Kachina and the Cross (7 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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area for exchanging shell, coral, turquoise, pottery, maize, and beans for bison products, bois d'arc (Osage orange wood) used for bow making, and the translucent schist fibrolite for axes. Additional trade routes may have run from eastern coastal Mexico, the Huasteca, though these have yet to be worked out. In that regard, it might be pointed out that the nearest source of the scarlet macaw, the most desired of all the bright feathered birds, is the lower Huasteca.
Other peoples were interacting with the Pueblo world during this golden age. The
Querechos
, met by Coronado in the sixteenth century in what is now northeast New Mexico and the upper Texas Panhandle, were Apachean-speaking groups who had probably moved into those regions sometime around A.D. 1300. They traded with the Pueblo world but also raided when feasible. A bit farther south were the
Teya,
on the Llano Estacado, who were also in a trade-raid relationship with the eastern Pueblos for at least a century before Coronado. These Indians seem to have spoken a language related to that of the Tompiro, a group of Tanoan-speaking Pueblos out in the area of salt lakes east of the Manzano Mountains. The relationships of the Querechos and Teyas with both Pueblo Indians and Spaniards lasted throughout the seventeenth century.
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Chapter Three
A Clash of Cultures
By the early sixteenth century the population of the Pueblo world was something on the order of sixty thousand Indians. Of those, some ten thousand to twelve thousand lived in the western pueblos of Cibola and Hopi, probably a total of twelve towns. These Native Americans were distributed in four major linguistic groups. The furthest west, the Hopi of present-day northeastern Arizona, were and are Shoshonean-speaking, their language related to other Shoshonean groups in the Basin and Plateau regions of western America: the Utes, Paiutes, and Comanches. They are related at a more distant level to the Tepimans (Pima, Papago, and Tepehuan), the Taracahitans (Tarahumar, Opata, Yaqui, and Mayo among others) and even more distantly to such people as the Aztecs of Mexico. The large language family to which all these groups belong is called
Uto-Aztecan
. On an even wider level, according to the recent language classification of Joseph Greenberg, the Hopi belong to the Central branch of the great Amerind stock of languages.
In chapter 2, I mentioned that the Zuni spoke a language of the Penutian family. Greenberg considers Penutian to be part of the Northern branch of Amerind. Another language group, also originally considered an isolate, is that of Keresan, spoken in the sixteenth century by Acoma Pueblos on the San José River, a tributary of the Puerco, and by Zia and other Pueblos on the Jemez River. A second branch of Keresan was and is utilized by Pueblos along the main Rio Grande, including Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, and Cochiti. Greenberg believes that Keresan is related to Iroquoian, Siouan, Yuchi, and Caddoan in a Keresiouan stock and, like Zuni, a part of the Northern branch of Amerind.
The Tanoan speakers were contained in several branches in the sixteenth century. In the north were the Northern Tiwa speakers of Taos and Picurís. Along the Chama River, the main Rio Grande south of the Chama mouth, the mountain fringe in the Santa Fe River basin, and to the south in the upper waters of
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Galisteo Wash were speakers of Tewa-Tano. To the south was the great Southern Tiwa-speaking province of Tiguex, on the main Rio Grande from about the junction of the Jemez River south to around Abó Wash, roughly the line of modern U.S. Highway 60. Tiguex was flanked by Towa-speaking Jemez and Pecos. To the south and east were speakers of Piro, a Tanoan language probably most related to Tiwa. Piro speakers extended in a line of villages down the Rio Grande south of Tiguex to about Milligan's Gulch near modern San Marcial. South of them were villages of the Manso, descendants of the Jornada Mogollon, whose language affiliation is uncertain but was perhaps Tanoan.
The Tompiro, whose language was a dialect of Piro, lived in the region east of the Manzano Mountains, today called the Salinas country. To the north of them, along the eastern slopes of the Sandia Mountains, were villages of Southern Tiwa, related tobut apparently not part ofthe polity of Tiguex. The Tanoan and their linguistic kinsmen, the Kiowa, were distantly linked to Uto-Aztecan and were also members of Central Amerind.
The Querechos and Teya, mentioned in chapter 2, were both nomadic groups with rather complex relationships with the Pueblos. The Querechos were probably ancestral to all the later eastern and western Apaches as well as Navajo, but in the sixteenth century these may not have been totally differentiated. The Teya, who later in the sixteenth century were called the Jumano, seem to have been closely related linguistically to the Tompiro and had a series of trading relationships with them. Teya Indians also had trading interaction with the Patarabueye at La Junta and with the Suma and Manso who lived along the Rio Grande, upstream from the mouth of the Conchos River.
Informationat least significant informationabout the Spaniards probably did not reach the Pueblo world until after the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish captain Hernán Cortés in 1521. This conqueror moved quickly to consolidate his control over central Mexico, reaching the west coast of Colima by 1522. Two years later one of his captains pushed northward from Colima to what is now southern Sinaloa. In 1530 another Spaniard, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, began an expansion along that coast, reaching as far north as Culiacán in central Sinaloa. Guzmán was partly motivated by stories he had heard of a gold-rich area to the north. One of his kinsmen, Diego de Guzmán, raided northward to the lower Yaqui River in 1533 searching for slaves.
By that time, news of the Spaniards was trickling up the trade routes and had probably reached the Pueblo area, though likely in a somewhat garbled form. That the Spaniards were powerful was obvious; that they were also vulnerable became known in 1532. In that year a ship sent northward by Cortés to explore the west coast of Mexico was wrecked, probably somewhere around the mouth
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Peoples of the Southwest and High Plains found by early Spanish explorers
of the Sinaloa River. The crew reached the Fuerte River region, where they were killed by local Indians. Iron and other objects from the ship quickly entered the trade network and were spreading north and south when Guzmán arrived the following year.
A more dramatic series of contacts came in the years 1535-36 with the Cabeza de Vaca party. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was treasurer in the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. This brutal and wildly incompetent commander had been sent to explore and conquer Florida, a vaguely known area that included the modern state and much territory beyond. Leaving Havana in 1528, Narváez floundered around northern Florida, committing a number of atrocities but finding little treasure. After sending his supporting ships back to the Cuban home base, he and his party built boats crafted from the skins of the expedition horses and coasted along the shore, hoping to reach the Spanish settlement of
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Pánuco. The misadvised and misdirected expedition actually reached a point west of the Mississippi Delta before a storm blew Narváez away, leaving his men strewn dead or barely alive along the Louisiana-Texas coast.
The hundred or so survivors gradually dwindled from hardships, hunger, and Indian hostility until eventually only four remained: Cabeza de Vaca himself; two other Spaniards, Andrés de Dorantes and Alonso de Castillo Maldonado; and a black slave, Esteban, belonging to Dorantes. Of the four, Cabeza de Vaca was the clear leader and Esteban the most skilled traveler. Esteban was adept at languages and became the interpreter and general contact man for the group.
In 1535, these four men were in a region that sounds very much like La Junta de los Rios, where the Rio Grande and Conchos Rivers meet. There they encountered an agricultural people and also a group that hunted bison. The latter, who were in all probability the Teya, told them of people farther upstream, most likely the Rio Grande Pueblos: "They informed us also that, all the way while we traveled upriver, we should pass among a people who were their enemies but who spoke their tongue and, though they had nothing to give us to eat, would receive us with the best of good will and present us with mantles of cotton, hides, and other articles of their wealth. However, they advised against going by this road."
If Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were, in fact, among the Teya, it seems that the people "who spoke their tongue" were Piro or possibly Manso. The Spaniards recorded some ethnographic information about their hosts, including a succinct account of stone-boiling, a technique used on the western Plains.
Uncertain of what was best to do and of which trail to take we remained for two days with those Indians [at La Junta de los Rios] who give us beans and squash to eat. Their method of cooking is so new that for its very strangeness I want to describe it. Thus it may be seen how curious and various are the uses and ingenuity of human beings. Those people have never obtained pottery, so in order to cook what they want to eat, the, fill half a large calabash with water and toss on the fire many stones of a convenient type to absorb the heat. When the stones are hot they take them up with wooden tongs and drop them into the calabash until the water boils from the heat carried by the stones. Then they put in whatever they want cooked and continue taking out cooled stones and throwing in hot ones until it is cooked. In this way they boil their food.
Finally the Cabeza de Vaca party decided to push on westward, though their actual route is a matter of much disagreement. One scenario has the four men following the Rio Grande in a northwestern direction into the Mesilla Valley and then cutting westward across what is now southern New Mexico and
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Arizona, finally going south to reach the Sonora River valley. Another possibility is that they traversed the desert westward, crossing the Carmén, Santa Maria, and Casas Grandes Rivers before finally reaching the Sierra Madre Occidental, perhaps in the Janos region. This route would in all probability have followed an ancient trade route running from Casas Grandes, but one likely deserted for a century. Proponents of this route are divided on whether the party went up the Rio Grande for a time and then swung off westward or whether they left the Rio Grande at La Junta.
One way Cabeza de Vaca clearly did not go: "Two days being spent [at La Junta de los Rios] while we waited we decided to go in search of the corn. We did not want to continue along the trail leading to the bison for it was to the north and would lead us in a great loop since we were sure that going toward the sunset we would find what we desired." This "trail leading to the bison" (Camino de las Vacas) was the major trail used by Teya going from La Junta by way of Toyah Creek to the Pecos River, and then up the Pecos to the eastern Llano Estacado, where they lived, and the Tompiro Pueblos, where they traded and may also have resided part-time. Coronado, six years later, found the Teya in the Llano Estacado and heard stories about Cabeza de Vaca. In the 1580s, Espejo was to utilize Jumano (Teya) guides to travel over the Camino de las Vacas going south. In the sixteenth century Spanish lexicon, the term
vaca
[cow] was also used for bison.
Whatever the route, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions arrived in the region of the Sonora River, near the Ures Gorge, in the spring of 1536. There they were welcomed at a town they called Corazones (Hearts), the natives presenting them with six hundred dried deer hearts. This seems a rather curious offering, but the deer was and is a sacred animal throughout northern Mesoamerica and the Southwest. The real name of the settlement is unknown.
The little Spanish party also found evidence of a flourishing trade with peoples to the north who lived in large apartment-like houses several stories high and who traded turquoise and other semiprecious stones for bright-colored feathers of macaws and parrots. Cabeza de Vaca was on a major trade route running from western coastal Mexico to the Pueblo Southwest. He was in the region of the Sonoran statelets: small polities, each consisting of a primate town and associated villages along given stretches of the Sonora and Yaqui Rivers and some of their tributaries. The statelets were relatively sophisticated entities, organized especially for trade and warfare. They seemed to have welcomed Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, perhaps considering them traders who had lost their way or their goods. Although the inhabitants of most of the statelets spoke dialects of the Opata language, Corazones seems to have been a Pima-speaking area. Going farther south, Cabeza de Vaca was guided by Pima speakers, and a number of them

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