Great River - Paul Horgan

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       What was that?

      The Governor and all others were astonished. As a soldier later said, it was like hearing the serpent bark like a dog, after the defeat of the Tarquinians, in Roman history.

      The Indian would not repeat what all were sure he had said, and therefore the Governor had him and his companions seized. Then, terrified, the Indian spoke again.

      “Thomas and Christopher!” he shouted.

      What?—And by much questioning with signs, and indications upon the ground, the soldiers found that he was telling them of two men named Thomas and Christopher who lived at a town two days away, who had been there for seven years, ever since the last time the valley had seen men with horses, armor and guns.

      This could only mean the two Mexican Indians who had stayed behind after Castaño de Sosa. The Governor needed them as interpreters, for they could speak Spanish, and having lived in the pueblos they must now speak Indian languages. Their capture was essential to his mission. He took leave of this first town and hurried north with his cavalcade to look for Thomas and Christopher two days’ journey away.

      On the following day he came to Puaray and with all his men was hospitably received. They were conducted into the pueblo where passing through a room they saw something that made their hearts turn over. It was a wall painting which had been lately whitewashed, as though in hasty response to a warning. But the effacement was not complete, and the Governor and his men could see that the mural painting represented the murder with stones and arrows of two Franciscan fathers. Now it was plain that seventeen years ago Fray Agustín Rodríguez and Fray Francisco López had died there in that fashion. With his eye the Governor warned his people not to give any sign. They accepted rooms for the night, but did not sleep, and late in the darkness while the whole pueblo slept, the Spaniards led by the Governor withdrew in dead quiet.

      Early the next morning at the pueblo which the Spaniards named El Agua de Santo Domingo they met the Indians as friends and asked if Thomas and Christopher were here.

      Yes, they were here, but still in bed.

      Just where?—and the soldiers found them, brought them to the Governor, and they spoke freely with him.

      They said they were Christian Indians who had come from New Spain with Castaño. When he was taken away, they had stayed here of their own will, were now married to pueblo women, and were happy. They could speak the Mexican, Spanish and the local Indian tongues. From that time on, they belonged to the Governor, and played a vital part in his government, for through them he could now make his way into the understanding of the people of his river.

      At Santo Domingo the Governor received seven chiefs representing thirty-four pueblos. With fuller communication achieved through Thomas and Christopher, a solemn ceremony was held in the great kiva of Santo Domingo in which the chiefs swore allegiance to God and the king of the Christians on the seventh of July.

      The Governor moved upriver again, and on the eleventh arrived near the two pueblos of Yuque and Yunque which faced each other across the river just below the confluence of the Chama with the Rio del Norte. These were the same towns seen fifty-seven years before by Captain Barrionuevo of Coronado’s army. From the nearer one of these pueblos—the one on the east bank—the people came out to give their submission to the Governor, and peaceably evacuated their houses to let him and his soldiers move in. In memory of the first Spaniards who had erected the cross there years before, the Governor named his town San Juan de los Caballeros, and designated it as his capital.

      Captain Vicente de Zaldívar, the Sergeant Major, was sent downstream to meet and escort the heavy train of the wagons and the cattle to the new capital, while the Governor with a small party rode to the north as far as Taos, and to the east as far as Pecos.

      At Pecos a man was brought forward who could speak in a sort of Spanish. His name was Joseph. After a few words he struck deep into the interest of his hearers. Another mystery of the north was partly solved as he talked. Five years ago Joseph was taken from the Rio del Norte with other Indians to guide some Spanish soldiers eastward to the plains. He spoke the names of Captain Francisco Leyda de Bonilla and Captain Antonio Gutierrez de Humaña.

      The Spaniards quickened at this mention of the deserters, the leaders of an illegal entry, whom it was the Governor’s assigned duty to arrest, and for whom he had been looking ever since his arrival in New Mexico.

      But go on: where were they now?

      Joseph continued. They had gone together eastward, and for six or seven weeks travelled past pueblos, rivers, great herds of buffalo, until one day Gutierrez de Humaña turned on Leyda de Bonilla and killed him on the plains.

      So: Gutierrez de Humaña was not only a deserter but also a murderer. What else?

      After that, the party came to a large river, and there Joseph and five other Indians ran away and tried to go back to the Rio del Norte. He alone got back, and then only after a year’s captivity by plains Apaches.

      And Gutierrez de Humaña and the rest of his soldiers?

      They had never returned from the plains. There were several possibilities. They might be living there as conquerors. They might be captive slaves of buffalo-hunting Indians. They might be dead.

      Joseph, after his escape, hearing that there were other Spaniards on the river, went to meet them, and there, at Pecos, found them. The Governor was glad to take him into his service as interpreter, guide and geographer. Turning back to the Rio del Norte, the Governor’s party crossed westward and explored the Jemez province.

      In his absence from the capital, other soldiers, with fifteen hundred Indians, undertook to build the first municipal works—an irrigation ditch—for the river city of San Juan. At that point the valley was wide, with many grand steps in the land rising away from the river, through river terraces of pinkish sand, and Indian-colored foothills carved by the wind into fantastic shapes, and high fiat mesas, to mountains whose forests turned the clear air blue as smoke. The river course was edged with trees.

      Here on August 19 the wagon train arrived to be reunited to the Governor and his command, and to stay on the river as no colony had yet stayed. They brought more than their lashed and lumbering cargoes to the capital high on the river, more than their toiling bodies. They brought all that had made them, through the centuries. If their heritage was a collective memory, it remembered for all more than any one man could know for himself. It shone upon their inner lives in another light than the light of the material world, and in countless hidden revelations suggested what brought them where they were.

      18.

       Collective Memory

      Brown plains and wide skies joined by far mountains would always be the image of home to them, the image of Spain, that rose like a castle to inland heights from the slopes of the Mediterranean, and gave to the offshore wind the fragrance of ten thousand wild flowers that mariners smelled out at sea.

      The home of the Spanish spirit was Rome. When Spain was a province of the Caesarian Empire her promising youths went to Rome, to make a name for themselves, to refresh the life of the capital with the raw sweetness of the country, and to help form the styles of the day in the theatre, like Seneca of Cordoba, and make wit acid as wine, like Martial of Bilbilis, and elevate the public art of speech, like Quintillian from Calahorra, and even become Emperor, like Trajan, the Spanish soldier. Rome gave the Spaniards their law; their feeling for cliff and wall, arch and cave, in building; and their formal display of death in the arena, with its mortal delights, its cynical esthetic of pain and chance. Martial said it:

      Raptus abit media quod ad aethera taurus harena, non fuit hoc artis sed pietatis opus.…

      A bull, he said, taken up from the center of the arena rises to the skies, and this was not act of art, but of piety.… It remained an act of passion when Spanish piety turned to Christianity.

      It was an empowering piety that grew through fourteen centuries,

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