The Jornada del Muerto

From the northern edge of the Mesilla Valley, the land opens into one of the most feared stretches of road in colonial North America: the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man. The name appears on Spanish maps as early as the sixteen hundreds and refers to a ninety-mile passage across a flat, waterless basin flanked by mountain ranges that offer no help and no water.

The standard Camino Real route through this region followed the Rio Grande northward, but the river route was longer and rougher, and the Jornada cut straight north across the basin until the trail met the river again at Fray Cristobal, far to the north. Travelers who followed the river faced a long detour through rough terrain. The Jornada del Muerto cut straight north across the basin, saving distance at the cost of water.

For summer caravans, the crossing could be lethal. Travel parties pushed through the night to avoid the worst heat, carrying every drop of water their animals could manage. Horses, mules, and oxen died in the basin with some regularity, and their bones marked the trail for those who came after. One particularly grim episode occurred in sixteen eighty when Governor Antonio de Otermín led the surviving colonists south through the Jornada after the Pueblo Revolt drove the Spanish from Santa Fe. Exhausted, wounded, and short of water, they staggered the length of the basin and made it through.

The Jornada del Muerto entered the twentieth century as a remote ranching basin. In nineteen forty-five, the United States Army selected it as the test site for the world's first nuclear weapon because it was, in part, exactly what it had always been: empty, remote, and brutal. Trinity Site lies near the northern end of the old Jornada route.

Today the basin is White Sands Missile Range, and the Jornada del Muerto retains roughly the same human presence it had when the first Spanish travelers crossed it four hundred years ago: almost none.