CHAPTER XII. AMONG THE ARCHIVES. (_Continued._)

From the journal of Capitan-General Don Domingo Jeronso Petriz de Cruzate (what a Spanish ring there is in that name!), who was governor and military commandant of Nueva Mejico from 1684 to 1689, we can form some idea of the state of affairs in the province. But a few detached pages of this important document survive. They appear the clearest where all are confused.

The Spaniards had been driven from the country as far south as the Texan line. Cruzate’s little army failed in the reconquest of the liberty-loving Pueblos, and the service was finally entrusted to General Vargas, or, as it was anciently written, Bargas, to whom the faithful knight and true love was secretary.

The chronology of this period is some times in a hopeless tangle; but the march of Governor-General Don Diego de Vargas is pretty well connected. He lives in history as one of the most bigoted and brutal of the Conquistadores. As has been written of the Duke of Alva: “His vices were colossal, and he had no virtues.” From shreds and patches of mouldy MSS. his march is traced with tolerable clearness, and the conduct of the foreigners was so nearly alike that their stories are much the same.

By and with consent of the royal audience, he left home and pleasures in the City of Mexico for El Paso del Norte, to organize one hundred friendly Indians and less than two hundred mounted men. Among the latter was the secretary, Antonio Eusebio de Cubero, who on fiesta days wore a light glove on his casque, a love-knot on his spear.

The country swarmed with a numerous and enraged enemy, and every league of ground was contested. Vargas seemed awake to the perils of the situation, and to have a wholesome fear of public opinion besides, for on the night before marching he wrote to Count Galvas, Viceroy of Mexico: “I have determined to risk life and all in the attempt, and am prepared rather to be considered rash to being looked upon as a man of too much caution, thereby exposing my reputation to remarks.” He was successful from the very outset. The reader will remember that the Pueblos lived in community houses, built in a hollow square. A whole tribe sometimes inhabited one house, and one after another they were reduced to submission.

The invading army found game in abundance; but the blessing of the early and the latter rain is not for New Mexico, and the scarcity of water made great suffering. “In roasting-ear time” the bold land-robbers feasted in the cornfields; “hares like those of the Castiles” furnished nourishing food; and in all their journeying simple natives gave the fair visitants their choicest stores, for paltry trinkets of glass, pewter, and tinsel. The blaze of their camp-fires attracted large numbers of rattlesnakes--“the serpent with tiger-colored skin and castanets in its tail;” the mountain cat’s green eyes glared at them from the black rim of the illuminated circle; and lovely gazelles shyly approached the springs, where they had hitherto drank undisturbed, to sniff the tainted air and gaze at the strangers.

There survives one description of a large torpid lizard the explorers encountered, striped with red, white and black bars--a hideous creature; and a horned snake, kept in spirits, to be sent the viceroy. Here, too, we hear first of the wonderful traveling stones, that within the distance of a few feet of each other seek a common centre, roll together, and lie close like eggs in a nest. They were in the bottom of shallow basins in the levels, and their magnetism was a source of wondering awe to the superstitious soldiery. The reporter, a naturalist of some sort, whose name is lost, begs a moderate subsidy, that he may employ natives to help capture the venomous beasts and assist in making collections. The barbarians refused to work, even with wages, and thus writes Vargas: “I have been obliged to raze whole villages to the ground, in order to punish their obstinacy.” Possibly here we have the secret of the uninscribed ruins now slowly crumbling down in the valleys by the narrowing waters of the Pecos and the Rio Grande.

The chief burden is the Indian. The chronicles are heavily laden with details of grievances the conquerors were obliged to bear from him. How he refused to accept slavery as his best estate; and, worse than that, how he rebelled against the power which would force him to worship the unknown, unseen God, whose sign was the red cross, whose ambassadors’ march was tracked by the smoke of cities sacked and burnt, lands made desolate, the widow’s cry, the orphan’s wail.

The Spaniards were disciples of the school of Narvaez, who on his death-bed, being urged by his confessor to forgive his enemies: said “Bless your heart, Father, I have none. I have killed them all.” In those good old times--for as the poet sings,

“All times when old are good”--

the religion of the governor must be the religion of the governed. The Pueblos were and still are sun worshipers; and every day their deity--the peculiar friend of the red race--rose with unveiled face, rejoicing the eyes and cheering the hearts of his children. Why should they believe in One whose followers taught that sulphurous flames were in waiting for all who had not money enough to pay for certain mystic rites held over the dead body? Whenever there was chance of escape, the Indians fled before the mailed and mounted warriors fast as their own mountain antelopes, and the Pueblos were rapidly brought to submission. To perfect the surrender of soul and body, after a city was taken, Father Francisco Corvera baptized by thousands at a time. He was attended by several Franciscan priests, charged with the reconversion of those fallen from the true faith. They were forced to assemble before a large cross in the plaza. There the red sinners were absolved from their sins, and, on pain of death, forbidden their idolatrous dances, especially the _cachina_, the delight of the aboriginal heart, and, as the old MS. words it, “were to be obedient to the divine and human majesty.”

Very devout was this Vargas. After the reduction of Jemez, he reported to the Viceroy of Mexico, Count Galvas: “This action having been fought the day before Santiago Day, I believe that glorious apostle and patron saint interceded in our behalf, and which was the cause of our signal success.”

Here are some of the mild requirements laid on the baptized heathen by his order:

“They must keep crosses over their doors; treat ministers with love and reverence; and, whenever they meet them, kiss the hem of their habit, with submission and veneration. They must have their bows in order and ten arrows, to offend and defend; and none shall dare use the arms of the Spaniards, for the reason they are prohibited by the royal ordinances.”

Fighting his way northward, near Zuni, he leveled a large pueblo, “the size of a long horse-race;” but how long the horse-race was in that time your correspondent has no means of knowing. By his own autograph on the everlasting hills we know when and in what spirit the haughty hidalgo passed that point for the recapture of La Villa Real de Santa Fé, then in the hands of its rightful owners.

One hundred and ninety miles southwest of Santa Fé, ten miles from the Arizona line, fifty miles west of the dividing ridge of the continent--called, in consequence, Sierra Madre--is antique Zuni, a city of memory. It is one of the seven vanishing cities sought by Coronado in 1540, and by wandering knights from Spain and Portugal in the time of Philip Second. Capital of the fabled kingdom of Cibola, it is the most ancient and most interesting, because the least changed, of all the pueblos of New Mexico.

When Governor-General Vargas and his gallant little army reached this pueblo, they halted for rest and recruiting, before pressing on to the City of Holy Faith. The General was accompanied by his secretary, the beloved Antonio Eusebio, and they must have looked with the deepest concern at the stout walls of the strange fortress. I have not been able to learn whether he attacked it or not. Even a successful and intrepid leader, with the help of the red allies, used to savage warfare, would deliberate well before besieging that city set on a hill, which must be carried by assault, in the face of arrows, slings, lances, huge stones rolled from above, and burning balls of cotton dipped in oil. The modern Zuni, a compact town of fifteen hundred souls, stands in the centre of the valley of the Colorado Chichito (Little Red River); but ancient Zuni, now in ruins, was several miles away, on the top of a _mesa_, or precipice, one thousand feet high, almost inaccessible from the valley. It was built in five stories, with thick walls of stone laid in mud mortar, terraced from without and fortified by towers. A formidable citadel.

The camp of the victorious army was probably in the present camping-ground, a choice spot, where grass grows with tint of richest green, lovely to the eye as fresh lilies--a garden beauty, skirting the spring of cool, sweet water, about fifteen miles from old Zuni. To reach it from Santa Fé, the traveler of to-day crosses a country very beautiful and fertile, where rapid change of geological structure makes varying change of scenery. Maize grows in the valley without irrigation--not an _acequia_ in sight; and peaches, planted by the Jesuit Fathers, are deliciously sweet. After straining over sand and rock, in the hot, white sun-glare, with the fever-thirst which comes from drinking alkali water, it must have been a deep pleasure for the soldiery to leave the trackless plain, and lie in the cool, rich grass, restful alike to jaded steed and war-worn rider; to feast their eyes on the delicate enamel of green--the setting of this Diamond of the Desert; and watch, as we have, the birds of strange note and plumage coming and going, with merry twitter, flirt and flutter, to bathe and drink in the sparkling fountain.

Enchanting effects of light and color vary the passing hours. A rose-blush of exquisite haze greets the rising sun; and the mirage--most marvelous of Nature’s mysteries--often swims in mid-air in early morning, when the first warm flush has faded. The perfect blue, curtaining the valley, is jeweled with opal and turquoise. That ethereal brilliance allows no “middle tones.” The sun sets as on the Nile, and when the flaring disc sinks low suddenly the hidden splendor is unveiled--“a vision sent from afar, that mortals may feebly learn how beautiful is Heaven.”