| OCR Text |
Show Besides the two priests, the party included Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, or Captain Miera, an engineer with an astrolabe. There were also six traders who had explored the country some distance westward and north-westward from Santa Fe, an interpreter and Indian guides. They entered our valley from the north to camp at a spot they named Vegas del Puerto or Meadows of the Pass. As they plodded southward along the Beaver River they met winter's first attack, October rain and unseasonable snow. Now and then they glimpsed a broad plain opening before them. That the Fathers named the plain Valle de Nuestra Senora de la Luz (Valley of Our Lady of the Light) did not mean they were struck by the sunlight that usually floods the desert. They were plagued by stormclouds. Thus the "light" must have been the light of divine guidance, both in the general sense of the Truth and, more narrowly, the warnings they received to abandon one of their original purposes, to pioneer a route to California's new capital Monterey. They believed that God warned them: shun the snowy sierras that rise before you threatening death. Snowclouds pressed down upon them so densely that scouts declared the sierra to the west impassible. As a matter of fact, the Cricket Mountains are not that bad. Perhaps the clouds made the range seem to rise high into the heavens. Nevertheless, beyond were desert ranges high and low, then the great Sierra Nevada. Following the stream, they floundered into the marshes we used to call the Sinks of the Beaver River. Their camp that night was dismally cold, wet, lacking in solid firewood. They named the site Santa Brigida for the "Mary of the Gaels." Oxbow lakes, meandering |
