Oñate, 1604, Crosses Arizona to the Colorado—A Remarkable Ancient Ruin Discovered by Padre Kino, 1694—Padre Garces Sees the Grand Canyon and Visits Oraibi, 1776—The Great Entrada of Padre Escalante across Green River to Utah Lake, 1776—Death of Garces Ends the Entrada Period, 1781.
In the historical development of the Basin of the Colorado four, chief epochs are apparent. The discovery of the river, as already outlined in previous chapters, is the first; second, the entradas of the padres; third, the wanderings of the trappers; and fourth, the expeditions of the explorers. These epochs are replete with interesting and romantic incidents, new discoveries; starvations; battles; massacres; lonely, dangerous journeys, etc., which can only be touched upon in a volume of the present size. Dr. Coues placed the diary of Garces, one of the chief actors of this great four-act life-drama, in accessible shape, and had not his lamented death interfered he would have put students under further obligation to him.
Entrance to Acoma, N. M.
The town is on top of a mesa, and was a prominent point on the highway from the Rio Grande to Zuñi.
Photograph by Ben Wittick. |
Preliminary to the entradas of the padres, Don Antonio de Espejo, in 1583, went from the Rio Grande to Moki and westward to a mountain, probably one of the San Francisco group, but he did not see the Colorado. Twenty-one years elapsed before a white man again ventured into this region. In 1604, Don Juan de Oñate, the wealthy governor of New Mexico, determined to cross from his headquarters at the village of San Juan on the Rio Grande, by this route to the South Sea, and, accompanied by thirty soldiers and two padres, he set forth, passing west by way of the pueblo of Zuñi, and probably not seeing at that time the celebrated Inscription Rock,1 for, though his name is said to be first of European marks, the date is 1606. From Zuñi he went to the Moki towns, then five in number, and possibly somewhat south of the present place. Beyond Moki ten leagues, they crossed a stream flowing north-westerly, which was called Colorado from the colour of its water,—the first use of the name so far traced. This was what we now call the Little Colorado. They understood it to discharge into the South Sea (Pacific), and probably Oñate took it for the very headwaters of the Buena Guia which Alarcon had discovered over sixty years before. As yet no white man had been north of Moki in the Basin of the Colorado, and the only source of information concerning the far northern region was the natives, who were not always understood, however honestly they might try to convey a knowledge of the country.
Across the House Tops of Zuñi.Photograph by J. K. Hillers.Skirting the southern edge of the beautiful San Francisco Mountain region, through the superb forest of pine trees, Oñate finally descended from the Colorado Plateau to the headwaters of the Verde, where he met a tribe called Cruzados, because they wore little crosses from the hair of the forehead, a relic, no doubt, of the time when Alarcon had so freely distributed these emblems among the tribes he encountered on the Colorado, friends probably of these Cruzados. The latter reported the sea twenty days distant by way of a small river running into a greater, which flowed to the salt water. The small river was Bill Williams Fork, and on striking it Oñate began to see the remarkable pitahaya adorning the landscape with its tall, stately columns; and all the strange lowland vegetation followed. The San Andreas, as he called this stream, later named Santa Maria by Garces, he followed down to the large river into which it emptied, the Colorado, which he called the Rio Grande de Buena Esperanza, or River of Good Hope, evidently deciding that it merited a more distinguished title than had been awarded it at the supposed headwaters. He appears to have well understood what river this was, and we wonder why he gave it a new name when it had already received two. Sometimes in new lands explorers like to have their own way. They went down the Colorado, after a party had examined the river a little above the mouth of the Bill Williams Fork, meeting with various bands of friendly natives, among whom we recognise the Mohaves and the Cocopas. Not far below where Oñate reached the Esperanza he entered the Great Colorado Valley and soon crossed the highest point attained by Alarcon in 1340, probably near the upper end of the valley. He now doubled Alarcon’s and presently also Melchior Diaz’s paths, and arrived at the mouth of the river on the 25th of January, 1605, the first white man in over sixty years. A large harbour which struck his fancy was named in honour of the saint’s day, Puerto de la Conversion de San Pablo, for the sun seldom went down without a Spaniard of those days thus propitiating a saint. We are more prone to honour the devil in these matters. The Gila they called Rio del Nombre de Jesus, a name never used again. So it often happens with names bestowed by explorers. The ones they regard most highly vanish, while some they apply thoughtlessly adhere forever.
All the tribes of this region, being familiar with the Californian coast, described it in a way that caused Oñate to believe that the gulf was the South Sea, extending indefinitely beyond the mouth of the Colorado northwards, and thus the persistent error that Lower California was an island received further confirmation. Without going across to the sea beyond the mountains, which would have dispelled the error, Oñate returned to the Rio Grande by the outward route, suffering so greatly for food that the party were forced to eat some of their horses, a source of relief often resorted to in future days in this arid country. A few years after Oñate’s expedition Zalvidar (1618), with Padre Jiminez and forty-seven soldiers, went out to Moki, and from there fifteen leagues to the Rio de Buena Esperanza, but they evidently encountered Marble Canyon, and soon returned.
Ruin called Casa Grande.Photograph by Cosmo Mindeleff, U. S. Bu. Eth.Another name closely linked with the early history of the Colorado is that of Padre Eusibio Francisco Kino,2 an Austrian by birth and a member of the Jesuit order. This indefatigable enthusiast travelled back and forth, time and again, over the whole of northern Sonora and the southern half of Arizona, then comprised in Pimeria Alta, the upper land of the Pimas, and Papagueria, the land of the Papagos. His base of operations was a mission he established in Sonora; the mission of Dolores, founded in 1687. For some thirty years Kino laboured in this field with tireless energy, flinching before no danger or difficulty. He was the first white man to see the extraordinary ruin called Casa Grande, near the present town of Florence, and on the occasion of his first visit he took advantage of the structure to say mass within its thick adobe walls. This is probably the most remarkable ancient building within the limits of the United States, For a long time it was called the House of Montezuma, though, of course, Montezuma never heard of it. A similar ruin, called Casas Grandes, exists in Sonora. The construction is what is called cajon, that is, adobe clay rammed into a box or frame, which is lifted for each successive course as the work advances. In the dry air of that region such walls become extremely hard, and will endure for ages if the foundations are not sapped.3 Kino paid a second visit to the ruin of Casa Grande in 1697, this time accompanied by Captain Juan Mateo Mange, an officer detailed with his command to escort the padres on their perilous journeys.
See the
map which appeared at this point in the book.
A Lateral Canyon of Escalante River.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Colo. Riv. Exp. |
The method of the authorities was to establish a military post, called a presidio, at some convenient point, from which protection would be extended to several missions. The soldiers in the field wore a sort of buckskin armour, with a double-visored helmet and a leathern buckler on the left arm. Kino was as often without as with the guardianship of these warriors, and seems to have had very little trouble with the natives. The Apaches, then and always, were the worst of all, In his numerous entradas he explored the region of his labours pretty thoroughly, reaching, in 1698, a hill from which he saw how the gulf ended at the mouth of the Colorado; and the following year he was again down the Gila, which he called Rio de los Apostoles, to the Colorado, now blessed with a fourth name, the Rio de los Martires. “Buena Guia” “del Tizon,” “Esperanza,” and “los Martires,” all in about a century and a half, and still the great Dragon of Waters was not only untamed hut unknown. Kino kept up his endeavours to inaugurate somewhere a religious centre, but without success. The San Dionisio marked on his map at the mouth of the Gila was only the name he gave a Yuma village at that point, and was never anything more. On November 21, 1701, Kino reached a point only one day’s journey above the sea, where he crossed the river on a raft, but he made no attempt to go to the mouth. At last, however, on March 7, 1702, he actually set foot on the barren sands where the waters, gathered from a hundred mountain peaks of the far interior, are hurled against the sea-tide, the first white visitor since Oñate, ninety-eight years before. Visits of Europeans to this region were then counted by centuries and half-centuries, yet on the far Atlantic shore of the continent they were swarming in the cradle of the giant that should ultimately rule from sea to sea, annihilating the desert. But even the desert has its charms. One seems to inhale fresh vitality from its unpeopled immensity. I never could understand why a desert is not generally considered beautiful; the kind, at least, we have in the South-west, with all the cacti, the yucca, and the other flowering plants unfamiliar to European or Eastern eyes, and the lines of coloured cliffs and the deep canyons. There is far more beauty and variety of colour than in the summer meadow-stretches and hills of the Atlantic States. So the good Padre Kino, after all, was perhaps to be congratulated on having those thirty years, interesting years, before the wilds could be made commonplace.
The Moki Town of Wolpi, Arizona.700 feet above the valley.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey.Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; indeed, it was like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable. The padres crossed it and recrossed it on the southwestern corner, but they made no impression. After Kino’s death in 1711 there was a lull in the entradas to the Colorado, though Ugarte, coming up along the eastern coast of Lower California, sailed to the mouth of the river in July, 1721. Twenty-four years later (1744) Padre Jacobo Sedelmair went down the Gila from Casa Grande to the great bend, and from there cut across to the Colorado at about the mouth of Bill Williams Fork, but his journey was no more fruitful than those of his predecessors in the last two centuries. It seems extraordinary in these days that men could traverse a country, even so infrequently, during two whole centuries and yet know almost nothing about it. Two years after Sedelmair touched the Colorado, Fernando Consag, looking for mission sites, came up the gulf to its mouth, and when he had sailed away there was another long interval before the river was again visited by Europeans. This time it was over a quarter of a century, but the activity then begun was far greater than ever before, and the two padres who now became the foremost characters in the drama that so slowly moved upon the mighty and diversified stage of the South-west, were quite the equals in tireless energy of the Jesuit Kino. These two padres were Garces and Escalante, more closely associated with the history of the Basin of the Colorado than any one who had gone before. Francisco Garces, as well as Escalante, was of the Franciscan order, and this order, superseding the Jesuit, was making settlements, 1769-70, at San Diego and Monterey, as well as taking a prominent part in those already long established on the Rio Grande. There was no overland connection between the California missions and those of Sonora and the Rio Grande, and the desire to explore routes for such communication was one of the incentives of both Garces and Escalante, in their long entradas. But it seemed to be the habit of those days, either never to seek information as to what had previously been accomplished, or to forget it, for the expedition of Oñate might as well never have been made so far as its effect on succeeding travels was concerned. He had crossed Arizona by the very best route, yet Escalante, 172 years afterward, goes searching for one by way of Utah Lake! Coming from the west, the Moki Towns were ever the objective point, for they were well known and offered a refuge in the midst of the general desolation. Garces had his headquarters at the mission of San Xavier del Bac, or Bac, as it was commonly called, nine miles south of the present town of Tucson. Here Kino had begun a church in 1699, and at a later period another better one was started near by. This was finished in 1797 and to-day stands the finest monument in the South-west of the epoch of the padres. It is a really beautiful specimen of the Mexico-Spanish church architecture of that time. No better testimony could there be of the indefatigable spiritual energy of the padres than this artistic structure standing now amidst a few adobe houses, and once completely abandoned to the elements. Such a building should never be permitted to perish, and it well merits government protection. Its striking contrast to Casa Grande, the massive relic of an unknown time, standing but a few leagues distant, will always render this region of exceptional interest to the artist, the archaeologist, and the general traveller.
Church of San Xavier del Bac, near Tucson.
Drawing by F. S. Dellenbaugh, after a photograph. |
From Bac, under the protection of the presidio of Tubac, some thirty miles farther south, later transferred (1776) to the present Tucson, Garces carried on his work. He made five great entradas from the time of his arrival in June, 1768. The first was in that same year, the second in 1770, but in these he did not reach the Colorado, and we will pass them by. In the third, 1771, he went down the Gila to the Colorado and descended the latter stream along its banks perhaps to the mouth. On the fourth, 1774, he went with Captain Anza to the Colorado and farther on to the mission of San Gabriel in California, near Los Angeles, and in his fifth, and most important one, 1775-76, he again accompanied Captain Anza, who was bound for the present site of San Francisco, there to establish a mission. Padre Font was Anza’s chaplain, and with Garces’s aid later made a map of the country.4 At Yuma Garces left the Anza party, went down to the mouth of the Colorado, and then up along the river to Mohave, and after another trip out to San Gabriel, he started on the most important part of all his journeys, from Mohave to the Moki Towns, the objective point of all entradas eastward from the Colorado. The importance attached at that time to the towns of the Moki probably seems absurd to the reader, but it must not be forgotten that the Moki were cultivators of the soil and always held a store of food-stuffs in reserve. They were also builders of very comfortable houses, as I can testify from personal experience. Thus they assumed a prominence, amidst the desolation of the early centuries, of which the railway in the nineteenth speedily robbed them.
Cocopa Woman Grinding Corn.
Photograph by Delancy Gill. |
Garces, like most of his kind, was an enthusiast on the subject of saving the souls of the natives. “It made him sick at heart,” says Coues, “to see so many of them going to hell for lack of the three drops of water he would sprinkle over them if only they would let him do it.” With this idea ever in mind he toiled up and down the lower Colorado, and received assistance from a Yuma chief called Captain Palma. Once when he came up the river to Yuma, where he had left Padre Eisarc, the report the latter gave was so encouraging that Garces exclaims: “I gave a thousand thanks to God to hear them sing psalms divine that the padre had taught them.” He further declared that Captain Palma would put to the blush for observing the forms of piety, “many veteran Christians, by the reverence and humility with which he assisted at the holy sacrifice.” But alas for the padre’s fond hopes!
The Yumas called the Colorado Javill or Hahweel according to Garces; and he also says the name Colorado was given because, as the whole country is coloured, its waters are tinged in the month of April, when the snows are melting, but that they are not always red, which is exactly the case. The name is also said to be a translation of the Piman title “buqui aquimuti.”
Leaving Mohave June 4, 1776, Garces struck eastward across Arizona, guided by some Wallapais, but with no white companion. These people had told him about the distance to Moki and the nature of the intervening region. Heading Diamond Creek5 on his mule, Garces made for the romantic retreat of the Havasupais in the canyon of Cataract Creek, a tributary from the south of the Grand Canyon. He was the first white man, so far as known, to visit this place, and in reaching it he passed near the rim of the great gorge, though he did not then see it. This was the region of the Aubrey cliffs and the place in all probability where Cardenas approached the Grand Canyon, 236 years before. Garces arrived among the Havasupai or Jabesua, as he called them, by following a trail down their canyon that made his head swim, and was impassable to his mule, which was taken in by another route. At one place a ladder was even necessary to complete the 2000 feet of descent to the settlement, where a clear creek suddenly breaks from the rocks, and, rapid and blue, sweeps away down 2000 or more feet to the Colorado, falling in its course at one point over a precipice in three cataracts aggregating 250 feet, from which it takes its name. Here are about 400 acres of arable land along the creek, on which the natives raise corn, beans, squashes, peaches, apricots, sunflowers, etc. There are now about 200 of these people, and they are of Yuman stock. Garces was well treated and rested here five days.
Soon after leaving this retreat he “halted at the sight of the most profound caxones which ever onward continue, and within these flows the Rio Colorado.”
“There is seen [he continues] a very great Sierra which in the distance looks blue, and there runs from the southeast to the north-west a pass open to the very base, as if the sierra were cut artificially to give entrance to the Rio Colorado into these lands. I named this singular pass Puerto de Bucareli,6 and though to all appearances would not seem to be great the difficulty of reaching thereunto, I considered this to be impossible in consequence of the difficult canones which intervened. From this position said pass bore east northeast.”
The padre is standing in admiration before the long line of the Kaibab seen as a great sierra from this position on the south-east, and as the land on the south rises toward the rim it probably appeared to him as if the sierra were really a continuation of the San Francisco Mountains on his right, and was cut in twain by the great gorge of the river. From his standpoint he looked up Marble Canyon, and all the directions he mentions are exactly correct. They saw smokes on the north, which his guides said. were made by the Payuches (Pai Utes) living on the other side. The Kaivavitz band of Pai Utes in summer occupy their lands on the summit of the Kaibab, hunting deer and camping in the lovely open glades surrounded by splendid forest. This same day his guides pointed out some tracks of Yabipai Tejua, who go this way to see and trade with their friends, “those who live, as already said, on the other side of the Rio Colorado.” It was one of the intertribal highways. Just where it crossed the canyon is hard to say. There were several old trails, and one came down from the north, reaching the river a few miles below the Little Colorado, but where it came out on the south side I do not know. There was once another trail which came from the north down the canyon of Kanab Creek and found a way across to the Coconinos or Havasupai; at least Jacob Hamblin7 told me he was so informed by the Pai Utes. The “Hance” trail, I believe, was built on the line of an old native one, and probably this was the one the Yabipais were heading for.
The hill surmounted by the town lies itself on top of a mesa.
Drawing by E. O. Beaman. |
Garces had a good understanding of the topography, for he says when he reached the Rio Jaquesila de San Pedro, as he called the Little Colorado, that it joined the main stream just above his Puerto de Bucareli. Coues thought it probable that Cardenas on his way to the Grand Canyon, followed from Moki the same trail Garces is now taking to reach that place, and that therefore the first view Cardenas had of the canyon was from near the same place as that of Garces—that is, he saw the Puerto de Bucareli. This is hardly probable, as Garces was only five days reaching Moki from here, and Cardenas travelled twenty from Tusayan to the canyon. As I pointed out on a previous page, so far as the data go, Cardenas reached the Grand Canyon opposite the east side of the Shewits plateau.
Of the Little Colorado Garces said: “The bed of this river as far as the confluence is a trough of solid rock, very profound, and wide about a stone’s throw.” That this was an accurate statement the view on page 95 amply proves. Indeed, the accuracy of most of these early Spaniards, as to topography, direction, etc., is extraordinary. As a rule where they are apparently wrong it is ourselves who are mistaken, and if we fully understand their meaning we find them to be correct. Garces found his way down to the Little Colorado by means of a side canyon and got out again on the other side in the same way. Finally, on July 2nd, he arrived at the pueblo of Oraibi, his objective point, and when he and his tired mule had climbed up on the mesa which bears the town, the women and children lined the housetops to get a glimpse of the singular stranger.
Spaniards were something of a novelty, though by no means unheard of, just as even I was something of a novelty when I visited Oraibi one hundred years after the Padre Garces, because the Oraibis never encouraged white visitors.8 The first missions were established among the Moki in 1629, when Benavides was custodian of the Rio Grande district, and included Zuñi and Moki in his field. Three padres were then installed at Awatuwi, one of the towns, on the mesa east of what is now called the “East” Mesa. Four were at work amongst the various towns at the time of the Pueblo uprising in 1680, and as one began his labours at Oraibi as early as 1650, a priest was not an unknown object to the older people. All the missionaries having been killed in 1680, and Awatuwi, where a fresh installation was made, having been annihilated in 1700 by the Moki, for three-quarters of a century they had seen few if any Spaniards. Therefore the women and children were full of curiosity. Padre Escalante had been here from Zuñi the year before, looking over the situation with a view to bringing all the Moki once more within the fold. At that time Escalante also tried to go on to what he called the Rio de los Cosninos, the Colorado, but he was unable to accomplish his purpose. Had he once had a view of the Grand Canyon it would undoubtedly have saved him a good many miles of weary travel in his northern entrada of this same year that Garces reached Oraibi.
The Canyon of the Little Colorado.Photograph by C. Barthelmess.Garces was not permitted to enter the house where his Yabipai guide intended to stop, and he therefore made his way to a corner formed by a jutting wall, and there unsaddled his faithful mule, which the Yabipai took to a sheep corral. The padre remained in his corner, gathering a few scattered corn-stalks from the street, with which he made a fire and cooked a little atóle. All day long the people came in
A Court in Wolpi, Arizona.
Drawing by F. S. Dellenbaugh. |
succession to stare at him. I can testify to the sullen unfriendliness of the Oraibi, and I have seen few places I have left with greater pleasure than that I felt when, in 1885, I rode away from this town. Garces was not able to make a favourable impression, and after, considering the feasibility of going on to Zuñi, and deciding against it, he thought he would visit the other towns with a hope of being better received, but a few yells from some herders sent him back to his Yabipai guide and several friendly Zuñis at Oraibi, where he occupied his corner again. In the morning he perceived a multitude approaching, some bedecked with paint and feathers, and when four of these came forward and ordered him to leave he held up his crucifix and assured them of his desire to do good to them. They made wry faces and cried “No, no,” so that he called for his mule and departed, smiling upon them as he went. He returned by the same route. It was the 4th of July when Garces was expelled by the Oraibis, a declaration of independence on their part which they have maintained down to the present day. That other Declaration of Independence was made on this same day on the far Atlantic coast. The Colonies were engaged in their battle for freedom, but no sound of that strife then reached New Mexico, yet its portent was great for that region where, three-quarters of a century later, the flag of the Great Republic should float triumphant over all, Garces reached the Colorado once more on July 25th, his arduous journey absolutely fruitless so far as missionary work was concerned. He arrived at his mission of Bac September 17, 1776.
A Zuñi Home.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey. |
On July 29, 1776, another even greater entrada was begun at Santa Fé by the Fray Padre Francisco Silvestre Velez Escalade,9 in his search for a route to Monterey, unaware that Garces had just traversed, next to that of Oñate, the most practicable short route to be found. Garces had written to Escalante, ministro doctrinero of Zuñi, a letter from Oraibi, but as the ministro had already departed for Santa Fé, leaving Fray Mariano Rosate in charge at Zuñi, the letter probably did not reach him till his return. The northern country, notwithstanding several small entradas and the considerable one of Juan Maria Ribera in 1761, who went as far as Gunnison River, was still a terra incognita, and the distance to the Pacific was also an uncertain quantity. Escalante believed a better road existed to Monterey by way of the north than by the middle route, and a further incentive to journey that way was probably the rumours of large towns in that direction, the same will-o’-the-wisp the Spaniards for nearly three centuries had been vainly pursuing. The authorities had urged two expeditions to Alta California, to establish communication; Garces and Captain Anza had carried out one, and now Escalante was to execute the other.
The Governors of Zuñi.Shows well the general type of the Puebloans of the Basin of the Colorado.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers.Besides the ministro Escalante, there were in the party eight persons, Padre Francisco Dominguez, Juan Pedro Cisneros, alcalde of Zuñi, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, capitain miliciano of Sante Fe, Don Juan Lain, and four other soldiers. Lain had been with Ribera and was therefore official guide. They went from Sante Fe by way of Abiquiu and the Chama River to the San Juan about where it first meets the north line of New Mexico, and thence across the several tributaries to the head of the Dolores River, which they descended for eleven days. I am at a loss to exactly follow the
Upper Waters of Rio Virgen.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey. |
route, not having been able to consult either the copy or the original of Escalante’s diary. The party made its way across Grand River, the Book Plateau, White River, and finally to the Green, called the San Buenaventura, which was forded, apparently near the foot of Split-Mountain Canyon. Here they killed one of the bisons which were numerous in the valley. Following the course of the river down some ten leagues, they went up the Uinta and finally crossed the Wasatch, coming down the western side evidently by way of what is now known as Spanish Fork, to Utah Lake, then called by the natives Timpanogos. Here they heard of a greater lake to the north, but instead of seeking it they turned their course south-westerly in what they considered the direction of Monterey through the Sevier River Valley, the Sevier being called the Santa Isabel, and kept down along the western edge of the High Plateaus. It being by this time the 7th of October, Escalante concludes that it will be impossible to reach Monterey before winter sets in and persuades his companions that the best thing to do is to strike for the Moki towns. They cast lots to determine this, and the decision is for Moki. Evidently he thought this would be an easy road. When he was at Moki the year before, had he not failed to go to the Colorado he would have better understood the nature of the undertaking he now set for his expedition.
Pai Ute Girls, Southern Utah, Carrying Water.
The jugs are wicker made tight with pitch.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey. |
Going on southward past what is now Parowan, they came to the headwaters of a branch of the Virgen, in Cedar Valley, and this they followed down to the main stream which they left flowing south-westerly. The place where they turned from it was probably about at Toquerville.10 They were now trying to make their general course south-east. Could I but see the original I certainly could identify the route from here on, having been over the region so often. As Escalante was obtaining what information he could from the natives, it seems to me that his first course “south-east” was to Pipe Spring along the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, then his “north-east” was up toward Kanab and through Nine-Mile Valley to the head of the Kaibab, where a trail led him over to House Rock Valley, on his “south-east” tack, skirting the Vermilion Cliffs again. But they lost it and struck the river at Marble Canyon, through a misunderstanding of the course of the trail, which bore easterly and then northerly around the base of the cliffs to what is now Lee’s Ferry, where there was an ancient crossing. Another trail goes (or did go) across the north end of the Paria Plateau and divides, one branch coming down the high cliffs about three miles up the Paria from the mouth, by a dizzy and zig-zag path, and the other keeping on to the south-east and striking the river at the very point for which Escalante was evidently now searching. Perhaps the Pai Utes had told him of this trail as well as the one he tried to follow, which would have taken him to the Lee’s Ferry crossing about thirty-five miles below. He seems to have reached the brink of Marble Canyon, perhaps half-way between the Paria and the Little Colorado,11 and followed up-stream first north and then (beyond Paria) north-east, hunting for a ford. Twice he succeeded in descending to the water, but both times was unable to cross. They had now become so reduced in food that they were obliged to eat some of their horses. With great difficulty they climbed over the cliffs, and at the end of twelve days from their first arrival at the river they found the ford, which ever since has been called El Vado de los Padres. This was the 8th of November, 1776. The entrance to the river from the west, the side of their approach, is through a small canyon in the homogeneous sandstone, no more than ten feet wide. The course is then about half a mile down the middle of the river over a long bar or shoal to the opposite side, where the exit is made upon a rocky slope. It is a most difficult ford. The trail through the water at the low stage, when, only, fording is possible, is marked by piles of large stones. There is no ford at the Lee’s Ferry crossing.
Ashtishkel.
Photograph by E. O. Beaman, U. S. Geol. Survey. |
From this Crossing-of-the-Fathers, just above where the river enters Arizona, to the Moki Towns Escalante had a plain trail, and a much simpler topography, and had no difficulty in arriving there. The remainder of his road, from Moki to Zuñi and around to Santa Fé, was one he had travelled before, and the party soon completed the circuit of more than 1500 miles mainly through unknown country, one of the most remarkable explorations ever carried out in the West. It is sometimes stated that Escalante crossed the Grand Canyon, but, as is perfectly plain from the data, he did not; in fact, he could not have done it with horses.
Garces was not yet finished with his labours on the lower Colorado, and we will return to him. The authorities had decided to establish there two nondescript settlements, a sort of cross between mission, pueblo, and presidio. Captain Palma, the Yuma chief, whose devotions and piety had so delighted the good Father, was eager to have missions started, and constantly importuned the government to grant them. Garces, therefore, went to Yuma again in 1779 to prepare the way, and in 1780 two of the hybrid affairs were inaugurated, one at what is now Fort Yuma, called Puerto de la Purisima Concepcion, after the little canyon hard by, so named by Garces previously, a canyon fifty feet deep and a thousand feet long; the other, about eight miles down, called San Pedro y San Pablo de Bicuner. There were four padres; Garces and Barraneche at the upper station, and Diaz and Moreno at the lower. Each place had eight or ten soldiers, a few colonists, and a few labourers. The Spaniards were obliged to appropriate some of the best lands to till for the support of the missions, and this, together with the general poverty of the establishments when he had expected something fine, disgusted Palma and exasperated him and the other Yumas. In June, 1781, Captain Moncada, lieutenant-governor of Lower California, arrived with soldiers and recruits en route for California settlements, and encamped opposite Yuma. After some of these people had been sent forward or back as the plans demanded, Moncada remained at the camp with a few of his soldiers. No one suspected the tornado which was brewing. All the life of the camp, of the missions, and of the Yumas went on with the same apparent smoothness, but it was only a delusion suddenly and horribly dispelled on the fateful 17th of July. Without a sign preliminary to the execution of their wrath, Captain Palma and all his band threw piety to the winds, and annihilated with clubs Moncada’s camp and most of the men in the two missions. Garces and his assistant, Barraneche, were at first spared. Even the conscience of Talma hesitated to murder the good and amiable Garces, who had never been to him and his people anything but a kind and generous friend, but the rabble declared these two were the worst of all, and under this pressure Palma yielded. It was the last terrible scene of this act in the life-drama we are following. The lights were out, the curtain down. Military expeditions were sent to avenge the massacre, but they might as well have chased the stars. The missions on the Colorado were ended. Never again was an attempt made to found one. The desert relapsed into its former complete subjection to the native tribes, and the indifferent Colorado swept on to the conflict with the sea-waves as if neither white man nor Amerind had ever touched its waters. Nearly half a century passed before the face of a white man was again seen at the mouth of the river, and all the toil of Kino, Garces, and the rest was apparently as completely wasted as if they had tried to stop the flow of the Colorado with a broom.
1This is a quadrangular mass of sandstone about a mile long, thirty-five miles east of Zuñi. On its base at the eastern end are a number of native and European inscriptions, the oldest, of the European dates according to Simpson, being 1606, recording a visit by Oñate. The rock, or, more properly, mesa, is also called the Morro. Chas. F. Lummis has also written on this subject.
2The name is written Kuhn, Kuhne, Quino, and in several other ways. Humboldt used Kuhn, and either this or Kuhne is probably the correct form, but long usage gives preference to Kino.
3See The North Americans of Yesterday, by F. S. Dellenbaugh, p. 234; and for complete details see papers by Cosmos Mindeleff, Thirteenth An. Rep, Bu. Eth. and Fifteenth An. Rep. Bu, Eth.; also Font’s description in Coues’s Garces, p. 93.
4Font says of Garces: “He seems just like an Indian himself…and though the food of the Indians is as nasty and disgusting as their dirty selves the padre eats it with great gusto.” Dr. Coues had planned to publish a translation of Font’s important diary. See Garces, by Elliot Coues, p. 172, Font meant his remark as praise.
5This name, by the way, has no connection with the notorious “Arizona” diamond swindle of more recent years. It bore this name in Ives’s time and the swindle was much later—1872. The alleged diamond field also was not in Arizona at all, but in north-western Colorado.
6After the viceroy.
7Jacob Hamblin, whom I knew very well, was the “Leather-stocking” of Utah—a man who knew the Amerinds of Utah and northern Arizona better than any one who ever lived.
8A year or two after my visit, James Stevenson, of the Bureau of Ethnology, was driven away from Oraibi. Thomas Keam and he then went there with a force of Navajos and compelled the surrender of the chiefs who had been most obnoxious. They took them to Ream’s Canyon and confined them on bread and water till they apologised.
9H. H. Bancroft gives a map of the route as he understands it, History of the Pacific States, p. 35, vol. xxv., also a condensation of the diary. Philip Harry gives a condensation in Simpson’s Report, Appendix R., p. 489. Some river names have been shifted since Harry wrote. What we call the Grand, upper part, was then the Blue.
10From here to the California mission of San Gabriel would hardly have been as difficult as the route taken, excepting perhaps the matter of water, and little if any further than the distance to Santa Fé, but the Pai Utes could give him no information of the distance to the sea.
11There was an old crossing near there, also.
