The Pueblo Revolt, page 13
Like many another friar, Benavides misjudged the Puebloans’ apparent willingness to be converted. In a chapter called “How Well They Take to Christian Practices,” he claimed,
When we ring the bell for mass, they all come as well scrubbed and neat as can be. They enter the church to pray as though they had been Christians forever…. All these people make their confessions in their own tongues. They ready themselves for confession by studying their own sins, bringing them along recorded on a series of knotted strings…. If we travel down the roads, and they see us from their pueblos, or their croplands, they all come out to greet us with very great delight. “Praised be Our Lord Jesus Christ,” they say. “Praised be His Holy Sacrament.”
The potent foreshadowing of 1680 embodied in those knotted strings, Benavides would not live to appreciate. It did not take long, however, for the custodian to receive vivid evidence of the hatred for the brown-robed men of God that lurked under the surface of the charade of Puebloan piety. At Zuni, in 1630 or 1632, the resident priest was murdered, as was another friar who had left Zuni to travel to the Mexican state of Sonora.
The quasi-omniscient Very Rev. James H. Defouri, that indefatigable chronicler of the martyrs of New Mexico, writing in 1893, gives us an eyewitness account of the treacherous killing of Fray Francisco Letrado at Zuni:
Father Francisco was on the point of celebrating mass, but the Indians did not come. After repeated signals, he went out to see the cause of the delay. Meeting some of them he invited them to come, but as they refused, he reproached them for their want of religion. They became angry. Perceiving that they were prepared to do him harm, he fell on his knees, holding with both hands a crucifix, and in that attitude he was pierced with innumerable arrows.
A few years later, priests at Taos and Jemez were also murdered by the Puebloans, and the miracle-working Fray Francisco de Porras at Hopi was poisoned. According to Defouri, the latter friar died with the psalm “In te, Domini, speravi” on his lips.
After killing the priests at Zuni, the Puebloans, knowing retribution must come, fled en masse to their mesa-top refuge of Dowa Yalanne. An expedition of soldiers failed to dent the precipitous defenses of this natural fortress. Only in 1635 did the Zuni dare to descend and take up residence again in their low-lying villages.
Under the governorship of Luis de Rosas, from 1637 to 1641, relations between church and state were strained almost to the breaking point. Rosas’s innovation was to install the Indians in workshops of his creation, the goods they turned out to be sold for the governor’s personal profit. The friars were outraged, ostensibly because Rosas was exploiting Indian labor, but also because the workshops denied these men of God the kinds of help from Indian “servants” they had grown to take for granted. Rosas also conducted the most ambitious slave-raiding expeditions against the Apaches yet attempted in New Mexico.
In 1636, Rosas and one of the friars, Fray Antonio de Arteaga, engaged in a melodramatic exchange in the middle of a church service that must have baffled Puebloan witnesses every bit as thoroughly as the contretemps between Ordóñez and Peralta in 1613. Aiming his remarks at the governor, Arteaga sermonized that “all Catholic princes were subject to the laws of the Church.” Even the king of Spain was so constrained. Furthermore, “any man who refused such obedience would be a heretic.” Unable to bear such pronouncements, Rosas exclaimed, “Shut up, Father, what you say is a lie.” According to Scholes, the Indians present were “scandalized” by the governor’s outburst.
Only months after his term as governor had ended, Rosas was killed in Santa Fe by a soldier who, returning from an extended leave in New Spain, found his wife hiding underneath the ex-governor’s bed.
In the middle of Rosas’s reign, a terrible smallpox epidemic swept through the pueblos. At least 3,000 Indians died. This epidemic, which coincided with a lasting drought, proved to the Puebloans that the friars’ magic was worthless. According to Ramón Gutiérrez, it also “indicated that the native gods were angry.” With the 1640 epidemic, a movement to revive the kachina religion—often enacted in dances and rites defiantly carried out under the noses of the priests—swept the Pueblo world.
This provoked a predictable counterreaction. The priests, whom Oñate had scripted to play the role of saviors and protectors of the Indians, could also prove themselves apt disciples of Torquemada. At their most extreme, some of the punishments carried out by friars against Puebloans bespeak a cruelty, guided by religious bigotry, whose horror still reverberates more than three centuries later. At Hopi, Fray Salvador de Guerra brutally flogged a Puebloan for “worshiping idols” until “he was bathed in blood,” then poured hot turpentine on his wounds. (The man died from the treatment.) At Taos, according to Gutiérrez, Fray Nicolás Hidalgo “punished his insolent children by castration and acts of sodomy.” The friar also fathered a number of illegitimate children by Indian women. A priest at Awatovi, alarmed that his affair with an Indian woman had aroused the jealous wrath of a leading Puebloan, ordered two soldiers to kill the man. Then, to cover up his own role in the plot, the friar contrived to have the soldiers arrested, brought to a swift trial, and hanged.
In the mid-1640s, as part of the backlash against the revival of the kachinas, Governor Fernando de Arguello Carvajal had forty Indians whipped and imprisoned for “sedition.” No pueblo suffered more than Jemez. On the flimsiest of evidence, Arguello accused Jemez leaders of aiding the Apache and Navajo enemy, and summarily hanged twenty-nine of them.
By the 1640s, then, after four decades under the quixotic and often mutually contradictory despotisms of Spanish church and state, the Puebloans had seen their way of life profoundly disrupted. Complicating the situation was the fact that not a few of the conversions were genuine. Thus within each pueblo, a tense struggle was acted out between Christianized Indians (mostly young) who were loyal to the friars and the more conservative and usually older Puebloans (particularly the shamans) who clung to the kachina faith. According to Gutiérrez, there were instances in which the “traditionalists” seized half-breed children fathered by concupiscent friars and beat them to death.
At the same time, overwhelmed by the suffering caused by the encomienda and the repartimiento, many Puebloans simply fled their home villages. Improbable though it seems, some of these refugees allied themselves with their enemies, the Apaches, and took their revenge by raiding Spanish settlements and supply trains. (The suspicion of such defections at Jemez was part of what had prompted Arguello to carry out his mass hangings.)
It was during this decade that the seed of the Pueblo Revolt was sown. During my rambles across New Mexico in search of rock art, I found the occasional petroglyph or pictograph that vividly recorded these years of oppression. Rock art is extremely difficult to date, but many images that I stumbled upon—some of them on the margins of panels that exuberantly celebrated the pre-contact glory of a way of life presided over by the kachinas—were unmistakably intended to proclaim the gloomy truths of a world changed forever by the coming of the Spanish.
In 1598, Oñate had found a roundabout way to climb the bajada separating the Río Abajo from the Río Arriba. But Santa Fe Canyon, which carves a gorge through the basalt cliffs of the “jump,” soon became the Camino Real that every train of immigrants and soldiers rode from the capital of New Spain to the capital of New Mexico.
Today, Santa Fe Canyon is a parcel of Bureau of Land Management quadrangles crowded from the south by small homesteads and rancherías, mostly Hispanic-owned. The perpetual stream that winds through the valley floor carries the sanitized but still foul-smelling effluent from Santa Fe’s waste treatment facility down to the tributary’s junction with the Rio Grande (located, perhaps symbolically, smack in the middle of the Cochiti reservation).
On the south-facing rim of Santa Fe Canyon, several hundred feet above the stream, I found petroglyphs of three Spanish soldiers, complete with cornered hats, on horseback. All three were riding northeast, up-canyon. It was not hard to imagine an artist hiding on the rim, watching the invasion as it passed below. Near one soldier, an upright sword, complete with hilt, had been carved; the weapon seemed all the more ominous for its detachment from any human actor.
The Pajarito Plateau is a vast tableland sloping south and east from the Jemez Mountains to the Rio Grande, dissected by many sharp canyons and arroyos. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this may have been the most densely populated region in all of what is now New Mexico. Unlike the Galisteo Basin, which a century later would be the center of the Pueblo world, with its huge aggregated villages, the seulement pattern on the Pajarito was defined by scores of small pueblos, many located less than half a mile from one another. Literally hundreds of such ruins lie secluded in the piñón and juniper forest that swathes the plateau, although one valley full of them, Frijoles Canyon, forms the restored centerpiece of Bandelier National Monument.
The rock here is neither basalt nor sandstone, but volcanic tuff, the congealed debris of several colossal eruptions that occurred long before humans entered the region, but not so far back in geologic terms. Tuff forms a gravelly, soft stone ranging in hue from gray to orange. Here the Puebloans learned a new way to make a house, simply by carving out arching hollows in the tuff, probably with tools no more sophisticated than fire-hardened pointed sticks. These “cavates,” as archaeologists call them, look superficially like cliff dwellings, but really have nothing in common with the Anasazi villages of the Four Corners area—mud-and-stone buildings erected within the shelter of arching natural alcoves. Gavates tend to be diminutive and close to the base of the cliff, but what makes them beguiling to the eye is that each architect has scraped and carved his home (no two alike), complete with little storage niches, benches, and granaries, straight out of the bedrock.
Hiking the Pajarito Plateau over the years, I had always thought that here the Puebloans had crafted an ideal marriage of landscape to living space. Yet the paradox that hangs over this sweeping shelf of arable, well-watered terrain is that it was almost completely deserted by the time Coronado entered the Southwest. At a loss to explain this mini-abandonment, archaeologists vaguely invoke climate changes that have yet to be firmly documented.
I had thus assumed that I would learn little or nothing about the conflict between Spaniards and Puebloans on the Pajarito Plateau, but Rory Gauthier proved me wrong. Park archaeologist for Bandelier National Monument, Gauthier, who grew up in nearby Los Alamos, dropped his usual chores on a balmy late October day to hike with me to several little-known but deeply evocative corners of the plateau.
On a blithe ridge near the Bandelier outlier called Tsankawi, I followed Gauthier past a number of cavate dwellings, then some faint petroglyphs of kachinas grooved in the soft stone. In all its crumbly splendor, tuff makes a poor canvas for rock art, but this had discouraged the local engravers not one whit. Suddenly we came to a startling design, hard to make out in the slanting mid-morning light, but unambiguous in its purport. At about half life-size, some Puebloan artist had carved a conquistador on horseback galloping from left to right across a flat vertical wall of tuff, sword raised menacingly in his right hand.
The implications of this petroglyph are buttressed by a small number of field studies dating fugitive reoccupations of the Pajarito Plateau. Sometime after Oñate’s entrada, a limited number of Puebloans—most likely Tewa, from such nearby villages as Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and San Juan, or Keres from Cochiti, whose forebears had claimed much of this tableland—had returned to these ancestral haunts, perhaps to hide from soldiers who were hunting them down. The petroglyph of the rampaging conquistador was a lasting emblem of the fear that had driven these refugees here.
Gauthier also led me to a site that, while off-limits to tourists today, lies not far from the monument headquarters. In many of the cavates, the dwellers had smoothed the walls with a surface of brown clay. Years of campfires inside these cramped precincts had coated the upper walls and ceiling with a layer of black soot. Upon this tabula rasa, in a small number of cavates, artists had used some kind of sharp tool to etch half-mystic designs with a filigree delicacy rare anywhere in the Southwest.
To protect the wall beneath this particular cavate as we entered the dwelling, Gauthier and I climbed a stepladder that he had lugged up the hillside. Sitting cross-legged inside, I let my headlamp play across a congeries of overlapping drawings, ranging from abstract grids to half-formed humanoids to what Gauthier interpreted as a koshare—a kachina clown—shinnying its way like a koala bear up a tree.
The cynosure of this cávate art gallery, the finest yet found at Bandelier, is a design that pulses with a strange mixture of native and Spanish connotations. This eerie figure, lightly but expertly traced in the flaking soot, shows a human head haloed by a band from which radiate twenty-one triangles, forming what looks like an ethereal crown. In a brilliant study of this single image, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Matthew J. Liebmann, argues convincingly that the head, carved no doubt by a Puebloan refugee, idiosyncratically blends the horned or feathered headdress of a kachina with the haloed crown of a European saint, or, more particularly, of the Virgin of Guadalupe (paintings of which circulated widely in New Spain). Even the stylized facial features blend European and native conventions: the curving eyes and nose, according to Liebmann, “are undoubtedly in the European style,” while the rectangular mouth is pure kachina. Hunkering in this little-visited cávate, I beheld as perfect an emblem of the syncretic welding of Catholic onto kachina religion as it would be possible for a Puebloan artist to conceive.
Thirty miles northeast of Bandelier, I found another teeming body of rock art that reflects the intrusion of the conquerors on the conquered. On Black Mesa, where the Rio Grande spills abruptly out of a tight canyon, an estimated 20,000 petroglyphs abound, making up one of the richest museums of outdoor iconography in the Southwest. I befriended Katherine Wells, an artist who owns 165 acres of prime land here (which will revert to the Archaeological Conservancy upon her death). Wells guided me to some of the most startling panels on her property, etched on basalt boulders that have tumbled from the mesa top down toward the river.
One remarkable image, almost surely from before 1540, depicts a mountain lion in profile, feet curled like pinwheels, with a human head face-on, bristling with spikes as if to allude to the sun; a snake bisects its throat. Only a few hundred yards away, Wells showed me an isolated image of another kind of lion—a heraldic, curvilinear beast straight off a Spanish coat-of-arms, copied no doubt by some impressionable Pueblo artist after 1598.
Near the heraldic lion, etched on the south face of an otherwise unremarkable boulder, I found a circular design quartered with four triangular marks, crossed diagonally with a double-headed arrow. The petroglyph looked remarkably like an old-fashioned compass. I took out my own pocket compass, then held it level before the boulder. The needle pointing toward magnetic north settled into an alignment exactly parallel to the “needle” on the rock carving.
Higher on the slope, I found an absolute masterpiece: an upright carving of Awanyu, the plumed serpent ultimately of Toltec origin, fully eight feet tall. Above its head, presumably added later, was a neatly incised Christian cross. I assumed the cross was the work of a converted Puebloan after the conquest, but when I mentioned it to Polly Schaafsma, she referred me to an obscure passage from the dispatch of an officer at Abiquiu in 1763. Under the orders of the governor of New Mexico, this functionary “went to the said district with the intention of destroying and annihilating, in as much as possible, the adoration sites [adoratenos], and places where they might have been [worshiping]; or places where detestable idolatry, superstitions, or vain observations might be committed presently.”
On the west side of a high peak called El Cerro de los Pedernales, the official found three caves that his Indian guide indicated were sites “where witches in various animal forms went to request from the devil what they wanted.” The interiors of the caves were covered with rock art, which the pious Spaniard did his best to obliterate. The key passage: “With the figures erased and crosses drawn on the same large rock … I returned to this said pueblo.” After carving the crosses on top of the effaced petroglyph panels, the official had bade a priest among his company formally to exorcise the site.
On Black Mesa, however, the superb Awanyu had been left undefaced. My ultimate guess is that crosses carved on rock art panels—of which I would eventually see scores—had been added both by Spanish officers and priests and by Christianized Indians. (In Britain and France, I had seen menhirs, or standing stones, the work of artists who had lived some 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, that had been recarved into crosses in the Middle Ages.)
Later, at El Morro, I would see another example of a Christianized petroglyph, a design that seems to have gone undocumented by scholars and rangers preoccupied with puzzling out the myriad Spanish and Anglo inscriptions that surround it. Someone had added a small cross to the top of a stepped pyramid, thereby converting the standard Puebloan icon for a rain cloud into a stylized church.
Farther up the slope at Black Mesa, I found yet another masterpiece: a life-sized humanoid carved upside down, as if plunging headfirst toward some invisible doom, with fingers spread in helpless anguish, an arc and spiny rays sprouting from his blank, round head. Perhaps a shaman in mid-trance—and many rock art experts believe that upside-down figures symbolize death, worldwide. On a nearby boulder was carved what had to be a Franciscan priest in buttoned robe and hat, his right hand tucked piously behind his back. The patina of this pair of images (the coloration of the stone where it has been grooved, which darkens slowly with age) suggested that the two might be contemporary. In any event, it seemed unlikely that the juxtaposition of the pair was accidental. Here, I believed, I was witnessing a powerful tableau of the demise of the old religion, the faith of divinatory trance and health-giving kachina, under the onslaught of men of God in brown robes, wielding crucifixes, promising a fiery hell to the unconverted.
