Kachina and the Cross (11 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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four natives who may also have been Concho or perhaps Suma. Using these new guides, Zaldívar reached the Rio Grande on February 28. He then turned back to make his report to Oñate, reaching the San Pedro on March 10.
One branch of the Concho Indians lived in the vicinity of Santa Bárbara and had been interacting with the Spaniards for three or more decades. Conchos were on the expedition of Chamuscado and probably that of Espejo. Both the Concho Indians and the Suma lived in small scattered bands. They were basically hunters and gatherers, using the bow and arrow in hunting and collecting vegetable foods such as mesquite beans and various cacti. Hunting focused on a variety of animals including rabbits, deer, and along the Rio Grande, bison. There is some evidence that certain groups had a simple agriculture of maize, beans, and squash. I think that those Suma living on the Rio Grande probably had a marginal agriculture since they were on a major trail from La Junta to the Pueblo country and were well acquainted with the uses of agriculture. The same was probably true of the Concho Indians in the upper Conchos drainage because they too were on an old and established trail. In fact, Espejo in 1583 mentioned meeting a Concho Native American living among the Manso in the El Paso area.
The southern Concho Indians, by Oñate's time, may have begun to pick up animal husbandry. By the mid-seventeenth century, horses, often obtained by raiding, were becoming important throughout the area, and likely this was also true in Oñate's time. The more northerly groups, contacted by Zaldívar, whether Concho or Suma, were largely unacculturated. The Concho were probably Uto-Aztecan-speaking, perhaps related to the Taracahitan subgroup of languages.
The route of Oñate northward is not securely known. He seems to have swung somewhat to the west of the later Camino Real, probably rejoining it just to the south of modern Chihuahua City. He then moved slightly west of north, reaching the Rio Carmén not too far from the modern Villa Ahumada and near the large pre-Columbian sites of Loma de Montezuma and El Carmén. From there northward, Oñate was on an old trail leading to the Rio Grande. In mid-April he reached the great expanse of Médanos de Samalayuca, the extensive sand dunes some forty miles south of the El Paso area. He seems to have gone through the dunes before swinging off to the northeast in the vicinity of the later mission of San Elisario, southeast of El Paso. Oñate, basically, was on one of the seventeenth-century routes of the Camino Real. During that century an alternate route was developed that turned northeastward at Ojo Lucero, the modern Lucero, north of Villa Ahumada. On reaching Tinajas de Cantarrecio, the direction was north to the Rio Grande at a point some twenty miles southeast of San Elisario.
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Oñate, with an advance party, reached the Rio Grande on April 20, remaining there until April 26 to allow the army to catch up. He sent Captain Pablo de Aguilar Inojosa, a Spanish-born officer, with a few men to scout out the road ahead. The Spanish army slowly ascended the river, pausing on April 30 to take formal possession of New Mexico in the name of Felipe II and Spain. They continued along the south bank until May 4, when they reached the ford adjacent to a narrow pass on the opposite bank, the site of present-day El Paso. Oñate was now in Manso Indian territory (see chapter 5 for discussion of this group).
At the El Paso ford, Oñate made the statement that the site was "in 31" exactly." Considering the crudeness of the Spanish surveying instruments, this is reasonably correct, being off by less than a degree of latitude. On May 4, near the ford, Oñate noted the wagon tracks left seven years before by Morlete. The following day he moved through the pass, traversing what is now urban El Paso, and pushed on north along the east bank of the Rio Grande. The expedition proceeded slowly, reaching the Organ Mountains, called by Oñate the Sierra del Olvido, on May 13. Oñate was slowly losing expedition members: on May 17 the party lost a child, and on May 21, one of the officers, Pedro Robledo, approximately sixty years and one of the oldest members of the expedition, was buried. The region of his burial became known as the Paraje Robledo (the Robledo stopover or camp) and kept that name to the end of the colonial period. It is in the modern Rincon area, the southern entry to the Jornada del Muerto.
Meanwhile, on May 12 Captain Aguilar was sent ahead again to scout out the Piro area. He returned May 20 after having entered the first Piro village, a direct violation of Oñate's order of secrecy. The governor wanted Aguilar to avoid even being seen by any Indian group he might come across. This secrecy was important to Oñate because in previous expeditions the Indians had fled the invaders, taking their food supplies with them. The governor was furious and had to be dissuaded from ordering Aguilar's execution.
On May 22, Oñate, the Franciscan commissary, Alonso de Martínez, along with another friar, Cristóbal de Salazar, the Zaldívar brothers, and some sixty men pushed on ahead of the slowly moving wagons to contact the nearest Piro town. This is the point where the Rio Grande describes a curve westward and flows between rugged mountain ranges to the east and a highly dissected plateau country to the west. As Morlete had found out several years before, it was not practical for carts and wagons to follow the river at this point. Oñate likely followed Morlete's trail, perhaps even saw signs of his wagons as he moved through this flat, arid region. On his way he marked water holes, but even so his soldiers and especially the main army following slowly behind became very thirsty.
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The party reached the north end of the Jornada on May 27 at a point near historic San Marcial. The next day the advance group reached the Piro town of Qualacú on the east bank of the Rio Grande near Black Mesa, bypassing the large pueblo later called San Pascual. As Oñate feared, the Piro had fled their towns, but they were coaxed back with gifts. Fray Alonso de Martínez was now very ill with gout, so Oñate camped in the Qualacú area for a month. During that time his purveyor general, Diego de Zubía, collected maize for the main army. According to Oñate, he "bought the provisions," though what was used to pay for the foodstuffs is not clear. Probably trade goods were used. Meanwhile, Oñate went back to help the wagon train, returning on June 13. Two of the black servants, Luis and Manuel, who were presumably with the advance party, wandered away and disappeared. On June 14, the party reached the riverbank opposite a pueblo that Oñate called Teypana (later known as Pilabó), which the Spaniards renamed Socorro (succor) because they received a great deal of maize there. On June 15 they reached a small Piro town on the east side of the river that they referred to as Nueva Sevilla (New Seville), the later Sevilleta, "because of its site." They camped there for a week and then pushed on northward. At a newly built pueblo they called San Juan Bautista, the people had fled, leaving large stores of maize. Here, Indians from various parts visited them, in Oñate's opinion probably acting as spies. Among them was a person the Spaniards called "Don Lope." He had been sent by Tomás and Cristóbal, "Indians who had remained [in Tiguex country] since the time of Castaño."
Leaving San Juan Bautista on June 25, the day following John the Baptist's feast, the group pushed on, "passing many pueblos, farms and planted fields on both banks of the river, most of them abandoned on account of fear." The governor was marching toward Puaray and at some point entered Tiguex country, probably on June 26. The party reached Puaray on June 27, for some reason assigning it the patronage of Saint Anthony of Padua, whose feast day was earlier that month. Oñate, with the maestro de campo, Juan de Zaldívar, and a small party then moved on to Santo Domingo, a pueblo that had been chosen by the missionaries for the Franciscan headquarters. The immediate purpose, however, was to seize Tomás and Cristóbal, who were taken by surprise and carried off to Puaray. On June 29, Juan de Zaldívar and Fray Cristóbal de Salazar pushed on to Zia, the pueblo that had befriended Coronado's group almost sixty years before. The town was given as patrons Saints Peter and Paul, whose day it was. This casual religious renaming of native villages signaled the Franciscan strategy of massive acculturation that was to ensure a century of turmoil between the Pueblos and the missionaries.
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Oñate quickly explored other portions of the Rio Grande Valley. On July 7 he met at Santo Domingo with seven "Indian chieftains of different provinces of this New Mexico" and obtained a voluntary pledge of obedience to the king. Who these chieftains were, what pueblos they were from, and what they thought they were pledging are not known. During this period, Oñate brought Doña Inés, the Indian woman who had been living in Mexico City, to her natal village of San Cristóbal in the Galisteo country. She was, according to Oñate, "like a second Malinche"that is, like Maria, the mistress of Cortés and his translator to the Aztecs. Unlike Maria, however, Inés no longer remembered the native languages, and her family and almost all her relatives were dead. According to Oñate, Inés had been brought south by Castaño de Sosa, something most unlikely since Castaño had been returned to Mexico in chains. I have suggested that Inés's removal to Mexico might possibly date to the Coronado expedition. We know that Juan Troyano brought a woman, presumably Pueblo, back from that expedition (see chapter 3). Troyano's wife was living in Mexico City in 1568. If she married Troyano in her teens, something not at all unlikely, she would have been in her seventies in 1598.
Another Pueblo Indian for which we have a clearer provenance was Pedro Oroz. He had been brought back to Mexico by Espejo but had died there. However, he had been taught Nahuatl and baptized, his sponsor perhaps being the Franciscan commissary-general, Pedro Oroz. While in Mexico, the Pecos native taught the Towa language to the lay brother Juan de Dios, and this man was escorted on July 26 to Pecos Pueblo, where he was left with Fray Francisco de San Miguel.
Oñate quickly settled on the region around the mouth of the Chama River for his capital. He took over the Tewa town of Okeh, the future San Juan Pueblo. The wagon train with the main Spanish party arrived on August 17, and Oñate made plans to visit all the major groups of Pueblos and to allot them among the missionaries. The first phase of the conquest and settlement of the upper Southwest was now underway.
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Chapter Five
The Pueblos and Their Neighbors in 1598
The native world of the Southwest in 1598 had changed somewhat from the cultural landscape seen by Coronado six decades before. At the time of Coronado there was an east-west extension of the Pueblos from Pecos and the Salinas towns to the Hopi mesas. The most northern town was Taos, and settlements extended southward down the Rio Grande and its tributaries to Milligan's Gulch Pueblo, some thirty-five miles north of modern Truth or Consequences. Downriver from Milligan's Gulch were the rancherias of the Manso Indians (discussed later in this chapter). To the east were the Querecho, ancestors to the Apache and Navajo, and the Teya, who may well have spoken a language similar to that of the Piro/Tompiro. The Querecho held the plains in the Canadian and upper Red River drainage in what is now the upper Texas Panhandle, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and sections of northeast New Mexico and southeast Colorado. The Teya lived on the Llano Estacado south of the Querecho and also along the Pecos River valley below the Santa RosaFort Sumner area.
West of the Pueblo world lived the various Pai groups and the lower Colorado River Yumans, both probably active in trade to the Hopi and Zuni towns, and both helping to form a link with the Pacific coast of California. To the southwest were the various Piman groups of the Gila River drainage, and south of them the Sonoran statelets, middlemen in an active trade network that extended throughout the Pueblo world and far to the south in western Mexico. On the northern frontier, there is a good possibility that Utes were situated in the Four Corners area, a region they held in later historic times.
During the fifty-six years between the time Coronado left the Southwest and Oñate arrived, the various Pueblos had pretty much continued living in the
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territories they held in Coronado's time. The Teya, now called Jumano, continued to control the southern part of the Llano Estacado and the Pecos River valley. During this period, however, the Querecho (ancestral Apacheans) began a series of migrations, still not clearly understood but reminiscent of those that had first brought them into the northeastern corner of the Southwest three centuries earlier. They started a move westward and at least by the early 1580s had reached the region around the Acoma and Hopi. It seems possible that Querecho began filtering into the Chama drainage at about this time. These Apachean forebears were also spreading southward in a line west of and paralleling the Jumano. The Apacheans gravitated to the mountains that fringe the Tularosa Basin to the east, and, indeed, some of them remain there today. As of Oñate's time, this penetration of the eastern New Mexico mountains may still have been in process. A little later on, Apaches were to threaten the Camino Real, especially along the Jornada del Muerto. During the seventeenth century the Apache continued to move southward, both to the east and to the west of the Pueblo world. They infiltrated groups such as the Jumano, Suma, Jova, and Jocome and gradually absorbed them. By the end of that century, the Apache were pressing on the Pima of what is now southern Arizona.
The Comanche as of the time of Oñate were still west of the Great Plains and made little or no impact on the Pueblo region. This Uto-Aztecan-speaking group did not reach the Plains and begin their love affair with the horse, and their reputation as fierce raiders, until after A.D. 1700. The Comanche did become important in the struggle for control of the western Plains in the eighteenth century, and they were a chronic threat to New Mexico. In the nineteenth century, Comanche war parties were deflected somewhat from the latter province, but they harried both northern Mexico and the Anglo-American settlements of Texas. They were not finally defeated until the 1870s.
The two Spanish expeditions of the 1580s found large numbers of pueblos, some thirteen or fourteen in the Piro area alone. In Tiguex there seems to have been at least fifteen and perhaps twenty or so pueblos, up from the twelve counted by Coronado forty years earlier. Individual pueblo size may have been somewhat less, however, for it seems unlikely that the aggregate population had increasedthough from the Spanish figures one might think so. Since large numbers of Indians (and for the Church, large numbers of converts) inflated the importance of the new province in Spanish governmental eyes, there was always some inclination on the part of the governors and the Franciscans to exaggerate populations. This was true especially in the early period of Spanish control when dreams of establishing an important Spanish presence in New Mexico were high. For example, Oñate in a letter dated March 2, 1599, commented, "Here [among

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