The Trails of Juan de Oñate and Francisco Garcés

Arizona's Earliest Highways III Oñate and Garcés

In 1983, when Jerry Jacka and I first traveled into Arizona's outback in search of trails traversed by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his captains, landscape evidence verified insights we had gleaned from the conquistadores' reports that they had followed trade routes established long before by Indian runners. This conviction was reinforced in subsequent years as we completed our investigation of the pathways trod by the Spaniards who came later to explore the "Tierra Incógnita" of the greater Southwest.As our study of Arizona's geography widened, we became increasingly aware of the explorers' various and innovative approaches: for the entradas of Fray Marcos de Niza, Coronado, and Father Eusebio Kino penetrated the state from the south; the expeditions of Antonio de Espejo and Juan de Oñate entered this region from the east; the long ride of Francisco Garcés from the Colorado River to the Hopi pueblos originated from the west; and the exploring party led by Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante in 1776 made a northern passage into Arizona at the end of a wideranging excursion from Santa Fe that marked the first entry of Europeans into the Great Basin.

With this report, we complete our survey of Arizona's first "highways" by retracing the trails followed by Governor Oñate in 1604 and by Father Garcés in 1776.

Juan de Oñate was a stellar figure in the history of North America. Don Juan, a founder of the silver city of San Luis Potosi in 1593, contracted a marriage that linked him with the earliest days of Mexico's history: his wife's mother was Doña Leonor Cortés Montezuma, daughter of the great conqueror Hernan Cortés and the Aztec princess Isabel Montezuma. But the younger Oñate's bid for lasting fame rests on his leadership in establishing the first permanent nonmilitary European community in what is now the United States.

Historians have withheld from Juan de Oñate the recognition he deserves as the earliest "founding father" of our country. In the summer of 1598-nine years before the first English settlement in Virginia and 22 years before the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock-Don Juan followed what was probably an existing Indian trail to the Río Grande from the south and guided a company of settlers he had organized and financed to a homeland in northern New Mexico. The Oñate party included 10 Franciscan friars; 270 other single men; 129 families; 83 wagons and carts loaded with seeds, tools, and household goods; and 7,000 head of livestock. Unlike the settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts who established coastal colonies that had regular commerce with Europe, Oñate's pioneers made an overland journey ofnearly a thousand miles into a beautiful Shangri-la valley in the heartland of a vast continent before putting down roots in what is now United States soil.

Despite the remoteness of this tiny settlement, however, the entire land mass of the Southwest was accorded status as a new kingdom by the Spanish monarch. Governor Oñate invoked the name of King Felipe II when he proclaimed the official occupation of the province of Nuevo Mexico on the day his expedition crossed the great River of the North at El Paso.

Juan de Oñate was the first experienced mining man to come into the Southwest, and it is clear that he invested his personal fortune in the colonization of his province of Nuevo Mexico on the assumption that he would be able to locate and develop valuable lodes of silver or gold in the new land. Antonio Espejo had described

promising outcrops of ore to the viceroy's aides in Mexico City after his unauthorized trip into that region in 1583. As a consequence, soon after Oñate established the site of his capital at the confluence of the Chama River and the Río Grande, he sent Capt. Márcos Farfán de los Godos on a winter excursion to Arizona's Verde Valley to search for and evaluate the character of "the mines" located by Espejo. Although Farfán failed to return with the hoped-for silver samples, his report did not dampen Oñate's expectation that he would find precious minerals to replenish his fortune and enrich his king. The next year, he conducted an upriver foray into a region of southern Colorado never before penetrated by Spanish explorers, but no encouraging ore body was located on this journey. Then, in the fall of 1601, the governor led a 60-day sweep that retraced some of Coronado's eastward steps across the "buffalo plains" to the vicinity of today's Wichita, Kansas.

Having scoured vast regions of his domain without finding silver hills like those in Zacatecas, Governor Oñate was still driven by his dream of a bonanza that would redeem the efforts he and his friends had made to make Nuevo Mexico a shining gem of the Spanish crown. Now, with undertones of desperation, he began contemplating a seaport and possible mines in the western sector of his domain As the best hope to justify all of the sacrifices that had been made. One hundred thirty soldiers accompanied Oñate on his final lunge to discover precious minerals in his realm. The caravan began by following paths first taken by Coronado's captains. The riders rode down the Río Grande, then traveled westward to Acoma and present-day Zuni, New Mexico, and northwesterly, perhaps passing just north of the Painted Desert and across Jadito Valley to Awatobi and the other mesa villages of the Hopi Indians in Arizona. Father Escobar, the scribe of Oñate's last odyssey in 1604, has provided us with a vivid description of the Hopis. "Very friendly," he tells us, they lodged the Spaniards in their houses and fed them "joyfully and courteously." The natives of this "poor and cold" land, he noted, wore colored blankets and dressed themselves in buckskin and buffalo hides. In the last century, historians have diverged in their attempts to trace the trail the Oñate party followed to the Verde Valley. One expert even concluded that these travelers approached the area down Sycamore Canyon from the vicinity of

Oñate and Garcés

Williams. After examining the terrain and studying the words written by Oñate's companions, Jerry and I were persuaded by the logic of a thesis developed by Dr. James W. Byrkit of Northern Arizona University that all of the early Spaniards who visited this region used an ancient but “very precise” Indian pathway-designated by Byrkit as the Palatkwapi Trail-to get from the Hopi mesas to the Verde River. (See “The Palatkwapi Trail,” Plateau, Vol. 59, No. 4.) A Hopi tradition, Byrkit says, recites that some Hopi clans once lived in a warm, well-watered area to the south that they referred to as Palatkwapi, the “Place of the Red Rocks.” From the Hopi mesas, the Palatkwapi Trail went due south parallel to present-day State Route 87, past the Hopi buttes, and on to Homolovi pueblo (whose ruins just north of Winslow were designated in 1986 as a state park). At this point, the trail crossed the Little Colorado River at the ford known in the 19th century as Sunset Crossing. Archeological evidence indicates that Homolovi and two other pueblos served as way stations that marked the course of the Palatkwapi Trail. These were Nuvakwewtaqa, whose ruins are visible today at Chavez Pass, and the ruin preserved and interpreted in our day by the National Park Service as Montezuma's Well.

From Winslow this old Hopi trail-first traversed by Espejo in 1583-turns southwest, still aligning with Route 87, through Sunset Pass and on to Chavez Pass. It then turns westward toward Long and Soldier lakes and traverses one of Arizona's beautiful ponderosa pine forests to Pine Springs and Stoneman Lake. From this landmark, signs of an old wagon road in Rattlesnake Canyon support Byrkit's contention that in all likelihood Oñate's party descended that rugged canyon to Dry Beaver Creek and Beaverhead Springs, moved over Beaverhead Flat, crossed Oak Creek near the present community of Cornville, forded the Verde River near Bridgeport, and probably camped at Haskell Springs while investigating the ore outcrops originally staked out by Espejo in the Jerome area.

The supposition that the earliest Spanish explorers used the Palatkwapi Trail is buttressed by maps and other records indicating that this very trail was the road used by many of Arizona's settlers from the East in the 1860s and 1870s after Arizona Territory was split off from the Territory of New Mexico by Congress and President Lincoln in 1863. Territorial records reveal that one of the first American citizens to follow the route was Lt. Col. José Francisco Chaves of the First New Mexico Infantry Volunteers, who was sent to escort Arizona's new governor, John N. Goodwin, from Santa Fe to Fort Whipple, a frontier military post temporarily located 25 miles north of today's Prescott. Colonel Chaves' report indicates that the route he used on his return trip was the Palatkwapi Trail -and this soon appeared on the military maps of that era as the Chaves (or Chavez) Cutoff. (See “El Coronel,” Arizona Highways, January 1990.) Father Escobar relates that from the Jerome area the Spaniards followed the Verde River upstream “to its source.” This suggests that the trail Governor Oñate now pioneered across an unknown stretch of his realm passed by Perkinsville and came into Chino Valley near Paulden before climbing westward to the headwaters of the Santa Maria River. This route also was probably a long-used Indian trail that could have followed a natural course into Williamson Valley and then south of the Santa Maria Mountains in Prescott National Forest. It is likely that Oñate proceeded southwest along the Santa Maria River, then west through what is now Alamo State Park, following the Bill Williams River to its confluence with the Colorado River.

One wonders whether Juan de Oñate paused to study the outcrops he passed through, described by Escobar as “mostly mountains with bare rock.” The indelible irony that has hovered over his quest for centuries since is that he rode by two areas that later offered up rich yields of gold and silver to placer miners who had

Oñate and Garcés.

Oñate's unsuccessful midwinter trek passed through the valley of the Bill Williams River (ABOVE). He then followed the river to its junction with the Colorado. From this point, he continued south to the Gulf of California, before returning home empty-handed to his capital on the Rio Grande.

Primitive equipment. Within a 40-mile arc to the south of Oñate's path in Yavapai County lay, near the surface, silver and gold deposits that sparked a boom in placer mining and helped make Prescott the new territory's first capital.

On their pleasant December ride to the big river in the west, Father Escobar informs us, the Spaniards stayed close to the "bed of the [Bill Williams] river." During their uneventful journey along the plain formed by the Colorado, the Spaniards encountered several large settlements of peaceful Indian farmers, but they were unable to obtain much information about possible mines. There were other disappointments. Where the river entered the Gulf of California, there were no Indians fishing for pearls and no promising site for a seaport.

Governor Oñate was surely downcast on his long midwinter ride back to his capital on the Rio Grande. He had personally inspected more of the Southwest's expanse than any Spaniard before him, but the silver hills that tantalized him eluded his grasp. He did, however, leave a mark on the land that enjoys the distinction of being this nation's oldest non-Indian signature artifact, and the source of the term "Pasó por aquí" ("Here passed by") frequently found in New Mexico literature. East of Zuni on one of the sandstone walls at the dramatic castle rock that is preserved now as El Morro National Monument, Don Juan carved this synopsis of his last exploring expedition: Here passed by the Governor-General Don Juan de Oñate, from the discovery of the South Sea, the 16th of April, 1605.

Father Garcés is so well fitted to get along with the Indians...that he appears to be but an Indian himself.... God has created him, as I see it, solely for the purpose of seeking out these unhappy, ignorant and rustic people.

That distinguishes the Spartan odysseys of Fray Francisco Garcés is that, unlike Spain's other trailblazers in the Southwest, he typically traveled alone on his journeys of discovery. The first assignment of this native of Aragon when he arrived in Sonora in 1768 was to serve at Mission San Xavier del Bac on the Santa Cruz River as the padre of the Pima Indians. Bac, the northernmost of the missions established by Jesuit priests before they were expelled from the New World, would be the starting point of his far-flung excursions into the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. Two personal attributes enabled Father Garcés to carve out a special niche in the history of the American West. He was a magnificent missionary because he was able to win the trust of the Indians he encountered by attuning himself to their modes of thought and action. He was an exceptional explorer because his fearless approach to his work enabled him to disdain the usual escort of soldiers and plunge into undiscovered country armed only with "charity and zeal." It was very fortunate for Spain that Fray Francisco's ministry coincided with the rule of New Spain's last dynamic viceroy, Antonio Maria de Bucareli. In the 1770s, Bucareli began developing a two-pronged plan to strengthen Spain's presence in California in order to thwart Russian and English intrusions into the northern sector of that province. The viceroy's first priority was to ascertain whether there was a passable overland "road" from Sonora to the California coast. If such a pathway could be found, it would allow him to assemble settlers with livestock on the west coast of Mexico. Soldiers would then escort them across the deserts west of Tucson to the Pacific, then northward up California's inland valleys, where they would establish a community and a fort on the south side of San Francisco Bay. Bucareli's second strategy involved the discovery of a trail that would link New Mexico with Father Junipero Serra's new mission at Monterey, California, and enable these two provinces to profit from interchange of commerce. Father Garcés' initial contribution to Western history was the result of a oneman reconnaissance trip he made in 1771 into the region west of present-day Calexico. This bit of adventure convinced Fray Francisco that travelers could cross the wastelands west of Yuma to the California coast. Thus, when Bucareli ordered Sonora's boldest frontier soldier, Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza, to study the feasibility of such an overland route in the winter of 1774, Anza asked Father Garcés to guide his company into this unmapped region. The location of a path across the desert to the green hills of southern California enabled Anza to march forward to "upper California" and prepare a report for the viceroy recommending that Spain establish a military outpost on the south side of San Francisco Bay. This report set the stage for Spain's last great surge of exploration in the West in 1776. The epic year of U.S. history is 1776. As every American knows, that watershed date saw the 13 colonies on the Atlantic coast launch a campaign for political independence that led to the creation of the United States of America. But relatively few Americans realize that, because of Viceroy Bucareli's initiatives, 1776 was also a vintage year for Spanish exploration and settlement in an area that would ultimately

Oñate and Garcés

to be Needles, near Topock (OPPOSITE PAGE), are a prominent landmark for travelers on the Colorado River. In an effort to find a shorter route to the missions of Junipero Serra in California, Father Garcés, in 1776, rode north along the Colorado to this area. On a later trek to seek out a trail from the Colorado River to the Hopi villages, he passed through the Black Mountains (LEFT). From there he had a spectacular view (BELOW) looking over the valley of the Colorado River west into California.

(FOLLOWING PANEL, PAGES 12 AND 13) Supai Village, home of the Havasupai Indians in the Grand Canyon, seems only slightly less remote today, with helicopters and horses to reach it, than when it was visited by Father Garcés in 1776.

To become part of the new nation.

The year 1776 saw Captain Anza lay the foundation for the city of San Francisco by leading a company of 240 settlers on a thousand-mile trek from Culiacán to northern California. That same year, pursuant to an order issued by the viceroy, an expedition led by Father Silvestre Escalante left Santa Fe on a history-making search for an overland route to Monterey. Escalante's party ranged northward almost to Wyoming and mapped so many areas in the intermountain region and the Great Basin that Herbert Bolton, the distinguished authority on the history of the Spanish borderlands, proclaimed that Escalante and his men explored “more unknown territory than Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, or Lewis and Clark.” This was also the year Francisco Garcés brought his work as a discoverer to a climax by locating a “northern trail” that offered a land link, via the Hopi country, to interconnect the missions of northern California with the settlements in Nuevo Mexico.

Father Garcés was the great friend of the Yuma Indians, and when the caravan of the founding families of San Francisco arrived at Tubac in December, 1775, Captain Anza asked him to guide his company down the Santa Cruz and Gila rivers, and help them safely pass through the Indian country along the Colorado River. With this accomplished, the padre undertook missionary work among the tribes along the river. But Garcés, a free spirit who rarely waited for orders from his superiors, apparently soon decided that if he went upriver he could find a shorter route across the desert to the new missions Father Serra was establishing along the California coast.

Accompanied only by his Indian friend Sebastian, Garcés mounted his mule on February 14, 1776, and set out on a lonely seven-month trek. He first rode north along the big river to the area of “The Needles,” where he persuaded two Mojave Indians to join his tiny expedition. The padre then turned westward, discovered the Mojave River, traversed the Mojave Desert, and penetrated the San Bernardino Mountains to the San Gabriel Mission. The next leg of his journey took him north, and by the end of April he had crossed Antelope Valley and the Tehachapi Mountains and had entered the San Joaquin Valley through Tejon Canyon. When his Indian companions were intimidated by reports that natives to the north might kill them, Father Garcés left them at Tejon and traveled alone for two weeks, exploring the southern reaches of the San Joaquin Valley. Garcés' journal substantiates that he was the first European to discover the Kern and White rivers, the first to explore the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the first to survey the resources of Kern and Tulare counties-and that he was the European discoverer of the site of the present city of Bakersfield. Armed with insights about the relationship of the Sierra and the Central Valley to the coastlands on the western horizon-insights that confirmed his hunch that a trail linking Santa Fe and Monterey was feasible-Father Garcés rejoined his Indian companions and took a shortcut route back to his Mojave River path to The Needles. With only a short pause to rest, Francisco Garcés in early June struck out alone into a vast region never seen before by European eyes to seek out a trail from the Colorado River to Oraibi. His first task was to locate a path through the desert spirals and monoliths of the Black Mountains.

Jerry Jacka and I have concluded that the padre and his mule either traveled through Secret Pass Canyon east of Bullhead City or, more likely, wound through Sitgreaves Pass, a route that would later accommodate the Beale Wagon Road in the 1850s and this century's transcontinental automobile road that gained widespread fame as Route 66. Geographical landmarks and Fray Francisco's journal entries offer additional evidence that after the priest reached the vicinity of Kingman, he probably traveled on the same alignment toward Peach Springs that Arizona's highway engineers staked out 150 years later for Route 66. As he followed this path, Garcés would have studied the forested Hualapai Mountains on his right and the gold-rich Cerbat Hills on his left (a range he named "the Swarthy Mountains") before he passed by the Peacock Mountains and onward up Truxton Wash.

Oñate and Garcés

Terrain logic next suggests that Father Garcés and his three Indian companions (Hopis or Hualapais who said they lived in the direction he wanted to go) set a north-easterly course by Fraziers Well that probably paralleled today's Indian Route 18 to the rim of Havasu Canyon-and a panoramic view of the scenic canyon that is the home of the Havasupai Indians. Here, since he had an opportunity to "see yet other peoples and discover new regions," the fray tarried for several days during which, with considerable astonishment, he rode to the rim to view the chasm of the Grand Canyon and perhaps descended into the deep valley to visit the Indians in the village of Supai. From there he doubtless rode in a southeasterly direction on an existing trade trail used by the Hualapais, the Supais, and the Hopis. Avoiding the abyss created by Cataract Creek, this trail angled across the Coconino Plateau toward Red Butte, which is near U.S. Route 180 south of Tusayan. Here, a few miles from the edge of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the European trailblazing of Father Garcés probably ended. It was in this area that one of Coronado's captains, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, had ridden with his men in 1540 when he became the first European to view the splendid gorge cut by a great river into the Colorado Plateau.

If we assume that Father Garcés stayed on this prehistoric trail into Hopi country, it is reasonable to surmise that he rode west to the Cameron area, crossed the Little Colorado River, turned north to Moenkopi Springs, then rode his mule southeast across the Moenkopi Plateau, skirting Coal Mine Canyon, and to old Oraibi. An entry in Fray Francisco's diary reveals he was at Oraibi on the then-meaningless date of July 4, 1776, but the Hopis were inhospitable and ushered him on his way with the admonition, "Get thee gone without delay... back to thy land."

On his return trip, Fray Francisco ministered to his Indian brothers as he retraced his steps to The Needles, to Yuma, and back to his home base at San Xavier del Bac. And he surely wondered whether the new road he had pioneered would, in time, open new fields for harvesting Indian converts and help his country strengthen its California colonies.

The story of Father Garcés has a tragic ending, for he was a Franciscan marked for martyrdom. In 1781, blunders by Spanish officials inflamed the Yuma Indians and provoked a rebellion that led to the killing of Garcés and the other priests in that area. We have an eyewitness account of this massacre that informs us about the last hours in the life of Father Garcés. The report tells us that Fray Francisco's faith in his Indian brothers never wavered, and that just before his death he delivered a rebuke to a fellow Spaniard who wanted to assign blame for the uprising.

ending, for he was a Franciscan marked for martyrdom. In 1781, blunders by Spanish officials inflamed the Yuma Indians and provoked a rebellion that led to the killing of Garcés and the other priests in that area. We have an eyewitness account of this massacre that informs us about the last hours in the life of Father Garcés. The report tells us that Fray Francisco's faith in his Indian brothers never wavered, and that just before his death he delivered a rebuke to a fellow Spaniard who wanted to assign blame for the uprising.

"Let us forget now whose fault it is," the good man said, "and simply consider it God's punishment for our sins." "

Stewart Udall, served as Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969. He is author of The Quiet Crisis, Agenda for Tomorrow, and, with photographer Jerry Jacka, of To the Inland Empire: Coronado and Our Spanish Legacy. Jacka, a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways and expert in contemporary native American art, collaborated with writer Lois Jacka to produce Beyond Tradition: Contemporary Indian Art, and Its Evolution and an accompanying videocassette. Udall and Jacka have written about the Spanish exploration of the Southwest in April 1984, January 1988, and October 1988 issues of Arizona Highways.