Road to California: The Search for a Southern Overland Route, 1540-1848

ROAD TO CALIFORNIA

The Search for a Southern

Overland Route, 1540-1848

by

Harlan Hague

Copyright 1978, 2001, 2011, by Harlan Hague

Originally published by Arthur H. Clark, 1978

American Trails Series, Vol. XI

Paperback by Authors Choice Press, 2001

Smashwords Edition 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4580-8848-2

Graycatbird Books

California

graycatbird@softadventure.net

This ebook is licensed for your enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other persons. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com or other seller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of the author.

Credit for cover: Navajos, a colored lithograph by H.B. Mollhausen, from Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives, Report Upon the Colorado River of the West, Washington, 1861. From the author’s collection. Cover design by Donna Yee.

To Carol

Contents

Preface

I. An Ancient Land

II. Spanish Expeditions

III. Peak and Decline of the Spanish Northern Frontier

IV. Mexico's Frontier Provinces

V. The First American Invasion

VI. Conquistadors from the North

VII. For God and Country

VIII. End and Beginning

Footnotes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Oñate's March by Charles Russell

Mission Church of San Xavier Del Bac

William Wolfskil

Village of the Pima Indians

Kit Carson

Philip St. George Cooke

Tucson, Sonora

Maps

Spanish Period, 1536-1821

Mexican Period, 1821-1846

American Period, 1846-1848

Preface

Among the most exciting stories about western America are the histories of trails and the journals of trailmakers. Particularly absorbing are the narratives of the earliest expeditions to Oregon and California, the stuff of adventure and empire and the great American obsession with being first. Yet, nowhere in all this literature is the complete story told of the first overland route to the Pacific Ocean coast of what is now the United States. The first non-Indian to reach the coast by a land route was neither English nor American; he was Spanish. The year was 1774. The trail ran not beside the Platte River through the central plains, but along the Gila River through the southwestern deserts. There were many variations of the latter trail, the last not established until 1848. It is that story, the beginnings of the southern overland route to California, that this book tells.

Unlike northern trails, the southern route was never a single, well-defined path connecting two points. Anza's route originated in Sonora. The Old Spanish Trail crossed southern Colorado, Utah and Nevada. The trappers' trail that ran beside the Gila River from western New Mexico to the Colorado River subsequently was followed by General Kearny's Army of the West. The wagon road pioneered by Lieutenant-Colonel Philip St. George Cooke and the Mormon Battalion dipped southward into present-day Mexico before turning back toward Tucson and the Gila. Though Cooke's road eventually became the most-heavily traveled route through the Southwest, thereby symbolizing an end in the search for a trail to California, it was never used to the complete exclusion of alternative paths.

Certainly, there was no Gila Trail, as the term is commonly used in western literature. The title is misleading. It has fostered the myth that the southern route to California was a solitary trail, running along the Gila River.¹ (See footnotes at the end.) The route of the Army of the West might qualify as a Gila Trail, but Kearny's route never became popular. Cooke's road followed the river only a fraction of that trail's length. Anza's routes touched the Gila even less often. The Old Spanish Trail touched it not at all. Argonauts of 1849 and the 1850s who traveled the variations of the southern route did not call them the Gila Trail, so far as we know. Some spoke of Cook's route, Major Graham's trail, Cook's trail, Cook's road, Colonel Cooke's trail, and also Cook's wagon route. Others gave no particular name to the paths they followed. The term, Gila Trail, has become popular only in recent years when some historians appeared to need a solid title for the southern route. The selection of Gila Trail to fill that need was unfortunate.

Until now, the story of the southern route has been scattered in bits and pieces throughout the literature of the period. The closest attempt thus far to treat the southern route as an integrated topic is Jack D. Forbes's The Development of the Yuma Route before 1846.² Due to its brevity and limited scope, however, the article falls short of a complete analysis of the southern route. As the title indicates, Dr. Forbes confined his study to the trails that converged and crossed the Colorado River at Yuma, thereby excluding the attempts to open a direct connection between New Mexico and California, a trail which would have crossed the river north of Yuma. Yet, the stories of Escalante, Armijo, Wolfskill and the northern travels of Garcés are essential to an understanding of the history of the southern route. Ending his study at 1846, furthermore, Dr. Forbes did not include the marches of Kearny's Army of the West, Cooke's Mormon Battalion or Graham's command. But the story of the development of the southern route is not complete without these three marches.

Attempting to fill an empty space in western literature, this book then is concerned with the search for and use of the southern overland route to California from the earliest Spanish penetration into the present United States Southwest to 1849, just before the country was inundated, comparatively speaking, by California-bound argonauts.

Specifically, it is perhaps easier to state what the study is not than to say what it is. It is not a history of the Spanish Borderlands, though there is much history of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico here.³ Neither is the Santa Fé Trail given thorough treatment, though the fabled road constituted a vital link in the trail between the United States and California.⁴ Instead, the story is confined largely to the development of the trails in the present states of New Mexico and Arizona and to a lesser extent in California and northern Mexico.

The study often notes, but does not dwell on, hardship, though travelers suffered extreme hardships. Every diarist tells of thirst, hunger, rough country, heat, discomfort, fatigue and the unending search for water and grass. But once stated, it can be assumed that all travelers experienced the same hardships, and a repetition in the narrative is unnecessary, indeed tedious, unless repeating adds somehow to the story. On the other hand, a lack of suffering, being the exception, is worthy of mention.

The story of the southern route is high drama. It is filled with examples of courage, endurance, fulfillment and not a little tragedy and failure. It is a story about people. This book constitutes both an attempt to make a coherent whole of the experiences of those generations of path-followers and bystanders and an introduction to a fascinating era.

The debts accumulated in the preparation of the book run back too far and too long to detail here. I must nevertheless express my gratitude specifically to Russell R. Elliott for his scholarship, R. Coke Wood for his inspiration, and, for so many kindnesses, the good people of Chastleton in England's north Cotswold Hills where the first draft of the manuscript was written. For generous assistance, I wish to thank the personnel at the Pacific Center for Western Studies at University of The Pacific, the Bancroft Library, the Huntington Library, the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. Special thanks go to Robert A. Clark of The Arthur H. Clark Company who was determined to produce a high quality book in spite of the author's impatience.

Harlan Hague

California

Back to Contents

Chapter I: An Ancient Land

The Southwest was the first known region of what is now the United States, and the southwestern trails certainly were older than the other western trails, at least from the viewpoint of use by white people.¹ It would be meaningless to say that the trails to California that ran through northern Mexico and the southwestern part of the present United States were unique. Most phenomena are unique in some way or another. Perhaps it would be safer to say simply that the southwestern trails were different from the other trails to the far reaches of the American West. The climate and terrain of the arid Southwest² presented hardships to a degree not experienced by most travelers of the northern trails. On the other hand, while Indians along northern trails were largely hostile or indifferent to white travelers, Indians of the Southwest, with some notable exceptions, welcomed whites.

The land was and is one of contrasts. The elevation ranges from sea level at the mouth of the Colorado River and nearby deserts to highlands in the north of 8,000 feet, with many peaks in the central and northern parts of the region rising above 10,000 feet. The face of the land varies from the arid and semi-arid country that dominates the landscape to forested mountains in the north. The climate runs the gamut from blistering desert sun to the chilling snows of the high mountains.

Though the contrasts are quite visible, aridity is the dominant characteristic.³ It is in this land of little rain that the story of the search for a southern route to California largely takes place. The average annual precipitation of the southwestern region is around twelve inches, with six to eight inches in the deserts. Yuma receives less than five inches. Throughout most of the area, there is too little rain to support the growing of crops without irrigation, but usually enough to support grazing. The threat of drought, however, is ever-present, and more than once cattle and sheep have suffered when the rains have failed to come. At other times, the scanty annual rainfall has come all at once, causing the often-destructive flash floods common to the region. In spite of the extremes, precipitation over the years has been sufficient to prevent the land from becoming a sterile desert of shifting sands, but not so much that its predominantly tropical nature has been altered.

Life in the arid country has shown an amazing capability for adaptation. Plant life has come to terms with the desert by becoming drought-resistant and water-storing or by developing a cycle of life keyed to the infrequent, short rains. As if jolted to life by the moisture, desert plants experience a rapid growth, mature quickly, produce seeds, then die. Also adapting to the peculiar demands of the land and climate of the Southwest were the various animal species, not the least of which was man himself.

Man is known to have inhabited the American Southwest for 15,000 years and perhaps 20,000 years. These nomadic ice-age hunters eventually gave way to settled communities that set the pattern for aboriginal life in the region. The introduction of corn probably made the difference.⁴ By the first century A.D., it was being grown in southeastern Arizona by the already long-established Cochise people and a short time later by the Anasazi, or Basketmakers, in the four- corners country where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet.

The Hohokam, descendants of the Cochise people, were farmers in the area of the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers. A peace-loving, democratic society, the Hohokam practiced extensive irrigation. By 700 A.D., their water works included hundreds of miles of intricate canal systems. Some of the waterways were as wide as twenty-five feet and as deep as fifteen feet. A single complex paralleling the Salt River contained 150 miles of canals. The accomplishments of these contemporaries of Mayas were not limited to agriculture. The Hohokam, for example, developed an etching process around the year 1000 A.D., hundreds of years before chemical etching was first known in Europe.

Descended from the Hohokam are the Papagos who live in the deserts of southern Arizona and the Pimas who live farther north, notably along the Gila River where generations of Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans found them. The word, Hohokam, in fact, is a Pima word meaning Those who have gone. Also probably descended from the Hohokam are the Yumas and related tribes who live principally on the Colorado River.

The culture of the previously-mentioned Anasazi was marked by skills in basket making and architecture. They built huge multi-storied pueblos of stone in villages of several thousand inhabitants. The largest of these great structures, Pueblo Bonito in northwestern New Mexico's Chaco Canyon, was five stories high and had over 800 rooms. It could have housed well over 1000 people. Pueblo Bonito was the largest multiple-family dwelling in the United States until 1882 when a larger one was built in New York City. The Indians completed their apartment building about 900 years earlier.

The Anasazi, or Pueblos as they might more properly be called by the thirteenth century, gradually moved southward from their homes in the four corners country. Doubtless, they were driven by years of drought, but perhaps also by incursions from the north by marauding Apaches and Navajos. One Pueblo group migrated southwestward to live peacefully among the Hohokam, later to drift eastward. Other groups settled in the northeastern corner of Arizona and in the Rio Grande country in northern New Mexico.

Navajos and Apaches also found lives in the Southwest. Though the Navajos did not give up their pillaging completely, they gradually assumed a more settled existence with herds of cattle and sheep. The Apaches, originally hunters, turned parasitic, living on the spoils of their raids against the Pueblos.

It was the descendants of these same Pueblos whom Spaniards would visit later at Zuñi, Santa Fé and Oraibe. And it was these same Apaches and Navajos, who came first to the Southwest as invaders, that would provide the strongest resistance to the successive waves of white-skinned conquistadores.⁵

White people, even the earliest Spaniards, opened few new trails as they moved into and through the Southwest. There is ample evidence to show that trails in the region were extensive and well-traveled long before the appearance of Europeans. There seems to have been a regular trade among Indians of the interior, even as far east as New Mexico and beyond, and California coastal tribes. Probably the most sought-after commodity by the inland tribes was sea shells from the Pacific coast and Gulf of California. The desire for the treasured shells, indeed, appears to have been the prime factor in the development of the intertribal trade. Shells have been found at archaeological sites throughout the region, as far removed from the coast as Utah and New Mexico. Pacific coastal and mountain Indians contributed other products to the commerce: steatite, asphaltum, acorns and deerskins. From the interior of Mexico came live macaw birds and from southern Arizona, pottery. Indians of New Mexico offered blankets, a trade good that was still valued by Californians as late as the second quarter of the nineteenth century.⁶ Spaniards who later ventured into this unknown land benefited immeasurably from the knowledge of these native merchants who were hired to guide the explorers over the well-known trade routes.

The earliest explorations northward from settlements in New Spain were motivated by a search for a water route through the American land mass and a continuing thirst for riches. Columbus's failure to find a water passage and the subsequent failure to locate the link in the region of New Spain did not diminish the expectation of finding it. Indeed, the existence of the rumored Strait of Anian gradually became generally accepted as fact rather than speculation. As interest in the north grew, all sorts of rumors about that mysterious country were rife in the Spanish settlements. When one begins to appreciate the Spaniards' total ignorance of the geography of the north, coupled with the hope of discovering rich cities and the fabled strait, it becomes easier to understand how explorers could believe the fantastic tales they heard of that country.⁷

Chief among the rumor-mongers was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. The only known survivors of Pánfilo de Narvaez's disastrous expedition to Florida in 1528, Nuñez and his three companions arrived in Culiacan in 1536 after wandering for eight years along the Caribbean coast and in northern Mexico. Whether their route led them into present New Mexico and Arizona is still a matter of debate. Some observers place their wanderings south of today's international boundary; others credit the castaways with being the first non-Indians to see the United States Southwest.⁸ Nuñez's own account of the Spaniards' ordeal throws little light on the route they followed. His narrative is at best puzzling, and at worst virtually incoherent.⁹

One interesting, indisputable fact emerges from this otherwise confusing journal. Nuñez and his party did not wander aimlessly in a wilderness. Nuñez was no pathfinder. The trails were already there. In his narrative, Nuñez directly mentions trails or roads seventeen times and implies travel over a defined path in many other passages. The little party probably had Indian guides and escorts throughout. Furthermore, the trails must have been well known to the Indians. Only once in his narrative does Nuñez mention that water was carried along. And he adds that their Indian companions on that occasion objected strenuously to taking that particular trail. This could only mean that potable water was found daily on all other occasions.¹⁰ In the dry season, only certain trails would satisfy this requirement; therefore, the Indians must have known enough trails to discriminate among those that had water and those that did not.

The significance of the castaways' wanderings lies not in their route, but in their stories of rich cities and unknown lands beyond the northern frontier. Nuñez and his companions volunteered that they had never actually seen the cities, but had received all their information secondhand from Indians. That fine point was of no importance to the eager conquistadores who had been looking in all directions for new sources of treasure and adventure since the subjugation of the Aztec empire.

Among those who were intrigued by Nuñez's tales was Don Antonio de Mendoza, the viceroy of New Spain. The enthusiastic Mendoza shortly sent out a small expedition to confirm the stories. The party was led by Fray Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan who had served God and King with Pizarro in Peru and in Nicaragua before coming to Mexico. Marcos was accompanied by the black slave, Estevanico, who had been with Nuñez during his wanderings. Traveling northward in the spring of 1539, Marcos and his companions found the Indians friendly and eager to tell the strangers about far-off peoples who lived in magnificent cities. Estevanico was sent ahead to scout the way and apparently was welcomed everywhere he went. Word eventually reached Marcos, however, that the black man had been killed upon reaching the fabulous, rich city of Cibola. Fearing to enter the town lest he not survive to tell what he had seen, the padre viewed Cibola from a distant hilltop. Satisfying himself from this vantage point that everything he had heard about the richness of the land was true, Marcos formally took possession of the country, which he named El Nueva Reyno de San Francisco, and departed. Thus Marcos described his journey.

Controversy continues to swirl about the pretensions of Fray Marcos, as it did during his own time. The debate centers not so much on his route as on the northernmost extent of his penetration and whether he really saw what he said he saw. As in Nuñez's case, the controversy eventually comes around to the question of whether Fray Marcos and Estevanico should be credited with the discovery¹¹ of New Mexico and Arizona, a question which has been amply argued elsewhere.¹² The evidence indicates that Marcos believed the wonderful tales Indians told him and that he had verified them to his satisfaction from his hilltop viewpoint. If this were not so, he would not have been so imprudent to accompany the subsequent Coronado expedition as its guide, thereby risking the wrath of a whole army. Patently, he expected Coronado to confirm his reports.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Viceroy Mendoza was satisfied and directed the governor of Nueva Galicia, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, to prepare a major expedition to exploit Marcos’s findings. Believing Cibola to be near the sea, the viceroy fitted out a fleet to co-operate with the land force, with orders to touch the gulf coast as often as possible to provision the army.¹³ Commanded by Hernando de Alarcón, the fleet eventually did reach the mouth of the Colorado River, which Alarcón named the Buena Guia.

Boats sent up the Colorado in late summer 1539 might have reached the confluence with the Gila, though this has not been confirmed. Hearing no word of the army's advance, the commander left letters at the head of the gulf and de-parted. The letters actually were found later by a party sent out by Coronado.¹⁴ Alarcón's ships never did make direct contact with the land column, therefore figure no more in the story of Coronado's expedition.

Meanwhile, the land expedition got underway. A scouting party of fifteen men under Melchoir Diaz and Juan de Zaldívar late in 1539 probably reached the valley of the Gila River before turning back. Coronado himself set out in April 1540 with a small advance force of seventy-five horsemen, twenty-five foot soldiers and some Indians.¹⁵ The ponderous main body of approximately 300 Spaniards and 1,300 Indian allies was ordered to follow at a more leisurely pace.¹⁶

The advance force, guided by Fray Marcos, soon learned the truth of Cibola. Exhausted and near starvation by the time they reached the Gila River, the Spaniards turned eastward and found Cibola, probably the village called Hawikuh, located a few miles southwest of the present-day Zuñi pueblo. Within a few days, the soldiers subdued Cibola and other nearby pueblos.

Surveying the heralded Seven Cities, of which they were now the masters, the Spaniards were stunned. There were no riches to be seen. They found instead a collection of small villages inhabited by poor farmers. The disappointed soldiers fell on Fray Marcos whom they felt was responsible for all their suffering. The disgraced padre soon left the expedition and returned to Mexico.

From Cibola, Coronado dispatched exploring parties to try to locate the rich cities that he still believed existed somewhere in the vicinity of the pueblos. Don Pedro de Tovar was sent to the Hopi villages in northeastern Arizona. Soon after, Lopez de Cárdenas was ordered westward to locate a great river that the Hopis had described to Tovar. Cardenas and his twelve companions became the first Europeans to see the awesome Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Neither Tovar nor Cárdenas found any treasure, but their journeys can be seen as unconscious probes in the later search for a trail from New Mexico to California.

Coronado sent another party eastward under Hernando de Alvarado to investigate the tales he had heard about a region called Cicuye. En route, the Spaniards visited the mesa-top pueblo of Acoma, which Alvarado called one of the strongest pueblos he had ever seen. Arriving at the Rio Grande, the Spanish found a broad valley dotted with towns. The inhabitants were friendly, and Alvarado sent word back to Coronado at Cibola, recommending the valley, called Tiguex, as the site for their winter quarters. The region was pleasant indeed and eventually would become the center of Spanish settlement in New Mexico.

Completing his journey to Cicuye, probably located in northeastern New Mexico at the edge of the plains, Alvarado saw great herds of buffalo. He was more intrigued with the stories told him about an even more distant country called Quivira where there were rich cities and great stores of gold and silver. With this promising report, Alvarado's party returned to Tiguex where Coronado, following Alvarado's suggestion, had set up winter quarters for the expedition.

The Spaniards spent two unhappy, unproductive winters in Tiguex. The Indians at first welcomed the strangers to their villages, but the soldiers soon became overbearing. The Spaniards made unreasonable demands of their hosts, requisitioning lodgings, blankets, food and clothing that the poor Indians could not spare. The exasperated natives finally rebelled, for which they were brutally chastised by the soldiers. From that time, the Indians became virtual captives in their own towns and the pattern of encroachment on the rights and lands of Indians by Europeans began to take shape in New Mexico.

The Spaniards were no more successful in their search for treasure. A full-scale expedition to Quivira found only the populous, but poor, province of the Wichita Indians, probably in present-day Kansas. The whole story, in fact, had been a hoax. On behalf of the people of Cicuye, the expedition's guide, an Indian the soldiers called the Turk, was to have led the Spaniards astray on the plains where they would exhaust themselves and their supplies and thus fall easy prey to the pueblo Indians on their return. The Turk was promptly put to death, and the disillusioned army turned back.

In the spring of 1542, all the tales of riches having proven false, Coronado terminated the expedition and the army departed Tiguex for New Spain. At the Gila River, the Spaniards met reinforcements and a supply train. This prompted a number of gentlemen adventurers to petition the commander for a return to the northern explorations, but the great body of the army would listen to no suggestions for arresting their speedy journey to the south. By this time, Coronado had almost lost control of the force and would have been powerless to reverse the retreat even if he had wished to do so. Reaching Culiacan in June 1542, the once proud army melted away gradually until the remnants, about 100 men, arrived in Mexico with Coronado in midsummer.¹⁷

It is understandable that fame did not come immediately to Coronado. The expedition had set out in search of treasure; it found none. Therefore, it was a disappointment, and the general was severely criticized for his conduct of the enterprise. Viceroy Mendoza remained his friend, however, and never failed to defend him.¹⁸ The immediate result of the expedition was that it laid to rest, for a time at least, the widely-held belief and hope that there were riches to be found in the northern lands. The expedition gained instead valuable knowledge of the geography and inhabitants of the country, treasure that was put to no use.

For the next half century, Spanish penetration into the upper frontier regions was sporadic and, with the exception of the expedition led by Don Antonio Espejo, of little consequence in the development of trails to California. A small party of friars and soldiers under Fray Augustin Rodriguez and Sanchez Chamuscado probably reached the pueblos of Tiguex in 1581 in a search for a reported superior Indian civilization. Soon after the soldiers left the padres to return to New Spain, rumors circulated in the settlements that they had been killed.¹⁹

To investigate the fate of their brothers, Franciscan authorities dispatched an expedition of about fourteen soldiers and some Indian servants under the leadership of Padre Bernardino Beltran and Espejo, an adventurous, rich citizen who had offered to finance the undertaking and to serve as the military leader.²⁰

Reaching Tiguex in the fall of 1582, the nature of the expedition soon changed. During the course of explorations and visits to pueblos, Espejo learned that the padres indeed had been killed. He also was told about Coronado's visits and, in fact, found at Zuñi three Christian Indians who had accompanied the Coronado expedition and had remained when the army departed. The Indians told Espejo about a great lake to the west whose bank was well-populated by people who had great amounts of gold. Though Father Beltran objected that their mission was not to seek treasure, Espejo with nine soldiers, the Christian Indians and 150 local Indians set out to locate the great lake. The padres remained, determined to return to Nueva Vizcaya.²¹

Espejo's party met with mixed success. Led eventually by Hopi guides, through whose land the early-day argonauts passed, the Spaniards actually found mines in the mountainous region north of present Prescott, Arizona. Here they also heard of a great river to the west, undoubtedly the Colorado, but they did not visit it. Espejo returned to Zuñi just before Father Beltran and his companions set out for the south. Espejo stayed to explore further in northern New Mexico.

As the explorations progressed, the Indians' resistance, or the Spaniards' brutality, or both, hardened. The Indians increasingly refused the Spaniards' demands for food. The soldiers responded by punishing the Indians. Homes and maize fields were burned, but the Indians remained uncowed. On one occasion, angry Indians attacked the Spaniards so vigorously that a member of the expedition begged God to preserve us for His holy service and keep us under His protection, for we are really in distress.

The Spaniards decided that they would have to set an example. The next time they were refused food, they shot and garroted sixteen Indians and burned alive others who had hidden themselves in a building.²² When hostility continued to grow, Espejo returned to Mexico in late summer, 1583.

Interest in the conquest and settlement of the northern frontier country increased. The reports of Espejo and Father Beltran encouraged those who saw great prospects for mineral wealth and colonizing ventures there. The mysterious and rich settlements to be found on the great lake and river in the west had to be investigated. The expectations of locating Quivira and