Lone Star (5 page)

The Spanish conquest of the New World began in the islands of the Caribbean discovered by Columbus. Here also began the Spanish colonization policy based on the
encomienda
. This was a grant of land, usually huge, to the Spanish conqueror who defeated the American Indian inhabitants and created a
tierra paz
, "pacified country." The grant included all the inhabitants as well as the land; they were to work for the
encomendero
and provide him with revenues, a part of which went to the Spanish Crown. The system was an obvious extension of the social organization of feudal Spain, incorporating the far older Mediterranean concepts of latifundia, modernized by the newly powerful, centralized authority of the Crown. Because, from the first, Spanish exploration and colonization were both subsidized and rigidly controlled by the Crown, colonization became one of conquest, never settlement, which was always expected to return a profit to the central authority, and which was jealously guarded.

The islands of Cuba and Santo Domingo were conquered and enclosed in encomiendas, but immediate problems developed with the conquered Indians, who were supposed to work the land in the style of European peasants. The Circum-Caribbean tribes died rapidly under such treatment, both from Spanish barbarity and their own cultural inability to adjust to such a form of serfdom. The Spanish discovery of Mexico was the result not of a search for gold but of a hunt for new Amerind slaves.

While the economic needs of the island encomiendas were eventually filled by the importation of African slaves, the discovery and conquest of the Valley of Mexico turned the Spanish toward a new preoccupation: the hunt for gold. Vast quantities of gold were found in Tenochtitlán, the city of the Aztecs. This, however, was the accumulation of centuries; Cortés and others were disappointed to find that Mexico did not possess extensive gold deposits. But the chagrin was soon ameliorated by the discovery of virtually inexhaustible silver lodes, at Potosí and elsewhere. A stream of metal eventually amounting to billions of dollars was begun to Europe. Shortly afterward, Pizarro entered the Inca empire of Peru, and found a real storehouse of virgin gold, and the search was on again.

Thousands of Spaniards, eager for fame and fortune, accumulated in the New World. Spreading out from the central valley of Mexico, Spaniards quickly reduced the agricultural civilizations of the Middle American plateaus. The reduction was characterized by brutalities that with the passage of time historians tend to ignore, but in the end it was complete, and final. All traces of the higher Amerind culture were destroyed, though millions of Mexican Indians continued to live on in various stages of Spanish servitude. The efforts of genuine Spanish humanitarians, such as the gentle Bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, to improve the harsh treatment of Indian serfs failed, and could not help but fail, in the face of Spanish nature and the
de facto
, if not always admitted, needs of the Crown. Both Charles V and his son, Philip II of Spain, were increasingly desperate for money to finance their enormous European wars.

It was not really possible to bring crippling pressures against the
encomenderos
, who operated mines and plantations with the sword and lash but who also fed millions of silver pesos into the treasury of the Crown. The Indians would not have performed these services without the severest repression, and Spaniards of the 16th century were enormously successful at adjusting humanitarian theory to economic reality. Nor was the policy without its genuine rationale, a rationale that kept the Spanish then and later from any sort of trauma.

All the Spanish conquistadores were marked in unusual degree by four dominant characteristics. They were ferociously courageous and audacious; they were the most successful explorers the world had ever seen. They were rapacious for fame and gold—but not, curiously, avaricious, because they seldom held what they seized but spent gold prodigally. They were utterly racist in an unconscious way, never doubting Spanish superiority, not even bothering to theorize it—but making the practice of their superiority nonetheless terrible to the victims. Finally, as a heritage of the Moorish wars, the Spanish were filled with the juices of religious crusade, the most hideous of all human conflicts. The bigotry that fueled the Counter-Reformation and applauded the Inquisition was frequently turned against French or Italian Roman Catholics—something not always understood; it was not a purely Catholic, but a remarkably Iberian, phenomenon that differentiated the Spanish Church from every church in Europe. The Moors left something behind in Spain besides the Alhambra and the Afro-Asian mustang: an unconscious cultural impulse toward expounding religious faith with the sword. To the Spaniard, intellectualism was for German monks; rationalism for cowardly Italians. The Spanish were not unique, or even peculiarly detestable, though a long line of Anglo-Saxon chroniclers have tried to make them so. Every age has a people or a culture that believes the shortest distance between dreams and goals is a bomb, a bullet, a gas oven, or a keen Toledo sword and burning stake.

Because the Spanish faith was real, and America had two continents filled with heathen, even the Spaniard who came for lands, riches, or to raise his station in life arrived with a ready, and unshakable rationale for conquest. It gave him a sort of moral superiority that not only dominated the battlefields of Europe for more than a century but lasted and stood the test of time. Destroyed empires and millions of dead Amerinds never haunted the Spanish conscience, because even the enemies of the Spanish were willing to give crimes against humanity committed with an ideological basis higher status than those done with no such excuse.

A superior culture—superior in the realities of organization and power—always has attempted, and always will attempt, domination of other cultures upon which it impinges. The means can be in question; the practice, never. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan de Zumárraga, who blenched at the documented atrocities done to
Indios
, never questioned the propriety of the conquest itself, or the inherent value of the advance of European civilization. They would have preferred that it be carried out in gentler ways.

Conquerors who question themselves or their values soon cease to be conquerors, whatever else they become. When Vásquez de Coronado, for example, who was known among the conquistadores as something of a legalist, asked his chaplain about the ethicality of impressing several Indian girls into his wife's service, he was told that while the captives were not technically subject to the Crown or laws of Spain, but free agents, if they were allowed to go free they would remain heathen and unquestionably burn in hell forever. However, under Doña Beatriz, the girls would learn both European civilized values and adopt the true faith, ensuring their eventual entry into Paradise. The real crime would not be in enslaving them, but in letting them go free. Coronado was satisfied; the girls were kept in bondage, and passed from recorded history.

Those who regarded this Spanish attitude as magnificent sophistry, however, had to face the fact that the Spanish were fully prepared to back it up with hot blood and cold steel, to the ends of the earth. Not only the Aztec and Inca states but the kingdoms of Europe quailed when the Spanish tercios of massed infantry received the
¡Adelante!
(Forward!), and the cavaliers of Salamanca kissed the cross-hilts of their swords and shouted the
¡Sant'Iago!
calling upon the patron saint of Spain. To the world of the 16th century, the phrase "fought like Spaniards" meant "fought like devils," and was the fighting man's supreme compliment.

Besides ferocity, battle skills, and an ultimate sense of moral superiority, the Spanish invaders were equipped to invade America in other ways. Accustomed to an arid homeland (most of the true conquistadores came from Salamanca), which was essentially a high plain devoid of timber and lacking large rivers, the Spanish found the mountains, deserts, and high plains of Middle America different only in degree. They left no record, as other Europeans did, of finding the Southwest particularly unlovely or forbidding; it was a land in which they could feel at home. More important, they were mounted, and rode the Spanish mustang, not the heavier, grain-fed northern European horse.
Caballero
and gentleman were the same word in Spanish, as in no other European language. Spaniards were horsemen, and they had a horse that could live in the new land.

The Spanish horse was a relict of the Moorish occupation. It had a strong dash of Arabian blood, crossed with North African barb; it was desert-bred and hardy. It could feed entirely off grass, and live from waterhole to waterhole.

It could carry the Spanish armor across the plains and high mesas, thus giving the invaders mobility and military advantage. In a pinch, the mustang could, and did, serve as food. Mounted on Spanish mustangs, armored, and armed with Toledo steel, a Spanish
entrada
could cut through any American Indian "nation" that lived.

Two events called forth the Coronado expedition of 1540. Spanish conquest and pacification of Mexico had reached nowhere near the Rio Grande, but New Spain was filled with adventurers eager to find new kingdoms in America. After all, Cortés had found Mexico, and Pizarro Peru. No one believed the possibility of conquerable empires was exhausted. Further, the Crown was insatiable in its demands for specie, which poured through Madrid without lasting benefit, to enrich the Flemish and German bankers who financed Spanish wars. The viceregal government of New Spain not only believed in the existence of more golden cities, but was prepared to implement the belief. When Álvar Núñez (who preferred to use his matronimic of Cabeza de Vaca, because it denoted higher social rank) returned to Mexico from his shipwreck on the Texas coast, after six years of wanderings among the Amerind tribes, he brought rumors of great cities in the north and west, and he reported to the Viceroy, Mendoza, that he had seen "signs of gold, antimony, and iron." Cabeza de Vaca had not actually seen gold or silver, and he had in fact suffered incredible hardships in captivity among the Karankawas and Coahuiltecans, who had not yet learned the expediency of killing a white man on sight. The "cities" the Texas Indians had told him about were the terraced cliff dwellings of the Puebloan culture of New Mexico. But the Spaniards, with the fresh evidence of Tenochtitlán and Cuzco, were easily led astray.

Mendoza sent a priest from Nice on the French-Italian coast, Fray Marcos, to investigate Cabeza de Vaca's rumors. His report was the second event that assured the Coronado invasion. Marcos had had vast experience in the New World: he had been on Santo Domingo during the final extermination of the natives, accompanied the brave Alvarado on his sweep through Guatemala, and claimed to have been with Pizarro in Peru. He was considered an old hand, who could recognize gold when he saw it, and he was ordered to scout the northern country with a Negro slave who had returned with Núñez.

Fray Marcos de Niza traveled an incredible distance, through modern Arizona and New Mexico, then fortunately relatively devoid of Apaches. Eventually he came to a city, which he scouted from a great distance. On his return, he informed Mendoza of a "land rich in gold, silver, and other wealth . . . great cities . . . and civilized people wearing woolen clothes." He had seen the wealthy city of Cíbola rising out of the desert, with walls and gates, surrounded by domestic animals whose names he did not know. Cíbola was larger than Tenochtitlán—which, before the Spanish swords and smallpox epidemics, had contained 300,000 Amerind souls.

Marcos did not claim to have entered Cíbola or any of the other six cities of that fabulous land. But before retiring he had piled a cairn of stones on a hill overlooking the Cíbola plain, and on the rocks erected a small Cross, taking "possession" of Cíbola and "the kingdoms that lay beyond it" in the name of God, King Charles V, and the Viceroy, Mendoza. No one in New Spain questioned the validity of that title, and Mendoza himself was enthralled.

From his own purse, Mendoza put up the equivalent of two million dollars to finance an expedition to claim these northern kingdoms. The choice of commanding it—there were many claimants—fell on Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, thirty years of age, already distinguished in rounding up
Indio
slaves and pacifying areas of Mexico, and more to the point, wealthy enough through his wife's inheritance to raise 50,000
excelentes
to defray the costs. Thus Coronado and Mendoza, between them, invested almost four million modern dollars in this quest for gold. Coronado also seemed a reasonable choice in other ways. Not a great combat leader, he was still high-minded, and with a strict legalistic sense. As Governor of the Mexican province of Nueva Galicia, he had been an enormous improvement over the conquistador human beast, Núño de Guzmán, who once nailed a man to a post by his tongue, for insolence.

With an army of 321 Spaniards, five Portuguese, two Frenchmen, two Italians, a German, and one Scot, several hundred tamed Indians, several women, and some religious (the Spanish term for assorted clergy) including Fray Marcos of Nice, Coronado moved north. After five months of marching through the
despoblada
, hot, dirty, and hungry, on July 7, 1540, the army arrived on the upper Rio Grande, outside the city Fray Marcos had claimed was Cíbola.

Cíbola proved to be a sun-bleached rock pueblo of Zuñi Indians, containing perhaps two hundred dwellings all told. In front of this village, several hundred Zuñi warriors were disposed warily for peace or war.

The army's notary, Bermejo, rode forward in armor to read a proclamation to the astonished Puebloans. They were decreed subjects of his Spanish Majesty beyond the sea, and further informed that they were now under the King's protection, with nothing to fear. Here, for the first time, a ceremony was enacted on North American soil that was to have many counterparts over the years.