Road Trip 2017 - Day 3

March 29



After closely following US160 between Farmington and Kayenta the Armijo route heads north across Shonto Plateau. Armijo was apparently relying on intelligence gathered by the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition.  These two priests, accompanied by a cartographer Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, set out from Santa Fe in 1776 to find a route to California.  The ran into trouble finding a route across the Colorado River.

"These Spanish were the first European men to travel the route through much of the Colorado Plateau into Utah, and back through Arizona to New Mexico.^[4] During the course of their trip, they documented the route and provided detailed information about the "lush, mountainous land filled with game and timber, strange ruins of stone cities and villages, and rivers showing signs of precious metals." [see wikipedia  accessed 4/8/2017]

The river was a significant impairment to east-west travel in the southwest.  Following the Armijo route I continued north on AS98 to Page - the city that was built to accommodate construction of the Glen Canyon Dam.  The Armijo route is north of the current highway between the Kaiboto Plateau and the Rainbow Plateau and crosses the Colrado River a few miles north of where I cross at Page   In Page I stopped at the John Wesley Powell museum that is devoted to the history of the man, and the geologic and paleontology of the area.

On the drive to Page, and any time I drive in the southwest, I am fascinated by the geology.  For example, here is a view from a roadside rest on AZ98 looking east on the Kaiboto Plateau and toward the Rainbow Plateau- the route of the Armijo expedition went across the plateau and turned north as it anticipated the Colorado River.

Looking northwest across the Kaiboto Plateau- Northern Arizona

 It is doubly fascinating when you consider the relationship of the paleological record with the geological record. After viewing the geology as I drove through New Mexico and Arizona, and reading a about it in the Powell museum I am dismayed by my own ignorance. Combine that with my ignorance about paleontology, despite my desires as a junior high school student to be a paleontologist,  I find the whole subject to be a fascinating "forensic" puzzle. I have been reading  Michael Lewis' book The Undoing Project" about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty." [The quote is from Kahneman's Nobel Prize citation.] Are there any fields of study more subject to "decision-making under uncertainty" than either geology, paleontology, or forensic science? But I digress.

One of the women , Kim, who was working at the Powell Museum was a Spanish Trail aficionado. What I learned from her is that the route of the Armijo expedition across the Colorado river was upstream from the Glen Canyon dam, and now is under several hundred feet of of water of Lake Powell.  This was the site which has become known as the Crossing of the Padres where the earlier Dominguez-Escalante party crossed the river.  Kim at the Powell Museum, though, had a different theory.  She said she is of the opinion that they crossed somewhere upstream from the Padres crossing. Her theory is based on a report of a inscription on a rock possibly by a member of the Dominguez-Escalante party. In Kim's exploration in the vicinity of the alleged inscription she discovered a piece of pottery in the area that she proposes  is "definitely not Indian, but is Spanish" pottery. Therefor it could be from the Armijo expedition.

Following my visit to the Powell Museum in Page I proceeded to the Glan Canyon Dam site - it is an impressive piece of work. A large large 710 ft. high concrete dam with associated generating facilities, spillways, diversion tunnels.

and a beautiful bridge.  The visitors center at the site of the dam is very inter sting and I had another discussion abouyt how the Armijo expedition got across the Colorado River.  The people I spoke to there were generally of  the opinion that Armijo used the Crossing of the Padres which is not under several hundred feet of water of Lake Powell. Whatever the detail , the party did cross the Colorado and proceeded across the Mojave Desert .  The trail is parallel to the US160 route which I will follow tomorrow from St. George.

Today I followed US89 southwesterly. The road closely follows Armijo's route as heads to the difficult part of his journey across the Moaje Desert. A few miles after Kanab in Utah, where the road truns south, the route crosses the Utah-Arizona brder to Fredonia where US89 turns east but AZ Route 389 turns west. Both the road and the Spanish Trail then go to another site that I basically stumbled across, Pipe Springs National Monument. Located on the Kaibab Paiute reservation and in an area Arizona Strip.

There I met Range Ben who, with two long, gray hair braids and nice jewelry,  pretty clearly was a Native American. He provided a good fascinating and history of the place.  It is the site a natural spring which until ran until only a few years ago.  In \the middle of the 19th Century the spring fed a grassland with grass as high as the belly of a horse the stretched for 30 miles in all direction.  Thanks to over grazing, the grassland is now replaced by scrub brush except for a 30 square foot plot where the Park Service is trying to grow some of the original grass.

When the Mormon's arrived in Utah Brigham Young apparently recognized the potential of the place and wanted to include it in his claim which he called Deseret.  A proposal was sent to congress from Young  to create the Deseret Territory consisted of most of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and parts of some of the adjoining states. To make a long story short, Young's proposal was not accepted by Congress.  In the meantime, some buildings were erected on the Pipe Springs site, without asking the naive Paiute Indians, and a cattle ranch was started.

Living quarters and cheese production building

It was operated by a Mormon family with a husband and three wives and, consequently, a large number of children.  Their daily routine was to milk cows and made butter and cheese - nearly 1000 pounds a week. The butter and cheese was shipped  by wagon to St. George to give to the people there who were involved in building the Mormon Temple there or to sell to raise money.

Typical Paiute living area

Ranger Ben regrets the loss of the Native American population in the neighborhood, even tough a chart in the visitor center museum shows that the population has increased substantially over the past few years, but  no where near what is was historically. Along with starvation, loss of traditional food resources due to the cattle, and imported diseases, Ben  blames the Mexican and US traders who, beginning the the 16th Century, came to the area.  They brought some goods but their main goal, according to Ben, was to take women as slaves to either Los Angeles or Santa Fe.  That was a more profitable business.  I learned later that there are  no records of this illegal activity because under Spanish law anyone who went into that Spanish Territory had to pay a fee to the Governor in Santa Fe.  To avoid the fee the simply didn't  keep records.  However, Indian oral history and discovery of abandoned mining sites (the other resource that the traders were looking for) provide ample evidence of the slave trade.

Toward the end of the 19oth Century the site was transferred to private hands and fell into disuse due to the destruction of the grasslands. The Armijo route passes right through the Pipe Springs site then proceeds west to an area just just northeast from the present-day Mesquite, Nevada, where the later Northern route of the Old Spanish Trail came down along the San Juan River. The area where the two route merge is just southwest of Saint George where I spent the night.