Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 140
commented on the mines, the same ones mentioned by Luxán, and "took from them with my own hands ores which, according to experts on the matter, are very rich and contain a great deal of silver."
Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, the lieutenant governor of Nuevo León who led an unauthorized expedition to New Mexico in 1590-91, was also looking for mines. According to his
Memoria
, the lieutenant governor, while at Pecos, showed residents some ore samples that he carried. The Indians told him of several pueblos where he could find similar ore. Eventually, Castaño discovered mineral-rich deposits in the Galisteo region, though he failed to extract any silver. All and all, however, the Castaño expedition found less promise of mineral riches than did earlier expeditions.
This does not seem to have fazed the Spaniards. A major reason why colonization of New Mexico was so desirable was the possibility of striking it rich with silver and perhaps gold. Oñate came prepared with equipment and assay know-how to check out and exploit any mineral deposits. Quite early in the occupation of the new colony, Oñate sent Captain Marcos Farfán de los Godos to investigate the Verde Valley region that had so excited Espejo. They found large veins of ore "so long and wide that one-half of the people in New Spain could stake out claims in this land."
The ores brought back by Farfán were assayed using the quicksilver method. The ore produced some twelve ounces of silver per quintal, though one of the assayers, Contador Alonso Sánchez, believed that the assaying methods were inefficient and that the ore contained a great deal more silver. Not too long after Farfán's return, Oñate wrote the viceroy asking for stamps to label the silver he planned to ship south. It is not clear what silver Oñate had in mind, but perhaps it was the mine near San Marcos where Vicente Zaldívar had built a crushing machine. It may have been this mine that produced a letter by Luis Núñez Pérez in November 1600, talking of a "great [silver] mining discovery."
Unfortunately, Oñate's discovery of silver proved to be a chimera. In a report by the viceroy to King Philip III, dated March 31, 1605, Viceroy Montesclaros commented that ore samples sent by the adelantado had produced copper but no silver. Still, belief in the mineral richness of New Mexico continued. Writing in the 1620s, Fray Gerónimo de Zárate Salmerón claimed that there were mines of all sorts in New Mexico: "silver, copper, lead, magnet stone, coperas [copperas, a green crystalline compound used in dyeing and ink making], alum, sulfur, and turquoise." These mines are not utilized because, as Zárate Salmerón comments sourly, "The Spaniards who are there laugh at all this; as long as they, have a good supply of tobacco to smoke, they are very contented, and they do not want any more riches, for it seems as if they had made the vow of poverty,
Page 141
which is a great deal for being Spaniards, who because of greediness for silver and gold will enter Hell itself to obtain them."
Not only Zárate Salmerón but also Alonso de Benavides believed strongly in the mineral riches of New Mexico. In his
Memorial of 1630
, Father Benavides stressed the richness in gold and silver of the province, particularly in the Socorro area and the mountains extending along the Piro country. Especially rich was the hill of Socorro: "Nowhere in the Indies can silver be more easily extracted than from this hill. It will be more profitable to extract one silver mark here than many from other mines, because, while at these mines of Socorro everything is right at hand, at the others all the materials, supplies and even the water have to be hauled a very great distance, thus necessitating expenditures which consume all the yield in silver." This great wealth was going unexploited because there was no one who understood or knew how to properly develop and work the mines. According to Benavides, he had personally sent samples to "some miners in New Spain" who after assaying them were preparing to enter New Mexico in order to develop the mines. The exact location of Benavides's "hill of Socorro" is not known today.
As late as 1638 the commissary-general of the Franciscans in Mexico City, Juan de Prada, mentioned that "mines of gold and silver are not lacking [in New Mexico]". However, the poverty and unfitness of both Indians and Spaniards prevented any mines from actually being worked. Indeed, this seems to have been the case throughout the seventeenth century for there is no evidence that
any
silver or gold came out of New Mexico mines.
It might be well to consider the mining situation in the region south of New Mexico, where enormously rich silver strikes had been made in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The Santa Bárbara area in what is now south-central Chihuahua was settled originally because of the mining potential. This general region, like major mining districts farther south, was on the eastern flanks of the Sierra Madre. The first settlement at Santa Bárbara was actually not the center of great mining activity, but for strategic reasons the town became an important anchor to the northern part of New Spain (and of course the jumping-off point for New Mexico). Around the villa of Santa Bárbara and the Franciscan mission station at San Bartolomé, some thirty-five miles to the east, there developed considerable farming and ranching activity. Mining was only moderately important until 1631, when a major silver strike occurred on the Rio San Gregorio about twenty miles north of Santa Bárbara, the site of modern Parral. In 1634 a second strike developed about three miles northwest of Parral at the modern Villa Escobeda. In subsequent years further strikes were made in the general region.
Page 142
The mines of the region were associated with volcanic activity in Cenozoic times. The silver ore is located in fissure veins that often run for many miles. The ore itself is either argentite (silver sulfide) or is carried as argentiferous galena in galena (lead sulfide). Argentite generally has a much higher silver content and was worked in the seventeenth century by what is called the "patio amalgamation" process. In this process the ore was crushed to a fine powder using a water-or mule-powered stamp mill. Then the finely ground ore was mixed with water and with three reagents: salt, a slurry of mercury, and magistral (chalcopyrite). Occasionally, other materials, lime, and/or iron filings were added in. The mixing was done in a rock-floored outside patio and was stirred usually by driving mules through the muddy concoction. The ore was then put in heaps and allowed to stand for several weeks, or in cold weather even several months. During this period the silver amalgamated with the mercury. The mixture was then washed in tanks or troughs, and the slime was carried away, leaving the heavier amalgam. The amalgam was then pressed into bars and heated, freeing the mercury and leaving metallic silver or a silver-gold alloy.
If the ore to be reduced was galena or if the mercury, which had to be obtained from Spain, was insufficient, another process was used: that of smelting by lead fusion and subsequent cupellation. This was an ancient technique, going back to the days of early metallurgy in the Old World. In this process, the ore, after being crushed into gravel size, was smelted in a blast furnace with lead to separate the silver and gold from the lighter slag and combine them with lead to form an alloy. This alloy was then taken to a cupellation furnace lined with a porous bone ash. At a high temperature the lead in the alloy oxidized and was absorbed by the lining of ash. The more-or-less pure silver and gold were then left at the bottom of the furnace. Forced air was supplied by bellows of goat skin or sheepskin. Bellows, probably similar to these, were part of Oñate's equipment, listed in the Salazar inspection of 1597-98.
Why then did the Spaniards not find silver and gold in the new province? In fact, there is a considerable distribution of argentite in the area. It is found in various places in western New Mexico and in the Río Verde region of central Arizonathough not in the Hopi region, the only part of Arizona with a Spanish presence throughout most of the seventeenth century. Mines in the Rio Verde were simply too far from the power center on the Rio Grande to be seriously exploited. However, much nearer Spanish settlements, there were and are argentite outcroppings in the Jemez Mountains, in the Sangre de Cristos, the Magdalena Mountains, the Sandia-Manzano region and in the Cerrillos Hills. Galena also has a wide distribution, as does gold. In the nineteenth century there
Page 143
was a great deal of mining, though there never was the frenetic activity that characterized the California gold rush or the great silver strikes in Nevada.
In the seventeenth century, certain components necessary to a successful mining operation were absent. It is true that chalcopyrite was plentiful, as was salt (the latter material in fact being shipped to the Santa Bárbara-Parral region to use in mining). Mercury, however, is rare or absent in New Mexico. This metalwhich is reduced from its sulfide, cinnabarwas shipped to Mexico primarily from Spain. Even in the rich Parral mines there were sometimes shortages of mercury, and New Mexico was even more remote. Mercury was so important that a rumored cinnabar mine in Hopi country created a considerable stir when de Vargas reached that area in 1692. An additional problem, perhaps even more serious than the lack of mercury, was that mining operations were greedy users of water. In New Mexico, as Benavides pointed out, water was generally not immediately at hand.
The major factor in the lack of mining development, however, was the serious undercapitalization of New Mexico throughout the seventeenth century. Income was always very low, and the province had to be massively subsidized by the crown. In fact, France Scholes has estimated that in the period 1596-1683, expenditures for the province exceeded receipts by a greater than ninety to one ratio. There was a low population level and a lack of skilled and motivated workers. In an arid environment with prohibitively high shipping costs for essential raw materials such as mercury, mining in seventeenth-century New Mexico was simply not cost-effective.
The Spanish population in seventeenth-century New Mexico was primarily rural. As said earlier, only one "villa" or town existedSanta Fe, the capital of the provinceand it had a small and partly seasonal population. Both the missionaries and private individuals had estancias, which in the case of the lay population were basically licenses from one or another of the governors for the use of particular tracts of land. These licenses technically became land grants only when registered with the
Audiencia
, either in Mexico City or Guadalajara. This formalization may have occurred occasionally, but as yet no such grants have been found in the archives. Governor Baeza in 1639 spoke of ten to twelve estancias, but during the course of the seventeenth century, their number slowly increased. The central portion of the Rio Grande Basin seems to have had the thickest population. In 1680, for example, on the east side of the Rio Grande, some seventeen estancias extended southward, in one eight-mile stretch, from the Tiwa town of Alameda. There were a large number of mission estancias, sixty or more by the 1660s, although the legal basis of them is unclear. Nor is the legal distinction clear between the mission estancias and Pueblo Indian communally
Page 144
held lands. In any case, the mission estancias produced a great deal, especially stock animals by the thousands. From the reports of the de Vargas expedition during the reconquest of the 1690s, it would seem that certain other areas were relatively heavily populated. The Galisteo Basin had a number of estancias, and there were a dozen or so families in the Santa Cruz region south of the Rio Grande-Chama junction.
The owners of estancias, and to some degree the encomenderos, lived on scattered estates, many of them near one or the other pueblo. In addition, encomenderos sometimes lived within their encomiendas in spite of the strong Spanish laws against this practice. It certainly led to abuses. In one notorious case, the encomendero of Pojoaque, Antonio de Salas, built a ranch house, grazed his stock on Pueblo lands, and drafted Indian labor for a variety of personal servicesall forbidden by Spanish law. Governor López de Mendizabál ordered Salas to raze the house and leave the Pueblo land. In the López residencia, Salas sued for damages, claiming that under the special conditions in New Mexico, with constant danger from nomadic Indian raids, the governors had from the first allowed encomenderos to live on their encomiendas. A stepdaughter of Salas, Petronilla, with eight or ten children, was still living near Pojoaque at the time of the Pueblo Revolt, and all were killed in the opening days of the uprising. Antonio de Salas himself escaped south to El Paso, where he died in 1681.
Unfortunately, there has been relatively little archaeology of the outlying seventeenth-century Hispanic settlements in New Mexico. A number of sites have been located, and a few have had a certain amount of excavation. A settlement (LA 34) in the Cochiti area, the largest site known to date, is a building of some twenty rooms with a corral of some 2,100 ft
2
. An estancia (LA 20,000, the Sánchez site), some fifteen miles south of Santa Fe, on Cienega Creek, a tributary of the Santa Fe River, has been excavated in part by students from Colorado College. Here the building is along the south-facing slopes of a ridge, overlooking the small stream. It has ten to fifteen rooms, a corral, a Spanish
horno
(oven), and possibly a torreón (defensive tower) at one side of the building. A certain amount of Mexican majolica and Spanish olive jars were found, as well as the ubiquitous Pueblo pottery. Part of the Indian pottery likely came from the pueblo of La Cienega, which is generally considered to have been nearby but has never been located. The building period at LA 20,000 dates from at least the 1630s and perhaps is earlier. Although the Francisco de Anaya Almazán family held encomiendas in the general area, there is no evidence that this group actually owned or settled the estancia. It has been suggested that it was owned by members of the influential Baca family, a group that was also
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