The Gilded Man (El Dorado)/The age of the city of Santa Fé
THE AGE OF THE CITY OF SANTA FE.
THE belief has been fixed in the public mind for a considerable time that Santa Fé, the capital of New Mexico, is also its oldest Spanish settlement, and even the oldest city in the United States. It is obvious that the latter opinion is incorrect, for St. Augustine in Florida dates from 1560. After Coronado's retreat from New Mexico in 1542 no Spaniard entered the territory till 1580, consequently no city was founded there by them; and it is well known that Coronado left no settlers there. Santa Fé is therefore, in any event, younger than St. Augustine, for it was built after 1580.
Concurrently with the belief that Santa Fé is the oldest city in New Mexico prevailed the legend that it occupied the site of a populous Indian settlement, of a native seat of government for all the pueblos of the Province. This fable is wholly destitute of documentary proof, and is not supported by any traditional or archæological evidence. The present city covers the ruins of an Indian village, and the earthworks of old Fort Marcy have partly obliterated the remains of another, older one. The older village contained hardly five hundred inhabitants; the more modern one, of which one house besides San Miguel's Church is still standing, numbered seven hundred souls in the year 1630. The plateau of Santa Fé contains besides these two ruins only four sites of remains of Indian dwelling-places or pueblos. Five miles south are two, one smaller and one larger, on the banks of the usually dry "Arroyo Hondo." The small village contained not quite two hundred, the larger one—which is called "Cua-Kaa" by the Tanos, to whom it belongs—less than eight hundred souls. Both were deserted before the middle of the sixteenth century. Twelve miles southwest lie the ruins of "Tzigu-ma," near the place called "Ciénega." This village also, which was abandoned after 1680, never numbered one thousand inhabitants. Lastly, there is San Marcos, or "Yaa-tze," eighteen miles south-southwest of Santa Fe, near the so-called "Cerrillos." In the year 1680 it contained six hundred Indians, and the extent of the ruins leads me to the conclusion that this number was not at any time doubled. The plain of Santa Fé, which includes an area of hardly one hundred square miles, thus never held more than three thousand settled inhabitants before the advent of the Spaniards, and these were distributed among not more than four villages inhabited at one time. None of these villages could compare in population with Pecos, Hauicu, Pilabó (or Socorro), Teypaná (or Quivira), etc., or with the Zuñi of to-day.
Those villages were inhabited in the sixteenth century and from a long time before by the Indians called "Tanos." The Tanos were Tehuas; they constituted the southern half of that great linguistic stock; and their territory extended from Pojuaque ("P'ho-zuang-ge"), seventeen miles north of Santa Fe, to San Pedro ("Cua-Kaa"), forty miles southwest. Their traditions are fully confirmed by the archaeological remains; but these traditions make not the slightest mention of a "center of population," or of a New Mexican "Indian capital," at Santa Fe.
The pueblo on the ruins of which Santa Fe stands is called "Cua-P'ho-o-ge," or "Cua-Pooge" (musselpearl-place-on-the-water). That the place, and even the district, played no prominent part in the sixteenth century, appears from the fact that no Spanish document specially mentions it till after the founding of the capital.
The plateau is dry and barren. The little Rio de Santa Fé sinks into the sand not far from the present capital, and issues from it again at the "Ciénega," or the entrance to what is called the "Bocas." The Arroyo Hondo is entirely dry; the village of CuaKaa, as well as San Marcos, get their water from a spring situated near them. The scarcity of water, which is still very much felt, would make any aggregation of native settlers around Santa Fé absolutely impossible.
The historians of Coronado hardly mention the region. Probably Cua-Pooge was one of the seven villages which Casteneda mentions as lying near the snowy mountains.[1] The accounts of the eight Spanish soldiers who went in the year 1580 with the unfortunate Franciscan monks Fray Augustin Rodriguez, Fray Juan Lopez, and Fray Juan de Santa Maria to Bernalillo on the Rio Grande, prove that neither the escort nor the missionaries set foot upon the Santa Fé plateau.
In the year 1583 Antonio de Espejo, going east from the Queres villages on the Rio Grande, arrived at the Tanos and Galistéo. He called them "Ubates"—a corruption of the word "Puya-tye," by which the Queres now designate the Tanos. He there touched upon the southern part of the plain of Santa Fé. He mentions five Tanos pueblos, and estimates their population at 20,000 souls. Espejo was a careful and intelligent observer, except that his estimates of population are always exaggerated at least four times. The exaggerations arise from the fact that whenever the Spaniards visited a village not only the people of that village, but those also of the neighboring pueblos, were present to greet their strange animals, and this multitude followed them as long as they continued in the territory of the tribe. This was a result more of curiosity than of fear. Moreover, an Indian village, in consequence of the peculiar structure of its buildings, always appears at least twice as large as it really is.
The founding of Santa Fé has been ascribed to Espejo. The error is the result of inaccurate, extremely superficial historical inquiry. The mere reading of Espejo's account would satisfy any one that he marched all through New Mexico and northern Arizona with only fourteen soldiers; that his expedition was a mere reconnoissance and no scheme of colonization; and that he arrived again, with all his men, in Santa Barbara in southern Chihuahua on the 20th of September, 1583. The story of the founding of Santa Fé by Espejo in the year 1583, aside from the one which fixed the origin of the capital in 1550—which suggested the spurious "Tertio millennial jubilee" of 1883—furnishes a most emphatic proof of the want of thought and of scientific care with which the history of Spanish colonization is still written. After his return Espejo made a proposition to the Crown concerning the settlement of New Mexico (April 23, 1584), but he died in 1585, before the government had examined his plan.
The first Spanish settlement in New Mexico was founded in the year 1598 by Juan de Oñate. It was not, however, where Santa Fé now stands, but thirty miles north of that place, on the tongue of land formed by the junction of the Rio Grande with the Rio Chama, opposite the present Indian village of San Juan de los Caballeros. It was therefore very near the station Chamita, on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Oñate marched from San Marcos to San Ildefonso on the Rio Grande, barely touching the southwest corner of the Santa Fé plateaus, and paid no attention whatever to the little village of Cua-Pooge. The well-watered, highly fertile valley near San Juan, on the contrary, attracted him at once, and he began the building, opposite that pueblo, of a chapel and a Spanish headquarters, which he called "San Francisco de los Españoles," on the 23d of August, 1598. The chapel was consecrated on the 8th of September of the same year. This first colony was called San Gabriel in 1599, and that has continued till now to be the name given to the place by the Mexicans, although every trace of the buildings disappeared long ago. Ruins were still visible about 1694.
San Gabriel remained the only settlement of Europeans in New Mexico till 1608. In that year the Crown fixed the governmental regulations of the new possession and assigned a regular salary of 2000 ducats a year to the governor, and he immediately departed for Santa Fé. More exact statements concerning the date of this settlement are not accessible, although they probably exist in the Spanish archives; but it is certain that Santa Fé was not founded till after the year 1607. Twenty years afterward two hundred and fifty Spaniards dwelt there, including soldiers; and when the Indians rose and drove out the whites in 1680, the whole district contained not more than one thousand Europeans, about half of whom lived in Santa Fé.
All the other towns in New Mexico, the Indian villages excepted, are of much later origin than Santa Fé. Albuquerque, for example, dates from 1701, Las Vegas from 1835, Bernalillo from 1701, Socorro—the old pueblo was destroyed in 1681—from 1817. The oldest Indian missions in Arizona—"Tubac," "Tumacacori," etc.—date from the close of the seventeenth century. Tucson was still in 1772 a small village of the Pimas. Santa Fé is therefore the oldest existing city in the two Territories, and the second oldest European town in the United States that is still inhabited.
The first church in Santa Fé was begun in 1622 and completed in 1627. It stood on the site of the present cathedral, and the remains of the walls of the old "Parroquia," or parish church, probably belonged to that oldest temple. Of San Miguel, the walls are of the middle of the seventeenth century. The roof and towers were built after 1694. The old house by the side of it is of the same age. The oldest churches in New Mexico still standing and in use are those in the Indian villages San Ildefonso and Santa Clara; the oldest abandoned houses of worship are those of Pecos, San Diego de Jemez, and perhaps Abó and Cuaray. All these buildings were erected in the beginning of the seventeenth century.
- ↑ See the chapter on Cibola.