by Ray Suarez
Here, another American story began. The Acoma people had lived in this place since the thirteenth century. They were here three hundred years before the Spanish arrived, and began an encounter that would remake their world. There were no straitlaced Puritans dressed in black and white, bundled up against the cold and damp. There were no Elizabethan adventurers hoping to find a way to get Indians to part with land, tobacco, and gold to pay off the investments of shareholders back in London.
In today’s New Mexico, and in Texas, Florida, California, and Arizona, soldiers and priests pushed their way north and west from the first places they made landfall from Spain. For decades, small groups of men—explorers, not colonizers—threaded their way through what would become the Southwestern United States, extending the authority the Spanish monarchs exercised from faraway Mexico City in the longer-settled parts of New Spain.
Shield your eyes from the midday sun and try to imagine traversing this landscape in outfits of wool, linen, and leather, with metal armor to protect shoulders, arms, chests. Wearing heavy leather boots on their feet and gleaming metal helmets on their heads, small groups of Spanish soldiers conquered Indian nations.
The church of San Esteban is a reminder of the oppression wrought by these strange men from far away. Inside, heavy forty-foot-long beams frame a particularly beautiful Spanish colonial church. Yet run your eyes over the vast landscape again and you will see no trees of any size. There are also no roads, no wheeled carts, and no machines. Indians carried those massive beams more than twenty miles across the land and to the top of the mesa. Tons of earth, stone, and clay were similarly hauled up from the valley floor over thousands of hours of Indian labor. It took fourteen years to build the church.
Juan de Oñate was a New World man. Unlike the earliest conquistadores—conquerors—who were Europeans, he was born in Zacatecas in New Spain, to a wealthy and influential family. The Oñate family was made minor nobility by an ancestor’s victory over an Arab army in Spain, and they owned a silver mine in Mexico. Young Juan continued the arc of his family’s upward mobility by marrying Isabel de Tolosa Cortés, granddaughter of the conqueror Hernán Cortés, and great-granddaughter of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma.
The Spanish king Philip II ordered Oñate to colonize the northern reaches of New Spain. The Spaniards’ announced intention was to establish the Catholic religion and build new missions north of the Rio Grande. The young soldier, however, also had dreams of finding new silver deposits, a path to the pearls of the Pacific, and also to Quivira, one of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola and, according to legends, a place where Indians covered in gold ornaments toasted one another with goblets of gold.
Along with souls for God and gold for Spain, the Spanish Empire moved north for solid security reasons, according to Professor Stephen Pitti of Yale University. “Spain is competing with England in particular and Portugal and the Dutch eventually,” he said. “The Spanish are interested in securing parts of North America for their own national and imperial advantage. The Spanish are looking for the security of holding places like San Francisco Bay, or the Florida or Texas coasts.”
Oñate crossed the Rio Grande at today’s El Paso, Texas, and declared it a possession of Philip of Spain. He headed north, and established his capital by what he called the San Juan Pueblo, having extended the Camino Real, the Royal Road from Mexico City, another six hundred miles. (The San Juan Pueblo reverted to its original name of Ohkay Owingeh in 2005.) Construction on new missions began, sinking roots for the Roman Catholic faith that still thrive in that land four centuries later.
The soldiers who came north with Oñate had a problem. So far, they had found Indians, deserts, salt deposits, and not much else. The young captain was facing mutiny because the promised riches had not been discovered, and the colonists expected to head up from New Spain had not arrived in the new settlement either. Oñate punished rebels, ruled his small domain with an iron fist, and sent his restless men radiating out from his headquarters in search of silver and gold, water and game.
Oñate was now a full-fledged colonial governor of the province called Holy Faith of New Mexico. He visited the Indian pueblos now under his control. He hoped to find a shortcut to the Pacific and supply Mexico City with much-prized salt. He and his men hunted buffalo after failing to capture them, returning to the young settlement with plenty of meat and hides. Today what a buffalo looks like is such a common piece of knowledge, and it is hard to remember that people like Oñate were the first Europeans to see such animals, to draw and describe them in letters.
In a report to the king’s representative, the viceroy back in Mexico City, Oñate’s secretary, Juan Gutierrez Bocanegra, writes of the bison, “Its shape and form are so marvelous and laughable, or frightful, that the more one sees it, the more one desires to see it, and no one could be so melancholy that if he were to see it a hundred times a day he could keep from laughing heartily as many times, or could fail to marvel at the sight of so ferocious an animal.”
In the autumn of 1598, shortly after taking control of the pueblo, Oñate’s soldiers, under the command of his nephew Juan de Zaldívar, took sixteen captured Acoma men to the mesa and demanded supplies be delivered to the pueblo for their use. The Acomas’ leader, Zutacapan, had abandoned his earlier intention to attack the Spanish forces in the belief that the Europeans were immortal. When the Acomas refused the Spanish demands for supplies, fighting began that, if nothing else, proved the rumors about Spanish immortality unfounded. Oñate’s nephew was killed in the fighting along with eleven of his men. The governor sent Zaldívar’s brother Vicente toward Acoma on a punitive expedition.
It was not the first example, and it would not be the last: Spanish soldiers were able to bring superior technology and firepower to bear. They attacked the pueblo atop the mesa with a small force, and a cannon. Vicente Zaldívar’s attackers were able to inflict large numbers of casualties and widespread damage, even as they took terrible casualties in fierce combat with the Acomas. Zaldívar wrote in his diary that after the Indians surrendered, “Most of them were killed and punished by fire and bloodshed, and the pueblo was completely laid waste and burned.”
But the Spaniards were not satisfied with mere victory. Hundreds of Acoma men were seized as slaves and dispersed to Spanish possessions in the New World. Originally, the governor decided to enslave them for twenty years, and amputate the right foot of every man over twenty-five years old. He relented, to a certain extent, and cut the right foot from just two dozen men. He enslaved many more men, along with girls and women over twelve years of age. Oñate had shown the colonists and the colonized that he could be a cruel man when he needed to be. Now it was time to show his own people he could deliver on the promises of riches.
The stories of great wealth in seven cities north of New Spain had been circulating for decades, since a Franciscan priest told officials in Mexico City that he had seen Cibola, the City of Gold, in what is now New Mexico. When Fray Marcos de Niza wrote about his journey in 1539, he said he first saw Cibola in the distance. It was, he wrote, a city larger than Mexico City, with fine houses. His story continued: “At times I was tempted to go to it, because I knew that I risked nothing but my life, which I had offered to God the day I commenced the journey; finally I feared to do so, considering my danger and that if I died, I would not be able to give an account of this country, which seems to me to be the greatest and best of the discoveries. When I said to the chiefs who were with me how beautiful Cibola appeared to me, they told me that it was the least of the seven cities, and that Totonteac is much bigger and better than all the seven, and that it has so many houses and people that there is no end to it.”
The Spanish monarchs had already taken fabulous wealth out of Mexico in gold and silver. Nothing was bound to get their attention like the promise of even more riches. Earlier explorations headed to modern Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri looking for the cities of gold. They found Indian n
ations peaceably farming corn, beans, and squash, but no golden goblets.
The Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico. The land corridor leading north from Mexico across the Rio Grande at El Paso connected New Spain to a string of Spanish missions and Indian pueblos in this 1727 map. CREDIT: THE DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Oñate headed out in 1601 looking for two things: gold and a route to the sea. He brought 130 soldiers and a dozen Franciscan priests, and used Jusepe Gutierrez as a guide, the lone survivor of an earlier, ill-fated voyage in search of the Seven Cities. Oñate roamed far from his home province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico. He followed the meandering Canadian River through northern Texas (near today’s Amarillo), into Oklahoma, and then north into Kansas. He and his men were received peaceably in the Quivira settlements. There was no gold.
Instead Oñate became the first European to describe the tallgrass prairie, which covered much of the Midwest before agriculture and European colonization.
Back in New Mexico, as the governor ranged over the continent, things were not going well. There were no promised riches. The land was hard to farm. The Indians clearly did not want the settlers there. When Oñate returned from Kansas he found many of the settlers had returned to their hometowns south of the Rio Grande, and only his strongest supporters among the colonists hung on in his makeshift capital.
Ranging far from his arid capital, Oñate saw well-watered land capable of supporting large settlements. Emboldened by what he had seen in the future Amarillo and Wichita, he decided to mount another expedition. This time Oñate, soldiers, priests, and a few Indian translators headed west.
The diaries kept by priests, officers, and, through secretaries, by Oñate himself provide thrilling reading, filled with all the wonder of men seeing unimagined things for the first time and having the rare privilege of being the first Europeans to experience these early contacts with the people scattered across the Southwest.
One of the priests heading west with Oñate, Fr. Gerónimo Zárate Salmerón, describes the people of one pueblo this way: “The men are well-featured and noble; the women are handsome with beautiful eyes, and they are affectionate. These Indians said that the sea was distant from there twenty days’ journey. . . . It is to be noticed that none of these nations was caught in a lie.”
Time and again, the witnesses to these early encounters illustrate the assumption that the Indians should understand that there were new bosses in town. At one point the Spanish column took a local chief hostage, and there was surprise and offense when the chief’s own warriors launched an assault, freeing their leader unharmed.
Many of the languages spoken by Indian nations across this vast region came from different linguistic families and were mutually unintelligible; it is from the distance of four centuries impossible to know who was able to understand what and when. The diaries note that the Spanish expeditions all took Indian translators along with them, but at a time when people were not likely to travel many hundreds of miles from their homeland, the confidence that “our” Indians could talk to “those” Indians must often have been misplaced.
Father Francisco de Escobar’s accounts of the trip west to the Gulf of California tells of energetic gesturing, pointing, and describing done by men encountered near the Colorado River: “They almost convinced me beyond all doubt there were both yellow and white metals in the land, though there is no proof that the yellow metal is gold or that the white is silver, for of this my doubts are still very great.” Father Escobar may have had his doubts, but the feverish speculation was to go on for a hundred years.
When enthusiastic Spaniards animatedly asked about a large lake and deposits of gold, were Indians humoring them, passing along their own legends, or trying to describe a large and faraway body of water they themselves had never seen but only heard about, like the Puget Sound?
Indians told the Spaniards about a laguna de oro, a lagoon of gold surrounded by rich communities. Antonio de Espejo explored the Southwestern deserts in the 1580s, and was told by inhabitants of the Zuni Pueblo of “a large lake where the natives claimed there were many towns. These people told us there was gold in the lake region, that the inhabitants wore clothes, with gold bracelets and earrings, that they dwelt at a distance of a sixty days’ journey from the place we were.”
Espejo looked over a greater distance for the lake of gold than any Spaniard before him, but all he could find were copper deposits flecked with a little silver in modern-day Arizona.
Espejo’s own exaggerated stories of potential treasure waiting to be found in the arid Southwest overwhelmed all the years of failure and what has been taken as proof that there were no cities of gold. Espejo’s chronicles reinvigorated the rumor mill, and led in part to the eventual commissioning of Juan de Oñate to head north to New Mexico.
After all that search and struggle, maybe the Spanish should have seen a pattern emerging. Wherever they heard these Indian tales, the amazing lakes, peoples covered in gold were always a long journey from where they were at the moment. Oñate and his men also heard the stories of the lake of Copalla and gold. In Zarate’s telling, the faraway Indians “wore bracelets of gold, on the wrists and on the fleshy part of the arms and in their ears, and that from there they were fourteen days’ journey.”
California as an island. The long, narrow gulf that separates Baja California from the Mexican mainland long led explorers and mapmakers to assume the territory was an island. The name came from a sixteenth-century adventure novel, The Adventures of Esplandián. The author, Garci Rodríguez Ordonez de Montalvo, told of an island at “the right hand of the Indies” inhabited by a race of black women. He called his “rugged island” California, the name that has stuck for 600 years. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Oñate’s expedition kept heading west, and reached the Gulf of California, the inlet that separates the Mexican mainland from Baja California. However, Oñate did not follow the gulf all the way up to its end, where the Colorado River flows in. It was assumed the water continued northward, contributing to the idea that would persist for decades that California was a long island off the western shores of the North American continent.
Oñate headed back home to New Mexico and attempted to make up for what he lacked in gold with persistence. He petitioned the viceroy for more soldiers, more settlers, and more supplies to take another run at making a success of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico.
What he got instead of more help was a summons to return to court. Word had made its way to Mexico City of Oñate’s treatment of Indians in general, and in particular his handling of the conflict at the Acoma Pueblo. King Philip II of Spain had issued a royal ordinance thirty years earlier governing the treatment of Indians by Spaniards. The use of violence against Indians was outlawed, which afforded them some protection from the casual assault and theft that marked so many encounters with Europeans. Standards were put in place for priests and monks, colonists, and military people.
It was five years before Oñate was finally called to New Mexico to face charges of cruelty to the Indians in connection with the Acoma uprising, and when he did the indictment significantly underplayed the carnage at the pueblo. He was also charged with executing mutineers and deserters, and adultery. He was fined, expelled permanently from New Mexico, and banished from Mexico City for four years.
Historian Marc Simmons concludes that given the charges, the sentence eventually handed down was a lenient one. “In the career of Juan de Oñate, we find a summation of the motives, aspirations, intentions, strengths and weaknesses of the Hispanic pioneers who settled the Borderland.” The man often called “the Last Conquistador” died in Spain in 1626.
Founder of what became an American state. Witness to the founding of the oldest capital in North America, Santa Fe. Explorer of half a dozen American states covering a vast slice of the United States from Oklahoma to California. Whose name are yo
u more likely to hear in an American history class? Captain John Smith, admiral of New England, saved from beheading by Pocahontas? Henry Hudson of the Dutch East India Company? Or Don Juan de Oñate, founder of the first European settlements north of the Rio Grande?
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AS TRIBES ALONG the Eastern Seaboard, through the Great Lakes, and throughout South America learned all during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, defeating a few white men, or giving them what they wanted and sending them on their way, settled nothing. There would always be more.
In the decades that followed the death of Juan de Oñate, the Spanish viceroys in Mexico City continued to work to solidify their control of the vast, dry territories that stretched deep into the continent they maintained Spain owned. Roads poked their way into New Mexico, and eventually into Colorado, connecting routes of commerce and communication between the small cities and the sparsely settled European families heading north to take possession of land deeded by the Spanish Crown. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of descendants of these early families living in the Southwestern United States, including the actress Eva Longoria, and the former U.S. secretary of the interior and U.S. senator Ken Salazar.
The California Pueblos. This network of religious and military settlements consolidated the weak Spanish control of its northern possessions. These missions later grew into many of the largest cities in California and the United States. On this map you can see missions that are today the cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Carmel, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Jose, San Francisco, San Rafael, and others. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS