CHAPTER 26 - Santa Fé

“There is something preternatural about unknown lands that seizes the imagination of certain visionaries. Promoters, opportunists, reformers, businessmen, and even crackpots are attracted to the unknown magnet and often see it as their particular El Dorado, awaiting nothing more than the touch of their hands, the power of their money, and the fruits of their skills to achieve incalculable wealth.”

Seeding the Mustangs

A lot of ink has been spilled since the turn of the last century over the nature and origin of the North American feral horses or “mustangs.” The debate has unearthed at least five red herrings, myths of origin either entirely unfounded or highly unlikely:

1. The mustangs descend from horses abandoned either east or west of the Mississippi by the expeditions of Pánfilo Narvãez or Cabeza de Vaca (1528-1537).
2. The mustangs descend from horses abandoned by Hernando  DeSoto or Luís de Moscoso (1539-1543).
3. The mustangs descend from horses abandoned west of the Mississippi by Francisco Vásquez Coronado (1540-1542).
4. The mustangs descend from the Seminole, Choctaw, or Chickasaw horses; or from the appaloosas, medicine-hats, paints, buckskins, tiger-striped duns, or palominos which today comprise the western “color” breeds; or that the albino “Ghost Horse” or “Great White Stallion” of the plains is the true ancestor.
5. The mustangs descend from horses indigenous to the North American continent (i.e., the species Equus caballus never became extinct here, and hence mustangs are, in the technical sense, wild horses and part of the native fauna of the Western Hemisphere).

Of the fifth red herring we can readily dispose; there is no fossil or artifactual record of the indigenous horses of North America dating later than 10,000 years ago. All horses today living in the Western Hemisphere are the descendants of European or Asian imports of Columbus’ time or later. There are no truly wild horses in the Americas; mustangs are feral, not wild, and however harmoniously they have interacted with the native fauna, they are not themselves a part of that fauna.

The fourth red herring simply gets the cart before the horse. Mustangs – feral horses coming up from Mexico – really were the ancestors of some of the western breeds and characteristic color-
phases. They were likewise the ancestors of some of the Choctaw-Chickasaw horses bred in the Gulf states of the South. Likewise, the “Great White Stallion” of the prairie – if he was really more than legend – was a son of that heritage, not the ancestor of it.

The last several chapters have served, finally, to dispose of the first three ideas, yet in the history of the Spanish borderlands, where Native Americans struggled with European explorers and conquistadors, lies the true origin of the Spanish bloodlines of the U.S. and Canada.
 
It was not Coronado, but Juán de Oñate and his colonists from New Spain who brought horsebreeding into what is now the southwestern United States. In the original capitulation for the colonization of New Mexico, Oñate agreed to bring 25 stallions, 55 mares and some foals. Later his allotment was increased to include some 7,000 head of cattle and 800 horses. Animals that escaped from this herd became the ancestors both of the mustangs and of the “ponies” of the Navajos, Apaches, Utes, and the Pueblo tribes. The number of head lost by Oñate’s colonists, either because of the fenceless herding typical of the Spanish style of stock-keeping, or because horses were traded to the tribesmen for food, women, or other goods, was high. As a result, the horse population explosion that had earlier occurred in the Antilles was repeated in the southwest, but on a larger scale. With the heartland of the continent before them, the mustangs eventually burgeoned to fill a range extending from New Mexico and Texas to the Mississippi in the east and the Rocky Mountains in the west. Ultimately, the wave reached all the way into Canada.

George Catlin, an artist who in the first half of the nineteenth century spent eight years among the Indians, frequently saw mustangs on the Texas plains: “The wild horse of these regions is a small, but very powerful animal; with an exceedingly prominent eye, sharp nose, high nostril, small feet and delicate leg.” Few mustangs of Spanish ancestry ever exceed 1.42 m (14:0 hands) in height. An individual which was exhibited in an 1867 London exposition of bloodstock stood only 1.33 m (13:0 hands) tall. This animal, named Ishto-Plac, was liver chestnut in color and according to his exhibitor, Lord Southwell, was a Comanche warhorse from North Texas. An English reporter wrote in a tabloid of the day that the stallion was very docile and – not at all surprising for those who are aware of the ancient linkages among the “ox-headed” breeds, in which category the Spanish-American mustang certainly belongs – in appearance he “resembled the Welsh pony” (Fig. 6.8).

Catlin’s paintings are somewhat stylized, but the mustang’s appearance is more photorealistically recorded in the sketches made by Rudolph F. Kurz, a Swiss painter who also lived among the tribes of the upper Missouri from 1846-1852. Especially notable is his drawing of a mare named Fashion, “a purebred mustang, black in color with all four feet white.” Kurz’ mustangs are animals in the possession of the natives and already broken to ride, but they came from the southern Great Plains and were indistinguishable from those still at liberty.

Mompit and Milco

Such were the horses brought, early in 1598, by Oñate’s colonists into the hostile and still largely unknown lands north of Mexico City. They not only brought the animals which seeded the Great Plains, but which provided the tribesmen with their first mounts as well. Searching for a shorter route to the El Paso region, Oñate’s nephew Vicente de Záldivar led a scouting party across country and by chance struck upon a village (probably of the Concho tribe) containing some 200 wikiups. Two soldiers crawled through the brush to a position where they could observe the ranchería without being seen. Then the Spaniards decided to use their horses to surprise and bamboozle the tribesmen, who greatly outnumbered them. Záldivar sent several men running into the village yelling and stampeding loose horses among the huts, while another group fired guns into the air and a third party rushed into the camp to destroy the natives’ bows, arrows, and other arms. The plan quickly succeeded in emptying the village of its terrified inhabitants, and four tribesmen were captured. The Spaniards conscripted two, named Mompit and Milco, as guides, promising each a beautiful horse if they would lead the Spaniards to the Río Grande. Mompit escaped, but Milco may actually have received his horse at the river – and if so, he was the first native of record to mount a horse west of the Mississippi and north of what is now Mexico.

Submission and Resentment

In July when Oñate’s army reached the Keres pueblo which the Spaniards called Santo Domingo, representatives from some thirty-one pueblos of the vicinity met with Oñate and – at least as the Spaniards told the tale – agreed to become subjects of the King of Spain. The sincerity of the Pueblans’
“submission” may be doubted, since they well remembered the rapacity of Coronado’s army and were probably willing to do almost anything to get rid of the Europeans. However, Oñate and the many governors of New Mexico who came after him were always able to use this act of submission as grounds for regarding pueblos that attempted to throw off Spanish rule as “treasonous,” and for legally declaring war upon them.

By September Oñate had moved his headquarters to the Tewa pueblo of San Juán and there he received the submission of many other pueblos. There, too, he gradually discovered the geographic
distribution of the peoples of the region: surrounding the sedentary agriculturalists of the pueblos were nomadic and semi-nomadic Athapascan-speakers (Navajos, Utes, and various tribes of Apaches). Through the Apache country to the northeast he once again sent Záldivar to explore the buffalo plains, like Coronado before him mandating reconnoitering expeditions just to make sure that there were no golden cities within striking distance. Over the next several years, other Spanish captains set out south (to Texas) and east (to Arizona and eventually, to the Gulf of California) to reconnoiter the land in hopes of finding lodes of silver or copper.

In January of 1599, Záldivar led a massacre at Ácoma Pueblo in which at least 800 men, women, and children were murdered in cold blood, even after tribal leaders tried several times to surrender. There were no Spanish casualties, and this massacre and another in the same year involving the Júmano Tompiros served to drive native resistance underground and keep it smoldering for centuries.

After these developments it cannot be surprising that most of the tribes of the region never submitted to Spanish domination or sincerely converted to the Catholic religion. Peaceful and intelligent agriculturalists, they struggled instead to maintain their traditional way of life, which meant seasonal rounds of planting and harvesting interspersed at regular intervals with trading with the Apaches. Until the Spaniards invaded their country in the seventeenth century, it had been usual for whole tribes of Apaches or Navajos to encamp near a pueblo for the purpose of exchanging dressed buffalo hides, meat, fat, and deerskins for the pots, woven cotton blankets, and maize of the pueblos. The destruction of ancient pueblo communities
resulted in disruption not only of agriculture but also of trade and the balance of power between the tribes of the pueblos and the plains.

Quivira Again

In 1600, Oñate decided to scout the plains of Quivira himself with a company of 70 soldiers and a remuda of some 700 horses. In contrast to Coronado’s careful management of the horses, records indicate that a significant number of Oñate’s were carelessly lost in the buffalo grass. Meanwhile, Oñate’s departure from the pueblos with most of the horses and half of the soldiers gave the remaining New Mexico colonists the opportunity to flee back to Mexico. When Oñate returned on November 24, 1600, only Fray Juán de Escalona and about 25 others remained to meet him.

The complaints of the colonists who fled back to Mexico prompted the Viceroy to send Oñate a supply train, but along with it an auditor-general to check up on his administration. By the time the supply train arrived, only a dozen cows and half a dozen oxen remained to the Spaniards out of all the livestock the Crown had originally supplied, and Oñate and his men were in danger of starvation. Indeed, unwilling to plant or to build, several months later they had already eaten 280 of the 630 cows sent by the Viceroy to relieve them. This was wasteful even by Spanish colonial standards, and it is not surprising that Oñate, who by now had many enemies and little respect in the colony, was unable to prevent his men from trading horses to the tribesmen for women and other pleasantries. As the Viceroy himself later remarked to the King, “no one comes to the Indies to plow and sow, but only to eat and loaf.”

A Slave’s Education

By this date, the Spanish were occupying the Tewa pueblo of San Gabriel. With the coming of Oñate’s army, many Pueblans who had not been massacred or starved or driven to refuge in the mountains were enslaved. As peones they performed all the colony’s manual labor manufacturing, farming, watering – and herding and caring for sheep, cattle, and horses. The tribes of the pueblos thus learned very early all there is to know about European livestock.

In 1606, the acquisition of horses by the Plains and Pueblo tribes alike was stepped up when Juán Martinez de Montoya was granted an encomienda of the Jémez pueblo, entitling him to the fruits of their labor. The Jémez were in very close contact with the Navajos, and were not slow to communicate to their allies the desirability of inconveniencing their Spanish “master.” Hostilities commenced with horse-stealing, and before three years had passed, Navajos, Utes, Apaches, and other allies were strong enough to attack San Gabriel. Although Crístobal de Oñate and Martinez retaliated, the tribesmen succeeded in making off with many more horses and cows.


Santa Fé: Heart of Horse Dispersal

On June 17, 1606, the King decided to remove Oñate; he officially resigned in 1607, and in 1609 Pedro de Peralta was installed. During Oñate’s last years Santa Fé had been founded as a camp, but in 1610 Peralta built it up to become the capital of the colony. San Gabriel was then abandoned by the Spaniards, nor have the Tewas ever seen fit to inhabit it again. For the next hundred years, while Spanish-Indian relations throughout New Mexico and Arizona remained hostile, Santa Fé hung on and slowly grew.

In 1617 the Spanish established Pecos as a gateway for trade with the Plains Apache tribes, so that those tribes all became mounted before mid-century. Lucky that was for them, for in 1627-1628 and again in 1638, New Mexico governor Felipe Sótelo Ossorio instigated raids upon the New Mexico Apaches to take slaves, attacks which infuriated the Apaches and convinced them that the only good Spaniard was a dead Spaniard. The Jesuit and Franciscan friars who came to found missions in the arid lands of Sonora, New Mexico, and Arizona also failed to make real contact. Though for a hundred years they worked among the Yaquis, Pimas, Apaches, Ópatas, Chisos, Taraúmaras, Tepehuanes, Lagúneros, Conchos and Tobosos, no lasting relationship of trust and mutual understanding was reached. The Tobosos revolted in 1612, and from 1617 to 1622 the entire province was plunged into war as the powerful Tepehuanes strove to free themselves. The Conchos, Tobosos, and Chisos, neighbors of the Júmano Apaches, allied themselves with this struggle and continued their war of liberation for many decades. Thanks to these conflicts to the south, hundreds of horses and objects of European culture penetrated the Plains.

Tribes of the Southern Plains Acquire Horses

Deplorable though it was, slave-trading by the Spaniards was hardly a novelty among either the Pueblans or the Plains tribes, as the tale of Xabe (told in the previous chapter) reveals. Goods in human form sent from the Wichita area had already, a long time previously, helped to establish trade connections between Native American communities as far apart as Kansas and New Mexico. When horses began to be available for exchange at Santa Fé, they traded on a par with slaves. Chronicler Fray Alonso de Posadas confirms that during the early 1660’s when he was at Pecos Pueblo, the Plains Apaches often traded Quivira slaves to the Europeans in exchange for horses.

While Indian wars raged in Sonora, New Mexico governor Luís de Rosas began to promote slave raiding against the Utes and other Athapascans in the north. In retaliation, the Utes took mission herds whenever they could get at them, driving off hundreds of head. It appears likely that captive Utes had already obtained knowledge of horses before 1641, and that Utes escaping from Spanish peonage were the first to spread horses north of the Colorado River. By the 1650’s Utes were using pack horses, although they did not yet ride them.

Meanwhile, in 1639, the Taos Pueblans decided in desperation to abandon their ancient home and fortification and fled out onto the plains to live among their Apache allies. In what is now Scott County, Kansas, they established a new pueblo called El Cuartelejo (“The Box”) by the Spaniards. The flight of the Taos brought still another infusion of horses out onto the plains. Sometime about 1642 or 1643, a Spanish commander named Juán de Archuleta attacked the pueblo along with twenty soldiers and brought most of its occupants back to New Mexico, but not before the Wichitas encamped in that region had acquired horses in trade from the Taos.

During the 1650’s and 1660’s the natives of southern Texas and northern Mexico intensified their resistance. Repeatedly breaking into Spanish settlements, they stampeded not only horses but all classes of livestock. In 1653 and 1655 Spanish-Mexican armies campaigned as far north as southern Texas in reprisals against horse-theft by the Cacaxtles, but the efforts of the leatherjackets came to nearly nothing: the horsemanship and strategies of the Indians were now the equal of their own – and the Indian determination was certainly greater. On August 1, 1671, a group of Apaches headed by a war-leader named El Chilmo rode in to attack the Pueblo of Senecu in broad daylight and stampeded all the livestock. When the Spaniards and their Piros allies galloped after them, the Apaches caught them in an ambush and killed them to the last man.

The greatest sea-change came, however, on August 10, 1680, in the long-overdue, coordinated uprising called the “Pueblo Revolt.” Almost simultaneously, tribesmen of many adobes rose up and killed all the padres and soldiers, at the same time sending platoons of mounted warriors onto the roads to disrupt Spanish communications. In only three days, the whole of northwestern New Mexico was free, and Governor Otermín was forced to defend himself within the walls of Santa Fé. On August 21, Otermín determined to retreat downstream, abandoning the capital, which was promptly sacked by the victorious tribesmen. In this war, the tribesmen acquired their largest single haul of guns, cattle, horses, and other supplies.

Tribes of the Northern Plains Acquire Horses

Their victory left the Pueblans with the problem of re-establishing peaceful trading relationships with the Apaches and other Athapascans. A young Júmano told Otermín that the Apaches were in favor of reestablishing the old trade links, for the tribesmen of the newly-liberated Gila area had horses which the Plains tribes needed “as much for war against other [tribesmen] who are their enemies, by means of which they make great massacres, as for chasing the buffalo which are their substance.” By the 1680’s all the Plains Athapascans probably had horses to ride to war and to the hunt, although among the Apaches horses only slowly replaced the traditional dog as a pack animal. In 1682, the French explorer La Salle met a party of tribesmen at his camp near the mouth of the Missouri. Among them was a Pawnee who hailed from some 200 leagues to the west. From him, La Salle learned that the Pawnees “are neighbors and allies of the Gattacka and Manrhoat, who are to the south of [the Pawnee] villages, and that they sell them horses which they rob … from the Spanish of New Mexico.” “Gattacka” is a Pawnee name for the Plains Apaches; thus by this early date Plains tribesmen were already riding and trading as far east and north as Illinois. Fray Louis Hennepin reported in the same year that the Metontonta (Oto) tribe also knew of horses, for they came into camp with a horse’s hoof and said that “the [Apaches] make cruel war upon them, and that [they] use spears more commonly than firearms.” The Apaches had already frequently used their horses to attack other plains tribes, creating bitter hatreds redressed only after 1700 when the Comanches, Pawnees, Kansas, Otos, and others also became mounted and forced the Athapascans off a large part of their old hunting grounds on the plains.

Father Kino

While the Apaches were expanding east and north, the Spaniards trended westward. In 1603, Captain Gerónimo Marquéz led a party from Oñate’s New Mexico settlement to the copper mines near Jerome, Arizona, from which he brought back some ore. Since Oñate had discovered wealth neither in Quivira nor in New Mexico, he determined to follow up the Marquéz expedition by discovering a route to the Pacific Ocean and plundering any rich lands that might lie along that route. However, thanks to the growing hostilities in the region, it was impossible for him to get through, and indeed no effective European incursions were made in Arizona until Fray Eusebio Francisco Kino established cattle raising among the Pimas and Yumas in valleys of the Gila River region beginning in 1687. Kino, an experienced rancher, gained his knowledge of cattle-breeding at the ranch connected with his first mission in Old Mexico. From there he was able to drive hundreds of head of cattle and sheep to his missions in Arizona, and justly does
historian Herbert Bolton say of him that he was “the cattle king of his day and region.”

Kino continued his work until 1711, but his successes, like those of other missionaries, were often countermanded by the continuing cruelty and shortsightedness of Spanish encomen-deros and other officials. In the spring of 1695 a Spanish officer executed three Pimas and horsewhipped several more for allegedly rustling beef. The Pimas responded by killing several Spaniards, burning missions and ranches, and running off cattle and horses in the Altár and Magdalena valleys. As the eighteenth century progressed, mission natives – under continuing pressure from their free relatives to abandon their creole lifestyle –  became more independent of Spanish authority. The Jesuits tried to continue Kino’s work, but their long war of nerves with the governors of New Spain and New Mexico sapped their resources and their energy, although during this era it was also finally proven that many of them had been just as greedy and destructive as the encomenderos. A Pima revolt in 1751 helped to bring their injustices to light, for the Viceroy in 1767 expelled the Jesuits from all of New Spain and confiscated their property, saying “there is no reason to doubt that [the Jesuits] either wasted or embezzled the rich temporalities of all or most of the missions, and these funds were lost, with decadence and ruin the inevitable result.”

The last decades of the eighteenth century ushered in the “golden age of Pimeria Alta,” when silver mines were finally discovered. Franciscans established mission ranches in Arizona while the government issued land grants for the establishment of haciendas to supply the mines. But, thanks to Padre Kino who pointed the way, from Arizona the Spanish were finally able to penetrate across mountain and desert to the golden land of California, where greater treasures lay in store than any “silver bullets” from the Pimeria.