Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880

2. Refugees and Migrants: Making Hispanic-Apache Communities, 1680–1750

Both Chiricahua and Janos made their communities via violent competition over the most basic resource: people. Refugees from the New Mexican Pueblo Revolt of 1680 created Janos presidio in 1686 in response to an Indian rebellion. Apaches continued to migrate from the Southern Plains to the Rio Grande Valley to the mountains above Janos during the seventeenth century, resulting in conflict with Hispanics. Both Chiricahua and Janos were thus made in the cauldron of war between the Spanish crown and resisting Indians. Initially both communities incorporated the original inhabitants of the region into their communities; Chiricahua as wives, Janos as part of a caste system that included the offspring of an increasing number of ethnic intermarriages. Both then turned to taking each other’s population into their own via violence in raids and campaigns. While Janos and Chiricahua would occasionally take adult captives, especially women, both preferred to seize young children to add to their populations and increase their communities . This meant that the two communities were ultimately related, at least at the genetic level, a relation brought about by violence. Refugees Under the late summer sun a sad dispirited parade made its way into the paraje (campsite) of La Salineta, three leagues north of El Chapter 2 Refugees and Migrants Making Hispanic-Apache Communities, 1680–1750 refugees and migrants 24 Paso. More than two thousand men, women, and children filled the site that September day in 1680, all refugees from a revolt by northern Pueblo Indians in the Kingdom of New Mexico. Although they had been alerted to the coming uprising, its size and vehemence surprised the Hispanic settlers as Indians killed several hundred on isolated ranches and farmsteads. Those who could fled to Santa Fe, where Governor Antonio de Otermín defended the capital against a loose siege for a week. He then led a retreat southward through scenes of devastation and desecration, catching up with those settlers from the Río Abajo (downriver area) who had survived the rebellion . United, the refugees continued their month-long disheartened withdrawal southward before coming to rest at La Salineta.1 As descendants of the last conquistadors, 90 percent of whom were born in the province, these refugees had been the dominant class in New Mexico. By virtue of conquest the settlers enjoyed aristocratic status, although this was at best a local honor, plus access to Indian labor and mercedes (royal grants of land). They maintained these privileges for over four generations by continual campaigns against enemy Indians, especially Apaches, who had come to surround the province.2 Now they were refugees, without the status they had enjoyed in New Mexico and therefore likely to remain landless and laborless. Thus many of these Hispanic New Mexican refugees exploited kinship ties and continued beyond La Salineta, into the province of Nueva Vizcaya. Governor Otermín immediately realized many of his kingdom’s subjects were going on southward from La Salineta on their own. He informed the governor of Parral, who ordered Captain Andrés López de Grasia, alcalde mayor (magistrate) of Casas Grandes, or in his absence Captain Alonso Pérez Granillo, alcalde mayor of Carretas and Janos, to go to El Paso to prevent anyone from leaving . It is unknown if either López or Pérez went to El Paso, and it might not have helped stem the tide if they had, as Casas Grandes and Carretas, which was on the road to Sonora, were the very places to which New Mexican refugees were retreating. Upward of five hundred Hispanic refugees from the Pueblo Revolt came to settle refugees and migrants 25 in the river valley of Casas Grandes, named for the nearby ancient Indian ruin, along the northeastern flank of the Sierra Madre.3 The connections between Casas Grandes and New Mexico went back almost two decades to when the Suma Indians of the region had asked for a mission. Franciscan friars built one, San Antonio de Padua de Casas Grandes, downstream of the ancient Indian ruin, with corresponding lands for corn and wheat and pastures for sheep, goats, and cattle. At the same time Andrés López de Grasia of El Paso settled his family and several others at Casas Grandes south of the mission lands, separated by an irrigation ditch. López became the first alcalde mayor.4 By 1681 Francisco Ramírez de Salazar, López’s son-in-law, served...