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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 230
The El Paso settlements, 1680-92
northern frontier were aware of the success of the Pueblos, and the region was extremely volatile. Shortly after the attempted rebellion at Socorro (apparently while Otermín was still in power), there was a rising of transplanted Tiwas and Piros who were in contact with the rebels in New Mexico. This revolt "was suppressed by some gentle measures," according to Vélez de Escalante, though "gentle" must have been in the eyes of the beholder for nine Piros were sentenced to four years' labor in a crushing mill.
Jironza was soon involved on several fronts. In November 1683, he sent a small party up the Rio Grande, reaching a point south of modern Albuquerque. After a skirmish with the Apaches and realizing that the Pueblos had no interest in a Spanish return, the group retreated to the El Paso area. Jironza now decided to concentrate the Spanish population nearer the Manso mission of Guadalupe in the El Paso region. This coincided with, and possibly triggered, a widespread Manso plot which, fortunately for the Spaniards, was discovered in time, with eight ringleaders sentenced to be garroted. This sentence was momentarily held
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up because an expedition led by Juan Domínguez de Mendoza had gone to the La Junta region, the juncture of the Conchos and the Rio Grande, and the families of his soldiers feared retaliation. Domínguez had taken approximately twenty men, leaving only fifty, seriously under-armed defenders in the El Paso area. The Mansos fled to the stronghold of a rebel Captain Chiquito some fifty miles from El Paso.
Meanwhile, rebellion had flared up among the Sumas, Janos, Jocomes, Chinarras, and Conchos over a large area of what is now western Chihuahua. In part this was caused by the unauthorized influx of Spanish settlers fleeing New Mexico, which put great pressures on the area's resources. Clearly, the population figures for 1684 indicated a continued leakage of people away from the El Paso frontier. A
visita
of the settlements taken in September of that year counted only 1,051 persons, though it is not clear if this count included the resettled Tiwa and Piro Indians. Equipment was also in short supply: the investigators recorded only sixty-six harquebuses, fifty-one swords, and seventy-eight saddles.
At the time of the rebellion, Francisco Ramirez de Salazar was alcalde mayor of Casas Grandes. He had only a dozen men in arms but managed to get an additional thirty (including Indian allies, perhaps Pima or Opata) on loan from the alcalde mayor of Sonora. After a series of inconclusive skirmishes, Ramirez moved his small force to El Paso, joining Captain Roque Madrid, head of the El Paso presidio, in search of the Manso rebels. The two forces of approximately ninety soldiers followed the Manso trail somewhere in the area of the Florida Mountains southeast of present-day Deming. The Mansos were moving farther west, trying to join forces with the Janos. Hearing that Casas Grandes was in trouble, Madrid and Ramirez split their forces, the latter man going to rescue the citizens of Casas Grandes while Madrid pushed on to the Carretas Mountains, some twenty-five miles southwest of Janos, near the Sonoran border. He attacked this stronghold and scattered the Mansos, then turned back to help out in the fighting around Casas Grandes. After a savage battle, the Indian confederates were defeated near Casas Grandes, Madrid reporting that his party had killed forty of the rebels and wounded many others.
By the end of 1684, the situation was more or less under control. Jironza ordered a complete muster of the El Paso presidio, and Spanish soldiers in Nueva Vizcaya gradually gained the upper hand over the various rebel forces. The Spaniards then carried out executions of various ringleaders of the rebellions. Jironza, for example, executed the Manso rebel leaders, by then totaling ten, while at Casas Grandes, forty-three Suma Indians were hanged in 1685.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Crown was coming under increasing geopolitical pressure to reoccupy New Mexico. Shortly after the revolt, the Spaniards learned
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that France was extending its exploration in the Mississippi Valley. In 1682, the French empire builder, Réne Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, formally took possession of the entire Mississippi drainage. In part acting on information from ex-governor Diego de Peñalosa, then living in France, La Salle planned an ambitious program of colonization of the vast new area. Named governor of Louisiana, as the new province was to be called, La Salle sailed in 1684 to found a settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi. The following year, after considerable difficulties including the loss of his supply ship to the Spaniards, La Salle landed at Matagordo Bay in present-day Texas, assuming this to be the westernmost mouth of the Mississippi. There he built a fort, St. Louis, and explored inland. La Salle seems to have thought that from Matagordo he would have easy access to New Mexico, and he may actually have intended to challenge the Spaniards. There was certainly no threat to the northern provinces of Spain, for La Salle's tiny expedition had far too little logistical support. In January 1687, the French governor, with some sixteen men (about half of the St. Louis force), made an attempt to go overland to Canada. La Salle was assassinated en route, though a handful of his men reached the Red River, the Mississippi, and eventually a French outpost on the Illinois River. Most of the colonists who remained were killed by Indians.
In 1699, the French began the settlement of La Salle's vast new area of Louisiana. Although they concentrated on the Mississippi River drainage rather than east Texas, a shrewd series of alliances with Indian groups pushed their de facto sphere of influence farther west. Controlling the Mississippi allowed the French in the early eighteenth century to operate trading parties in the Great Plains and to supply guns and horses to their Native American confederates in that region. The effect was to block the Spaniards on the north and east, but the French were never in a position to threaten either New Mexico or the post-seventeenth-century Spanish settlements in southern and western Texas.
By this time New Mexico had a new value in the eyes of the Spanish government, for it was a buffer zone for mineral-rich Nueva Vizcaya. The old missionary value remained, and there was continuing pressure from the Franciscans, who understandably were reluctant to desert their converts in New Mexico. For the moment, however, political infighting between Jironza and the Santa Fe cabildo took center stage. The governor accused Juan Domínguez de Mendoza of attempting to undercut his authority in order to obtain the position of governor. The subsequent trial in absentia (Domínguez being in Mexico City, carrying the cabildo's complaints against the governor) was a field day for Juan Domínguez de Mendoza's enemies, rehashing charges against him going back to Governor Medrano's time. There is no doubt that Domínguez deeply wanted
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the governorship, and he was vigorously supported by Fray Nicolás López, who was leader of the Franciscans in the La Junta expedition. As pointed out in chapter 12, however, there is no indication that his candidacy was ever taken seriously by the viceroy and the Spanish Crown.
In any case, Pedro Reneros de Posada was given the appointment, arriving in El Paso in September 1686. Reneros is somewhat of a mystery. He first appears as a presidio soldier in El Paso in September 1681, volunteering to go with Otermín on his raid northward. He was listed as a native of Castile, from the Burgos area, a bachelor who owned four horses. Reneros rose to the rank of captain and had been sent by Jironza to Mexico City on some sort of official mission in 1684. I can find no evidence that the new governor had ever been in New Mexico before 1681.
Reneros's regime started off with the execution, for some unspecified crime, of young Juan de Montoya, a member of a family that had come to New Mexico in 1600. The new governor made a series of somewhat rash attempts to tighten the defenses around El Paso. In 1687 he was accused of embezzling the quarterly pay of the presidio for that year. In late summer of 1687, Reneros made a raid northward as far as the Jemez River, where he burned the pueblo of Santa Ana. Returning with four captive Pueblo leaders and with ten others who seemed to have deserted the Indian cause and come to him willingly, Reneros returned to El Paso. There he had the Pueblo leaders executed and the ten other Indians sold into slavery in Nueva Vizcaya. Shortly after his return, Reneros was forced to quell a revolt of Suma Indians in the region southeast of El Paso. Calling the rebels together under a flag of truce, Reneros attacked, killing a number of Indians and capturing others. Nine leaders were immediately shot, and some forty Suma Indians were sold into slavery.
But Reneros's tenure of governor was shortly over. He was replaced in February 1689 by Jironza, who arrived in El Paso with much-needed weapons and supplies. Parenthetically, this ended the hopes of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza for further influence on the northern frontier. Although he had been cleared by the Mexican authorities of the various charges brought by Jironza, he was found guilty of leaving El Paso without a license and forced to pay the court costs. Still, Domínguez seems to have maintained some influence in the viceregal court. He received permission from the viceroy for his wife, son, and daughter to join him in Mexico.
Jironza's main ambition with this second chance at governorship was to activate the reconquest of New Mexico. The Spaniards had been collecting information on how things were going in Pueblo land for some years. In 1682, at the beginning of the governor's first term, an Indian named Juan had made his way south after some years captivity among the Apache. Juan reported that the
Page 234
Pueblos were still bitterly anti-Spanish. The ruler at this time was the war captain Luis Tupatú of Picurís, and his main lieutenant was Alonso Catití. Hopi tried to break free of the federation but was attacked by a force under Catití, who executed ten men and brought back horses and other booty to Tupatú. The major enemy was becoming the Utes, who had attacked Jemez in the summer of 1683.
In February of 1685, a Tiwa Indian named Lucas reported a recent trip to the Pueblo area. According to Lucas, the Utes were the universal enemy, but that the pueblos of Taos, Picurís, Jemez, and Acoma were on friendly terms with the Apache. He was told that Catití had died, probably in late 1684.
Jironza was determined to see for himself, so in August of 1689, with some eighty soldiers, he marched upriver and attacked Zia in a fight that lasted from dawn to ten at night. Some fifty of Jironza's soldiers were wounded, but according to Vélez de Escalante's later account, Jironza killed six hundred Indians, women and children as well as fighting men. Jironza found the Pueblo area in considerable disarray. Some of the Acoma people had joined other Keresan speakers at Laguna and were involved in a struggle with the remaining Acoma who had stayed at the parent town. The Hopi and Zuni were in a war with each other, and the Keres along with Jemez, Pecos, and Taos were in a struggle with the Tewa and Picurís. These accelerating hostilities had mainly come after the loss of power by Popé, which seems to have occurred sometime around 1683. In 1688 Popé was returned to a leadership position, but he died shortly thereafter. Tupatú again became head of the increasingly fragmented Pueblo world, just in time to take the brunt of Jironza's raid.
It seems likely that Jironza could have carried out the reconquest, but events were not on his side. Diego de Vargas had already been given a provisional appointment as governor as early as 1689, and another claimant, Toribio de la Huerta, who had powerful friends at the Spanish court, had also put in a bid. De la Huerta dangled in front of the Crown his supposed knowledge of mines, not only silver but in particular a mercury mine, somewhere in the Hopi area. Although Huerta did not get the governorship, his story of the mercury mine became important in Vargas's later planning for the reconquest. Jironza apparently was planning another entrada into the Pueblo country but a flare-up of Indians at La Junta in 1690 drew his attention away from the north. By that time, Vargas very much had the inside track.
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Chapter Fourteen
An Era Ends, An Era Begins
Diego José de Vargas Zapata Luján Ponce de León y Contreras was born in Madrid in November 1643. He was, in the words of a recent biographer, a member of the ''middling nobility," from an old family dating back to the eleventh century, with a long history of military service to the Castilian kings. The first Vargas to test his fortunes in the New World was Diego's father, Alonso de Vargas, who in 1650 served as alcalde mayor in Chiapa, at that time administratively attached to Guatemala. Alonso, whose young wife had died in 1649, married again in the Indies and started a second family. Alonso's own death came in Chiapa in August of 1665.
In 1664, Diego was wed to Beatríz Pimentel de Prado, from a well-connected neighboring family, and the young couple had five children over the next several years. But Diego did not have the necessary wealth or aristocratic connections to obtain a really prestigious office, and his lack of judicial training ruled out a judgeship. Like his father, he looked to the Indies and in 1673 sailed for Mexico. Diego served as alcalde mayor first in Oaxaca, then in the mining district northwest of Mexico City. A combination of administrative skills and favor from succeeding viceroys helped to advance Vargas's career. In June of 1688 he was appointed governor of New Mexico, though he did not actually take over the post in El Paso until early in 1691. During this period, crucial to Vargas's ambitions, he was considerably bolstered by the marriage of his daughter to an influential royal official andat about the same timethe arrival in Mexico of a new viceroy, Gaspar de la Cerda Sandoval Silva y Mendoza, the Conde de Galve, a former Madrid neighbor and family acquaintance. Galve remained in office until early 1696 and would support Vargas throughout his tenure as viceroy.
As discussed in chapter 13, there were two other contestants for the governorship. Toribio de la Huerta, a former New Mexican, probably never seriously had a chance, though his claim of a quicksilver mine in Hopi country did to some
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