The Pueblo Revolt, page 22
“That’s what happens when you burn a place,” Bremer explained. “Turns it into pottery. This is one giant piece of pottery.”
Vargas had first come to Old Kotyiti in October 1692, during his pacification tour of the pueblos. On finding Santo Domingo and Cochiti abandoned, he learned that people from several pueblos were ensconced on the high mesa. With five squadrons, he advanced to the foot of the mesa, then climbed it, probably by the southern trail, on the opposite side from the path Bremer and I had followed. Although he heard war songs being chanted from above, Vargas was greeted on top in peaceable fashion. There was even a large cross erected at the entrance to the pueblo. Father Francisco Corvera baptized 103 Puebloans here. On asking which pueblos were represented on the mesa top, Vargas was told that the people came from Cochiti, San Felipe, and San Marcos. Why had they taken refuge? Vargas was told that these Keresans feared an attack by their enemies, the Tewa and Tano. The governor reassured them that Spanish soldiers would make it safe for the Puebloans to return to their lowland villages.
Yet two years later, Vargas once again found a large horde congregated on top of the ancestral Cochiti mesa. These refugees, he had been told, had made many depredations upon Zia, Santa Ana, and San Felipe, the only three pueblos still loyal to the Spanish when Vargas had returned to New Mexico the previous October. In mid-April 1694, Vargas marched out of Santa Fe, in an angry mood after his failed siege at Black Mesa. He had fifty soldiers, but the key to his eventual success at Old Kotyiti lay in a body of 100 Puebloan auxiliaries. These were warriors from the pueblos of Zia, Santa Ana, and San Felipe, and they knew the mesa well.
In just such a fashion—using one defeated tribe as allies in the attack on the next—Cortés had performed his daring conquest of Mexico in 1521. By the end of the seventeenth century, Cortés had become legend among the Spaniards, his tactics a textbook for latterday conquerors such as Vargas. In the dark of night early on April 17, Vargas divided his forces into three parties to sneak to the top of the mesa by three different routes.
As we strolled through the ruin, I read Vargas’s campaign journal out loud. “The enemy took up arms, resisting and firing on the path up where I was. The captain, officers, and other soldiers courageously responded…. Because they were assailed, the people outside could not wait for our men to tear them to pieces and kill them. Therefore, they fled.”
The bland smugness of Vargas’s diary had Bremer shaking his head. “This guy sounds a lot like George W.,” said the archaeologist. It was just weeks after Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
With surprising ease, in only a few hours Vargas seized Old Kotyiti. The governor claimed to have captured 342 “noncombatants”—women, children, and old men—whom he sequestered inside a kiva. This was manifestly impossible, in view of the small size of the two kiva depressions we had found. Perhaps the 342 prisoners had been confined in one of the plazas. Only eight Puebloans were killed in the battle. “Thirteen warriors were also captured,” I read on. “As soon as one of the two reverend missionary fathers and chaplains who came from the camp had absolved them, I ordered them shot without delay.”
“God bless you. Bam!” editorialized Bremer, in disgust.
Vargas also rounded up 900 sheep and goats, as well as seventy horses. Here, as elsewhere in New Mexico, was vivid proof of the failure of the Puebloans, during their twelve years of freedom, to abide by Popé’s extremist dictum that the people abjure everything, from wheat to cattle, introduced by the Spaniards.
The conquest of Old Kotyiti, however, proved less simple than Vargas at first believed. In the initial attack, most of the warriors had fled to higher ground. Bremer pointed to the northwest, where a series of cliffs guarded an extension of the mesa, some 200 feet higher than the site of the ruin. “Bob Preucel thinks the warriors were up there, hiding in the trees,” said Bremer, “watching Vargas do his thing in the pueblo down here.”
On April 21 came the counterattack. “With furious war-cries and a large number of people,” according to Vargas, these warriors swarmed into Old Kotyiti and engaged the soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. Though taken by surprise, the Spaniards “bravely went on to offer resistance and succeeded, with everyone fighting courageously.” Four Puebloan warriors were killed, but in the pandemonium more than half the 342 captives escaped. To that extent, the Keresan counterattack had succeeded.
Vargas lingered on at Old Kotyiti for three more days. Before climbing down from the mesa, he set fire to the village—preserving its walls, ironically, for Bremer and me to admire 309 years later.
We walked to the south rim of the mesa, sat on the edge of the cliff, and ate lunch. The drought of the previous several years had unleashed a scourge of pine beetles all over the Southwest. Nearly all the piñons here were dead or dying, their brown needles giving a washed-out pallor to the normally verdant forest. With the uneven battle that had raged a hundred yards to the north in our heads, we stared down on the dusty plain more than a thousand feet below. In the distance, we could see the huddle of adobe houses that is Cochiti today. The silence around us seemed to shimmer with the sense of what the Puebloans had lost here in 1694, in the third year of Vargas’s bloodless reconquest.
The other refugee pueblo in the national forest is the one to which the people of Jemez had fled after 1692. Long before coming to New Mexico, I had recognized that the confrontation played out on that mesa top in July 1694 was the pivot point of the whole complicated, tragic reconquest. Before my ill-starred meeting with the Jemez Cultural Committee, I had hoped to ask someone from the pueblo to hike up to the refuge with me. But that Tuesday night in the conference room of the governor’s office, once I felt the distrust arrowing toward me from each of the nine Jemez men who were questioning the very propriety of my writing a book about the Revolt, I bit my tongue about the refugee pueblo.
Two months before that meeting, I had had breakfast in Santa Fe with Mike Bremer and his close friend and colleague, Mike Elliott. Resource area archaeologist for the Santa Fe National Forest, Elliott had spent years building a fragile trust at Jemez, managing through tireless consultation to convince at least several members of the pueblo’s Department of Resource Protection that archaeology and native tradition need not always be at irreconcilable loggerheads. Elliott would be one of the two forest archaeologists asked to leave the room when I spoke to the Cultural Committee.
At breakfast, both men had impressed on me just how powerful a place for the Jemez was the mesa-top ruin Vargas had attacked on July 24, 1694. I agreed not even to mention the Jemez name of the pueblo in print. Instead, I would call it, as the Spaniards consistently referred to it, “the Pueblo on the Peñol”—“peñol” being an old Spanish word for butte or steep-sided mesa.
“You have to understand,” said Bremer. “For the Jemez, that site is like their Gettysburg battlefield—”
“Or their Sistine Chapel,” Elliott emended.
“Their Sistine Chapel and their Gettysburg battlefield all rolled into one,” Bremer concluded.
In the end, I climbed up to the Pueblo on the Peñol alone. I chose the difficult back-side route, which had proved the key to Vargas’s success. Low-angle slopes gave way to a steep, gravelly scree, then to a series of cliffs through which I made a devious scramble. A thousand feet above the valley floor, I crested the rim of the mesa, then walked north to the natural gateway that guarded the back-side approach.
Suddenly, before my feet, I saw something that made my throat catch in sorrow. A pile of smooth, round stones, ranging in hue from gray to brown to reddish orange, spilled toward the gateway. I picked up one of the stones, held it in my palm, and felt, across the span of more than three centuries, the weight of doom.
These stones were the very missiles the defenders of the peñol had used in their slingshots, or simply hurled at the Spaniards as they climbed toward the rim. I turned the round stone, about the size of a baseball, in my hand, as I tried to imagine flinging it off the cliff at a mounted, armored invader. The cliffs and bedrock of the peñol are made of a brown volcanic tuff—too light a rock to serve as an effective weapon. The Jemez had instead gathered hundreds of sandstone river cobbles from the streambeds below, carried them a thousand feet up the mesa, and piled them at the top of the trail that climbs the mesa from the north.
Vargas had approached the Pueblo on the Peñol by way of Zia, Jemez’s neighbor pueblo only ten miles to the south. Despite that proximity, the two peoples speak completely different languages (Keresan and Towa, respectively). They had united in 1680 to drive the Spanish out of New Mexico, but Zia and Jemez had a long history of friction and even warfare against each other, exacerbated in 1694 by Zia’s having turned loyal to the Spanish. Vargas thus had no trouble recruiting 100 Zia warriors to supplement his mounted soldiers, whose numbers by July had swelled to 120.
The refuge site had been well chosen. Sheer cliffs plunging from the rim defended the triangular mesa on all sides. There were only the two routes to the top: an obvious trail on the south, and the devious, secret path I had followed up the back side. It was the Zia warriors who told Vargas about the latter route.
The governor had approached the Pueblo on the Peñol with the utmost stealth. Under cover of darkness on the night of July 23, he hid his forces behind a low butte beside the Jemez River. At one o’clock in the morning of July 24, the governor sent his captain, Eusebio de Vargas (apparently not a relative), with twenty-five soldiers and the 100 Zia allies, to slink north and attack the peñol from the rear. Vargas himself, with his main army, stayed in hiding until Venus rose in the east, then started up the southern trail on horseback.
From the northern gateway, I rim-walked on the west edge of the peñol toward its southern point. All along the way, wherever the cliffs below the rim were less than sheer and unclimbable, the Jemez had piled up breastworks of tuff stones and boulders, behind which they might hide and fire upon an enemy clambering up the mesa. After I had walked a mile and a half, I arrived at the southern gateway. Here, too, I found a pile of river cobbles, the stones the defenders had not had time to throw or shoot. I climbed fifty yards down the approach trail. There were stones at every hand—the missiles the Puebloans had indeed launched, but which had failed to stem the Spanish onslaught.
I returned to the gateway and stood for a moment, gazing down at the twin streams merging in the middle distance, fringed by cottonwoods just coming into new leaf. Far to the south I saw the blue skyline of Sandía Mountain, Albuquerque’s backyard playground. To my east, I heard the whine of a semi gearing down on the highway that spilled from the mountains. At the moment, however, I had the mesa to myself.
On July 24, 1694, it was the same old story—arrows and stones no match for harquebuses, swords, and chain mail. As Vargas wrote in his journal, “Although they hurled some large stones and rocks, as well as shooting many arrows, they were valiantly resisted.”
From the southern gateway, I walked a hundred yards north. Along either side of a shallow draw (across which the faint vestiges of check-dams testified to a desperate effort to trap rainwater on the springless mesa top), I saw the collapsed ruins of some 250 rooms, built of squared-off chunks of tuff mortared with mud. Unlike Old Kotyiti, this pueblo looked quickly and haphazardly built.
The twin-pronged attack, with both forces reaching the mesa rim at the same moment, was devastatingly efficient. Now, shortly after daybreak, Vargas’s soldiers swarmed through the village, killing as they went. I found one four-foot wall, still standing, that was punctured with a small aperture, through which a crouching Jemez warrior had shot arrows that July day. “From their loopholes,” Vargas wrote, “they had wounded and injured many, although not seriously.”
The Spaniards enacted a methodical slaughter. Fifty-five men, by Vargas’s count, were shot or lanced to death at close quarters. Once the killing was largely finished, Vargas set fire to the pueblo. Four men and a woman were burned alive in the rooms where they tried to hide.
I wandered through the debris of the ruined village back to the south rim. Near the edge, natural hollows in the bedrock had been masoned into subterranean chambers. I clambered through several of these catacomb-like enclosures, finding a few charred roof beams, wondering whether it was here that the five luckless Jemez had been burned to death.
On this perfect day in early April, the mesa seemed a beautiful place. Yet as I stood in the middle of the burned ruin, my heart was heavy with the injustice of colonial history. No single place that I had visited in all my travels across New Mexico, poking among canyons and mesas for traces of the Revolt and its aftermath, had stunned me with the emotional force of the Pueblo on the Peñol. I was glad, after all, to be alone.
I hiked to the east rim and headed north along it. Here, too, piled barricades of tuff boulders and stones still vainly guarded every place on the mesa edge where a nimble attacker might have scrambled through the cliffs to gain the summit. Off this side, Vargas reported, seven fleeing Jemez warriors had jumped to their deaths. Their demise is corroborated by Jemez oral tradition, as recorded by Joe Sando in Pueblo Nations. Sando acknowledges the seven suicidal leaps, but then adds, “A likeness of San Diego soon appeared on the cliff. After that, those who jumped landed on their feet, and did not die. The likeness of San Diego is still visible today on the red rock cliffs.” Early that morning, I had paused on my drive up the canyon east of the peñol to spy the apparition with binoculars, making out a natural discoloration on the smooth wall that indeed looked like a hooded, cloaked figure. (That a Catholic, Spanish saint should miraculously appear to save Puebloan lives was simply one more evidence of the syncretism, bizarre to my Western way of thinking, that by now seamlessly bridges two apparently irreconcilable faiths.)
The battle of July 24 was over by four in the afternoon. Without the loss of a single Spanish life, the attackers slew eighty-four Jemez men and took another 361 men, women, and children prisoner. Two combatants captured alive were baptized by a Franciscan friar and then shot on the spot.
Vargas was not surprised at his total victory. As he wrote in his journal, as soon as the battle was over, his men “gave thanks to His Divine Majesty and His most holy Mother for having obtained such success, also thanking … the apostle Santiago, on the eve of his glorious day, on which he doubtless influenced with his sponsorship our most fortunate victory.” July 25 is the feast day of Santiago, or Saint James, who once more had appeared on the battlefield to turn the tide in the Spaniards’ favor.
In the aftermath of the massacre on the peñol, Vargas offered the captive Jemez men a devil’s bargain. He would spare their lives in return for their pledge to fight by the soldiers’ sides when they attacked the last remaining refugee pueblo, Black Mesa, to which Vargas had unsuccessfully laid siege the previous March. In the Pueblo Revolt, of course, the Jemez and the Tewa had been the staunchest of allies. Now, however, the demoralized Jemez men took up arms against their fellow Puebloans. The Zia, for their part, were only too glad to make war against the Tewa.
In September, with his vast new army, Vargas returned to Black Mesa. The antagonists fought several skirmishes before the Spanish settled once again into siege mode. This time, it worked. On September 9, the Tewa surrendered. Vargas’s reconquista was complete.
Or so he thought. Vargas spent the rest of 1694 and all of the following year consolidating the little empire he had made of New Mexico. In April 1695, he founded the second Spanish town in the colony, at Santa Cruz, thirty miles north of Santa Fe, in the heart of the Tewa country. By March 1696, Vargas could count 276 Spanish families settled in New Mexico, still far short of the 500 he believed necessary to ensure stability in the province.
To the far-flung pueblos, he once again sent Franciscan missionaries to tend to their Indian flocks. One by one, the churches burned in 1680 were rebuilt.
All was not well, however, in the battle-weary colony. The winter of 1695-96 proved as severe as the one two years before, when Vargas’s soldiers had slogged through the snow to drive the Tewa and Tano out of Santa Fe and to besiege Black Mesa. With large portions of their stores of maize appropriated to feed the settlers, Puebloans once more began to starve.
Somehow, from Taos to Hopi, messengers carried the tidings of the most recalcitrant leaders and shamans, urging one more union of the pueblos to rise against their despised masters. There was no knotted cord this time, and the imminent revolt was hardly a secret. As early as December 1695, missionaries sent alarming letters to Santa Fe warning of the Puebloan unrest, begging the governor to send soldiers to protect the vulnerable friars. Vargas was slow to act, however. Leery that the approach of mounted troops might itself instigate warfare, he believed instead that he could ride from one pueblo to another and talk the natives back into docile acceptance of Spanish rule.
The inevitable happened. On June 4, 1696, in a coordinated effort, the Puebloans killed five friars and twenty-one settlers across a broad swath of New Mexico. All but five pueblos participated in this last-ditch rebellion, but those five—Zia, Santa Ana, and San Felipe, loyal as ever, but also Pecos and Tesuque—furnished Vargas with invaluable allies in putting down the revolt.
Once more, the Very Rev. James H. Defouri, writing in 1893, employed his omniscient retrospect to witness the lamentable martyrdoms of the friars. At the pueblo of San Cristóbal, on June 4, Fray José de Arvisu and Fray Antonio Carboneli (visiting from Taos) were clubbed to death by Indians who “wished to live a licentious life, and indulge in all the impurities of their devilish rites.” Father Arvisu had written to Vargas, warning of the impending uprising, but, according to Defouri, “not the least precaution was taken by the Governor to hinder the shedding of blood. He was too busy at the time … in making money for his latter days.”
