The Last Empty Places (37 page)

Only four days later Indian messengers returned from Esteban to Fray Marcos’s comfortable and well-provisioned camp. The runners bore a cross the size of a man and a message from Esteban that he had found people who told him they knew of the largest country of the world. One of the Indian runners Esteban sent back to Fray Marcos had been to that country himself. Through interpreters and signs, he reported to Fray Marcos:

Fray Marcos broke camp and hurried north in Esteban’s footsteps, expecting to catch up with him, but Esteban kept moving northward himself, leaving crosses behind to mark every good camping spot for the friar. The friar received warm welcomes at Indian villages whose inhabitants had traded with the distant country called Cíbola, and even worked in Cíbola, in exchange for the abundant bison hides and
turquoise jewelry the friar spotted adorning the village inhabitants. In addition to Cíbola, he heard, there were three other kingdoms. The people in those regions, he heard, wore clothing woven of cotton—considered a luxury in the early 1500s.

One senses Fray Marcos’s excitement as he hustled north, with Esteban just ahead of him. (One wonders, with all this haste, if Esteban was following instructions from his owner, Dorantes, to reach the Seven Cities first and lay Dorantes’s claim to the finder’s share of the riches.) On May 9, 1539, having traveled two months, and still in the footsteps of Esteban, Fray Marcos crossed what was probably the Gila River. He now heard that the largest of the seven cities of Cíbola was called Ahacus. From the Gila River, in another twelve days’ travel, he neared this largest of the seven. It was then, at the end of the twelfth day, that an Indian messenger suddenly appeared in Fray Marcos’s camp along the desert trail, his body covered with sweat and his face contorted with sorrow.

He told Fray Marcos that Esteban had approached within a day’s travel of Cíbola. Just outside the city, Esteban had sent a messenger carrying his healer’s rattle, adorned with feathers and bells, into the city to announce his arrival. This was always his practice when reaching an unfamiliar settlement. Taking the rattle, the chief of the city grew enraged, threw it to the ground, and told the messengers to leave. He said the rattle wasn’t of their own style. The chief said he knew these people and would kill them
⁸
if they entered the city. But the charming Esteban, outside the city and hearing this account from his returning messengers, reassured the messengers that those chiefs who initially received him coolly always warmed up on meeting him. He went unabashedly onward to the city entrance with a contingent of more than three hundred Indians who had joined him during his travels.

The residents blocked his way. They then shut Esteban into a large house outside the city, stripping him of all his trade goods. The next morning, Esteban’s Indian messenger left the house to get a drink
⁹
from the river, and returning toward the city, spotted Esteban and his Indian followers fleeing, pursued by a band of warriors. The Indian messenger had escaped slaughter by hiding near the river.

So went the messenger’s account to Fray Marcos. The next day, a few other survivors stumbled into Fray Marcos’s camp smeared with blood, pierced by arrow wounds, and wailing over their losses. Once
the friar quieted them enough to hear what had happened, he learned that they had survived only because they’d been buried alive beneath the carcasses of their fleeing companions. Esteban had been killed, also.

“…I confess I was at a loss what to do,” wrote Fray Marcos to his superiors. “I told them that Our Lord would chastise Cíbola and that when the Emperor knew what had happened he would send many Christians to punish its people.”

This didn’t satisfy the grieving Indians. No one could withstand Cíbola’s power, they said to the friar. Fray Marcos struggled with the situation, justifiably. Alone, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest Spanish outpost, he had become the trigger of hostilities between two formerly peaceable groups of Indians whom—by orders from his superiors—he was supposed to pacify while searching for their gold. He finally walked off a stone’s throw to compose himself, to pray to God, and to try to figure out what to do next.

When he returned an hour and a half later, the grief of the Indian followers had turned to anger. They were ready to kill Fray Marcos. They blamed him not only for the deaths of their three hundred fathers, sons, and brothers, but were convinced that he would be the cause of their deaths, too.

At this point, he changed tactics. He gave away all his trade goods to them. He said that they could go ahead and kill him, but it would do him no harm, as he would go to heaven, while those killing him would suffer, as Christians would come looking for Fray Marcos and kill all those who killed him.

“With this and many other words I pacified them
¹⁰
somewhat, although there was still high feeling on account of the people killed.”

Thus Fray Marcos escaped death by vengeance for the three hundred dead. But he still desperately wanted to see Cíbola and also learn any news of Esteban. No one was willing to accompany him, and so Fray Marcos said that he would go himself. Finally two chiefs agreed to go along. Traveling quietly, they neared a settlement on about June 5, 1539. Climbing a hill, they spied the city, which sat on a neighboring hill protruding from a plain. Fray Marcos wrote:

The chiefs told him that the city of Tontonteac was far larger—“there is no end to it.” And so, Fray Marcos, calling the land “the new kingdom of St. Francis,” built a large cairn of stones with the help of the Indians, and stuck onto it a small cross, not having enough wood handy on this barren hillside to fashion a larger one. In the name of Viceroy Mendoza of New Spain and the emperor of Spain himself, King Charles, Fray Marcos claimed from this hillside all seven cities as well as the kingdoms of Tontonteac, Acus, and Marata, admitting, however, “I did not go into them, in order that I might return to give an account of what I had done and seen.”

On his return, the word of his discoveries spread wildly among the Spanish inhabitants of Mexico City. Viceroy Mendoza declared that he would send a major military expedition to Cíbola and its Seven Cities, which matched the old legend perfectly and convinced the Spanish that here shimmered the next great gold bonanza of the New World. Pleading with King Charles to be leader of the Seven Cities expedition were both Cortés, conqueror of the Aztecs, and Hernando de Soto, future explorer of the Mississippi. But instead of these two illustrious explorers and would-be conquistadors, Viceroy Mendoza chose his friend to head it, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.

Wrote one inhabitant of Mexico City of that time:

Barely nine months after Fray Marcos had first stood on that barren hillside and surveyed the city of Cíbola, fashioning his little wooden cross and reciting his words to the air, a full-scale military expedition under Coronado headed north to seize the riches of the Seven Cities of Gold. Fray Marcos’s hillside, and the Indian pueblo he saw in
the distance that seemingly confirmed the rumors of the Cities of Gold, lay just on the northern edge of a great blank spot—blank then, too—now known as the Gila Forest and Wilderness. Just on the southern edge of the wilderness lies Silver City and its copper deposits, which may be the same metal deposits that triggered Cabeza de Vaca’s rumors of gold in the late 1530s that started the madness.

W
E FOLLOWED
H
IGHWAY
15 north out of Silver City—significantly not named “Gold City”—as it rolled gently upward toward that blank spot. We drove past tasteful, adobe second-home haciendas scattered on the tawny juniper hillsides just out of town, then climbed through the weathered old hamlet of Pinos Altos, as the road started its serious climb into the pine-covered mountains—twisting upward through dozens and dozens of switchbacks, downward through dozens and dozens more, and then upward again. There were no houses now. A single power line skipped through the forest from switchback to switchback. The state highway dwindled to a single lane of corkscrewing asphalt. A sign warned, “No Center Line Next 18 Miles.”

“It’s only forty-two miles,” someone in Silver City had cautioned me about the road north from Silver City to the cliff dwellings and our departure point, “but expect it to take a long time.”

We played road bingo with Molly and Skyler. The items we each had to spot were a bird, a green sign, a yellow flower, a dead tree. No one even bothered to suggest anything typically domestic, like “mailbox” or “flagpole” or “lawn ornament” or—laughably—“stoplight,” because the chances of seeing one here were nil. Dead trees, however, were easy. Birds, surprisingly, were not.

The road crested a tall ridgetop and we stepped out of the car at a turnout and looked around. The westering sun backlit one of those landscapes that shone so enormously and silently and lucidly that it reminded me of a museum diorama of, say, the Mesozoic Era. There was a dead, windless silence except for the occasional primordial caw of a crow and the crunch of gravel under our shoes. From our feet the mountainside fell away into a deep chasm of luminous bluish air, then, maybe five miles off, the bottom crumpled up into still more layered, bluish ranges of mountains whose faces were split and contorted by canyons, cliffs, and escarpments of naked, tannish rock, and beyond
them rose still more bluish ranges. Creatures from a different era existed out there…spirits from a different time.

W
E ALL WOKE AT FOUR A.M.
, shivering. Molly and Skyler were sleeping in cocoon bags in our small winter-weight tent, and Amy and I in our summer-weight one, pitched side by side beneath piñon pines in a deserted campground at road’s end. We heard their rustlings.

“Mom, I’m cold,” said soft voices muffled still softer by layers of pile clothing, sleeping bag hoods, and tent fabric.

When Amy switched on her headlamp, the LED beams glistened like hundreds of tiny stars on the ice crystals that coated the ceiling of our tent. Outside, the night was a deep black. Icy, intense stars of the heavens glistened through the pine boughs. In these high, dry mountains in late October, the daily temperature swung enormously: from up around 70 degrees during the sunny, blue day, to far below freezing at night.

Amy unzipped their tent, wrapped the children in more clothes, and stuffed them deeper into their sleeping bags. She and I both added layers. Then we nestled in our own bags, pressed back to back, our warmth radiating to each other.

We didn’t stir until the sun hit the tents, warming them. Climbing out, we discovered the water in our water bottles and in the pots on the campsite’s picnic table had frozen solid. As we chipped ice out of the breakfast pots, the palm trees at the Mesa airport two days before seemed very far away.

It took us most of the day to get our act together to step beyond this point: a leisurely breakfast; reading in the warm sun; a quick walk up the hill behind camp to survey this cozy river valley where we’d camped—the West Fork of the Gila; drive a mile back down the road to the Gila Visitor Center to buy more maps, a wildlife guide, and to leave word of our route, so they’d know where to look in case we didn’t return.

As I was going over maps at the Visitor Center’s counter, one of the clerk ladies, an indoor-looking type, glanced skeptically over at Skyler and Molly as they checked out the racks of gifts and guidebooks.

“Do you know it was nineteen degrees last night?” she said to me.

“Yes…we were camping.”

“Have you ever done anything like this before?” she asked.

“Well, we went backpacking last summer for one night in Montana,” I said, then added, “These children are both soccer players. Skyler just ran a ten-K race. They’re in very good shape. I
know
they can do this hike physically. Whether they’ll
want
to do it mentally is another question.”

This seemed to satisfy her, now that I’d framed our well-being as a matter of parental discipline.

Think of the map as a box within a box within a box. The innermost box, almost like a miniature national park, is the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. Located up a side canyon of this innermost box are the cliff dwellings themselves. This national monument box is surrounded by another box, the 760,000-acre Gila Wilderness Area and Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area—named after their founder—which are themselves set within the sprawling, 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest, a tract that measures roughly seventy by seventy miles, and even larger than that if you include adjoining national forests.

Our plan was to start hiking at the innermost box—the national monument—leaving from a trailhead near our campground. We’d loop out into the Gila Wilderness Area for several days, trekking through its river canyons and exploring its hot springs. We’d then return by a different route so that we ended up not far from where we started. At the very end of the hike, on the last day, we’d go up the side canyon and explore the Cliff Dwellings themselves.