Waiting on a mule deer crossing…
In this important book, ethnohistorian and archaeologist Steven G. Baker carefully documents for the first time the routes of Juan Antonio de Rivera’s two expeditions from New Mexico into today’s western Colorado in 1765, correcting the mistaken notion, publicized by historian Donald C. Cutter in 1976, that Rivera reached the Colorado River in the area of modern Moab, Utah, via the Spanish Trail on his second trip. From a structural standpoint, this book is strikingly similar to Herbert E. Bolton’s Pageant in the Wilderness for the better-known 1776 expedition of Friars Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante. Although Baker and Bolton are from different disciplines and write in very different styles, in each study the author’s thorough description of the route precedes the translated journals, which, in this case, New Mexico state historian Rick Hendricks has transcribed, translated, and annotated. In addition to clarifying that Rivera reached the Gunnison River near modern Delta, Colorado, which Bolton also recognized, Baker’s book is also significant for offering one of the earliest known, firsthand accounts of the area of the Centennial State, the cultures and homelands of its Ute and Paiute inhabitants, and the Navajo-Uncompahgre Trail.Comprising the first eighteen chapters, Baker’s interdisciplinary trail study and narrative history of Rivera’s trips is divided into three sections. In part 1, the author contextualizes Rivera’s travels by noting that New Mexico governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín encouraged the initial trip “to test the veracity of the legend” of “the indigenous province of Teguayo” in modern Utah and “to search for sources of silver,” and the return journey to explore the Río Tizón, or modern Colorado River, and its peoples (14). Although little is known of Rivera himself, he was apparently baptized in Chihuahua in 1738 and departed from Abiquiu in 1765 in a company of fifteen to twenty men, who were guided by genízaros, including Joaquin Trujillo, a Ute-speaking Kiowa who had earned his freedom after Comanches sold him into slavery at Taos. Once in the area of southwestern Colorado, Rivera’s men needed Ute and Paiute permission and guidance to navigate the rugged, mountainous terrain. In part 2, Baker documents Rivera’s thirty-six-day, five-hundred-mile trip from Abiquiu to the Big Bend of the Dolores River and back to Santa Fe, explaining that the Paiutes advised him to return in October, when it was cooler, to reach the Tizón. In part 3, Baker argues, confusingly enough, that although both Rivera and his Tabeguache Ute guide believed he had reached the Tizón River on his second expedition, in actuality, he reached the Gunnison, which is a tributary of the Colorado River, forty miles south of modern Grand Junction, Colorado.Part 4 consists of Rick Hendricks’s meticulous transcriptions and translations of Rivera’s exceedingly brief and difficult-to-decipher journals. Originally located by Austin Nelson Leiby in the Archivo General Militar de Madrid in 1969, the journals were translated previously by Joseph P. Sánchez in 1997. What sets Hendricks’s version apart, however, is that, like the rest of this book, it is based on firsthand observations of the landscape.In addition to the author’s painstaking written analysis of Rivera’s route, Baker’s book contains numerous other strengths, including its extensive visual documentation of New Mexico and modern Colorado’s terrain and the Ute and Paiute cultures that Rivera’s party encountered, through detailed maps, photographs, and illustrations. The author also offers useful synonymies of place-names from the journals of Rivera and Domínguez and Vélez de Escalante with modern equivalents, and ethnohistorians will appreciate his investigations into Ute equestrianism, knowledge of silver deposits, and the English translations of numerous Ute headmen’s names obtained through correspondence with a Ute informant.Most unfortunate, of course, is the extent of the scholarly controversy over Rivera’s route, which meant that Baker had to expend so much time and energy proving that Rivera did not reach Moab, and that he was unable to publish his study sooner. Given that Rivera was actually looking for the Colorado River, could see modern Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and still passed within a hundred miles of Moab on his corrected route, it seems that the Cutter research team could be forgiven for making an easily understandable mistake, especially considering that in 1765 Colorado and Utah did not yet exist as US states. Beyond that, although Baker is quick to promote Colorado at every turn, he is entirely too dismissive of Spanish New Mexico, referring to the colony as “small and militarily weak,” Santa Fe as “small and poor,” and Abiquiu as “dusty” and “little” (3, 14, 35). At times, he also seems to get mired in detail on subjects such as the Bearded Utes and Ketchumup Stock Trail. In spite of these limitations, Baker’s book is a major contribution to the history and archaeology of the early North American West, offering both Hispanic and indigenous perspectives.
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