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.”
* * *
Above Robledo, the river wound between steep banks intersected continually by transverse gullies. The gullies, whether shallow or deep, mired the wheels of their carts at every turn. Seeking better ground, the caravan left the river and continued northward.
OJO DEL PERRILLO
The members of Rosas’s train rode through warm days beneath azure skies along the worn and tattered track of the royal road. Their course after leaving the river at Robledo took them through a seemingly waterless stretch of nearly 90 miles that would save them a day or more of travel. The lack of water and the choking dust brought them all—horse, man, mule, and foodstock—to the utmost limit of their endurance.
At one of the few springs the travelers found, they met a small group of Indians who, demonstrating their friendly intentions, knelt in the mud surrounding the spring, crossing themselves as a means of mutual recognition. Drawing their right hand from forehead to breast and then from shoulder to shoulder, they returned their hands to their mouths afterward signifying they required food.
“There are Christianized Indians here?” asked Rosas about the tattooed and painted Indians they found at the spring. “I’ve seen no churches or conventos. Are they members of a hunting party or nomads?”
“They’re a Plains people, Governor,” Gomez responded, “members of the Jumanos or Rayados whom we refer to as the Apaches del Perrillo. They live in three large pueblos which we’ll find north of here near the pass of Abo, and, if people of the same tribe, in rancherias on the Rio Colorado far to the east. They come to the Rio Grande villages for purposes of trade,” he said as they unloaded food from one of the wagons. “The friars tell of a miracle which occurred among these people,” Gomez added continuing his discussion regarding the Jumanos. “Approximately two decades ago, as the friars tell it, the Jumanos were the subject of a supernatural conversion. The priests tell of visits by at least two nuns who were miraculously transported here from Spain for the purpose of preaching God’s word and who assisted the friars in the Indians’ conversions. One, a sister named Luisa de la Ascencion, an old nun of Carrion, had the power to become young and beautiful and to transport herself in a trance state to any part of the world where there were souls to be saved. The second nun, who was able to do much the same thing, was Maria de Jesus, the abbess at the convent of Agreda, who, the friars say, was carried here by the heavenly hosts. She was able to make several round trips in a single day.”
“Do you believe any of this?” Rosas asked with a sneer. “That nuns can fly?”
“I’m not sure what to believe regarding these stories, Governor, so I’ve tried to suspend judgment,” Gomez responded. “When Custos Salas, whom you’ll meet at Santo Domingo, was at the Pueblo of Isleta, where he built the church and convento, he developed a special relationship with the Jumanos who came there to trade. They told him this story and Salas believes it. He went among them with another priest named Diego Lopez, and tells of the miracles of conversion they were able to achieve because of the work of these nuns. The number of conversions was so great that they had to baptize the Indians by swirling a fleece soaked in holy water over their heads. My brother would believe these stories without question,” he said regarding the flying nuns, “but I respond better to fact than fancy.”
“Then you believe the stories to be a fiction?” Rosas asked.
“I place the Indians’ visions in the same category as the mirages one might see on the desert or at sea,” Gomez responded, “those on the desert appearing as ripples on a lake ruffled by the wind, or of trees materializing upside down. I think the apparitions are like the so-called, Fata Morgana, the mirage of a city which my brother and I saw on the Strait of Messina. None of these images is real and yet they’re there as plain as the nose on one’s face. I think I’ll suspend judgment until I know more.”
The
