by Peter Stark
But it wasn’t to be. It was a tough winter for the Spaniards. They had missed the comforts of New Spain for almost two years. It was cold in the Pueblo village they’d appropriated along the Rio Grande, about 120 miles northeast of where we were hiking. They lacked warm clothing. They pulled apart the adobe houses and used their wooden posts and beams for firewood, and dug up the buried Indian containers of corn. The Pueblo Indians were hostile toward them, if not quite outright at war. Coronado received a letter, delivered by reinforcements coming up from Mexico, from his wife, whom he missed deeply or, as some may have speculated, suspected of having affairs in his absence. Another letter arrived addressed to one of Coronado’s closest officers, Don García López de Cárdenas, informing him that his brother had died and he was now heir to the family estates back in Spain. Coronado granted him permission to go home, especially in light of his broken arm, which wouldn’t heal.
That winter, too, during a feast day, Coronado was out racing his powerful horse, which he liked to do for his amusement, against Don Rodrigo Maldonado, when the girth broke. Captain General Coronado tumbled to the ground between the two horses and was run over by Maldonado’s horse. Its hoof struck him in the head.
“[This] laid him at the point of death,”38 wrote Castañeda, who was in the encampment that winter, “and his recovery was slow and painful.”
When Coronado finally was well enough to get up from his bed, he discovered that his close officer López de Cárdenas had returned. He bore the terrible news39 that the way back to Mexico was blocked. He had reached the Spaniards’ supply base at Suya, near today’s southern Arizona border. He found it in ruins, smoldering and deserted, and the Indians in the whole region in rebellion against the Spanish. He retreated back to Coronado’s winter camp. Turning up months later, Spanish survivors described how their leader at the outpost, a man named Alcaraz, forced sex with Indian women and stole Indian provisions. One night the Indians crept silently into the Spanish pueblo and attacked with their poison-tipped arrows, killing between thirty and sixty Spaniards and many of their fearsome horses.
Coronado heard the news in his winter camp and took to his bed again.
You can imagine him, lying there, in the adobe room of a Pueblo village along the frozen Rio Grande. The winter wind blows. There is little wood to burn for warmth. Everyone is beset by fleas. His army is scattered about the Tierra Nueva—the New Land. His supply base, he has just learned, has been burned and its soldiers killed. With all the fanfare that had attended the expedition’s departure from Mexico, he has nothing to show for two years of hard effort at attaining glory and wealth and the Seven Cities of Gold to add to the empire of the king of Spain but loss and humiliation and a few stolen buffalo robes, his quest dashed by a small collection of straw huts five hundred miles out on the Plains.
It’s no wonder he took to bed. Where could he possibly go from here but toward deeper humiliation?
There was still talk of returning to Quivira and the rumored settlements and broad river farther east. But then, reports Castañeda, perhaps with a bit of cattiness and contempt, Captain General Coronado, lying in his bedchamber in the adobe pueblo, recalled a prophecy given to him by an astrologer friend back in Salamanca.
“…that he would become a powerful lord in distant lands,40 and that he would have a fall from which he would never be able to recover.”
This plunged Coronado deeper into depression. If he were to die, which it appeared he might, he wanted to be with his wife and children when it happened, writes Castañeda.
Some of Coronado’s officers and soldiers, however, hungered to carry on the search for the rumored gold and the fabulous cities. Coronado undermined them through subterfuge, according to Castañeda. Using his gossipy physician as intermediary, he reached out to several of the expedition’s “gentlemen” who agreed with him about returning to Mexico, and had these gentlemen talk in small groups among the soldiers, who then signed petitions, which were also signed by officers, to Coronado requesting that the army head back. The main argument for returning was that they had found neither gold nor settlements large enough to provide Indians as forced laborers for all the members of the expedition. Signatures obtained, Coronado immediately announced the expedition would return home. Many of the men recanted, and wanted to stay and keep the search alive with a core group of sixty. They broke into Coronado’s bedchamber and stole his locked chest to get the signed papers back, but Coronado, reports Castañeda, had stuffed the documents into his mattress for hiding.
“He guarded them so that he did not leave one room, pretending that his ailment was much worse and posting guards over himself and the room, and at night on the roofs where he was sleeping.”
Coronado’s army turned south toward Mexico, leaving behind a few of the friars, who weren’t under his command and who hoped to convert the Indians to Christianity or be martyred (they were soon murdered). The captain general was happy, although respect for his authority sank on the homeward journey, and the army had to work its way through rebellious Indian regions. Horses died. At times during the journey home, two or three men perished each day by either sickness or poisoning—no one really knew why. When they finally reached the first outposts of New Spain—Mexico—the men began to drop out. The captain general’s authority was all but disregarded. He took to his bed again, pretending to be sick, according to Castañeda, so he could hold conversations in secret and try to convince his officers and gentlemen to stay with the expedition until it reached Mexico City. He was carried part of the way on a litter.41
Captain General Coronado arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1542. Less than one hundred men from the original grand expedition still accompanied him. It was an ignominious return. Viceroy Mendoza met the captain general—not graciously, reports Castañeda, but he nevertheless gave him an honorable discharge.
“From then on,”42 states Castañeda flatly, “he lost his reputation.”
Viceroy Mendoza, who had been Coronado’s friend and ally, must have tried to move delicately. The viceroy eventually took over for himself the governorship of Nueva Galicia, the northwest part of Mexico, which Coronado had held. Coronado went bankrupt from debts he’d run up mounting the expedition. In its aftermath, he was subject to an investigation into whether he mistreated the Indians. He was cleared and abuses against the Indians—of which there were clearly many, in direct violation of edicts from the king and queen of Spain—were blamed on Coronado’s soldiers, not the captain general.
Coronado did retain a seat on the Mexico City council, thanks to his friendship with Viceroy Mendoza. There he remained, in Mexico City, a gentlemen still, until his death in 1554. You can imagine him, an aging council member, who led a once-great expedition into the Tierra Nueva—the Unknown Lands of the North. Parents must have pointed him out on the street to their children. They must have told the story. He went away in a great parade of hundreds of eager gentlemen soldiers and powerful horses and wearing a suit of golden armor with a feathery plume en route to discover the Seven Cities of Gold, went away on a mission from the king himself, and he returned, two years later, exhausted, trailed by only a few stragglers who didn’t really obey him anyway, having found not heaps of gold and fabulous cities in the Unknown Lands but a place where nothing exists but grass and sky, having found…Kansas.
There was a lesson to be learned.
WHILE SITTING ON THE SUMMERY PORCH of his parents’ home overlooking the Mississippi River recuperating in 1913, Aldo Leopold read the just-published43 Our Vanishing Wildlife by William Temple Hornaday. Director of the New York Zoological Society, Hornaday sounded the alarm about the rapid depletion of U.S. wildlife. Deer, ducks, elk, and other species prized by hunters were being wiped out by market gunners. The 60 million or so buffalo that had grazed the Great Plains in Coronado’s day had shrunk, by 1913 when Leopold was reading Hornaday’s book, to a few hundred scattered animals. The following year, the last known passenger pigeon of hundreds of millions wou
ld die at the Cincinnati Zoo.
“For educated, civilized Man to exterminate a valuable wild species of living things is a crime,” wrote Hornaday. “It is a crime against his own children, and posterity.”
Firing up to the cause, Leopold resolved to take on the mission to save southwestern game species, melding with a growing national concern about game protection, and his own deep passion for hunting.
During his seventeen-month recuperation in Iowa, he crafted a plan to establish game reserves on national forest lands. A Washington bureaucrat shot it down. Back in New Mexico, his sympathetic boss, Arthur Ringland, created a position for Leopold as a public-relations officer to promote the new activity of “tourism” and “recreation” on National Forest lands that had formerly been used mainly for commercial timber harvest and grazing. Leopold ran with the job, organizing game-protection groups in New Mexico, giving talks, writing for the Forest Service its first Game and Fish Handbook.
Wrote Teddy Roosevelt in a letter to Leopold,44 with characteristic gusto, “I think your platform simply capital. It seems your association in New Mexico is setting an example to the whole country.”
Nor did his energy and eloquence go unnoticed among Forest Service higher-ups in Washington, who offered him a job in public relations in the nation’s capital. Leopold declined it.
“I do not know whether I have twenty days or twenty years45 ahead of me,” he wrote to Arthur Ringland. “Whatever time I have, I wish to accomplish something definite…This ‘one thing’ for me is obviously game protection.”
The coming of the Great War, with its need for timber and beef for the troops, severely strained the cause of game protection on the national forest lands. After a brief stint at the Albuquerque chamber of commerce—where he came to descry “boosterism”—Leopold rejoined the Forest Service after the war as second-in-command for all 20 million acres of National Forests in the Southwest.
He was shocked by what he saw. When he personally toured the forests, he observed how overgrazing and destructive logging had triggered massive erosion. Roughly ten years earlier, when he’d first arrived in the Southwest, he had ridden through the Blue River country of the Apache Forest. A mere decade later 90 percent of the arable soil along the Blue had washed away or blown away because of overgrazing of the grasses and overcutting of timber.
“One day,” he wrote to his mother back in Iowa, as he did regularly throughout her life, “we came home with cakes of mud a quarter of an inch thick surrounding our eyes—stuff that had blown into our eyes and ‘teared’ out so you had to pull off the lumps every few minutes.”
Leopold’s focus began to shift—from single-minded game protection and the elimination of game-killing predators like wolves, it broadened to include the condition of the soil, and thus of the land itself. He wrote passionately about the soil, and how earlier peoples of the Southwest had managed to use it for centuries without destroying it, until the settlers of the last few decades:
Destruction of the soil is the most fundamental kind of economic loss46 which the human race can suffer. With enough time and money, a neglected farm can be put back on its feet—if the soil is there. By expensive replanting and with a generation or two of waiting, a ruined forest can again be made productive—if the soil is there.…But if the soil is gone, the loss is absolute and irrevocable.
WHEN WE GOT BACK on the trail after the lizardlike lunch on the sun-warmed log, Molly and Skyler marveled at the number of crossings ahead for us to reach the Meadows—twenty-six, the couple had reported.
“The map said it was, like, fifteen,” said Skyler, “and today we’ll cross the river forty-one times.”
But the crossings came quickly. It was pleasant hiking in the sunny canyon and shady forest. I’d chosen walking sticks for Molly and Skyler from a pile of driftwood branches near our lunch log. Skyler used his with great determination, swinging it along the trail, going out front to measure the depth of the river crossings with it, and giving us a report. If it was deep, he hurled his walking stick like a spear to the far bank so he could free both hands to hike up his shorts to his hips.
We sang the beer-bottle song—once, which was enough. I realized why the infantry sings as it marches—to occupy the mind, to bond the marchers in rhythm, and thus in a single body. A corps.
We chatted amiably, the four of us, about the sycamores and oaks. In the deepest, most twisty bends of the canyon, we admired the forests of the Elf-Kings that we crept through.
Finally, an hour before dusk, as the crack of clear blue sky deepened toward a shade of purple, the canyon’s high rock walls meandered apart from each other. Between the tawny cliffs lay a wide meadow, through which the river ran. Open groves of Ponderosa pines studded the meadow, rising like giant columns.
It was a perfect camping spot.
Then, under the perfect grove, we spotted two tents, sitting side by side.
Shit! I thought.
I knew Amy was thinking the same.
There’s a palpable tension—almost a ritual—to finding a camping spot in the wilderness, one that I feel quite intensely and have since my first wilderness trips as a child. I’ve wondered if this tension is genetically coded, recalling our hundreds of thousands of years as a species of nomadic hunter-gatherers. The right—or wrong—choice of a camping site could mean security, or encounters with predators or enemies, it could bring abundant food or starvation, water or thirst, warmth or debilitating cold. The two tents sitting off there in the perfect grove could signify friends or rivals. In any case, we felt they were crowding “our” space in the wilderness—and they probably felt the same to see us coming down the trail.
“Look! More humans!” a woman’s voice called out.
It was a surprise, for all parties, to see anyone after the silence of the canyons.
A middle-aged man bearing a droopy, graying handlebar mustache rose from where he was stooping over, staking down one of the tents. Near him stood a middle-aged woman, dark-haired and fit-looking, and a blond teenage girl lingered off in the grove, perhaps gathering firewood. I noted instantly that the couple wore the same style of hightech synthetic clothing we did—pile jackets, breathable waterproof fabrics—as if this signified they belonged to our own tribe.
A subtle unspoken dance began about what distance we’d maintain between our two parties and our campsites.
“Hike!…Hike!…Hike!” the woman sang, cheering on Molly and Skyler in their strides as we came down the trail past their camp.
We paused for a moment. We asked if they knew where the trail forked ahead. They hadn’t been there.
“But another fellow told us there’s another nice campsite a little ways on, under a big dead snag,” said the man. “You can’t miss it.”
“If you can’t find a spot to camp,” the woman added, “you can come back here.”
We thanked her, and kept hiking. It was a generous gesture on her part, a family willing to give up the solitude they’d presumably come for, in order to give us a space should we need it. We belonged to the same tribe—distantly related.
A half-mile on or less, we looked across a meadow of tall grass and spotted the big dead ponderosa. Beyond it the Gila wove between willowy banks, and the cliff wall of the canyon rose beyond that. Four or five towering ponderosas created a vaulted cathedral ceiling of pine and beneath it lay an old fire ring assembled of char-blackened stones. It was a beautiful place to camp. What’s odd is how there is a kind of universal agreement on what constitutes a beautiful campsite, which makes me think it is indeed a genetic impulse. I felt tucked in, secure in this spot—the meadow afforded a view, visibility for anyone approaching, the ponderosas gave shelter and wood, the cliff wall a kind of security at our backs, and the Gila coursing past offered a source of water, and, if I wished, a place to gather fish.
Soon we were sitting on logs and on the pine-needle-matted ground around a popping fire of fragrant pine logs, the children sipping hot mint tea and Amy and I mojitos
made with a squeeze of lemon, rum, sugar, and the crushed bunch of mint I had plucked from the bank when we left our morning’s camp.
IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1919, Aldo Leopold took a Sunday off and went trout fishing. For his outing, he chose an area at the headwaters of the Gila River. He had a family connection here. Estella’s mother, a member of an old New Mexico family, had inherited a large sheep outfit, the N-Bar Ranch, whose grazing lands included parts of the Gila National Forest and its Gila River headwaters.
While fishing, Leopold admired the lack of telephone poles and automobile roads47 in the area. It got him thinking: Was there a way to preserve the pristine quality of the Gila River canyons before the inevitable roads and human structures invaded them?
The timing was crucial. The automobile had become a practical means of transportation in the decade since he’d first come to the Southwest from Yale. The year before he’d arrived, in 1908, Henry Ford had introduced the first affordable and mass-produced automobile, the Model T—“the car that put America on wheels.” What had recently been “horse country”—accessible only on foot or by horse—was just a decade later opening up to the average citizen’s automobile. The federal government, meanwhile, was encouraging the settlement of unused lands in the West. Leopold had witnessed how a few years of heavy grazing and logging had wiped out the Blue River bottomlands,48 reducing its once-rich grasses, soils, and pine groves to a wide bed of stony cobbles washed by flash floods.