From the journal of Capitan-General Don Domingo Jeronso Petriz de
Cruzate (what a Spanish ring there is in that name!), who was governor
and military commandant of Nueva Mejico from 1684 to 1689, we can form
some idea of the state of affairs in the province. But a few detached
pages of this important document survive. They appear the clearest
where all are confused.
The Spaniards had been driven from the country as far south as the
Texan line. Cruzate’s little army failed in the reconquest of the
liberty-loving Pueblos, and the service was finally entrusted to
General Vargas, or, as it was anciently written, Bargas, to whom the
faithful knight and true love was secretary.
The chronology of this period is some times in a hopeless tangle;
but the march of Governor-General Don Diego de Vargas is pretty well
connected. He lives in history as one of the most bigoted and brutal
of the Conquistadores. As has been written of the Duke of Alva: “His
vices were colossal, and he had no virtues.” From shreds and patches
of mouldy MSS. his march is traced with tolerable clearness, and the
conduct of the foreigners was so nearly alike that their stories are
much the same.
By and with consent of the royal audience, he left home and pleasures
in the City of Mexico for El Paso del Norte, to organize one hundred
friendly Indians and less than two hundred mounted men. Among the
latter was the secretary, Antonio Eusebio de Cubero, who on fiesta
days wore a light glove on his casque, a love-knot on his spear.
The country swarmed with a numerous and enraged enemy, and every
league of ground was contested. Vargas seemed awake to the perils of
the situation, and to have a wholesome fear of public opinion besides,
for on the night before marching he wrote to Count Galvas, Viceroy of
Mexico: “I have determined to risk life and all in the attempt, and am
prepared rather to be considered rash to being looked upon as a man
of too much caution, thereby exposing my reputation to remarks.” He
was successful from the very outset. The reader will remember that the
Pueblos lived in community houses, built in a hollow square. A whole
tribe sometimes inhabited one house, and one after another they were
reduced to submission.
The invading army found game in abundance; but the blessing of the
early and the latter rain is not for New Mexico, and the scarcity
of water made great suffering. “In roasting-ear time” the bold
land-robbers feasted in the cornfields; “hares like those of the
Castiles” furnished nourishing food; and in all their journeying
simple natives gave the fair visitants their choicest stores, for
paltry trinkets of glass, pewter, and tinsel. The blaze of their
camp-fires attracted large numbers of rattlesnakes--“the serpent with
tiger-colored skin and castanets in its tail;” the mountain cat’s green
eyes glared at them from the black rim of the illuminated circle; and
lovely gazelles shyly approached the springs, where they had hitherto
drank undisturbed, to sniff the tainted air and gaze at the strangers.
There survives one description of a large torpid lizard the explorers
encountered, striped with red, white and black bars--a hideous
creature; and a horned snake, kept in spirits, to be sent the viceroy.
Here, too, we hear first of the wonderful traveling stones, that within
the distance of a few feet of each other seek a common centre, roll
together, and lie close like eggs in a nest. They were in the bottom
of shallow basins in the levels, and their magnetism was a source of
wondering awe to the superstitious soldiery. The reporter, a naturalist
of some sort, whose name is lost, begs a moderate subsidy, that he
may employ natives to help capture the venomous beasts and assist in
making collections. The barbarians refused to work, even with wages,
and thus writes Vargas: “I have been obliged to raze whole villages to
the ground, in order to punish their obstinacy.” Possibly here we have
the secret of the uninscribed ruins now slowly crumbling down in the
valleys by the narrowing waters of the Pecos and the Rio Grande.
The chief burden is the Indian. The chronicles are heavily laden with
details of grievances the conquerors were obliged to bear from him. How
he refused to accept slavery as his best estate; and, worse than that,
how he rebelled against the power which would force him to worship the
unknown, unseen God, whose sign was the red cross, whose ambassadors’
march was tracked by the smoke of cities sacked and burnt, lands made
desolate, the widow’s cry, the orphan’s wail.
The Spaniards were disciples of the school of Narvaez, who on his
death-bed, being urged by his confessor to forgive his enemies: said
“Bless your heart, Father, I have none. I have killed them all.” In
those good old times--for as the poet sings,
“All times when old are good”--
the religion of the governor must be the religion of the governed.
The Pueblos were and still are sun worshipers; and every day their
deity--the peculiar friend of the red race--rose with unveiled face,
rejoicing the eyes and cheering the hearts of his children. Why should
they believe in One whose followers taught that sulphurous flames
were in waiting for all who had not money enough to pay for certain
mystic rites held over the dead body? Whenever there was chance of
escape, the Indians fled before the mailed and mounted warriors fast as
their own mountain antelopes, and the Pueblos were rapidly brought to
submission. To perfect the surrender of soul and body, after a city was
taken, Father Francisco Corvera baptized by thousands at a time. He was
attended by several Franciscan priests, charged with the reconversion
of those fallen from the true faith. They were forced to assemble
before a large cross in the plaza. There the red sinners were absolved
from their sins, and, on pain of death, forbidden their idolatrous
dances, especially the _cachina_, the delight of the aboriginal heart,
and, as the old MS. words it, “were to be obedient to the divine and
human majesty.”
Very devout was this Vargas. After the reduction of Jemez, he reported
to the Viceroy of Mexico, Count Galvas: “This action having been fought
the day before Santiago Day, I believe that glorious apostle and patron
saint interceded in our behalf, and which was the cause of our signal
success.”
Here are some of the mild requirements laid on the baptized heathen by
his order:
“They must keep crosses over their doors; treat ministers with love
and reverence; and, whenever they meet them, kiss the hem of their
habit, with submission and veneration. They must have their bows in
order and ten arrows, to offend and defend; and none shall dare use the
arms of the Spaniards, for the reason they are prohibited by the royal
ordinances.”
Fighting his way northward, near Zuni, he leveled a large pueblo, “the
size of a long horse-race;” but how long the horse-race was in that
time your correspondent has no means of knowing. By his own autograph
on the everlasting hills we know when and in what spirit the haughty
hidalgo passed that point for the recapture of La Villa Real de Santa
Fé, then in the hands of its rightful owners.
One hundred and ninety miles southwest of Santa Fé, ten miles from
the Arizona line, fifty miles west of the dividing ridge of the
continent--called, in consequence, Sierra Madre--is antique Zuni, a
city of memory. It is one of the seven vanishing cities sought by
Coronado in 1540, and by wandering knights from Spain and Portugal in
the time of Philip Second. Capital of the fabled kingdom of Cibola, it
is the most ancient and most interesting, because the least changed, of
all the pueblos of New Mexico.
When Governor-General Vargas and his gallant little army reached this
pueblo, they halted for rest and recruiting, before pressing on to the
City of Holy Faith. The General was accompanied by his secretary, the
beloved Antonio Eusebio, and they must have looked with the deepest
concern at the stout walls of the strange fortress. I have not been
able to learn whether he attacked it or not. Even a successful and
intrepid leader, with the help of the red allies, used to savage
warfare, would deliberate well before besieging that city set on a
hill, which must be carried by assault, in the face of arrows, slings,
lances, huge stones rolled from above, and burning balls of cotton
dipped in oil. The modern Zuni, a compact town of fifteen hundred
souls, stands in the centre of the valley of the Colorado Chichito
(Little Red River); but ancient Zuni, now in ruins, was several miles
away, on the top of a _mesa_, or precipice, one thousand feet high,
almost inaccessible from the valley. It was built in five stories, with
thick walls of stone laid in mud mortar, terraced from without and
fortified by towers. A formidable citadel.
The camp of the victorious army was probably in the present
camping-ground, a choice spot, where grass grows with tint of richest
green, lovely to the eye as fresh lilies--a garden beauty, skirting
the spring of cool, sweet water, about fifteen miles from old Zuni.
To reach it from Santa Fé, the traveler of to-day crosses a country
very beautiful and fertile, where rapid change of geological structure
makes varying change of scenery. Maize grows in the valley without
irrigation--not an _acequia_ in sight; and peaches, planted by the
Jesuit Fathers, are deliciously sweet. After straining over sand and
rock, in the hot, white sun-glare, with the fever-thirst which comes
from drinking alkali water, it must have been a deep pleasure for the
soldiery to leave the trackless plain, and lie in the cool, rich grass,
restful alike to jaded steed and war-worn rider; to feast their eyes
on the delicate enamel of green--the setting of this Diamond of the
Desert; and watch, as we have, the birds of strange note and plumage
coming and going, with merry twitter, flirt and flutter, to bathe and
drink in the sparkling fountain.
Enchanting effects of light and color vary the passing hours.
A rose-blush of exquisite haze greets the rising sun; and the
mirage--most marvelous of Nature’s mysteries--often swims in mid-air
in early morning, when the first warm flush has faded. The perfect
blue, curtaining the valley, is jeweled with opal and turquoise. That
ethereal brilliance allows no “middle tones.” The sun sets as on the
Nile, and when the flaring disc sinks low suddenly the hidden splendor
is unveiled--“a vision sent from afar, that mortals may feebly learn
how beautiful is Heaven.”