TEGUAYÓ AND THE LOST SPANIARDS
EVEN THOUGH THE SPANIARDS FAILED TO RECOGNIZE THE Río de San Rafael as the long-sought Río Tizón, it would have made sense to follow that waterway indefinitely downstream, for it flowed west, toward far-off California, and there were no canyons in sight to box the team in, as the tortured Dolores had done. Instead, on September 6, the men struck off northwest up a side creek toward another high upland.
Even today, the Piceance Basin is little traveled, a maze of shallow draws threaded by bad dirt roads that dead-end near the headwaters of such uninspiringly named creeks as Brush, Clear, Dry, and Roan. Pronounced “Pee-ants” by locals, Piceance is a Ute word meaning “tall grass.” In recent years, developers have started coveting the basin for its natural gas reserves, and the oil shale potential lights dollar signs in the eyes of fracking zealots. During four days from September 6 to 9, 1776, the Domínguez–Escalante expedition crossed the basin. In 1975, a new Bicentennial retracer named G. Clell Jacobs took over from the duo who had gamely shadowed the expedition across the Uncompahgre Plateau and down the Uncompahgre River to the Gunnison, then up onto Grand Mesa. To navigate the Piceance Basin, Jacobs stitched together transport by four-wheel-drive truck, dune buggy, and his own feet, as he guessed just where the Spaniards might have ridden and camped. At one point he interviewed a ninety-year-old rancher who’d been raised and spent his whole life on Carr Creek, one of the streams that trickles down to join the Colorado. The old-timer pointed out an ancient Ute trail that had been rendered impassable by landslides, which he guessed the Spaniards might have followed.
Those four days traversing Piceance Basin were not happy ones. It was not D & E who chose the route but Silvestre, the Laguna guide they had hired. And on the first day, the mutinous genízaros—the Muñiz brothers and Felipe—shared with the padres their suspicion that Silvestre had been enticed “to keep us winding about so as not to proceed further or to hand us over to a Sabuagana ambuscade that could be awaiting us.” D & E scoffed at the notion of such a nefarious plot and kept the team moving northwest. That night they camped next to the teepees of a Sabuagana party, who swore that they had spent the day even farther north, in Yamparica Comanche territory, hoping to steal horses. But these raiders had found neither their enemy nor their horses, instead deducing from tracks in the sand that the Comanches must have moved out to the east, headed toward El Río de Napeste.
Once more, Escalante’s diary threatened to give me a headache. The Napeste is the Arkansas River, which flows almost 1,600 miles from its headwaters near present-day Leadville, Colorado, all the way across eastern Colorado, southern Kansas, northern Oklahoma, and Arkansas before emptying its waters in the Mississippi River. The middle Arkansas was indeed Comanche territory, but its headwaters rose no nearer the Piceance Basin than 120 miles as the crow flies. Even James Fenimore Cooper would have thought it a stretch for the Sabuaganas to derive from horses’ footprints in the sand a destination as remote as the Arkansas.
For several days the Spaniards had ridden on under the dire warning that they would be wiped out by Comanches. Unless the usual confusions of language skewed everything, the Sabuaganas lived in daily fear of an enemy they called the Comanches. But whoever that phantom foe really was, the Spaniards never caught a glimpse of them. And that night was the last the team spent in the company of Sabuagana Utes. The Indians whose conversion to the true God had seemed a fait accompli a few days earlier were left behind, entrenched in their aboriginal ways, as the Spaniards sought another tribe—the people of the lake, the Lagunas.
FROM GRAND JUNCTION, Sharon and I could have driven back up the Colorado River 25 miles to the old railroad stop of DeBeque, where D & E had crossed the great river. We could have pushed the dirt tracks up Roan and Carr Creeks, but without a dune buggy or a vigorous hike I doubted that we could have traversed the Piceance. I wasn’t feeling good on the morning of September 21, and I was starting to worry that we were falling behind our own schedule. So instead we set off north on State Highway 139, where I knew we’d meet up with the D & E track, and where I wanted to revisit a prehistoric mystery along the banks of Douglas Creek.
Despite my post-migraine daze, to be on the road again was deeply satisfying. All the years when I’d bombed across country as fast as I could to link Colorado and the East Coast, or endured the gauntlet of the Alaska Highway to get to the limitless mountains of my ambition, I’d been too impetuous to enjoy each journey itself except as a means to an end. But now Sharon and I were in the middle of a true road trip, and skipping one part of the D & E itinerary gave us the leisure to stop and savor another part.
In an essay mock-heroically titled “The Rediscovery of America: 1946,” Wallace Stegner celebrates the joy of setting out on an ordinary car camping trip from San Francisco to Lake Mead, Las Vegas, Death Valley, and the Sierra Nevada after four years of service during the war. In that piece Stegner tosses off a credo that I could sympathize with now: “We are a wheeled people; it seems to me sometimes that I must have been born with a steering wheel in my hand, and I realize now that to lose the use of a car is practically equivalent to losing the use of my legs.”
About 30 miles up Route 139, we crested a low pass that separates the watersheds of Salt Creek and Douglas Creek. And 20 miles farther north, as low cliffs on either side began to shelter the winding valley from the mesas surrounding it, we suddenly came upon the first painting. On the sandstone wall on our left, someone had drawn a pair of uplifted hands in white, their edges gilded in red. Other panels followed, the figures painted in red, white, and brownish purple. Some depicted humanoids with horned heads or headdresses; others plainly represented dogs and bighorn sheep as well as long stalks of plants, probably corn.
On September 9, after completing the traverse of Piceance Basin, the Spaniards discovered the same paintings. Writes Escalante, “Halfway in this canyon toward the south there is a quite lofty rock cliff on which we saw, crudely painted, three shields, or ‘Apache shields,’ of hide, and a spearhead.” The “Apache shields” panel, which is held together today by a rusted metal cable to prevent the collapse of the sandstone slab the prehistoric artist used for canvas, looked to me like a red figure carrying shields (or other blobs) as well as a spear or staff, while also playing a flute held sideways before his face. This stretch of Douglas Creek is still called Cañon Pintado, or Painted Canyon, the name Escalante gave it. The sites are maintained by the BLM, with signboards giving their modern names: “Waving Hands Site,” “Carrot Man Site,” “White Birds Site,” and the like.
It’s odd that Escalante shows no curiosity about who might have created these tableaux. At the ruin beside the Dolores he had at least pointed out the kinship that village seemed to have with the mud-and-stone structures of the New Mexico pueblos. He may have assumed the art in Douglas Canyon was the work of Utes, but if so, he would have been wrong.
Sharon had never been to Cañon Pintado before, but I had spent a day here in 2005 as I researched an article for National Geographic about a canyon in east-central Utah that a single rancher named Waldo Wilcox had kept in pristine condition for fifty years by fencing it off and scaring off curio hunters and archaeologists alike with stern “no trespassing” signs and (rumor had it) the shotgun he toted around his spread. Nearly all the ruins and rock art in Range Creek were the work of Fremont people, prehistoric farmers and hunter-gatherers whose culture bore some resemblance to that of the Anasazi, but also crucial differences.
Much less is known about the Fremont than about their neighbors to the south, but both peoples were afflicted by a combination of environmental degradation (drought, deforestation, the depletion of big game, “arroyo-cutting”) and perhaps a spiritual mandate to move elsewhere that led to the wholesale abandonment of the Colorado Plateau by 1300 AD. A profound difference between the cultures, however, lies in the fate of the peoples after the abandonment. We know that the Anasazi moved south and east and assimilated with the Puebloans in New Mexico and with the Hopi in Arizona. But the experts have no clear handle on what happened to the Fremont. They may have assimilated so thoroughly with Utes and Shoshone as to be invisible today. One scholar believes they migrated all the way to western Kansas and “became” the Kiowa. But they may also have died out completely, spiraling into cultural extinction.
Douglas Creek is named for the last Ute chief to call this valley home, before the government forced his people to move to the reservation in Utah. What’s so interesting about Cañon Pintado is that that shallow canyon, almost treeless today, its muddy stream fringed with intrusive growths of tamarisk and cheat grass, way out on the eastern edge of the Fremont domain, seems to have been the very last refuge of the Fremont. Archaeologists have detected them flourishing there as late as 1500 AD. What survival tricks might they have learned that the proud builders of Mesa Verde and Keet Seel and Lowry and Yellow Jacket never mastered? As Sharon and I studied the paintings—yes, they’re crude compared to the brilliant Fremont panels at McConkie Ranch or in Nine Mile Canyon—I was beguiled again by the thought that the last bands of Fremont might have hung on almost into the decade when the Spaniards first entered the Southwest.
At the town of Rangely, Douglas Creek pours its meager flow into the White River. We had intended to stop there for a picnic lunch, but a nasty 30 mph wind out of the west was blowing dirt and trash through the streets. No one was about in the sleepy burg. We found a concrete picnic table in a city park, but because of the wind ended up dining in the front seat of our SUV. Brie cheese and Ritz crackers again, rice pudding, a handful of nuts, a Reese’s peanut butter cup, a bottle of Starbuck’s Frappuccino, but also a gloriously ripe peach: one more of my patented meals for survivors of radiation therapy to the mouth and throat. There’s something regressive about eating lunch in a car. Perhaps it conjures up childhood snacks on the road when Mom and Dad were too irritable to stop and lay out a proper picnic spread. I felt a glum mood creep over me. The high school next door proclaimed itself “Home of the Panthers.” Ever since Tierra Amarilla, where the Escalante Mid–High School was “Home of the Lobos,” we had been driving past schools whose students embraced as their totems wildcats, eagles, bulldogs, bobcats. I thought of Domínguez lecturing Red Bear about the difference between brutes and humans and rechristening him Francisco.
The Spaniards reached the White River late on September 9 and named it El Río de San Clemente, camping on its north shore. They noted that the stream, like the San Rafael (Colorado), flowed west, but dismissed its banks as “offer[ing] no prospect for a settlement.” It would have made good sense to follow the White River downstream to where it joins the Green. But now Silvestre, the Laguna guide, was calling the shots, and he led the team off to the northwest, through a parched badlands of “rockless hills and brief plains with neither pasturage nor trees,” as Escalante dispiritedly observed. The team camped that night without water, keeping guard until dawn over the horses and mules. On September 11, more of the same.
The route D & E followed between the White and Green rivers roughly parallels State Highway 64 and U.S. Highway 40. E. Clell Jacobs, the Bicentennial retracer, made a brave effort to rediscover the precise path the Spaniards followed across what is today a bleak plain of oil fields. He consulted old maps that indicated “Indian trails” and chatted with old-timers, but as was so often the case with the Commission’s effort to pin down the Spanish itinerary, Jacobs ended up reverting to likely guesses and hints of corroboration. For instance, Escalante describes the campsite of September 11 only as an arroyo with running water near a poplar (cottonwood) grove. Writes Jacobs, “After making many trips to this region and driving and walking the route, this researcher has concluded that the party was east of Snake John Reef and that the campsite was near the present K Ranch.” Perhaps.
That day, for the first time, Escalante admits that his team is beginning to run low on food: “By now we had few provisions, in view of the long traveling we still had to do, because of what we had spent among the Sabuaganas and other Yutas.” That the men thought they could possibly carry enough food for the whole journey, no matter how many pack animals they allocated for the purpose, signals a disastrous miscalculation. Yet before the trip, Domínguez had blithely claimed as much. In a letter to Fray Isidro Murillo, the head of the Franciscan order in New Mexico, written on the day of the team’s departure from Santa Fe, he expressed his gratitude to Governor Mendinueta, who “not only applauded our plan but also opened up his heart and his hands, giving us supplies and everything we might need for the journey.” So on September 11, in the midst of the wasteland near today’s Colorado–Utah border, when the team discovered bison tracks, D & E sent “two companions” off to track the great animals. They returned after noon saying they had spotted a buffalo. The hunt was on. “We dispatched others on the fleetest horses and, after chasing it for about three leagues, they killed it; then at seven-thirty at night they brought back a grand supply of meat.” This was also the first time on the whole journey that Escalante recorded shooting any game, or even trying to live off the land more aggressively than pausing to sample handfuls of the local berries.
On September 13 the team came to the Green River. It was a moment of high importance, for several reasons. Escalante noted that “the river is the most copious one we have come by”—larger, in fact, than the Colorado, which the team had forded eight days earlier. No doubt Silvestre told him that the new river was joined somewhere far to the west by the San Clemente (the White), “but we do not know if it does [come together] with the preceding ones.” In other words, even the Laguna guide was ignorant of the cardinal fact that the Colorado River ultimately joins the Green to form the mighty current that flows through Cataract Canyon, Glen Canyon, and the colossal gorge of the Grand Canyon—the most powerful river in the American Southwest. Several weeks hence, that ignorance would plunge the Spaniards into a life-threatening predicament.
Unfazed for the moment, the padres named the big river the San Buenaventura—literally, the Saint of Good Fortune. Silvestre told them there was only one place to ford the river, “on the west side of the hogback on the north, very near to a chain of small bluffs of loose dirt.” Today’s Highway 50 crosses the Green on a sturdy bridge at the derelict farming town of Jensen, Utah. A ramshackle visitor center was staffed by a small, ancient lady. I asked her, “Do you know where the Ute crossing of the Green River was?” “What?” she cried, her mouth agape. I explained our mission retracing the route of Domínguez and Escalante. Those names meant nothing to her. (What kind of information, I wondered cruelly, was this old crone capable of dishing out?) She urged me to head north to another visitor center at the gateway of Dinosaur National Monument. I thanked her and fled.
Fortunately, the Bicentennial Commission had done the research I craved. In 1975 two new retracers, Jerome Stoffel and George Stewart, fused local lore with Escalante’s careful description to pinpoint the place of the ford. They were aided by the memory of a Jensen old-timer named Demar Dudley, who recalled that in 1917 a big flood had altered the course of the Green. With Stoffel and Stewart’s coordinates in hand, Sharon and I took a back road three miles north along the west bank of the Green to the spot where Brush Creek trickles into the main current. Staring across the surging water, we could imagine the ford just as Silvestre had described it. Not for the first time, I realized that in 1975 the Commission men had been able to call upon the long memories of local residents to enhance their rediscovery of the Spaniards’ route. By 2017, that link of oral lore seemed to have gone extinct—as exemplified by the stare of incomprehension of the old lady in the visitor center. (I would have wagered that Demar Dudley, may he rest in peace, knew who Domínguez and Escalante were.)
In the same journal entry on September 13, Escalante notes that the big river is “the same one which Fray Alonso de Posada . . . relates in his report as separating the Yuta Nation from the Comanche.” The mention of Posada is the key to just what goals the padres were pursuing in mid-September 1776, besides the desire to find a route to Monterey, which by that point in the journey seems to have been pushed to a back burner.
Writing in 1686, in the midst of the shock that the Pueblo Revolt had dealt the Spaniards six years earlier, Posada attempts a grandly ambitious survey of the geography of all of North America, despite the fact that half the continent remained unknown to Europeans. But more particularly—and more vitally for Escalante—Posada tries to fix the geographical location of a mysterious place known alternately as Teguayó and Copala. The history of the idea embodied in those names intermingles native origin myths and the Spanish passion to discover a fabulously rich land somewhere beyond the frontiers of Old Mexico. When Coronado entered the Southwest in 1540, he was in the grip of a zeal to discover Quivira, loosely synonymous with the Seven Cities of Cíbola, or the Seven Cities of Gold. As related in chapter 1, Puebloans invented Quivira and located it far to the east of the Rio Grande, out on the plains of today’s Kansas, to lure the genocidal conquistador into a wild goose chase and thereby spare their own settlements. After Oñate’s conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spaniards became dimly aware of the belief of the Tewa Indians, who occupied six pueblos ranging from Ohkay Owingeh to Tesuque, that long ago their people had migrated from an origin place many leagues to the northwest of their present villages—the semi-mythical Teguayó. And in 1604, on a foray in search of the great South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean, Oñate was told by natives near the lower Colorado River about a place equally far off to the north called Copala.
Copala became conflated with Quivira. Oñate listened hungrily to a story of men and women wearing bracelets and earrings made of gold but who somehow spoke Spanish, living in utopian splendor in distant Copala. Writing six years after the Pueblo Revolt, Posada was well aware that, during an unsuccessful attempt to win back the colony in 1681, an elderly Puebloan who was captured and executed provided the first testimony about Popé, the shaman who had directed the great uprising. According to that informant, as Popé meditated in a kiva at Taos, three supernatural beings appeared who gave him the vision of a homeland rid of the oppressor, and those spirits “said they were going underground to the Lake of Copala.” To make matters even more complicated (and more baffling to the Spaniards), Cortés and his men had learned that the Aztecs believed they had migrated from a mythical homeland far off in the little-known north. Moctezuma himself was supposed to have come from Teguayó/Copala.
Posada notes that for almost a century, geographers have confused the “provinces” of Quivira and Teguayó. The main thrust of his scholarly report is to disentangle these two lands. What galvanized Escalante (and no doubt Domínguez) was Posada’s fairly precise claim that Teguayó lay 180 leagues (or 475 miles) northwest of Santa Fe. Moreover, “the land which the Indians of the North call Teguayó” is one and the same as the territory that “the Mexican Indians by an old tradition call Copala.” According to Popé’s vision, unearthed in 1681 by the tortured informant, Copala was a lake.
One of the major goals, then, of the Domínguez–Escalante expedition was to find Teguayó and to discover whether or not it was the rumored land of incalculable wealth and luxury. Thanks to Posada, Escalante knew that Teguayó/Copala was centered on a big lake. Not by accident did the padres call the Ute tribe supposed to inhabit that land the Lagunas (laguna is Spanish for “lake”). Whether Silvestre promised the Spaniards a lake is uncertain, but likely, for when D & E eventually reached the vast inland body of water known today as Utah Lake, they professed not an iota of surprise.
Oddly enough, Posada doesn’t say a word about Comanches, despite Escalante’s assertion that the 1686 report fixes the boundary between the territory of the Yutas and that of the Comanches. What Posada does define is the well-known border between the “Apacha” and the Yutas. Apacha was a standard appellation for “Apaches de Navajo,” which ethnographers identify today as the Navajo of New Mexico and Arizona. This only deepens the mystery of the Yamparica Comanches. Did Escalante willfully equate Posada’s “Apacha” with the Comanches the Utes kept warning him against? Or did he simply forget? The point is that by September 1776 D & E were far more motivated to find the mythic stronghold of Teguayó than they were by their mandate to blaze a trail to Monterey.
All this is murky and complicated enough. But we know that the padres were equally entranced by another thread of legend and rumor. Much of it sprang from the electrifying report received by Escalante’s colleague at Zuni, Fray Damián Martínez, sometime in the early 1770s. According to Martínez, a Navajo whom the Spaniards trusted reported as follows:
On one of the forays he made with them [his people] they traveled between north and west as far as the river called El Tizón, on the shore of which he found a white man on horseback with clothing and armament of the type we use. He spoke to him in Castilian and in his Navajo language, and he says that the man did not reply but only smiled to himself when he used our language. This Indian and his companions observed among the groves on the opposite bank of the river a number of smokes, as if from chimneys and some plantings. . . . They waited a while to observe the ford and the route which the white man was taking, but the said man remained motionless on this side until, tired of waiting, they turned back.
This startling encounter reinforced an old idea in the New Mexico colony that there might be a band of “lost Spaniards” hanging on somewhere beyond the Río Tizón. Other reports specified that these men grew full beards, which seemed to prove that they could not be Indians. Ever since Coronado’s entrada in 1540–42, the idea had taken hold that some band of allies sent to support the conquistador’s massive army had been waylaid or captured or had simply gotten lost somewhere in the uncharted wilderness to the north. The rumors of bearded men beyond the Tizón, perhaps still wearing armor and speaking Castilian, provided yet another dramatic spur to the quest of 1776: not only to discover Teguayó, but to find and save the countrymen lost more than a century before. Escalante himself alluded to this goal in a letter he wrote from Zuni to a Franciscan brother in August 1775, as he first contemplated the great expedition he would co-lead the next year. Wrote Escalante: “Here it is believed the Spaniards or white people whom the Yutas say they have seen many times may be descendants from those 300 soldiers whom Captain Alvarado left when he entered by the Río Colorado at the beginning of the conquest.”
Whew. Hernando de Alvarado was the commander of Coronado’s advance guard, leading 75 to 100 soldiers (not 300) first to Zuni, then out onto the Kansas plains in the fruitless search for the riches of Quivira. He returned to Mexico after the expedition and died peacefully in Mexico City in 1550. But by the 1770s, Spaniards in New Mexico had invented, or evolved, the legend that Alvarado himself, or at least a substantial portion of his troops, had gotten separated from the expedition and never returned. It was this legend, reinforced by the Navajo’s account of the man in armor speaking Castilian on the other side of the river, together with the stories of bearded strangers in the far northwest, that Escalante wholeheartedly bought into. And what cause could be more noble than the rescue of fellow countrymen enslaved or lost three generations before? The lost Spaniards were the original POW/MIAs.
ESCALANTE DOES NOT say whether the team thought the San Buenaventura was the fabled Tizón. But it was the biggest river they had crossed on the whole journey, bigger even than the Rio Grande, by which yardstick they measured all the waterways they discovered. The men spent two days on the banks of the Green, resting their horses. They managed to kill another bison, a small one, from which “we enjoyed little meat.” Yet there was a sense within the party that something monumental had been accomplished. On the very edge of the river there were “six big black poplars [cottonwoods] which had grown in pairs,” as well as another standing alone. On that solitary tree Joaquín Lain used his adze to cut a rectangular “window” in the bark, then wielded a chisel to carve “Year of 1776,” his last name, and two Christian crosses. It was a conscious imitation of the inscription Rivera had carved in the big cottonwood on the banks of the Gunnison in 1765, which D & E had searched for in vain.
Herbert E. Bolton, retracing the expedition route in 1950, believed he had found the same grove. “The six giant cottonwoods still stand at the site described by Escalante,” he wrote in Pageant in the Wilderness, “but the inscription, perhaps covered by the growth of a century and three-quarters, is not visible.” The historian’s claim was one more example of partisans of D & E needing to be more certain than they had any right to be that they had found traces of the long-ago journey. Later a team of botanists from the University of Utah cored the cottonwoods and found that none of them was more than seventy-five years old.
Celebratory those days on the banks of the Green may have been. Escalante envisioned a future settlement here, complete with irrigation ditches to water the fields. But as soon as the team moved on, a mood of paranoia and mistrust took hold. On the far side of a dry arroyo, the Spaniards discovered the tracks of “about twelve horses and some people on foot.” They could of course have been left by any party venturing near the crossing of the Green, for all kinds of purposes, but D & E studied the markings closely and concluded that “they”—the authors of the prints—“had been lying in wait or spying for some time on the ridge’s highest part, without letting go of the horses. We suspected that they might be some Sabuaganas who could have followed us to deprive us of the animal herd at this place, where we would likely attribute the deed to the Comanches instead of the Yutas, since we were no longer in the latter’s country but the former’s.”
Where was the padres’ serene faith in God to protect them from all enemies? In its absence, the miasma of suspicion wrapped itself around Silvestre. The Spaniards recalled that the night before, the guide had “casually and without being noticed” slipped out of camp to sleep alone. Back on the Gunnison, the team had given Silvestre a blanket to wear, but the man had never put it on. Now, on September 16, he wore the blanket all day. “We suspected,” wrote Escalante, “that, for his having had an understanding with the Sabuaganas, he wore it so as to be recognized in case they attacked us. He increased our suspicion all the more when he lagged behind for a while, pensive and confused, before reaching the ridge where we found the tracks.” Rather than confront Silvestre, the padres “dissembled,” pretending nothing was wrong. And indeed, nothing happened.
By now I thought it was high time to settle this pesky Comanche business for good, but of course in our baggage on the road we lacked the research materials to dig into this ethnographic puzzle. It was only months later, back home in Massachusetts, that I could make a stab. In Pekka Hämäläinen’s definitive culture history, Comanche Empire (2008), a well-drawn map of the tribe’s homeland in the 1770s and 1780s covers a vast territory stretching from eastern New Mexico into what are now Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas. Small zones of Comanche raiding focus on Santa Fe and the pueblos along the Rio Grande, but extend no farther west than Jemez pueblo or north than a few miles beyond Abiquiu. Yet on that map, a small blob of separate land is glossed as “Comanche raiding zone.” And that blob stretches from Grand Mesa to the Green River, where the Sabuaganas warned D & E about Comanches to the northwest.
That analysis sounds authoritative. But as I read more closely, I realized that Hämäläinen’s only source for the presence of Comanches way up in northeastern Utah was Escalante’s journal, reinforced by Miera y Pacheco’s map, which affixes the legend “Comanches Yamparicas” across the blank space just north of where the team forded the “Rio de S Buena Ventura” (the Green). If the D & E expedition is Hämäläinen’s sole source for this anomalous Comanche presence, perhaps he is simply passing on undigested the padres’ misconception that the indomitable warriors of the plains had established a stronghold in far-off Ute country. Hämäläinen seems to admit his own surprise at such an intrusion, observing that that stronghold would have been “separated from Comancheria proper by four hundred miles of rugged mountains, deep canyons, and thick forests.”
I think the most likely explanation of the phantom enemy whom the Sabuaganas lived in dread of, and who rattled the nerves of the Spaniards as they pushed beyond the Green, is that they were another tribe of Utes, or perhaps Shoshone, who threatened the existence not only of the Sabuaganas but also of Silvestre’s Laguna people. “Yampirica” seems to echo the Yampa River, a tributary of the Green, which flows about 60 miles north of Grand Mesa. “Yampa” is a Snake Indian word for an edible plant that grows along the river—and the Snakes include the Eastern Shoshone. A band called the Yamparica, or Yampa Utes, eventually emerges in the historical record, but not until 1850, or three-quarters of a century after the Spaniards rode through Utah. That tribe, of course, could have been there all along. None of this explains, however, why D & E insisted that the Yutas with whom they made peace consistently swore that the bad guys against whom they sporadically warred were Comanches.
ON SEPTEMBER 21, Sharon and I hoped to camp out. But the weather, which had turned for the worse as we drove up into Hubbard Park the day before, was further deteriorating, as the thermometer steadily dropped and the clouds smudged with hints of rain. After Jensen, we drove north into Vernal, the biggest town for miles around, and found a motel. That evening, in a gloomy cafeteria-like restaurant, we watched as a large family of Utes came in and occupied the long table next to ours. They ranged in age from a pair of toddlers to a grandma robed in a fine dress, spangled with necklaces and bracelets. Every member, sad to say, was obese. On the Navajo reservation I’d often witnessed the equivalent. In historic photos of both Navajos and Utes from the end of the nineteenth century, all the men and women look lean and fit. But the traditional diet of corn and mutton and berries has relentlessly morphed into platters of fry bread and tacos and burgers, supplemented with jumbo-sized Cokes and Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes, not to mention booze. The family next to us, though, looked stone-cold sober, and they were having a good time, laughing and teasing one another.
Simply to make an observation such as this one is to tiptoe on the edge of ethnic stereotyping, not to mention cultural condescension. But in 2017 it was hard for me not to see the legacy of Silvestre and the Sabuaganas as marginalization, anomie, and the reservation blues. On September 17, 1776, the day after the expedition found the prints that warned them of what they feared was an impending “ambuscade,” Silvestre led the team up a high ridge, from the summit of which he pointed southwest to show the men where the Green and White Rivers meet. That junction today is the site of the little town of Ouray, Utah, named after the vacillating chief who in the early 1880s bowed to manifest destiny and traded his people’s Colorado domain for the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, whose four million acres cover, after the Navajo reservation, the second-largest Indian reserve in the United States. From Vernal on September 22, we drove along U.S. Highway 40 and at Fort Duchesne turned south on dirt roads to creep onto the reservation. At the junction, a scattering of shops gave us our choice among Ute Gas, the Ute Coffee House, and the Ute Crossing Grill.
The houses on either side were small and poor. Yards were decorated with defunct trucks and cars, their tires removed, rust invading the chassis. The ditches along the roadside collected the trash. For some reason, the beer of choice for both reservation Navajos and Utes is Bud Lite, either in cans or brown bottles. We crossed the Duchesne River and turned west. On either side barbed wire fences paralleled the roadway. We stopped to read several signs hung from the upper strands. The wording was uniform:
NOTICE!
TO ALL NON-MEMBERS OF THE UTE INDIAN TRIBE
THIS IS INDIAN LAND
NO TRESPASSING
NO HUNTING
The hostility baked into that printed message seemed hard-earned. A century and a half ago, Ouray’s people had given away their homeland to politicians who coveted canyons and mountains rich with gold and silver. Whatever the four million acres the tribe had received in exchange might be good for, it was not to fuel such nineteenth-century bonanzas as the Camp Bird and Tomboy mines, nor such twentieth-century temples to Sybaris as Aspen and Telluride.
About ten years earlier, I had tried to get permission to hike on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, which I knew must be swarming with prehistoric ruins and rock art left by the Fremont people, just as I’d found in Range Creek, which borders the rez on the west. Many times I’d paid for a permit to hike on the Navajo Reservation, and some of my most rewarding Anasazi discoveries had come in canyons seldom visited by Anglos. Even in the most culturally sensitive areas, such as Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley, I’d been able to explore in the company of a Navajo guide I hired.
Several phone calls and emails to the Ute headquarters in Fort Duchesne went unanswered. Finally I got an agent from the tribe’s Fish and Wildlife Department on the line. He was perplexed. For decades, Ute guides had charged decent fees to guide Anglo hunters on the reservation, where they stalked trophy elk and black bear. But no one, the man claimed, had ever asked about hiring a hiking guide. For want of a pigeonhole in which to insert my request, it floated in bureaucratic limbo. Nothing came of my inquiry.
On the evening of September 17, the Spaniards camped near here, where Sharon and I trundled along the dirt road beside the Duchesne River. From their camp, staring at a distant mountain range (probably the eastern edge of the Uintas) they caught sight of wisps of smoke rising from distant campfires. “When we asked the guide who in his opinion had sent them up,” wrote Escalante, “he said that they could be Comanches or some of the Lagunas who usually came hunting thereabouts.”
During the next five days, the Spaniards moved steadily westward, driven by the paramount desire to reach the main encampment of the Lagunas. The way ought to have been straightforward, following first the Duchesne and then the Strawberry rivers upstream. But Silvestre seemed to guide the team into arbitrary byways and incomprehensible tangles of vegetation. Escalante’s diary is rife with complaint—and suspicion. On the 18th, “Because the guide wanted to cross over to the river’s other side and follow it, he stuck us through an almost impenetrable willow bosque, or thicket, and into marshy estuaries which made us backtrack and cross the river thrice while making many useless detours.” The next day, Silvestre chose a route that required “making several turns over almost impassable terrain” that “caused one of our horses to be injured and made us backtrack another mile.” A different horse died on September 20. So the litany proceeds: “a stretch of sagebrush, flat but bothersome, and with a lot of prickly pear cactus”; “narrow valleys of very soft dirt and many small holes in which, because they lay hidden in the undergrowth, the mounts kept sinking and stumbling at every instant”; “breaking through almost impenetrable swaths of chokecherry and scruboak and passing through another poplar forest so thick that we doubted if the packs could get through unless they were first taken off.” On the 21st, Silvestre managed to infuriate the padres and ratchet up their suspicion. “The guide, anxious to get there sooner than we ourselves could make it, was hurrying so fast that he vanished in the forest at every step, and we knew not where to follow him. . . . He was ordered to go slow and always within our sight.”
In our SUV, we watched the temperature on the dashboard sink to 43˚, and a light rain began to fall. Along the same stretch of the Duchesne River, the Spaniards endured a comparable weather change. “Tonight it was so cold,” Escalante reported on September 20, “that even the water which stood close to the fire all night was frozen by morning.”
The moment we crossed the invisible boundary between Uinta and Duchesne counties, the highway improved, potholes replaced by smooth tarmac. The road stopped curving and instead abruptly changed direction by jolts of ninety degrees aligned with the points of the compass. In place of peevish “no trespassing” placards proclaiming Indian sovereignty, we found neat green signposts announcing 8850 South, 3500 East, and the like. We had left the Ute reservation and entered greater Myton, a venerable Mormon town (2010 population 569). But when at last we entered the village center, we found trailers and cottages that looked every bit as poor as the rez shacks. One lane, however, bore the proud signature Escalante Way.
We traveled on west of Myton on U.S. 40 toward Duchesne, the biggest town we would visit between Vernal and Provo. The origin of the name of that high plains outpost, like the Scottish romance informing Montrose, piqued my fancy. Rose Philippine Duchesne was born in Grenoble, France, in 1769, seven years before D & E hit the trail. (I’d climbed and hiked a lot in the Vercors and Chartreuse, using Grenoble as my home base. The region is one of my favorite parts of France.) At the age of eighteen, Rose Philippine became a nun, but when the French Revolution forced her underground, she longed to light out for America.
Her wish was answered only in 1818, when she traveled to Louisiana to serve in the Catholic missionary effort on the frontier that Jefferson had purchased from Napoleon. She ended up in St. Charles, Missouri, where she ran a school that struggled to stay afloat. Her grand passion, like that of D & E, was to bring the Gospel to American Indians. She got her one chance at age seventy-two, as part of a Jesuit campaign to educate Potawatomi girls. Too ill to do much in the way of teaching, she gained the sobriquet “the woman who always prays.” After a single year among the Indians, she was recalled to St. Charles.
What Sister Rose Philippine, who never got closer to Utah than Sugar Creek, Kansas, had to do with naming the thoroughly Mormon town of Duchesne, I never got straight. She was beatified in 1940, but six years before that, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers installed a plaque in the center of Duchesne, which we stopped to ponder. The inscription vaguely hailed the nun as “having links” with the explorer William Clark and the mountain man William Ashley. I think the town was named after the river, and it’s likely that French trappers bestowed the tribute, but when and exactly why, who knows?
Domínguez and Escalante camped just west of today’s town of Duchesne on the night of September 21–22. But any effort to find the site of their bivouac today is thwarted by one more man-made lake that obliterates the Spaniards’ trail—the Starvation Reservoir, smack in the middle of Starvation State Park. Alas, that designation alludes not to the lean rations the Spaniards were consuming by the end of September 1776 but to some desperate wintering-over by homesteaders around 1900.
About 30 miles beyond Duchesne on Route 40, we came to an even larger dammed lake, the crown jewel of the Strawberry Reservation Recreation Area. From here, the easiest way to cross the Wasatch Range to get to Provo is to continue on Highway 40 northwest to Heber City, then jog southwest on Route 189. But the Spaniards, guided by Silvestre, took a more circuitous route over several high passes, through a maze of forests and crooked creeks. By the time we got to the Strawberry Visitor Center the rain was coming down steadily, and it was cold enough that we thought it could be snowing up higher. But the ranger on duty gave us a map, circled the national forest roads (mostly dirt) that we should follow, and judged that our SUV would have no problem negotiating the outback.
The barren surroundings of the reservoir, mostly treeless, coated with heather turning brown, reminded me of a Scottish moor. I was pleased to see that the displays outside the visitor center once more hailed Domínguez and Escalante. The Bicentennial Commission had persevered here, for the plinths of white stone holding the black-and-gold panels were in the same style as the ones we had seen at the ramada on the outskirts of Montrose.
Ever since our drive had begun on September 2, I had been anticipating a calendrical quirk that I thought would bind us closer to Domínguez and Escalante. I thought of it as a kind of syzygy, like the moment every twenty-six months when Mars and Earth come closest in their orbits, aligned in a perfect vector away from the sun. Somewhere that afternoon, on the dirt roads of the Uinta National Forest, it happened. The date was September 22, 2017, and the relevant passage in Escalante’s journal covered the events of September 22, 1776. Our conjunction, of course, would occur only once, because the Spaniards traveled so much more slowly even than Sharon’s and my balky pace.
For the expedition, it was a day of keen anticipation, though the team found it rough going. Escalante reports “many dangerous defiles and slides,” “the sierra’s corrugated ruggedness,” and “lofty shoulders, some of them craggy with rock.” But from a high ridge the Spaniards saw “a large number of big smoke signals being sent up, not too far away.”
Silvestre the guide said they belonged to some of his people possibly out hunting. We returned the message with others to avoid being mistaken, should they have seen us, for hostile people and so have them run away or welcome us with arrows. Again they began sending up bigger smoke clouds at the pass through which we had to go toward the lake—and this made us believe that they had already seen us, for this is the handiest and the regular signal used for anything worth knowing about by all the peoples in this part of America.
D & E beseeched the guide “to be on the lookout tonight in case one of his own, who knew of our arrival, approached the king’s camp to find out what people were coming.” At 2 AM, Silvestre suddenly “spoke for a long while in their language”—apparently broadcasting his message into the empty night. But, wrote Escalante, “We did not learn if anyone heard him.”
We had driven only a few miles south on Forest Road 131 when we abruptly saw three hunters trudging back to their pickup from the slope below the road. They looked hypothermic, but the man in front had a grimace of pride on his face, for on his shoulders he was hauling the severed head and antlers of a big stag. The other two men were apparently lugging nothing but their rifles. We could only hope that the trio had not abandoned the rest of the carcass to scavenging animals, although it was so miserable out that we could imagine the faint-hearted violating this cardinal rule of the big game hunter’s credo.
For the next two hours, as we followed forest roads 131, 042, and 051, we crept slowly through an enchanted landscape. As we climbed, patches of forest, dark green Engelmann spruces mixed with aspens just entering their autumnal gold, sprang up on either side. But from a ridgeline near 8,500 feet, we stared down on the charred wreckage of some gigantic recent forest fire. The only other vehicles we passed on the roads were hunters’ pickups and RVs, and half the pullouts were occupied by their white canvas tents. The rain did not quite turn to snow, but on the higher benches we passed patches of new drift.
Once more, the Bicentennial retracers had to guess just where the Spaniards had passed 199 years before. Their commentary resorts to the usual phrases: “we propose that,” “we surmise,” “it must have been,” “it would have been necessary.” After much driving back and forth, Jerome Stoffel and George Stewart convinced themselves that “there seems little doubt that the campsite the night of September 22 is at the junction of Wanrhodes Canyon and Diamond Creek.” Escalante specifies only “a brief plain which lies between two rivulets that join each other,” but I had to admire the retracers’ gumption. As we crested Unicorn Ridge, we were four or five miles away from that junction, but even in good weather I doubted that we would have hiked cross-country to behold the empty meadow of the Commission’s conjecture.
On September 23, the Spaniards found their way out of the convoluted upland as they emerged in the broad valley of the Spanish Fork River. It is just possible that that place name, which first appears on a John C. Frémont map published in 1845, echoes the Domínguez–Escalante expedition, but it more likely derives from trappers in the 1820s who gradually sketched out what would come to be called the Spanish Trail. Once the team started down that generous corridor, bisected today by U.S. Highway 6, they could barely contain their excitement. Yet eagerness was tempered by wariness, for despite Silvestre’s reassurances, the men did not know how they would be received at the main Laguna encampment. Rather than ride boldly ahead, they stopped to make an early camp, roughly where today’s Route 6 meets Interstate 15, the main Utah thoroughfare linking Salt Lake City in the north with St. George in the southwest corner and on to Las Vegas. From that site, which the padres named the Vega del Dulcísimo Nombre de Jesús (The Plain of the Most Sweet Name of Jesus), Domínguez, Andrés Muñiz, and Silvestre rode ahead, “racing their horses as much as they could, even to the point of exhaustion, so as to get there this afternoon.”
The next two days, from the afternoon of September 23 to midday on the 25th, would furnish in several respects the true climax of the whole expedition. On these events Escalante lavished two of the longest entries in his journal, and later he appended to its pages a “Description of the Valley” that serves as a kind of gazetteer to the bounteous basin and its inhabitants, outlining its promise as the site of a future Spanish settlement. Yet those entries must be read with more than a healthy dose of skepticism. It is almost impossible to believe that the encounter with the Laguna Utes occurred the way Escalante insists that it did. His narrative reads rather like a script from some Franciscan passion play.
The Spaniards’ caution was well-advised, for Domínguez’s advance party was met by “some men [who] came out to meet them with weapons in hand to defend their homes and families.” It is at this point that the reader must suspend his disbelief—or else try to probe just what ends the apparent fiction of the journal narrative serve. According to Escalante,
As soon as Silvestre spoke to them the show of war was changed into the finest and fondest expressions of peace and affection. They very joyfully conducted them to their little humble abodes, and after he had embraced each single one and let them know that we came in peace, and that we loved them as our greatest friends, the padre allowed them time to talk at length with our guide Silvestre, who gave them an account so much in our favor of what he had observed and witnessed ever since he had become one of us, and about our purpose in coming, that we could not have wished for anything better.
Escalante, of course, was not present to witness this joyful embrace between two alien cultures; he would have listened to Domínguez’s account of it later that evening, back at camp on the Spanish Fork. Perhaps Silvestre was indeed as smitten by the padres’ kindness as the journal makes him out to be. “With greatest awe,” the guide cited as proof of the miraculous power of the Spaniards the way the team had blithely passed through Comanche country. Gone from the narrative now is any of the paranoia and suspicion that attended the team’s hesitant movements after crossing the Green River. Once more, serene faith trumps peril. According to Escalante, Silvestre told his fellow Lagunas “how, after the Sabuaganas had said that the Comanches would surely kill us or deprive us of our herds of horses . . . they had not attacked us nor had we seen them—what the padres had said thus coming true, that is to say, that God would deliver us from all our enemies and . . . that even if we passed through their very own country they would not detect us nor we ourselves see them.” This seems to hint at supernatural intervention, as if to escape harm the Spaniards had made themselves invisible. Sounding like a brainwashed yes-man, Silvestre doubled down on his praise: “He ended by saying that only the padres spoke the truth, that in their company one could travel all over the earth without risk, and that they were nothing but good people.”
Now, once the ice was broken, Domínguez offered tobacco to his hosts, then launched into a speech about the padres’ purpose in coming. It was the preamble to a mass conversion effort such as the one he had attempted among the Sabuaganas. Through Silvestre and Andrés Muñiz as interpreters, Domínguez explained that the team’s principal motivation
was to seek the salvation of their souls and to show them the only means whereby they could attain it—the chief, primary, and necessary one being to believe in a single true God, to love Him and obey Him wholly by doing what is contained in His holy and spotless Law—and that all this would be taught them with greater clarity and at greater length, and the water of holy baptism poured on them, should they wish to become Christians and for the padres to come to instruct them and Spaniards to live among them, and that in this event they would be taught how to farm and raise livestock. . . . For, by submitting themselves to live in the manner ordered by God and as the padres would teach them, our Great Chief whom we call King would send them everything that was needed, because, on seeing how they wished to be Christianized, He would already be guarding them as His children and would be caring about them as though they were already His people.
Who knows what the Lagunas made of this extraordinary tirade? The passion play was launched. “They listened gladly,” Escalante reported second-hand, “and replied that they were ready to do all this, revealing from the start their great docility.” After what must have been an exhausting day, Domínguez returned to the camp on the Spanish Fork and shared his glad tidings with his team.
Yet even as he left the Laguna encampment, Domínguez could not resist warning his new hosts that the team’s stay in their homeland would of necessity be brief. Not because they had to get on to California, but because “we had to continue our traveling in order to learn about the other padre, our brother.” When I first read this passage, I was incredulous. Were D & E still obsessed with finding out the fate of Fray Francisco Garcés? Did they really think they could locate him in the vast wilderness through which they sojourned? So far Escalante’s journal says nothing about the lost Spaniards or the white strangers with beards, but in view of later events, I would come to think that this throwaway allusion to Brother Garcés was a kind of coded tag for that larger quest into the topography of myth and rumor.
AS WE DROVE into Provo, the rain became torrential and the temperature dropped to 36˚. Through gaps in the smothering clouds we glimpsed new snow coating the slopes of Mount Timpanogos north of town. It felt like a day in late November, with winter just around the corner. We found a motel not far from the campus of Brigham Young University, lugged our gear up to the room, and turned the thermostat high. We had called ahead to a hospital to get another blood draw, my first since Durango two weeks earlier. Because I seemed so susceptible to the cold, and because it took so little exercise to exhaust me, Sharon was worried about my sodium level.
The next day, we drove to the edge of town to look at Utah Lake, the body of water that D & E had so keenly anticipated, for which they had named Silvestre’s Utes the Lagunas. The gray-green lake, choppy with whitecaps, disappeared into the fog. We were the only visitors in a city park that on a nice day would have teemed with picnickers. Staring out into the gloom, I felt as though I had ventured to the edge of some subarctic ocean. It looked like the kind of day even seasoned mariners might fear.
The night before, worn out by the long drive from Vernal, addled by the cold and rain, I’d had my first meltdown on the trip. Having settled into our motel only at dusk, we tried to find a nearby restaurant for a quick meal. A steakhouse called Ruby River stood just across the street. Sharon looked up the reviews on TripAdvisor, which rated the place “#7 out of 229 restaurants in Provo.” One patron summarized his dining experience as “good but slow”—a warning I should have heeded. It was a Friday night, but Ruby River didn’t take reservations. Instead, over a bedlam of noise on the phone, the hostess took our name and guaranteed us “priority seating.”
We should have turned around at the door upon discovering large families patiently hovering in the lobby and even out the door in the rain. We should have opted for McDonald’s. Instead, we succumbed. Since it was Mormon Provo, there was no bar. To get a beer or a glass of wine, we had to snag the attention of one of the waitresses, all of whom were dressed as cowgirls. Despite the Western theme, Frank Sinatra’s gooeyest hits blared from the sound system. Still standing in the vague space between waiting line and tables where the 5:30 crowd was just tucking into their dinners, we were handed our drinks after only forty-five minutes. Half an hour after that we were seated on skimpy stools. Sometime thereafter we were allowed to order.
When two hours went by without the appearance of any food, I lost it. As soon as I could rein in the eighteen-year-old in her Stetson and chaps, I started screaming, “Where the hell is our dinner?” Other patrons looked on in horror—this sort of thing wasn’t done in have-a-nice-day Provo. The waitress started crying. Sharon put her hand on my sleeve and begged me to stop making a scene. In the end, the only consolation was that Ruby River decided not to charge me for the soggy mashed potatoes drenched in white chicken gravy that I couldn’t eat.
On September 24, 1776, Domínguez and Escalante had a much more fruitful meeting on the shores of Utah Lake than Sharon and I did as part of the hungry mob inside Ruby River. The day before, Domínguez had been told that not all of the Laguna “chiefs” had gathered to hear his electrifying message. But on the 24th, he could flatter himself that the entire Laguna nation hung on his words.
The padres had learned that the Lagunas called themselves the Timpanogotzis. The name can be translated as “people of the rock water-mouth” or “rock canyon.” Their neighbors the Sabuaganas, however, somewhat less poetically referred to the tribe as the “fish-eaters,” in allusion to their dependence on the catch from the great lake. Now Domínguez repeated his promise that the padres would come back soon to live among the Indians, would baptize them and thus save their souls, and would teach them how to farm and raise livestock. According to Escalante, the Timpanogotzis “all unanimously replied that the padres should come, that they would live as the tatas (thus the Yutas call the friars) taught them, and that they offered all their land to the Spaniards for them to build their homes wherever they pleased.”
As I pondered these passages in the journal, I vacillated between thinking that Escalante wrote only what he wanted to hear and wondering why the Timpanogotzis might have been so welcoming and servile. When I posed the riddle to Matt Liebmann, my Harvard anthropology professor friend, he instantly replied, “From the Ute point of view, the coming of the Spaniards might have meant access to trading resources. And they might have seen the Spaniards as allies against their enemies—the so-called ‘Comanches,’ whoever they were.”
Sure enough, on the 24th Domínguez offered the head chief (“who had a genteel appearance”) some special gifts: “a big all-purpose knife and white glass beads, and Don Bernardo Miera gave him a hatchet.” The padres also parceled out those time-honored European baubles for appeasing natives, the glass beads, to other Timpanogotzis in attendance, “a few to each one since they were so many.” In return, Domínguez demanded from the chief a “token sign” of their pledge to become good Christians—some object to take back to Santa Fe to prove the efficacy of the conversion the padres had wrought so far away in the wilderness. The next day, the Timpanogotzis presented the Spaniards with a remarkable thing: a painting on deerskin of their main warriors, each adorned with splotches of red ocher to signify the blood spurting from “wounds in battles with the Comanches.”
Thus, for the first and only time on the expedition, the padres explicitly pledged to return and build a mission and settlement among the Indians. Why the Lagunas and not the Sabuaganas? Although Escalante never mentions Teguayó or the lake of Copala, it’s clear that the fertile basin of the great lake met Spanish expectations of a wealthy land beyond the Río Tizón. If the Timpanogotzis were not actually wearing bracelets and earrings made of gold, they nonetheless embodied an affluence beyond any the padres had yet encountered among the Utes. The “Description of the Valley” that Escalante inserted in his journal gushes with visions of the prosperity of the basin. “As many Indian pueblos can fit inside the valley as there are those in New Mexico,” he marvels. The place had the “finest of advantages.” Not only “flat meadows with good land for farming” and “good soil that can be irrigated,” but “plenty of firewood and timber in the adjacent sierra.” As for game, the valley “abounds in several species of good fish, geese, beavers, and other amphibious creatures which we did not have the opportunity to see”—not to mention rabbits and “fowl,” as well as bison herds off to the northwest. On the strength of a day and a half spent in the region, Escalante could swear that “the climate here is a good one, for having experienced cold aplenty since we left El Río de San Buenaventura, we felt warm throughout the entire valley by day and by night.”
Even as the Spaniards admired the big lake that gave the Timpanogotzis a way of living, their hosts told them about an even larger one off to the north. “Its waters are harmful and extremely salty, for the Tipanois assured us that anyone who wet some part of the body with them immediately felt a lot of itching in the part moistened,” Escalante recorded. You would think the Spaniards would have been keen to explore that topographical wonder, but they seem to have been in too much of a hurry to contemplate the 40-mile detour northward to explore the strange salty lake. Yet Miera y Pacheco drew it on the map he compiled after the expedition. Instead of a 40-mile gap between the lakes, he shows them connected by a short, narrow inlet, and gives them both a common name, Laguna de los Timpanogos. On no authority mentioned in Escalante’s journal, Miera also drew a major river flowing straight west out of today’s Great Salt Lake. The wish-fulfilling fantasy of a river leading from the Rocky Mountains across the West to the Pacific would tantalize and frustrate explorers for another three-quarters of a century.
It must have been a shock to the padres to discover that many of the Timpanogotzis men grew beards. Escalante reports the fact almost offhandedly, not in the journal itself but in the set piece of “Description of the Valley.” Only a week later, when the team came across Indians with even fuller beards, Escalante would muse on the connection between those bearded men and the old story about lost Spaniards beyond the Tizón.
By noon on September 25, the Spaniards were ready to make their getaway. They persuaded two young Lagunas, whom they had named Joaquín and José María, to accompany them as guides to the unknown lands ahead. And now the padres explained the main reason for their haste in moving on, besides the search for Father Garcés. Once the two guides had been secured, Escalante wrote on the 24th, “we decided to resume our journey next day toward the establishments and port of Monterey.” Although orders given to the padres before the expedition posited the main goal of the venture as linking Santa Fe to California, this is the first time in the journal that Escalante explicitly mentions the need to find a route to Monterey.
Having made such powerful promises to the Timpanogotzis about the salvation of their souls and the mission and town they would return to build, the padres must have felt chagrined as they begged for food. Writes the chronicler, “At the very last, we let them know that we now had but few provisions and that we would be grateful if they sold us some dried fish. They brought it and we bought a good portion.” Bought with what? More glass beads?
Escalante paints the actual departure as an emotional rupture. Should any of the natives fall ill, D & E counseled, “they were to call upon God by saying, ‘God, the True One, help us, protect us.’ ” Those words in Spanish were too much of a mouthful for the Timpanogotzis, so the padres gave them instead the mantra “Jesús–María.” “This they began repeating with ease . . . and during all the time we were making preparations to leave they did not cease repeating these holy names.”
At the hour of leave-taking, “all bade us farewell most tenderly, especially Silvestre, who hugged us tightly, practically in tears.” The Timpanogotzis had taken the padres’ promises to heart. As the men mounted their horses, the Utes “began charging us once more not to delay our return too long, saying that they expected us back within a year.”
Those parting words would haunt Escalante through the rest of the expedition—and beyond.