Great River - Paul Horgan

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picked soldiers made up the army against Ácoma. Each had his coat of mail, double strength. They had shields which when not in use hung from the shoulder. The lancers carried many designs in their tall weapons. Some had points called partisans, like sharp leaves facing both ways. There were glaives, which carried a plain, long knife with a sudden curve at the tip like an eagle’s beak. The halberds had an axe facing one way, a steel beak another, and at the very top, a long sharp point. All these the soldiers polished and tightened and sharpened. The firearms were taken apart, the springs tested, oiled and reassembled. Some musketeers carried the harquebus, others the petronel, which was fired with its butt against the breast. Colonel de Zaldívar had two pieces of brass artillery to take with him—culverins with the Spanish Crown engraved above their touchholes. The artillerymen polished them inside and out until they shone green with the blue sky. Gunpowder was sifted and spread thin to dry in the sun. The heavy fixed maces and the morning stars from Germany with a spiked ball hung by a short chain from the mace-staff were scrubbed with river sand. All riding equipment was inspected, repaired with rawhide thongs, and inspected again—bridles, reins, saddles, stirrups. The horses had heavy steel breastplates, and these were burnished. Every man’s knapsack was filled with his issue of emergency rations, gunpowder, bullets. With so much at stake, proper preparation was essential. As the men worked day by day, after Christmas, and into the New Year, they came to love their weapons and equipment. They worked as absorbed as children in ritual play. Their common purpose, their similar tasks, the buried excitement of awaiting danger, made them happy in a way that they could never expose. They were soldiers getting ready for a soldier’s job.

      By order of the Governor all men went to confession and communion before leaving with the army—all but one, “who, despite the urgings of his commander, would have nothing to do with the holy sacraments.” He was called “an abandoned wretch.”

      On the morning of January 12, 1599, the army against Ácorna left the capital on the river. It took nine or ten days to reach Ácoma. On arriving, Vicente de Zaldívar was under orders to call upon the Ácomese for peace and submission. If these were denied, he was to attack. It would take nine or ten days for news to come back to the river after that. The Governor and the colony could only wait, hope and pray as January passed.

      On the night of the twenty-first while the Governor was in his quarters at San Juan disturbances broke out among the Indians in the twin pueblo over the river. Sentries reported hostile announcements. Defiant reports came of how all the pueblos of the river country were marching in arms to destroy the Spanish colony. The Governor personally took charge of doubling the sentinels on guard, with a captain at each of the four gates to San Juan. Fires were lighted to see by. It was a cold night. The army must have just about then come to Ácoma, for they had left nine days before. Here on the river, and there far to the west, were they all in danger tonight?

      The Governor making his rounds saw the rooftops of his own town full of people who should be inside. Who were they? He sent two officers to find out. They returned to report that the roofs were thronged by the wives, the mothers, the widows of the colony, under the leadership of Doña Eufemia de Sosa Peñalosa, wife of the royal ensign. They had all decided that they must in the common peril help their soldier menfolk to defend their common home, the capital city. The Governor was touched at such spirit, and confirmed Doña Eufemia’s command of the roofs. The women of the garrison “walked up and down the housetops with proud and martial step.”

      The vigil lasted all night, but no attack came, then, or in the days following. It was hard to wait and to wonder, but they could do nothing else at San Juan, though a curious thing happened in the late afternoon of January twenty-fourth. A very old Indian woman came to see the Governor and was admitted. She was accustomed to the respect which her people always gave to the aged and the ancestors, and she expected it from the Spaniards. She had something to tell the Governor and she told it with gravity. She made references to distance, westward, wide country, vastly high rock, so, long and sheer. Her little crabbed hands whirled in gestures of battle and strife one against the other. The war at Ácoma. The soldiers with brave swords, the Indians with arrows, the air full of fury. The battle came and went. It lasted three long days. It was over just today, she said. There was much death amidst the Indians. There came smoke, the town was burning. There was a vision in the air. Quiet came. The soldiers were victorious. She nodded many times, nodding with her whole drawn, eroded and folded person in emphatic confirmation of what she knew and told.

      The Governor thanked her and dismissed her. Her recital hardly allayed his impatience to hear what really had happened.

      But at last nine days afterward, the quartermaster Diego de Zubia came riding to San Juan from the battle of Ácoma with information and two prisoners. The prisoners he put into a kiva under guard and went to report to the Governor. He announced an overwhelming victory at once. The details followed.

      Late in the afternoon of January twenty-first the army was greeted at Ácoma by fearful sights and sounds. On the rock overhead, the Indians, men and women, were naked, figuring obscene gestures, and shrieking like devils out of hell. Vicente de Zaldívar sent the secretary and Thomas, the interpreter, to demand peaceful submission and delivery of the murderers of December, only to be greeted with vileness and scorn. Night falling, the army camped below the rock while Zaldívar completed his battle plan. When the sun rose on the morning of January twenty-second he took eleven men unseen to one of the rocks of Ácoma while the rest of the army marched in plain view to the other announcing their attack. The Indian defenders swarmed to fight the main army, while Zaldívar and his little squad scaled the far rock to gain an all-important foothold. Four hundred Indians discovered them and attacked them with stones and arrows, but without driving them off the cliff. Zaldívar called on his patron Saint Vincent and gave battle. Soon he saw an Indian dressed in his brother Juan’s clothes, and in valorous rage he killed him with one blow. The army at the other rock, and other soldiers on the ground far below, attacked with all their power so that the Indians found themselves defending three fronts. Many Indians were killed by fire from below, and fell from the edge of the island “leaving their miserable souls up in their lofty fortress.” The battle raged all the first day and was ended only by the cold January nightfall, with Vicente down on the ground in camp again, making plans for the second day, while his squad retained their safe position on top of the first rock. The army once more confessed to the chaplain, all but the “abandoned wretch,” and received communion from the Father President before sunrise on the second morning, January twenty-third. A large force then went to the first rock, scaled the cliff and were received by the soldiers on top. The pueblo on the islands looked deserted. Thirteen soldiers carrying a heavy timber to bridge the chasm between the rocks advanced and crossed, and pulled their bridge with them to use again farther ahead. The Indians then broke from hiding to attack. The rest of the army saw their comrades cut off from them beyond the abyss. Captain Pérez de Villagrá superbly ran, leaped the chasm and heaved the great log up, restoring it as a bridge, upon which the soldiers crossed to the reinforcement of their fellows, while the trumpeter blew his trumpet and all felt great new strength. A harque-busier, firing wildly, shot four times through the body of his comrade the “abandoned wretch,” who then called for God’s forgiveness and heroically made his way to the camp below, where he confessed to the Father President and died. The two brass culverins were brought up, and each was loaded with two hundred balls and fired into a front of three hundred Indians who were advancing, and did fearful damage. A squad of soldiers went behind the battle and set fire to the city of Ácoma, so that smoke and flame rose to obscure the sun. Peace demands were made repeatedly by the attackers and refused. Some Indians in despair threw themselves from the rock, and others walked into the burning houses to die, and others hanged themselves. In the third day an Ácoma ancient came forward walking with a staff, pleading for peace, offering the surrender for his people, which was accepted by the Colonel. Zaldívar asked what had happened to the bodies of the soldiers murdered in December, and the old man led him to the place where all had been gathered and burned in a savage funeral pyre. There Zaldívar prostrated himself to weep and pray, saying to the soldiers with him, “Here is another Troy.” He raised a cross at the site. After the surrender of every Indian was certain, the soldiers saw the women of the pueblo rush forward with sticks and fall to beating a dead body that lay on the stone until it was a mound of formless flesh. They explained in their rage that they were punishing

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