Lone Star (6 page)

The unimpressed Zuñis rejected the King's protection with a shower of arrows, all badly aimed. Coronado again tried for peaceful submission, but the Indians mistook this for temporization, and attacked. Coronado, tried beyond patience, sounded the charge. Flint-tipped arrows rattled off Spanish armor, but Toledo steel struck home. After two dozen Zuñis were killed, the others scampered up the ladders of their rock dwellings, and pulled the ladders up behind them, leaving the angry Spaniards temporarily baffled.

The Zuñis, and other Puebloan culture tribes, were not warlike. They were agricultural workers; they tended their beans and squash, and fought, rather ineptly, when Apaches or others failed to leave them alone. Their main defense was their stone houses, terraced into rock cliffs or hills. These had no doors or entrances on the lower floor. Upper stories were entered through trapdoors, and behind these walls the Puebloans had managed to survive.

The Spanish, however, pushed a siege with much more determination than Apaches. By means of a captured ladder they carried the bottom story after a bruising battle against arrows and stones. Coronado himself was struck down and saved from death only by his golden armor. But now, seeing the issue lost, the Zuñis made terms, and were allowed to retreat out of "Cíbola" to another fortress, to which their women and children had already gone. In the captured
 
village Coronado found some food, which a chronicler admitted the expedition was then in greater need of than gold.

Coronado was enraged and heartsick with the disillusionment of the reality of Cíbola, which was actually the pueblo of Hawikuh. He and his cavaliers rained curses on Fray Marcos's head, if not to his face; and the priest was sent back to New Spain with a report to Mendoza. Shortly afterward, Fray Marcos suffered a stroke and died in disgrace, which most of the conquistadores considered was God's justice.

However, Coronado was not prepared to return to Mexico as a failure. Too much money and effort had gone into his expedition. There still might be kingdoms beyond Cíbola or gold somewhere in the country; even the
Indios
possibly could be a source of slaves. He determined to stay the winter and explore the land.

The Spaniards did explore, with almost incredible persistence. One of Coronado's lieutenants actually reached the Grand Canyon of the western Colorado after tracking across New Mexico and Arizona. Another expedition journeyed far to the east, across the Panhandle of Texas, and contacted a party of Caddoan Indians. These were Hasinai, but the Spaniards called them Tejas, from the Caddoan
Teychas
, meaning "allies" or "friends." This word was spelled "Texas" frequently in old Spanish, in which the "x" was substituted for a "j" sound, and from this mistaken tribal name the land derived its name. The Spanish seized all the Texas Indians' buffalo robes, at which the Indians wept.

Meanwhile, the Spaniards wreaked a bloody havoc on the Puebloan culture of the upper Rio Grande. Coronado proclaimed that the Hopis and other tribes were annexed in the name of the Crown; and those Indians who did not submit to the "will of God and the King" were treated as rebels.

On one occasion, after a Spanish rape of Hopi women, the Indians began to kill Spanish horses and mules. Coronado's lieutenant, Cárdenas, the same officer who had reached the Grand Canyon, reduced the rebellious pueblo with ferocity, and acting on Coronado's orders "to take no one alive, in order to impose a punishment that would intimidate the others," had two hundred stakes erected outside the Indian town. Then some two hundred Puebloan captives were brought forward. Realizing Cárdenas was going to burn them alive, the prisoners broke en masse. The Spanish cut down more than one hundred, and in the end only thirty unfortunates died screaming at the stake, in front of women and children witnesses. Coronado also sent over some chiefs or headmen from other villages to watch Spanish justice, and embraced Cárdenas after the executions.

During the winter of 1540–41, Coronado continued to reduce Puebloan settlements and partially destroyed or depopulated at least twelve. In one case, fierce Spanish hounds were turned on a chief, in an attempt to make him confess to having gold. Though severely bitten, the Indian was unable to produce any precious metal.

Through these measures, the Coronado expedition broke all Indian resistance, and Coronado was able to proclaim the area along the upper Rio Grande
tierra paz
, or pacified country.

He found a Pawnee, from a tribe far to the east, in one of the Puebloan towns. This Indian, whom the Spanish named El Turco because he looked like one, talked about a great empire in the east, called Quivira. Here there were table services "of silver and gold." El Turco was probably party to an Indian plot with two aims: to get the murderous Spaniards lost on the Great Plains, or at least out of the Pueblo country. El Turco, though a Pawnee captive, was not a slave in the sense the Spaniards thought; he had been adopted, with full rights, into the tribe. But Coronado and his captains were eager to believe in hidden kingdoms, and in the spring of 1541 they set out, marching east.

They approached and climbed onto the vast escarpment thrusting up from the lower mesas of New Mexico and Texas like a palisaded wall. Coronado called this the
Llano
Estacado
, which was unfortunately translated as "Staked Plains" by later English-speaking explorers, losing the real Spanish meaning of stockaded or palisaded high plain. Fortunately for him, Coronado entered the Llano Estacado early in the year, when the country was flowering and the water holes still full, and the bison herds covered the grass as far as the eye could see. Later in the year, the Llano became an arid semidesert, and had Coronado tried to cross the plains in summer he might well have left his golden armor gleaming about his bleached bones. But although the Spanish, guided by El Turco, more than once became lost on the Great Plains and had to march by compass as on the sea, they escaped serious hardship.

After marching for many days, the dirty, ragged Spanish came to Quivira. It turned out to be a miserable grass-thatched village of tattooed Wichita Indians. It was probably in modern Kansas, though some historians think that Coronado did not leave Texas. Coronado remained here more than a month, avoiding serious trouble with the Plains Indians, investigating about twenty other villages—all of which were mere accumulations of hive-shaped mud and grass huts.

The Spanish disillusionment was terrible. El Turco was tortured until he confessed he had lied to Coronado, and although he screamed out promises of another, richer kingdom further east, Coronado ordered him garroted.

After claiming the entire Wichita country in the name of the King, Coronado gloomily returned to the Rio Grande, this time led on a shorter path by Wichita guides. Unknowingly, he was at this time only about three hundred miles west of Hernando de Soto's contemporary entrada, which was seeking "Cíbola" from the east. De Soto had landed at Mobile Bay, fought his way through Indian tribes to Texas, finally raiding the granaries of the Caddoan Confederacy, which was as helpless before the warlike Spaniards as the Hopis. De Soto, unlike Coronado who had narrow escapes, was killed and buried in the river he discovered, the Mississippi. His party, reaching the Great Plains on the edge of Caddo territory, recoiled from them and returned east.

Back in Pueblo country, Coronado's men spent a cold and hungry winter. The Indians had fled to the mountains; they offered no services or assistance, and the Coronado expedition nearly starved. In April 1542, Coronado, who had now been injured in a fall and who was sick mentally and physically, mumbled the order to return to New Spain.

The three priests with his army—whatever their cruelty and intolerance, they were entirely sincere—chose to remain to convert the Indians. None was ever heard from again.

On his way south, Coronado slaughtered some rebellious Mexican Indians in the Sonora Valley, then reported to Viceroy Mendoza. His reports, and his official letter to King Charles V, written in New Mexico, profoundly affected Spanish policy toward the north.

Coronado found Texas and the Plains a "country of fine appearance," not unlike Spain. It was "full of cattle" in numbers impossible to estimate—bison, which the Spanish ironically came to call
cíbolos
. It was potentially rich for farming, especially the lands of the Wichitas to the east. But Coronado warned that there was no gold or any other metal, and the Indians were uniformly a poor lot, who owned nothing and spent their miserable lives following the "cows." There was nothing to be exploited or turned to ready cash; thus there was nothing in it for the Crown.

The effect of this was that, although there were several
contra
bandos
or unauthorized expeditions in the following years, Spain officially ignored the Cíbolo-Quivira country for many decades, and abandoned any attempt to colonize the Texas plains for 150 years. The violent, colorful, and cruel
entradas
into the land were successful explorations, but nothing more. They left a series of romantic accounts and a country dotted with exotic place-names, but, in the 16th century, Spanish ardor implanted no European seed in Texas soil.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a magnificent failure as a conquistador, was relieved of his office of governor and brought to trial on charges of gambling, financial peculations, and "great cruelties upon the natives." The first two charges were patently trumped up, and ridiculous; the third was a crime under Spanish law, but not under the polity of an expanding Spain. A royal
audiencia
acquitted Coronado of all charges, and permitted him to die in bitter and disappointed peace.

In 1598, when the memory of Coronado's rape of the upper Rio Grande was only a legend among the Puebloans, the
Adelantado
Don Juan de Oñate, future Governor and Captain-General of the province of New Mexico, which he officially named while pausing at the site of present El Paso, again carried Spanish power north. Again, Spanish armor, banners, crucifixes, and swords came into the land. Oñate repeated much of Coronado's old explorations, but he brought something new. Old Mexico was relatively "pacified" now, and Spanish civilization was creeping north, following the path of Indian corn thousands of years before. Four hundred soldiers and priests accompanied Oñate, the first to catch
Indios
and the second to Christianize them; but far more important, 130 families of soldiers went along. This was to be a permanent colonization, to set a Spanish peasantry in North American soil.

Most important of all, though Oñate could not have known it, were the seven thousand domestic animals in his train, which included three hundred Spanish colts and mares. Oñate was introducing European cattle, and the Spanish mustang, to the Great Plains.

The long history of the brutal conquest of the Puebloan tribes, the founding of Santa Fé and numerous missions, the dotting of the New Mexican country along the upper Rio Grande with Spanish villages and
ranchos
, the great revolt of the missionized Indians in 1680, and the hideous reconquest in the 1690s by Vargas, which implanted a stultified Mexican-Spanish culture, half Christian, half Indian, upon New Mexico for centuries, had little importance to the development of Texas. Oñate's introduction of horse herds in the Southwest did.

Because the Puebloan cultures were fixed to the soil, and the gardening Indians were already bound to labor, the Spanish conquest was feasible and
 
relatively successful. Puebloans, unlike the more savage tribes, allowed themselves to be captured, and also to be enslaved, either by the friars at the missions or by
rancheros
who needed hands. Oñate himself, however, turned up something ominous when he ventured out on the Plains to the east. The Spanish struck a war party of Wichitas, and although the armored, mounted Europeans won through a bloody battle, the Wichitas neither surrendered nor showed any fear of Spanish might. They could be killed, but not, like the Puebloans, easily cowed. The only real advantage the Spaniards enjoyed over these more warlike people was the fact that they were mounted; they had both mobility and the terrifying shock of the cavalry charge.

No historian any longer believes that the
entradas
left horses among the Indians. Coronado and others lost horses, some of which went wild, and some of which were undoubtedly eaten—but the Indians learned to ride only when a permanent colonization of New Mexico placed a horse culture in close proximity to the High Plains. The Spaniards forced "tame" Indians to tend their horses, and such Indians naturally learned horsemanship. And some escaped into the mountains or plains, and took skills and stolen horses with them. In the first half of the 17th century, both passed into the hands of the Apaches and other tribes. What now happened was an absolute revolution on the Great Plains of North America.

The hardy Afro-Arabian Spanish mustang was a small, unlovely beast, rarely more than fourteen hands high. It was shaggy, and often looked ill-proportioned—but no horse on earth was more admirably suited to life on the semiarid, grassy mesas. It was incredibly hardy, unbelievably swift, used to little water, and could thrive on a diet of grass alone; the European horse required gentler handling and regular feedings of grain. Thus the bison country and the Spanish mustang were beautifully matched; no region in the world was better suited than the warm Southwestern prairies for such a steed. Either domestically or wild, they multiplied.

Sometime between 1600 and 1650, the entire horse knowledge of the Spanish was transmitted to the Apache tribes. And something else had happened: while the Spanish and Plains Indians at first were at peace with each other, the ancient feuds of the Apaches and the Puebloans were inherited by the conquerors, now living on the land of, and being the "protectors" of, the Puebloan Indians. In 1659, the appearance of a new, ominous cloud on the Spanish colonial horizon was first recorded—one that all the power of Spain in America never dispelled: Apaches—on horseback—were raiding Spanish-Indian settlements from both the northeast and west. Apache horsemen now could raid fast and far, striking deep into Spanish territory, and then run back to safety on the endless plains before they could be pursued. On one raid alone in the 1650s, Apaches carried off three hundred horses. They also made wholesale incursions on Spanish cattle, which they liked as much as buffalo.