Daring the Green River
EXPLORERSTRAPPERS-TRADERS
T X he history of Uintah County is filled with legends and stories about Spanish explorers and lost Spanish mines. The documentary evidence is inconclusive regarding the presence of the Spanish in Uinta Basin before the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition. Some publications maintain that members of the 1540 Coronado expedition made their way as far n o r t h as the Uinta Basin, and contact of individual Spaniards in the area with Spanish New Mexico continued before and after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.1 While researchers continue to search the archives of Mexico and Spain for documents to prove the Spanish were in the Uinta Basin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, others claim to have found physical evidence of such a Spanish presence in the form of old mine shafts, smelter foundations, and inscriptions and signs carved into rocks and trees. Whether fact or fiction, stories and lore of lost Spanish mines continue as a part of the area's heritage nearly 500 years after the first Europeans may have set foot in the Uinta Basin and over 200 years after the first expedition to leave a detailed written description of 53
