The Heritage of the Southwest
Unlike the Middle West, there were no rich, fertile valleys in the Spanish borderlands; no plains which invited the plow; no lakes well stocked with fish; no rivers to be used for navigation or harnessed for power; no forests to provide lumber and fuel. The few areas capable of cultivation required irrigation in a land where water was scarce. Learning to survive in this region was a harsh and difficult undertaking. Resources had to be carefully husbanded; communications were hard to establish and difficult to maintain; and isolation magnified every aspect of the problem of settlement.
Yet the Spaniards, in a triangular relationship with Mexicans and Indians, succeeded in laying the foundations for the present-day economic structure of the region. Anglo-Americans in the Southwest have been the beneficiaries of three hundred years of experimentation, adaptation, and innovation. If one thinks of the Southwest in terms of mines, sheep, and cattle, and irrigated farming, then it is readily apparent that the underpinnings of the economy are of Spanish origin.
1. Mr. Marshall’s Chispa
The lure of gold and silver was, of course, a prime motivation for Spanish explorations in the New World. In the Americas, the ancient mining culture of Spain was fused with elements of Aztec metallurgy to form, what was for the period, an advanced mining technology. Mining is still the most important, as it is the oldest, industry in Mexico. Mexico had its “gold rush” at Zacatecas in 1548, three hundred years before the discovery of gold in California. Out of this experience, the Spaniards and Mexicans had learned a great deal about placer and quartz mining and had made of prospecting a fine art.
Although the Spanish had sought gold and silver with the sword and spear, rather than with pick and shovel, they were the first to discover gold in California. On March 9, 1842, Francisco López, a Mexican herdsman, discovered gold in Santa Feliciana Canyon forty miles from Los Angeles. For a decade prior to James W. Marshall’s famous discovery, Mexicans had worked various “diggings” along the coast range between Los Angeles and Santa Cruz and had found gold in paying quantities. There is no mystery whatever about why they failed to make the big discoveries in California, for the gold of California, as Dr. Rodman W. Paul has pointed out, “was secreted in the interior of the province: precisely the region that the Spanish race had not colonized.”*
In one of the most famous and popular scenes in California history, Marshall is supposed to have rushed into Fort Sutter with a nugget in his hand shouting, “Gold! Gold!” Actually, Marshall did not say that he had discovered gold; nor did he use the word “gold” or “nugget.” What he said was that he had discovered a chispa, which is Spanish for “bright speck” or “spangle.” That he should have used this term is some indication of how widely Spanish mining practices, and the Spanish mining vocabulary, had permeated California prior to 1848. The importance of Mexican metallurgy in the Southwest, however, rests on foundations more secure than such circumstantial details.
When American mining engineers began to explore the Arizona-Sonora frontier after the Gadsden Purchase, they discovered a long history of prior mining operations in the region. Literally hundreds of mines had been worked by Mexicans in Sonora subsequent to the discovery of the famous bolas de plata at Arizonac in 1763. But most of these mines had been abandoned when Mexican troops were withdrawn from the frontier during the struggle for independence. In the face of incessant Apache raids, most of the equipment had been stored in the tunnels of the mines and the pits were closed in, with the thought of a later reopening once order had been restored. But the confused situation created by the Mexican-American War, the Gadsden Purchase, and the American Civil War had resulted in even more extensive raids by the Apaches.
In their hatred of everything American, the Mexicans had mutilated boundary markers and continued to regard Arizona as legitimately a part of Sonora. Instead of reopening the mines, the gambussinos, or professional prospectors, then became freebooters who raided abandoned properties on the American side of the border and carried off equipment to Mexico which was used to smelt ores stolen from American properties.
These Sonora gambussinos were among the first outsiders to receive word of the discovery of gold in California. In fact they were first attracted to California by the secularization of the missions. “They came flocking in,” wrote Hugo Reid, “to assist in the general destruction, lending a hand to kill cattle on shares, which practice, when at last prohibited by government orders, they continued on their private account.” By midsummer of 1848 some five thousand Sonorans had left for the goldfields. Small bands traveled to California from points as distant as Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango. Starting from Tubac, they followed the old De Anza trail to Yuma, crossed the Colorado, and then came to Los Angeles by way of San Gorgonio Pass.
In California the Sonorans were treated with great contempt. Wearing cotton shirts, white pantaloons, sandals, and huge sombreros, they were known as calzonaires blancos or “white breeches.” In small groups of fifty and a hundred, they started out in the early spring from Mexico, worked in the southern mines in the summer, and returned south in the fall. Not infrequently, their families came along, riding the pack mules and burros. Between 1848 and 1850, ten thousand Sonorans passed through Los Angeles each spring and the processions continued for several years. Katherine M. Bell said that she had seen hundreds of Sonorans in Santa Barbara in 1849 on their way to the mines. Camped in caravans of ten, twenty, and thirty families on the outskirts of the town, they made merry with much singing and dancing to the music of “violins, guitars, and flutes.”
The mining camps in the southern district—in Calaveras, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin counties—were largely made up of Spanish-speaking people: Sonorans, Mexicans from Southern California, Chileans, and Peruvians. The town of Sonora, named after the Sonora miners, was the center of the southern district. As large as Stockton, it was described as being “far ahead of it for gold, gals, music, gambling, and spreeing.” A visitor of 1861 said of Hornitos, still another Mexican mining camp in the district, that “the town is certainly of Spanish origin and … there seems to be an omnipresent struggle between the Mexican and American element. … This rivalry is visible in everything. … Even the very signs seem to fight it out, or compromise. The stage house is the ‘Progresso Restaurant’; the bakery is a ‘panaderia’; the hotels invite both in Spanish and English. … In the plaza Brother Jonathan, however, has it pretty much all to himself, and manifest destiny will, undoubtedly, prevail in the end.”
True to this prediction, Brother Jonathan had driven the Mexicans from the southern mines by the late sixties; but, before doing so, he had first appropriated their traditional mining lore. “The average American in 1848,” writes Dr. Paul, “was ‘handy’ with a considerable number of trades and occupations, but mining was not one of them.” There had been of course some placer mining in the Carolinas and Georgia prior to 1848 but, by and large, the Anglo-Americans were not a mining people. On the other hand, the Sonorans were experienced miners—the heirs to the great mining tradition of the Spanish people.1
It was the Sonorans who first introduced the batea, a flat-bottomed pan or bowl with gently sloping sides, which was widely used in early creekbed or placer mining in California. The southern mines were so-called “dry diggings,” that is, there was a general shortage of water, except in the rainy season, to wash the dirt from the gold. Mexicans introduced the first successful extractive technique used in the dry diggings. “It was their custom,” writes Paul, “to dry the mixed gold and sand in the sunlight, or over the fire, then to separate the two by blowing upon the dry sands or by tossing them up in the air as one would wheat and chaff.” Known as the “dry-wash” method, this technique was widely used in the southern mines and had an important bearing on the rapid exploitation of mineral wealth in California. In 1850 the Alta California remarked that “American energy and assiduity, and Mexican skill and experience have together developed the riches of the Southern Placer.” Up to 1860, Mexicans were a majority in perhaps all of the counties in the southern mines; but, by the end of the decade, they had largely disappeared. Even before they had been driven from the district, however, the importance of their contribution to mining technology was widely recognized in California as witness this item from the Stockton Times:
The Mexican is of the utmost service in the Southern mines. We ask those who have had actual experience in mining operations in this country, whether the American, with all his impatience of control, his impetuous temperament, his ambitious yearning, will ever be content to deny himself the pleasures of civilized life in the states, and for the sake of from four to eight dollars per day, be content to develop the resources of the dry diggings of the country.**
2. Comstock’s Mistake
Most of the gold produced in California from 1848 to 1860 was obtained by working surface placers. As the miners worked up the streams and rivers, however, they soon discovered the ledges or deposits from which the gold had come. Once these deposits were located, the period of quartz mining began. If the Anglo-Americans were novices in placer mining, they knew literally nothing of quartz mining. “The first quartz miners in California,” wrote J. Ross Browne, “were Mexicans, who knew how gold-bearing rocks were reduced in their native country.”2 Thus the Morgan Hill mine in Calaveras County, one of the first quartz mines in California, was originally operated by Mexican labor. From this one mine alone over $2,000,000 in gold was taken in 1850.
The first quartz ores in California were so rich in gold that the Mexicans treated them by hand mortars, but it was not long before they introduced the arrastre (more often spelled “arrastra”) or “Chili mill.” In building an arrastra, the Mexicans constructed a circular stone pavement in the center of which stood a post. To an arm extending out from the post a mule was hitched, or, in some cases, the arrastra was operated by a water wheel. The mule dragged a heavy piece of granite around the post which pulverized the quartz on the pavement. Once the quartz was pulverized, the gold or silver was then amalgamated by the use of quicksilver. Primitive as it was, the arrastra could be built on the spot, required no manufactured or imported parts, and was simple to operate. Quartz mining might have been retarded for many years in the West had it not been for the Mexicans’ familiarity with the arrastra, its use and construction.
In the middle fifties, Ignacio Paredes, a miner from Alamos in Sonora, discovered some valuable ores in Nevada which he tried to work, first by the use of the batea, and, later, by the dry-wash method, but without success. Some years later, Comstock, prospecting in the same area, kept complaining about “base metals” and “blue stuff” that made it difficult for him to isolate the gold. At this time, Comstock was convinced that he had discovered a gold mine. One day a Mexican miner happened along when Comstock and his partner were rocking gold with a batea. Noticing the heavy stone with bluish cast, he became very excited and started shouting, “Mucha plata! Mucha plata!” It was only then that Comstock realized that he had discovered one of the richest silver mines in the world.
Dan De Quille, one of the most accurate of observers, reported that “the business of working silver-mines was then new to our people, and at first they depended much on what was told them by the Mexican silver-miners who flocked to the country.” These miners, he wrote, “were in great demand” and much of what was subsequently learned about quartz mining was based on their experience and knowledge. The arrastra made possible the early development of the Comstock Lode; at one time, some sixty arrastras were in operation at the mine. “The Spaniard of old and his Mexican successor,” wrote the Arizona historian, James H. McClintock, “were the best prospectors and the closest judges of ore ever known … the first American mining followed the pathways made by the Spanish.”3 J. Ross Browne, who prepared the first official report on the mineral resources of California, pointed out that “by far the larger portion of the work-people in the California mines are Mexicans who are found to be more adventurous than Cornishmen, and willing oftentimes to undertake jobs which the latter have abandoned.”
Quite apart from many technical mining expressions in Spanish which passed into American mining law and the vocabulary of American miners, dozens of Spanish-Mexican mining terms found wide popular acceptance in the West. Bonanza or rich ore is one such expression; borrasco or barren rock is another. Such terms as placer, xacal (slack), and escoria (slag) are merely a few of many terms that might be cited. In The Big Bonanza, Dan De Quille devoted three pages to a glossary of Mexican mining terms in general use in the Washoe territory. Appropriation of these terms was a necessity since there were, of course, no equivalent expressions in Anglo-American speech.
3. The Vermilion Cave
In 1557 Bartolomé de Medina, a miner at Pachuca, Mexico, revolutionized mining technique by the invention of the patio process for separating silver from ore by the use of quicksilver. Thereafter quicksilver became an essential material in quartz mining. Immediately upon the discovery of the patio process, the Spanish reserved the quicksilver monopoly for the famous Almaden mine in Spain by prohibiting quicksilver mining in the Americas. By monopolizing the supply of quicksilver, they hoped to control all mining in the Americas. Most of the quicksilver used in Mexico, Central, and South America, in fact, was imported from the Almaden mine. “This fiat,” writes Gruening, “destroyed a potential industry and greatly hampered an existing one.”
In the mountains about twelve miles from San Jose, California, was a cave which contained a bright vermilion clay. For many years, Indians had visited the cave, dabbing their faces with its clay. As early as 1824 two Mexicans, Antonio Sunol and Louis Chaboya, had tried to extract silver from the clay but had failed to do so. In 1845 the Mexican government sent Captain Andrés Castillero, a young cavalry officer, on a military mission to Fort Sutter. When Castillero, who had been trained in metallurgy, heard about the famous vermilion cave from a priest at the San Jose mission, his interest was immediately aroused. Putting some of the cinnabar clay in his gun, he found that drops of quicksilver gathered in the gun-barrel after the gun was fired. On returning to Mexico City he filed a claim on the property but the intervention of the Mexican-American War forced him to assign the claim to a British company. This mine—the famous New Almaden—was the first important quicksilver mine to be discovered in the Western Hemisphere.
It was the discovery of the New Almaden that unlocked the gold and silver resources of California and the West. The timing of the discovery and the location of the mine were nothing short of providential. Small quantities of quicksilver were produced late in 1848 and, two years later, the mine was in heavy production. The New Almaden, moreover, was conveniently located with reference to the California mining districts. Prior to its discovery, quicksilver, a monopoly product, had sold on the world market for $99.45 per flask; but once the New Almaden was in production the price fell to $47.83. J. Ross Browne once said that the discovery of gold and silver in California would have meant very little had it not been for the simultaneous discovery of the New Almaden which, as late as 1918, was still producing one million flasks of quicksilver a year.
Not only was the New Almaden discovered by a Mexican, but it was developed by Mexican labor. J. Ross Browne said that five-eighths of the 1,973 miners employed at the property in 1865 were Mexicans. “The laborers,” said another visitor, “are all Mexicans and have generally served a sort of apprenticeship in the silver mines of Spanish-America.”4 Living in a town on the hill near the mine, the Mexicans were divided into two categories: the actual miners or barreteros; and the ore-carriers or tanateros. Starting from the pit of the mine, the ore-carriers would fill a large sack or pannier made of hide with two hundred pounds of ore and then ascend the escalera or ladder-like circular path to the surface. Open at the top, the pannier was flung over the shoulder and supported by a strap passing over the shoulders and around the forehead. Ore-carriers made from twenty to thirty trips a day up the escalera for all the ore was carried to the surface by hand. The escalera was narrow, slippery, and lighted only by a few flickering torches. Visitors told of seeing the tanateros, dressed in pantaloons rolled tight above the knees, and calico shirts, hurrying up the escalera with “straining nerves and quivering muscles.”
In the patio near the mine, where the ores were reduced, Americans were employed at wages of from $5 to $7 a day; but the miners and ore-carriers received a wage of from $2 to $3 a day. “In the early years,” writes Dr. Paul, “the Mexicans tended to form a special element in the labor supply, paid at a lower rate than Americans and Europeans.” Living in straw-thatched huts on the hill, the Mexicans were a carefree lot, “spending their money on the visiting señoritas from San Jose,” and celebrating their días de fiesta by sending for girls, guitarristas, and wine. It is also interesting to note that the British and American owners of this fabulously rich mine sent their engineers to Spain to study the processes used in quicksilver production, and later entered into a cartel with the owners of the Almaden to control the world market.
4. Anglo-Saxon Law and Order
Prior to the discovery of gold in California there had been so little American mining that the Anglo-Saxon common law had virtually no mining-law precedents. Precedents were never more badly needed than in California, for most of the miners were trespassers on the public domain. With no mining law on the statute books and with no precedents for guidance, the federal government was powerless to bring order out of the chaos that prevailed. Faced with this situation, the miners were forced to develop their own codes and rules which were the only “law” on the subject of mines and mining in effect in the United States from 1848 to 1866. Later these codes, which form the basis of the present-day “law of mines,” were carried by California miners throughout the West. Wherever these miners traveled, they also carried the knowledge and experience which they had acquired in California.
In the history books, the famous miners’ codes are invariably cited as another illustration of “the extraordinary capacity of the Anglo-American for self-government.”5 Bearing in mind that it was the discovery of gold in California that gave birth to a distinctive American mining law—there having been no general mining law in force in the United States prior to 1848—just how was it that these inexperienced Anglo-American miners were able to develop, in such a brief period, a comprehensive system of mining rules and regulations and a law of mines? The Spanish-speaking miners of California had been trained, of course, under the mining ordinances of Spanish America which represented a complete body of mining law tested by experience.
“The miners of California,” writes the legal historian, Halleck, “generally adopted, as being the best suited to their peculiar wants, the main principles of the mining laws of Spain and Mexico, by which the right of property in mines is made to depend upon discovery and development,” principles that are still cited as being preeminently Anglo-Saxon in origin. Yale, the outstanding authority on the American law of mines, writes that “most of the rules and customs constituting the codes are easily recognizable by those familiar with the Mexican ordinances. … In the earlier days of the placer diggings in California, the large influx of miners from the western coast of Mexico and from South America, necessarily dictated the system of work to the Americans, who were almost entirely inexperienced with this branch of industry. … The Spanish-American system which had grown up under the practical workings of the mining ordinances of New Spain, was the foundation of the rules and customs adopted.” Although this information has been common knowledge among lawyers for fifty years, there are California historians who still write eloquent chapters in praise of the Anglo-American miner’s “capacity for self-government.”
Under the Spanish law, possession of minerals in the subsoil was reserved to the crown. From 1836 to 1883, the State of Texas received five percent of the gross receipts from all mineral concessions, which was used to establish a system of public schools. For this happy prevision, the Texans are indebted to the Spanish law of regalia. When Texas adopted the Anglo-Saxon common law in 1840, the only Spanish statute specifically retained was this doctrine of mineral rights.
5. Apaches and Copper
In the year 1800 a Spanish colonel, José Carrasco, guided by an Apache Indian discovered the famous Santa Rita silver and copper mine in western New Mexico. A native of Rio Tinto, Carrasco quickly identified the ores of the Santa Rita, for he remembered the appearance of copper ores from his youth. While the nearest smelter was four hundred miles from the mine, poverty had decreed that the peon population of Mexico should have a copper coinage. For many years, Santa Rita ores were carried by pack-trains to smelters in Mexico and sold for sixty-five cents a pound. As early as 1804, the Santa Rita was being operated on a fairly large scale with over six hundred employees living in the community which had grown up about the property. Incidentally, one of the watchtowers built by the Spanish still stands at the mine. The Santa Rita is, perhaps, the most famous mine in Western America for it was here that the techniques of copper-mining were first developed in the Southwest.
The Heintzelman mine, thirty miles from Tubac, with its attractive farms and orchards, had also been worked at an early date. Some eight hundred Mexican miners were employed in 1859 at the mine which was then producing $100,000 in silver a year. Along with the Santa Rita and many other mines, the Heintzelman property was abandoned during the Apache raids. At one time, the Arizona Mining Company at Tubac found itself besieged on one side by the Apaches and on the other by a band of enraged Sonorans. Engine boilers weighing six thousand pounds, which had been laboriously freighted in from Lavaca, Texas, a distance of 1,200 miles, were abandoned in 1861 when the owners were forced to move out.
Mexican miners from Sonora were employed, from the earliest date, at both the Santa Rita and Heintzelman mines. The prevailing wage of from fifty cents to a dollar a day was paid, according to Mowry, “in large part in merchandise sold at large profits.” Since bullion was too clumsy to handle, wages were paid in company-issued boletas or paper bills with the denominations indicated by the figures of animals—pigs, roosters, cows, and horses. “The only difference between peonage and Negro slavery,” wrote Will H. Robinson, “was that a peon miner could not be sold from one master to another.”6 Visiting the reopened Santa Rita on payday, J. Ross Browne reported that “under every tree sits a group of thriftless vagabonds, conspicuous for their dirty skins and many-colored sarapes, shuffling the inevitable pack of cards or casting their fortunes of greasy ‘hobos’ upon capricious hazards of fortune. The earnings of the month are soon disposed of. The women and children are left dependent upon new advances from the store-houses; the workingmen are stupefied by mescal and many nights of debauch, and when all is over, the fandangos at an end, and the monte tables packed up, every miner is bankrupt.”
A curious and accidental by-product of the final “pacification” of the Apaches in Arizona was the discovery of important new copper deposits by cavalry officers. The famous Bisbee mines were discovered around 1875 by cavalrymen in hot pursuit of Apaches. The development of these new properties was largely based upon the early experimental techniques which had been evolved at the Santa Rita mine and at various mines in Sonora. When Henry Lesinsky began to develop the rich copper deposits at Clifton in 1872, one reads that he went to Juárez to employ Mexican laborers who were “considered very skillful smelter men.” These miners constructed the first furnaces to smelt copper ores in Arizona which were “of the Mexican type, built of adobe,” and fired by charcoal made from mesquite.7 The adobe furnace had a capacity of about two tons of ore per day and its fire was sustained by hand bellows. Mexican miners, using burros, packed the crude ores from the mountains to the smelters. The smelted ore was then packed by ox and mule teams, operated by Mexicans, to Kansas City. Don Antonio, foreman of the Clifton mine, rode throughout Sonora recruiting Mexicans to work in the copper mines.
Western mining developed, of course, by a series of “waves”: first gold, then silver, and finally copper. At first only the high-grade copper ores—those that ranged from five to twenty percent copper—were exploited; but a new process was perfected around 1892 for smelting the low-grade ores (the disseminated or porphyry ores). The smelting of these ores involved an enormous capital outlay and brought about a rapid consolidation in ownership. Simultaneously new processes were developed for extracting ores in the underground mines. One of these techniques was the “cave-in” system whereby a whole section of earth would be caved in by a single blast. This system greatly increased the amount of ore that could be produced in a day, but the system was—and still is—extremely dangerous. Experienced miners often refused to work in underground mines where it was used; but Mexican immigrants, excluded from the skilled miner category, were compelled to work in these mines. In this way a rift developed, which has not yet been healed, between Mexican and non-Mexican labor in the copper mines.
Between 1858 and 1940 the Arizona mines produced three billion dollars’ worth of metal. Copper production increased from 800,000 pounds in 1874 to 830,628,411 pounds in 1929. It was the vast expansion in the electrical industry which enabled copper, “the red metal,” to dethrone its “white rival,” silver. One might say, therefore, that Mexican miners in the copper mines of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, have played an important role in making possible the illumination of America by electricity. The census of 1930 listed 16,668 Mexicans engaged in the extraction of minerals: 3,880 as “coal-miners,” principally in Colorado and New Mexico; and 12,623 “other operators,” mostly in the copper mines of the Southwest.
6. Homage to the Churro
Although Coronado brought the first sheep to the Southwest, the herds that were to constitute the basis of the pastoral economy of New Mexico came north in the famous entrada of Juan de Oñate in 1598. The raising of sheep is preeminently a frontier enterprise. Sheep helped to make the Spanish explorations possible for they were the mobile, marching food supply of the conquistadores. According to Messrs. Towne and Wentworth,8 sheep were an indispensable item in equipping every Spanish expedition to the north. From the founding of New Mexico until the Civil War, sheep fed, clothed, and supported the colonists. The only important source of cash income in the colony, sheep also served as a kind of currency. “Sheep,” writes Winifred Kupper,9 “were the real conquerors of the Southwest.”
In 1598 Spain had one of the oldest sheep cultures in the Western world. Its breeds were principally of two types: the beautiful, aristocratic merinos with their fine wool; and the ugly “scrubs” or churros long relegated to the periphery of the Spanish sheep culture. It was the scrub or churro, however, that the Spanish brought to the Southwest: a small, lean, ugly sheep whose wool was coarse and light in weight, seldom averaging more than a pound or a pound and a half at a shearing. But during a long period of adaptation to the semiarid environment of Spain it had learned to hunt food and shelter, to make long marches, to survive in all sorts of weather, and to protect its lambs from wild animals. Its very “scrubbiness” made it ideally adapted to conditions in the Southwest.
The Spanish also brought to New Mexico their traditional sheep culture. Without this knowledge, based on six hundred years’ experience under somewhat similar conditions, the value of the churro might have been negligible. There is no doubt whatever that “sheep husbandry in the United States,” to quote Wentworth and Towne, “owes more to Spain than to any other nation on earth.” Long prior to 1598, the Spanish had developed an extensive lore about sheep and had evolved elaborate institutions to protect and to further the sheep industry.
In Spain sheep were marched from the lowlands to the highlands and back from the highlands to the lowlands. The privilege of marching sheep in this manner had given rise to the trashumante system under which the rights and privileges of sheepmen were minutely regulated, defined, and safeguarded. To make this system function, an ancient organization of sheepmen had been effected known as the “Honorable Assembly of the Mesta,” which has its almost precise counterpart today in the various “sheepmen’s associations” in the Southwest. In Spain the various “sheep walks” were carefully laid out and defined; and what sheepmen could and could not do, on these marches, was also fixed by custom and ordinance. A somewhat similar system is in use today in the Southwest.
In short, Anglo-American sheepmen in the Southwest took over and adapted an already functioning and time-tested pattern of sheep-raising. About all they did was to enlarge the grazing areas by bringing the nomadic Indians under military control (a victory largely made possible by the introduction of the Colt revolver) and improve the breed of sheep. Apart from these contributions, they simply took over the customs, practices, institutions, personnel, and organization of an existing industry. The system of Spanish and Mexican land grants, based on larger units of land than were to be found in a non-arid environment, made possible the expansion of an industry which involved an extensive use of land resources. Similarly the practice of assigning fixed grazing rights to particular owners was Spanish in origin. Even the breeding of a heavy wool-bearing sheep came about as a result of crossing two Spanish types. For about 1820 some fine Spanish merino sheep were first brought to the eastern seaboard. These sheep reached the Southwest about 1876, with the general westward movement, and were then crossed with the churro to produce a new type ideally adjusted to the environment.
Under the Spanish system, sheep-raising was based upon a traditional social structure and a well-defined division of labor. At the base of the pyramid was the pastor or shepherd who was usually assigned a flock of about two thousand sheep. Over each two or three pastores was a vaquero or mounted rider. Supervising the vaqueros was a caporal or range boss and over the caporal was the major-domo or superintendent. Ultimate authority rested, of course, in the owner or patrón. In general, this system of organization was taken over in toto by the Anglo-Americans and still prevails on the large sheep ranches of the Southwest. Between the eastern seaboard and the boundaries of the Southwest, sheep-raising was, and still is, an avocation or sideline business. Once the center of the industry had shifted to the Southwest, which was around 1870, sheep-raising became a specialized business, conducted on a large scale, by men whose sole vocation was sheep-raising. This was the Spanish system and its excellent adaptation to conditions in the Southwest is shown by the phenomenal increase in the wool clip: from 32,000 pounds in 1850, to 493,000 pounds in 1860, to 4,000,000 pounds in 1880.
New Mexico was “the ovine nursery of the nation” whose herds provided the foundation stock for the entire West. The Californios had never looked with particular favor on sheep-raising; in fact there were only about seventeen thousand sheep in the province in 1850. But, with the discovery of gold, large herds were driven overland from New Mexico to the mines. It is estimated that, between 1850 and 1860, more than five hundred thousand sheep were driven from New Mexico to California. Here, again, the marching qualities of the churro were of considerable importance. From these drives came the herds that were soon grazing in the foothills and valleys of California. It was also in California that the churro was crossed with the merino to produce the present range stock of the Western states. From California large herds were then driven eastward to the Rocky Mountain states and the new and improved breeds made their way back to New Mexico. During the seventies and eighties, large herds were driven eastward every season, grazing as they marched, to the terminal points on the rail lines from which they were then shipped to Middle Western markets. In the process of making these “drives,” such states as Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and Montana were stocked with sheep.
Once this development had taken place, American wool production soared from five million pounds in 1862 to twenty-two million pounds in 1880. Increased wool production in the West meant, of course, increased factory employment in the East. The development of the sheep industry also stimulated another Western industry in which Mexicans have played a key role. For with the establishment of the first Western sugar-beet factories, the modern era of lamb-feeding came into its own. One reason for the rapid growth of the sugar-beet industry in the West was the fact that sheep could be fed and fattened on the by-products of sugar-beet production. Thus one industry neatly supplemented the other.
It was the Spaniards, of course, who taught the Indians of the Southwest to weave with wool. From 1800 to 1850 many Navajo women were employed in weaving in New Mexico and these women carried back to the tribes the skills which they had learned. From the Spaniards and Mexicans, also, the Navajo inherited the churro sheep. That they are today largely a pastoral people is to be traced to this early cultural borrowing. In the development of the art of weaving, however, the Spanish borrowed designs and dyes from the Indians. According to Ruth Laughlin, the Spanish brought only two dyes to New Mexico; the rest were all developed from native dyes used by the Indians. Blankets were long an important item in the barter economy of New Mexico. When trade was opened with Los Angeles by way of the Spanish Trail, one reads that New Mexico blankets were exchanged on the Coast for California horses. Blankets were also a principal item in the barter-markets of Taos and Chihuahua.
7. Los Pastores
Throughout the Southwest, the term “Mexican sheepherder” is proverbial. In the folklore of the region the solitary, superstitious, patient Mexican sheepherder is supposed to be as witless and moronic as the sheep he herds. But Mexican herdsmen are the carriers of a great tradition and it has been their skill and knowledge which has sustained the sheep industry in the West. Full of incredible lore, they can read the signs of changing weather at a glance; they know the habits of predatory animals; their knowledge of range vegetation is unrivaled; and there is little about the care of sheep that is unknown to them. In the early journals, one reads of how they trained sheep dogs by suckling pups on ewes so that the dog would learn to follow the sheep while they grazed, and return them at night to the corral. Above all, these pastores know how to graze a flock, guiding their movements without driving them, so that the sheep travel slowly and graze contentedly as they travel.
Living on coarse meal, goat’s milk, kid’s flesh, and peppers, New Mexico pastores have tramped over most of the West in all sorts of weather and under the most difficult conditions. Until the 1890s, sheepherding was a hazardous occupation in New Mexico. One reads of Apache raids that netted five thousand sheep and of a raid in 1850 in which forty-seven thousand sheep were stolen. The most famous New Mexico Indian fighters were sheepmen. Colonel Manuel Chavez, and his pastores, fought the Indians for fifty years. Nor were Indians the only hazard. In California the herdsmen lived in mortal terror of bears and slept at night on raised platforms, called tepestras, which were built on poles eight, ten, and twelve feet above the ground.
The isolation of the shepherds was even greater than that of the other colonists in New Mexico. Something of the present-day brooding, introspective quality of the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico can probably be traced to this experience. The notion that sheepherders are a weird lot, often driven crazy by loneliness, may be unfounded; but they are certainly the most taciturn of men. To guard against the hazards of loneliness a state law in New Mexico requires that sheepherders must be employed in pairs. Carrying their giant jews’-harps, called bijuelas, the pastores sang folk songs on the ranges of New Mexico which were of great antiquity when Columbus discovered America. No one knows the precise origin of the ancient folk play, Los Pastores, which has been produced in New Mexico for as long as the colony has existed. Some of the most beautiful New Mexico folk songs are, of course, the songs of the pastores.
Lieutenant J. H. Simpson, who traveled west in 1849, reported that the first New Mexican he sighted was “a swarthy, copper-colored young Mexican, of eighteen or twenty years of age, most miserably clad, driving the sheep before him. The morning air was keen and cold, and as he, with brimless straw hat on, a forlorn blanket about his shoulders, and pantaloons which were only an apology for such, hugged his only wrapper, his steps slow and measured, I thought he looked the very personification of patience and resignation.” Whether it was the scrawny character of the sheep or the appearance of the herdsman, somehow the combination of being both a sheepherder and a Mexican came to be synonymous, to most Anglo-Americans, with the lowest possible status.
From the 1860s, bands of New Mexican sheep-shearers, each with its capitán, made the great circle of the shearing pens from Texas to California to the Northwest and throughout the Rocky Mountain states. “I remember the Mexican sheep shearers galloping up,” wrote Sarah E. Blanchard of her childhood on a ranch near Santa Paula, “and it was a time of thrilling excitement. Usually an old woman accompanied them to make tortillas and to provide them with Mexican delicacies. They were paid by ticket, so much for each fleece, and at night they gambled with these around the camp fires.”
Not infrequently a few Chinese sheep-shearers accompanied these bands. “The shearers would come in,” wrote Sarah Bixby Smith, “a gay band of Mexicans on prancing horses, decked with wonderful silver-trimmed bridles made of rawhide or braided horsehair, and saddles with high horns, sweeping stirrups, and wide expanse of beautiful tooled leather. The men themselves were dressed in black broadcloth, ruffled white shirts, high-heeled boots, and high-crowned, wide sombreros which were trimmed with silver-braided bands, and held securely in place by a cord under the nose. They would come in, fifty or sixty strong, stake out their caballos, put away their finery, and appear in brown overalls, red bandanas on their heads, and live and work on the ranch [in Southern California] for more than a month, so many were the sheep to be sheared.” Shearers were the migratory aristocrats of the industry. They were never herdsmen, for the shearing of sheep was an exclusive vocation. Paid a wage of from five to eight cents a fleece, New Mexicans monopolized sheep-shearing until around 1890 or 1900 when the first power-driven shearing machines were introduced in California.
“The New Mexicans,” wrote Twitchell, “were essentially a pastoral people.” Lummis once said that sheep were “the one available utilization of New Mexico” where society was divided into two classes: those who owned sheep and those who tended sheep. Today it is said in New Mexico that those who own sheep are Spanish-Americans; those who herd them are Mexicans. From the earliest date, the great herds of New Mexico were owned by a handful of ricos. According to the New Mexico Guide (WPA), a few large operators still own seventy-five percent of the sheep. The Spanish governor, Bartolomé Baca, once owned two million sheep and employed 2,700 men. “El Guero” Chávez, the first governor under Mexican rule, owned a million head and Don José Leandro Perea of Bernalillo had herds of more than 250,000. In 1880 three-fourths of the sheep of New Mexico were owned by about twenty families, sixteen of whom were families native to New Mexico. Sylvestre Mirabal, who owned 250,000 acres of grazing lands at the time of his death some years ago, was descended from a family that had raised sheep in New Mexico since 1600.
The dependence of pastor on patrón was complete and absolute. The patrón protected the pastor against the Indians and before the law. In the 1890s New Mexico pastores were paid a wage of from $5 to $8 per month, board included; and as late as 1940 the wage was only $35 a month. Many of the pastores were bound to their patrones by debts inherited from their fathers; even after peonage was abolished, the partido system by which herds were “farmed out” on shares, functioned as a thinly disguised form of peonage. “The social effects of a system of economy,” writes John Russell, “wherein four-fifths of the white male population were employees of a handful of landlords have left their stamp on present-day New Mexico.” Long after 1846, all the patrón needed to do was to say the word and his pastores would vote, as a group, for any candidate he recommended. “The most paternalistic form of government in the world,” writes Miss Kupper, “is a flock with a sheepherder as dictator” and the relationship between the herder and the flock is essentially that between the patrón and his pastores.
For several hundred years, thousands of New Mexico sheep were driven to points as far removed as Veracruz, Guadalajara, and Mexico City, principally for sale at the mines. After Mexico won its independence, the annual sheep drives to Chihuahua became immensely profitable and between 1839 and 1850 about two hundred thousand sheep were driven south every year. For these drives, the ricos would purchase the small herds of the paisanos who were, of course, unable to drive their sheep to market. Profits of from three hundred to four hundred percent were occasionally made on these annual drives to Mexico. With the discovery of gold in California, sheep sold for $16 a head and the drives to the West Coast took the place of the drives to Mexico. Little of this bonanza wealth ever found its way into the pockets of the pastores.
8. From Gregorio de Villalobos
The cattle industry began in the mesquitals along the Rio Bravo.
J. FRANK DOBIE
By a curious cultural transmutation, Anglo-Americans have long claimed credit for the origin and development of the cattle industry. No folk hero in American life has enjoyed anything like the popularity of the American cowboy. Each week millions of Americans see “Western” films and their sons and daughters will probably line up at the box-office years hence to see cowboys ride, rope, and shoot on the screen. Yet with the exception of the capital provided to expand the industry, there seems to have been nothing the American rancher or cowboy contributed to the development of cattle-raising in the Southwest.
One Gregorio de Villalobos is supposed to have shipped the first cattle to the New World. From this initial shipment to the West Indies came the stock later used to establish the great herds in Mexico and from these herds, in turn, came the cattle that Coronado drove to the Southwest. Like the lowly churros, the cattle that the Spanish brought to the New World were not much to look at. Light-bodied, long-legged, thin, with elongated heads and muzzles, their wide-spreading horns often measured five feet from tip to tip. “The general carriage of a Spanish cow,” wrote one early-day historian, “is like that of a wild animal: she is quick, uneasy, restless, frequently on the lookout for danger, snuffing the air, moving with a high and elastic trot, and excited at the sight of a man, particularly if afoot, when she will often attack him.” Such was the parent stock of the American range-cattle industry. Dating from the latter part of the eighteenth century, the cattle industry had its real beginnings in California and Texas.
When the San Carlos anchored in San Diego Bay on April 30, 1769, as part of the Serra expedition, some six or seven head of cattle were taken ashore: supposedly the first cattle to appear in California. Somewhat later, small herds were driven overland to California by Rivera and De Anza. So rapidly did cattle multiply in the province that the mission fathers and rancheros could count a million head by the end of the century. In fact cattle came to be regarded as a major nuisance in California. People afoot were forever dodging behind trees or jumping into ditches to escape from the wild charges of Spanish steers, regarded as more dangerous than grizzly bears. Anyone could start a herd in California, for there was no limit to the available pasture. Beef in California, like mutton in New Mexico, became a principal staple in the diet; and the hides, worked up into rawhide, were used for manifold purposes. At the Mission San Jose, a hundred cattle were butchered every Saturday. Cattle horns topped the fences around the wheat fields and the hides of cattle, drying in the sun, were to be seen at all seasons of the year.
With the first shipments to South American ports (1810) and the opening of the hide-and-tallow trade with Boston (1822), markets were finally found for the great surplus of cattle in California. The clipper ships, described by Dana as floating department stores, brought merchandise to exchange for the hides and tallow and a flourishing trade developed. Between 1800 and 1848 over five million hides were exported from California. It so happened, also, that the opening of the hide-and-tallow trade coincided with the beginning of the Mexican regime and the secularization of the missions. Under the impetus of this trade, the mission estates were carved up into great ranchos and stocked with cattle often plundered from the missions. By 1860 some three million were grazing on the great unfenced pastures of California. The cattle industry in California, however, had reached its zenith and had begun to decline at about the time that Texas became the cattle nursery of the nation.
Large herds were to be found in Texas at an early date but incessant Indian raids kept the industry from developing as rapidly as it did in California. In the chaotic period which followed the Texas rebellion, thousands of cattle roamed wild in the brush country between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. From an estimate of 100,000 in 1830, the number of cattle in the state increased to 382,733 in 1846. Four-fifths or more of this total was made up of so-called “Spanish cattle,” for about the only cattle the Anglo-American settlers brought to Texas were a few milch cows. From these wild herds, the cimarrones of the brush country, came the cattle later driven to the rail terminal points in Kansas for shipment to the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago and which were used, still later, to stock the ranges of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. While the Anglo-Americans may claim credit for the remarkable expansion of the cattle industry and for the conditions which made this expansion possible, the industry is indisputably Spanish in origin.
It was the coming together, as J. Frank Dobie puts it, not in blood but in place and occupation, of the Anglo-American, the Spanish owner, and the Mexican vaquero that produced the Texas cowboy—“a blend, a type, new to the world.” The word “cowboy” was unknown prior to 1836. “Cowboy” is the literal American equivalent of vaquero which is derived, of course, from vaca or “cow.” Everything that served to characterize the American cowboy as a type was taken over from the Mexican vaquero: utensils and language, methods and equipment. The Spanish brought the horned saddle, to be distinguished from the English “muley” saddle, to the Southwest. Long before they came to the borderlands, the Spanish had taken this saddle over from the Moors. Along the Rio Grande, Mexican vaqueros made saddle stocks from the soft wood of the giant prickly pear and used a flat-topped silver horn as “big around as a soup plate.” The saddle of the cowboy was merely an adaptation of this Spanish saddle. From the vaquero, the American cowboy took over, and adapted in his own way, the Spanish horned saddle, bridle, bit, and spur. From the vaquero, also, he got his lasso or lariat, cinch, halter, mecate or horsehair rope, “chaps” or chaparejos, “taps” or stirrup tips (tapaderas), the chin-strap for his hat (barboquejo), the feedbag for his horse (morral), and his rope halter or bosal. Even his famous “ten gallon hat” comes from a mistranslation of a phrase in a Spanish-Mexican corrido “su sombrero galoneado” which referred to a festooned or “gallooned” sombrero.10
“The very language of the range,” writes Mr. Dobie, “is Spanish.” Such terms as bronco (from mesteno), mesquite, chaparral, reata, grama, huisache, retama, remuda, cavyard from the Spanish cabal/ada, lariat from la reata, outfit or corrida, lasso from lazo, buckaroo, burro, cinchas, latigo, quirt (from cuerda), stampede (from estampida), hondo or hondoo for loop, calaboose (from calabozo), vamoose, mesa, canyon, barranca (bluff), rodeo, corral, sombrero, loco, all these, and many more, are Spanish-Mexican in origin. From the Spanish-American War, the cowboys of the Southwest brought back the word “hoosegow,” or lockup from the Spanish juzgado. In the borderlands, a ranchero (ranch) was an estate where cattle were raised; while an estate where crops were raised was a hacienda. Among the cowboys with whom I consorted as a youngster in Colorado, nothing was resented more keenly than the suggestion that they worked on a “farm.” The words “farm” and “farmer” were anathema; they were “cowboys” who worked on a “ranch.”
The Mexican ranchero loved and understood horses and often had more horses about than he had cattle. Some of the ranches in Texas had as many as a thousand head of horses and these herds, and the wild horses of the range, made the horse market in San Antonio the greatest of its kind in the world. A manada was a unit of horses on the range: one stallion for each twenty-five mares. The bell-mare in the herd was the remudera. The cowboy expression “wind-broken” is from the Spanish. The technique of horse-breaking as practiced by the American cowboy was based directly on the technique of the domador or professional Mexican horsebreaker.11
No language in the world is so rich in hairsplitting terms to distinguish the exact color markings and characteristics of a horse as the “sagebrush” Spanish of the Southwest. The following and many similar terms are really Southwest slang, with the Spanish words being given, by long local usage, a meaning of their own: Alazán tostado, a chestnut sorrel; andaluz, a yellow horse with blond mane and tail; azulero, a dark blue roan; barroso, a smudgy dun-colored horse; canelo, a blue-red roan; cebruno, a dark brown; grullo, a bluish gray; moro, almost blue; tordillo, iron-gray; palomino, a cream-colored horse; roano or ruano, shortened to “roan,” a dapple-colored horse. A “pinto” is, of course, a painted, a piebald horse. An estrello is a horse with a star on its forehead; a cuatralbo is a horse with four white feet; a potro is an unbroken horse.12
The American cowboy’s elaborate lore about the rope and roping techniques was acquired directly from the Mexican vaquero. Roping by the forefeet was based on the mangana technique; while to rope by the hind feet or “to peal” was a feat also learned from the Mexicans. The Mexican expression dale vuelta, meaning to twist a rope about the horn of the saddle, became first “dolly welter” and, later, simply “dolly” on the Anglo-American tongue. The Mexican was an artist with knife and rope both of which he used as weapons. It was only when the Texans got the Colt revolver, about 1838, according to Dr. Webb, that they “became a terror to the Mexicans and all enemies.” At a rodeo in Tucson on May 31, 1939, one José Romero, a Mexican vaquero, roped a full-grown golden eagle from horseback. It is also quite probable that the famous American cowboy songs are based on the corridos of the vaquero.
The great King and Kennedy ranches in Texas still rely upon Mexican vaqueros. The semifeudal organization of these ranches, in fact, is directly patterned after the organization of the large ranchería. The managers are, nowadays, Anglo-Americans; but the “hands” are Mexican—the vaqueros, the caporales or foremen, the pasteros or pasture tenders, and the jinetes or horsebreakers. “The proudest men I ever saw,” is the way George Sessions Perry describes them. They still love goat meat or cabra and brew the tea of the ceniza or sage. Spanish-speaking to a man, they sing the old corridos about the bordertowns, the great cattle drives, the stampedes, and the song of the caballo fragado or broken-down horse. Voting pretty largely as their “boss” tells them, the hands on the King ranch still refer to themselves as Kineños.
10. Cortez Had a Brand
Long prior to the appearance of the Anglo-American stockman, the Mexicans had a fully developed system of brands and brand registrations. Their brands were of three types: the fierro or iron; the señal or earmark; and the venta or sale brand. Like much of the Spanish lore about cattle and horses, brands came to Spain with the Moors. Mexican brands are of great antiquity, some of them being based on the Moorish rúbricas—signs used first as a signet or signature and later added as a flourish when the writers learned to spell their names. Many Mexican brands were also copied from Indian pictographs and from symbols of the sun, the moon, and the stars. The brand used by Cortez—three Christian crosses—is said to have been the first brand used in the Americas. “There were brand books in Spain,” writes Dane Coolidge, “hundreds of years ago.” The Spanish had a system of registering brands which was in use in Mexico as early as 1545. When a horse or cow was sold, the old brand was “vented”—stamped on the shoulder—as a bill of sale; and the new brand was burned below this marking. The American law of brands and the various brand registration systems in use today are based directly on these ancient Spanish-Mexican usages.
Once a year in California the rancheros held a general roundup or rodeo which was presided over by one or more Jueces del Campo or Judges of the Plain. These judges settled all disputes over ownership and saw to it that calves were branded with the right brand. “In West Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and northward,” wrote Charles Howard Shinn, “wherever great cattle ranges are found today, the stockmen, in their round-ups, still follow the ancient Spanish plan; not knowing it is a heritage from a race they despise, they choose ‘cattle judges’ to settle disputes and uphold their decisions as final.”
The well-organized and powerful cattlemen’s associations of the West today are based upon the Spanish institution of the alcaldes de la mesta. When Austin drew up his code for the first colony in Texas, the Mexican officials added only two articles: one governing the registration of brands and the other having to do with cimarrones or wild cattle. As with the sheep industry, all the Anglo-Americans did was to provide capital for expansion, drive the Indians from the range, and improve the breed of cattle. The same can also be said of horses, goats, and mules. The mule industry of Missouri—once a thriving industry—was Spanish-Mexican in origin. Spanish range laws had an influence even in the Southeastern coastal part of the United States. Many Southern fence laws, range laws, and toll systems in use today are said to have grown out of customs and practices which the Spanish brought from the West Indies.
11. A Drop of Water
Just as Anglo-American settlers knew little about mining, sheep, or cattle, so they were almost wholly unfamiliar with irrigated farming. In fact there was little in Anglo-Saxon law or institutions that was applicable in the semiarid environment of the Southwest. The Anglo-Saxon common law, with its doctrine of riparian rights, had been formed in Great Britain where water was not a problem. On the other hand, the Spanish civil law was based on a recognition of the shortage of water and the need for irrigation. The Moors had brought many of their irrigation practices and water-saving institutions to Spain in the tenth century. The similarity in environment made it possible for the Spaniards to carry over into the borderlands practices and institutions which had arisen out of the need for irrigation on the Spanish Peninsula.
The oldest irrigation systems now in use in the United States are to be found in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. Here the Spanish were irrigating the bottomlands around Las Cruces when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth. The Pueblo Indians were irrigating between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand acres in the valley when the Spaniards first appeared on the scene. Indeed there are evidences that the Indian irrigation systems of the Southwest are more than nine hundred years old. The Spaniards naturally had a lively interest in and respect for the accomplishments of Indians in the field of irrigation and noted, in their early journals and records, how closely Indian practices resembled those with which they were familiar. While the New Mexico colonists were familiar with irrigation, it is also apparent that they learned a great deal from the Pueblo Indians.13
Irrigation is an art. To prevent wastage of precious water, soils have to be carefully prepared and leveled; and the question of when to irrigate, and to what extent, are matters learned only from long experience. “There are some arts,” writes Edith Nicoll Ellison, “of which a man becomes master in the course of three hundred years or so. Levelling land is one, irrigation is another. In both these arts the Mexican is at his best. … With his big hoe and inherited lore, the Mexican is a valuable person.”14 It was from the Mexican and the Indian that the Anglo-Americans learned how to irrigate.15
After carefully leveling the land, the Mexicans blocked out their fields in squares, the sides of which were just high enough to hold the water. When one block was soaked—not flooded—a hole was made in the side wall of earth and the water was permitted to flow into the next square. This manner of irrigating is still known in the Southwest as “the Mexican system.” The first irrigation systems in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were Mexican-Spanish in origin, if the Indian experience is excepted. It was only after the Anglo-Americans had learned to irrigate, after the Mexican-Indian manner, that they became successful irrigation farmers.
Irrigation has always been a communal enterprise. In New Mexico, the diversion dams, laterals, and canals were always regarded, and are still regarded, as common property. Every spring the villagers elect a mayordomo who has charge of directing work on the irrigation system. A survey made by the government in 1891 revealed that in New Mexico no one was allowed to take waters from the main irrigation ditch unless he had either personally or by proxy performed the tasks assigned to him by the mayordomo. All work of this kind was performed by the villagers together, as a joint enterprise. The village type of agricultural settlement in both New Mexico and Utah is in part a consequence of the necessity of communal controls in irrigated farming.
The pueblo of Los Angeles, at an early date, appointed a zanjero to keep the main ditch or zanja in repair and the office was continued for many years after the American conquest. The word of the zanjero was supreme in all matters relating to water and took precedence over that of the alcalde, the priest, and the military commander. The zanjero was authorized, if necessary, to impose corvées of labor upon the population and to utilize every resource of the community to preserve the water supply. Many of these practices have a striking similarity with those of the Moors and such Spanish words as acequia, zanja, and zanjero are said to be Arabic in origin.16 To the borderlands, also, the Spanish brought a very considerable lore about water wells, both of the hand-drawn and water-wheel variety, and of the technique of drilling wells. Above all the Spanish colonists had an inherited social sense of the importance of water which they transmitted wherever colonies were founded.
The attempt of the Anglo-Americans to apply the doctrine of riparian rights in the arid Southwest resulted in years of conflict and litigation and retarded the development of the region. In the end most of the states were forced to repudiate the doctrine or to modify it in many important respects. The only state that had little trouble with irrigation law was New Mexico, where water rights were regulated by immemorial custom. At the present time, most of the Western states have adopted the Arid Region Doctrine, or, as it is sometimes called, the Doctrine of Appropriation. In developing this doctrine, Anglo-American jurists were no doubt influenced by the law of waters in Mexico. Under Mexican law, the government was vested with ownership of all rights in rivers and streams but could grant the use of waters to private owners. This use could be conferred on both riparian and nonriparian properties but it was customarily conferred subject to certain conditions and limitations so as to ensure the maximum utilization of a limited water supply. While Walter Prescott Webb has said that the riparian rights doctrine was abandoned in the Southwest by necessity, rather than through any conscious borrowings from the civil law of Mexico, other students of the problem have shown that Mexican precedents were frequently cited in the decisions of Western courts and must, therefore, have had some influence on the formation of the present-day Doctrine of Appropriation.
Under the Spanish scheme of colonization, the pueblos were invested with certain special “pueblo rights” in respect to water. Usually four square leagues of land were set aside as communal lands belonging to the pueblo. Title to the water in streams flowing through these common lands, including the right to the underground flow, was reserved to the pueblo and its inhabitants, not only for domestic use, but for parks, trees, and nonagricultural purposes. Safeguarded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, these “pueblo rights” proved to be of inestimable value to the City of Los Angeles which succeeded to the rights of the former pueblo. In a famous lawsuit between the City of Los Angeles and the landowners of the San Fernando Valley, the Supreme Court of the United States finally ruled that the “pueblo rights” of the city took precedence over the common law rights of the landowners. Thus the city was given a prior claim to all waters originating within the watershed of the Los Angeles River, a claim paramount to that of all appropriators subsequent to 1781 when the pueblo was founded. One could not, therefore, estimate what the City of Los Angeles owes to the lucky circumstance that it was founded by Spanish colonists.
In general, the land-use systems developed by the Spaniards and Mexicans were much better adapted to an arid environment than were those long traditional with the Anglo-Americans. A Mexican homestead consisted of 4,470 acres: twenty-eight times the size of a homestead in the Ohio Valley. The land unit which Anglo-Americans found in the Southwest had no counterpart in the East or Middle West. It was a contribution, as Dr. Webb has said, “from Latin-America, and it came by way of Texas into the Great Plains: it was the cattle ranch.” A cattle ranch might comprise two thousand or twenty thousand acres, depending on the circumstances. The Mexican idea was to give the settler some good land along a stream, for farming and considerably more land, back from the stream and not necessarily contiguous, for stock-grazing. Sometimes a three hundred-foot strip along a stream or acequia-madre extended fifteen miles back from the stream. Grants were never made without an adequate porción or portion of water. This land-use system was of major importance in the rapid development of the sheep and cattle industries in the Southwest. In 1839 Texas enacted a homestead law which was directly patterned upon the Mexican homestead. In fact, “the Texas land system,” writes Dr. Webb, “had for its foundation the Mexican and Spanish system.”
Property rights as between husband and wife are regulated today in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, in accordance with the Spanish ganancial system of community property. “Our whole system,” wrote one California jurist, “by which the rights of property between husband and wife are regulated and determined is borrowed from the civil and Spanish law.” When the first state constitution was adopted in California, specific provision was made for the retention of the Spanish law of community property. Of great incidental benefit to the residents of the Southwest, this system has been called “one of the most important landmarks of Spanish civilization in America.” It was certainly a much more equitable system, so far as the wife was concerned, than the Anglo-Spanish common law doctrine which conferred an almost unrestricted control over the wife’s property on the husband and recognized virtually no right, on her part, to property accumulated during marriage. Here, again, the needs of the West created a predisposition to accept the Spanish practice. For it has been suggested that the unequal ratio between men and women in California, when the first constitution was adopted, was an important factor in the decision to adopt the Spanish law of community property.
Any study of cultural borrowings and mutations in the Southwest must recognize that necessity has been as influential as conscious imitation. In the long run, the basic industries of the region, including mining, sheep- and cattle-raising, and irrigated farming, would have developed much as they have developed without the aid of Spanish precept and example. Peoples change their habits and customs in response to the challenge of a new environment; the question, in this instance, is one of the speed and facility with which these changes were made. On this score there can be little doubt but that the Spanish example greatly accelerated the process of cultural adaptation. For instance, studies which have been made of the California system of irrigation districts, widely imitated throughout the West, have traced the beginnings of this system to the mission establishments and their communal utilization of a limited water supply. It is also true that other cases can be cited in which the lineage of present-day institutions is uncertain and can, perhaps, never be determined. But one does not need to accept the “diffusionist” interpretation of cultural history to accord Spanish-Mexican influences due recognition in the heritage of the Southwest.
* Reprinted from Rodman Wilson Paul—California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947.
** On the role that Mexicans played in the development of gold and silver mining in the West, including the inauguration of pack-trains which supplied the mining camps, see The Gold Rushes by W. P. Murrell (1941), pp. 98, 102, 104, 137, 140, 156, 191.