Messing with Maps: Miera y Pacheco, Dominguez, and Escalante edition

Plus: Feds fork out $1 million to Lisbon Valley lithium operation

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

I’ve been fascinated by maps of all sorts for as long as I remember. Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s map, drawn following the 1776 Escalante-Dominguez expedition, has intrigued me for nearly as long. And the more I look at old maps of the region, the more interesting this one becomes, in part because it’s far more accurate, especially in its depictions of the Four Corners Country, than maps made a century later by U.S. surveyors. 

In July of 1776, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, a couple of Franciscan priests, headed out with a motley crew from Santa Fe in search of a route to California. Instead, they ended up going up what is now Colorado’s Western Slope and through the heart of Ute territory, across to the Great Salt Lake, dropping down through western Utah, and finally looping — somewhat erratically — back to Santa Fe. But if they didn’t find California, they did leave behind relatively detailed journals and maps that give us insight into what the region looked like prior to the Euro-American invasion, and into early European colonists’ perception of the region. 

The party set out from the Pueblo of Santa Rosa de Abiquiu, on the first day of August, effectively leaving the Spanish Empire. The country beyond was the domain of the Weenuchiu, Tabeguache, Caputa, and Mouache bands of Ute. Not wanting to provoke the Ute people any more than necessary — they had made that mistake before — the Spanish Crown forbade settlers from wandering into the territory of or trading with the Utes. 

Herbert E. Bolton’s map showing Escalante’s route along with current day locations.

Still, the path they followed was well-established. Juan Rivera had travelled it a decade earlier, and he had followed well-established routes through a land that had been inhabited for millennia, and that had been intimately mapped in the collective consciousness of oral histories. Rivera probably wasn’t even the first Spaniard to tread these paths; mavericks defied the travel and trade ban to acquire deerskins or to try their luck in the mineralized slopes of the high San Juan Mountains. The Spanish mavericks, in turn, were merely following paths already well trodden by Ute, Diné, Paiute, and Pueblo travelers long before. 

So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that current day routes more or less follow Escalante’s and Dominguez’s path. From Abiquiu the party traveled northwest, roughly following Hwy. 84 about to Los Ojos/Tierra Amarilla, which they described as: 

“The river’s meadow is about a league (2.63 miles) long from north to south, good land for farming with the help of irrigation; it produces a great deal of good flax and abundant pasturage. There are also the other prospects which a settlement requires for its founding and maintenance. Here it has a good grove of white poplar.”

This sort of assessment of a site’s suitability for a settlement is common in Escalante’s journals. Most places he deemed good for a village now have a village on them, from Arboles to Ignacio to Dolores to Hotchkiss, though none would be established for another century or more after Escalante’s journey. 

They then cut westward, meeting up with the Navajo River near Dulce, which originates in what they called the Sierra de la Grulla, or the Mountains of the Cranes — now known as the South San Juans. Later they note that the headwaters of the Rio de Los Pinos are in the Sierra de la Plata, indicating that the entirety of what we now think of as the Western San Juans were then called the La Plata Mountains. When they reach the confluence with the San Juan River near Carracas, they write: 

“El Río de San Juan carries more water than the Navajo, and they say that farther north it has good and large meadows because it flows over more open country. Together they now form a river as plenteous as El Norte in the month of July, and it is called Río Grande de Navajo for separating the province of this name from the Yuta nation.” 

They called their camp “Nuestra Señora de las Nieves,” or Our Lady of the Snows, because they could see snow-capped peaks from there. This seems odd given that it was early August and they would have been looking at the south faces of the San Juans, where the snow should have melted months earlier. Maybe 1776 was a cold year, because later, they describe the passage between Durango and Hesperus like this: “the terrain is very moist, since it rains very frequently because of its proximity to the Sierra; as a result, both in the mountain forest — which consist of very tall and straight pines, scrub oak, and several kinds of wild fruits — and in its narrow valleys there are the prettiest of pastures. The climate here is excessively cold even in the months of July and August.”

On this version of the map, Miera did not include the route of the expedition. But the little circles with crosses indicate places they stopped, camped, or named.

They make it to the Big Bend of the Dolores River and then do some bending of their own, deviating from their westward course by 90 degrees for reasons I can’t figure out. Were their guides trying to avoid the rugged Canyon Country of southern Utah? Were they blindly following the path of their predecessor, Rivera? For whatever reason, they ended up heading north, encountering the Dolores River a second time near Cahone and a third time near Slick Rock. 

The party tried to follow the Dolores River downstream (north), but was stymied by the narrow, twisty gorge, writing: “The canyon we named El Laberinto de Miera because of the varied and pleasing scenery of rock cliffs which it has on either side and which, for being so lofty and craggy at the turns, makes the exit seem all the more difficult the farther one advances.” They turned eastward into the Big Gypsum valley, then toward Naturita and Nucla, before crossing the Uncompahgre Plateau where they found “deer and roe and other animals breed, and certain chicken fowl the size and shape of the common domestic ones, from which they differ in not having combs. Their flesh is very tasty.”

They dropped down to what they call the El Rio de San Francisco north of Montrose and that the “Yutas” call Ancapagri — i.e. Uncompahgre — or “Red Lake”, “because they say that near its source there is a spring of red-colored water, hot and ill-tasting.” 

It seems that part of the reason Miera’s maps somewhat accurately depict areas the party never journeyed to is because they spoke with the Indigenous people who intimately knew the country. This is in sharp contrast to U.S. maps drawn a century later, which depict much of southeastern Utah as a big blank spot, with the San Juan River vanishing into the desert after passing the Four Corners. Miera y Pacheco’s map, meanwhile, accurately shows the stream meeting up with the Colorado in Glen Canyon. 

That said, Miera y Pacheco does make some errors. He has the Gunnison River (San Xavier) running into the Dolores River near the present site of Gateway (passing through the Unaweap Gorge, perhaps?), and his maps appear to have the Green River (Rio San Buenaventura) flowing through the Wasatch Range and into Utah Lake. 

Miera’s depiction of the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake.

At Montrose the party again took an odd route, going up the Gunnison River, in a northeasterly direction, rather than following it downstream to the northwest, up and over Sierra del Venado Alazan (Mountain of the Sorrel-Colored Deer), or Grand Mesa, before getting back on course (sort of) and making their way to the Great Salt Lake. It wasn’t until that point, when winter was starting to set in, that they realized maybe they should have taken a different route, and that Monterey, their final destination, was still a long ways off. 

From the Great Salt Lake, the expedition went southward, roughly following I-15, before cutting east at St. George and encountering the Colorado River where it passes through the Marble Gorge. As you might imagine, crossing the river and the canyon wasn’t easy.

So they went south, all the way down to St. George, before turning back to the east, Santa Fe-bound. This is where it gets interesting, because their guides were not familiar with the country (what we would now call the Arizona strip) they were headed for. And yet, even though their route-finding was sometimes determined by drawing lots, they somehow managed to encounter the Colorado River at one of the few places they could get down to it, just downstream from the Paria River. Crossing the river, itself, wasn’t so easy.

“We were surrounded everywhere by plateaus and inaccessible peaks; therefore two of our men who were good swimmers entered the river naked, carrying their clothes on top of their heads. It was so deep and broad that the swimmers, in spite of their skill, were scarcely able to reach the opposite bank, abandoning in the middle of the river their clothing, which they never saw again.” 

So they built a raft of logs, and “Father Fray Silvestre, accompanied by the servants, tried to cross the river; but although the poles they used to propel it were about five yards long, they did not touch bottom even a short distance from the bank.”

It was late October by then and, “Not knowing when we would be able to leave this place, and having already eaten up the meat of the first horse, the pine kernels and the other provisions we had bought, we ordered another horse killed.” Desperate, they hiked up the Paria until they were able to climb up to the plateau, then dropped back down to the Colorado River in Glen Canyon in a place they called San Diego. Finally they found a place where the canyon and river widened — now inundated by Lake Powell — and they were able to cross. After climbing out of the canyon: “We found today many Indian tracks, but saw no one. So many wild sheep flourish here that their tracks look like great herds of domestic sheep. They are smaller than the domestic variety, of the same shape but much swifter.”

The party finally reached Santa Fe and in the ensuing years Miera y Pacheco created at least two maps of the country they had traveled through.

Another version of the Miera y Pacheco map.

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⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

• Mandrake Resources says the Department of Energy has awarded the firm, in partnership with the University of Utah and the National Renewable Energy Lab, $1 million to help it develop its proposed lithium extraction project in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah. The company has also drilled for uranium on the property.

• IsoEnergy says it has successfully reopened the main portal of its Tony M uranium mine, located near Ticaboo, Utah. This is just the first step of many the company needs to complete to restart production in the long-idled facility.

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🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

It’s hot out there, folks. And pretty darned dry. Which is why wildfires are erupting everywhere right now and the air is filled with smoke. Here are some maps from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information showing that California and other parts of the West Coast experienced their hottest July on record. Other parts of the West were also way warmer than normal.