Having encountered unfathomable wealth and high civilization among the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico, Spaniards quickly turned their attention northward, hoping to find another Mexico. New Mexico acquired its name and its early European visitors and residents from this misplaced belief in its potential mineral wealth. The Europeans found a dry, mountainous land of few trees and even less water populated by indigenous descendants of Anasazi Indians, whom the Spaniards named "Pueblos" for their towns that occupied the best lands along the banks of the Rio Grande. Seminomadic Athapascan and Shoshonean peoples, the Apaches and the Navajos, also called the high desert plateau home. The descendants of all of these groups inhabit the "Land of Enchantment" in the twenty-first century. New Mexico's history revolves around the relationships, sometimes tense, sometimes violent, sometimes friendly, among these groups and the land.
Another Mexico
The miraculous return in 1536 of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Moorish slave Esteban, and two others from the disastrous 1528 Florida expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez piqued the curiosity of Spaniards. Cabeza de Vaca and his compatriots did not return with glowing reports of northern wealth, just rumors of a populous country to the north with large houses and trade in turquoise and other valuable items. These rumors sparked wild speculation as to the existence of another Mexico. When Cabeza de Vaca refused Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza's offer to return to the north, Mendoza selected the Franciscan
Fray Marcos de Niza to lead the expedition to verify the presence of wealthy northern cities. He was accompanied by the experienced Esteban.
After departing from Culiacán in 1539, Esteban and his Native retinue ranged ahead of Fray Marcos. In accordance with their plans, Esteban sent to Fray Marcos crosses of varying sizes, depending on his findings. When Esteban heard of Cíbola, he sent a large cross to Fray Marcos. The friar instructed Esteban to wait but to no avail. Esteban forged ahead, arriving at one of the Zuni pueblos, Háwikuh, where the Zunis seized and killed Esteban. Horrified at his companion's fate and eager to return to Mexico City, the Franciscan friar caught a glimpse of the Zuni village from afar, declared it Cíbola, and returned to Mexico City.
Fray Marcos's report of the golden glories of the north prompted Viceroy Mendoza to appoint his protégé Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to lead an expedition northward. The expedition seemed a mobile colony, including 350 Spaniards outfitted in armor and weaponry, 1,000 Native Mexican auxiliaries, six Franciscans, and hundreds of support staff. In July 1540 the expedition's vanguard arrived at the Zuni villages Fray Marcos had identified as the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola, a rival to the wealth and size of Mexico City. Coronado and his forces discovered an adobe pueblo of some one hundred families. Disgusted with the friar's apparent lies, Coronado sent him back to Mexico City. The expedition settled down at Zuni for five months, where Coronado entertained delegations from other pueblos. The delegation from Pecos Pueblo told him all about the Great Plains, prompting Coronado to send Captain Hernando de Alvarado to return to Pecos with the delegation. At Pecos, a citadel of some two thousand people on the western edge of the Plains, Alvarado learned from an Indian slave called "the Turk" of a rich kingdom known as Quivira out on the Plains.
Alvarado brought the Turk to Coronado, who had relocated to Tiguex Pueblo. The expedition settled into a pueblo vacated for them north of present-day Albuquerque, where they spent the severe winter of 1540–1541. When spring finally arrived, almost the entire expedition headed for the Plains in search of Quivira, which proved elusive. Coronado, at the behest of the Turk, took thirty Spaniards and support persons deep into the Plains of central Kansas. Although other Indians claimed the Turk was lying, Coronado pushed onward. At last he located Quivira, not a rich kingdom but a village of grass lodges. In league with Pecos Pueblo, the Turk had hoped the Spaniards would be enveloped by the Plains and never return to New Mexico. For his treachery the Turk was garroted. Now convinced that no kingdom or city filled with riches lay hidden in the north, Coronado returned to Mexico in the spring of 1542. Although Coronado took no gold or riches back with him, his expedition mapped out much of the American Southwest, transforming the region from a mystery into an area ripe for permanent European settlement.
European Settlement
The scion of a silver-rich Zacatecas family, don Juan de Oñate received royal permission to colonize New Mexico in 1595. He spent three years organizing the privately funded expedition and recruiting colonists. After six months of travel, Oñate and his colonists arrived at San Juan Pueblo on the banks of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. The San Juans graciously shared their food and homes with their new neighbors, who soon founded their first capital at San Gabriel. Oñate and his colonists hoped New Mexico would prove rich in mineral wealth, and to that end the governor made several early forays into the New Mexican wilderness. While Oñate was out on one such journey in the late fall of 1598, his nephew Juan de Zaldivar, who was second-in-command, was killed in a battle with the Acomans at the summit of their sky city fortress. In retaliation Oñate launched a successful war party against Acoma. Determined to send a message to would be rebels among the Pueblos, Oñate passed harsh punishments onto the Acomans, the severity of which set the stage for rebellion against the Spaniards.
Finding no mineral wealth, Oñate's colony failed, leading the Spanish government to take it over in 1608. No longer proprietary, New Mexico became a royal colony maintained to secure the thousands of indigenous souls Franciscan friars had baptized during Oñate's tenure. Spain also found it prudent to maintain New Mexico as a buffer zone against foreign encroachment on the profitable mining areas of northern New Spain. The royal governor Pedro de Peralta replaced Oñate in 1608 as a symbol of Spain's takeover of the colony. In 1610 Peralta removed the San Gabriel settlement to a site further from Pueblo settlements and renamed it Santa Fe.
Franciscans established missions along the Rio Grande in or near existing Pueblo Indian communities. In addition the Franciscans launched a harsh campaign of eradication against the Pueblo religion, particularly against Native priests, which angered the Pueblos. Peralta almost immediately clashed with religious authorities in New Mexico, inaugurating a competition for authority that endured until the 1680 Pueblo revolt. Civil and religious leaders argued over which group held control of and authority over Pueblos and their tributes. In essence the contest between the two groups was over control of New Mexico itself. Such squabbles revealed to Pueblo Indians the weaknesses of the sparsely populated northern colony of less than two thousand Europeans.
Pueblo Revolt
In one of their first acts of unity, most of the Rio Grande and western Pueblos (Tanos, Tewas, and Keres), with the exception of Socorro, which did not get the word of revolt in time, and Isleta, which was hampered by the presence of too many Spaniards, organized to drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico. Plans were to revolt on 11 August 1680. The New Mexico governor Antonio de Otermín found out about the plan, however, so the revolt was moved up one day to 10 August. On that day Pueblos rose up against everyone and everything Spanish, killing twenty-two Franciscan missionaries and some four hundred Spanish settlers and destroying mission churches as the most hated symbols of Spanish domination. The Pueblo Indian Popé directed the rebellion, allegedly hiding from the Spanish in a Taos Pueblo kiva. The revolt was largely successful. The Spanish survivors, many of them female heads of households, accompanied by some Isleta and Socorro Pueblos, spent twelve years in exile in the El Paso area.
In 1692 don Diego de Vargas arrived in El Paso as New Mexico's new governor and led a "bloodless" and largely symbolic reconquest of New Mexico. The Pueblos had lost their unity, and some sought to ally themselves with the Spanish. Vargas's bloodless reconquest had to be followed by force, including a room-by-room siege of Pueblo-held Santa Fe. The Spanish victory in Santa Fe provided Vargas with a stronghold, from which he conducted a difficult military campaign against the Pueblos throughout 1694. The Pueblos answered his campaign with another revolt in 1696, during which they killed five Franciscan priests and twenty-one other Spaniards and burned churches and convents. Determined to subdue the Pueblos, Vargas launched a war of attrition that lasted six months, targeting food supplies as well as rebellious Natives. By the war's end all but the three western pueblos (Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi) were subdued. The resumption of trade in European goods beckoned the rest of the Pueblos, and they fell in line.
Accommodation
New Mexico after Vargas was largely a different place from what it had been in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century ushered in more accommodation between Spanish settlers and Pueblos, ending the "mainly missions" atmosphere of the seventeenth century and the religious intolerance of the Franciscans. The two groups intermingled on a daily basis, sometimes intimately. Most New Mexicans eked out a meager existence, combining agriculture with raising small livestock. Merchants, soldiers, and government officials fared better, often employing a retinue of servants to tend their fields and care for their families. Roman Catholicism provided a central focus for many New Mexicans, including the Pueblo Indians, who practiced a form of Catholicism that left much of their Native religion intact.
In the eighteenth century raids by Comanche and Apache Indians and foreign encroachment from the French, British, and later the upstart Americans posed the largest threats to New Mexico. In 1786 Governor Juan Bautista de Anza engineered a "Comanche peace" by defeating the Comanche leader Cuerno Verde. Spaniards learned from the French that "peace by purchase" was far cheaper in the long run than continual raids and protracted battles. Anza convinced the Comanches to join with the Spanish against their common enemy the Apaches. The joint forces were successful in ending the Apache raids that had impoverished New Mexico's Spanish and Pueblo communities. The independence-oriented turmoil in Mexico in the 1810s and 1820s brought an end to "peace by purchase" payments to the two tribes and therefore an end to the peace.
Although Spanish officials frowned upon foreign trade, a few tenacious foreign souls attempted to reach Santa Fe and its markets prior to Mexican independence in 1821. In the late 1730s the French traders Pierre Mallet and Paul Mallet embarked on a mission to establisha trade route from New France (the modern-day upper Midwest) to Santa Fe. En route to New Mexico in 1739 they lost their six tons of trade goods in the Saline River in Kansas. Spanish authorities in Mexico denied the Mallet brothers' request for a trade license, but the brothers made a private agreement to trade with Santa Feans despite the government's decision.
Over the next few decades dozens of French traders from the Illinois country carried implements, cloth, and manufactured goods to Santa Fe in exchange for furs, gold, and silver. The international trade made Santa Fe a thriving town, and by the advent of the Missouri–Santa Fe highway, Santa Fe boasted nearly two thousand inhabitants. A few intrepid Americans, such as Zebulon Pike, rediscovered the trail to Santa Fe in the early 1800s. The trade remained the same as with the French, furs and silver in exchange for textiles, cutlery, and utensils.
The American purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 put New Mexico on the defensive. Spanish officials justifiably feared invasion, as American explorers and traders kept appearing along the border and even in Santa Fe. But Spain, weak and on the verge of collapse, was in no position to guard New Mexico from the Americans. Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 brought looser trade policies to New Mexico, but Mexico had as much difficulty protecting its northern frontier from foreign intrusion as had Spain.
Santa Fe Trail
Thanks to the fortune of good timing, William Becknell, an Indian trader from Missouri, first broke open the Santa Fe trade. In so doing Becknell paved the way for American traders to tap into the pent-up consumer desires of New Mexicans. In the autumn of 1821 Becknell followed the Arkansas River west from Franklin, Missouri, with twenty men and a pack train of horses loaded with trade goods. As Becknell's group crossed Raton Pass north of Santa Fe to trade with Indians, they by chance encountered Mexican soldiers, who told them of Mexican independence and predicted that Santa Feans would gladly welcome the Missouri traders. To Becknell's delight the Mexican soldiers were correct. From trading with the New Mexicans, Becknell earned a healthy profit in silver. New Mexicans were pleased as well, for Becknell sold them higher-quality goods than what they received from the Chihuahua, Mexico, merchants, who had been their only legitimate source of trade goods prior to Becknell's visit to Santa Fe.
Becknell returned to Santa Fe in June 1822 with even more goods and men, including three wagons loaded with trade items worth$5,000. Seeking a shorter and easier route for wagon travel than the long and arduous trip across Raton Pass, Becknell forged the alternate Cimarron route, crossing the Cimarron River west of modern Dodge City, Kansas. This route, despite its heat and lack of water, became the Santa Fe Trail. By 1824 a well-established highway marked the route between Independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe.
Under Mexican Rule
American fur trappers also made their way into New Mexico in the 1820s, and Taos became the focus of the western American fur trade. By 1826 more than one hundred Mountain Men trapped beaver along the Rio Grande and the Gila. While Mexican authorities saw these mountain men as a threat, presciently recognizing them as the advance wave of American movement into the Southwest, they were not willing to interrupt the lucrative trade the trappers ushered into New Mexico. For the most part Mexican authorities left New Mexico to its own devices. Accustomed to benign neglect, New Mexicans reacted strongly to Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna's attempts to centralize Mexico. Heavy-handed attempts at imposing order on the province by Governor Albino Pérez, the only nonlocal governor of New Mexico during the Mexican period, ended in chaos in 1837 as rebellion swept through the province. The fleeing Pérez lost his life to a rabble and was replaced by the native New Mexican Manuel Armijo, who restored order. In 1844 Governor Armijo successfully warded off attempts by land-hungry Texans to claim all the land east of the Rio Grande to its source, an episode that engendered a long-held antipathy toward Texans.
The U.S.–mexican War
Texas's bid to join the United States launched a war between Mexico and the United States in 1846. U.S. general Stephen Kearney took New Mexico without a fight. Rather than organizing a defense, Governor Armijo departed for Chihuahua after meeting with the trader James Magoffin, who somehow negotiated a peaceful conquest, although no one knows for certain what happened. All did not remain peaceful, however. Discontented New Mexicans planned an uprising for 24 December 1846, but rumors reached officials, who managed to squelch the opposition's plans. On 19 January 1847 a rebel mob scalped the appointed U.S. governor Charles Bent and twelve others sympathetic to the American cause. Rebellion spread throughout northern New Mexico. In February 1847 Colonel Sterling Price marched on Taos Pueblo, where the rebels had gathered. After a bloody battle the ringleaders were hanged, bringing an end to the armed resistance to the American occupation of New Mexico.
In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the war in 1848, New Mexico became part of the United States, and its people became American citizens. New Mexico had the necessary population for statehood, sixty-one thousand Hispanics and thirty thousand Indians in the 1850 census, and the support of Presidents James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor, but circumstances changed as gold was discovered in California. The Compromise of 1850 declared New Mexico a territory without restrictions on the issue of slavery and adjusted the long-contested boundary between New Mexico and Texas. New Mexico lost its bid for statehood to the politics of slavery and remained a territory for sixty-two years, until 1912.
The Civil War
During the 1850s the U.S. military built an elaborate defense system in New Mexico consisting of six military posts designed to keep hostile Indian tribes under control. The military thereby became the mainstay of the territory's economy and allowed the population to spread out from the Rio Grande valley. In 1861, however, Federal troops returned home to fight the Civil War, abandoning the defense system protecting those settlers and disrupting the orderly development of New Mexico. The territory sided with the Union, mostly out of hatred for the Confederate Texans. The few Civil War battles, including Valverde and Glorieta Pass (1862), that took place in New Mexico were more a reassertion of Texas imperialism than an integral part of Confederate strategy. Indeed most of the fighting in New Mexico during the Civil War years was against Indians. Colonel James H. Carleton ordered Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson, a former mountain man, to campaign against the Mescalero Apaches (1863) and then the Navajos (1864). Carson prevailed against both tribes. Survivors were marched to Bosque Redondo, the first experiment in Indian reservations, which failed utterly. An 1868 treaty allowed the Navajos to return to their much-reduced homeland. The U.S. military confronted the Comanches and the Apaches in the 1870s and 1880s and confined both groups to reservations by the end of the 1880s.
The Civil War was a watershed in New Mexico history, bending the territory toward the United States and away from Mexico. After the war New Mexico shared much of the history of the rest of the American West, range wars, mining booms, railroad construction, Indian wars, nationalized forests, and military bases. As Anglo-Americans moved into the territory, Hispanic New Mexicans found it more difficult to hold onto their ancestral lands. The 1878–1879 Lincoln County War reflected the tensions among New Mexico's various populations, especially Hispanic sheepherders and Anglo cattle ranchers.
Statehood
New Mexico finally achieved statehood in 1912, beginning a new era. Statehood meant that a satisfactory level of Americanization had been reached, and participation in the twentieth century's major military efforts continued the process. Some 50,000 New Mexicans served their country in World War II, including Navajo Code Talkers. The state had the highest volunteer rate of any state. Many of these volunteers died in the Bataan death march. Northern New Mexico's mountains hid the secret Los Alamos labs and the Manhattan Project during World War II, and the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site at White Sands on 16 July 1945, establishing the state as a major location for federal defense projects. Investments reached $100 billion by the end of the Cold War. Military defense continued to boost New
Mexico's economy in the early twenty-first century along with tourism and some manufacturing. The legendary Route 66 bisected the state, passing through Albuquerque and bringing tourists who sampled the state's blend of cultures and drank in the romanticized Spanish and Indian past provided by boosters.
Indians maintained a significant presence in New Mexico. Unlike most Native Americans, the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches remained on a portion of their ancestral homelands, while many other Native Americans settled in Albuquerque. India agent John Collier and the General Federation of Women's Clubs helped New Mexican Pueblos successfully overturn the 1922 Bursum bill, which would have given squatters land ownership and water rights in traditional Pueblo lands. The Pueblo Lands Act of 1924 protected Pueblo lands from squatters and recognized the land rights Pueblos had enjoyed under Spanish and Mexican rule. In recent years, Indian gaming brought an influx of cash to some of New Mexico's tribes and added punch to their political presence.
After 1848 Hispanics sought redress for the loss of their ancestral lands, mostly through the U.S. court system. In the last half of the twentieth century the issue of land grants generated some isolated violence, namely the July 1967 takeover of the county courthouse at Tierra Amarilla by the activist Reies Lopes Tijerina and his followers. New Mexican Indians also fought the loss of their lands, particularly sacred sites such as Taos Pueblo's Blue Lake, which had been swallowed by the Carson National Forest. President Richard M. Nixon returned Blue Lake to them in the 1970s. The twentieth century also put New Mexico on the map as a center for the arts. Early in the century Taos became an arts colony, attracting artists, writers, and other intellectuals. In 1914, artists Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Philips founded the Taos Society of Artists, prompting the development of a distinctive New Mexican style. Santa Fe, the state capital, also draws artists and the tourists who support them. The mix of three cultures, Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo, makes the forty-seventh state a vibrant laboratory for race relations.
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