Unhappy Trails : Greenhorn Cowboy Recounts Struggle of Following in Coronado’s Footsteps

On April 13, 1989, Douglas Preston mounted a horse named King on the banks of a river in an isolated corner of southeastern Arizona and set out on a 1,000-mile odyssey to trace the footsteps of a 16th-Century Spanish conquistador.

For Preston, a writer who recently moved from New York to the Southwest, the thought of riding horses over rugged mountains and vast deserts was a romantic one. What could be better than sleeping under the stars and listening to the coyotes howl? Plus, it was a great idea for a book.

There was just one hitch.

“I was a total greenhorn Boston Yankee,” Preston says. “I didn’t know how to saddle a horse or anything.”

Three years later, Preston still shakes his head at his folly. “I had no idea how difficult packing a horse was, or how to control a horse in the middle of the desert,” he says. In fact, he’d only been on horseback half a dozen times.

In the 10 weeks of hard riding that followed, Preston and his friend, Walter Nelson--a photographer who came along for the ride--narrowly skirted disaster several times. They nearly rode their horses over a cliff, constantly faced the prospect of dying of thirst and found themselves subsisting on a diet of strong coffee, oatmeal and sugar.

Preston was right about one thing: The adventure makes for a memorable tale. His new book, “Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado,” recounts the pair’s journey from the San Pedro River, which the Spanish explorer is believed to have followed into Arizona, to Pecos National Monument in New Mexico, site of what was once the largest of Indian pueblos.

Along the way, Preston met and interviewed Indians, ranchers, cowboys and people who were curious about their mission.

The book weaves a narrative of the trip (on which Preston and Nelson, through much trial and error, mastered the vanishing art of Western horsemanship) with the cruel history of the land they traversed.

In the end, Preston says, he came away with an overpowering sense of loss.

Many of the ranch hands he met were working for near-minimum wage for the new corporate owners of land their grandfathers had homesteaded. And the Indians he talked to reminded him of how 450 years of contact with Europeans had nearly destroyed their culture.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t a story about winning the West,’ Preston says. ‘It’s a story about losing the West.’ ”

Preston, 36, has had a romantic streak since his childhood, as the son of a Boston lawyer and college art historian in Wellesley, Mass.

“When I was a kid, I always used to dream of faraway places,” he says.

Tall and lanky, with horn-rims and a mop of wavy brown hair streaked with gray, Preston looks more like a college writing instructor (he spent a year teaching at Princeton) than a cowboy. As a teen-ager he spent a couple of summers at a camp in New Mexico, where a nascent interest in archeology and anthropology was nurtured with field trips around the Southwest.

After graduating from Pomona College, he lit out for New York and landed a job as an editor for the American Museum of Natural History. He wrote a regular column for Natural History magazine, which led to his first book, “Dinosaurs in the Attic,” published in 1986.

That year, Preston decided he’d had enough of New York and, taking the money he made from the book and from selling his co-op, he moved to Santa Fe and bought some land.

Settling into his adopted home, Preston says, “I kept thinking about what this country was like when the Spanish first arrived.”

Preston became acquainted with the story of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, the young nobleman who took 1,500 soldiers and hundreds of Aztec allies into the Southwest in 1540 in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola.

In the course of a year, Coronado occupied or defeated many of the pueblos in what is now New Mexico, sent out scouts who discovered the Grand Canyon and marched far into the plains of Kansas. It was the largest and best-equipped expedition ever to explore the Americas.

After Coronado, the Indian cultures of the Southwest were changed forever.

“That moment of first contact is one of the most significant points of our history as a continent,” Preston says. But in the historical accounts of Coronado’s journey, “what was missing was any sense of what the moment was really like,” he says. He began to think about how he could capture it.

It was then that he hit upon the idea of trying to follow Coronado’s route on horseback.

“The thing I wanted to do was to see the country unfold the way it did for the Spanish,” Preston says. “I didn’t want to know what was up ahead. I wanted to face some of the same problems Coronado faced.”

To cover the $15,000 in expenses, Preston lined up an advance from a book publisher and financial support from the Smithsonian magazine, for which he later wrote an article. Then he recruited his next-door-neighbor Nelson, a feisty former commercial photographer. Nelson packed 100 pounds of photo gear, including an $8,000 Deardorff 8-by-10 view camera. (His photos accompanied the Smithsonian piece.)

They also hired a man, identified in the book by the pseudonym Eusebio, to serve as horse wrangler and pack master.

By the time they set out, there had already been one mishap: A horse had stepped on Preston’s foot, breaking his little toe. He spent most of the trip wearing wide-toed hiking boots to alleviate the pain.

Trouble bedeviled them throughout their trek.

The San Pedro River, which meanders northward into Arizona from Mexico, is filled with quicksand and choked with tough, thorny mesquite. The group made terrible time for the first few weeks because there was no trail through the thicket.

It also became clear that the wrangler had no real idea of what he was doing. He backed out of the project after 2 1/2 weeks, leaving Preston and Nelson to fend for themselves.

In the sparse desert of southern Arizona, the horses had to be free to forage at night, so the pair learned how to hobble them so they wouldn’t wander too far. Nevertheless, they’d often be a mile or more from camp.

“We’d get up in the morning, and the first thing we’d do is track our horses,” Preston says. He and Nelson learned how to “cut” for signs, spreading out with flashlights to look for the slightest hint of hoof prints.

Finally, an old codger sold them a rusty cowbell for a dollar. Preston hung it on one of the horses every night.

Preston had permission to cross the various Indian pueblos in New Mexico along their route, but they simply rode across ranches in Arizona, most of which consisted primarily of leased federal and state land.

“In southern Arizona there’s still these old-time ranches where things are done the old way,” Preston says. “The ranchers were really great. They were really good to us.” Often, he says, they would offer the travelers lodging, as well as feed and water for their horses.

Life began to take on a hypnotic, primal rhythm.

“It was nomadic; it was a really powerful experience,” he says. “All of a sudden, I felt, ‘This is the way human beings were meant to live.’ ”

Preston and Nelson spoke seldom and crawled into their sleeping bags as soon as they finished wolfing down their dinners. “I look at my journal, and it starts to look like the scratchings of an illiterate,” Preston says.

Water was a constant concern. Each man needed at least two gallons a day, and each horse needed 10 to 15 gallons. Preston and Nelson usually found themselves drinking untreated water from streams, springs and stock ponds.

“Eighty percent of the water sources on the maps were inoperative,” Preston says. “They’d show a windmill, and you’d arrive there and find a few piles of rotting wood and some rusty metal on the ground.” That was frustrating and worrisome.

“Walter kept saying, ‘Damn, Doug, you’re gonna have a great book here,’ ” Preston says, raucously mimicking his partner’s Texas twang. “And I’d say, ‘The hell with the book, I just want to find some water.’ ”

The friends sometimes grew testy as the stresses of the ride took their toll.

“We had some pretty bad fights,” Preston recalls. “We had this ridiculous fight over whose horses were better.”

Although often tempted to give up, Preston says, “what kept me going was that I couldn’t even afford to pay back the money I took from the publisher. And I had to prove something to myself.”

After six weeks, the pair had picked their way across a tortured landscape of mountains and ridges to the top of the Mogollon Rim, a great escarpment that stretches across central Arizona. This was the region Coronado called the despoblado --”the howling wilderness.”

Zuni, which Coronado believed was the legendary land of Cibola, was the next stop. They were almost out of food and water when they rode up to the ruins of Hawikuh, the village where Coronado defeated the Zunis in a pitched battle.

Preston and Nelson took a two-month break to recuperate and escape the worst of the summer heat before resuming their trip at Zuni on Aug. 1.

In the next four weeks, they rode through Acoma Pueblo, site of the mesa-top “Sky City,” said to be the oldest inhabited village in North America. They pushed on to Albuquerque, where the most harrowing moments of their trip came as they gingerly led their horses across a bridge over the Rio Grande near downtown amid heavy traffic.

On an overcast afternoon in late August, they arrived at the ruins at Pecos Pueblo, surprising a group of tourists in pantsuits. As it dawned on the pair that their journey was finally over, rain began to fall.

Three years later, Preston often saddles up one of his horses for a ride in the mountains east of Santa Fe. There, he reflects on his trip and on the terrible price paid by Indians and early settlers as the modern West took shape.

“I just look out and wonder,” he says. “Was it really worth it? Was it progress?”