Five Empty Saddles

In 1769, five men deserted the expedition that would claim California for Spain. Only their saddles came back.

July 1769. A column of starving soldiers, friars, and muleteers marches north from San Diego to find a harbor no Spaniard has seen in 167 years. Mateo Valdez, a soldier who once kept a merchant's accounts, carries a musket, a letter from his sister he cannot bring himself to answer, and a clerk's eye for numbers that do not add up.

On this road, nothing adds up. Corporal Baltasar Soria keeps the ration books, and the men's debts grow faster than their food. Then, in the gravel of a river ford, Mateo finds three grains of gold.

By December the harbor has been missed, the mules are being eaten, and the expedition is turning back. Five men take a forage order into the coastal mountains and do not return:

• Mateo
• his friend Domingo Tapia, a gambler who owes Soria more than he can ever repay
• Luis Quirós, an old muleteer with a granddaughter waiting in Loreto
• Kiká and Ríito, Cochimí brothers carried on the expedition's books as "workers supplied with the animals"

The mules walk back into camp alone.

Soria follows. He has his own reasons for wanting them found, written in his own hand. And one of the five has already marked the trail.

From redwood canyons and a hidden basin veined with gold to a river in flood and a salt plain on Christmas Day, Five Empty Saddles is a novel of greed and loyalty, of debts and the men who carry them, and of the question every record leaves behind: whose names get written down, and who decides what they mean.

Inspired by a single line in the history of the Portolá expedition, which returned to San Diego in January 1770 with five deserters unaccounted for.