Great River - Paul Horgan

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into the terrible revolt from the beginning. Finally as the stillness of the third evening came, the Indians asked the soldiers who was the mighty warrior who rode to battle above them in the sky, mounted on a white charger, carrying a fiery sword, wearing a long white beard, and accompanied by a maiden of heavenly beauty, robed in blue and crowned with stars. Hearing this Zaldívar and his men made the sign of the cross and declared that their arms had been triumphant through the support of Saint James of Compostela on his white horse, and of the Queen of Heaven herself. Colonel de Zaldívar shortly afterward sent the news of all these events to the Governor at San Juan by his courier the quartermaster Diego de Zubia, who reported thus. Zaldívar, the army and their captives would arrive in a few days.

      Governor de Oñate could be proud and thankful. The victory was prodigious—seventy soldiers against thousands of Indians on their rocky fastness. He marvelled. Almost a thousand Indians were killed, and only two soldiers. And the city burning, and the vision in the sky? The Governor regarded all Indians, including that old woman who had come to him on the twenty-fourth, as superstitious creatures. How had she known on the very last day of battle what the courier took nine days to bring him? The Indians believed all old people wise unless crazy. Who knew?

      He thanked the quartermaster, who mentioned the two Indian prisoners whom he had brought and who were now detained in a kiva at San Juan.

      Who were they and what were they about?

      Zubia explained that he had taken them as they were fleeing Ácoma. They told him they were Indians from elsewhere who had been attacked and robbed by the Ácomas. They asked him for food and help. He gave them what they needed and they were now awaiting attention in the kiva.

      The Governor made inquiries. Friendly Indians reported to him that the two men in the kiva were not fugitives from Ácorna at all, but were actually two Ácoma Indians who had not surrendered. An extraordinary affair followed, a miniature of the battle of Ácoma itself. The two in the kiva when asked to come out refused. For three days they threw stones at all who tried to reach them. They lurked in the dark kiva emanating baleful energy, like wild animals dangerously trapped. Finally their bodies yielded but not their wild spirits. They asked for daggers with which to kill themselves, as they disdained to surrender to the Spaniards. The Governor and his Indian friends besought them to come out and be baptized. The reply came in vile abuse from the dark round cave. The Governor shrugged, and ordered then that instead of daggers, ropes be thrown to them, with which if they chose they might hang themselves. Silence followed for some time. The soldiers stood listening in the bright sunlight while mortal exasperation gathered its powers out of sight in the kiva. At last there was a sound, the scratch of body on packed clay, and the two emerged wearing their nooses already around their necks. Permitted to pass, they went to a sizable cottonwood tree like all those that cast shade by the river. In and out of sunlight they climbed to a topmost branch where the golden winter leaves quivered about their dry brown bodies. Knotting their ropes to the tree, they were silent, and after that they stared at the Governor and the others who watched from below. Finally one of the Ácomas spoke. With pride and scorn he declared that the two of them would die and dying would leave the soldiers free to ravage the land. “Our towns, our things, our lands are yours,” he said bitterly, and promised vengeance, if anyone could ever return from the dead. And with that, he and his comrade dropped from their bough with the spittle of fury on their lips. They hung swaying and ugly with bent necks and swollen faces as they died.

      Looking up in awe and fascination, the soldiers, the Governor, witnessed there in the river cottonwood at San Juan the end of the battle of Ácoma.

      22.

       Afterthoughts

      Though there were afterthoughts that wanted expression in the official terms of legal government, and found it. The battle, the war was won, but the Governor set about confirming the gains already made in his province by civilization as he represented it. If he re-examined the legal opinion of December twenty-second, he found full justification to punish the leaders of the insurrection, so long as “divine and civil” law were properly administered. It was therefore with every proper observance of the Spanish passion for legality in its finest details that he ordered a trial at the pueblo of Santo Domingo down the river of those captives brought from Ácoma by Vicente de Zaldívar.

      The prisoners were charged with killing eleven Spaniards and two Indian servants in the massacre of December; and further charged with refusal to submit peacefully, deliver the murderers, and accept due punishment when the army went in January to Ácoma to accomplish these ends.

      The trial was held in early February, 1599, with the Governor presiding. It was a medium through which the Spaniards heard once again the chronicle of Ácoma treachery and Spanish valor. The prisoners—a throng of them—had no advocate. Witnesses described known perfidies. The corporate indignation of the stronger of two societies energized itself emotionally. Who could doubt that punishment—any conceivable punishment—paled beside the acts that cried for it? Virtue was not a strand of life interwoven with evil. It was a dogmatic posture which for its own protection could justly resort to any devices of pain and mutilation. The law took for granted in the last year of the sixteenth century that acts of crime done by a human body called for the breaking of such a body in degrees varying with the offense. Such degrees could hardly be arrived at without due process of law, and the Governor heard the witnesses one by one as they came in their soldierly leather, steel, feather and linen and wool to speak. The testimony was all in by the eleventh, and on the twelfth of February, the head of the government was ready to respond with the sentences, which would be properly recorded and notarized.

      The Governor ordered that: all male Ácomese prisoners over twenty-five years old be condemned to have one foot cut off and to give twenty years of personal service (assignments to be made later); all males over twelve and under twenty-five years of age, to give twenty years of personal service; all females over twelve years of age, to give twenty years of personal service; and two Indians from the towns in the far west who had been captured at Ácoma, to have their right hands cut off and to be sent to their western homes to warn others of the power that dwelled upon the river.

      The expression “personal service” with its limitation of term was preferred to the term slavery. Among the assignments made later was that of sixty girls of Ácoma who, escorted by Captain Pérez de Villagrá, were sent to the viceroy in Mexico for distribution among the convents, to be educated and converted, in alien peace. Pérez left in March, 1599, bearing a letter to the Viceroy from the Governor, asking for reinforcements in men with families “who are the solid rock upon which new republics are permanently founded,” and arms, and ammunition; while the colony got on with the spring planting.

      23.

       Exchange

      With each day that passed the colony more deeply established its roots, bringing new ways to the Indian people, and in turn acquiring from them some of the old habits of living along the river.

      The river lands met now a new use on a larger scale than ever before. The Spaniards set their cattle, sheep, horses and goats out to graze on the slopes of the valley above the irrigated fields—the slopes where storm water ran, and according as it was detained by vegetation made great or little damage in the face of the earth. Nobody could see in the first years or even generations, as the grass came back every spring, whether or not there was less of it showing each time; and whether gullies formed and grew faster than before. It was an immemorial process, the grazing of animals, and the land had always fed them. There were no thoughts of river life and valley character and land use as related to one another by all the fateful possibilities that lay within change wrought by man.

      Vásquez de Coronado had brought his sheep along to be eaten. Oñate’s sheep gave not only mutton but wool. Indian weavers prepared the wool just as they had their cotton and used the same looms and methods with the new material. New garments began to appear among the Indians, which could be acquired by the Spaniards in turn through sale or force.

      Foods were exchanged. The Indian chocolate, that had come from the Aztec, and the tomato, were already in the Spanish household. Indian

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