Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  As I’m mentally strolling about in my own happy little world assigning names and personalities to this odd cast of characters, Bryan stops and without much fanfare (I’m guessing he’s not a fanfare kind of guy) says, “This is it.”

  This is what? I think, glancing over a scattered pile of large gray rocks. I lean closer and realize that mixed among them are chunks of curved gray wood. Then I see the base of the tree jutting about a foot and a half out of the ground, cut unevenly across the top. Prometheus.

  I had expected the stump, but not these large portions of the actual tree strewn about. He must have been enormous, I think, reassembling the pieces in my mind. Currey reported the circumference to be 252 inches, or exactly 21 feet.

  I tell Bryan I need about a half hour to make notes and take a few pictures of the site. He says that’s fine and goes off to conduct whatever duties he’s officially here to perform.

  Before coming to Nevada, I had considered Prometheus’s fate—in that he had been cut down by those who, ostensibly, should have been protecting him—as comically ironic. But looking over his withered remains, I’m struck by how profoundly sad a loss this is. A tree that had tenaciously survived for approximately five thousand years, through droughts and blizzards and windstorms and avalanches, was knocked down, just like that, in an afternoon.

  Currey later expressed regret for what he had done, and before he passed away in 2005 at the age of seventy he was an impassioned voice for both the creation of Great Basin National Park and a law that would protect bristlecone pines on federal property, legislation that Congress eventually enacted.

  Currey’s defenders believe that, ultimately, he made an honest mistake and that human inquiry often relies on poking holes in the natural world to study what’s inside. “Archaeologists,” the old saying goes, “burn the pages of history as they read them,” and the same can be said of many other researchers. Some scientific data were gleaned from Prometheus’s rings, aiding climatologists in measuring temperature fluctuations and weather patterns over thousands of years, as well as archaeologists who utilize tree rings to verify radiocarbon-tested data. Like the Greek titan of myth who was condemned to endless suffering for stealing fire (representing knowledge) from his fellow gods and sharing it with man, WPN-114 also sacrificed for the sake of humanity.

  Currey’s detractors, and there are many, argue that he acted recklessly and with a touch of hubris. He was a geographer, after all, not a dendrologist. And while useful information was indeed acquired by sectioning Prometheus, it should be weighed against what else might have been learned over time if the tree had been spared. Any hope of following Prometheus’s life span to its natural conclusion ended irrevocably on August 6, 1964.

  There’s another long-term factor that comes to mind as I amble about the wide sunlit area where Prometheus once grew. It relates to something Bryan told me soon after we met, when he was extolling Great Basin National Park’s scientific value as an “eighty-thousand-acre living laboratory where ecological, biological, and genetic diversity can be studied.” There is also, he said, the park’s human story, from the Fremont Indians and sheepherders who once lived and hunted in this area to the day hikers and overnight campers who now visit this peaceful, pristine environment for mental and spiritual renewal. They—all of us—need time to reflect and think and imagine, undistracted by gadgets, deadlines, and incessant chatter. Great Basin offers that sense of solace and respite.

  Bryan is particularly heartened by the number of families he sees come here and reconnect with one another, communicating in whole sentences—as opposed to abbreviated texts—and bonding over a shared discovery, whether it’s an intricate rock formation, a hidden bird’s nest, or stands of bristlecone pine trees that first sprang to life about the same time Homer was composing The Iliad. When these are destroyed, whether through vandalism or carelessness, future visitors are denied memories and experiences that have nourished the souls of so many others. The impact of these irreparable losses cannot be quantified.

  Bryan has returned and is eating quietly about thirty feet away from me. I’m not hungry but decide I’ll need energy for our descent and begin nibbling on some granola and a green apple. After I finish, Bryan stands up and adjusts his backpack, a silent signal that it’s time to leave. I check around to make sure I haven’t dropped anything and then pocket my notebook. My mind was a whirlwind of questions coming up here, but now I’m just lost in the scenery.

  Bryan looks over to see if I’m ready, and I nod.

  We head down, neither of us saying a word.

  MOUND KEY ISLAND

  JUAN PONCE DE LEÓN, believing the reports of the Indians of Cuba and San Domingo to be true, made an expedition into Florida to discover the river Jordan. This he did either because he wished to acquire renown, or, perhaps, because he hoped to become young again by bathing in its waters. While I was a prisoner in those parts, I bathed in a great many rivers, but I never found the right one. It seems incredible that JUAN PONCE DE LEÓN should have gone to Florida to look for such a river.

  —From Memoir of Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda (1575)

  THE ISLAND, FROM half a mile away, seems to be floating above the ocean.

  “That’s because of the red mangroves,” Bobby Romero explains to me as we approach Mound Key in Estero Bay, Florida. “Inland you have the black, white, and buttonwood trees. The red ones, which thrive in saline, are mostly on the edges, and their roots grow straight down from the branches, right into the water.” Clustered together they create a dark, shadowy ring around the island, giving the illusion that it’s hovering several feet in the air.

  Fifty-six years old and semiretired, Bobby charters tours of Estero Bay and is motoring me out to Mound Key on his catamaran Beachcomber. After we nestle the boat in a tiny lagoon called North Landing, I lower myself into a kayak and paddle around the island’s edge to take pictures. Up close the mangrove roots appear ominous, a dense tangle of fingerlike undergrowth waiting to grab anything that ventures too near. I head out into the deeper water.

  The island, Bobby also told me earlier, is growing. “It’s much larger now than it was during Fontaneda’s time,” he says, referring to Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda, whose story is my reason for coming here. For seventeen years the young Spaniard was held captive by the Calusa Indians in La Florida, as the territory was then known, and Mound Key is the one verifiable place he lived before gaining his freedom.

  This was in 1556, more than fifty years before Captain Christopher Newport brought the first Virginia Company settlers to a swampy outpost called Jamestown and almost sixty-five years before the Pilgrims rowed ashore at Cape Cod. Fontaneda, whose writings about the New World influenced European royalty and future explorers, gold seekers, and colonists, is significant in his own right. But he’s also representative of an entire era—starting from the time Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492 to the arrival of English entrepreneurs and Pilgrims more than a century later—that is something of a historical blind spot in our nation’s rearview mirror.

  A few brief highlights from this period: In early April 1513, Juan Ponce de León waded onto a Florida beach, making him the first non-native individual to set foot on what would eventually be the United States of America. Beginning in 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano made three trips to North America, sailing up and down the Atlantic coast until he was eaten by Carib Indians in 1528. That’s also the year Pánfilo de Narváez organized the first—and, to this day, most catastrophic—overland expedition across the continent. It started near Tampa Bay with more than four hundred men and ended in present-day Arizona with four, including the Spanish nobelman Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a Muslim slave named Estevanico—but not Narváez, who perished along the way. A decade later, fellow Spaniard Hernando de Soto led a six-hundred-man army from Florida to the Mississippi River, thinking he would do better. He would not. By 1542 half of his troops were dead, as was de Soto, and the rest had given up. And in 1565 the Spanis
h Navy’s Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement in the States.

  When Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda landed in Florida in 1523, he had no intention of exploring or schlepping around the New World. Born in 1536 (possibly ’37; the records are iffy) to wealthy Spanish parents living in Peru, the thirteen-year-old Fontaneda was sailing to Spain with his older brother when their ship sank near the Florida Keys. Fontaneda was “rescued” by the Calusa Indians, who stole whatever treasure could be salvaged from the ship and murdered most of the other passengers. Killing and robbing the near-drowned survivors wasn’t very hospitable, but the Calusas were motivated by more than greed; previous light-skinned visitors were known to carry a nasty array of incurable infections and did not, themselves, always play nice. Fontaneda’s life was spared because he danced and sang for the Calusas’ chief, Carlos, who considered him a harmless amusement. Carlos ruled from Mound Key, and from there Fontaneda was granted release and allowed to return home after seventeen years in captivity.

  The water around the island is choppier than I’d anticipated, and my kayak is rocking unsteadily. I’m a fair distance from shore at this point and having trouble putting out of my mind what one of the local park rangers told me when I called to ask if there were sharks in Estero Bay: “Yes,” he said. There might have been more to that response—something about the odds of an attack being about a billion to one—but I don’t remember anything after the “Yes” part.

  When a speedboat’s wake almost tips me over, I snap one more picture of the island and paddle back to North Landing. Bobby and I hoist the kayak onto his boat, and after gathering together my camera gear, food, and water, I set out on foot for the other side of the island.

  Ten minutes later, I’m there.

  Mound Key is about a thousand yards across at its waist, and a trail of crushed seashells leads from North Landing to an even smaller beachhead on the south side. The path is meant to discourage visitors from veering off into the wooded areas where archaeological digs are ongoing, and it’s mostly straight except for a slight wiggle near Mound 1, where Carlos is believed to have released Fontaneda. Interpretive signs about the Calusas, which are the only historical markers on the trail, make no mention of Fontaneda. Instead they focus on the inventive assortment of tools and mechanisms the Calusas devised for cooking and hunting—bow drills to start fires, spears with replaceable stone points, snares, traps, and atlatls—along with sophisticated awning-covered canoes.

  Before finding Mound Key, I’d sought out where Fontaneda had shipwrecked in the Keys, which would have added some variety to my landlocked itinerary. Florida has an exceptional historical marker program, and they’ve even mounted plaques on the ocean floor next to sunken steamers, World War II cruisers, and Spanish treasure ships from the early 1700s. Fontaneda’s ship has yet to be recovered, and the Florida treasure hunters I contacted said there was little financial incentive to locate the vessel because the Calusas had stripped it clean.

  Five years after returning to Spain, Fontaneda published an account of his New World experiences. Travels with Charley it is not. Although written in the first person, the narrative is dry and impersonal. There’s only one perfunctory sentence about the shipwreck that claimed Fontaneda’s brother and so dramatically altered his own fate, and he spills considerably more ink on Ponce de León’s supposed search for the fountain of youth, a story that, although Fontaneda made famous, he himself didn’t believe. But whatever Fontaneda lacked in literary style he made up for in expertise. No other European had spent more time in the New World, and his observations were widely disseminated and carefully scrutinized. Author and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, herself a notable figure for her work saving the Everglades, notes that Fontaneda penned “the first book about Florida, or, indeed, about the whole mainland of North America.”

  And Fontaneda does flash an intriguing light on the land’s flora and fauna. He writes of giant eels as thick as “a man’s thigh,” tortoises “the size of a large shield … with as much flesh as a cow,” and the ubiquitous Guaiacum officinale tree, “which physicians know is useful for many purposes.” Possibly he’s being coy; the tree’s gum was used primarily for treating syphilis, which was ravaging Europe in the sixteenth century. What Fontaneda did not find, much to his extreme displeasure, was gold or silver. By my count, he harps on this half a dozen times.

  Fontaneda also goes on at length about the Native Americans, describing their diet, customs, weapons, and clothing—or lack of it. “These Indians,” he remarks of one tribe, “go almost naked, wearing only a sort of apron. The dress of the men consists of braided palm-leaves, and that of the women of moss.” He goes on to portray them as being “a tall race of men and women graceful and well-featured.”

  It is by far his most charitable comment. Unlike Cabeza de Vaca, who had good relations with and espoused fair treatment of the natives, Fontaneda refers to various tribes as “rascals and beggars” and others as “barbarous” and perceives the whole lot of them as “treacherous.” He warns that the natives are skillful warriors and would not be easy to subjugate. “They are very adroit at drawing the bow,” he says, “and I am convinced they can never be made submissive and become Christians.”

  He concludes: “They should all be taken, men and women, after terms of peace have been offered them, placed on ships, and scattered throughout the various islands, and even on the Spanish main, where they might be sold as his Majesty sells his vessels to the grandees [noblemen] in Spain.” Fontaneda was by no means the sole voice calling for such measures (Columbus proposed something similar about two minutes after making landfall), but he was certainly one of the most authoritative.

  From the 1600s through the early 1800s, tens of thousands of Native Americans were enslaved, but men, women, and children imported from Africa were ultimately preferred over the indigenous population. Torn from their homes and tribes and thrust into unfamiliar territory after a debilitating mid-Atlantic crossing, they were easier to dominate. The natives, as Fontaneda noted, were well armed, knew the terrain, and could band together. They were also being decimated by European diseases. There were simply too few of them left to satisfy the avarice of slaveholding merchants and plantation owners.

  As I walk back to North Landing and reflect on the legacy of men such as Fontaneda, my first thought is how unfortunate it was that the Calusas ever let him go. But that, I realize, might be too harsh a judgment. Fontaneda didn’t ask to be a castaway at age thirteen and held captive until he was thirty. The real pity, I suppose, is that he ended up here in the first place.

  After Bobby drops me off at a marina in Fort Myers Beach, I drive over to the ranger station in Estero that manages Mound Key. (No one is posted on the island itself.) I need to pick up some literature related not to Fontaneda but to my next site, in Indiana. Mound Key is a perfect example of how stories, somewhat haphazardly, lead to other stories.

  While planning my itinerary months ago, I needed to confirm with the rangers in Estero that Mound Key was accessible, and when I phoned, a male voice on the other end said: “Hello, and thanks for calling the Koreshan State Historic Site.”

  “Sorry, I was looking for Mound Key,” I said, assuming I’d called the wrong number. Mike Heare, the Park Service specialist who answered, informed me that they covered the island, too. I asked who or what a Koreshan was, and he explained that they were a cult that tried to establish a utopian colony here more than a hundred years ago. Their founder, Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed, had changed his name to Koresh and founded a religion that promoted reincarnation, communal living, celibacy, and the belief that the universe is contained within the earth, which is actually a concave sphere.

  “Koresh like David Koresh from Waco?”

  “Not related.” (The Waco guy did share one thing with Teed. He, too, felt that Koresh—referenced in Isaiah 44 as God’s shepherd—had a stronger, more messianic ring to it than his given name, which was Ver
non Wayne Howell.)

  “That’s pretty crazy,” I said, dismissing the story as a kind of fringe footnote.

  Mike set me straight. “Communities like this sprouted all around the United States, and they’ve been a major part of American history.”

  They have indeed, I learned after plunging into the topic. They also represented a natural continuation from the early explorers and pilgrims who had once perceived this country as a Garden of Eden or New Jerusalem. By as early as the 1840s, many citizens were bemoaning that the American experiment had failed, and they went off to build new societies untainted by the sins and vices they believed were contaminating mainstream society. These utopian communities attracted the lunatic crowd, no doubt, but they also appealed to many sensible and distinguished individuals, including the eminent publisher and one-time presidential candidate Horace Greeley, who famously advised, “Go west, young man.”

  So, after thanking Mike Heare for his help, I’m going west to Grand Prairie, Indiana, in search of Greeley’s promised land.

  THE GRAND PRAIRIE HARMONICAL ASSOCIATION

  The last time I slept or ate with a floor under me (our wagon-box and mother earth excepted) was at Junction-City, nearly four weeks ago. The “Denver House,” which is the Astor House of the gold region, has walls of logs, a floor of earth, with windows and roof of rather flimsy cotton-sheeting.… Still, a few days of such luxury surfeited me, mainly because the main or drinking-room was also occupied by several blacklegs as a gambling-hall, and their incessant clamor … persisted in at all hours up to midnight, became at length a nuisance, from which I craved deliverance at any price. Then the visitors of that drinking and gambling-room had a careless way, when drunk, of firing revolvers, sometimes at each other, at other times quite miscellaneously, which struck me as inconvenient for a quiet guest with only a leg and a half, hence in poor condition for dodging bullets. So I left.