Hard Climb Leads Up a High Road to History

Salvador, our Mexican taxi driver, had parked his cab beside the rock-strewn, narrow dirt road to San Javier. We had been climbing slowly for about an hour, mostly following an arroyo seco into the Sierra de las Giganta. Vultures wheeled above the huge cardon cacti and mesquite. The palo verde greened the arid slopes of reddish earth, crowned by peaks and mesas of massive geologic upthrusts.

“Arriba! Arriba!” Salvador had remarked jocularly, making expressive undulating movements with one hand, as his other steered the vehicle expertly around sharp rocks that threatened to puncture the crankcase like can openers.

Yes, up, up! We crept at 5 to 10 m.p.h. along the serpentine road, following generally the ancient trail of the intrepid padres and Indians who had once passed this way, bringing farm produce from San Javier to Loreto. Occasionally the road offered a vista below to the alluvial plain where the town of Loreto squatted among fan palms on the shore of the Sea of Cortez. About seven miles seaward, Isla Carmen showed soft pink.

Only the stone bell tower of the Mision Nuestra Senora de Loreto, the so-called Mother of Missions founded in 1697, first of the chain of missions of the Californias, lower and upper, thrust skyward above the town of largely one-story buildings. It fired the imagination to think that this sleepy, dusty little town was the capital of both Alta and Baja California--their first--for nearly a century.

The explorer Gaspar de Portola and his men would not reach the mouth of the Salinas River on the Bay of Monterey until late in 1769. Monterey would not become the capital of the Spanish province of Alta California until 1774.

The second mission to be established by the Jesuits, Mision San Francisco Javier de Vigge, was our destination up this torturous road. But now, Salvador had something important he wished my wife and me to see.

“Indios!” he announced dramatically, with a broad gesture like a magician producing flowers from thin air. “ Es mucho viejo ,” said Salvador, then added, “Too much old, maybe two-three-hundred-year too much old. Quien sabe ?”

He had guided us on foot about 500 yards up a running creek in a steep-sided canyon, lush with green shrubbery and the ubiquitous fan palms that proclaim the presence of water. On the rock wall of what remained of a cave undercut by the creek were strange Indian paintings that still retained their vivid colors of red, blue, black and yellow. My wife was ecstatic. Archeology ignites her spirit; she fairly glows.

But what did these abstract pictures depict? The visage of other-world spirits, perhaps. Messages to old gods? And here was possibly one of the bighorn sheep that still inhabit the crags.

Pondering the mystery, we returned to our cab, and once again arriba! arriba! until at last another and much large oasis burst into view. At last, San Javier, a single-street village at the head of which stood in somber, gray grandeur the Mision San Francisco Javier de Vigge, against a backdrop of towering mountain peaks. This great hand-dressed stone edifice was begun in 1699 by Padre Francisco Maria Piccolo. It was moved five miles south to its present location in 1720 and completed in 1758.

Having seen it, I didn’t require reading what Orange Countian Tom Miller, a resident Baja expert, wrote in one of his guidebooks. He said San Javier is the most impressive and best preserved of the missions and “probably the most rewarding of all the missions to visit, as it is very much as it was over 200 years ago.” San Javier, with its beautiful stone carvings and soaring pinnacles, its magnificent original altar, proclaimed its preeminence without words and that proclamation smote directly the heart’s core.

And I tried to communicate with Salvador as best I could in pigeon Spanish-English about that giant man of a priest, the intrepid Father Juan de Ugarte. He is said to have seized two fighting Indians by the hair and dashed them to the ground. It was Ugarte who, after Piccolo was driven from San Javier, sent the soldiers away and used his great strength to re-establish this mission and to put the Indians to work at agriculture.

Then we all stood before the richly carved and decorated altar, its old gold gleaming softly in the dim, reverential light from narrow windows near the vaulted ceiling.

“ Es magnifico ,” breathed Salvador.

“It is too mucho,” said I, fighting back the mist in my eyes. Nearly two hours of bumps and dust had been more than rewarded by this trip to California’s origins.