Here their provisions became exhausted, and from then on they had to subsist largely upon horse flesh and such food as they could procure from the Indians. The next morning, as they started on their journey, they met a group of the Parrusits Indians who were living in scattered bands along the Upper Virgin River, forming one of the dozen or more clans belonging to the Paiute tribe, and who warned them that they were headed toward the Grand Canyon at a place where it could not be forded. After much persuasion they agreed to show the explorers a route by which they could climb the Hurricane Fault and proceed eastward toward a ford of the Colorado.
The Indians led them four or five miles up a narrow canyon along a footpath that became so steep and ledgy that the horses and mules could not follow. Perceiving this, the Indians fled and the party was forced to retrace the rocky trail to the foot and press southward again, crossing the present line into Arizona. They became suspicious that the Indians were purposely misdirecting them.
That night they made a dry camp, and having neither food nor water, both men and animals suffered intensely. Early next day they found water but after traveling about twenty-five miles some of the men were so weak and hungry they had to stop to rest. After ransacking their camp outfit, they found odds and ends enough to satisfy their worst needs.
At this point they found a way to climb the bold face of the Hurricane Fault. Hungry and thirsty, they headed for rough country to the southeast where they found water after about eighteen miles. They also found Indians from whom they procured some food. Again being warned by the Indians of the great impassable Grand Canyon ahead they swung off sharply to the northeast.
Continuing the journey, guided only by the vague directions given by the Indians, the party spent several days during late October and early November in crossing the Arizona Strip and southern Utah before they found a ford of the Colorado, a few miles upstream on the Utah side of the state line, since known as the “Crossing of the Fathers.” The hardships of the party in traversing Northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to get back to Santa Fe, however, are not a part of this story.
The journey lasted from July 29, 1776 to January 2, 1777. It covered a circuitous route through four states and the priests had been pathbreakers in new and unexplored territory. One objective, the route to the Pacific coast, had not been attained, but the other, that of locating sites for missions, had been abundantly fulfilled. Many possibilities were marked along the route, but apparently none gave the Fathers more satisfaction than the prospects among the Parrusits Indians on the Pilar River (now Ash Creek and Virgin River) who were already farmers.
On finding the cornfield and irrigation ditches of the Parrusits, Escalante remarked:
By this we were greatly rejoiced, now because of the hope it gave of being able to take advantage of certain supplies in the future; especially because it was an indication of the application of these people to the cultivation of the soil; and because we found this much done toward reducing them to civilized life and to the faith when the Most High may so dispose, for it is well known how much it costs to bring other Indians to this point, and how difficult it is to convert them to this labor which is so necessary to enable them to live for the most part in civilized life and in towns.[8]
The Spanish Fathers never fulfilled their dreams of missions beyond the Colorado, but they explored an uncharted area, into which other Spaniards followed. The records, however, are meager and information incomplete about these later expeditions. Two other Spaniards, Mestes in 1805 and Arze and Garcia in 1812-13, seem to have penetrated as far as Utah Lake and perhaps southward, but so far as is known, their trips had little significance.[9]
Still later, other Spaniards developed the route from Santa Fe to the Pacific coast which the Fathers had failed to do. Known as the Old Spanish Trail, this passed northwestward from Santa Fe through southwestern Colorado and central Utah and then southwestward to Los Angeles. It crossed Escalante’s trail near Cedar City. But before this route was developed, other explorers had opened the way.