A Trail Long Gone

“In Search of Domínguez & Escalante — Photographing the 1776 Spanish Expedition through the Southwest” by Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus with an introductory essay by Joseph Sánchez Museum of New Mexico Press, $50, 232 pp. with 146 duotones

In July 1776, two Franciscan friars led a 10-man expedition northwest out of Santa Fe in search of a route to Monterey, what today is a city in California.

The purpose of the Domínguez-Escalante expedition was to seek converts to Christianity among Native peoples and land where Spaniards could ranch and settle.

These hearty men didn’t make it to the coast. Instead, starting out from Santa Fe they made a 1,800-mile loop around the Four Corners region that’s still considered an impressive trip.

Remarkably, all travelers survived. So did a diary of the journey, a document still read today.

A new large-format book of black-and-white photographs reveals what 21st-century photographer-educators Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus discovered in retracing the Domínguez-Escalante expedition. The modern Santa Feans traveled by car, not horse.

Mac Gregor and Halus’ cameras present elements of the natural landscape that the 1776 crew probably encountered — a mesa at Ghost Ranch, the Dolores River Canyon overlook that’s part of the San Juan National Forest in Colorado, a notch through which the Green River cuts and exits the Yama Plateau of the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, and a cave shelter at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona.

During their two-year project, Mac Gregor and Halus also photographed the man-made landscape along that same expeditionary trail. Among those images are wind turbines, abandoned buildings, a junkyard, a triceratops sculpture, dead cattle, a feedlot, a tree whose branches have shoes hung by their laces, trash, a jewelry vendor, a marina, a dam, a convenience store, a trading post, tourists, trucks on Interstate 40, a freight train, a casino-hotel and the Rail Runner.

Interspersed with their photographs are quotes from entries of the 1776 expedition’s diary; few, if any, quotes describe the stark beauty of the arid landscape; that’s left to Mac Gregor and Halus.

Historian Joseph P. Sánchez’s introductory essay brims with valuable context and details of the 1776 expedition.

Incidentally, the Spaniards’ trip was to have departed the City Different on July 4. Departure was delayed. It left on July 29 and circled back on Jan. 3, 1777.

Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus lecture and sign “In Search of Domínguez & Escalante” at 2 p.m. today at the New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe, and at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW.