Kachina and the Cross (9 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
3.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Page 34
and about half the party. The little group reached Zuni and Hopi and then westward into the Verde Valley region of central Arizona. Returning, they had a brief but violent battle with a group of Querechos camped in the Acoma area. Reaching the Rio Grande, they found that about thirty of the Puala inhabitants had moved back into the pueblo. Espejo's men massacred these people and burned the pueblo. The expedition then departed the Southwest via the Pecos River valley, eventually reaching La Junta. Espejo, led by a Jumano guide, contacted Teya-Jumano somewhere in the middle Pecos drainage.
Expeditions to the Pueblo world were now coming at an accelerated rate. Beginning in July 1590, there was an unauthorized expedition from the new Spanish settlements in Nuevo León, headed by Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, the lieutenant governor of that province. Castaño led a party of some 160 to 170 settlers, including women and children, from Almadén (present Monclova) to the Southwest. There were ten or more carts or wagons, the first wheeled transport into the region. The Castaño expedition angled north and west, crossing the Rio Grande somewhere around modern Del Rio then traveling northwest to the Pecos River, perhaps in the present-day Sheffield area. Following the Pecos upstream, Castaño eventually arrived in the vicinity of Pecos Pueblo in late December 1590. Leaving his main party and the wagons somewhere around the junction of the Gallinas and Pecos Rivers, he pushed on with some forty men to Pecos, attacking the pueblo and occupying part of it on December 31, 1590. The Indians maintained themselves in certain of the house blocks for two or three days, but on the night of January 2, 1591, they fled to the mountains, leaving Castaño in charge.
From Pecos, Castaño de Sosa led his advance guard into the Rio Grande Valley. He explored portions of the Tewa and Keresan region, appointing officers at various pueblos. He hardly visited the Tiguex area, and the Piro not at all. Santo Domingo (actually so named by Castaño) in the Keresan region was chosen as a center of government. In late January he returned to the main camp, bringing those who had been camping on the Pecos back to the Rio Grande. Castaño presumably intended to settle New Mexico, to allot the native population in
encomienda
(grants of Indian tribute), and set up a government.
Castaño's ambitions came crashing down when Juan de Morlete arrived in mid-March 1591 to arrest him and to return the expedition to New Spain. Morlete led the two groups, including the wagons, down the Rio Grande to around modern El Paso and then apparently on to La Junta and up the Conchos. Because of the wagons, his expedition may have been forced to traverse the Jornada del Muerto, if so, making it the first Spanish party to go by that route.
Page 35
Spanish exploration in the Southwest, 1581-83

 

Page 36
The Spanish government was now beginning to consider a long-term colonization plan for the Southwest. As early as 1568, Juan de Troyano of the Coronado expedition, who had brought home a Pueblo girl and married her, pleaded for a chance to take part in a new expedition to the north. In 1583, King Philip II of Spain issued a call for a wealthy settler who would undertake the settlement of the new area. Several individuals responded, including Cristóbal Martin, Antonio de Espejo, and Francisco Diaz de Vargas. In 1589, a well-to-do citizen of Nueva Galicia named Juan Bautista de Lomas y Colmenares actually had his proposal approved by the viceroy. Like the earlier proposals, however, it eventually died of neglect in the Spanish royal court. Castaño's attempt to settle New Mexico in defiance of the government was quickly checked, but it indicated the rising interest in the Southwest on the part of Spanish frontier settlers.
While the various government officials in Spain and Mexico pondered the fate of the Pueblo world, at least one other clandestine expedition thrust itself into the Southwest. In 1593 the governor of Nueva Vizcaya, Rodrigo del Rio de Losa, sent the entrepreneur Francisco Leyva de Bonilla from Santa Bárbara northward on a trip to punish Indians who had been raiding border ranches. Marching with Leyva was a small group of soldiers and a vice-commander (or perhaps co-commander) Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña. The expedition unilaterally and illegally extended its field of operation to the Pueblos, spending about a year, mostly at San Ildefonso in Tewa country.
The party then departed to look for Quivira and reached perhaps as far as the Arkansas River, where there was a large Indian settlement. Humaña murdered Leyva in a quarrel, and the group seems to have been eventually dispersed by the Indians. At least nothing else was heard of it except for an Indian servant of Humaña named Jusepe, who fled after the murder and was held captive by the Apaches for a year before escaping "near a pueblo of the Pecos," perhaps a Pecos summer town. Jusepe was still in that area when Oñate arrived in 1598, as were Cristóbal and Tomás, two Indians from somewhere in northern New Spain who remained at Santo Domingo after the collapse of the Castaño expedition.
Page 37
Chapter Four
Oñate
The struggle for the honor and profit of settling New Mexico was long and bitter. There was little doubt from the time of Castaño that sooner or later such an attempt would be made. The different players in this southwestern sweepstakes had various reasons for wanting a part in the colonization. Later in this chapter I talk about the geopolitical considerations of the Crown, based on faulty geography but nonetheless real to the Spaniards. The primary reason for settlement, however, was silver, the engine that drove the expeditions of the 1580s and 1590s. Rich strikes of this precious metal had been found in Nueva Vizcaya; why not in New Mexico? Also important was the now well-known fact that the Pueblo Indians consisted of large numbers of peoples living in compact towns. The possibilities of exploiting this economic source must have played an important role in Spanish planning. One way was through the encomienda, an institution introduced at the very beginning of the Spanish period in the New World through which individual Spaniards were given grants of the labor and tribute of specific Indian groups. Encomiendas, though frowned on more and more by the Spanish government, were still granted in such frontier areas as New Mexico. In that colony they were to last throughout the seventeenth century.
A third factor was that of available arable or grazing lands. The expeditions from Coronado on seem to have given a somewhat exaggerated view of the fertility of New Mexico, but it was a country well suited for the rough-wooled and hardy
churro
variety of sheep bred in the northern Mexican area. Cattle were somewhat less adaptable to the New Mexican landscape, but still they were imported, and
estancias
, or ranches, quickly grew up in the riverine areas. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the great cattle herds were introduced in that large region where the Great Plains and Southwest mergeand that involved U.S. citizens rather than Spaniards or Mexicans.
Page 38
A fourth possible source of wealth was trade. Spaniards had been carrying on an active trade along the northern frontier for decades. They needed certain northern products, especially hides and other products from bison, antelope, and deer; slaves for the mines and ranches (though slaves may have seemed a chancy business in view of the recent colonization laws); and minerals and semiprecious stones.
In addition to those considerations, the Franciscans had in mind the conversion of large populations. They already had martyrsthree from the Chamuscado expedition alone. Forty years before Chamuscado, Father Juan de Padilla had been killed as a direct result of his southwestern trip, and probably Fray Luis de Ubeda as well. There was another reason why the Franciscans wished to go to the Southwest. The ecclesiastical province of New Mexico would surely resound to the missionaries' glory both in this world and the next. In this world it might lead to a Franciscan diocese.
The region of New Spain that had the most direct interest in colonization of New Mexico was the north, especially the province of Nueva Vizcaya (the new "Basque-land"). This had been formed out of the fuzzy northern boundaries of Nueva Galicia in 1562, and the governorship was given to Francisco de Ibarra, who spent four years (1562-66) exploring his new domain. Nueva Vizcaya included essentially what were later to be the states of Durángo, Chihuahua, and for a time Sinaloa. Its capital, Durángo, was located in the rich Guadiana Valley in the southern portion of the modern state of Durángo. The town, which was often called Guadiana in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was formally founded in 1563 apparently on or near a mission station established by the Franciscans a few years earlier. It quickly became a center for ranches that supplied agricultural goods and especially cattle and sheep products for the miners.
The Basques, whose homeland contributed the name Nueva Vizcaya, were an ethnic group living in the mountainous north of Spain and in southwestern France. They spoke, and still speak, an isolated language called Euskera, quite unlike the various Indo-European languages of historic and modern Europe. Indo-European, the family that includes most modern European languages, spread through the continent within the last three to four thousand years. The place of Basque in a classification of world languages is still unsure, but the Basque language represents a remnant tongue isolated in the rugged Pyrenees, possibly from Upper Paleolithic times. Some linguistic specialists even believe that Basque is related to Apache and Navajo languages, though of course on a very distant time level.
In any case, the Basques were important in the settlement of Nueva Vizcaya and surrounding regions of northern New Spain. Ibarra himself was Basque, as
Page 39
were such influential families as the Oñates, the Tolosas, the Urdiñolas and the Zaldívars. True to their mountain heritage, the great Basque families developed sheep ranching and mining interests in various parts of the north. They also entered politics; Ibarra, of course, was the first governor of Nueva Vizcaya, and Cristóbal Oñate served as acting governor of Nueva Galicia during Coronado's expedition to the Southwest in 1540-42. His son Juan would be the first governor of New Mexico.
As mentioned in chapter 3, interest in settling New Mexico went back to the 1560s, but it reached fever heat by the 1590s. It was not all mining and missionary zeal, for the Spanish Crown also had a geopolitical interest. Crown officials had just heard of an English settlement at a latitude near that of New Mexico and were fearful that the English might eventually flank New Spain to the north, or that they might intrude on Spanish territory.
With our sophisticated map knowledge of today, this seems ludicrous, but it was taken seriously by the Spaniards. The English colony, though hardly successful, was real enough. It was Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast, where a town was attempted in 1585-87. Roanoke, near the thirty-sixth parallel, does lie directly east of the Santa Fe-Rio Chama area. But despite the de Soto explorations of the eastern United States a half century before, the Spanish authorities seemed not fully to comprehend the region between North Carolina and New Mexico. Though on the same east-west parallel, these two places were nearly two thousand miles apart, separated by a wilderness of mountains, forests, rivers, swamps, plains, and desert. More to the point, the easy water passage that sixteenth-century Europeans thought connected the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans simply did not exist. The contract made with Juan de Oñate contains a striking indication of Spanish ignorance of North American geography. Originally it allowed him to bring two ships across the Atlantic to the province of New Mexico "to provision the land and exploit the mines." This section of the contract was later canceled, not because of its topographic unreality, but for legal reasons having to do with royal control of the Atlantic shipping.
It is not clear just when Oñate first decided to make a bid for the New Mexico honor, though it may have been soon after the royal announcement of 1583 (see chapter 3). But the initial struggle to obtain this northern prize seems to have been between Juan Lomas y Colmenares, who had powerful ranching interests in central Nueva Vizcaya, and a former lieutenant-governor from the eastern part of Nueva Vizcaya named Francisco de Urdiñola. In 1594 Urdiñola was asked by Viceroy Luis de Velasco to head a New Mexican colonizing expedition. This plan fell through when Urdiñola was accused of wife-murder, apparently

Other books

Beast by Donna Jo Napoli
The Beginning by Mark Lansing
Suited to be a Cowboy by Nelson, Lorraine
Bitter Bite by Erin M. Leaf
The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer
Strong and Sexy.2 by Jill Shalvis
After Death by D. B. Douglas