Great River. Paul Horgan

no organized Spanish entries were made into the country of the Rio Grande. As Garay had abandoned the river at its mouth, so Coronado had abandoned its pueblo valley. What these explorers knew about the river was not lost, yet neither was it part of common knowledge. The river had to be discovered over and over again. From time to time little streams of information came out of the blind north country along Indian trails and aroused speculation as though no Spaniard had ever been there before. No comprehensive theory of the river’s course was yet held; but Indians told of how the big Rio Conchos, flowing northeast from the Mexican Sierra Madre, made a junction—La Junta de los Rios the Spaniards called it—with the long river whose valley twisted and turned and led northward to the pueblos. The Conchos suggested a new route to the north, more direct than the wide swing westward up the Mexican coast and across Arizona to approach the river from the west as Coronado had done; and finally like all roads it called to be taken. From 1581 to 1593 four small expeditions went to the river from the vast empty highlands of Northern Mexico.

      Marching northward along the Conchos, three Spanish Franciscan friars, nine soldiers and sixteen Mexican servants arrived on July 6, 1581, at the junction with the Rio Grande, which they called the Guadalquivir, and also the Rio de Nuestra Señora de la Conceptión. The founder of this expedition was Fray Agustín Rodríguez. His squad of soldiers was commanded by Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado. They were on their way to convert the pueblos in the north. Guided by river dwellers they marched northwest following the valley, and turned with it northward, coming at last among the nation of towns that Coronado had known as Tiguex. One of the friars, Juan de Santa Maria, who was an adept in astrology, there resolved to return to Mexico with reports of what the party had seen; and despite warnings of his comrades departed alone for the south.

      The rest of the company explored the land east of the river, passing through Pecos to the buffalo plains and returning; visiting the salines east of the Sandia and viewing the rosy stone town of Abo; and marching to the west past Ácoma as far as Zuñi, where a December snowfall forced them back to the river. There the two other Franciscans declared they would stay to preach the word of God. A handful of Indian servants elected to stay with them at the pueblo of Puaray, not far from Coronado’s capital of Alcanfor. Chamuscado gave them a few goats, horses and articles of barter, and left them there. With his reduced party he went down the river retracing his course. He was sixty, an old man, exhausted and ill from his hardships. He never reached his home in Santa Barbara near the headwaters of the Conchos, but died a few days’ journey from it.

      In the following year another small troop took the same passage up the river. This party of thirteen soldiers and various Indian servants was commanded by a merchant of New Spain, Antonio de Espéjo, who was a fugitive from justice under charge of having murdered one of his ranch hands. Its real authority was its spiritual leader, Fray Bernardino Beltrán. Their mission was to bring aid to the two friars who had remained the year before at Puaray, and to look for the astrologer, Fray Juan de Santa María, who had never arrived in Mexico. Coming on December 9, 1582, to the Rio Grande, which they called the Rio del Norte, for the direction of its source, and the Rio Turbio, for its heavy flow of mud, the soldiers were welcomed by people who greeted them with odd, sweet music, which they made with their mouths, and which sounded like the tones of flutes. Along the river Espéjo came upon the memory of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who with his one black and two white companions was still spoken of among the little towns of willow switches, mud and straw above the junta de los rios. The river flowed in silence even in its larger passages. Some of the inhabitants went naked with strings tied upon their prepuces. Other peoples farther north were fully clothed.

      The soldiers proceeded up the river in December 1582, passing crosses that still stood since the year before. On occasions Indians whom they met sat at night around a great bonfire and clapped their hands in music, while some rose to dance in pairs, fours or eights. In curiosity and delight the Indians touched the soldiers with their hands, fondling them, and their horses. Gifts were brought to the travellers—food, blankets, hides. Tanned deerskins reminded the soldiers of soft Flemish leather. The Indian weapons were wooden clubs and “Turkish” bows, both fashioned from mesquite. The soldiers made new stocks for their harquebuses of the same wood.

      Wherever they stopped the Spaniards erected crosses, and took possession of the lands of the river with properly notarized documents. After turning due north on the river, they met an Indian who told them that one of friars of the year before had been killed (was this the astrologer on his way alone to Mexico?) and that the other two still lived (and were these the two left at Puaray in Tiguex?). Coming into the country of the three-and-four-storey pueblos, they marvelled at their size and permanence after the half-dugout, perishable houses below them in the valley. At Puaray, not far from Coronado’s old headquarters of Alcanfor across the river, they learned the worst. The two missionaries had been slain, presumably for their possessions—the goats, the horses, the little metal hawk’s-bells, the beads, and the red caps, of barter.

      Espéjo and Fray Bernardino had completed their mission, but like all of their kind before and after them, turned to explore the lands east and west of the river. Near Pecos, they found that Fray Juan was indeed also dead. He had been murdered before the expedition of the year before had even left the pueblo valley. They went on to the plains and saw the buffalo herds, and they returned to the river, crossing it and marching to the west. They saw Ácoma, and beyond, in the pueblos far from the river, they found that Coronado was remembered, and in one of them, Espéjo came upon an old, small travelling chest and a book that the General had left there. They collected mineral specimens from mines even farther west, and turned back to the river, where since their passage the towns had become rebellious.

      Espéjo met his own battles, too, in the upriver pueblos, and with spirit. “The Lord willed this that the whole land should tremble for ten lone Spaniards, for there were over twelve thousand Indians in the province with bows and arrows.…” declared his chronicler, and yet when reports came of Indian peoples waiting to attack the travellers, “… trusting in God we always marched to the place where we were told the largest number of people awaited us.” Espéjo was obliged at one point to burn a town and execute by the garrote sixteen Indians, not to mention those who burned to death. A soldier reflected that “this was a strange deed for so few people in the midst of so many enemies.” He knew too what it was to come before a walled town and find it empty, its people immured in the mountains, full of distrust and fear.

      In Indian grottoes or caves the soldiers saw prayer sticks with feathers and bits of cooked meat and concluded that there the Devil came to take his ease and feed himself and speak with the Indians. Once they saw in a cage what looked like a Castilian parrot. They noticed that the women of the river were whiter of skin than the Indian women of Mexico, and that the pueblo people did not stink like Indians met with earlier. They remarked much “game of foot and wing, rabbits, hares, deer, native cows, ducks, geese, cranes, pheasants, and other birds,” and spoke, like connoisseurs, of “good mountains,” and Espéjo euphorically cited “millions of souls” for conversion.

      When they turned toward home, the company divided and followed two routes. Fray Bernardino and one group went down the river as all had come. Espéjo and his soldiers returned to Pecos and marched southward along the Rio de la Vacas, which was the Pecos River. Indians whom they met told how this River of Cows joined with another large river flowing eastward which in turn formed a junction with a large river flowing from the north. They knew then that they were once again near the Rio del Norte and its meeting with the Conchos. Turning west they found the river and were given a joyful reception by the people, who performed dances, and fed the soldiers with a feast of green corn, cooked and raw squashes, and cat, and other river fish. The welcome was so friendly that the soldiers put aside arms and armor, going about “almost in shirt sleeves.” On August 21, 1583, they came to the junta de los rios, where people of another town greeted them warmly, and gave the news that Fray Bernardino and his party had already passed safely by there. The river was now too high to ford. The soldiers rested there for three days, and all traded for blankets, buffalo robes, and Indian bows reinforced with rawhide, and received supplies of squash, beans and corn. Those Indians, thought a soldier, were “fine and elegant people who would readily accept the Holy Faith.”

      On the twenty-sixth the little troop started homeward up the Conchos into Mexico.