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32 W hen more than seven thousand animals accompanied Don Juan de Oñate in 1598 on the grandest entrada of all, domestic livestock would become a permanent fixture in New Mexico. As the expedition got under way, Juan de Frías Salazar performed the required official inspection of the party. His meticulous examination resulted in a comprehensive documentation of most everything Oñate, his soldiers, and the colonists were transporting. The livestock component totaled (in rough round numbers) thirteen hundred horses, one hundred donkeys and mules, sixteen hundred cattle, three hundred oxen, thirty-four hundred sheep, one thousand goats, and sixty pigs.1 Stretching out more than two miles, Oñate’s caravan included some eighty wooden carretas and carros —carts and wagons piled high with supplies for the colonists and drawn by oxen rather than by mules. Of course, a significant number of the cattle, sheep, and goats were consumed by the five hundred or so soldiers and prospective colonists during their seven-hundred-mile, seven-month march, and many more would have perished en route, for water was almost nonexistent on some stretches of the journey, such as the Jornada del Muerto, which paralleled the Rio Grande north of El Paso. It is not known how many domestic animals reached the final destination—San Juan Pueblo (now preferably called Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo after the original Indian name), at the junction of the Rio Chama and the Rio Grande, not far from present-day Santa Fe. But in any case, Oñate can be credited with launching the livestock industry in the American Southwest. The Original Colony Oñate’s entourage struggled to establish a permanent settlement, which they named San Gabriel, all the while with the leader preoccupied with Driving Herds of Animals chapter five Driving Herds of Animals • 33 leading forays to the outer reaches of his intended realm. Oñate pleaded for reinforcements, and another contingent of recruits set off from Mexico with around seven hundred head of cattle (including oxen) and three hundred horses, reaching the colony on Christmas Eve 1600. That the colony’s food supply would dwindle was unavoidable.2 Within three years it was reported that despite the Pueblo Indians helping with planting, cultivating, and tending livestock (but probably not yet raising any of their own), livestock numbers had become greatly reduced. And it was not long before so many cattle had been slaughtered or had starved to death that the Spaniards were no longer eating beef and plowing had to be done with horses rather than oxen.3 New Mexico’s livestock industry was off to a shaky start. One would expect that the starving colonists would have reverted to hunting wild deer, rabbits, or ground squirrels, or catching fish from one of the two rivers. At least they could have bartered for or demanded such fare from the Puebloans. Indeed, thirty years later, visiting Franciscan Alonso de Benavides wrote, “The diversity of animals which this country produces is incredible. . . . Deer are countless; among them is a certain type [elk] which is as large as the largest of horses. . . . Cottontails and jackrabbits are inexhaustible, and they destroy the crops. Turkeys are limitless.”4 However, analysis of animal bones recovered from San Gabriel shows that only a small portion of them were from wild game. Archaeologist Florence Ellis, who oversaw the excavation of San Gabriel, suggested, “Evidently the soldier colonists were not sportsmen or Oñate feared to have them out in small parties in the mountain area.”5 Few, if any, of those colonists from Mexico had any experience in hunting or eating wild game. My own take is that too many of the younger, fit men had joined up to find treasure, not to grovel for subsistence. And too many of the leaders were haughty Spaniards who had envisioned the good life at the end of the trail—soldiers such as Captain Alonso de Quesada, whose accoutrements for the journey included “Four suits, one of purple velvet with a short cloak of pale green Castilian cloth; One of course plain-gray Castilian cloth; One of fine monk’s cloth lined with yellow damask, trimmed with braids of silver; And the last one of plain greenish cloth. . . . Four doublets, two of silk and two of linen. . . . Four pairs of silk stockings of various colors. . . . One hundred cakes of soap.” It appears that the good captain had no plans for involving himself with food procurement at the new colony.6 It...

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