USA > California > The Spanish Pioneers And The California Missions > Part 4
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Carried away by his ambition, he actually plotted open rebellion against Spain and to make himself emperor of Mexico. The Crown got wind of this precious plan, and sent out emissaries who seized
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his goods, imprisoned his men, and prepared to thwart his secret schemes. Cortez boldly hastened to Spain, where he met his sovereign with great splendor. Charles received him well, and deco- rated him with the illustrious Order of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. But his star was already declining ; and though he was allowed to return to Mexico with undiminished outward power, he was thenceforth watched, and did nothing more that was comparable with his wonderful earlier achievements. He had become too unscrupulous, too vindictive, and too unsafe to be left in authority ; and after a few years the Crown was forced to appoint a vice- roy to wield the civil power of Mexico, leaving to Cortez only the military command, and permission for further conquests. In 1536 Cortez discovered Lower California, and explored part of its gulf. At last, disgusted with his inferior position where he had once been supreme, he returned to Spain, where the emperor received him coldly. In 1541 he ac- companied his sovereign to Algiers as an attaché, and in the wars there acquitted himself well. Soon after their return to Spain, however, he found him- self neglected. It is said that one day when Charles was riding in state, Cortez forced his way to the royal carriage and mounted upon the step deter- mined to force recognition.
" Who are you?" demanded the angry emperor.
"A man, your Highness," retorted the haughty conqueror of Mexico, "who has given you more provinces than your forefathers left you cities !"
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THE CHAPTER OF CONQUEST.
Whether the story is true or not, it graphically illustrates the arrogance as well as the services of Cortez. He lacked the modest balance of the greatest greatness, just as Columbus had lacked it. The self-assertion of either would have been impos- sible to the greater man than either, -the self- possessed Pizarro.
At last, in disgust, Cortez retired from court ; and on the 2d of December, 1554, the man who had first opened the interior of America to the world died near Seville.
There were some in South America whose achieve- ments were as wondrous as those of Cortez in Mex- ico. The conquest of the two continents was prac- tically contemporaneous, and equally marked by the highest military genius, the most dauntless courage, the overcoming of dangers which were appalling, and hardships which were wellnigh superhuman.
Francisco Pizarro, the unlettered but invincible conqueror of Peru, was fifteen years older than his brilliant cousin Cortez, and was born in the same province of Spain. He began to be heard of in America in 1510. From 1524 to 1532 he was making superhuman efforts to get to the unknown and golden land of Peru, overcoming such obstacles as not even Columbus had encountered, and endur- ing greater dangers and hardships than Napoleon or Cæsar ever met. From 1532 to his death in 1541, he was busy in conquering and exploring that enor- mous area, and founding a new nation amid its fierce tribes, - fighting off not only the vast hordes
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of Indians, but also the desperate men of his own forces, by whose treachery he at last perished. Pizarro found and tamed the richest country in the New World ; and with all his unparalleled sufferings still realized, more than any other of the conquer- ors, the golden dreams which all pursued. Prob- ably no other conquest in the world's history yielded such rapid and bewildering wealth, as certainly none was bought more dearly in hardship and heroism. Pizarro's conquest has been most unjustly dealt with by some historians ignorant of the real facts in the case, and blinded by prejudice ; but that marvellous story, told in detail farther on, is coming to its proper rank as one of the most stupendous and gallant feats in all history. It is the story of a hero to whom every true American, young or old, will be glad to do justice. Pizarro has been long misrep- resented as a blood-stained and cruel conqueror, a selfish, unprincipled, unreliable man; but in the clear, true light of real history he stands forth now as one of the greatest of self-made men, and one who, considering his chances, deserves-the utmost respect and admiration for the man he made of himself. The conquest of Peru did not by far cause as much bloodshed as the final reduction of the Indian tribes of Virginia. It counted scarcely as many Indian victims as King Philip's War, and was much less bloody, because more straightforward and honorable, than any of the British conquests in East India. The most bloody events in Peru came after the conquest was over, when the Spaniards
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FRANCISCO PIZZARO
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THE CHAPTER OF CONQUEST.
fell to fighting one another ; and in this Pizarro was not the aggressor but the victim. It was the treach- ery of his own allies, - the men whose fames and for- tunes he had made. His conquest covered a land as big as California, Oregon, and most of Washing- ton, - or as our whole seaboard from Nova Scotia to Port Royal and two hundred miles inland, - swarming with the best organized and most advanced Indians in the Western Hemisphere ; and he did it all with less than three hundred gaunt and tattered men. He was one of the great captains of all time, and almost as remarkable as organizer and executive of a new empire, the first on the Pacific shore of the southern continent. To this greatness rose the friendless, penniless, ignorant swineherd of Truxillo !
Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, sub- dued that vast area of the deadly Araucanians with an "army" of two hundred men. He established the first colony in Chile in 1540, and in the following February founded the present city of Santiago de Chile. Of his long and deadly wars with the Arau- canians there is not space to speak here. He was killed by the savages Dec. 3, 1553, with nearly all his men, after an indescribably desperate struggle.
There is not space to tell here of the wondrous do- ings in the southern continent or the lower point of this, - the conquest of Nicaragua by Gil Gonzales Davila in 1523 ; the conquest of Guatemala, by Pedro de Alvarado, in 1524 ; that of Yucatan by Francisco de Montijo, beginning in 1526 ; that of New Granada
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by Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, in 1536 ; the con- quests and exploration of Bolivia, the Amazon, and the Orinoco (to whose falls the Spaniards had pene- trated by 1530, by almost superhuman efforts) ; the unparalleled Indian wars with the Araucanians in Chile (for two centuries), with the Tarrahumares in Chihuahua, the Tepehuanes in Durango, the still un- tamed Yaquis in northwestern Mexico; the exploits of Captain Martin de Hurdaide (the Daniel Boone of Sinaloa and Sonora) ; and of hundreds of other unrecorded Spanish heroes, who would have been world-renowned had they been more accessible to the fame-maker.
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VI.
A GIRDLE ROUND THE WORLD.
B EFORE Cortez had yet conquered Mexico, or Pizarro or Valdivia seen the lands with which their names were to be linked for all time, other Spaniards - less conquerors, but as great explorers - were rapidly shaping the geography of the New World. France, too, had aroused some- what; and in 1500 her brave son Captain de Gonneville sailed to Brazil. But between him and the next pioneer, who was a Florentine in French pay, was a gap of twenty-four years; and in that time Spain had accomplished four most important feats.
Fernão Magalhaes, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan, was born in Portugal in 1470; and on reaching manhood adopted the seafaring life, to which his adventurous disposition prompted. The Old World was then ringing with the New ; and Magellan longed to explore the Americas. Being very shabbily treated by the King of Por- tugal, he enlisted under the banner of Spain, where his talents found recognition. He sailed from Spain in command of a Spanish expedition, August 10, 1519; and steering farther south than ever man
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had sailed before, he discovered Cape Horn, and the Straits which bear his name. Fate did not spare him to carry his discoveries farther, nor to reap the reward of those he had made; for during this voyage (in 1521) he was butchered by the natives of one of the islands of the Moluccas. His heroic lieutenant, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, then took command, and continued the voyage until he had circumnavigated the globe for the first time in its history. Upon his return to Spain, the Crown rewarded his brilliant achievements, and gave him, among other honors, a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a globe and the motto, Tu primum circum- dedisti me, -" Thou first didst go around me."
Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida, - the first State of our Union that was seen by Euro- peans, - was as ill-fated an explorer as Magellan ; for he came to "the Flowery Land " (to which he had been lured by the wild myth of a fountain of perennial youth) only to be slain by its savages. De Leon was born in San Servas, Spain, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. He was the conqueror of the island of Puerto Rico, and sailing in 1512 to find Florida, - of which he had heard through the Indians, - discovered the new land in the same year, and took possession of it for Spain. He was given the title of adelantado of Florida, and in 1521 returned with three ships to conquer his new country, but was at once wounded mortally in a fight with the Indians, and died on his return to Cuba. He, by the way, was one of the bold
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Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his sec- ond voyage to America, in 1493.
More of the credit of Florida belongs to Her- nando de Soto. That gallant conquistador was born in Estremadura, Spain, about 1496. Pedro Arias de Avila took a liking to his bright young kinsman, helped him to obtain a university education, and in 1519 took him along on his expedition to Darien. De Soto won golden opinions in the New World, and came to be trusted as a prudent yet fearless officer. In 1528 he commanded an expedition to explore the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan, and in 1532 led a reinforcement of three hundred men to assist Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. In that golden land De Soto captured great wealth ; and the young soldier of fortune, who had landed in America with no more than his sword and shield, returned to Spain with what was in those days an enormous fortune. There he married a daughter of his bene- factor De Avila, and thus became brother-in-law of the dis- coverer of the Pacific, -Balboa. De Soto lent part of his soon-earned fortune to Autograph of Hernando de Soto. Charles V., whose constant wars had drained the royal coffers, and Charles sent him out as governor of Cuba and adelantado of the new province of
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Florida. He sailed in 1538 with an army of six hun- dred men, richly equipped, - a company of adven- turous Spaniards attracted to the banner of their famous countryman by the desire for discovery and gold. The expedition landed in Florida, at Espiritu Santo Bay, in May, 1539, and re-took possession of the unguessed wilderness for Spain.
But the brilliant success which had attended De Soto in the highlands of Peru seemed to desert him altogether in the swamps of Florida. It is note- worthy that nearly all the explorers who did wonders in South America failed when their operations were transferred to the northern continent. The physical geography of the two was so absolutely unlike, that, after becoming accustomed to the necessities of the one, the explorer seemed unable to adapt himself to the contrary conditions of the other.
De Soto and his men wandered through the southern part of what is now the United States for four ghastly years. It is probable that their travels took them through the present States of Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the northeastern corner of Texas. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River ; and theirs were the first European eyes to look upon the Father of Waters, anywhere save at its mouth, -a century and a quarter before the heroic Frenchmen Marquette and La Salle saw it. They spent that winter along the Washita ; and in the early summer of 1542, as they were returning down the Mississippi, brave De Soto died, and his body was laid to rest in the bosom of the mighty river he had discovered, - two
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centuries before any "American " saw it. His suf- fering and disheartened men passed a frightful winter there; and in 1543, under command of the Lieutenant Moscoso, they built rude vessels, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in nineteen days, - the first navigation in our part of America. From the Delta they made their way westward along the coast, and at last reached Panuco, Mexico, after such a five years of hardship and suffering as no Saxon explorer of America ever experienced. It was nearly a century and a half after De Soto's gaunt army of starving men had taken Louisiana for Spain that it became a French possession, - which the United States bought from France over a century later yet.
So when Verazzano - the Florentine sent out by France - reached America in 1524, coasted the Atlantic seaboard from somewhere about South Carolina to Newfoundland, and gave the world a short description of what he saw, Spain had circum- navigated the globe, reached the southern tip of the New World, conquered a vast territory, and discov- ered at least half-a-dozen of our present States, since the last visit of a Frenchman to America. As for England, she was almost as unheard of still on this side of the earth as though she had never existed.
Between De Leon and De Soto, Florida was visited in 1518 by Francisco de Garay, the con- queror of Tampico. He came to subdue the Flowery Land, but failed, and died soon after in Mexico, - the probability being that he was poi- soned by order of Cortez. He left even less mark
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on Florida than did De Leon, and belongs to the class of Spanish explorers who, though real heroes, achieved unimportant results, and are too numerous to be even catalogued here.
In 1527 there sailed from Spain the most disas- trous expedition which was ever sent to the New World, - an expedition notable but for two things, that it was perhaps the saddest in history, and that it brought the man who first of all men crossed the American continent, and indeed made one of the most wonderful walks since the world began. Panfilo de Narvaez -who had so ignominiously failed in his attempt to arrest Cortez - was commander, with authority to conquer Florida ; and his treasurer was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. In 1528 the company landed in Florida, and forthwith began a record of horror that makes the blood run cold. Ship- wreck, savages, and starvation made such havoc with the doomed band that when in 1529 Vaca and three companions found themselves slaves to the Indians they were the sole survivors of the expedition.
Vaca and his companions wandered from Florida to the Gulf of California, suffering incredible dan- gers and tortures, reaching there after a wandering which lasted over eight years. Vaca's heroism was rewarded. The king made him governor of Para- guay in 1540; but he was as unfit for such a post as Columbus had been for a viceroy, and soon came back in irons to Spain, where he died.
But it was through his accounts of what he saw in that astounding journey (for Vaca was an educated
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man, and has left us two very interesting and valuable books) that his countrymen were roused to begin in earnest the exploration and colonization of what is now the United States, - to build the first cities and till the first farms of the greatest nation on earth.
The thirty years following the conquest of Mexico by Cortez saw an astounding change in the New World. They were brimful of wonders. Brilliant discovery, unparalleled exploration, gallant conquest, and heroic colonization followed one another in a bewildering rush, - and but for the brave yet lim- ited exploits of the Portuguese in South America, Spain was all alone in it. From Kansas to Cape Horn was one vast Spanish possession, save parts of Brazil where the Portuguese hero Cabral had taken a joint foothold for his country. Hundreds of Spanish towns had been built; Spanish schools, universities, printing-presses, books, and churches were beginning their work of enlightenment in the dark continents of America, and the tireless follow- ers of Santiago were still pressing on. America, particularly Mexico, was being rapidly settled by Spaniards. The growth of the colonies was very remarkable for those times, - that is, where there were any resources to support a growing population. The city of Puebla, for instance, in the Mexican State of the same name, was founded in 1532 and began with thirty-three settlers. In 1678 it had eighty thousand people, which is twenty thousand more than New York city had one hundred and twenty-two years later.
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VII.
SPAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
C ORTEZ was still captain-general when Cabeza de Vaca came into the Spanish settlements from his eight years' wandering, with news of strange countries to the north ; but Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy of Mexico, and Cortez' superior, and between him and the traitorous conqueror was endless dis- sension. Cortez was working for himself, Mendoza for Spain.
As Mexico became more and more thickly dotted with Spanish settlements, the attention of the restless world-finders began to wander toward the mysteries of the vast and unknown country to the north. The strange things Vaca had seen, and the stranger ones he had heard, could not fail to excite the dauntless rovers to whom he told them. Indeed, within a year after the arrival in Mexico of the first transcontinental traveller, two more of our present States were found by his countrymen as the direct result of his narra- tives. And now we come to one of the best-slan- dered men of them all, - Fray Marcos de Nizza, the discoverer of Arizona and New Mexico.
Fray (brother) Marcos was a native of the province of Nizza, then a part of Savoy, and must have come to
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America in 1531. He accompanied Pizarro to Peru, and thence finally returned to Mexico. He was the first to explore the unknown lands of which Vaca had heard such wonderful reports from the Indians, though he had never seen them himself, - " the Seven Cities of Cibola, full of gold," and countless other marvels. Fray Marcos started on foot from Culiacan (in Sinaloa, on the western edge of Mexico) in the spring of 1539, with the negro Estevanico, who had been one of Vaca's compan. ions, and a few Indians. A lay brother, Onorato, who started with him, fell sick at once and went no farther. Now, here was a genuine Spanish explo- ration, a fair sample of hundreds, - this fearless priest, unarmed, with a score of unreliable men, starting on a year's walk through a desert where even in this day of railroads and highways and trails and developed water men yearly lose their lives by thirst, to say nothing of the thousands who have been killed there by Indians. But trifles like these only whetted the appetite of the Spaniard ; and Fray Marcos kept his footsore way, until early in June, 1539, he actually came to the Seven Cities of Cibola. These were in the extreme west of New Mexico, around the present strange Indian pueblo of Zuni, which is all that is left of those famous cities, and is itself to-day very much as the hero- priest saw it three hundred and fifty years ago. At the foot of the wonderful cliff of Toyallahnah, the sacred thunder mountain of Zuñi, the negro Esté- vanico was killed by the Indians, and Fray Marcos
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escaped a similar fate only by a hasty retreat. He learned what he could of the strange terraced towns of which he got a glimpse, and returned to Mexico with great news. He has been accused of misrepre- sentation and exaggeration in his reports ; but if his critics had not been so ignorant of the locality, of the Indians and of their traditions, they never would have spoken. Fray Marcos's statements were abso- lutely truthful.
When the good priest told his story, we may be sure that there was a pricking-up of ears through- out New Spain (the general Spanish name then for Mexico) ; and as soon as ever an armed expedition could be fitted out, it started for the Seven Cities of Cibola, with Fray Marcos himself as guide. Of that expedition you shall hear in a moment. Fray Marcos accompanied it as far as Zuñi, and then returned to Mexico, being sadly crippled by rheu- matism, from which he never fully recovered. He died in the convent in the City of Mexico, March 25, 1558.
The man whom Fray Marcos led to the Seven Cities of Cibola was the greatest explorer that ever trod the northern continent, though his explorations brought to himself only disaster and bitterness, - Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. A native of Sala. manca, Spain, Coronado was young, ambitious, and already renowned. He was governor of the Mex- ican province of New Galicia when the news of the Seven Cities came. Mendoza, against the strong opposition of Cortez, decided upon a move which
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would rid the country of a few hundred daring young Spanish blades with whom peace did not at all agree, and at the same time conquer new coun- tries for the Crown. So he gave Coronado com- mand of an expedition of about two hundred and fifty Spaniards to colonize the lands which Fray Marcos had discovered, with strict orders never to come back !
Coronado and his little army left Culiacan early in 1540. Guided by the tireless priest they reached Zuñi in July, and took the pueblo after a sharp fight, which was the end of hostilities there. Thence Coronado sent small expeditions to the strange cliff-built pueblos of Moqui (in the northeastern part of Arizona), to the grand canon of the Colorado, and to the pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mex- ico. That winter he moved his whole command to Tiguex, where is now the pretty New Mexican village of Bernalillo, on the Rio Grande, and there had a serious and discreditable war with the Tigua Pueblos.
It was here that he heard that golden myth which lured him to frightful hardships, and hundreds since to death, - the fable of the Quivira. This, so Indians from the vast plains assured him, was an Indian city where all was pure gold. In the spring of 1541 Coronado and his men started in quest of the Quivira, and marched as far across those awful plains as the centre of our present Indian territory. Here, seeing that he had been deceived, Coronado sent back his army to Tiguex, and himself with
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thirty men pushed on across the Arkansas River, and as far as northeastern Kansas, - that is, three- fourths of the way from the Gulf of California to New York, and by his circuitous route much farther.
There he found the tribe of the Quiviras, - roaming savages who chased the buffalo, - but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of incessant marching and awful hard- ships. Soon after his return, he was so seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked ; and disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative obscurity.
This was a sad end for the remarkable man who had found out so many thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries before any of our blood saw any of it, - a well-born, college- bred, ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He was a city- bred man, and no frontiersman ; and being accus- tomed only to Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California, he knew nothing of,
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and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands, that New Mexico was successfully colonized.
While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a golden fable across their des- olate plains, his countrymen had found and were exploring another of our States, - our golden garden of California. Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three centuries later.
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