Plumed Serpent
The conquistadors followed in the footsteps of Columbus. Puerto Rico was subjugated during 1508-1509 by Juan Ponce de Leon (ca. 1460-1521), who, according to partially credible legend, had come to the New World in search of the fabled Fountain of Youth. (He didn’t find youth, but death: Ponce de Leon was mortally wounded by an Indian arrow in Florida.) Next, Jamaica and Cuba fell easily to the Spaniards in 1510 and 1511.
Far more spectacular was the battle for Mexico. It was led by Hernan Cortes, a minor nobleman who had rejected a university education to become an adventurer in the New World. In 1519, Cortes led an expedition into the present-day region of Tabasco, defeating the Tabascan Indians on March 25. By September 5, he moved against the Tlascalas as well. After triumphing over the Tlascalas, he made them allies in his campaign against their traditional enemies, the powerful Aztecs, who dominated Mexico.
Surprisingly, when Cortes landed at what is today Veracruz, he was met not with hostility, but cordially and humbly greeted by ambassadors of Montezuma II, the Aztec emperor. This fact has mystified generations of historians. Some have concluded that, unlike the ruthlessly brilliant warrior kings who had preceded him, Montezuma II was indecisive and possessed of a weak character. Others have speculated that the Aztecs, having never before seen men mounted on horseback—strange and strangely attired men at that—thought the Spaniards were incarnations of their gods. Some have suggested that Cortes deliberately posed as Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec “plumed serpent” deity. Still other scholars believe that Montezuma II hoped to appease the intruders with gifts of great beauty and value—gems and gold—in the hope that, satisfied, they would simply depart.
If that was Montezuma’s hope, it was a tragic misjudgment. Receiving the gifts, Cortes remarked: “Send me some more of it, because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.” After an embittered battle, the Aztecs surrendered on August 13, 1521, and the Aztec Mexican empire fell to Hernan Cortes.
Borderlands
Cortes had achieved what all the conquistadors sought: access to unimaginable wealth. However, the only other Spaniard whose success began to approach that of Cortes was Francisco Pizarro, who twice attempted to invade the Incas of Peru during the 1520s and finally achieved his objective on a third try in 1531.
Pizarro, like Cortes, was regarded as a great conqueror, and his exploits stimulated Spanish expeditions into the borderlands—that is, the area of the present United States. The hope was that, somehow, somewhere, another Aztec or Inca realm would be discovered. Indians had told Columbus tales of villages containing vast treasuries of gold. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a member of a calamitous 1520 expedition led by Cortes’s rival, Panfilo Narvaez, journeyed throughout the American Southwest for eight years and brought back to Spain tales of rich pueblos—the Seven Cities of Cibola—though he never claimed to have visited them personally. Another survivor of the Narvaez expedition, a black slave named Estevan, joined an expedition led by Marcos de Niza in 1539 to locate the Seven Cities. Zuni Indians killed the unfortunate Estevan in a battle outside the Hawikuh pueblo, but de Niza returned to Mexico City and there rendered a vivid account of the pueblo and its treasures. Never mind that he had failed to gain entry into Hawikuh.
But, then, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado did not insist on proof. As with so many others who would journey to the American West in the centuries to come, all that was necessary to propel Coronado was a dream of riches. During 1540-42, he traveled throughout the Southwest, as far as present-day Kansas. Early in the expedition, during July 1540, he and his troops rode into the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in central New Mexico. Imperiously, he demanded the surrender of the pueblo. In response, the usually peaceful Zuni showered stones upon the conquistadors, knocking Coronado himself unconscious. Within an hour, however, Hawikuh fell, Coronado and his men entered it, and they found—very little. Certainly, there was no gold.
Coronado pressed on, in fruitless search of the elusive Seven Cities. Traveling through the pueblo region along the Rio Grande, he took one Zuni or Hopi town after another, forcing the inhabitants into slavery and taking from them whatever food and shelter they required. In the wake of Coronado’s visit, during the summer of 1541, the pueblos, led by an Indian named Texamatli, rebelled, but were quickly defeated by the forces of Nino de Guzman, governor of New Spain.
Onate the Terrible
With Coronado’s disappointment, the legend of the Seven Cities of Cibola diminished, and Spain’s interest in the American Southwest likewise dimmed. Then, in 1579, the English sea dog Sir Francis Drake landed on the central California coast and laid claim to what he christened “New Albion,” using the old poetic name for England. This spurred the Spanish viceroy at Mexico City to alert the royal court in Madrid that Spain’s New World monopoly was imperiled. Embroiled in costly European wars, the Spanish crown did nothing to reinforce the apparently worthless northern frontier of its colonies for another twenty years. Finally, in 1598, an expedition was launched northward from Mexico under the ambitious Don Juan de Onate. When he reached the site of present-day El Paso, Texas, Onate claimed for Spain-and his own governance-all of “New Mexico,” by which he meant a region extending from Texas to California.
With 400 men, women, and children in tow—plus 7,000 heads of cattle—Onate colonized deep into pueblo country, depositing settlers at various sites. In no place, except at the Acoma pueblo, in western New Mexico, did he meet resistance. At Acoma, as usual, he sent an advance squad of conquistadors to tell the Indians that they were hereafter to consider themselves subjects of the Spanish crown. In response, the Indians killed 13 of the Spanish soldiers. Perched atop a high-walled mesa, the defenders of the pueblo believed their position was impregnable. But in January 1599, Onate’s troops fought their way to the top of the mesa, killed most of the pueblo warriors, then took captive 500 women, children, and noncombatant men. Of the latter, 80 over the age of 25 were condemned to the amputation of one foot and a period of 20 years’ enslavement. (Whether or not Onate considered the usefulness of 80 one-footed slaves is not recorded.) The women—as well as children over age 12—were permitted to retain their extremities, but were likewise enslaved. Children under 12 were considered ripe for conversion to Christianity and were committed to the care of priests. A pair of Hopis who had the ill fortune to be visiting Acoma at this time were seized. The governor caused their right bands to be severed, and he sent the maimed Hopis back to their own pueblo as a bloody warning of the consequences of rebellion.
Birth of the “Black Legend”
In 1514, the Spaniard Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), known as the “Apostle of the Indies,” catalogued with Outrage a litany of his countrymen’s atrocities in his Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies).
Through the writings of Las Casas and other witnesses to Spanish colonial history, a “Black Legend” grew up around Spain in the New World. The conquistadors came to the Americas thoroughly grounded in a bloody tradition of racial warfare, having fought the Moors for eight centuries to gain control of the Iberian peninsula. Moreover, colonizers such as Onate financed operations with their personal funds. When Onate failed to turn up the gold he had hoped for, he relentlessly worked the Indians in an effort to make a profit from agricultural enterprise. As it turned out, the people he had subjugated failed to produce enough food even to sustain the colonists, let alone to sell for profit, and, after Onate’s cruelty became obnoxious even to royal officials, he was fined and stripped of all honors.
The Black Legend was also fostered and sustained by the encomienda system, which dominated Spanish colonial government from the 16th through the 18th centuries. By 1503, the crown began granting loyal colonists a type of deed (called an encomendar) to specific tracts of land with the additional proviso that the Indians living on
