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Article Excerpt
As seen in the previous chapters, Spanish conquerors began fanning out in search of other rich kingdoms or exploitable natural resources shortly after the final conquest of Tenochtitlan. Following the subjugation of areas to the west of the central valley--Michoacan, Guerrero, Nayarit, Colima, and southern Sinaloa--Spaniards began a northward thrust in the early 1500s and established the administrative area of Nueva Galicia with Guadalajara as its capital. When the expected riches in that area failed to materialize, interest waned until illegal slave raiders, working for Nuno de Guzman in Sonora in 1536, encountered the four grizzled ghosts of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Andres Dorantes, Alonzo Castillo Maldonado, and Castillo's Moroccan slave Estevan were the sole survivors of a colonizing expedition mounted in the Caribbean under a grant made to Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528. Narvaez's patent was to conquer and colonize the Gulf Coast area between western Florida and the Rio de las Palmas in eastern Mexico. The story of these men, who finally eluded their captors in Texas and made their way across Texas, New Mexico, and Sonora, is one of the most extraordinary epics of survival ever told. It is pertinent to this outline because of the stories they had heard of large cities situated a short distance to the north as they wended their way more or less westward along the current international boundary between New Mexico and Chihuahua. Large cities were equated with wealth in the New World experience of the conquerors. Therefore, the secondhand report authorities heard from the Narvaez survivors was sufficient to send out an exploratory party.
Led by the Franciscan Friar Marcos de Niza with Estevan (or Estevanico) as guide, the party set their course northward in 1539. Estevan, preceding the slower-moving force, sent back the thrilling message of having arrived at the fabled city of Cibola (or Gran Quivira, actually Zuni.) However, before Fray Marcos and the others were able to catch up with him, Estevan was murdered and the expedition advanced only within sight of the pueblo to confirm its existence before retreating south. Undaunted by reality, Fray Marcos promised rich rewards to be gained and convinced the viceroy to mount a larger exploratory expedition. The entrada, under the command of Nueva Galicia's governor Francisco de Coronado, was a cumbersome force of some six hundred armed Spaniards, numerous Indian allies, a pack train, and a herd of cattle that marched north the following year. They reached Zuni, but found no wealth; so Coronado dispatched a smaller exploratory party to the Grand Canyon, while he headed east to visit the Rio Grande pueblos. After wintering north of Bernalillo, his party went as far east as the Staked Plains of northwest Texas before heading north to eastern Kansas in the vain pursuit of another rumored Quivira.
In the meantime, Indians in Nueva Galicia and allies from Zacatecas took advantage of his absence and a frontier weakened by the manpower drawn into the expedition to rebel. The ensuing Mixton war was not quelled until a year later. The failure of the Coronado expedition to find the expected riches and the Mixton war slowed northward expansion until the discovery in 1548 of rich silver mines in Zacatecas inaugurated the New World's first mining boom. Prospectors spread out from there, and soon Guanajuato and San Luis Potosf were enjoying the same economic prosperity. At the same time, native populations were being severely impacted and silver trains were coming under increasing attacks by nomadic Chichimec tribes, lured from the north by the wealth to be plundered. The evolution from garrisons to full-blown presidios occurred as a consequence of the threat. Several rebellions threatened the new frontier: the Zacatecos and Tepehuanes in the 1570s, the Acaxees from 1600 to 1603, the Xiximes from 1610 to 1611, and the Tepehuanes again from 1616 to 1618.
Despite these setbacks, the Spanish flood northward was not to be stopped. As Basque adventurers, prospectors, miners, cattlemen, farmers, and merchants moved into Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, and Chihuahua, the province of Nueva Vizcaya was established in 1562 with the young Basque Francisco de Ibarra as governor and captain general. Mining strikes at Santa Barbara (1560s) and Parral (1631) guaranteed an ever-expanding northern frontier.
While missionaries had harbored the hope of expansion into New Mexico since the initial entradas of Fray Marcos and Coronado, events on the international chessboard were what swayed the crown toward actual occupation of the area. The appearance of Sir Francis Drake on the Pacific coast of California in the 1570s precipitated the rumor of his discovery of the fabled Straits of Anian, the mythical shortcut across the continent. As long as the Spanish navy ruled the seas, the English threat was not taken too seriously. The loss of their Armada to the English in 1588, however, was the checkmate that awakened the crown to the need for defensive outposts to secure the northern perimeter. Sebastian Vizcaino was issued a patent to colonize California (actually effected later, as described in chapter 1) and Juan de Onate one to colonize New Mexico. Onate led his expedition to New Mexico in 1598, crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso, and followed the river northward to settle initially at San Juan de los Caballeros, and later at San Gabriel. Discouraged over his failure to find the expected wealth and the widespread hostility of the impoverished colonists, who felt betrayed, the governor resigned in 1606. Pedro de Peralta succeeded to the governorship and moved the capital to Santa Fe in 1610. By 1670 the Spanish population, clustered near the capital for the most part, numbered somewhat less than three thousand. With trade established between the province and Parral, the population even achieved a moderate degree of prosperity.
However, the seeming economic stability belied seething tensions within the pueblos, which had suffered abuses and excessive demands of tribute to sustain the Spanish population. The consequence was the emergence of a charismatic shaman named Pope. He was able to unite the linguistically diverse Pueblo people into a concerted and successful ouster of the Spaniards from the northern portion of the province back to the El Paso area. Attempts at recolonization under Governor Antonio Otermin the following year and again in 1688 under the new governor, Domingo Jironza Petris de Cruzate, failed. The refugees, clustered in settlements around El Paso, languished for twelve years while the government, distracted from their plight by internal problems and the French encroachment in Texas, was unable to mount a serious attempt at reconquest. Then, beginning in 1692 the new governor, Diego de Vargas, slowly reclaimed the territory one pueblo at a time. A final resistance that flared in 1696 was put down quickly, and peace and security finally restored to the province.
Both secular clergy and Franciscans from the original province of Santo Evangelio de Mexico had been active in southern Nueva Vizcaya from the 1550s, but by 1570 the only Franciscan doctrina was at Nombre de Dios--a territory disputed between Nueva Galicia and Nueva Vizcaya. Franciscan withdrawal from the new mission field was occasioned by the scarcity of friars, until the arrival in 1573 of a...
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