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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 135
Until the year 1631, mission trains were supplied by the viceregal government in Mexico City, which purchased various supplies at auction. When enough materials were amassed, they were sent to New Mexico at somewhat irregular intervals, usually between two and four years. In 1631 the service was reformed. According to James Ivey,
The viceregal treasury transferred the total budget due the New Mexico missions to the Franciscan procurador-general, who then arranged for the purchase of goods from merchants and suppliers, usually in Mexico City. The method enabled purchase of the goods in a timely manner and at minimum cost. In addition, the treasury would purchase and outfit the necessary wagons, including all spare parts; hire the drivers, guards and other necessary personnel, and cover the expenses of their upkeep during the journey to and from New Mexico. In return, the Franciscans agreed to pay for the upkeep of the wagons and personnel during the time they were in New Mexico and to keep up a full complement of mules for each wagon. After the return of the supply train to Mexico City, the government agreed to maintain the wagons and mules during the year and a half until the next dispatch, but it reserved the right to use them as needed during this period.
The basic contract vis-à-vis the supply train was amended in 1664 when an ex-governor, Juan Manso, received the contract. Although the actual caravan numbers and times may not have changed very much, the organization and function of the supply train were altered, the Franciscan procurator-general no longer having overall power. Manso held the contract until his death in 1673. The final seven years before the Pueblo Revolt saw a retreat to earlier conditions, with the new Franciscan procurator-general, Fray Francisco de Ayeta, purchasing mules, wagons, and supplies using Crown monies.
In any case, from 1631 until at least 1664 the operation of the train tended to be pretty much the same, trip after trip, as per the arrangements between the viceroy and the Franciscans. There were usually thirty-two wagons divided into two sections of sixteen, which in turn were divided into two subsections making four groups of eight wagons each. Each wagon had a single driver, or
chirrionero
. The wagons were not, however, as implied by this term (
chirrión
means "cart"), two-wheeled. Rather, they were four-wheeled vehicles somewhat like the famous Conestoga wagons used by the American pioneers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The wagons had iron-tired spoked wheels, and spare parts and appropriate tools were regularly carried. For example, axle trees were listed in the inventories and valued at two pesos each. In 1665 a chirrionero was paid nine pesos per month, not a great sum, but probably meals were supplied, and members of the supply train presumably slept in or near their wagons. A wagon
Page 136
was hauled by 8 mules, and each wagon had two teams, plus an additional 32 mules to replace dead or sick animals, for a total of 544 animals. Wagons were supposed to carry about two tons of supplies, though some were loaded well beyond that capacity. Each friar reporting to New Mexico for the first time was supposed to bring, courtesy of the order, 10 heifers, 10 sheep, and 48 chickens, the latter partly consumed on the road, with any survivors added to the mission supply of fowl. Depending on the number of friars with the mission train, there could be several hundred stock animals moving up the trail with the wagons. Although quantities of the goods were intended for the missions, certain luxury goods such as sugar, chocolate, majolica wares, knives, and other manufactured materials were used by the governors for their private use or for trade purposes.
The procurator-general seems to have normally gone with the supply train and until 1664 was its overall director. Along with the thirty-two drivers there were usually four Indians employed as scouts, drovers, and hunters, and sixteen Indian women as cooks. The standard wage for Pueblo Indians during this period was one-half real per day until López de Mendizábal raised it to one real per day in 1659 (see chapter 10). The drovers (
Indios sabaneros
) received 7 pesos (56 reales) a month each and probably were supplied with food. Each female cook had two wagons to care for and received the miserable pay of 20 reales per month plus food. On the other hand, according to a document of 1677, the "usual pay and salary" for soldiers seems to have been 15 pesos per month. The sergeant referred to in the same document received 17 pesos per month, while a commander of a company of fifty men was allotted 4 ducados per day (amounting to approximately 168 pesos per month).
According to the Manso contract of 1664, the Crown was accustomed to supplying fourteen soldiers and their commander as a military escort for the caravan. Thus, each of these trips would involve at least sixty-seven individuals plus the procurador-general and however many friars were along. Of course, when a new governor was coming to New Mexico, his personal retinue would add to the numbers. There were, after all, twenty-five governors (not counting the irregularly appointed Cristóbal de Oñate), all of whom had to make their way to New Mexico. Many of them, certainly, came and left with the mission train. The wagon trains generally departed Mexico City around midsummer, timed to arrive in the New Mexico settlements in late fall or early winter, when the rivers were low and before the severe winter weather. This schedule was not always kept, however. For example the 1659 train reached Santo Domingo in July and left for Mexico City in the autumn. As Governor López de Mendizábal traveled with this particular mission train, and a sizable number of missionaries also journeyed with it, this may have been an exceptional year.
Page 137
There were most likely entrepreneurial individuals and groups, merchants primarily, who also attached themselves to the supply caravan, though we know very little about these people. That there were individual traders is indicated by the story of Bernardo Gruber from Sonora. This man, operating in the Salinas area, was arrested by the Inquisition on a flimsy charge in 1668 and held prisoner at Sandia until his escape and subsequent mysterious death on the Jornada del Muerto in 1670. The inventory of Gruber's belongings included 105 pairs of assorted wool socks, as well as 14 pair of understockings and 88 elk skins. The skins and the wool socks were likely produced or collected in New Mexico and intended for shipment down the Camino Real.
Mission trains averaged about 10 miles per day in actual travel time on the 1,600-mile trip. This has to be considered a remarkable speed considering the poor roads, heavily loaded wagons, and size and complexity of the wagon trains with their hundreds of livestock. There was a rest and refitting stop of two to three weeks at Zacatecas, 400 miles north of Mexico City. From Zacatecas the train wound its way through deserty and largely empty country for another 500 miles, finally reaching the oases around Santa Bárbara and, after its founding in 1631, Parral. This latter town soon became the commercial hub, especially for goods returning south on the Camino Real. Here another rest stop was made in preparation for the final seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. The train continued north, crossing the Rio Conchos near the mission of San Francisco, and then passed near the site of the later Chihuahua City. Generally, the trains seem to have gone through the great Samalayuca sand dunes some 30 miles south of El Paso, then continued northward to Paso del Norte, roughly following the line of modern Mexican National Highway 45. There was an alternate route, however, for those who wished to avoid the dunes. That was to swing northeastward, reaching the Rio Grande 30 to 35 miles southeast of the Paso del Norte.
On arrival in the El Paso area, supplies for the southernmost mission, that of Guadalupe after its founding in 1659, were presumably off-loaded. The train then crossed the Rio Grande and the wagons continued on the east side of the river, traversing the Jornada del Muerto and crossing again at Senecú the first of the Piro missions. It is not entirely clear which side of the river the wagon trains used going northward from Senecú. There were missions on both sides of the Rio Grande, but at least in the nineteenth century, wagon trains preferred the west side because of better forage and availability of water. It is usually assumed that in the seventeenth century the main trail was east of the river, though a more western alternate trail may also have been used.
On reaching the mission headquarters at Santo Domingo, the wagon trains were split, one group going west to Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi, a second north to
Page 138
The Camino Real in the seventeenth century

 

Page 139
Santa Fe and the upriver missions, and a third east to Galisteo and the Salinas country. The wagons then returned to Santo Domingo where the assembly of a train back to Mexico would take place over the next few months. The wagons were about as heavily laden on the return trip as they had been on the journey north. Trade goods, collected by the governors, and probably influential colonists as well as the missionaries, included antelope, deer, bison, and elk hides, piñon nuts, salt, candles, raw wool, wool woven in the form of mantas and socks, and some maize and wheat. Also shipped south were slaves, including children, captured from the Apaches and other nomadic groups. Large numbers of cattle and sheep were sent with the wagon train in spite of official misgivings about stripping the province of its stock animals. Much of this material was destined for the Santa Bárbara-Parral region, especially the livestock and the salt, which was needed in mining operations.
One of the obsessions of the Spaniards in the New Mexico colony during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was mining of precious metals. It was a major goal of the Coronado expedition and one of the basic reasons why the later entradasthose of Chamuscado, Espejo, Castaño, and Leyva-Humañawere mounted in the first place. By the time of Chamuscado, silver in great amounts had been found stretching in a roughly north-south line from Zacatecas through parts of Durángo into present-day Chihuahua. The upper Southwest looked to be the same sort of terrain, and the Spaniards were confident of finding metallic ores in profusion.
Members of the Chamuscado expedition (1581-82) reported mineral deposits in the general region of the Cerrillos range, the Galisteo country, and the Magdalena Mountains. Hernán Gallegos from the Chamuscado party stated that ore samples brought back to Mexico City assayed at twenty marcos (a marco equals about eight ounces) per quintal (a ''hundredweight'' of roughly one hundred pounds). The "Brief and True Account" says that there were eleven mining areas. Various ores were assayed; one sample was half silver, another was twenty marcos per quintal, and a third one, five marcos per quintal. A letter from the Council of the Indies to the king dated March 14, 1583, mentions an assay of thirty-six marcos per quintal.
Diego Pérez de Luxán with Antonio de Espejo (1582-83) reported mines in the Elephant Butte region, and in the Manzano Mountains. Luxán was on the trip to central Arizona, the region of the Verde Valley near modern Jerome, but he was disappointed in the ores there, finding copper rather than silver. In reality there is both, something that Espejo realized even if Luxán did not. Espejo himself described mines in the Tompiro portion of the Manzanos, the Jemez country, and the Galisteo region. Among the central Arizona mountains, Espejo
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