Touching the Valley of Abó on the east and the basin of the Salt Lake on the north, rises a broad mesa, the borders of which are covered only on the north side with thin woods. The surface is inclined toward the south, and is treeless, though covered with good grass, but from the northern edge of the mesa south, southeast, and southwest, there is for from thirty to sixty miles not a drop of standing water. While I was there from the 4th to the 10th of January, 1883, melted snow was my only drink. This uninhabited plateau is the “Mesa de los Jumanos,” and on its southeast side stand the ruins of a pueblo which, according to my measurements, contained about twelve hundred inhabitants, with two stone churches, one of which is thirty-four feet wide and one hundred and thirty-two feet long, and stands almost undamaged, except in the roof. The walls are six feet thick, and a few hewn beams are still left in the interior. Adjoining these ruins are the walls of a considerable presbytery. The other church has been reduced to crumbling walls. No running water is to be found anywhere near, but four large artificial pools afford enough water for drinking purposes. This is the ruin which the old Jumano Indian of Socorro in the last century described as the former mission of Quivira, and which consequently now bears the name of “la gran Quivira.”
The old man was right. In the year 1630 Fray Francesco Letrado undertook the conversion of the Jumanos after an earlier effort had failed. But instead of going directly among the Indians, he established himself in a pueblo of the Piros, and had them build a church for the use both of the people there and of the inhabitants of the surrounding country. This pueblo was called the “Tey-paná” in the Piro language, and was the present Gran Quivira, while the ruins of the little church are those of the smaller temple. The place was the most eastern mission in New Mexico, and was called la mision de los Jumanos. At the same time with the Jumanos, the Quiviras were visited by the priests; and a number of members were gradually associated from all these tribes with the people of the village, and thus the building of a new church became necessary. This was the newer, larger ruin, and the structure was never quite completed. The Apaches pressed so closely upon the remote and isolated village that the mission to the Jumanos was abandoned in 1679. A few surviving members of the Piros who once dwelt there still live in Jemez, but the Jumanos and Quiviras have died away.
The history of the mission, too, was lost in the eighteenth century, although it could be clearly learned from the annals of the church and in Spanish books and manuscripts. But instead of studying these, men have peopled the ruins with fanciful figures, and have entered them cautiously and timidly in superstitious treasure-hunting. Numerous excavations attest the stay there of persons who have searched for the golden cups, the candlesticks of solid silver, and all that the fables ascribed to the poor missionaries of the sixteenth century. Had the gold-hunters, and, in later times, the water-hunters, considered the history of the Gran Quivira, they might have spared themselves trouble, labor, much money, and much suffering.
What is true on a small scale of Quivira is true in far greater measure of New Mexico and its metallic wealth in general. Historical writers have dealt superficially with that country by taking only a few authorities (Espejo, for example), and those without adequate criticism, as the basis of their sketches. Practical life demands of research in the historical field that it make it acquainted with the experiences of the past for the use and advantage of the present. Had those experiences been represented as they are clearly and truthfully laid down in the Spanish documents, much useless expenditure of capital would have been spared in New Mexico alone. It cannot be said that those documents were inaccessible, for the reports of Fray Marcos and of Coronado were printed in Italy and in England in the sixteenth century, and the works of Gomara, Herrera, and Torquemada contained the truth in abstracts. A Spanish officer wrote as early as 1601 that New Mexico was not so bad as it was occasionally drawn, but was far from being as good as it was usual to represent the country; and Alexander von Humboldt explicitly denied (“Histoire politique du royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne,” vol. ii. cap. viii. 3d book, p. 246) the existence there of rich beds of ore. In spite of this he has often been brought forward as authority for the assertion that the richest mines in the world were once opened there and in Arizona. The truth as to the metallic wealth of the country lies between the two extremes, but considerably nearer the former; and a critical study of the documentary history of the region should have been enough of itself to convince inquiring mankind of the fact.
THE MASSACRE OF CHOLULA (1519).
The day on which occurred the massacre of Cholula—a very important event in the annals of the Spanish conquest of Mexico—has not been determined with certainty, but the month is known. It took place about the middle of October, 1519, probably between the 10th and the 15th. The usual account of the tragedy—the conception of it regarded as historical—represents it as a causeless piece of treachery on the part of the Spaniards, an act of unjustifiable cruelty, an eternal blot on the fame of Hernando Cortés. Prescott gives the fairest and most exact expression to this view in his “Conquest of Mexico” when he says: “This passage in their history is one of those that have left a dark stain on the memory of the conquerors. Nor can we contemplate, at this day, without a shudder, the condition of this fair and flourishing capital thus invaded in its privacy and delivered over to the excesses of a rude and ruthless soldiery.” At the same time Mr. Prescott excuses the proceeding as an act of military necessity, and censures only the excess of the chastisement which Cortés allowed to be inflicted upon the Indians of Cholula.
A long residence in Cholula has enabled me to become thoroughly acquainted with the scene of the massacre, and to collect and study the native traditions concerning it, and their pictorial representations of it. Many documents referring to the slaughter have also come to light since Prescott’s work was published. These papers set the transaction in a new light, and illustrate how important to the composition of a correct historical account of an event is a previous study of its details and the local conditions.
Most incorrect and exaggerated ideas prevail concerning the condition of Cholula at the beginning of the sixteenth century, even in works admired for their apparent thoroughness; and of this Prescott is an example and proof. “The Cholulan capital,” he says, “was the great commercial emporium of the plateau.... Not a rood of land but was under cultivation.” From the top of the artificial hill (falsely called a pyramid) the spectator saw “the sacred city of Cholula, with its bright towers and pinnacles sparkling in the sun, reposing amidst gardens and verdant groves, which then thickly studded the cultivated environs of the capital.” On the summit of what was called the pyramid “stood a sumptuous temple.”
These passages are examples of the conceptions that are current, and specimens, as well, of inaccuracy and exaggeration. Concerning the pyramid so often mentioned, I appeal to the testimony of the authors whom Prescott is accustomed to cite. They agree that at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards this great artificial hill had long been in ruins and was overgrown with bushes. The top of the hill was then convex, and crowned with a “little ancient temple” dedicated to the god Nahui Quiahuitl, or nine rains. There was no trace of a large building, and the pyramid looked so much like a wooded hill that the conquerors regarded it as a natural elevation.
Cholula was not a capital, for it had no cities or villages attached to it, nor any rural population. I have investigated in the archives the development of the present district from the earliest period of Spanish rule, and have shown (“An Archæological Tour in Mexico”) that all the Indian villages date from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; that the few more ancient remains besides Cholula—except the sacrificial hill of Calpan—belong to a far more ancient period, and had been long deserted and forgotten when Cortés conquered Mexico; and that the whole tribe of Cholula dwelt together in six quarters, which were erected on the ground covered by the present city of Cholula and commune of San Andrés Cholula. The environs of these six quarters, which were separated from one another by open places, were cultivated; but the plantations extended no farther out. Three fourths of the present district lay fallow, where now forty villages with twenty thousand souls are supported by the cultivation of the soil.