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

by Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

In this description of Casteñeda’s it is easy to recognize the upper course of the great Rio Colorado. The Spaniards also explicitly declare that it was the Rio del Tizon, by which name Melchior Diaz designated the Colorado.

In the course of less than six months the Spanish reconnoitring corps had thus three times touched the largest river of western America, had explored its shores with tolerable accuracy for a considerable length of its course, and had also travelled in two directions through parts of Arizona, which have only in a very recent time again attracted attention. Coronado had even followed the New Mexican boundary northward through two thirds of the length of the territory, and the documents relative to his campaign give correct accounts of the Gila River, and excellent descriptions of the Sierra Blanca region and the Little Colorado. Diaz had crossed southwestern Arizona. Alarcon had, besides, explored and correctly described the mouth and the lower course of the Rio Colorado. Lastly, Cárdenas had traversed the whole of Arizona from east to west. The accomplishment of such enterprises with small means deserves admiration; and when we consider that official reports were made of these matters by eye-witnesses—reports the great accuracy of which as regards the country and people only more recent researches have made it possible to demonstrate—we cannot refuse to pay these men, so long decried as “Spanish adventurers,” “cruel freebooters,” etc., all honor for their achievements. The Spanish government also deserves high praise for the carefulness and far-sightedness with which it permitted such enterprises, and preserved the written records of them.

While the reconnoitring operations toward the west were thus discontinued, the eyes of the Spaniards were turned from Zuñi more earnestly toward the east. Coronado had given the people of the Zuñi tribe to understand that they must spread the news of his coming and of his intention to stay in the country as widely as possible. The command was unnecessary, for reports of that kind spread very rapidly among the Indians without any postal system. A certain kind of peaceful intercourse is constantly going on, even between hostile tribes, and news passes from one tribe to another through numerous channels, though distorted in many ways, to great distances. I cite the accounts of Cibola, which were carried to the middle of Sonora. Thus there existed, and still exists, a close bond among the Village Indians, or Pueblos, especially, which connects the far distant Pecos and Moqui with the Opatas, and the most northern Taos with the most southern Piros. Their scattered position among nomadic tribes made them sensible of the need of a connection, and the equal condition of their civilization confirmed the feeling. Neighboring Pueblos often made war upon one another, and would still do so were it not for the whites, but visits were made between the more remote ones for trade and for purposes connected with religion. There are fetishes and incantations which, when they have been discontinued in one pueblo, can only be recovered from some other one, often far distant.

In these and similar ways had the story of the coming of the Spaniards reached Moqui, and their horses had been represented there as man-eating creatures. There came also to Zuñi Indians from the extreme east of the Pueblo region, from a village called Cicuyé. This village was situated “seventy leagues toward the east.” The arrival of Coronado was already known there. The men brought buffalo robes with them, and invited the Spanish commander to visit their place, presenting him with skins and shields and “helmets” of buffalo leather.[81] With the reports from Cibola, the Spaniards had also received in the south accounts of the existence of “wild cows,” confirming what Cabeza de Vaca had previously related. The Indians of the shores of the extreme lower Colorado had likewise told Alarcon of these animals. Now the Spaniards were in contact with people whose home was near the buffalo, and who hunted it.[82] A very welcome occasion was thus presented to them for making themselves acquainted with these new animal forms, and an excellent opportunity to advance with good leaders farther into the interior. Coronado therefore sent Hernando de Alvarado with twenty men to go with the people of Cicuyé on their return to their home, and to report to the chief in command in eighty days concerning what he had seen and done. The main corps remained in the meanwhile at Zuñi, whither Alvarado was to return after completing his tour. His campaign took place in August, 1540.

The word “Cicuyé” is “Tshi-quité,” the aboriginal name of the Pecos Indians. I will here mention that Casteñeda says that Pecos is the last village to the east, and that the great plains are only thirty leagues, or eighty miles, distant from it. I have already shown in my earlier work, “A Visit to the Aboriginal Ruins in the Valley of the Rio Pecos,”[83] that Cicuyé is identical with Pecos. It is not necessary to repeat the demonstration here.

Alvarado and his company reached the first village in five days. It was built on a rock, and was called “Acuco.” This is the “Ha-cu-qua” of the Zuñi, the pueblo of Acoma, so famous for its situation. Casteñeda very appropriately describes it as being upon “a perpendicular rock ... so high that a bullet could hardly reach the top”; but with less accuracy he speaks of a “stairway” of three hundred steps hewn in the rock as being the only way to the highest story. Acoma is indeed situated on a rock, the shape of which resembles that of a spider. The walls of the rock fall perpendicularly down for nearly three hundred feet, while four winding paths lead to the pueblo, none of which has been cut out by human hands. Slight improvements in the shape of implanted posts and notches for the hands and feet have been made in a very few places. At the summit is the pueblo, with its great church of adobe and stone, and the churchyard, the soil of which has all been brought up on the backs of the inhabitants. Not a foot of other loose ground can be found on the gigantic cliff; the ten houses stand on the bare rock, whence the view down into the yawning depth is awful. The six hundred inhabitants draw their supply of water the year round from the accumulations of rain and snow in two deep natural cisterns. The cultivated fields are fourteen miles away.

I hope I may be pardoned if I repeat here a few impressions which were deeply marked upon me during a long sojourn in Acoma, and in words which I have already published in “A Letter from Acoma” in the German journal Das Ausland (1884, No. XIII.). These impressions have been renewed on two visits to the place, when the same feelings were daily awakened.

“When the visitor stands upon the rocks which immediately surround the water-pool, he looks down from them into the valley upon the great mesas that surround them, and beyond these upon the massive pyramid of Mount Taylor, or the Sierra de San Matéo.... As evening approaches the shadows lie deep upon the ground, and as they climb up the rock-walls, as cliff after cliff is swallowed up in darkness, his heart is oppressed with the feeling that all intercourse with the outer world is henceforth cut off. This feeling has crept upon me every evening at sunset; for escape from Acoma in the night would be impossible to any one who had not lived there a long time. When the last ray of the sun has taken leave of the lofty sierra, one feels absolutely alone, forsaken, helplessly floating in the darkness of night. But this feeling soon passes away; for a clear, although monotonous, singing sounds from the pueblo, fires blaze on the roofs, and when one has returned to the houses laughing voices greet him, and joyous groups are moving around and above him. The oppressive feeling of desertion changes into one of pleasure in being the plain guest of a simple people.”

The population of Acoma has not changed much in three hundred and forty years, for Casteñeda speaks of two hundred braves. The people prepared to defend themselves against the Spaniards, but no battle took place, the fear of the horses inducing a speedy peace. It seems, however, that Alvarado did not stay in Acoma, and he was quite right in not trusting to the peaceful disposition of the people, for once on the rock the same fate might easily have met him that, fifty-eight years later, overtook the Maestro de Campo Zaldivar and his men at that place. Three days’ journey from Acoma brought him to Tiguex, where he met a friendly reception. Tiguex (pronounced Tiguesh), according to Casteñeda, was a group of twelve smaller pueblos situated on a large river, in a valley about two leagues, or five miles, wide. From that place Alvarado sent a messenger to Coronado with the advice to remove his winter quarters there.

Tiguex has been looked for at various places in New Mexico: on the eastern Rio Puerco, at the site of the present Santa Fé, and at other points. I have marked as the situation of this pueblo group the banks of the Rio Grande near Bernalillo, or rather between Algodones and Albuquerque. The very name points thither, for the Tiguas Indians call themselves Tiguex, and they formerly lived in a chain of larger and smaller pueblos along the Rio Grande. They were divided into two groups: a northern group, of which I know of twelve ruins between the “Mesa del Cangelon” in the north and “Los Corrales” in the south, and of which the present pueblo of Sandía is the only one left; and a southern branch now concentrated at the large village of Isleta, but which was still, about 1630, scattered in several small places. I have no doubt that the Tiguex of Coronado denotes the northern group of the Tiguas, for it lay north of Acoma and on a large river. This river east of Zuñi could only have been the Rio Grande del Norte, for the Puerco is in that latitude in parts of its course filled up with sand, and in other parts reduced to an insignificant, muddy rill. An expression of Casteñeda’s, likewise applying to Cicuyé-Pecos, is decisive on this point. “Tiguex,” he says, “is the middle point,” and “from Cibola to Cicuyé, which is the last village, we count seventy leagues.” The villages of Tiguex were not, like Zuñi and Acoma, built of stone and mortar, but of adobe; and that is also the structure of the pueblos the ruins of which I have examined around Bernalillo. I mention still another piece of documentary evidence, although it is derived from an account written at a later period. At Tiguex Coronado stormed and destroyed a pueblo—the only case of the destruction of a village in New Mexico during his campaign. In the year 1583 the “Tiguas” told Antonio de Espejo, on his arrival among them, that his countrymen on their first coming had burnt one of their towns in the vicinity of the present Bernalillo. This fixes the locality of Tiguex, as I have attempted to show in an earlier publication, beyond all doubt.