"Between Dream and Reality"

DOUGLAS PRESTON

excerpt from

Photographs by Christine Preston

Text by Douglas Preston and José Antonio Esquibel

University of New Mexico Press, July 1998

The sun broke over the distant Sierra Oscura, throwing a sheet of golden light across the desert floor. And suddenly, in the oblique light, Christine and I could see the wagon-wheel ruts of the original trail; they rolled over the northern horizon, converged at Lava Gate, and then vanished southward.

For months, we had been chasing the ghost of this ancient Spanish trail, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, The Royal Road of the Interior Lands. Lava Gate was the best place between Mexico City and Santa Fe to see this scar of history; in most other places it has been obliterated by asphalt, cement, riprap, coke and steel —buried under highways and railroad beds.

At Lava Gate, little had changed in a thousand years or more. The landscape remained as it was in the 13^th century when Pueblo Indians traded turquoise, salt and macaws along the trail. It was the same when the conquistador don Juan de Oñate roe through this gap in 1598 with a group of European colonists. It was the same when Kit Carson drove oxen down here in 1827. And it was the same on July 16, 1945, when the terrible incandescence of the first atomic bomb, detonated only 35 miles away, illuminated this landscape.

We waited while the sun climbed in the sky. The ancient ruts began to vanish in the brilliant sunlight, until we wondered if they were there at all.

Today the Camino Real is largely forgotten by Americans and Mexicans alike. In the United States, most schoolchildren are taught about the Mayflower, the Pilgrim's landing at Plymouth Rock, and the settlers at Jamestown instead of the history of Juan de Oñate and the intrepid colonists who settled New Mexico in 1598. For some Americans, perhaps, it is uncomfortable to learn that the first permanent European colonists were not English but Hispanic people whose descendants can rightly look on members of the Mayflower Society as parvenus, For some others, the history of the Camino Real is relegated to the pages of "Hispanic history" or "ethnic history"—not American history.

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The old Camino real traverses some of the loveliest, and some of the ugliest, landscapes in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. The contrasts are striking. Sometimes we found it as a dirt road winding beside cool groves of cottonwooods, with great blue herons flying overhead, Sometimes we found huge dunefields or vast dry lakebeds whipped up by alkali-laden dust devils. Sometimes we found a cheerful country road passing through Hispanic and Mexican villages, alongside fields of ripening chiles. And sometimes we found ourselves creeping through a tangle of angry commuters on a downtown avenue lined with strip malls or winging our way down a highway crowded with billboards, gaming casinos and trash.

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The southern segment of the Camino Real passes through some of the oldest towns in the New World: Querétaro, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Zacatecas, San Luis de Potosí, Nombre de Dios, Sombrerete. Many families who would later settle New Mexico came from these places.

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Contrary to the historical stereotype, I believe the people who came up the Camino Real were not solely or even primarily motivated by the promise of wealth; this is to misunderstand human nature. They came because of hope, because of a dream that ran far deeper than a mere desire for status and comfort. In their spirit they felt the tug of Las Sierras Azules, the distant blue mountains, beyond which lie the in known lands and the promise of a new life.