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January 12, 2005
Back to adventures on the Old Spanish Trail
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
For anyone living in Southern Nevada, or anywhere in the Southwest for that matter, it's hard to remember that in 1776 this arid land was not just the home to American Indians, waiting in the wings, as it were, for Americans from New England, Virginia or Pennsylvania to head West and discover them. While most American schoolchildren learn in history courses about the early presence of imperial Spain in Western North America, the fact doesn't really stick in mind. The main cultural reminders in the everyday world are exotic Spanish landform and place names, a growing Spanish speaking population, and Mexican restaurants. New Western historians since the 1960s have tried to reformulate the meaning of "the West of the imagination" by including social groups formerly neglected in American history; think of the West and the image that comes to mind is probably the wholly Caucasian Marlboro Man. "The history of the West is tied more to the Spanish and the settlement of the West by Spain," says Brad Mastin as the four of us hike out a thorny mesquite-brushed trail in the borderlands east of Tecopa, just over the California line and southeast of Shoshone. Mastin is an outdoor recreation planner with the Barstow, Calif., field office of the Bureau of Land Management. His management area, the southern Great Basin in California, is arguably the most interior part of the United States, with a geography of river drainage named by explorer John C. Fremont, "the Pathfinder," during his 1843-44 expedition across the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin. The latter was the last large region of the U.S. mainland to be explored by any European or American power. Accompanying us are Rose Foster-Beardshear, another BLM staffer and Carol Ward, a Pomona, Calif., off-duty police officer, who drove here to volunteer for the trail maintenance work project. It's her second time doing volunteer work in the barren area. Ward says she loves the scenery. We're somewhere in the vicinity of the Old Spanish Trail, a network of difficult to discern traces along its oxbow shaped 1,200 miles between Santa Fe, N.M., and Los Angeles. Fremont gave the trail its name as well, having read earlier reports of Spanish missionaries and knowing first hand about then current users of the trail - Santa Fe traders, horse thieves and slavers. Many, including unemployed-mountain men, made a living raiding the Spanish missions in California and driving horses and mules back to New Mexico, reaping astounding profits. Others legitimately traded woolen New Mexican serapes and other imported goods from Missouri for mule and horseflesh. In a general way, what we're doing out here in the desert is more than trimming back overgrown mesquite; we're re-blazing the "Old Spanish Trail" for present-day recreation seekers. When Americans headed West of the Mississippi River in the early 1800s they discovered the wide Missouri flowed from the north; Lewis and Clark never dipped as far south as Nevada. Even when the Corps of Discovery crossed the Continental Divide into what would become Idaho, they were trespassing on Spanish territory. After winning the Mexican War in 1848, the U.S. took formal possession of California and the Southwest region. Other, more familiar emigrant routes to California took center stage as the Old Spanish Trail faded into history. In later, one-dimensional accounts of the "settlement of the Wild West," the older trail was forgotten. In retrospect, U.S. "Manifest Destiny" culturally erased what went on out West while English colonists were fighting for home rule against mother England in the East. In July 1776, as American colonists seceded from the British Empire, Spain's version of Lewis and Clark prepared to carry out a strategic initiative handed down by the governor of the northern Province of New Mexico. Franciscan friars Silvestre Velez de Escalante, 24, and Francisco Atansio Dominguez, Escalante's superior in the expedition - along with a dozen or so soldiers, interpreters and Indian guides - were scheduled to leave on - how's this for coincidence - the Fourth of July, 1776. Their mission, delayed a few weeks due to attacking Indians, was to find an overland route to Monterey in the colonial Spanish province of California. The reconnaissance was also partly in response to British and Russian exploration and trade with Indians in the Oregon country. Spain wanted to thwart this encroachment by the European powers. With similar military aims and diplomatic objectives as those pursued by the more familiar Lewis and Clark a quarter century later, the Dominguez-Escalante expedition set out to explore 1,800 miles of a vast, unknown territory encompassing the future states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona - lands circling the Colorado Plateau. Laying the foundations of the Old Spanish Trail, the Catholic friars were pioneers in opening the route connecting Spain's northern frontier settlements in California and New Mexico and creating what today we would call economic development. The trail was the commercial trade route - the Route 66 - of the early-19th century Southwest. On Dec. 4, 2002 the U.S. Congress designated the Old Spanish Trail a national historic trail, making it a part of the nation's scenic and historic trail system, the 11th historic trail so recognized for its significance to American history. The BLM and the National Park Service are responsible for administering and planning interpretive facilities and developments along the trail. Working with the Old Spanish Trail Association and a variety of governmental and non-profit agencies, the BLM in this neck of the desert has lead responsibility for drafting a comprehensive management plan and environmental impact statement. The Nature Conservancy and private landowners are also involved in preservation of Tecopa's scenic and historic lands, where the Old Spanish Trail is to the Mojave Desert what the Wilderness Road was to forests of Kentucky, or the Mormon Trail to the plains of Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming. "When Mexican trader Antonio Armijo completed the first trade caravan in 1829 over the Old Spanish Trail, he accomplished what Christopher Columbus set out to do," Mastin says. "He found a trade route to the East," one connecting the Pacific Coast with Santa Fe, then the western-most trade market for a just industrializing U.S. economy. But the mythical Rio San Buenaventura - which according to Spanish legend was supposed to flow to the western sea - was never found, nor the Seven Cities of Cibola or the gateway to Cathay (China). Columbus' dream, like the English myth of a Northwest Passage across the continent to the Orient, would be instead transformed: East, as well as West, North and South, would soon be coming here, to the New World Columbus had accidentally discovered. Explorers and settlers for 400 years after him would "discover" pathways through remote regions of the country still unclear to geographers. In Nevada, the Old Spanish Trail over Emigrant Pass to Tecopa continued on through the Mojave and over Cajon Pass to the Spanish mission settlement of San Gabriel, the budding Los Angeles. In the BLM's plans to interpret the trail for the public, the agency will begin in Santa Fe and work west, Mastin says. Congress has still to complete the management plan for the trail, expected to take another couple of years. Specific details of that plan involve placing signing for traffic turnouts and trailheads and designating where visitor centers and restrooms are to be located. Public "scoping meetings" are planned for summer. "Basically, trail development from end to end," Mastin says. No trivial thing: tourism dollars are at stake. Now the BLM is gearing up to hold public meetings in the spring in Pahrump and all along the trail's other communities, to help in the planning effort to integrate the wagon ruts of the Old Spanish Trail into modern America - and into modern American consciousness. "Our goal is to capture the local communities' knowledge base," says Mastin, indicating that many local people may have historical familiarity with the network of local trails that often make up the Old Spanish Trail through Southern Nevada. |
