The American West Read online

  Moctezuma’s houseguests took him hostage, ambushed his nobles, and finally put him to death. Their god-emperor gone, the residents of Tenochtitlán rose up. The Spaniards fled the city, but not before many were killed, their carcasses left to rot along the roads leading to the city, a warning should the Spaniards think of returning. But return they did, a year later, reinforced by troops from Cuba and thousands of Indian allies who grabbed the opportunity to overthrow their overlords. In the meantime Tenochtitlán was struck by an epidemic of smallpox, spread by the invaders. “They died in heaps, like bedbugs,” wrote one Spaniard. An Aztec account underscored the human tragedy: “There came amongst us a great sickness, a general plague. . . . It raged amongst us, killing vast numbers of people. It covered many all over with sores: on the face, on the head, on the chest, everywhere. It was devastating. . . . Nobody could move himself, nor turn his head, nor flex any part of this body. The sores were so terrible that the victims could not lie face down, nor on their backs, nor move from one side to the other. And when they tried to move even a little, they cried out in agony. . . . The worst phase of this pestilence lasted 60 days, 60 days of horror. . . . And when this had happened, the Spaniards returned.”8

  The Aztec capital fell. The Spaniards demolished the temple at the city center and erected a cathedral atop the rubble. Tenochtitlán became Mexico City, the vortex of Spanish colonization. From there the conquistadors radiated out in all directions. In the Andean highlands of South America, Francisco Pizarro encountered a civilization to match the Aztecs. The Incan empire had everything the Spanish desired—a hierarchy to govern, lots of souls to convert, good roads and communication networks, and vaults loaded with precious metals and jewels.

  Aztecs suffer with the smallpox. “Florentine Codex,” c. 1550. World Digital Library.

  . . .

  Expeditions to North America, however, discovered far less spectacular New Worlds. In 1513 Juan Ponce de León landed on the southern Atlantic coast, which he named in honor of the Easter season—pascua florida—making Florida the oldest European place-name in the United States. Native warriors beat back the invasion. Ponce de León made several more attempts to take the peninsula before being killed in battle in 1521.

  Several years later, in 1527, a conquistador named Panfilo de Narváez invaded Florida’s west coast with an expedition that would set records for miles traveled, miles traveled while naked, and miles traveled in the wrong direction. The Spanish monarch had granted Narváez the right to a huge chunk of North America, stretching from Florida to the Pacific, and he was determined to seize his due. His inexperienced navigator, however, miscalculated the strength of the Gulf’s currents, and the treacherous waters wrecked both Narváez and his ambitions. He cut his lifeline by abandoning his ships. The Florida swamps were pitiless and so too the swamp dwellers. Unlike Cortés, Narváez had no talent for building alliances. His men bullied the Indians, stole food and women, and after wearing out their welcome had to endure sniper fire and ambushes. Starving, they ate their horses and melted down their swords to forge axes, implements of rudimentary survival that nobody had thought to pack. They chopped down trees, built rafts, and cast off for Mexico in the swirling waters of the Gulf.

  The three rafts coursed westward along the coast, slipping past the gush of the Mississippi River delta. When two of the rafts foundered on a barrier island along the Texas coast, Narváez, in command of the third, refused to assist the stranded men and sailed off into oblivion, never to be seen or heard again. Hungry, cold, and naked, the survivors leaned on the hospitality of the island’s native inhabitants, who themselves lived on the edge of starvation during the winter months. They offered what aid they could, but bristled when the strangers demanded more. When the desperate Spaniards began to eat each other, the Indians were horrified. An epidemic of dysentery killed half the island’s native population along with most of the castaways. Pushed to the brink, some of the Indians lobbied for the eradication of the strangers. Others thought that they might be remade into slaves. The slavers won the argument, and for the next six years a handful of Spaniards lived as servants in native households.

  One of these slaves was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had been the expedition’s royal treasurer. Captivity transformed him. He endured beatings, malnutrition, and existential bewilderment. A man of substance in his former incarnation, he discovered what life was like on the fringe. Knocked off his foundation, he rebuilt his identity from the ground up with empathy and religion. He served his masters well, and they trusted him. They sent him on errands, and he traveled to and traded with neighboring groups, learning the ins and outs of native economies and politics. He cultivated the reputation of a healer, circulating through the countryside with three other survivors of the expedition, visiting tribe after tribe, blessing the sick and healing their wounds. Eventually, traveling in northern Mexico, the survivors encountered a small party of Spaniards who escorted them to Mexico City. Cabeza de Vaca would write an account of his adventures, the first captivity narrative in North American history.

  His story thrums with adventure, heartache, and wonder. He constructed it with skill, giving his journey a narrative arc that took him from lackey to faith-healing Pied Piper. He told his story to convince his superiors to give him another crack at conquest. What makes his account remarkable is not that he steered history but rather the guiding philosophy by which he steered it. Humiliation and transformation buoyed his account. A royal appointee from an influential family, Cabeza de Vaca filled his report with instances of woe and suffering. A high-born male from a culture that valued masculine potency, he went out of his way to show his vulnerability, to bear witness to his utter powerlessness.

  His years among the Indians had reformed his idea of how Christians should approach them. Instead of frightening them into submission and turning them into laborers and slaves, Cabeza de Vaca argued that the Spaniards should go among them naked and humble like Christ. The Indians would bow and obey, but to the righteousness of the Spaniards’ mission, not the frightfulness of their greed and guns. He won another commission and in 1540 led a group of conquistadores to the region of the Río de la Plata in today’s Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Cabeza de Vaca walked barefoot before his mounted men. He offered the Indians an embrace instead of a mailed fist. But in the end his gentle tactics worked no better than Narváez’s brutal ones. The soldiers mutinied, and the Indians rejected all efforts to Christianize them. The onetime castaway-turned-miracle-worker was sent home to Spain, where he watched his career sink like a raft in the breakers. Yet Cabeza de Vaca demonstrated how experiences on the margins could change people. Far from home, on the edge of death and at the fringe of native society, he saw openings for peace and mutual benefit among Indians and Europeans, possibilities to which most of his compatriots remained blind.

  . . .

  Cabeza de Vaca wasn’t the only Spaniard to protest the horrors of conquest and work to obtain justice for the Indians. The most notable critic was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a priest who assisted in the plunder of Cuba in 1511 and was awarded a large encomienda but afterward suffered a crisis of conscience and began to denounce the conquest. The whole point of coming to the New World was to convert the Indians, he declared, “not to rob, to scandalize, to capture or destroy them, or lay waste to their lands.” They might be bizarre, ignorant, lewd, and even violent, but the Indians were first and foremost human beings, God’s children, and “the entire human race is one.” It was one of the first declarations of universal human rights.9

  Las Casas’s argument reached the highest levels of the Spanish state. Appointed “Protector of the Indians,” he spent the next twenty-five years thundering against the abuses of the conquest, arguing that colonization and conversion could be carried out by peaceful means. Largely as a result of his brave efforts, in 1537 the Catholic Church officially condemned the enslavement of Indians, and five years later the Spanish monarchy issued new colonial regulations prohibiting Ind
ian slavery and ending the encomiendas. Las Casas was appointed bishop of the Mexican province of Chiapas, where he attempted to enforce the new laws. But the Spanish colonists violently resisted. They threatened the life of the new bishop, and Las Casas was forced to return to Spain, where he continued to argue for a more humane approach to colonization.

  Bartolomé de Las Casas. From Oeuvres de . . . las Casas (Paris, 1822).

  Finally, in 1550, King Charles I of Spain invited Las Casas to participate in an official debate over the treatment of the Indians. His opponents, seeking to justify the conquest, argued that the Indians practiced horrible vices that underscored their savagery. They snorted drugs until senseless and had sex with people outside their marriages and inside their genders. To let these sinners go unpunished would be to go against God. Las Casas dismissed these accusations as slander intended to denigrate all the native peoples of America based on the actions of few reprobates. “The Spaniards have defamed the Indians with the greatest crimes,” he wrote, making all Indians seem “ugly and evil.” The charge of sodomy he dismissed as a “falsehood,” and he compared the native use of drugs to the Christian ritual of communion. He even tried to explain Aztec human sacrifice in its own terms. “It is not surprising that when unbelievers who have neither grace nor instruction consider how much men owe to God,” he explained to the court, “they devise the most difficult type of repayment, that is, human sacrifice in God’s honor.” The Aztecs were wrong in their belief, he said, but they believed with enthusiasm, and their passion signaled their readiness for conversion.10

  “The Cruelties used by the Spaniards on the Indians.” From An Account of the First Voyages and Discoveries Made by the Spaniards in America (London, 1699). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The outcome of the debate was inconclusive. Las Casas won the moral argument, but there was little change in policy. He responded in 1552 by publishing a brilliant, muckraking history of the conquest, The Destruction of the Indies. In this powerful text, one of the most influential books published in the early modern period, Las Casas blamed Spaniards for the deaths of millions of Indians and indicted them for what today we would call genocide. His arguments were later used by other European powers to condemn Spain while covering up their own dismal records of colonial aggression. Subsequent scholars, doubting the high death rates and huge declines in population that Las Casas threw about, accused him of exaggerating and contributing to the “Black Legend,” which mistakenly blamed Spain for being more criminal than any other colonial power. Today his big estimates look spot on, although not for the reasons he proposed. Las Casas was a perceptive man, yet even he couldn’t see the primary cause of native mortality: lethal microbes.

  . . .

  Because we lack solid numbers, population figures for this period are educated guesses. Estimates of the size of the native Mexican population on the eve of conquest, for example, vary between 8 and 25 million. A century later it stood at little more than a million. For the rest of the continent, north of Mexico, historical demographers argue over estimates varying from 4 million to 18 million native inhabitants before colonization. But no one disputes that over the subsequent four hundred years the native population dropped to a mere 250,000.

  Disease or its ripple effects seeped into every North American frontier. Microbes altered the course of history more than any other factor. Next to a smallpox or influenza virus, the leading characters usually cast as the prime movers of history—Columbus, Moctezuma, Cortés, Malinche, and all the rest to come—look like bit players. Without killer germs, the West as we know it wouldn’t have happened. The American region would have developed into something else, an Aztec hinterland, perhaps, or the territory of a confederation of native bison hunters and salmon fishers. But the microorganisms invaded, and the unequal responses of human immune systems guided the course of history.

  Indians had little experience with the aggressive crowd diseases that had plagued the residents of the Eurasian continent for centuries. That’s not to say that native peoples lived in a world without maladies. They suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, pinta, yaws, hepatitis, encephalitis, polio, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and venereal syphilis. But these were hangnails compared to the depopulation bombs that the Europeans carried unseen in their bodies. Smallpox, measles, influenza, malaria, bubonic plague, typhoid, and cholera decimated the humans whose ancestors had crossed the Bering land bridge, distancing their immune systems from these killers. As a general rule, European diseases cut native populations in half within a decade of exposure.

  Different groups encountered different diseases at different times. Epidemics came and went, and their timing influenced the outcomes of history as much as their virulence. European germs rocked the Western Hemisphere, yet the reactions of survivors mattered just as much. The dead and the living wrote history together. Crowd diseases radically altered the balance of power among humans. Native groups gained and lost power in relation to one another and in relation to colonizers. Overall, disease empowered Europeans, and it helps explain the almost unbelievable success of some of their conquests.

  The invasion of America had another profound demographic consequence. Columbus and his crew unknowingly passed germs to the Taínos of Hispaniola. Estimates of the preconquest population of the island range from several hundred thousand to several million, but within a quarter century, the Indians had diminished to “as few as grapes after harvest,” in the words of one colonial official. To replace their workers, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa, and by 1560 Africans had become the majority population on Hispaniola. By the end of the sixteenth century African slaves vastly outnumbered both native and European populations throughout the Caribbean. The European colonization of the Americas thus commenced with twin demographic catastrophes: the decimation of hundreds of thousands of native Americans through violence and disease, and the enslavement and forced relocation across the Atlantic of hundreds of thousands of native Africans.11

  . . .

  Germs eased invasions yet hampered colonization. The destruction of native populations capsized schemes for turning profits. The Spanish wanted the Indians to work, not to die. Immigration from Spain remained low. Even with crowd diseases thinning their numbers, Indians continued in the majority on the Mexican mainland, and by the end of the sixteenth century native populations there had begun to rebound from their disastrous collapse. The Spaniards inhabited the cities, whereas the countryside stayed predominantly Indian. “This state of New Spain,” observed a convention of missionaries meeting in Mexico City in 1594, “is made up of two nations, Spaniards and Indians.”12

  A third “nation,” however, rose quickly. New Spain attracted young, single men eager for opportunities denied them in their home country. These men desired families, and they created them with native women. Their unions created a large population of mixed ancestry known as mestizos. By the eighteenth century mestizos constituted nearly a quarter of the population of New Spain, and by the nineteenth century they had become the majority. While high-level clerics and philosophers questioned the humanity of Indian people, Spanish men and Indian women ignored the debate and closed the argument with the smiling faces of their children.

  THE SPANISH INVASIONS

  The Spanish organized their empire into two parts: New Castile in South America, and New Spain, stretching from the Isthmus of Panama to Mexico, from the Caribbean islands west across the Pacific to the Philippines. At the heart of New Spain was Mexico City, an imperial seat with shady parks, high-fashion colonists parading in coaches, splendid churches towering over the sites of Moctezuma’s temples, a university (founded in 1553), a government mint, hospitals, monasteries, and sumptuous homes for the wealthy. Commanding this colonial empire was the viceroy—the new Moctezuma—regent of the Spanish king and, in the New World, a man as powerful as the king himself. There were sixty-one viceroys during the three hundred years before Mexico gained its independence f
rom Spain in 1821. Beneath them, bureaucratic control reached down through provinces and finally to the local magistrate—the alcalde—who administered justice, executed imperial policies, and collected taxes in more than two hundred cities and towns. The empire ran on the suffering labor of millions of peons and slaves, Indians and Africans.

  Aztec civilization provided the base for Spanish colonization. Cortés dislodged the top tier of the society and ruled through class structures, communication networks, and alliance systems already in place. The vectors of colonization—among them disease, violence, intermarriage, proselytizing, theft, and slavery—radically altered native societies, but the transformations took hold in a human environment filled with cities, divisions of labor, and religious hierarchies laid down by the Aztecs.