The Spanish Pioneers

by Charles Fletcher Lummis

At daybreak of the 23d, a squad of picked men at a given signal rushed from their hiding-places with a log on their shoulders, and by a lucky cast lodged its farther end on the opposite brink of the abyss. Out dashed the Spaniards at their heels, and began balancing across that dizzy "bridge" in the face of a volley of stones and arrows. A very few had crossed, when one in his excitement caught the rope and pulled the log across after him.

It was a fearful moment. There were less than a dozen Spaniards thus left standing alone on the brink of Acoma, cut off from their companions by a gulf hundreds of feet deep, and surrounded by swarming savages. The Indians, sallying from their refuge, fell instantly upon them on every hand. As long as the Spanish soldier could keep the Indians at a distance, even his clumsy firearms and inefficient armor gave an advantage; but at such close quarters these very things were a fatal impediment by their weight and clumsiness. Now it seemed as if the previous Acoma massacre were to be repeated, and the cut-off Spaniards to be hacked to pieces; but at this very crisis a deed of surpassing personal valor saved them and the cause of Spain in New Mexico. A slender, bright-faced young officer, a college boy who was a special friend and favorite of Oñate, sprang from the crowd of dismayed Spaniards on the farther bank, who dared not fire into that indiscriminate jostle of friend and foe, and came running like a deer toward the chasm. As he reached its brink his lithe body gathered itself, sprang into the air like a bird, and cleared the gulf! Seizing the log, he thrust it back with desperate strength until his companions could grasp it from the farther brink; and over the restored bridge the Spanish soldiers poured to retrieve the day.

Then began one of the most fearful hand-to-hand struggles in all American history. Outnumbered nearly ten to one, lost in a howling mob of savages who fought with the frenzy of despair, gashed with raw-edged knives, dazed with crushing clubs, pierced with bristling arrows, spent and faint and bleeding, Zaldivar and his hero-handful fought their way inch by inch, step by step, clubbing their heavy guns, hewing with their short swords, parrying deadly blows, pulling the barbed arrows from their quivering flesh. On, on, on they pressed, shouting the gallant war-cry of Santiago, driving the stubborn foe before them by still more stubborn valor, until at last the Indians, fully convinced that these were no human foes, fled to the refuge of their fort-like houses, and there was room for the reeling Spaniards to draw breath. Then thrice again the summons to surrender was duly read before the strange tenements, each near a thousand feet long, and looking like a flight of gigantic steps carved from one rock. Zaldivar even now wished to spare unnecessary bloodshed, and demanded only that the assassins of his brother and countrymen should be given up for punishment. All others who should surrender and become subjects of "Our Lord the King" should be well treated. But the dogged Indians, like wounded wolves in their den, stuck in their barricaded houses, and refused all terms of peace.

The rock was captured, but the town remained. A pueblo is a fortress in itself; and now Zaldivar had to storm Acoma house by house, room by room. The little pedrero was dragged in front of the first row of houses, and soon began to deliver its slow fire. As the adobe walls crumbled under the steady battering of the stone cannon-balls, they only formed great barricades of clay, which even our modern artillery would not pierce; and each had to be carried separately at the point of the sword. Some of the fallen houses caught fire from their own fogones;[14] and soon a stifling smoke hung over the town, from which issued the shrieks of women and babes and the defiant yells of the warriors. The humane Zaldivar made every effort to save the women and children, at great risk of self; but numbers perished beneath the falling walls of their own houses.

RUINS OF CHURCH AT PECOS.
See page 161.

This fearful storming lasted until noon of January 24. Now and then bands of warriors made sorties, and tried to cut their way through the Spanish line. Many sprang in desperation over the cliff, and were dashed to pieces at its foot; and two Indians who made that incredible leap survived it as miraculously as had the four Spaniards in the earlier massacre, and made their escape.

At last, at noon of the third day, the old men came forth to sue for mercy, which was at once granted. The moment they surrendered, their rebellion was forgotten and their treachery forgiven. There was no need of further punishment. The ringleaders in the murder of Zaldivar's brother were all dead, and so were nearly all the Navajo allies. It was the most bloody struggle New Mexico ever saw. In this three days' fight the Indians lost five hundred slain and many wounded; and of the surviving Spaniards not one but bore to his grave many a ghastly scar as mementos of Acoma. The town was so nearly destroyed that it had all to be rebuilt; and the infinite labor with which the patient people had brought up that cliff on their backs all the stones and timber and clay to build a many-storied town for nearly a thousand souls was all to be repeated. Their crops, too, and all other supplies, stored in dark little rooms of the terraced houses, had been destroyed, and they were in sore want. Truly a bitter punishment had been sent them by "those above" for their treachery to Juan de Zaldivar.

When his men had sufficiently recovered from their wounds Vicente de Zaldivar, the leader of probably the most wonderful capture in history, marched victorious back to San Gabriel de los Españoles, taking with him eighty young Acoma girls, whom he sent to be educated by the nuns in Old Mexico. What a shout must have gone up from the gray walls of the little colony when its anxious watchers saw at last the wan and unexpected tatters of its little army pricking slowly homeward across the snows on jaded steeds!