a precarious balance between the wishes and needs of the clergy, the settlers, the Pueblo and Plains Indians, and Spanish authority, with each having incredible determination and will as deeply rooted in them as in any people. I would not presume to tell you how to conduct your office,” Gomez continued, “but if one is to be successful in governing New Mexico, the needs and desires of the three estates must be kept in perfect balance with the promises and difficulties presented by the Indians. Neither Onate nor anyone else has been successful in achieving that balance.”
“And you, Gomez, do you speak of yourself when you speak of the New Mexican character?”
“Yes, I guess I do,” Gomez responded thoughtfully, “for I am, like you, a descendant of the Iberians, fearless soldiers who fought courageously but never learned to hold their shields together in combat. We learned, though, those of us from Spain and from Portugal, to fight together. Learned to hold our shields together in an impenetrable phalanx and have thus become among the greatest soldiers on earth. What we have not learned is how to live or work together as a people. And our independence and separatism, our stubborn refusal to be welded into a uniform dominion, are, perhaps, both our strength and our weakness. But our shortcomings, or what others see as our shortcomings, have made us who we are, and the qualities that are ridiculed as our faults are really the bases of our superiority. I was not a first colonist, Governor, not one of Onate’s soldiers of fifteen ninety-eight or sixteen hundred, but I am one of them. So, yes, in terms of tenacity and will and pride, I am one with the New Mexico colonists and they are both the root of my successes as well as my failures.”
Gomez was quiet for a long time, seemingly contemplating it all, saying finally, “This is the last measure of civilization we’ll find before entering the wilderness. The country above Santa Barbara is referred to as ‘The Beyond,’ and you’ll find little there. If you wish to correspond with anyone in the city of Mexico, or elsewhere, this will likely be your last opportunity.”
* * *
Governor Luis de Rosas looked over Santa Barbara’s extensive lands of mesquite and grass plains, a land bathed in the winter colors of sienna, gold, and burnt umber, viewing the many arroyos and verdant valleys of the foothills region leading to the Rio Conchos. He took his final opportunity to communicate with his business partner, the duque de Segorbe, and, also, as required, with his “Most Illustrious Sir,” and with the audiencia, sending back with a returning caravan, his final notes. “Before me,” he wrote to the viceroy, “lies a desolate land without convenience or refuge, offering every means of misfortune and peril. We will, nevertheless, keep our pace of ten or fifteen leagues a day and find our provisions along the way.” And to the duke he wrote: “I see little of promise here, even my digestive difficulties have worsened. But perhaps things will improve as we go north.”
DEL PASO
Trudging through sand dunes, the caravan continued northward along a route as ragged as the bed of a stream. Above La Toma del Rio del Norte (where Juan de Onate had, in 1598, first entered the new land) the caravan crossed the watercourse at a gorge the river had carved between two oddly shaped hills. The pass, referred to by the Indians as a “gateway” or “mountain gap” (the Spanish equivalent of which was “Los Puertos”), was, for the traveler of the period, the gateway north. Beyond “the pass,” or “del paso,” the train encountered a cascade of rapids. Beside the brown torrent were grassy banks in narrow strips, which at various intervals, spread out into small meadows with dense stands of emerald-hued willows growing along their edges. On either side of the river were rolling stony hummocks and higher knolls of naked earth.
* * *
In the opening days of the New Mexican spring, the train moved up the east side of the Rio Grande Valley, its route devised so as to avoid soft and sandy ground and steep inclines. Lofty mountain ranges were strewn here and there both to the east and to the west of the river, with barren plains waiting just beyond the river’s banks. The days were hot and a cloud of dust billowed behind their many beasts as the men of the wagon train rode along.
The river, offering appealing trailside marshes, coves, and pools, was a corridor for the millions of migratory birds the travelers saw as the birds made their annual relentless passage northward, moving from winter food in the south to their northern breeding grounds. Following the birds, the members of the caravan pointed the noses of their mounts northward and continued their journey.
* * *
At a bend in the river, five leagues above del Paso, they spent their first night at the Ancon de Fray Garcia where they went into camp. Here the scene changed. Over this stretch travel was slow and difficult for the ground was rough and they had repeatedly to skirt washouts and plough through marshes. On either side of the river ran ranges of barren hills. When they reached their tops they looked out upon a broad expanse of desolate plains edged on the east by the rugged peaks of the Sierra de Los Organos. Camping in turn at El Estero Largo, El Estero Redondo, the Pools of Fray Blas, La Yerba del Manso, and Robledo el Chico, the train moved forward.
EL PARAJE DE LA CRUZ DE ROBLEDO
At a point 22 leagues north of del Paso, in a bleak expanse offering little inducement to encampment, the caravan rode parallel to, but somewhat removed from, the river. The soldiers of the supply train stood in their stirrups, peering this way and that, obviously looking for something. “I promised my wife that I’d add a stone in prayer for her, so I must find it,” Gomez said to the governor, regarding the stone cairn for which they were searching. “But you have no responsibility to come with me,” he said to Rosas and to the men of the escort who rode beside his horse.
“We see it as our responsibility, too,” said Blas de Miranda. “He may have been your wife’s grandfather, but he was also the first colonist to die in New Mexico. It’s important that we keep his memory alive.” He, Nicolas Ortiz, Gomez and the governor broke away from the train and rode down toward a great, bare, roundish mountain on the west bank of the river.
“The original cairn was built almost four decades ago by Juan de Onate and one of his captains to mark a special place,” Gomez explained to the governor. “Every year-and-a-half or so, as supply caravans pass though here on their way to or from Santa Fe, some of us who ride escort for the train do our best to rebuild it. It’s incredible how much damage can accrue to a stone structure in such a short time,” Gomez added. “If, in our passage, we didn’t rebuild it, the cairn would soon lose its definition, its stones merging with those of the landscape. It would be lost.”
“And who is the man we honor?” the governor asked as they rode across the rolling hills of a broad gap between the Caballo and San Andres Mountains.
“Pedro Robledo,” Gomez responded, “an alferez in Onate’s troop who died during the entrada of fifteen ninety-eight. A soldier from Carmena,” Gomez said, “he was my wife’s grandfather, a sixty-year-old gentleman, wearing mail and carrying the arms of Spanish authority who, with his wife and six children, came here as a settler. He provided four sons for the expedition,” Gomez continued, “a number only equaled once as the largest number of soldiers provided by one family. The Indians at the pueblo of Acoma killed one son during the same year. We see the father and his family as symbolic of who we are as a Spanish colony,” Gomez said, “and, therefore, we honor him.”
Scrambling over rocks and through the tangles of brambles and thorns along the brown austerity of a wretched and miserable desert stretch, later to be known as the Jornada del Muerto, the Dead Man’s Route, the soldiers of the escort finally found the gravesite. It looked very much like the so-called Kuba Rumia in Algiers, a curious circular stone monument said to be a Christian burial site, about which there had been much speculation.
“It’s larger than I would have expected,” the governor said, regarding the stone structure they had found.
“Four decades of stones,” Gomez responded, “and the good wishes and prayers provided by the men of twenty-six trains. The site is known as the Cruz or Paraje de Robledo, the Robledo campsite. We’ll rebuild the cairn for the settlers and soldiers of future trains to find and will camp here tonight.”
* * *