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15 PROLOGUE Yellow Earth WHEN THE SPANISH MISSIONARY-EXPLORERS Fray Atanasio Dominguez and Fray Francisco Silvestre Vélez de Escalante left Santa Fe on July 29, 1776, they and a small detail of military and civil aides labored north on familiar trade routes up dry mesas and through piñon-juniper forests alongside the Rio Grande’s dense cottonwood bosque, or forest. The pair had been charged with opening a direct trading route that would link Spanish colonial New Mexico to new Spanish settlements in California. The route was crucial to the survival of Spanish New Mexico, where “powerful Indian societies controlled most of the territory New Spain claimed with its northern boundary.” By the end of their first day on the trail, the party had reached the confluence of the Rio de Chama and the Rio Grande, the site where Juan de Oñate brought a wagon train of settlers and soldiers north from Zacatecas in 1598 to establish Spain’s first permanent settlement in New Mexico. Oñate’s short rule in New Mexico was marked by a relentless military campaign against Pueblo Indian communities up and down the Rio Grande. When the mesa-top pueblo of Acoma resisted Oñate’s authority, he launched a three-day siege of the pueblo. Oñate’s soldiers killed nearly two thousand members of the pueblo during the short battle and burned Acoma to the ground. The children who survived the slaughter were shipped off to convents in Mexico City. Adult women were enslaved . Spanish authorities hauled the few men who survived the “war by blood and fire” on a gruesome publicity tour of various other pueblos, where their public punishments, including the amputation of their right leg below the knee, served as a grisly warning to potential insurgents and sympathizers. The violence of Oñate’s campaign put Spanish and Pueblo Indians on a collision course that exploded in 1680, when Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande conspired to eject the Spanish from New Mexico. In a violent uprising they routed Spanish troops and expelled Spanish settlers from the Rio Grande valley . The Spanish reconquest twelve years later relied on new patterns of diplomacy and military authority in New Mexico. While diplomacy rather than brute force characterized the Spanish reconquest and largely resolved hostilities between Spanish settlers and Rio Grande Pueblos, volatile relations with the 16 • prologue powerful equestrian societies that surrounded New Mexico threatened to once again undermine Spain’s tenuous foothold in New Mexico. Various Indian nations controlled huge swaths of what Spain considered its northern boundary in the New World. The Utes had displaced the Navajos out of the Upper San Juan Basin in the early eighteenth century and asserted political and military authority in a region stretching from Santa Fe into presentday southern Utah and central Colorado. Their equestrian prowess threatened more than Navajo political and economic power, however, as it also threatened Pueblo Indian communities and Spanish settlements along the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. The Utes attacked Taos in 1716 and, combined with the growing military and economic power of other equestrian societies such as the Apaches and the Comanches, posed a difficult challenge to Spanish settlements in New Mexico. In 1749 the new Spanish governor of New Mexico, Tomás Vélez Cachupín, concluded that the only way to ensure Spanish security in New Mexico was to interrupt existing Indian alliances along the northern borderlands. He bristled at what he considered the shortsightedness of militarized Spanish policies governing frontier politics and argued for diplomacy alone as the key to peaceful frontier Indian relations. He pursued a policy of Spanish-Indian trading and found an ideal ally in the various Ute bands along New Mexico’s northern border . He exploited increasingly strained Ute-Comanche relations by establishing a 1752 peace accord with a Ute coalition and then restricted access to Ute lands in order to avoid unnecessary conflict. Eventually, the Spanish-Ute alliance proved to be an important countervailing force to Comanche and Navajo conflict and assured, at least temporarily, consistent and peaceful trade relations . “The conservation of the friendship of this Ute nation and the rest of its allied tribes,” Cachupín explained to his Spanish superiors, “is of the greatest consideration because of the favorable results which their trade and good relations bring to this province.” The strategy required a network of frontier trading outposts along the northern borderlands, linked to Santa Fe, where Spanish traders could establish trade...

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