Between October 1997 and April 1998, I walked from Tecate to Loreto with a pack burro called Misión. And on that trek, through the mountain and desert wilderness of Baja California, I was fortunate to find many, many friends.
Perhaps the greatest was none other than my burro companion. He was a stout, good natured, sweetheart of a burro-the best $150 I ever spent! Another, more distant, "friend" was Arthur Walbridge North-the author of Camp and Camino in Lower California. The book is a fascinating account of his travels in the peninsula from January to December 1906-much of it down the mission trail. It is one of the works I quote most often in my account of my travels "with a donkey."
Born in Marysville, California in 1874, the son of a forty-niner, North graduated from the University of California, and then began a long and varied career as a lawyer, member of the State Legislature, outdoorsman, author, lecturer, and infantry captain during Word War I. Fittingly, he lost his life "outdoors" in a 1943 canoeing accident on the Genesee River in New York. A great promoter of collegiate sport, he was a sportsman in the broadest sense-handy with pistol and rifle-a proud patriot, a man in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt.
Certainly he was a product of his time and place-confident, perhaps arrogant, in his Anglo-Saxon values-and one must make allowance for that. Facing the prospect of dying of thirst crossing the Vizcaíno desert with his guides, North was mindful in his suffering that, "I belonged to the superior nation and I must keep up my end before my Mexicans." Unlike so many travelers before him, he journeyed through Baja California not to look for mines or investments or a route to somewhere else, but out of love for the land that he called the Mother of California. He has been described as the "first tourist to travel the peninsula." Many of his highly readable descriptions are still valid, while others reveal just how much the peninsula and the world have changed over the course of the twentieth century.
Luckily North did not fall victim to the Vizcaíno. He made it safely to San Ignacio. "Assuaging the further poignancy of our sufferings by chewing viznaga [barrel cactus] pulp, we kept on for about ten miles. Then, unexpectedly, the blank rocky mesa, over which we were traveling opened before us. At the bottom of the chasm, five or six hundred feet below, lay a long, narrow valley, of perhaps two thousand acres, with water-pools of fine, rippling water flowing through green masses of sedge-and palms-thousands of tall, graceful palms, shading numerous thatched houses-and over to the further side a beautiful stone church with spires and belfry rising aloft...Off came my sombrero. "Hurrah, hurrah!" I cried hoarsely." Arthur North rode - often on a burro -- into his peninsular journey, fully prepared and with eyes wide open. Describing his departure from Mission San Fernando, he wrote "I headed eastward having determined to trace out the old Sierra Camino Real and enjoy that freedom which only exists where there are no settlements and where a man must rely entirely upon himself in whatever adventures may befall him, a freedom which abounds in that narrow, rugged and almost unknown section of Baja California-the "waist" of the California peninsula. Let him who would plunge into that delightfully mysterious region be slow in leaving San Fernando, however, unless he be well supplied with provisions, ammunition and fire-arms, with generous-sized canteens and with mules-or, still better, with stalwart, long-hoofed burros."
North used several pack and riding burros. After my own experiences with Misión, I readily related to his references to burro "deviltry" and their "strange faculty for falling unexpectedly down." However, his enthusiasm for burros as a means of Baja transport was undiminished. North wrote, "But when the caminos were at their worst and grazing scant I realized that the horse has his limitations and the burro his advantages. For the humbler beast no sierra trail's too fearful, no provender too poor; browsing on cacti he can exist without water; he survives or avoids the eating of poisonous herbs; he outlasts all other beasts of the sierra caminos. Though his pace is deadly slow, it is steady, continuous; it goes on, on, monotonously on perhaps, but ever on, unswervingly on, on, cutting away and wearing down distance until the goal is attained." Although there was little room for sentiment on his challenging expedition, North clearly grew attached to his animals. "That afternoon [my pack burro] began to fail...The following morning...I had his pack transferred to my riding burro and I proceeded on foot...a few hours later... the poor beast sank upon the camino, unable to arise… [As] my eyes rested on the sturdy brown shoulders, I remembered how bravely they had borne my possessions for a thousand miles."
North prepared to shoot the unfortunate animal, but with one of the guides suggesting there was a slim hope of recovery, he turned the burro loose instead. Anyone who has visited the lonely, lioney fastnesses about Mission Santa Maria will appreciate North's account of his time at that mission site. It was a good place to bag "a noble supply of big game." And to "distract my mozos, who were in continual dread of lions, I had them build a shady ramada…To their delight, manifested by many a 'Viva la Mejico,' I tied a small Mexican flag to one of the supports, then flung out the stars and stripes above my tent."
North reported how, after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768: "Tradition says that [Padre Arnes'] Indians missed him; that after his departure death fell upon them and into the gorge...came a strange lion, a lion which neither spear nor arrow could destroy, and that the Indians fled before it. And now for a century no Indians, no people have lived about the Mission of Santa Maria." He then added, "Today no Mexican willingly stays any time in the mission precincts. When the shadows of night creep around the looming adobe walls and echoing down from the rocky cliffs comes the weird scream of a lion and the ghostly palms shiver and moan in the lonely night, then Señor Mejicano crosses himself and nervously curses the luck that brought him to the spot, piles wood on his fire and lies down to broken slumber, naked machete close at hand..."
When Arthur North reached Mission Santa Gertrudis, he had "serious trouble" with his newly acquired Mexican guide: "Throughout the day the insolent eyes of the greedy mestizo had been fixed covetously on my outfit. Now the very evening of our arrival at Santa Gertrudis, he discovered in the currency which I tended him a pretext for the quarrel which he seemed only too anxious to bring about. His pay must be in silver, he cried. To this I made brief response, saying that I carried only currency and the smaller coins. For a moment he stared at me with lowering brows; then turned aside, muttering a surly rejoinder: silver he would have-and by morning.
As I hunched my shoulders up against the massive stones of the southern wall of the iglesia of Santa Gertrudis, slipped my wrist through the buckskin cord about the butt-ring of my Colt .45, fixed a weather eye on the swathed form stretched out not three paces distant and realized that a long night was before me, I paid no heed to picturesque surroundings, my mind being occupied exclusively with the thought that an angry mestizo with a treacherous six-inch blade rested within the serapa." Next morning North took the mestizo through the graveyard for a "most unappreciated dissertation" on the equality of coin and bills. Then North saw the very thing to lend weight to his argument and the reputation of Mexican paper money- "a big, long-eared jackrabbit." By shooting the rabbit with his revolver, he managed to impress the fellow that "national bills were legal tender."
His description of arriving at the brink of the Valley of San Jose de Comondú could have been penned today. "Seven hundred feet below us lay a semi-tropical park, well watered and verdant with olive, fig, palm, cottonwood and orange trees...As I looked upon this superb vista, tropical with deep verdure, waving sugar cane, trellised vines and tall palms, the sounds of lowing cattle, baaing sheep and soft voiced Mexicans came floating gently upward, mellowed by the distance...Hugging close to the winding camino we made the dizzy descent into the valley." And a modern traveler would have little trouble recognizing North's account of his entry into San Javier, "Crossing a small brooklet, we entered the village...and rode down its single street...At the north end of the street there stood a substantial stone monument surmounted by an ancient stone cross. Down at the farther end…a hundred paces distant, rose the mission of San Francisco Xavier de Viggé, a splendid stone structure, rich in the noble elegance of Moorish and Romanesque architecture, and worthy of the name of the most beautiful mission church on the Pacific coast." Camp and Camino contains hundreds of historically accurate snippets: "Each day we came to some well or water hole close by which would be the house of a ranchero. Although these rancheros controlled all the way from a thousand to a hundred thousand acres…their houses were usually jacales, or huts with thatched roofs and stake-and-mud walls." "The vaqueros reported lions extremely troublesome in the sierras...At one rancho a burly, good natured Mexican showed me the heads of three lions which he had recently slain with the assistance of his perros grandes (big dogs)."
"…whatever his shortcomings, the civility of the average Mexican is superb. He inherits it from his Spanish forefathers, he acquires it at his mother's knee, he learns it at school."
A poignant element to North's trip was that he was on the trail in the year of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. "As I left Mulegé early the morning of April the 18th," he wrote, "the world seemed in perfect peace, the mission bells were ringing and there was no sympathetic sign of the great natural disturbance that was bringing disaster upon the busy metropolis of the State of California." When at last he reached Loreto, his jubilation was tempered by his anxiety for his family. "After over a thousand miles of El Camino Real I had come to sacred Loreto, the Mother of Missions, the ancient capital of the Californias, but my thoughts were far away in Alta California, [in] San Francisco, the home of those nearest to me."
Originally published in 1910, and reprinted in 1977 by the Rio Grande Press, Camp and Camino in Lower California remains a fascinating read, and a fertile source of inspiration for subsequent Baja adventurers.
