They’d been exploring some of the most challenging mountain and high-desert country in the American West, landscapes unseen before by any but their Native inhabitants. Often these uninvited aliens relied on Indian guides. Before they found their way back, they would kill and eat some of their horses, just to stay alive.
The sick man, a seasoned frontier veteran, was not Kit Carson, but Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, a Spaniard. And this rough, dry landscape was not yet Mexican or U.S. territory, but part of Spain’s boundless Kingdom and Provinces of New Mexico. Earlier, on Aug. 8, don Bernardo and his party had camped on the future site of Durango. The year was 1776.
A larger-than-life presence in New Mexico, the 63-year-old, multitasking Miera was never a braggart. Asked his occupation, he’d answer farmer. Yet he could’ve added: engineer, militia captain, cartographer, district office, merchant, luckless silver miner, debtor and debt collector, stone- metal- and wood-worker, rancher, and prolific religious artist.
Miera lived a life bigger than any bronze statue. He deserves to have his name enshrined on a 14er somewhere in the Four Corners. Or why not rename Utah Lake? The first non-Indian booster to marvel at the scene, Miera enthusiastically promoted the lake’s potential to King Carlos III of Spain. We have Escalante this and Escalante that, and of course Carson National Forest. So why not Lake Miera?
Were it not for his baptismal entry, we might not know Miera’s birth in 1713 in the hill country of far north-central Spain. But what of his youth? Where did he learn to draw, paint and sculpt? Who taught him the science of mathematics and cartography? When did he first pick up a brush, a chisel or an astrolabe?
As el primogénito, the family’s first-born son, why did he leave home? On what ship, with whom and where did he land? Was it a pull, an invitation he simply couldn’t refuse from a relative already established in the Spanish Indies? Or a push, a failed first marriage or a scandal. Had the young Miera fled a dastardly crime, he surely would have used an alias at his wedding in 1741 at the god-forsaken presidio of Janos in the Chihuahua desert.
By marrying a local New Mexican girl, he became cousin to half the colony. After Estefanía bore their first son, he moved his young family to El Paso del Norte, gateway to the Kingdom and Provinces of New Mexico. There, for a dozen years, Miera struggled to make a living at a variety of pursuits, from dry goods to silver mining. Finally, a bullying creditor put him in jail. Just then, early in 1755, Miera’s luck changed.
The viceroy in Mexico City was demanding up-to-date maps of the northern provinces. All at once, the governor of New Mexico needed a cartographer on staff. The only name anyone could suggest was Miera’s. Hence, his debts evaporated. Moreover, Gov. Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle took the young map maker into his circle.
When Marín set out on his official visitation of the colony, Miera rode at his side. The geographical and cultural field data gathered by Miera fell neatly onto his New Mexico map of 1758, the earliest we have by his hand. That map pleased the viceroy, and Marín set Miera to making more maps. When Marín’s term ended, Miera adapted. He seems not to have drawn any more maps for at least 15 years, but he kept on accepting commissions for artwork.
In the mid-1770s, a new client approached him. Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante wanted a carved and painted wooden altar screen for the remote mission church at Zuni Pueblo. Paisanos from the same region of Santander in Spain, artist and missionary struck a deal. Neither could have foreseen the consequences.
Despite the newly arrived Franciscan’s utter ignorance of the region’s human and physical geography, his religious superiors in Mexico City had instructed the young missionary to learn everything he could about a possible northern overland route westward from Santa Fe to Monterey in Alta, California.
A quick visit to the obstinate Hopis, who had thrown off Christianity in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and word of forbidding country beyond, convinced Escalante that any road westward must pass north of the Hopi towns through the country of the Utes. Talks in Santa Fe with fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, his no-nonsense superior, set plans in motion. Miera would draw a map. But who else would go?
Only a handful of New Mexicans volunteered. Delays, including a murderous Comanche raid, erased their planned departure July 4, 1776. Ten members in all, soon swelled by a pair of runaway Genízaro Indians, they trailed north out of Santa Fe on July 29 with no idea of what lay ahead. Historian Herbert Eugene Bolton exalted their trek as “a pageant in the wilderness.” Hardly more notable than ticks on an elk’s belly, these motley dozen souls were poised, nevertheless, to make one of the truly epic explorations of the American West.
Veteran Miera probably resented not being named captain of the little train. Worse, his stomach ached. On Aug. 6, 1776, camped on the Río de Navajo (today’s San Juan), he shot the sun at midday with his astrolabe, then retired to his tent. That afternoon, according to Escalante’s diary, Miera’s stomach “got much worse, but God willed that he got better before morning the next day, so that we could continue on our way.”
Aug. 7 saw them splash across the Piedra (the Piedra Parada, or Standing Rock, for our Chimney Rock), and camp on the Río de los Pinos on the site of Bayfield. The next day, they crossed the Florido (our Florida), and made it to the Animas, just downstream from today’s Strater Hotel (which, incidentally, didn’t open for another 111 years).
Up in the San Juans, the impatient Miera rode ahead alone along the Dolores and disappeared into Summit Canyon. For fear he’d get lost, the two Franciscans sent another rider after him. It was past midnight when they finally showed up where the friars were waiting “extremely worried over the two’s delay.”
Still, they named the canyon El Laberinto de Miera (Miera’s Labyrinth), as Escalante explained, because the rock cliffs on both sides “being so lofty and craggy at the turns, makes the exit seem all the more difficult the farther one advances.” Three days later, Miera insisted on climbing a rocky ridge that all but killed their horses.
Another month of trials and errors found them on the Green River in the vicinity of today’s Jensen, Utah. This was as far north as they would go. Yet more than half their vision quest lay ahead.
Having scrambled up, through and around every obstacle, they rejoiced in the flat, open Utah Valley and the cautious but welcoming Uintah Utes. They were camped on the shore of Utah Lake.
A few days later, the weather turned ugly. Heavy, wet snow fell in early October. The plain became so soggy that their pack animals staggered and got stuck. No Indian they met had heard of Spaniards farther west. And whatever mountain passes that lay in that direction surely by now were clogged with snow.
Fathers Domínguez and Escalante took anxious council and decided that they must turn back. Miera fumed. The unruly cartographer and a couple of the others, according to Escalante, “came along very peevishly.” They could make it to Monterey in a week, Miera insisted.
Unnerved, the fathers relented. As previously on the trail, they would cast lots – on toward Monterey or back to Santa Fe? Despite Miera’s harangue, the lots fell to Santa Fe. Whatever dark thoughts he harbored, had the little band listened to Miera, they would surely have frozen to death in the Sierra Nevada like so many of the Donner party 70 years later.
His stomach got worse. Ten days later, after the sun had set, the disgruntled map maker and most of the others ducked into an Indian hut. Fathers Domínguez and Escalante heard chanting but didn’t know until the next morning what was going on. A venerable Paiute medicine man, it seemed, had set about to cure Miera’s stomach. The two Franciscans condemned the rite as superstitious idolatry and scolded the participants. They said nothing about Miera’s stomach.
The journey back eastward would bring upon all of them thirst, hunger and sickness from wild foods and bad water. They would eat horse meat to survive and negotiate almost impassable slick-rock canyons and desert wastes. Finding a ford of the Colorado River deep in Glen Canyon cost them 12 grueling days.
From there to the Hopi pueblo of Oraibi, cold and hunger stalked their every step. On Nov. 12, while the rest of the half-starved party trailed out, the two friars remained in camp “to build a fire and warm up Don Bernardo Miera, who was ready to freeze on us.” Again they made no mention of his stomach.
All survived. They never reached Monterey; their preaching had scant effect; and, at this stage, Spain possessed neither the motivation nor the resources to colonize the Great Basin. (Just 70 years later, Mormons, long on motivation but short of resources, would spill into the void.).
Still, Domínguez and Escalante deserve enormous admiration for not losing en route a single one of their 10 compañeros, each of whom endured countless perils by skill, luck and God’s grace. How many of today’s rugged Rocky Mountain or canyonlands outfitters would step back willingly into the unknown landscape of 1776 for a four-month pack trip?
Miera’s final years proved as full as his middle years, especially after the arrival of renowned Gov. Juan Bautista de Anza in 1778. Anza wanted more maps: just the facts, Miera – no papal chariots, leaping buffalo or bearded Paiutes. Finally, in April 1785, fellow presidial soldiers laid Miera to rest in the military chapel at the base of his enduring stone altar screen. He was 71.
At the foot of Miera’s enlistment, Anza noted that the subject had died “naturally.” Whether the stomach aches he suffered a decade earlier figured in his death, we just don’t know. While Miera’s early life in Spain is yet to be revealed, the man and his accomplishments in distant New Mexico still inspire. Over the years, the unruly cartographer, a European Spaniard by birth, had been transformed into the quintessential Hispanic New Mexican.
As such, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco deserves that commemoration. Had someone suggested the name to Anza, Utah Lake would surely be Lake Miera today. And neither Domínguez nor Escalante would have seen any harm in that.
Dr. John Kessell is a University of New Mexico Professor of History who lives near Bayfield. He has two books published on Southwest history, “Miera y Pacheco” and “Whither the Waters.”
