Chapter 3

The sermon alluded to is the earliest print, so far as known, concerning the great Indian uprising of 1680. Next in date comes a publication touching the various attempts made by the Spaniards to reconquer New Mexico prior to 1693. In that year Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora published in the City of Mexico a kind of irregular newspaper bearing the title _El Mercurio Volante_, in which appears a concise and tolerably reliable sketch of the insurrection and the various attempts to reconquer the territory, including the successful one in 1692 by Diego de Vargas. Sigüenza is brief, but reasonably accurate. Part of the documents concerning the Indian uprising were published in the nineteenth century in the Third Series of the _Colección de Documentos para la Historia de Mexico_, but no complete print of the voluminous papers concerning those events has yet appeared, and indeed the most important documents still remain in manuscript. In 1701 Villagutierre y Sotomayor published his voluminous _Historia de la Conquistay Reducciones de los Itzaes y Lacandones en la America Septentrional_, in which appears a brief description of the Indian uprising in New Mexico. His data are of course gathered at second hand, although from contemporary sources.

I know of no other publications concerning the Indian uprising, so often mentioned, between the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. The manuscript material, which has been much scattered, may be divided locally into three groups. The one, originally at Santa Fé, New Mexico, is now in the Library of Congress at Washington; it had been much neglected, hence for the greater part seriously reduced, in former times, but it still contains most valuable information on the condition of the Rio Grande Pueblos immediately after the uprising and during the time the Pueblos were left to themselves, attempting to return to their primitive condition. This information, embodied in interrogatories of Indians subsequent to 1680, I made the subject of a closing chapter to my _Documentary History of the Zuñi Tribe_, but it was withheld from publication for some cause unknown to me. The military reports on the expeditions of Diego de Vargas and the final reconquest of New Mexico are reduced to disconnected but still bulky fragments. Almost unique of their kind are the so-called "Pueblo grants" emanating from Governor Domingo Gironza Petros de Cruzate in 1688. The term "grant" is a misnomer, since it refers in fact to a limitation to the innate tendency of the Indians to arbitrarily expand their tribal range. These documents have become the legal basis of landholding by the Pueblos and the first step toward eventual single tenure.

The second group of manuscripts, in the national archives in the City of Mexico, is more complete than the first. It contains information on the beginnings of the rebellion and on later events that are of great importance.

The third group, and by far the most complete, is in Spain, but in regard to it I am unable to give any precise information, since every opportunity of completing my investigations concerning the Southwest by studying the Spanish archives, notwithstanding repeated promises, has been withheld.

For the eighteenth century documentary materials pertaining to New Mexico remain, it may be said, almost exclusively in manuscript. A connecting link between the printed sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the _Apuntamientos que sobre el Terreno hizo el Padre José Amando Niel_, in the early part of the eighteenth century, published in the Third Series of the _Documentos para la Historia de Mexico_. Father Niel was a Jesuit who visited New Mexico shortly after the reconquest. His observations are of comparatively mediocre value, yet his writings should not be overlooked. The journal of the Brigadier Pedro de Rivera, in 1736, of his military march to Santa Fé, is a dry, matter-of-fact account, but is nevertheless valuable owing to his concise and utterly unembellished description of the Rio Grande valley and of what he saw therein. The book is very rare, and therefore correspondingly unnoticed.

A brief but important contribution to the history of New Mexico is the letter of Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante, published in the Third Series of the _Documentos para la Historia de Mexico_. About the same time, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Brigadier José Cortés wrote an extended report on the territory, but it concerns more the relations with the constantly hostile roaming tribes than the condition of the Pueblos. It also is printed in the _Documentos_.

The otherwise very important diary of the journey of Fray Francisco Garcés to northern Arizona, published first in the above-mentioned _Colección de Documentos_, and more recently (with highly valuable notes) by the late Dr Elliott Coues, touches only incidentally on the Rio Grande region. In 1746 Joseph Antonio de Villa-Señor y Sanchez embodied in his _Theatro Americano_ a description of New Mexico, condensed chiefly from the journal of the Brigadier Rivera, mentioned above. The _Diccionario Geografico_ by Murillo is also a source that should not be neglected.

A great amount of documentary manuscript material, mostly of a local character, is contained in the church books of the eighteenth century formerly at the pueblo of Santa Clara and now preserved at Santa Fé through the efforts of the late Archbishop J. B. Salpointe. There are also the "Informaciones Matrimoniales," which contain data of great importance. Through them we are informed of the tragic fate of the last expedition of the Spaniards to the northwest, with its horrifying incidents. The story of woe and disaster that pictures the life of the Indian Pueblos and Spanish settlers during the eighteenth century is contained in fragments in the plain, matter-of-fact church registers, and it requires painstaking investigation to collect it. The greatest part of this information concerns the Rio Grande Pueblos. A careful investigation of the matrimonial and baptismal registers will yield data concerning the clans and indications of the primitive rules of marriage, while the "Libros de Fabrica" contain interesting data on the churches of the Rio Grande valley. Great labor and the utmost scrutiny are required in sifting these time-worn papers for desirable data, and especially is a considerable knowledge of conditions and events necessary; but the result of thorough investigation, especially through literal copying by the student, will amply repay the time and labor bestowed.

What I have stated in regard to the church archives applies, in a still greater degree, to the state and private papers that may be accessible. Of the former the archives of Santa Fé contain a great number, though many of them are only fragmentary. Valuable documents exist also in the archives of the Surveyor General at Santa Fé; these are valuable chiefly for historical data covering the first half of the eighteenth century. The national archives in the City of Mexico are much more complete than those of New Mexico, while in Spain we may expect to find an almost complete set of government documents, preserved with much greater care and with more system than in any early Spanish possessions in America. The city of Sevilla would be the first place in which research in this direction should be conducted.

Before closing this bibliographic sketch with a glance at the earliest literature of the nineteenth century, I must mention two ponderous books of the eighteenth century which, while based on second-hand information and not very valuable in detail, refer occasionally to facts and data not elsewhere found. These are the two volumes of the _Crónica Apostólica y Seráfica de la Propaganda Fide de Querétaro_. The first volume, written by Fray Isidro Felis Espinosa and published in 1746, is interesting especially on account of its reference to the fate of the first Frenchmen brought into New Mexico, and one of whom, Juan de Archibèque, played an important rôle in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The second volume, the author of which was Fray Domingo de Arricivita, was published in 1792, and is the chief source concerning the still problematical expedition to the north attributed to two Franciscan friars in 1538. Both of these works are of relatively minor importance, and I mention them here only for the sake of completeness and in order to warn against attaching undue importance to them so far as the Pueblos are concerned.

It is of course understood that I omit from the above account a number of publications containing more or less brief and casual references to New Mexico. Most of them are geographical, and but few allude to historical facts. In the notes to the Documentary History proper I may refer to some of them.

Perhaps the last book published on New Mexico in the Spanish language is the little book of Pino, which, however, has little more than a bibliographic value except in so far as it touches the condition of New Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The documents in the New Mexican and Mexican archives up to the date of the American occupancy present features similar to those that characterize the Spanish documents of the eighteenth century. It would be too tedious to refer to them in detail, and I therefore dismiss them for the present with this brief mention. If I do not mention here the literature on New Mexico in the English language it is not due to carelessness or to ignorance of it, but because of its much greater wealth in number and contents, its more ready accessibility, and because in matters respecting the history of early times the authors of these works have all been obliged to glean their information from at least some of the sources that I have above enumerated and discussed.

It may surprise students of New Mexican history that I have thus far omitted the very earliest sources in print in which New Mexico is mentioned, namely, the work of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, and that of Gomara. The former was published in part in the first half of the sixteenth century, the entire work appearing at Madrid not earlier than 1850 and 1851. Its title, as is well known, is _Historia General y Natural de las Indias_. The work of Francisco Lopez de Gomara bears the title _Historia de las Indias_, and is in two parts. Gomara is more explicit than Oviedo, who gives only a brief and preliminary mention; but even Gomara, while more detailed, and basing his work evidently on the earliest data then accessible in regard to the expedition of Coronado, cannot be compared with the later reports of those attached to the expedition. The value of these books is comparatively slight, so far as New Mexico is concerned. Much more important is the _Historia General_, etc., by Antonio de Herrera (1601-1615). What authorities Herrera had at his command cannot be readily determined. He may have had access to the report of Jaramillo, and he was certainly acquainted with the letters of Coronado. Perhaps the letter of Coronado which I have as yet been unable to find was consulted by him. In any event Herrera's information is all second-hand, and while by no means devoid of merit, his work cannot rank with sources written by men who saw the country and took part in the events of the earliest explorations. The map accompanying the first volume of Herrera, while scarcely more than an outline, is still in advance of the charts published during the sixteenth century.

Here I may be permitted to refer to the older cartography of New Mexico in general. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century these maps are very defective and incomplete. It is almost as if the Ptolemy of 1548 had served as a basis for them. Even the large and beautiful globe constructed at St. Gall in Switzerland in 1595, and now in the Swiss National Museum at Zürich, places Tiguex near the Pacific coast. It is through the work of Benavides that more correct ideas of New Mexican geography were gained and a somewhat more accurate and detailed nomenclature was introduced, since the _Geografie Blaviane_ of 1667 by the Dutch cartographer Jean Blaeuw contains a map of the region far superior to any hitherto published. The number of early maps of New Mexico is larger than is generally supposed, and there are to-day unpublished maps (for instance in the National Archives of Mexico for the eighteenth century) that indicate, as existing, Indian pueblos and missions that were abandoned nearly a century before the maps were made.

I must state that in this Introduction I have abbreviated as much as practicable the titles of books and manuscripts. These are often very long, and it is unnecessary to burden the present text with them, as I shall have to give the full titles in the notes to the Documentary History proper.

It may not be out of place to add to the above a brief review of the distribution and location of the various Pueblo groups at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but strictly according to documentary information alone. The location of different villages must be reserved for later treatment, hence as the ranges of the various linguistic groups had no definite boundaries, only the relative position and approximate extent can be given here.

Following the course of the Rio Grande to the north from northern Chihuahua, the Mansos were first met, in the vicinity of the present Juarez, Mexico. This was in 1598. Nearly one hundred and forty years later Brigadier Don Pedro de Rivera met them farther north, not far from Las Cruces and Doña Ana, New Mexico. To-day they are again at El Paso del Norte. About San Marcial on the Rio Grande began the villages of the Piros, at present reduced to one small village on the right bank of the Rio Grande below El Paso. The Piros extended in the sixteenth century as far north in the Rio Grande valley as Alamillo at least, and a branch of them had established themselves on the borders of the great eastern plains of New Mexico, southeast of the Manzano. That branch, which has left well-known ruins at Abó, Gran Quivira (Tabirá), and other sites in the vicinity, abandoned its home in the seventeenth century, forming the Piro settlement below El Paso, already mentioned. North of the Piros, between a line drawn south of Isleta and the Mesa del Canjelon, the Tiguas occupied a number of villages, mostly on the western bank of the river, and a few Tigua settlements existed also on the margin of the eastern plains beyond the Sierra del Manzano. These outlying Tigua settlements also were abandoned in the seventeenth century, their inhabitants fleeing from the Apaches and retiring to form the Pueblo of Isleta del Sur on the left bank of the Rio Grande in Texas.

North of the Tiguas the Queres had their homes on both sides of the river as far as the great cañon south of San Ildefonso, and an outlying pueblo of the Queres, isolated and quite remote to the west, was Acoma. The most northerly villages on the Rio Grande were those of the Tehuas. Still beyond, but some distance east of the Rio Grande, lay the Pueblos of Taos and Picuris, the inhabitants of which spoke a dialectic variation of the Tigua language of the south. The Tehuas also approached the Rio Grande quite near, at what is called La Bajada; and in about the same latitude, including the former village at Santa Fé, began that branch of the Tehuas known as Tanos, whose settlements ranged from north of Santa Fé as far as the eastern plains and southward to Tajique, where their territory bordered that of the eastern Tiguas.

The Rio Grande Queres extended also as far west as the Jemez river; and north of them, on the same stream, another linguistic group, the Jemez, had established themselves and built several villages of considerable size. East of the Rio Grande and southwest-ward from Santa Fé another branch of the Jemez occupied the northern valley of the Rio Pecos.

The main interest in this distribution of the Rio Grande Pueblos lies in the fact that it establishes a disruption and division of some of these groups prior to the sixteenth century, but of the cause and the manner thereof there is as yet no documentary information. Thus the Tigua Indians of Taos and Picuris are separated from their southern relatives on the Rio Grande by two distinct linguistic groups, the Tehuas and the Queres; the Jemez and the Pecos were divided from each other by the Queres and the Tanos. That the Piros and the Tiguas should have separated from the main stock might be accounted for by the attraction of the great salt deposits about the Manzano and greater accessibility to the buffalo plains, but that in the Rio Grande valley itself foreign linguistic groups should have interposed themselves between the northern and southern Tiguas and the Jemez and Pecos constitutes a problem which only diligent research in traditions, legends, and the native languages may satisfactorily solve.

NEW YORK CITY, March, 1910.

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Transcriber's Note.

Several words purposely occur in accented and non-accented forms. The differing occurrences are retained.

Page 20: Misspelling of Sante Fé corrected to Santa Fé. Page 23: The title "Coleccion de Documentos" modified to "Colección de Documentos".