Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico

3: Braving the Storm

CHAPTER THREE Braving the Storm Father, as yet we have no power with God. — a Tompiro Indian B y the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Indians’ world had begun to look vastly different than it had a generation before. Where once moccasined feet had trod silently on the dirt paths between settlements, galloping horses’ hooves punctured the trails and wooden wheels rutted the roads. Armed men, even some overly dressed women and children, marched to the natives’ homes to construct forts, haciendas, and ranches in the hinterlands of the Indians’ larger towns. Domesticated sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, and cows gorged on local flora and trampled the underbrush where berries and nuts had flourished. Even the robed Spaniards, who lived next to the freshly wrought churches that stood within the confines of the Indians’ villages, regularly walked a circuit to neighboring camps to preach the strangers’ faith. But the newcomers were not the only ones on the move. Indians packed supplies and a few cherished belongings to take to the trails. Ordered to walk to the colonial capitals or to settlers’ plots, native men provided the muscle for the construction of municipal buildings, military facilities, and expansive agricultural fields. Others toiled on farms or among the herds of Spanish livestock. The demand for native labor and the business of the Florida and New Mexico colonies made frontier byways conductors of perpetual motion. 61 The ebb and flow of humanity along Indian trails might have made mission villages bustling hubs of social interaction, commerce, and spirituality . But for native inhabitants of the doctrinas and visitas, the world was eerily quiet. Invisible microbes had silently killed thousands of natives who had no acquired immunities to diseases born from centuries of human interaction in the Eastern Hemisphere. The morbid speed and stealth of the epidemics—alternatively smallpox, influenza, whooping cough, bubonic plague, typhus, dysentery, scarlet fever, and measles among others—ravaged native communities and left survivors with reduced resources and depleted populations. The Pueblos were less affected than the Indians of Florida, losing only half their population over the seventeenth century to disease. The Southwest’s dry climate and sparsely settled landscape hindered the spread of European diseases. Humid and crowded conditions in Florida made for a different story. The Timucuas’ numbers were halved in four years, between  and , and continued to plummet over the course of the century until only , souls remained.Apalachee suffered a precipitous drop in population from twenty-five thousand in  to eight thousand in . Recurring epidemics efficiently depleted chiefdoms, villages, clans, and households; entire towns were wiped out. The extensive demographic cataclysm and its attendant disruption, dislocation, and anxiety wreaked havoc on Indian cultures. Native communities that had carefully divided tasks between men and women, distributed certain responsibilities among clans, and invested power in its leadership and its priesthood found that the epidemics left the social fabric in shreds. Those who had kept ritual knowledge for the perpetuation of the cosmos and those who passed on the practical skills needed to survive the changing seasons died too quickly to impart their life lessons to their progeny. Indeed, Indians who survived decimation by disease had difficult choices to make in their search for stability. Some joined with cousins who shared their language and customs. Others risked confederating with foreign groups. Both options were perilous; neighboring kinsmen probably suffered equally from mysterious illnesses, and strangers could be unpredictable. But at least they found security in familiarity and safety in cultural similitude. Still others chose the most terrifying route, and took to the roads as individuals or in small bands with no particular destination in mind. It was no wonder that in light of such insecure times, many Indians decided to welcome the Spaniards to their 62 Chapter Three villages and, perhaps, to find explanations in Christianity for what was happening around them. No matter how native people reacted to life in the missions, to the message the friars taught, and to the gray-robed doctrineros themselves, they were in a defensive posture. The Spaniards had come across oceans and through jungles and deserts to the peoples in Florida and New Mexico, not the other way round. The conquerors had compelled the Indians to submit to a foreign power and had introduced them to new diseases, technologies, animals, plants, and ideas. Certainly the indigenous peoples taught the Spaniards new things as well, but they...