Came Men on Horses: The Conquistador Expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Oñate

6. Terrorizing Tiguex

79 6 Terrorizing Tiguex Because the general had ordered that the [Indians] not be taken alive, so as to be a punishment and to make the rest of the Indians afraid, [López de Cárdenas] ordered that two hundred posts be planted in the ground right away in order to burn the [Indians] alive. Castañeda1 When winter came, Coronado sent for a Tiguex chief he had met and declared that he needed clothing for his poorly clad, shivering troops. He demanded that he be furnished with about 300 mantas, or robes.The chief said he could not possibly provide them, suggesting that the matter be put before the various town governors. Instead, Coronado sent parties of soldiers to round up—by force—the needed cloaks and blankets from among the twelve Tiguex villages.At times,when people hesitated to give up the garments they were wearing, the soldiers stripped them from the person’s back and made off with them.2 Still another issue arose when an Indian accused a soldier of violating his wife at a pueblo called Arenal. When the soldier spied a pretty Indian woman at the pueblo, with audacity he called her husband down to hold his horse while he climbed to the upper story. There he assaulted the woman, then came back down, took his horse, and departed. When 80 T e r r o r i z i n g T i g u e x Coronado learned of the matter, he made all of his soldiers appear before the husband so the offender could be identified. The man could not pick out the soldier. When he did identify the horse he had held, the owner argued that if the Indian could not recognize the culprit,he could be wrong about the horse. Because of this flimsy defense, no one was charged and the husband’s complaint was left unaddressed. The incident caused great concern among the Indians for the safety of their wives and daughters. This was by no means the only such transgression. Juan de Contreras, Coronado’s head groom, who ate in Coronado’s tent and slept at the entrance at night, testified, “It was widely known and publicly acknowledged that a [certain] Villegas, a brother of the Villegas who is regidor of the city of Mexico, went to a pueblo in the Tiguex province with other soldiers from don García de López Cárdenas’s company and took a quantity of clothing, poultry, and mats without the natives’permission. He also seized an Indian woman with whom it was said he had sexual relations.”3 On the day following that event, the natives revolted. A band of Indians attacked the men guarding the army’s horses and mules, killing one of the guards and driving off the stock. This last may have been an effort to rid the Spanish soldiers of their enormous advantage in waging war. The Spaniards’ horses and mules posed a threat to the Puebloans in another way.The Spanish practice of grazing their animals on the stubble of pueblo cornfields destroyed a vital source of winter fuel for the Indians. This was a perilous loss to the shivering natives, who were at the same time sacrificing their limited clothing to the Spaniards.4 Many of the horses and mules were never recovered. Cárdenas discovered some of them, however, when he was sent to Arenal to talk with the Indians. With a command of sixty mounted men, some foot soldiers, and a number of Mexican Indian allies, he arrived during late December 1540 to find that barriers had been erected to close off the village. He heard a great hubbub inside the enclosure and discovered that the Indians were chasing some of the stolen horses about the improvised arena and shooting them with arrows.5 Efforts were made to read the Requerimiento to the pueblo, but the Indians shrieked and sang war songs so loudly that it could not be delivered .6 When they totally rejected Cárdenas’s call to surrender, he surrounded the village and launched his attack. Some of his troops fought their way to the top of the pueblo, while others used battering rams to crush holes in the pueblo walls.The soldiers then lit smudge fires to drive 81 T e r r o r i z i n g T i g u e...