The Old Spanish Trail: Seven Hundred Miles From Santa Fe
Near Moab, Utah
The Colorado River crossing at Moab was one of the strategic facts of the American Southwest for centuries before any town existed here. The first European to document it was Juan Maria de Rivera, a Spanish colonial explorer who is said to have reached the Colorado River near the present site of Moab in seventeen sixty-five, guided by Ute companions. In seventeen seventy-six, the Franciscan priests Dominguez and Escalante explored farther north in Utah during their attempted overland route from Santa Fe to the California settlements, and their journal described the rugged country with a mixture of wonder and genuine difficulty.
By the eighteen thirties the crossing at Moab had become a fixed point on the Old Spanish Trail, the commercial route that connected Santa Fe, New Mexico with the Spanish settlements of southern California. Mule trains loaded with woolen blankets, horses, and trade goods traveled west toward Los Angeles and returned with horses and cattle. Fur trappers working the beaver streams of the Rocky Mountains used the same crossings.
The Colorado River at Moab was one of the few places where the water could be forded, which made it a chokepoint through which most east-west travel across the plateau had to pass. The trail is gone now, its ruts absorbed into desert or buried under pavement. But the logic that made the crossing important has not changed.
Moab is still a crossroads, still the place where people moving across the canyon country are likely to stop. The Spanish found it first, and the river keeps offering it.
