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

By Baker H. Morrow

The most thorough account ever written of southwestern life in the early seventeenth century, this engaging book was first published in 1630 as an official report to the king of Spain by Fray Alonso de Benavides, a Portuguese Franciscan who was the third head of the mission churches of New Mexico. In 1625, Father Benavides and his party traveled north from Mexico City to New Mexico, a strange land of frozen rivers, Indian citadels, and mines full of silver and garnets. Benavides and his Franciscan brothers built schools, erected churches, engineered peace treaties, and were said to perform miracles.

Benavides’s riveting exploration narrative provides portraits of the Pueblo Indians, the Apaches, and the Navajos at a time of fundamental change. It also gives us the first full picture of European colonial life in the southern Rockies, the southwestern deserts, and the Great Plains, along with an account of mission architecture and mission life and a unique evocation of faith in the wilderness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780826351586

Book preview

A Harvest of Reluctant Souls

Courtesy of Morrow Reardon Wilkinson Miller, Ltd.

titlepage.jpg

© 1996 by Baker H. Morrow

All rights reserved.

First University of New Mexico Press paperback edition published 2012.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benavides, Alonso de, fl. 1630.

[Memorial. English]

A harvest of reluctant souls : Fray Alonso de Benavides’s history of New Mexico, 1630 / translated with a revised introduction and notes by Baker H. Morrow. — 1st UNM Press pbk. ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Niwot, Colo. : University Press of Colorado, 1996, which is a translation of Benavides’ Memorial, written in 1630.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8263-5157-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5158-6 (electronic)

1. New Mexico—Description and travel—Early works to 1800. 2. Indians of North America—New Mexico—Early works to 1800. 3. Franciscans—Missions—New Mexico—Early works to 1800. I. Morrow, Baker H., 1946– II. Title.

F799.B43 2012

978.9´01—dc23

2011047922

Translator’s Dedication

To JoAnn and Susie, with much love.

And to the old ghosts of the Pueblos, the Apaches, the Navajos, and the Spaniards of New Mexico in the seventeenth century: here’s a good wish for all your souls across the centuries.

Acknowledgments

The late Calvin Horn, eminent Southwestern historian and publisher, was kind enough to provide me with a pristine copy of his 1965 reprint of the Ayer translation of Fray Alonso de Benavides’s Memorial as I began my work. It contains a very useful and clear photofacsimile of the Newberry Library/Ayer copy of the original Spanish edition of 1630, as well as copious notes. I appreciated his help and his friendship.

The staff of the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico also obtained for me a microfilm copy of the 1630 edition of the Memorial from the University of Kentucky Library. This I used for page-by-page and word-by-word comparisons. I am grateful to both libraries for their assistance.

Professor Emeritus John Kessell of the University of New Mexico discussed aspects of Mother María de Agreda’s mystical appearances with me at length. He also provided a manuscript copy of his recent study of this extraordinary nun, author of The Mystical City of God, an autobiography of the Virgin Mary. I would like to offer him my gratitude and appreciation.

My friend, Professor V. B. Price, provided much good advice and encouragement as this translation took shape. Many thanks, Barrett. I would also like to thank my friends Jeff Romero, Fred and Susan Roach, Laura Sowers, and Craig Sowers for their interest and support.

My secretary, Rosine McConnell, was exceptionally creative and helpful in transcribing a complex manuscript. I deeply appreciate her dedication and hard work. Susan Lowell, a former member of my staff, drafted a very useful map for the book from my sketches, and I will remember kindly her precision and care. I also am grateful to Ms. Amy Bell, ASLA, for her help with images for the book.

I would like to thank Luther Wilson, former director of the University Press of Colorado, for believing in the hardback version of this book from the start. Jody Berman, managing editor of the University Press of Colorado, was also most helpful and encouraging.

I am grateful to John Byram, director of the University of New Mexico Press, and to Maya Allen-Gallegos, production manager, for making possible this new paperback version of Fray Alonso’s classic.

The National Park Service at Salinas National Monument was very accommodating in allowing photographs and study at odd hours of the day. I am grateful in particular to Superintendent Glenn Fulfer, Jim Boll, and Juan Gonzales.

Every translator stands on the shoulders of his or her predecessors, and the thoroughness, dedication, and persevering scholarship of Mrs. Edward E. Ayer and Father Peter P. Forrestal and their colleagues will always be remembered and admired whenever the long and distinguished history of this book is recounted.

My wife, JoAnn, and daughter, Susan, were both most gracious and dedicated in agreeing to travel around the region with me in Fray Alonso’s footsteps. They allowed me the time and solitude I needed to complete this modern translation of one of the most singular and compelling early works in Southwestern literature.

Baker H. Morrow

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2012

Introduction

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 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 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.

A Franciscan priest in New Mexico, late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, Neg. No. 87294.

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 American writer. His tales of New Mexico have classic American themes. 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 still at hand. The old churches at Abó and Quarai in the Manzano Range and at Las Humanas on the flanks of Chupadera Mesa stir the visitor to this day: no one can walk through them in their somber remoteness and be unmoved. They are beautiful, brooding, and stark, much like the surrounding landscape. And they are made of the same sandstone or limestone as the lively Indian towns they served. They still speak to the strong Franciscan vision of what the Christian God should mean in the North American wilderness.

We can easily imagine Father Benavides visiting these churches on his rounds, checking on the construction of new walls for a friary or the administration