Page 30 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

society. They succeeded to some extent with the
50 pueblos but not with the nomadic tribes.
TheMimbres(thenomadicreplacementoftheear- lier peaceful villagers) and other Apaches may have joined the pueblo Indians in welcoming the bearded White intruders from the south and even established some degree of trade. But hostilities were sure to come, given the pugnacious nature of both and the vast
differencesinwealthandsocialattitudes. Fromthe earliest contact there were intermittent engagements between the Apaches and the Spaniards. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the hos- tilities escalated sharply and would not abate for nearly another two centuries.51
The Spanish adopted a policy of retaliation toward these people who had not responded favorably to their religious conversion efforts. When Indians pillaged a settlement, as they did with increasing frequency, the colonists would organize expeditions and extract pain-
52
ful retribution on the camps of the Indians
a policy on both sides to kill the adults, occasionally sparing the women, and take the young to be held as slaves or sometimes brought up as family.
The Spanish discovered, all too quickly, that they could not conquer and enslave the Apaches. There- fore, they instituted the tactic of agitation between the tribes. This ancient military strategy of divide and conquer worked well, and before long the Apaches were considered a renegade people by almost everyone 53 This same philosophy would be used repeatedly by the Mexicans and Americans in later years. The success of this policy was placed in tem- porary jeopardy about the middle of the eighteenth century when the Spanish signed a peace treaty with the Comanches at Pecos.
The Apaches saw the opportunity to reestablish the commerce they had enjoyed with the Spanish 35 or 40 years previously and appealed for a similar treaty. Whereupon the Comanches became outraged; if the Spanish made peace with these Apaches, who would the Comanches have left to fight? Seeing the peace- with-everybody policy as untenable, the Commandant General instructed Governor Fernando de la Concha to keep the peace with only the “four allied tribes,” the Comanches, Utes, Navajos, and Jicarillas, and reject
54
to New Mexico in 1625, mentioned that a friar named
the overtures by the Apaches.
Not all relations with all bands of the Apaches
amounted to constant warfare. In a 1628 communica- tion Father Alonso de Benavides, head of the Francis- can Mission and Custos who had led a dozen apostfes
59
The Indian was master of New
The Iberian Influence
It became
it
El Paso del Norte
Mexico once again, but not for long.
16
Martin (or Domingo) del Espiritu Santo
had^ worked
withgreatcourageamongtheGilaApaches. Forthe
most part, this was to be a fleeting situation. Relations
between the Spanish and Apaches became more acute
during the 1660s, and in 1663 the Governor’s repre-
sentative and commander of the Piro Pueblos
(southeast of present-day Albuquerque), Nichols
Aguilar, wrote that “no road is safe from this heathen
56
On April 1, 1669, Fray Juan de Bernal wrote that,
among other problems with the Apaches, they were 57
killing all of the Christian Indians they could find. The message would be repeated by the frontiersman, explorer, and Jesuit missionary, Father Jacobo Sedel- mayr, in 1763 when he wrote of “the cruel Apache nation” and as late as 1812 when the only New Mexico representative who ever attended the Spanish Cortes, Don Pedro Bautista Pino, called the Apache “a
58
treacherous, cruel, and thieving people.”
For New Mexico, the period from 1628 to 1680 was one of internal conflict and isolation as the military and church fought for domination of the government and
the Indians, and the supply carts from the interior of Mexico came infrequently and sporadically. Subjuga- tion of the Indians by force and by religion was carried out zealously, and in 1675, Governor Juan Francisco de Trevino tried to end the fratricidal power struggle by siding with the clergy and prohibiting pagan obser- vances. In a raid on such practices, he rounded up 47 Indians and publicly whipped them except for the 4 he hung. Among those beaten was Pope, a middle-aged Indian, from the pueblo of Ohke, later renamed San Juan.
In 1680, led by Pope from his Taos kiva headquarters, the pueblos decided they had experienced sufficient Spanish domination and rose in rebellion. The various villages banded together in a unified upheaval, except for Isleta and Socorro, and aided by the nomadic Navajos, drove out the Spaniards and their Indian friends, killing many in the process. The defeat of the southern invaders and their converts was complete, and the rout did not abate until the survivors reached
This would be the major theme until the Mexican revolution brought down the Spanish flag in Central and North America.
nation.”
After the Indian revolt against the Spanish in 1680 and the retreat to El Paso del Norte, the Spanish Governor Antonio Otermin ordered the construction