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25.

The Desert Fathers

An early Franciscan on the river said that its human life seemed to show on a map the shape of a cross. The upright stem, north and south, was the river itself along which clustered the great house-towns, and the arms reached east and west to settlements of other Indian people. It was an approximate image, but it expressed the dedication of the friars to their inner and immaterial motive. Their spirit and their flesh were one in purpose. They came to take nothing and they brought with them nothing that could be measured. Like the founder of their order, Saint Francis of Assisi, they could have said that they “had been called to the way of simplicity,” and that they always “wished to follow the ‘foolishness of the cross,’ “by which they meant the innocence that made worldly men smile. Certainly it was the act of a fool, in terms of shrewd mankind, to go into barbarian wilderness at times alone and unprotected to preach the love of Christ. The Castilian Saint John of the Cross said, “Where there is no love, bring love and you will find love.” The martyrs of Puaray, and Fray Juan de Padilla in Quivira, had made their ultimate demonstration. “They killed him,” said another Franciscan of Fray Agustín Ruíz, “and threw his body into the Rio del Norte, which flows along the edge of this pueblo.” And at Taos, when Fray Pedro de Ortega came to offer his faith to the Indians, he was refused a place to live, and to eat was given tortillas made of corn meal and the ground-up flesh of field mice, mixed with urine. These he ate with words of relish, remarking that for “a good appetite there is no bad bread.” The Indians marvelled. “They go about poor and barefoot as we do,” said Indians elsewhere, “they eat what we eat, sit down among us, and speak to us gently.”

In one respect the Indians and the friars were close together from the beginning. Both had profoundly religious character, and saw life’s essentials best explained through the supernatural. But as the friars believed that their faith enclosed all faiths and purified them in the fire of divine love, until God’s relation to man shone forth in the image of Christ Who was the Son of Man, so did they think to bring love to replace the fear that animated all objects, creatures and forces in the Indian’s pagan world. The gift they sought to give the Indian was the sense of his individual human soul, and the need, and the means, of its salvation.

But if the friar in himself was poor and managed with very little, his work in the aggregate required extensive organization. The friar’s immaterial mission was enclosed in a system that rested on a rigid hierarchy and showed itself in massive monuments. At the pueblo of El Agua de Santo Domingo, that stood on the banks of Galisteo Creek a short way east of the river, the Franciscan order established the religious headquarters of the whole kingdom of New Mexico. There resided the Father President, and there he held his yearly chapters when all his friars would come in from their lonely posts in the outlying missions. Santo Domingo was a little Rome, the seat of an authority that bowed to no secular power in matters of the spiritual welfare of men and women. In the mountains to the northeast was the new political capital of the colony at Santa Fe, founded in 1610, after Oñate’s recall. Between the river pueblo and the mountain capital much was in dispute throughout the seventeenth century and would be composed only in slowly gathering tragedy.

Meanwhile the work of the religious reached into the river towns to the north and south; into the pueblos of the west, and to the saline towns over the eastern mountains. Nominally, even the Apache nations who roamed the plains and alternately traded with and attacked the settled pueblo people were part of a missionary parish. The Apaches, wrote a Father President in his report, “are very spirited and belligerent… a people of a clearer and more subtle understanding, and as such laugh at other nations that worship idols of wood and stone. The Apaches worship only the sun and the moon.… They pride themselves on never lying but always speaking the truth.” It was an optimistic vision of mass murderers of whole towns. To such peoples went “missions of penetration,” consisting of a travelling friar who preached, converted where he could, and if he lived, returned to Santo Domingo, or to the settled “mission of occupation” to which he was assigned; for many of the outlying missions in Indian towns were organized as field headquarters from which faith and civilization were carried to other towns that had no permanent pastor. Such other towns were designated visitas,

Fifty churches were built in New Mexico by twenty-six friars in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. First came the word of God and the conversion of the Indians; and then, with no other power but example and patience, the solitary Franciscan father led his parishioners in building a church. In choosing the site for his church he considered many things. He looked into the hearts of the Indians and seeing all that mankind was capable of in good and evil, he felt that a church surrounded by the town was subject to being overwhelmed from within. He looked at the country beyond the town and he saw that the strongest fortress should stand first in the way of invaders. Considering ceremony, he saw how a church must have approaches for processions, and remembering functions, he knew it must be close to community life. Accordingly, at the edge of the pueblo he marked out a site for the church where it could stand by itself, yet be tied to the walls of the town.

He had large papers scratched with drawings. The people looked from these to his face and then to the straggled marks on the baked ground. He was all things: architect, engineer, carpenter, mason, foreman, building master to apprentices who themselves were masters of a building style. He did not scorn their methods or their designs. He saw their perfect economy of material and purpose in what they built. Remembering vast vaults of stone, the flutings of arches and echoing heights, sombre color in glass and every intricacy of grille and recess and carved screen, he saw that reduced to essentials, even the great churches of Europe and Mexico had a plain strong purpose, which was to enclose the attention of men and women in safety and direct it toward the altar. Here were wanted walls and roof as soon as possible. They must be made of materials already used and understood by the people, and to them must be added new methods understood by the friar. He had with him, assigned by the Father President at Domingo, and paid for by the King of Spain, ten axes, three adzes, three spades, ten hoes, one medium-sized saw, one chisel, two augers, and one plane; six thousand nails of various sizes, a dozen metal hinges, two small locks, several small latches, and one large latch for the main church door. With him, too, he brought the principle of the lever, the windlass and the block and fall. Out of his belief and his technique, combined with native materials and the Indian’s reproduction of earth forms in building, a new style was ready to come, massive, stark, angular, and powerfully expressive of its function.

Until they worked under Spaniards, the Indians built their walls of puddled clay and rock. Now the first lesson of the friar was to teach the making of adobes—earthen bricks. Clay was disintegrated rock. The adobe was a restoration of clay to coherent form—a sort of return to rock. With their new hoes, people went to work mixing water and earth in an excavated tray. Only Indian women did this work, for as theirs was the ancient task of enclosing life so they had always made the dwelling rooms of the family. Men, as craftsmen of arms and tools, learned carpentry, and made wooden molds after the friar’s instructions. Into the wet clay, straw was mixed as a binder, and the clay was then pressed into the molds to take the shape of large bricks. A brick weighed sixty pounds, and measured ten by eighteen by five inches. It was about all the load a man or woman could carry over and over, as the rows of drying bricks grew longer.

Sometimes foundations were dug and filled with loose stone footings, sometimes the walls rose directly from unopened ground. The walls were deep—six to nine feet thick, and one side wall was several feet thicker than the other. The people wondered why this was as the width was marked out on the ground, and as the walls rose they discovered why, but meanwhile the dried bricks were brought by a long line of workers, and laid in place. The entire pueblo worked on the church. While women mixed earth, and men molded bricks, other men and boys went to the mountains to bring back timbers. With rock and chisel they shaped these. The friar drew patterns for them to follow and out of the wood came beams, corbels, door panels, doorframes, window embrasures. If someone knew where deposits of selenite or mica were to be found, men were sent to bring in a supply so that thin layers of the translucent mineral could be worked into windowpanes. The days were full and the walls rose slowly but all could see progress, and it made them one in spirit. The church was from twenty to forty feet wide, and sixty to a hundred feet long. Its ceiling was to occur at about thirty feet. On one of its long flanks, against the thicker of the two walls, were laid out living quarters for the friar and his Indian staff in a row of little square rooms with low roofs. These formed one side of a patio, the other sides of which held more rooms or a covered cloister. In certain towns the walls of the convent quadrangle took in a round sunken kiva previously used by the Indians. Rooms in the patio were planned for teaching classes, for cooking, dining, and storage of grain and other supplies.

Nowhere in the church or its convento was there a curved wall line, or arch, or dome.^* As the walls rose to their limit, the purpose of the wider wall became plain. Down on the ground the great tree beams were about to be hoisted up to span the church. Their weight needed a heavy support, and the dozens of men on top of the wall working to bring them up needed room to stand. The wide wall made a fulcrum for the great levers of the beams, and served as a broad platform on which men could work. Scaffolding was little used. Indians had ladders by which to enter their houses and kivas from the roof, and these were put to work too in acts of building. As the church walls achieved their height, carved wooden corbels were laid into the bricks to support crossbeams. Oxen dragged one timber at a time to the base of the walls and men hauled it upright, tipping it against the massive fulcrum at the top, and laying it across the nave. Such beams, or vigas, were of unequal length. Their ends projected beyond the walls and were often left so. Now between the beams were placed branches of uniform size to close the ceiling, and above these rose the parapet of the walls high enough to hide a man. Crenellations were let into the parapet for sighting with musketry or arrows. Over the whole roof went load after load of loose earth, which was packed down by feet, and hardened by water and sun.

The river churches followed two designs. One was that of a long narrow straight box; the other that of a cross, with shallow transepts. Where transepts occurred, the builders lifted a higher roof over them and the sanctuary in a gesture of grace; for where this higher portion rose above the long nave, they placed a clerestory window reaching the width of the nave that took in the light of the sky and let it fall upon the altar, while the rest of the interior remained in shadow. The only other occasional windows were two or three small, high openings in the thinner of the long side walls.

Entering by the main door anyone had his attention taken to the altar by many cunningly planned devices of which the first was the pour of wide and lovely light from the clerestory whose source was hidden by the ceiling of the shadowy nave. The builders used the science of optical illusion in false perspectives to make the nave seem longer, the approach to heaven and altar more august and protracted. The apse, tall and narrow, tapered toward the rear wall like the head of a coffin. Where there were transepts, the body of man was prefigured ail-evidently—the head lying in the sanctuary, the arms laid into the transepts, and all the length of the nave the narrow-ribbed barrel and the thin hips and the long legs inert in mortal sacrifice. Many churches added one further symbol and illusion: the rear wall of the sanctuary was built upon another axis than that of the nave. It suggested two things—the fall of Christ’s head to one side as He hung on the cross; the other, a farther dimension to the house that honored Him. All such variation of symmetry, and modulation of perspective, combined with inexact workmanship and humble materials, resulted in an effect of spontaneity and directness, like that in a drawing made by a child to fulfill a great wish. The wish, the emotion, transcended the means, and stood embodied forth in grave impersonal intimacy.

^* Excepting an arched doorway at Pecos.

Over the adobe texture was placed by the women a plaster of mud. They applied it with the palms of their hands and sometimes smoothed it with a patch of sheepskin bearing fleece. The outer walls in time bore the same marks of the weather as the ancient natural forms of earth all about—little watercourses that ran making wrinkles which when dry came to resemble the marks of life in an old sun-browned face. And yet with even such sensitive response to the elements, an unattended adobe building weathered down only one inch in twenty years. In any proper town the walls were replastered after every rainy reason. The walls were renewed so long as human life used them. Some stood for centuries after being abandoned, and still stand in part, above talus of their own yielding as they go ever so slowly back to the earth.

The interior walls received a coat of whitewash and on this in pure colors the people painted designs, as though they were decorating great unrolled surfaces of clay pots. Scrolls, parrots, columns; flowers and cornstalks; symbols of sun, rain, lightning, thunder and the oblique slan tings of terraced forms that took an impression of the landscape receding from the river. Many of the frescoes had not only an Indian but also a strangely Byzantine air, as though a new hybrid culture must turn back to relive all the stages of its various influences.

Finally, before the front of the church a walled enclosure was completed where the blessed dead could lie, and where, against the façade an outdoor altar could be set in a sort of atrium to accommodate large crowds on feast days and Sundays.

From a little distance then the finished building gave its purpose with hard grandeur in its loom and weight, its grace of plain angular shadow, and the wide sunlight on its unbroken faces, where the shadows of the vigas bladed down the walls making a sundial that told not hours but centuries. The whole mission with church, convento, cloister and walled burial field seemed like a shoulder of earth emerging out of the blind ground as a work of living sculpture. To see the true beauty of those structures it was necessary first of all to love and to believe in their purpose.

With the establishment of the “missions of occupation” came the need of a train to bring supplies from Mexico every three years. An invoice of 1620 showed aside from common tools and builders’ supplies a variety of foodstuffs, clothing, and articles of religious use. The Father President at Domingo received for distribution many boxes of salt pork, cheese, shrimps, haddock, dogfish; lima beans, lentils, frijoles; rosemary and lavender; white sugar, salt, pepper, saffron and cinnamon; preserved peaches and quinces and sweetmeats; noodles, Condado almonds, Campeche honey, Castile rice, cloves, ginger and nutmeg; and wine, olive oil and Castile vinegar. On his lists he checked frying pans, brass mixing mortars, tin wine vessels with pewter dishes, and leather wine bags. To clothe his friars he noted Córdoban shoes, Mexican sandals, leggings, kidskin hats with cords, sackcloth and Rouen linen in bolts, and to work these materials, papers of pins, sixteen hundred needles, twenty-four pounds of thread and fifty-two pairs of scissors. To take the missioners on their visits he issued travelling bags for bedding, and leather saddlebags and saddles and heavy Michoacan cloth of tents, and tin boxes in which to carry the Host. For the infirmaries he checked one hundred and seven Mexican blankets.

To furnish the altars he distributed frontals of Chinese damask, with borders of brocatel and fringes of silk, and lined with Anjou linen; figures of Christ on crosses four and a half feet high; pairs of brass candlesticks and snuffing scissors; an octagonal wooden tabernacle over six feet tall lined with gold leaf and its panels painted in oil with sacred likenesses; several large paintings framed in gold; a pall of red damask edged with brocade; vessels of tin, silver and copper for water and wine; and handbells for the consecration. He bestowed silver chalices lined with gold plating, and gold patens, and bound missals “recently revised,” and tin chrismatories, and processional candelabra of gilt wood, and choir books, and a brass lamp. For sanctuary floors he sent Turkish carpets. The Father President assigned vestments to the missions-chasubles, stoles, maniples, dalmatics and copes, of various materials: velvets from Granada and Valencia, brocades from Toledo, enriched with designs by the embroiderers whose craft came long before from the Netherlands; “small shirts of Chinese goods to be used as surplices” by altar boys; and for the friars albs and surplices of Rouen linen and lace. He gave them rosaries and breviaries and little iron molds in which to bake the wafers of the Host. For the towers he sent bronze bells, and for High Mass sets of musical instruments—flageolets, bassoons and trumpets; and incense, and wax, and four quires of paper, and oddments like a gross of little bells, and macaw feathers, and twelve bundles of glass beads, and ecclesiastical certificates on which to record the large stages of life, and twelve plowshares with steel edges to help all become self-sustaining on their riverside fields. The Father President’s catalog was a history in itself.

And when the mission was built and furnished it was both fortress and sanctuary. When outside its blind heavy walls a wind rose, there within were peace and security, where the many candle flames never wavered as they shone on flowers of colored paper. “It all looked very holy,” remarked a friar of such a church in 1634. And yet, if he knew Spain, and its sacred treasures, he perhaps looked upon his mud walls and his rough-chiselled timbers and bitterly told himself that here he had contrived no beauty or splendor, remembering such an altar vessel as the monstrance of Toledo that took nine years to fashion out of three hundred and thirty pounds of silver, until it was eight and a half feet high, with two hundred and sixty small statues amongst jewelled pillars, so that in its exposition the Blessed Sacrament appeared to hover in midair surrounded by a shining cloud. He could only say to himself that there was work to be done as well as possible with the materials at hand. Ending his day only to dedicate the morrow, he recited the prayer written by his founder Saint Francis that said “… grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

And when the morrow came, there were many tasks to guide. The convento and the church were staffed by Indians—a bell ringer, a cook, two or three sacristans, a porter, two boys who kept order in the friars’ cells, some women to grind corn, an old man who scratched at the beginnings of a garden within the clay walls of the patio. Without seeing themselves so, the Franciscan priests of the early river were great artists of community life. If they desired to bestow and maintain the standards of civilization in their wilderness, they had first to show the Indians the whole image of the cultivated life that came from Europe. Many of the friars were extraordinarily versatile, and most of them were wholly without that pride of learning which in the universities and coteries of the day often allowed both the scholar and his knowledge to die unused by life. The friars put their learning to work.

Lessons were organized and conducted with discipline. At dawn every day but Sunday the bellman went to ring the church bell for Prime. The pupils, young and old, came to the classrooms which they at once swept out. They then took their places and the pastor came to teach.

He was quick at languages, and for immediate understanding of the Indians, learned the native tongues rapidly, and taught the Christian story in the people’s own words. The earliest book to be printed in the New World appeared in Mexico in 1539 under the imprimatur of Zumárraga, the first Bishop of Mexico. It was a catechism in Spanish and Náhuatl. Some of the friars came to the river after preaching for years in Mexico in the native dialects. Once having reached the understanding of the Indian, they developed it with classes in many subjects. They first taught Latin, so that the responses at Mass and vespers could properly be made. Eventually they taught Spanish so that daily life might link the wilderness people to the all-powerful source of national life in Madrid. The Indians learned to speak and to write in those new ways, through which such amazing information came to them. The past found a way to exist in the Indian mind.

Along with words, the Indians learned music. Boys were formed into choirs and trained in the sacred chants of the Church. In one pueblo, out of a thousand people who went to school the pastor chose and trained a “marvelous choir of wonderful boy musicians.” In another, the singing boys “with their organ chants… enhanced the divine service with great solemnity.” Winter and summer, in the river dawns and twilights the heavenly traceries of the polyphonic style rose to the blunt clay ceilings of the coffinlike churches; and the majestic plainness of antiphonal chants echoed from sanctuary to nave as the people together stolidly voiced the devotions composed by Fray Geronimo Ciruelo and shipped north to the river in 1626. A little organ with gilt pipes went to Santa Fe in 1610, and a few decades later eighteen of the kingdom’s churches had organs. The friars taught how to play them, and how to make and play stringed musical instruments, and flutes, and bassoons, and trumpets, after the models shipped in from abroad. On great feast days, the level Indian voices were enriched by ardent stridencies from pierced cane, hollowed gourd, and shaped copper. A tradition lasting centuries had an imitation of nature at work in the worship of the Mass. From the choir loft over the main door of the church came first softly then mounting in sweet wildness the sounds of a multitude of little birds calling and trilling in controlled high spirits. On the gallery floor a dozen little boys lay before pottery bowls half-filled with water. Each boy had a short reed pierced at intervals which he fingered. He blew through one end while the other rested in the water, from which rose the liquid notes of songbirds adoring God. At the elevation of the Host or other moments of high solemnity it was proper on great feast days to fire a salute of musketry amid the rolling of the bells.

The Franciscan school taught painting. Indians learned not so much how to hold a brush or use color—they knew that—as how to see, look, formalize a representation. A whole new notion of what the world looked like came to the Indians; yet without greatly affecting their decorative styles, for they continued to draw more the spirit, the idea of a subject, than its common likeness.

Joy and laughter were praised by Saint Francis, and there was no reason why the river fathers should not by these means as well as any other reach into the minds and hearts of their taciturn children. The Spanish delight in theatre, scarcely a hundred years old, was already a deeply rooted taste; and the friars, like the lay colonists, gave plays on suitable occasions. In the pueblos, the comedies were meant to instruct as well as entertain. Ancient Nativity stories were acted out by well-rehearsed Indians, who took the parts not only of the Holy Family and their ecstatic attendants but also represented a little party of Indians in their own character. When in the play it was asked who were these strangers come to attend the birth of the Infant Savior, the answer said that they too were men for whom the Son of God was born on earth that He might save them. A dignifying love reached out to the Indians in the audience. Sometimes the plays were hilarious, and all could laugh at the embarrassments and defeats cleverly visited upon Satan, whose exasperation would know no bounds. Any play telling the story of people brought a sense of community and self-discovery.

The Franciscan teaching turned everywhere, lifted up the soil, planted new seeds, and put the soil back. Among the first new crops was one directly related to the Mass. Cuttings of fine grapevines were brought across the sea from Spain and sent up the long trail from Mexico—a light red grape and a purple one, from which the fathers made sacramental white and red wines. New fruits were set out in orchards-peaches, apples, pears, plums, cherries, quinces, figs, dates, pomegranates, olives, apricots, almonds, pecans, walnuts. Later when the missions rose by the river at the gateway to Mexico, lemons and nectarines were planted to thrive in the mild winters, and oranges, which had first been planted in the New World by Bernal Díaz del Castillo landing with Cortés. Together with the fields of newly introduced vegetables, the orchards were irrigated from the river with improved methods long known to the friars from their Mediterranean culture. With the foundation of horses, cows and sheep brought by the colony, the friars taught the Indians how to herd and how to breed the animals for improvement of the stock. There were workable resources in the kingdom observed by the well-educated priests, who said that with patience and labor much could be done with the ores in the mountains. The treasure hunters had come and gone, unwilling to work for what they wanted. New Mexico was officially reported as a poor country. But a Father President of the Franciscan province in 1629 disagreed: “As for saying that it is poor, I answer that there nowhere in the world has been discovered a country richer in mineral deposits.” He listed the very localities of the river kingdom where he had seen deposits, and went on scornfully to say that all such news meant nothing to the Spaniards in Mexico, who if they had merely a good crop of tobacco to smoke were content. It seemed odd to him that they should be so indifferent, when Spaniards “out of greed for silver and gold would enter Hell itself to get them.”

But the chance and toil of the freight trains to and from Mexico could not be lightly ignored. The regular service to supply the missions was established in 1617. Trains left for the north every three years, and took the better part of a year to complete the journey. Escorted by a handful of hard soldiers and driven by Mexican Indians about thirty cottonwood carts drawn by oxen came over the gritty trail in movements as slow as the high turns of astronomy by which like ships at sea they made their course. They passed among enemies and at the Northern Pass came to the Rio del Norte, whose source, they said, was at the North Pole. This was easy to believe, in the absence of maps visualizing the unknown country above New Mexico, for the river had an arctic character, “during the months of November, December, January and February… frozen over so solid that iron-bound wagons, heavily laden,” crossed on the ice, and “vast herds of cattle” went over it at full gallop. “To the same extreme,” they noted, “this land suffers from the heat during the months of June, July and August, for even in the shade of the houses tallow candles and salt pork melt.”

The freighters saw the Manso Indians about the river at the Pass, who ate their fish and meat raw and bloody, not even cleaning the entrails, but devoured it all “like animals.” With mineral powders of different colors rubbed on their nakedness they looked fierce, despite their “good features.” As the years passed, and the trains came and went in their crawling regularity, these people about the ford at the Pass came to know the Franciscans and in them grew the desire to be Christians. In time they were taken farther north on the river, near to the Piro pueblos which were the first of the river towns reached by northbound travellers, from Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to the supply trailers of the seventeenth century; and there they found their mission. It was the policy of the religious province wherever possible to bring together compatible Indian peoples, the better to instruct large numbers, and to insure common defense. Pueblos grew. Ways were traded. New dimensions of human life reached out from the river. Tucked away in the lumbering carts were richly printed little gazettes and random news sheets from the printing shops in Mexico. So came news of the great world, the gossip of government and religion and solemn bulletins in science and philosophy, to the remote fastnesses of spirit and education in the river kingdom of the north.

Knowledge, a full mind, made a companion in the empty wilds when the friars went forth from their clay citadels to preach among the Indians far east or west of the river. They might be accompanied by a dozen soldiers “more,” as a Father President said, “for the pious sentiment of not abandoning such a sacred enterprise than for protection or defense, which would have been very limited considering the large number of people they were to meet, all as skilful at arms as they were tenacious in their wars.” The friars, he said, “know much hardship in crossing the river each time their ministering demands it, since the river is very swift and subject to bad floods.” But all was endurable in the natural world for the sake of that which came to pass in the spirits of those whom they sought in simplicity and love. An Indian cacique came to a father missioner bringing him a marvelously tanned buffalo hide. Unfolding it, the friar saw a painting that showed a green sun and a gray moon, and above them each a cross.

“What does this painting mean?” he asked, and the cacique replied,

“Father, until now we have not known other benefactors greater than the sun and the moon. They light us and warm us, and make our plants produce and the flowers germinate. Thus because of so many benefits we have worshipped them as the arbiters of our lives. But since we heard you tell us who God is who created the sun and the moon, in order that you may know that we now worship only God, I had these crosses, which are the emblem of God, painted above the sun and the moon.”

And there were other simple evidences of the new reach of spirit and understanding. If once the Indians were creatures of blind destiny denied by fear the state of the responsible individual, they now had an instrument of self-knowledge and mercy and they used it serious as children. “When they come to confession,” wrote a pastor, “they bring their sins, well studied, on a knotted string, indicating the sins by the knots.…”

Again, encouragement of their efforts seemed to come in “a very special manner” to the laboring friars in 1629. Its awesome source was in itself enough to overwhelm them with a renewal of the humility that was their spiritual food. One day in the church at the ancient pueblo of San Felipe on the west shore of the river below a dark mesa, Father Fray Cristóbal Quirós was busy baptizing a large group of Indians. He was an old man, though his tonsure was not gray, and his long face had a ruddy complexion. The stone baptismal font stood at the rear of the nave to the right of the main door. Many Indians crowded into the door but hung back in diffidence from taking their proper places. The throng grew. The old priest would have them come forward to help him expedite the ceremonies. They hardly moved until suddenly there was a surge in the crowd and each row turned around to see who pushed. Even the people in the last row turned around, for they had felt the push harder than anybody. When all saw that no one was behind the rearmost people, who yet were thrust forward by an invisible force, they laughed out loud, and continued to push those ahead of them until all were in their places and old Fray Cristóbal was satisfied. Though mysterious and amusing, the incident by itself would not have seemed significant. But other interesting events followed.

On July 22, 1629, at the pueblo mission of Isleta fifty Humanos Indians appeared on what had been for several summers an annual excursion. They invariably brought the same request. Would not the fathers come to their country east of the river over the waste of plains, and convert them to the Christian faith? Summer after summer the request was received with a stir of interest. It was odd that those people should come from so far away, already aware of Christianity. Yet each year the fathers had to deny them what they asked for, because so much work for so few priests was already called for in the river kingdom. The Humanos presently would go away unsatisfied. It was sad for all. They were so persistent. They were so ignorant and so hopeful.

A few days later in July, 1629, the first supply train in four years drew into view through the glassy curtain of the river heat, and with it arrived thirty friars. They brought letters and news from Spain, and fresh supplies of food, and holy oil for the tin chrismatories, and many other supplies, and reinforcement in their persons for the field forces of the missions. And they brought an interesting assignment from Don Francisco Manzo y Zúñiga, the new archbishop of Mexico. It was a professional matter, and the newly arrived religious settled down with their hosts to discuss it fully.

It seemed that for the past several years, there was much talk in Spain of how the Reverend Mother Superior of the Discalced Nuns of the order of Saint Francis at Agreda, on the borders of Castile and Aragón, had been miraculously transported over and over again from Spain to New Mexico to preach the Catholic doctrine to the savage Indians. Her name was Mother María de Jesús, though in the gossip that aroused such interest everywhere she was more commonly mentioned as María de Agreda. Her whole family were widely known for their unusual piety. On a single day in 1619, she and her mother entered a convent, and her father and two brothers took their first vows as Franciscan friars. She became abbess of her convent in Agreda at the age of twenty-five. Her leadership was exemplary, and under her rule the convent became fervent and prosperous. People said she was planning to write an extraordinary book, to be called “The Mystical City of God, A Divine History of the Virgin Mother of Christ.” In it she was to give detailed accounts of her puzzling visits to other kingdoms, including Spain’s farthest colony on the Rio del Norte. How could it be? She never left Agreda, yet was able at the same time to be in a far corner of the earth. The Bishop of Viseo in Spain heard of her aetherial journeys. Learned theologians spoke of “bilocation,” a miraculous faculty with subtle distinctions as to whether it was the physical body that was transported, or the spiritual essence, which then projected the image of its body’s likeness. María de Agreda spoke of being transported to the Orient, and to New Mexico, which she visited as often as four times in one day. She gave descriptions of her visits—how she spoke to the Indians in their own tongue, though at home in Spain she could not speak a word of theirs; how she was lifted and taken by angels; how the people needed instruction and of what kinds of country and customs would be found by the missioners when at last they went among them. The whole affair was fascinating, even though as usual in newly reported supernatural matters the Church preserved an official skepticism pending further investigation. News of the marvellous mother superior came to Mexico, and the Archbishop now wished to know whether in the country of the Rio del Norte there had been any evidence of her visits, or “flights,” as they were spoken of.

The pueblo friars looked at one another and racked their brains. To men of their fervid belief, whose very canon of faith proclaimed the possibility of the miraculous, it was an exalting thought that they and their works may have been visited by Divine Favor through the occasional presence of the zealous nun. And yet nobody could recall out of the dangers and labors of every day a bit of evidence that she had indeed been with them. If only they might see her, speak with her, ask her what of the river kingdom she had observed, to test her knowledge! The matter must be deeply looked into. What had the Archbishop written? The Father President Alonso de Benavides had the paper in his own hands: “… do hereby urgently recommend this inquiry to the reverend custodian and fathers” of New Mexico “in order that they may carry it out with the solicitude, faith and devotion as the case demands, and that they duly inform us concerning its results, so that they may be verified in legal form.” The whole thing deeply stirred the religious New Mexicans. They had never before heard of Mother María de Jesús, or suspected the existence of her influence.

But a thought struck them. What of the pathetic trudging visits, summer after summer, of the Humanos people from far over the plains? Why had they come back faithfully after so many discouragements? Was it possible—who could dare hope so—was it even likely that they had been inspired by someone from far away? The fifty Humanos petitioners were still lingering in the pueblo of Isleta before setting out in disappointment once again for their homeland. The pastor of Isleta, Fray Estevan de Perea, sent for a group of their spokesmen. They came where he and the other friars now sat in the common room of the convento.

Why, asked the pastor, had the Humanos come year after year to ask with such insistency for baptism?

The Indians pointed to a painting that hung on the wall of the refectory. It was a portrait of a famous old nun, Mother Luísa de Carrión, in the full habiliments of her order.

“A woman in similar garb,” they said, “wanders among us over there, always preaching, but her face is not old like this, but young.”

The inquirers leaned forward with quickened interest. But why, demanded the pastor, had the Humanos never mentioned this before?, and they replied,

“Because you did not ask us, and anyway, we thought she was around here, as well.”

It was astounding. It demanded action. The religious community immediately decided to send two friars from the river province to the Humanos kingdom. Without delay, Fray Juan de Salas and Fray Diego López set out with the Humanos for the east. In a week or two they were back to call for more workers, “as the harvest was great.” They told how crossing the plains of the Apache buffalo country they travelled one hundred leagues by the time they came among the Humanos nation. There the people came forward in procession to meet the friars, calling aloud for baptism. They carried a large cross garlanded with wild flowers. Mothers with babies at their breasts held the infants aloft and begged that they be baptized too. The friars were enchanted. Where had the people gained knowledge of the cross? The Indians replied that the same young woman in nun’s robes had told them how they must go in procession to meet the friars, and herself had helped to decorate the cross with its garlands. For several days the friars prayed with the people about the cross which they set in the ground. There was more to hear about the visitation. To the Indians she was flesh and blood like another woman. They all saw her, though this joy was denied to the friars. The Indians told how she taught them in their own language, and reproved them for laziness that they did not go more often to seek the priests of the Rio del Norte. The friars were moved. What was known of this matter in Spain now began to be supported by what was becoming known of it in this last wilderness of the New World. One day while Fray Juan and Fray Diego were with the Humanos, messengers from two other Indian nations to the east arrived asking for baptism. A white woman, young, pretty, in gray, black and white robes, with a blue cloak, had been among them preaching and urging them to seek the desert fathers. It was bewildering. The Franciscans made ready to return to the river to ask for more help in the great task. The Humanos chief begged that before they went they would bless the sick. Two hundred invalids were brought to the cross, and the friars told the other missioners at Isleta on the river how they had immediately arisen, “well and healed.”

There was much to report to the Archbishop of Mexico. Fray Alonso de Benavides, the Father President of the river province, resolved to go to Mexico, and—there was much other administrative business to justify the decision as well—even to Spain, where he hoped to obtain permission to pay a call upon Mother María de Jesús himself. To his brothers on the river he would report the outcome as soon as possible. He left New Mexico in the summer of 1629, in time to make the spring sailings from Veracruz in 1630.

It took nearly two years for his report to come back to the river. Affairs of the church and the government moved slowly across time and distance. But at last it came. Fray Alonso submitted his findings in detail, in a letter written at Madrid on May 15, 1631.

“Most dear and beloved father custodian and other friars of our father, Saint Francis, of the holy custodia of the Conversion of Saint Paul in the kingdoms and provinces of New Mexico,” he wrote, “I give infinite thanks to the divine majesty for having placed me, unworthy as I am, among the number enjoying the happy good fortune of your paternities, since you are so deserving of heavenly favor that the angels and our father, Saint Francis, aid you. They personally, truly, and actually carry the blessed and blissful Mother María de Jesús, discalced Franciscan of the order of Concepción, from the town of Agreda, which is in the limits of Castile, to help us with her presence and preaching in all these provinces and barbarous nations.”

Having first stated his tremendous conclusion he went on to the absorbing details. He arrived in Spain on August 1, 1630, and in due course was received by the Bishop of Viseo, who at the moment was governing the Franciscan order. They exchanged their knowledge of Mother María de Jesús. The Bishop had been familiar for years with the matter, had been to see her, and only looked for confirmation of her claims. Fray Alonso told him of what had occurred in New Mexico, which seemed to supply it. The Bishop authorized him to go to Agreda, there “to constrain the blessed nun through obedience to reveal… all that she knew about New Mexico.” He kissed the bishop’s ring and by the last day of April, 1631, was in Agreda, where the Mother Superior was waiting.

She could not, he thought, be as old as twenty-nine. Her face was beautiful, white except for a faint rosy tinge. She had large black eyes under heavy, high-arched eyebrows. Her costume consisted of coarse gray sackcloth worn next to the skin, and over that a habit of coarse white sackcloth with a scapulary of the same stuff. She wore the white cloth tucked up so that much of the gray showed. Around her neck was a heavy rosary. At the waist she wore the Franciscan cord. Her face was framed in a winding of white cloth over which she wore a black veil. To her feet were tied hemp sandals. Her cloak was of heavy blue sackcloth. If her eyes were darkly calm, her mouth had a little smile of sweetness and humor. She talked freely.

She said that all her life she had suffered for those who did not know God, especially the heathen peoples whose ignorance was not their own fault. She had had made known to her in revelations all those lands which did not know God. To them she had been repeatedly transported by her guardian angels, whom she identified as Saint Michael and Saint Francis of Assisi. As for New Mexico, she had been expressly called for by the custodian angels of that kingdom, who had come to get her by divine command. She went there the first time in 1620, and continued to go ever since. On some days she went three or four times in less than twenty-four hours.

So much for the general claims. As to particulars, she said that when Fray Alonso himself had gone to baptize the Piro pueblos, she had been there. She recognized him now.

On another occasion somewhat similar, she said, when a father was baptizing Indians in a pueblo church, the people all crowded about the door. With her own hands she pushed them on. They looked to see who was pushing “and they laughed when they were unable to see who did it.” She described the officiating pastor—an old man but without gray hair, who had a long face and a ruddy complexion. It was a clear description of Father Cristóbal Quirós, who was known to all the province.

She told in detail about how Fray Juan de Salas and Fray Diego López went from the river to the Humanos nation, and said that it was she who had sent the Indians to fetch them. She described the two priests, and declared that she helped them herself in their work. When the messengers came to them from the other tribes farther out on the plains, it was because she had sent them. Her descriptions of the country were so accurate and detailed that they recalled to Fray Alonso much that he had seen and forgotten.

Fray Alonso asked her “why she did not allow us to see her when she granted this bliss to the Indians?” and she “replied that they needed it and we did not, and that her blessed angels arranged everything.”

He then asked her “most earnestly” if she would not make herself plain to the friars still in New Mexico, and “she promised that she would ask God, and that if He granted it, would do it most willingly.” Fray Alonso wrote that he trusted that “by the time this letter reaches the hands of your paternities some of you will have succeeded in seeing her.” They could not say that they had.

She went on to tell of other savage kingdoms which she had visited, and of dangers, conversions, and martyrdoms. She herself, in her other person, had been martyred “and received many wounds, and her heavenly angels crowned her.…”

When the interview was over, Fray Alonso showed her what he had written down of their exchange, and asking her whether it was the truth he “invoked the obedience from our most reverend father general that I carried for this purpose.” Her confessor was also present and he called down upon her the same powerful sanction. In her own hand she addressed to the friars of the New Mexican river a confirmation of all that Fray Alonso had put down in his notebooks. “… I saw and did all that I have told the father,” she wrote, and in a final summation of his view, the priest declared, “She convinced me absolutely by describing to me all the things in New Mexico as I have seen them myself, as well as by other details which I shall keep within my soul. Consequently, I have no doubts in this matter whatsoever.”

In her written statement to the friars, Mother María de Jesús spoke gently of the nature of the Indians, and of the measures to be taken for their salvation. It grieved her to see them “continue in darkness and blindness and… deprived of the… immaculate, tender and delightful law.” The friars must work tirelessly, and in their work must be aided and protected by “soldiers of good repute and habits, men who forbear patiently the abuse that may come upon them.” All must “exercise the greatest possible charity with these creatures of the Lord, made in His image and likeness with a rational soul to enable them to know Him.” It was a view of the Indian that was by no means universally held. But she was firm. “God,” she wrote, “created these Indians as apt and competent beings to serve and worship Him.…”

When Fray Alonso asked her whether in the river kingdom of New Mexico all were “proceeding in the right way” in the work of conversions, she replied that “everything was pleasing to our Lord, as it was all directed to the aim of the conversions, which is the greatest charity.” But she also said that she had taken it upon herself to pray for “the peace and harmony between the governors and the friars… so that friars, governors, Spaniards and Indians together and in harmony may worship and praise the Lord.…”

With those words, and in her baffling knowledge of the river kingdom of the seventeenth century, Mother María de Jesús de Agreda went to the heart of a problem that was charged with passion and violence.