THE high, dry country of New Mexico is the birthplace of America’s tall tale. The land’s heady mixture of winelike air, sparkling sunlight, and bare-earth colors dazzles the senses and stimulates the imagination, so that the separation of fantasy from fact becomes a difficult, sometimes impossible, chore. Here, where space stretches far and often resembles the moonscape, golden mirages and extravagant yarns of lost treasure have found a compatible breeding ground. The past is pock-marked with stories of men gone a little crazy, running pell-mell after nonexistent riches. Many among the gullible came to pointless and tragic endings, but a few, in their mad scramble to chase fantastic myths, changed the course of history. Among the latter were sixteenth-century Spaniards beguiled by a now almost forgotten fable of seven golden cities. The pursuit of this wonder sent them on tremendous journeys that ultimately led to the discovery, exploration, and naming of New Mexico.
The legend of seven cities was an old one, variant of a tale long popular in medieval Spain. According to tradition, seven bishops fled their country ahead of the Moorish invasion in the eighth century. Sailing westward, they reached the island of Antilia (a name echoed today in the Antilles Islands), where they each built an opulent city brimming with treasure. Graciousus Benincasa, on his map of 1482, placed Antilia west of the Madeiras, and on it he inscribed names of the seven mythical cities. After Columbus made his discovery, men wondered if these metropolises might lie somewhere on the northern continent.
The earliest Spanish captains, looking at the New World through medieval lenses, fully expected to find the fabulous places described in their ancient literature. They were particularly attentive to any reference to the magical number seven. Persistent rumor told of seven Indian towns in the jungles of western Mexico. And the Maya of Yucatan, as well as the Aztecs of central Mexico, spoke of seven caves from which their ancestors had sprung. Then, in 1539, something of real substance surfaced: a Franciscan friar, traveling hundreds of leagues north of Mexico City to a land called Cíbola, claimed actually to have seen, from a distance, the first of the seven wondrous cities. His announcement set off a chain of events destined to form the initial chapter in the history of Spanish New Mexico.
The willingness of colonial Spaniards to put faith in romantic and imaginative tales owed much to the extraordinary experience of Fernando Cortez, the man who discovered and conquered the land we now know as Mexico. With a fleet of ships, Cortez sailed from Cuba in 1519, intending to explore the then unknown mainland to the west. Entering Mexican waters from the Caribbean, he was deeply impressed by the natural beauty of the coastline. The country so reminded him of his Spanish homeland that he decided to call it New Spain, Nueva España, and that title remained to the end of the colonial period. It also established a precedent for other European powers that later named their American possessions New England, New France, New Netherlands, and New Sweden.
Landing on the Gulf Coast, Cortez and his daredevil soldiers heard of a stupendous kingdom nestling in a high valley beyond a wall of mountains and presided over by an emperor named Montezuma. An epic march took the Spaniards inland to the edge of the Valley of Mexico and to their first glimpse of Tenochtitlán, the treasure-laden capital of the Aztecs. What they beheld was one of the world’s great cities, its inhabitants numbering in the hundreds of thousands, of whose existence until that moment Europeans had been wholly unaware. Awestruck, these knights of Spain gazed at magnificent palaces, temples, and towers, and at the glitter of a welcoming committee headed by Montezuma’s nephew, who rode in a gold litter adorned with jewels and green plumes. The incredible picture reminded them of nothing less than the enchanted scenes described in fanciful novels of medieval chivalry. “To many of us,” wrote one of the soldiers afterward, “it seemed doubtful whether we were asleep or awake … for never yet did man see, hear, or dream of anything to equal the spectacle which appeared to our eyes on this day.”1
Over the next two years, Cortez made himself master of the land and, in the process, destroyed both the Indian empire and Tenochtitlán. Upon the ruins of the native capital, he built a new Spanish metropolis called Mexico City, after Mexica, the Aztecs’ name for themselves. In the vernacular of the day, the word Mexico became synonymous with riches beyond reckoning and served as the yardstick by which future discoveries were measured.
The stunning conquest of the Aztecs and their fabulous state placed such strains upon the imagination that, for long afterward, the Spaniards were prepared to accept every absurd tale that reached their ears. Given the improbable events that had already come to pass, it was natural that their minds should conjure up even more fantastic possibilities beyond the horizon. If one Mexico, one storehouse of treasure, could exist, why not another, perhaps tucked away in the mountain-and-desert fastness of the far north? In time, the quest for a new Mexico would draw conquistadors like a magnet toward the frontier of the Rio Grande and beyond.
In the defeat of the Aztecs, Cortez reaped a fortune and gained a title of nobility from the king. But he failed to win what he coveted most: the right to rule over lands he had seized for Spain. The crown looked with wariness upon men of ambition and strength, and it moved to clip the wings of Fernando Cortez.
In 1535, the vast domain stretching from Central America to the misty unknown north was organized as the Viceroyalty of New Spain, under a royal official who bore the title of viceroy. Cortez, with his record of accomplishment, expected to be named to the post; but it went instead to a man sent out by the king, Antonio de Mendoza. The aging conquistador accepted his eclipse with grace and made plans to turn his energies to new projects of discovery in western and northern New Spain. But his main effort was finished, and, in the quest for another Mexico, he was forced to make way for younger swashbucklers.
The search was suddenly given focus in 1536, when four destitute figures, more scarecrows than men, appeared in Culiacán, the outermost settlement northwest of Mexico City. They were the only survivors of the resplendent Narváez Expedition that had set sail from Cuba in 1528 to colonize Florida. After a series of disasters that brought the enterprise to ruin, these four alone, shipwrecked on the Texas coast, had managed to make their way westward from one Indian tribe to another across the middle Rio Grande to eventual safety. It was a harrowing odyssey that carried them—the first Europeans—through the interior wilds of the North American continent.
Leader and spokesman of this party of three Spaniards and a black slave was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the original expedition’s treasurer. What he and his companions had seen of value in the remote and sterile country sounded meager enough: some cotton shawls of the Indians, beads, coral from the South Sea (Pacific), turquoise, and five arrowheads made of “emeralds,” which were probably malachite. More to the point were things of which they had heard but failed to see, notably a populous country to the north whose people possessed large houses and traded in turquoise and other desirable goods. It was a mere scrap of information, but one quickly seized upon by eager Spaniards. Could this be a clue to another Mexico?
His Excellency Don Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, meant to find out. He proposed a small reconnaissance party to go and probe the secrets of the northern mystery, for more definite information was needed to justify a full-scale expedition of conquest. Thus it was that a Franciscan friar was picked for the mission which, in a matter of months, would lead to the finding of the seven cities of Cíbola.
The friar was Father Marcos de Niza, an adventuresome cleric who had been with Francisco Pizarro during the conquest of Peru and who had served afterward in Guatemala. Both his experience and his religious calling seemed to qualify Fray Marcos as a truthful reporter. Moreover, to the viceroy’s way of thinking, a friar would not stir up the Indians along the way, nor would his simple wants entail unnecessary expense for the royal treasury in the event that his hunt came to nothing.
In March of 1539, Fray Marcos set out, escorted by friendly Indians and guided by one of the castaways who had accompanied Cabeza de Vaca. His guide was Estevanico, the black slave, a man considered resourceful at finding a trail or dealing with the natives.
The precise route taken and the ultimate point reached by Fray Marcos have been much debated by historians. His own account of the journey is sketchy, and, within a year after his return, what he claimed to have done and seen was brought into serious question. But existing evidence allows the following story to be pieced together with some color of certainty.
Fray Marcos, Estevanico, and their Indian retainers walked up the west side of Mexico, angled through the sun-drenched desert of southern Arizona, and approached the cluster of pueblos belonging to the Zuñi people, located just inside the modern New Mexico boundary. They had found the fabled province of Cíbola, about which natives farther south had spoken with awe. Estevanico, ranging ahead in his role as scout, entered the first Zuñi town of Hawikúh. The tribesmen proved hostile in this, their initial encounter with a man from the Old World. His strange appearance may have pegged the black man as a sorcerer, for even today the Zuñi maintain a healthy regard for spellbinders and witches. Or perhaps it was the liberties Estevanico took with the women, or his appetite for turquoise. In any case, the Indians slew the fearsome scout and, for good measure, cut his body into pieces. Several members of Estevanico’s escort escaped and carried word of the deed back to Fray Marcos.
The friar had been moving ahead rapidly, but the dire news brought progress to a sudden halt. Natives in his own band threatened to kill him in reprisal for relatives and friends lost with Estevanico. Fray Marcos calmed them with kind words and distributed small trinkets. Then he hastened on again until he entered the limits of Cíbola and glimpsed the pueblo of Hawikúh from afar. Fear kept him from going closer.
So it happened that the clear, rarified New Mexico air, heightening the illusionary effects of light and space, played its trick and showed the eager Franciscan what he wanted to see. Of Hawikúh, aglow with sunlight, he later informed the viceroy: “It appears to be a very beautiful city; the houses are … all of stone, with their stories and terraces, as it seemed to me from a hill whence I could view it.”2 His own Indians told him it was the least of seven cities, and that another, far larger than any in Cíbola, lay beyond. Called Tontonteac, it possessed so many houses and people that there was no end to it.
A skeptical man might have lingered awhile longer on the fringes of Cíbola; he might even have skirted it and gone on to seek the mystery of Tontoneac. But Fray Marcos had seen enough to confirm in his mind what he and other Spaniards had already imagined. So, with his Indian followers arguing for retreat, prudence overrode skepticism. The friar, after claiming the land for his sovereign, turned south toward the capital with all speed to tell the viceroy what he had found.
The news that Fray Marcos brought of the discovery of seven cities spread like wildfire and grew in the telling. In no time, the embroidered tale included mention of abundant gold and of civilized people who had weights and measures, wore woolen clothes, and rode on strange beasts. Some urgency existed in laying claim to the new prize, for it was known in Mexico that Hernando de Soto, governor of Cuba, had won royal approval to explore the mysterious land of Florida. And, given the imperfect notions of geography that prevailed, no one knew whether Cíbola lay close to Florida.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was the young governor of the western province of Nueva Galicia. He happened to be at home in his primitive little capital of Compostela during late June of 1539, when Fray Marcos de Niza made a stopover on his way from Cíbola to Mexico City. Thus, Coronado was among the first to get word of the seven cities and to be stricken with gold fever. He went on with the friar to the viceregal capital, listened to the formal report made to Antonio de Mendoza, and shared in the excitement that followed.
Viceroy Mendoza, up to this point, had moved cautiously. Now, with the favorable disclosures of Fray Marcos, he was ready to act. Someone must go at the head of a full-blown expedition to unlock the secrets of Cíbola and conquer what surely would be another Mexico. The viceroy toyed briefly with the idea of assuming leadership himself, but the demands of his office kept him chained in Mexico City. Next best was to send a close and trusted friend, one who could carry his own weight and command men. The eager governor of Nueva Galicia seemed to meet the requirements.
Mendoza invested heavily in the expedition’s costs for outfitting both an overland party and a co-operating fleet of three ships to be sent up the Gulf of California. Coronado, for his part, added fifty thousand pesos, a sum that would represent now perhaps a million dollars. The two men took as an article of faith that the seven cities of legend had been found and that each was a bursting cornucopia.
Fray Marcos, of course, would go as guide. By now he was something of a celebrity, his story all the rage in New Spain. Some three hundred men enlisted as soldiers, many of them of noble blood, and a host of Indian allies and servants were added to the train. Five friars, in addition to Fray Marcos, joined the group, both to minister to the company on the march and to preach to the Cíbolans and other people that they might discover. The viceroy made clear in his instructions to Coronado that Indians in the new land should be treated with fairness and civility, so that “the conquest might be Christian and apostolic and not a butchery.”3 From earlier experience, the Spaniards had learned something.
On Sunday, February 22, 1540, exactly 192 years to the day before the birth of George Washington, Viceroy Mendoza was on hand at the outpost of Compostela to conduct a grand review and muster of Coronado’s company. The following morning, amid pageantry and soaring hopes, the glittering cavalcade departed. Not a man there could foresee that the hour of glory at the launching would be the high point of the expedition and that the year ahead would be overspread with bitterness and weighted with defeat.
The march north was anything but a holiday outing. As the company crossed southeastern Arizona, provisions grew short, and tempers became frayed as men and animals wore thin. After six hard months on the trail up from Mexico, Cíbola began to take on new importance as a place where food and rest could be found.
Then Hawikúh, westernmost of the Zuñi towns, came into sight, and luster faded from the dream. The shock of Fray Marcos was as great as that of anyone else. Instead of a dazzling city, there, perched on a flat and sandy hill, was a rock-and-mud pueblo “all crumpled together.” Eatables it might contain, but that was the extent of its treasure. In anger, the Spaniards heaped curses upon Fray Marcos, and shortly Coronado wrote to the viceroy, informing him acidly that the padre “has not told the truth in a single thing that he has said, for everything is the very opposite of what he related except the name of the cities.”4
Worse, the people of Hawikúh proved belligerent, and the first of the seven cities had to be taken by storm. But once it was in Spanish hands, a deputation arrived from the remaining towns to make peace. A count showed that the Zuñi had only six pueblos; Fray Marcos had been mistaken even in that. In desperation, Coronado began casting glances beyond Cíbola. Perhaps something worth their trouble still lay hidden in the wide and sunlit land.
A detachment under Pedro de Tovar headed for Tusayan, the Tontonteac about which Fray Marcos had heard the year before. Upon investigation, that province, inhabited by the Hopi Indians of northern Arizona, presented an even poorer appearance than Cíbola. Another wing of the army, captained by García López de Cárdenas, went farther and came upon the Grand Canyon, but even the massive grandeur of the world’s greatest gorge could not offset disappointment over the paltriness of the “seven cities.”
Then expectations soared again. Several Indians, led by a chief the Spaniards nicknamed “Bigotes”—“Whiskers”—reached Hawikúh from the east. They had learned of the bearded strangers from Zuñi messengers and were curious. Bigotes, a handsome and well-proportioned young man, presented Coronado with gifts of finely tanned buckskin and received beads and small bells in return. More important, Bigotes was full of information about a new province called Tiguex, where numerous pueblos lay strung along the wide rope of a river. That stream, one the Spaniards would soon call the Rio del Norte, is what we know today as the Rio Grande.
Past the eastern pueblos, Bigotes related, there stretched a limitless plain that melted into the sunrise, a country mysterious and little known. It was tenanted by immense herds of “woolly, humpbacked cattle,” ferocious animals whose horns and hooves had felled many an Indian hunter. If the Spaniards wished to travel east and see for themselves, they would find a welcome, and Bigotes would serve as guide.
With the illusion of Cíbola in tatters, Coronado seized upon Bigotes’s recital as some small promise of better things ahead. Three hundred irritable young bloods needed action; and, if nothing else, exploration consumed surplus energies. Pedro de Alvarado, one of Coronado’s subordinates, went ahead with a picked body of men to sound out prospects for the main army. He paused briefly at Acoma, the pueblo that, to this day, resides 380 feet in the air atop its incredible rock; pushed on to Tiguex and other Rio Grande pueblos; continued to Bigotes’s native village of Pecos; and made a hurried excursion onto the Buffalo Plains, where he followed the Canadian River for one hundred leagues before turning back.
Coronado, biding his time in Cíbola, felt some relief when a message arrived from his lieutenant, suggesting that the expedition move to Tiguex and take up winter quarters. If the land held any opportunities, clearly they lay in the east.
On the Rio Grande, the Spaniards found twelve Tiwa (or Tigua) pueblos clustered in the area north of present-day Albuquerque, and other villages lay both north and south. Like those of Cíbola, the towns resembled multistoried apartments, with ladders or notched logs giving access to upper levels. Cubical rooms in each huge complex shared common roofs and walls and were piled upon one another stair-step fashion, sometimes up to seven stories. With several hundred souls crowded inside, they were not only cozy dwellings, but formidable fortresses.
The piece of river valley where Coronado stopped is still one of the most congenial spots in all New Mexico during the summer and fall. The air is bracing, and the sun is plentiful. Cottonwoods and willows shade the banks of the Rio Grande, casting a latticework of shadow on the roiling waters. Indians work with hoes to open small ditches that irrigate patches of green corn and melons. And they cast frequent glances, just as their ancestors did in Coronado’s day, toward the curved hump of Sandía Mountain to the east.
The beauty of this peak, whose timbered summit rises more than ten thousand feet above sea level, dominates the river and the surrounding countryside. The Tiwa call it Oku Piñ, South World Mountain. Among its craggy battlements near cloud level dwell important deities like the Twin War Gods; like Wind Woman, who raises the spring dust storms; and like Spider Woman, whose friendship to the Pueblo people is commemorated in ancient legend.
In wintertime, when Sandía Mountain is crowned with snow and a cutting wind rattles the withered cornstalks, life in the valley is not so pleasant, as Coronado and his company found out. With considerable presumption, they obliged the Tiwa to vacate one of their villages—Alcanfor—to provide lodging for the army. The Indians left grudgingly. Later Coronado requisitioned grain from native stores and imposed a levy of blankets, so that his men, used to the tropics, might have some protection from the severe weather. The expedition’s chronicler justified such highhandedness with the age-old refrain that necessity knows no law.
Other incidents followed. The Indians rebelled. Two pueblos were laid waste, and refugees streamed toward Oku Piñ, a welcome sanctuary even in the dead of winter. It was the worst sort of diplomatic bungling, necessity aside, and for his part in it, Coronado would later be called to account.
Had it not been for an Indian named “the Turk” and his extravagant yarns, the winter of 1540–1541, with its hunger and biting cold, would have witnessed the smothering of Spanish hopes. On his trip east the previous fall, Alvarado had taken an Indian in tow at Pecos Pueblo and had dubbed him the Turk, “because he looked like one.”5 That Indian, born of some Plains tribe, became a new prophet of glory. Through signs, he told of a distant kingdom, ruled over by an emperor who slept under a tree festooned with golden bells. In a river six miles wide floated galleons with gold ornaments at the prows, and in the water swam fish bigger than horses. Gold and silver were so plentiful, claimed the Turk, that wagons would be needed to cart it all away. How many of these fabrications were his own and how many the Spaniards invented from his telling is impossible to say. The Pueblos had a hand in it also, for it seems that they encouraged the fellow to make such talk in the hope of drawing the troublesome white men out of their country.
From the beginning, Coronado’s quest for mythical cities possessed all the trappings of a medieval adventure story. His band of knights in burnished armor needed only some monumental success to transmute legend into reality, and the Turk’s golden kingdom on the prairies, which they were now calling Quivira, seemed to fulfill the requirements and to promise a happy conclusion to the fable. The episode was to prove again that the more preposterous a tale, the more apt it is to be believed.
The following spring, Coronado set out for Quivira in a last bid to refurbish his tarnished star. Following directions of the Turk, he steered northeast across the Staked Plains of the Texas Panhandle and was brought at last to the end of the rainbow. In central Kansas, he discovered the grass houses of the Wichita Indians, and a chief who prized a copper plate worn about the neck because that was the only metal he had ever seen. This was the much-vaunted Quivira. The deceitful Turk was executed on the spot, and the dejected Spaniards, after erecting a cross to mark their farthest advance, retraced their steps to the Rio Grande.
In his own mind, Coronado now admitted failure. Some with spirit among the expedition favored continuing the search, and they asked permission to establish a settlement. Also, several of the friars expressed a wish to remain and begin missionary work. Coronado denied their requests, and, in April 1542, turned his party toward New Spain. Three of the clergy, nevertheless, overrode his authority and, with several Indian servants, elected to stay behind. They were never seen again.
In terms of its original goals, Coronado’s march was a fizzle. He and his backers suffered financial loss, and the rigors of the trail broke both his spirit and his health. A cold reception by his patron, the viceroy, awaited him in Mexico City. And more. In September 1543, charges were raised against him, alleging abuse of the Tiguex Indians and contending that he passed up an opportunity to enlarge the realm by founding a settlement on the Rio Grande. Lengthy investigation by Mexico’s high court acquitted Coronado of misconduct, but the verdict did little to restore his reputation.
Time has dealt with him more charitably. Seen in the perspective of centuries, his expedition stands as the grandest ever to invade the American West. Coronado expanded enormously the geographic knowledge of North America’s heartland and first gave to the world some notion of the continent’s interior vastness. His men were the first Europeans to view the Grand Canyon, the first to penetrate the interior of Puebloland, the first to recognize the Continental Divide, the first to cross the oceanic plains. Throughout a journey marked by unparalleled hardship and disillusionment, Coronado provided courageous leadership that alone brought his army intact back to Mexico. In spite of his mishandling the Indians and his failure to find gold, his record remains a remarkable one.
The career of Coronado and that of Hernando de Soto, who explored at the same time Florida and the lower Mississippi valley, have left an indelible, if sometimes negative, impression on American history. They served as models by which people, centuries later, came to judge all Spaniards. How many American schoolboys, for instance, have had the phrase “Spaniards lusting for gold” drummed into their heads? It is simple to say that the men of Spain lost all reason with the mention of gold, that the merest hint of a new bonanza was enough to send them skittering off to the wilderness on some bootless and harebrained enterprise. But like most stock images, that one distorts the truth. The fact is that the Spaniard was no more—or no less—prone to lose his wits over the search for treasure than was any other European. For what fairness can be found in condemning Spanish adventurers with one breath and, with the next, approving the mindless stampede of the forty-niners to California or the swarming of American prospectors into the Black Hills that had been granted by treaty to the Sioux?
The Coronado expedition is practically the only New Mexico episode to find its way into American history books. While its spectacular character and perennial interest cannot be denied, for the sake of balance, we should recall that that event was scarcely more than a brief prologue in the long story of Spanish activity on the Rio Grande.
Actually, the era of the gold-seeking conquistador, with all its smoke and thunder, was brief and transitory. Before a single English colonist had set foot on the mainland, conquest almost everywhere in New Spain had given way to productive settlement. Mexico City, by the 1570s, held a population of fifteen thousand, possessed refined public and private buildings, and supported a university that conferred degrees in law and theology. Other cities stretching toward the northern frontier flourished as important outposts of European civilization. The conquistadors, with all their foibles, were the men who made this possible.
The next chapter in New Mexico’s story was added some forty years after Coronado marched home to disgrace, and it involved a flurry of four lesser expeditions. These are little known, but they are significant, for in their unfolding, more myths were dispelled. And, in their place, the notion arose that New Mexico was a country worth settling.
To reach Cíbola, Fray Marcos and Coronado had leapfrogged across almost a thousand leagues of forlorn and desolate wilderness. They labeled one section in Arizona the Despoblado, the Uninhabited Place, because even the Indians shunned it. When no rich cities appeared at the end of the northern trail, Spaniards for a time became content to push ahead the frontier line above Mexico City in a more orderly fashion.
This is not to say that the lure of the north had altogether lost its magic. Enough unknown country stretched beyond Cíbola and Quivira to excite wonder and to lead the imagination to conjure up new mysteries. Most seductive was the belief in a continental passage, the Strait of Anian, giving access to the Pacific. For two hundred years, that vision charmed the Spaniards, until the true geography of North America was puzzled out and finally understood. During four decades, however, following Coronado’s wayfaring, lands on the Rio Grande and beyond saw no horses or bearded knights. Interest in the Pueblo country and search for the strait had suddenly taken second place to more impelling events farther south.
In the year 1546, soldiers on an Indian campaign chanced upon a spectacular silver deposit at a place called Zacatecas, northwest of Mexico City. The strike brought a stampede of miners and prospectors to the frontier. Scouring the country in an ever-widening arc, determined men with picks made additional discoveries that allowed the creation of the new provinces of Nueva Vizcaya (modern Durango and Chihuahua), San Luis Potosí, and Nuevo León. The flow of metal created mining barons overnight and made the Mexican peso one of the most sought-after coins in the world. And it had another result, for it sparked a new interest in the lands seen by Coronado.
Some of the soldiers who had gone on that epic journey recalled in later years that the bare, rock-ribbed mountains flanking the Rio Grande resembled the sierras in the south that were now yielding up fortunes in silver. Was it not possible, and even likely, that those lands that had appeared so sterile and had turned out so disappointing in 1540 might actually be filled with riches? The enticing prospect was one to ponder and to build new dreams upon. By the 1580s at the latest, the idea had taken hold and had fathered a revival of the old hope of another Mexico. From that time forward, Spaniards referred to the vast northern interior as New Mexico, and the name clung, even when the country continued to prove a burying ground for visions of easy wealth.
Another force was at work, drawing attention northward, and it was one more potent than any inspired by fanciful silver mines or mythical straits. Bedded deep in the conscience of all Spaniards lay the conviction that their nation was chosen to convert the heathen of the New World. The source of that missionary impulse resided far back in Spanish history. During the Middle Ages, when Christian knights had struggled to free their Iberian homeland from the African Moors of Islamic faith, Spanish Catholicism had assumed a militant quality unparalleled in Europe. Priest and soldier worked in concert for centuries to achieve a common aim: drive the infidel back across the Strait of Gibraltar. The clergy raised money for the war effort, ministered to the spiritual needs of the soldier, and furnished him a noble reason for fighting.
In Spain, the man of the sword, profiting from that cooperation, became pre-eminently a crusader. The relationship continued when another theater of conquest opened in the New World. The triumph over Islam at home and the discovery of America confirmed Spaniards in the belief that the Almighty had found their performance pleasing and that He wished them to extend their mission to the pagan Indians in the wilderness.
That conceit bred an enormous self-confidence and fueled superhuman efforts that allowed the Spaniard to explore and claim some of the world’s most forbidding deserts, mountains, and jungles in the space of a few short decades. It also contributed to the formation of the most popular image of the Spaniard handed to us by history: that of the armored conquistador moving fearlessly into some howling wasteland, with a robed and sandal-shod padre striding humbly by his side. As far as New Mexico is concerned, at least in the early years, that image is not unsound.
It was in fact a Franciscan lay brother, not a prospector after silver nor an explorer questing for the Strait of Anian, who set off the chain of events that brought about the rediscovery and ultimately the colonization of the land of the Pueblos. His name was Fray Agustín Rodríguez, and, in 1580, he was saving souls among the Conchos Indians of southern Chihuahua near the outpost town of Santa Bárbara. Hearing stray reports of an advanced agricultural people who lived to the north, Fray Agustín perceived a splendid opportunity to expand the field of the church. He knew a little of Coronado’s earlier exploration, but initially, it seems, he failed to connect it with the land he was now proposing to enter.
After receiving permission from the viceroy, the friar put together his expedition, comprised of two additional Franciscans, nine soldiers, and some nineteen Indian servants. The soldiers were volunteers, animated in some measure by a desire to carry out their ancient role as protectors and supporters of the clergy. But, as several of them had experience in prospecting, it is easy to guess that they intended to keep a sharp eye peeled for promising signs of minerals.
The party got off on June 5, 1581, pushed down the Conchos River to its junction with the Rio Grande, then ascended that stream to the villages of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. The friars were exuberant. The potential harvest of converts exceeded all expectations. Hernando Gallegos, a member of the escort, expressed a thoroughly favorable opinion of the Pueblo people. He saw them as clean, handsome, and industrious, and he felt that if interpreters had been available, some would have quickly become Christians.
The inquisitive band of Spaniards probed the secrets of this strange country, visiting Taos in the far north, the buffalo range beyond the Pecos River, and the western homes of the Acoma and Zuñi. One of the friars, Father Juan de Santa María, was so elated with what he saw that he set off alone to carry a report to Mexico. But the Pueblos, whose docility was more apparent than real, believed he was going to fetch more soldiers; warriors therefore followed his trail for three days and killed him. The mischief done by Coronado’s men two decades before bore bitter fruit.
Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado, captain of the soldier contingent, decided they had dallied in that quarter long enough. Not so Fray Rodríguez and his remaining companion, Father Francisco López: they were not about to leave when before them loomed the kind of prospect every missionary dreamed of. They would stay and build a mission at the Tiguex pueblo of Puaray; the soldiers were free to go home.
Chamuscado died of a fever just a few leagues before reaching Santa Bárbara; but his men, including Hernando Gallegos, went on with news of what had been done. Of immediate concern was the safety of the two friars left in New Mexico. Frontiersmen spoke of a rescue, and they were encouraged by a certain Fray Bernardino Beltrán who wished to go and aid his fellow Franciscans.
A colonial merchant and man of circumstance, Antonio de Espejo, agreed to finance and lead an expedition. After recruiting fourteen soldiers, he and Fray Bernardino set a course for the Rio Grande in November of 1582. They were too late. The friars at Puaray had been slain, evidently soon after their escort left. At that discovery, Espejo showed his larger motive: he was interested in a rumored lake of gold and in mines hinted at by the Indians. Brushing aside complaints from Fray Bernardino, he went pelting off into the tablelands west of the Rio Grande. The golden lake was a phantom; but, casting a wider loop than had any Spaniard before him, Espejo uncovered, near modern Prescott in central Arizona, outcroppings of copper that displayed a little silver. In his own mind and in later writings, he magnified the importance of his find enormously. Returning to the Rio Grande, he encountered hostility among the Indians at Puaray, so he sacked the pueblo and executed sixteen captives. The people of Tiguex were learning again what it meant to oppose the reckless Spaniards.
Espejo’s exaggerated recital of New Mexico’s potential richness, given upon his arrival home, stirred up sleeping dogs left lying since Coronado had punctured the myths of the seven cities and Quivira. Plenty of stout souls were still willing to risk their necks for a chance at fortune. But the matter rested with the king, and his pious majesty, who saw himself as the supreme crusader, cared more for extending the dominion of the church than in listening to embellished tales of treasure. It was the large number and quality of the Pueblo Indians that titillated his interest. That consideration led him to issue a royal decree (dated Madrid, April 19, 1583) directing the viceroy of New Spain to arrange a contract with some responsible citizen to go, at his own expense, to settle and pacify the land now known as New Mexico and to see to the conversion of the native people. After much scrambling among a legion of contenders, the prize finally went to Juan de Oñate of Zacatecas.
During the years when the Spanish bureaucracy was shuffling papers and moving at a snail’s pace toward the appointment of Oñate, two wholly unauthorized expeditions left for New Mexico. The first was led by Castaño de Sosa, the second by Leyva de Bonilla. While their influence on history was slight, they do illuminate the workings of a new Spanish law that governed exploration and conduct toward the Indians.
In the interval since Coronado and de Soto had marched to conquer, the entire concept of conquest had been called into question and was found wanting in morality. As a consequence, His Spanish Majesty had issued a set of Royal Ordinances in 1573, outlawing the use of violence in dealing with the Indians, except in a few specified cases, such as when they offered submission and then later rebelled. The measure set strict standards of conduct for soldiers, colonists, and friars, and bade them use gentleness and persuasion with the native people. The repugnant term conquest, which seemed to give license to strong-arm tactics, was now replaced by pacification. The juggling of words was more than an idle formality designed to appease Spain’s critics. It meant that the king firmly intended to protect his Indian subjects.
Proclaiming worthy laws in Madrid was one thing; enforcing them under the stern realities of life on a far frontier was another. And the crown knew it.
So it added a key feature to the Ordinances in hopes of insuring their observance. In the future, no Spaniard would be allowed to undertake discovery and settlement of new lands on his own responsibility. Such enterprises, vital to the affairs of empire and church, could only proceed under strictest supervision and with personal authorization of the king. The viceroy might review qualifications of those interested in leading expeditions, might make a preliminary selection and draft a contract defining privileges and restrictions under which they were to operate. But the final decision in all these matters remained that of the sovereign. If only men of proven loyalty and high quality received admission to the frontier—and they were bound by tight laws—the king reasoned that expansion of his New World realm could advance at a more serene pace and that maltreatment of the Indians would abate.
The idea was noble, if unrealistic. Certainly it left no room for bold individualists to go their own way. Pioneers in English America would have found such restrictions not only meddlesome but intolerable. Spaniards, on the other hand, viewed the ordinances with the same reverence they attached to all the king’s commands. Outwardly, at least, most tried to conform. The few who did not paid for their folly.
A fraudulent silver assay and the first wagon train to cross a portion of what is now the United States figured in a testing of the Royal Ordinances during the years 1590–1591. Gaspar Castafio de Sosa, lieutenant-governor of Nuevo León in northeastern New Spain, was the man who stirred up the tempest, when he decided on his own initiative to settle New Mexico.
Ruling Nuevo León in the absence of a governor, this ambitious and restive Spaniard looked about for some way to carve a name for himself. The small silver-mining town of Almadén, where he maintained his headquarters, offered slim prospects. The original strike had burned itself out in a matter of months, and the residents were left almost destitute. All goods had to be carried in on muleback over rough trails, and few could afford their exorbitant cost. Almadén was a place without a future.
Not so New Mexico. Every man of the frontier, Castaño de Sosa included, knew that there lay the next utopia whose mountains and mesas offered certain reward. Why not pack up the people of Almadén—men, women, and children, numbering some 170 souls—and break for that shining land? The plan, in its sheer audacity, was a novel one. In aim, it foreshadowed the movement of countless American pioneers who, in later centuries, would leave home to seek more fertile pastures.
Unfortunately, there was a hitch. The law of 1573 stood in the way. Could it be circumvented?
At that very moment, Oñate and other influential men were petitioning the crown for permission to invade and pacify the northland, as Castaño de Sosa was probably aware. No matter. He would ride out anyway, and as justification for his action, he settled upon a technicality. New Mexico was not a new country waiting to be discovered. Coronado, Fray Agustín, and Espejo had explored it and made effective Spain’s claim. So his colony would go forth, pretending confusion, because rules in the Ordinances referred to “new discoveries.”
It was a shaky point, the lieutenant-governor well understood, since prevailing law prohibited travel anywhere without official sanction. Therefore, to show conformity with the law, he would request permission of the viceroy, but only after measuring a good start on the trail. A bold push might carry the project through. If it succeeded and he colonized New Mexico, his superiors would likely accept the fact and give grudging endorsement. At least that was his hope.
Another problem arose, less formidable than the legal one, but more immediate. Some of the Almadén people, whether out of fear of the unknown or from mere inertia, failed to warm to the idea of migration. Resourceful Castaño de Sosa, with the cleverness of a magician, produced some Indians from the north who happened to be toting a load of rock threaded with gleaming metal. He made an assay, attended by much hullabaloo, and before it was finished, he slipped a silver mug into the pot, without anyone being the wiser. The upshot of his little deceit was predictable. At the completion of the assay—when a small, rough ingot of silver passed from hand to hand—the majority raised a clamor to be off at once. For the benefit of a tiny handful who still held back, the leader announced airily that any man not joining would be executed as a traitor to the king. In the end, all tagged along. So once more the celestial vision of a treasured kingdom furnished grist for another installment in the early history of New Mexico.
The struggling colonists from Nuevo León cast themselves adrift without a map, much less a road over which to roll their ten wagons and carts. Castaño de Sosa knew vaguely of the Pecos River, and he guessed its valley might offer a convenient avenue to their destination. He directed his path across the thorny shrub and cactus flats of south Texas, where the hard and pebbly soil wore out twenty-five dozen horseshoes in a matter of days.
Plagued with thirst, the Spaniards reached the Pecos to find its waters pregnant with bitter alkaline salts, but the valley opened above them through diminutive forests of greasewood and pointed the way they wished to travel. When the terraced walls of Pecos Pueblo at last rose to view, on December 30, 1590, they had been on the trail for five months, an epic trek accomplished with nerve and daring. Scarcely known today, their journey marked the first passage of wagons upon ground destined to become part of the American nation. Though the people spoke Spanish and moved north instead of west, they deserve credit as forerunners of that tidal wave of settlers in prairie schooners who would one day pour across trails of the Far West.
For the next two and a half months, Castaño de Sosa wandered among the Pueblos along the Rio Grande. He exacted promises of obedience to God and king and conducted himself with restraint, just as the Royal Ordinances demanded. Some of his followers, who had never developed much heart for the undertaking, became disquieted and began to whisper of mutiny. Their poking about in the mountains revealed no silver mines, and nothing else in that desolate region excited their interest.
When the sword fell, however, it was not from within. Out of the south, a troop of fifty soldiers suddenly appeared, bearing an order of arrest issued by the king and the viceroy. Flinty Castaño de Sosa accepted the document, placed it over his head in token of submission, and with supreme dignity received the iron fetters that he was to wear back to Mexico City. Like others before him, he had gambled on the reputed riches of New Mexico and lost.
A second incident offers more evidence of the Spanish government’s hostility toward illegal expeditions. Not long after the Castaño de Sosa episode, a Captain Francisco Leyva de Bonilla led his troop of soldiers against renegade Indians who were attacking cattle ranches along the Nueva Vizcayan frontier. The campaign stretched into weeks and carried the men farther north than they had ever been before. Almost before they were aware of it, the lower reaches of New Mexico opened ahead of them. The pull of opportunity proved overpowering. Without any shadow of authority, Captain Leyva announced his intention to continue on to the Rio Grande. If anything worthwhile lay hidden there, he would find it.
The venture carried the small party of Spaniards and their Indian servants north to the pueblo of San Ildefonso, above the site of Santa Fe. There they remained for a year, parts of 1593 and 1594, living off the local people. When the Indians’ patience wore thin, they dredged up the shopworn, but still useful, tales of populous kingdoms tucked away on the outer margin of the Buffalo Plains. Captain Leyva and his men left in a cloud of dust kicked up by their horses. And they did not return.
Years later, one of the native servants, Jusepe, found Oñate on the Rio Grande and related the terrible sequel. The little company had gone east to a great settlement, probably the same seen by Coronado in Kansas, where one of the soldiers, Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña, quarreled with Leyva and killed him. Afterward, Indians overran the camp, and Jusepe, escaping, fled toward New Mexico, where he was picked up by roving Apaches. His information allowed the Spaniards to close the books on Captain Leyva, whose misdeed had provoked an order for his apprehension. The king remained unyielding: exploration was far too important to be left to law-breakers and soldiers-of-fortune.
Spaniards had now entered New Mexico on at least six distinct occasions. None of them stayed and settled, for the moment was not right, and all their comings and goings scarcely left a trace on the sprawling land. Then, in the bench-mark year of 1598, matters took a different turn.
Don Juan de Oñate, governor and adelantado, came with horsemen, livestock, and families in wagons. His caravan was attended by the rumbling, rattling, bawling, thumping medley of sounds that betray homeseekers on the wilderness roads of every new frontier. These reverberations spelled the beginning of change for New Mexico and the end of somnolent days in which the Pueblo Indians had lived and worked in perfect independence. For them, the time when centuries were allowed to drift evenly by, one almost indistinguishable from another, was definitely over.
About Juan de Oñate, founder of New Mexico, certain facts are plain. He was born in 1552, in the mining town of Zacatecas, which his father, a Basque, had helped establish six years before. Juan and his brother Cristóbal were twins, the latter named for their sire. The pair grew to manhood enjoying the advantages and prestige that came with being sons of a silver baron. But they shared in the hard knocks that were the lot of every youth weaned on the savage frontier beyond Mexico City.
Early in his teens, Juan de Oñate went as a soldier with the viceroy of New Spain to wage war against the ferocious Chichimecs of the north, who skinned Spaniards alive and left their bodies hanging along the roadways. For twenty years he fought them, becoming a seasoned campaigner; and, as head of his own expeditions, he won extensive new lands for the royal domain.
Juan married Isabel Cortez Tolosa, daughter of a mine owner and descendant, on her mother’s side, of Fernando Cortez. By her, he had two children. When Isabel died prematurely, in the late 1580s, the husband was overcome with grief, and friends, in the following years, claimed that his loss caused him to begin looking toward New Mexico as a place to forget his troubles.
These spare details we have. What is missing is the essence of the man—knowledge of his thinking and mood, understanding of the full scope of his motives. Even his physical appearance eludes us; we know only that, at the time of going north, he had reached his late forties and wore a beard, threaded with gray and neatly trimmed. No portrait survives of Oñate, nor indeed for any figure prominent in the affairs of New Mexico during that period—with a single exception.
Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, one of Oñate’s lieutenants and a most vocal supporter, published in Spain, in 1610, a volume entitled A History of New Mexico. In epic verse, it recounts the dry and miserable march of the settlers northward, the planting of a settlement above Santa Fe at San Gabriel, and the week-by-week existence of the colony’s first troubled months. As literature, it lacks distinction, but as the personal record of a crucial period in New Mexico history, the work stands unique. Furthermore, its printing came ten years before the landing of the Pilgrims and fourteen years before publication of Captain John Smith’s much-quoted history of Virginia.
From a heavy-lined woodcut, which serves as a frontispiece, stares forth Pérez de Villagrá, bearded, his balding head framed by one of the outsized fluted collars of the day. The austerity, the inner toughness, the dignity, and the natural grace so often attributed to Spaniards radiate from this simple portrait. It leads us to believe that something of the same qualities must have been apparent in the features of Juan de Oñate. What is known of his career in New Mexico confirms the suspicion.
The whole venture started badly. For three years—from 1595, when he began putting the pieces together, until his departure for New Mexico early in 1598—Oñate did battle with the ponderous bureaucracy that wanted each detail spelled out in advance. And at every turn, he had to fend off envious rivals who hoped to discredit him and grab the honors that went with the founding of a new province.
In the end, his perseverance won through. The viceroy and the king approved, after some modifications, the contract he had submitted. The most telling points were these: Oñate himself was to bear practically the entire expense of the project, including recruiting and equipping two hundred soldiers and their families, the assembling of livestock, and the purchase of supplies needed to build new homes on the Rio Grande. For his part, the king granted Oñate titles of governor, adelantado (purely honorific), and captain-general of New Mexico; a salary of six thousand ducats yearly; and the right to distribute land and Indian tribute to his followers. Since the main purpose of this occupation, at least in the eyes of the crown, was to pacify and Christianize the Indians, the royal treasury stood the cost of five missionaries and a lay brother.
Oñate received a set of instructions reminding him that the work of the Church had first claim on his attention. Pointed mention was made of the Ordinances of 1573, and a curious requirement was included, directing that a survey of New Mexico’s coastline and harbors be made. Everyone assumed that once this new bastion of settlement was installed at the core of the continent, the elusive Strait of Anian would providentially turn up. While all these considerations weighed on Governor Oñate, they failed to keep him from considering his own profit and glory. Into his personal stock of supplies went heavy mining tools and forges, bellows, and crucibles for smelting—just in case New Mexico yielded any silver.
After six months on the long trail from the south, Oñate’s cavalcade lumbered into the shelter of the Tewa pueblo of San Juan, astride the Rio Grande. Thirst and hunger and vast discouragement had worn the colonists ragged. Only constant prayer, much kneeling at open-air Masses, and the unbounded energy of the governor brought them through. But here was a fit place to build a capital.
San Juan stood in the midst of a narrow though fertile valley near the Chama River’s junction with the Rio Grande. East and west, lofty peaks marched in line across the horizon; one of them, Tsicomo, served as a sacred shrine for all the Tewa people. Reports of the Castaño de Sosa expedition had mentioned the hospitality of the residents of San Juan (in contrast to the Indians of Tiguex farther south, who had learned to despise the Spaniards) and the abundant surpluses of corn their irrigated fields produced. Oñate desperately needed friendship and food to face the coming winter.
Amiable relations were established almost at once. The San Juans lived up to their reputation, even offering to share their homes with the newcomers—at least that is Captain Villagrá’s testimony. One of the friars remarked that they were the best infidel people he had ever seen.
In the short space of two weeks, the Spaniards hastily threw up a church, large enough to contain every member of the colony. Their original intention was to construct a town adjacent to the pueblo, which they had come to call San Juan de los Caballeros. Within a few months, that plan was abandoned. Oñate ordered everyone to remove to the west bank of the Rio Grande, where there was more room to expand. On a low hill some three harquebus shots above the Chama, they began work on the villa of San Gabriel, New Mexico’s first capital.
The frustrations Oñate experienced in his decade as governor were all foreshadowed by a series of unnerving events during the initial months of occupation. Division in his ranks brought the first trouble.
More than he would have admitted, the governor was banking on some spectacular mineral discovery early in the game to give his men and his own hopes a needed lift. Almost at once he began visiting the shadowy corners of the province to obtain the allegiance of outlying pueblos and to search for ore-bearing rock. But his prospecting merely confirmed what others before him had already found out. New Mexico was not Zacatecas.
The small grain of enthusiasm that had survived the rigorous journey to the new country rapidly waned. Some men plotted mutiny; four others stole valuable horses and scurried south toward Santa Bárbara. Pérez de Villagrá pursued the deserters, caught two, and returned to San Juan with the gloomy tidings that he had beheaded them on the trail.
Then a greater disaster broke: massacre and retribution, the frontier’s twin scourges. Though it pulled the colonists together, weeks passed when survival of the tiny Spanish enclave by the Rio Grande appeared in doubt.
It started innocently enough in the late fall of 1598. Oñate took a squad of soldiers and rode southeast to survey a group of pueblos situated near some salt lakes beyond the Manzano Mountains. From there he decided to go directly west and find the seacoast, assuming that it lay within easy march. He sent a messenger to Juan de Zaldívar, his nephew and second-in-command, with orders to collect reinforcements and catch up with him on the trail. With luck, they would meet somewhere near Zuñi.
Young Zaldívar never made it. His party camped one evening at the foot of the great rock upon which Acoma Pueblo perched. Here dwelled some of the most independent-minded and openly hostile Indians in New Mexico. A military strategist would have judged their sky village to be the stoutest native stronghold in North America. On all sides, sheer walls rose abruptly hundreds of feet above the surrounding plain. Steep and narrow trails, at places mere toe holds pecked out of the rosy sandstone, provided the only way to the top. Above, on the flat surface, a fortified pueblo offered another perimeter of defense. Certainly the Acomas felt safe, else they would never have taken measures—which, through hindsight, appear foolhardy—to oppose the Spaniards.
Zaldívar and some of his men were lured to the summit, and a horde of painted and befeathered warriors fell upon them. One after another, the sword-swinging Spaniards went down, until the few who remained were driven to the edge of the cliff. There was no choice; they jumped. Twenty-year-old Pedro Robledo smashed against the rocky wall, his body tumbling to the base like a broken doll. Three other soldiers landed in sand dunes swept up by winds against the foot of the mesa. They were gathered up, dazed, by members of the horse guard who had remained below.
Oñate got the news as he was moving slowly over the trail west of Acoma. His nephew and ten of the men dead. Several more injured. The Acomas in revolt. Other pueblos showing hostility as word spread. The colony teetering on the brink of catastrophe.
When Pérez de Villagrá wrote later in his History that no men have ever yet been able to count upon good fortune and a lucky fate to order their affairs, he expressed a truism familiar to all Spaniards. For them, personal valor and a strong faith, demanding direct confrontation with problems, were the hallmarks of manhood. Trusting in chance or in the healing salve of time to resolve matters was not their way. That course only served weaklings.
And Juan de Oñate was no weakling, although persons unaccustomed to the behavior of Spaniards might have judged him so, if they had seen him pass that first night, after receiving the tragic news from Acoma, alone in his tent weeping and praying before a cross. Yet the succeeding weeks left no doubt of the man’s nerve or of his determination to hold the colonists together.
From his camp in the west, the governor beat a hasty path back to San Juan under a leaden December sky, arriving a few days before Christmas. The next weeks passed in feverish activity as war councils hummed and arms were readied with much clanking and polishing. Every Indian in New Mexico watched and waited to see what the Spaniards would do.
Oñate wanted to head the attack against Acoma himself, but on that, every soldier in the company voted against him. In the event that something went awry, he would be needed at home to take the surviving colonists out of New Mexico. Hence, leadership passed to Vicente de Zaldívar, younger brother of the slain Juan.
In mid-January, seventy men, with weapons glinting in the winter’s sunlight, departed for Acoma like a medieval army bent on a crusade. Of the monumental battle that took place—Spaniards scaling the walls in brutal assault; Indians pelting them with a hail of arrows and stones; the sheer blind courage of attacker and defender locked arm in arm in combat; the firing of the pueblo and appalling slaughter of its inhabitants—of all this on that battle-seared promontory, scarcely an American today knows a single detail. The Spaniards had their victory, but it was a heartbreaking day for humankind.
Oñate rejoiced, not so much in the ruination of a people and their home but in the salvation of his colony, for the terrible fate of Acoma effectively cooled the passion for war in other pueblos. But he meant to nail down the message with one last hammer-blow. Vicente de Zaldívar had returned to the Rio Grande, triumphant, leading a pathetic string of captives. Hundreds of Acomas were dead, but the governor still intended to hold these survivors accountable for the massacre of his nephew and his men. After a lopsided trial, conducted in mid-February 1599, Oñate handed down the sentences. Perhaps through clemency, he condemned no warrior to death. Yet the punishment was so harsh that almost four hundred years after the fact, it still strikes us with horror: men over twenty-five to have one foot cut off and to spend twenty years in personal servitude; young men between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, twenty years of personal servitude; women over twelve, twenty years of personal servitude; sixty young girls to be sent to Mexico City for service in convents, never to see their homeland again; and two Hopi taken at Acoma to have the right hand cut off and to be set free so they might convey to their people news of the retribution.
It would be pleasant to relate that, after the misfortunes of that first winter, Juan de Oñate got a firm grip on matters and was able to construct a solid foundation for the New Mexican colony. But such was not the case. In spite of his dedicated effort, the project slowly fell apart.
From the viceroy, Oñate was obliged to request military reinforcements, since, after Acoma, he dared not go on lengthy expeditions without a strong garrison to leave behind and defend San Gabriel. The plea for aid in itself alerted the crown that all was not going well on the Rio Grande. Red tape promoted the inevitable delays, so that the new contingent of soldiers, along with much-needed supplies and six additional friars, did not reach the capital until Christmas Eve, 1600. Thus strengthened, the governor was ready to resume the search for those things needed to give stability and glory to his frontier government: mines, the Strait of Anian, harbors on the South Sea.
First he looked toward Quivira as offering the greatest promise. He possessed a competent guide in Jusepe, the Indian who appeared from the plains with information on the fate of the Leyva de Bonilla party. But though the governor led eighty men down the Canadian River, across Oklahoma, and explored the gilded land of Quivira, like Coronado, he found nothing to stir the imagination or lend foundation to wispy legend.
Returning to his struggling settlement, Oñate received a crushing blow. San Gabriel was practically deserted. The majority of colonists, soldiers, and friars, sick to death from disappointments and angered by the governor’s strict rule, had taken advantage of his five-month absence and had gone back to New Spain. Many of the men had been aristocrats, living in comfortable circumstances before coming to New Mexico; and when heaven failed to drop immediate riches in their laps, they grew fussy and lost interest in the bleak little colony. Defection of the friars was the result of dissatisfaction with Oñate’s oftentimes stern policies toward the Indians. Yet they themselves had displayed a lack of zeal, staying at San Gabriel and offering excuses for not going to assignments at remote mission stations. They had emerged, in fact, as the ringleaders in the movement to abandon the province.
In face of this new setback, the governor stubbornly clung to the hope that, with the few loyal people remaining to him, he could somehow put things back together. While he sent Vicente de Zaldívar to Mexico and then to Spain in an effort to raise new money and recruits, the governor attempted one last search for the Golden Fleece. In the fall of 1604, he picked up the trail westward to the South Sea, the route he had been forced to quit in mid-stride at the time of the Acoma trouble. Even some small success might disperse the cloud gathering over his name, for he knew that the deserters, upon reaching New Spain, had accused him of incompetence and mismanagement.
With thirty men, less than half his Quivira expedition, Oñate struck across the heart of Arizona by way of the Hopi villages. He encountered the Colorado River and followed it to the head of the Gulf of California. Then he scouted about in a futile attempt to find rumored pearl fisheries. He listened to Indians who beguiled him with tales of a tribe of unipeds, of giant Amazons, and of people who slept under water. And he finally reckoned that nothing existed in these parts that could possibly benefit his province of New Mexico. Even the sea was too far away to be of any use. With this final throw of the dice, his last pinch of optimism faded.
New Mexico had become a millstone around Oñate’s neck. Gold and silver deposits, if he had but known it, lay within reach—in Colorado, in Arizona, in Nevada, and even in New Mexico. But he, and every Spaniard before and after him, missed them; the vast riches kept their secret safe until American prospectors broke open the vault in the late nineteenth century.
Had the Spaniards experienced a gold rush or silver boom anywhere along the frontier, a flood of miners and settlers might have raised a permanent center of Hispanic civilization that would have changed the course of history in western America. Oñate, when that seemed a real possibility in the beginning, had entertained visions of a new northern viceroyalty, with himself at the head, which would spread over the upper continent and guard the approaches to the Strait of Anian, when that marvel should be found. But none of that was to be. That fate, in which Captain Villagrá put so little stock, blasted Oñate’s dream and marked his efforts a failure.
Yet not entirely. For he fathered a province that lived long after Oñate and his heirs were dust. And if it failed to flower as a viceroyalty, at least New Mexico matured to become the main anchor of Spanish power along a fifteen-hundred-mile frontier. Could the first governor have returned two centuries later, to view the thirty thousand inhabitants distributed in towns, villages, and ranches, with their homes and fields, herds and flocks, all supported by a chain of missions, he would have seen that his years of misery and privation had not been wasted. It has always been in the nature of things that some men build so that others may reap the benefit.
In 1607, the same year that Englishmen laid the foundations of Jamestown, the Spanish crown suspended Oñate from office. The king flirted briefly with the idea of withdrawing the colonists and giving up the sickly outpost in Puebloland. Before such a drastic step could be taken, an encouraging report came from Franciscan friars who had gone out to replace the faint-hearted deserters. The Indians were beginning to respond, and eight thousand converts could already be counted. In view of that, it was unthinkable that the king, committed to spreading the faith, should abandon New Mexico. Instead, he made provision for taking the province under royal patronage, meaning that he, or the viceroy of New Spain, would, in the future, appoint succeeding governors, to serve a term of four years, and that all of the province’s expenses—civil and religious alike—would be borne by the treasury. The period of flamboyant treasure-seekers and empire-builders ended with this announcement of New Mexico’s new status.
Early in 1610, Oñate’s successor as governor arrived on the upper Rio Grande. Don Pedro de Peralta carried not only his appointment to office but an order directing removal of the colonists from San Gabriel to some better location. It is probable that the viceroy had decided that Oñate’s settlement lay too close to San Juan and infringed upon the croplands of the Indians. Or he may have been aware that, in the event of hostilities, its exposed and vulnerable position posed a serious danger to the Spaniards.
As near as investigation can determine, Governor Peralta inaugurated construction of the new villa of Santa Fe in the late spring of 1610. The name? Peralta may have called his capital after the city of Santa Fe in Spain, built on the Roman grid plan by Ferdinand and Isabella and designated as the prototype for New World municipalities. Or he may have simply got the idea from his formal instructions, which commanded him to extend the Santa Fe, the Holy Faith, among the Indians.
The site was a congenial one: high, above seven thousand feet, on the banks of a narrow stream that flowed from the towering Sangre de Cristos and disappeared in a southwesterly direction toward the Rio Grande. Best of all, the handsome little valley was unclaimed by any Indian pueblo, although a scattering of low dirt mounds indicated that the native people had once lived and farmed there.
Peralta and the first members of an elected town council, the cabildo, superintended the marking of municipal boundaries, the assignment of house and garden lots to citizens, and the selection of space for a plaza and for official government buildings. Throughout all this activity prevailed a feeling of permanence and solidity that had been lacking in the establishment of San Gabriel. The Spaniards pegged their claim to their new ground, and now, they meant to build for the future.