Within two decades of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, Spanish explorers had surveyed vast regions of what is now the United States. Juan
Ponce de Leon, a shipmate of Columbus on the admiral’s second voyage, made the first Spanish landing on the mainland of North America, exploring the east coast of Florida in 1513. In the 1520s Panfilo de Narvaez explored the Gulf Coast westward from Florida, and after his death his lieutenant, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, wandered for years in the region north of the Gulf. Finally, along with three companions, one a black slave named Esteban, de Vaca made his way across what is now New Mexico and Arizona and then south to Mexico City. Between 1539 and 1543, Hernando de Soto traveled north from Florida to the Carolinas, then westward to the Mississippi River. During the same period Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ventured as far north as Kansas and west to the Grand Canyon. All sought to replicate Cortes’s triumph, but none succeeded; most treated the Indians barbarously.
By the early 1600s, Spanish explorers had reached Virginia, and in Florida a single Spanish military garrison remained at San Augustin— today’s Saint Augustine. Years later the governor of Cuba, having failed to promote Spanish settlement of San Augustin, explained that “only hoodlums and the mischievous go there.”
More consequential was the attempt to extend the Spanish empire beyond the Rio Grande into New Mexico. By the close of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had learned that it was more profitable to acquire the crops and labor ofIndian farmers than to search for rumored cities of gold. In 1598, the
The legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe holds that in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared before an Indian on a hill near what is now Mexico City and left an image of herself imprinted on cloth. This darkskinned Mary, illuminated by rays of light, shows a fusion of European and native beliefs at that time.
Viceroy of New Spain charged Don Juan de Onate with the task of conquering the Indians of New Mexico and founding a colony in their midst. Onate led an expedition of 500 Spanish colonists and soldiers and a handful of Catholic missionaries across the Rio Grande into the territory of the Pueblo Indians, a farming people.
But the Pueblo were poor and their settlements meager; a Spanish soldier described New Mexico as “at the ends of the earth—remote beyond compare.” When Onate extorted maize, seized farmlands, and allowed cattle and pigs to plunder the fields, the Indians seethed. Eventually they ambushed and killed a Spanish patrol. Onate retaliated by butchering 800 Pueblo, including women and children, and arresting another 500. The captured males over twenty-five years of age were sold into slavery; to prevent them from running away, one of each of their feet was chopped off. Onate’s brutality generated no profits; in 1614 he was dismissed.
His successors found a surer source of wealth: capturing nomadic Indians, especially the Ute and Apache, and selling them as slaves to work in Mexican silver mines. Spanish soldiers forced Pueblo warriors to assist in slave raids; the Ute and Apache retaliated against the Pueblo with furious attacks on their settlements.
Franciscan missionaries were given the task of Christianizing the Pueblo. The friars were, for the most part, dedicated men. They baptized thousands of mission Indians and instructed them in the rudiments of the Catholic faith. They also taught Indians to use European tools; to grow wheat and other European crops; and to raise chickens, pigs, and other barnyard animals.
The friars exacted a heavy price in labor from the people they presumed to enlighten and civilize. The Indians built and maintained the missions, tilled the surrounding fields, and served the every need of the friars and other Spanish colonists. For this they were paid little or nothing.
For a time, the Pueblo accepted these conditions. They were impressed by the friars’ religious bearing, ascetic lives, and evident commitment. That the Christian deity possessed wondrous powers, too, was manifest in the ease of Spanish domination. Indian shamans—spiritual leaders—often conceded the potency of the Christian God but considered it evil sorcery: Why else did so many Indians die after a priest had ministered to them? For their part, the Franciscans sought to destroy all vestiges of pagan culture.
By the 1670s, after years of drought, the Pueblo became restive with these arrangements. They especially resented being coerced to take part in slave raids. Their shamans, too, increasingly called for a revival of the traditional religion. In 1675 the Spanish arrested forty-seven shamans; three were hanged and the remainder whipped as witches.
One of the latter, named Pope, secretly organized a rebellion. Without warning, some 17,000 Pueblo rose against the Spaniards, driving them out of towns and missions, destroying churches and killing priests, and plundering farms. The Spaniards fled to Santa Fe, escaping just before the Indians razed the town. The Pueblo drove the survivors all the way back to El Paso. Of the 1,000 Spanish in New Mexico, over 200 were killed.
In the mid-1690s the Spaniards regained control of most of the upper Rio Grande. Thereafter they maintained power with little difficulty. This was partly because they had learned to deal less harshly with the Pueblo people. The Spanish also recruited the nomadic Indians of the region to capture more distant Indians and sell them to the Spaniards as slaves.
By the early 1700s Spain had become master of a huge American empire covering all of South America except Brazil, and also all of Central America as well as a region extending from California east to Florida. New Spain was ten times larger than Spain itself. The Spanish monarch ruled three times more Indian subjects than Spaniards.
But while Spain had founded a vast empire, one major and literally fatal problem remained: The Indian population was declining rapidly, and had done so from the start. Almost as soon as Europeans set foot on American soil, Indians began to die.
View the Image Cabeza de Vaca, “Indians of the Rio Grande" at myhistorylab. com
•••-[Read the Document Conquistadores Torturing Native Amerindians at myhistorylab. com
•••-[Read the Document Legal Statement by Pedro Hidalgo, soldier, Santa Fe 1680 at myhistorylab. com
World History
