Chapter Six

The decision of the Spanish crown to create a buffer state on the northern frontier of its possessions in the New World had far-reaching effects. By this act, Spain placed her indelible stamp on yet another vast area of the Americas. Spain transferred her own character and that of the Hispanic-Mexican culture that had evolved in seventy-five years of colonization to a territory that is now part of the United States, and so set the stage for a unique fusion of Anglo- and Hispanic-American cultures.

The crown, in announcing its intention to establish the Kingdom of New Mexico, offered the right to lead the colonization effort to the highest bidder. One who answered the challenge was Juan de Oñate, a silver baron from Zacatecas. On ate not only had wealth behind him, as one of the four or five richest men in New Spain, but social prestige as well: his mother was a descendant of Hernán Cortés and, according to legend, of the Emperor Montezuma. He was enough of an adventurer to see a great opportunity in the colonization of New Mexico. And he was greedy enough to dream of finding new fortunes in precious metals; should this fail, Oñate envisioned a thriving trade in wool and buffalo hides. He expected also to find ocean harbors, rich in pearls, which demonstrates how little the people of the colony knew of their new world.

Thus Juan de Oñate bid for the opportunity to form the new colony. He offered to recruit colonists and soldiers, reasoning that a sufficient number of fortune hunters would be willing to settle in the unknown land. He would take, at his own cost, all the provisions necessary to start and maintain a colony. In return, Oñate asked for the title of captain-general and governor of the Kingdom of New Mexico, the right to make all government appointments in the colony and an annual salary. He asked that the crown provide only the friars and church bells that the colony would need. The viceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco, accepted the bid in the name of the crown, although he reduced by one fourth the salary Oñate had asked. The mining millionaire began to recruit his colonists and collect his provisions. Viceroy de Velasco, true to the ideals of his king, advised Oñate: "Your main purpose shall be in the service of God our Lord, the spreading of His holy Catholic faith, and the [missionizing] of the natives of the said provinces" (Hogan, 1954: p. 176) . In other words, Oñate was charged with the duty of pacifying the colony, preferably by peaceful means, and thus ending the Indian threat to New Spain.

While Juan de Oñate was preparing for the journey north, recruiting his colonists and collecting his supplies, a new viceroy arrived from Spain, replacing Velasco. The new official, typical of his breed, found it necessary to reexamine all the business of his predecessor, including the Oñate colonization contract. The colonists, already gathering at the departure point, waited many long months while the viceroy considered. In the end, Oñate's expedition was authorized, but his privileges were sharply curtailed. For instance, he was denied the right to appoint government officials in his colony-this was to be left to higher authorities in Mexico City and Spain. Oñate had no choice but to submit or completely lose his right to lead the colony. Under these new conditions, the northward march got under way on January 26, 1598. It consisted of eighty4hree wagonloads of supplies, seven thousand head of stock, four hundred soldiers, and one hundred and three families (Horgan, 1954: P.179). Traveling an average of five or six miles a day, the settlers made their way north.

Building the New Colony

In September, exhausted and covered with the dust of long months on the trail, the party finally arrived at a choice spot for settlement at the edge of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico near present-day Espanola. They called the place San Juan de los Caballeros and began the difficult task of building a colony. The land was parceled out among the settlers. They immediately set about to create a means of irrigating the farmlands. They used their knowledge of Spanish irrigation and they borrowed from the techniques of the Pueblo Indians, who had been irrigating their own crops for many centuries. The only water system that could possibly work in such an arid land was a communal one; the settlers would have to share the available water equally, regardless of their wealth or social position, if the colony was to survive. To this end, the colonists elected a council to regulate the water rights. Under the direction of the council, they dug a ditch-the acequia madre, or mother ditch-to carry water from the river, and smaller secondary canals leading off it to irrigate each man's plot of land. These farmlands, intended for cultivation, were owned outright by the settler. But the pasture lands were communally owned, shared by all as was the water. Fences were unheard of and each colonist was responsible for keeping his grazing livestock out of the crops. This system of open range and shared water rights was so ideally suited to the environment that it is still, nearly four hundred years later, a common feature of ranching in many parts of the Southwest.

Once the first colonists finished digging the acequia madre and the secondary canals, they turned to the task of building a settlement. The first building erected was a church, large enough to serve all the settlers and soldiers. While it was under construction, the people continued to live as they had lived on the trail-in wagons or perhaps tents. By this time it was well into September, and the brisk cold of early autumn nights must have made them uncomfortable indeed. We can imagine that the builders finished the church as quickly as possible and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the construction of their homes. Anxious to have cover over their heads before winter set in, they built the village of San Juan in short order. This village, and those settled later in New Mexico, was designed for protection. Its houses and public buildings, adjoining one another, formed a square. All opened onto a central plaza. The village was a fortress against possible Indian attacks.

At first, the settlers at San Juan, insecure in alien territory, all lived in the village. They left its protection to tend the fields only by day. Later, as the settlement expanded and more towns were established, people began to move away from the safety of the village. There was a very good reason for this: land grants were often located at some distance from the village and it was more convenient to live on the land than to travel to it each day. The hacienda system (chapter 5) was transported to New Mexico, too. On these vast estates, often at great distance from the settlements, colonists built homes that were villages in miniature. The houses formed a great square around a central courtyard, a fortress in the wilderness.

The Hopi Indians

The Hopi Indians call themselves Hopituh, which in their language means "Peaceful Ones." They live in twelve villages on or below three remote mesas in northern Arizona, where the surrounding desert helps to isolate them and protect their peaceful ways. One of their villages has been inhabited continuously since 1150 A.D.

The Hopi belong to a group of tribes the early conquistadores called Pueblo Indians. Pueblo is the Spanish word meaning "village." When Coronado was looking for the fabled cities of Cibola in 1540 he made contact with these Indians. He called them Pueblo Indians because, unlike many of the nomadic tribes, the Pueblo Indians lived in permanent villages of adobe houses.

Because of their isolation, the Hopis were better able to withstand the inroads of the Spanish than the other Pueblo people. In 1680 they killed the early missionaries and then. to avoid further trouble moved their villages from the springs at the foot of the mesas up the steep sides to the flat tops. Bands of Navajo, Ute, Apache, and Comanche, who used the white man's horses to penetrate the desert, raided their cornfields below the mesas, but the Hopi held out. For a while the land of the Hopi was part of Mexico, and then it became part of the United States.

Today the Hopi share a reservation with the Navajo, though they live in separate villages. Hopi women make beautiful pottery and wicker baskets, while the men weave cloth and grow their crops in the low valleys near their mesas. Their main crop is still the special strain of corn their ancestors grew; ordinary corn would not survive in the dry soil of the desert. Water for everyday use must still be carried up to the villages by hand or on burros.
The Hopi have been quick to adopt the conveniences, tools, and techniques of modern civilization, but they retain many of their ancient values, customs, and ceremonies. Although the children learn the ways of the white man in school, they also learn the traditions and rituals of their clan in their houses high on the cliffs.

Pueblo Resistance

The pacification of the local Indians was of the greatest concern, both from a moral and an economic standpoint. To Juan de Oñate and his little band of settlers, this meant converting the Indians to Christianity and putting them to work for the benefit of the colony. But the two peoples got off on the wrong foot from the very start. The arriving Spaniards demanded supplies and met with strong resistance. The Pueblos were not fierce warriors like the Apaches; but they were not about to bow to the mastery of invaders in their homeland. For nearly a year, an uneasy peace was maintained between settlers and Indians.

War broke out in 1599. The Spaniards were determined to defeat the Indians and permanently subdue them. Juan de Oñate told his officers, "inasmuch as we have declared war on them without quarter, you will punish all those of fighting age as you deem best, as a warning to everyone in this kingdom. All of those you execute, you will expose to the public view.... If you should want to show lenience... make the Indians believe that you are doing so at the request of the friar with your forces" (Forbes, 1964: P.36) . The war was short; the Pueblos were not a fighting tribe and the Spaniards, with the advantage of superior weapons, killed eight hundred Indians and wounded many more. Oñate decreed the punishment for the defeated Indians. Men over the age of twenty-five were to have one foot cut off and be sentenced to twenty years of personal servitude; those twelve to twenty4our years old received the sentence of twenty years of servitude. Thus the colonists subdued the Indians and secured a labor supply for the immediate future. However, trouble with the Indians did not cease. Pueblo resistance surfaced from time to time during the next few years, and Apache raids on both Spanish and Pueblo communities grew in intensity during the seventeenth century. From that standpoint, New Mexico served its purpose well: it did act as a buffer colony, absorbing much of the Indian hostility and thus protecting New Spain.

The friars who had come north with Oñate pursued their calling among the Pueblos and worked hard to convert them. They built missions near Indian villages (by 1630 there were twenty-five such missions in New Mexico) but, unlike their counterparts in Mexico, they did not gather the Indians into the mission community. The Pueblos were allowed to remain in their own villages and the friars went there to work among them. The missionaries believed they' were making great progress, instilling in the Indians the true faith. However, they failed to see that, in many instances, the Indians accepted the externals of Roman Catholicism but reverted to their old religious ways in the privacy of their homes, or combined the most attractive aspects of both religions. As any rate, the friars considered their task essentially finished within a few years. And the colonists believed the pacification of the Pueblo Indians complete-a false assumption for which they would pay dearly toward the end of the seventeenth century.

Frontier Hardships

Life was hard in New Mexico, even after villages and water supplies had been established and the Indians "pacified." The main characteristic of the colony' was its extreme isolation. The colonists of New Mexico were almost completely cut off from the centers of their civilization. Mexico City was many months away. Communication was slow and sporadic at best. The problems created by lack of communication between Spain and Mexico City were compounded in the case of New Mexico. A directive from the crown was not just months late, but sometimes a year or more in reaching the northern colony. New Mexico was a forgotten, frequently ignored part of the colonial system and its colonists, in turn, frequently ignored the workings of government and society in Spain and Mexico. They had to be independent since they rarely had any contact with the outside world.

The settlers were isolated from one another, too. People in the small colonial villages which were established along the river lived an insular existence. They had little if any contact with other villages. Their society became very ingrown, almost stagnant, because it lacked any stimuli other than the routine of daily living. On haciendas away from the villages the isolation was still more severe. Social contacts were few; a visit even to a neighboring hacienda was a strenuous undertaking, involving a long journey and the danger of Indian attacks. "Society" to most of these people meant family and servants and was confined to the courtyard of the house. The sons of wealthy hacendados married the daughters of nearby landowners and these families formed a closed circle almost totally independent of the larger society.

Life in the Kingdom of New Mexico. Food was a basic problem, for the soil of the colony produced crops unwillingly. At times, the water was so scarce that the fields could not be irrigated properly. As a result, the diet of the colonists was routine. The rich ate mostly lamb, rice, raisins, and tamales, and used spices to add flavor to their foods; the poor lived on dried beef and tortillas along with beans and chili (Horgan, 1954: p.796).

A nineteenth-century traveler to New Mexico, Josiah Gregg, reported in amazement that the people took their meals not at a table but while holding their dishes on their knees. Homes were so sparsely furnished that few families had dining tables (Gregg, 1967: p. 147). The settlements boasted no craftsmen and few tools. Whatever the people needed in the way of furniture, clothing, or kitchen wares, they had to make themselves. Clothing was perhaps the least of their worries; the Spaniards brought with them a skill for weaving and also taught the Indians to weave fine woolen cloth. But other items were often primitive. Homemade furniture served its purpose, but the carpentry-done without the tools of the trade-was crude and represented long hours of painstaking labor. Thus most homes had little furniture-hard wooden beds, a few chests, a few wooden chairs.

New Mexico lacked other services, too. There were no doctors in the colony. The women learned to tend to most of the medical needs of their families. They could care for wounds and used common herbs to treat illnesses. Nor was education available. Illiteracy was common, but it mattered little in a colony that had no newspapers and few books. However, there was evidently some early effort to teach the colonial children, and what education did exist was under the control of the priests and theological in nature. Few parents sent their children to school. Sons were needed to help with the farming, to assure a family's survival. Daughters were trained in the art of homemaking by their mothers and aunts; education for women was not considered necessary or even desirable.

The product of isolation was a new and unique culture. It was modified Hispanic-Mexican culture, but it was further changed by contacts with the Pueblo Indians, whose knowledge of the land was added to the experience and institutions of the settlers. Life in New Mexico was a struggle for survival. Out of that struggle grew a society far stronger, far more viable than the one the colonists had left behind.

Internal Strife and Oñate's Downfall

Political problems compounded the struggle for survival. From its earliest days, the Kingdom of New Mexico was torn by internal conflict. Under the charter for colonization, the governor was the most powerful official, the absolute authority in all colonial affairs. Juan de Oñate, as captain-general and governor, headed a discontented settlement. A revolt, led by forty-five officers and soldiers, threatened the new territory almost at once (Horgan, 1954: p. 186). Oñate arrested the men and condemned them to death. Outraged citizens threatened to desert the infant colony and return to Mexico. Rather than face the failure of his colonial experiment, the governor responded to popular pressure and granted the rebels clemency. But his problems were not over.

The crown, not yet ready to give up the elusive dream of El Dorado, had directed Oñate to search for riches. In 1601, the governor, accompanied by a small force of men, led the first of several expeditions to seek gold and silver and pearls. In his absence, the settlement divided into opposing camps. Few settlers were satisfied. Many felt that the promise of the colony had been broken; they saw a life of hardship ahead of them rather than opportunity and fortune. Leaders of the discontented element prepared a letter of complaint and sent it of{ via messenger, to the viceroy in Mexico City. But many were unwilling to wait for an answer. They loaded up their wagons, gave up on the colony, and headed south for home. When Oñate returned he found that only a skeleton colony remained. With few people left, the colony's struggle for survival-and Juan de Oñate's personal struggle for success-intensified.
After due consideration, the crown recalled Oñate in 1606. Because of the slowness of communication, he did not leave New Mexico until three years later. Like so many Spanish colonists with a dream, Oñate returned to New Spain a disillusioned man. His personal fortune was depleted, his enthusiasm spent. As a final blow, his only son was killed by Indians on the journey home.

After Oñate left, New Mexico floundered. New governors were appointed, new villages built (Santa Fe was founded in 1610), and a few new settlers made their way north to the colony. But Spain had second thoughts about the wisdom of founding the Kingdom of New Mexico. True, it served as a buffer state. But the first settlers found no precious metals, and the land offered no promise of profit from commercial agriculture for the crown. According to Spain's mercantilistic policy, a colony that did not enrich the mother country was worthless. New Mexico offered the crown nothing in the way of profit, yet it had to be maintained and administered at considerable cost. It was, in short, a financial disaster. As early as 1601, Spain was considering whether or not to abandon the effort. At the time Oñate was recalled and a new governor appointed, the crown had decided to continue the colony, but to ignore it as much as possible. New Mexico, if it was to survive, would have to do so without support, either financial or moral.

Conditions in the colony deteriorated steadily throughout the seventeenth century. Ignored by Spain, New Mexico found isolation an ever more prominent feature of life. Long periods of time passed without any communication between Mexico City and the colony. The crown even failed to send priests north to care for the religious needs of the settlers and carry on the work among the Indians. Years of drought, when the water supply dried up completely, further complicated the situation. During the famines, hungry Apaches raided Pueblo communities and Spanish settlements alike, stealing livestock and spreading devastation wherever they went.

Indian Rebellion

The Pueblo Indians became increasingly resentful of the Spanish intrusion as the years passed. The crisis finally came to a head in 1680. Agitated by a violently anti-Spanish medicine man, the Acoma pueblo revolted against the Spaniards. They were soon joined by other pueblos. They attacked Spanish villages, farms, and haciendas with even more ferocity than the Apaches had shown. They killed colonists by the scores and burned the homes and crops. The devastation of the colony was total. The Indian rebellion resulted in the complete expulsion of Europeans from the Kingdom of New Mexico. The few terrified Spanish survivors, carrying what belongings they could salvage and accompanied by the small number of Indians who remained loyal to them, fled south. They stopped at the mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe at El Paso on the Rio Grande. There they remained for the next twelve years.
Sporadic efforts to reconquer the colony began immediately. In 1681, an expedition tried to subdue the Indians and retake New Mexico. It was turned back by the still active Pueblos. Other expeditions met the same fate. Meanwhile, Spain had decided that the New Mexico colony should, after all, be maintained. The crown continued to treat the colonists, in exile, as part of the empire, to recognize the officials of the colony and to encourage the reconquest. Finally, a new governor was appointed and charged with the task of reestablishing Spanish settlements in New Mexico. His name was Diego de Vargas.

The Kingdom Rebuilt

In 1692, Vargas, after carefully planning his military strategy, led a small army up the banks of the Rio Grande and ruthlessly attacked the Pueblo forces. Once he had defeated the Indians, he returned to El Paso and led some eight hundred people (including a throng of Indian allies) back to New Mexico (Hollon, 1968: p. 63). It was like starting all over again. The colony had to be rebuilt from scratch; the settlers had to go through much of the same agony their ancestors had experienced nearly a hundred years before. Indian uprisings continued. The Pueblos were not permanently subdued until 1696, and Apaches continued to harass the settlements for the next two centuries. Moreover, the isolation of the colony from the outside world increased. In succeeding years Spain ignored New Mexico more completely than it had ever done before.

Still the colony grew, slowly and steadily. By 1750, the Spanish citizens (only adult men were counted) in the Kingdom of New Mexico numbered 3,779; ten years later the number had increased to 7,666. During that same period the Indian population decreased from 12,142 to 9,104. And by the end of the eighteenth century, 18,826 Spanish citizens resided in New Mexico-almost double the Indian population which had grown only to 9,732 ('ones, 1966: p.153).

These settlers laid the foundations for the modern society of the southwestern United States. The economic structure of the region is the child of their invention-ranching based on the open range, where livestock roam at will; communal water rights, still regulated by council and recognized in many communities. The settlers left an indelible mark on the culture of the Southwest. Many of its institutions are of Spanish origin. Most important, thousands of the region's people are of Indian-Spanish descent. The heritage of the first settlers is still very much alive in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest.

REFERENCES

Forbes, Jack D. The Indians in America's Past. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Gregg, Josiah. The Commerce of the Prairies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

Hollon, W. Eugene. The Southwest: Old and New. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

Horgan, Paul. Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. 2 vols. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.

Jones, Oakah L., Jr., Pueblo Warriors and Spanish Conquest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966.