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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 236
Diego de Vargas Zapata Luján Ponce de León 
(courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 11409)

 

Page 237
degree dictate the policy of the early reconquest. Governor Domingo Jironza, who was serving his second term as governor, was another matter. He pressed the Spanish government for a reappointment, and his successful attack on Zia in 1689 had given him a certain credence in the mind of royal officials. But in the end, Vargas was confirmed in his appointment. The new governor arrived in El Paso, taking office on February 22, 1691.
Vargas found the exiled colony in considerable disarray. Jironza in 1690 had been forced to march against the Patarabueye Indians of the La Junta area and had further exhausted his very scanty forces and supplies. On his arrival in El Paso, Vargas made an inventory for the viceroy. In El Paso and the other settlements in the Rio Grande Valley there were perhaps a hundred male Spanish citizens capable of bearing arms, with a total population of some four or five hundredan indication of the gradual loss of Spaniards over the past decade or so. There were less than a thousand resettled Pueblo Indians. Supplies were in very short supply: a total of three hundred horses and mules, no cattle, and only about six hundred sheep, mostly in mission hands. Food was also lacking: for example, wheat flour had to be imported from Nueva Vizcaya. The presidio at El Paso was very short on arms of any sort, as were the civilians.
Vargas asked for additional muskets and other supplies from the viceroy. It seems likely that he had originally planned to march north in 1691, but troubles closer to El Paso kept him there for a time. He was requested to help Governor Juan Isidro de Pardifias of Nueva Vizcaya in the west, and there were also problems with the Suma and Apache. In exchange for his services to Nueva Vizcaya, Vargas asked Pardifias to supply him with fifty soldiers, which Vargas offered to help feed and arm. Governor Vargas was determined to push on with his first entry into rebel New Mexico, and with a fine sense of history, he proclaimed the expedition on August 10, 1692, the twelfth anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt. A week later, Vargas left El Paso on the road northward, with Captain Roque Madrid and the fifty soldiers from the El Paso presidio, plus ten armed citizens and a hundred Pueblo Indian auxiliaries. The fifty soldiers expected from Parral had not yet arrived, so Vargas left orders that they were to follow him northward. With Vargas were three Franciscans: Miguel Muñiz, Francisco Corvera, and Cristóbal Alonso Barroso.
This was an incredibly small group to conquer Pueblo Indians who could call on thousands of warriors, but it seems very clear that Vargas had a great deal of information about the weaknesses of the Pueblo position. Spanish expeditions and individual Indians had been going back and forth from the El Paso area to the Pueblo region for the past twelve years. The most recent Spanish expedition, that of Jironza in 1689, had given the Spaniards considerable up-to-date news.
Page 238
The previously mentioned deserter from the Pueblo cause, Keresan war captain Bartolomé de Ojeda, who had ties with Zia and Santa Ana, provided detailed information to the Spaniards concerning the situation in the north.
With Bartolomé de Ojeda in camp, Vargas no doubt quickly opened negotiations with other Pueblo leaders. A number of them joined the Spaniards, including Luis Tupatú, ''El Picuri," formerly the overall leader of the Pueblos; members of the Ye family of Pecos; and Cristóbal Yope of San Lázaro in the Tano country. On the other hand, Luis Cuniju, the Jemez leader, seems to have remained constant to the Pueblo cause and would be a factor in the 1696 rebellion. Francisco Pacheco of Taos offered fealty to the Spaniards under pressure but reverted to the Indian cause. Lucas Naranjo, the mulatto leader of Santa Clara, temporized for a time but was on the Pueblo side in 1696. Antonio Bolsas, the Tano leader, also remained faithful to the rebellion and was executed by Vargas in late 1693.
Why did a significant percentage of the great captains of the Pueblo world join the Spaniards? I have discussed this matter in previous chapters, but it will bear repetition here because winning over the war leaders of the Pueblos was crucial to the reconquest. One reason probably was thatwith conditions worseningthe war leaders may have seen their own best interests served by allying with the Spaniards and receiving, from Spanish hands, power in their own communities. Certainly a number of them thrived under newly established Spanish control. This is a bit reminiscent of the "conservatives" versus "progressives" struggle in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century pueblos, in which the Bureau of Indian Affairs tended to take the side of the progressive or anti-traditionalist faction. The late-seventeenth-century war captains in any pueblo could certainly depend on Spanish support against the native religious power elite. They were also honored in certain specific ways. Vargas, for example, consistently referred to his new allies as "Don," the Spanish title of respect.
Another reason that Pueblo leaders joined the Spaniards is that a number of these men had kinship ties with them and their black and mestizo compatriots. Family ties crosscut ethnic loyalties in certain cases. There were probably also the ties of
compadrazgo
, the godfather/godchild relationship. Vargas used this freely, linking various Pueblo war captains to him by becoming godfather to their children. One suspects that this pseudo-familial relationship had been practiced since Oñate's time, though the loss of church records in the revolt period makes it impossible to be sure of the extent.
Religion may also have been a factor. All the war leaders had grown up in missionized pueblos, and at least Bartolomé de Ojeda seems to have been a believing Christian in the Spanish sense of the word. It could have been operative in other
Page 239
individual situations. A more likely case is that the various native military leaders saw in the events of the past decade an indication that the Christian deity was more powerful than their own gods and therefore worth propitiating.
It seems reasonably clear that Diego de Vargas had at least the beginnings of an "arrangement" with some of the war captains before he started for Pueblo country. His march upriver was swift, and on September 9, 1692, he had reached the ruined Mejía hacienda, roughly at the site of modern Albuquerque. The fifty-man Parral reinforcement had not caught up with the governor's party, and Vargas decided that speed and stealth were the order of the day. Leaving fourteen men with one of his captains, Rafael Téllez Girón, to guard and rest the horse herd and the oxen, Vargas moved quickly on. Téllez Girón was ordered to take an additional ten men from the reinforcement party and send the other forty to augment the governor's rather scanty forces.
Vargas then marched on to Cochiti, which he reached on September 11. The pueblo was abandoned, so Vargas backtracked to Santo Domingo, which he also found abandoned, as was San Felipe. Vargas then followed the Camino Real northeastward to Santa Fe, arriving on the morning of September 13. The governor, finding that the Indians had fashioned the Spanish buildings, the "casas reales," into a fortified pueblo, erected his military camp in the nearby fields, "within sight of the fortress, about a musket shot away." He began a complex series of negotiations both with the Indians who held Santa Fe and deputations from other pueblos in the vicinity. And then, on September 16, Luis Tupatú, "El Picuri,'' overall war leader of the central group of Rio Grande Pueblos, arrived to see the Spanish commander. Vargas greeted the Picurís war leader and his followers cordially, and the entire group was given absolution by the friars for their apostasy. Vargas had every reason to be cordial. It was a great breakthrough for the governor, perhaps the single most important event of this first expedition of the reconquest. The following day, Don Lorenzo, brother of El Picuri and current governor of Picurís, made obeisance to the Spaniards.
Through the good offices of Tupatú, Vargas made a series of contacts with the Tewa and Northern Tiwa pueblos. On September 21, with Tupatú and Lorenzo, Domingo, a Tewa captain, and various Indians from other pueblos, Vargas set off for Pecos. Arriving there on September 23, having meanwhile met up with the Parral reinforcements, Vargas found the pueblo deserted. Over the next several days he cajoled a few members of the pueblo to return to their home, and he collected some captives from there including the son of Cristóbal de Anaya and the Spanish-speaking Jumano woman mentioned in chapter 13. Meanwhile, Vargas sent out a Keres Indian messenger to try to contact the Santa Ana and Zia people, living in the high country behind their pueblos.
Page 240
Returning to Santa Fe on September 29, Vargas pushed on to Tesuque, where with Domingo's help he assembled the people and had the Franciscans absolve them. In the next few days, Vargas, the missionaries, and the Spanish soldiers moved through various of the Tewa towns, the friars absolving and baptizing. He then traveled to the Tano towns, where the process was repeated. Vargas reached Picurís on October 5, and three days later was in Taos, where the native governor, Francisco Pacheco, swore allegiance, and general absolution was given by the Franciscans.
The latter part of October was given over to visits to the Keres pueblos and to the Towa of Jemez. At the latter area Vargas seems to have been in some danger of attack but managed to pull off a reconciliation. Captain Roque Madrid must have been useful in these campaigns for he spoke Keresan, probably an Eastern Keres dialect. Meanwhile, on October 16, Vargas had appointed Luis Tupatú to be governor of the thirteen pueblos of the Tano and Tewa, Taos, Picurís, and Santa Fe, extracting an oath of allegiance and formally investing Luis with a cane of office.
The governor then planned to visit the western pueblos of Zuni and Hopi. He was especially eager to do this not only to secure the Spanish western flank but also to investigate the various rumors of wealth in that region. According to various tales circulating in El Paso on the eve of the reconquest, there were rich silver mines in Hopi country where both the Zuni and Hopi Indians were involved in mining operations. Even more important was the story of Captain Huerta, mentioned above, of a cinnabar, or mercury, mine in Hopi land. Having found no silver in eighty years of occupying the Hopi area, the Spaniards might have been somewhat skeptical of supposed silver mines. The report on cinnabar, however, was new, and given the great demand for mercury for processing and reducing the silver from the Nueva Vizcaya mines, this was an exciting potential prize.
Vargas had already contacted Hopi individuals whom he found in the Keresan area.
That is, in the entry which I made into the pueblo of the Keres tribe of Sia, Santa Ana, and Santo Domingo, which I subdued, reduced, and conquered on the mesas of the Cerro Colorado, their captain being Antonio Malacate, in the entry and ascent to the said mesa three indians came out to receive me, two of whom are from this province of Moqui, the eldest named Pedro, the second Sebastián, and the third a coyote named Ventura, an intelligent Indian native of the pueblo of Alona and the province of Zuñi. . . . Having seen the said entry into the pueblo of the said Keres tribe, and, on the following day, the entry which I made to the mesas of the hill and canyon of the Jémez tribe, that afternoon all three Indians accompanied me.
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