JFRCalifornia
Keeper of San Juan Secrets
Padre Bay
September 4, 2011
Lake Elevation 3655'
In 1776, while revolution raged along the eastern seaboard, the future of the west was left in the hands of two Catholic priests. It had taken over 150 years for the Spanish Empire to gain even a tenuous foothold in the southwestern deserts, mostly in the form of a few scattered missions among the Pueblo tribes in what is now modern New Mexico. The most successful of these, Santa Fe, had been the base of Spanish missionary operations on the edge of their imperial frontier since it was founded in 1609, but even then it was subject to occasional native insurrection, as the Indians resisted conversion at every turn. In 1680, a tribal revolt ravaged the Santa Fe archives, setting back the settlement, and reminding the overlords back in Spain that more support—both military and religious—would be needed to make the remote southwest into a profitable extension of the empire. But after a series of disastrous 17th century setbacks in Europe—notably wars and plague—that saw the empire eroded from within and essentially left leaderless, Spain could not afford to focus on distant outposts in North America, especially unprofitable ones. So little help was forthcoming, and the few soldiers and priests left to watch over this distant frontier faced the arduous task of building an empire from scratch, one sure to take several generations to complete.
The Pueblo Indians—the Hopi and Zuni descendants of the long-vanished Anasazi—didn’t make this any easier. They were tough customers, not easy to bring into the Christian fold, with their naked dance rituals and other curious tribal customs. The lack of resources (especially water), vast distances, and generally unknown lands full of tribes rumored to be hostile, left little choice to the local Spanish authorities but to hold on and wait for better days.
Things began to look up somewhat in the 18th century, when Spain was able to successfully establish a series of missions along the California coast, first in Baja, then farther north by the latter half of the century. In 1769, the Spanish established armed garrisons to protect new missions in San Diego and Monterey, and from there the new strategy was to spread from these two bases, ultimately linking with other established outposts to create a more workable imperial network, based on Indian slave labor, unified under Jesus Christ, and motivated by Spanish soldiers with guns.
What lay between Monterey and Santa Fe was largely unknown, apart from rumors spread through sporadic contact and trade with exotic tribes in the deserts and canyons. Very little of this area had been mapped at all, much less even seen, and there was no known safe route to link Spain’s holdings in New Mexico with California, over a thousand miles away. In 1776, New Mexico’s Spanish Governor Don Pedro Fermin de Mendinueta pondered that difficult task, and knew that to succeed in finding a route would require someone familiar with the Indian tribes, as well as the more remote corners of the desert, to the extent they were known.
What better person for the job than a priest?
Especially one who had recently toured the New Mexican missions. Father Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, a native of what is now Mexico, had been called north in 1775 not only to inspect the missions, but to assess the lives of the frontier padres, the relations with the local Indian populations, and the damage to the Santa Fe archives ravaged in the 1680 revolt. In short, the Franciscan priest quickly became the foremost political expert on Spanish-Indian relations in New Mexico, and a natural choice for the assignment.
But the governor realized Dominguez needed inside help, and that came in the form of fellow Franciscan Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante. A European by birth, Escalante had already spent many years in Santa Fe, and often traveled to the Zuni and Hopi villages seeking converts. Where Dominguez saw the political big picture, and could assess the difficult situation as an outsider, Escalante had worked directly with these people for many years, and had established a practical working relationship with the locals. Together, they would make an ideal team to find a workable route to Monterey, using their understanding of what it took to travel though a harsh desert landscape filled with potentially hostile tribes. Of course, neither of them had any practical knowledge of tribes they had never met, nor of lands they had never seen.
What they did have was an armful of rumors, and a general idea to avoid the tribes directly northwest of Santa Fe, particularly the feared Chirumas, who were believed to be vicious cannibals. Instead, they decided to take a more circuitous route through the lands of the relatively friendly Utes, first by heading due north, then west.
After a three-week delay to deal with an unexpected Comanche raid, the two priests finally left Santa Fe on July 29, and gathered a party along the way that eventually included twelve Spanish colonials and two Indians. About half of these recruits were especially helpful, with firsthand knowledge of the areas through which they would travel, particularly through modern day Colorado. But little was known once they crossed the present-day Utah border near what is now Dinosaur National Monument. Soon the hired guides led the priests to the valley just south of modern-day Salt Lake City, and sensing this might be an opportunity for Spanish settlement, they took their time to assess the area for possible colonization. But the delay set back their travel timetable, and unexpected early October storms forced them to abandon any hope of making it to Monterey by winter. Instead, Dominguez and Escalante decided to return to Santa Fe, through the familiar Hopi and Havasupai land of northern Arizona, completing what would be a great circle through what is now the Four Corners region.
The problem with this route, and not known to them at the time, was that they would have to re-cross the Colorado River to get back to Santa Fe, only this time far downstream of the easier location their guides had taken them in present day Colorado. When they finally encountered the river, it was a mile straight down, in the awesome gorge of the Grand Canyon. It would be impossible to cross in northern Arizona. So they continued northeast, skirting the river upstream along the canyons till reaching a relatively wide ford in a butte strewn valley in the heart of lower Glen Canyon, just north of the present day Utah-Arizona line. Here they could cross easily, and they did so in November 1776, through the wide and shallow river, placid among the gentle pink-colored canyons. They then returned to Santa Fe, having failed to reach California. History shows that the Spanish also failed to settle the Utah Valley, near Salt Lake, which had looked so promising, leaving that to future settlers on an entirely different religious mission, the Mormons, some 70 years later.
But even in their failure, without realizing it, the two priests had just made a huge contribution to western geography. They became the first Europeans to find a practical crossing of the Colorado River at a location that until then had been unknown to white people. The river’s course through Glen Canyon—in fact that Glen Canyon existed at all—had not been known. Today, El Vado de los Padres—the Crossing of the Fathers—is an important landmark in the west. But since 1963, it has laid silently, 300 feet under the water of Lake Powell, between two sandstone monoliths whose modern names recall what had happened here centuries before. There’s Dominguez Butte, standing guard on the lake’s southern shore, and a mile away to the north, smaller Padres Butte, surrounded by the waters of Padre Bay. The trail of the priests leads away to the southeast, above Face Canyon, along what is now a path used by modern Navajo shepherds and hikers with Camelbaks.
The hundreds of houseboaters and jet skiers that cruise by this site along the lake every day generally have no idea (much less care) about the history of the crossing laying hundreds of feet below their hulls; no idea of a drowned plaque that commemorates the event, nearly as important as the American Revolution of the same year, maybe even more so to these boaters. Because while those two Catholic priests failed to make it to Monterey, they unwittingly opened the west to trappers, adventurers, Mormons, explorers, geologists, and the finally the Bureau of Reclamation who built Glen Canyon Dam, without which, none of those boaters would be there at all.
That includes us.
September 4, 2011
Lake Elevation 3655'
In 1776, while revolution raged along the eastern seaboard, the future of the west was left in the hands of two Catholic priests. It had taken over 150 years for the Spanish Empire to gain even a tenuous foothold in the southwestern deserts, mostly in the form of a few scattered missions among the Pueblo tribes in what is now modern New Mexico. The most successful of these, Santa Fe, had been the base of Spanish missionary operations on the edge of their imperial frontier since it was founded in 1609, but even then it was subject to occasional native insurrection, as the Indians resisted conversion at every turn. In 1680, a tribal revolt ravaged the Santa Fe archives, setting back the settlement, and reminding the overlords back in Spain that more support—both military and religious—would be needed to make the remote southwest into a profitable extension of the empire. But after a series of disastrous 17th century setbacks in Europe—notably wars and plague—that saw the empire eroded from within and essentially left leaderless, Spain could not afford to focus on distant outposts in North America, especially unprofitable ones. So little help was forthcoming, and the few soldiers and priests left to watch over this distant frontier faced the arduous task of building an empire from scratch, one sure to take several generations to complete.
The Pueblo Indians—the Hopi and Zuni descendants of the long-vanished Anasazi—didn’t make this any easier. They were tough customers, not easy to bring into the Christian fold, with their naked dance rituals and other curious tribal customs. The lack of resources (especially water), vast distances, and generally unknown lands full of tribes rumored to be hostile, left little choice to the local Spanish authorities but to hold on and wait for better days.
Things began to look up somewhat in the 18th century, when Spain was able to successfully establish a series of missions along the California coast, first in Baja, then farther north by the latter half of the century. In 1769, the Spanish established armed garrisons to protect new missions in San Diego and Monterey, and from there the new strategy was to spread from these two bases, ultimately linking with other established outposts to create a more workable imperial network, based on Indian slave labor, unified under Jesus Christ, and motivated by Spanish soldiers with guns.
What lay between Monterey and Santa Fe was largely unknown, apart from rumors spread through sporadic contact and trade with exotic tribes in the deserts and canyons. Very little of this area had been mapped at all, much less even seen, and there was no known safe route to link Spain’s holdings in New Mexico with California, over a thousand miles away. In 1776, New Mexico’s Spanish Governor Don Pedro Fermin de Mendinueta pondered that difficult task, and knew that to succeed in finding a route would require someone familiar with the Indian tribes, as well as the more remote corners of the desert, to the extent they were known.
What better person for the job than a priest?
Especially one who had recently toured the New Mexican missions. Father Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, a native of what is now Mexico, had been called north in 1775 not only to inspect the missions, but to assess the lives of the frontier padres, the relations with the local Indian populations, and the damage to the Santa Fe archives ravaged in the 1680 revolt. In short, the Franciscan priest quickly became the foremost political expert on Spanish-Indian relations in New Mexico, and a natural choice for the assignment.
But the governor realized Dominguez needed inside help, and that came in the form of fellow Franciscan Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante. A European by birth, Escalante had already spent many years in Santa Fe, and often traveled to the Zuni and Hopi villages seeking converts. Where Dominguez saw the political big picture, and could assess the difficult situation as an outsider, Escalante had worked directly with these people for many years, and had established a practical working relationship with the locals. Together, they would make an ideal team to find a workable route to Monterey, using their understanding of what it took to travel though a harsh desert landscape filled with potentially hostile tribes. Of course, neither of them had any practical knowledge of tribes they had never met, nor of lands they had never seen.
What they did have was an armful of rumors, and a general idea to avoid the tribes directly northwest of Santa Fe, particularly the feared Chirumas, who were believed to be vicious cannibals. Instead, they decided to take a more circuitous route through the lands of the relatively friendly Utes, first by heading due north, then west.
After a three-week delay to deal with an unexpected Comanche raid, the two priests finally left Santa Fe on July 29, and gathered a party along the way that eventually included twelve Spanish colonials and two Indians. About half of these recruits were especially helpful, with firsthand knowledge of the areas through which they would travel, particularly through modern day Colorado. But little was known once they crossed the present-day Utah border near what is now Dinosaur National Monument. Soon the hired guides led the priests to the valley just south of modern-day Salt Lake City, and sensing this might be an opportunity for Spanish settlement, they took their time to assess the area for possible colonization. But the delay set back their travel timetable, and unexpected early October storms forced them to abandon any hope of making it to Monterey by winter. Instead, Dominguez and Escalante decided to return to Santa Fe, through the familiar Hopi and Havasupai land of northern Arizona, completing what would be a great circle through what is now the Four Corners region.
The problem with this route, and not known to them at the time, was that they would have to re-cross the Colorado River to get back to Santa Fe, only this time far downstream of the easier location their guides had taken them in present day Colorado. When they finally encountered the river, it was a mile straight down, in the awesome gorge of the Grand Canyon. It would be impossible to cross in northern Arizona. So they continued northeast, skirting the river upstream along the canyons till reaching a relatively wide ford in a butte strewn valley in the heart of lower Glen Canyon, just north of the present day Utah-Arizona line. Here they could cross easily, and they did so in November 1776, through the wide and shallow river, placid among the gentle pink-colored canyons. They then returned to Santa Fe, having failed to reach California. History shows that the Spanish also failed to settle the Utah Valley, near Salt Lake, which had looked so promising, leaving that to future settlers on an entirely different religious mission, the Mormons, some 70 years later.
But even in their failure, without realizing it, the two priests had just made a huge contribution to western geography. They became the first Europeans to find a practical crossing of the Colorado River at a location that until then had been unknown to white people. The river’s course through Glen Canyon—in fact that Glen Canyon existed at all—had not been known. Today, El Vado de los Padres—the Crossing of the Fathers—is an important landmark in the west. But since 1963, it has laid silently, 300 feet under the water of Lake Powell, between two sandstone monoliths whose modern names recall what had happened here centuries before. There’s Dominguez Butte, standing guard on the lake’s southern shore, and a mile away to the north, smaller Padres Butte, surrounded by the waters of Padre Bay. The trail of the priests leads away to the southeast, above Face Canyon, along what is now a path used by modern Navajo shepherds and hikers with Camelbaks.
The hundreds of houseboaters and jet skiers that cruise by this site along the lake every day generally have no idea (much less care) about the history of the crossing laying hundreds of feet below their hulls; no idea of a drowned plaque that commemorates the event, nearly as important as the American Revolution of the same year, maybe even more so to these boaters. Because while those two Catholic priests failed to make it to Monterey, they unwittingly opened the west to trappers, adventurers, Mormons, explorers, geologists, and the finally the Bureau of Reclamation who built Glen Canyon Dam, without which, none of those boaters would be there at all.
That includes us.
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