The American West Read online

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  Rumors of Indian empires elsewhere inspired more Spanish expeditions. In 1526 the conquistador Francisco Pizarro invaded the homeland of the Incas and commenced the conquest of their Andean kingdom. Other conquistadors turned north. In 1539 Hernando de Soto, who had been one of Pizarro’s officers, landed at Tampa Bay with a Cuban army of seven hundred men and thousands of hogs and cattle, and pushed hundreds of miles through the heavily populated Southeast. He found plenty of towns ruled by chiefs, but nothing like Tenochtitlán and no one like Moctezuma. A brutal man, “much given to the sport of hunting Indians on horseback,” de Soto tormented new acquaintances, and native leaders developed a strategy to keep him and his men on the move. De Soto badgered chiefs to reveal the location of the “cities of gold,” and they played along, pointing their fingers toward the horizon. Paradise was always just a town away. Lured on by his fantasies, de Soto reached today’s Alabama, where armies of Tuscaloosa and Chickasaw warriors chewed the Spaniards up. De Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi. Some three hundred survivors of the expedition reached Mexico on rafts in 1543. The invasion repelled, the native peoples of the South retained control of the region for another 250 years.13

  Another sort of vision, this one a specter of ungodly competition, brought the Spanish back to Florida to stay. In the 1560s a group of French Protestants from Normandy, led by Jean Ribault, established a colony on Florida’s Atlantic coast. At their first location, on Parris Island along the South Carolina coast, the colonists nearly starved. They saved themselves by relocating to a location south of present-day Jacksonville, near a cluster of villages inhabited by a people known as the Timucuas. The Timucuas were hospitable, welcoming the French into their homes with food and drink, likely seeing them as potential allies against the slave-raiding Spaniards.

  Timucua chief and French Huguenots in Florida. From Theodore de Bry, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae . . . [America, Part 2] (Frankfurt, 1591). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  A French colony just off the sea lanes that Spanish galleons traveled to bring Mexican treasure home was unacceptable. A French colony populated by infidel Protestants was unthinkable. In 1565 the Spanish crown sent Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, captain-general of the Indies, to crush the Huguenots. He established a base south of the French, then marched overland through swamps to surprise them with an attack from the land. “I put Jean Ribault and the rest of them to the knife,” Menéndez wrote the king, “judging it necessary to the service of the Lord Our God and Your Majesty.” The dead bodies of five hundred French colonists bobbed in the surf of the white, sandy beach, ending the French attempt to colonize the temperate latitudes of North America. The Spanish built a fort at their base camp and set about enslaving and infecting the Timucuas. Thus, Europeans claimed their first permanent address in North America: Saint Augustine, no city of gold but a monument to religious intolerance, ocean traffic, and for the Timucuas the end of the world. Over the next two centuries slavery and disease erased them as a distinct people.14

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  Saint Augustine watched the sea. A built expression of the Atlantic world, the fort protected shipping lanes that linked Europe, Africa, and North and South America. The second Spanish entrada de conquista into North America was a more continental affair. Far more mysterious than the ocean by 1539, the interior beckoned with visions of golden cities and undiscovered civilizations. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led three hundred Spaniards, both mounted troops and infantry, as well as eight hundred Tlaxcalan warriors north along a well-marked Indian trading path that connected central Mexico to the northern region known as Aztlán—the legendary homeland of the Aztecs.

  The expedition passed through the settlements of the Pimas, near the present border of the United States and Mexico, and finally reached the village of the Zunis, the southernmost town of the Pueblo peoples. The Zunis resisted, but the invaders smashed them. Coronado continued north, where after some persuasive violence the Indians allowed him to establish a base camp among the villages in the valley of the Rio Grande. The Indian towns disappointed the Spaniards. Constructed “of stone and mud, rudely fashioned,” as one of the Spaniards described them, the homes exuded a depressing plainness. “I have not seen any principal houses,” wrote this chronicler, “by which any superiority over others could be shown.” Coronado moved on in search of a social hierarchy to molest. But moving north made the situation worse. The grasslands yielded no cities, no ruling classes, no treasure vaults, only vast herds of “shaggy-cows” (bison) and mobile human communities camping in huts. The void repelled the entrada. Coronado and his army limped home to lower everyone’s expectations. For the next half-century Spain lost interest in the Southwest.15

  Souls, not spoils, drew them back. Catholic missionaries targeted the dense, settled communities of the Pueblos. Franciscan missionaries hiked up the trading road and began proselytizing among the Pueblos during the 1580s. Rumors of underground mineral wealth drifted from the friars. After emptying other people’s treasuries, the residents of New Spain had developed a booming silver- and gold-mining industry. Always on the lookout for new strikes, especially in the silver-rich north, the reports from the Rio Grande valley sparked a sustained colonization effort.

  In 1598 an expedition left New Spain led and financed by Juan de Oñate, a member of a wealthy mining family from northern New Spain and married to a woman descended from both the emperor Moctezuma and the conquistador Cortés. Oñate’s party reflected the mingling of peoples and priorities on the northern Spanish frontier. One hundred and thirty predominantly mestizo and Tlaxcalan soldiers and their families would safeguard and populate the colony while some twenty Franciscans would reap a harvest of converts. The name Spanish officials bestowed on the region—Nuevo Mexico—registered their high hopes. Oñate and his sponsors anticipated a payoff that rivaled the toppling of the Aztec empire.

  The arrival of the Spaniards. Petroglyph, Canyon del Muerto, Arizona, c. 1700. Photograph by Richard Erdos, c. 1965. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Oñate soon displayed a cruel streak that matched his forebears. Reaching the valley of the Rio Grande, Oñate advanced from town to town, announcing the establishment of Spanish authority. The reaction of the Pueblos ranged from skepticism to hostility. Acoma, “the sky city,” built atop a commanding mesa, offered the most resistance. After tensions irrupted into violence, with Acoma warriors killing soldiers stationed in the town, Oñate laid siege to the city, intent on making an example of the rebels. Indian fighters (both men and women) killed dozens of invaders with arrows and stones. The Spaniards clawed their way up the rock walls and eventually took the city, killing eight hundred men, women, and children in the battle. They torched the Acoma homes, and Oñate ordered his men to sever one foot from each surviving warrior. He sold five hundred Acoma residents into slavery.

  Oñate’s throwback conquistador behavior displeased some of the Franciscan missionaries while his inability to locate sumptuous gold and silver mines upset his superiors in Mexico City. There would be no grand conquest, no epic conquistador in Nuevo Mexico. Oñate lost his command and was recalled. Officials debated abandoning the colony, but the Franciscans lobbied for more time and funds. The king agreed. He would bankroll the New Mexico colony as a religious experiment. In 1609 a new governor founded the capital of La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis—“the royal town of the holy faith of Saint Francis of Assisi”—and from their base at Santa Fe the missionaries infiltrated the surrounding Indian villages.

  Zuni Pueblo in the valley of the Rio Grande. Photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan, c. 1872. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  . . .

  The Franciscans used the marginality of New Mexico to wage a culture war. The Pueblos and the friars struggled over definitions of morality, truth, and eternity. Their fights spilled into everything—food, sex, marriage, work, clothing,
posture, child-rearing, worship, habits, and hygiene. They argued about the meaning of the universe and the appropriate styles for hair. The comprehensiveness of their quarrels hinted at the costs of winning or losing them. Both sides sweated the small stuff because they foresaw enormous risks and rewards. The Franciscans labored to destroy what they considered a heathen culture in order to save the Pueblos from eternal damnation while Pueblo religious leaders worked to save their culture to prevent the world from tumbling into chaos. Only with the stakes so high would both sides stoop so low.

  The missionaries entered an Indian world they found difficult to understand. Pueblo society turned Spanish assumptions about gender and property on their heads. The Pueblos, for example, reckoned descent through the mother’s line, with women exercising control over their households. “The woman always commands and is the mistress of the house,” wrote one Franciscan, “not the husband.” Men and women, wrote another, “make agreements among themselves and live together as long as they want to, and when the woman takes a notion, she looks for another husband and the man for another wife.” Pueblo men’s power resided outside the home, an alien concept for the Spaniards, who thought that authority radiated out from a man’s status as father and patriarch. Pueblo men formed religious societies, and they oversaw external affairs—hunting, trading, warfare, and ceremonial religion.16

  Though they swore off fatherhood and family-making themselves, the Franciscans assumed that patriarchal households defined a good, godly society. The contentiousness that invigorated gender relations among the Pueblos confused and upset the friars. One missionary reported that when Pueblo women bore a girl-baby they placed a seed-filled gourd over her vulva and prayed that she would grow up to be fertile, but they sprinkled a boy-baby’s penis with water and prayed that it would remain small. This angered Pueblo men. They responded by strapping on giant phalluses during public ceremonies and sang the praises of their genitalia, “the thing that made the women happy.” Suffice it to say, the Pueblos and the Franciscans had very different understandings of sexuality. The priests were celibate, whereas the Indians perceived sexual intercourse as a mighty force bringing together the worlds of men and women. The absence of sex defined the Franciscan order just as the open practice of sex defined the Pueblo community.17

  An incident during an outdoor ceremony arranged by the missionaries illustrated the difference in the Pueblo and Franciscan points of view. A friar preaching the benefits of monogamy drew a fierce rebuttal from a Pueblo woman. Suddenly, according to the missionary sources, “a bolt of lightning flashed from a clear untroubled sky, killing that infernal agent of the demon.” To the priest, God had struck her dead. But the Pueblos reached an opposite conclusion. For them, lightning-struck persons became cloud spirits, they got a metaphysical raise, and the woman’s flash-bang ascendancy confirmed the rightness of her ideas.18

  The missionaries found full-grown minds with engrained beliefs hard to change, so they targeted Pueblo youth, many of whom the priests took from their families. The religious leaders of the Pueblos labeled these baptized converts “wet-heads.” Along with age, geography influenced the spread of Christianity. Pueblos in outlying villages—the Acomas, the Zunis, and the isolated Hopis—resisted the Franciscans and retained their old customs including the system of matrilineal kinship. In the heart of the Rio Grande valley, however, Catholicism took root. Over time the power of women and mothers’ lineages faded. European and Indian ideas intertwined in the frontier process known as acculturation. As with most developments on the margins, acculturation calls forth mixed emotions. Did the Franciscans and Pueblos create a new society that fulfilled Cabeza de Vaca’s vision of peaceful coexistence? Or did the priests destroy a culture in a fit of self-righteous genocide? One Pueblo tale focused on what was lost when the Franciscans arrived. “When Padre Jesus came,” the story goes, “the Corn Mothers went away.” But if Jesus and his robed friends left, would the old ones return?

  . . .

  Acculturation extended beyond churches and kivas, crosses and kachinas. It even went beyond humans and their views on sex, heaven, and the proper gender requirements for homeownership. Sheep and cattle played an equally impressive role in bringing—and keeping—these people together. Colonial New Mexico accrued a small-scale agricultural economy centered on imported European domestic animals. Herds of gnarly cows and rangy sheep brought a measure of wealth to some families. Colonists of means exploited the labor of the Indians, recasting themselves as lords with leisure. As one Spanish official put it, “No one comes to the Indies to plow and sow, but only to eat and loaf.” Indians—Pueblos and their raiding neighbors, especially a group known as the Navajos—also gathered herds. As the decades passed and generations of lambs and calves wobbled into the brush in search of feed, the alien livestock and their human enablers made the Southwest a permanent home. In time, it became impossible for all sides to conceive of living without hooved property.19

  It became equally hard to imagine a New Mexico without finely drawn racial distinctions. Most of the soldiers who came with Oñate were themselves Mexican Indians, mestizos or mulattoes, but their service to the crown whitewashed their ancestry. Frontier aristocrats, they bore the title of hidalgo, and their descendants inherited all the rights and privileges of that caste. Rising in rank, the former soldiers of mixed parentage proudly claimed the status of españoles, received encomiendas, and exploited Indian labor with a haughtiness that suggested they had come straight from Castile. On the northern fringes of the Spanish Empire, writes historian Quintard Taylor, “color presented no insurmountable barrier to fame, wealth, or new ethnoracial status.” Moreover, after the initial conquest, few new colonists ventured up the dusty road from Mexico, and the growth of population came almost entirely from the mixing of Indian women and settler men.20

  By the late seventeenth century, three thousand mostly mestizo New Mexicans clustered in a few settlements along the Rio Grande, surrounded by fifty thousand Pueblos in some fifty villages. Despite their numerical superiority, the Pueblos were the besieged. European diseases surged through their towns, striking communities nearest the Spanish settlements hardest. Illness and death shrunk the available labor pool, and the encomenderos watched their profits dwindle. Colonists pressed for more land, more pasture for their sheep, goats, and cattle. Conflicts with the Pueblos increased until a severe drought in the 1670s carried them to the edge of endurance. Twenty thousand Pueblos had converted to Catholicism over the previous few decades, but the crises stalled the acculturation process. Traditional Pueblo religion staged a comeback.

  The Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe. Postcard, c. 1870. Author’s collection.

  The Spanish panicked. They outlawed native rituals and confiscated ceremonial items. Priests sent soldiers to raid underground kivas and destroy such sacred artifacts as prayer sticks and kachina dolls. They publicly humiliated holy men and compelled whole villages to perform penance by digging irrigation ditches and weeding fields. The governor of New Mexico had three Pueblo holy men executed and dozens more whipped for practicing their religion.

  One of those humiliated, a native priest from San Juan Pueblo named Popé, started a movement dedicated to overthrowing the colonial regime. In 1680 the Pueblos revolted, killing four hundred colonists and several dozen priests, whose mutilated bodies they left strewn upon altars. They ransacked churches and desecrated sacred objects in retaliation. Two thousand Spanish survivors fled to the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Three thousand Pueblo warriors surrounded the building. After a siege lasting five days, the Spanish counterattacked and fled south, in the words of one account, with “the poor women and children on foot and unshod, of such a hue that they looked like dead people.”21

  In victory, the Pueblos transformed the governor’s chapel into a kiva, his palace into a communal home. Pueblo women ground corn on the inlaid floors that decorated the one-time abode of power. The corn mothers had returned. Santa Fe became the capital of a Pueblo conf
ederacy with Popé as a religious headman. He forced Christian Indians to the river to scrub away the taint of baptism. He ordered the destruction of everything Spanish, a command that struck many as wrongheaded. Horses, sheep, fruit trees, and wheat benefited the people. Some Spanish introductions had made life better. The people had jettisoned the bullies; why not keep their stuff? The nomads to the north—the Navajos and the Apaches—were not giving up their herds. Indeed, with the Spaniards gone, the Pueblos faced these traditional enemies alone without Spanish assistance. Their raids proliferated while the drought intensified. Popé lost his sway, and with the chaos mounting, the Pueblos deposed him in 1690.

  The Spaniards returned in 1692, launching a violent six-year reconquest that reestablished their power. But both sides had learned a lesson, and over the next generation the colonists and the Pueblos reached an implicit understanding. Pueblos observed Catholicism in the missionary chapels, while missionaries tolerated the practice of traditional religion in the Pueblos’ underground kivas. Royal officials guaranteed the inviolability of Indian lands, and the Pueblos pledged loyalty to the Spanish crown. Together they fought off the nomads for the next 150 years.

  On the Spanish fringes, Europeans and Indians coalesced into frontiers of inclusion. With a great deal of intermarriage between male settlers and native women, their communities were characterized by a process of mixing, or mestizaje. Thousands of Indians died of warfare and disease, but thousands more passed their genes on to successive generations of mestizo peoples. The children of the Old World fathers and New World mothers became the majority population of New Spain. Thus Spanish colonization brought forth groups of people even as it destroyed them.

  FURTHER READING

  Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Border lands (2007)