Kachina and the Cross (40 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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none of the post-López governors had any inclination to challenge their authority. The brush that Villanueva had with the Church was basically over secular matters, and the governor backed down in the clash over Anaya Almazán. Durán de Miranda seems to have been generally pro-Church, and in spite of clashes with his successor, Governor Villanueva, and with the settlers (or at least with the powerful Domínguez family), he was reappointed in the early 1670s following Juan de Medrano y Mesia, of whom relatively little is known. Medrano does seem to have fallen out with the Domínguez faction; at least, according to documents of a later (1685) trial of Juan Domínguez in El Paso, he actually sentenced Juan to death for his bad treatment of Apaches, though the sentence was commuted. Following Durán's second term was Juan Francisco de Trevino, whose use of force against the Pueblos most likely hastened the revolt, something that Trevino left his successor, Antonio de Otermín, to deal with.
The Medrano y Mesia governorship did coincide with a very grim period in the history of the province. Added to other difficultiesPueblo unrest, pressure from Apachean groups, and continuing dissension within the colony, problems that were becoming more acute by the yearthe period 1667-72 was one of terrible drought and famine conditions throughout New Mexico. In April 1669, the commissary, Juan Bernal, wrote that for the last three years there had been a dramatic shortage of food, with hundreds of Indians dying of hunger (450 at Humanas alone). Not only the Pueblos but the Spaniards were suffering, the latter living primarily on cowhides. Weakened resistance, caused by starvation, may have been a factor in the outbreak of disease, perhaps smallpox, that swept the area in 1671, greatly adding to the turmoil in the province.
The famine started with inadequate harvests in the year 1667, which hit the various pueblos very hard. Fortunately, the mission storehouses were stocked with ample supplies of corn, beans, and wheat, and the missionaries had large herds of sheep and cattle. By early 1668 they were beginning to dip into these supplies to alleviate the food shortages among certain of the Rio Grande pueblos. In subsequent years the famine spread to virtually all the pueblos. The Rio Grande itself seems to have been very low in water, perhaps virtually dry, and both Indians and Spaniards who depended on irrigation agriculture suffered greatly.
The production of food during those dry years was sporadic. Some pueblos and mission estancias apparently brought in crops, even if somewhat reduced ones, and the same thing was true of the colonists. For example, the wealthy Domínguez de Mendoza family was able to donate cattle for famine relief, as did the Valencia and Garcia families. Other Spaniards were desperate for food. In order to supply the missions and the settlers at Santa Fe, the governors organized the
escolta
, or military escort, to the more exposed areas of the province. Some of
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The Rio Grande Pueblo world.
these escorts were stationed for extended periods at threatened pueblos, and it became common for escorts to meet the supply trains coming north out of Mexico.

 

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The drought and the increasing pressure of Apache warfare put great strain on the outlying portions of the province of New Mexico. In the Salinas area, the most affected pueblo was Humanas. This pueblo, built in the semiarid reaches of the southern Estancia Valley, depended on wells and catchments for its water supply. Because of the limited amount of available water, an early attempt by the Franciscans to missionize Humanas in the late 1620s was discontinued, the church there reverting to a visita. In 1659 a permanent mission, San Buenventura, was established, although the missionaries were unable to organize the full mission estancia system due to the water shortage in the region. Fields to support the Humanas mission were set up at Quarai, and some of the herds were kept at Abó. With the coming of the drought, however, life at Humanas became unsupportable. As mentioned earlier, there seems to have been widespread starvation at the pueblo, and an Apache attack in September 1670 greatly added to the woes of Humanas. It was probably deserted sometime shortly after that date, the converts being moved to the more northern and eastern Salinas towns. But the Salinas and eastern Tiwa regions as a whole were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, and one after another of the missions closed. According to Fray Francisco de Ayeta, writing from Mexico in 1679, Humanas with five hundred families, Abó with three hundred families, and Cuarac (Quarai) with two hundred families were all deserted in the period 1672-77. Fray Alonso Gil de Avila, forced to abandon Abó, moved to Senecú, where he was killed in an uprising. By 1677 the entire region had lost its missionaries, although apostate or non-Christian Indians may have remained at some or all the towns. An attempt was made in the late 1670s to reestablish a mission presence at Tajique and Quarai. Tajique was briefly reoccupied in 1678, but the effort collapsed two years later with the Pueblo Revolt.
Closing of missions was a complex matter since an attempt had to be made to shift converts to safer locations, nearer the heartland of Spanish control. Desertion of a pueblo had a ripple effect. By wiping out the income of its encomendero, it depressed the economy of the colony, and since the encomenderos functioned as military leaders, it decreased the ability of the Spanish government to maintain a properly working military force.
On the western fringe of the province, there were also desertions. Hawikuh in the Zuni area was under severe Apache pressure, and in 1672 a nomadic attack, probably combined with action by the anti-missionary party in the pueblo, caused the death of the Franciscan Fray Pedro de Avila y Ayala and the destruction of the church and convento. That effectively ended mission control of the western and southern Zuni towns (Hawikuh and Kechibawa), and probably they were deserted by the time of the Pueblo Revolt eight years later.
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Mission church at Halona (Zuni Pueblo), late nineteenth century
(courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 14417)
In Hopi country, the famine hit very hard. The missionaries there slaughtered some 4,000 sheep and perhaps 250 cattle and oxen to keep the Indians from starvation. The Hopi, however, do not seem to have been quite as threatened by nomadic Indians, and missionary control of the Hopi towns appeared firm. At the time of the revolt, there were three missions, at Awatovi, Shongopavi, and Oraibi, with two additional visitas. In 1680, there do not seem to have been Spanish soldiers or civilians in the area, and the four priests in residence were killed. This is the one Pueblo area where the Spaniards were permanently swept away.
Apache and Navajo attacks through the last twenty years of Spanish rule in New Mexico increased steadily. Attempts were made to safeguard the Camino Real since Apache groups from the southeastern mountains of New Mexico had begun to regularly infringe, especially on the nearby Jornada del Muerto. For example, in June 1671, Gila and Siete Ríos Apaches attacked a small wagon train in the Jornada, one that was bringing the new governor, Juan Durán de Miranda, to Santa Fe. A rescue mission mounted by Governor Medrano was sent to escort Durán de Miranda to the capital. The Apaches struck again in July, a daylight raid on Senecú that netted a number of horses. It was becoming increasingly necessary in the decade of the 1670s to send escorts to El Paso to meet the mission supply trains.
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The Gila Apaches lived in the high country west of and south of the Piro missions, while the Siete Ríos group probably held the east slopes of the Sacramento Mountains, from which stronghold they could raid westward through the Tularosa Basin into the Jornada del Muerto. These and other Apaches to the east of the province, including the troublesome Faraones of northeastern New Mexico, and the Navajos to the north and west, posed more and more of a threat as the century wore on. The dreams of the early missionaries, including Benavides, of massive missionization of the nomads had faded, and well before mid-century a pattern of trade and raid had become the norm. Trade was, and continued to be, important. It was based on earlier trade relationships between the Pueblos and the Querechos (Apaches) and Teya (Jumano). At Coronado's time the most important trading partners to the Pueblo were probably the Teya of the central and southern Llano Estacado. It seems likely that the Pueblo goods trickling into the Wichita and Pawnee country (Quivira and Harahey) in central Kansas went at least in some part through Teya middlemen. As we have seen, the Apaches, during the latter part of the sixteenth century and all of the seventeenth, gradually filtered down the line of the Pecos River, displacing Teya (by then called Jumano) in the western Llano Estacado and penetrating the mountainous area of southeastern New Mexico. Trade was now increasingly to Apaches as the Jumano were squeezed to the east and south. In addition to the earlier maize and beans, shell, pottery, and turquoise that went eastward, the Spaniards added certain European goods, including iron tools, manufactured beads, and holy metals and other religious paraphernalia. In spite of official disapproval, a certain number of guns and supplies of powder also trickled out onto the Plains. Horses were not traded (except perhaps clandestinely), but the Apaches found other ways to obtain this most desirable animal, primarily by raiding the missions and the Spanish settlements.
It is difficult to know which of the parties, settled people or nomads, were the main instigators of the raids, but the fact remains that both benefited greatly by raiding. For the Europeans and their Pueblo auxiliaries, raiding was a quick and easy way to obtain slaves, especially slave women and children who could be sold in Nueva Vizcaya or in central Mexico for a very good profit. The Apaches and Navajos also captured slaves as well as domestic cattle and sheep (in fact, the later large Navajo sheep herds probably had their inception during this period). But, increasingly, the great demand was for horses and horse gear. Sixteenth-century nomads had eaten such horses that fell into their hands. In the seventeenth century the full implications of using the horse as a riding animal, especially to the people on the western Plains, became more and more evident.
The possibilities of Apache as well as Utes, Jumanos, and other wandering tribes receiving horses increased when in 1621 the New Mexico encomenderos were
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authorized to use Pueblo Indians as herders and teamsters. This was most likely necessary, considering the small number of Spaniards in the province, but it quickly led to horses spreading to the nomadic Indians as apostates among the Pueblos slipped away to join the Apaches and other non-Puebloan tribes, taking with them horses and riding equipment. By mid-century, hostile Indians, especially Apaches, were beginning to be equipped with horses, and this inevitably led to even more effective raiding. By the 1680s the use of horses in warfare was reported for eastern Texas by La Salle. Not only were horses spreading into the southeastern Plains, but attacks on estancias in Nueva Vizcaya were on the increase.
Granted the availability of horses, it is still not entirely clear to what extent the Apaches and Navajos were mounted in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The expedition against the Navajos initiated by Roque Madrid in 1705 did not turn up very much in terms of Navajo horses or other livestock. However, the Navajo were fighting defensive battles from their fortified settlements on the high mesa tops, and cavalry maneuvers would not have been a factor in this kind of warfare.
But certainly to some degree the horse, and war tactics based on horses, had become available to the Apaches before the Pueblo Revolt. This probably did not mean the kind of fighting from horseback that was perfected by the Comanches in the eighteenth century, but rather the use of horses to drastically increase the range and the speed with which a given Apache group could operate. What seems to be a rather steady rise in Apache attacks in the last two decades before the revolt suggests that something had disturbed the balance of power between Spaniard and nomadic Indian. Several things may have been involveddisease and famine with its concomitant population decline among the Pueblos, and tensions within the Spanish communitybut the greater flexibility brought by horse use among the Apaches was surely a factor.
The increasing tensions led to attempts to increase the firepower of the provincial armed forces. To counter Apachean and Ute marauders, Pueblo auxiliaries were used with increasing regularity. In 1675, Juan Domínguez de Mendoza was sent with fifty-four Spanish harquebusiers and 250 Indians, presumably Pueblo, with bows and arrows to attack the Faraón Apaches of northeastern/north-central New Mexico and the adjacent Texas Panhandle. Three years later, the same officer was dispatched with a detachment of 50 mounted Spanish soldiers and 400 Christian (Pueblo) auxiliaries to make war against the Navajos to the west of the Jemez Mountains. On the very eve of the Pueblo Revolt, Pueblo Indians were being used in considerable numbers in the Apache wars. The Spaniards do not seem to have realized that they were training Pueblo men for warfare, not only with Apaches but potentially with themselves.

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