The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  He told Fray Marcos that Esteban had approached within a day’s travel of Cíbola. Just outside the city, Esteban had sent a messenger carrying his healer’s rattle, adorned with feathers and bells, into the city to announce his arrival. This was always his practice when reaching an unfamiliar settlement. Taking the rattle, the chief of the city grew enraged, threw it to the ground, and told the messengers to leave. He said the rattle wasn’t of their own style. The chief said he knew these people and would kill them8 if they entered the city. But the charming Esteban, outside the city and hearing this account from his returning messengers, reassured the messengers that those chiefs who initially received him coolly always warmed up on meeting him. He went unabashedly onward to the city entrance with a contingent of more than three hundred Indians who had joined him during his travels.

  The residents blocked his way. They then shut Esteban into a large house outside the city, stripping him of all his trade goods. The next morning, Esteban’s Indian messenger left the house to get a drink9 from the river, and returning toward the city, spotted Esteban and his Indian followers fleeing, pursued by a band of warriors. The Indian messenger had escaped slaughter by hiding near the river.

  So went the messenger’s account to Fray Marcos. The next day, a few other survivors stumbled into Fray Marcos’s camp smeared with blood, pierced by arrow wounds, and wailing over their losses. Once the friar quieted them enough to hear what had happened, he learned that they had survived only because they’d been buried alive beneath the carcasses of their fleeing companions. Esteban had been killed, also.

  “…I confess I was at a loss what to do,” wrote Fray Marcos to his superiors. “I told them that Our Lord would chastise Cíbola and that when the Emperor knew what had happened he would send many Christians to punish its people.”

  This didn’t satisfy the grieving Indians. No one could withstand Cíbola’s power, they said to the friar. Fray Marcos struggled with the situation, justifiably. Alone, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest Spanish outpost, he had become the trigger of hostilities between two formerly peaceable groups of Indians whom—by orders from his superiors—he was supposed to pacify while searching for their gold. He finally walked off a stone’s throw to compose himself, to pray to God, and to try to figure out what to do next.

  When he returned an hour and a half later, the grief of the Indian followers had turned to anger. They were ready to kill Fray Marcos. They blamed him not only for the deaths of their three hundred fathers, sons, and brothers, but were convinced that he would be the cause of their deaths, too.

  At this point, he changed tactics. He gave away all his trade goods to them. He said that they could go ahead and kill him, but it would do him no harm, as he would go to heaven, while those killing him would suffer, as Christians would come looking for Fray Marcos and kill all those who killed him.

  “With this and many other words I pacified them10 somewhat, although there was still high feeling on account of the people killed.”

  Thus Fray Marcos escaped death by vengeance for the three hundred dead. But he still desperately wanted to see Cíbola and also learn any news of Esteban. No one was willing to accompany him, and so Fray Marcos said that he would go himself. Finally two chiefs agreed to go along. Traveling quietly, they neared a settlement on about June 5, 1539. Climbing a hill, they spied the city, which sat on a neighboring hill protruding from a plain. Fray Marcos wrote:

  …it looks very pretty; it is the largest city I have seen in these parts. Having climbed onto a rise from whence I could observe it, I saw that the houses were built as the Indians had told me: all of stone, with several floors, and surmounted by terraces. This city is more extensive than that of [Mexico City]…Having told the chiefs who accompanied me that I found this city very beautiful, they assured me that it was the smallest of the seven cities…

  The chiefs told him that the city of Tontonteac was far larger—“there is no end to it.” And so, Fray Marcos, calling the land “the new kingdom of St. Francis,” built a large cairn of stones with the help of the Indians, and stuck onto it a small cross, not having enough wood handy on this barren hillside to fashion a larger one. In the name of Viceroy Mendoza of New Spain and the emperor of Spain himself, King Charles, Fray Marcos claimed from this hillside all seven cities as well as the kingdoms of Tontonteac, Acus, and Marata, admitting, however, “I did not go into them, in order that I might return to give an account of what I had done and seen.”

  On his return, the word of his discoveries spread wildly among the Spanish inhabitants of Mexico City. Viceroy Mendoza declared that he would send a major military expedition to Cíbola and its Seven Cities, which matched the old legend perfectly and convinced the Spanish that here shimmered the next great gold bonanza of the New World. Pleading with King Charles to be leader of the Seven Cities expedition were both Cortés, conqueror of the Aztecs, and Hernando de Soto, future explorer of the Mississippi. But instead of these two illustrious explorers and would-be conquistadors, Viceroy Mendoza chose his friend to head it, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.

  Wrote one inhabitant of Mexico City of that time:

  The [city] was so stirred by the news11 which the friar had brought from the Seven Cities that nothing else was thought about. Everybody wanted to go so much that they traded for the licenses which permitted them to go as soldiers, and people sold these as a favor, and whoever obtained one thought it was as good as a title of nobility at least.

  Barely nine months after Fray Marcos had first stood on that barren hillside and surveyed the city of Cíbola, fashioning his little wooden cross and reciting his words to the air, a full-scale military expedition under Coronado headed north to seize the riches of the Seven Cities of Gold. Fray Marcos’s hillside, and the Indian pueblo he saw in the distance that seemingly confirmed the rumors of the Cities of Gold, lay just on the northern edge of a great blank spot—blank then, too—now known as the Gila Forest and Wilderness. Just on the southern edge of the wilderness lies Silver City and its copper deposits, which may be the same metal deposits that triggered Cabeza de Vaca’s rumors of gold in the late 1530s that started the madness.

  WE FOLLOWED HIGHWAY 15 north out of Silver City—significantly not named “Gold City”—as it rolled gently upward toward that blank spot. We drove past tasteful, adobe second-home haciendas scattered on the tawny juniper hillsides just out of town, then climbed through the weathered old hamlet of Pinos Altos, as the road started its serious climb into the pine-covered mountains—twisting upward through dozens and dozens of switchbacks, downward through dozens and dozens more, and then upward again. There were no houses now. A single power line skipped through the forest from switchback to switchback. The state highway dwindled to a single lane of corkscrewing asphalt. A sign warned, “No Center Line Next 18 Miles.”

  “It’s only forty-two miles,” someone in Silver City had cautioned me about the road north from Silver City to the cliff dwellings and our departure point, “but expect it to take a long time.”

  We played road bingo with Molly and Skyler. The items we each had to spot were a bird, a green sign, a yellow flower, a dead tree. No one even bothered to suggest anything typically domestic, like “mailbox” or “flagpole” or “lawn ornament” or—laughably—“stoplight,” because the chances of seeing one here were nil. Dead trees, however, were easy. Birds, surprisingly, were not.

  The road crested a tall ridgetop and we stepped out of the car at a turnout and looked around. The westering sun backlit one of those landscapes that shone so enormously and silently and lucidly that it reminded me of a museum diorama of, say, the Mesozoic Era. There was a dead, windless silence except for the occasional primordial caw of a crow and the crunch of gravel under our shoes. From our feet the mountainside fell away into a deep chasm of luminous bluish air, then, maybe five miles off, the bottom crumpled up into still more layered, bluish ranges of mountains whose faces were split and contorted by canyons, cliffs, and escarpments of naked, t
annish rock, and beyond them rose still more bluish ranges. Creatures from a different era existed out there…spirits from a different time.

  WE ALL WOKE AT FOUR A.M., shivering. Molly and Skyler were sleeping in cocoon bags in our small winter-weight tent, and Amy and I in our summer-weight one, pitched side by side beneath piñon pines in a deserted campground at road’s end. We heard their rustlings.

  “Mom, I’m cold,” said soft voices muffled still softer by layers of pile clothing, sleeping bag hoods, and tent fabric.

  When Amy switched on her headlamp, the LED beams glistened like hundreds of tiny stars on the ice crystals that coated the ceiling of our tent. Outside, the night was a deep black. Icy, intense stars of the heavens glistened through the pine boughs. In these high, dry mountains in late October, the daily temperature swung enormously: from up around 70 degrees during the sunny, blue day, to far below freezing at night.

  Amy unzipped their tent, wrapped the children in more clothes, and stuffed them deeper into their sleeping bags. She and I both added layers. Then we nestled in our own bags, pressed back to back, our warmth radiating to each other.

  We didn’t stir until the sun hit the tents, warming them. Climbing out, we discovered the water in our water bottles and in the pots on the campsite’s picnic table had frozen solid. As we chipped ice out of the breakfast pots, the palm trees at the Mesa airport two days before seemed very far away.

  It took us most of the day to get our act together to step beyond this point: a leisurely breakfast; reading in the warm sun; a quick walk up the hill behind camp to survey this cozy river valley where we’d camped—the West Fork of the Gila; drive a mile back down the road to the Gila Visitor Center to buy more maps, a wildlife guide, and to leave word of our route, so they’d know where to look in case we didn’t return.

  As I was going over maps at the Visitor Center’s counter, one of the clerk ladies, an indoor-looking type, glanced skeptically over at Skyler and Molly as they checked out the racks of gifts and guidebooks.

  “Do you know it was nineteen degrees last night?” she said to me.

  “Yes…we were camping.”

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?” she asked.

  “Well, we went backpacking last summer for one night in Montana,” I said, then added, “These children are both soccer players. Skyler just ran a ten-K race. They’re in very good shape. I know they can do this hike physically. Whether they’ll want to do it mentally is another question.”

  This seemed to satisfy her, now that I’d framed our well-being as a matter of parental discipline.

  Think of the map as a box within a box within a box. The innermost box, almost like a miniature national park, is the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. Located up a side canyon of this innermost box are the cliff dwellings themselves. This national monument box is surrounded by another box, the 760,000-acre Gila Wilderness Area and Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area—named after their founder—which are themselves set within the sprawling, 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest, a tract that measures roughly seventy by seventy miles, and even larger than that if you include adjoining national forests.

  Our plan was to start hiking at the innermost box—the national monument—leaving from a trailhead near our campground. We’d loop out into the Gila Wilderness Area for several days, trekking through its river canyons and exploring its hot springs. We’d then return by a different route so that we ended up not far from where we started. At the very end of the hike, on the last day, we’d go up the side canyon and explore the Cliff Dwellings themselves.

  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.

  WITHIN 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.

  IN 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 family13 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.