The Last Empty Places (38 page)

It was 1:37 p.m. when we locked the white rental car, leaving it under the shade of a scrawny tree, hefted our backpack straps over our shoulders, cinched our pack belts around our waists, and walked across the trailhead parking lot known as TJ Corral—a surface of mangled sagebrush, dust, and dried horseshit. Where the parking lot ended a steep, rocky, sun-baked hillside began, dotted with juniper trees, and the beginning of a trail. With that particular sense of finality—the knowledge that with this footstep you’ve just severed all recourse to the comforts and requisites of civilization except those carried on your back and in your head—we began.

W
ITHIN FIVE MINUTES
we were dripping sweat. After the morning’s hat-and-glove cold and frozen water pots, we paused to strip down
to shorts and T-shirts. The sky shone so deep blue and serene above the hillside that I didn’t mind the heavy pack pushing down on shoulders and hips.
Clunkity-clunk
went our hiking boots up the rocky trail. It wound up the sparse grass cover of the hillside, dipped across little brushy gullies, swung onto the grassy open again, threaded between clumps of juniper trees, and, always, kept climbing. This wasn’t, as it had appeared, simply a small hillside at the edge of the TJ Corral parking lot. It was a long, gradual mountain ridge that we had to climb up and over, in order to descend into the river canyon that lay beyond.

I led. Amy was lingering in the back, taking photos. Skyler and Molly hiked right behind me.

“Dad,” Skyler said after about ten minutes. “How far do you think we’ve gone?”

“Maybe a third of a mile,” I replied, turning my head back.

“How far is it to the top of this mountain?” he asked.

“Maybe about two miles.”

“Then we have a mile and two thirds left to go,” he calculated, liking to do numbers in his head. “So how long will that take?”

“Maybe an hour and a half,” I said. “It depends on how fast we hike. Why don’t you lead the way and set the pace.”

“Okay.”

He squeezed past me on the trail, his small blue mountaineer’s pack bulging with his sleeping bag and pad, his clothing and his water bottle, and—his share of the communal family burden—all our lunch food. Small as he was, he strode upward at a decent pace.

In a moment, he began to sing.

“One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer…”

At first I thought, “This is going to drive me nuts if he runs through the whole song.” But then I realized that if the song kept him occupied, it was one way we could travel a lot farther than we might otherwise.

Molly and I, just behind Skyler, joined in singing. With Skyler’s personal set of metrics to gauge our progress—miles, hours, and bottles of beer on the wall—we hiked past the little sign marking the boundary
of the National Monument and the beginning of the 760,000 acres of the Gila and Leopold Wilderness.

I
N TODAY’S TERMS
, the launch of the Coronado expedition in February 1540 was the equivalent of, say, sending a manned spacecraft to Mars. Surely it was dispatched with as much—if not more—formality and fanfare. Not since Europeans arrived in the New World had there been an undertaking of such opulence and brazenness—“the most brilliant company ever assembled in the Indies,”
¹²
wrote its chronicler, Pedro de Castañeda, “to go in search of new lands.”

Gathering in Compostela, a Spanish outpost near Mexico’s Pacific Coast, the army underwent three days of formalities demanded by the departure of so grand a venture—first a High Mass by the Father Commissary of New Spain, followed by Viceroy Mendoza’s review of the entire column as it marched past his stand, and the viceroy’s short, eloquent speech exhorting the spiritual and financial rewards that lay ahead for every man—providing he kept loyal to his leader—then a precise inventory of every man and his mounts, his armor, and his weaponry.

Finally each soldier placed his hand on a cross and swore to “uphold the service of God and his Majesty [and] to be obedient to the said Francisco Vásquez de Coronado…as a gentleman should do…”

Imagine the clouds of dust roiling around the column as it moved out of the mountain town of Compostela on February 23, 1540, bound for the unknown lands of the north and their Seven Cities of Gold. At its head, wearing a suit of gilded armor and a feathery plume in his helmet, rode the thirty-year-old Coronado himself, born of a landed Salamanca family
¹³
but whose brother had inherited the family estate. Coronado, looking for grander possibilities than being a landless aristocrat in Spain, had come to the New World at age twenty-five with his friend Mendoza, who soon rose to viceroy. Behind the gilded and plumed Coronado were 336 Spaniards, most of them on horseback and trailing extra mounts, upwards of a thousand Indians, three soldiers’ wives, four Franciscan priests, including the “discoverer” of the Seven Cities of Gold, Fray Marcos himself, and hundreds of pigs and sheep driven along to feed the men. In addition, two ships were to sail up the Pacific Coast bearing extra baggage.

The three hundred were not ordinary professional Spanish soldiers, however, but men of aristocratic bloodlines. Their family connections had given them first shot at joining the great expedition that was expected to add “another Mexico” to Spain’s New World empire, as well as bestow unspeakable wealth on its participants, and, along the way, convert the lost, heathen Indians to Christianity. “Get Rich While Doing Good”—it was a concept that proved as irresistible then as it is now.

But you also sense an aura of amateurism that beset the expedition, precisely
because
the soldiers were aristocrats rather than professionals. Wearing assorted bits of armor they’d scrounged, mixed with native dress, they toted along every odd piece of weaponry they could carry, from muzzle-loading harquebuses to Aztec war clubs to giant two-handed swords. Of course, they also packed their finest robes and linens in order to be properly attired for their grand entrance into the golden cities. Likewise, Castañeda implied that the leadership was shaky. He backhandedly remarked that Captain General Coronado should have worried more about leading his men and less about his wife and his estates, which were actually his wife’s, back home. Castañeda humorously describes how the aristocratic “soldiers” didn’t even know how to load their own horses, so their belongings were constantly falling off in the beginning.

“In the end necessity, which is all powerful, made them skillful,
¹⁴
so that one could see many gentlemen become carriers…”

And so they headed out of Compostela toward the north, toward that blank spot—a blank spot far larger than any of the armored Spaniards could comprehend, the blank spot that was in actuality the whole interior of North America, and, more specifically, toward the region that held the even blanker spot that’s now the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico.

The first bad news arrived at Chiametla, a tiny Spanish outpost two hundred miles north up the coast from Compostela. Earlier, Coronado had sent ahead a scouting party of “a dozen good men” under Melchior Diaz to learn more about the Seven Cities. The scouts had traveled nearly a thousand miles north until they came to the edge of a great wilderness where no one lived, “…and there they turned back, not finding anything important.”
¹⁵
Four hundred years later, it would be left
to Aldo Leopold to find the importance of the great empty places like this one that thwarted Coronado’s scouting party.

Returning south, the scouting party met the cumbersome main expedition—pigs and sheep trailing, the gear falling off—at Chiametla and presented their reports to Captain General Coronado. He and the officers attempted to keep the disappointing news a secret, that there was only wilderness to the north, but word leaked out through the men. Fray Marcos, addressing the grumblings and rumors among the ranks, “cleared away these clouds, promising that what they would see should be good, and that he would place the army in a country where their hands would be filled, and in this way he quieted them so that they appeared well satisfied.”

Onward they marched, reaching the last Spanish settlement, Culiacán, at Easter, where, in a bit of ceremony provided by the Spanish inhabitants, the army was greeted with a mock battle of resistance and finally allowed to “win” the town, although one of Coronado’s artillerymen lost his hand by giving the order to fire the cannon before he’d drawn out the ramrod. Here at Culiacán the gentlemen soldiers gave away their finery to anyone who asked for it, weary of the hassle of packing it on their horses. From Culiacán, Coronado himself marched ahead from the main army, moving quickly and lightly northward, with fifty horsemen, the Franciscan friars, and hundreds of Indian allies. After traversing modern-day northern Mexico, populated by Indian villages, they crossed the Gila River and spent fifteen days trekking over the great stretch of desert and mountain wilderness in that region east of today’s Phoenix, still largely empty of people nearly five hundred years later, and where the Gila Forest and Wilderness is located.

B
EYOND THE WILDERNESS
they came to the “Red River”—the Zuñi River—where Coronado and company encountered the first Indians from the Seven Cities, who ran and spread the news of the strangely mounted Spanish approaching. The Indians were unfamiliar with the sight of horses, and of men riding on their backs. The next night, as Coronado’s party camped within five or six miles of the first city, a group of Indians yelled out from a hiding place in the darkness. This so excited Coronado’s gentlemen soldiers into action that some saddled
their horses backward, but the veterans among them managed to chase the Indians away. Castañeda reported what happened next:

After five months and more than a thousand miles, it came as a crashing, angry disappointment to discover that this first of these celebrated Seven Cities of Gold consisted of an adobe village of two hundred warriors rather than a metropolis shimmering with towers of precious metals. Yet it still had to be conquered. Coronado’s men assembled outside its walls, while “defiant” villagers
¹⁷
—Zuñi Indians in a settlement near today’s Zuni Pueblo
¹⁸
south of Gallup, New Mexico—came out to meet them. Coronado and his men attacked the Zuñi Indians and pushed into Cíbola’s narrow, twisting entrance. The Indians hurled stones from the roof terraces and shot arrows. A large stone caught Coronado in the head as he was trying to climb a ladder to the roof terraces, knocking him to the ground, where he lay in his gilded armor and plumed helmet, unconscious. Coronado would have been killed on the spot if two of his officers hadn’t thrown themselves on him, taking the blows of more hurled stones, and dragged their commander to safety.
¹⁹

After an hour’s battle, and with the help of hundreds of their Indian allies who had accompanied them from Mexico, the Spanish took the village and fell eagerly on the food in its storerooms. The Zuñi quietly escaped down the back walls and fled to their other villages. Jars of cornmeal weren’t exactly bags of gold but provided nourishment, after all, for the near-starved men. Of some consolation, too, was that they heard from the subdued inhabitants of Cíbola that bigger and wealthier Indian towns lay ahead.

T
HE PROMISE OF OUR SEARCH
for the hidden canyons and hot springs of the Gila Wilderness spurred us forward. As we crossed the crest of the ridge above Little Bear Canyon about 3:30 p.m., the warm
sun still shone in the blue sky but we could sense it lowering—a spear’s length above the horizon, as the old accounts put it—and anticipate the layers of cold that, beyond sundown, would settle over this high, dry country. We paused and looked north, our direction of travel, where the country fell away into a broken maze of cliffs and rims, forests and mountains. Somewhere down there twisted the Middle Fork of the Gila River, our immediate destination. Centuries earlier, Coronado’s army skirted this mountain-and-canyon wilderness of the Gila River headwaters, passing north and west of us by one hundred miles.

Down we dropped into Little Bear Canyon. The trail wound through shady, cool pine forest and padded over the sandy, dried-up creek bed. Then the canyon narrowed and steepened and we squeezed through rock slots, and jumped down rock ledges that had been smoothed by flash floods. The cliff walls loomed higher as we descended. Molly and Skyler shouted to hear their voices echo and dodged off the trail to explore the smooth, cavelike alcoves under the overhanging rocks. One of these, we learned later, contained cave paintings.

By four thirty we’d descended to the mouth, where Little Bear opened up like a doorway to the canyon of the Gila’s Middle Fork. We entered a sun-dappled little clearing at the confluence. The sun hung on the canyon rim and its last rays jumped over the dark, cliffy shadows and filtered through a grove of yellow-leafed cottonwood trees and feathery pines, painting the scene in warm golds and chilled greens. The Middle Fork spilled a swift, clear green between tannish cliffs. During this dry season, the river itself wasn’t that big—maybe fifty feet wide and knee-to-thigh deep—and ran smoothly over rounded rocks.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. “We can camp here, in this really nice spot, or go on and try to find the hot springs.”

“Let’s go on,” Molly and Skyler immediately replied.

“It’ll probably be almost dark when we get there,” I warned. “And we might not even get there tonight. And we’re going to have to wade across the river.”