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148 New Mexico’s Place in the American Scene chapter fourteen C oronado’s introduction of domestic animals from the Old World into New Mexico in 1540 was not the first time that Native people witnessed the presence of European livestock. The first occurrence took place in Florida.1 Juan Ponce de León, a member of Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, headed an expedition that landed on the coast of Florida and explored the interior twenty years later—in 1513. Whether or not horses accompanied his men on their brief landings ashore is unknown, but if they had, it would have been only the second time that livestock from the Old World set foot on the American mainland. (The first livestock on American shores were raised by the Vikings at their Newfoundland colony some five hundred years earlier.) Hernán Cortés did not land on the coast of Yucatán with his armored stallions until 1519. Two years after the conquistador’s entrada, Ponce again disembarked on Florida’s west coast with a colonizing expedition that included farmers and domestic livestock. Once ashore, however, they were driven back by Natives, and they soon abandoned their attempt to establish a colony. Next, a royal Spanish expedition of around four hundred men and their horses made landfall in Florida in 1528. After months of disasters, they slaughtered and ate their few remaining horses, after which they set sail along the Gulf Coast on five rafts that had been constructed on the spot. About ninety survivors made it to a landing on the Texas coast. After years of strife and loss of men, in one of the most incredible overland excursions on record, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and three others set off northward, then westward and southward on foot, finally reaching Spanish settlements in Mexico eight years after their initial landing on the mainland.2 Hernando de Soto, accompanied by a troop of six hundred men, came ashore at Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1539 and then, over a period of four years, New Mexico’s Place in the American Scene • 149 marched northward into Georgia, up through South Carolina and southern Tennessee, across the Appalachian Mountains into Alabama, down the Mississippi, over to East Texas, and finally across the Gulf by barges to Pánuco on the east coast of Mexico. Hogs, to be used as a food bank, were driven along much of the journey, and it’s likely that some of them escaped into the wild and became the source of the feral swine (razorbacks) that eventually overran the American Southeast.3 An estimated four million of them still thrive in the southern countryside today. Spanish Colonies on the Atlantic Coast It wasn’t until 1564 that any semblance of a colony was established on American shores. That year, French Protestants founded Fort Caroline near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, but the garrison, with its presumed complement of livestock, was overrun by a Spanish force a little over a year later. The following year, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, leader of that force, established the first permanent settlement in today’s United States at Saint Augustine, Florida, a short distance south of the overrun French fort. The Crown intended its 1565 settlement to be self-sufficient, so besides the six hundred to eight hundred soldiers and settlers, two hundred calves, four hundred pigs, four hundred sheep, and an unspecified number of goats and chickens were aboard the ships bound for Saint Augustine.4 Thus the real cradle of livestock husbandry in the United States was on the coastal region of northern Florida, not New Mexico. However, a too-humid climate and impoverished soils worked against the colonists, many of whom had formerly been farmers in Spain, where growing conditions differed immensely. Sheep, every Spaniard’s preferred source of meat, fared poorly, just as they had in muggy Hispaniola.5 Bereft of mutton, the colonists there and at another colony, Santa Elena, which had been founded by Menéndez nearly two hundred miles up the coast in present-day South Carolina, turned to raising pigs. They also raised cattle from the dozen head that had survived over the Saint Augustine colony’s first five years, but herd building progressed slowly, and the first real cattle ranch didn’t appear for another thirty years or so. No substantial herding activity occurred until the 1650s.6 Until that time, fish and shellfish harvested in nearby estuaries, plus venison, supplied...

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