The Shady Career of Andres Muñiz

How we could wish that our Catholic history were a story of unbroken progress, of one triumph after another in which saintly men and women vanquished one evil after another in the gradual spread of the Kingdom of Heaven! Instead, the story often is one of human shortcomings and imperfections, in which people fail to live up to God's expectations and the spread of the Kingdom of Heaven progresses only in fits and starts.

The story of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition of 1776 is often presented in glorious terms, as a tale of two intrepid and dedicated Franciscan friars braving great privations in their efforts to explore an unknown part of the continent and to bring the Gospel to previously unchristianized peoples. And as far as it goes, that image is true, for the two friars, at least, seem to have been exemplary Christians who were willing to sacrifice anything to serve God. But their frank and detailed diary reveals another story as well, a story of greed, insubordination, and dissent among some members of the party.

Let me introduce you to Andres Muñiz.

Andres and his brother Lucrecio had been accepted as members of the party because Andres, at least, claimed to have been a member of the Rivera expeditions of 1765 (see "The Phantom Pathfinder" on this webpage), so he could serve as guide on the first leg of the journey, and he spoke the Ute language, so he could act as interpreter as well. He was lying about the first part. Although we have no roster of the Rivera party, Andres's version of his role in the venture is rendered impossible by reference to Rivera's diary. As things turned out, Andres proved almost worthless as a guide and wasted weeks of the expedition's time wandering around lost in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. His command of the Ute language was not a lie, but where would he have acquired such fluency? Subsequent events reveal him to have been a trader, and reasonable suspicion suggests that he had been engaged in trading expeditions among the Utes, all of which were illegal under New Mexico law. The guy was an outlaw.

The first trouble broke out on September 1 in the vicinity of Grand Mesa, Colorado. After negotiating with a band of Ute Indians for a guide who could take them to Utah Lake, the friars were surprised to find the Indians vigorously discouraging the party from proceeding. Why? Investigation disclosed that the Muñiz brothers were behind it all because they had secretly brought trade goods which they wanted to finish trading to the Utes for weapons they might need further along the route. Such trading had been specifically prohibited in the instructions the friars had given the party members before beginning the trip because they wanted any Indians they encountered to understand that the venture had a higher purpose than material gain, and also that the Spaniards were trusting solely in God for protection and had no need of weapons. The Muniz brothers had just betrayed both of those goals. The friars' diary seethes with sarcasm: the Muñiz brothers "proved themselves to be such obedient and faithful Christians that they peddled what they secretly brought and most greedily sought weapons from the [Indians]."

And there would be more trouble.

Because of delays in finding their way through Colorado (much of it caused by Andres's bad guiding) and stopovers to preach to the Indians, by the time the party reached central Utah and were approaching the latitude of Monterey, California where they would need to head west to locate a way through the mountains, it was getting late enough in the season that a crossing of the mountains might be dangerous or fatal. As they approached modern Cedar City, the friars suggested abandoning the goal of reaching Monterey and instead find a way back to Santa Fe.

 Rebellion ensued, among the Muñiz brothers and two other members of the party motivated by material concerns who wanted to establish a trade route to the Monterey mission. Historians have suggested that the friars had their own motives as well, that they had been fired with enthusiasm for returning to establish a mission at Utah Lake as they had promised the Indians there, and had come to regard pressing on to Monterey as a distraction. At that point, the rebels "came along very peevishly; everything was extremely onerous, and all unbearably irksome." Things had surely come to a head: the traders' frustration with the friars' heavenly idealism, and the friars' becoming "disheartened by seeing how in the business of heaven the one of earth was being sought first and foremost." The friars decided to resolve the issue by casting lots (a gambling procedure variously explained): if Santa Fe came up, all would return there; if Monterey came up, the party would split, with the friars returning and the others proceeding to California. Santa Fe won, the entire party returned, and the trade route to California had to wait until establishment of the Old Spanish Trail in the following century.

Ironically, the Utah Lake mission never was created, the great project for which the friars had endured so much (and for which, one historian suggests, they may even have stacked the deck when the lots were cast!). Why not? With the expulsion of the Jesuits from the New World in the late 1760s, the other religious orders, primarily the Franciscans, were already spread too thin covering the previously established missions, so the Order was not interested in creating another one on the far northern frontier. Also, the Spanish government had long since been losing interest in their New World empire, which was producing less and less wealth and becoming more and more expensive and troublesome to govern. Expansion was not in the cards.

With the casting of the lots and the return to New Mexico, the Muñiz brothers pass out of the historical record. In retrospect, it would be easy to condemn them for their attempts to sabotage the spiritual mission of the friars in behalf of their materialistic one. But that is a spiritual judgment we don't get to make, and I prefer to regard them as just a couple more struggling Catholics like myself, succeeding at times and failing at others.