It was a crisp October day when the two Spanish explorers guided their horses into the deep, wide river and urged them across the ford. The water surged to the edges of their decorated saddles and then over their horses's rumps. Around them rose dramatic red sandstone cliffs streaked with the dark brown of desert varnish, but the men, intent on the business of discovery, noted only that the area was "very boxed in." Returning to their companions on the southern bank - several other Spaniards, some Hispanized Indian guides and a band of Tabeguache Ute Indians who had led them to this crossing - the explorers rejected the Indians' claim that they had reached the river they sought, the Rio del Tison, the River of Firebrands - the Colorado River.

The year was 1765, the place was Moab, Utah, and the explorer was Juan Maria Antonio de Rivera. A week earlier he had become the first known white man to enter what is today the state of Utah. While many are aware of the more publicized expedition of Fathers Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante in 1776, fewer are aware that these distinguished explorers were not the first white men to have blazed a trail into Utah. Indeed, the earlier expedition of Rivera opened up the first quarter of the trail Dominguez and Escalante would follow from Santa Fe through Southwestern Colorado. But near Dove Creek the trails diverged, with the Spanish friars heading north beyond the Gunnison River to ford the Green River near Jensen, Utah, just northeast of Monticello. From here the expedition continued through Little Indian Canyon, down Lower Lisbon Valley where they experienced a "furious" wind and rainstorm and consequently dubbed the area "El Purgatorio," then across the flanks of the La Sal Mountains and up Spanish Valley to the Moab crossing of the Colorado.

While Dominguez had been given charge to seek out a possible route to Monterey, Calif. - an alternate overland route to supply the still-struggling California missions established only a few years before - Rivera had no such directive. With the California missions still several years in the future, Rivera's 1765 expedition was twofold: to seek the origin of a lode of silver an old Ute named Cuero de Lobo, "Wolfskin,' had brought to the Taos trade fair and, second, to seek out the Indians' crossing of the Rio Grande del Tison (the Colorado River) and to verify a series of Indian traditions about the strange - possibly rich - inhabitants who dwelt beyond it.

Prominent among these traditions was the existence of a large lake at the foot of a small mountain, around which lived an advanced people more myriad than the stones. The legends of a large lake where a rich and civilized people lived stretched through early New World traditions from the Lake Copala of the Aztec origin myths. In 1540 Coronado would hear of it as Lake Teguayo from the Pueblo Indians. In 1604 Don Juan de Onate, colonizer of New Mexico, also heard the legends which were subsequently chronicled by Father Jeronimo de Zarate Saleron in 1626 when he wrote of the Amavaca Indian tales of a "Great Lake . . . with great pueblos by its shores inhabited by peoples who adorned themselves with golden jewelry."

Did the Rio del Tison have its origin in this rich land? wondered New Mexican Gov. Tomas Velez Cachupin, who sent Rivera. Knowing that veins of silver must exist in the regions north of the New Mexican frontier - the large lobe of silver had been brought from there to Taos - Governor Cachupin was anxious to confirm the rumors that there was silver in the "de la Plata mountain chain" and perhaps to discover another rich Indian civilization as had Cortez in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. Thus the governor wrote that Rivera should determine if there was such a Lake Copala/Teguayo, and if it was "surrounded by many large pueblos, according to ancient and modern reports, andT has a king or Sovereign . . . "

Another intriguing tale was that of a mysterious Spanish colony which existed beyond the Colorado River (del Tison). Legends of unchronicled Spanish travel into the interior of the American West continue even today and include tales of early Spanish visitations in Oregon, Idaho, Montana and eastern California. But Rivera sought to confirm tales he heard from the Indians in 1765 of a Spanish colony five or six days journey beyond the Colorado. This colony could be found after reaching the "great lake" by taking a trail along the "skirt of the mountain chain." Here, along "the banks of a pretty little river of a goodly amount of water" lived a colony of fair-skinned and bearded people who spoke Spanish and lived in houses like the Spaniards but dressed in "chamois" or buckskin because they did not have European clothing.

It is interesting to speculate on the reality behind the legends of Lake Copala/Teguayo, its myriad inhabitants and the Spanish colony. Utah's interior has two "great" lakes, the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake.

While there have never been great colonies of inhabitants around the Great Salt Lake - Salt Lake Valley had for centuries been a "no-man's land" between the Shoshone and Ute Indians - Dominguez and Escalante did discover a large population of Indians living in Utah Valley in several large villages surrounding a lake at the foot of the "small" Y-mountain. While not "rich" in gold or silver, by comparison to the nomadic and often impoverished Utes and Paiutes of central Utah, the Timpanogos Utes lived in an area rich in game, food grasses, fish and water fowl.

Where was the "pretty little river" along which lived the bearded Spanish colony? While Rivera never made it beyond the Colorado River, Dominguez and Escalante did reach Utah Lake and followed the "skirt of the mountain chain" south. Although they found no Spanish colony, south of Nephi and along the Sevier River they did find a band of heavily bearded Indians with features that "more resemble the Spaniards than they do all the other Indians known in America up to now" but who spoke the Ute language as did the Timpanogos, or Fish-Eater Utes of Utah Valley. These Indians, speculated the Spanish fathers, may have given risen to the legends Rivera had noted in his journal (and which they had consulted on their own journey). Or . . . could there have once been an unsanctioned colony of Spaniards in central Utah who had eventually intermarried with natives giving rise to these bearded Indians who, even into the 1800s as the Pahvant, remained a distinctly separate people from either the Utes or the Paiutes around them? We will probably never know.

Rivera's explorations, generally ignored by most except as a footnote to the better known Dominguez-Escalante journey, had a lasting impact on Utah and Colorado. Not only did he supply many of the place names that still adorn New Mexico and Colorado maps today (for example, the Las Animas River, the La Plata, the Rio Florido, Purgatory), he opened up a new trade route. His trail from Santa Fe led to the crossing of the Colorado - which he eventually admitted was the Rio del Tison he sought - and would be followed by covert Spanish traders out of the New Mexican frontier town of Abiquiu (such trade was technically illegal) from 1765 on. Even by the time Dominguez and Escalante traveled the trail some of their guides were both members of Rivera's early expedition and had been trading with the Utes themselves in Colorado. Dominguez and Escalante, while leaving an invaluable record of their explorations, had little actual impact on the inhabitants of Utah for their plans to return failed to materialize.

But Rivera's route would become the first leg of the traditional Spanish traders' route into central Utah, later to be named by historians the Old Spanish Trail. By the early 1800s Spanish traders were already making annual trading treks into central Utah where they exchanged weapons and horses for buckskins and Indian slaves.

This infusion of Indian wealth and strength helped to create the warrior Utes of central Utah who would eventually greet the Mormon pioneers on their arrival in 1847.