Kachina and the Cross (8 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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remained in west Mexico for several years, learning Spanish and becoming guides for the expeditions of 1539-42.
Cabeza de Vaca and his companions reached Mexico about the time that news of Pizarro's conquest of the gold-rich Inca Empire of western South America was spreading to Mexico. The possibility that the Pueblo area might also be rich in gold stimulated the new viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, to plan an expedition into the unknown north. He was further motivated when he found that one of Pizarro's captains, Hernando de Soto, was in the process of launching his own expedition, entering the new lands at Florida with the intention of marching westward. After two years in the planning and organizing stage, de Soto's expedition left Cuba in the spring of 1539 and spent the next several years exploring the southeastern region of the present-day United States. After de Soto's death in 1542, his lieutenant, Luis de Moscoso, reached as far west as the Trinity River area of east Texas. This expedition was, however, a disaster, and more than half of its soldiers failed to return.
Of course, Mendoza did not know this when in the spring of 1539 he sent the first probing party into the Southwest. The party was led by a Franciscan friar named Marcos de Niza who had been with Pizarro in Peru and could be expected to know gold if and when he saw it. With Marcos was the black slave from the Cabeza de Vaca party, Esteban de Dorantes, and a number of Indians including some from central Mexico and Piman speakers who had come south with Cabeza de Vaca and now wished to return home. A second friar started the journey but soon dropped out due to illness.
Marcos's route north in 1539 has been much disputed, but I think that he stayed close to the coast, crossing the lower sections of the various rivers. On reaching the Sonora River in west-central Sonora, Marcos stayed on a northward course though the coastline veered off to the northwest. Eventually he arrived at a place called Vacapa, which I believe was in the Altar or Magdalena Valley, probably near the confluence of the two rivers. Here he sent Esteban on northward with some of the Indians. In a few days word came back from Esteban that the party was traveling toward the "Seven Cities of Cíbola."
Esteban eventually did arrive at some Zuni town, assumed by earlier scholars to be Hawikuh but which probably was K'iakima, and for reasons still unclear was killed there. Possibly he was mistaken for a witch and/or a spy for the Europeans. Stories told in Zuni the following year do seem to indicate that the Zuni people already had heard stories of Europeans and were very mistrustful of them.
Marcos, at any case, went on to Zuni, observing from a distance the town outside of which Esteban had been killed. He then retreated to Mexico, taking
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time on his return to make a short trip up the Sonora Valley in the direction of the Ures Basin. He reported gold in that area, and, indeed, some was found by Coronado's men, the only gold discovered by the Coronado expedition.
Viceroy Mendoza was intrigued by the report of Marcos, and the expedition plan went forward. In November of 1539, he sent a reconnaissance party northward commanded by Melchior Diaz, a pioneer of the border country and mayor of the newly founded settlement of Culiacán. With fifteen horsemen, Diaz penetrated the region of Sonora and reached as far as a large ruined town the Spaniards called
Chichilticalli,
a term that means "Red House" in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. The exact location of this site is unknown, but it seems to have been one of the large Salado ruins somewhere south of the Gila River. He returned in time to be with the Coronado vanguard the following spring.
Meanwhile, the viceroy had appointed a young protege named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, already governor of the far west province of Nueva Galicia, to lead an expedition to the north. Coronado launched his expedition from near modern Tepic with a force of around 350 Spanish soldiers, 1,200 to 1,300 native allies (Aztecs, Tlaxcalans, Tarascans, and probably Otomi and other groups), a large number of horses, burros, sheep, and probably cattle. Pigs were also purchased for the trip, but whether taken as salted pork or on the hoof is unknown. At Culiacáncin in April 1540, Coronado divided his forces, moving on northward with perhaps 200 to 300 men, with the main party following at a slower pace.
In the period 1540-42, Coronado made an extraordinary number of discoveries. He explored the northeast Sonoran valleys, especially the statelet area of Corazones and Señora, and parts of the Gila drainage in Arizona and New Mexico. One of his parties reached the Hopi mesas, and another penetrated as far west as the Grand Canyon. Coronado's men explored the Rio Grande as far north as Taos and perhaps as far south as modern Hatch. His army ventured onto the Great Plains and reached the Llano Estacado, where the army camped for a time in Blanco Canyon just north and east of present-day Lubbock. With a small party, searching for the supposedly gold-rich region called Quivira, he journeyed north and eastward to the Arkansas River in modern central Kansas. The sea wing of the expedition, under Hernán de Alarçón, explored the lower Colorado River to the mouth of the Gila.
Though it led to new geographic knowledge, the Coronado expedition was basically a failure. The Spaniards created enemies at various of the Rio Grande pueblos, in the Sonoran area, at Hopi, and at Pecos. Tiguex, the large Tiwa-speaking confederation on the Rio Grande, was badly mauled in a war that raged for the first three months of 1541. Coronado's way station at Corazones in
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the Sonora Valley was wiped out with considerable loss of Spanish lives. And, with the exception of some deposits in the Sonora Valley, no gold was found. Following a fall from his horse, resulting in a severe head injury, Coronado decided to retreat from the Southwest. In the spring of 1542, he returned to Mexico. Left behind were a number of disaffected central and west Mexican Indians and a Franciscan lay brother, Luis de Ubeda, who dreamed of converting the native southwesterners. With Fray Luis was a herd of sheep, presumably to teach the Pueblo Indians animal husbandry. One of the priests on the expedition, Juan de Padilla, insisted on returning to Kansas, where he believed that Quivira was on the edge of that fabled kingdom of Antilia founded by the Portuguese a thousand years before. Padilla was killed in Kansas, but certain other members of his party escaped back to Mexico.
The Mexican Indians settled in the Southwest and may have introduced a number of Mesoamerican traits to the area. Ubeda, however, seems to have been killed, as likely were his sheep. No new animal domestication came out of the Coronado expedition, although certain new plants, cantaloupes and watermelons, may have entered the Southwest during this period.
Coronado had approached the Southwest from the west coast of Mexico. As late as the time of Francisco de Ibarra in the early 1560s there were attempts to explore in that direction. Ibarra, who became governor of the new province of Nueva Vizcaya, crossed the central Sierra Madre Occidental in the Topia region and then worked his way north along the coast, exploring the Sonoran statelets and fighting a fierce battle with the people of Sefiora in the middle Sonora Valley. He then recrossed the Sierra into what is now Chihuahua, being the first European to view the great ruins of Casas Grandes, which had been deserted for a century or more but whose crumbling adobe walls were still an impressive sight. Ibarra returned to the Sonoran valleys and eventually moved back down the coast.
By this time, however, the Spaniards were well on their way to an advance up the intermontane interior of Mexico. Lured there by great silver strikes in Zacatecas beginning in 1546, the newcomers quickly moved into the modern Durángo, where both silver and rich riverine grasslands for cattle ranches were to be found. Indé in northern Durángo was settled by a lieutenant of Ibarra's named Rodrigo del Río in 1567, and that same year saw the colonization of the rich silver mining region of Santa Bárbara on the Río Florido, a tributary of the Conchos. Two years later the population of Santa Bárbara was enlarged by Tlaxcalan tribesmen, and around 1570 the Franciscans moved into the area establishing a center at San Bartolomé, the modern Allende.
Silver mining was labor intensive, and Indians were needed to work the mines. Slave raiding into the still largely unknown north became common
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despite attempts by officials in Mexico City and Spain to control it. In the process of this slave raiding, the Spaniards rediscovered the Rio Grande, probably first at La Junta where the Conchos and Rio Grande join. During the 1570s it became ever more clear to the Spaniards that they were on the edge of the great area explored by Coronado.
It was only a matter of time before exploring parties would penetrate the southwestern mystery once more. Even though Coronado had discovered no precious metals, rumor continued to have it that such riches existed in the Southwest. There was also the matter of the Coronado friar Luis de Ubeda, who had remained to missionize the Pueblo region. The Franciscans were eager to find out what had happened to Ubeda. Had he succeeded in producing a Christian Pueblo world? If so, there must be numbers of converted Indians badly in need of priests.
In 1542-43 Spain had made a serious attempt to control abuses to the native populations of the Americas with a series of sweeping ''New Laws.'' These had been only partly successful, and the Crown in 1573 promulgated a second series of colonization reforms. These forbade "conquests" and set down rules for the peaceful contact and missionization of the Indians. No new area would be settled without a specific license from the king, and the missionaries and their agendas were to be favored over those of the civilian colonizers. It was under the aegis of the 1573 laws that later exploration of the upper Southwest was carried out.
The first persons to receive permission for a southwestern expedition were Fray Agustin Rodriguez and Captain Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado, who headed a small party leaving Santa Bárbara in June 1581. There were two other friars, Francisco López and Juan de Santa Maria. With them were nine soldiers and nineteen servants plus some six hundred head of stock and ninety horses. In spite of the pious intentions of the Franciscans, it was also to be an explorative outing with an eye to finding new mines.
The party made its way down the Conchos to La Junta, where the Spaniards met the sedentary Patarabueyes and probably also the nomadic Jumanos, a group who wintered at La Junta and spent the more clement months hunting bison on the southwestern Plains. These Jumano, clearly, were the same people called Teya by the Coronado expedition.
There can be little doubt that the Jumano were in trading contact with the eastern Pueblos, especially the Salinas group, the Galisteo pueblos, and probably Pecos. That the Patarabueyes also had Pueblo contacts is indicated by a later statement of Juan de Oñate. According to the Oñate contract to colonize New Mexico, written in 1595, only fourteen years after Chamuscado left for the Southwest: "They must give me the Indians that are to be found in this City of
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Mexico of the nation [Patarabueyes], for they are the nearest to that province, and in particular an Indian woman who was brought from New Mexico, so that they may serve as interpreters on this expedition." The Patarabueye-Pueblo connection seems to have been a common assumption among the Spaniards. I shall discuss the Indian woman from New Mexico in chapter 4. Despite the proximity in the wording, she likely was not connected to the Patarabueyes.
The Chamuscado expedition worked its way northward along the north side of the Rio Grande from La Junta to what is now southern New Mexico. In fact, it was Chamuscado who gave the name San Felipe de Nuevo México to that section of the Rio Grande and, by extension, to the entire upper Southwest. The San Felipe portion of the name, possibly introduced in honor of Philip II of Spain as well as the saint, quickly dropped out, and the area became known simply as Nuevo (or Nueva) México. The first Piro town, also named San Felipe by the Spaniards, was on the west side of the Rio Grande south of Milligan's Gulch. It was in ruins, but as the party went on upstream, they found occupied settlements from which the Piro had fled at sight of the Spaniards. I have suggested that there may have been unrecorded Spanish slave raids into the area, perhaps in the early 1570s, which caused the Piro Indians to react with fear to this small Spanish party.
Continuing north, the Chamuscado party reached the Tiguex country and in the next few months explored to the west as far as Zuni and to the east into the edge of Querecho country. In September 1581, one of the friars, Juan de Santa Maria, decided for reasons unknown to return to Santa Bárbara. Leaving from Tunque Pueblo east of the Rio Grande, he attempted to make his way south along the eastern slopes of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains and was killed by hostile Pueblo Indians. In spite of this example of Pueblo unfriendliness, the two other friars, Agustín Rodriguez and Francisco López, decided to remain at Puaray in Tiguex country. This pueblo was most likely the Tiguex town of Arenal, burned and sacked by the Coronado expedition around the beginning of the year 1541. Chamuscado's two friars were killed a few days after the Spaniards began their march southward. Chamuscado also died on the way home.
Concern about the two missionaries left at Tiguex and a continuing desire to find rich mines in New Mexico led to the launching of another expedition in November 1582. This was led by Antonio de Espejo with fourteen soldiers and a number of servants plus one Franciscan missionary, Bernardino Beltrán. This group again followed the Conchos to its juncture with the Rio Grande and then went up the latter river to Piro country. Reaching the Tiguex towns, it found Puaray (called Puala by the Espejo chroniclers) deserted. The Espejo expedition explored widely even though dissension in the ranks led to desertion by the friar

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