Escalantes dream, p.1
Escalante's Dream, page 1
ESCALANTE’S
DREAM
On the Trail of
the Spanish Discovery
of the Southwest
David Roberts
Contents
Author’s Note
CHAPTER ONE
ABIQUIU AND BEYOND
CHAPTER TWO
WHERE ARE THE INDIANS?
CHAPTER THREE
ESCALANTE SLEPT HERE
CHAPTER FOUR
SEARCHING FOR YUTAS
CHAPTER FIVE
FINDING THE RÍO TIZÓN
CHAPTER SIX
TEGUAYÓ AND THE LOST SPANIARDS
CHAPTER SEVEN
DECISION
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CROSSING OF THE FATHERS
CHAPTER NINE
HOPI AND BEYOND
EPILOGUE
THE LEGACY
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
For Sharon—
Because you are there
Route followed by the Domínguez–Escalante expedition, July 29, 1776, to January 2, 1777.
Courtesy of Adam Stack.
Author’s Note
THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY ALL THE WAY UP TO WHAT IS today north-central New Mexico was a Spanish colony from 1598, as was much of southern Arizona up to the mission at San Xavier del Bac, from 1692. Both regions, of course, are today parts of the American Southwest. In crediting the Domínguez–Escalante expedition with “the Spanish discovery of the Southwest,” as I do in the subtitle to this book and several times in the text, I mean to evoke the greater Southwest—the convoluted and magnificent landscape of deep canyons and towering buttes and alpine mountains ranging from the San Juans to the Wasatch, from Canyonlands to the Grand Canyon, from the lakes of northern Utah to the plains of northern Arizona. It was the Spanish discovery of this vast country, known before 1776 only to the indigenous Native Americans, that the Franciscan padres and their ten companions accomplished.
ESCALANTE’S DREAM
Chapter One
ABIQUIU AND BEYOND
THE THREE-QUARTER MOON HAD CREPT INTO THE WEST when my nightmare arrived.
It was September 2, 2017. That morning my wife, Sharon, and I had left Santa Fe on what promised to be a six-week journey, following the fugitive trail of the twelve-man expedition that had passed this way 241 years before. Our voyage was one that would have seemed almost tame to me throughout my adult life—until two years earlier, when cancer had abruptly redefined all my notions of the possible. Now I knew that our forty days in pursuit of Domínguez and Escalante posed as stern a challenge as I dared to engage.
We had driven north on Highway 84, through the crossroads town of Española, along the Chama River, arriving after some 45 miles at the sleepy village of Abiquiu, famed for Georgia O’Keeffe’s obsession with cow skulls, local flowers, and the old mission church. From there we had headed south on a dirt road that climbed out of a tight canyon to emerge on a glorious grassy plateau—land still held by the descendants of the benefactors of an old Spanish land grant. After some 10 miles we had crossed into the Santa Fe National Forest. Around 5 PM we found the perfect roadside campsite, at 8,000 feet under the soaring ponderosas, with open views east to a far rim of the forest and west to Cerro Pedernal, the volcanic mountain from which the ancients had extracted chert and obsidian to craft their dart points and arrowheads. We set up our tent, gathered sticks for a fire, and sat in our ten-dollar Walmart camp chairs sipping Pilsner Urquells as the sun slipped toward the horizon. I was as happy as I had been in months.
It was Saturday night. The previous evening, an old friend who lives in Santa Fe, on learning about our plans, had warned us that Española was the center of opioid and alcohol excess in northern New Mexico. As she wished us well, she parted with that timeless admonition, “Be careful.”
I was inclined to dismiss our friend’s malaise, recognizing in it, along with statistical accuracy, an ancient bias against Hispanic lifeways promulgated by the Anglos who ran New Mexico after 1848. But Sharon was troubled. Unable to sleep during our last night in Santa Fe, she got up and Googled “Española–opioids–crime” on her iPhone. I slept on oblivious. In the morning, she haltingly shared her worries. I pointed out that we would pass through Española in the afternoon and that wherever we car-camped, it would be well beyond the range of the region’s most malevolent junkies.
Since we had set up camp, only a single vehicle had passed by on the dirt road, a pickup headed at dusk, I guessed, for home or some other civilized refuge. But paradoxically, when almost no cars pass your campsite, the advent of a single one, announced by distant engine noise, then by the beams of headlights bouncing among the trees, seems faintly ominous.
I had unconsciously absorbed Sharon’s fears. In the night, a dream delivered a black SUV that stopped just yards away from our tent. Instead of hiding or fleeing, I got up to greet the strangers. Several bearded men wearing camo stepped out of the vehicle. They carried their guns nonchalantly in their hands or slung across their backs. One of them surveyed our campsite. “We just need something to eat,” he said.
“But is it deer season?” I asked.
“No.”
I fought down a thread of panic. “I’ve camped out,” I said, “for sixty years now.”
“Not much left then, is there?”
The sun rose at its appointed hour over the far rim in the east. Bundled against the cold, I put a pot of water on our two-burner stove to heat for coffee. Slowly the pallor of the nightmare dissolved. But I didn’t tell Sharon about the visitation in the night until the next day.
TO ECHO MACAULAY, every schoolboy knows about the journey across the continent launched by Lewis and Clark in 1804, as the Corps of Discovery fulfilled Thomas Jefferson’s mandate to learn just what kind of territory the United States had bought from France the preceding year. Twenty-eight years before Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis, a pair of Franciscan priests led a much smaller cadre of men on a monumental exploration through some of the most spectacular and difficult terrain in the future United States, in the process actually discovering more land unknown to non-natives than Lewis and Clark did. Yet not even Macaulay’s brightest pupil today has more than the haziest grasp of the extraordinary journey led by Domínguez and Escalante in 1776. The journals kept by Lewis and Clark are disjointed, preoccupied with minutiae, and myopic about the shape of the great voyage, and Clark’s command of spelling, grammar, and punctuation is so shaky that his passages often verge on the illiterate. America’s most famous expedition of discovery is best absorbed today via such excellent second-hand narratives as Bernard DeVoto’s The Course of Empire or Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage. But Escalante’s journal—coherent, succinct, yet full of curious asides and observations—is far more readable than any of the several commentaries about the Spaniards’ journey written by latter-day historians. In the words of DeVoto, the journal is “a poem, dramatized against the backdrop of the rock deserts.” The expedition itself, despite its harrowing tribulations and a life-or-death denouement, seemed to DeVoto a “sunnily stupendous journey.” What’s more, the team’s cartographer, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, drew an extraordinary map that is an artistic masterpiece in its own right. It remained the best chart of the greater Southwest until the middle of the nineteenth century.
In 1951, Herbert E. Bolton became the first historian to engage Domínguez and Escalante at book length. About the padres as explorers, he wrote, “For the opening of new vistas they belong with Coronado and the splendid wayfarers of Mexico and South America. For their relations with the strange peoples encountered they stand in a class almost by themselves.”
No book yet written about the Domínguez–Escalante journey has gone beyond a paraphrase of the journal and a summary of the expedition’s results. My intention in Escalante’s Dream is to cross-examine the padre’s account at every turn, to wonder what was going on whenever the explorers made a strange decision or engaged in a puzzling interaction with Native Americans met along the way, and to dig below the surface of the conflicts among and characters of the twelve men on the team. And as Sharon and I retrace the 1776 journey through forty days in the fall of 2017, I intend to treat our own adventure as a parallel expedition 241 years later—a road trip through a world Domínguez and Escalante could never have foreseen.
Silvestre Vélez de Escalante was born in 1749 in Cantabria, a green, hilly province in northern Spain. He was a montañes, a highlander, and had he stayed in his native land he might well have whiled away his years as a shepherd or a farmer. We know very little about the man’s early life, but by the late 1760s he had arrived in Mexico City. There, at only eighteen, he became a friar in the order of Saint Francis of Assisi. From 1598 onward, it had been Franciscans who took charge of the religious life of New Spain’s northernmost colony, and their highest duty and keenest passion had to do with bringing the salvation of the Redeemer into the hearts and souls of the “benighted” natives the Spaniards found when they arrived.
Escalante was second in command of the bold expedition on which he embarked in July 1776—the same month that fifty-six ardent rebels convened in a hall in Philadelphia to sign a ringing declaration of their freedom from the tyranny of King George III. We know as little about the expedition’s commander, another friar named Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, as we do about Escalante. But because it was the latter man who wrote the official journal—virtually the sole primary document from the adventure to come down to us—w
As many commentators have pointed out, we should refer to Domínguez’s lieutenant not as “Escalante” but as “Vélez,” since the “de Escalante” of his name merely identified where he was from—as in Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt. Likewise, of course, with Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. But calling the conquistador who led the first great exploration of what would become the American Southwest “Vázquez” would simply confuse the reader. The name Escalante, like that of Coronado, has been attached to all kinds of places in the Southwest, and to insist on “Vélez” here would be to err on the side of pedantry.
As Sharon and I retraced the route of the long-ago journey, and read and reread the entries that dealt with each stage of the voyage, I often wondered what kind of role fear had played in the men’s lives. Because the expedition turned into a survival ordeal, reducing the twelve men to the most desperate conditions, I knew that terror and doom must have ridden beside them on their played-out horses. But the diary is for the most part laconic about their hardships.
On our own journey, the risks were minimal. A bad dream about creepy gunslingers arriving at our camp in the night bore only the faintest subconscious echo of the real threats that had shadowed travelers in the wilderness in previous centuries. Normally, Spanish expeditions crossing the badlands of the American Southwest—most notably the Jornada del Muerto between El Paso and Santa Fe, a gauntlet that invited attack by Apaches and Comanches—traveled heavily armed. Among the ten men who set off to the north from Santa Fe in 1776, there were no soldiers. And though Escalante never records what weapons the men carried, the few references to firearms surface only when the starving men used muskets to fell a bison here or celebrate a river crossing there.
The journal does not suppress the tribulations the men endured, especially during the second half of the journey. Terrible cold, even in September; grim trudges across prairies devoid of firewood or water; confusion in canyons and forests as the men suspect they’re lost—these and other depredations come to vivid life in the pages of the journal. But against the threat of even more insidious dangers, Escalante wore a suit of invisible armor: his faith.
In 1775, the twenty-five-year-old priest was assigned to the pueblo of Zuni far to the southwest of Santa Fe—in historian John Kessell’s pithy phrase, to Spanish minds “the Siberia of New Mexico.” Yet he decided, in the hope of making conversions among an even more remote community of natives, to make a journey to Hopi, 130 miles farther west.
Escalante’s mission was an utter failure. Not a single Indian was persuaded by his earnest sermons, translated by a local, to give up his allegiance to Maasaw and the kachinas and become a Christian. As he prepared to return to Zuni, a sympathetic Hopi told Escalante that he had overheard a group of Navajos plotting to lie in wait along the trail to ambush and massacre his small party.
Escalante was unfazed. “I replied that I was very grateful to him for the warning, [but that] . . . he was to tell them from me that even all of them were too few to carry out their intention; that if they liked, they might seek the aid of other tribes, but even if many went forth, they would have an exceedingly costly trial of their weakness and my safeguard.” The informant, thinking that Escalante had misunderstood the Navajo threat or given no credence to his words, called upon other Hopi to witness his warning. The friar doubled down, saying that “though I believed him, I was not worried, nor should he be, because I trusted in God Who is infinitely more powerful than all the men there ever were, are, or will be.”
SPAIN’S EXPLORATION OF what would become the western United States began with Coronado’s entrada, from 1540 to 1542. It is a measure of just how ambitious the conquistadors were, how hungry for new land, that only nineteen years after Cortés had completed his astonishing conquest of the Aztec empire centered around Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), the Spaniards were pushing the borders of terra incognita more than a thousand miles to the northwest.
Coronado’s adventure was launched in response to one of the strangest and most unlikely journeys ever accomplished by Europeans in the New World. One day in 1536, four Spaniards stumbled into the colonial outpost of Culiacán in today’s Mexican state of Sinaloa. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three weary companions were the sole surviviors of an expedition of some 600 men that had come to grief along the west coast of Florida in 1528. For eight years, the four survivors had wandered among Indian tribes, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as shamans revered for their magical gifts, as they made their way across 2,500 miles of unmapped terrain from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific.
Although at first they were suspected of making up their outlandish tale, the four vagabonds brought electrifying news of unknown lands and tribes that whetted the Spanish imagination. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for gold and silver, but also by a zeal to convert pagans to the true faith, the governors of New Spain sent out a scouting mission in 1539. The party was led by a Franciscan, Fray Marcos de Niza (a missionary model for Domínguez and Escalante two and a half centuries later), and guided by Esteban, a Moor from North Africa, originally a Spanish slave, who had been one of Cabeza de Vaca’s companions on that epic journey of survival.
All across the wilderness the four refugees traversed, Esteban spurred bewildered curiosity among the Indians. Who was he, this brown-skinned stranger traveling with his white-skinned comrades, speaking the same strange tongue as they did? The Moor had a remarkable gift for picking up native languages, so during their desperate journey it was he who best communicated with the Indians. By some he was treated as a servant to be starved and tormented, while to others he was a healer with occult and wondrous powers.
In 1539, his success among the “savages” must have gone to Esteban’s head. Impetuously he rode several days ahead of the cautious priest and the main party, and while he announced the coming of white men who would “instruct [the natives] about things divine,” he also demanded tribute in the form of turquoise and women. Somewhere in what is today the greater Southwest, Esteban rubbed his temporary hosts the wrong way. In the words of historian Andrés Reséndez, those Indians “deliberated for three days about what to do and finally chose to kill him.” Despite this setback, Fray Marcos de Niza rode in sight of some large native settlement, where he later claimed to have seen from afar buildings made of gold, festooned with precious jewels.
This doubtful sighting reinforced the enduring legend of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, or the Seven Cities of Gold. A persistent oral tradition has it that Esteban’s fatal encounter occurred at the New Mexico pueblo of Zuni, though some scholars doubt the connection.
On a warm September day in 2002, a Zuni woman named Lena Tsethlikai guided me to Hawikuh, the village in which, if the oral tradition has it right, Esteban met his doom. Though the site lies in ruins today, in the sixteenth century it was one of six villages that made up the prosperous pueblo of Zuni. No one knows how long those people have dwelled in their current location, but the fact that the Zuni language is an isolate—a tongue related to no other language anywhere in the world—suggests a geographic stability lasting 8,000 years or longer.
With Tsethlikai, I strolled across the furrows and swales of the ruin, which is normally off-limits to Anglos. The ground was covered with polychrome potsherds, and scores of crumbling walls, the purplish building stones scattered on either side, outlined the layout of the ancient town. The site lay open to the distant horizon on the southwest, the direction from which the Spaniards would have come.
I asked Tsethlikai what had happened here in 1539. As a young girl, she had been told the story by her father. “At first the Zuni thought he was a great man,” she said. “They liked the parrot feather plumes that he had. They thought he must be an important man.
