Kachina and the Cross (49 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Alona, or Halona, eventually became modern Zuni Pueblo. Ventura told Vargas that the Hopi man Pedro was willing to go on to Zuni and Hopi to prepare the way for Spanish reoccupation. Vargas therefore sent messages ahead with Pedro, giving him a rosary and cross, provisions, and a blanket. He then set out for Zuni, taking along Sebastián and Ventura. At Zuni, Vargas found two more Hopis, who announced that the Faraón Apaches had warned the Hopi that Vargas intended to kill them all: "for I was untrustworthy; and for this reason the natives of this said province of Moqui had fled to the mountains, taking with them their livestock and horse herds; whereupon [the two Hopi men] had come to see what I was doing which they had seen, and for which reason they wished to return immediately to tell them to return to their pueblos."
Sending a directive to the Awatovi chief, Miguel, Vargas left a garrison at Zuni and pushed on with two companies numbering sixty-three soldiers. Vargas's hopes were high for he had been extremely successful persuading war captains in the Rio Grande area to switch to the Spanish side, and it looked as if he could also do this in Hopi. Writing the following year, Sigüenza y Góngora stated that a numerous contingent of Pueblo Indians under the leadership of Luis Tupatú marched with Vargas to Hopi. Actually, Luis and his auxiliaries stayed in the Rio Grande area, but showcasing Tupatú at this particular time indicates the importance that Vargas gave to the Pueblo leader's help. Although El Picurí was not to play an important role in the final chapters of the Spanish reconquest, his help in 1692 was one of the major turning points in that struggle.
At Hopi, Vargas flirted with annihilation. He carried off the trip with his customary confidence and courage, but it was a close thing. Miguel and some of the Awatovi people were friendly and wished to see Spanish rule and the missionaries return. But the remaining Hopi towns were universally hostile, and it is a tribute to Vargas's diplomacy that things were kept a degree below flash point. He did manage to baptize 122 children at Awatovi and even a certain number at the other towns. He had planned to go to Oraibi, the westernmost of the Hopi towns, but on advice of his Awatovi friend, Miguel, decided against it. On November 24, after collecting information on the "cinnabar" mine (which in fact turned out to be hematite), Vargas left for Zuni and then for El Paso, arriving there in mid-December. The first phase of the reconquest, dazzlingly successful except at Hopi, was now over. Vargas, however, had no illusions about the work ahead. In order to hold New Mexico he needed more soldiers and several hundred colonists. For the moment, Vargas's star rode high, and he had every hope that his requests would be fulfilled.
The year 1693 was one of frenetic activity as far as the resettlement of New Mexico was concerned. New colonists were recruited in Mexico City and elsewhere,
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and Vargas pulled together people, provisions, and equipment. Even so, it was October when the first contingent left El Paso for the northern Rio Grande area. With Vargas were seventy families, a hundred soldiers, a number of Indian auxiliaries and eighteen friars. Vargas had three cannons, various supply wagons, and several thousand head of livestock, including horses and mules. The Santa Fe cabildo in exile now returned to New Mexico.
As the expedition moved northward, Vargas learned that the brittle "submission" that he had negotiated the year before had broken down. His main interpreter, the mixed-blood Pedro de Tapia, deserted and informed the Indians that Vargas secretly planned to kill all the adult Pueblos. The Tewa-Tano group, the Northern Tiwa, the Jemez, Acoma, and Hopi had by then decided on independence, and the Tewa-Tano held Santa Fe.
On his way north, Vargas met with various Pueblo leaders who jockeyed for position. The governor was inundated with rumors and counter-rumors about the loyalty of various individuals and the reliability of this or that pueblo. Although he met with Tupatú; his brother, the Picurís governor, Lorenzo; and the Tesuque governor, Domingo, Vargas seems to have lost trust in them. Part of Vargas's suspicions came from information he received from Juan de Ye, who had been appointed governor of Pecos the previous year. Ye met with Vargas on November 25, warning of Tupatú, Lorenzo, and Domingo, among others. Vargas probably did not believe that the three men had actually defected, simply that they had become ineffective. In any case, he took no action. It does seem that Tupatú and Lorenzo had lost their influence in their pueblos and were no longer effective in political affairs. Luis el Picurí died sometime in the mid 1690s, and little more is heard of Lorenzo. Domingo, however, remained active in the Spanish cause and was killed by his own people in 1696.
By the time Vargas was in the vicinity of Santa Fe, he was depending more and more on men like Ye, Ojeda, and Cristóbal Yope of San Lázaro. Vargas had developed a godparent relationship with Yope, and the Tano chief remained loyal; like Domingo, Yope eventually was killed by his own Pueblo group. Ye also counted Vargas as a friend, although in the case of the Pecos leader, fear of the Apaches and their continuing meddling in Pueblo affairs may have been a factor. Pecos was, after all, dangerously exposed, especially to the aggressive Faraón Apaches.
Vargas arrived in the vicinity of Santa Fe in December 1693, and a temporary settlement was made in the area of the Camino de Cuma, probably less than a mile from the center of the villa. The settlers' straits were desperate: by Christmas, some 22 children had died of exposure, hunger, and disease. Attempts to persuade the Indians holding Santa Fe to surrender produced no results, and after receiving
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Northwestern New Spain in the late seventeenth century
140 warriors from Pecos, Vargas attacked on December 29. By the following day, the Indian stronghold of Santa Fe was overrun. Some four hundred people of both sexes and all ages, who surrendered voluntarily, were sentenced to ten years of slavery and distributed among the incoming Spanish settlers. Nine of the
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Pueblo defenders were killed in battle, and two committed suicide. Seventy others were executed by Vargas's men. The settlers were moved within the walls of Santa Fe.
Vargas had won the battle but war was still ahead. Though he held Santa Fe, only four of the pueblosPecos and three Keresan towns, San Felipe, Santa Ana, and Ziaremained loyal to the Spaniards. All the other pueblos were hostile, and a number of them were pulling back into defensive positions and generally making ready for continued struggle. The governor was faced with the task of reducing the enemy, one town at a time. The war also prevented his colonists from following the routine of everyday life, planting fields and harvesting crops. Throughout 1694 the colonists continued to be dependent on looted Indian grain and on the long supply line to Mexico.
Vargas managed to overrun the Cochiti Indians in April but moved cautiously until the arrival of Fray Francisco Farfán in June with an additional 230 colonists forced the governor to step up his food-gathering activities. The Tano towns and Picurís had no extra food, but Taos, where the Indians fled to the mountains at the approach of Vargas, proved to have considerable grain. Through the good offices of some visiting Apaches, Vargas, along with Juan de Ye, met Francisco Pacheco, headman of Taos, urging the Taos to return to their pueblo. After some fruitless negotiation, Juan de Ye offered to spend the night with the Taos Indians and attempt to persuade them to join the Spaniards. Ye failed to return the next morning and at some point in the next few days was murdered.
Vargas then turned to Jemez, where on June 24 he captured a mesa-top refugee town with a considerable amount of foodstuffs. After a summer of warfare, Vargas by early September had subdued all the pueblos with the exception of Picurís and Taos and the westernmost towns of Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi. From September to December 1694, missionaries assigned to the newly reconquered territories moved to take up their posts. By January of 1695 eleven missions had been reestablished, and Spaniards were spreading out along the Rio Grande. In April of 1695, a second villa, that of Santa Cruz in the Tewa area, was inaugurated by newly arrived colonists. This was a region where the pre-revolt Spaniards had held a number of estancias. Another series of settlers, some 44 families, arrived from Mexico in May and were settled in the Santa Fe area. Later that year an additional settlement was made in the region of Bernalillo. The name itself referred to the Bernal family, which had owned an estancia there in pre-revolt times. Parenthetically, the third villa, or chartered town, in New Mexico was founded a decade later in 1706 with the establishment of Albuquerque (originally Alburquerque) at the "Bosque Grande."
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Church interior, Santa Cruz (photo by William H. Jackson,
ca. 1881, courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 9785)
By 1695, Vargas had hopes that the province of New Mexico was at last secured. However, the harsh winter of 1695-96 caused desperate hardship both to the Spanish colonists and to the Indians, many of whom had lost their stored grain to Vargas's depredations. In the latter part of 1695 it became increasingly
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evident, at least to the missionaries, that the Pueblos were ready to make one last effort to throw off their conquerors. As of March 1696, Governor Vargas estimated that there were 276 Spanish families in New Mexico, far short of the 500 he believed were necessary to create a stable province. In addition to the settlers, Vargas had approximately 100 soldiers, but these were considerably scattered, about a quarter of them being on the way to El Paso to bring livestock and food stores back to New Mexico.
In early June, reports of a widespread uprising began to reach Santa Fe. On June 4, 5 missionaries were killed along with 21 Spanish settlers, and all the Pueblos were in revolt with the exception of Pecos and the three Keresan towns (San Felipe, Santa Ana, and Zia) discussed above. Vargas responded by ordering all the missionaries to be withdrawn to safety in the two villas. An attempt by Luis Cuniju and Diego Xenome (war captains at Jemez and Nambé, respectively) to persuade the Pecos Indians to rise was scotched by the new governor, Felipe Chistoe. The Pecos cacique, Diego Umviro, was hanged along with war captain Cachina and two others. A fifth man, Caripicado (Pock Face), escaped but was killed later when he tried to return to the pueblo, and Chistoe sent Vargas his severed head, plus a hand and foot. Cuniju and Xenome were also turned over to Vargas, who had them executed. Pecos supplied 100 warriors to the Spaniards, who also could count on a number of Manso Indians, some of them apparently attached to the missions.
The Tewa towns of Santa Clara and San Juan, led by Lucas Naranjo, were a main focus of the rebellion. Launching a counterattack from Santa Cruz, Vargas crossed the Rio Grande and in late July clashed with Naranjo and his men, who were deployed ''in the boulders and the woods of the sierras." The rebel captain was hit in the adam's apple by a lucky shot from one of Vargas's men, apparently killing him instantly. This sudden turn of events demoralized his supporters, who fled the field. Naranjo's bloody head was hacked off by the Spaniards as a trophy. In the opinion of J. M. Espinosa, Vargas's victory in this battle was the turning point of the war. It certainly ended one chapter in the tangled story of the Naranjo involvement in the revolt.
But the Naranjo family maintained a foot in the Spanish camp, for one of their members, José or Josephe, alerted Vargas's most important commander, Roque Madrid, to the 1696 uprising at Santa Clara and subsequently joined the Spaniards. A grandson many years later claimed that it was José who cut off Lucas Naranjo's head, though Vargas reported to the viceroy simply that it was a soldier other than Antonio Cisneros, the man who fired the fatal shot. In later years, José became fairly important in the Spanish government. During the period 1700-1702 he served as alcalde mayor of the Zuni town of Halona. By
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1704 he was Vargas's chief scout and captain of the Indian allies. In 1706 he was involved in Ulibarri's expedition to bring the Picurís Indians back from their western Plains refuge settlement among Apaches at El Cuartelejo in western Kansas. Naranjo continued his command role with the Pueblo Indian auxiliaries until 1720, when he was killed during the disastrous Pedro de Villasur expedition to the central Plains.
With the Santa Cruz area more or less pacified, Vargas gradually reduced all the pueblos, although both Zuni and Hopi remained for the time being outside the Spanish orbit. The inhabitants of Picurís "voted with their feet," fleeing to the Cuartelejo Apache groups on the western Plains, but the Rio Grande Pueblos began to adjust to the post-revolt reality of Spanish rule. Custodian Francisco de Vargas, late in 1696, wrote that there were only thirteen missionaries in New Mexico and asked that the number be increased to twenty-one. In April of 1697, Viceroy Sarmiento Valladares ordered that eight more Franciscans be sent to New Mexico.
The final stabilization of the province in 1696 left the Pueblos with deep internal divisions. At Pecos, the ruthless native governor Felipe Chistoe met continuous opposition but remained firm in his decision to tie his pueblo to the Spanish cause. Those Pecos Indians who did not favor the Spaniards slipped away to the Apaches. The northern Tiwa and Tewa continued to foster Apache alliances for a number of years, as did the Jemez with the Navajo. Curiously, one pueblo that may have welcomed the Spaniards was the lone Zuni town of Halona. The Zuni were in a seriously exposed position, warred on by Apachean groups and apparently at odds with their Hopi neighbors. A Spanish presence gave at least nominal protection from the marauding nomadic tribes. Even so, Zuni was very loosely held in the eighteenth century, and the pueblo had a considerable amount of autonomy, something reflected in the power of the native religion, especially the kachina cult, in modern Zuni.
The Hopi at the time of Vargas's first entrada in 1692 had lined up a number of allies: Utes, Apaches, and Havasupai. Later in the century, the Hopi had troubles, especially with the Utes and Apaches, but for the time being they were friends. Hopi was strengthened by several of the eastern Pueblo groups who fled the Spanish reconquest and reached the Hopi mesas. These included Keresans, Tewa/Tano, and Tiwa, some probably moving to Hopi as early as 1681 in the wake of Otermín's attempted reconquest. Another wave of refugees came to Hopi after the troubles along the Rio Grande in 1693 and 1696. By 1700, there were two separate non-Hopi towns on the Hopi mesas: Payupki on Second Mesa, made up largely of Tiwa from Sandia, and Hano on First Mesa, built by Tano-speaking Indians. The Tewa anthropologist Edward Dozier has suggested that Hano was

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