The Gilded Man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America

by Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

Few valleys have so small a breadth for so great a length as the valley of the Sonora River. From Babiácora to Sinoquipe, a distance of forty-five miles, the fertile intervale widens out at only one place, Banámichi, to three miles; elsewhere it is seldom more than half a mile wide. Large gravel dunes with thorny bushes of mesquite, choya, pitahaya, agovin, and palo-blanco form a base of greater or less breadth on both sides, from which mountains rise abruptly with wild, picturesque profile, forming on the eastern side a continuous chain which is crossed by only a few extremely difficult paths. The defile which Jaramillo mentions as leading from the south to the Sonora River can only be that one which enters the valley at Babiácora and comes down from Batuco. The Rio Sonora turns thence toward the southwest, and runs through the dark gorge of Ures to the present city of Hermosillo and the Gulf of California. When the first Jesuit missionaries visited the region in the year 1638, they found its inhabitants numerous and more peaceful and better civilized than the other peoples of the country. These inhabitants are now known by the name of “Opata”; they call themselves “Joyl-ra-ua,” or village people. The name “Opata” belongs to the Pima language; it arose toward the end of the seventeenth century and is analyzed into “Oop,” enemies, and “Ootam,” men. The Pimas designate themselves by the latter word. Opata is therefore equivalent to “men hostile to the Pima tribe.” The languages of the two tribes are very closely related.

Few tribes in Spanish America have so readily and completely assimilated with the whites as the Opatas of Sonora. I am convinced, after a slow journey of three months through their whole country, that there are hardly two dozen of them who can and will speak their own language. The dress of the Opatas is white, customary in all Mexico, with the palm-leaf hat. Their houses are like the habitations of the Mexicans. They wear sandals or moccasins indifferently, although the latter are more common on account of the great roughness of the mountains. They are generally ashamed of their mother tongue, desire to be castellano or ladino, and speak only Spanish with their children. Hardly more than recollections and a few dances that have been converted into church festivals are left of their former customs. Four of these were danced a hundred years ago, but only the “daninamaca” and the “pascola” are still in use. The “mariachi,” a dance which is similar to our round dances, has been abandoned on account of its obscenity, but the “majo dani,” the stag dance, still exists in the recollections of the people.

The present organization of the Opatas has been conformed since the reform legislation of 1857 to the North American pattern—that is, one in which the old and the new are partly combined. The original community of goods of the Indians, which the Crown accorded to them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, still subsists. Hence, since the Indians live alongside of the Spanish families, there is a double administration, which is plainly apparent at some places in the Sonora Valley.

The easy and voluntary, even eager, denationalization of the Opatas cannot be ascribed to the influence of the Jesuits alone, although they exercised an almost theocratic rule over the tribe for one hundred and thirty-eight years. The Pimas were under the same influence for a like period, yet even the Pápagos of Tucson tenaciously hold to the language and partly to the religion of their fathers. There was an element of greater docility in the nature of the Opatas, which the fathers of the Society of Jesus encouraged, and vigilantly guarded against all interference of the officers and colonists. Then the necessity of defence against a common formidable enemy, the Apaches, attached the sedentary Opatas closely to Spanish civilization and customs for more than two hundred years. The awful desolation which this hereditary enemy inflicted upon the Opatas after the conspiracy formed at Casas Grandes in Chihuahua in 1684 drove them all to the large towns, and compelled them to seek the better protection which the adoption of the Spanish-Mexican arrangement of houses and manner of living afforded them. Those who did not adapt themselves to this condition and remained outside of the pueblos soon fell victims[76] in the Sierra Madre, the sierra of Texas, to the Janos and Jócomes, and afterward to the Apaches, which gradually absorbed these tribes.

The chroniclers of the campaign which is the object of this study spoke of the Opatas as being “numerous and intelligent.” Their habitations in the Sonora Valley were, however, not so large as those of the southern Pimas, and their villages were less populous. I have surveyed seventeen ruins between Los Fresnos and Babiácora, and have visited many other sites of ruins, but have found no village there that contained a hundred huts. But Batesopa, at the foot of the Sierra Huachinera (a branch of the Sierra Madre), may have had two hundred houses. The houses there are also more durably built of clay and stone, or their posts rest on square or rectangular foundations of stone, while the walls are made of intertwined reeds and the roofs of palm leaves or yucca blades, for it is cold in the Sonora Valley. A fan palm is growing in Arispe which has a height of twenty-five feet; and the artistically woven roofing of the leaves of this species, which I have admired in Oaxaca, is an adequate protection against the heavy rains of summer. The little villages were always on elevations near the water, and the rainfall flowed away safely to the lower land. I found no settlement fortified, but places of refuge are numerous in the interior of the Sierra Madre. They are very significantly called fort-hills (Cerros de Trincheras). They are natural heights, often very steep, along the brows of which and bending to their sinuosities rude bulwarks of stone have been raised. The hill could thus be converted in the simplest way into a fortification, and where it is conical, as at Terrenate, Ymúrez, and Toni-vavi, near Nacori, the walls naturally assume a spiral form. The Indians thus adapted their constructions to the irregularities of the slopes. The people of several villages could take refuge in one of these fortified heights. These primitive fortifications have attracted the attention of travellers in recent years, and have given rise to exaggerated newspaper reports concerning a gigantic artificial pyramid in the vicinity of Magdalena.

Division into many small tribes was the original constitution and social order of the Opatas. The people of Opasura attacked them on the Sonora River at Banámichi, and the river-side tribes made war upon one another. The Opatas had slings, stone axes, clubs, and arrows without stone heads, but burnt hard and strongly poisoned. Their clothing was of cotton and skins, and their decorations were of colored feathers.

Our information respecting their religious rites is very scanty, but I have succeeded in collecting some of their folk tales, which permit a glimpse into their earlier forms of belief as well as into their history. They affirm that they came from the north and moved gradually southward. The New Mexican Pueblo Indians recognize the Opatas, as well as the Pimas and the Yaquis, as allied to them, although they are of different linguistic affinities.

Coronado’s movements in the valley of the Sonora River appear to have been rapid. He could not possibly have reached Arispe in about a day’s journey from Babiácora, as Jaramillo asserts, for the distance is seventy miles; and though a single horseman might accomplish it in case of emergency, a troop composed of horse and foot could not. His relations with the natives seem to have been friendly—Coronado was always very much liked personally by the Indians—and they recognized Fray Marcos and welcomed him. The advance to Sinoquipe in the months of May and June, or before the rainy season begins, is attended with no difficulties. The river is really shrunken to a brook, as Jaramillo describes it, and there are only occasional very low dunes to climb. But the thickets of river poplar, elder, willow, and cane which bordered the course of the Sonora may have presented impediments then, for the paths from village to village wind up and down over the dunes. At Sinoquipe the Spaniards would come upon the series of deep ravines which extend uninterruptedly to Arispe, and thence with slight intermissions to near Bacuachi, and often force the traveller to take to the bed of the river. In the whole distance of one hundred and forty miles between Babiácora and the source of the Sonora the traveller leaves the river bank only once for a short time, while he crosses the narrow stream two hundred and fifty times. It is one of the most charming and at the same time least difficult routes which the North American continent offers to a horseman. A steadily mild climate enhances the traveller’s pleasure.

The “Cajon,” more than twenty miles in length, through which one passes in going from Sinoquipe to Arispe, is rich in the magnificent development of the most diversified rock-forms. When the “Cabezon de San Benito,” a massive, bell-shaped peak, has sunk behind the ever-increasing heights north of Sinoquipe, and these gather thickly around the river’s course, there also disappears in the east the rudely notched mountain of the nueve Minas, and the inviting cove of Tetuachi reposes on the right bank, surrounded by mighty mountains. Narrow tongues of rock jut forward into the peaceful valley, fall perpendicularly to the ground, and imitate artificial masonry in their resemblance to squared stones piled up in regular symmetry. The rocks that overhang them, rising thousands of feet, are clothed with the peculiar vegetation of the country, which lends a tint of green to even the highest crests. Through this grand valley as a door one goes into the Cajon proper. The river is bordered with thick foliage, and gigantic cliffs rise like coulisses, one behind another, away up, in the most varied colors of the quaternary rock, alternating with lava. The pillar-shaped Pitabaya fastens itself in the clefts of the steepest, even vertical cliffs. Rarely wider than half a mile, yet affording by its numerous bendings a constant change of view, never bare, but unceasingly grand and wild, the ravine appears to go along with the traveller, till the solitary palm-tree at the entrance to the half-ruined city of Arispe introduces him to a new and entirely different landscape: a hollow verdant with fields and with poplars; in the east the Sierra Arispe rises bare and forbidding; the west bank descends steeply to the river’s edge, and to it clings a group of adobe dwellings with many ruins of stone buildings and a large, bare church. This is the former capital of Sonora, the population of which has diminished by two thirds in half a century—a melancholy place of decay in the lead region. Here the Rio de Bacanuchi empties into the Sonora from the north, and the Sonora turns; between Bacuachi and Arispe it flows from northeast to southwest. I have already observed that Guagarispa most probably stood on the site of the present Arispe. No ruins of it are visible; they have been built over; but stone axes, mortars, and grinding stones (metates) are unearthed here and there. A ravine like that between this place and Sinoquipe begins on the Sonora River farther north, and at “Ti-ji-só-ri-chi” stand above the river the ruins of an ancient pueblo. The country becomes more level at “Chinapa”[77] and a short distance farther along shapes itself into the sides of the wild Cajon, in the bottom of which one rides beside the foaming Sonora to near Bacuachi. Here the country becomes open, the depression of the chain of the “Manzanal” permits a glimpse in the west of the pillar-shaped Picacho; on the eastern side the dunes extend like a low table-land ten miles toward the east, where a majestic cordillera of picturesque shape and covered with fir-trees stretches from northwest to south. There are a succession of high chains—the Sierra de Bacuachi, the Sierra Púrica, and, in the farthest southeast, the mountains of Oposura or the Sierra Grande.

If Coronado steadily followed the course of the Sonora, Suya should be looked for in the valley of Bacuachi. But if he followed the Bacuachi River, going therefore directly north, he would have approached the Cananía, and consequently the sources of the Rio Santa Cruz. The accounts on these points are unusually indefinite, the same writer often contradicting himself several times. I am inclined to the opinion that he followed the Rio Sonora all the time, and that San Hierónymo should therefore be sought near the ruins of Mututicâchi. Juan Jaramillo says that the Spaniards marched from “Sonora” for four days through an uninhabited region, and then came to a brook which he calls “Nexpa”; followed down this brook for two days to a chain of mountains, along which they continued for two days. This chain of mountains was pointed out to him as “Chichiltic-calli.” The itinerary of this writer, who marched with Coronado while Casteñeda probably followed the main body, deserves to be reproduced literally.