Escalante's Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest

Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition.



In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical pa...