Most historic travel routes across the American West arced east to west, but one dramatic exception is the Camino Real or the supply line that stretched from Mexico City to Santa Fe roughly following the Rio Grande. One particularly dry segment earned the name Jornada del Muerto – or dead man’s journey. Even though it’s been 350 years, dead men still tell tales.
Over the years, I’d heard versions of the story, but one October I set out to find the historical facts from the ground up. Passage through the Jornada was a life or death search for water and a constant lookout for swift-moving Apaches on horseback. Even today some of the place names in that Chihuahuan desert landscape include Massacre Gap and Apache Gap.
El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail embraces northern Texas and most of central New Mexico. Modern maps have the trail following the Rio Grande as far north as Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo known by the Spanish as San Juan Pueblo.
For centuries, trade had come to Santa Fe from the south in caravans of two-wheeled carts or carretas. Many of the traders simply walked alongside their burros and mules, and camped in parajes or campsites every 20 miles or so along the trail, hoping always for fresh grass and abundant water.
Near what is now Elephant Butte Reservoir I drove past Ojo del Muerto and Laguna del Muerto. South of Engle, New Mexico, I passed Paraje del Aleman and finally found Jornada del Muerto trailheads on Bureau of Land Management National Conservation Land where I could literally walk into the past on the same ground traders had traversed. The faint outlines of their wooden wheels still could be seen on the landscape, especially on long clear north-south stretches.
The German trader Bernardo Gruber, known as El Aleman, had been accused of witchcraft by the Spanish Inquisition in 1668 and jailed at a hacienda near Sandia Pueblo. His accusers forced him into a single room with a heavy wooden bar across an adobe window. He had come north from Sonora with 10 pack mules, 18 horses and a few oxen. His trade goods included “fine stockings, gloves, embroidered cloth, buckskins, and iron tools and weapons,” wrote Marc Simmons in Witchcraft of the Southwest.
As Gruber’s livestock and trade goods slowly fell to thieves, and he wasted away in his single cell, he carefully loosened the bar on his window. Two years after being jailed, he escaped fleeing south. On horseback with four other horses and a faithful Apache servant, he came to the “forbidding desert” south of Socorro, New Mexico, between the caravan camp of Paraje de Fray Cristobal to the north and Paraje de Robledo to the south. After two days of thirst, Gruber lay sprawled in a small swatch of mesquite shade amid cholla cacti while his servant took a horse and a harquebus gun, and rode hard desperately seeking water.
Finally returning with precious water, the servant found El Aleman gone. Weeks later, south bound traders found “a roan horse tied to a tree by a halter” – dead. The traders found “hair and remnants of clothing … the skull, three ribs, two long bones, and two other little bones which had been gnawed by animals.” Blown into bushes and partially covered by sand were pieces of Gruber’s torn clothing, a short coat of blue cloth and his scattered bones whitening in the desert heat. Perhaps this began the Hispanic custom of marking the place of one’s death by a cross, a descansos, as a warning to other travelers and mute testament to our short lives. The site became known as La Cruz (the cross) del Aleman.
He had died on the dusty trail vaingloriously named El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, or “Royal road of the interior,” along the earliest Euro-American trade route in what would become the United States. For more than 300 years and 1,700 miles, this frontier wagon road united Spanish colonial provinces. Slowly moving north at the pace of burros in a six-month one-way trip, the caravans brought Catholicism to Native villages as well as sheep, cattle, vegetables, fruit and the favorite of all – peaches.
Experienced traders knew where to find water in desert drainages, and they sculpted earthen stock tanks to hold precious gallons. Riding north with the merciless sun beating down upon their left shoulders despite their broad brimmed straw hats, they clicked their rosary beads a mile or two in advance of water holes hoping against hope that they would find cattails, mud, and enough water for their stock and themselves, because on this long and dangerous 90-mile stretch, the Rio Grande lay to the west encased in rocky defiles and unreachable.
Over centuries, thousands of people and animals took the Camino Real always in the face of wind, desperate to find and stay the trail or encontrando el sendero, for to lose the trail in a dust storm could mean losing one’s life. What did experienced travelers watch for? A broken line of mesquite bushes ahead of them and the proper shadows playing across the land where the path could be discerned in the fragile soils, at least until the next windstorm. The slight swales are still there. Rainwater pools in these gentle depressions. Because of a tiny bit of extra water and numerous droppings from pigs, mules, horses, sheep and cattle, there is a little more vegetation visible where the old route traversed the landscape. Each evening, the caravans sought grass, wood and water, but sometimes they found only dust and a frigid night of merciless stars.
When we think of history, we think of people and places. We visualize travel over distances, but we don’t think of sounds – the yells and cussing of the freighters choosing their favorite epithets in Spanish, or the “unearthly music” of the two-wheeled carretas or small carts as they jostled, bumped and bounced on the trail, their pine axles tightening in the heat and dust, and making “a siren sound which wakened the dead for five miles or more.”
On the Jornada del Muerto, “people and draft animals literally walked out of their shoes.” Archaeologists have found dozens of horseshoe nails, boot nails, and from the last decades of the 19th century, cans, buttons, horse tack, coffee pots and innumerable busted bottles.
By the 1830s, the Santa Fe Trail brought trade goods faster from Missouri than could arrive along the Camino Real. Spanish colonialism ended with Mexican independence in 1821, and as the royal road faded, American trade flourished. After the Mexican War of 1846-1848, New Mexico became American territory only to be fought over during the Civil War.
Civil War veteran John Martin returned to the Jornada del Muerto and the place where Bernardo Gruber’s cross had been erected. He dug a well, created a stagecoach stop and began a ranch known as el Aleman, which since the 1880s has been part of the Bar Cross Ranch. Dry, flat desert has little appeal, but history swirls around place names.
The Jornada del Muerto remains a deadly landscape. Just to the northwest, beyond the Poison Hills and within view of the Oscura Mountains, before dawn July 16, 1945, American scientists detonated the world’s first atomic bomb at Trinity Site. Historians have described it as the day the sun rose twice.
From where he died, the German trader Bernardo Gruber could have seen the explosion. It would have blinded him. Since then we have all lived in the Atomic Age. We all face our own premature dead man’s journey. We live under a potential mushroom cloud.
Excerpted from the forthcoming book Lonesome Landscapes: Stories from National Conservation Lands (University of Utah Press, 2026).
Andrew Gulliford, an award-winning author and editor, is professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at andy@agulliford.com.
