A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  The statue’s sculptor had since attached a new foot, and the repair was barely visible. But the original foot had never been found. Nor were the persons who severed it, though they’d sent an anonymous letter to newspapers, claiming the amputation “on behalf of our brothers and sisters of Acoma.”

  Max walked me back to his shed and opened us each a beer. The descendant of a pioneer family, he hadn’t learned to speak English until he went to school. “We’re not as isolated anymore, but some things we keep,” he said. “Words and accents from the old time. Strong family ties. An easygoing lifestyle—relations are more important than money. And the church is still central, of course.”

  Also distinctive were the Penitentes, who performed self-punishment as a mark of devotion and contrition. Their practices, similar to those of medieval flagellants, may have come to El Norte with the first Spanish. In Max’s childhood, Penitentes held processions, gashing and whipping themselves as they dragged heavy crosses into the hills. The ceremony ended with a man being tied to a cross. There were unconfirmed reports that nails were sometimes used, and even that men had died while reenacting the crucifixion. “Years ago,” Max said, “they used to go all the way.”

  The Penitentes had since dwindled in number and now kept their rituals private. One of their meeting places, a morada, stood just down the road. It was an austere building with a cross in front and an outhouse behind. Max said it was used only for funerals and at Easter. “Eventually, the Penitentes will fade away and all the Spanish here will blend in,” Max said. “No one will notice us anymore—except for Oñate up there on his horse. He’s hard to miss.”

  Max didn’t care one way or the other about the statue. But he knew someone who did: Emilio Naranjo, the driving force behind the memorial and known as El Patrón, the political boss of the valley. On my way to see him, I noticed a sign for San Juan pueblo, the site of Oñate’s first headquarters in 1598. It was now a reservation, centered on a cluster of adobe buildings and a crafts cooperative, where I met the tribe’s historian, Herman Agoyo. He wore a cap advertising the tribal casino, on the nearby interstate, and appreciated the irony of his headgear. Europeans first came to New Mexico to loot pueblos of their riches; now Indians were getting back their share, with roulette and blackjack. One pueblo casino was named, appropriately, Cities of Gold.

  “The conquistadors were gamblers, they took big risks, and I admire that,” Herman said. But he resented the Oñate statue, particularly the “in your face” placement, which forced Indians to look at the conquistador each time they drove past. “If you want to recognize conquistadors, remember the bad with the good,” he said. “The Spanish here don’t want to do that. They make pure heroes of these men.”

  Pueblo tribes had waged a countercampaign to honor a controversial hero of their own: Po’pay, a San Juan Indian who led the great Pueblo Revolt in 1680, which killed hundreds of Spaniards and drove colonists from New Mexico for twelve years. A statue of Po’pay was set to go up in the U.S. Capitol Building, as a representative figure of New Mexico history. “Of course, some Spanish people hate that—they think Po’pay was a murderer,” Herman said. “Which is just how we feel about Oñate.”

  When I told him I was on my way to see the man behind the Oñate statue, Herman went to a shelf at the craft cooperative and handed me a rawhide necklace. Dangling from the string was a small clay foot, cleanly severed at the ankle. “You might want to take him this,” he said.

  EMILIO NARANJO LIVED in a ranch house with a cross in the yard and an American flag on his truck. In person, El Patrón didn’t look like the feared political boss I’d heard about. He was in his eighties, quite deaf, and seemed in poor health. But he kept active in local affairs, from a home office lined with signed photographs of U.S. presidents, senators, and governors.

  “I’ve been everything,” he said, ticking off his many posts, including head of the local Democratic Party for fifty years. He paused before a picture of himself beside the Oñate statue, the proudest of his many accomplishments. “This was my idea, it came into existence because of me. My forefathers came with Oñate. He should be honored here just like the Pilgrims in the East, who got to America much later.”

  As he talked about the region’s history, and his efforts to commemorate conquistadors, I felt as though I was back at El Morro’s cliff face, reading the imperious Spanish inscriptions. “I have the guts to do things, and I get them done,” Emilio said. “I owe it all to my Lord. My own time and money went into the statue, I made it possible and people gave thanks.”

  “Even Indians?” I interjected.

  “Why shouldn’t they? My God, Oñate made this place. He introduced cabbages, chili, tomatoes, and what not. He created an irrigation system. Oñate did many things for Indians.”

  Including, I pointed out, killing and maiming Acomas. “That’s a lot of bullshit!” Emilio shouted. “When his nephew was killed, naturally he sent an expedition to pacify the Indians. That story about him cutting off feet, I don’t believe that. It’s propaganda by people who didn’t like him.”

  This wasn’t true; the Spanish, like more recent European perpetrators, kept careful records of their atrocities. But it was impossible to break into El Patrón’s monologue: about how well Indians were treated, how they’d gotten rich from casinos and government aid, how ungrateful it was of them to resent Oñate. “People have just been told to hate him,” he concluded. “There’s no reason they should.”

  I’d often heard an eerily similar refrain while traveling the American South. To die-hard defenders of the Confederacy, Dixie was a gentle land of kindly whites and happy blacks; Confederate leaders were unblemished heroes; it was just a few “troublemakers” who agitated over displays of the rebel flag. In New Mexico, as in the South, the bloodshed had ended long ago. But the combatants still lived side by side and continued fighting, with statues and symbolically severed feet rather than with swords and arrows.

  El Patrón, for one, was used to ideological slugfests; his armor was as thick as his hero’s. “I know why they cut off Oñate’s foot. It was payback.” He smiled thinly. “But you know what? I don’t think it hurt very much.”

  COMPARED WITH OÑATE, Coronado was little remembered in New Mexico, even at the Coronado State Monument. Created to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the expedition, the park lay near the Spaniards’ winter camp, at a pueblo outside Albuquerque. I found the turnoff on a busy interstate spur, between a gas station and outlet store. All that remained of the pueblo were low walls outlining a checkerboard of house sites. A trail led to the Rio Grande, slow and brown and only fifty feet across, but nonetheless grand after all the trickles I’d crossed since Hermosillo.

  The park museum had a few Spanish artifacts. Still, considering this monument was named for Coronado, the conquistador seemed strangely absent. “There was supposed to be more, but it didn’t pan out,” a ranger explained. He showed me a sketch for a two-hundred-foot-tall statue of Coronado, with a pavilion and walkway stretching down to the river. Conceived during the Depression, the grandiose design had proved too costly.

  Also overblown was a speech by Spain’s ambassador to the United States at the park’s dedication in 1940. He likened Coronado’s expedition to Spain’s expulsion of the Moors, and to the country’s recent civil war, when “Spain shed the blood of her sons to defend our Christian world against a new menace from the Orient—the menace of Communism.” This seemed an expansive use of “Orient,” and put Coronado in league with the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Every era found its own meaning in the exploits of conquistadors.

  “Personally, I think we should rename this place for the Indians who lived here, and leave Coronado out of it,” the ranger said. “Anyway, this isn’t even the site of his winter camp.” Excavations had revealed that the camp actually lay at another ruined pueblo a few miles downriver. Following the ranger’s directions, I passed a Home Depot and Wendy’s and Walgreen’s until I saw a roadside marker for Coronado’
s nearby camp. The historic site was impossible to reach or even glimpse. A four-lane highway moated off access; behind it stood a subdivision of starter castles.

  Pueblo is Spanish for “town,” a word that accurately described the settlement pattern in native Arizona and New Mexico: compact, high-rise communities, surrounded by open country. Spanish colonists, who equated urban living with civilization, built their own well-ordered towns, in accordance with planning ordinances that dictated the precise layout of streets and plazas. Now, in most of the Southwest, the footprint of both Indian and Spanish settlement lay buried beneath an avalanche of sprawl.

  THE NEGLECT OF Coronado in New Mexico was matched by a scarcity of recent scholarship. The most readily available translation of documents relating to Coronado’s expedition dates to 1896; the standard biography, Herbert Bolton’s Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains, was published in 1949. Since then, the conquistador has fallen out of favor, certainly as compared with other explorers.

  In my reading, though, I’d kept coming across the names Richard and Shirley Flint. They’d published a new translation of Coronado-related documents and countless articles on the entrada. Much of their research focused on reconstructing Coronado’s route, or the army’s members and equipment. From this arcane research, and the Flints’ address in backcountry New Mexico, near Coronado’s route, I’d formed a vague impression of fusty local historians, the sort often active in antiquarian and genealogical societies.

  “We’re six miles off the main road and nine from the nearest neighbor,” Richard Flint said, when I phoned to ask if I could visit. He told me to turn at a green gate on a rural route lacking other landmarks. When I did, the rutted dirt road quickly became impassable. I abandoned my car and hiked a mile before meeting Richard, who had come the other way to find me.

  A lean, graying man with a mustache and large round glasses, Richard led me to his four-wheel drive and drove to a small stone-and-beam house. A windmill-driven well provided water, solar panels the only power. Inside, Shirley Flint stood by a wood stove, cooking garbanzo beans. Deeply tanned, with pale blue eyes and a long blond braid, and wearing an embroidered blouse, she looked very much a child of the sixties. She and Richard had met at St. John’s College in Santa Fe during the Vietnam War.

  “I objected to killing human beings, and still do,” Richard said. In 1969, the couple moved to Sweden and then Canada. On returning to the United States, Richard applied for conscientious objector status. With the help of a draft resisters’ group and a sympathetic legislator, his induction was deferred. After that, the Flints bought fifty-five acres of high, scrubby plain for $7,500 and built an adobe cottage on it with their own hands.

  “We were just subsisting, really,” Shirley said. Then, from a bookmobile volume on Coronado, the Flints learned that the conquistador had traveled by their property. They began researching his route, initially as a hobby and then as an obsession. Richard went back to school for a master’s degree in archaeology and a Ph.D. in Latin American history (Shirley already had a master’s in history). In the two decades since, they’d turned their remote house into a cottage Coronado industry, churning out books and articles and securing a Fulbright and other grants for research trips to Spain and Mexico.

  After a dinner of cheese, apple slices, bread, and soup, Shirley showed me the document she was currently translating. “It’s a bit like reading Shakespearean English,” she said. In the 1500s, spelling and grammar weren’t standardized, and written Spanish was evolving from Gothic script to modern cursive. Also, authors employed their own shorthand and abbreviations of Spanish and Latin words. So Shirley had compiled an abecedario, or key, for each scribe whose writing she deciphered.

  “Some letters take weeks to crack,” she said. As the Flints hunched over their shared desk in the dim light of a low-wattage lamp, debating a line of Castilian legalese, I felt as though I’d been transported to a medieval monastery where clerics transcribed ancient manuscripts.

  But this wasn’t how the Flints saw themselves. “ ‘Question authority,’ that was our generation’s motto, and that’s what we’re still doing,” Shirley said. “Once you start poking at the received wisdom, it unravels pretty quickly.”

  The orthodoxy, in this case, was the Bolton school, named for Herbert Bolton, a renowned California professor and president of the American Historical Association in the first half of the twentieth century. Bolton championed the Spanish and their role in the hemisphere. In his eagerness to dispel the “black legend,” he created a “white legend” that romanticized conquistadors as heroic and civilizing “knights.” The many students Bolton trained in his long career helped perpetuate this image.

  Richard admired the sense of mission Bolton displayed at a time when Hispanics and their history were ignored or reviled by Anglo-Americans. “But he swung the pendulum so far the other way that he obscured the truth.”

  Bolton, for instance, glossed over some of the brutalities inflicted in Tierra Nueva and wrote that Coronado possessed a “finer sense of the rights and dignity of human beings” than other Spaniards. Richard showed me one of his own books, Great Cruelties Have Been Reported, an anthology of documents from a 1544 Spanish investigation of Coronado’s entrada. In those documents, members of the expedition described in flat detail the many atrocities committed against Indians: massacres, sexual assaults, torture, burning at the stake. “Here’s the rebuttal to Bolton,” Richard said, “in the Spaniards’ own words.”

  The Flints also questioned contemporary scholarship about early America. The trendy new orthodoxy emphasized the role of European-borne disease in destroying native societies. Records from sixteenth-century Mexico and the Caribbean, telling of horrific epidemics, buttressed this thesis. But no such evidence existed in the many documents relating to Coronado. Nor had Spaniards who followed him a generation later noted a population decline among Indians.

  “Germs were clearly a factor in many places Europeans invaded—a lot of natives died,” Richard said. “But a lot of people were murdered; that’s in the records, too.” By focusing on disease, he said, scholars risked sanitizing conquest and absolving the invaders, just as Bolton had done. “The message of the new scholarship is ‘Europeans did awful damage to natives, but most of it was unintended and inevitable.’ ”

  Richard returned to his documents to illustrate his point. As he walked me through still more carnage and plunder, I began to see the Flints as latter-day Las Casases: bearing witness, like the Dominican friar, to crimes against natives and Spain’s betrayal of the Christian ethos.

  When I mentioned this, Richard and Shirley surprised me again. They didn’t want to resurrect the black legend, which tarred Spaniards as heedless butchers. The fact that Coronado and many other conquistadors were prosecuted for their cruelties gave evidence of Spain’s moral struggle over conquest. Nor did the Flints bear any animus toward Coronado as an individual. “He was a prominent cog in the imperial bureaucracy,” Shirley said, “not a forward-or independent-thinking person.”

  The real issue, as the Flints saw it, was the very enterprise of one society imposing its will on another. “There are so many parallels between that era and our own,” Richard said.

  Shirley finished his thought. “Arrogance and empire, Spain’s and now America’s. It never works, but the damage that’s done lasts for centuries.”

  CORONADO LEFT THE pueblo country in late April 1541, guided by several Indians, including El Turco, the captive who had promised to lead the Spanish to his wealthy homeland of Quivira. After ten days of travel, Coronado wrote, “I reached some plains so extensive that wherever I traveled on them I did not find their end.”

  The Spanish had entered the vast grassland that once covered a quarter of the continent. Few travelers today regard this landscape as wondrous. But to sixteenth-century Spanish eyes, the endless Plains were a world truly new, stranger and more striking than the arid and mountainous Southwest—which, after all, bore a passing resemblance to par
ts of their homeland.

  “The country is like a bowl, so that when a man sits down, the horizon surrounds him all around,” one horseman marveled. Also astonishing was the grass, which “straightened up again as soon as it had been trodden down.” Coronado’s immense legion left “no more trace where they passed than if nothing had been there—nothing.”

  Even more astounding were the “cows” pounding across the plain in herds so vast “that to count them is impossible.” As yet, the Spanish had no word but vaca for the American bison (commonly called buffalo), a huge, horned, and aggressive creature that frightened both the metal-clad conquistadors and their mounts.

  “There was not one of the horses that did not take flight when he saw them first, for they have a narrow, short face,” one rider wrote. “They have long beards, like goats, and when they are running they throw their heads back with the beard dragging on the ground.” Another Spaniard thought them “the most monstrous thing in the way of animals which has ever been seen and read about. . . . There is such a quantity of them that I do not know what to compare them with, except with fish in the sea.”

  Several weeks after entering the Plains, the Spanish also met Indians unlike any they’d yet encountered: tall, “well-built” nomads with painted faces, who followed the buffalo herds and lived entirely off their prey. They ate buffalo meat raw or half roasted over fires of buffalo dung; drank buffalo blood from sacks made of buffalo gut; used buffalo hides for their clothing, shoes, and conelike “tents,” and buffalo sinew, wool, and bone to make thread, rope, and awls. “They were very intelligent,” one of Coronado’s men wrote. “Although they conversed by means of signs they made themselves understood so well that there was no need of an interpreter.”