Beyond the Devil’s Road:
Francisco Garcés and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest
by jeremy beer
university of oklahoma, 474 pages, $39.95
The Armagnac was low in the bottle when my host erupted on the subject of American empire. “We have farm boys from Iowa in every damned desert on earth! We have them in Syria, in the middle of a civil war with nothing but savages on either side, and for twenty years we had them in Afghanistan! What the hell were they doing there?”
I would not risk an answer, but as my host brooded into his snifter, I considered that far-flung farm boys have always been with us. I thought of Macedonian peasants following Alexander through the snowy precipices of the Hindu Kush. I thought of Roman legionaries—farm boys from Illyria—stationed in such remote hellscapes as Yemen, Crimea, and Yorkshire. And then, because I had just read Jeremy Beer’s Beyond the Devil’s Road, I thought of Francisco Garcés, a farm boy from balmy, sleepy Aragon whose brains were bashed out by tribesmenin a hideous patch of Arizona desert a few months before Cornwallis surrendered far away at Yorktown.
Currently, the only monument to this intrepid martyr is a rather unfortunate statue in a Bakersfield traffic circle, but Beer makes a convincing case that Garcés should be ensconced in the pantheon of America’s greatest explorers. Often alone and on foot, Garcés crisscrossed Sonora, Arizona, Nevada, and California—then a vasts terra incognita,only nominally claimed by Spain—befriending, baptizing, and evangelizing the native peoples he met on his way. He was the first European to enter Nevada, descend the Grand Canyon at Supai, cross the infernal Colorado desert, find the San Joaquin Valley, and discover a land route from Mexico to California.
He was also, in Beer’s compelling portrait, an utterly delightful man. Gentle but courageous, he was almost insanely undaunted by murderous heat, impassable terrain, and menacing tribes, blithely inviting himself into the villages of Indians who had never seen a European. Though unintellectual and unlettered, he was fascinated by the lands and (above all) the people he encountered, penning detailed geographic and ethnological journals in prose so infelicitous that officials often struggled to decipher it. He was a man content in his vocation, completely at ease in his own sweaty, blistering skin.
Born in a village near Zaragoza in 1738, Garcés joined the Franciscans at sixteen; at twenty-five, he was recruited by the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Queretaro in central Mexico, and in 1763 he sailed for the New World. The Queretaro colegio was one of several Franciscan institutions that formed “highly disciplined, courageous” missionaries to the “Indian Nations” on the fringes of the Spanish Empire. The mission in question was, of course, evangelization—but the friars of Queretaro were also paid, sworn agents of the Crown, with a writ to manage, stabilize, and expand the imperial frontier. Taking enthusiastically to both these briefs, Garcés devoted his life to serving what he called the “Two Majesties”: Jesus Christ and the King of Spain.
The first of these majesties presumably needs no introduction. The second was Charles III, a Bourbon great-grandson of Louis XIV who spent an enviable youth ruling Naples before inheriting the Spanish empire from his half-brother. Short, ungainly, and unhandsome (with an alarming nose described by Harold Acton as “a protuberance more than Roman”), Charles was enamored of hunting, fishing, and billiards—not an entirely unwinsome character, but a rather odd man to imagine as co-regent with the Incarnate Word.
Of course, serving two masters is a famously tricky business, and the demands of Christ and his Church were sometimes at odds with those of Charles and his Crown. Indeed, Garcés owed his career to a particularly explosive moment in this relationship: the suppression of the Jesuits. In June 1767, the viceroy of New Spain—along with every other governor in the empire—opened a secret order from the King to seize and deport every Jesuit in his realm. (Lest any confusion arise, His Most Catholic Majesty admonished his servants that should there later “be found in [your] district a single Jesuit, even if ill or dying, you shall suffer the penalty of death. Yo el Rey.”)
The Crown’s motives were undeclared but not mysterious: Enlightened despotism was in the air, and so was greed; the Jesuits were unenlightened, suspiciously transnational, and rich. Alas, however satisfying and remunerative this strike may have been for Yo el Rey, it created a serious problem, for the Jesuits had long managed the missions of New Spain’s northwest frontier. The Crown would doubtless have preferred to replace them with enlightened secular prefects, but as these were hard to come by, the viceroy turned to the Franciscans of Queretaro. Francisco Garcés was headed to the border.
His first assignment was San Xavier del Bac, now in southernmost Arizona but then the northernmost, “most isolated mission in all of New Spain.” The native inhabitants of the region were the O’odham—known to the Spanish as the Pima—and it was Garcés’s considerable task to turn them into good subjects of Christ and Charles III. Setting immediately to work, he baptized and catechized and cheerfully assured the Pima that they were loved by the Spanish King—which was, as Beer concedes, “truly if only abstractly the case.”
What set Garcés apart was that he actually liked the Indians. Beer quotes liberally from other missionaries who libeled their charges as lazy, vicious, stupid, and intolerably smelly, but Garcés delighted in the Pima, gushing that “I love them and they love me.” He also accommodated himself to their ways:
He intuited how important it was to eat what they ate, sit how they sat, converse in the way they wished to converse. . . . his sympathetic tolerance, even affection, for the people he encountered . . . his bravery, openness, and peaceable nature typically won him natives’ affection and respect.
Beer is appropriately careful not to canonize Garcés, but the friar’s joyful humility, utter indifference to comfort, devotion to the weak, and unshakable purpose do rather surround him like a halo. To my mind, nothing captures the man better than this exclamation from his travel diary:
Oh, what a vast heathendom! Oh! what lands so suitable for missions! Oh! what a heathendom so docile! How fine it would be if the wise and pious Don Carlos III might see these lands!
“Problematic” might be the gentlest term applied to these sentiments by modern arbiters, but what strikes me is how holy and human they are: the awestruck wonder before the vast bounty of this continent; the simple, almost childlike devotion to God and King—and, of course, the utterly irresistible image of the knob-nosed, inbred Spanish sovereign traipsing merrily through the trackless wilderness of Arizona!
Happy though he may have been in San Xavier, Garcés was restless; he was eager to expand the King’s domain and nursed bold ideas of how to do it. Having finally secured an assistant to manage matters at San Xavier, Garcés walked off into the desert.
These were not pleasant journeys, and the friar’s modern obscurity probably arises at least partly from the insalubrious geography he often explored. While his compatriot Junipero Serra was busy stringing a necklace of missions along the most beautiful coastline on earth, Garcés plodded the Devil’s Road, a fiery expanse of desert so hostile to human life that even today motorists are discouraged from traversing it.
He plodded doggedly down this infernal trail—in high summer, wearing a wool habit, often without food or water—because he believed that at the other end of it lay—what else?—Junipero’s strand of pearls: California, veiled in the uncanny witchy glamour of Eden, the westward-leading siren’s song that calls to every European heart.
Like Columbus, Garcés correctly surmised the direction of his quarry, but not its distance or the continental obstacles in his way. Unlike Columbus, he got there in the end. The terminus of the Devil’s Road was actually the Colorado River, beyond which was another desert, and beyond that, mountains. Garcés bounded over all of them, finally descending through “the variously colored wildflowers, the thick stands of grass, the tall cottonwoods and sycamores” to the Mission San Gabriel. This was literally a land of milk and honey:
Nothing better might be wished for. The cows . . . are very fat and yield a great deal of delicious milk with which they make a number of cheeses and very good butter. . . . The meat was particularly good, and I do not recall having ever eaten richer and finer mutton.
He was standing, of course, in what is now Los Angeles—oh, what a vast heathendom!—then as now a realm of dreams where, in Beer’s picture, “even the light and air were different . . . the former less sharp and more diffuse, the latter softer, seeming rather to bathe than attack.”
And then, having glimpsed the promised land, he turned around. Charles III wanted a direct road from California to New Mexico, and Christ wanted whatever souls were on the way. Garcés—their dutiful, indefatigable, enthusiastic servant—returned to the desert.
Beer’s meticulous descriptions of Garcés’s wanderings remind one how gobsmackingly vast this country is—and how hauntingly empty it can feel. In the name of a monarch an entire world away, this lonely friar crawled across a thousand miles of wasteland that no sane king would ever want to rule, wandering over half a continent without meeting a soul who spoke his language or knew his God.
In 1779, Garcés was ordered to establish a mission on the Colorado River at Yuma, a point of great strategic interest to the Spanish. He was fond of the Quechan people who lived at Yuma, whom he had first met ten years before, and he hoped for a warm welcome. Garcés himself helped plan the mission, which was to be not some lonely outpost but a real colony, with dozens of soldiers, farmers, and craftsmen, all accompanied by their wives and children. Garcés insisted on this last point: Families would root the colonists in their new home, and wives would keep their husbands from molesting native women. Spanish farmers, meanwhile, would make the colony self-sufficient and obviate the need for native labor. Neither menaced by soldiers nor pressed into farm work, the Indians would presumably be attracted to Christian civilization by the example of peaceful, prosperous Spanish families.
Like so many imperial designs, the plan was a fantasy with only a tenuous connection to hard facts on the ground. The Quechans had actually been expecting a mission—but not a colony—for some time: Years before, their chief had been invited to the viceregal capital in Mexico, where he was feted and enticed with offers of enrichment and alliance. The chief brought these extravagant claims back to Yuma, buttressing his rule with rash talk of impending Spanish largesse. “Desire had been awakened, and unhappiness predictably followed in its wake.”
When Garcés was sent empty-handed, with only hopeful assurances that gifts would be forthcoming, the Quechans were mightily displeased. Things only worsened when the settlers arrived, for there was not nearly enough farmland along the Colorado to support both the Indians and the Spanish families.
For two years, the mission carried on as tensions steadily built. Garcés said Mass, preached, baptized, and wrote increasingly desperate letters to the authorities, begging for the promised gifts. Finally, on a hot July morning in 1781, war whoops sounded as Garcés said Mass, and soon the mission was a scene of slaughter. After rescuing a group of women and children, Garcés and another priest managed to escape to the river. Still pursued, they met a friendly Quechan whose wife had been converted by the friars. The man hid them in his hut, where, some time later, they would die.
Beer deserves great credit for painting such a lively likeness of this extraordinary man, but his book’s greatest service may be in simply depicting the Spanish colonial and missionary enterprise on its own terms, without heavy lashings of moral indignation, through the lens of a winsome, holy, but obdurate priest who loved the natives and wanted to save their souls. But crucially, this priest loved them not merely as souls, spiritual ore he was in the business of mining, but as the actual, living, warring, fornicating, pungently fragrant men and women that they were.
Beer stresses that these qualities do not make Fr. Garcés into some countercultural hippie priest: “He is best understood not as a maverick . . . but as a priest trying his best to deal with [a] complicated legacy on the ground in a creative and faithful way.” Fair enough—but the book positively revolves around how singular he was. Despite Beer’s admirable and largely successful attempts to take historical figures on their own terms, few of the good friar’s compatriots are attractive characters, and some are positively insufferable. Among the priests, we find prissy prefects lamenting native flatulence and, even worse, the dreary sort of man who dreams ecstatically of martyrdom. From the soldiers, meanwhile, comes the usual depressing tale of rape and woe. But though Garcés imagines himself a servant and prophet of “both Majesties,” he is constantly exasperated by the incompetence, indolence, and avarice of Church and State alike. In the Indians, Garcés alone recognizes loving and lovable human persons. Everyone else sees only raw materials—backs to be worked, in the view of the soldiers and officials; souls to be harvested, in the view of the priests.
Well, by their fruits ye shall know them. The enterprise ends in calamity for all concerned, and the missions of Arizona are extinguished in an orgy of blood. Beer piously tries to put a good face on this in the last three pages of the book by noting the success of later, twentieth-century Catholic missionaries, but I find this unconvincing. Christendom, of which the Viceroyalty of New Spain was in some sense a decrepit and feverish extension—and which Garcés certainly imagined he was serving—was decisively rejected by the peoples of Arizona. The Franciscans who returned in 1895—more than a century later—represented a very different civilization.
This rejection should not surprise us. I have some sympathy for the worldview of, say, an eighteenth-century Spanish viceroy, but even I will admit that modern liberalism’s deeply guilty conscience about the native peoples of North America is abundantly warranted. The Pima among whom Garcés worked, for instance, were a society of peaceable, orderly farmers—friendly and generous, with a rich oral and material tradition. Their communities were agreeably free-floating. They worked small plots or drifted into the hills to gather food, according to the season. Corporal punishment was unknown to them, until the Spanish graciously introduced it. To the chagrin of the friars, they went around naked, but then it is rather famously hot in southern Arizona. Their sexual ethics belonged more to the commune than to the convent, to be sure (with even a dash of homosexuality and transgenderism, as Beer notes), but they could be forgiven for preferring their own mores to the celibacy of the Spanish friars—or the wanton rape of the Spanish soldiery.
The Two Majesties of Christendom, meanwhile, demanded that these people be herded into pueblos, work the land for no pay, submit to the lash, wear woolen clothes, cut down on the drinking and dancing, and have a great deal less sex. To his credit, Garcés realized that this was a deal the Pima were unlikely to take.
Of course, the Pima really were quite poor; and though peaceful themselves, they were often savagely attacked by more violent tribes like the Apache. This was what the Spanish really had to offer: prosperity and security. Alas, in this too they utterly failed. An estimated 32,000 natives lived in the region when the first Franciscans arrived there in 1680; by 1800, there were only 9,000. As Beer admits, “the high Indian death rate and low Indian birth rate were due largely to the diseases, despair, and cultural destruction introduced by the fathers.” As Tacitus so bitterly quipped, apropos a different Latin empire and a different tribe of primitives, “they make a desert and call it peace.”
Garcés served two Majesties, but the Pima would have been happier with one. For there was one class of Spanish imports the natives really did desire and cherish: the sacraments and sacramentals of the Catholic faith. The wandering friar never got much traction with the catechism, but everywhere Garcés went, Indians eagerly kissed his crucifix and desperately begged him to baptize their children. They learned the Latin words of the Lord’s Prayer and the Angelus, and Garcés found, whenever he returned to a village after a long absence, that they knew them still by heart.
They never forgot them, and a folk Catholicism—Santo Himdag,the “saint way”—endured among the Pima long after the friars and their empire had vanished. This was the vestige of Christianity that latter-day Franciscans found when they returned to the desert in the twentieth century: strange prayers passed down for generations, humble ersatz tabernacles guarding the sacred vessels of the Mass. It was something to build on, however modestly, and the font at which Garcés baptized his neophytes is now again in service. There is aWaughian flavor to all this—“something quite remote from anything the builders had intended”—and Beer may make too much of it. But it was a great deal more than nothing.
Still, one wonders what Garcés would make of his legacy. Beer actually begins his story in medias res—on July 4, 1776—by contrasting the Philadelphia colonists rebelling against their king, with Garcés, who was risking life and limb to serve his. Beer, an American, treats this as a historical curiosity and quickly turns away—but for me this contrast freighted every page that followed with futility and dread.
Garcés died with no inkling of the coming deluge: Three months after the friar perished, Washington triumphed in Virginia; eight years later, the cataclysm of 1789 would obliterate the entire political and moral order the friar had served. Both majesties were thrown down in the dust; the Spanish Empire boiled bloodily away, replaced in Mexico by a succession of anti-clericalist regimes that often viciously persecuted the Church. Meanwhile, the American republic rolled on under the night. The hot, hard lands where Garcés toiled would belong not to Christendom but to the very different—if no less totalizing—“Empire of Liberty.”
To us, this may seem overdetermined. We tend to think of the antediluvian anciens regimes as sclerotic, terminal despotisms—Spain has long been a byword for backwardness in the Anglophone lexicon—and of eighteenth-century Christendom as an absurd, spiritually exhausted archaism. We may well be right to think so—but things certainly did not look that way to a pious patriot like Francisco Garcés, who spent his life zealously expanding the realms of Christ and Spain. Alas, perhaps his murder was a mercy: He never knew he was dying for a lost cause. The far-flung farm boys rarely do.
Empires curdle quickly in the desert. Only four years after Garcés giddily exclaimed “Oh! what a heathendom so docile!” his friend Father Pedro Font recorded this harrowing scene after an Indian revolt:
[There was] a pregnant woman whom the enemy had caught and transfixed to the floor with their lances. Her little daughter’s intestines were hanging out and she was dying. I confessed her and she died the following night.
“This country was hard on people,” said Ellis in No Country for Old Men, and in the end, Garcés’s grim demise was worthy of that novel. The Quechan rebels finally found him and his fellow friar in the hut, sipping hot chocolate.
“Stop drinking that,” demanded the Quechan leader, “we’re going to kill you.”
“We’d like to finish our chocolate first,” replied Garcés.
“Just leave it!”
The priests obeyed, and the rebels did as they had promised.
Garcés died six thousand miles from Zaragoza, and from a certain vantage, the ultimate cause of his killing was imperial neglect. In the name of His Most Catholic Majesty, the authorities of New Spain sent the friar—and the men, women, and children who died with him—into hostile territory and abandoned them, having made the restive natives rich promises they would never keep. His last, desperate letter arrived in Mexico City too late: The old viceroy was dead, and the new one had different priorities. Across the sea, Charles III was now at war with Britain, and his court worried far more about the English in Gibraltar than about the Quechans in Arizona.
When resources became available, there would of course be a bloody, punitive raid to teach the offending natives a lesson, but the Arizona missions were definitively abandoned. It is a bitter but perennial tale: Empires are slow, capricious things. If, brooding in his cups, some courtier in Madrid ever cast his thoughts upon those unlucky martyrs on the Colorado, I suspect he may have wondered, “What the hell were they doing there?”
