Across the Southwest,
Native Americans, explorers, miners, settlers and Mormon pioneers
have left dozens of inscriptions on rock walls. Now, a rare
historical marking has been authenticated on one of the canyon
cliffs that surround Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation
Area. The inscription was carved when the United States was only
six months old.
It was left in November 1776 by Friars
Dominguez and Escalante when their exploring party became trapped
in a fierce storm along the Colorado River. In a hidden canyon up
from the main river channel in what is now Padre Bay, someone
carved in elegant script “paso por aqui, 1776.” The
words are Spanish for “we passed by here.”
The custom of carving or painting on stone in the Southwest is as
ancient as the oldest Native American image of the human hand and
as modern as the latest graffiti of an initialed heart. What makes
one picture rock art, and the other graffiti? The answer lies in
historical context.
For Native Americans, petroglyphs, or
carvings on stone, and pictographs, or painted markings, are
thought to reveal the ideas and migrations of their ancestors. The
same is true for the descendants of 17th century Spanish explorers
and colonists who left their marks at what is now El Morro National
Monument, south of Gallup, N.M. El Morro protects 2,000
inscriptions and petroglyphs of travelers between the pueblo
village of Zuni and the Rio Grande River along an ancient trail.
Many carvings begin with the phrase “paso por aqui.”
Historian and guide Fred Blackburn, who has done
extensive research on Southwestern inscriptions, calls them a
primary historical record. He loves to put carved information
together with an event, “especially if the written history is
wrong or not recorded at all.”
Western explorers
and pioneers used knives, pencils, charcoal, the tips of lead
bullets and even axle grease applied with sticks when they traveled
by wagon across southern Utah. Blackburn has found that within any
site, including 1,000-year-old cliff dwellings, “when one
person signs, especially on beautifully plastered walls, other
people then record their names.” At some point, the piling-on
becomes graffiti.
At El Morro, all signatures after the
establishment of the monument on Dec. 8, 1906, have been removed,
though the impulse to mark the rock continues. Leslie DeLong, the
monument’s chief of visitor services, has developed a novel
way to deflect the graffiti impulse: “We have boulders
outside of the visitor center that we encourage visitors to carve
on.” She hands out dull nails as writing instruments and
always cautions folks not to use their car keys. After several
tedious minutes of trying to scratch even a line with a nail, she
says, visitors leave awed by the flowing Spanish writing etched so
deeply into El Morro’s sandstone.
Along the 1,900
miles of shoreline surrounding Lake Powell, vandalism has become a
common sight. Ironically, It was graffiti that led to the discovery
of the 1776 Dominguez and Escalante expedition’s carving.
Inscribed just under a modern graffiti, the 232-year-old
inscription was discovered over a year ago by GRIT, acronym for
Graffiti Removal Intervention Team. All are volunteers who spend a
week on houseboats and daily scour graffiti off the sandstone walls
with wire brushes. Kevin Schneider, a staffer at Glen Canyon
National Recreation Area, says the GRIT teams, who work for free
and are supported by donations, are trained to scout for historic
inscriptions. This time they hit the jackpot.
The
Dominguez-Escalante inscription is the only known physical marking
left from the friars’ unsuccessful attempt to find a route
between Monterey, Calif., and Santa Fe, N.M. Their journal
describes the perils they faced that November of 1776: “We
were stopped for a long time by a strong blizzard and tempest
consisting of rain and thick hailstones amid horrendous thunder
claps and lightning flashes.” The storm was so fierce,
“We recited the Virgin’s litany, for her to implore
some relief for us, and God willed for the tempest to end.”
Now that the inscription has been authenticated, the
National Park Service is keeping its exact location secret until
conservation has been done at the site along with archaeological
investigation near the cove. Then, says Kevin Schneider, “We
want to launch a major educational campaign that it’s not
appropriate for our 2 million annual visitors to scrawl names on
canyon walls.”
Meanwhile, the GRIT program will
soon be accepting this year’s volunteers at 928/608-6200. Who
knows what historical inscriptions remain to be discovered on those
arching sandstone walls?
Andrew Gulliford is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is professor of southwest
studies and history at Fort Lewis College in Durango,
Colorado.
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