The Colorado Delta, 1771–1776: Rereading Francisco Garcés

AbstractThe ethnohistory of the Colorado River delta has been substantively misunderstood, owing to the widespread neglect and/or misinterpretations of the writings of Francisco Garcés. In 1771, 1774, and 1775–76, Garcés undertook three entradas into the delta, and wrote a series of valuable ethnographic accounts. Not only have Garcés’s locations and routes frequently been misidentified by earlier scholars, his observations on agricultural production and population size have been ignored or marginalized, enabling misconceptions about delta historical demography and adaptation to flourish. The present paper seeks to restore Garcés’s accounts, making his locations and ethnographic observations intelligible and interpretable, and to show how these can help resolve extant misconceptions. Part I focuses on some key texts, tying his locations to a master map. Part II focuses on ethnolinguistic groups and settlement sites, and discusses the implications for a better understanding of historical demography and agricultural adaptation in the delta.La etnohistoria del delta del río Colorado ha sido mal entendida debido al descuido generalizado y/o malas interpretaciones de los escritos de Francisco Garcés. En 1771-1776, Garcés emprendió tres entradas al delta y escribió varios relatos valiosos. Pero las ubicaciones y rutas de Garcés han sido frecuentemente identificadas erróneamente por estudiosos anteriores, y sus observaciones sobre la agricultura y la población han sido ignoradas o marginadas, lo que ha permitido que florezcan conceptos erróneos sobre la demografía histórica y la adaptación del delta. Este artículo busca restaurar los relatos de Garcés, hacer inteligibles sus ubicaciones y observaciones, y mostrar cómo estos pueden ayudar a resolver conceptos erróneos existentes. La parte I se centra en algunos textos clave. La Parte II se centra en los grupos etnolingüísticos y los sitios de asentamiento, y analiza las implicaciones para una mejor comprensión de la demografía histórica y la adaptación agrícola en el delta.KEYWORDS: EthnohistoryYumanColorado deltapopulationagricultureSpanish explorationIndigenous interrelationsAnza expedition AcknowledgmentsArchival and field research into Garcés’s writings since 2010 has been supported by the Ogden Mills Fund, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History. I am most grateful to archivists at the following institutions: Bancroft Library (Berkeley), University of Arizona Special Collections Library (Tucson), Office of Ethnohistorical Research, Arizona State Museum (Tucson), Newberry Library (Chicago), Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), University of New Mexico Library Center for Southwest Research (Albuquerque), Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas (Austin), Library of Congress Manuscript Division (Washington D.C.), National Anthropological Archives (Suitland, MD), Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Real Biblioteca (Madrid), Historical Archives, OFM (Rome), British Library (London), and Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico City). I am especially grateful to delta geoscientist Steven M. Nelson for indispensable, patient guidance in June and July 2022, and February-May 2023 on the historical hydrology and geomorphology of the Colorado delta, and particularly for his reading of the 1939 aerial photographs (see Figure 3): in any instance where my interpretations depart from his, I alone am responsible. I am also most grateful to four anonynmous readers for KIVA, who provided very valuable suggestions.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Reconstruction has benefitted from several other early maps, notably: Hardy (Citation1829), Derby (Citation1850), Ives (Citation1861:map 1), Evans (Citation1879), Sánchez and Wheeler (Citation1879), Read (Citation1885), Silsbee (Citation1900), Douglas et al. (Citation1906), Sykes Citation1907 (in MacDougal Citation1907), Bonillas and Urbina (Citation1913), LaRue (Citation1916), Romero (Citation1916), Beal (Citation1922), Sykes (Citation1926), and Sykes (Citation1937, especially figures 15, 18, and plate I). Coordinates vary, especially for longitude. Sykes’s Citation1905 115° W meridian falls ca. 2′ 15″ west of that by Douglas et al. (Citation1906)—the most reliable early map—and farther west than his own later maps (Sykes Citation1926: map after p. 254; 1937:38, figure 15). Other discrepancies include the location of Cerro Prieto at approximately 115° 22′ W, rather than 115° 18′ W, suggesting some distortive east-west contraction. Despite these shortcomings, Sykes’s Citation1905 map remains the most useful proxy for present purposes. Georeferenced coordinates (i.e., not Sykes’s coordinates—see figure 2) are included on figure 1.2 Corrections appear in his 1774 diary, in a 1774 letter to Viceroy Bucareli (Bolton Citation1930, II:361–372), in the Noticias Sacadas cited below, and in his 1775–76 diary. Garcés’s 1771 diary has never been published in translation, and only recently in Spanish (Oltra Perales and Martínez Gracia Citation1995:92–119; Baroni Citation2016:49–79). The two published texts belong to “Version A” and are similar to the manuscript copy I cite here as Garcés Citation1771a. Version B is represented by at least two manuscripts cited herein as Garcés Citation1771b and Citation1771c. Version A provides more detail than B in certain instances, and less in others.3 A better translation by Galvin (Citation1965) has received less attention.4 See Hackenberg (Citation1983).5 Garcés's phrasing is elliptical, but from several similar references to Native groups wanting him to return by the way he had come (because they feared soldiers would come if anything should happen to him in their territory), they were likely “not able to accomplish” taking him back across the river simply because he refused.6 From Nahuatl tlapechtli, a bed or platform of rods (Bright Citation2000:494). Garcés was most likely referring to a type of Cocopah raft made of a willow-log frame with two floors of tule bundles (Kelly Citation1977:53). For a 1900 photograph of a Cocopah man poling a tule raft on the Colorado, see Dellenbaugh (Citation1902:30).7 For the Spanish text, too long to include here, see Whiteley (Citationn.d.).8 I rely on a microfilm of the original diary (Garcés Citation1774), on Baroni’s (Citation2016) transcription of that copy, and Bolton’s (Citation1930, II) translation of it.9 Both Garcés and Anza say six (Bolton, Citation1930, II:49, 170); in 1775, Font calculated four (Brown Citation2011:128).10 That both old chiefs were Halyikwamai is confirmed in Garcés's diary entry for March 1, 1774 (Bolton Citation1930, II:333).11 Their enemies in this area were Hia C-eḍ O’odham and Cocopah.12 Galvin’s source copy belongs to Version II of the diary (Whiteley Citation2015), while the manuscript copy relied on here (Garcés Citation1777) belongs to Version III. The differences are not significant for the passages of interest.13 Garcés had passed generally south from the southern end of the Sierra de San Geronimo (i.e., the Sierra Mayor, approximately 32° 00′ N). On December 19, he reached mudflats near the river-mouth, where he observed 32° 17′ N (which I infer corresponds to ca. 31° 57′ N in modern coordinates). From the flats, he proceeded four leagues northeast (he says) to Las Llagas (Garcés Citation1777: 12-19-1775), about the head of tidewater on the Colorado (i.e., 32° 04′ N). (At only one minute farther north from his notation near the mouth, this exemplifies his inconsistent observations: one minute latitude northeast airline here = ca. 2.6 km, or ca. 0.6 leagues.) Then on December 21, from Las Llagas Garcés went five leagues southwest and one league farther to arrive at the mouth near Antelope Slough (MacDougal Citation1907:324). The next day, he made his observations of mountain ranges from near this spot, i.e., approximately 31° 51′ N, 114° 59′ W.14 Of his three other observations, Garcés used Font′s latitude for Santa Olaya (32° 33′ N), about 4′ 45″ north of the National Park Service’s estimate, 32° 28′ 16″ N (Delgado et al. Citation2015: Appendix B), which agrees with Bolton’s (Citation1930, I:120). Las Llagas at 32° 18′ N, noticed by Garcés as about the limit of tidewater on the Colorado, is about 14′ north of my estimate, thus differing from the variance (4′ 45″) between Font’s observation of Santa Olaya and current coordinates by an additional 9′ 15″. From Delgado et al’s estimate for Santa Olaya south to mine for Las Llagas is about 24 min (32° 28′ to 32° 04′ N), an airline distance of approximately 27.6 miles or 44.4 km (one minute latitude on this part of the globe = 1.15 miles, or 1.85 km). Yet Garcés’s latitudes for the two sites differ by only 15 min (17.25 miles or 27.75 km). Garcés’s estimate for southernmost La Merced (32° 25′ N) lies approximately half-way (by his latitudes) between Santa Olaya and Las Llagas (see also Part II for my inferences of coordinates).15 This is important in light of Sykes’s (Citation1937:16) argument (which ignored Garcés) that from at least the 1740’s through the third decade of the nineteenth century the mainstem “swung far over to the possible western limits of its meandering,” i.e., the Río Hardy, which thus constituted the Colorado’s main channel into the Gulf. Although erroneous, this argument has been influential in reconstructions of agriculture in the delta (see Part II). Garcés’s observations of 1771–1776 strongly suggest the active mainstem course then lay on the east side of the delta similar to as charted in the nineteenth century (e.g., see Figure 2; cf. Ross Citation2020).16 Bolton (Citation1930, II:57, 177, 270; 1930, IV:122-123) inferred El Rosario well lay near the middle Paredones River. Garcés says El Rosario was two leagues east of El Carrizal, Díaz three (Bolton Citation1930, II:178). Anza registered El Carrizal as seven leagues west-northwest of Santa Olaya, though both Díaz and Garcés recorded nine (Bolton Citation1930, II:57). Bolton (Citation1930, II:57) inferred El Carrizal was twenty miles west-northwest of Santa Olaya on a northern Paredones branch not shown on figures 1 or 2 (see Bolton Citation1930, I: facing p. 120). Bolton’s proposal for Santa Olaya is ca 2′ 40″ too far west, per Delgado et al. (Citation2015). Bolton’s location of El Rosario thus appears approximately 1′ 30″ too far north and 4′ 20″ too far west.17 According to Font, Cojat was four leagues southwest (both Garcés and Anza in 1774 say six) of San Pablo (Brown Citation2011:128–130). Bolton (Citation1930, II:54–55, n. 1) suggested Santa Olaya Lake lay near the Pescadero Dam (see Sykes Citation1937:fig. 48, fig. 50, Plate I). Bolton thought it was “six or seven miles” west of the river, which seems too far compared to Font’s two leagues (5.2 miles)—a conclusion shared by Delgado et al. (Citation2015: Appendix 2). Conversely, Forde (Citation1931:map 2) depicts Santa Olaya too far east, by the Colorado mainstem. As Bolton inferred, the Santa Olaya slough area itself thus probably formed part of the area taken over by the 1909 mainstem course change in this area.18 Volcano Lake received its waters from the Paredones River, a northern distributary of the Colorado. Lake Cahuilla (Salton Sea) “had mostly or completely desiccated by the time of Anza’s visit in 1774, when Anza’s party did not report finding water in the Salton Basin” (Rockwell et al. Citation2022:13). This implies Volcano Lake would have been mostly dry too (Steven M. Nelson personal communication 6-9-2022), as supported by the 1771 and 1774 diaries. On September 23, 1771, approaching Cerro Prieto from the southeast (see Table 2), Garcés could not reach it because his horse shied at two salty lagoons. Instead he headed east, uninterrupted by any large lake, toward La Merced. Shortly afterward, he reached San Jacome by walking back west from La Merced: “Sali hacia el Poniente a un Pueblo grande, que está cerca de la Sierra prieta, y Rio salado de Sn. Lino, y donde havia visto los humos/I went toward the west to a large pueblo that is near the Cerro Prieto and salty river of San Lino, and where I had seen the smokes [two days earlier]” (Garcés Citation1771a: September 25)—again, no lake interrupted his passage. And when Garcés, Anza, and Díaz approached deserted San Jacome from La Merced in 1774 they were not blocked by any lake.19 Steven M. Nelson (personal communication 6-14-2022) emphasizes: “All lakes on the surface of the floodplain would occupy abandoned river channels. As such they would be generally linear but have bends at old meanders. It would be quite reasonable for the Natives to know of shallow places where a bend could be forded saving many miles of walking to get around.”20 Bolton (Citation1917: 326–327) initially concluded Garcés did not reach Lake Macuata in 1771, but later argued, in a comment on his 1774 diary, that the Agua Amarilla and Lake Macuata were one and the same (Bolton (Citation1930, II:330, n. 1; for Lake Macuata, see Laylander et al. Citation2016). That correlation does occur in the 1774 diaries of Garcés and Díaz, but not as Bolton implies. At the north end of Lake Macuata in 1774, with its many beached ocean fish, Garcés inferred it was part of the Agua Amarilla, as an estuary that emptied into the gulf. After discussion with Garcés, Díaz noted the Agua Amarilla was a “large estuary formed in time of heavy rains, or perhaps by the sea during some extraordinary overflow … and that it extends the full length of this valley” (Bolton Citation1930, II:278). Garcés informed him (Bolton Citation1930, II:277) that in 1771 he had seen the Agua Amarilla “ten or twelve leagues” farther down the valley (i.e., the Pattie Basin). His 1775 observations of mountain ranges from near the mouth of the river near Antelope Slough included looking northwest through a gap into the Pattie Basin toward the Sierra Juárez: it seems beyond unlikely that he would not have commented on having passed through this gap in 1771 if he had in fact done so. My inference that in 1771 Garcés reached the lower Río Hardy about where its southwestern distributary feeds Lake Macuata (e.g., figure 2) is consistent with an area ten or twelve leagues south of northern Lake Macuata. In short, I am in agreement with Bolton Citation1917—and not with Bolton Citation1930—that there is no evidence Garcés reached Lake Macuata proper in 1771.21 “Aquel Rio que mas aparecia amarillo que colorado me hiso dudar si era Laguna o estero pero viendo movimiento en las Aguas y Ynquietud sin hacer aire considerable y que en aquella grandesa y tamaño proseguia assia abajo y venia de arriba por las inmediaciones de la Cierra crei que era el Rio Colorado.” Bolton’s (Citation1917:326) suggestion it was a “large lagoon or bayou near the sierra” ignored Garcés’s analytical conclusion it was a river.