What drove them to such efforts? Force, or belief? I sensed the ghosts of slave/master relationships, and repression. But maybe I had Chaco wrong. Maybe the people who lived there built to honor the solace and power given to them by a spiritual idea. Exacting work, doors and windows absolutely aligned as at Chaco, each stone precisely and particularly fitted—is not often produced on demand. Maybe Chaco should be thought as made sacred by generations of devotion, like Chartres or Machu Picchu. I’m reminded of utterly joined Inca walls. On the other hand, in his long poem, The Heights of Machu Picchu, Neruda decried what he thought of as the slavery involved in that labor.
As Vincent Scully, Jr., says, the pueblos were built to support a ceremonial system dedicated to influencing the gods of the natural world, essentially, to bring rain. They are most fundamentally a setting for prayer and ceremony.
The world view of the people at Chaco, according to archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson, is based on “myths concerning the emergence of people from the earth in the time of genesis and their subsequent migration to a place of settlement.” This shows in “the correspondence between man-made symbolic constructions and abstract notions of cosmic geometry.” The “architectural and ritual repetition of these themes established immutable points of reference and order.”
People from Chaco cleared long straight roads with staircases cut into sandstone rims, thus connecting themselves to outlier villages and at the same time delineating their sacred geography, an entire landscape understood as a staging ground for ritual based on cosmology. North/south roads were likely routes along which pilgrimages progressed toward a sacred “central place” where humans lived. Chacoans kept exact track of seasons and equinoxes, serving both ceremonial and agricultural purposes. The pueblos spread over four square miles in an integrated, built, and urban environment. But not all was symbolic. They channeled rainwater off mesas to farms along the wash. Old men sat in the sun and watched young women, squash blossomed and children played in the water, laughing.
Then, around A.D. 1150, Chaco was abandoned. The people, anthropologists think, mostly went north to the San Juan River drainage, to Aztec pueblo and Mesa Verde. Some drifted west to the Hopi pueblos and south to those at Zuni.
We tend to think of preliterate peoples, around the world, as stuck in place. But that’s not true. Tribes were constantly moving on to new ground, in long waves, a few miles in every generation. It’s a mostly unknown history, recorded only in communal memories, stories transformed into legends and then myths.
Europeans came to North America, New England and Virginia, to the middle West, in waves. They came all the way West only generations ago, on the move, in search of homes. Which perhaps accounts for our eagerness to fathom reasons why a people so securely in place as the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon—who worked endlessly to construct elaborate homes for themselves—would abruptly take part in the “abandonments.”
Across the Southwest, by A.D. 1250, culminating around A.D. 1300, there was a general depopulation of major settlements. The Mogollon had already been absorbed into the Anasazi; the Hohokam and Anasazi cultures collapsed; building construction and most craftwork ceased. There were of course causes. But no one claims to know specifically what they were.
Between A.D. 1090 and 1100, and between 1130 and 1180, there were severe droughts. It’s possible that dry winters, and monsoon rains in the summer, resulted in gully washing. Chaco Wash is presently cut by a deep channel, which lowered the water table to the point that subirrigated agriculture is now impossible. In conjunction with salination in the irrigated soils, and the gradual killing off of large hunting animals, prolonged drought and the subsequent gully washing may have led to starvations.
But if that’s so, why did the dispossessed tend to resettle on cliff-top mesas or in caves high on almost unclimbable cliffs? It seems they were intent on defending themselves. Against whom?
For answers to such questions, we have unsubstantiated speculation. It’s been theorized they may have been terrorized by hunter-gatherer bands of the Athapascans who had come south from the Mackenzie River Delta of northwestern Canada at roughly this time. No one knows how long they had been on the move, or if they came south through the Rocky Mountains or followed bison across the short-grass plains. Confronted by what must have seemed an infinity of deserts, they began settling and interacting with the people who became the Hopi and Zuni and those in the pueblos along the Rio Grande. Their culture evolved into that of the present-day Navajo and Apache. But there’s no evidence of armed conflict. Except, of course, for the name, Anasazi, sometimes taken to mean “ancient enemies.”
Or, did a theocracy lose control? Did an uprising run across the deserts in reaction to colonialist overlords from the high cultures of Mesoamerica? Were the rebels fearing retribution?
This kind of guessing isn’t utterly off the wall. Through neutron activation analysis, turquoise in the ancient Toltec trading system across central Mexico has been shown to have been mostly mined in the Southwest. Then there are those parrot feathers, found in Hohokam and Anasazi ruins. Clearly, there was back-and-forth contact.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, archaeological evidence indicates that much of the Southwest, including areas which had been densely populated, were emptied of human presence. The people had moved from Chaco to Mesa Verde and to cliff houses (defensive positions) like the White House in Canyon de Chelly, Betatakin and Keet Seel in Tesgi Wash, where they stayed for a generation. Tree-ring dating shows that Betatakin, with 135 rooms and perhaps 125 residents, was only lived in from 1267 to perhaps 1300. What drove them to keep moving? We can only guess.
Arroyo Hondo, a pueblo of 1,200 two-story rooms, was built in the years between A.D. 1315 and 1330, then abandoned, then resettled in the 1370s. It was burned and abandoned again in A.D. 1410. The people ate starvation foods such as cattails, cholla, and grass seeds. Infant mortality was high—26 percent died before the age of one, and 45 percent died before five. The average age was 16.6 years.
But other tribal people were congregating in places where they were to settle and stay, around the Hopi mesas and at Zuni and Acoma and Laguna, and in pueblos along the Rio Grande, where there was more reliable water and they were able to count on their crops. They built high-walled defensive pueblos, no doorways on the ground floor but rather ladders that could be pulled up in times of attack; they developed societies in which personal, social, and religious relationships were woven together in a complex fabric which did not easily unravel; they acted out their prayers, planted and hunted and harvested, and danced in time with what they took to be the rhythms of the cosmos.
The time of resettlement after the so-called abandonment can be thought of as one of cultural reinvention. The problems of coexistence were at least partially resolved. Commonly known stories and sacred rituals brought people into sanctified relationships and allegiances. Status was almost exclusively based on taking care.
Entire communities often moved en masse, a fact which implies that the network of emotional ties, the social glue that holds groups together, was considered indispensable to survival. If various groups depended on one another to help in the rituals considered necessary to ensure safety and maintain the world, if they truly believed that their prayers and rituals might affect rainfall and crops, they may have believed that in order to hold their ritual system together they had to stay together. This was likely true in many cases.
Cultures survived because of elaborate enfranchising stories, and rituals in which they acted out the reasons why they were who they were, where their ancestors had come from, and how to live gracefully. Stories and rituals held them whole as they suffered resettlement, always praying for rain, and struggled to keep believing in themselves.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Invasions: Spanish Swords, Christianity, and Americans
Then the growth of native cultures in the Southwest was profoundly interrupted. The Spanish arrived, armored warriors on horseback and Catholic
priests, men interested in conquest, saving souls and rumors of fortunes for the taking. History arrived.
The first non-Indian in the Southwest was a black Spanish slave named Estéban. He survived the 1528 wreck of a sailing ship on the Florida coast, and with three Spaniards made his way around the Gulf of Mexico to Spain’s colonial capital in Mexico City. The trip took eight years. Along the way Estéban became a shaman. In Mexico City he told stories of cities and gold. In 1529 he accompanied an expedition to find the seven golden (and nonexistent) cities of “Cíbola.” What the Spaniards found was a Zuni village. The Zuni imprisoned Estéban and three days later killed him. But the seeds to another dream had been scattered, and they grew.
In 1540 the Spanish sent Francisco Vasquez de Coronado north with three hundred Spanish soldiers, eight hundred Indian servants, and herds of horses. On July 7, encountering people who became the present-day Zuni, Coronado demanded food. They refused; their village was sacked. Thirteen pueblos along the Rio Grande were destroyed and hundreds of Indians were burned at the stake over the next two years, before Coronado took his forces back to Mexico. A intermittent bitter war had commenced.
The Spanish crown, in 1598, having ordered that the natives be met with “peace, friendship, and good treatment” to enhance chances they might become Christians, sent Don Juan de Oñate north from Mexico to the Rio Grande valley with 129 soldiers, 7 friars, and 2 lay brothers. Oñate established seven missionary districts, ranging from Hopi to Taos and Pecos to El Paso, and named Nueva Mexico. But “peace, friendship and good treatment” soon went wrong, at Acoma. Oñate’s nephew, a thug named Zaldivar, demanded food, climbed the 357-foot tower of rock to the pueblo with fourteen men, and began raiding supplies. The people at Acoma slaughtered them. Oñate struck back savagely, and six hundred people from Acoma were killed. Men over twenty-five had one foot cut off before being sent into bondage.
Seventy settlers arrived from Mexico in December 1600.
But they’d come to a land of deserts, no mineral wealth, and a native population who showed no interest in Christianity. Over the next decades Nueva Mexico languished, the military, friars, and settlers competing to exploit Indian labor and tribute. The settlers put the natives to work on their properties. The friars wanted both voluntary labor and for the pueblos to give up their native religions (the friars particularly abhorred what they took to be the devil worship practiced underground—in kivas). The political and military rulers seemed exclusively dedicated to amassing wealth they could take back to Mexico.
Severe drought in the late 1660s led to starvations and increasingly savage raids by the nomadic Apache and Comanche. By that time, 2,500 settlers and 30 friars lived in the midst of 15,000 native people in the pueblos along the Rio Grande and in Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi. Seemingly unable to realize the degree to which they were vulnerable, they governed with stunning arrogance.
In 1675 the military assisted friars in publicly whipping forty-three native religious leaders and hanging three others for encouraging idolatry. Native anger exploded during the summer of 1680, in the Pueblo Rebellion. Organized by a humiliated native priest named Pope, and a black slave named Naranjo, Indians in the pueblos across the northern Rio Grande valley struck early on the morning of August 10, 1680, with unprecedented unity.
The first death reported was that of a friar from the pueblo at Tesuque, just north of Santa Fe, Father Pio. He was killed by men he thought of as members of his flock. Over the next two days, along the Rio Grande and in pueblos to the west, Indians killed friars, burned missions, sacked haciendas, and drove settlers to safety behind walls in Santa Fe. The siege that ensued only ended when the military and settlers finally broke out and endured a long, degrading march to El Paso. The Pueblo Rebellion had accomplished its purposes. The hated Spaniards had been driven away.
But pueblo unity came apart, old hostilities were renewed, Apache raiding increased, pueblos were abandoned. The Spanish returned twelve years later.
This time the friars were no longer determined to eradicate kachinas and native religion. Indians were no longer punished for not going to Mass; they gathered in kivas and danced in their squares. The pueblo creator was after all not utterly different from the Christian god, nor were the pueblo goddesses so unlike the Virgin, nor were the kachinas entirely unlike angels. Mutual religious tolerance became a habit and is to this day.
Spanish settlement in southern Arizona came later, and accomplished less. The missionizing of a Jesuit named Eusebio Francisco Kino, from the 1680s to his death in 1711, resulted in little substantive change.
In 1767 Jesuits were banned from the New World, their place taken by the Franciscans. In 1775 an Irishman named Don Hugo O’Connor built a military post on the Santa Cruz River, the Presidio of San Augustín del Tucson. In 1783, south of Tucson, the Franciscans began building a twin-towered baroque, Moorish, and Byzantine church. Known as White Dove of the Desert, with vivid paintings on the walls and ceilings, and red, blue, yellow, silver, and gold painted statuary, it serves the Tohono O’odham Indians on the San Xavier Indian Reservation, and is a prime tourist destination these days.
That was as far into present-day Arizona as the Spanish settled. As a result, the Athapascan bands in the north, people who became the Navajo, were left on their own. Over time they adapted elements from the pueblos at Hopi and Zuni and along the Rio Grande, and from the Europeans. From the pueblos they took weaving and pottery-making. From the Spaniards they learned to herd cattle, sheep, and goats, to use metals and cotton. But the Spanish never converted the Navajo to Catholicism, or imposed much in the way of political control. The Navajo settled in and reinvented themselves as pastoralists. Their language remained intact, as did their religion, centered in their ceremonial six-or eight-sided hogans (which were built with short logs and thus suited to juniper-tree country).
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the raiders known as Apache had begun to settle. But not much changed among the Hispanic settlers. Many spoke sixteenth-century Castilian Spanish. Because iron for wagon-wheel rims was hard to come by, hauling was done with wooden-wheeled carts. In the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, from Santa Fe to Las Cruces, they farmed soils renewed each year by flooding, and developed a system in which communities elect a mayordomo or ditch boss, to oversee the distribution of irrigation water. Designed to ensure fairness in the use of a commons, it’s an envied model around the world, and still in widespread use.
But as happens so often in isolated backlands, a defensive and repressive ruling-class culture was coalescing. At the top was an aristocracy claiming descent from Spain (some were Jews driven from Spain in the anti-Semitic wave around the time of Columbus).
The highest social rank was reserved for those born in Spain. Then came, in this ranking, “pure-blood” Spanish born in Mexico; mestizos of mixed Spanish and Mexican Indian blood; coyotes, the children of Spanish and New Mexican Indians; and mulattos, who were black and Spanish. Last were genizaros, enslaved children of the nomadic tribes who had been brought up Spanish and freed as adults.
Changes accumulated slowly. French and American mountain men and traders were coming in over the Santa Fe Trail. While their behavior was often outlandish, drunken, and barbaric, they brought new ideas, books, textiles, and medicines. Then in 1821 the people of New Spain overthrew the Spanish, creating the Republic of Mexico. All the people, Indians and Spanish of all varieties, were now citizens.
In 1845 the United States annexed the former Mexican state of Texas. On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico itself. The 2,700-man Army of the West entered Santa Fe without opposition in mid-August and took possession of New Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in 1848 and guaranteed land grants awarded by Spain to pueblo peoples, known as “barbarians.” (The nomadic raiding tribes, the Comanche and the Apache and even the Navajo, who were by this time largely settled, were called “savages.”)
The Navajo operated in bands, some settled
and others wandered and raided. Treaties made with one band did not hold for the next. Because of this they were soon crossways with the United States military. In 1860 some two thousand Navajo in eastern Arizona attacked Fort Defiance. They suffered serious defeat, even though it looked for a while as if they had inexplicably won when the U.S. military abandoned forts throughout the region. But the other shoe was getting ready to drop.
In 1862 a column of U.S. troops arrived in Santa Fe from California. They were under orders to put an end to raiding by the “savages.” Kit Carson, mountain man and scout, was hired out of retirement in Taos. It was Carson’s task to round up the raiders into a forty-square-mile camp, Bosque Redondo (“round woods”) on the Pecos River, where they would be converted into Christian farmers. After corralling the Mescalero Apache (some four hundred warriors and families), in 1866-67 Carson went after the Navajo. He soon destroyed their herds and reduced them to starvation in Canyon de Chelly. About eight thousand Navajo made the famous Long Walk, more than three hundred miles to Bosque Redondo; stragglers were shot or taken into slavery by New Mexicans.
The chance that Carson accepted but despised his role in these sad events is sensibly written about by Tom Dunlay in Kit Carson and the Indians. Col. John Chivington, after his Sand Creek massacre of two hundred Cheyenne, mostly women and children, claimed to be the greatest Indian fighter of all time. Carson said, “I don’t like a hostile Red Skin better than any of you do. I’ve fit ’em—fout ’em—as hard as any man. But I never yit drew a bead on a squaw or papoose and I loath and hate the man who would…no one but a coward or a dog would do it.”
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