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

by Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

Five days’ journey brought Alvarado from the Rio Grande to Cicuyé, where a friendly reception was also given him. Of this village Casteñeda writes: “The village of Cicuyé can furnish about five hundred men of war.... It is built on a rock, and the middle is occupied by an open place in which are the estufas. The houses are four stories high, with terrace roofs, all of the same height, on which one can go around the whole village without stepping into a street. The first two stories have passages resembling balconies, on which one can go round the whole village, and where he can be under shelter. The houses have no doors below; one goes up to the balconies which are within the village by means of a ladder. All the doors open upon the balcony, which serves the purpose of a street. The village is surrounded on the outside by a low stone wall. There is also a spring there, which could be diverted.... Cicuyé lies in a narrow valley, in the midst of fir-clad mountains. A small river, in which very fine trout are caught, flows through the valley. Very large otters, bears, and good falcons are found there.”

It is not necessary to compare this description with that of the Valley of Pecos and the present ruins of the former pueblo. Casteñeda describes this pueblo so well and truly that when, after completing the measurement of the ruins in September, 1880, I restored the plans and afterward wrote them out, I perceived with astonishment that they exactly repeated the picture which the Spanish soldier had sketched three hundred years before. He was but little wrong even in his estimate of the population of Pecos-Cicuyé. Five hundred warriors represent among the Village Indians eighteen hundred inhabitants of all ages and both sexes. In the year 1630 Pecos contained “over a thousand souls,” in 1689 about two thousand. The latter number might easily, according to the plans, have been accommodated within the village, for it was the largest pueblo that New Mexico contained in the sixteenth century, or afterward.

The tribe of Pecos has not yet died out. When the inhabitants in 1840, reduced by a hundred years’ hostilities with the Comanches and by illness to five families, fled to their tribe-relatives at Jemez, their immediate extinction was considered inevitable. Instead of that they have increased, and numbered twenty-eight persons in 1885. They live with their kindred, and participate equally with them in the governmental affairs of Jemez. They also speak the same language.

Alvarado was received by the Pecos with drums and flutes. The native flute might rather be called a clarinet, for it has a mouth of painted gourd-shell, and is blown from the end and not from the side. Many cotton cloths and turquoises were presented to him. Such a reception indicated that the Pecos Indians were somewhat doubtful concerning the human origin of their guest. He also met here a strange Indian who lived with the Pecos,[84] and whom the Spaniards called a “Turk” on account of his appearance. He was a native of the Mississippi Valley, and belonged to one of the tribes of that region. He informed the Spaniards that gold-bearing and thickly populated districts lay toward the east. Such information was extremely welcome; he was taken as a guide for the visit to the buffalo herds of the plains that was to be made in pursuance of Coronado’s directions; but this was not continued long, for Alvarado hastened back, in order to communicate to his commander what he regarded as important news. He returned speedily to Tiguex or Bernalillo, where Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas had in the meantime arrived, Coronado having despatched him to prepare quarters for the whole army, which was to spend the rest of the winter there.

“The Turk” (el Turco) was to play so important a part henceforth in the fortunes of Coronado’s expedition, that I think it right to give the charge of deliberate deception which the Spaniards have made against him a closer examination. The charge has perhaps some foundation. The Indian was unquestionably a native of the plains, and had been carried to Pecos by war or the incidents of hunting expeditions. It was a custom among the Pueblo Indians (and it ceased only a few years ago) to make at least one expedition a year to these plains for the purpose of providing themselves with buffalo meat, and more particularly with buffalo skins, which they used in armor, for shoes, and for many other of their needs. The plains were not constantly inhabited; even the Apaches, who regularly roamed through a part of them, did not live there, for they are without water, and are a long distance from it, and the buffaloes resort to them only at certain seasons. As the tribes of the southwest made their regular hunts on the plains, those of the east likewise resorted to them, from Kansas, Arkansas, and the present Indian Territory, in similar expeditions, and they met. Trade or war was the result; often both; and thus these deserts were the market in which the novelties of either half of the North American continent were exchanged. “The Turk” there fell into the hands of the Pecos Indians, and they did not kill him. He tried now to make the Spaniards understand whence he had come, and what was the character of the country there, and as his language was not sufficient for the purpose, he was obliged to employ gestures. Conversation in this way was very inconvenient, and mistakes were inevitable. He is said to have told the Spaniards of houses like those of the pueblos, but larger. If he did this, he intentionally falsified, as the result showed. But while the Spaniards were thinking of houses, he may have had something quite different in his mind, and may have mentioned the pueblos only for comparison. He spoke, they said, of gold. Did he know what gold was? I am satisfied that he did not know the difference between gold, yellow mica, bright pyrites, and copper pyrites, of which there is much in the Mississippi Valley. That he should prefer his native land, where vegetation was apparently more luxuriant than in New Mexico, and where animal life was consequently more abundant, to the more barren southwest was natural, and so it was, too, that he should extol it to the Spaniards, for he had reason to suppose that he might possibly, with the aid of these strangers, be restored to his people. It is also probable that “the Turk” eventually ally led the Spaniards wofully astray, but this, too, was possibly as much the result of mistakes as of wilful deception on his part; for it was not possible to reach an adequate mutual understanding under the circumstances.

Alvarado’s return to Tiguex was marked by an event that places that officer’s character in a most unfavorable light. To provide quarters for his few men he forced the evacuation of a whole pueblo, and would not permit the inhabitants to take away anything but their clothing. The pueblo cannot have been of great size, for those communities were generally not large previous to the advent of the Spaniards. The villages were smaller but more numerous than they have been since; for the Franciscan monks combined them into larger settlements, both for purposes of defence, and in order to attach the Indians more closely to the churches and to the schools connected with them. It may be readily conceived that the forced occupation of this pueblo created an unpleasant feeling in the whole region of the present Bernalillo. It was the introduction to subsequent difficulties and dangerous contentions.

Coronado had in the meantime gone away from Zuñi with a small number of his men, leaving the larger number behind under the command of Arellano, who was to follow him after twenty days to the Rio Grande. The route he took led him to that river, about thirty miles south of Bernalillo, in the vicinity of the present Isleta. He recognized that the people there belonged to the same tribe as those of Tiguex. Their houses were likewise of adobe. Casteñeda calls this region “Tutahaco,” while Jaramillo applies that name to Acoma. The latter is right to the extent that the name is “Tutahaio,” a corruption of the word “Tuthea-uây,” by which the Tiguas call the rocks of Acoma. As the Spaniards came from there the name of the place was confounded with that of Isleta. The Spaniards asked for the latter, and the Indians gave the name of the other place, a confusion such as I have often encountered among the natives.

Casteñeda mentions eight villages in the vicinity of Isleta, but adds that they were situated “down the river.” The ruins of hardly more than four are to be seen between Albuquerque and Los Lunas, nine miles south of Isleta. The statements of Jaramillo, who gives the Tiguas of the Rio Grande fifteen villages in twenty leagues, or fifty-four miles, are on the other hand correct. It is forty-six miles from Algodones to Los Lunas, and fifteen or sixteen Tigua villages were inhabited in the year 1627. The four or five villages farther south, which Casteñeda counts besides these, were those of the Piros. They began in the vicinity of Tomé and Los Lentes, and extended to San Marcial and Fort Craig. Casteñeda was acquainted only with the most northern of them, for there were fourteen in all.

Marching up the Rio Grande to Tiguex, Coronado arrived there when the quarrels among his subordinates had just broken out. He found that his men had “the Turk” with them, and were rejoicing over the pretended information which he gave them. This Indian’s conduct became more suspicious, and he appears to have harbored a resentment against the people of Pecos. He complained that they were keeping a golden arm-band of his. The knave had never had such a thing, or it may have been a copper ring; but the Spaniards understood it to be gold, and Alvarado went to Pecos to recover it for him. When he was assured there that “the Turk” had never worn an ornament of the kind, he seized the cacique and another chief of the place by treacherous means, and carried them prisoners to the Tiguas. The Tiguas were very angry at this act, for, the two tribes not being adjacent, peace prevailed between them and the Pecos.

Since Cortés had in 1520 made a prisoner of the “war captain” (capitan de la guerra) of the Mexican tribe, whom later historical description transformed into the monarch Montezuma, the Spaniards had tried many times to secure other similar hostages. They had forgotten, or rather had never comprehended, that the importance of a chief among the Indians is very relative, and in no way comparable with the significance which the head of the state in a civilized commonwealth possesses. The fall of a valiant leader may decide the issue of a battle, but the capture by craft of the same chief in time of peace is of no greater moment than a similar treachery exercised upon a common Indian. Offices are never hereditary among these Indians, but are and were always elective. Only in the case of a leader in the mystic service, a medicine-man, or shaman, being taken away, or of one of those whose function it is to work for the good of the tribe by mortification or sacrifice, would that tribe be moved to offer a ransom for his recovery. For while an administrative officer, even a warrior, can be easily replaced, the importance of the other one lies in his knowledge of the secret arts; if he is lost, the connecting link with the beings of a higher order is removed, and the pueblo is, according to its own striking expression, “made an orphan.” The successor of the medicine-man is elected only in cases when he is taken away by sudden death; otherwise the candidate is carefully selected and slowly trained by the incumbent, and cannot enter upon the practice of his act till one or more years after the death of his predecessor. At the present time the functionary whose duty it is to suffer on all occasions for the good of the pueblo is called the “cacique,” or, by the Zuñis, “Châcui Môsona.”