The Last Empty Places (42 page)

We suddenly heard voices. We sat up. We hadn’t heard voices other than our own in a day and a half.

They emerged from the forest, striding down the trail toward us, a young couple, moving quickly, swinging their arms, using ski poles for balance, each draped with a sun hat.

“Well, look at this!” I remarked. “People! Information!”

“Hi,” we called out.

“How far is it to the Meadows?” Amy asked before they’d even reached our log.

He was in the lead. I noticed that he’d duct-taped two water bottles to the front straps of his backpack, so he didn’t have to stop hiking to take a swig of water, but only bend down his head. They both looked sun-crisp, and slightly smudged, and their limbs ropy with exercise.

“Twenty-six crossings,” he replied.

The guy wore big snow gaiters zipped over his soaking-wet hiking shoes, reaching up to his knees. He had a stubble on his chin that looked at least a couple of weeks old. Her lips were smeared with white cream against the sun. Their packs looked small and light and compressed compared to ours.

“How far back?” I asked, thinking that twenty-six more crossings was going to be a long, long day.

“We left there about eleven-thirty,” he said.

“Did you camp there?” I asked.

“No, we camped at the head of Indian Creek and came down Indian Creek this morning,” he replied. “We’ve been hiking the Continental Divide Trail.”

I was impressed.

“We started in Glacier National Park, Montana, on the Canadian border on June fifteenth,” he continued. “Now we only have the last two hundred miles to go to Mexico.”

“That’s, like,
five straight months of hiking
!” I marveled.

“So you started hiking at one foreign country,” Skyler asked with amazement, “and now you’re hiking all the way to another foreign country?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How far do you go in a day?” I asked.

“Twenty to twenty-five miles,” he replied. “Now it’s a little farther
because sometimes the trail follows roads. Even at that pace, you can barely make the length of the Continental Divide Trail in one season. You can’t start any earlier than June fifteenth because of the snow up in Montana. And then you have to keep moving south to stay ahead of winter. We got out of Colorado just in time. It was starting to snow in the high country.”

He started making a move toward the creek, as if eager to keep moving. Amy was chatting with the woman about the equipment they carried and the high-tech, lightweight, accordionlike sleeping pads strapped to their packs.

“It’s a little thin,” she confessed to Amy.

The man made another move toward the creek. They were trying to get to the hot springs for a soak this afternoon, and then camp farther down the canyon where Little Bear Creek joined it. This meant that they’d be hiking in the next
four hours
what it took us
two days
to cover, plus squeeze in a quick soak in the hot springs. Yes, they were moving
fast
. The entire Continental Divide Trail covers 3,100 miles. The trail’s existence was, in many ways, due to Aldo Leopold and his efforts on behalf of wilderness preservation. This couple would, in a single day, hike across most of the Gila Wilderness. It felt like they were in a race. I wondered whether the raw need to make mileage had obliterated the psychic rewards of wilderness.

“You have fifteen crossings to the hot springs,” I told the man, “and another fifteen to Little Bear Creek.”

They looked chilled already, after the twenty-six crossings they’d already done today. That would total fifty-six in one day. There wasn’t any insulating fat on their sinewy bodies. Now I understood why the man wore the knee-high snow gaiters—for warmth in the chilly water. Clearly impatient to get going, he waded onward into the creek. She followed.

“Goodbye,” we called out. “Good luck.”

We watched them splash across, quickly mount the stone-cobbled far bank with ski poles clicking, and disappear into the shady forest under the cliff wall. There was something obsessive about it. You either had to be obsessive to start, or certainly had to be obsessive to finish, a hike so long, so quickly.

“I wonder if they’ll still be together at the end of this hike,” Amy mused as they vanished down the canyon.

C
ORONADO’S OBSESSIVENESS
propelled him forward, too—toward a psychological breaking point. He returned to the Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande to spend the winter of 1541–42. In the spring, he planned to head eastward again, to chase down stories of rich cities even farther off and reports from the Indians of a broad river plied by huge canoes.

These rumors weren’t entirely false. Archaeologists have noted that ancient peoples occupied large settlements along the Mississippi River. The Cahokia Mounds site in southern Illinois, which, at its peak around A.D. 1250 was larger than London at the time, covered six square miles and housed a population of 10,000 to 20,000 people. The settlement included monumental earthworks and giant sun calendars. On the Mississippi River, as the rumors reaching Coronado had suggested, the Indians traveled in huge canoes powered by dozens of paddlers.

But it wasn’t to be. It was a tough winter for the Spaniards. They had missed the comforts of New Spain for almost two years. It was cold in the Pueblo village they’d appropriated along the Rio Grande, about 120 miles northeast of where we were hiking. They lacked warm clothing. They pulled apart the adobe houses and used their wooden posts and beams for firewood, and dug up the buried Indian containers of corn. The Pueblo Indians were hostile toward them, if not quite outright at war. Coronado received a letter, delivered by reinforcements coming up from Mexico, from his wife, whom he missed deeply or, as some may have speculated, suspected of having affairs in his absence. Another letter arrived addressed to one of Coronado’s closest officers, Don García López de Cárdenas, informing him that his brother had died and he was now heir to the family estates back in Spain. Coronado granted him permission to go home, especially in light of his broken arm, which wouldn’t heal.

That winter, too, during a feast day, Coronado was out racing his powerful horse, which he liked to do for his amusement, against Don Rodrigo Maldonado, when the girth broke. Captain General Coronado tumbled to the ground between the two horses and was run over by Maldonado’s horse. Its hoof struck him in the head.

“[This] laid him at the point of death,”
³⁸
wrote Castañeda, who was in the encampment that winter, “and his recovery was slow and painful.”

When Coronado finally was well enough to get up from his bed, he discovered that his close officer López de Cárdenas had returned. He bore the terrible news
³⁹
that the way back to Mexico was blocked. He had reached the Spaniards’ supply base at Suya, near today’s southern Arizona border. He found it in ruins, smoldering and deserted, and the Indians in the whole region in rebellion against the Spanish. He retreated back to Coronado’s winter camp. Turning up months later, Spanish survivors described how their leader at the outpost, a man named Alcaraz, forced sex with Indian women and stole Indian provisions. One night the Indians crept silently into the Spanish pueblo and attacked with their poison-tipped arrows, killing between thirty and sixty Spaniards and many of their fearsome horses.

Coronado heard the news in his winter camp and took to his bed again.

You can imagine him, lying there, in the adobe room of a Pueblo village along the frozen Rio Grande. The winter wind blows. There is little wood to burn for warmth. Everyone is beset by fleas. His army is scattered about the Tierra Nueva—the New Land. His supply base, he has just learned, has been burned and its soldiers killed. With all the fanfare that had attended the expedition’s departure from Mexico, he has nothing to show for two years of hard effort at attaining glory and wealth and the Seven Cities of Gold to add to the empire of the king of Spain but loss and humiliation and a few stolen buffalo robes, his quest dashed by a small collection of straw huts five hundred miles out on the Plains.

It’s no wonder he took to bed. Where could he possibly go from here but toward deeper humiliation?

There was still talk of returning to Quivira and the rumored settlements and broad river farther east. But then, reports Castañeda, perhaps with a bit of cattiness and contempt, Captain General Coronado, lying in his bedchamber in the adobe pueblo, recalled a prophecy given to him by an astrologer friend back in Salamanca.

“…that he would become a powerful lord in distant lands,
⁴⁰
and that he would have a fall from which he would never be able to recover.”

This plunged Coronado deeper into depression. If he were to die, which it appeared he might, he wanted to be with his wife and children when it happened, writes Castañeda.

Some of Coronado’s officers and soldiers, however, hungered to carry on the search for the rumored gold and the fabulous cities. Coronado undermined them through subterfuge, according to Castañeda. Using his gossipy physician as intermediary, he reached out to several of the expedition’s “gentlemen” who agreed with him about returning to Mexico, and had these gentlemen talk in small groups among the soldiers, who then signed petitions, which were also signed by officers, to Coronado requesting that the army head back. The main argument for returning was that they had found neither gold nor settlements large enough to provide Indians as forced laborers for all the members of the expedition. Signatures obtained, Coronado immediately announced the expedition would return home. Many of the men recanted, and wanted to stay and keep the search alive with a core group of sixty. They broke into Coronado’s bedchamber and stole his locked chest to get the signed papers back, but Coronado, reports Castañeda, had stuffed the documents into his mattress for hiding.

“He guarded them so that he did not leave one room, pretending that his ailment was much worse and posting guards over himself and the room, and at night on the roofs where he was sleeping.”

Coronado’s army turned south toward Mexico, leaving behind a few of the friars, who weren’t under his command and who hoped to convert the Indians to Christianity or be martyred (they were soon murdered). The captain general was happy, although respect for his authority sank on the homeward journey, and the army had to work its way through rebellious Indian regions. Horses died. At times during the journey home, two or three men perished each day by either sickness or poisoning—no one really knew why. When they finally reached the first outposts of New Spain—Mexico—the men began to drop out. The captain general’s authority was all but disregarded. He took to his bed again, pretending to be sick, according to Castañeda, so he could hold conversations in secret and try to convince his officers and gentlemen to stay with the expedition until it reached Mexico City. He was carried part of the way on a litter.
⁴¹

Captain General Coronado arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1542. Less than one hundred men from the original grand expedition still accompanied him. It was an ignominious return. Viceroy Mendoza met the captain general—not graciously, reports Castañeda, but he nevertheless gave him an honorable discharge.

“From then on,”
⁴²
states Castañeda flatly, “he lost his reputation.”

Viceroy Mendoza, who had been Coronado’s friend and ally, must have tried to move delicately. The viceroy eventually took over for himself the governorship of Nueva Galicia, the northwest part of Mexico, which Coronado had held. Coronado went bankrupt from debts he’d run up mounting the expedition. In its aftermath, he was subject to an investigation into whether he mistreated the Indians. He was cleared and abuses against the Indians—of which there were clearly many, in direct violation of edicts from the king and queen of Spain—were blamed on Coronado’s soldiers, not the captain general.

Coronado did retain a seat on the Mexico City council, thanks to his friendship with Viceroy Mendoza. There he remained, in Mexico City, a gentlemen still, until his death in 1554. You can imagine him, an aging council member, who led a once-great expedition into the Tierra Nueva—the Unknown Lands of the North. Parents must have pointed him out on the street to their children. They must have told the story. He went away in a great parade of hundreds of eager gentlemen soldiers and powerful horses and wearing a suit of golden armor with a feathery plume en route to discover the Seven Cities of Gold, went away on a mission from the king himself, and he returned, two years later, exhausted, trailed by only a few stragglers who didn’t really obey him anyway, having found not heaps of gold and fabulous cities in the Unknown Lands but a place where nothing exists but grass and sky, having found…Kansas.

There was a lesson to be learned.

W
HILE SITTING ON THE SUMMERY PORCH
of his parents’ home overlooking the Mississippi River recuperating in 1913, Aldo Leopold read the just-published
⁴³
Our Vanishing Wildlife
by William Temple Hornaday. Director of the New York Zoological Society, Hornaday sounded the alarm about the rapid depletion of U.S. wildlife. Deer, ducks, elk, and other species prized by hunters were being wiped out by market gunners. The 60 million or so buffalo that had grazed the Great Plains in Coronado’s day had shrunk, by 1913 when Leopold was reading Hornaday’s book, to a few hundred scattered animals. The following year, the last known passenger pigeon of hundreds of millions would die at the Cincinnati Zoo.

“For educated, civilized Man to exterminate a valuable wild species of living things is a crime,” wrote Hornaday. “It is a crime against his own children, and posterity.”

Firing up to the cause, Leopold resolved to take on the mission to save southwestern game species, melding with a growing national concern about game protection, and his own deep passion for hunting.

During his seventeen-month recuperation in Iowa, he crafted a plan to establish game reserves on national forest lands. A Washington bureaucrat shot it down. Back in New Mexico, his sympathetic boss, Arthur Ringland, created a position for Leopold as a public-relations officer to promote the new activity of “tourism” and “recreation” on National Forest lands that had formerly been used mainly for commercial timber harvest and grazing. Leopold ran with the job, organizing game-protection groups in New Mexico, giving talks, writing for the Forest Service its first
Game and Fish Handbook
.