$Unique_ID{bob00984}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{The Big Bend
Part I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Tyler, Ronnie C.}
$Affiliation{National Park Service;U.S. Department Of The Interior}
$Subject{spaniards
indians
mexico
bend
big
la
rio
junta
de
new
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1984}
$Log{See Indian Pictographs*0098401.scf
}
Title:       The Big Bend
Book:        Chapter 2: Spanish Explorers
Author:      Tyler, Ronnie C.
Affiliation: National Park Service;U.S. Department Of The Interior
Date:        1984

Part I

     For the peaceful, sedentary Puebloan tribes who lived at the confluence
of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos and the nomadic, aggressive Comanches
and Apaches who rode from their winter abodes north of the Rio Grande to raid
and plunder the frontier villages each summer, the despoblado was home.  Its
well concealed, infrequent water holes that dried up periodically, its mapless
mountains and gorges, and its haunting emptiness protected them from the slow,
ill-equipped Spanish soldiers who clumsily pursued them along the northern
frontier.

     To the Spaniards the Big Bend was only an obstacle to their domination of
other parts of the frontier.  Their advance into the Bend was a slow,
calculated effort required to defend their frontier settlements and to
establish a direct line of communications along the frontier.  Curious about
the mysterious despoblado, the Spaniards knew no more than the 19th-century
French traveler who summed up contemporary knowledge of the region all too
well when he observed that "there is no vegetation other than brambles, no
view other than the immense sandy plains Words cannot convey the strangeness
and supreme melancholy of the landscape."

[See Indian Pictographs: Indian pictographs, such as these at Hot Springs, are
common in the Big Bend.]

The Search For Gold

     The first Spanish expeditions, however, did not enter the Big Bend for
either defensive reasons or out of curiosity, but for gold.  The first
expeditions into the Big Bend were little more than blind efforts to discover
another Mexico.  The Spanish quest for New World treasures met unqualified
success when Hernando Cortez conquered the advanced Aztec civilization in
1521, securing wealth and thousands of Indian slaves.  Montezuma's fantastic
empire renewed the Spaniards' belief in such legends as the seven wealthy
cities of Cibola (supposedly established by seven renegade Portuguese
bishops), Queen Califia and her Amazon woman empire, and the Gran Quivira.

     The Spaniards quickly established a governmental system in Mexico to
control the Indians, and devoted much of their energy to exploration and
treasure-hunting.  The king appointed a viceroy for Mexico City, who was the
chief officer of the crown in the New World.  He handled all civil matters,
and granted commissions to adventurers and would-be explorers to search other
areas for advanced civilizations or wealth.  All exploration in the empire was
carefully regulated by the viceroy, with the crown receiving a stipulated
percentage of any discoveries.  The Spanish empire was probably the most
disciplined one in the New World.  Its procedures were carefully thought out
by the king and his council, and disobedient subjects were quickly punished.

     In the decades following the conquest, Spanish adventurers fanned out
along the Gulf of Mexico coast in search of another rich native kingdom, an
undertaking that led to the first contact with the Big Bend.  In February 1528
Panfilo de Narvaez led an expedition to Florida in search of treasure, only to
suffer hostile Indian attacks and abandonment by the ships that were supposed
to pick them up.  The survivors constructed small boats with the intention of
sailing along the coast to Mexico, following the course charted by Alonso
Alvarez de Pineda a few years before.  In November 1528 the ragged survivors
landed on the coast of Texas, probably on Galveston Island.  They called it
the Isle of Misfortune.

     The first Spaniard to reach the Big Bend may have been Alvar Nunez Cabeza
de Vaca, the leader of the small party.  After spending 7 years with the
Indians - first as a captive, then as an honored medicine man - he escaped and
headed westward, hoping to find a Spanish settlement.  He may have crossed the
present national park, though more probably he passed north of the Chisos
Mountains, perhaps nearer the Guadalupe Mountains on the Texas-New Mexico
border.  He eventually encountered a Spanish slave hunting party and returned
to Mexico City, where he told of the Indian civilizations to the north.

     Although the Spaniards finally concluded they were not interested in the
Big Bend itself, it took them several expeditions and more than a century to
reach the decision.  The viceroy sent a small exploratory expedition northward
to find out whether a more ambitious foray would be useful.  Then in 1540 a
major expedition under Francisco Vazquez de Coronado set out for the same
country.  Coronado was the first white man to see the Hopi and Zuni villages
of Arizona and the Pueblos of New Mexico; some of his men discovered the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado River.  But the Southwest was not another Mexico, and
the Spaniards turned their attention elsewhere.

Los Entrados

     What probably was the first Spanish penetration of the Big Bend came
years later as a result of the natural expansion of the frontier northward.
Mining settlements had been founded, and Spaniards thrust their expeditions
into unknown territory to enslave the hapless Indians.  Thus they reached the
Rio Conchos and followed it to La Junta de los Rios, at the confluence of the
Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos.  They were too late to see the pre-basket
maker culture that lived at La Junta - Indians who probably combined a mixture
of traits from their own hunting and gathering culture with others acquired
from the Pueblos who lived up the Rio Grande - but they did encounter Indians
they called the Jumanos.

     The first Spanish contact with the Jumanos might have been Cabeza de Vaca
and his ragged party, for the Indians later reported that they vaguely
remembered seeing four bearded men.  The first documented contact with the
Jumanos of La Junta came in 1581.  One of the Indian slaves captured in 1579
told of large settlements to the north, populated by natives who raised cotton
for clothing and had plenty of food.

     Inspired by the prospect of converts, Fray Agustin Rodriguez, a
Franciscan lay brother stationed in the mining village of San Bartolome,
received permission in 1581 from the viceroy to make the entrada.  Fray
Francisco Lopez and Fray Juan de Santa Maria accompanied Rodriguez.  The
military commander of the party was Francisco Sanchez, known more widely as
"El Chamuscado" (or, "the singed one," probably because of his red hair), who
was interested only in finding riches.  Following the slavers' path down the
Rio Conchos, the Rodriguez party encountered the Jumanos at La Junta.  "The
. . . people . . . are very handsome, very spirited, very active and more
intelligent than the people previously met," recorded Hernan Gallegos, a
member of the Chamuscado party.  "They are of large stature.  Their faces,
arms and bodies are striped with pleasing lines.  These people are cleaner and
more modest than . . . [the others they had met.]  They go about naked . . .
[and] wear their hair in the shape of skull-caps."

     The Jumanos were an established civilization.  In fact, the Indians were
probably the fringe settlements of the Pueblos, who had migrated down the Rio
Grande as far as La Junta between 1200 and 1400.  By the time Rodriguez
visited them, their farming culture extended up the Conchos a few miles.
Because the Jumano culture probably had peaked and begun to decline before the
Spaniards encountered it, there is much confusing information concerning its
origin and civilization.

     Two distinct groups of Indians were called Jumanos by the Spaniards: the
puebloan culture at La Junta, and a tribe of nomadic hunters in the Chisos and
Davis Mountains.  Since they both belonged to the Uto-Aztecan language group,
some authorities speculate that they were at one time part of the same group
that dispersed because of a food shortage.  The Chisos Indians the Spaniards
encountered in the area of the national park probably were forced to turn to
hunting, but even less is known about them.

     After moving down the Rio Grande to La Junta (a climate change probably
allowed them to cultivate more of the desert), the Jumanos then encountered
difficulty.  A severe drought may have disrupted their culture.  The Indians
Cabeza de Vaca saw were in such desperate condition that they ate their seeds
instead of planting them.  By the 15th century the Jumanos Rodriguez visited
had dispersed their communities, probably because the land would not support
large concentrations of people.  The shifting, unsettled conditions continued
for the Jumanos, because the Spaniards and unfriendly Indians from the north
combined with the climate to drive them from their homes.

     After visiting the Jumanos, Rodriguez and Chamuscado turned
northwestward, traveling to the upper reaches of the Rio Grande in New Mexico.
Finding no riches, Chamuscado was soon ready to return to Mexico.  The friars
remained to minister to the Indians, although they would no longer be
protected by their soldiers.  Although the expedition failed to discover new
wealth, Rodriguez and Chamuscado opened the route by which other parties would
enter New Mexico.  For years Spaniards traveling this route were the only
foreigners to enter the Big Bend.

     Rodriguez's expedition led directly to the next entrada.  Antonio de
Espejo, a wealthy rancher in the Querataro and Celaya districts, used the
alleged threat to the friars' safety as an excuse to organize another
expedition in 1582, hoping, of course, to explore further and find the fabled
cities.  After the Franciscan priests in Santa Barbara pleaded that they be
allowed to go along because they had not heard from their brethren, even the
viceroy agreed that such a task should be undertaken.  Espejo and his
companions traveled the path of Rodriguez and Lopez.  They talked with the
Indians at La Junta, including some who claimed to have vague memories of
Cabeza de Vaca and his friends.  There they learned that Rodriguez and Lopez
were dead, but continued on to New Mexico since the real purpose of the
expedition was to explore the new land.

     They searched New Mexico extensively without finding any mineral riches,
finally reaching the Pecos River.  Marching down that stream to the vicinity
of present-day Toyah Lake, near the city of Pecos, they met some Jumano
Indians who told them of a more direct route.  The Jumanos pointed out that
the expedition would save time by marching overland to La Junta and offered to
guide them.  Espejo thus became the second Spaniard to pass through the Big
Bend.  He did not find it as inhospitable as later explorers, describing the
"many watering places in creeks and marshes on the way," and receiving "fish
of many kinds, prickly pears and other fruits . . . buffalo hides and tanned
deerskins" from the Jumanos.  His good fortune probably can be credited to his
Indian guides.

     In addition to the licensed expeditions of Rodriguez and Espejo, Gaspar
Castano de Sosa illegally passed through the Big Bend in 1589.  The ambitious
Gaspar, lieutenant-governor of Nuevo Leon, led a colonizing party
northwestward from Monclova, hoping to settle in the productive lands in the
north.  Perhaps the party entered the Big Bend region near the present Rio
Grande Village, as some authorities claim.  More likely it crossed near the
Pecos River and paralleled it, following closely the route that Espejo had
traveled to New Mexico.  The Spaniards' presence was documented in Indian
pictographs in the southeastern corner of the Trans-Pecos.  Although the
fringes of the Big Bend had been penetrated, it still had not been explored.

The Church Returns

     The Indians themselves were responsible for the next expedition.  Priests
had visited La Junta in the past only because the Rio Conchos provided a good
route to New Mexico.  After the Spaniards shifted the Chihuahua City-Santa Fe
road westward to El Paso, La Junta was isolated.  It was soon deserted.  A
Jumano chief, Juan de Sabeata, surprised the Spaniards when he visited El Paso
in 1684 and requested that the friars come back.  His request was granted by
the governor, and Capt.  Juan Dominguez de Mendoza organized an expedition.

     The venture was commercial as well as religious, like so many Spanish
endeavors.  In addition to helping Jumanos, the Spaniards still hoped to find
the fabled cities of the north.  Mendoza was instructed to travel as far as
the Nueces River, where he was to search for pearls and riches.

     The captain provided one of the first detailed reports on the Big Bend.
Leading his men down the Rio Grande, he met Fray Nicholas Lopez and Fray Juan
Zavaleta, who had come down the Conchos.  The combined party journeyed
northeastward across the Big Bend country, passing through much of the same
land that Espejo had visited over a century before.  Mendoza went down the
river as far as Alamito Creek, then turned northeastward, passing by San
Esteban and Antelope Spring.  Continuing through Paisano Pass, the party
marched to the southeast of Musquiz Canyon through Leoncito Draw to the
spring, which Mendoza named San Pedro de Alcantara.  A few days later he
christened present-day Fort Stockton (Comanche Springs in the 19th century)
San Juan del Rio.  Mendoza, in fact, named most of his campsites in the Big
Bend, although none of them has retained the designation.  He went as far as
present-day Menard County before turning back in May 1684.  Fathers Acevedo
and Zavaleta remained at La Junta to minister to the needs of the Jumanos,
while Mendoza and Father Lopez returned to Mexico to present their memorials
to the viceroy and urge that La Junta be granted a mission.  All hope of the
La Junta mission vanished, however, when a French expedition under command of
La Salle landed on the Texas coast in January 1685, threatening Spanish
control in that region, and forcing the Spaniards to recall their frontier
forces.  It was not until 1715 that Franciscans were able to reestablish
missions at La Junta.

Defense

     The changing relationship with the Indians of the despoblado soon
required the Spaniards to turn their attention from religious and financial
interests to defense.  The first Spanish contacts with the Indians were of a
cautious but friendly nature.  Coronado encountered some hostility but
probably as much curiosity in New Mexico and Arizona.  The Indians of La Junta
had welcomed the Spaniards.  "Standing on top of their houses they showed
great merriment on seeing us," Gallegos recalled.  Juan de Onate, colonizer of
New Mexico, later noted that, "We were not disturbed by them, although we were
in their land, nor did any Indian become impertinent."  The French seem to
have proved that Europeans could trade and coexist with the natives.

     But the Spaniards provoked hostility, and the Indians' attitude changed
drastically.  First, the Spaniards seized Big Bend Indians and sold them as
slaves to mine operators in Mexico.  Then, the Spaniards severely punished the
Indians who resisted, as if to show the natives the power of the Europeans.
When a group of Apaches raided Gaspar Castano de Sosa's camp near the Pecos
River, killing one friendly Indian and driving off some stock, the Spaniards
pursued, killing several Apaches and capturing four.  One was hanged, the
other three kept for interpreters.  Although the Spaniards were no doubt
convinced that harsh measures were necessary, such reactions precluded any
possibility of peaceful coexistence.

     The Indians quickly struck back.  For months after the incident they
raided Spanish settlements across the northern frontier with impunity, then
retreated into the despoblado where the Spaniards could not follow.  The
Apaches and their neighbors, nomadic hunters and excellent warriors, proved
immune to the methods that had humbled the more civilized natives of central
Mexico and the upper Rio Grande.  In addition to the cunning of the Indians,
the Spaniards had to deal with the problems of the despoblado itself.  The Big
Bend thus assumed a negative importance to the Spaniards.  There would be no
reward for sacrifice in its conquest; survival depended on it.

     Realizing that the Chisos Indians in the Big Bend were some of the more
ardent troublemakers, Gov. Gabriel del Castillo of Nueva Vizcaya dispatched
Juan Fernandez de Retana to La Junta to rout them from their stronghold in
1693.  An able military man, Retana closed in on the Chisos in an area south
of the Rio Grande, where they had recently been involved in a struggle with
another tribe and had lost their horses.  He trapped them on Penol de Santa
Marta.  After several assaults on the height, he convinced them to surrender.
Most of the Chisos returned peacefully to La Junta, where they had lived for
years, and asked that the Spaniards again send missionaries to them.  A few
months later Retana conducted another foray into the Rio Grande country.
Marching from La Junta toward the junction of the Pecos and the Rio Grande,
apparently without crossing the Rio Grande, he encountered another hostile
band of nomads and defeated them.  He would have pursued them until they were
dispersed, but he elected to return because the waterholes in the despoblado
were dry.

     Retana's raids seemed only to aggravate the Indians.  Their attacks
continued.  In central Mexico the Spaniards had confronted a people who
controlled the area; once the dominant tribe was conquered, the land belonged
to the Spaniards.  On the frontier, however, one or two successes did not
assure control.  Victory meant only that one or two bands were now scattered.
The Indians could easily regroup and raid again.  When a tribe such as the
Chisos was finally beaten and pacified, another tribe migrated from the north
to take its place.  The Indians were a continuous threat, requiring constant
vigilance.  The Europeans at this point must have shared the impression that
the Indians soon were to have: that there was no end to the wave upon wave of
enemies entering their land.

Apaches In The Big Bend

     The Indians who migrated southward to fill the void left when the Chisos
turned to more peaceful ways were the Mescalero Apaches.  Pressed from their
traditional hunting grounds by the Comanches and Utes, the Apaches moved first
into New Mexico, then into Texas and Mexico, raiding Spanish settlements.
There are many bands of Apaches and often the same band was called different
names, adding to the confusion.  The Mescalero Apaches (from mescal eater)
established rancherias in New Mexico, where they raised crops in spring and
summer and roamed from southern New Mexico to northern Mexico, including the
Big Bend.  They historically were the most warlike of the Apaches.  Their
small, isolated settlements made ideal targets for the far-ranging, aggressive
Comanches, who rode into village after village, pillaging, killing, and
driving the Apaches even farther south.  The continual pressure from the north
forced the Apaches into conflict with the less-feared Spaniards, who could not
penetrate the despoblado with the same ease.

     Although they led a meager existence, the Mescaleros solved the mystery
of living in the Big Bend.  They seldom, if ever, established permanent
residences there, but did locate rancherias in the mountains, which they
occupied seasonally.  They knew how to live as they crossed the despoblado,
which the Spaniards and later the Americans could only do by carrying
provisions with them.  They knew through experience where the tinajas, or
temporary waterholes, were located and when they would have water in them.
They knew the edible plants.  And they knew they could not stay long in one
place without exhausting the land's scanty fare.  So they traveled light and
moved quickly from place to place, continually eluding their pursuers merely
by fleeing into the despoblado.  They were the only people who learned to live
in harmony with the raw forces of nature in the Big Bend.