Escalante's Dream by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

ESCALANTE DOES NOT say whether the team thought the San Buenaventura was the fabled Tizón. But it was the biggest river they had crossed on the whole journey, bigger even than the Rio Grande, by which yardstick they measured all the waterways they discovered. The men spent two days on the banks of the Green, resting their horses. They managed to kill another bison, a small one, from which “we enjoyed little meat.” Yet there was a sense within the party that something monumental had been accomplished. On the very edge of the river there were “six big black poplars [cottonwoods] which had grown in pairs,” as well as another standing alone. On that solitary tree Joaquín Lain used his adze to cut a rectangular “window” in the bark, then wielded a chisel to carve “Year of 1776,” his last name, and two Christian crosses. It was a conscious imitation of the inscription Rivera had carved in the big cottonwood on the banks of the Gunnison in 1765, which D & E had searched for in vain.

Herbert E. Bolton, retracing the expedition route in 1950, believed he had found the same grove. “The six giant cottonwoods still stand at the site described by Escalante,” he wrote in Pageant in the Wilderness, “but the inscription, perhaps covered by the growth of a century and three-quarters, is not visible.” The historian’s claim was one more example of partisans of D & E needing to be more certain than they had any right to be that they had found traces of the long-ago journey. Later a team of botanists from the University of Utah cored the cottonwoods and found that none of them was more than seventy-five years old.

Celebratory those days on the banks of the Green may have been. Escalante envisioned a future settlement here, complete with irrigation ditches to water the fields. But as soon as the team moved on, a mood of paranoia and mistrust took hold. On the far side of a dry arroyo, the Spaniards discovered the tracks of “about twelve horses and some people on foot.” They could of course have been left by any party venturing near the crossing of the Green, for all kinds of purposes, but D & E studied the markings closely and concluded that “they”—the authors of the prints—“had been lying in wait or spying for some time on the ridge’s highest part, without letting go of the horses. We suspected that they might be some Sabuaganas who could have followed us to deprive us of the animal herd at this place, where we would likely attribute the deed to the Comanches instead of the Yutas, since we were no longer in the latter’s country but the former’s.”

Where was the padres’ serene faith in God to protect them from all enemies? In its absence, the miasma of suspicion wrapped itself around Silvestre. The Spaniards recalled that the night before, the guide had “casually and without being noticed” slipped out of camp to sleep alone.

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