The Romance of the Colorado River : $b The Story of its Discovery in 1840, with an Account of the Later Explorations, and with Special Reference to the Voyages of Powell through the Line of the Great Canyons — John Shaqi
The Romance of the Colorado River : $b The Story of its Discovery in 1840, with an Account of the Later Explorations, and with Special Reference to the Voyages of Powell through the Line of the Great CanyonsDellenbaugh, Frederick Samuel
History
The Romance of the Colorado River : $b The Story of its Discovery in 1840, with an Account of the Later Explorations, and with Special Reference to the Voyages of Powell through the Line of the Great Canyons
Dellenbaugh, Frederick Samuel
Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico) -- Description and travel; Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico) -- Discovery and exploration; Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico) -- Description and travel; Colorado River Valley (Colo.-Mexico) -- Discovery and exploration; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Description and travel; Gran
congratulated on having those thirty years, interesting years, before
the wilds could be made commonplace.
The Moki Town of Wolpi, Arizona. The Moki Town of Wolpi, Arizona.
700 feet above the valley.
Photograph by J.K. HILLERS, U.S. Geol. Survey.
Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; indeed, it was
like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable. The padres crossed
it and recrossed it on the southwestern corner, but they made no
impression. After Kino’s death in 1711 there was a lull in the entradas
to the Colorado, though Ugarte, coming up along the eastern coast of
Lower California, sailed to the mouth of the river in July, 1721.
Twenty-four years later (1744) Padre Jacobo Sedelmair went down the
Gila from Casa Grande to the great bend, and from there cut across to
the Colorado at about the mouth of Bill Williams Fork, but his journey
was no more fruitful than those of his predecessors in the last two
centuries. It seems extraordinary in these days that men could traverse
a country, even so infrequently, during two whole centuries and yet
know almost nothing about it. Two years after Sedelmair touched the
Colorado, Fernando Consag, looking for mission sites, came up the gulf
to its mouth, and when he had sailed away there was another long
interval before the river was again visited by Europeans. This time it
was over a quarter of a century, but the activity then begun was far
greater than ever before, and the two padres who now became the
foremost characters in the drama that so slowly moved upon the mighty
and diversified stage of the South-west, were quite the equals in
tireless energy of the Jesuit Kino. These two padres were Garces and
Escalante, more closely associated with the history of the Basin of the
Colorado than any one who had gone before. Francisco Garces, as well as
Escalante, was of the Franciscan order, and this order, superseding the
Jesuit, was making settlements, 1769-70, at San Diego and Monterey, as
well as taking a prominent part in those already long established on
the Rio Grande. There was no overland connection between the California
missions and those of Sonora and the Rio Grande, and the desire to
explore routes for such communication was one of the incentives of both
Garces and Escalante, in their long entradas. But it seemed to be the
habit of those days, either never to seek information as to what had
previously been accomplished, or to forget it, for the expedition of
Oñate might as well never have been made so far as its effect on
succeeding travels was concerned. He had crossed Arizona by the very
best route, yet Escalante, 172 years afterward, goes searching for one
by way of Utah Lake! Coming from the west, the Moki Towns were ever the
objective point, for they were well known and offered a refuge in the
midst of the general desolation. Garces had his headquarters at the
mission of San Xavier del Bac, or Bac, as it was commonly called, nine
miles south of the present town of Tucson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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