ON SEPTEMBER 26, SHARON AND I DECIDED TO TAKE A short detour off the Spaniards’ trail. Except that it wasn’t really a detour so much as a shortcut into the realm of historical irony, of which the West owns more than its fair share. If the name Escalante rings any bell in the brain of the casual traveler today, it is the one that peals in Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, the vast federal reserve of canyons, mesas, and streams decreed by President Bill Clinton in 1996—2,937 square miles of backcountry that ought to gladden the heart of the most jaded outdoor aficionado. Three months after Sharon’s and my journey, President Trump ordered that the monument be reduced in size by 47 percent, though as of this writing lawsuits brought by environmental groups have pushed the ultimate fate of that wilderness into judicial limbo.
Escalante’s name on the monument derives from the Escalante River, the last major tributary of the Colorado to be discovered by Anglos, which shares its appellation with the Mormon town first settled in 1875 (population 797 in 2010). The irony is that the Domínguez–Escalante expedition never came closer to the town or river named after the junior friar than 55 miles as the raven files its flight plan. Even the farthest-sprawling corners of Clinton’s generous monument keep a 15-mile distance from any of the Spaniards’ 1776 footprints.
During the past quarter century I’d spent many of my best hiking and camping days within the monument. In the early 1990s, before Clinton acted, Sharon and I joined our friend Matt Hale to pack with llamas for eight days along the Escalante River and tributaries such as the Gulch, Wolverine Creek, and Little Death Hollow without running into a single other soul. In September 1996, just a week after Clinton’s fiat, I’d hiked the canyons for a magazine assignment and interviewed the townsfolk of Escalante, most of whom were in favor of tarring and feathering the president who (they said) hadn’t had the guts to visit the town but instead had delivered his proclamation from the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Since then, I’ve hiked the slot canyons, set out on four-day solo circuits, and made forays up onto remote Kaiparowits Plateau, all in homage to one of my favorite wildernesses in the Southwest. Escalante was the last town the vagabond poet Everett Ruess passed through in 1934 before he vanished. For a pair of magazine articles, and then for a book, I’d quizzed the old-timers in town who still remembered the youth sauntering through with his two burros in 1934, and I’d prowled through every corner of Davis Gulch, where Ruess’s last camp was found the next spring.
Even in 2017, before Sharon and I set out on the D & E trail, friends I mentioned my “project” to assumed I’d start my researches in Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. By way of demurral, I recounted my favorite irony about the name and the place.
In 1875, Almon H. Thompson, a government geographer who was John Wesley Powell’s brother-in-law, undertook a vast pioneering survey of some of the ruggedest country in southern Utah, including the Henry Mountains, the Aquarius Plateau, and the Kaiparowits Plateau. Coming down from Fifty-Mile Mountain (as the locals called Kaiparowits) in early August, he ran into a group of Mormons from Panguitch who were starting to lay out a town on the banks of the river that bisects this desert-like outback. Those settlers were hoping that a town at a lower elevation than Panguitch would provide a longer growing season. They had tentatively named the new settlement Potato Valley.
Thompson struck up a conversation with these hardy pilgrims. In his diary entry for August 5, he wrote, “Saw four Mormons from Panguitch who were talking about making a settlement here. Advised them to call the place Escalante.” No doubt Thompson filled in the men about the glorious failure the expedition led by two Franciscan priests out of Santa Fe had prosecuted a century earlier. The locals liked the idea, and slapped the name of Escalante on the fledgling settlement.
Thompson was already referring to the river as the Escalante, even though its discoverer had called it Birch Creek. Thompson’s team thus honored the padre because the river’s mouth “was not a great distance up from where Escalante had crossed the Colorado.” In any event, it’s clear that the architects of Potato Valley knew nothing about the Domínguez–Escalante expedition until they consulted with Thompson.
Jump ahead forty-eight years. In 1923, a sociologist named Lowry Nelson came to Escalante, intent on including the town in his study of Mormon villages. He found that the locals uniformly pronounced the name “Es-ca-LANT,” rhyming it with “slant” and rendering the Spanish final “e” silent. Just so the citizens pronounce the name today. When Nelson asked his informants about the origin of the name, they said that it was an old Indian word whose meaning had been lost.
Sharon and I were eager to camp out again, and it seemed appropriate to do so on some corner of the monument named after Escalante, whether or not the padre had ever set foot on the precise patch of land where we would pitch our tent. From Kanab we drove nine miles east on U.S. Highway 89, then headed north on a numberless side road. A few miles along, we stopped to behold a tableau that had outraged me ever since I discovered it five or six years earlier.
Near the turnoff for Johnson Canyon, a fenced nook of ranch land, furnished with an old corral and a sagging shed, a carpet of cow dung, a live calf or two, and forbidding entry with the usual dire “no trespassing” signs, backed against the nearly vertical sandstone cliff. More than 700 years ago, and perhaps as long as several thousand, artists had used that wall to carve a dizzying panoply of spirals, humanoids, animaloids, and abstract designs. Taken as a whole, the wall was a frenzied masterpiece.
Some of the crudest desecrations of ancient art in the West are the work of the first Anglo settlers. We found names and inscriptions dating back to 1871, and bullet holes everywhere, all of it deliberately splashed on top of the petroglyphs. John English, a painter from Omaha, had stitched his calling card here in 1895, as had John Allen, an attorney who had just hung his shingle in Kanab. Another section of the wall read like a billboard from the 1920s, inscribed in neat white painted letters:
Jensen & Brooksey
STORE & GARAGE
FREDONIA ARIZONA
GASOLINE OIL & SUPPLIES
ICE CREAM
And on the edge, like a last-minute addendum:
EASTMAN
KODAKS
AND
FILMS
Those Kilroys could have painted and carved their messages across any part of the adjoining cliff that was barren of Anasazi art. What impulse, I wondered for the nth time, made it gratifying for them to obliterate the ancients? What lost visions did they feel the need to neutralize? What spasm of nihilism did each well-placed bullet scar unleash?
We drove on, turning east on the dirt road that leads to the old Deer Springs Ranch. Here we were tiptoeing by SUV on the border between private land on the left and national monument on the right. Yet even on the Grand Staircase–Escalante side of the road, barbed wire and “no trespassing” signs flipped the finger at Clinton’s 1996 decree.
I was still in a bad mood from the Johnson Canyon obscenities, but now I gave full vent to an anger that had smoldered in me for decades. What is it about the American psyche that turns private property into a sacred fetish? Which aliens is the barbed wire strung to keep out? In France, England, and Scotland I’d often hiked across private land—fenced but without barbed wire—to admire a dolmen or a set of standing stones erected more than four millennia before, in homage to gods or worship of ancestors whose identities we will never know. In Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize I’d found decorated sacrificial vessels in situ deep inside caves on private land. In these countries—indeed, in almost all the nations of the world except the United States—if you find antiquities in your front yard or back pasture, those relics belong not to you but to the state. But in the U.S., you can do whatever you want with a prehistoric clay olla or yucca basket you dig up as you plow a new field or excavate a cellar. You can display the artifact on your mantel, or sell it on eBay, or—like the cronies of the father of the woman I’d talked to in Dove Creek—set it up on a rock and blast it for target practice. At the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, Utah, there’s a room stacked from floor to ceiling with stunning pots and effigy vessels, some of them unearthed on private property, but most illegally dug out of public land by “owners” who then lied about the artifacts’ proveniences.
I could go on about what dark traits in the American character this peculiar conception of ownership, not only of land but of the immemorial past, seems to validate, but pontificating is not my favorite pose. Let me mention, though, a certain basin in New Mexico, all of it owned by ranchers whose deeds date back to the colonial land grants with which Spain enriched its favorite citizens in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and whose descendants have put up some of the most threatening “no trespassing” signs (warning of “full prosecution under the law”) for the most timid encroachments on their sacred acres. That basin also happens to be one of the richest repositories of dazzling Anasazi rock art, much of it blazoning forth nascent images of the kachina religion that still glues together the spiritual life of the pueblos—as well as the locus of the slumbering ruins of at least seven major villages. I’m proud to say that I’ve made more than a dozen “illegal” visits to this wonderland, ducking under the barbed wire, slinking from arroyo to outcrop, without pocketing a single potsherd or touching a single petroglyph. Each time I return, it’s with a dark song in my head, the refrain of which goes something like, No one has the right to “own” these prodigies of the human soul.
By 4 PM, Sharon and I had found a perfect pullout on the monument side of the road, unblemished by barbed wire, to serve as our campsite. We pitched our tent, gathered downed wood for a fire, and then sat in our camp chairs drinking (without intentional irony) Mexican beer. The wind that had gusted all day died to a whisper. We were perched on the edge of a drop-off that opened on a panoramic view northeast. As the sun lowered behind us, we gazed down on the distant hamlets of Cannonville and Tropic (where Everett Ruess had picked apples with the local kids and “almost” fallen in love with a Mormon girl). Beyond that valley, softening in the last sunlight, stretched the long massif of the Escalante Mountains, and way beyond that, reduced to blue silhouettes, the Henry Mountains.
My mood had shifted by 180 degrees. I felt a weary contentment. In two hours, only a pair of cars passed by, their occupants tossing us waves of the hand. “You know,” I said to Sharon, “now that they’re in serious trouble, I feel more sympathetic with those guys.”
“Domínguez and Escalante, you mean.”
“Yeah. They all get really pissed off at each other, but they never split up.”
After a moment or two, Sharon said, “I was surprised by the casting of lots.”
“Because?”
“The padres could just have decided for the whole team. Ordered the others to turn back. Instead, they were willing to put it up to—what would you call it?”
“A cosmic test?”
“Something like that.”
I took a sip of beer. “If they didn’t rig it, the casting of lots shows how much they believed God would decide for them.”
“They could have held a vote.”
“Yep. And I’ll bet it would have come out nine to three in favor of Cosnina. Of turning back. If you can trust the journal, only the three guys led by Miera really wanted to go on to Monterey.”
Sharon rummaged through our food bags. “What do you want for dinner?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I’m never hungry.” I knew I needed to eat, but I said, “Let’s wait an hour or so.”
After a longer silence, I went on, “You know, when we started out, I wasn’t sure I could finish this whole trip.” Sharon nodded. “I half expected some collapse like at Mammoth or Hanover. Or a really bad sodium reading in Durango or Provo.”
“We’re lucky. Or we’re doing it right.”
“And now,” I said, “I’m sorry it’s almost over.”
“Me, too.”
We looked at each other. There was a flicker of nervousness in Sharon’s smile. It wasn’t just the trip, I realized, that we didn’t want to end. That’s what cancer had come to mean.
“I could eat a salad,” I said. “Are the vegetables in the cooler?”
Later, with a few pieces of lettuce soaked in blue cheese dressing wilting on my paper plate, I threw out a thought. “One thing you can’t get around is that D & E were pretty brave. They’re in such bad shape they’re about to eat one of their horses, but the whole point of the journey is still in their heads.”
“It helps to believe in God,” said Sharon.
“Blind faith. Why do we say that true belief is blind?”
“But you admire them, don’t you? They’re like Joan of Arc.”
“Or John Brown at Harpers Ferry. It helps if you yourself believe in their cause. Otherwise they’re just fanatics.”
Sharon chuckled. “I can’t even remember what Joan of Arc’s cause was.”
“Something to do with saving France from the Brits. You could look it up.” I moved my camp chair to catch the last rays of sun angling through the junipers. “You know,” I went on, “I don’t believe at all in the padres’ cause. Converting the savages. Cramming Jesus and the Gospel down the throats of polytheistic Indians. But in 1776, cultural relativism hadn’t yet been invented.” I took a slow breath. In my voice I heard the long-dormant tone of the professor I’d once been, but I had to finish the thought. “I don’t for a minute respect what they were trying to do with the Utes. But I admire them anyway.”
Now Sharon’s smile was unconflicted. “This would be a hard trip to do if we didn’t. Admire them, I mean. Yes, they were like Joan of Arc. What they were after was all worth dying for.”
“You mean Monterey?”
“No,” said Sharon. “Something more abstract. Something to do with God.”
“God’s hand in the wilderness?”
As if the team’s plight was not already desperate enough, on October 17 Miera y Pacheco fell seriously ill. He “became so weakened that he could barely talk,” wrote Escalante. Even so, the team covered 12 miles by midday. In an arroyo they discovered some weeds they thought might be edible, “but we could gather only a very few, and these tiny.” Later they searched the saddlebags in which they had carried their food for months, hoping to find “leftovers,” but all they dug up was some pieces of squash that the “servants”—presumably men such as Simón Lucero, whom Juan Pedro Cisneros had beaten on October 5, triggering the desertion of José María, the Laguna guide—had traded with the Paiutes to obtain the day before “and had hidden to avoid having to share them with the rest.” The team added these scraps to “a bit of brown sugarloaf” the men had found in a saddlebag, and “made a concoction for everybody and took some nourishment.”
As Escalante’s entry about the “servants” hiding food indicates, the fragile solidarity of the team was crumbling. That afternoon, D & E disagreed with “the companions” about which way to proceed. An unauthorized scout to the east led its adherents to predict “flat country with many arroyos where there had to be good water.” The padres were in favor of a beeline south toward the Colorado River, but they decided to humor their “companions.” By evening, Escalante—addict of the second guess—recorded the error of the scouts’ prognostication. Without water after a day’s ride of 23 miles, the padres declared a camp. At once two of the “scouts” set off again, swearing they had seen water from a distance and promising to bring some back for the whole team. They were gone all night and failed to return by morning. Escalante peevishly concluded that the men had ridden ahead to find Indian camps, had bartered there for food, and had in effect deserted. On the morning of October 18, the rest of the team saddled up and headed onward without bothering to search for their missing teammates.
Despite the loyalty to one another the Spaniards had nurtured on the long trail out from Santa Fe, now their sense of a common purpose was disintegrating. Even if some of the men weren’t hiding pieces of squash so they wouldn’t have to share them, the fact that Escalante would accuse them of such a fundamental breach of comradeship betrays the collapse of the team’s unity. And though one or two (or five) men had gotten separated from the others at various points on the expedition, now for the first time the padres refused to search for their missing comrades.
During the next three days, Miera’s serious illness failed to heal. Somehow the veteran kept up with his marginally healthier teammates, as they pushed on south and east toward their fateful confrontation with the Colorado River. On October 18, frantically searching for water, the men discovered five Indians peering down on them from a high mesa. When D & E redirected their course in hopes of a meeting, four of the natives hid while the fifth ignored the padres’ entreaties to approach. “We could not persuade him to come down,” noted Escalante. “At each step we took, as we came closer to him, he wanted to take off. We let him know that he did not have to be afraid, that we loved him like a son and wanted to talk with him.”
At last the Spaniards achieved a tête-à-tête with the skittish Paiutes. With Andrés Muñiz and Joaquín the Laguna doing their best to interpret, after an exchange lasting an hour the Indians revealed that a good water source lay near at hand. “We begged them to come along and show it to us, promising them a swatch of woollen cloth, and after much urging three of them consented to go with us.” The Paiutes led the men, “very much exhausted from thirst and hunger,” about five miles across “a bad and very rocky route,” to two good water holes. When the horses were brought up, they drained the pools dry. Even so, the team was too played out to move on. Escalante indicates that the Indians were shocked to learn that the Spaniards were out of food. Enticed by the promise of more goods in trade, one of the Paiutes offered to set off for their “humble abodes, which were somewhat distant,” and come back with food. After midnight the man returned with “a small quantity of wild sheep meat, dried cactus prickly pear done into cakes, and seeds from wild plants.”
The next day twenty Paiutes arrived at the Spaniards’ camp with more food. “We paid them for everything they brought, and we charged them to bring meat, piñon nuts, and more cactus pear if they had any, that we would buy it all, especially the meat.” Escalante does not record what goods the team “paid” for the food with—more swatches of cloth, perhaps, or more glass beads? If the Spaniards were humiliated to be begging food from Indians whose own supplies of cactus pear and wild seeds were probably limited, the chronicler does not confess to any such chagrin. Foremost in the minds of the Spaniards was anxiety about the impending crossing of the Colorado, so that when the Paiutes not only conveyed the distance to the great river but “a few vague directions with regard to the ford,” the men were heartened.
In camp on October 19, one way or another the padres orchestrated a far-ranging discussion with their visitors. None of the Paiutes would admit to knowing anything about the Cosninas, though the usual linguistic confusion must have hindered the exchange of information. Even though the men had given up the quest for California eight days before, they were still hoping to learn how far away the original goal of the expedition might be. But when they were asked about “the Spaniards at Monterey,” the Paiutes showed “not the least indication of their having been spoken of.” Improbably, one of the Indians reported that “he had heard about the journey of the Reverend Padre Garcés.”
Puzzling over this entry in Escalante’s journal, I wished for the umpteenth time that we could know what really took place in the October 19 camp, that we could somehow retrieve the Paiute perspective on the parley. It seems likely that the natives still harbored a deep distrust of the white-skinned strangers who had staggered into their homeland, for when D & E pleaded with the men to guide them on to the Colorado, they refused.
FRESH FROM OUR CAMP in the national monument, Sharon and I caught up with the Spaniards on U.S. Highway 89A east of Fredonia, Arizona. Here the road, and the route the Spaniards took, climbs from the desert up onto the ponderosa-thronged Kaibab Plateau. In 30 miles of easy driving we gained almost 2,400 feet of elevation, from 5,500 feet above sea level at Fredonia to 7,925 at Jacob Lake. The Spaniards had hoped to avoid the plateau, but it seemed as though there was no bypassing the arduous climb if they hoped to reach the Colorado River at a place where it could be forded. In that stretch of highway the temperature gauge on the dashboard of our SUV dropped from 66˚ to 52˚.
Writing for the Bicentennial Commission in 1975, Gregory Crampton insists that the precise path the Spaniards followed here was not today’s Highway 89A but “the Winter Road, an alternate route across the Kaibab used in the 1930s when U.S. Highway 89 was closed.” My maps gave no hint of this old thoroughfare, so as we pulled into Jacob Lake—an outpost on national forest land and the main gateway to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon—I was hopeful that local knowledge would fill in the blank.
It was only September 27, but already the touristy village felt as though it was shutting down for winter. At 1:30 PM on a Wednesday, the visitor center was closed. The only alternative was the motel-cum-gift shop. Judging from the kitschy Indian knicknacks on sale, we had made the transition from Ute to Navajo, even though the Spaniards had encountered only Paiutes hereabouts. I asked the woman behind the counter about the old winter road favored by travelers in the 1930s. “You should talk to Tommy in the dining area,” she replied. “He’s lived here his whole life.”
It took me a few minutes to locate Tommy. At once he said, “I don’t know about that. You should ask my uncle Johnny. He’s in the gift shop.” I trudged back to the racks of fake silver bracelets and dreamcatchers. Johnny indeed worked there, but at the moment he was “not available.”
I sighed. The old winter road would have to go undiscovered, at least by me on our present journey. I wished I’d gotten to know Crampton before he died in 1995, for no one was master of more half-forgotten Southwest lore than he. As a teenager I had pondered the marvels of his classic celebration of the canyonlands, Standing Up Country, long before I’d ever seen Shiprock, let alone the Totem Pole or Spider Rock.
By nightfall on October 22 the Spaniards had crossed the Kaibab Plateau, despite “plenty of difficulty and fatigue experienced by the horse herds, because it was very rocky, besides having many gulches.” Darkness fell as the men were still descending from the divide, so they headed for a pair of fires they saw glowing in the distance. D & E had sent the two interpreters ahead to search for water, so the team assumed it was they who had built the fires. But when they arrived, they found Andrés Muñiz and Joaquín the Laguna attempting to converse with Indians around their own fires. As the whole team came up in the darkness, the Paiutes panicked and all but three men and two women fled. One of the women pleaded with Joaquín, “Little brother, you belong to our very own kind; do not let these people with whom you come kill us.”
The padres tried to convey their usual reassurances, emphasizing that the team came in peace and harbored only fond, loving feelings for the natives. “They calmed down a bit,” noted Escalante, “and in an effort to please us presented us with two roasted jackrabbits and some piñon nuts.” They also led the Spaniards to a nearby spring, where the horses greedily drank.
Gregory Crampton located this camp with great certainty at Coyote Spring, in the cleft that connects House Rock Valley with Coyote Wash, since “there is no other springwater north or south for several miles.” In 1975 a rancher from Kanab told Crampton how the source got its name. At some point after the Spaniards passed through, drifting sands completely covered the spring. It was only when coyotes dug through the sand to get to the water that local ranchers rediscovered and developed the font. D & E named their campsite San Juan Capistrano, after the fifteenth-century Italian saint and fellow Franciscan, Giovanni da Capistrano, whose accomplishments included burning fifty Jews to death in the Polish city of Wroclaw in 1453. The cliff swallows of Capistrano, made famous in a 1940 hit song, allude to the California town named after the saint, where a Catholic mission was founded during the months the Domínguez–Escalante expedition was in the field.
At the Capistrano campsite, the team rested only 25 miles in a straight line from the Colorado River, but it would take them four more days to reach its banks. One of the reasons for the delay was something that happened in the wee hours of October 22–23, an event that so disturbed the padres that it provoked by far the angriest outburst against any of their teammates in the whole of Escalante’s journal.
That evening, Miera y Pacheco was still as sick as he had been since October 17; if anything, his ailment had grown worse. After the friars had gone to bed, Miera, with several of his teammates, conveyed his distress to the Paiutes. On hearing the Spaniard’s complaint, one elderly Indian “set about to cure him with chants and ceremonials.” In the journal Escalante professes not to know whether the veteran soldier asked for such treatment or was spontaneously offered it by the old shaman. From the Franciscan point of view, Indian cures, “if not overt idolatries (which they had to be), were wholly superstitious.”
Domínguez and Escalante were wakened by the medicine man’s chanting. Soon they learned that not only Miera himself but the unspecified teammates had “gladly permitted” the cure. Most leaders of Spanish expeditions would simply have shrugged at Miera’s turning to the Paiutes for a remedy, but Domínguez and Escalante were horrified. In their view, Miera and his accomplices “hailed [the curing ceremony] as indifferent kindly gestures when they should have prevented them for being contrary to the evangelical and divine law which they profess, or at least they should have withdrawn.”
It’s hard not to see this whole fiasco from Miera y Pacheco’s point of view. For six days straight he had been seriously ill, with stomach pains so severe that he had trouble riding his horse. Over the years he’d spent so much time among Indians that he’d surely witnessed curing ceremonies performed by the medicine men of various tribes. Perhaps he’d even seen victims miraculously recover. Whatever treatment the padres were offering him for his ailment—treatment never specified in Escalante’s journal—it wasn’t working. Why not give the Paiute shaman a whirl?
Intriguingly, though Escalante never says that Miera felt better after October 22, there are no more entries recording the victim’s illness. Maybe Paiute medicine—or the placebo effect—had done the trick.
What begins in Escalante’s journal as a rebuke of Miera and the teammates for trafficking in Indian superstition quickly turns into a tirade. It’s as if, in the padres’ minds, everything that had gone wrong on the expedition could be blamed on the “companions” who interacted with the savages either for the wrong reasons or in ways that betrayed their dangerous ignorance. Escalante verges on blaming all that’s rotten in the state of New Mexico on Spaniards who failed to distinguish between truth and idolatry. Even at a distance of 241 years, Escalante’s shock at Miera’s transgression is itself shocking.
On the morning of October 23, having learned of the shenanigans that Miera and crew had participated in, D & E were “extremely grieved by such harmful carelessness and we reprimanded them, instructing them in doctine so that they would never again lend their approval to such errors.” This lecture by the young, unworldly priests must really have stuck in Miera’s craw. But of course we don’t have the veteran’s own journal (if he kept one) to give the other side of the story.
Escalante’s tantrum had only begun. Behavior like the midnight séance with the shaman, he insisted, was “one of the main reasons why infidels who have most dealings with the Spaniards and Christians in these parts show more resistance to the truth of the Gospel, and their conversion becomes more difficult each day.” As an example of his teammates’ malfeasance, Escalante digs up the little speech Andrés Muñiz had made to the first group of Sabuaganas the team had met near the Gunnison River. Trying to convey Catholic doctrine to the Utes, poor Muñiz had explained, “The padre says that the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches who are not baptized cannot enter heaven, and that they go to hell where God punishes them, and they will burn forever like wood in the fire.” That sounded to me like a fair (if slightly crude) exposition of the Church’s position on heaven and hell, but according to Escalante, the Sabuaganas “became overjoyed on hearing themselves excluded, and their foes included, in the unavoidable destiny of either being baptized or of being lost forever.” The padres attributed Muñiz’s oversight to the venal motive of trying to get in the Sabuaganas’ good graces so that at some future date he could return to engage in “the despicable fur trade.” Back on September 22, on hearing what Muñiz had told the Sabuaganas, the padres had “reprimanded” the interpreter, so that “he changed his conduct on seeing his stupid puny faith exposed.”
D & E had apparently heard tales from their teammates of other occasions when Spaniards, including themselves, had participated in Indian “idolatries.” Thus, Escalante sorrowfully imagines, “what will they not do while wandering three or four months among the infidel Yutas and Navajos with no one to correct them or restrain them?”
The despicable fur trade was not the only temptation for weak-willed Spaniards in Indian country. The padres knew that “when some go to the Yutas and remain among them in their greed for pelts, others go after the flesh which they find here for their bestial satisfaction.” Sex with savages was a kind of ultimate horror for the padres, who had found the sight of Paiute women in skimpy loincloths intolerable. Escalante closes his diatribe of October 22—unique in the journal—with a chilling prayer: “Oh, with how much severity should similar events be attended to? May God in His infinite goodness inspire the most suitable and practical means.”
Throughout Sharon’s and my long journey, and for months before and after, I had found my greatest challenge to be trying to see the world through the Franciscan eyes of Domínguez and Escalante. About that matter, I had consulted both my professor mentors, Steve Lekson and Matt Liebmann. Steve had jauntily replied by email, “If you want to get inside D & E’s heads, take Franciscan orders. Or you could do like Sir Richard Burton getting into Mecca, wear the cowl and infiltrate a Franciscan monastery.” Matt gave me a more practical answer. “I always tell my students that in the eighteenth century the worldview of the friars in New Mexico was closer to that of the Puebloans than it is to ours today. Both believed that forces for good and evil were abroad in the world. They might have been invisible, but they were real, active, powerful. For the Franciscans, the devil was there in the room when they dealt with natives.”
This exegesis helped me understand why from D & E’s point of view, Miera’s seeking a cure from a Paiute shaman was so much worse than merely accepting “indifferent kindly gestures.” It was entering into a compact with evil beings.
I realized that to understand Domínguez and Escalante, I needed to go back to Francis of Assisi himself, of whom I had little more that the Disneyfied image of the patron saint of animals with adoring birds flitting about his head. What struck me on further probing into the life of the founder of the Franciscan order (1182–1226) was the man’s hunger for martyrdom as the fulfillment of God’s design. As a young missionary he sailed to Jerusalem, only to have shipwreck turn him back to Italy; on the way to Morocco he fell ill and never got beyond Spain. On the Fifth Crusade, he was captured by Muslims and brought before the Sultan of Egypt, who somehow took a liking to the earnest priest and sent him back to the Crusader camp unharmed.
Francis died peacefully at age forty-four in Italy while singing Psalm 142. But one of the dicta for which his followers most admired him was the statement that “a servant of God ought always to desire to die and to end by the death of a martyr.” That genuine death wish, so anathematic to our modern sensibility, helped explain, I thought, Domínguez and Escalante’s repeated answers, whenever Indians warned them that the tribe the next valley over would surely kill them, that they had nothing to fear because God was on their side.
Father Garcés himself managed to achieve true Franciscan martyrdom. Having survived his bold eleven-month ramble with no European partners across California and Arizona, he was trapped by a violent upheaval among the Yuma Indians to whom he was ministering in 1781. As he took refuge with soldiers and settlers in the church, he listened to them quarreling bitterly about who was to blame for the predicament. “Let’s forget now whose fault it is,” said Garcés, “and simply consider it God’s punishment for our sins.” Those were his last words before the Yumas clubbed him to death.
It was by no means inevitable that it would be Franciscans, rather than Dominicans or Jesuits, who would be in charge of the formidable job of making Christians out of the natives of New Spain. Shortly after conquering the Aztecs, Cortés asked Emperor Charles V of Spain to send Franciscan friars to minister to the natives (secular priests, Cortés believed, would fall into corruption). In 1524, only three years after the end of the conquest, twelve Franciscans arrived, “animated,” writes Fernando Cervantes in The Devil in the New World, “by a fervent millenarian hope in the rebirth of the Church in the New World.”
The early success of the Franciscans in New Spain, as thousands of Indians thronged the plazas to listen to the word of God and to undergo baptism, not only convinced the friars that the Puebloans were eager to have their superstitious veils torn from their eyes but that the millennium was at hand. Priests gathered up pagan idols and systematically destroyed them with little apparent native resistance. It took some time to realize that Puebloan religion, far from being obliterated, had simply gone underground, to be practiced in secret.
When the Franciscans learned that the old pagan religion was still being observed in clandestine rites performed in hidden sanctums, fury replaced benevolence. Seizing and smashing the stone and wood and feather idols did little to suppress the religion. As Cervantes writes, “Idolatry was deemed so widespread that in the early 1530s the Franciscan Archbishop of Mexico . . . saw fit to implement the first inquisitorial practices against idolatrous and superstitious Indians.” The padres believed not merely that native shamans had lapsed into their old ways but that the devil himself was alive and subverting the common good in New Spain.
The war against heresy and false gods came to a climax in 1562, under the aegis of Diego de Landa, archbishop of the diocese of Yucatán in Mexico. On learning of rampant idolatries being practiced in the small town of Mani, he ordered all the codices—the folding-screen “books” on which the only thoroughly written language to evolve in North America carried on the tradition of the hieroglyphic literacy of Classic Maya civilization (250–900 AD)—burned in a great public bonfire. For the epigraphers at the end of the twentieth century, Landa was the arch-villain; yet, ironically, the Relación de las Casas de Yucatán that he was later compelled to write contained a half-digested explanation of the alphabet of the codices that served for the epigraphers as something like a Maya Rosetta Stone that finally cracked the code.
Landa was not content to burn books. According to Cervantes, his inquisition ended up executing 158 natives, mostly priests, and mostly by burning at the stake. “At least thirteen committed suicide rather than face the inquisitors,” writes Cervantes. “Eighteen disappeared; and many were crippled for life.”
As recounted in chapter 1, the Franciscan predilection for cruel and violent treatment of heretics or even underlings deemed insufficiently servile persisted into the seventeenth century, as exemplified by Father Guerra’s beating of the Hopi man, then smearing turpentine in his wounds until he died. Against that legacy of tyranny and physical punishment, the treatment of the Indians by Domínguez and Escalante stands as a strong counterexample, for no matter how forcibly the two padres harangued the Utes and Paiutes about the true Way, they never once (if the journal can be trusted) laid a hand or a whip on a native in anger.
In New Mexico, the Dominicans and Jesuits never really got a foothold. The history of the colony would have been quite different if they had. The Dominicans, in particular, were critical of how facilely the Franciscans baptized the natives; for, once baptized, an Indian could not be abandoned. Bartolomé de las Casas, the priest whose early treatise A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies stands today as an astonishingly prescient condemnation of slavery and the mistreatment of Indians in the colonies, was a Dominican. As for the Jesuits, they went out of their way to learn the native languages, as the Franciscans almost never did. How differently Escalante’s journal would read—indeed, how differently would the journey have proceeded—if Domínguez or Escalante had been even semi-fluent in Ute, Paiute, or Hopi.
Because Escalante never mentions the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, I found myself wondering how large that cataclysm, which took place some seventy years before he was born, had loomed in his thoughts as he set out in 1776 to convert the heathens. His hopefulness of success at Hopi, both in 1775 and 1776, seems almost naive when weighed against the torture and killing of the priest and burning of the church to the ground in 1680.
An excellent scholarly book written by a Franciscan, Jim Norris’s After “The Year Eighty,” gave me a vivid answer. The high point of Franciscan power in the colony came in the 1650s, when about seventy Franciscan priests served in forty-three different missions. By 1680 their number was down to thirty-three, of whom twenty-two died in the Revolt. So scarifying had that insurrection been for the Franciscan order that ever after it was referred to as el año ochenta, “the year eighty.” Throughout the eighteenth century, the church struggled to regain its power and importance in the colony. But by 1776, when D & E set out, the whole Franciscan establishment was in tawdry decline. Domínguez’s assignment to survey all the missions, which resulted in the important book The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, was an ambitious effort to take stock of the state of Franciscan affairs in the colony. For Domínguez, it was a deeply dismaying year’s work. Norris quotes not from the finished compendium so much as from Domínguez’s letters to his superior, Fray Isidro Murillo. There he condemns friars in El Paso for being too lazy to teach the neophytes anything, as well as priests who were having affairs with married women. Padres at Sandia and Isleta were getting rich and fat by robbing their charges. Others were too ill or feeble-minded to carry out their duties; two were “notorious drunkards”; some were embezzlers; others had let the missions’ holdings fall into rickety disrepair. Of seven particular friars among different pueblos, Domínguez observed, “They are depraved, disobedient, bold characters and brothers who carry knives and blunderbusses as if they were highwaymen.” Summing up the sorry state of affairs, Domínguez concluded that fully half the Franciscans serving in New Mexico should be fired.
Against this sordid backdrop, the expedition Domínguez and Escalante undertook in 1776 to find a route to Monterey ought to be seen as an attempt to build a valedictory monument for 250 years of Franciscan stewardship in New Spain. Viewed in that light, D & E were unquestionably heroes, even if their great journey ended in failure.
ON OCTOBER 23 the Spaniards slaughtered a horse, then cut it up into pieces suitable for carrying. Yet that day they never left camp at San Juan Capistrano, because now Domínguez himself fell ill with “a severe anal pain, so that he could not even move about.” The next morning twenty-six Indians arrived in camp. Despite their fearfulness, the Paiutes were evidently intrigued by the advent of the strangers. And despite the Spaniards’ weakened and demoralized condition, D & E seized the missionary opportunity: “We preached the Gospel to them, decrying and explaining to them the wickedness and futility of their evil customs, most especially with regard to the superstitious curing of their sick. We made them understand that they should seek help in their troubles only from the one and true God, because His Majesty alone has power over health and sickness, over life and death, and is able to help everyone.” According to Escalante, rather than resist this spiritual dressing-down, the Paiutes “listen[ed] with pleasure,” and when the friars asked them if they would like to become Christians, they readily assented. As they had with the Timpanogotzis, the padres promised to come back with settlers and more priests.
At last the team got moving, but it was not until October 26 that they reached the banks of the Colorado, about where the Paria River flows into the great current, just downstream from today’s boat launching point of Lees Ferry and the Navajo Bridge, across which Route 89A effortlessly whisks vehicles ranging from convertibles to Winnebagos. Perhaps this is the spot where the Paiutes had indicated the river could be crossed, for that very afternoon the Spaniards made their first attempt. Escalante’s account of the effort sounds almost comical, until one considers just how dire the failure threatened to become.
Ever since August 14, when they had sneaked up on and then reluctantly been allowed to join the expedition, the two “hitchhikers,” Felipe and Juan Domingo, had gone virtually unmentioned in Escalante’s journal. Now, however, the chronicler identifies them as the two best swimmers on the team. So the trial crossing was up to them. The pair “entered the river naked with their clothes upon their heads.”
It was so deep and wide that the swimmers, in spite of their prowess, were barely able to reach the other side, leaving in midstream their clothing, which they never saw again. And since they became so exhausted getting there, nude and barefoot, they were unable to walk far enough to do the said exploring, coming back across after having paused a while to catch their breath.
Presumably the hypothermic genízaros were given clothes by their teammates to replace the ones lost in the bold swim.
But it was a grim omen. For the next eleven days, the Spaniards poked and prodded through the cliffs and creases of the tortured landscape on the northern bank of the Colorado, searching for a viable ford. By October 29, every scrap of the slaughtered horse had been consumed, so the padres “ordered another horse killed.”
The campsite at the mouth of the Paria River served as an unwelcome base. With uncharacteristic humor, the friars named the camp not after a beloved saint but rather San Benito de Salsipuedes. “Salsipuedes” means “Get out if you can.” And editor Ted J. Warner points out that “a ‘San Benito’ to the New Mexican Franciscan of the eighteenth century referred to a garish white cassock with colored markings worn by errant brothers as a mark of punishment.”
On October 28 the team made a second attempt to cross the raging current, this time with a driftwood raft. Escalante himself and the “servants” set out on the fragile craft. The poles the men had cut from driftwood to use instead of oars were 15 feet long, but only a short way off shore they failed to touch bottom. Three times the raft drifted back to the near bank.
After this setback, the padres sent Andrés Muñiz and his brother Lucrecio off to scout a route upstream and look for a better ford. This was no matter of simply hiking along the bank, for a high cliff and mesa blocked all progress only a few miles upstream from Salsipuedes. The brothers would have to scramble inland to summit the mesa, then find their way back to the river through other cliffs and draws. For three days the rest of the team simply waited, starving and scared.
Sharon and I got to Lees Ferry by early afternoon on September 27. Curiously, we had found a trailside marker on Highway 89A at the site of the Spaniards’ camp on October 24 on a low mound called Emmett Hill, just east of House Rock Valley, but no memorial of the expedition at Lees Ferry, where the fate of the team hung in limbo. Instead all the signage commemorated John D. Lee, the renegade Mormon, exiled from Brigham Young’s Zion, who established the crossing of the Colorado by homemade ferry here. In 1887 Lee was executed for his role as a ringleader in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the sole conspirator among a cadre of prominent Mormons that may have had the approval of the Prophet himself ever to be brought to justice.
I’d been to Lees Ferry several times before, including on the launch of a two-week rafting trip down the Grand Canyon in the mid-1990s. But Sharon had never visited the Grand Canyon, and even though its gateway at Lees Ferry gives only the faintest hint of the glories to come downstream, she was transported by the grandeur of the place. “Right away, I couldn’t believe how fast the river was running,” she said later. “I wanted to get in a boat and just go down into that mystery. And all around us the cliffs were magnificent. Everything was beautiful except for the parking lot.” Indeed, the massive boat-launching platform, dirt shelving into metal ramps, scattered with empty vans that had dropped commercial rafts here, was the usual put-in eyesore times three.
On the afternoon of November 1, the Muñiz brothers returned from their three-day scout with great news: they had found a way up and over the mesa to the northeast, then a way back to the river where a ford was possible. Meanwhile the temperature had dropped, and the men waiting in camp had added an “exceedingly cold” night to their privations.
Full of hope, the whole team set out on the Muñiz bypass on November 2. It took them two days to cover 17 miles. Escalante’s journal is a laundry list of complaints about the terrain: “extremely difficult stretches and most dangerous ledges,” “cliff-lined gorges,” “a stretch of red sand which was quite troublesome for the horse herds,” “such terrible rock embankments that two pack animals which descended the first one could not make it back, even without the equipment.” And then, when at last the team got to the promised ford, the padres judged it impossible. Escalante, so quick to criticize the “guides” and “experts” within his party, was unsparing in his contempt for the brothers Muñiz: “Here we learned that they had not found the ford either, nor in so many days made the necessary exploration of so small a space of terrain, for their having wasted the time looking for those Indians who live hereabouts, and accomplished nothing.”
On three separate outings in 1973 and 1974, Bud Rusho, Gregory Crampton, and another Bicentennial researcher, Don Cecala, pieced together what they thought was the tortuous route reconnoitered by the Muñiz brothers and followed by the expedition with the horse herd. Their research demanded approaches by foot from the west and by jeep from the east. Even so, at least one of their forays was terminated when “exhaustion set in.” All in all, this clever traverse of the ridges and mesa that caused the starving Spaniards so much trouble represents the Commission’s finest effort on the whole route to rediscover the pathway of the pioneers where it was most enigmatic. Rusho named the high saddle at about 4,800 feet where the descent begins Dominguez Pass, “in honor of the often-neglected head of the 1776 expedition.”
On my USGS maps, I could follow the precise route the retracers took. Dominguez Pass even appears on the map, apparently an official name. Before cancer, I would have set out at once to hike the beguiling route as it twists between fins and slots. The maps indicate a “pack trail” along that outback, but I doubted that nowadays more than a tiny handful of hardcore desert rats bothered to explore it. Even in 1975, Rusho reported that “cattlemen in the area are unaware of the long unused pass.” Today all the “recreation” in this part of Arizona focuses on raft trips down the Grand Canyon and on houseboats on Lake Powell. If you simply want to cover the eight airline miles between Lees Ferry and the town of Page (which is what the Spaniards had to do), U.S. Highways 89 and 89A offer an effortless alternative. That was the route Sharon and I took that afternoon, saving the rugged trail through the slickrock domes and pockets for another life.
Thoroughly disgusted by the false expectations the Muñiz brothers had raised, D & E balked at descending all the way to the river, for fear that if the ford didn’t “go,” the horses might not be able to backtrack up the steep and rocky slope. They could see that the river was slower and broader here than at Salsipuedes, but the glitch was a narrow canyon on the far side that offered the only way onward. If that canyon boxed out, the expedition could be caught in a trap. Still, several “companions” were ravenously urging the team to give the ford a try. Instead, the padres delegated their ace swimmer, Juan Domingo, to make the crossing and explore the narrow canyon beyond. (No mention in the journal if this time the genízaro swam naked with his clothes on his head!) The man was beseeched to return by late afternoon so the party could move on if the ford proved untenable. Shortly thereafter, humiliated perhaps by his scolding from the padres, Lucrecio Muñiz volunteered to ride a horse bareback across the river and support Juan Domingo’s reconnaissance. He “[took] along the things needed to make a fire” and promised to “[send] up smoke signals in case he found an exit.” Lucrecio, too, was enjoined to return before nightfall.
At this point, virtually without food, wasting precious effort to find water holes in the slickrock, effectively lost in a sandstone malpais, the team was at its lowest ebb in the three months since leaving Santa Fe. And now the expedition flirted with a fatal collapse.
The team waited until dark, then all through the night. Neither Lucrecio nor Juan Domingo returned. No smoke signals came from the far bank. Camp was on a rim overlooking the Colorado where the two brave scouts had forded it, but maddeningly it was waterless. D & E were unwilling to take the horses down to the river to drink for fear they could not get the weary animals back up the treacherous slope.
By morning the men had eaten every last scrap of meat from the second horse they had slain. Their only food that day was “toasted pads of low prickly pear cactus” and some kind of berries crushed and boiled in water, whose taste was “insipid.” By late afternoon, with no sign of the missing scouts, the exasperated padres decided to risk the descent to the river. Several horses lost their footing and rolled through the rocks, injuring themselves.
Finally, just before dark, Juan Domingo arrived. He reported that the canyon opposite had no viable exit, but that Lucrecio had stayed on, following Indian tracks in the sand. (If there were footprints in the far canyon, there had to be a way out—but not necessarily one that horses could negotiate.) The genízaro’s testimony settled the question for D & E. They resolved to push on toward the northeast in the morning, leaving Andrés Muñiz with the dolorous assignment of waiting for his absent brother, then catching up to the expedition.
The team’s march, or stumble, on November 5 was a disheartening one. Their route lay across a gauntlet of “many ridges and gullies,” “a dry arroyo,” and a “very high-walled canyon.” At a paltry water hole they stopped for the night, still well inland from the river, after a journey of only eight miles. As the men pitched camp a heavy rain fell, then turned briefly to snow. It was still raining in the morning. All day the exhausted men had had nothing to eat.
At 6 AM on November 6, Andrés Muñiz arrived in camp. He told his comrades that he had waited through the previous day with no sign of his brother. These dismal tidings stirred a germ of pity and apprehension in the hearts of the padres. As Escalante wrote, “This news caused us plenty of worry, because [Lucrecio] had been three days without provisions and no covering other than his shirt, since he had not even taken trousers along—for, even though he crossed the river on horseback, the horse swam for a long stretch and the water reached almost to the shoulders wherever it faltered.” At this point Juan Domingo volunteered to go back to the camp of November 5, swim the Colorado again, and search for Lucrecio where the two men had parted two days earlier.
The padres readily accepted this heroic offer, and piled new orders on top of the genízaro’s mission. Juan Domingo was told to find the footprints where he had last seen his fellow scout, follow them wherever they led, and after catching up to Lucrecio, leave the latter’s horse behind and somehow strike out along the southern bank of the great river as the two men tried to keep up with the main team on its parallel path on the other side of the Colorado. Or, if the rendezvous could be accomplished soon enough, both Juan Domingo and Lucrecio were to recross the river (Juan Domingo for the fourth time) and “try to overtake us as quickly as possible.” The men must have slaughtered another horse, for D & E gave Juan Domingo some meat to fortify his desperate backtrack and search.
Throughout the long expedition, Domínguez and Escalante had shown a remarkable sense of responsibility toward their ten companions, even as they castigated them for their stupid mistakes as guides. Other Spanish expedition leaders, especially those of martial mien like Coronado and Oñate, never hesitated to dole out corporal punishment for even the slightest of derelictions. But except for the squalid incident on October 5, when Juan Pedro Cisneros had beaten his “servant” (or at least “grappled with him arm to arm”) because the man refused to pray the Virgin’s litany with his master, Escalante’s journal records not a single case of physical violence among the team members, much less as punishment meted out by the padres themselves. When teammates went missing overnight, the expedition usually halted in its tracks until the errant members could be found.
Yet in the dire predicament of November 6, trapped in the maze of canyons on the wrong side of the Colorado River, famished and demoralized, the padres seemed to countenance the option of effectively abandoning Lucrecio and Juan Domingo to give the rest of the team a chance to survive. The other eleven men (including the Laguna guide, Joaquín) set out in mid-morning on November 6, only to be “stopped for a long time by a strong blizzard and tempest consisting of rain and thick hailstones amid horrendous thunder claps and lightning flashes. We recited the Virgin’s Litany, for her to implore some relief for us, and God willed for the tempest to end.” Another grueling day’s ride produced a gain of only nine miles, before the team stopped to camp where “some rock cliffs blocked our way.” They were only about a mile north of the river but could not see it from camp. Juan Pedro Cisneros set out in the waning light to find a way to the bank of the Colorado and judge whether here, at last, a successful crossing could be made by the whole team.
A single dry sentence at the end of the journal entry for November 6 condenses and conceals an extraordinary exploratory deed: “Before night came the genízaro arrived with the said Lucrecio.” (No mention of Lucrecio’s horse.) For three days, without trousers, Andrés Muñiz’s brother—scarcely mentioned in the journal during the three months out of Santa Fe—had crossed the Colorado twice, pushed the far canyon along the track of Indian footprints to an unspecified distance, and together with Juan Domingo followed the onward track of the main expedition through 17 miles of convoluted slickrock canyons and domes. For three nights the ill-clad Lucrecio had bivouacked through rainstorms that had drenched and chilled his comrades even in their tents and around their campfires. The reconnaissance of these two scouts stands as one of the gutsiest accomplishments of the whole expedition, yet Escalante deigned it an episode not even worth enlivening with the barest details, since in the end, as a way to cross the Colorado River, the scouts’ attempted route failed to find an answer.
That afternoon of November 6, however, Juan Pedro Cisneros, off to check out the mile of trackless country between camp and the river, came back with the most promising report yet, though D & E, with their habitual caution, gave it only provisional credence. Cisneros said that where he reached the Colorado it was very wide and apparently not very deep. The glitch was that the only approach lay through a troublesome canyon. For want of a better alternative, the padres sent out two more teammates to corroborate Cisneros’s intelligence. They came back with the vague admonition that “everything was difficult to negotiate.” Still, it was the best hope for a ford the team had found during the last eleven days.
Very early on November 7, the padres set out to investigate the route themselves, bringing along their two crack swimmers, Felipe and Juan Domingo, to test the ford. At one point in the canyon of approach, D & E saw that the horses they were riding might be unable to descend a slickrock ramp, so they wielded axes to chisel out broad horizontal steps across a crux section about 10 feet long. With the aid of those steps, all four men reached the bank of the Colorado without mishap. From there they pushed downstream “for about as far as two musket shots,” where the river appeared to be widest. One of the genízaros “waded in and found it all right, not having to swim at any place.” D & E followed on horseback. About halfway across, the horses “missed bottom and swam through a short channel.” But by then, either Felipe or Juan Domingo had completed the crossing and found the best route through the ford. He led the friars to the south bank, across a line consistently shallow enough that neither horse had to swim again. On the far side, the way looked open ahead. Escalante reports no sudden burst of joy, no sense that the team had escaped its potentially lethal trap. Instead, at once, the padres sent word to the nine men lingering at camp to come ahead.
The ford of the Colorado River that was destined to become famous had been solved. Thanks to their scouts, so often maligned, Domínguez and Escalante had discovered the Crossing of the Fathers.
FROM OUR MOTEL in Page, Sharon and I would have loved to follow the itinerary of the Spaniards during those eleven desperate days as they searched for a way to cross the impossible Colorado. Alas, nearly all the complex topography through which the team forced its painful way in early November 1776 is drowned under that Mother of All Reservoirs, Lake Powell. I had thought that other impounded lakes like the Abiquiu and Strawberry reservoirs thwarted our determination to go where D & E had gone. But here, during the dramatic crux of the whole expedition, our desire to relive it through the sympathy of travel was defeated by silt and stagnant water. Even in 1975, the Bicentennial retracers found Glen Canyon already partly obliterated by Lake Powell. That didn’t keep Bud Rusho and David Miller from racking their brains to pinpoint campsites and trails on the Spaniards’ route, as they identified such landmarks as Castle Rock, Warm Creek, Ramona Mesa, and Gunsight Butte. Miller, the distinguished historian who headed the Commission and edited its report, had had the good fortune to walk in the footsteps of the expedition with Gregory Crampton back in 1950, before Lake Powell was even a gleam in the eye of the Bureau of Reclamation. By then the ledge where the expedition had gouged steps for the horses had become a legendary stop for backcountry sleuths. The two men also visited a bronze plaque installed nearby to salute the key to the Crossing of the Fathers. Old photos capture the haunting power of the staircase that eased the Spanish horses’ descent to the great river (see photograph in insert).
As soon as the padres and Felipe and Juan Domingo had made the ford, they sent back word to the last camp to bring the whole team down to the river. Saddles, saddlebags, and other gear were lowered with ropes down short sections of cliff. Only at 5 PM on November 7, with the team and all the horses safely across, did the whole expedition stop to celebrate, by “praising God our Lord and firing off some muskets in demonstration of the great joy we all felt in having overcome so great a problem.”
There is no doubt that the Crossing of the Fathers had been a ford well known to the Indians for centuries, maybe even millennia, before 1776. Domínguez and Escalante knew as much. In the same paragraph in which he announces the team’s joy and gratitude to God, the chronicler bitterly complains about “our having no one to guide us through such difficult terrain. For through the lack of expert help we made many detours, wasted time from so many days spent in a very small area, and suffered from hunger and thirst.”
There had to be a reason for the Paiutes’ unwillingness to show the Spaniards the way. The padres had no trouble discovering it, for “God doubtless disposed that we obtain no guide, either as merciful chastisement for our faults or so that we could acquire some knowledge of the peoples living hereabouts.”
That night, in the camp on the south bank the padres named La Purísima Concepción de la Virgen Santísima (the Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Virgin), the men slept well. The way onward was not quite a yellow brick road, but Escalante could sense across the canyons and plains the relative proximity of Moqui, the great multi-village pueblo of the Hopi, which he had visited the year before in his futile attempt to convert the most recalcitrant of all the Puebloan peoples.
In 2006, quite by accident, a ghostly talisman of the long-ago expedition appeared out of nowhere. A group of volunteers attached to the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area were out in a motorboat on Lake Powell, as part of a project to remove graffiti from the sandstone walls. In an area called Padre Bay, several hundred feet of water directly above the Crossing of the Fathers, they discovered, underneath the crudely gouged boasts of “AJ” and “Rob” and “Kathi” from 1994, a faint, cursive “paso por aquí 1776”—“passed by here [in] 1776.” According to Siegfried Halus and Greg MacGregor, in their picture book In Search of Domínguez and Escalante, “Extensive testing using laser scanning, lichen-growth comparisons, handwriting style, lead analysis, and rock-varnish comparisons have [sic] led to the conclusion that the inscription dates prior to the twentieth century and is likely to be two or three hundred years old.”
To my mind the stone message is unmistably the work of the D & E expedition (see photograph in insert). It’s curious that the padres carved it not on the bank of the Colorado where they found their life-saving ford, nor beside the steps they chiseled in the bedrock to ease the horses’ passage, but on a nondescript wall several hundred feet above the river, on the trail of their approach to the ford. The obscurity of that location explains why the record of the team’s passing was not discovered before 2006. In its simplicity—three words and a date, bereft of names—it remains unique, and haunting: the only inscription ever found from the Spanish discovery of the American Southwest.