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Supplemental Documents 317 best assurance of this aid. In regard to the people and wagons, they will pass muster in my presence, to be held outside the walls of this city, and supported until those provinces have been judged to have attained relief and their lives secured and settled in [those provinces], including the conservation of the religious missionaries. Of their good account, I hope to have very brief reports to notify Your Majesty, although I have had none until this time with respect to the great distance from this city to those provinces, in which the wagons take six months going and six months to return, not counting the time to prepare the wagons with supplies in delivering the various aids, charity, and stipends to the missionaries, who are also separated from each other by the distances. Notwithstanding the above aid, which is very necessary, there is the additional cost of four thousand and seven hundred pesos, as appears from the attached attested edicts, which Your Majesty has commanded to see. God protect the Catholic and royal person of Your Majesty, since Christianity depends on you. Mexico [City], January 13, 1678. Don Payo [Enríquez de Rivera] Archbishop of Mexico [rubric]. Notes 1. AGI, Audiencia de México, 50, R.1, N.3, ff. 1r.–3r, Cartas del Virrey Payo Enríquez de Rivera, El Virrey a Su Majestad, socorros a las provincias de Nuevo México, 13 de enero de 1678. Translation by José Antonio Esquibel. Supplemental Document 8 Excerpt from a Petition of Fray Nicolás López to the Viceroy Mexico City, June 7, 16851 At this time [the supplicant] found himself with twenty-six captains of different infidel nations and three Christians, who were begging for the water of baptism, once, twice, and three times. The supplicant scrutinized the desire they had to become [Christians] because he had informed at considerable length by Licenciado Antonio de Salaices, commissary of the Holy Office in the Real del Parral, that many of those nations had repeatedly petitioned for the water of baptism in the said real, but it had not been 318 Part Two granted to them on account of the long distance to the junction of the Río de Conchos with the Río del Norte. In order to learn whether the petition was sincere, the supplicant propounded to the said infidel Indians the difficulty that they did not have a church where mass could be said to them. The following day the said captains dispatched couriers, taking measurements of the altars of the church of El Paso, and they went to order a church made. And within twenty days the couriers returned with more than thirty persons, men, women, saying that all the people were at work building two churches. At the same time, they pretended that a cross had fallen down to them from the sky in order to further obligate us to [make] the said journey, as the captains by whose order the first ones had gone declared afterward. The said Indians alleged that they had been serving the king in the mines and farms of the citizens of Parral and they [the latter] had never given them ministers, although they had asked for them many times. For this reason they went to El Paso de Río del Norte, realizing its proximity and knowing that there were Spaniards residing there. When the supplicant saw that the said Indians facilitated the journey, he decided to set forth, apostolically, on foot, with two friars, in the company of the said infidels, as is recorded in a certification. He spent thirteen days on the journey, because of going little by little, finding great numbers of heathen Suma Indians on his way to La Junta de los Ríos. When he reached the first nations, the supplicant found an adequate church built of sacate with its altar in accordance with the measurements the couriers had taken, and good enough to make it possible to say mass. Going six leagues farther, he found another church, much larger and more elaborate, where a halt was made; and there was also a house that the said Indians had built for the minister to live. Realizing that their desires were sincere, we began without the least delay to catechize and to baptize many babies because their parents asked for this with great importunity. The supplicant found very many Christian Indians, who, desirous of Our Holy Faith, had gone out...

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