Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (46 page)

Colonel Washington and his men continued marching west along the Santa Fe River, then turned south, dropping steadily into the broad valley of the Rio Grande. The pack animals were skittish and ornery, as they often were when they first hit the trail. “Many of the mules being wild, much trouble ensued,” Dick Kern jotted in his journal. The expeditioners crossed the dry, sandy bed of the Rio Galisteo and established camp at Santo Domingo Pueblo, an old settlement of about eight hundred Indians.

Dick Kern was struck by how “beautiful and fertile” the Rio Grande Valley was around Santo Domingo. “It is harvest time,” he noted, “and the Indians are carrying their wheat in bundles on their heads to the thrashing place and singing their wild songs.” The Indians at Santo Domingo were friendly to the soldiers and eagerly took them in. Lieutenant Simpson watched a pueblo woman making a kind of tortilla, and she offered him one to eat. Put off by the “perspiration rolling from her face in streams,” the fastidious eater reluctantly tasted the freshly baked flat bread. “Although I was exceedingly hungry,” he wrote, “it did not fail to leave at the stomach a sensation of nausea.”

Washington’s men left Santo Domingo the next day and forded the muddy Rio Grande, in which two of their supply wagons became deeply mired. They continued on for twenty-six miles, bearing northwest, through dry country “utterly worthless for cultivation” in Simpson’s estimation, until they came to another Indian settlement known as Jemez Pueblo. Lieutenant Simpson was not much impressed with the place. He noted the “unsightly appearance” of the settlement, with its “ragged-looking goat enclosures.” The Roman Catholic church was a sagging adobe affair that “was evidently wasting away under the combined influence of neglect and moisture.” Inside the musty church flitting and diving from the rafters were innumerable swallows that “seemed to be perfectly at home.” Cryptically, a human skull and a pile of bones were placed beside the pulpit. Simpson was impressed, however, by a large painting hanging on the back wall of the chancel, a beatific image depicting San Diego bearing the cross. “At present it is considerably defaced, but the touches of a genuine artist are yet visible upon it,” Simpson wrote. “None but a true son of the muse could have thrown into the countenance the expression of beautiful sadness with which it is radiant.”

All around Jemez Pueblo, the grounds were covered in orchards of apricot and peach, and along the Jemez River were “patches of good corn and wheat.” A few miles from camp Simpson spotted a gray wolf “shying off very reluctantly from us.” Curiously, not far from the pueblo, strung along the river, were dozens of empty houses and compounds, even an abandoned copper smelting furnace. According to Simpson’s guide, these ruined adobe buildings were “once inhabited by Mexicans who had deserted them from fear of the Navahos.” Less than a month earlier a Catholic pastor, Vicente Garcia, had been murdered by Navajo raiders.

The precariousness of life here was all too apparent. Jemez was situated on the front lines of the Navajo wars; over the centuries the vulnerable pueblo had suffered a disproportionate share of devastation at the hands of the Navajo raiders. During the latter part of the sixteenth century, the Navajo had nearly wiped out the Jemez population, and sometime in the seventeenth century a large number of Jemez fled the region altogether, resettling in a safer location many miles away. Other Jemez Indians joined forces with or were absorbed by the Navajo and eventually intermarried with them, their offspring forming the nucleus of a distinct Navajo clan, the
ma-ii deeshgiizhnii
.

Colonel Washington made camp just north of the pueblo. It being the beginning of harvest season, the Jemez people were celebrating the Green Corn Dance, and many of Washington’s men wandered over from camp to watch the ceremony from the rooftop of one of the dwellings. In his journal, Simpson described the movements of the dancers in minute detail—their feathered headdresses, their gourd rattles, their costumes of turtle shell, antelope feet, and fox skin. But, for all its energy and sense of spectacle, the lieutenant was not much impressed by the Jemez dance, either. “The movements in the dance,” he sniffed, “differed but slightly from those of Indians generally.”

The governor of Jemez, whose name was Hosta, gave Simpson a tour of the pueblo and led him down into one of its ceremonial kivas, a dark, round chamber without windows entered from the smokehole in the roof. The kiva’s walls were painted with representations of turkeys, deer, foxes, and wolves. The two men fell into a conversation about the Jemez religion. Hosta made it clear that his people had held on to their ancient beliefs even while adopting the tenets of Roman Catholicism—“which,” Simpson noted, “he says has been forced upon them, and which they do not understand.”

Hosta said that both the Jemez and Pecos people believed they were the direct descendants of Montezuma and the Aztecs, and that one day they would be delivered from their enemies, the Spanish and the Navajos, and restored to their former glory “by a people who would come from the East.” The Jemez Indians, Hosta added, were “beginning to believe that that people had come”—in the form of General Kearny and the Americans. Perhaps it was in part because of flatteries such as these, but Hosta had made quite an impression on Simpson and others in Washington’s party. The pueblo chief was invited to accompany Washington’s expedition, and he was only too glad to participate in an incursion into the heart of his people’s enemy, the Navajo. Before they left Jemez, Dick Kern persuaded Hosta to stand in full warrior regalia for a watercolor portrait. “Hosta,” Simpson concluded, “is one of the finest-looking and most intelligent Pueblo Indians I have seen, and on account of his vivacity and offhand graciousness, is quite a favorite among us.”

As they left the pueblo behind on the cool morning of August 22, the four hundred men of Washington’s expedition pushed into the harsh and beautiful world that sprawled weirdly before them on the back side of the Jemez volcano. The supply wagons could go no farther, the road having petered out in a broiled maze of buttes and gulchy badlands and intervening alkali flats studded with monoliths of rock that suggested the shapes of animals and mythic creatures. It was a fantastical country whose patterns the Americans found more and more difficult to grasp as they worked their way slowly westward.

In his journal, Simpson struggled to find a vocabulary to describe this strange enveloping landscape. Several times he called it “a broken country.” Often he resorted to the geological argot of his day, seeming to take comfort in identifying “scoriaceous deposits,” “friable sandstones,” and “argillaceous rocks burnt to different degrees of calcination.” Other times he lapsed into biblical allusions, citing verses from Isaiah and Psalms about the salty desiccation of the Holy Land and suggesting at one point that “the curse of barrenness may be chargeable to the wickedness of the people who inhabit it.” Much of this land, he proclaimed, was “a barren waste.”

Yet even Simpson was not always entirely immune to the country’s charms. He loved its weather, which was favorable to marching—hot and dry in the days, crisp and cool in the star-filled nights, with occasional “fine showers of rain” to clarify the dusty afternoons. Simpson had his first puzzling encounter with petrified wood—“Do not these petrifactions show that this country was once better timbered than it is now?” One morning he was delighted to be entertained by a hummingbird that buzzed into his tent “where it lit for a moment within a foot or two of my person and then disappeared, not to be seen again.” Simpson even allowed himself a moment of uncharacteristic poetry. On the morning of August 25, shortly after breaking camp, he looked back with his horizon glass and caught a majestic glimpse of Cabezon Peak, a stand-alone plug of volcanic rock towering two thousand feet over the rolling floor of the Puerco Valley. He wrote, “As the morning sun threw its golden light upon its eastern slope, leaving all the other portions in a softened twilight shadow, I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful and grand.”

Inspired by the same vista, Dick Kern did a wash drawing of Cabezon Peak, with the dawn waxing over its fluted shaft. The Navajos, who had been living around Cabezon Peak for centuries, called it Black Rock Coming Down and believed it was the ossified head of an enormous evil giant, Yeitso, chief of the Enemy Gods, whom the great warrior Monster Slayer decapitated in a battle described in Navajo creation stories.

The expedition struck the Rio Puerco, Simpson finding that “rio” was too charitable a term, there being almost no water in it other than a few pools “here and there—the fluid a greenish, sickening color and brackish to the taste.” The Puerco’s bottom was choked with gumbo mud, and at one point during the crossing a mule bearing a heavy mountain howitzer lost its footing and tumbled into the streambed. The groaning animal fell on its back with its legs trundling helplessly in the air like a capsized beetle, “a scene,” Simpson wrote, “that partook both of the painful and ludicrous.”

After two more days of slow, steady marching, Washington’s men crossed the Continental Divide. On August 26 they came to the Chaco Wash and soon found themselves in the presence of what Simpson called a “conspicuous ruin.” The Pueblo Indians serving as guides had different words for it. The Pueblo of Montezuma, one of them called it. Another called it the Pueblo of the Rats. In the end, Simpson would call it the Pueblo Pintado, or “Painted Village.”

Pintado was the easternmost of the nine “great houses” of Chaco Canyon, the most magnificent prehistoric ruins in the American West. It was apparently not Colonel Washington’s conscious intention to route his expedition through this extraordinary place, but since he did, Simpson and the Kern brothers were afforded a great opportunity. They would be the first Americans to describe and survey the sprawling stone remains of the vanished Anasazi civilization that thrived here around
A.D.
1000.

With “high expectations,” Simpson, Dick Kern, and a small party of Mexican escorts took off to examine the ruins. This was a once-in-a-lifetime treat for trained surveyors, and a welcome change from the drearier requirements of a military expedition. But they knew they didn’t have much time. Washington’s troops were moving on, and they would not wait for Simpson and his party to catch up with them. They could not forget that they were in dangerous Navajo country now, and did not want to become separated by too many miles from the protection of the army. And yet they couldn’t help themselves; a ruined civilization was too enticing to pass up.

So Simpson and his team worked in a fast fury—taking measurements, drawing sketches, collecting artifacts, examining rock art, making excavations, taking compass and astronomical readings. They kept themselves occupied for three long days, moving from one great ruin to another, each structure seemingly larger and more splendid than the last. The vast stone and timber great houses were semicircular, multistoried pueblos, with hundreds of rooms, some of which were “in an almost perfect state of preservation.” Most of these pueblos were built on the north side of the wash, back up against the high sandstone wall of the canyon. The largest of all the structures, Pueblo Bonito, had more than seven hundred rooms, stood four stories high, and was oriented almost perfectly along a north-south axis, within fifteen minutes of true north. Simpson marveled at these structures, noting “the grandeur of their design and superiority of their workmanship.” They represented, he thought, “a condition of architectural excellence beyond the power of the Indians or New Mexicans of the present day to exhibit.”