IN THE LONG VIEW OF HISTORY, WHAT DID THE Domínguez–Escalante expedition accomplish? What, indeed, was its legacy? How would the discovery of the American Southwest have been different had the padres and their ten companions never set out from Santa Fe in 1776, determined to find a route to Monterey?
In 2017 and 2018, when friends asked me what the book I was working on was about, I often resorted to a shorthand résumé: “It’s the Spanish Lewis and Clark,” I would suggest, “a quarter century before Lewis and Clark.”
No American saga has been wreathed in richer glory than the Corps of Discovery expedition President Thomas Jefferson sent westward in 1804. Even as Lewis and Clark were on their way homeward from their great voyage of exploration, Zebulon Pike set out at the head of his own government-sponsored enterprise, aimed at reconnoitering the vast territory beyond the Mississippi River and well to the south of the route Lewis and Clark had chosen. Despite the many peaks, creeks, and counties named after Pike today, his journey has never basked in the glow of historical adulation that shines eternally on Lewis and Clark. In part this neglect can be blamed on the crowning ignominy of Pike’s venture, as he was captured by Spanish authorities in Santa Fe and shipped to Chihuahua for interrogation before being verbally spanked and sent back to his own people.
Thirteen years passed after Pike’s journey before Stephen G. Long was launched on the next official American jaunt into the limitless West, in 1820. His charge was to discover the sources of the Platte, the Arkansas, and the Red rivers, none of which he accomplished. One of his actual achievements was the first ascent of Pikes Peak, which Pike himself had declared unclimbable. Long’s published report of his voyage is a testament to discouragement and pessimism. Memorably, he wrote that the Great Plains all the way from Nebraska to Oklahoma were “unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture.”
Despite the encomiums of Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Ian Frazier, I’ve always found the Great Plains, which I crossed as fast as I could drive by auto a couple of dozen times in the 1960s and ’70s, bleak and depressing and monstrously unrelieved. Sir Richard Burton, on his journey to check out the Mormons in Salt Lake City in 1860, was of like mind, declaring that to survive crossing the Plains by mail wagon one must resort to opium.
In short, the notion that Lewis and Clark laid the groundwork for the inevitable expansion of the United States “from sea to shining sea” rests on a shaky foundation. John Colter was a member of the Corps of Discovery who, on the way back east, quit the company to head back into the wilderness the team had only begun to discover. His desertion triggered a thirty-two-year cavalcade of exploration of the West in the form of freelance entrepreneurs bent on getting rich by trapping beavers to be sold to the markets back east. The Anglo discovery of Yellowstone was made by Colter, whose outlandish tales of exploding geysers and boiling mud pools earned his fantasy landscape the nickname Colter’s Hell. As a brotherhood, the mountain men were mostly illiterate, unconcerned with history, and not particularly patriotic. Many of them were French or Spanish. Only in the 1840s, with the expeditions of John C. Frémont, a new fascination with Oregon and California as dreamlands in which to start a new life, and above all the discovery of gold, did westward expansion turn into America’s manifest destiny.
The ambition behind the Spanish quest to link Santa Fe with Monterey was every bit as imperialistic as Jefferson’s designs on the American West. Yet, for many reasons, after 1776 the course of history in New Spain took a diametrically different path.
When the Domínguez–Escalante expedition reached Zuni on November 24, the junior friar was at last back on home ground, having been assigned to the mission there a year and a half earlier. He and Domínguez lingered at Zuni for another nineteen days before setting out for Santa Fe—exactly why, the journal does not make clear. Nor does Escalante account for what happened to the padres’ eleven companions after they got to Zuni. Scholars have assumed that the other men made their own way back to Santa Fe, probably long before the padres returned. By 1776 the trail, after all, was well-known and often traveled.
From Zuni Domínguez wrote a letter to Fray Isidro Murillo, briefly summarizing the team’s adventure and promising a fuller narrative in the journal the padres would bring back to Santa Fe. In the letter he lays out the obvious reasons for giving up the quest for Monterey—lack of provisions, cold, and the discouraging fact that not even at the point of their farthest westward push “did we find any information whatsoever about the Spaniards of Monterey.” Domínguez confesses the failure to dent the Hopi obstinacy about not becoming Christians, but near the end of the letter he makes a case for both settlement among and conversion of the Utes and for trying again to establish a trade route to California. “From the lake [Utah Lake] to near the Río Colorado,” he writes, “there is an extremely beautiful road, and entirely free from enemies. With regard to Monterey, according to what we observed and through all the land we traveled from the lake, it is possible to travel safely with a very small force.” This letter to Murillo is the only surviving commentary in Domínguez’s hand on the journey he had co-led, though scholars argue about how big a contribution he made to Escalante’s writing of the official journal.
It was not until January 2, 1777, that Domínguez and Escalante finally reached Santa Fe. The next day they presented the journal to their Franciscan boss, Fray Murillo, and to Governor Mendinueta. In front of these worthies they formally signed the manuscript, declaring in its last line that “everything contained in this diary is true and faithful to what occurred and was observed during our journey.” They also presented the deerskin painting on which the Timpanogotzis had illustrated their best warriors in battle with the Comanches, which the team had carefully carried through all their trials from Utah Lake back to Santa Fe. (Where is that relic today? Gathering dust in some drawer of a neglected archive in Mexico City? Or long since thrown out as trash?) That diorama on deerskin had been given to the padres as a token of the Timpanogotzis’s sincerity in wishing to become Christians, and as such D & E handed it over to the Franciscan Custodian and the Governor as proof that the Yutas were hungry for conversion.
For D & E, blazing the trade route to Monterey was ultimately of secondary significance. What they clung to was the hope that their superiors would see the value of returning to that newly discovered land, where the padres and other Spaniards could build towns and establish missions and fulfill their promises to return and bring eternal salvation to the infidels. Whatever Murillo thought about this proposal, Governor Mendinueta promptly squelched it. Even before the expedition, he had cast a jaundiced eye on the padres’ ambitions to found new missions in the wilderness. “If there are not enough fathers for those already conquered,” he had said then, “how can there be any for those that may be newly conquered?” By January 1777, he had not changed his mind.
The record does not show whether Domínguez and Escalante gave up their missionizing dream after that meeting. But Miera y Pacheco had not abandoned his own rather grandiose plans for how New Mexico might take advantage of the newly discovered lands. On October 26, 1777, he addressed a lengthy proposal not to Mendinueta or Murillo but to the King of Spain himself. He paid lip service to the importance of religious conversion: “It is certain, My Lord, that many tribes desire the water of baptism . . . for these people, with tears in their eyes, manifested their ardent desire to become Christians.” But ultimately, the key to expanding the empire of New Spain into the great Southwest was military. Miera built his vision on the vital need to establish three presidios—massive forts that would take the shape of walled cities. With those three, Miera would guarantee Spanish control of the vast domain stretching between Santa Fe and Monterey.
One presidio should be built at the mouth of the Gila River, where it flows into the Colorado. This locale, far to the southwest of any stage of the D & E circuit, had been the arena of a previous military campaign in which Miera had played a key role. From that fortress, the Spaniards could subdue the Gila Apaches, who had already caused so much trouble in the no-man’s-land between Sonora and New Mexico. A second presidio would be plunked down right on Utah Lake, in the heartland of the Timpanogotzis Utes. As Escalante had in his “Description of the Valley,” Miera rhapsodized about the region as “the most pleasing, beautiful, and fertile site in all New Spain.” The great lake on the edge of that homeland abounded in “many varieties of savory fish, very large white geese, many kinds of ducks, and other exquisite birds never seen elsewhere, besides beaver, otters, seals, and some strange animals which are or appear to be ermines, judging by the softness and whiteness of their furs.” The old soldier went on to extol the river that he had drawn flowing westward out of the even larger lake to the north (today’s Great Salt Lake), even though none of the team had seen it, but which he assured the king was “very large and navigable,” and which led to some “very large settlements in which lived civilized Indians.” Such a river, of course, does not exist.
The third presidio, curiously, should be built at the junction of the Navajo and Las Animas rivers, “along the beautiful and extensive meadows which its margins provide for raising crops, together with the convenience of the timber, firewood, and pastures which they offer.” Curious, because despite the cartographer’s acumen, the Navajo and Las Animas rivers never meet. Perhaps Miera meant the junction of the Navajo with the San Juan, near which the team had established its Nuestra Señora de las Nieves camp on August 5, where Escalante saw only “good prospects for a moderate settlement.”
No matter. The ultimate purpose of this third presidio, in Miera’s starry-eyed plan, was to be a concentration camp for all the Hopi people, after they had been “brought down by force from their cliffs” on the three mesas in faraway Arizona. Miera thought a bloodless siege of Moqui by soldiers guarding the water holes on the plains below Walpi and Oraibi would convince the obstinate Hopi to “surrender and do whatever might be required of them.” As industrious Indian slaves in the presidio on the Navajo River, the Moqui would buttress “a rich and strong province, adjoining New Mexico and expanding toward these new establishments [on Utah Lake].” Miera’s plan was Escalante’s scheme of conquest by siege added to forced removal to an alien land. In its ruthless totalitarianism, it anticipates the Long Walk of the Navajos beginning in 1863 and their five-year incarceration at Bosque Redondo.
Needless to say, nothing came of Miera’s cockamamie proposal. It’s doubtful whether the King of Spain ever responded to the letter advancing it.
After 1777, Miera, Domínguez, and Escalante never again went on record urging a second try at establishing a route from Santa Fe to Monterey, let alone the building of presidios and towns and missions along the way. Domínguez went back to work on his comprehensive survey of the existing missions of New Mexico, compiling that massive document by August 1777. In the words of his modern editor, Domínguez’s “lengthy report was filed away with a sarcastic notation and forgotten.” It was rediscovered only in 1928 in a dusty archive in the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City. It survives today as one of the two or three most valuable accounts of life in eighteenth-century New Mexico. Domínguez himself pops up in El Paso in 1778, then disappears from the record for seventeen years. His last written utterance emerges in 1795 in the form of a short, obsequious plea for a sinecure as “definitor” (a sidekick or yes-man to the head priest) in the benighted outpost of Janos on the northern frontier of the state of Chihuahua. He died at Janos sometime before 1805.
Bernardo Miera y Pacheco compiled his extraordinary map covering the route and discoveries of the 1776 expedition. It was recopied by himself and others, with some additions. As well as a priceless record of the five-month journey into the unknown Southwest that the motley team performed, it survives as a cartographic work of art in its own right.
In 1778 Juan Bautista de Anza became governor of New Mexico. His predecessor, Mendinueta, was wildly unpopular in Santa Fe. During his reign he had cut off trade with the dangerous Comanches, but as their antagonist he proved a feckless warrior. In 1779 Anza amassed an army of 600 soldiers, later reinforced with 200 Utes and Jicarilla Apaches, to ride out onto the plains in pursuit of the main Comanche band, under the leadership of their legendary chief, Cuerno Verde. Miera was almost certainly a member of that expedition, but since Anza never bothered to name even his principal lieutenants in his reports, we cannot be absolutely sure that Miera was on board. Still, the anonymous map produced to accompany the report bears Miera’s unmistakable stamp.
The two men were not only close friends, they were distant cousins. Anza gave Miera the official epithet distinguido to add to his title, and he left the best description we have of the mapmaker. In 1779, wrote Anza, Miera was “five feet tall, sixty-five years old, his faith Apostolic Roman Catholic, and his features as follows: gray hair and eyebrows, blue eyes, rosy fair complexion, straight nose, with full gray beard.” (Would that we had a description of either Domínguez or Escalante half so detailed!)
The war against the Comanches was a great success. Anza rode back into Santa Fe carrying aloft Cuerno Verde’s headdress (“a green horn in his forehead, fixed in a . . . tanned leather headpiece”) like a trophy scalp, as a “delirious” crowd in the plaza cheered the soldiers. According to historian Pekka Hämäläinen, the defeat of Cuerno Verde marked the beginning of the end of the century-long Empire of the Plains during which the Comanches terrorized all enemies, including the Spaniards.
Miera was almost certainly a soldier in that victorious army. He had, alas, only six more years to live, succumbing at the age of seventy-one in Santa Fe in 1785. His incomparable maps and the altar screens and statues for churches that survive furnish the legacy of the man biographer John Kessell calls “one of the most versatile and fascinating figures” of eighteenth-century New Mexico.
The excruciating “urinary ailment” of which Escalante complained in his 1775 diary, but all hints of which he stoically expunged from the much longer journal of the 1776 expedition, almost certainly caused his premature death. Whether, as Kessell believes, Escalante was stricken with pancreatic or bladder cancer or some other incurable disease, we will never know. After the great expedition, he stayed in New Mexico for three more years, serving as missionary to various pueblos. In 1780, he requested permission to make the long ride to Mexico City for treatment for his recurring malady. He never got there, dying in April in the ex-mining town of Parral in southern Chihuahua. He was only thirty years old.
AS RECOUNTED IN chapter 8, the Domínguez–Escalante expedition should be seen as a courageous campaign by two idealistic priests to save Franciscan honor in a colony rife with the corruption and incompetence of their missionary brethren. That the team failed to reach Monterey can hardly be held against them. Not even the Timpanogotzis living in what Marshall Sahlins has called “aboriginal affluence” on Utah Lake really comprehended the topographic obstacles that lay between the farthest western stab the team made in October 1776 and the Pacific Ocean—not the least of which was the lordly chain of the Sierra Nevada, which stretches from north to south a full 350 miles beyond the dreary sagebrush plain where the casting of lots dictated the retreat to Santa Fe.
It was not only the church in New Mexico that had fallen into torpor by 1776. Spain itself, the most powerful nation in Europe in the era of Cortés and Coronado, had slid into second-rate status compared to France or Great Britain by the end of the eighteenth century. It was not merely Mendinueta’s timidity that ruled out a further expedition in quest of a route to Monterey, much less the building of towns and missions along the trail pioneered by D & E. The monarchy in Spain was losing its grip on the New World, or at least on the northern frontier where it had once dreamed of consolidating its empire. Only forty-four years after the padres handed over the deerskin pledge of Ute allegiance to the authorities in Santa Fe, Spain altogether gave up its hold on that northern frontier, as Mexico gained its sovereignty in its war of independence in 1821. Within a decade, thanks largely to the exploits of Antonio Armijo, the Spanish Trail (which should really be called the Mexican Trail) solidified a trading route to California far more practical than the wandering path the padres had forged in 1776.
Yet even the Spanish Trail was soon to become an American trail. There was no quenching the relentless tide of trappers and miners and settlers a country bursting with ambition sent westward from St. Louis through the first decades of the nineteenth century. It’s worth remembering that when Brigham Young led his persecuted Saints into the valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1847, he was invading a foreign country. But only a year later, Mexico ceded its last-gasp hold on what would become the American Southwest to a nation enthralled by its God-given charter of manifest destiny. That surrender would be completed with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.
Historians love to play the game of what-if. If the United States had failed to spread its dominion all the way to the shores of the Pacific, would Lewis and Clark be as forgotten today as Domínguez and Escalante are? If in 2018 Oregon belonged to Great Britain, Alaska to Russia, and California to Mexico, would the daring pioneers of the Corps of Discovery be relegated to the footnotes of North American exploration?
Yet the lasting value of a voyage like that of Domínguez and Escalante does not hinge on whether or not it paved the way for conquest and empire. Even history books for kids no longer tout Columbus as having “discovered” America. Leif Erikson’s inspired determination around 1000 AD “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars” led to no enduring Viking settlement in North America. By the fifteenth century even the Danish colony in Greenland had gone extinct. Domínguez and Escalante, of course, did not “discover” the Southwest. Native Americans had thrived there for more than ten millennia before 1776. But they were the first Europeans to explore that majestic and difficult region of canyons and rivers and stark plateaus, and that is a distinction that the feckless decades of Spanish misrule that followed their unrepeated entrada cannot dim.
As Sharon and I drove out of Hopi on the road toward Zuni on September 29, I mused about how to sum up the padres’ achievement. For two unlikely feats they have been justly commended by later writers and travelers. The first is that, for all the desperate vicissitudes to which they were reduced by the pitiless country they explored, they lost not a single man. In fact, they brought back an extra “companion,” in the person of Joaquín the Laguna, who for reasons only he knew stayed with the team all the way, and seemed unfazed as he entered an unimaginable new life in Santa Fe. (Domínguez was quick to boast of this addition in his letter to Murillo from Zuni, writing that “this has sweetened the inevitable bitter things that so long a journey offers, because we have now assured the safety of his soul.”) Despite all the complaining Escalante indulged in as the “experts” led the padres astray time and again, or got lost overnight, there’s no avoiding the conclusion that this small and ill-equipped party of Spaniards looked after one another. You cannot say the same of the armies led by Coronado, Oñate, or Vargas.
The other achievement is that indeed they “never resorted to violence against their fellow men.” Even the equally peaceable Lewis and Clark team ended up killing two Indians when, on the Marias River in present-day Montana, the men chased a group of Blackfeet they suspected of trying to steal their horses. Meriwether Lewis shot one man, and a soldier stabbed another to death. For almost a century thereafter, the Blackfoot nation harbored a seething hatred of Americans, even while they traded on friendly terms with Canadians.
Escalante’s recommendation that obstinate Moqui ought to be brought to heel by force of arms seems in the end to have been an empty threat. No matter how “crestfallen” the padres were after the implosion of the oratory by which they sought to convert the Hopi through the sheer power of what they thought was reason, Escalante’s journal in November never hints at a final solution by force to be meted out by Governor Mendinueta’s soldiers. The padres gave up instead—and in their ignominous retreat, Escalante had the honesty to present the Hopi point of view so clearly that we can cheer from the sidelines 241 years later.
To be sure, twelve men with a few muskets, no armor, and only Miera’s experience in a real military campaign presented no threat to Utes, Hopi, or even “cowardly” Paiutes. The wonder is that somewhere along the trail the party was not wiped out by Indians who might have coveted the expedition’s meager belongings or simply resented white men trespassing on their homeland. The team seems to have glided along under the spell of a magic charm against harm, whether or not a Franciscan God was in charge of looking out for them.
For the modern observer, as for the reader of Escalante’s journal, the hardest thing to swallow is the padres’ self-righteous condescension toward the natives, linked as it is to their adamantine determination to turn every Yuta or Moqui they met into a dyed-in-the-soul Christian. Many times as I read out loud to Sharon a passage in which Escalante reports that he and his fellow friar told some band of Indians that “we loved them as our children,” or waxes outraged that the natives danced almost naked or used a shaman’s mumbo-jumbo to cure a sick man, I couldn’t resist sighing or snickering or editorializing, “Can you believe their arrogance?” But just as often, I caught myself on the brink of my own condescension, as I reminded myself that I needed to see these encounters through the lens of historical perspective.
In 2018, despite the dogged persistence of racism and xenophobia in America, we tend to take as a self-evident truth the idea that a culture or a people can only be judged in terms of its own mores and beliefs. Yet cultural relativism was an invention of the late nineteenth century. Yes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men twenty-two years before D & E took off from Santa Fe, and Europe during the Enlightenment of the last half of the eighteenth century took seriously the notion of the noble savage (a term Rousseau never used, though he championed the idea). But the lofty theorizing of French philosophes and the poetry of the English Romantics hardly trickled down to the remote northern frontier of New Spain. Even among Spaniards in New Mexico, no one was less inclined than its Franciscan priests to view Indian dances and idol worship as a viable alternative religion. For D & E, as passionate and dogmatic as any Franciscans, the devil was literally present in the kiva and the wickiup.
The generally received notion of today that a culture can only be judged in terms of its own internal logic was a radical idea in 1899, when Franz Boas began teaching anthropology at Columbia University. Such protégés as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, A. L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Zora Neale Hurston carried his teachings into the real world from Samoa to the Yahi-Yana hideout of Ishi, “the last wild Indian in North America.” As Matt Liebmann explained to me, Boas drove home in vivid fashion his doctine of cultural autonomy by reorganizing the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. Before Boas, the glass cases taught the steady and inexorable progress of humankind from Stone Age to Gunpowder, from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Boas dismantled this tendentious apparatus and reorganized the exhibits to treat each region of the world separately, in terms of its own development of everything from tools to customs to cosmogony.
Domínguez and Escalante may have been rigidly doctrinaire about the unbridgeable gulf between heaven and hell and about the absolute truth of the Bible as further explicated by Saint Francis. But they were almost entirely without guile, and they were full of humility about their own failings as men and priests. Escalante closes a typical letter to Fray Murillo thus: “Your most affectionate and useless subject kisses your Reverend Paternity’s hands.” He opens his letter to Murillo reporting the 1775 visit to Hopi by claiming that “the knowledge that my sins were responsible for its failure causes me great chagrin and mortification.”
An ancillary virtue of the black-and-white morality the padres brought to their Indian encounters is that the journal nowhere veers near the modern-day caricature of Native Americans living in wise and stoic harmony with the earth and with their fellow man. In Escalante’s account, the Hopi are in all-out war with the Navajos, the Sabuagana and Laguna Utes constantly raid against and battle with the Comanches (whoever that enemy was), and the Paiutes seem to lurk in fear of all strangers.
In almost six weeks of riding along with Escalante, I’d gotten used to his foibles: his incredulity that infidels didn’t at once see the transparent truth of the Gospel and its promise of eternal life, his I-told-you-so disgust when the “experts” led the team astray, his dogged humorlessness. I had come to find his quaint locutions charming: how Miera “was ready to freeze on us,” or how after cutting their porcupine into thirteen pieces “we tasted flesh of the richest flavor,” or how the Hopi man flung the blanket back at the Spaniards “with a mean look on his face.” Escalante’s squeamishness about the human body was like that of a Victorian maiden aunt, as he averted his eyes from the G-strings of the Paiute women “barely covering what one cannot gaze upon without peril” or as he managed to notice the “small and delicate feather subtly attached” to “the end of the member it is not modest to name” of the Hopi dancers.
Escalante was a chronicler without pretense or affectation. He never tried to put a spin on a failure in order to transform it into a partial success. Though he could tell Indians he’d just met that he loved them as his children, he tasted real grief when the teaching of the padres failed to win any converts. The dawning realization that he would almost certainly have to break his promise to the Timpanogotzis to come back and live with them and build them a church hums like a pulse of sorrow throughout the last two months of the journey. By the end of our long drive, Escalante almost seemed like a third passenger in our SUV. Though he wouldn’t have been my first choice as a companion on our road trip, by the time we reached Zuni he felt almost like a friend.
The journey of Escalante and Domínguez and their tenacious teammates is not unique in North American history, but the combination of the voyage and Escalante’s diary is. Lewis and Clark’s journals are packed with detail, so much so that the shape of the exploit often gets lost. Oddly, Clark’s semiliterate, unpunctuated jottings are often blunter and truer than Lewis’s more learned entries, and Clark sometimes fills in incidents that Lewis smooths over or omits altogether. It takes a historian such as Stephen Ambrose to tell the story whole.
The amazing eight-year traverse of the continent from Florida to Sinaloa from 1528 to 1536 by Cabeza de Vaca and his three tough comrades is arguably the most extraordinary voyage of discovery ever undertaken in North America. But Cabeza de Vaca’s diary is so sketchy, so vague, and ultimately so unreliable that scholars ever since have wrangled not only over where the four refugees went but over what they did during those eight years of survival.
John Wesley Powell’s classic The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons may be the liveliest and best-written narrative of an epic North American voyage of discovery ever penned. But the skill of the telling derives in large part from the ways that Powell turned his “journal” into a semifictional account, as he interweaves incidents from both his 1869 and 1871–72 trips, overdramatizes some hair’s-breadth escapes and neglects to mention others, and in painting the team as a platoon of loyal comrades streamlined to the will of their captain glides over the constant antagonisms and near mutinies that would have made the true story even more fascinating. (There is one other narrative of discovery in North America that I would put alongside Powell’s in the ranks of the greatest expedition books. That is Samuel Hearne’s Journey to the Northern Ocean, published in 1795—his account of the first European descent of the Coppermine River in arctic Canada. But that book is virtually unread today. I urge the curious aficionado to seek out a copy.)
All in all, I know of no combination of pathbreaking journey and first-person narrative in the short history of European and American exploration of our continent quite in Escalante’s league. At the finish line of our own journey, our odometer read 3434, almost exactly double the mileage the Spaniards racked up. If we were left puzzled by all kinds of fundamental questions the padres’ strange entrada raises, still, that uncertainty was suffused with admiration. And in memory, our own journey in homage to the padres fades only very slowly—maybe not at all.
SHARON AND I spent September 30 at Zuni, but nothing we did there evoked the spirit of the 1776 adventure the way even ten minutes of chatting with Leigh Kuwanwisiwma at Hopi had. On a late Saturday morning the visitor center was closed, as was the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center. The whole town, in fact, felt closed, except for the Giant gas station–cum–Subway, a few jewelry shops, and the yard sale on the porch of the modern church where we could have bought used T-shirts for 25 cents each. Instead of the stern “no photography” sign at the entrance to Oraibi, we read the gentle suggestion on the window of the visitor center, “Consider capturing visual memories instead of photographs!”
Only the old mission church seemed to reverberate with echoes of the Domínguez–Escalante expedition. Originally built in 1629, it had fallen into decrepitude by 1821, when Spain ceded its colony to Mexico. The National Park Service restored the buiding in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but on this genial morning in 2017 it was locked up tight and looked as though it had been for months. Sharon and I stood just outside the gates, gazing across the weed-strewn cemetery as we took in the lopsided grace of the adobe building. It was not hard to imagine Escalante giving sermons and hearing confessions here in the spring of 1775, before he set out on his first trip to Hopi. But it was hard to see Zuni as it must have felt to Spaniards back then, exiled to the far western outpost of what John Kessell called “the Siberia of New Mexico.” During our several hours at Zuni, four locals came up to our vehicle to beg for money. One leather-skinned oldster asked for “a dollar so I can get a drink.”
We drove on. No longer was there any incentive to match our journey to Escalante’s diary, for he barely recorded his eventual trek with Domínguez back to Santa Fe. The two-sentence entry for December 13 actually covers four days’ travel across 79 miles from Zuni to Acoma. We stopped at El Morro, or Inscription Rock, the astonishing 200-foot-high sandstone buttress on which hundreds of passersby have carved their names and messages, from the beginning of the seventeenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first. I’d stopped there several times before, but for Sharon this bulletin board of history, unique in the United States, was a revelation. About fifteen years before, as I researched a book about the Pueblo Revolt, I’d dutifully transcribed the vaunts of Oñate and Vargas at El Morro. In 1605, seven years after Oñate took possession of the fledgling colony of New Mexico, calling himself el adelantado (a title bestowed on someone who had “conquered” a new land), he had recorded his passage on the way back from “the discovery of the South Sea,” since he’d completed a voyage from Santa Fe to the Gulf of California. Vargas, the architect of the Bloodless Reconquest from 1692 to 1696, had deemed it fitting to carve into the stone his claim that he had retaken “all of New Mexico” from the treacherous Puebloan rebels not only for the Holy Faith and the Royal Crown, but “at his [own] expense.”
As we slowly walked the Park Service path along the base of the monument on a windy day with the tang of autumn in it, I noticed an inscription I’d previously overlooked, one that ironically anticipated D & E’s mission. In August 1716, the then governor of New Mexico, Féliz Martínez, had bragged that he was en route with the Franciscan Custodian of the colony (Murillo’s predecessor) to carry out “the reduction and conquest of Moqui.” Martínez, as it turned out, had no more luck with the obstinate Hopi than D & E would have six decades later.
In all likelihood, the padres passed by El Morro on December 13, 1776. They may have camped there, for the deep tank or pool filled by a waterfall spilling off the summit of the buttress made for one of the most reliable waypoints on the road between Zuni and Santa Fe. But if they stopped at El Morro, they didn’t bother to record the event in stone. Inscriptions, much less boastful ones, weren’t the padres’ style, they who had carved only “paso por aqui” and the year as they stumbled down the slickrock ramps toward the Crossing of the Fathers a month before. On the banks of the Green River, Joaquín Lain had used his adze to chisel out his name, the date, and a pair of crosses in a sturdy cottonwood tree in September, but despite Herbert E. Bolton’s wishful thinking in 1950, that piece of sylvan annotation had long since crumbled into the soil.
On the homeward stretch from Zuni at the end of September, I did a lot of thinking about the journey Sharon and I were about to complete. There’s no getting around the fact that the Domínguez–Escalante expedition ended not with a bang but a whimper. Our own forty-day pilgrimage (actually thirty-nine) was also heading toward a whimpering finish line. We did not even plan to return to Santa Fe, since we had rented our RAV4 at the Albuquerque airport, from which we would fly home on October 4. We wanted to camp out one more night on the trail, whether or not our bivouac corresponded in any way with the padres’ December dash back to Santa Fe.
I realized that our own “expedition” was the longest continuous journey in quest of any kind of goal that the two of us had ever taken together. When we were still in our twenties, between 1968 and 1971, Sharon had been my partner on four Alaskan expeditions—one a kayaking trip on the Tikchik Lakes in the southwestern corner of the state, the other three climbing expeditions with other men who would team up with me to attempt unclimbed peaks in the magnificent Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle. Those trips had lasted between eighteen and thirty-three days, so our Domínguez–Escalante jaunt was actually the longest single-purpose journey we had ever shared. It seemed fudging a bit to call it an expedition, especially since we were never that far from the next motel or McDonald’s. But it had the true intensity of a search. Every day—every hour on the road—we were trying to solve a puzzle that required mapping a 241-year-old diary onto a landscape that had been radically transformed since 1776 in some ways, in others hardly at all.
As we drove slowly toward Albuquerque, I realized that our trip also fit my paradigm for the kind of quest that I had discovered in the Southwest as I sought out prehistoric ruins and rock art panels. Unlike a climbing expedition, our retracing of D & E was in pursuit of an Other—in this case, not the Anasazi cosmos but a wilderness full of unredeemed strangers to which a pair of Franciscan priests brought a vision almost as alien to Sharon’s and my thinking as the one blazoned forth in kachina masks etched on sandstone walls. Escalante’s journal was our Rosetta Stone, but even through its kaleidoscopic lens it was hard to see the Satan lurking just beyond the drumbeat of an Indian dance that the padres were sure was there.
On our Alaska trips, I had always been the partner in charge. When my cronies and I went off to climb Igikpak or Shot Tower, Sharon waited at base camp, her ear cocked for the snuffling grunt of a grizzly bear wandering near or the joyful banter of climbers coming back exhausted from a first ascent. On the D & E trail, thanks to the ravages of my cancer, Sharon and I were truly equal partners. If anything, she was in charge, trying to figure out what to do when my nausea or fatigue threatened the day’s program, arranging blood draws in Durango and Provo, fixing meals I could eat with my saliva-less mouth and throat, sorting out my dozens of pills and reminding me to take them, and hugging me back to sleep when a nightmare woke me drenched in sweat. And, yes, driving our SUV at least two-thirds of the time.
Ten months after our trip, in July 2018, as I was writing the last pages of this book, I got bad news. The Pembrolizumab that had held the metastasized cancer in my chest nodules in check for two years seemed not to have stopped a new growth in nodules on my adrenal glands. It was the second metastasis of throat cancer, and its appearance in a different part of my body boded ill. My oncologist opted to start infusions of Pembro again, but I could see that she wasn’t optimistic.
Yet even the previous fall, by the end of our D & E circuit, I had felt the weight of mortality hanging over me. The bad days when it was hard to get back in the SUV and keep going portended the decline into helplessness, hospitalization, and death that was never far from my thoughts. Often I wondered if Escalante, who must have suffered every day from the “urinary ailment” that probably prefigured his death, rode onward with a kindred sense of doom. But he had one advantage over me: he was certain of the far better world that lay on the other side.
AT THE END of our journey in early October 2017, Sharon and I were three and a half weeks shy of our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Like any long-married couple, we had traversed alpine ridges of transporting joy during those years, and slogged through swamps of anger and estrangement. By staying together, we had of course locked doors to alternate lives we might have explored had the option of chucking it in and starting over seduced us with its illusion of freedom.
All my adult life, I have been tantalized by the vision of intimacy embodied in Robert Browning’s poem “Two in the Campagna.” It seems to speak directly to the craving for love vexed with doubt and distraction that is like a blueprint for my life with Sharon. The poem begins:
I wonder do you feel today
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?
But “Two in the Campagna” is no simple love poem. “Help me to hold it,” the speaker pleads to the woman beside him, as Browning launches on a tour de force of metaphor, the “thought” he tries to hold skimming from fennel to “brickwork’s cleft” to five “blind and green” beetles groping for nectar inside a flower, alighting briefly on the “grassy slope” on which the lovers lie. The poem is about the almost-meeting of souls, the desire to merge completely with the other, which the speaker can never quite realize.
No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth—I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
Then the good minute goes.
That poem has always seemed to capture the depths of love I felt for Sharon crossed with the futility of love, of the impossibility of finding true contentment with any other person. The poem ends with a characteristic Browning outcry:
Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
But during our thirty-nine days on the road from New Mexico to Colorado to Utah to Arizona and back to New Mexico, much of that despairing “almost-perfect” stasis between Sharon and me seemed to transmute into something quieter and less troubled—something not, in Browning’s phrase, “to catch at and let go,” but rather “to catch at and hold.” Yes, we had our little squabbles along the road, our arguments about where to stop for lunch or whether to spend an hour hiking along a creek that D & E might have skirted way back then, even those all-too-normal marital blackouts when one of us got so caught up in our own thoughts that we heard not a word the other was saying for three minutes at a time.
Yet as the end of the journey loomed in the image of the Albuquerque airport, and neither of us wanted the trip to end, I realized that this mini-expedition was the best thing we had ever done together. I didn’t need to ask Sharon if she felt the same way.
Late in the afternoon of October 1, we turned off State Highway 53 and drove south on the dirt road that skirts El Malpais National Monument on the west and the Chain of Craters on the east. Spaniards long before D & E named the black smother of congealed lava covering 462 square miles of what was once ponderosa forest El Malpais, or the Badlands. From such mini-volcanoes as Cerro Lobo and Cerro Chato in the Chain of Craters, wave after wave of eruptions shook the land over the last million years, the last substantial flow spreading the molten magma from the earth’s interior only 3,000 years ago. The Spaniards avoided El Malpais, but the Puebloans who lived nearby embraced it long before Coronado. Old secret trails through the lava tubes connected Acoma pueblo to Zuni, and archaeologists are still finding pottery and projectile points in the most arcane bends of the tunnels that reticulate the igneous labyrinth. Here lay one more corner of the Southwest outback I had promised myself I’d explore, and that I now must forgo.
We were not in a national forest but rather in the El Malpais National Conservation Area, set aside only in 1987 by the Bureau of Land Management. We drove back and forth, looking for the most genial site we could find for our last campout on the D & E trail. The usual hodgepodge of private inholdings, replete with barbed wire and “no trespassing” signs, bordered the fenceless pine-needle swards where we guessed no one would object if we pitched our tent. A few cows greeted our SUV with stupefied gazes. The stiff wind that had buffeted us at El Morro was fitfully dwindling, and when the sun left us at 6:30, the air took on a sudden chill.
At last we chose a mediocre campsite with little in the way of a view. In recent years a forest fire had scorched the hillside behind us, and I thought I could still smell a faint char when the breeze swept in the right direction. It was Sunday evening. The only other vehicles on the road were woodcutters with their truck beds loaded with logs and ATVers with their buggies strapped onto trailers, all of them headed home after a weekend tinged with the early threat of winter. “Doesn’t anybody camp out any more?” I wondered out loud as Sharon set the plates on our Walmart folding table.
Dinner was hot dogs with yellow mustard and diced onions and baked beans out of a can. It was the same meal we’d had several times before on our trip, but with my choices so limited by the cancer-zapping rays two years earlier, I savored every bite. I drank a bottle of Bohemia beer from Mexico, Sharon a glass of rosé from California, the rosé of Provence that we preferred being hard to come by in the liquor stores of Gallup. After dinner we lit our usual small fire of ponderosa branches.
It had rained hard two days before and the air felt scrubbed clean, its blue the color I remembered from my childhood in Boulder. A three-quarter moon crept up the eastern sky, ducking in and out of the trees. We talked about this and that, and then we just stared into the flames, studying the sparks flung upward and the blue jets of oxidized carbon as if they spoke a language we were just learning to read. We had the whole forest to ourselves.
I got up to pee around 4:30 in the morning. It was cold outside the tent, and I wanted to hurry back to my sleeping bag. But the moon had set, and the stars were sharper than they had been at any time on our whole trip. I lingered, gazing at Orion and Canis Major in the east, wondering if the pinpoint of Sirius had ever looked quite so cold and bright.
As a kid, long before I felt the pull of mountains, the wilderness of the universe had captivated me. That my father was an astronomer had something to do with it, but the constellations seemed to pulse with a demand I could feel in my nerve endings. I needed to get out there, to travel endlessly through space, to reach the stars that hung immobile in the sky each night, to find out what was there. Somewhere among those infinite spaces there was an answer to a question I could not yet formulate.
I turned back to the tent, assailed by a rueful memory of the moment when I first realized—was I seven or eight?—that I would never get to travel into outer space, that Sirius was too far away. That I would be bound by our humdrum earth for the rest of my life.
Inside the tent, I crawled back into my sleeping bag, embracing the tingle of warmth my body had left in its nylon and down. It didn’t matter, did it, that the cosmos was beyond our reach. In my seventy-four years, I had gone someplace far and strange and wonderful.
I put my arm around Sharon, and heard her murmur in her sleep. We had gone someplace together. We didn’t need a map to tell us where.