Great River. Paul Horgan

      Both within the Spaniard and without him lay the country which Lope de Vega called “sad, spacious Spain.” If Spaniards enacted their literature, it was because, like all people, they both created literature and were created by it. So it was with memories and visions in the colony of the river wilderness. Their hopes of what to be were no less full of meanings than their certainties of what they had done, and both found their center of energy in a moral sense that gave a sort of secret poetry to the hard shape of life. The Spaniard was cruel but he loved life, and his melancholy brutality seemed to issue forth almost involuntarily through the humanitarian laws and codes with which he surrounded himself. If his nature was weak his conscience was strong, and if he sinned his first act of recovery must be to recognize his guilt. When one of the most brutal of the conquerors of the New World was dying of wounds given to him by Indians he was asked where he ached, and he replied, “In my soul.”

      So the baggage of personality brought by the colonists told of their origin, their faith, the source of their power, the human types by which they perpetuated their tradition; and forecast much about how they would live along the river.

      But in that very summer of 1598 when the newest colony of the Spanish Empire was settling on the Rio del Norte in northern New Mexico, the Empire was already ailing. Its life stream carried human tributaries to the river, but already at its source, in Madrid, the springs of Spanish energy were starting to go low. It was an irony of history that just as the American continent was being comprehended, the first great power that sought it began to lose the force to possess it. It would take two more centuries for the flow to become a trickle that barely moved and then altogether stopped. But the Spanish effectiveness in government, society and commerce began to lose power in the New World with the failure of life in the last of the kings of the Golden Age.

      Laboring inhumanly to govern his world-wide kingdoms for goodness and prosperity, Philip II left them a complicated legacy of financial ruin, bureaucratic corruption and social inertia. After a dazzling conjugation of to do, the destiny of Spain seemed to turn toward a simple respiration of to be. One was as true of the Spanish temperament as the other.

      If Philip left to his peoples anything in the way of a true inheritance, one that expressed both him and them, and that would pass on through generations, it was his example in adversity, his patience facing a hideous death, and his submission to the will of God.

      He lay through the summer of 1598 in the Escorial holding the crucifix that his father the Emperor had held on his own deathbed. The son in an agony of suppurating tumors repeatedly gnawed upon the wood of the cross to stifle his groans. His truckle bed was run close to the indoor window through which he could look down upon the big altar of the Escorial church. In the early mornings he could hear the choir singing in the dark stalls and watch the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass performed for the repose of his soul whose liberation was nearing. But it came slowly. On August 16 he received the pontifical blessing from Rome. A fortnight later he took the last sacraments, and afterward spoke alone to his son and heir on the subject of how reigns ended and crowns passed and how instead came shrouds and coarse cinctures of rope in which to be buried. For days and nights the offices of the dying were chanted by priests in his cell. If momentarily they paused, he whispered, “Fathers, continue, the nearer I come to the fountain, the greater my thirst.” Before four in the morning on September 13 he asked for a blessed candle to hold. Its calm light revealed a smile on his face. His father’s crucifix was on his breast; and when he gasped faintly three times, and died, and was enclosed in a coffin made of timbers from the Cinco Chagas, a galleon that had sailed the seas for him, the crucifix was still there. By his will the blood-crusted flail left to him by his father now passed to the new ruler, King Philip III. In the austere grandeurs of such a scene the deathly luxuries of the Spanish temperament, as well as the dying fall of the Empire, found expression. At San Juan de los Caballeros, in the valley of the Rio del Norte, near the junction with the Chama, where willows and cottonwoods along bench terraces of pale earth all imaged the end of summer, the Crown’s new colony was at work on a matter of enduring importance to their settlement. By order of Governor de Oñate they were already building their church.

      19.

       Duties

      It was a dry summer. Late in August, 1598, the Governor was at his mess table one day when he heard unearthly wailing from many voices. He sent an officer to inquire who returned to report that the Indians were making lamentations to their gods because there had been no rain, in spite of the many dances for rain that the pueblo had performed during the summer. It was already very late, and the crop of corn would wither and die and the people would hunger unless rain came. Through four centuries it was a familiar condition along the river in certain years.

      The Father President and his assistant Fray Cristóbal spoke to the Indians and calmed them, saying that he and his brothers would offer prayers to God that rain might come and the corn be saved. An officer heard the promise, and sarcastically remarked that the Indians ceased their frightful wailing immediately, “like little children who hush when they are given the things they have cried for.” All the rest of the day, and that night, and the following day, the Indians watched the sky, which was “as clear as a diamond,” until suddenly it rained. Torrents fell. They were moved and awed. The corn was saved.

      But the Indians were not the only residents of San Juan who showed dissatisfaction and fear on occasion. Some forty-five soldiers and officers, including Captain de Aguilar who had once had his life spared by the Governor’s clemency, felt aggrieved on several counts. The Governor was aware of their feelings. They had come expecting to get rich, and they were not rich. He said, with his heavy irony, that they expected to find whole platters of silver lying on the ground waiting to be picked up. Failing that, they were not even allowed to take what they liked of the Indian properties, or do as they wished with the Indian persons. They were disgusted with the country, or, said the Governor, “to be more exact, with me,” and they resolved to mutiny and desert the colony, stealing slaves and clothing in their flight. The plot failed. The Governor put Aguilar and two soldiers in arrest, and condemned them to die by the garrote. It was a shocking event with which to begin life in the new capital, and once again, as at the entrance to the Dead Man’s March, down the river, the Governor was entreated to pardon the condemned.

      Life was as easily spared as taken. He consented, ordered a week of jubilee, and work on the church was hastened, and on the eighth of September, the first Mass was sung before San Juan’s own altar. The heads of all the pueblos had been invited to the celebrations. A messenger had visited them all in their provinces, carrying with him the Governor’s diary, which the Indian chiefs acknowledged as his emblem of office—the pages bearing the marks of his own hands. All had accepted the Governor’s invitation but the chief of Ácoma, who chose to be represented in another way. He sent spies who lost themselves among the other Indians but saw everything.

      The colonists gave a new comedy specially written for the feast (was Captain Farfán at work again?) and a mounted tournament was staged, and bullfights, and a pageant and sham battle representing the wars of the Moors and Christians, in which brave salvos of firearms were discharged, concluding with a “thunderous discharge of artillery”—but all with gunpowder without shot.

      The Ácoma spies watched. How was it that though the soldiers fired, nobody fell and died? The firearms of the white men, though noisy and smoky, must be harmless. It was useful to Ácoma to know this.…

      On the following day, September ninth, a solemn event was celebrated in the church. The Governor rose to address the chiefs of the Indian provinces. Behind him were the Father President and the other priests. As the Governor spoke the royal secretary noted down his words.

      He spoke of his love for the Indian people, and came to them with a grave duty. He must tell of his Divine Lord, and the rewards of heaven, and the punishments of hell, that came to all according as they chose well or ill in the life of the world. But man needed guidance and was provided with God’s ministers who could give it. To receive it, all must swear allegiance to the royal crown, and could never after withdraw. Many benefits of body and spirit would come to those who swore. Would they swear?

      The Indian