Humboldt's Utah, 1811

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 26, 1958, No. 3

HUMBOLDT'S UTAH, 1811

By C. Gregory Crampton

Utah's magnificent natural scenery was first revealed to public view on a comprehensive scale in 1811 through the works of the German scientist, Baron Alexander von Humboldt. In his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain he wrote of the latitudes south of Great Salt Lake when it was one of the limits of geographical knowledge in the Rocky Mountains above the Spanish settlements; his maps in the accompanying atlas extend no further north than forty-two degrees of latitude. Humboldt described with much detail the country now shared by Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and California, then the northern frontier of the viceroyalty of New Spain, which was wholly portrayed in the essay.

As he pictured the wealth and resources of the northern Spanish provinces, Humboldt fairly prophesied the westward sweep of the United States across the continent, and it was he, one of the greatest scientists of his time, more than anyone before him, who publicized these attractions. It could scarcely have been at a more auspicious time, for the essay was published just as Mexico plunged into a revolutionary war for independence from Spain. The war invited attention to a region which had long lived under Spain's monopolistic control. Intercourse with the world outside was prohibited, and little was known abroad of the vast resources of Spanish North America until Humboldt's work proclaimed them to the world. He said he wanted to "contribute something to dispel the darkness which for so many ages has covered the geography of one of the finest regions of the earth." He did just that. The Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain raised the Spanish curtain in North America to reveal in intimate detail a dazzling region which emerged as sovereign and independent Mexico when the patriots finally severed the political bond with Spain in 1821.

Some years before the revolution, with permission of the Spanish government, Humboldt, in company with the botanist Aime Bonpland, had come to Spanish America in 1799 to prosecute scientific studies which were expected to take him around the world. He spent five years in the New World, most of it in South America and Cuba. When plans failed for a voyage across the Pacific, he journeyed to New Spain and studied there for a year. The scientist traveled about some in central Mexico, and from his own observations, in conversation with learned men, and from official records in the viceregal archives which were opened to him, he gathered a mass of material upon which he based the Political Essay. The general map accompanying it was completed in preliminary draft before he left the viceroyalty. En route to Europe in 1804, Humboldt stopped briefly in the United States. He visited President Jefferson, with whom he must have had some interesting conversations about Mexico and the West, and left with the Department of State in Washington a copy of the preliminary map. The Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain was published sectionally in the original French from 1808 to 1811; the complete first edition together with a folio atlas appeared in 1811. An English edition translated by John Black was published during the same year, and a German edition (1809- 1814) was followed by one in Spanish (1822) and others.

The essay on New Spain contains the first detailed published description based upon actual exploration of the region which is now the state of Utah. Humboldt himself never visited the northern part of Mexico, but he talked to those who had, and he used many manuscript and printed sources which are discussed in the long geographical introduction in volume one and elsewhere throughout the work. Most of the Utah material appears on the general map accompanying it, the north- western part of which is reproduced here on a reduced scale. The boundaries of the state may be superimposed upon Humboldt's map by drawing two perpendicular lines from the northern edge of it, one at longitude 109° 23', the other at longitude 116° 23', to intersect a horizontal line drawn from the western edge of the map at the latitude of thirty-seven degrees. The northwestern boundaries may be drawn by dropping a perpendicular line at longitude 113° 23' to forty-one degrees of latitude and by extending the line along this latitude until it intersects the eastern boundary. These lines are adjusted to the Greenwich meridian from that of the observatory of Paris which Humboldt used. He adopted Mercator's projection.

Most of the geographical features appearing on the Utah part of the map are those discovered in 1776 by the Spanish exploring party directed by friars Francisco Antanasio Dominguez and Francisco Silvestre Velez de Escalante and first laid down on maps by the expedition cartographer, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco. Although Miera drew several maps reflecting these discoveries, none was ever printed, so far as is known, and it was left to Humboldt to publish the work of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition. It is not certain that Humboldt used Miera directly, for he is not acknowledged by name in the geographical introduction of the essay; but the first map Humboldt mentions there is one by Mascaro and Costanso on which Miera data have obviously been used, though again unacknowledged.

Humboldt's "Carte Generale" is a fair reflection of Utah as it was known at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it was regarded as an authoritative work for much of the area mapped until Fremont, who recognized Humboldt's contribution and retained some of his geography, published the report of his first two exploring expeditions thirty-five years later. The modern traveler will be interested to learn how many of the scenic wonders of Utah were known, named, and found a place on Humboldt's great map of 1811. With a few, and some quite radical, adjustments the Humboldt geography may be squared with the modern map. Note that most of Humboldt's place names are in Spanish; the names of lakes and Indian tribes and explanatory and descriptive matter are in French. In the analysis of Humboldt's map to follow, we will travel counterclockwise around the state, following as it were the trail of Dominguez and Escalante as laid down by the German scientist.

The main dividing ridge of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra de las Grullas, separates the waters of the Rio Grande del Norte, shortened now to the Rio Grande, from those of the Colorado River system. The upper basin of the Colorado River is rather accurately drawn. The San Juan River is identical with the Rio Nabajoa, which receives the Rio de las Animas, the name today of a major fork heading in Colorado. The Rio de Nra. Sra. de los Dolores has been shortened by modern usage to the Dolores River, which skirts the Montagnes de Sel Gemme, a name retained partly in its Spanish form today as the La Sal Mountains, the striking peaks on the Utah-Colorado line, south of the Colorado River. Humboldt's Rio de S. Xavier is the Gunnison; and the Rio de S. Rafael, indicated as being the major source of the Colorado, is indeed the Colorado River above the mouth of the Dolores. All of these streams and other geographical features were known to Spain before the traverse by Dominguez and Escalante in 1776. Beyond the Colorado these men pushed into country new to the whites, and they left a trail of names many of which appear on Humboldt's map.

The first considerable discovery of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition was the Green River, first seen where it was crossed just outside the southern boundary of Dinosaur National Monument. The explorers reported no fossilized bones, but they were the first to view spectacular Split Mountain, through which Green River flows in Dinosaur. Miera named the adjacent Yampa Plateau Sierra Verde as it appears on Humboldt's map, though too far east. The origin of the name Green River, which is still in doubt, may well be related somehow to Miera's Sierra Verde.

On Humboldt's map the Green is the Rio de S. Buenaventura, the name applied to it by the discoverers, who thought it to be a river wholly unrelated to the Colorado. Miera documented the Spaniards' conclusions when he extended the stream westward and emptied it into a salt lake which is in fact Sevier Lake! This serious error perpetuated by Humboldt confounded explorers and geographers for more than thirty years after his map appeared. Even after the Green was discovered to be a branch of the Colorado River, Humboldt's authority was so great that some cartographers identified his Rio Nabajoa with the Colorado and his Rio Zaguanganas with the Green even though the junction of the two extended below the southern boundary of Utah.

The Sierra de Timpanogos was the name applied to the western part of the Uinta Mountains and the northern reaches of the Wasatch Mountains by the Spaniards. Miera has shown them much more accurately than Humboldt, but then Humboldt was probably using a secondary source and not Miera directly, and under these conditions his accuracy is surprising. The name remains in use today to identify majestic Mount Timpanogos, overlooking Utah Lake and Valley, and in Timpanogos Cave National Monument located on its northern slope.

Dominguez and Escalante also applied the name Timpanogos to Utah Lake, which they discovered. The Indians of the same name living about the lake told the explorers that its waters communicated with an "extremely salty" lake to the north. The explorers did not visit Great Salt Lake, but Miera put it on his maps seemingly as an arm of Lake Timpanogos extending some distance above forty-two degrees (a very considerable error), so it does not appear on the Humboldt maps, which do not reach above that latitude. But Humboldt casts doubt upon the size of the portion of the lake which he does show by the word "douteux," the omission of water lines, and reference to Escalante's journal.

The little stream Rio Yampancas flowing into Lac de Timpanogos from the west is probably identical with the Rio de los Yamparicas (Humboldt's Indiens Yamparicas is the same word) which Miera on some of his maps causes to enter the lake from the east above forty-two degrees of latitude. The Yampa River, which enters the Green River in Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, and the Yampa Plateau may be historic vestiges of this stream and name.

Just south of Lac de Timpanogos the massive Mount Nebo is shown on the Humboldt map as another Montagnes de Sel Gemme, or Mountains of Rock Salt. Miera places hills of salt on some of his maps in the locality adjacent to the Valle de Salinas where, Escalante notes in his diary, the Indians living about Utah Lake came to obtain their supplies of salt. The stream today known as Salt Creek, which drains the southern slopes of Mount Nebo and debouches in Juab Valley at Nephi, is thought to be the Valle de Salinas of the Spaniards.

The Franciscan fathers, Dominguez and Escalante, together with their colleague, Francisco Garces, were the discoverers of the Great Basin. Yet in their extensive pioneer explorations of it in 1776 — Garces crossed the Mojave Desert only months before Dominguez and Escalante traversed its eastern edge — they were altogether unaware that they were in an interior basin with no outlet to the sea. Quite the opposite. Garces in California, after crossing the Mojave Desert, concluded that the rivers he found in the southern Sierra Nevada headed back in the Rocky Mountains, and Dominguez, Escalante, and Miera imagined that the streams originating in the Rockies, or Sierra de las Grullas, flowed westward to reach the Pacific, an idea accepted by Humboldt, who adopted Miera's illustration of it from the sources he used to construct his map. This is again the Rio de S. Buenaventura, in reality the Green River, which is discharged into the large unnamed lake the western limits of which are indicated as unknown. On the Miera maps this is Lake Miera (or Laguna de Miera); this and Lake Timpanogos were both used by cartographers after Humboldt as sources for several mythical westward-flowing streams which reached the Pacific in various latitudes between the mouths of the Columbia and the Colorado, much to the confusion of explorers who tried to find them. Historic Lake Miera, left without name by Humboldt, is Sevier Lake, the salty sink of the Sevier River which heads south on the High Plateaus of Utah near Bryce Canyon National Park and Cedar Breaks National Monument. The Rio Salado entering an arm of Sevier Lake on the Humboldt map is the way Miera has it on his maps. When the Spanish explorers visited the lake in 1776, they must have found it much larger than it is today, covering most of the flats, now dry, below the town of Delta. The running stream, Rio Salado, or Salt River, is identified with the spring source that today fills Clear Lake, a migratory water fowl refuge.

South of Miera's lake the Plaines (Llanos) de Nuestra Senora de la Luz is the open country south of Milford, appropriately called now the Escalante Valley and the Escalante Desert. Here the Spanish explorers decided to return to New Mexico rather than go on to California as they had intended. They crossed over the rim of the Great Basin and descended Ash Creek along the Hurricane Cliffs until they reached the Virgin River, called by them the Rio Sulfureo, or Sulphurous River, for they discovered or were near the mineralized La Virken Hot Springs at the mouth of Timpoweap Canyon. The Virgin (a later Spanish name — Virgen) appears as the Rio de las Piramides Sulphureas, a corruption on the Humboldt map of one of the names Miera applied to the Virgin. But the term Miera most frequently uses is the Rio Sulfureo de los Piramides, or the Sulphurous River of the Pyramids, and from a study of his maps it is clear that the word pyramid is intended to describe the mountainous towers and temples to the east of the trail at this point and to the north of it as they headed back toward New Mexico. This may be regarded as the first description of the intricately carved escarpments peculiar to the southern exposures of the High Plateaus of Utah which find classic expression in Zion National Park and Monument not far from the Spanish Trail of 1776. As the Spaniards turned eastward, they skirted the brilliant Vermilion Cliffs, catching views here and there of the terrace of White Cliffs which stand above them, until they reached the Colorado River. To the High Plateaus, which they had seen at many points, Miera appears to have given the name Sierra de los Guacaros, a prominent feature on Humboldt's map.

Returning for a moment to the River of the Pyramids: Humboldt in a note in French states that the location of the mouth of the stream is unknown. In a legend to the left of this in French he also notes the existence of a chain of mountains extending toward the west, traversed by the Rio de San Felipe. The San Felipe (Kern River) was one of the discoveries of Francisco Garces in California, who believed that it headed far back in the interior of the continent. This became one of the more durable mythical rivers of the West, in part because of its mention on Humboldt's respected map. Even Miera's Sulphurous River of the Pyramids was caught up in this cartographical fantasy when it was emptied into the Pacific Ocean without first joining the waters of the Colorado.

The explorations ascribed to Pedro Font in the next note below on the Humboldt map refer actually to those of Father Garces in 1776. After crossing the Mojave Desert and discovering the Mojave River, which he named the Rio de los Martires, as Humboldt has it (though flowing the wrong way!), he crossed the Colorado River and made a pioneer traverse eastward to Oraibi in the Hopi country. Father Pedro Font made the maps incorporating his discoveries, and these were used by Humboldt.

There is nothing on Humboldt's map to show where the Dominguez-Escalante expedition crossed the Colorado River on its way back to Santa Fe. This was at a point in Glen Canyon, which the Spaniards discovered, later known as El Vado de los Padres and now as the Crossing of the Fathers, a few miles upstream from the Glen Canyon damsite. On Humboldt's map this is just below the junction of the Rio Nabajoa and the Rio Zaguanganas, a corruption of Miera's Zaguaganas (Escalante's Sabuaganas), the name of the Indians upstream where the Spaniards crossed the Colorado (San Rafael) on the outgoing trip. The only landmark in the area noted by Humboldt is El Rastrillo, a misspelling of El Castillo, Miera's name for one of the castle-like monuments east of Glen Canyon Dam, possibly Leche-e Rock, perhaps White Mesa, or Preston Mesa. The Puerto de Bucarelli nearby is Garces' name for the lower course of the Rio faquesila, now the Little Colorado River. When Dominguez, Escalante, Miera, and company reached the Hopi town Oraibi (Humboldt's Oraybe), they were on familiar ground again, and they soon arrived at Santa Fe, the point of beginning. In the field six months, they discovered much new territory which became known to the world when Humboldt published his "Carte Generate" in 1811.

Not the least valuable feature of the map is the location of many of the campsites named by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition; if a line is drawn counterclockwise around the map connecting places identified by the small circular dot (S. Rustico, Valli de S. Jose, etc.), the route followed by the explorers through Utah may be located approximately. The expedition by reference to "Pere Escalante" is mentioned three times on the face of the map and a number of times in the text of the Political Essay. The one legend where the name is given as ". . . Pere Antonio Velez y Escalante . . . ," followed by the erroneous date 1777, is a curious mixture of the names of Dominguez and Escalante, and it belies Humboldt's indebtedness to the manuscript maps drawn by Costanso and Mascaro.

Indian tribes are located by Humboldt; those in the Utah region he has quite probably adopted from the Mascaro-Costanso sources, though he has not reproduced the tribal boundaries found in their work and in the maps of Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, the original source. The Aztec Indians who left their homeland Aztldn in 1160, Humboldt suggests, may have traveled across Utah in their wanderings, passing Utah Lake, which he says might be Lake Teguayo, en route to the San Juan River, where they remained for a time before going on to the Gila River in Arizona. This startling information is carried in the legend in French to the left of Lac de Timpanogos, in one immediately below the Rio Nabajoa, and in another just below the Casas Grandes in Arizona.

Hypothesis to Humboldt was fact to another. The word Teguayo, a product of the fertile seventeenth-century-Spanish imagination, identified a fabulous land northwest of New Mexico. This was a legend contradicted in fact by the Dominguez-Escalante expedition, but it was revived by the weight of Humboldt's words alone. Lake Teguayo blossomed out again on the maps after 1811, competing with Timpanogos as the name for Great Salt Lake, or Utah Lake, or it was applied to Sevier Lake, which had been left blank by Humboldt. It was not crowded off the map altogether until some time after the Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847.

The Aztecs and Montezuma are still here. It was easy after the middle of the nineteenth century, once the numerous ruins left by ancient peoples in Utah and the Southwest became better known, to conclude that Humboldt's hypothesis was right: they had passed this way. Two frequently encountered names in the Southwest today are Aztec and Montezuma. Utah has at least one of each. Montezuma Creek, a fork of the San Juan River, drains the slopes of the Abajo (Blue) Mountains, and Aztec Creek, which receives the waters that flow under Rainbow Natural Bridge, are both where Humboldt notes that tradition, however uncertain, accounts for one of the stopping places of the Aztecs in their migrations.

Alexander von Humboldt, then, literally put Utah on the map. The Political Essay was accepted at once, even before it was published, as the word of authority, and it remained so for some time after the mountain men and later explorers corrected the geographical errors. Humboldt revealed the land, he told what was known about it, and he prophesied what might become of it. At a time when men were probing for water routes across the continent, and before Lewis and Clark published their report, Humboldt suggested the feasibility of commercial communication between the Rio Grande and the Colorado. But, he said, the Rio Zaguanganas and Rio Grande "can never be interesting for commerce, till great changes ... introduce colonization into their fertile and temperate regions," and as he observed the rapid advance of the Americans into the Mississippi Basin, he concluded that "these changes are perhaps not very distant."

As much as any other, John Charles Fremont personifies the American advance and the searcher for first the water and then the railroad routes to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. And Fremont recognized and acknowledged his debt to Humboldt by frequent reference to him in his published works and by naming after him the Humboldt River and the mountains in which it heads. But these were lost to Nevada in 1861 and in 1864 and 1866 when the-territory was first divided and then reduced, and one studies the map in vain- today to find a place in Utah commemorative of the man who first publicized some of its many wonders.

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