The kiva and the mission church frame the two worlds of the Pecos Indians. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Pecos Indians destroyed the first mission and built this kiva (now restored) within the mission’s convento. For a few years they followed their religion undisturbed.
The ruins of Pecos Pueblo and Spanish missions of the 17th- and 18th-centuries crown a small ridge overlooking the Pecos Valley in upper New Mexico. At the time of the Coronado entrada, the pueblo was a giant apartment house, several stories high, with a central plaza, 600 rooms, and many kivas—home to 2,000 souls. The village prospered because it commanded the trade path between Pueblo farmers of the Rio Grande and buffalo hunters of the Plains. Pecos was a crossroads of commerce and culture, and its people grew adept at trade and war. The arrival of Franciscan priests in the 1600s with Spanish custom, religion, law inexorably altered Pueblo life. The Spaniards built a spacious mission church on the south end of the ridge, and a second but smaller one when the first church was destroyed in the Pueblo revolt of 1680. Pecos continued as a mission for more than a century. Disease and Comanche raids spelt decline in the late 18th century. The last inhabitants—fewer than 20—drifted away in 1838.
The park is 25 miles southeast of Santa Fe. Among its features are the ruins of the ancient pueblo, two restored kivas, and adobe mission walls. For information on the park and its programs, write:
Superintendent
Pecos National Historical
Park
P.O. Drawer 418
Pecos NM 87552-0418
Extensive pinyon-juniper forests once surrounded Pecos Pueblo.
The vessel is a 16th-century olla. The Spanish spur dates from the 17th century.
Cabrillo National Monument, California
The Old Point Loma Lighthouse, built 1854.
Gray whale migrations in winter are an annual spectacle.
This park honors the man who led the first European exploring expedition along the California coast. Sailing under a Spanish flag, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo departed on 27 June 1542 from the port of Navidad on Mexico’s west coast. He commanded the ship San Salvador (with a crew of 60); with him was Victoria, and another smaller vessel. His objective: “to discover the coast of New Spain.” Three months later he hove to in “a very good enclosed port”—San Diego Bay. This was the mariner’s first landfall north of Baja peninsula. Cabrillo himself died and was buried in the Channel Islands. His crew went on to explore as far north as Oregon, seeing new landmarks and new peoples, not all friendly.
The park is located on Point Loma, within the city of San Diego. Features include a heroic statue of Cabrillo, dramatic views of the Pacific and San Diego Bay, and Old Point Loma Lighthouse, a 1850s structure. In winter, the point is a good place to see the annual migration of the gray whale.
For information about the park and its programs, write:
Superintendent
Cabrillo National Memorial
P.O. Box 6670
San Diego CA 92166
The 14-foot sandstone statue of Cabrillo is the work of Portuguese sculptor Alvaro DeBree. Completed in 1939 for the San Francisco World’s Fair, it was eventually relocated here. The portrait is conjectural; there is no known likeness of the explorer.
Essay on Sources
If any of the leading conquistadores who march through these pages kept a running account of his adventures, the journal has been lost. Except for occasional letters, the closest we can come to firsthand information are reminiscences written or dictated by lesser participants many years after the events described. Some supplementary material also comes from court testimony. More immediacy is lost by the fact that most English readers must depend on translations of varying accuracy and fluency. There are several translations of all main documents.
The first of the New World adventurers to reminisce in print was Cabeza de Vaca. His Relación ... appeared in 1542. Buckingham Smith’s English translation, first printed in 1855, was later included with several other documents in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, edited by Frederick Hodge and Theodore Lewis (New York, 1907).