Juan Rivera’s Colorado, 1765: The First Spaniards among the Ute and Paiute Indians on the Trails to Teguayo. By Steven G. Baker. Foreword and translation by Rick Hendricks

Abstract

Thirty-one maps, sixteen black-and-white photos, twenty-five mostly archival sketches, fourteen color drawings and watercolors by Gail Sargent, and painstakingly careful attention to the narrative’s geographical descriptions in the lengthy commentary and short historiographical essays distinguish this coffee-table tome from previous transcriptions and translations. The historiographical essay, as well as portions of the commentary, re-revise a twenty-year-old “revisionist” interpretation that “led to the formation of a new and fake tradition of evidence rationalization” about Juan Rivera’s route and eventual terminus (p. 310). However, author Steven Baker also corrects erroneous assertions about Rivera himself, draws some surprising inferences about Tabeguache and Moache Utes’ mobility, and concludes that Rivera smoothed the path for the much better known Dominguez-Escalante-Garces expeditions of 1775–76. Taken together, descriptions in the journals from these and Rivera’s expeditions “constitute the most important early historical and ethnological data on the Native Americans of Colorado and Utah” (p.265). Rivera’s two trips in unsatisfactory pursuit of the people of Teguayo and their realms—arguably the multiply suggestive name for the place of origin of the Tewa Pueblo people—embedded fatigue and frustration but also mystery and apocryphy. The trips included a search for bearded men in buckskin, a quest for “silver nails” (p.99), pursuit of various elusive native guides and sages, and above all, a reconnaissance for the legendarily mighty “Rio Tizon” (p.66). In establishing trading relationships and opening the “diplomatic portal” for Spanish merchants to blaze the “Spanish Trail” (p. 39) along a pre-existing Ute and Paiute pathway, Rivera serendipitously investigated Pueblo ruins, provided useful impressions of Ute and Paiute life and socio-political organization, witnessed dramatic testimony of Utes’ relationships with Comanches, and quite possibly kept alive an oral historical tradition about intense conflict that Baker himself may have corroborated through archaeological excavation at Fremont more than two centuries later. One erroneous ethnographic misapprehension should be noted. Utes on the Delores River warned Rivera about the Cosninas. Baker notes that “ethnographers usually identify the Cosninas as Havasupai, a Southern Paiute-speaking people” (p. 129). Although indeed identified as such, the Havasupai are Yuman-speaking, not Paiute-speaking. Yuman languages are unrelated to the Utaztekan Ute and Paiute languages.