El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Whatever the genesis, Niza reported that he had met a “citizen of Cíbola,” a man of “good disposition,” who told him that “Cíbola is a big city, that it has a large population and many streets and squares, and that in some parts of the city there are very great houses, ten stories high, in which the chiefs meet on certain days of the year.”9 The priest wrote a glowing account of the place, describing it as “a beautiful city, the best that I have seen in these parts.”10 Niza said he was told about another of the seven cities, Ahacus, and reported that the richest was Totoneac. He crowned his imaginary achievements by claiming for Spain all seven cities and the “kingdoms of Totoneac and Ahacus and Marata.”11

  Inspired by the friar’s report and having no way to know the extent of its exaggeration, Mendoza sent a much larger exploration party. This time he put twenty-nine-year-old Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in charge, with some three hundred soldiers, eight hundred Indian allies from New Spain, fifteen hundred horses and mules, and six Franciscan friars, including Niza. Also with him was the young Tristán de Luna, twenty years before his disastrous expedition to establish a colony in Florida. They set off from Compostela, near the coast in the Jalisco region, in February 1540.12 Coronado left by land, while Hernando de Alarcón took two ships from nearby Acapulco to attempt a maritime route.13 They managed to navigate the vessels as far as the Gulf of California and today’s Colorado River, reaching the Gila River before having to turn back. This western expedition was taking place at the same time that Hernando de Soto was encamped among the Apalachee, in the middle of his ill-fated exploration of Florida.14

  Niza guided Coronado back to the supposed cities of Cíbola, coming first to the town of Hawikuh. Although it was impressive, with its multistoried adobe houses, there was little sign of gold. The Zuni were also wary of these visitors, not wanting them to enter the town, and the result was a brief battle, in which Coronado was wounded and the Spanish raided the Zuni food supply.15

  The Zuni were one group out of a much larger and diverse community that the Spanish categorized together under the umbrella term “pueblo,” the Castilian word for town or village. They used it because the people in this area were sedentary and resided in what the Spanish considered to be recognizable towns. Pueblo villages were dotted along the Río Grande valley in New Mexico, reaching to the west and north into today’s northern Arizona. The people of the pueblos had common ancestral roots in the Anasazi, who lived in the region around AD 1000. By the time of the Spaniards’ arrival, they were gone and their descendants had diversified, reaching an estimated population of around sixty thousand.16 Spread across a wide area, they encompassed five broad language groups. Along the Río Grande were the Tanoan, who included the Tiwa, Towa, Tewa, and Piro. Farther up the river valley were the Keresans, who also stretched to the west and included the Acoma. West from there were the Zuni, and beyond that to the north and west were the Hopi. In addition, some people would have spoken some Navajo and Apache because of contact through trade networks. However, these language groups and related dialects were for the most part mutually unintelligible, and the Spanish would have been forced to rely on multilingual translators.17

  The landscape was as diverse as the people, with the scrubby Chihuahuan Desert giving way to the Río Grande basin. From there, the river valley rises up beyond ten thousand feet, into the mountains and toward the Colorado Plateau, an otherworldly terrain of red rocks and skies of piercing blue. The higher altitudes were colder at night, while lower down could be baking hot, and rain mostly fell in seasonal cycles. Many of the Pueblo towns had the right conditions for agriculture, and so for the most part they were settled farming communities, growing crops such as maize.

  Their societies were organized by clan, usually with matrilineal descent, though men were often polygamous. Families lived in adobe homes, frequently extending them into compounds as a family grew. These dwellings could reach multiple stories and were accessed by a system of ladders.18 The houses in the towns were often built around a plaza, with kivas, sacred buildings used for religious rituals and community functions. Despite these general similarities, the broad linguistic groups among the Pueblo considered themselves socially and culturally different from one another, though there were points of overlap, one of which would be the shared experience of dealing with the Spanish.

  These settled pueblos were surrounded by nomadic people, including the Apache, Navajo, and Ute. The Apache traded with the pueblos, bringing valuable buffalo meat and hides to towns; they were also feared for their violent raids.19 The Plains Indians went as far west as the Taos Pueblo in order to trade.20 To the south, in today’s southern Arizona, which the Spanish called Pimería Alta, were the Tohono O’odham people, the Yuma, and the Sobaipuri; and farther into New Spain were the Opata, Pima Bajo, Seri, Concho, Lipan, and Tarahumara.21 This region was rich and diverse, though not in the way Coronado and his men might have hoped.

  Coronado occupied the Hawikuh pueblo for six months, using it as a base of exploration, with his men venturing to Acoma and Hopi territory, continuing to search for signs of precious metals.22 One band of men, led by Hernando de Alvarado, went north to the Hopi territory, and from there east to the Río Grande and beyond, to what was later called “land of the buffalo.” On their way they encountered the Acoma people, whose village was perched on top of a high, flat rock outcrop known as a mesa (Spanish for table), allowing them to see visitors or invaders from miles away.

  Alvarado’s men reached the Pecos pueblo—east of modern Albuquerque—where an Indian man they called “the Turk” told them about riches in a distant place called Quivira, which turned out to be the land of the Wichita people.23 Trusting the tale, the Spanish appear to have overlooked the possibility that he might have been making up such a story to get rid of these violent, corn-thieving strangers.

  While Alvarado continued to explore, some of the other men were preparing to spend the winter among the Tiwa pueblos, which were near Río Grande and to the west of Pecos. However, the Spaniards’ behavior, including their demands for food, guides, and women, incited a rebellion in the nearby Arenal pueblo that ended up spreading to at least twelve other villages, triggering what was later called the Tiguex War, as Coronado had called the area the “Tiguex province.”24 During this time Coronado and his men managed to put thirteen of the fifteen Tiwa towns under siege and killed some two hundred men by burning them at the stake.25

  By spring, Coronado was ready to head east to find Quivira. He and his men wandered along the modern New Mexico–Texas border, often losing their direction on the flat plains, where there were few trees to serve as landmarks.26 At last, Coronado realized he had been deceived. He turned on the Turk, who was traveling with the party, and demanded to know the truth. The Turk said that he had been asked to lead Coronado astray, and he was killed for his confession.

  Coronado no doubt had visions of glimmering cities, but they eluded him. He was forced to write a dispiriting report: “[Marcos de Niza] has not told the truth in a single thing he said, but everything is the opposite of what he related, except the name of the cities and the large stone houses.”27 Coronado returned to Mexico in the spring of 1542. Despite having covered thousands of miles passing through what are now the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, he was empty-handed. The whole expedition was such a fiasco that he was hauled before a tribunal.28

  BEFORE EMBARKING ON the expedition, Coronado had been the governor of Nueva Galicia, a province the Spanish created near Guadalajara. A few months after Coronado departed, an uprising known as the Mixtón War (1541–43) began among the Caxcanes people in the Zacatecas and Jalisco regions, 350 miles to the northwest of Mexico City. A number of factors were behind the rebellion, including resentment of the encomienda and a rejection of Christianity.29 It took the Spanish some time to quell because the Indians had placed themselves on top of cliffs (one of which was named Mixtón), that gave them a tactical advantage. With the aid of some thirty thousand
Texcoco and Tlaxcalan warriors, the Spanish wrested back control of the territory.30 Not long afterward, silver was found in nearby Zacatecas, and three large veins had been discovered by 1548.31

  Indigenous laborers from other parts of New Spain were brought there to work in the mines, as well as grow crops for the booming population.32 At first the silver deposits could be mined from the surface of the slopes of the hills around Zacatecas, but those were soon exhausted. This was followed by opencast mines, and later deeper excavation, making silver extraction increasingly dangerous.33 The establishment of the mines also disrupted the entire region, and before long regional nomadic groups, including the Zacateco, Chichimeca, Guachichil, and Guamare, attacked Spanish miners and merchants. The Chichimeca, who later had their own war against the Spanish in the 1550s, lived to the north of Zacatecas, and that area turned into hostile and dangerous terrain.34 Further exploration and mapping were now perilous, but the lure of silver meant other mining towns continued to spring up, including a new northernmost base in 1567: Santa Bárbara, in the modern state of Chihuahua.

  At the same time, the religious orders had been deepening their involvement. The Franciscans arrived in Zacatecas by the 1550s, moving north from their base in Michoacán, about three hundred miles to the south; the first Jesuits arrived in 1574.35 Like their secular counterparts, priests and friars would also venture to the outer limits of New Spain. In 1581, Franciscan Agustín Rodríguez set off on one such mission, though by this point it had been a considerable interval since Coronado’s failed effort. Rodríguez was accompanied by two other priests, as well as Captain Francisco Sánchez and a handful of soldiers. They reached the Río Grande and continued into Pueblo territory. They traded and had peaceful interactions with the people they met, and Rodríguez named the territory San Felipe del Nuevo México around this time. However, they were still looking for Cíbola—throughout the trip, Sánchez and the soldiers kept searching for silver.36 Eventually, the soldiers left for Santa Bárbara, and Rodríguez decided to stay on in one of the Tiwa pueblos. One of the other missionaries wanted to return as well but was killed on the way back to New Spain. The soldiers, now worried about the fate of the two remaining priests, organized a rescue party, led by the Franciscan Bernardino Beltrán and Antonio de Espejo, who brought fourteen men for protection.37

  They left in November 1582 and, upon reaching the pueblos, discovered that the friars were dead.38 However, after he returned to Santa Bárbara, Espejo wrote a report in 1583 recommending the Río Grande valley for Spanish colonization, with a plea for permission to settle the area.39 Felipe II authorized it in 1583. Espejo had been eager to lead such an expedition, but he died in Havana where he had stopped en route to Spain. The viceroy’s search for a suitable replacement took more than a decade, not least because a candidate needed to have the personal means to pay for such an expedition.40

  This, however, did not stop illicit ventures such as that of Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, who took a few hundred settlers without permission to New Mexico in 1590–92 before he was discovered. He was followed in 1593 by Francisco Leyva de Bonilla, who left New Spain and is thought to have reached as far northeast as Nebraska. During the expedition, Leyva de Bonilla and his deputy, Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña, had a disagreement and Gutiérrez de Humaña murdered his colleague; he in turn was later killed by Plains Indians.

  Finally, the viceroy and the Council of the Indies agreed on someone to colonize this part of New Spain: Juan de Oñate. He was a man of the Americas, a creole (or criollo), meaning he was born in New Spain to Spanish parents, in his case around 1550. His family had made their fortune from silver in Zacatecas and their numerous encomiendas. Oñate married Isabel de Tolosa Cortés, Hernando Cortés’s granddaughter and Moteuczoma’s great-granddaughter, putting himself in the highest tier of the Mexican elite.41 He had the money to pay for the enterprise and so he would be the adelantado. Although this was arranged in 1595, it took three years of review before he started, in part because a new viceroy was appointed: Gaspar de Zúñiga, who wanted to go over every detail of the arrangement.42 Oñate was aware of the risks—he heard in 1598 about Leyva de Bonilla and Gutiérrez de Humaña’s disastrous attempt from an Indian guide who had been with them—but he also knew of the potential rewards.43

  Although Oñate would be allowed to administer only a limited encomienda, he was instructed to “treat the Indians well; they [settlers and soldiers] must humor and regale them so they come in peace and not in war … this is very important for the success of such an important undertaking.”44 He was not to force them to work and was to exact only minimal tribute.45 In addition, the Franciscan missionaries who joined him would receive a subsidy as part of the patronato real (royal patronage), which was now supporting their work.

  Serving as Oñate’s captain was Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a fellow creole who would later write an epic poem about his experience with Oñate, his Historia de la Nueva México (1610).46 Villagrá believed they were going to conquer a “new” Mexico, like Cortés had done some seventy years earlier, writing, “That prodigy immense which we did find / When taking road, uncertain and unknown / for that New Mexico.”47

  The party left in January 1598 from the Valley of San Bartolomé, an area close to Santa Bárbara, then part of a larger region called Nueva Vizcaya, or New Biscay—an ironic toponym given that the damp maritime climate of Spain’s northern Basque region was almost the exact opposite of the dry extremes in the desert through which Oñate would spend months traveling. Accompanying him were around five hundred people, including soldiers, settlers, and missionaries, along with the goods they would use to establish settlements, distributed among some eight wagons and carts.48 By April they had arrived at the Río Grande, and continued north. Oñate passed through what became known as the Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Journey), a sixty-five-mile section of dusty trail with no source of water. Though dangerous and difficult—some of Oñate’s supply carts had to be left behind during their six-day trek—it was a useful shortcut around the longer route following the bend in the Río Grande.49

  Once the river came back into view, Oñate was close to the pueblos. The nearest were inhabited by the Piro-speaking peoples, who had been alerted about the arrivals and fled. Oñate tried to send gifts to reassure people, and when the Spaniards reached one pueblo, Teypana, the chief gave them a gift of corn. In return they called the pueblo Socorro, which means “help” or “aid.”50 Oñate continued on, reaching in early July a pueblo of the Keres-speaking people he had known about from Castaño de Sosa’s trip; the Spanish renamed this pueblo Santo Domingo. Two Mexican Indians, Tomás and Cristóbal, had decided to stay there, and they served as translators for Oñate. He asked them to explain to the people of Santo Domingo and from other pueblos who were present that they needed to pledge their loyalty to the king, in effect issuing the Requerimiento.51 When this had been seemingly secured, they pushed on.

  Farther north, Oñate was at first welcomed by the Ohkay Owingeh people, and he called their town San Juan de los Caballeros. The Spaniards stopped in nearby Yunque, which Oñate renamed San Gabriel and which would serve for a time as the capital for the Spanish. Oñate divided up the area into six districts and sent priests into each. He also handed out encomiendas and attempted to exact tribute, though the Pueblo Indians did not have these types of labor or taxation systems, and this quickly became the source of many disagreements.52

  By October 1598, Oñate was ready to try to find the yet undiscovered passage to the Pacific, still a preoccupation for the Spanish. Along the way, he sent out instructions, including some to his nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, asking him to join the expedition. Oñate did not wait for Zaldívar, however, and soon arrived at the Acoma pueblo that Coronado had earlier visited, some sixty miles west of the other villages.53 Oñate informed the Acoma they were now vassals of the crown and tried to trade. However, a plot was afoot to kill Oñate—whom the Acoma did not trust—which involved trying to lure him into a ceremonial pra
yer kiva where he could be murdered. For whatever reason, Oñate declined to enter the kiva, and in the end the Acoma leaders, some of whom had misgivings about the plan, did not follow through.54 Oñate continued on his way but would soon receive disturbing news about this pueblo.

  Juan de Zaldívar had been traveling west to catch up with his uncle. Zaldívar also called on the Acoma, sending some of the thirty men who were with him ahead to ask for food and water. The men stopped at the foot of the Acoma mesa and set up camp. The Acoma invited them up, as they had done with Oñate. The men who had arrived ahead of Zaldívar had obtained the food they sought, but by the time Zaldívar arrived the mood had shifted and the Acoma were angry. Varying accounts say the Spaniards tried to seize some priests or that they were stealing food, or that they harassed or even raped an Acoma woman. In the end, the Acoma attacked the Spanish, killing Zaldívar and around ten other men, hurling their bodies off the top of the mesa, while the rest scurried down the rock face and hurried off to find Oñate.55

  Oñate sent the younger brother of the murdered Zaldívar, Vicente, to lead a retaliatory mission. On January 21, 1599, they returned to the mesa and demanded that the Acoma hand over the people who killed their men. The Acoma responded with arrows, spears, and jeers.56 The Spanish then tried to distract them by climbing one side of the mesa, while troops on the other side brought up a cannon. They fired on the village, and, in the end, some eight hundred Acoma were killed and another six hundred taken prisoner.57 The prisoners were later put on trial because, Oñate said, they were judged as having broken their loyalty to the king. The sentences were severe: men over the age of twenty-five were to have their right foot amputated and to be put into servitude; younger men and women were to be put into twenty years of service to the Spaniards; and children were divided between the missionaries (girls) and direct supervision by Vicente de Zaldívar (boys).58