Читать книгу Great River - Paul Horgan - Страница 36

15.

Four Enterprises

For nearly forty years after Coronado’s retreat no organized Spanish entries were made into the country of the Rio Grande. As Garay had abandoned the river at its mouth, so Coronado had abandoned its pueblo valley. What these explorers knew about the river was not lost, yet neither was it part of common knowledge. The river had to be discovered over and over again. From time to time little streams of information came out of the blind north country along Indian trails and aroused speculation as though no Spaniard had ever been there before. No comprehensive theory of the river’s course was yet held; but Indians told of how the big Rio Conchos, flowing northeast from the Mexican Sierra Madre, made a junction—La Junta de los Rios the Spaniards called it—with the long river whose valley twisted and turned and led northward to the pueblos. The Conchos suggested a new route to the north, more direct than the wide swing westward up the Mexican coast and across Arizona to approach the river from the west as Coronado had done; and finally like all roads it called to be taken. From 1581 to 1593 four small expeditions went to the river from the vast empty highlands of Northern Mexico.

Marching northward along the Conchos, three Spanish Franciscan friars, nine soldiers and sixteen Mexican servants arrived on July 6, 1581, at the junction with the Rio Grande, which they called the Guadalquivir, and also the Rio de Nuestra Señora de la Conceptión. The founder of this expedition was Fray Agustín Rodríguez. His squad of soldiers was commanded by Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado. They were on their way to convert the pueblos in the north. Guided by river dwellers they marched northwest following the valley, and turned with it northward, coming at last among the nation of towns that Coronado had known as Tiguex. One of the friars, Juan de Santa Maria, who was an adept in astrology, there resolved to return to Mexico with reports of what the party had seen; and despite warnings of his comrades departed alone for the south.

The rest of the company explored the land east of the river, passing through Pecos to the buffalo plains and returning; visiting the salines east of the Sandia and viewing the rosy stone town of Abo; and marching to the west past Ácoma as far as Zuñi, where a December snowfall forced them back to the river. There the two other Franciscans declared they would stay to preach the word of God. A handful of Indian servants elected to stay with them at the pueblo of Puaray, not far from Coronado’s capital of Alcanfor. Chamuscado gave them a few goats, horses and articles of barter, and left them there. With his reduced party he went down the river retracing his course. He was sixty, an old man, exhausted and ill from his hardships. He never reached his home in Santa Barbara near the headwaters of the Conchos, but died a few days’ journey from it.

In the following year another small troop took the same passage up the river. This party of thirteen soldiers and various Indian servants was commanded by a merchant of New Spain, Antonio de Espéjo, who was a fugitive from justice under charge of having murdered one of his ranch hands. Its real authority was its spiritual leader, Fray Bernardino Beltrán. Their mission was to bring aid to the two friars who had remained the year before at Puaray, and to look for the astrologer, Fray Juan de Santa María, who had never arrived in Mexico. Coming on December 9, 1582, to the Rio Grande, which they called the Rio del Norte, for the direction of its source, and the Rio Turbio, for its heavy flow of mud, the soldiers were welcomed by people who greeted them with odd, sweet music, which they made with their mouths, and which sounded like the tones of flutes. Along the river Espéjo came upon the memory of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who with his one black and two white companions was still spoken of among the little towns of willow switches, mud and straw above the junta de los rios. The river flowed in silence even in its larger passages. Some of the inhabitants went naked with strings tied upon their prepuces. Other peoples farther north were fully clothed.

The soldiers proceeded up the river in December 1582, passing crosses that still stood since the year before. On occasions Indians whom they met sat at night around a great bonfire and clapped their hands in music, while some rose to dance in pairs, fours or eights. In curiosity and delight the Indians touched the soldiers with their hands, fondling them, and their horses. Gifts were brought to the travellers—food, blankets, hides. Tanned deerskins reminded the soldiers of soft Flemish leather. The Indian weapons were wooden clubs and “Turkish” bows, both fashioned from mesquite. The soldiers made new stocks for their harquebuses of the same wood.

Wherever they stopped the Spaniards erected crosses, and took possession of the lands of the river with properly notarized documents. After turning due north on the river, they met an Indian who told them that one of friars of the year before had been killed (was this the astrologer on his way alone to Mexico?) and that the other two still lived (and were these the two left at Puaray in Tiguex?). Coming into the country of the three-and-four-storey pueblos, they marvelled at their size and permanence after the half-dugout, perishable houses below them in the valley. At Puaray, not far from Coronado’s old headquarters of Alcanfor across the river, they learned the worst. The two missionaries had been slain, presumably for their possessions—the goats, the horses, the little metal hawk’s-bells, the beads, and the red caps, of barter.

Espéjo and Fray Bernardino had completed their mission, but like all of their kind before and after them, turned to explore the lands east and west of the river. Near Pecos, they found that Fray Juan was indeed also dead. He had been murdered before the expedition of the year before had even left the pueblo valley. They went on to the plains and saw the buffalo herds, and they returned to the river, crossing it and marching to the west. They saw Ácoma, and beyond, in the pueblos far from the river, they found that Coronado was remembered, and in one of them, Espéjo came upon an old, small travelling chest and a book that the General had left there. They collected mineral specimens from mines even farther west, and turned back to the river, where since their passage the towns had become rebellious.

Espéjo met his own battles, too, in the upriver pueblos, and with spirit. “The Lord willed this that the whole land should tremble for ten lone Spaniards, for there were over twelve thousand Indians in the province with bows and arrows.…” declared his chronicler, and yet when reports came of Indian peoples waiting to attack the travellers, “… trusting in God we always marched to the place where we were told the largest number of people awaited us.” Espéjo was obliged at one point to burn a town and execute by the garrote sixteen Indians, not to mention those who burned to death. A soldier reflected that “this was a strange deed for so few people in the midst of so many enemies.” He knew too what it was to come before a walled town and find it empty, its people immured in the mountains, full of distrust and fear.

In Indian grottoes or caves the soldiers saw prayer sticks with feathers and bits of cooked meat and concluded that there the Devil came to take his ease and feed himself and speak with the Indians. Once they saw in a cage what looked like a Castilian parrot. They noticed that the women of the river were whiter of skin than the Indian women of Mexico, and that the pueblo people did not stink like Indians met with earlier. They remarked much “game of foot and wing, rabbits, hares, deer, native cows, ducks, geese, cranes, pheasants, and other birds,” and spoke, like connoisseurs, of “good mountains,” and Espéjo euphorically cited “millions of souls” for conversion.

When they turned toward home, the company divided and followed two routes. Fray Bernardino and one group went down the river as all had come. Espéjo and his soldiers returned to Pecos and marched southward along the Rio de la Vacas, which was the Pecos River. Indians whom they met told how this River of Cows joined with another large river flowing eastward which in turn formed a junction with a large river flowing from the north. They knew then that they were once again near the Rio del Norte and its meeting with the Conchos. Turning west they found the river and were given a joyful reception by the people, who performed dances, and fed the soldiers with a feast of green corn, cooked and raw squashes, and cat, and other river fish. The welcome was so friendly that the soldiers put aside arms and armor, going about “almost in shirt sleeves.” On August 21, 1583, they came to the junta de los rios, where people of another town greeted them warmly, and gave the news that Fray Bernardino and his party had already passed safely by there. The river was now too high to ford. The soldiers rested there for three days, and all traded for blankets, buffalo robes, and Indian bows reinforced with rawhide, and received supplies of squash, beans and corn. Those Indians, thought a soldier, were “fine and elegant people who would readily accept the Holy Faith.”

On the twenty-sixth the little troop started homeward up the Conchos into Mexico. They had failed of their first purpose, but once again knowledge of the river and its lands went to the authorities in New Spain, who noted among other details that Espéjo spoke of a kingdom of New Mexico, which in honor of his native soil he preferred to call New Andalusia.

Again the country of the north, New Mexico in particular, emerged in both fact and dream. Coronado’s failure was forgotten, his hope remembered. Explorers were still talking of the vast river (the Mississippi) beyond the plains, adding now that it was salty, and spoke of a great lake with canoes whose prows carried decorations of “brass-colored” metal. The South Sea (the Pacific) was assuredly rich in pearls. New Mexico, as it lay between all these promises, must be worth the labor, the distance, the danger, to colonize as a base of operations. The government in Mexico City was besieged with applications to forward to the Crown, each begging for the honor and opportunity of leading a colony to New Mexico, and serving God and the King at private expense as governor and captain-general, and signed with piety, humble duty and rubric, duly notarized. Strict laws governed the terms by which a colony might be launched forth. Applicants made elaborate cases for themselves. All papers went to Madrid to pass over the worktable of King Philip II to await, sometimes for months, his personal attention. News of his pleasure, coming by sea, subject to the winds, could be hurried or delayed, or lost in disaster. The applicants could only wait.

But seven years after Espéjo with his soldiers marched down the Pecos on his way home, another, and much larger, procession followed it to the north. Acting apparently in good faith under the colonial laws which with certain requirements allowed any governor to settle lands already discovered, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa came to the Rio del Norte near the site of modern Del Rio in September, 1590, with one hundred seventy people, a long supply train, and two brass fieldpieces. The company were the whole population of the mining town of Almadén, now Monclova in Nuevo Leon. Castaño de Sosa was lieutenant governor of his province. At the river he found no settlements. He camped for three weeks in the low sandy hills and heavy greenery of late summer along the banks. On the first of October he started out again, following the south bank until near Eagle Pass he found the ford, crossed over, and went upstream to the Pecos. The canyon of this tributary was too deep to follow from this point to the north. He forded it, marched on to the passes of the Davis mountains, and found the Pecos again in its high plains character, and followed it to the pueblo of Pecos where he halted toward the end of December. His supplies were depleted, the weather was bitter, and it was time to be made welcome, but the people of Pecos were defiant before his resounding overtures of colonial kindliness. Night fell before the negotiations were completed, and when day came again, the colonists saw that the town had been silently abandoned during the dark. Entering in, Castaño de Sosa found rich supplies of corn in the storage cists of the cellular houses. Taking what they needed, the invaders went on their way westward to the Rio Grande del Norte. Once again the river towns submitted to Spanish expeditioners, let them have food, clothing, watched them raise crosses, saw them go exploring east and west of the river. Now and then there was hostility—at a parley before a pueblo, a soldier of Castaño de Sosa’s company spoke out for peace, at which an Indian came forth on his terrace, with throngs of his own people clustered about him on the rooftops, and in a gesture small in size but great in power, threw a pinch of ashes at the soldier. At this, as on a signal, the other Indians raised their voices in imprecation, and the soldier departed.

Near the pueblo later called Santo Domingo the new colony made its capital in camp. Castaño de Sosa, sure of his governorship now, sent couriers with news of his march and achievement to the Viceroy at Mexico City, to claim that what no one had yet done, he had succeeded in doing. In his river capital there were men, women and children, domestic animals, a government, a new land—in fact, a colony. Farms must come, he saw Indians growing cotton and several kinds of beans. In reporting to the Viceroy, he was complying with one of the most important requirements of the laws of colonial administration. Knowing its importance, he had been careful to acquaint the Viceroy of all his plans even before leaving Almadén. His report of later progress could only improve his position with the Viceregal Court. With it he sent requests for reinforcements—more soldiers, more families, more supplies.

Meanwhile, at his river outpost Castaño de Sosa was scrupulous to enforce all regulations protecting native peoples. Many of his followers wanted to use their superior armaments and habitual sense of command to despoil the Indians of property and require labor of them. The leader refused to approve such plans. As a result his life was in danger from his own people. A plot to kill him was exposed. He gave any man or woman freedom to return to Mexico as they liked, but he would remain. The cabal died away. He went to Pecos again for more corn from the stores. He explored his country north on the river, and west, and returned to his capital which was no better fed or clothed or protected against all strangenesses than Coronado’s Alcanfor. There he had news of a Spanish detachment marching up the river and went out rejoicing to meet his reply from the Viceroy—the reinforcements, the honors, he must have.

What he met instead was a warrant of arrest at the hands of an officer, Juan Morlete, who came to take him prisoner and to disband his colony. His report to the Viceroy from the river had been the first word of his adventures, his presumptions, to reach the government. The law was plain. He had entered the north without a royal commission, such as even then many great captains were hoping to receive from the King. They had been waiting for it, and would be waiting for it, for years. Castaño de Sosa’s disgrace was inescapable. Captain Juan Morlete led him down the river. His people were dispersed—Thomas and Christopher, two Mexican Indians, remained at Puaray to live, the rest straggled back to old homes and lost satisfactions. Castaño de Sosa was entered into the infinitely slow mercies of viceregal justice, which was merely a lever touched by the royal hand in Madrid.

The King: to the president and oidores of my royal audiencia which resides in the City of Mexico in New Spain: I have been informed that Gaspar Castaño… entered New Mexico with a company which he collected upon his own authority without order or license to do so. This having come to the attention of yourself, the viceroy, and you learning that those men had committed many disorders and abuses and had taken certain Indians as slaves, you sent in pursuit of them Captain Juan Morlete, who entered New Mexico and took prisoners Captain Gaspar Castaño and his companions. Since it is just that such a bold and dishonorable act should be punished, I command you to… proceed against them judicially.… Dated at Madrid, January 17, 1593. I THE KING.

Castaño was tried, found guilty, and exiled to China.

In the same year, two officers led a small detachment of soldiers on a mission to subdue Indian disorders in northern Mexico. The task accomplished, they were supposed to return south to their home garrison; but across the deserts of northern Mexico was the river, and up the river was what so many had gone for—Coronado, Chamuscado, Espéjo, Castaño—and the two officers proposed to their men that they too, though without orders, enter the north. Some of the men refused. Others agreed, and followed Captain Francisco Leyda de Bonilla and Captain Antonio Gutierrez de Humaña along the Conchos, up the Rio del Norte, and out of living knowledge. Word of their defection was circulated; they were famous deserters, lawbreakers. Their capture or voluntary return was awaited with all propriety. They would not be forgotten by the courts.

The courts, in fact, also remembered Castaño de Sosa and his case. Before a final decision was made in respect to applications before the King for the governorship of New Mexico, the case of Castaño was revived. Reconsideration of all its aspects led to a reversal of the earlier verdict. He was exonerated and ordered home from exile to become the first royally authorized governor of New Mexico. His recall went to China, where it arrived too late. He had been killed shortly before while dealing with a shipboard mutiny.

So through many weighings, intrigues, hesitations and refinements of policy, the question of the colony for New Mexico aged with the last decade of the sixteenth century; until the decision was finally made, the captain-general named once and for all, the expedition authorized, and the northward toil undertaken over a new route to the river in 1598.