The end of the Franciscan Espeleta would come shortly after his successes at Awat’ovi. Even during the years when Espeleta brought music, choral voices, and a semblance of social harmony to Antelope Mesa, other forces were combining to sabotage his work. Other Franciscans who joined the missions in the Hopi country proved more in the cut of Padre Posada than of Espeleta. One such was Fray Salvador de Guerra, first stationed at Shungopovi in 1652 and transferred shortly to the eastern Towa pueblo of Jemez, where his superiors could better monitor his abusive behavior to his charges. At Shungopovi, de Guerra had invaded Hopi homes in search of cotton cloth to demand as tribute, and when he discovered “some feathers” and “idols,” he seized the people and doused them with turpentine “so as to set fire to them.” One of his victims ran for a distant water spring where he could douse the flames, but de Guerra—fearing he meant to report the grotesque punishment to other Franciscans—mounted a horse and ran the man down, killing him. Authorities in Santa Fe heard of the crime and brought him east. When called before the ecclesiastical court to account for his actions, he defended himself by claiming that he only “occasionally used beating and larding to punish idolators and boys and girls for ‘culpas particulares.’” By 1664, just one year into Espeleta’s term, de Guerra turned up at Hopi again, appointed to Awat’ovi.
Espeleta could not control the rogue friar. Although he may have lessened his physical cruelties, he intensified his demands that the Hopis weave cotton mantas for him, doubtless for resale in the markets of Santa Fe. The courts again found against him, declaring “the said father is incorrigible, overbearing, and arrogant,” and removed him from Hopi to the eastern mission at Quarai for penance. And then inexplicably assigned him to the mission at the southern Tiwa pueblo of Isleta on the Rio Grande.
Complaints against de Guerra from Isleta provide a window into the tensions that would reach a flash point in the summer of 1680. The absence of rain had become so severe, and the temperatures so brutal, that it distressed even the Spaniards. No doubt more concerned about his own survival than that of the Pueblo Indians—who “perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines, and in their huts”—Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal finally “consented and gave permission to Christian Indians . . . to perform this dance (of the Kachinas) in public.” At Isleta this permission shattered what little decorum Padre de Guerra still maintained: “Not being able to restrain them in any other way, [he] went throughout the pueblo with the cross on his shoulders, a crown of thorns, and a rope about his neck, beating his naked body, in order that they might stop the dance.” The Isletans found his performance so disturbing that one group, probably the Christian faction, “came after him weeping, saying that they were not to blame, because the governor himself had commanded they dance.”
Elsewhere, Franciscans harshly suppressed the ceremonies and prosecuted the Katsina dancers for idolatry. In 1675, the local Inquisition hanged three Katsina priests in Santa Fe, and forty-three others suffered floggings for crimes of sorcery and sedition. Among the flogged were prominent spiritual leaders like Po’pay, from Okhay Owinge (San Juan Pueblo), Antonio Malacate of Tesuque Pueblo, the Keresan Alonso Catiti, and Luis Tupatú of Picurís Pueblo, who over the next several years quietly set about organizing an effort to expunge the Spanish curse from the region. The rebels sent runners to distant pueblos like Acoma, Zuni, and those of the Hopi mesas, using a knotted cord to indicate the days yet to pass before the rising would commence. Their careful timing went awry when Spaniards intercepted messengers from Tesuque Pueblo and tortured them to reveal the rebels’ plans. Lest the Spanish have time to raise a defense, on August 10, 1680, the Eastern Pueblos erupted in rebellion, followed a few days later by the Hopis. Widespread warfare, raiding, and sacking of outlying settlements delivered 422 Spanish subjects to death or captivity. The surviving 1,946 colonists, missionaries, servants, and allied “Christian Indians” were expelled from the northern colony for more than a decade.
Mission San Bernardo de Awat’ovi in 1680, on the eve of the rebellion.
Padre José de Espeleta died not at Awat’ovi, where he had been recently replaced by Fray José de Figueroa, but at Oraibi. His end is recalled in the histories passed down to Wikvaya. At “the moment of the yellow dawn” Hopi assailants woke him by pounding on his cell door, and rushed in once he had slid open the bolt. Espeleta resisted the assault and found himself dragged outdoors, where the attackers slit his throat and threw his body off the edge of the mesa for the ravens and coyotes to devour. Similar fates befell the other three documented priests at Hopi on that fateful day—Fray Figueroa at Awat’ovi, where the residents quickly began to loot the church of its paraphernalia and timbers; Fray José de Trujillo at Shungopovi, who was bound and burned over a fire fueled by timbers from the mission; and along with Espeleta at Oraibi the recently arrived Fray Augustín de Santa María, his throat slashed as well. No records exist of the fate of the lay brothers, carpenters, and any family members who lived at the missions, but no memories of their survival exist, either. Nor do Hopi traditional narratives recall the destiny of the “Christian Indians” who had participated in the Franciscan decades at Awat’ovi. The Hopis’ Navajo neighbors, however, recall that “some of the Catholics escaped to shelter among the Navajos, and some were driven over the cliffs.” By the end of August no living representatives of the Spanish Empire and its Catholic faith walked Antelope Mesa. And yet something powerful remained.
The stunning success of the rebellion’s early days disintegrated over the course of one year, although it would take more than a decade for the Spaniards to reexert their authority. Po’pay and his corevolutionaries understood that the Pueblo world had been utterly transformed during the eighty-some years of Spanish colonization. Pushing a program of nativistic purification and return to the “old ways,” the rebels urged the complete destruction of the mission churches and their liturgical paraphernalia, as well as rejection of the Spanish-influenced lifeways of livestock herding, wheat farming, tools, and architecture. Freed from the yoke of the missionaries, many Pueblo Indians set out to desecrate, dismantle, and reuse the adobe bricks, heavy timbers, and extensive construction of the mission complexes—yet often converted the churches and conventos into corrals for the sheep, cattle, and horses that they were wont to preserve, rather than reject. The deep divisions between traditionalists and those who had been drawn to Catholicism reemerged quickly, since they drew not only upon religious sympathies, but the inequities in power that had crosscut Pueblo society for generations. Pecos Pueblo experienced an internal civil war, and the southernmost Pueblo peoples—the Piros and Tompiros—refused to follow Po’pay’s leadership, distant as he was among the northern Pueblos. Enraged, Po’pay “began to act like the Spanish tyrants he had expelled,” executing dissidents and accumulating women for his pleasure. Deposed from leadership by dissatisfied Tewas and replaced by the northern Tiwa Picurís captain Luis Tupatú, Po’pay was dead by 1688. The Keres captain Alonso Catiti also died, and in the resulting leadership vacuum the Keresan pueblos fractured into competing raiders.
Nuestra Señora de la Macana (Our Lady of the War Club), a rare depiction of the Siege of Santa Fe in 1680, and the iconic Virgin that survived.
In contrast to the mythology of a “bloodless reconquest,” soldiers like don Diego de Vargas and the Franciscans who followed his mounted columns were forced to mix fierce fighting with complex recruitment of Pueblo allies, and a negotiated reimposition of the Catholic faith that included some sufferance of traditional Pueblo religious practices. In the same year as Po’pay’s death, Spaniards began forays into their former colony with reconquest in mind. Brief yet bloody engagements at Zia Pueblo suggested a waning rebel defensive capacity, and intelligence gathered in those entradas suggested that to the west, the Zunis and Hopis had begun raiding each other for their stores of corn. Finally, over the winter of 1691–92, embassies from the pueblos of Jemez, Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, and Pecos—combining Tow
a- and Keres-speaking peoples—reached the Spanish encampment at El Paso del Norte to parlay with the Spaniards, and invited their return to the devastated north. Pacification of the Rio Grande Valley pueblos occupied Spanish attention for several months. No words had reached them about the fate of the missions in the western provinces of Zuni and Moqui.
What the Spanish reconquistadores found when they finally reached Tusayán would only deepen the mystery of the Singing House. History did not stand still in the absence of Europeans.
4
Wolves from the East
And when all of these people act like bandits, I do not know what protection there is for a poor religious alone at his mission. What can one ant do against a thousand bloodthirsty wolves?
—FRAY ANTONIO CARBONEL, JUNE 1696
The Spanish reconquest of New Mexico took place across four long years and in several halting stages, far messier and traumatic than the “Bloodless” reconquest celebrated today in the annual Fiestas de Santa Fe each September. Indeed, the reconquistador don Diego de Vargas entered the province in that month of 1692 to little opposition and achieved a symbolic reoccupation of the villa of Santa Fe without bloodshed—yet the fortified Casas Reales (now Governor’s Palace) remained in the hands of Pueblo Indians who had reclaimed the settlement they once called Ogap’oge (White Shell Water Place). As winter enveloped the province, Vargas led an expedition to the west, receiving the (equally) symbolic subjugation of the Acoma, Zuni, and, after tense confrontation at the foot of Antelope Mesa “in the midst of 800 Moqui Indians, all armed,” a pledge of loyalty from “the chief, Miguel by name” of Awat’ovi, outside the gated walls of which he established an encampment and parade ground. This phase of his resettlement campaign fulfilled, he departed south for his base in El Paso. He would learn the conquest was incomplete.
Vargas returned as winter drew near in 1693, this time with recolonization his aim. He brought a substantial expedition—100 men-at-arms, 70 families, 18 Franciscan friars, and dozens of Indian allies herding some 2,000 horses, 1,000 mules, and 900 head of cattle, sheep, and hogs. The force arrived outside of Santa Fe in December to find the villa’s residents “shameless and sneering,” deeply suspicious of the colonists’ intent. Making an encampment “two harquebus shots” distant from the former provincial palace’s adobe walls, he negotiated for two weeks, until December 28, when the Indian occupants suddenly turned militant. Huge bonfires burned within the plazas of the palace, and war songs reverberated throughout the night.
As it turned out, the fighting would prove particularly fierce due to the defense offered by some seasoned warriors resident in the former Casas Reales. These Indian fighters, from the Galisteo Basin pueblos south of Santa Fe, had been the majority force in sacking the villa in 1680, and had rebuilt the ruined complex as an Indian pueblo during the decades thereafter. Their martial skills had been honed in defending their own villages (and associated missions) against Apache raiders during the seventeenth century, and through service as auxiliaries to Spanish campaigns against the Navajos during the same decades. Settling in the former village of Ogap’oge was a decision that removed them from daily anxiety about Apache raids in the Basin and confirmed their centrality to the revolt.
Known in Spanish accounts as “Tanos,” these peoples comprised one branch of the Kiowa-Tanoan language family that occupied much of the Rio Grande Valley north of the Sandia Mountains, and extending to encompass the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. Just when the subgroup of Tanos hived off from their Tewa kinspeople is unclear, but by the fourteenth century they were coalescing into major agricultural towns in the fertile former ocean bed of the Galisteo Basin. The first European mention of Tano settlements dates from the 1540s, when Coronado’s expedition passed through the Basin on their ill-fated quest to find Gran Quivira.
At least eight major towns, numbering more than a thousand residents in each, flourished when Spanish colonists arrived in 1598, profiting by exchanging their corn and beans with Plains Apaches in return for bison meat, hides, and slaves. Franciscan fathers established missions at the Pueblos of Galisteo and San Lazaro by 1616, and three more at San Marcos, San Cristóbal, and La Cieneguilla by 1626. Ostensibly devoted to the salvation of Indian souls, the Franciscans also saw the missions as economic engines for the colonial enterprise, especially in animal husbandry through the raising of horses, mules, and cattle for the new colony. Tanos resented the labor demands placed upon them, but also garnered important new skills in the livestock trades—iron forging, leatherworking, and gunsmithing. Providing military protection for the missions against seasonal raids by Apaches—newly mounted on escaped horses, the Vaqueros and Faraones were precursors to later Lipans and Mescaleros—Tanos were the most familiar with Spanish arms and tactics among all the 1680 rebels. Thirteen years later, with Vargas outside their walls, they would fight again, suffer defeat, and begin another migration.
Once the rebellion erupted, Tanos proved avid in the cause. Burning mission churches, killing friars, and marching north to turn the tide during the siege of Santa Fe, Tano fighters gained reputations as not easily intimidated. After expelling the surviving Franciscans and colonists, they rewarded themselves with the spoils and claimed Ogap’oge. They transformed it into a fortress, adding second and third stories of solid adobe ramparts from which they could command all the approaches.
Now, with Vargas’s forces surrounding their citadel, they employed defensive tactics that recalled medieval warfare during the reconquest of Spain. The Indians drew up their ladders from the exterior walls, “barred the main gate, and manned the ramparts, shouting their defiance” while letting loose a volley of arrows and sling stones at Vargas’s emissaries. An initial Spanish charge to the battle cry “Santiago!” was repulsed, and required more deliberate tactics. Spanish sappers set out to undermine the fortress walls, but the defenders “melted snow in iron kettles, and poured boiling water down upon them.” In response, de Vargas’s men built “shielded ladders” that helped them reach the battlements. Even then the fighting lasted throughout the freezing night. Only after the attackers breached the walls of a makeshift kiva that had been constructed adjacent to the fortress did the Spanish gain entrance to the two interior plazas. So intricate were the stronghold’s internal defenses that it took more than fifty of Vargas’s men to subdue the defenders, and even then it took “the whole blessed day until nightfall” to be sure that the surrender was complete. Seventy Indian fighters would eventually be captured and hanged. Two Indians, “without hope at the thought of defeat,” hanged themselves before the Spaniards could seize them. Tanos would remain staunchly opposed to the Spanish in the years to come, and that enmity would shape events far distant on the Hopi mesas.
The earliest known map of Santa Fe, as drawn by Joseph de Urrutia in 1767. The Governor’s Palace (the Pueblo citadel in 1693) is marked with the letter B, and the open square south of it is the present town plaza.
The villa regained, Vargas sought to stabilize the colony and to reestablish missions among the Pueblos as efficiently as possible. But resettling the Galisteo Basin pueblos seemed doomed to failure, since without either a presidial guard or the fortified mission complexes for security, and the livestock economy in shambles, the residents would be entirely vulnerable to Apache violence. Or, perhaps depart the colony all together and align themselves with those former enemies and trading partners. Vargas and his Franciscan advisors decided that requiring the defeated Tanos to settle north of Santa Fe, in the better watered and more secure valley of the Rio Santa Cruz would be the wiser course. The Spaniards called the reestablished pueblo San Cristóbal de los Tanos, known as Tsaewari (“wide white band,” or “dance sash”) by its inhabitants. A second expatriate community from the Basin was established as New San Lazaro, or Tewige, by which time some 500 Tanos had joined their Tewa cousins in the basin lying between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo ranges. In the autumn of 1695, Vargas expelled the Tanos from New San Lazaro, in order to cle
ar the site for anticipated new colonists, and all the Tanos were united at Tsaewari. Tewige would soon become the Spanish village of Santa Cruz de la Cañada.
The Franciscans were charged with renewing the Catholic faith among the resettled and deeply resentful Tanos. Vargas demanded that the Tanos build their padre a “house and chapel” in which he could sing the Te Deum Laudamus. These isolated priests, scattered throughout the colony in ramshackle missions, would spend their nights in fear of their lives (or anticipate martyrdom at the stroke of a stone axe). It was from new San Cristóbal/Tsaewari that Friar Carbonel wrote an anxious message to his custodian, Fray Francisco de Vargas, in which he characterized living among and attempting to proselytize the Tanos as being an “ant” (hormiga) surrounded by salivating wolves. The following spring would prove him right.
Mesa of Sorrows Page 6