New Mexico Historical Review Volume 86 Number 2 Article 2 4-1-2011 A Long Time Coming: The Seventeenth-Century Pueblo-Spanish War John L. Kessell Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr Recommended Citation Kessell, John L.. "A Long Time Coming: The Seventeenth-Century Pueblo-Spanish War." New Mexico Historical Review 86, 2 (2011). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol86/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. A Long Time Coming the seventeenth-century pueblo-spanish war John L. Kessell n his prize-winning book When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away, I Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (1991), historian Ramón A. Gutiérrez implied that New Mexico’s seventeenth-century Fran- ciscan missionaries routinely abused their Pueblo Indian neophytes. “New Mexico’s Indians,” Gutiérrez informed us, “were conquered and made mansos [submissive] by a technique for which Fray Nicolás Hidalgo was renowned. In 1638 the friar beat Pedro Acomilla of Taos Pueblo and grabbed him ‘by the member and twisted it so much that it broke in half.’” If, for a fact, grabbing Pueblo men’s penises had been standard procedure in the missions, I dare say that the Pueblo-Spanish War, fought between 1680 and 1696, would have been not such a long time coming.1 So why, through three entire generations—born, lived out, and buried between the Spanish assault on Acoma in 1599 and the Pueblo siege of Santa Fe in 1680—was redemption so long in coming? Was the colonial regime not really so bad after all? Did the benefi ts of coexistence repeatedly undermine the urge to revolt, even as smallpox, measles, and fl u cruelly reduced the Pueblo Indian population? Or were the Pueblos so deeply divided by traditional grudges—and by the new promise of settling old scores through alliance with Spaniards—that they simply could not rally themselves until 1680? 141 Professor Emeritus and founding editor of the Vargas Project at the University of New Mexico, John L. Kessell is the author of Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). 142 N new mexico historical review volume 86, number 2 A united pre-Hispanic Pueblo world never existed. Taken together, rock and kiva art showing men in combat, projectile points embedded in human bones, mass graves, burned communities, and defensive works testify that this evolving island of town-dwellers was no native Eden before the advent of rapacious Europeans. Nor was this a constant war zone. Warrior gods ap- peared early in Pueblo creation stories, and evidently hunt and war societies formed to honor them and to feed and protect their people. Yet much of life went on peaceably as various groups exchanged edible, material, and even cultural resources. Cooperation and confl ict ebbed and fl owed at different times and different places (just as they would during the colonial period). Some late-thirteenth and fourteenth-century discord likely followed upon the introduction of the new kachina ceremonial system borne up from Meso- america, as it certainly did when a new Christian ceremonial system arrived two hundred years later.2 As Spaniards fastened their one true religion, common sovereignty, and lingua franca upon New Mexico, they took advantage of Pueblo disunion, enlisting Pueblo Indians to fi ght other Pueblo Indians. Soon enough, however, as encircling nomadic peoples threatened New Mexico’s agricultural heart- land, colonial authorities began to rely on mixed Pueblo Indian auxiliaries who on campaign regularly outnumbered Spanish men-at-arms. More than once, numerically superior Pueblo Indian fi ghters sought retali- ation not against the kingdom’s nomadic enemies, but against the kingdom itself. Once Spaniards discovered the plots, these conspiracies broke apart, and the survivors took their grievances back underground. In 1680, however, the colony’s recovery from environmental calamity and the emergence of ironfi sted Pueblo leaders, at long last, produced the desired outcome. To stunned Spaniards, it was as if the familiar quotas of Pueblo auxiliaries set out one day on campaign and came back the next an angry, ordered, over- powering mob. * * * * Back in the mid-sixteenth century, Spaniards who fi rst broke in on the Pueblo world were already well practiced in using Indian peoples against each other or as allies in common battles.3 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s reverberating entrada of 1540—upwards of four hundred mounted Europe- ans and three times as many formidable Mexican Indian auxiliaries—upset the prevailing Pueblo balance of power. Only the self-assured inhabitants at Cicuique, or Pecos, the populous easternmost gateway between pueblos and plains, sent a diplomatic mission to welcome the invaders. “Cicuye [Ci- cuique],” Coronado’s chronicler Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera recalled, “is a pueblo of as many as fi ve hundred fi ghting men. It is feared throughout that spring 2011 kessell N 143 native groups in and around seventeenth-century new mexico 143 (Map drawn by Deborah Reade, Santa Fe, from John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico, 2008, courtesy University of Oklahoma Press) 144 N new mexico historical review volume 86, number 2 whole land. The people of this pueblo boast that no one has been able to subjugate them and that they subjugate [whichever] pueblos they want to.”4 En route to Cicuique, Coronado’s troop came upon “a fi ne, large pueblo, destroyed during their wars.”5 Although relations quickly soured when Span- iards took Cicuique hostages, Coronado testifi ed at his trial in Mexico City that he had requested fi ghting men from Cicuique to help subdue Tiguex, the province of Southern Tiwas in the vicinity of modern-day Albuquerque. Cicuique’s headmen envisioned a colonial scheme of their own. Their com- munity, cramped by a short, high-elevation growing season and constricted farms, coveted Tiwa land in the lower-lying Rio Grande Valley. “They asked the general,” Coronado’s testimony states, “to give them a pueblo there, which they could settle with their people. And they said that they were coming to help in the war.” But the Tiguex war ended, and the deal was never struck.6 Acoma, another seemingly aggressive pueblo, lacked the population of Cicuique but sat atop an all but unassailable height at the western gateway to the Rio Grande Valley. Its estimated two hundred warriors, characterized by Castañeda as “marauders feared throughout the land and region,” could strike at others and withdraw to the safety of their natural stronghold.7 Spaniards who came after Coronado also noted inter-Pueblo hostilities. Antonio de Espejo’s brash, fast-moving outfi t, numbering at most a few dozen, was apparently the fi rst expedition to use Pueblo Indian auxiliaries against other Pueblos in 1583. A contingent of Zuni men armed with bows and arrows volunteered to accompany the expedition to the Hopi pueblos. “Since about thirty of these friendly natives had come with us from the province of Sumi [Zuni], infl uenced by the Mexican Indian brothers, Andrés and Gaspar—two of those left by Coronado—and these warriors showed a fi ne spirit, saying they wanted to die wherever the Castillos died, we cut up pieces of red felt and put a colored sign on each man’s head so that all could be recognized.” Although this time the Hopis chose not to fi ght, no soldier who ever served in a foreign people’s homeland would have failed to appreciate the red insignias that distinguished friendly Zunis from potentially hostile Hopis.8 Fifteen years later, in the summer of 1598, Pueblo lookouts sighted a larger column of Spaniards moving laboriously up the Rio Grande Valley. Bulky animals strained at overloaded carts, children and women walked beside or rode, while cursing men tried to keep livestock from straying. No mere adventurers, these were migrants looking for a new home. Most of the Southern Tiwas, whose elders recalled their brutal strife with Coronado, simply vacated their pueblos and let these strangers pass by. Developer Juan de Oñate’s many-hued colonists, six or seven hundred in all, fi nally moved in amidst the Tewas at the pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh, spring 2011 kessell N 145 some twenty-fi ve miles north of later Santa Fe. Oñate called the place San Juan Bautista. Hardly catching a breath, these new arrivals began to explore in every direction looking for mines and performing unintelligible acts of possession in Pueblo communities. Among the hollow benefi ts promised by Oñate was the pax hispanica, an end to confl ict in the Pueblo world.9 Pecos, assaulted eight years earlier by the renegade entrada of Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, chose not to resist. Quizzical Pecos guides, hunters, and observers surely accompanied Vicente de Zaldívar and his metal men in Sep- tember 1598 as they rode out from Pecos onto the plains to corral buffalo. The high and mighty Acomas, in contrast, did resist, throwing down the gauntlet later in 1598 by killing Juan de Zaldívar, Oñate’s second-in-command and brother of Vicente, along with a dozen of his men. Rather than withdraw the vulnerable little colony—probably outnumbered at the time a hundred-to- one in the Pueblo world—a fi rm-jawed Oñate directed Vicente de Zaldívar and some seventy armed Spaniards to bring the Acomas to European justice. Neither he, nor poet Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, said anything about enlisting Pueblo auxiliaries.10 Before the colony’s restoration by Diego de Vargas in the 1690s, hardly anyone gave credit to allied Pueblo Indian fi ghting men.