thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries
before any of our blood saw any of it,--a well-born, college-bred,
ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an
explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He
was a city-bred man, and no frontiersman; and being accustomed only to
Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California,
he knew nothing of, and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts
of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when
there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands,
that New Mexico was successfully colonized.
While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a
golden fable across their desolate plains, his countrymen had found and
were exploring another of our States,--our golden garden of California.
Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great
distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan
Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred
miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three
centuries later.
After the discouraging discoveries of Coronado, the Spaniards for many
years paid little attention to New Mexico. There was enough doing in
Mexico itself to keep even that indomitable Spanish energy busy for
awhile in the civilizing of their new empire. Fray Pedro de Gante had
founded in Mexico, in 1524, the first schools in the New World; and
thereafter every church and convent in Spanish America had always a
school for the Indians attached. In 1524 there was not a single Indian
in Mexico's countless thousands who knew what letters were; but twenty
years later such large numbers of them had learned to read and write
that Bishop Zumarraga had a book made for them in their own language. By
1543 there were even industrial schools for the Indians in Mexico. It
was this same good Bishop Zumarraga who brought the first printing-press
to the New World, in 1536. It was set up in the City of Mexico, and was
soon very actively at work. The oldest book printed in America that
remains to us came from that press in 1539. A majority of the first
books printed there were to make the Indian languages intelligible,--a
policy of humane scholarship which no other nation colonizing in the New
World ever copied. The first music printed in America came from this
press in 1584.
The most striking thing of all, as showing the scholarly attitude of the
Spaniards toward the new continents, was a result entirely unique. Not
only did their intellectual activity breed among themselves a galaxy of
eminent writers, but in a very few years there was a school of important
_Indian authors_. It would be an irreparable loss to knowledge of the
true history of America if we were to lose the chronicles of such Indian
writers as Tezozomoc, Camargo, and Pomar, in Mexico; Juan de Santa Cruz,
Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, in Peru; and many others. And what a gain
to science if we had taken pains to raise up our own aborigines to such
helpfulness to themselves and to human knowledge!
In all other enlightened pursuits which the world then knew, Spain's
sons were making remarkable progress here. In geography, natural
history, natural philosophy, and other sciences they were as truly the
pioneers of America as they had been in discovery. It is a startling
fact that so early as 1579 a public autopsy on the body of an Indian was
held at the University of Mexico, to determine the nature of an epidemic
which was then devastating New Spain. It is doubtful if by that time
they had got so far in London itself. And in still extant books of the
same period we find plans for repeating firearms, and a plain hint of
the telephone! The first printing-press did not reach the English
colonies of America until 1638,--nearly one hundred years behind Mexico.
The whole world came very slowly to newspapers; and the first authentic
newspaper in its history was published in Germany in 1615. The first one
in England began in 1622; and the American colonies never had one until
1704. The "Mercurio Volante" (Flying Mercury), a pamphlet which printed
news, was running in the City of Mexico before 1693.
When the ill reports of Coronado had largely been forgotten, there began
another Spanish movement into New Mexico and Arizona. In the mean time
there had been very important doings in Florida. The many failures in
that unlucky land had not deterred the Spaniards from further attempts
to colonize it. At last, in 1560, the first permanent foothold was
effected there by Aviles de Menendez, a brutal Spaniard, who
nevertheless had the honor of founding and naming the oldest city in the
United States,--St. Augustine, 1560. Menendez found there a little
colony of French-Huguenots, who had wandered thither the year before
under Ribault; and those whom he captured he hanged, with a placard
saying that they were executed "not as Frenchmen, but as heretics." Two
years later, the French expedition of Dominique de Gourges captured the
three Spanish forts which had been built there, and hanged the colonists
"not as Spaniards, but as assassins,"--which was a very neat revenge in
rhetoric, if an unpraiseworthy one in deed. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake,
whose piratical proclivities have already been alluded to, destroyed the
friendly colony of St. Augustine; but it was at once rebuilt. In 1763
Florida was ceded to Great Britain by Spain, in exchange for Havana,
which Albemarle had captured the year before.
It is also interesting to note that the Spaniards had been to Virginia
nearly thirty years before Sir Walter Raleigh's attempt to establish a
colony there, and full half a century before Capt. John Smith's visit.
As early as 1556 Chesapeake Bay was known to the Spaniards as the Bay of
Santa Maria; and an unsuccessful expedition had been sent to colonize
the country.
In 1581 three Spanish missionaries--Fray Agostin Rodriguez, Fray
Francisco Lopez, and Fray Juan de Santa Maria--started from Santa
Barbara, Chihuahua (Mexico), with an escort of nine Spanish soldiers
under command of Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado. They trudged up along the
Rio Grande to where Bernalillo now is,--a walk of a thousand miles.
There the missionaries remained to teach the gospel, while the soldiers
explored the country as far as Zuni, and then returned to Santa
Barbara. Chamuscado died on the way. As for the brave missionaries who
had been left behind in the wilderness, they soon became martyrs. Fray
Santa Maria was slain by the Indians near San Pedro, while trudging back
to Mexico alone that fall. Fray Rodriguez and Fray Lopez were
assassinated by their treacherous flock at Puaray, in December, 1581.
In the following year Antonio de Espejo, a wealthy native of Cordova,
started from Santa Barbara in Chihuahua, with fourteen men to face the
deserts and the savages of New Mexico. He marched up the Rio Grande to
some distance above where Albuquerque now stands, meeting no opposition
from the Pueblo Indians. He visited their cities of Zia, Jemez, lofty
Acoma, Zuni, and far-off Moqui, and travelled a long way out into
northern Arizona. Returning to the Rio Grande, he visited the pueblo of
Pecos, went down the Pecos River into Texas, and thence crossed back to
Santa Barbara. He intended to return and colonize New Mexico, but his
death (probably in 1585) ended these plans; and the only important
result of his gigantic journey was an addition to the geographical and
ethnological knowledge of the day.
In 1590 Gaspar Castano de Sosa, lieutenant-governor of New Leon, was so
anxious to explore New Mexico that he made an expedition without leave
from the viceroy. He came up the Pecos River and crossed to the Rio
Grande; and at the pueblo of Santo Domingo was arrested by Captain
Morlette, who had come all the way from Mexico on that sole errand, and
carried home in irons.
Juan de Onate, the colonizer of New Mexico, and founder of the second
town within the limits of the United States, as well as of the city
which is now our next oldest, was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. His family
(which came from Biscay) had discovered (in 1548) and now owned some of
the richest mines in the world,--those of Zacatecas. But despite the
"golden spoon in his mouth," Onate desired to be an explorer. The Crown
refused to provide for further expeditions into the disappointing north;
and about 1595 Onate made a contract with the viceroy of New Spain to
colonize New Mexico at his own expense. He made all preparations, and
fitted out his costly expedition. Just then a new viceroy was appointed,
who kept him waiting in Mexico with all his men for over two years, ere
the necessary permission was given him to start. At last, early in 1597,
he set out with his expedition,--which had cost him the equivalent of a
million dollars, before it stirred a step. He took with him four hundred
colonists, including two hundred soldiers, with women and children, and
herds of sheep and cattle. Taking formal possession of New Mexico May
30, 1598, he moved up the Rio Grande to where the hamlet of Chamita now
is (north of Santa Fe), and there founded, in September of that year,
San Gabriel de los Espanoles (St. Gabriel of the Spaniards), the second
town in the United States.
Onate was remarkable not only for his success in colonizing a country so
forbidding as this then was, but also as an explorer. He ransacked all
the country round about, travelled to Acoma and put down a revolt of its
Indians, and in 1600 made an expedition clear up into Nebraska. In 1604,
with thirty men, he marched from San Gabriel across that grim desert to
the Gulf of California, and returned to San Gabriel in April, 1605. By
that time the English had penetrated no farther into the interior of
America than forty or fifty miles from the Atlantic coast.
In 1605 Onate founded Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith of St.
Francis, about whose age a great many foolish fables have been written.
The city actually celebrated the three hundred and thirty-third
anniversary of its founding twenty years before it was three centuries
old.
In 1606 Onate made another expedition to the far Northeast, about which
expedition we know almost nothing; and in 1608 he was superseded by
Pedro de Peralta, the second governor of New Mexico.
Onate was of middle age when he made this very striking record. Born on
the frontier, used to the deserts, endowed with great tenacity,
coolness, and knowledge of frontier warfare, he was the very man to
succeed in planting the first considerable colonies in the United States
at their most dangerous and difficult points.
VIII.
TWO CONTINENTS MASTERED.
This, then, was the situation in the New World at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Spain, having found the Americas, had, in a little
over a hundred years of ceaseless exploration and conquest, settled and
was civilizing them. She had in the New World hundreds of towns, whose
extremes were over five thousand miles apart, with all the then
advantages of civilization, and two towns in what is now the United
States, a score of whose States her sons had penetrated. France had made
a few gingerly expeditions, which bore no substantial fruit; and
Portugal had founded a few comparatively unimportant towns in South
America. England had passed the century in masterly inactivity,--and
there was not so much as an English hut or an English man between Cape
Horn and the North Pole.
That later times have reversed the situation; that Spain (largely
because she was drained of her best blood by a conquest so enormous that
no nation even now could give the men or the money to keep the
enterprise abreast with the world's progress) has never regained her old
strength, and is now a drone beside the young giant of nations that has
grown, since her day, in the empire she opened,--has nothing to do with
the obligation of American history to give her justice for the past. Had
there been no Spain four hundred years ago, there would be no United
States to-day. It is a most fascinating story to every genuine
American,--for every one worthy of the name admires heroism and loves
fairplay everywhere, and is first of all interested in the truth about
his own country.
By 1680 the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico was beaded with Spanish
settlements from Santa Cruz to below Socorro, two hundred miles; and
there were also colonies in the Taos valley, the extreme north of the
Territory. From 1600 to 1680 there had been countless expeditions
throughout the Southwest, penetrating even the deadly Llano Estacado
(Staked Plain). The heroism which held the Southwest so long was no less
wonderful than the exploration that found it. The life of the colonists
was a daily battle with niggard Nature--for New Mexico was never
fertile--and with deadliest danger. For three centuries they were
ceaselessly harried by the fiendish Apaches; and up to 1680 there was no
rest from the attempts of the Pueblos (who were actually with and all
about the settlers) at insurrection. The statements of closet historians
that the Spaniards enslaved the Pueblos, or any other Indians of New
Mexico; that they forced them to choose between Christianity and death;
that they made them work in the mines, and the like,--are all entirely
untrue. The whole policy of Spain toward the Indians of the New World
was one of humanity, justice, education, and moral suasion; and though
there were of course individual Spaniards who broke the strict laws of
their country as to the treatment of the Indians, they were duly
punished therefor.
Yet the mere presence of the strangers in their country was enough to
stir the jealous nature of the Indians; and in 1680 a murderous and
causeless plot broke out in the red Pueblo Rebellion. There were then
fifteen hundred Spaniards in the Territory,--all living in Santa Fe or
in scattered farm settlements; for Chamita had long been abandoned.
Thirty-four Pueblo towns were in the revolt, under the lead of a
dangerous Tehua Indian named Pope. Secret runners had gone from pueblo
to pueblo, and the murderous blow fell upon the whole Territory
simultaneously. On that bitter 10th of August, 1680, over four hundred
Spaniards were assassinated,--including twenty-one of the gentle
missionaries who, unarmed and alone, had scattered over the wilderness
that they might save the souls and teach the minds of the savages.
Antonio de Otermin was then governor and captain-general of New Mexico,
and was attacked in his capital of Santa Fe by a greatly-outnumbering
army of Indians. The one hundred and twenty Spanish soldiers, cooped up
in their little adobe city, soon found themselves unable to hold it
longer against their swarming besiegers; and after a week's desperate
defence, they made a sortie, and hewed their way through to liberty,
taking their women and children with them. They retreated down the Rio
Grande, avoiding an ambush set for them at Sandia by the Indians, and
reached the pueblo of Isleta, twelve miles below the present city of
Albuquerque, in safety; but the village was deserted, and the Spaniards
were obliged to continue their flight to El Paso, Texas, which was then
only a Spanish mission for the Indians.
In 1681 Governor Otermin made an invasion as far north as the pueblo of
Cochiti, twenty-five miles west of Santa Fe, on the Rio Grande; but the
hostile Pueblos forced him to retreat again to El Paso. In 1687 Pedro
Reneros Posada made another dash into New Mexico, and took the
rock-built pueblo of Santa Ana by a most brilliant and bloody assault.
But he also had to retire. In 1688 Domingo Jironza Petriz de
Cruzate--the greatest soldier on New Mexican soil--made an expedition,
in which he took the pueblo of Zia by storm (a still more remarkable
achievement than Posada's), and in turn retreated to El Paso.
At last the final conqueror of New Mexico, Diego de Vargas, came in
1692. Marching to Santa Fe, and thence as far as ultimate Moqui, with
only eighty-nine men, he visited every pueblo in the Province, meeting
no opposition from the Indians, who had been thoroughly cowed by
Cruzate. Returning to El Paso, he came again to New Mexico in 1693, this
time with about one hundred and fifty soldiers and a number of
colonists. Now the Indians were prepared for him, and gave him the
bloodiest reception ever accorded in New Mexico. They broke out first at
Santa Fe, and he had to storm that town, which he took after two days'
fighting. Then began the siege of the Black Mesa of San Ildefonso, which
lasted off and on for nine months. The Indians had removed their village
to the top of that New Mexican Gibraltar, and there resisted four daring
assaults, but were finally worn into surrender.
Meantime De Vargas had stormed the impregnable citadel of the Potrero
Viejo, and the beetling cliff of San Diego de Jemez,--two exploits which
rank with the storming of the Penol of Mixton[7] in Jalisco (Mexico) and
of the vast rock of Acoma, as the most marvellous assaults in all
American history. The capture of Quebec bears no comparison to them.
These costly lessons kept the Indians quiet until 1696, when they broke
out again. This rebellion was not so formidable as the first, but it
gave New Mexico another watering with blood, and was suppressed only
after three months' fighting. The Spaniards were already masters of the
situation; and the quelling of that revolt put an end to all trouble
with the Pueblos,--who remain with us to this day practically
undiminished in numbers, though they have fewer towns, a quiet,
peaceful, Christianized race of industrious farmers, living monuments
to the humanity and the moral teaching of their conquerors.
Then came the last century, a dismal hundred years of ceaseless
harassment by the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, and occasionally by
the Utes,--a harassment which had hardly ceased a decade ago. The Indian
wars were so constant, the explorations (like that wonderful attempt to
open a road from San Antonio de Bejar, Texas, to Monterey, California)
so innumerable, that their individual heroism is lost in their own
bewildering multitude.
More than two centuries ago the Spaniards explored Texas, and settlement
soon followed. There were several minor expeditions; but the first of
magnitude was that of Alonzo de Leon, governor of the Mexican State of
Coahuila, who made extensive explorations of Texas in 1689. By the
beginning of the last century there were several Spanish settlements and
_presidios_ (garrisons) in what was to become, more than a hundred years
later, the largest of the United States.
The Spanish colonization of Colorado was not extensive, and they had no
towns north of the Arkansas River; but even in settling our Centennial
State they were half a century ahead of us, as they were some centuries
ahead in finding it.
In California the Spaniards were very active. For a long time there were
minor expeditions which were unsuccessful. Then the Franciscans came in
1769 to San Diego Bay, landed on the bare sands where a million-dollar
American hotel stands to-day, and at once began to teach the Indians, to
plant olive-orchards and vineyards, and to rear the noble stone churches
so beautifully described by the author of "Ramona," which shall remain
as monuments of a sublime faith long after the race that built them has
gone from off the face of the earth.
California had a long line of Spanish governors--the last of whom,
brave, courtly, lovable old Pio Pico, has just died--before our
acquisition of that garden-State of States. The Spaniards discovered
gold there centuries, and were mining it a decade, before an "American"
dreamed of the precious deposit which was to make such a mark on
civilization, and had found the rich placer-fields of New Mexico a
decade earlier yet.
In Arizona, Father Franciscus Eusebius Kuehne,[8] a Jesuit of Austrian
birth but under Spanish auspices, was first to establish the missions on
the Gila River,--from 1689 to 1717 (the date of his death). He made at
least four appalling journeys on foot from Sonora to the Gila, and
descended that stream to its junction with the Colorado. It would be
extremely interesting, did space permit, to follow fully the wanderings
and achievements of that class of pioneers of America who have left such
a wonderful impress on the whole Southwest,--the Spanish missionaries.
Their zeal and their heroism were infinite. No desert was too frightful
for them, no danger too appalling. Alone, unarmed, they traversed the
most forbidding lands and braved the most deadly savages, and left in
the lives of the Indians such a proud monument as mailed explorers and
conquering armies never made.
* * * * *
The foregoing is a running summary of the early pioneering of
America,--the only pioneering for more than a century, and the greatest
pioneering for still another century. As for the great and wonderful
work at last done by our own blood, not only in conquering part of a
continent, but in making a mighty nation, the reader needs no help from
me to enable him to comprehend it,--it has already found its due place
in history. To record all the heroisms of the Spanish pioneers would
fill, not this book, but a library. I have deemed it best, in such an
enormous field, to draw the condensed outline, as has now been done; and
then to illustrate it by giving in detail a few specimens out of the
host of heroisms. I have already given a hint of how many conquests and
explorations and dangers there were; and now I wish to show by fair
"sample pages" what Spanish conquest and exploration and endurance
really were.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Pronounced Mish-ton.
[8] Often misspelled Kino.
II.
SPECIMEN PIONEERS.
I.
THE FIRST AMERICAN TRAVELLER.
The achievements of the explorer are among the most important, as they
are among the most fascinating, of human heroisms. The qualities of mind
and body necessary to his task are rare and admirable. He should have
many sides and be strong in each,--the rounded man that Nature meant man
to be. His body need not be as strong as Samson's, nor his mind as
Napoleon's, nor his heart the most fully developed heart on earth; but
mind, heart, and body he needs, and each in the measure of a strong man.
There is hardly another calling in which every muscle, so to speak, of
his threefold nature will be more constantly or more evenly called into
play.
It is a curious fact that some of the very greatest of human
achievements have come about by chance. Many among the most important
discoveries in the history of mankind have been made by men who were not
seeking the great truth they found. Science is the result not only of
study, but of precious accidents; and this is as true of history. It is
an interesting study in itself,--the influence which happy blunders and
unintended happenings have had upon civilization.
In exploration, as in invention, accident has played its important part.
Some of the most valuable explorations have been made by men who had no
more idea of being explorers than they had of inventing a railroad to
the moon; and it is a striking fact that the first inland exploration of
America, and the two most wonderful journeys in it, were not only
accidents, but the crowning misfortunes and disappointments of the men
who had hoped for very different things.
Exploration, intended or involuntary, has not only achieved great
results for civilization, but in the doing has scored some of the
highest feats of human heroism. America in particular, perhaps, has been
the field of great and remarkable journeys; but the two men who made the
most astounding journeys in America are still almost unheard of among
us. They are heroes whose names are as Greek to the vast majority of
Americans, albeit they are men in whom Americans particularly should
take deep and admiring interest. They were Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,
the first American traveller; and Andres Docampo, the man who walked
farther on this continent than any other.
[Illustration: WHERE ZALDIVAR STORMED THE CITY.
_See page 135._]