Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

Tags: #History, #Native American, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Ethnic Studies, #Native American Studies, #test

Kachina and the Cross (12 page)

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the Tewa] and in the other above-mentioned provinces there must be, being conservative in my reckoning, sixty thousand Indians, with towns like ours and with houses built around rectangular plazas.'' Fray Alonso de Benavides in his 1630 Memorial was even more generous, counting more than 68,000 Pueblos, not to mention vast numbers of Apaches who ''form the largest tribe in the world."
What the population was at the time of Chamuscado and Espejo is unknown, but the population estimates of Espejo suggest that the Pueblo area was still flourishing as of the early 1580s. Whether there had been a drop in numbers is uncertain because of the considerable inflation of the Espejo figures. But if Spanish impact caused the population drop in the second half of the sixteenth century, much of that impact must have been due to the large Coronado expedition rather than the smaller ones of the 1580s and 1590s. Coronado's soldiers surely introduced some diseases, though perhaps not smallpox, which became such a killer in later decades. Probably, depopulation of the Pueblo area by Coronado's party was caused as much by war and the looting of food supplies as by disease.
The Chamuscado and Espejo expeditions were disruptive, but unless there was a introduction of epidemic disease for which we have no records, they likely did not significantly affect the demography of southwestern peoples. However, diseases may have crept northward from the interior of Mexico, brought by slavers or even by traders. Such diseases could have reached the Suma, Manso, and such southern Pueblos as the Piro before the Spanish entradas of the 1580s.
My own estimate for the Pueblo population of the Southwest in Coronado's time is around 60,000. In other parts of Spanish America, populations fell drastically when native peoples were first introduced to Euro-African disease. Although firm figures are lacking, I believe that this most likely happened in the Southwest. Here I will give a very tentative estimate of 50,000 Pueblo Indians at the end of the sixteenth century. This decline, as said above, was due partly to disease and partly to the economic disruptions of the Coronado and later expeditions.
Another factor could have been weather. Beginning about 1560 and lasting through the 1580s, there were a number of years with below-average rainfall. If climatic patterns from other parts of the Northern Hemisphere are any indication, the sixteenth-century Southwest likely had winters that increased in severity as the century wore on. It is not clear what effect, if any, these climatic hard times had on population. Certainly, this "Little Ice Age" changed a number of economic and social patterns in Europe.
In 1935, archaeologist Frederick W. Hodge compiled an astonishing list of pueblo names in the Oñate documents, more than 150 in all, even when duplicate names are taken into account. They were surely not all occupied towns; indeed, some may have been place-names rather than settlements. A certain confusion is
Page 53
also indicated by the Enrico Martínez map, apparently done at the direction of Viceroy Monterrey and included in the viceroy's letter to the king dated May 14, 1602. In this map, only 32 pueblos are numbered for the Rio Grande Valley, although some 56 pueblo markers are scattered on the map. Most of the numbered pueblos are named, though in one case some 11 or 12 pueblos are grouped under the heading
Pueblos del valle de Puará
, which probably represents those Tiguex towns on the east side of the Rio Grande. A separate Tiguex town, Santiago, is placed on the west bank. The large Mann-Zuris site in the Albuquerque area does not appear on this map, and this pueblo may well have been deserted by Oñate's time. A complete count of towns is probably impossible, although Torquemada's figure, published in 1615 but referring to the Oñate period, of 112 or more pueblos seems too high.
Oñate's count of pueblos in the Piro area and the archaeological evidence for such sites suggest about the same number of pueblos as listed by the Chamuscado and Espejo parties. The large pueblo of San Felipe, the southernmost of the Piro towns, was deserted by Oñate's time, but San Pascual, probably Senecú (since it became a mission station thirty years later), Qualacú, Pilabó, and Sevilleta were occupied, as were several others. Additional Piro archaeology will help clarify the occupation picture as of 1598.
What today we call the Tompirothose Piro-speaking pueblos across the Manzano Mountains and in the Salinas regionOñate referred to as Jumano. There were five towns including Quelotetrey (Gran Quivira), Cenobey or Genobey (perhaps Tenabó), and Pataotrey (perhaps Tabirá). Abó is listed separately as "Piro." The use of the term
Jumano
is especially interesting, for I have suggested that Jumano-Teya spoke a language similar to Tompiro. Certainly, there was extensive trade between the nomadic Jumano and the sedentary Tompiro.
For the Keres region, the Oñate documents list some eleven towns. Included are Guipui (Santo Domingo), Tzia (Zia), Cochiti, Acoma, Katishtya (San Felipe), and Tamaya (Santa Ana), all important towns of later times. By Benavides's day, in the 1620s, this number had fallen to eight, including the six listed above. For the Tano of the Galisteo Basin, and possibly in the Santa Fe River drainage, ten towns are listed. Some of these may have been temporary villages since a quarter of a century later Benavides mentions only five pueblos, probably San Marcos, San Lázaro, San Cristóbal, Ciénega, and Galisteo.
The Tewa towns included, of course, Okeh (San Juan) and Yungue in the lower Chama drainage; from the latter town, Oñate formed his first capital, San Gabriel del Yungue. Oñate lists a number of other towns including the pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara. It seems likely that the large towns upriver on the Chama and its tributariesTsamauinge, Pesedeuinge, Kuuinge, and Teeuinge
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had been deserted by Oñate's day, probably even by Coronado's day, and there had been a movement from the Chama Basin to the Rio Grande. Several of the upland towns south of the Chama and Rio Grande junction may have been occupied in Oñate's time.
As I said earlier, what may have happened between the time of Coronado and that of Oñate was that the Rio Grande area lost population but actually had a greater number of smaller pueblos. Acoma and the Pecos, Taos, and Picurís areas, however, continued to have their unitary pueblos as they did in Coronado's day. The Zuni towns, as in Coronado's time, enumerating roughly from southwest to northeast, included Hawikuh, Kechibawa, Kwa'kina, Halona (the modern Zuni), Matsakya, and K'iakima. The Spaniards talked of the "seven cities of Cíbola," but in all likelihood there were only six. By 1598 they were not all equally prosperous. Seven years after Oñate arrived, Father Escobar noted that while all the Zuni towns were occupied, "four of them [were] almost completely in ruins." The two flourishing towns were no doubt Halona and Hawikuh.
The Hopi town names in the Oñate documents are a bit confused, but in all likelihood they were the same as earlier in the century: Awatovi on Antelope Mesa, and Walpi, Mishongnovi, Shongopavi, and Oraibi at the edge of the three Hopi mesas. There is some possibility that two additional pueblosKawaika-a on Antelope Mesa, and Sikyatki on First Mesawere occupied in Coronado's time, as that expedition had also reported a magical seven pueblos. In any case, these latter towns were deserted by the time Oñate arrived in New Mexico.
The fact that the Pueblos had regular towns is indicated by the Spanish use of the word
pueblo
, which in Spanish simply means "town." These pueblos were grouped around rectangular courtyards, and often the house structures rose several stories above the courtyards. Sometimes the room blocks offered a blank wall to the outside, entryways being through the courtyard, the area in which many of the ceremonies and much of the everyday work was carried out. The kivas or ceremonial rooms were often (though not always) within the courtyards. The traditional building material of the Anasazi was squared-off sandstone laid in mud mortar, with the walls then being plastered over with fine clay. By A.D. 1150 or a little earlier, an alternate method of house building was spreading from southern New Mexico. This was the use of coursed adobe to form house walls. The idea of adobe buildings probably originated somewhere in the Casas Grandes world and became popular during the Golden Age of the Pueblos, though most pueblos continued to be built the old-fashioned way with stone and mud mortar.
The language distribution of the upper Southwest in Oñate's time was very similar to what it was in the Coronado period and for perhaps two or two and a half centuries before Coronado. The major linguistic movement, discussed
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above, was the spread of the Querechos southward and westward, something that would have considerable consequence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
One important group, living in the El Paso area, not only figured in the Oñate accounts but was probably contacted as early as Coronado. Here were the various settlements of Manso Indians who for the purposes of missionization were considered part of the New Mexico province throughout the seventeenth century. Oñate first contacted the Manso on May 4, 1598, when forty of them came to the Spanish camp opposite modern El Paso:
They had Turkish bows, long hair cut to resemble little Milan caps, headgear made to hold down the hair and colored with blood or paint. Their first words were
manxo, manxo, micos, micos,
by which they meant "peaceful ones" and "friends." They made the sign of the cross by raising their thumbs. They told us clearly by signs that the settlements were six days distant, or eight days along the road. They mark the day by the course of the sun; in these things they are like ourselves. We gave them many presents, and they helped us to transport the sheep across the river, which was forded on this day at the crossing which we named Los Puertos, because it is used by them to go inland. There is no other road for carts for many leagues.
By the time of Fray Alonso de Benavides, thirty years after Oñate, the term
Manso
had clearly become a Spanish-imposed tribal name. The word itself is an old Spanish term from the Latin
mansuetus
, meaning in both Latin and Spanish "tame" or "gentle." An alternate name, occasionally used, was
Gorretas
, meaning small caps, and referred to the peculiar style of haircut mentioned by Oñate. Since the Indians actually used the term
manso
in speaking to Oñate, it suggests a certain amount of previous contact with the Spaniards, and indeed the Manso were on the main trail taken previously by Chamuscado, Espejo, Morlete, and Leyva. I doubt if the Indians meant
manso
as a group name at this early date; they probably were only indicating their friendliness or neutrality. Luxán, with the Espejo party in 1582, referred to the group as
Tanpachoas
, a name of uncertain origins. Castafieda in the Coronado expedition probably was talking about the Manso when he referred to the downriver pueblos where the river turned to the east.
The evidence for Manso language is very scanty; only a handful of possibly Manso words have survived. There are, currently, two different theories as to the Manso language. One states that the Manso were closely related, perhaps identical, to the Jano and Jocome, who lived off to the west in and around the New Mexico bootheel, and that all three groups spoke one of the languages of the Taracahitan branch of Uto-Aztecan. Another theory holds that the Manso, along

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