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Saguache isn't big, but neither is the Old Spanish Trail Association, so the small town was able to accommodate a national convention on June 21, and I had the pleasure of dropping by for a few sessions.
Voltaire once remarked that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Much the same could be said of the Old Spanish Trail.
It wasn't really old, since no one traversed its full route until for nearly 300 years after Coronado first visited in 1540. It wasn't truly Spanish -- that first traverse came in 1831, a decade after Mexico declared independence from Spain -- and two American trappers led the way.
Nor was it much of a trail. Historian Leroy Hafen called
it the longest, crookedest, most arduous pack mule route
in the history of America.
And besides, Saguache isn't even close to the main line of the Old Spanish Trail. It sits on the North Branch; the South Branch, which cut across the Colorado corner of the Four Corners, was the major corridor during the trail's heyday in the 1830s and '40s.
Trail Association members conduct some research, looking for ruts and old diaries, but the group's goal is to get the Old Spanish Trail designated a National Historic Trail, complete with signs and literature from the National Park Service. They're on the way -- a bill passed by Congress last year directs the Park Service to conduct a three-year study of the trail's suitability for designation.
But the final step might be difficult, since America prefers to honor routes that fit with Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, such as the Overland, Oregon and Santa Fe trails. The Old Spanish Trail offers a very different insight into our past.
Spain's hold on the northern portions of its New World empire was tenuous in the latter part of the 18th century. From Mexico, the empire had two threads of settlement extending north -- one up the Pacific Coast to Los Angeles and beyond, and the other up the Rio Grande to Santa Fe.
If those two pueblos could be linked, so that they might supply and support each other, the empire might be strong enough to withstand and repel incursions from the British and Russians along the West Coast, the French from the northeast and the Yankees from the east.
But a direct route from Santa Fe to Los Angeles route was impossible, on account of Apache hostility and the deep canyons of the Rio Colorado.
So in the service of empire, the friars Dominguez and Esclante were dispatched north from Santa Fe in 1776 to look for a route west. They found part of the eventual course (the South Branch from Tierra Amarillo, N.M., through Durango and Delta in Colorado, to Moab and Green River, Utah), and they left their names on canyons in Colorado and Utah.
Other efforts ensued from the Los Angeles end. Meanwhile a few curious souls ventured north from Santa Fe into our San Luis Valley and then west at Saguache over Cochetopa Pass, thereby creating the North Branch which had east and west forks along the flanks of the San Luis Valley.
Despite some heroic efforts, the Empire of Spain never connected Santa Fe to Los Angeles, and it lost its dominion over that territory.
In essence, the Old Spanish Trail was a failed effort to hold together a doomed empire. That's not exactly the inspirational stuff that our Republican Congress wants us to associate with American history, and besides, the Old Spanish Trail provokes some seditious thoughts.
It was, after all, an empire, not the residents, that wanted the trail built -- there wasn't much grassroots agitation for better roads in la frontera del norte.
And so, whenever a highway is proposed, the story of the
Old Spanish Trail makes me wonder what empire wants this
road, and why?
Or the converse. The day after that convention, I walked down to where the Salida depot used to stand so I could see Union Pacific steam locomotive No. 844 pulling a farewell excursion.
The UP wants to abandon that track. One empire had laid those rails in 1880 to convert a high mountain valley into an industrial zone; another empire must want the tracks out now, but which one, and why?
(For more information about The Old Spanish Trail Association, write to P.O. Box 521, Monte Vista, Colo. 81144).
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