A Harvest of Reluctant Souls: Fray Alonso de Benavides's History of New Mexico, 1630

Introduction

• xi I. I have attempted in this translation to treat Benavides’s History (the Memorial in the original) as one of the great early works of southwestern American history and narrative literature. There is no question of its unique nature. It is at the same time medieval and a tale of the Renaissance; a portrait of the Pueblos, the Apaches, and the Navajos at a time of fundamental change in their lives; the first full picture of European colonial life many centuries ago in the southern Rockies, the southwestern deserts, and the edge of the Great Plains; and a story of mystical revelation and supernatural transport across the Atlantic. It is also a public relations pitch to the king of Spain, an account of mission architecture and mission life, a social history, a history of exploration, and an early ethnological study of no mean distinction. And it is an impressive rendition of faith in the wilderness. By American standards, the Memorial is ancient. Addressed to King Philip IV of Spain, it was first published by the Royal Print Shop in Madrid in 1630 and is now nearly four hundred years old. In the early seventeenth century, a memorial was simply a lengthy official report of some importance. Benavides’s gripping tale of distant New Mexico was likely the first comprehensive account of the colony to make its way into the hands of the Spanish monarch. It was translated almost immediately into French, German, Latin, and Dutch, and by 1634 its author, the Portuguese Franciscan Fray Alonso de Benavides, had Introduction xii • Introduction traveled to Rome to offer a revised and expanded version of the book in person to Pope Urban VIII. Fray Alonso was angling perhaps a little obviously for a bishopric in frontier New Mexico, the remote province of New Spain in which he had served as the third custodian of missions and the first commissary or agent of the grim Inquisition from 1626 to 1629. Originally elected to his position in Mexico in 1623, it took him two years to prepare himself for his duties, consult with Fray Juan de Santander, the commissary general of the Indies, and gather a number of other like-minded friars together to accompany him to the mission fields. He set out in 1625, and after a tedious year on the road found himself in Santa Fe on January 26, 1626, where he was received by the governor and the resident Franciscan clergy with great pomp and ceremony. Scattered throughout his narrative are numerous pleas A Franciscan priest in New Mexico, late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, Neg. No. 87294. Introduction • xiii for more priests for the missions, faster supplies, more protection for the Indians against the ravages of the Spanish civil authorities, and more recognition for the fantastic miracles of conversion witnessed by the Franciscans during their arduous labors on behalf of the Native Americans of New Mexico. Benavides was clearly fascinated by the Pueblo and Apache people and their extraordinary homeland. With relish, he tells the king of deer trained to draw wagons, sorcerers struck down by lightning and laughter when they oppose the divine word of God, buffalo grazing in their millions on the endless plains, invisible padres eluding their Pueblo enemies, and a country so cold in the winter that wine freezes in the chalices and no one can dig proper graves in the church floors for the poor souls frozen stiff in the snowy fields. In many ways, this Portuguese priest in Spanish service is a very Americanwriter.Histalesof NewMexicohaveclassicAmericanthemes. There are, for instance, the generally disastrous encounters of the local Indian population with transplanted, headstrong, cocksure Europeans on a mission for God and personal advancement. There is an exaggerated local boosterism resulting in an influx of new capital and goods to benefit the local economy. There are also frontier building programs (in this case, the construction of new stone churches, friaries, and complete Indian villages) based on utopian ideals and the general conviction that the will of the Almighty Himself was expressed in the word and deed of the king—the supreme civil authority. Fray Alonso has little doubt that God and the king are on a first-name basis. Unlike many early American promoters, Father Benavides and his hardworking Franciscans actually did what they said they would do on the mission frontier. Evidence of their work is...