Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
16
of their architecture has led modern archae-
oastronomers to speculate on the impor-
tance of the equinoxes to the Anasazi
religion.
The diminishing of the Ancestral
Puebloan culture, and the emergence of
the Pueblo culture in its place, is some-
thing of a mystery today. Scholars disagree
about why the Anasazi left their villages
around the 13th century. Some suggest
drought or soil exhaustion; others, inva-
sion, epidemic, or social unrest. But by the
time the first Spanish explorers arrived in
the 1500s, the Anasazi were long gone and
the Pueblo culture was well established
throughout northern and western New
Mexico, from Taos to Zuni, near Gallup.
The Hopi had also established their home
in northeastern Arizona.
Certain elements of the Anasazi civiliza-
tion had clearly been kept alive by the
Pueblos, including the apartmentlike
adobe architecture, the creation of rather
elaborate pottery, and the use of irrigation
or flood-farming in their fields. Agricul-
ture, and especially corn, was the eco-
nomic mainstay.
Each village fiercely guarded its inde-
pendence. When the Spanish arrived,
there were no alliances between villages,
even among those with a common lan-
guage or dialect. No more than a few
hundred people lived in any one pueblo,
an indication that the natives had learned
to keep their population down in order to
preserve their soil and other natural
resources. But not all was peaceful: They
alternately fought and traded with each
other, as well as with nomadic Apaches.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE SPANISH
The
Spanish controlled the Southwest for 300
years, from the mid-16th to the mid-19th
century—longer than the United States
has. The Hispanic legacy in language and
culture is still strong in the region.
The spark that sent the first European
explorers into the region was a fabulous
medieval myth that seven Spanish bishops
had fled the Moorish invasion of the 8th
century, sailed westward to the legendary
isle of Antilia, and built themselves seven
cities of gold. Hernán Cortés's 1519 dis-
covery and conquest of the Aztecs' trea-
sure-laden capital of Tenochtitlán, now
Mexico City, fueled belief in the myth.
Twenty years later, when a Franciscan friar,
on a reconnaissance mission for the vice-
royalty, claimed to have sighted, from a
distance, “a very beautiful city,” in a region
known as Cíbola, the gates were open.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the
ambitious young governor of New Spain's
western province of Nueva Galicia, was
commissioned to lead an expedition to the
“seven cities.” Several hundred soldiers,
accompanied by servants and missionaries,
marched overland to Cíbola with him in
1540, along with a support fleet of three
ships in the Gulf of California. What they
discovered, after 6 hard months on the
trail, was a bitter disappointment: Instead
of a city of gold, they found a rock-and-
mud pueblo at Hawikku, the westernmost
of the Zuni towns. The expedition win-
tered at Tiguex, on the Rio Grande near
modern Santa Fe, before proceeding to the
Great Plains, seeking more treasure at
Quivira, in what is now Kansas. The grass
houses of the Wichita Indians were all they
found.
Coronado returned to New Spain in
1542, admitting failure. Historically,
though, his expedition was a great success,
contributing the first widespread knowl-
edge of the Southwest and Great Plains,
and encountering the Grand Canyon.
By the 1580s, after important silver
discoveries in the mountains of Mexico,
the Spanish began to wonder if the wealth
of the Pueblo country might lie in its land
and people rather than in its cities. They
were convinced that they had been divinely
appointed to convert the natives of the
New World to Christianity. And so a
northward migration began, orchestrated
and directed by the royal government. It
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