Kachina and the Cross (17 page)

Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

Tags: #History, #Native American, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Ethnic Studies, #Native American Studies, #test

BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
3.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Page 78
whom Zaldívar referred to as "Vaqueros," probably somewhere in northeast New Mexico or the western part of the Texas Panhandle. They did not locate Humaña but did kill a number of bisonfood for the colonists who were chronically short of supplies. The expedition returned on November 8, 1598.
While this was going on, Oñate, taking only thirty soldiers, made a trip to various Pueblos, receiving their submission and investigating mineral and other wealth in the new province. He visited the Tompiro pueblos in the Salinas area, east of the Manzano Mountains, then turned westward, apparently with the idea of finding a route to the Pacific Ocean. Oñate stopped briefly in the Tiwa region and from there marched to Acoma, where he was received with apparent friendliness, though Villagrá later claimed that there was a plot by one of the war society heads, a man the Spaniards called Zutacapán, to isolate and kill him. Considering what happened a few days later, this may well have been the case. The pueblo of Acoma is at the top of a high isolated rock, or
peñol
, extremely difficult to attack. The Indians may have felt that it was invulnerable.
From Acoma, Oñate went on to Zuni, where he met Alonso, a son of the Mexico City native, Gaspar. Alonsoit is unclear how or why he had this Spanish name"used a few Mexican words but did not understand any." Oñate's captain, Marcos Farfán de los Godos, was sent to explore the Zuni Salt Lake, some forty miles south of the pueblo. About the same time, Villagrá joined the group, having returned from the expedition to capture the deserters and pushed on alone to catch up with Oñate. In transit, Villagrá ran across an Acoma war party under Zutacapán and narrowly escaped with his life.
On November 8, Oñate and his party continued on to the Hopi pueblos where he had heard there were rich mines. Sending Farfán de los Godos with another officer, Alonso de Quesada, and a party of seven soldiers southwestward to explore for mines, Oñate returned to Zuni. He had left instructions for his deputy at Okeh, Juan de Zaldívar, to join him there as soon as brother Vicente returned from the buffalo plains. On December 11, Farfán de los Godos, leaving his small band of soldiers at Hopi, returned from his exploration of central Arizona. He had reached the Verde River and had investigated the mining possibilities in the region around modern Jerome. This area had been previously explored by the Espejo party, from information given by Hopi Indians. It most likely was one of the sources of mineral pigment used by the Hopi for various decorative purposes. The Spaniards never exploited this section of Arizona, though in the nineteenth century Jerome became a copper mining center, and there are gold, lead, and silver deposits in the general region.
December 9 brought desperate news. A small Spanish party under charge of Bernabé de las Casas reached Oñate thirty miles east of Zuni and told the governor
Page 79
that the maestro de campo, Juan de Zaldívar, had been ambushed at Acoma. He and twelve of his party were dead, and other Spanish soldiers were wounded. The first serious Pueblo challenge to Spanish rule of New Mexico had begun.
Juan de Zaldívar had left to join Oñate on November 18, ten days after his brother's return from the Plains. With a party of around thirty-one men, he reached Acoma on the first of December, stopping over for supplies. Initial contact was reasonably friendly, the Acoma Indians giving him wood and water. However, they asked for more time to collect and prepare cornmeal, so Zaldívar made camp at a small stream about five miles from the pueblo. On December 4, Zaldívar led a party totaling nineteen individuals to Acoma in order to collect provisions. Later witnesses stress that the camp master was willing to trade for the cornmeal and had a number of hatchets, hawks' bells, and other objects to offer the Indians. Left in charge of the camp was Captain Gerónimo Márquez, who had only recently returned from Mexico.
Once he reached the top of the pefiol, Zaldívar divided his little party into at least three groups to more efficiently collect food from the various houses. This, however, proved to be a mistake for it made the Spanish party extremely vulnerable. The fighting apparently was set off when a Spanish soldier named Martin de Vivero (or Ribero) took two turkeys from one of the terraces, perhaps against the understood agreement. He was set on and killed, and the Acoma flared into attack. Only five of this provisioning party escaped, jumping from lower portions of the rock and rescued by Bernabé de las Casas, who had remained at the bottom with the expedition's horses.
The surviving Spaniards reacted promptly to this crisis. After an initial party under Captain López de Tavora became lost and returned to camp, Márquez sent Bernabé de las Casas with seven men to warn Oñate, while the captain, with the rest of the group, retreated to San Gabriel. On hearing of the threat to Spanish control, Oñate pulled up stakes at Zuni and also returned to Okeh-Yungue, avoiding the rebellious Acoma Indians on the way. His great fear was that the outbreak at Acoma would trigger a Pueblo-wide rebellion. The Spaniards were outnumbered something on the order of a hundred to one, and they were spread rather thinly, with one group of soldiers at Zuni, a few at Hopi, and the major army in the Rio Grande area.
Oñate now consulted the Franciscans and gathered evidence that the attack had been unprovoked and that a Spanish counterattack would be, in Spanish terms, a "just war." On January 12, 1599, the sargento mayor, Vicente de Zaldívar, brother of Juan, was dispatched with seventy-two men plus two pieces of artillery and carts for supplies. With Zaldívar were the interpreters, Cristóbal and Tomás. These two Mexican Indians had lived at least for a time at Santo
Page 80
Domingo and probably spoke some eastern Keresan, though they may not have known the western, Acoma dialect. However that may be, many individuals in the pueblos must have been fluent in two or more languages, and probably the two native Mexicans managed to interpret reasonably well.
Because of Gaspar de Villagrá we have a fairly complete, if one-sided and flowery, description of the battle for Acoma. Another account by the treasurer of the colony, Alonso Sánchez, is somewhat more prosaic but adds additional information. Still further details come in the various judicial hearings in later years.
Zaldívar and his soldiers reached Acoma on January 21, 1599, and through the interpreters called for the Pueblo to surrender. When that failed, as expected, he camped in the vicinity and worked out a plan for an attack the following day. It was to be a frontal assault. The leader, however, with eleven men would steal behind the peñol and attempt to scale the summits of Acoma from the rear. On the afternoon of January 22, the frontal attack began, and Zaldívar with Captains Villagrá and Aguilar and nine soldiers established a foothold on the peñol. What happened after that is not clear, but Zaldívar and his party seem to have held on during the night of January 22. On January 23, the Spaniards launched a major two-pronged attack, and Acoma was overwhelmed. Many Indians were killed, and seventy or eighty warriors and some five hundred women and children were captured. This is the official account. In 1601, Captain Luis Gasco de Velasco, who was listed in the muster roll of 1598 as treasurer of the expedition, gave another version. According to Gasco de Velasco, the Acoma Indians surrendered and gave up blankets, maize, and other food, but then Vicente de Zaldívar ordered the Indians seized and thrown off the cliffs. Women and children, who had fled to the kivas and houses, had their hiding places set on fire, burning many of them alive. Although Gasco de Velasco had supported Oñate in a letter from the army to King Philip in March of 1599, he later became an outspoken critic.
Whatever the truth of how the Acoma Indians died, certainly several hundred of them perished, including Zutacapán and the other war leaders. A three-day trial beginning on February 9, 1599, was then held for the survivors at Santo Domingo Pueblo. An advocate for the Indians, Alonso Gómez Montesinos, was appointed to meet the requirements of Spanish law, but a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. Punishment of the Acoma Indians was announced by Oñate.
No one was to be executed. Of course, a large number of Indians had already been killed, clearly including at least some women and children. Of the captives, males over twenty-five years of age were condemned to have a foot cut off and twenty years of slavery; twenty-four individuals received this sentence. Two
Page 81
Hopi Indians found at Acoma were ordered to have their right hands severed and were then sent back Hopi as an advertisement of Spanish resolve. Males aged twelve to twenty-five were not mutilated but were also sentenced to twenty years of servitude, as were women over twelve. Girls under twelve were turned over to the commissary, Fray Martínez, and boys under twelve to Vicente de Zaldívar with instructions that they be given a Christian upbringing. According to Villagrá, the poet himself helped escort sixty female children to Mexico, where they were divided out among the various convents. It is not clear where the remainder of the children were sent.
Interestingly, according to Oñate, "Old men and women, disabled in the war, I order freed and entrusted to the Indians of the province of the Querechos that they may support them and may not allow them to leave their pueblos." These Querechos were the Apachesmost likely Navajo (see chapter 5)living in the vicinity, probably in the Cebolleta region north of Acoma. It does indicate the close relations of the two groups, something noted by Espejo sixteen years previously.
The mutilations, no doubt chosen for their shock value, seem monstrous to the modern reader. It might be said, however, that in the context of late-sixteenth-century European penal practices and attitudes, Oñate did not inflict particularly harsh punishments. Even the enslavements were for a sharply limited period, and children were not to be punished. Of course, permanently removing children from their parents might disturb our sensibilities, but from Oñate's own point of view his actions were hardly excessive.
Still, even in terms of the contemporary moral code, Oñate's actions at Acoma returned to haunt him. In 614 he was condemned by the viceregal court on a number of counts. One of these concerned the Zaldívar attack. "After the Indians of the town of Acoma had killed Oñate's nephew, the maese de campo, Juan de Zaldívar Oñate, and other soldiers of this company, he sent Vicente de Zaldívar, brother of the deceased, to punish them, which he did with great severity, injuring many innocent people and causing the death of many natives; and the adelantado exercised the same severity with those taken alive in the said pueblo." Politics may well have entered this condemnation of Oñate, but by contemporary Spanish law, Oñate was judged to have exceeded a reasonable response to the Acoma "rebellion."
This was, of course, in the future. As of the beginning of 1599, Oñate had strengthened his position by his firm treatment of Acoma. He quickly made plans to expand the area under his control. First, however, it was time to report to the viceroy, so on March 2, 1599, he wrote a long letter to Monterrey sketching out the events of the past year. Oñate described the new province in enthusiastic
Page 82
terms; there was a variety of rich ores, abundant salt, and, in the mountains, large deposits of sulfur. Game was plentiful, and the area was bountiful in terms of plants. The Rio Grande and other streams had ample fish. The Pueblo Indians were of "good disposition," the Apaches and Cocoyes were extremely numerous, the latter people perhaps to be identified with the Pai people of Arizona. Certain Apache groups lived not in rancherías but in pueblos, one of which was eighteen leagues (about forty-five or fifty miles) from the Spanish capital, a pueblo of fifteen plazas. If this settlement was Navajo, it was likely west of Okeh and may be identical to the Navajo town visited by Benavides's party in 1629.
Not only was New Mexico rich in its own right, but the South Sea was near, and thus the possibility of trade with "Peru, New Spain and China." The region was also suitable for the production of "wines and [olive?] oil." Bison hides represented an important potential trade item. It was a very upbeat report.
A second, short letter enclosed with the first and written on March 5 asked that the viceroy send irons with the royal stamp to mark the silver ingots. Oñate continued to tout the silver mines of New Mexico and was said to have actually constructed an ore crusher at a pueblo called El Tuerto. This town was described as six leagues from San Marcos in the Galisteo country, and seven leagues from the first pueblo of the Salinasthat is, the Tompiro group. Perhaps it was one of the Tiwa-speaking towns east of the Sandias. Possibly it was the San Buenaventura, where Juan Martínez de Montoya reported mines in 1607 or 1608. There is no evidence that any silver, stamped or otherwise, ever reached Mexico from mines discovered by Oñate, but in 1599 hopes were high. As late as 1601 there were persistent reports of mines in the San Marcos region.
The letters were sent with a party that contained Fathers Martínez and Salazar and Captains Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Juan Pinero (or Piñero), and Marcos Farfán de los Godos, three men who were deeply trusted by Oñate. Villagrá was given the task of putting together a relief expedition. Meanwhile, the Spanish town of San Gabriel del Yungue was organized as the governmental center and remained the capital of New Mexico until the move to Santa Fe in 1610. At Yungue was constructed the first permanent church in New Mexico, an east-west-oriented edifice built of blocks of volcanic tufa, collected from the edge of the Pajarito Plateau only a few miles away, and set with mud mortar. The foundations of the San Gabriel church were uncovered by Florence Hawley Ellis in the 1960s; its destruction came in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
Hard times were ahead for the New Mexico colonists. The years 1600 and 1600 saw serious drought in the Rio Grande Valley, something that affected the Pueblo Indians more than the Spaniards since the latter could and did seize food from the natives. An attempt by Zaldívar to get food and cotton blankets from

Other books

Over the Barrel by Breanna Hayse
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies by Alexander McCall Smith
A Measured Risk by Blackthorne, Natasha
The Book of Rapture by Nikki Gemmell
Serpent in the Garden by Janet Gleeson
The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton
06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 by Casey, Kathryn