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Article Excerpt
The native village at Sonoyta, Sonora, was first recorded by Europeans when Father Eusebio Kino visited it in 1698. By 1700, he wrote that this "rancheria ... is the best there is on this coast. It has fertile land, with irrigation ditches for good crops ..., water which runs all the year, good pasture for cattle, and everything necessary for a good settlement" (Kino 1924, 2:255). Kino was proved right. Sonoyta was a good place to live.
By the 1920s, Sonoyta was a prospering town, full of busy and optimistic inhabitants, a desert oasis on the Sonoyta River. This was the Sonoyta of the writer, poet, teacher, hunter, and explorer Gumersindo Esquer, one of the most colorful yet least known characters of the northwestern Sonora frontier at that time. He rhapsodized about his little town on the first page of his 1928 novel, Campos de Fuego (Fields of Fire).
Sonoyta is an oasis in the midst of the desert. It is worthy of being seen and admired because of the small but never-failing river which, like a beautiful silver ribbon, runs from east to west along the north side, until its waters are lost in the unexplored sand dunes which are in the eastern part of the steep mountain range of El Pinacate. ... Its climate is, I know not why, extremely variable, very hot in summer, very cold in winter, and subject to abrupt changes in temperature in spring and fall. When in flood, the "Little River," as the North Americans call the stream, fertilizes the flood-plains on both banks, where small plantings of maize, wheat, beans, vines, fig-trees, pomegranates, etc., may be seen; these are pleasing to the eyes of the passers-by, presenting as they do a most lovely panorama of verdure-clothed fields. (1)
SONOYTA AND THE EXPLORERS
Scientific exploration helped inspire the flowering of Sonoyta in the early twentieth century. As earls, as 1887, the French geographer Mphonse Pinart passed through the area. Sailing from San Francisco, he visited Caborca and Sonoyta, explored the Pinacates, and sketched missions and lava fields. His account of his travels was published in 1880 in the French journal Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie (Pinart 1880). Intriguingly, Pinart mentions that around Batamote, on the southeast flank of the Pinacates south of Sonoyta, he heard a rumor of a discovery of ruins of a presumably Spanish-era "mission or church" and other structures. As we will see, this is the kind of story that may have influenced Esquer, forty years later.
Pinart's publication, covering both geology and folklore, probably also helped inspire a more famous expedition in 1907, when the sizeable MacDougal-Hornaday-Sykes party, passed through Sonoyta, with colorful local lawman Jeff Milton as a guide. From then on, other historically interesting citizens of the area, such as Alberto Celaya and Hia C'ed O'odham Quelele, acted as guides for such Pinacate explorers as Carl Lumholtz and Julian Hayden. MacDougal's 1907 party described various species of large animals such as bighorn sheep and pronghorn that roamed the region. They collected specimens, discovered and named yawning craters, and photographed cacti and rattlesnakes. Hornaday, primarily a zoo director and travel writer, published a bumptious book about the expedition's adventures in 1908. Brimming with American turn-of-the-century optimism and enthusiasm, Hornaday's Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava describes awesome vistas of lava and "first" descents into spectacular craters (which Native Americans had certainly visited previously). One of the most impressive anecdotes recounts the odyssey of MacDougal's indefatigable colleague, Godfrey Sykes, who left camp alone one day at 1 p.m., and without telling anyone, made a forty-three-mile round-trip walk (according to his pedometer) across the trackless Gran Desierto dunes in order to reach the coast and calibrate his barometer at sea level, returning at 1:30 a.m. Sykes was photographed standing on his head after an ascent to Pinacate Peak, Jeff Milton was photographed with a rattlesnake on his bedroll, and a swell time was had by all.
Lumholtz, a Norwegian naturalist, passed through Sonoyta in 1909 and published his slightly more sober book of exploration in 1912. The two books, Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava and New Trails in Mexico, written only four years apart, inspired new interest in the little-known natural and historical features of this isolated volcanic desert area. Both books contained new maps. Sonoyta was getting noticed. In a few decades a north-south road to Rocky Point would bring new commerce as well as tourists.
ESQUER'S CURIOUS BOOK: CAMPOS DE FUEGO
The MacDougal expedition and the growing interest in the wonders of the Pinacates inspired something else in the 1920s--a burst of literary creativity little known outside of Sonora. Out of nowhere, seemingly, came an intriguing book in Spanish, recounting an astounding tale about an obscure but amazing Mexican expedition into the Pinacate region. It was an expedition that discovered historical treasures, a Spanish-era burial, and a lost mission, all amidst the Pinacate wonderland of dark volcanoes and sun-bleached dunes. The book, tided Campos de Fuego, was written by Gumersindo Esquer, an otherwise obscure schoolteacher.
Esquer's book was never well known. Originally published in Spanish by El Modelo in Hermosillo, Sonora, it was printed as a small, softcover book with an artfully designed cover. We are not sure how large an edition was printed. The book, long out of print, is available in the Special Collections of the University of Arizona Library (Esquer 1928).
The book became something of a legend among the small band of scientists, explorers, and desert buffs who penetrated the Pinacates by mid-century. Two of us (WKH and GHH) learned about it from Julian Hayden in the early 1970s....
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