Castaño had no choice but to follow the Devils River, which was far from easy but at least provided some access to water. His men repeatedly tried to find a way across the Pecos, losing twenty-five dozen horseshoes in their various attempts. One group of scouts came upon a large group of Indians who were friendly and gave them buffalo and antelope hides and shoes, as well as meat. Finally they succeeded in finding a good route to the Pecos and a passable ford, possibly striking what became known to westering Texas Rangers, adventurous mail carriers like Bigfoot Wallace, U.S. cavalrymen, and stagecoach customers as the Southern Road, one portion of which happens to cross the divide between the two rivers on my family’s ranch at Juno, after leaving the Devils a few miles south of Beaver Lake.
Pecos River, west of Comstock, Texas
After crossing the Pecos south of what would later be Fort Lancaster, the members of the expedition followed the river north. They came upon empty rancherías and occasionally met natives, such as one group that was traveling with “loaded dogs.” The Spaniards had never seen a dog dragging a travois, so they were delighted, “as it was a new thing.” A group of Indian warriors killed one of the expedition members; another stole some cattle, which led to a battle in which several of the thieves were killed. Two were captured and hanged; three youths were taken as “servants” but later escaped with an ox.
Eventually, Castaño and a small group of scouts came to the Pecos pueblo, a fortified adobe town of four or five stories with a central plaza. It was not the first time these people had encountered Spaniards (both Coronado and Espejo had paid visits, which did not go well), and they were not disposed to be friendly. Castaño ordered his men to blow trumpets, and he attempted to make peace. The Indians threw stones and fired arrows and slingshots at their visitors. Castaño walked around the building and attempted to communicate his peaceful intentions. He gathered his men and held a conference. Perhaps he was concerned about the 1574 Law of Settlement, which forbade making war on the natives. Whatever his motivations, Castaño asked his secretary to record that their intentions were peaceful and the fact that the pueblo insisted upon presenting a hostile face to their entreaties. Then he attacked. Two cannons were set on a high place, and they were fired at the pueblo. Harquebuses were fired and Indians were shot. Castaño’s Indian guides fired their arrows, which apparently did more to frighten the residents of Pecos than the explosions of gunpowder. Eventually, the Indians surrendered and became friendly, even though they had suffered casualties, and the Spanish entered the pueblo. They were amazed at how much corn was stored inside the buildings and at how comfortable and well-appointed the dwellings were. They made note of the underground kivas and other structures as well as the complex and interesting methods used by the pueblo Indians for processing their corn and beans. These Indians wore cotton blankets and buffalo hides and robes woven from turkey feathers, and they stockpiled stone and wood in addition to corn and water.
The next day the Spanish were astonished to find that every single inhabitant of the pueblo had slipped away during the night, especially because the weather was very cold, with severe wind and snow. Even the rivers were frozen. Castaño and his party were very sad and disappointed, and they resolved not to harm the pueblo or take any of the people’s belongings, though they did help themselves to the pueblo’s precious stores of corn and bean flour. When the Spaniards went among other pueblos, they sounded their trumpets and fired guns to proclaim their arrival; they erected crosses and appointed mayors and governors; they forbade the natives to carry bows and arrows in Castaño’s presence, and they feasted on tamales and tortillas, beans and squash and turkeys. The Indians were mostly friendly, and because Castaño was gentle, for a Spaniard, and did not take their turquoise jewelry or other belongings, they humored him and swore allegiance to his mysterious God and to his equally mysterious king beyond the sea. Some of Castaño’s men wanted to pillage the pueblos, and they were very unhappy with his refusals. They plotted to kill him; the plan was discovered, but Castaño took mercy on the conspirators and did not execute them in the traditional Spanish manner, by affixing an iron collar, called a garrote, around the neck and tightening it with screws until the condemned person was strangled.
Castaño de Sosa pursued his expedition under an interpretation of the laws that was not shared by the Spanish crown and its agents in New Spain. He did not have the proper authorizations, and so the king disbanded his colony and sent soldiers north to arrest him. When the soldiers arrived, they informed Castaño that the king had ordered his arrest. Castaño submitted and said that the arrest was very welcome if that was the will of his king. Castaño was tried, found guilty, and banished to China. Later, Spanish authorities had occasion to revisit his case, and his sentence was voided. The reprieve came too late, for he was dead, having been killed by pirates.
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It was Don Juan de Oñate who at last received the royal charter, in 1595, to establish a colony in the north. Oñate was a rich man, and his entrada was largely financed out of his personal funds, which had been greatly increased by his marriage to Isabel de Tolosa Cortés Moctezuma, the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés and great-granddaughter of the emperor Moctezuma. Three years later Oñate crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso, marched across a desolate stretch of ground known as the Jornada del Muerto, Dead Man’s March, into the northern Rio Grande valley, and subdued the many pueblos he encountered there. He founded the river kingdom of New Mexico. He searched for gold and silver—traveling as far as the Gulf of California to the southwest and Kansas in the east—but found only Indians, mountains, deserts, and seas of grass on the high plains. When the Indians rebelled, Oñate was brutal in suppression. After the revolt of Ácoma pueblo he ordered that all male prisoners over the age of twenty-five forfeit one foot by amputation and serve twenty years of what was euphemistically called personal service. Women were also sentenced to twenty years of slavery; they were permitted to keep both feet.
Oñate was eventually called back to Mexico City, in 1606, after King Philip III ordered a halt to all exploration in search of treasure in New Mexico. He said the colony was profitless. The king told his viceroy in Mexico to find some sufficient pretext for recalling Oñate, “so that he may come without disturbance; as soon as he has come you will detain him in the City of Mexico, disband whatever military force he may have, and appoint a satisfactory governor.” On his way back to Mexico, in a skirmish with some Indians, Oñate lost his only son, whom he buried on the Jornada del Muerto. He continued down the Camino Real to the capital, where like so many great conquistadors he was convicted of committing crimes against the Indians as well as adultery.
The friars who lived in New Mexico and the other northern reaches of New Spain continued to harvest the souls of Indians with Christian zeal. The Christian brothers were often abused, sometimes fed tortillas made with dead mice and urine, and occasionally martyred. They came into contact with the Apaches. They taught the Indians to make adobe; they taught them to use whitewash and to work hard, like European peasants; they instructed them in Christian dogma. The friars, assisted by the Indians, cultivated grapes for Communion wine and planted fruit trees. Churches were raised.
One day in 1629, fifty Jumano Indians showed up at the Isleta pueblo and begged for the friars to come to their rancherías across the wide plains and convert their people to Christianity. It was not the first time such a request had come from the Jumanos. The Spaniards were impressed by this distant people who so desired to be instructed in the one true faith, and there was great interest among the religious of New Mexico in bringing these earnest natives into the faith. But there were so few priests and so many souls to attend there in New Mexico. At about the same time, a supply train, the first to be received in four years, arrived from Mexico City, and with it came thirty new padres, who brought word from Spain about a miraculous phenomenon involving a Franciscan nun from northern Castile named María de Jesús de Ágreda. María de Jesús was a remarkable young woman who h
ad become famous for her trances, in which she claimed to travel to the Orient and to New Mexico, where she appeared to the natives and spoke to them in their own language. Religious officials in Mexico were asked to investigate these mysterious “bilocations.”
When a friar asked the Jumanos how they had come to learn about Christianity, they responded that it was the Lady in Blue who came among them and was always preaching. They pointed to a painting of a nun and said that she was dressed like that one, except her face was young and very beautiful. The Spanish were stunned, because the nuns of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, where Sister María de Jesús was abbess, wore a distinctive blue cloak over their habits. Friars were sent east from New Mexico to the Jumanos, who were camped along a river called Nueces, which was probably the modern Concho River near San Angelo, Texas. At that time, according to a Spanish memorial of 1630, the Jumanos were suffering from a drought that had dried up their water sources and caused the buffalo to move away. They were planning to move their rancherías to find new sources of food, when the Lady appeared to each of the Jumano captains personally and told them that the Spanish fathers were coming near, so they sent out a party to meet them. The padres and the soldiers who traveled with them were greeted by a procession of the Jumanos, led by two men holding crosses. More than ten thousand people assembled in a field, and the padres asked if they wished to be baptized. The captains of the Jumanos responded that it was only for this purpose that all the people had gathered together. The padres asked that everyone who wished to be a Christian raise up his arm, and in response, “with one great cry, all uplifted their arms, rising to their feet, asking for the holy Baptism.” Even mothers with suckling babies took them by their little arms and held them upward. And so they were baptized and indoctrinated, and before the fathers left the Jumanos, they healed their sick and their infirm, the blind, the lame, and the dropsied, of all their pains and afflictions.
The religious custodian of New Mexico, Fray Alonso de Benavides, was so amazed by all the miracles that had transpired that he undertook a great journey, traveling down the Camino Real from Santa Fe, across the Jornada del Muerto to El Paso, and thence to Chihuahua and southward to Mexico City, to make a report to the archbishop of Mexico. Then he sailed to Spain, where after some time he obtained permission from the head of the Franciscan order to visit Mother María de Jesús herself in Ágreda. María de Jesús was a spiritual virtuoso, a religious prodigy who took a vow of chastity at the age of eight and entered the Convent of the Immaculate Conception at seventeen, with her mother, the same year that her father and brother entered the Franciscan order, very much under her influence. The pope made her abbess when she was twenty-five. When Fray Benavides appeared before her in 1631, she was twenty-nine years old and very beautiful, with large black eyes and pale white skin and rosy cheeks. María de Jesús told the padre of her travels among the heathens and the savages who did not know the one true God, transported by guardian angels, among them Saint Francis. She described to him the pueblos of New Mexico and told how she had been present when he himself had performed various baptisms among them. She described his appearance when he was a younger man and that of the Jumanos and the friars who had gone among them. The padre was greatly moved and wrote down an account of what he had learned and showed it to her, and she signed it with her own hand. Fray Benavides sent this account in a letter to the friars in New Mexico and said that he had been convinced absolutely of all that she had told him. Included also was a message from Mother María, who charged them to work tirelessly and gently to bring the Indians out of darkness and blindness into the immaculate, tender, and delightfully radiant law of God.
In later years, Mother María de Jesús published a book titled The Mystical City of God, Divine History of the Virgin, Mother of God, which includes detailed descriptions of her mystical flights to the New World in addition to the life of the Virgin, as well as an account of the nine months that Mary spent in her mother’s womb, during which time, already infused with the holy light of reason, the Virgin Mother commenced her great work of mediation, intercession, and reparation. The book was condemned for indecency and heresy by the Roman Inquisition in 1681, though the king of Spain, who was an active correspondent with Mother María, insisted on an exemption within his domains.
In 1658 a group of Babane and Jumano Indians petitioned the local Spanish captain at Saltillo for the right to form an autonomous pueblo in Coahuila; they were seeking a legal remedy to their predicament, which was not much better than slavery. The Native peoples of the region had been rounded up and put to work; children were taken and imprisoned so that the parents would work on the encomiendas, in the farms and mines of settlers who were entrusted (for that is the meaning of encomendar) with the bodies and souls of the Native peoples, who were to be instructed in the ways of civilization, the Spanish language, and the one true faith. The Spanish called this reducción. In practice, the reduction of the Indians, whether as part of the encomienda system or not, typically meant they were subjected to forced labor without contract or payment. The petitioners pointed to a precedent, which was the agreement between the Spanish and the Tlaxcaltecans, who had previously established a pueblo there. The encomenderos were not happy; the haciendas and the mines needed workers, and their labor force was parlous. Indians tended to die when forced to work. The petition was rejected.
Sixteen years later a businessman from Saltillo by the name of Don Antonio de Balcarcel was appointed mayor of Coahuila. He soon reestablished a settlement at Monclova that had fallen victim to frontier hazards. Large groups of natives began to appear before him, asking to be taken under his protection. The political situation was remarkably complex, with different nations vying for position and various coalitions trying to ally themselves with the Spanish. In the documents one finds wonderful names of vanished peoples. The Bobole coalition included the Xicocosse, Jumane, Bauane, Xupulame, Yorica, Xianco cadam, Yergiba, and Bacaranan. Another coalition included the Gueiquesale and the Hueyquetzale, as well as the Manos Prietas, Bacoram, Pinanacam, Cacaxte, Coniane, Ovaya, Tetecora, Contotore, Tocaymamare, Saesser, Teneymamar, Codam, and many others. A third comprised the Mayo, Babusarigame, Bamarimamare, Cabesa, Bauiasmamare, Igo quib, and others. The Catujano led a coalition that included the Masiabe, Madmeda, Mabibit, Ape, Pachaque, Xumez, and Garafe.
In one report, a Spanish soldier complains that the Indians were always starting wars with one another, killing and eating one another. Managing all the possible enmities was daunting. One group in particular, the Ervipiame, who might have lived near the Devils River, were fighting with the Gueiquesale coalition and the Yorica. The Spaniards, good imperialist bureaucrats, were diligent with their paperwork. They took notes and they took names. Ethnohistorians, mining Spanish archives, have identified more than six hundred different Native groups living in Texas alone.
Balcarcel officially established a pueblo under the leadership of the Bobole and their allies, which included groups of Jumanos. Other groups were there as well, and soon many more arrived. The Native population swelled, and alarmed Spanish settlers began to flee. Balcarcel, fearing that he would be overrun, sent a group led by Father Juan Larios and Fernando del Bosque to count the people living north of the Rio Grande and to urge them to stay put. Although the territory of Coahuila already included the lands north of the Rio Grande, at least nominally, those lands had not been explored, and the Spanish evidently viewed the river as a convenient administrative boundary. There is no reason to believe the Indians did so, and some groups defended territory on both sides. All were hunter-gatherers; they lived in one area for a brief time and then moved on when they had exhausted local resources, just as they had when Cabeza de Vaca came among them some 150 years previously. When the buffalo appeared in South Texas every year, some of the Indian groups fought wars over hunting rights.
All that began to change as the Apaches came under pressure from the Comanches and started to move south out of the Great Plains. The Apac
hes had been raiding pueblos in New Mexico for decades and were beginning to pressure the nations in Texas, which could explain the eagerness of so many groups to ally themselves with the Spanish. The Apaches themselves would do the same a century later.
The Bosque-Larios expedition set out in May 1675. Wherever the Spanish went, they took possession of the land in the name of their king. When they encountered Indians, according to the expedition diary, the natives asked for baptism, and Fray Larios taught them doctrine. When they came to the Rio Grande, it was very full; the riverbed was more than eleven hundred feet wide. They found Indians drying buffalo meat who complained about the depredations of their enemies, the Ervipiame. Everywhere the expedition went, they counted the numbers of warriors and women, girls and boys. On May 15, the expedition came to a river that the natives called Ona, which in their language meant “salty.” Bosque took possession in the name of the king, erected a tall wooden cross, and named the place San Isidro Labrador. (The ethnohistorian Maria F. Wade, in her definitive study on the Indians of the Edwards Plateau, suggests that the location was probably Elm Creek, between Brackettville and Del Rio.) The Indians came to them, and their leaders were questioned individually. All declared that they were ignorant of God and the way to salvation but they now wished to be baptized and to settle in a pueblo as Christians under the authority of King Carlos. Bosque welcomed them under Spanish dominion and ordered them to be peaceful. The new converts kissed the robes of the friars and left offerings. “One placed on the ground a piece of animal fat, and another a piece of rendered fat.” The next day more Indians arrived, and they asked to be baptized but were told they must learn the doctrine first. The friars baptized fifty-five suckling babies. A Gueiquesale leader presented a twelve-year-old Spanish boy who had been raised by the leader’s own mother; he said that he loved the boy like a brother but that he would give him back as a sign of friendship. “The boy was tattooed with a black line that ran from the forehead to the nose, and one row of round designs in the shape of the letter O on each of his cheeks. The boy had several rows of Os on the left arm, and one line of Os on the right arm.”
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