The hard life of Fray Atanasio Dominguez

Intermountain Catholic

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A wood carving representing Fray Atanasio Dominguez adorns the bishop's chair in the Cathedral of the Madeleine. Courtesy photo/Diocese of Salt Lake City archives

By Gary Topping

Archivist, Diocese of Salt Lake City

Most of us Utah Catholics are aware of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition of 1776 and are proud that the first people of European descent to enter the present area of Utah were Catholics. But few of us know anything about the actual people who made the expedition. In fact, there is a fair amount of information about some of them. Take, for instance, Fray Atanasio Dominguez, the leader of the party.

Dominguez was a big-city boy, born in Mexico City about 1740. Mexico City at that time was perhaps the most cosmopolitan urban center in the entire Western Hemisphere and the capital of northern New Spain. Dominguez loved the place, calling it "the delightful and alluring cradle of my youth, for which no praise is ever adequate." But as things developed, he would spend most of his life in New Mexico, on the impoverished, isolated and dangerous far northern frontier of the Spanish empire.

Ordained to the Franciscan Order in 1757, he rose to prominence and was appointed canonical visitor to the province of New Mexico in 1775. By 1775 the Spanish empire in North America was beginning to unravel. Although new missions were still being created along the California coast, the northern provinces of Texas and New Mexico were in a state of decline. Having failed to discover gold or silver, and beset by hostile and aggressive Indian groups, Spanish settlers there felt discouraged, beleaguered, and exiled (Santa Fe is over 1400 miles from Mexico City). As canonical visitor, Dominguez was charged with two tasks: to revitalize the New Mexican missions, and to find an overland link from them to the missions in California to promote trade and diminish isolation. He failed in both.

His report on the missions, although it is loaded with minute details that are the delight of historians, is unflattering in its frank assessments of their shortcomings. It details such problems as bad bookkeeping (or none at all), liturgical irregularities, inadequate filing and preservation of records, disobedient friars engaging in illicit trade, poor catechizing of Indians and exploitation of their labor, and ugly church architecture.

It earned him the undying hostility of his fellow Franciscans. Dominguez was a perfectionist who had been raised in an urban environment where funding and staffing for church enterprises were abundant, and he never learned to appreciate the difficulties of carrying out such functions on a raw frontier where resources were always inadequate.

Likewise his attempted exploration of a route to California, impressive as its achievements were in the annals of western history, failed in its ultimate purpose, for the party turned back before finding a route across the Sierra. The importance of the diary kept by him and his assistant, Silvestre Velez de Escalante, and the map created by Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, which gave Europeans their first idea of the geography of the interior of the American Southwest, was under-appreciated by both church and government.

Consequently, Dominguez returned from the expedition to find himself under attack, and spent most of the rest of his life defending what he had done and reported. The Franciscans exiled him to a succession of impoverished and isolated missions on the New Mexican frontier, and as far as we can tell, he never returned to the "delightful and alluring cradle" of Mexico City before his death in 1805.

Was Dominguez a failure? Despite his best efforts and those of others, the Spanish empire continued to crumble and began to fall apart completely in the 1820s as indigenous revolutions all over Latin America overthrew Spanish rule and led to the creation of modern independent nations. But Dominguez led a life of remarkable integrity and of faithfulness to the Church, to the Franciscan Order, and to the Spanish crown. One could do much worse: Not all worthwhile goals are attainable, but that does not make them any less worthwhile.