Historical Marker · No. 1940

Escalante Expedition

Jensen, Uintah County · Utah

Erected by SAR, 1928

This 1928 monument does what the others nearby don't: it names the whole company. When the Domínguez-Escalante expedition forded the Green River a few miles above here in September 1776 — calling it the San Buenaventura — ten men made the crossing, and the plaque lists them all in Spanish. Among them was Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, the party's mapmaker, whose chart of this unknown country would guide travelers for decades. The Sons of the American Revolution raised the marker on the expedition's sesquicentennial, fixing a fleeting Spanish passage into permanent stone.

What the plaque says

Año 1776 About four miles above this place crossed Green River -their San Buenaventura- on the sixteenth day of September 1776 the Escalante expedition on the way from Santa Fe New Mexico to Monterey California Composed of these persons Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez Fray Francisco Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Don Juan Pedro Cisneros Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco Don Jauquin Lain Lorenzo Olivares Andres Munez Lucrecio Munez Juan Aguilar Simon Lucero

Where it stands

40.36992, -109.36040 · Directions

Worth the stop nearby

Fantasy Canyon — 4.5 mi
Impossibly shaped rock formations that look like alien sculptures
Dinosaur National Monument — 5.6 mi
A wall of 1,500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the rock where they were found
Vernal — 11 mi
The self-proclaimed Dinosaur Capital of Utah
Utah Field House of Natural History — 11 mi
A dinosaur museum with life-size replicas in an outdoor garden

More markers nearby

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