The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  Reported members of the expedition:

  These people sustain themselves entirely from the cattle [buffalo]…33 With the skins they build their houses; with the skins they clothe and shoe themselves; from the skins they make rope and also obtain wool. With the sinews they make thread, with which they sew their clothes and also their tents…These people have dogs. They load these dogs like beasts of burden and make light pack saddles for them like our pack saddles, cinching them with leather straps. When the Indians go hunting they load them with provisions. When these Indians move—for they have no permanent residence anywhere, since they follow the cattle to find food—these dogs carry their homes for them. In addition to what they carry on their backs, they carry the poles for the tents, dragging them fastened to their saddles.

  They were very intelligent people,34 added Castañeda, and could speak fluently to other tribes without interpreters by using sign language. They were moving their encampment eastward, and so they traveled alongside Coronado’s army for two days. The marching army now saw so many buffalo on the Plains that it “seemed something incredible.” Trying to kill some of the buffalo, the advance guard of Coronado’s army triggered a stampede, and the charging buffalo tumbled into a ravine. It filled with their writhing bodies, so that other buffalo ran right over the top of them, and three Spanish horses, equipped with saddles and bridles, fell into the furry maelstrom and completely disappeared.

  Following the Turk’s instructions, Coronado’s army veered southeast, into the territory of the Teyas Indians—later to give their name to Texas. The Turk told the Spaniards he was leading them to a nearby settlement, Haxa, and then on to Quivira, where golden bells dangling from trees tinkled in the breeze. Another Indian with the expedition, Ysopete, a native of Quivira, claimed that the Turk was lying but no one believed Ysopete. Coronado sent out an advance party to find the settlement of Haxa, which the Turk promised lay near.

  “Nothing but cows and sky,” they came back to report.

  Another four days’ march brought them all to a large Indian settlement in a deep valley. The shipwrecked Cabeza de Vaca and the Moorish medicine man Esteben had passed through this same settlement several years earlier on their wanderings across the Southwest, believed to be the Blanco Canyon area near Lubbock, Texas.35 Upon Coronado’s arrival, the Indians piled up hundreds of buffalo robes and teepees for him to bless, in the manner that Esteben worked his medicine, but—and here is a key difference between the two parties—Coronado wanted to divide up the pile of robes as spoils.36 His soldiers, each clamoring for first choice of robes, suddenly rushed at the pile, and, in less than a quarter of an hour, reported Castañeda, “nothing was left but empty ground.”

  You wonder if America would be different today—a gentler, more integrated land—if later European explorers had traveled as attuned to their cultural surroundings as Esteban and Cabeza de Vaca did, rather than with Coronado’s and his army’s obliviousness. But then, their objectives were very different, as were the objectives of all who came after. Coronado and his men wanted gold. Esteban and Cabeza de Vaca wanted to survive.

  For several more days, Coronado’s army followed the Teyas settlements through the fertile river valley where walnuts and grapes grew and fowl thrived. One day a storm pummeled them with hailstones so large that they dented the Spanish armor and broke their crockery. From these Teyas Indians in the valley, they learned that Quivira was, in fact, to the north—far to the north. Nor was there a good trail to get there from here. The Turk’s reputation began to sink, rapidly. Ysopete’s stock rose.

  In its search for Quivira, the army had already marched thirty-seven days from the Pueblo villages—two hundred and fifty leagues, or about five hundred miles, as measured by one Spaniard whose job it was, all day, to count his steps. With another long journey ahead, now to the north, Coronado, wishing to travel quickly, sent the cumbersome main body of the army back to the Pueblo settlements. After resting for two weeks, killing five hundred buffalo and drying the meat into jerky, Coronado swung due north toward Quivira with only his best horses, his ablest men, and a few Teyas Indian guides. The Turk was with them—now shackled in chains.

  You can imagine what the Spanish soldiers said to the Turk, after his guidance had brought them in the wrong direction five hundred miles out onto the Plains. Castañeda, who wrote the account of the expedition, apparently wasn’t fast enough for the final Quivira run and returned with the main army to the Pueblo villages in the mountains, so from him we have only the barest details of the final push to Quivira.

  Due north they marched, hard and fast, across the Plains. After thirty days they reached the River of Quivira. We call it the Arkansas River.37 They crossed it near today’s Dodge City, Kansas. For another week’s riding, they hugged it downstream, toward the northeast. It was then they finally arrived at the first settlements of the golden-belled, promised land—Quivira.

  They were not built of stone, or of wood, or even of mud. The houses were built of straw. They were not cities. They were small settlements. There were no golden bowls or golden bells dangling from the trees. The only metal the Spaniards saw was a single copper plate hanging around a chieftain’s neck.

  Again, a guide had led astray Coronado and his army of aristocrats in their quest for the Seven Cities of Gold. Fray Marcos had gotten off easy. The Turk not so. The Spaniards garroted him.

  “IT SMELLS LIKE MINT,” Molly said as we were making the day’s first crossing of the Middle Fork of the Gila.

  It was nearly noon by the time we left camp near the hot springs, slipped into our wet wading shoes, and, not a hundred feet from camp, scrambled down the bank for the slosh across. I could smell the sweet, minty fragrance, too.

  “It’s probably growing along the bank where it’s wet and shady,” I said, wading to the far side.

  Then I abruptly turned around and waded back across the Gila to pluck leafy bunches of the sweet mint and stash them in my backpack. I had a feeling we could use the mint come evening.

  We’d given Molly and Skyler the option of choosing the day’s route. Should we stay at the hot springs, and eventually hike out the way we’d hiked in? Or should we continue on up the Middle Fork canyon, until we reached a place where it opened up, called the Meadows, and camp there?

  They chose the latter. Before we’d left camp, they’d sat down together with our detailed topographical map and tried to count how many times the faint, dotted line of the trail might cross the snaking course of the Middle Fork between here and the Meadows.

  “It’s hard to see,” Molly reported, “but I think about fifteen.”

  Skyler did a double-check of her count.

  “Maybe eighteen.”

  In the chilly shade of canyon cliffs, the trail wound through piney glens, where our feet padded on fallen needles, and through copses of thick, gnarled, golden-leafed oaks.

  Straight above us, over a thousand feet up from the canyon bottom, a jagged crack of intense blue sky split the sunlit canyon rims, which cast their diffuse reflected light to the forest floor. With little underbrush, it was the archetypal forest—a fairy-tale forest.

  “Elf forests,” we called them.

  In other places we strode through patches of horsetails, up to Skyler’s chest.

  “These look like the trees in Maine,” he said of the trees along the river with horizontally striated bark whose branches sparkled in the sun.

  “You’re right,” I said, proud of his observation. “These are birch trees like the ones we saw in Maine. But these are called water birches.”

  The river crossings chilled us, cold water splashing high up our bare legs, as we shuffled carefully over the slippery rocks and through rushing water, hiking up our shorts even higher. We’d hop up gratefully on dry land. Swinging through another sharp bend, the canyon would change its direction and, ahead, we’d spot a golden patch among the dark green where the sunlight penetrated to the canyon floor. You could feel it coming as you walked through t
he needle-carpeted glens, a soft warmth of air mixing with the shady cold under the cliffs, and then you’d break out into the sunlight and feel suffused with the warmth and peacefulness thrown down by that big burning star. It was easy to understand how the native peoples in these black and white, shade and sun, cool and hot climates—the Aztecs in Mexico, for instance—would have their sun gods.

  IN APRIL 1913, Aldo Leopold, four years out of Yale Forestry School and supervisor of New Mexico’s Carson National Forest, was riding a hired horse alone through the Jicarilla Mountains when a major spring storm drenched him with sleet, hail, rain, and snow. For two days he grew increasingly wet and chilled. When the storm finally let up, he headed eastward out of the mountains aimed for the warmth of his new cabin and the embrace of his bride, Estella Bergere, a quiet, dark-haired beauty from an old New Mexican family.

  Trying to reach a rail line in this empty quadrant, Leopold got lost. He and his horse stumbled onto the household of an Apache Indian, who gave him a warm place to sleep and a fire to dry his clothing and bedroll. The following day, as he rode farther east, his legs and knees began to swell. Soon they’d grown so large he had to slice open his boots.

  When he finally staggered into Chama, the town doctor diagnosed the swelling as a bad case of rheumatism. He headed back home to his and Estella’s cabin at Tres Piedras, although she, now pregnant with their first child, was visiting her family in Santa Fe, so she didn’t see the ailing Leopold arrive. At his office, Leopold’s forest assistant took one look at his bloated face and immediately sent him to Santa Fe for treatment. He was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a form of kidney failure, and immediately sent to bed. For six weeks he remained there, hovering between life and death.

  With his recuperation dragging out many months, he took a long leave from the Forest Service and, at his family’s urging, he and Estella returned to his family home in Burlington, Iowa. All that summer of 1913, Leopold sat on the front porch of his parents’ home on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and reflected on the larger issues that lay before him. In the meantime, Estella was about to give birth to the first of their five children, Starker.

  From this high vantage point over the Mississippi and with a newborn nearby, Leopold saw clearly that the life of a U.S. forest ranger was so cluttered with reports, grazing permits, timber harvesting, and special cases to consider, that it was easy, quite literally, to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

  “We ride,” he wrote to his forest rangers, “but are we getting anywhere?”

  Rather than get too caught up in these items, he urged them to think about how to protect the entirety of “the Forest”—“timber, water, forage, farm, recreative, game, fish, and ‘scenic’ resources.” All decisions should be made with this entirety in mind.

  “[T]he sole measure of our success,” he wrote them, “is the effect on the Forest.”

  The “final specific truth,” he emphasized again, is “THE EFFECT ON THE FOREST.”

  What’s interesting here is how Leopold was pushed toward this holistic way of thinking about the natural world. Where Rousseau’s view of nature was shaped by his lover Madame de Warens, a Deist nature worshipper, and William Bartram’s view shaped by his father and the British poets, and Thoreau’s view of nature by Emerson’s philosophy, Aldo Leopold’s philosophy was shaped in part by his work as a government bureaucrat.

  Or, to be fair, he shaped his philosophy in reaction to his work as a government bureaucrat, combined with his scientific training and solid literary background. His desk work as a forest administrator shoved his nose into the minute details of grazing management, timber harvesting, water flows, erosion, game species numbers. He had to crunch the numbers, he had to write the reports, his desk work tempered by long rides through the forest. It didn’t make sense to him at first, all these bits of the mosaic. The decisions felt random. Only when he began to fit the bits of the puzzle together—to look at the entirety of the forest, to think holistically—did they begin to form a pattern that would shape his guiding philosophy.

  AFTER FOURTEEN CROSSINGS in two hours of the Middle Fork of the Gila River we were thoroughly chilled and wondering how much farther to the Meadows, where we planned to camp. Molly and Skyler had calculated fifteen crossings total to the Meadows. That was beginning to seem like a considerable underestimate.

  We hugged a cliff on the left bank through a long stretch of shady forest.

  “At the next patch of sun,” I suggested, “let’s stop for lunch.”

  Yes! Yes! Yes! Let’s stop! Everyone agreed.

  We spotted a golden luminance ahead where the river canyon carved hard to the left. Suddenly we broke from the deep cliff shadow into warm sunlight and a sunny crossing. We waded to the far shore, pulled off our shoes, and sat on a big driftwood log that sun and water had bleached to a smooth white.

  We pried open a can of smoked oysters. We dug from Skyler’s pack peanut butter, hard cheese, a little more dry sausage. These all tasted wonderful piled up on one piece of tortilla. We lay sprawled on the warm log, absorbing the sun, passing along morsels of food, flicking them into our mouths like a languorous lizard would snag a fly on its tongue. Amy pulled out a bag of gummi worms. Those vanished—the sweet succulent, red, orange, green worms.

  We suddenly heard voices. We sat up. We hadn’t heard voices other than our own in a day and a half.

  They emerged from the forest, striding down the trail toward us, a young couple, moving quickly, swinging their arms, using ski poles for balance, each draped with a sun hat.

  “Well, look at this!” I remarked. “People! Information!”

  “Hi,” we called out.

  “How far is it to the Meadows?” Amy asked before they’d even reached our log.

  He was in the lead. I noticed that he’d duct-taped two water bottles to the front straps of his backpack, so he didn’t have to stop hiking to take a swig of water, but only bend down his head. They both looked sun-crisp, and slightly smudged, and their limbs ropy with exercise.

  “Twenty-six crossings,” he replied.

  The guy wore big snow gaiters zipped over his soaking-wet hiking shoes, reaching up to his knees. He had a stubble on his chin that looked at least a couple of weeks old. Her lips were smeared with white cream against the sun. Their packs looked small and light and compressed compared to ours.

  “How far back?” I asked, thinking that twenty-six more crossings was going to be a long, long day.

  “We left there about eleven-thirty,” he said.

  “Did you camp there?” I asked.

  “No, we camped at the head of Indian Creek and came down Indian Creek this morning,” he replied. “We’ve been hiking the Continental Divide Trail.”

  I was impressed.

  “We started in Glacier National Park, Montana, on the Canadian border on June fifteenth,” he continued. “Now we only have the last two hundred miles to go to Mexico.”

  “That’s, like, five straight months of hiking!” I marveled.

  “So you started hiking at one foreign country,” Skyler asked with amazement, “and now you’re hiking all the way to another foreign country?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “How far do you go in a day?” I asked.

  “Twenty to twenty-five miles,” he replied. “Now it’s a little farther because sometimes the trail follows roads. Even at that pace, you can barely make the length of the Continental Divide Trail in one season. You can’t start any earlier than June fifteenth because of the snow up in Montana. And then you have to keep moving south to stay ahead of winter. We got out of Colorado just in time. It was starting to snow in the high country.”

  He started making a move toward the creek, as if eager to keep moving. Amy was chatting with the woman about the equipment they carried and the high-tech, lightweight, accordionlike sleeping pads strapped to their packs.

  “It’s a little thin,” she confessed to Amy.

  The man made ano
ther move toward the creek. They were trying to get to the hot springs for a soak this afternoon, and then camp farther down the canyon where Little Bear Creek joined it. This meant that they’d be hiking in the next four hours what it took us two days to cover, plus squeeze in a quick soak in the hot springs. Yes, they were moving fast. The entire Continental Divide Trail covers 3,100 miles. The trail’s existence was, in many ways, due to Aldo Leopold and his efforts on behalf of wilderness preservation. This couple would, in a single day, hike across most of the Gila Wilderness. It felt like they were in a race. I wondered whether the raw need to make mileage had obliterated the psychic rewards of wilderness.

  “You have fifteen crossings to the hot springs,” I told the man, “and another fifteen to Little Bear Creek.”

  They looked chilled already, after the twenty-six crossings they’d already done today. That would total fifty-six in one day. There wasn’t any insulating fat on their sinewy bodies. Now I understood why the man wore the knee-high snow gaiters—for warmth in the chilly water. Clearly impatient to get going, he waded onward into the creek. She followed.

  “Goodbye,” we called out. “Good luck.”

  We watched them splash across, quickly mount the stone-cobbled far bank with ski poles clicking, and disappear into the shady forest under the cliff wall. There was something obsessive about it. You either had to be obsessive to start, or certainly had to be obsessive to finish, a hike so long, so quickly.

  “I wonder if they’ll still be together at the end of this hike,” Amy mused as they vanished down the canyon.

  CORONADO’S OBSESSIVENESS propelled him forward, too—toward a psychological breaking point. He returned to the Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande to spend the winter of 1541–42. In the spring, he planned to head eastward again, to chase down stories of rich cities even farther off and reports from the Indians of a broad river plied by huge canoes.

  These rumors weren’t entirely false. Archaeologists have noted that ancient peoples occupied large settlements along the Mississippi River. The Cahokia Mounds site in southern Illinois, which, at its peak around A.D. 1250 was larger than London at the time, covered six square miles and housed a population of 10,000 to 20,000 people. The settlement included monumental earthworks and giant sun calendars. On the Mississippi River, as the rumors reaching Coronado had suggested, the Indians traveled in huge canoes powered by dozens of paddlers.