January 23, 1599
Northwestern New Mexico Territory
“Stand fast!” Vincente de Zaldivar ordered the half-frozen men around him. His breath puffed white in the frigid air, and he shivered inside his heavy armor. “Fire and fire again. We are God’s soldiers! The heathens will not prevail!”
“But—”
“Silence!” Cold, anger, hunger, and weariness spurred his words. “Our enemies must be defeated! My brother’s death will be avenged!” He glared at the filthy soldier, a youth barely old enough to have left his mother’s side. “Look at what we have accomplished.” He pointed up at the mesa-top Keres pueblo known as the Sky City and its nearly one thousand heathen residents. “Our weapons have created great holes in the stone walls and will continue to do so. Lead and powder and cannonballs will stand the day, not arrows and stones.”
Almost before he’d finished speaking, a large rock hurled from high overhead landed less than a foot away, causing him to jump back. His boots crunched on the ice that coated the vast and worthless land. If any of the men under him noticed his sudden fright, they were wise enough not to acknowledge it. That the primitive savages had thus far resisted the best the Spanish army could mount was unacceptable. The heathens’ time of regret and his of vengeance was coming, and when it did . . .
At the insistence of his uncle, Captain General Don Juan de Oñate, the Indians had been told—not once, not twice, but three times—to lay down their arms and submit to the authority of the King our Lord. Beyond that, they’d been commanded to surrender those responsible for the uprising so they could be dealt with justly.
Pacing because anger and frustration made inactivity impossible and because the frigid, relentless wind in this barren and Godless place cut through everything, Vincente recalled his instructions. If God was so merciful as to grant a victory—and surely He would—he, Vincente, was charged with arresting young and old alike and punishing all those of fighting age in any way he deemed prudent, as a warning to all savages living in the Crown’s newly claimed kingdom.
“Those you execute you will expose to public view,” his uncle had concluded. “And if you should want to show leniency, you must do everything possible to make the Indians believe you do so at the request of the friars, so they will see that the friars are their benefactors and protectors, so they will come to love and esteem them, and to fear us.”
Fear the Spanish army, yes!
“Where is Tomas?” he demanded, looking around for the tame Mexican Indian who’d come here nine years ago with the colonizer Gaspar Castano de Sosa and spoke some of the Pueblo language. When the short, stocky creature hurried up to him, clutching his ragged blankets around him, Vincente ordered him to once again address the savages.
“Remind them that we have been sent here by the most powerful king and ruler in the world, that they must meekly render obedience and vassalage to that king and the Christian God, that we serve God our Lord and will bring about the salvation of their souls but are also committed to bringing them to justice,” he told Tomas. “Remind them that many of their number have fallen under our weapons and more will do so if they do not surrender and place themselves under my care.”
“They will not listen.”
“They will!” Was he surrounded by dullards? “Tell them to count their dead. Remind them that we have already been here two days and nights and will not leave. Order them to look into the eyes of their women and children and ask themselves if they are willing to risk those lives as well.”
Tomas continued to look skeptical, but he was obviously intelligent enough not to argue with his better. At no small risk to his own life, Tomas once again plodded to the base of the large, sharp bluff upon which the Sky City had been built.
Vincente paid little attention to Tomas’s bellowed, halting words; nor did he care whether the Indian’s command of the heathens’ language was adequate to the task. What mattered to Vincente was that at his order, his men had ceased their firing so his brother’s killers could hear everything that was being said to them.
Silence followed Tomas’s incomprehensible speech, but finally someone called out from the pueblo high above. “What did they say?” he demanded of Tomas.
“That—that they will die before they surrender.”
• • •
As the frozen afternoon beat on, Vincente put the next phase of his plan into action. Not yet thirty, he’d already led some sixty men onto the plains in an attempt to capture and domesticate buffalo. Although the plan had failed, he’d learned how to command. Now, covered by heavy musket and cannon fire, a number of his handpicked soldiers managed to scramble up the four hundred feet of narrow stairway from the plains to the mesa top, where two hundred interconnected houses had been built.
The first Spanish explorers to see the Sky City had proclaimed it the greatest stronghold ever seen, and it had been, in part because its residents kept it fortified with rocks that they rolled down on any attackers. In addition, the pueblo had been well stocked with maize, beans, and turkeys. Still, at first the Keres had not been seen as a warlike people.
Years later, when the now-dead Juan de Zaldivar and his thirty fellow soldiers had reached the pueblo, they found that Vincente’s uncle’s troops had departed only a few days before, taking large quantities of the Indians’ blankets, clothing, and food with them and leaving the Keres with barely enough for their own needs in the middle of winter. The natives’ refusal to surrender what little warmth and food remained had enraged Juan and led to his death at the hands of the equally determined Indians. Now, relentless retaliatory fighting led by Vincente had depleted the natives’ rock supply.
At Vincente’s order, the first soldiers to reach the pueblo had immediately set fire to the roofs of the stone houses, forcing the Indian defenders, most of whom had no arrows left, to retreat deep into the honeycombed structures. More and more soldiers, hauling a small cannon up with them, joined their companions as their fleeing foes crowded into kivas. Instead of risking ambush within the dimly lit religious and ceremonial chambers, the soldiers fired lead and everything they could load into the cannon at the walls, crumbling what had taken thousands of hands many years to construct.
Vincente was standing before the largest hole when the first plea for mercy reached him. Although he hadn’t brought Tomas with him, it didn’t matter—there was no mistaking the pitiful cries of women and children.
“Surrender!” he ordered, using one of the handful of Keres words he’d bothered to learn. “Surrender!”
Silence flowed on the heels of his command, seeming to freeze as solidly as the earth that lay under the winter snow. He drew in the acrid stench of charred wood and flesh. Then a small shadow filled the nearby opening created by lead and powder. Vincente lifted his bloodied sword. The shadow shrank back, and this time when he ordered surrender, the single bellowed word echoed against stone.
A woman clutching a baby to her breast was the first to emerge. Vincente’s fingers ached to send the sword in a swift, wide arc that would separate the woman’s body from her head, but instead of avenging his late brother, he stepped back, allowing her to pass. Another woman was directly behind the first, and after that came a number of children. It pleased him that they were all ash-covered from the fires, coughing, their eyes streaming tears. Smoke would not, he vowed, be their only reason for crying.
It had never occurred to the heathens that their reliance on a single access to their mesa-top settlement might one day trap them. Vincente, his hunger and exhaustion forgotten, took full advantage by forcing them to descend the torturous path, one at a time, into the waiting and ungentle arms of his men.
Many of the captives tried to buy his forgiveness by presenting him with gifts of food, blankets, and robes as they filed past, but he disdained all offerings. The heathens’ stench was all but unbearable, the look in their eyes reminding him of curs seeking forgiveness from an angry master.
“We are in a wild land peopled by godless savages,” his uncle had said not long after the expedition—consisting of a hundred loaded wagons, more than seven thousand animals, and many troops in addition to one hundred and thirty Spanish families—started moving along the west bank of the Rio Grande little more than half a year ago. “Those brave souls who came before us succeeded because they met hostility with might. The savages must come to understand that their arrows and knives are no match against warhorses and muskets. Better a number die now than for us and those who depend on us for protection to live in fear.”
Vincente could not have agreed more.
• • •
Fear could render a man stupid; Vincente knew that. Now, as the sun slid toward the west and shrouded the tiled fields, sharp rocks, red cliffs, narrow valleys, lava mounds, and rugged native grasses that made up this wild land, he learned that whatever limited intellect the Indians might have once possessed had deserted them. Otherwise, certainly they would have seen the futility in trying to hide. However, as the line of men, women, and children, many of them wounded, continued down the twisting path, it became clear that hundreds more remained hidden in the dark chambers that made up their miserable homes.
When he ordered his men to go find them, he was met with protest. The heathens might be armed and waiting to attack. Wasn’t it better simply to set fire to every stick of wood in the pueblo, thus giving the Indians the option of either surrendering or burning to death? Vincente contemplated that, but his sword hadn’t yet tasted enough blood, and the need for revenge burned within him.
“You defy me?” he demanded of his troops. “You are afraid of women and children? Infants?”
“No!”
“Of the men perhaps? You, the king’s soldiers, believe yourselves inferior to those who can barely walk erect?”
“No!”
“You doubt God’s hand in this? His demand for might and justice?”
“No!”
The denial was still echoing around him when the first soldier pushed his way into the nearest chamber, a dagger in one hand, rapier in the other. He was followed, antlike, by his companions, and although Vincente remained outside with what there was of the sun on his back and his stomach rumbling, his ears soon told him that his men had found their prey.
The Indians came out singly or in small groups, cowering before the soldiers or wrestled to the surface by superior strength. Vincente allowed the first resistor, a crone of a woman, to scrabble past him, but when she was followed by a tall man with a side wound that streamed blood, he lunged at the savage, burying his sword to the hilt in the yielding flesh.
More Indians emerged, their cries pounding in his head. He permitted none to pass; instead, he dispatched them one by one until the smell of blood filled him and he couldn’t move for the bodies piled around him.
This was for his brother!
His arms and shoulders ached. His head became a drumbeat of pain and exhilaration, and he killed and killed again as if he’d been born to this one task. Arms, legs, and heads flew. Other soldiers followed his lead, their prayers to a vengeful God lending them strength.
Panting, his legs trembling, Vincente finally took note of the dying light. From his vantage point high above the endless, godless land, it seemed as if he could see forever. If the great explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado had been able to stand here and look out almost sixty years earlier, perhaps he wouldn’t have continued his futile search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.
“Set fire to it all!” Vincente cried. His throat rasped, bringing tears to his eyes.
As night sought to sweep over the plains, mesa, and pueblo of Acoma, it was kept at bay by red, clawing flames. If any insects were about, whatever sound they made was lost in the screams of dying Keres.
• • •
February 12, 1599
Competition had been fierce among those seeking a contract for the colonization of the land north of New Spain, which some now called Mexico. Although a number of the contenders had been compelled by religious zeal, others coveted the appointment because they had heard tales of gold and silver. Despite the earlier debacle of the expedition led by Gaspar Castano de Sosa, which saw him eventually imprisoned for what the Crown determined were grave injustices against the natives, there had been no shortage of applicants for the position.
Don Juan de Oñate of Zacatecas was a man of enormous wealth and distinguished lineage with more than twenty years of experience fighting and pacifying Mexican Indians. His wife was Dona Isabel de Tolosa, and her lineage was impeccable: her grandfather had been Cortes and her great grandfather Montezuma; her father was a renowned conquistador and mine owner.
Oñate’s contract with the Crown made him in almost every sense a dictator. As governor and captain general, he was the colony’s highest judicial officer, with the power of settling all decisions in civil and criminal cases. Most importantly, he presented himself as a devout Catholic, his image winning him favor with the Church’s highest officials.
On this day, some three weeks after the burning of the Sky City and the killing of more than eight hundred Indians, the remaining five hundred Keres, plus a handful from different tribes, stood at the village of Santo Domingo awaiting their fate.
With his nephew, Vincente, at his elbow, Oñate strode forward. His eyes swept dispassionately over the wounded remnants of a people that had once provided him and his men with food, clothing, and shelter. He spoke through Tomas.
“Responsibility for meting out punishment has been granted me both by the Crown and by God. I could set you free, but if I did, you might rise up against us again, and I will not, cannot allow that to happen. After much deliberation, I have determined that nothing will be served by more deaths. Instead, the men among you will serve as an example of the Crown’s power. All males over the age of twenty-five years will give twenty years of personal servitude to the Crown. In addition, they each will have one foot cut off.” Vincente grunted almost soundlessly; crippled, the men would be harmless.
Groans and sobs followed the translation of Oñate’s announcement, and he waited out the irritating sound.
“Furthermore, all males between twelve and twenty-five are sentenced to twenty years of servitude, save for the two Hopi and one Navajo Indian who were among those apprehended. They will have their right hands cut off and be set free to convey news of this punishment to their people.”
A single sound, a curse perhaps, briefly stopped him.
“I am a just man and as such I declare that all children under twelve are free and innocent of the offenses their parents carry. I place the girls under the care and guidance of our father commissary, Fray Alonso Martinez, asking him to distribute them in this kingdom or elsewhere so they may attain the knowledge of God and salvation of their souls.
“Boys of tender age are entrusted to my nephew in order that they may attain the same goal.”
His still-young features impassive, Vincente nodded.
“Finally, the old men and women as well as those disabled in the war are to be entrusted to the Apaches of the province of Querechos to be utilized as it pleases the wild Indians.”
When he was done, Oñate nodded to his soldiers, who began grabbing adult male prisoners and hauling them toward the large stone he’d selected as the mutilation site. If only the rest of the kingdom’s heathens could see the stricken looks or hear the pitiful cries! If they heard, then no Spanish man, woman, or child need ever fear the kind of death Juan had suffered.
“Begin,” he ordered the massive man who waited, axe uplifted, beside the stone.