The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  “In the end necessity, which is all powerful, made them skillful,14 so that one could see many gentlemen become carriers…”

  And so they headed out of Compostela toward the north, toward that blank spot—a blank spot far larger than any of the armored Spaniards could comprehend, the blank spot that was in actuality the whole interior of North America, and, more specifically, toward the region that held the even blanker spot that’s now the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico.

  The first bad news arrived at Chiametla, a tiny Spanish outpost two hundred miles north up the coast from Compostela. Earlier, Coronado had sent ahead a scouting party of “a dozen good men” under Melchior Diaz to learn more about the Seven Cities. The scouts had traveled nearly a thousand miles north until they came to the edge of a great wilderness where no one lived, “…and there they turned back, not finding anything important.”15 Four hundred years later, it would be left to Aldo Leopold to find the importance of the great empty places like this one that thwarted Coronado’s scouting party.

  Returning south, the scouting party met the cumbersome main expedition—pigs and sheep trailing, the gear falling off—at Chiametla and presented their reports to Captain General Coronado. He and the officers attempted to keep the disappointing news a secret, that there was only wilderness to the north, but word leaked out through the men. Fray Marcos, addressing the grumblings and rumors among the ranks, “cleared away these clouds, promising that what they would see should be good, and that he would place the army in a country where their hands would be filled, and in this way he quieted them so that they appeared well satisfied.”

  Onward they marched, reaching the last Spanish settlement, Culiacán, at Easter, where, in a bit of ceremony provided by the Spanish inhabitants, the army was greeted with a mock battle of resistance and finally allowed to “win” the town, although one of Coronado’s artillerymen lost his hand by giving the order to fire the cannon before he’d drawn out the ramrod. Here at Culiacán the gentlemen soldiers gave away their finery to anyone who asked for it, weary of the hassle of packing it on their horses. From Culiacán, Coronado himself marched ahead from the main army, moving quickly and lightly northward, with fifty horsemen, the Franciscan friars, and hundreds of Indian allies. After traversing modern-day northern Mexico, populated by Indian villages, they crossed the Gila River and spent fifteen days trekking over the great stretch of desert and mountain wilderness in that region east of today’s Phoenix, still largely empty of people nearly five hundred years later, and where the Gila Forest and Wilderness is located.

  BEYOND THE WILDERNESS they came to the “Red River”—the Zuñi River—where Coronado and company encountered the first Indians from the Seven Cities, who ran and spread the news of the strangely mounted Spanish approaching. The Indians were unfamiliar with the sight of horses, and of men riding on their backs. The next night, as Coronado’s party camped within five or six miles of the first city, a group of Indians yelled out from a hiding place in the darkness. This so excited Coronado’s gentlemen soldiers into action that some saddled their horses backward, but the veterans among them managed to chase the Indians away. Castañeda reported what happened next:

  The following day they entered the settled land16 in good order. When they saw the first pueblo, which was Cibola, such were the curses that some of them hurled at Fray Marcos that may God not allow them to reach [his ears]. It is a small pueblo, crowded together and spilling down a cliff. In Nueva España there are estancias [farm buildings] which from a distance have a better appearance.

  After five months and more than a thousand miles, it came as a crashing, angry disappointment to discover that this first of these celebrated Seven Cities of Gold consisted of an adobe village of two hundred warriors rather than a metropolis shimmering with towers of precious metals. Yet it still had to be conquered. Coronado’s men assembled outside its walls, while “defiant” villagers17—Zuñi Indians in a settlement near today’s Zuni Pueblo18 south of Gallup, New Mexico—came out to meet them. Coronado and his men attacked the Zuñi Indians and pushed into Cíbola’s narrow, twisting entrance. The Indians hurled stones from the roof terraces and shot arrows. A large stone caught Coronado in the head as he was trying to climb a ladder to the roof terraces, knocking him to the ground, where he lay in his gilded armor and plumed helmet, unconscious. Coronado would have been killed on the spot if two of his officers hadn’t thrown themselves on him, taking the blows of more hurled stones, and dragged their commander to safety.19

  After an hour’s battle, and with the help of hundreds of their Indian allies who had accompanied them from Mexico, the Spanish took the village and fell eagerly on the food in its storerooms. The Zuñi quietly escaped down the back walls and fled to their other villages. Jars of cornmeal weren’t exactly bags of gold but provided nourishment, after all, for the near-starved men. Of some consolation, too, was that they heard from the subdued inhabitants of Cíbola that bigger and wealthier Indian towns lay ahead.

  THE PROMISE OF OUR SEARCH for the hidden canyons and hot springs of the Gila Wilderness spurred us forward. As we crossed the crest of the ridge above Little Bear Canyon about 3:30 p.m., the warm sun still shone in the blue sky but we could sense it lowering—a spear’s length above the horizon, as the old accounts put it—and anticipate the layers of cold that, beyond sundown, would settle over this high, dry country. We paused and looked north, our direction of travel, where the country fell away into a broken maze of cliffs and rims, forests and mountains. Somewhere down there twisted the Middle Fork of the Gila River, our immediate destination. Centuries earlier, Coronado’s army skirted this mountain-and-canyon wilderness of the Gila River headwaters, passing north and west of us by one hundred miles.

  Down we dropped into Little Bear Canyon. The trail wound through shady, cool pine forest and padded over the sandy, dried-up creek bed. Then the canyon narrowed and steepened and we squeezed through rock slots, and jumped down rock ledges that had been smoothed by flash floods. The cliff walls loomed higher as we descended. Molly and Skyler shouted to hear their voices echo and dodged off the trail to explore the smooth, cavelike alcoves under the overhanging rocks. One of these, we learned later, contained cave paintings.

  By four thirty we’d descended to the mouth, where Little Bear opened up like a doorway to the canyon of the Gila’s Middle Fork. We entered a sun-dappled little clearing at the confluence. The sun hung on the canyon rim and its last rays jumped over the dark, cliffy shadows and filtered through a grove of yellow-leafed cottonwood trees and feathery pines, painting the scene in warm golds and chilled greens. The Middle Fork spilled a swift, clear green between tannish cliffs. During this dry season, the river itself wasn’t that big—maybe fifty feet wide and knee-to-thigh deep—and ran smoothly over rounded rocks.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. “We can camp here, in this really nice spot, or go on and try to find the hot springs.”

  “Let’s go on,” Molly and Skyler immediately replied.

  “It’ll probably be almost dark when we get there,” I warned. “And we might not even get there tonight. And we’re going to have to wade across the river.”

  “Let’s keep going to the hot springs,” they repeated.

  “Okay, if you’re sure you’re up for it. We can have a quick lunch and then everyone put on their water shoes.”

  Amy pulled the lunch items from Skyler’s backpack. As she sliced with her Swiss Army knife, the four of us devoured most of a block of sheep’s-milk cheese she’d found in Silver City that came from Ronda, which we’d once visited in Spain, and we knocked off a dried salami, as we’d eaten nothing since our breakfast of mush but a few handfuls of trail mix.

  “Dad!” Skyler said, eating his salami thoughtfully while sitting on a driftwood log in the sunlight. “Remember how mad you got when the sausage rolled off the cooler into the river on our canoe trip in Maine?”

  “Yeah, Dad, remember that?” Amy teased.

  “Yeah, Dad,” Molly sai
d. “You were so mad!”

  “No!” I responded. “I’d like to correct that statement! The salami didn’t just ‘roll off the cooler into the river’ by itself. It rolled off because Skyler was jumping from one canoe to another, pretending he was boarding a pirate ship while I was getting out lunch, and he rocked the canoe and the salami rolled off the cooler and sank. That’s why I was mad. I’d been looking forward to that salami for days! I really, really wanted that salami and it ended up somewhere on the bottom of the river!”

  They laughed. In the psychological arc of wilderness trips, morsels of food assume increasing symbolic significance as days pass and supplies dwindle. So do words, and gestures, and repeated annoying patterns of behavior. In an urban setting these things would be diluted or absorbed by thousands of other words, gestures, acts, bits of food. But here in wilderness it’s just you—or the four of you—and whatever you carry on your back and in your heads. Whatever distraction you find derives solely from memory or from nature. In dozens of different ways, over the course of his lifetime, Aldo Leopold, who would eventually found the Gila Wilderness, would make this point, expand it, constantly reach for wilderness’s importance. His concept started simply:

  Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries20 for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.

  “We’ve got to keep moving or we’re not going to make it to the hot springs by dark,” I said.

  We packed away the lunch things—Skyler’s backpack now lighter by two pounds—and pulled off our hiking boots. We tied them by their shoestrings to the backs of our packs, and put on our water shoes. In their white shoes and backpacks, Molly and Amy looked hilariously incongruent—prim nurses from the waist down, pack animals from the waist up.

  “Okay, ready?” I said.

  I took the first step into the Middle Fork of the Gila River. Cold water splashed up to my calves, then above my knees, as I shuffled across the slippery, rounded rocks of the bottom, arms outspread for balance. I looked back. The other three were shuffling after me, Skyler pulling up his shorts because the water went well up his thighs.

  “It’s not bad,” I called back. “Just a little deep in the middle.”

  I reached the far shore where the trail notched into the bank, and splashed out, my big shoes trailing streams of water like a wet dog’s legs, while the others splashed out behind me.

  “That’s one down,” Skyler called out. “Only fourteen more to go.”

  According to the hiking guidebook to the Gila Wilderness, there were fifteen river crossings along this trail to reach the hot springs. We’d torn out the pages and stuffed them in the top pocket of my pack.

  The canyon walls twisted, shoving the river from side to side. A chilly shade enveloped the bottom. The sun had vanished until morning. Our shoes squished. The trail cut through dim patches of forest—gambel oak, ponderosa pine—that filled the elbows of the river bends. We emerged from a copse onto the riverbank again. Down we scrambled, splashed in, and waded across, clambered out dripping from the cold water to the shady forest. That was two out of fifteen. This, I started to think, could be a cold, grim haul. We needed something to keep our minds off it. I remembered Skyler’s beer-bottle song. I amended it, starting to sing, “Fifteen river crossings…”

  Molly immediately picked it up, then Skyler, then Amy. As a family, we hashed out the lyrics as we hiked along.

  Fifteen river crossings in the canyon,

  fifteen crossings to go.

  Wade through one,

  pull yourself out,

  fourteen crossings to go.

  Fourteen river crossings in the canyon,

  fourteen crossings to go.

  Wade through two,

  pull yourself out,

  Thirteen crossings to go.

  An hour later, we were on the eighth crossing. I began to doubt that we’d make it to the hot springs this night. It was getting really dim. Everyone was chilled, bare legs against cold water. Amy and I had some tense words about whether we’d make it, which then made Skyler upset. We all got past it.

  “Seven river crossings in the canyon…seven crossings to go, wade through nine, pull yourself out, six crossings to go.”

  It took concentration to do the math, sing, and balance across the river at the same time. Down to five…four…three…It was now almost dark. We came to a small opening in the forest. I told everyone to remember the spot, as we might have to come back and camp here if we couldn’t find the hot springs.

  At the fourteenth crossing, I smelled a whiff of sulfur in the air. Climbing up the bank from the fifteenth crossing, we entered a dark grove of trees. A small rivulet ran across the trail. I put my hand in it.

  “Feel this,” I said to Molly.

  She dipped her hand.

  “It’s warm!” she exclaimed.

  Nearby lay a clearing under the trees and a circle of stones someone had shaped into a fire ring. We threw down our packs. We had a race to put up the tents—Amy and I versus Molly and Skyler—before it was too dark to see at all.

  “Now that we’ve helped with the tents,” Molly asked, “can we go swimming while you make dinner?”

  They scrambled up a short trail leading up the hillside above camp, slanting up toward the canyon walls. By headlamp, I collected dead wood and made a fire, got a pot of river water simmering on our little campstove, while Amy laid out sleeping bags and pads in the tents.

  It was dark by the time I climbed up the hillside to check on the children. There was a large boulder overhanging the pool. They’d strewn their clothes and hiking shoes atop it, and dropped their headlamps on the boulder, too, so they shone down into the pool. The beams illuminated the rock basin of slightly steaming water, with its bluish gravelly bottom. Molly’s and Skyler’s white shapes glided contentedly about in the clear water, like goldfish. An arched bower of leaves overhung the pool and from a cavern under massive tree roots a torrent of warm water gushed forth, replenishing the rock pool. On the pool’s far end, it spilled out over a small waterfall into a series of smaller, lower pools, and then streamed down the hillside toward the river below.

  They were the most beautiful natural hot springs I’d ever seen.

  IT WAS ABOUT 125 MILES north of these hot springs that Coronado had attacked and taken the Zuñi Indian village where he was almost killed by flung stones. The Zuñi knew the place as Hawikku, one of a group of seven close-knit villages. This was the origin of the “seven cities” of Cíbola21 (Cíbola was a southern tribe’s name for the group of seven Zuñi cities) that Fray Marcos had reported to the authorities in Mexico City after his first visit and rumors of which Cabeza de Vaca may have heard.

  Angry and disappointed, Coronado and his army had still not found anything remotely resembling the Seven Cities of Gold, but they didn’t entirely abandon hope in this arid, goldless landscape. That summer of 1540, based at the village he’d conquered and renamed—dreams of grandiosity still alive—Granada, Coronado sent messengers back to Mexico City to report the bad news to Viceroy Mendoza. He also sent Fray Marcos back to Mexico with the courier party in order to put the friar out of reach of the angry soldiers in Coronado’s army.

  “Fray Marcos has not told the truth22 in a single thing that he said,” Coronado wrote to the viceroy, “except the name of the cities and the large stone houses…God knows that I wish I had better news to write your Lordship…Be assured that if all the riches and treasures of the world had been here, I could not have done more than I have done.”

  He added a note, clearly intended to generate some sympathy for his hardships and deprivations, that the expedition no longer had any raisins to eat, nor sugar, nor oil, nor wine, “except barely half a quart.”

  Coronado also dispatched three smaller exploring parties in three different dir
ections. One bore southwest toward the coast to find the support ships that had sailed up from Mexico. But the ships had left only a packet of messages buried under a tree, pointed out by the Indians, which contained the explanation that they’d waited a long time for the army to appear and now were heading home because worms were eating the wooden hulls. A second exploring party tracked northwest from Cíbola, and, in today’s northeastern Arizona, encountered the first Hopi villages. After a brief skirmish, the Spanish subdued these “very intelligent people”—as Castañeda described them—and began friendly trading for turquoises and for the cotton cloth woven by the Hopi.

  The Hopi told the Spanish about a large river that lay beyond a desert country. With Hopi guides, the party traveled twenty days across the wilderness and reached a canyon rim. Seen from the rim, the river below appeared only about six feet wide and the canyon not deep, although the Indians reported that the river was actually far wider than it seemed. The skeptical Spanish sent their three lightest, most agile men scrambling down, and, after an entire day, they reemerged on the rim saying the canyon was far steeper and deeper than it looked. They hadn’t made it even one third of the way down. The rocks in the canyon that looked from the rim only as tall as a man were, in fact, taller than the Giralda bell tower of the great Cathedral of Seville23—which was 275 feet high—and the river was indeed very wide.

  These humbled Spaniards were the first Europeans to see, and hike into, what’s now called the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Still a third exploring party went east from Cíbola. They’d been invited in that direction by a tall, strong young Indian they nicknamed “Bigote”—“Whiskers” in Spanish, because he wore a long mustache—who came from the east. Bigote had brought the Spaniards gifts—strange woolly hides that looked like very heavy cowhides but weren’t, and sturdy leather shields and helmets crafted from the same material. Bigote said his country was full of these large animals.