The Spanish assumed that Christianizing the urbanized Pueblo they encountered in New Mexico would be an easy task. The Pueblo produced sophisticated pottery and lived in solidly constructed, multi-storied, terraced apartment buildings with as many as 2,000 residents. They hunted game, gathered plants, and grew corn, squash, beans, and cotton in irrigated fields. Between 110 and 150 functioning Pueblo villages existed at the time of Spanish contact. These villages maintained extensive trade networks with other pueblos and with neighboring nomadic people.69
The pueblos looked deceptively similar, but were in fact inhabited by people belonging to five major language groups—Piro, Hopi, Zuni, Tano, and Keresan. In 1609, this linguistic diversity led the viceroy to comment that New Mexico “is populated by a variety of nations, with very few people in each one of them, who speak various difficult and barbarous languages.” Only a few of the Franciscans mastered the Pueblo languages well enough to minister without an interpreter. The pueblos’ isolation from Spanish settlement presented missionaries with the challenge of living and teaching in communities that were alien and indifferent, if not hostile.70
Forcing Pueblos to relinquish their indigenous religion proved to be a never-ending task for the friars. After 1630, Franciscans began to seize and destroy native religious objects and imprison, torture, and publicly whip those who maintained indigenous religious practices. Civil authorities occasionally hanged alleged Indian sorcerers. In 1660, Fray Nicolas de Freitas declared, “It has been impossible to correct their concubinage, the abominable crime of idolatry, their accursed superstitions, idolatrous dances, and other faults.”71
Tribute collection increased tension between Spaniards and Pueblos. Encomenderos legally exacted salt, nuts, hides, and clothing from Indians and illegally appropriated their land and labor.
Figure 5.2 Taos Pueblo, north house block, by John K. Hillers, 1879 Source: Courtesy of Museum of New Mexico, #16096
The Spanish appropriated so many goods that the Pueblos could no longer maintain trade ties with nomadic people in the region. Nomads, who had grown dependent on Pueblo supplies, began raiding to seize what they could no longer obtain by trade. 72
Conditions for the Pueblo deteriorated in the late 1660s. A severe drought between 1667 and 1672 led to famine and increased raids by starving nomads. When Spaniards’ prayers failed to deliver rain, the Pueblo turned to traditional religious leaders. The Spanish responded by hanging three Pueblo religious practitioners and lashing forty-three others deemed guilty of sorcery and sedition. The combination of draught, epidemics, attacks by neighboring nomads, and Spanish labor and tribute demands pushed the Pueblo to the breaking point.73
Pope, a Tewa religious leader from San Juan Pueblo who had been flogged by the Spanish in 1675 for his attempts to reinvigorate native religious practices, organized the Pueblo response. Over a period of several years, he coordinated plans for a rebellion. He united speakers of six languages from two dozen independent towns spread over several hundred square miles. Pope’s success was based on his organizational skill and his promising that the old gods would restore happiness and prosperity after Christians and their god were ousted. He promised his followers that after the revolt the Pueblo could reclaim the choice lands held by Spaniards and that there would be no more forced labor.74
The conspirators set the revolt for August 11, 1680, the first night of the new moon. They timed it to occur just before the arrival of the supply caravan, which would bring additional ammunition and horses for the Spanish. A series of knots tied in cords carried to conspiring villages communicated that date. One knot was to be untied each day. The revolt was set for the day no knots remained. Spanish officials only learned of the rebellion on its eve, too late to Prevent it.
The Indians simultaneously attacked isolated missions and ranches in northern and central New Mexico. Given the element of surprise and their overwhelming numerical advantage, the Indians soon had all of northern New Mexico, except for Santa Fe, under their control. Using guns and horses captured in outlying areas, they besieged that Spanish stronghold. Just as the Spanish had cut the water supply when they had besieged Tenochtitlan, the rebels cut the water supply to the Spaniards in Santa Fe. Rather than attempting to withstand a siege by a vastly superior force, after nine days, the 1,000 people massed in Santa Fe retreated south to El Paso. The rebels did not attempt to prevent their flight. Even in the face of rebellion, Spanish oppression did not cease. The Spanish forced 500 of their Pueblo and Apache slaves to accompany them as they fled.76
During the rebellion, the rebels killed at least 400 Spaniards, including thirty-two friars, whom they encountered in isolated areas. They specifically targeted anything associated with Christianity. The Pueblo slew priests at their altars, desecrated holy furnishings with human excrement, and burned missions. Leaders instructed their followers to wade in streams and scrub themselves with yucca root to wash away Christian baptism. The rebels resumed worship of their old gods, after declaring the Christian god and St. Mary dead. Rebels prohibited speaking Spanish in areas they controlled. The Pueblo emptied and resacralized kivas that had been desecrated and filled with sand.77
Once the Spanish retreated, the rebels faced no immediate military threat, since 300 miles of rugged terrain, much of which was under Apache control, separated them from El Paso. However, after having ridded themselves of the Spanish, problems did not simply vanish. Old rivalries between Pueblo resurfaced, and epidemics continued. Since Spanish soldiers no longer offered protection, raids by nomadic Indians increased.78
Pope began to affect the role of a Spanish governor and demanded tribute. His actions, in the eyes of some Pueblo, smacked of extremism. He forbade the sowing of Spanish-introduced plants and demanded that long hours be devoted to religious ceremonies. After resentment built up against Pope, a coup finally ousted him.79
To reassert Spanish control, in August 1692 Spanish nobleman Diego de Vargas marched north from El Paso with fifty presidial soldiers, their officers, ten armed citizens, a hundred Pueblos, three Franciscan friars, pack animals, livestock, several wagons carrying provisions, a small cannon, and a mortar. De Vargas’s force stopped at each pueblo and offered its residents the opportunity to return to Christ and the Crown. After a pueblo accepted his offer, priests would absolve Indians of their sins and baptize the children who had been born since 1680. Indians who had occupied Santa Fe agreed to submit after the cross and the banner of the Blessed Virgin were displayed. From the Spanish point of view, De Vargas’s mission was a resounding success. Without a shot being fired, twenty-three pueblos pledged to return to the Christian fold and the Spanish empire. Priests baptized some 2,214 Indians, mostly children.80
De Vargas’s success in the 1692 campaign resulted from his willingness to accept submission without exacting revenge and his moving so quickly that pueblos did not have the chance to reunite. No leader emerged to replace Pope, who had died. De Vargas also enjoyed the support of the Crown, which financed the reoccupation of New Mexico, since it was reluctant to abandon those who had converted to Christianity. It also feared that if New Mexico was not reoccupied, the French would usurp Spanish territorial claims and invade the silver-producing regions of northern Mexico. Multiple crises, such as the appearance of La Salle, left the Crown overextended and delayed support for recolonizing New Mexico.81
Once he had received pledges of submission to the Crown, De Vargas returned to El Paso. In September 1693, he accompanied 800 settlers and their livestock back to New Mexico. Almost immediately, Spanish demands for scarce food supplies led to violence. De Vargas, in mid-winter, demanded that the Pueblo turn over accumulated food supplies and vacate buildings in Santa Fe so the Spanish could occupy them. Their refusal led to combat. In the ensuing battle to reoccupy Santa Fe, eighty-one Indians died, including seventy who were executed after having surrendered. An additional 400 men, women, and children were seized as slaves. This produced resistance in other pueblos. In early 1694, De Vargas traveled from pueblo to pueblo and forced them to submit once again. Even with the Spanish force in their midst, the pueblos never reunited. Not only did the Pueblo lack leaders to replace Pope, but some pueblos, such as Pecos, actively supported the Spanish.82
After reoccupying New Mexico, Christian religious practices were reimposed. However, the Spanish (those who survived the rebellion) did learn some lessons. They became more tolerant of Pueblo religious practices. Spanish priests, who numbered only twenty in 1776, were spread so thin that Indians enjoyed more religious freedom. The Spanish also realized that to prevent another revolt, they would have to become more self-sufficient and cease relying on the Pueblo to produce for them. Spanish governors in Santa Fe became more attentive to Pueblo complaints of abuse by friars and settlers. As the eighteenth century wore on, trade and intermarriage between Hispanics and Pueblo increased. In the late 1700s, the Hispanic population surpassed that of the Pueblo, who realized they would have to learn to live with non-Indians.83
GUERRA A SANGRE Y FUEGO
Northern New Spain never enjoyed the long, if flawed, social peace of the centre; Spanish hegemony was, at best, patchy and frequently contested.
Alan Knight, 200284
During the late colonial period, the borderlands were distinguished from central Mexico by the presence of independent Indian groups that refused to accept what the Spanish defined as appropriate behavior—conversion to Christianity and permanent settlements. Indians could successfully reject Spanish tutelage since: 1) they had acquired the horse and become expert horsemen; 2) they could acquire firearms from traders of other nationalities, especially the French; and 3) they had ready sources of food, such as buffalo, which permitted survival without submitting to the Spanish.
The European presence in North America led to massive destabilization, even among Indians who had never seen a white man. Epidemics spread far ahead of European settlement, wreaking havoc. Later, horses spread from the southwest, as they strayed or were stolen. Firearms obtained from traders flowed from the northeast. When Indian groups acquired both horses and firearms, the existing balance of power changed radically. After European settlement forced one group of Indians into the territory of another, food supplies were often inadequate for both groups, leading to raids on third parties, often the Spanish, for food.85
The Comanche, perhaps the most transformed of all Indian groups affected by, but not dominated by Europeans, originated in the mountainous country of contemporary Colorado and Wyoming and emerged onto the plains in the late seventeenth century. The combination of the horse, the gun, and the buffalo allowed them to remain independent of Europeans. They lived a fully nomadic life, trading, raiding, and hunting buffalo, which made them exceedingly difficult to control. The Comanche moved into the lush grasslands of eastern New Mexico and from there launched devastating raids against settlements along the Rio Grande. In the late 1700s, the area under Comanche control, known as the comancheria, covered some 240,000 square miles and formed a formidable barrier against Spanish efforts to expand north and west of San Antonio. At the height of their power, the Comanche boasted that they only allowed Spaniards and Mexicans to remain in northern Mexico to raise horses for them to steal.86
At the time of European contact, the Apache occupied southern New Mexico and adjacent areas of Texas. They engaged in horticulture, which provided a reliable food supply. The Apache never
Formed a tribe, in the sense of having one chief or a definable structure. Rather, they formed an ethnic group, which had at least twenty subdivisions, known by such names as Gileno Apache and Jicarilla Apache.87
The newly empowered Comanche forced the Apache to abandon their land and their way of life by denying them access to Spanish markets in New Mexico and by preventing them from establishing spring farming camps. Some Apache were displaced west into what is now southeastern Arizona and to the south and west into what is now northern Chihuahua and Sonora. The Lipan Apache moved into the area between the Big Bend and the lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Some of the northern Apache groups, such as the Faraones, disappeared entirely. The area under Apache domination, known as the gran apacheria, extended from today’s northern Sonora and southern Arizona to west Texas and Coahuila—750 miles from east to west and as much as 550 miles from north to south. During the middle of the eighteenth century, Apache control created a barrier to northward Spanish expansion.88
Sandwiched between the Comanche to the north and the Spanish to the south, the Apache perfected the raid as a means of survival. As historian Donald Worcester noted:
The Apaches successfully resisted all attempts to conquer them from the early seventeenth century until the last quarter of the nineteenth. They avoided pitched battles if possible, but when cornered fought to the death. As guerrilla fighters they were without peers; unlike the Plains tribes, they could not be starved into submission by extermination of the bison or any other animal.89
As the strength of independent Indian groups increased, the Spanish began to see themselves not as conquistadores but as underdogs. In 1758, the presidial commander at La Bahia del Espiritu Santo on the Texas coast commented that the surrounding Indians were so “superior. . . in firearms as well as in numbers, that our destruction seems probable.”90
The cycle of raid and counter-raid developed into a state of low-intensity warfare. Emphasis shifted from saving Indians’ souls to killing them. Spanish punitive expeditions often struck innocent groups. The ready market for booty and slaves did not lead punitive expeditions to be very discriminating concerning their choice of targets. Nor did they need to worry about Spanish officials enforcing laws against slavery. In 1752, New Mexico Governor Velez Cachupin reminded colonists that Indian slavery was illegal but tolerated in New Mexico so that captives “can be instructed in Our Holy Catholic Faith and made cognizant of the Divine Precepts, so that they may win their own salvation in honor and glory of God, our Lord.”91
By the 1770s, Apaches were subjecting the entire province of Nueva Vizcaya to attack, and many of its villages had been abandoned. The region was described as being in a state of “permanent warfare.” Governor Felipe Barri reported that between 1771 and 1776, Indian raids had resulted in 1,674 persons being killed, 154 captured, 116 haciendas and ranches abandoned, and 68,256 head of livestock stolen.92
To supplement the presidio, in Chihuahua the Crown established a series of fortified settlements inhabited by armed peasant freeholders. Migrants from Spain and central Mexico, as well as local Indians who settled in these colonies and participated in military action against nomadic Indians, received extraordinary benefits. These included extensive land holdings and exemptions from paying taxes for ten years. Indians who settled in the colonies, in contrast to Indian peasants in central Mexico, who were considered wards of the Crown, were given full rights of Spanish citizenship. Namiquipa, Cruces, Casas Grandes, Janos, and Galeana, the first five of these military colonies, were established in 1776, and each received 277,527 acres of land.93
Under the leadership of Teodoro de Croix, who commanded Spanish forces in northern New Spain, a three-pronged strategy for countering Indians was developed: 1) missionaries would encourage Indians to lay down their arms and settle peacefully; 2) failing that, the Spanish would adopt a scorched-earth military policy known as “guerra a sangrey fuego” (“war by fire and blood”); and 3) if war proved too expensive or futile, the Crown would bribe or buy off Indians who posed a threat. This third option proved especially favorable to the Comanche, who received gifts, weapons, and ammunition as bribes not to attack the Spanish.94
Croix organized troops who had previously cowered in presidios into mobile strike forces, or “flying companies” that would ride out in pursuit of Indians. He reformed the internal administration of presidios and increased the number of border troops to more than 3,000. These troops suffered high mortality, but unlike the Apache, Croix could bring in replacements from afar.95
Rather than considering the indigenous population as a monolithic entity, Spaniards began to exploit age-old ethnic antagonisms between groups, such as those between Comanche and Apache, and divisions within ethnic groups. They successfully formed an alliance with the Lipan Apache against the Mescalero Apache. Pedro de Nava, who served as general commander of the Interior Provinces from 1793 to 1802, commented on the divide-and-conquer policy in a letter to Texas Governor Manuel Munoz:
One of the maxims that should always be observed on our part, with respect to the nations of
Indians, is to allow them to make reciprocal war on each other in order in this way to bring
About a diminution of their forces, to energize their mutual hatreds, and to avoid their union
And alliance.96
Beginning in the 1780s, the Spanish began to pursue the Apache, destroy their settlements, and kill as many of them as possible. The Apache faced the alternatives of continued combat with the Spanish, a return north to face their hereditary enemies, the Comanche, or agreeing to settle near a mission.
Just as had occurred with the Chichimeca, the Spanish eventually concluded that the key to peace in the northern borderlands lay not in waging war but in supplying independent Indians with sufficient merchandise so that they would refrain from attacking Spanish settlements. Even though this merchandise transfer was referred to as “gift giving,” it was de facto tribute paid by the Spanish to independent Indian groups.
In 1786, the Comanche and Spaniards signed a formal peace accord at Pecos, amidst festivity and flattering oratory. The 1786 peace held and became one of the most enduring treaties signed between Indians and Spaniards. That year, the first installment of the promised gifts destined for the Comanche arrived in San Antonio from Louisiana. The shipment included thirty-seven boxes of imported European goods as well as 474 bundles of tobacco. In addition to receiving gifts, the Comanche benefited from the peace, trading to the Spaniards captives, buffalo hides, and jerked
Meat.98
The Comanche willingly ceased raiding at this time since: 1) they had greater difficulty obtaining guns after the Spanish assumed control of Louisiana; 2) they had suffered a major smallpox epidemic in 1780—1781; and 3) Spanish forces had just destroyed a Comanche camp in southeastern Colorado and killed prominent war chief Cuerno Verde. The Comanche not only refrained from attacking Spaniards but joined the Spanish in attacking the Lipan.99
The peace with the Comanche became so cordial that in 1806 when U. S. troops stood poised on the Texas—Louisiana border to support inflated American claims that the Louisiana Purchase extended as far as the Rio Grande, thirty-three Comanche chiefs offered their support to Spanish Governor Antonio Cordero in San Antonio.100
As a result of combined Spanish and Comanche attacks, in 1791 the Spanish were able to sign a peace treaty with the Lipan. Raiding was to cease in exchange for gifts, including weekly supplies of corn, meat, tobacco, and sweets. The Spanish created establecimientos de paz (peace establishments), where many Apache settled and received food. Pedro de Nava, who was serving a commander in chief of the Interior Provinces, expressly forbade missionary proselytizing in peace establishments, fearing it would annoy the Apache and cause them to flee. Since peace establishments cost less than war, the Spanish maintained them for rest of the colonial period.101
Apaches who promised to settle peacefully received not only food but seeds, farm tools, and protection from the Comanche. They also received copious amounts of liquor. As anthropologist Edward Spicier noted:
It was a frankly cynical policy based on the view that the Apaches could never be civilized, and thus represented a very sharp alteration of what had been the Spanish approach, namely, the belief that all Indians were capable through moral suasion of changing from barbarians to civilized Christians.102
Peace remained tenuous. Sometimes peace treaties would only bind Indians not to attack a specific Spanish settlement. Villages that regularly purchased booty or captives would be spared attack. This encouraged villages to make such purchases, but also encouraged attacks on other villages. In addition, lack of warfare did not necessarily mean Spanish control, as historian John Coatsworth noted: “Colonial frontiers were ill-defined, and virtually undefended. Although progress was achieved in settling and pacifying parts of the northern areas, vast regions remained entirely outside the control of Spain at the time of independence.”103
World History
