what might come of them?
The Spaniards withdrew to their own camp. That evening the chief and several Ute elders paid a visit. Their mood was grave.
They began trying to persuade us to turn back from here, exaggerating anew and with greater effort the hardships and perils to which we were exposing ourselves by going ahead, saying for certain that the Comanches would not let us do so—and that they did not tell us this to stop us from going as far as we wanted, but because they esteemed us highly. We acknowledged this token and told them that the one God whom we worshiped would expedite everything for us and would defend us, not only from the Comanches but also from all others who might intend to do us harm, and that we feared not a thing that they were bringing up because we were certain that His Majesty was on our side.
Plainly, the padres were determined to move on to the north and west. Yet as Domínguez tried to explain this to the Sabuagana elders, he said nothing about the need to find a route to California. Instead, all the talk was about finding the camps of that other band of Indians, the Lagunas. And D & E were counting on the Laguna whom they had named Silvestre to guide them there.
Before they could move on, however, the padres had to deal with another problem. Escalante blames it on a schism within the Spanish party and he does not hesitate to name the three men whose treachery, uncovered that very evening, he regarded as nothing short of mutiny. The malefactors were the interpreter, Andrés Muñiz, his brother Lucrecio, and Felipe, one of the genízaros who had stowed his way aboard the expedition by trailing the team for fifteen days before popping into sight on August 14.
This passage in Escalante’s journal is one of the thorniest in the whole five-month record of the expedition. In high dudgeon, the padres apparently lectured the whole team by reminding them that they had pledged in Santa Fe “not to take along any goods for trading,” because “all agreed not . . . to have any purpose other than the one they had, which was God’s glory and the good of souls.” This sounds like sheer hypocrisy, for that very day D & E had blithely traded glass beads for jerked bison meat and had proposed exchanging their own lame horses for the Sabuaganas’ fresh ones. But now, Escalante claims, he and Domínguez discovered (how?) that the three mutineers had smuggled goods along to offer the Utes to persuade them to oppose the Spaniards’ plan to push on in search of the Laguna camps.
Escalante leaves unclear just what motive the three “traitors” might have had for trying to sabotage the padres’ program. The phrase “either out of fear or because they did not want to go ahead” is so vague as to be ambiguous. Yet in the same passage Escalante records that the Muñiz brothers and Felipe had tried to trade their hidden goods for weapons, because they were so afraid of the Comanches lurking ahead.
If Escalante’s account of this near-mutiny is honest, there’s another possible explanation for it that the padre never addresses. All three of the miscreants were genízaros. What if in fact they had been raised as Sabuagana Utes? That might explain Andrés Muñiz’s facility as interpreter. And what more human motivation for forestalling the departure of the team could there be than wanting to linger with—perhaps even to rejoin for good—the people among whom they had been born and raised until they were sold as slaves to the New Mexico colonists? Alas, such a speculation is today beyond the reach of either proof or disproof.
One last detail in Escalante’s long, indignant, and baffling September 1 journal entry only adds to the conundrum. As the Sabuaganas still tried to prevent the Spaniards from riding off into dangerous Comanche territory, they played a last trump card: “They said that if we did not turn back from here, they would not make exchanges for the hoofsore horses we had.” To which Escalante replied that “we would go on even if they made no exchange, because under no circumstances would we turn back without knowing the whereabouts of the padre our brother who had been among Moquis and Cosninas and might be wandering about lost.”
Good lord! Father Garcés again? Wandering, maybe lost, somewhere between here and the far end of the Grand Canyon? Perhaps the Lagunas could help them find, and thereby save, the padres’ beloved Franciscan brother. No wonder the Sabuaganas were confused. What were these crazy Spaniards really trying to do?
IN THE END, the Sabuaganas gave in, even trading their good horses for the worn-out Spanish ones. On September 2, the expedition bade farewell to their temporary hosts and pushed on to the northwest, counting on Silvestre, their Laguna guide, to find the way. It took them four days to complete the traverse of Grand Mesa and reach the shores of the Colorado River.
From Hubbard Park, Sharon and I could have tried to navigate a network of old roads that looked somewhat sketchy on the map. Even if we had done so, we would have been following the D & E route only approximately. In 1975, the Bicentennial retracers had given up in the face of backcountry obstacles and ambiguities, pleading setbacks by fenced-off private land and flooded jeep roads. Instead they had plotted the course of the 1776 pioneers by their usual appeals to “likely” campsites and hill crossings divined via USGS quadrangle maps.
The weather was definitely turning for the worse, the temperature dropping, with the hint of a storm in the air. And I was starting to feel bad—a little nauseated, more fatigued than normal, with a nameless malaise hanging over my spirits. We decided to retrace our drive back to Paonia then head west to Grand Junction, where we’d spend the night in a motel. Sharon was worried about me. We had planned to get a second blood draw in Provo, the biggest city on the whole D & E loop, to see if my sodium level had dropped into the dangerous numbers. But Provo was still several days away.
As we drove back down Forest Road 701, I said, “It’s hard to like these guys,”
“Who?” asked Sharon, surprised. “The hunters?”
“No. Domínguez and Escalante.” Sharon didn’t respond at first. I wondered if my malaise was clouding my enthusiasm for our quest. But I went on, “They show up at the Sabuagana camp. Or rather, they sort of stagger in, guided by Atanasio. The Utes greet them warmly, it sounds like. They’ve only been there an hour or two before Domínguez gathers them together and tries to turn them into Christians.”
“Isn’t that what missionaries do?” Sharon parried.
“Sure, but not usually so abruptly, or so . . . what? Condescendingly. Scolding them for calling each other by animal names. Deciding poor Red Bear should be named Francisco from here on. Give me a break.”
When Sharon didn’t answer, I added, “I just can’t buy the instant conversion. Indians don’t just drop their religion like a bunch of old clothes and say, ‘Cool. We never heard about this guy Jesus before, and heaven and salvation and all that stuff. Thanks, bro!’ ”
At least that got a chuckle out of Sharon. I was letting off steam that had been building up for weeks, as I obsessed over Domínguez and Escalante. “What really doesn’t make sense about that conversion scene is that just the year before, Escalante had had a total failure at Hopi. The men at Oraibi told him, in effect, ‘We don’t want your stinkin’ Christianity. We’re perfectly happy with our own gods. And would you please get out of here before we get really riled up? Go back to Santa Fe.’ ”
Sharon was resisting my disaffected tantrum. “It was Domínguez doing the sermonizing, wasn’t it? Not Escalante.”
“True. And in his big mission report, Domínguez was pretty intolerant of the natives when he visited the pueblos. Bitches about how lazy and dirty they are. You know, though Escalante wrote the journal, Domínguez had a hand in what he said. Maybe a heavy hand. He was the boss of the expedition, after all.”
We drove slowly through the aspen trees. The bark of some had been carved by the men who had been on the crews putting in the National Forest track to Hubbard Park. Sharon slowed down so I could read one graffito from 1989: “Conrad Cisneros. Building road,” it read. No relation to Juan Pedro Cisneros, Escalante’s sidekick from Zuni? I wondered idly.
“You have to admit those guys were brave,” Sharon said. “Coming all the way up here without any soldiers, or hardly any guns. Going ahead toward the Comanches even after the Utes warned them they’ll all be killed.”
“I guess. I suppose it’s bravery. Or just blind faith. ‘With God on our side, nobody can hurt us.’ What’s that trite old war motto, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’?”
But my spleen was ebbing. “Yeah, Escalante was brave, all right,” I said. “I didn’t tell you this before, but he was in constant pain all through the expedition. Somewhere he’d gotten what he called a ‘urinary ailment.’ One reason the expedition didn’t leave Santa Fe on July 4, as they planned, was that he got a really bad attack just as they were ready to start. Domínguez ordered him to rest for a week.”
“How do we know it was bothering him the whole expedition?” Sharon asked.
“He wrote a letter to Fray Murillo about his trip to Hopi in 1775. Blames his own weakness for the failure to win any converts. It’s there that he talks about the pain. There’s one poignant passage, as he’s trying to ride his horse up to one of the hilltop Hopi villages. How does it go?” Later I found the passage. Escalante had written, “Although the ascent of the two hills is very difficult, I went up them without getting off my horse because my urinary ailment had been aggravated by the rough road, and the pain was such that I could not walk at all.”
I went on, “But that was a private letter to his Franciscan superior. The journal from 1776 was more official. And there’s not a word of complaint about his ‘ailment’ or his pain, even though Escalante records the fevers and stomachaches and illnesses of the other guys. Including Domínguez.”
My mood had changed. “He was a tough bastard. You know, he never recovered from whatever it was he had. He died less than four years after the expedition, in 1780. He was on the way to Mexico City to seek a cure, but he only got as far as Parral, a little town in Chihuahua. He was only thirty years old.” Sharon sucked in her breath. “John Kessell thinks the urinary ailment was prostate or bladder cancer, and that it killed him. I can relate to that.”
We wound down out of the spruces and aspens, back through the scrub oak. “Also,” said Sharon, “they never did any harm to the Indians, did they?”
“Nope.” I was coming around. “Compare them to Oñate or Vargas.”
“And they never treated their teammates badly. Even when they discovered that the three guys had smuggled along the trading goods—”
“Good point,” I interrupted. “Oñate would have said, ‘For that, we’re going to clap you in irons.’ Or when Felipe and Juan Domingo caught up with the team on August 14, these poor genízaros just wanting to tag along. Vargas would have said, ‘Fuck you guys. Get out of here. Find your own way back to Abiquiu.’ ”
We reached Grand Junction after dark and chose a motel more or less at random. After dinner I had a bad case of acid reflux and almost threw up. I took Alka-Seltzer, as well as Oxycodone for my back pain, then slept poorly. In the morning I was dizzy, with the sparkly aura of a migraine making my head throb and the sky too bright to look at without squinting. Sharon would have to drive all day. During the previous two years I had suffered from so many side effects of cancer that I took these new discomforts in stride. But a glum anxiety hung over us all morning.
Grand Junction is so named because here the Gunnison River flows into the Colorado. But it’s the knack of modern cities to bury the streams that gave them their reason for existing beneath grids of streets and houses and stores. Heading for the motel, very tired after the long day, we had crossed the Colorado River on South 5th Street without even noticing it.
Had we driven Highway 50 directly from Delta to Grand Junction, instead of following the Spaniards up into Hubbard Park on Grand Mesa, we would have passed only a few miles east of the Dominguez–Escalante National Conservation Area and the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness. These lands, set aside by the Bureau of Land Management in 2009, offer all kinds of backcountry enticements, from long hikes and backpacks to petroglyph panels to kayaking and canoeing on Big Dominguez Creek and Escalante Creek. In the central Dominguez Canyon Wilderness itself, neither motorized vehicles nor bicycles are allowed. It’s country preserved as close to true wilderness as the government agencies in charge of preserving the American environment can designate. It’s also a handsome tribute to the expedition that brought the first Europeans to this part of the great West in 1776.
I would have been tempted to spend a few days in that BLM playground, poking into places like the Potholes or Brushy Ridge or Gibbler Gulch. But the great irony is that Domínguez and Escalante never traveled within 20 miles of this outback dedicated to them. More than a week later, in southern Utah, Sharon and I would drive into the other vast domain of protected land memorializing the expedition: Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, which centers on the Escalante River and the venerable Mormon town of Escalante. But here, too, is a wilderness across which the Spaniards never traveled. Of the several ironies attendant upon that misnamed backcountry paradise, more below.
On the morning of September 21, the storm still held off, but the wind out of the west had increased. We drove on, glad to be tucked inside our SUV, as gusts swirled up the roadside dirt and the willows beside the river bent in submission. It was our twentieth day out of Santa Fe, and we were only a third of the way along the route of Domínguez and Escalante.
From the Sabuagana encampment on September 2, 1776, the Spaniards zigzagged through hills and ravines as they sorted out the jumbled topography of Grand Mesa. Somewhere near a butte known today as Bronco Knob they reached an elevation of 9,800 feet, the highest they would attain on the whole journey. Escalante’s journal turns lifeless as the men followed Silvestre’s vacillating directions, skirting scores of beaver dams and struggling with their horses and mules. They ran into no Comanches, nor even any signs of them, whoever those vaunted enemies might be. Their only human encounter was with three Ute women and a child who were out gathering berries, and who offered the Spaniards some. “The gooseberry which grows in these parts,” noted Escalante, “is very sour on the bush, but when already exposed to the sun, as these Yuta woman had it, it has a very delicious sweet-sour taste.”
In late morning on September 5, the team came to a big river. The Utes, they were told, called it the Red River, and said its source was a great lake far to the east. In a puzzling aside, Escalante adds that the great stream was a “river which our own call San Rafael.” (Which of “our own,” one wonders? Rivera never reached it.) The Spaniards noted that it ran higher than the Rio Grande near Santa Fe, but crossing it was no problem. They were not impressed with their surroundings, “where there are no prospects of a settlement.” The team stopped to camp. Miera y Pacheco got an astrolabe reading of 41˚ 4' N, still half a degree too far north. The expedition had traveled 575 miles during their thirty-nine eventful days since departing from Santa Fe.
Without even realizing it, Domínguez and Escalante had discovered the fabled Río Tizón—known today as the Colorado. On September 6 the men set out again, leaving the river after riding downstream only a little over a mile, striking off northwest into a new maze of canyons and hills.
Perhaps it was inconsequential that the men were unaware of their river discovery. Everything they sought lay on the other side, beyond the Tizón. Somewhere out there California beckoned, but before it, Teguayó.