Journey of the Dead Man
The Jornada del Muerto (as Larry McMurtry translates it, Dead Man's Walk) gets its name from the fate of one
Bernardo Gruber, a trader at Quarai Pueblo in New Mexico, who was called El Aleman (the German) by his friends.
El Aleman was not the first to die in this terrible desert crossing, and he would certainly not be the last.
But it was his death that would give this trail (and the desert it crossed) its grim name. Nobody knows how
many people died along the Jornada del Muerto, although it probably numbered into the dozens, if not hundreds.
Gruber became drunk on Christmas Eve in 1666 and during midnight mass bragged to some friends about a spell he had
learned. Word got back to the Inquisition's agent at Santa Fe, and Gruber was arrested for witchcraft. After several
years imprisoned in a makeshift cell at an estancia near present-day Albuquerque, Gruber made a daring escape and fled
southward on the Camino Real with his Apache servant, Atanasio. They headed through Lava Gate and across the desert.
After a harrowing ride, Gruber, parched and exhausted, halted at a place called Las Penuelas and sent Atanasio ahead
for water. The servant rode like the wind, filled up a gourd, and flew back -- only to break the gourd in his haste.
He returned to the water and, with nothing else to carry it with, soaked a saddle blanket. When he got back to where
he had left El Aleman, the man had taken a horse and disappeared.
A month later, travelers across the desert found Gruber's horse tied to a bush, dead. Nearby was a mass of human
hair, a skull, and a few gnawed bones. They gathered the pathetic remains for burial and erected a cross, which
stood for many years, becoming a well-known landmark known as La Cruz del Aleman, the Cross of the German.
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