Great River: The Rio Grand in North American History

By Paul Horgan

The Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning epic history of the American Southwest from the acclaimed twentieth-century author of Lamy of Santa Fe.

Great River was hailed as a literary masterpiece and enduring classic when it first appeared in 1954. It is an epic history of four civilizations—Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American—that people the Southwest through ten centuries. With the skill of a novelist, the veracity of a scholar, and the love of a long-time resident, Paul Horgan describes the Rio Grande, its role in human history, and the overlapping cultures that have grown up alongside it or entered into conflict over the land it traverses. Now in its fourth revised edition, Great River remains a monumental part of American historical writing.

“Here is known and unknown history, emotion and color, sense and sensitivity, battles for land and the soul of man, cultures and moods, fused by a glowing pen and a scholarly mind into a cohesive and memorable whole.” —The Boston Sunday Herald

“Transcends regional history and soars far above the river valley with which it deals . . . a survey, rich in color and fascinating in pictorial detail, of four civilizations: the aboriginal Indian, the Spanish, the Mexican, and the Anglo-American . . . It is, in the best sense of the word, literature. It has architectural plan, scholarly accuracy, stylistic distinction, and not infrequently real nobility of spirit.” —Allan Nevins, author of Ordeal of the Union

“One of the major masterpieces of American historical writing.” —Carl Carmer, author of Stars Fell on Alabama

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780819573605

Book preview

Great River

by Paul Horgan

NOVELS

The Fault of Angels • The Habit of Empire • No Quarter Given The Common Heart • Main Line West • Give Me Possession A Lamp on the Plains • Memories of the Future • A Distant Trumpet Far from Cibola • Whitewater

Mountain Standard Time

(containing Main Line West, Far from Cibola, and The Common Heart)

Mexico Bay

THE RICHARD TRILOGY

Things As They Are • Everything to Live For • The Thin Mountain Air

OTHER FICTION

The Return of the Weed • The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve Figures in a Landscape • Humble Powers • The Devil in the Desert

Toby and the Nighttime (juvenile)

One Red Rose for Christmas

The Peach Stone: Stories from Four Decades

HISTORY AND OTHER NON-FICTION

Men of Arms (juvenile) • From the Royal City

New Mexico’s Own Chronicle (with Maurice Garland Fulton)

Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History

The Centuries of Santa Fe • Rome Eternal • Citizen of New Salem

Conquistadors in North American History

Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch from Life • Songs After Lincoln The Heroic Triad: Essays in the Social Energies of Three Southwestern Cultures • Maurice Baring Restored

Encounters with Stravinsky: A Personal Record • Approaches to Writing

Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times

Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West

COLLECTIVE VOLUME

Of America East & West

Selections From the Writings of Paul Horgan

Great River

The Rio Grande in North American History

Paul Horgan

VOLUME ONE: Indians and Spain

VOLUME TWO: Mexico and the United States

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown, Connecticut

Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

© 1984 by Paul Horgan

All rights reserved

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7

CIP data appear at the end of the book

To Charles Arthur Henderson, 1907-1972, and to the students in my seminar on the American Southwest held at Wesleyan University

Preface to the Fourth Edition

i

In its length of nearly two thousand miles and its cultural evidence encompassing ten centuries and more, the Great River remains the unifying vein of history not only of the life adjacent to its banks, but also of the greater Southwest. There, if often far afield, the political, social, and geographical significance of the river can be traced through the times of five sovereignties—those of the Indian, Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States.

To do my subject anything like justice, I have hoped to produce a sense of historical experience rather than a bare record. This required me wherever possible to see events, societies, and movements through human character in action. While respecting the responsibilities of scholarship, I took every opportunity, when the factual record supported me, to stage a scene. Moreover, if here and there I halted the narrative of events to describe the various ways and customs of the people, then I had precedent for it, for Herodotus did the same, to our enrichment. Only when events are rooted in the soil of the culture might they seem to have a reality that endures.

ii

In manners of living, a long, slow sequence unfolded for the early river peoples. Prehistoric intuitions among them gradually gave way to knacks and simple ingenuities—primitive technologies to do with water, fire, agriculture, shelter, travel, weaponry. For centuries all these were developed without that sense of shock that accelerated rates of discovery produce. But with the waves of activity and means of control of the natural world that rose with the industrial revolution and the migratory imperatives of the nineteenth century, man’s impact on the environment brought swift and radical change within a single human lifetime.

Into the Rio Grande country, ranging through the area of what became three immense modern states and touching the great length of the river’s immediate course, came railroads, electricity, exploitation of mineral resources, colonization, urbanization at key points, and—not to be undervalued—the popular discovery of the natural aesthetic of generally benign climate over a landscape of most desirable beauty.

In modern days, therefore, population not only changed in character, it grew in a few generations to a size that threatened to create a dangerous imbalance between what was available to sustain life and what was demanded by headlong social increase. The problem was not exclusive to the Southwest, it plagued the nation and, indeed, with Latin America included, it invaded the hemisphere.

But it was in the Southwest that technological change became most rapidly visible. The desert country, having sustained sufficiently the modest requirements of the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Mexican, now had to meet the environmental levies of the United States genius for industry. Added to these were a foreshortened vision of the good life, which the American citizen and his suppliers made commonly necessary without much common foresight for the future effects of the technological society on such matters as pollution of air, earth, and water, and—most significant for the Southwest—dangerous depletion of the very sources of water itself.

The Rio Grande, long an adequate though never a voluminous river except in flood tide, has been attended in modern times by concerned management in its government conservancy districts; but in many places the river has become only a trickle, and in others entirely dry, to be replenished only by flood from otherwise dry or meager local tributaries and by diminishing ground water, this always in the face of increasing needs of its resources in both the United States and Mexico.

iii

In the late twentieth century, the cultural history of the Rio Grande country turned toward the devices and applications of science for a redefinition of its modern character. None of these has had a stronger regional association than the fateful development of nuclear science.

Before the mid-century in several nations, searching experiments in the revolutionary process of creating nuclear fission worked to bring vast new powers of energy within man’s grasp. It took fears and antagonisms and the stakes of war for the United States to apply atomic energy with all haste as a means of destruction on behalf of victory. The ultimate site for this development in weaponry was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in rugged mesa country west of the Rio Grande, and the history of the atomic bomb and its allied technical supports found location at other stations in the river empire such as Albuquerque, the White Sands, Alamogordo, and the Jornada del Muerto* in central New Mexico, where the first test detonation of the bomb took place in August, 1945.

The welcome clarity of the sky brought another world-changing technic to a Rio Grande tributary, the Pecos River, when Robert Hutchings Goddard chose Roswell, New Mexico, in the Pecos Valley for the continuation, and the eventual fruition, of his experiments in liquid fuel rocketry, which directly led to the achievement of space travel.

Added to these technical disciplines, with their ultimate administrative sprawl, was the wide use of southwestern lands for training the armed forces in World War II.

Through all such energies the Southwest, the Rio Grande ambience, was discovered by the nation at large, and the characters of its traditional life, with all the vestiges of its previous centuries still holding to the commingled styles of three races, was changed more swiftly and radically than ever before. The chronicle of life in the region always could be told in terms of change, whether at the pace measured by geology, archaeology, exploration, or successive national conquests; but the changes wrought by machine technics over life in the southwest desert empire have come so fast that designs for its future integrity seem almost to be overtaken before they can be effected.

To retain the past of the Great River, a course through historical time, remains the aim of the chronicle here.

---

* Translated as the Day’s March of the Dead Man, the grim suitability of this place name could not have been lost on the ironic and poetic genius of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the bomb’s production at Los Alamos.

iv

In order to give the reader an immediate sense of locality in the vastly scattered backgrounds of the river empire, I have in many cases used recent or modern place names in speaking of persons or events belonging to earlier times. For example, Mexico, properly speaking, was not the name of a nation or a whole integral area until 1821, but I use it for events before that date rather than the designation New Spain because I hope to give the reader a more ready sense of where he is on the map. Similarly, pressing ahead with early events near the site of modern river towns, I use their modern names (e.g., near Eagle Pass) as a quick means of orientation. On the other hand, intending to revive a period atmosphere, I have on occasion used older forms: the modern Port Isabel is given as Point Isabel after the usage of Ulysses S. Grant in his Personal Memoirs.

I have not used footnotes or running references with superior numbers to identify sources not because I did not have precise references for my information, or because I did not want to share these with the reader, but because it seemed to me to be to the reader’s advantage to give him the story without diverting his interest to the anatomy of my framework. But of course I identify my sources under two obligations: to acknowledge my debt to those authors whose works I have consulted, and to provide those interested in the source material—its range and authenticity—with general evidence for my statement. Accordingly, such information appears in brief form at the end of each volume, with sources listed by chapters, from which the reader may refer to the complete bibliography at the end of volume two in Appendix C.

Two works of distinction are absent from my bibliography. They were omitted not because they would have given me little, but because if I had reread them for the purposes of my study I feared that their persuasiveness in style and vision would have led me into unintended echoes in my own treatment of their subjects. These are Rio Grande by Harvey Fergusson (1933), a native New Mexican’s superb account of life in the middle river valley of New Mexico, and The Year of Decision by Bernard De Voto (1943), a vivid recreation of the experience and impact of the War with Mexico.

Otherwise I am deeply indebted to a great number of men and women who in person or in their works helped me in every phase of my long task. Contributing much to whatever successes my work may show, they are in no wise responsible for its shortcomings. Acknowledgments appeared in full in my earlier editions, where they remain to be consulted as a voluminous record of my wide indebtedness and abiding gratitude.

P.H.

Middletown, Connecticut,

1984.

Paul Horgan: A Biographical Note

Paul Horgan was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 1, 1903, the son of Edward Daniel and Rose Marie (Rohr) Horgan. In 1915, when he was twelve years old, he and the rest of his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. For most of his life, New Mexico—Albuquerque, Roswell, and Santa Fe—was his home territory, until in 1962 he was called to Wesleyan University to become director of its then active Center for Advanced Studies, a post he filled for five years. Following that assignment he became an adjunct professor of English at Wesleyan, and later professor emeritus and author-in-residence.

He was educated at the Nardin Academy in Buffalo, the Albuquerque public schools, the New Mexico Military Institute, and the Eastman School of Music and the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York.

In 1926, in order to pursue his work as a writer, he accepted the post of librarian at the New Mexico Military Institute, which gave him daily time for writing. In 1942 he entered the army and served until 1946 (captain to lieutenant-colonel) in the General Staff Corps, becoming chief of the Army Information Branch in the Information and Education Division, for which he received the Legion of Merit.

Following his military service he returned to New Mexico, and soon was able to give his whole time to writing. He is the author of seventeen novels, of which the most recent, Mexico Bay, was published in his seventy-ninth year, on February 25, 1982, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. For his first novel, The Fault of Angels, he received the Harper Prize in 1933. His total of some two-score books includes also four volumes of short stories, and works in history, biography, and literature. For works in history he twice received the Pulitzer Prize (Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, 1955) (Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times, 1975), and, also, a Bancroft Prize and the Robert Kirsch Award. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, and he held twenty honorary doctorates of letters, the first from Wesleyan University in 1956, the last from Yale in 1977. In 1976 he was awarded the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame, and in 1981 the Baldwin Medal of Wesleyan University. He taught at Wesleyan, the University of Iowa, and Yale. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. An associate fellow of Saybrook College, Yale, he was also a life fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library and an honorary trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Upon the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was appointed by President Johnson to a six-year term as a member of the Endowment’s National Council. His writing has appeared in seventeen foreign countries. Paul Horgan lived in Middletown, Connecticut, until his death in 1995.

Contents

VOLUME ONE: Indians and Spain

Prologue: Riverscape

1. Creation

2. Gazetteer

3. Cycle

Book One: The Indian Rio Grande

1. The Ancients

2. The Cliffs

3. To the River

4. The Stuff of Life

i. Creation and Prayer

ii. Forms

iii. Community

iv. Dwelling

v. Garments

vi. Man, Woman and Child

vii. Farmer and Hunter

viii. Travel and Trade

ix. Personality and Death

5. On the Edge of Change

Book Two: The Spanish Rio Grande

1. The River of Palms

2. Rivals

3. Upland River

4. The Travellers’ Tales

5. Destiny and the Future

6. Faith and Bad Faith

7. Facing Battle

8. Battle Piece

9. The Garrison

10. Siege

11. The Eastern Plains

12. Prophecy and Retreat

13. Lords and Victims

14. The River of May

15. Four Enterprises

16. Possession

17. The River Capital

18. Collective Memory

i. Sources

ii. Belief

iii. The Ocean Masters

iv. The King and Father

v. Arts

vi. Style and Hunger

vii. The Swords

viii. Soul and Body

19. Duties

20. A Dark Day in Winter

21. The Battle of Acoma

22. Afterthoughts

23. Exchange

24. The Promises

25. The Desert Fathers

26. The Two Majesties

27. The Hungry

28. This Miserable Kingdom

29. The Terror

30. Limit of Vision

31. A Way to the Texas

32. The Great Captain

33. Fort St. John Baptist

34. Early Towns

35. Colonial Texas

36. Mexico Bay

37. Forgotten Lessons

38. Hacienda and Village

i. Land and House

ii. Fashion

iii. Family and Work

iv. Mischance

v. Feast Days

vi. Wedding Feast

vii. Mortality

viii. The Saints

ix. Provincials

39. The World Intrudes

40. The Shout

41. The Broken Grasp of Spain

Appendix A: Sources for Volume One, by chapters

Maps

1. Pueblos and Early Settlements

2. Spanish Expeditions

Contents

VOLUME TWO: Mexico and the United States

Book Three: The Mexican Rio Grande

1. A Colony for Mexico

2. A Wild Strain

3. The Twin Sisters

4. Last Return

5. The Spark

6. The Ariel

7. Slavery

8. Bad Blood

9. The Mexico Trade

10. Tormented Loyalties

11. God and Texas

12. From Mexico’s Point of View

13. Fortunes of New Mexico

i. Peoples and Towns

ii. Politics

iii. Defense

iv. Church and School

v. Foreigners

14. Revolt Up River

15. The River Republic

16. The Santa Fe Pioneers

17. Border Smoke

18. To Mier and Beyond

19. Diplomacies

20. The United States to the River

Book Four: The United States Rio Grande

1. Way, You Rio

2. Collective Prophecy

i. New Man and New Principles

ii. Frontier Attitudes

iii. Woman and Home

iv. Community Expression

v. Language

vi. Arts and Utility

vii. Light in the Clearing

viii. Sons of Harmony

ix. Knacks and Crafts

x. First Interpreters

xi. The American Art

3. Bivouac

4. The Army of the Rio Grande

5. The Cannonade

6. Fort Texas

7. The Listeners

8. Palo Alto

9. Resaca de la Palma

10. The River Dead

11. The Nation’s War

12. Invasion Summer

13. Recurrent Frontier

14. Upstream and Inland

15. The Army of the West

16. The Secret Agent

17. Bloodless Possession

18. The Army of Chihuahua

19. The Free Missourians

20. Brazito and the Pass

21. Counterdance

22. The Avengers

23. Massacre at Taos

24. Chihuahua

25. Trial at Taos

26. All on the Plains of Mexico

27. El Dorado

28. Contraband

29. A Thread of Spirit

30. Boundaries

31. Flag and Lamplight

32. The Rio Grande Divided

33. The Desolate

34. Confederate Border

35. The Second Mexican Empire

36. The Mexico Moon

37. Bad Men and Good

38. The Last Wagons

39. The Last Frontiersman

40. Treasure

41. The Last Earth Secrets

42. Revolution and Reflex

43. Utility and Vision

i. Utility

ii. Vision

Appendix B: Sources for Volume Two, by chapters

Appendix C: General Bibliography

Appendix D: The Names of the Rio Grande

Index

Maps

1. Texas and Mexico

2. New Mexico

PROLOGUE

Riverscape

"… Since I offered to narrate the story, I shall start at the beginning, which is as follows."

—PEDRO DE CASTAÑEDA, OF NÁXERA

1.

Creation

Space.

Abstract movement.

The elements at large.

Over warm seas the air is heavy with moisture. Endlessly the vast delicate act of evaporation occurs. The seas yield their essence to the air. Sometimes it is invisible, ascending into the upper atmosphere. Sometimes it makes a shimmer in the calm light that proceeds universally from the sun. The upper heavens carry dust—sea dust of salt evaporated from ocean spray, and other dust lingering from volcanic eruption, and the lost dust of shooting stars that wear themselves out against the atmosphere through which they fly, and dust blown up from earth by wind. Invisibly the volume of sea moisture and dust is taken toward land by prevailing winds; and as it passes over the coast, a new condition arises—the wind-borne mass reflects earth temperatures, that change with the earth-forms inland from the sea. Moving rapidly, huge currents of air carrying their sea burdens repeat tremendously in their unseen movement the profile of the land forms over which they pass. When land sweeps up into a mountain, the laden air mass rolling upon it must rise and correspond in shape.

And suddenly that shape is made visible; for colder air above the mountain causes moisture to condense upon the motes of dust in the warm air wafted from over the sea; and directly in response to the presence and inert power of the mountain, clouds appear. The two volumes—invisible warm air, immovable cold mountain—continue to meet and repeat their joint creation of cloud. Looking from afar calm and eternal, clouds enclose forces of heat and cold, wind and inert matter that conflict immensely. In such continuing turbulence, cloud motes collide, cling together, and in the act condense a new particle of moisture. Heavier, it falls from cold air through warmer. Colliding with other drops, it grows. As the drops, colder than the earth, warmer than the cloud they left, fall free of cloud bottom into clear air, it is raining.

Rain and snow fall to the earth, where much runs away on the surface; but roots below ground and the dense nerve system of grasses and the preservative cover of forest floors detain the runoff, so that much sky moisture goes underground to storage, even through rock; for rock is not solid, and through its pores and cracks and sockets precipitation is saved. The storage fills; and nearing capacity, some of its water reappears at ground level as springs which find upward release through the pores of the earth just as originally it found entry. A flowing spring makes its own channel in which to run away. So does the melt from snow clinging to the highest mountain peaks. So does the sudden, brief sheet of storm water. Seeking always to go lower, the running water of the land struggles to fulfill its blind purpose—to find a way over, around or through earth’s fantastic obstacles back to the element which gave it origin, the sea.

In this cycle a huge and exquisite balance is preserved. Whatever the amount of its element the sea gives up to the atmosphere by evaporation, the sea regains exactly the same amount from the water which falls upon the earth and flows back to its source.

This is the work, and the law, of rivers.

2.

Gazetteer

Out of such vast interaction between ocean, sky and land, the Rio Grande rises on the concave eastern face of the Continental Divide in southern Colorado. There are three main sources, about two and a half miles high, amidst the Cordilleran ice fields. Flowing from the west, the river proper is joined by two confluents—Spring Creek from the north, and the South Fork. The river in its journey winds eastward across southern Colorado, turns southward to continue across the whole length of New Mexico which it cuts down the middle, turns southeastward on reaching Mexico and with one immense aberration from this course—the Big Bend—runs on as the boundary between Texas and Mexico, ending at the Gulf of Mexico.

In all its career the Rio Grande knows several typical kinds of landscape, some of which are repeated along its great length. It springs from tremendous mountains, and intermittently mountains accompany it for three fourths of its course. It often lies hidden and inaccessible in canyons, whether they cleave through mountains or wide level plains. From such forbidding obscurities it emerges again and again into pastoral valleys of bounty and grace. These are narrow, at the most only a few miles wide; and at the least, a bare few hundred yards. In such fertile passages all is green, and the shade of cottonwoods and willows is blue and cool, and there is reward for life in water and field. But always visible on either side are reaches of desert, and beyond stand mountains that limit the river’s world. Again, the desert closes against the river, and the gritty wastelands crumble into its very banks, and nothing lives but creatures of the dry and hot; and nothing grows but desert plants of thirsty pod, or wooden stem, or spiny defense. But at last the river comes to the coastal plain where an ancient sea floor reaching deep inland is overlaid by ancient river deposits. After turbulence in mountains, bafflement in canyons, and exhaustion in deserts, the river finds peaceful delivery into the sea, winding its last miles slowly through marshy bends, having come nearly one thousand nine hundred miles from mountains nearly three miles high. After the Mississippi-Missouri system, it is the longest river in the United States.

Along its way the Rio Grande receives few tributaries for so long a river. Some are sporadic in flow. Reading downstream, the major tributaries below those of the source are Rock Creek, Alamosa Creek, Trinchera Creek and the Conejos River in Colorado; in New Mexico, the Red River, the Chama River, and four great draws that are generally dry except in storm when they pour wild volumes of silt into the main channel—Galisteo Creek, the Jemez River, Rio Puerco and Rio Salado; and in Texas and Mexico, the Rio Conchos (which renews the river as it is about to die in the desert), the Pecos River, the Devil’s River, (another) Rio Salado and Rio San Juan. The river commonly does not carry a great volume of water, and in some places, year after year, it barely flows, and in one or two it is sometimes dry. Local storms will make it rush for a few hours; but soon it is down to its poor level again. Even at its high sources the precipitation averages only five inches year-round. At its mouth, the rainfall averages in the summer between twenty and thirty inches, but there the river is old and done, and needs no new water. In January, at the source the surface temperature is fourteen degrees on the average, and in July fifty degrees. At the mouth in the same months the averages read fifty and sixty-eight. In the mountainous north the river is clear and sparkling, in the colors of obsidian, with rippling folds of current like the markings on a trout. Once among the pastoral valleys and the desert bench terraces that yield silt, the river is ever after the color of the earth that it drags so heavily in its shallow flow.

Falling from so high to the sea, and going so far to do it, the river with each of its successive zones encounters a new climate. Winter crowns the source mountains almost the whole year round, in the longest season of cold in the United States. The headwaters are free of frost for only three months out of the year, from mid-June to mid-September. Where the river carves its way through the mesas of northern New Mexico, the seasons are temperate. Entering the Texas desert, the river finds perennial warmth that rises in summer to blasting heat. At its end, the channel wanders under the heavy moist air of the tropics, mild in winter, violently hot in summer.

3.

Cycle

Landscape is often seen as static; but it never is static. From its first rock in the sky to its last embrace by the estuary at the sea, the river has been surrounded by forces and elements constantly moving and dynamic, interacting to produce its life and character. It has taken ocean and sky; the bearing of winds and the vagary of temperature; altitude and tilt of the earth’s crust; underground waters and the spill of valleys and the impermeable texture of deserts; the cover of plants and the uses of animals; the power of gravity and the perishability of rock; the thirst of things that grow; and the need of the sea to create the Rio Grande.

The main physical circumstances of the Rio Grande seem timeless and impersonal. They assume meaning only in terms of people who came to the river.

BOOK ONE

The Indian Rio Grande

1.

The Ancients

THERE WAS NO RECORD BUT MEMORY and it became tradition and then legend and then religion. So long ago that they did not know themselves how long, their ancestors, the ancient people, moved. They went with the weather. Seasons, generations, centuries went by as each brought discovery of places farther toward the morning, across vacant Asia. They were guided that way by the lie of mountains, whose vast trough lay northeastward to southwestward. There was toil enough for people in taking their generations through valleys, without crossing the spines of mountains. But valleys end at the sea, and finally the people saw it too. The Asian continent ended, except for an isthmus of land or ice that remained above the waters. They crossed it, not in a day, or a year perhaps; perhaps it took lifetimes to find and keep what the bridge led to. But lost memory has no time, only action; and they came to North America, bringing their animals, their blind history, their implements and the human future of two continents. Once again they encountered mountains which became their immovable guides. The entire vast new land lay on an axis of north and south, and its greatest mountains did also. Having entered at the north, the people must move southward, between the sea and the mountains.

Movement, however laborious, slow and lost in dangers it may have been, was the very nature of their lives. Through age after age it took them down the continent, across another isthmus, and into the great continent to the south, until the antipodean ice fields were joined by the disorderly but urgent line of mankind. Movement was what kept them alive, for they lived by hunting animals that followed the seasons.

They knew how to twist vegetable fibres until they had string. They could bend a branch until it made a bow by which a string could be tautly stretched. With bow, then, and arrow, they brought down game. There was another weapon, a throwing stick, with which to kill. Fish in the streams were taken with the harpoon. Its points, and those of arrows, were chipped from stone; often from glittering, sharp volcanic glass. Birds and fish were snared with nets. These measures travelled easily. They were light, efficient, and imaginative.

There were others called alive in their consequence. To make fire, the ancient people set a wooden drill into a socket in a small wooden hearth, and rotated the drill with their palms. Smoke came. They blew upon it. Coals glowed and under breath burst into flame. It was possible to cook. They heated stones and in vessels of wood or bark, even of animal hide dried and toughened, cooked the booty of the hunt. When it was time again to move, valuable leftovers could be carried in baskets invented and woven as baggage. With them travelled, or crouched to eat, a clever, fond and valiant friend whose ancestors too had made the timeless migration. He was the dog.

Throughout ages of lost memory the people possessed the new continents and found great regions within which to rove, above and below the equator, as loosely scattered groups. Vast localisms determined their ways—whether they pursued animals on plains, or hunted for berries in mountains, or clung to the unvarying climate of warm zones in one luxuriant wilderness after another. It took a mystery of the vegetable world to unfold for them in slow discovery a new way of life. There was a seed which could be eaten. It could be planted. It could be watered and made to grow at the hunter’s will. It could multiply. It could be carried far and planted elsewhere. Wherever it took root it afforded food. It made a place where the people could stay season after season. It kept the hunters home, and their women and children and dogs, relieved of their wandering in search of life itself. Up from the warm zones of the earth it travelled from tribe to tribe, until most of the people who lived in the huge valleys and basins of the cordilleras knew how to use it, and using it, gradually discovered the arts of living together. Their histories were changed by it. The laws of its growth created their dwellings, their sense of property and brought them their gods, and its crushed seed became their most habitual and sacred offering in prayer. It was maize, or Indian corn.

In becoming farmers the ancient people looked for the most suitable places in which to remain. Corn needed water. Water flowed down the mountains making streams. In the grand valleys were many isolated mountain fragments standing separate whose heights were secure against animal and human dangers. When people could stay where they chose to stay there was time, there was imagination, to improve their conditions of life. A surplus of corn required some place in which to store it, safe against waste and thieving little animals. Dry caves in rocky cliffs seemed made by nature for the purpose. But food was wealth and people protected it in the caves by hauling stones, making enclosures which they sealed with clay which dried solid. The wall of a bin protecting food could be extended to make walls which gave shelter. Boldly beautiful rooms were made in the cliffs, some of masonry, some carved with obsidian knives out of rich soft yellow tufa itself. Arising independently, some at the same time, some at other times, and almost all on the western slopes of the continental divide in the American Southwest, many such cliff cities of the high plateaus were settled and developed by hunters who learned how to become farmers. After thousands of years of migration across continents in search of the always moving forms of live food, it took only a few hundred years of settled agriculture for the ancient people to discover how to satisfy their prime hunger, and find time and ways in which to recognize other hungers and give form to their satisfaction, socially, morally and spiritually. And though in their slowly developed mastery of how to grow corn they needed not only the seed but also water, they established their plateau cities not by the banks of the three or four great rivers that rose in the mountain system that had pointed the path for their ancestors, but on mesas and in valleys touched by little streams, some of them not even perennial in their flow.

Nor did all of the ancient people find the secret of maize. Some who found eastern gateways in the mountains spread themselves out on the great plains where for long succeeding centuries they continued to rove as hunters, governed by solstice and the growing seasons of animal feed. In time the wanderers heard of the plateau cities and their riches stored against hunger and the hardships of travel. Raids resulted, and battle, devastations and triumphant thefts, leaving upon the withdrawal of the nomads new tasks of rebuilding and revival according to the customs of the farmers who long ago had given up the bare rewards of the chase for hard but dependable and peaceful cultivation of the land.

If there was little regular communication between the scattered cliff cities of southwestern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, and northern New Mexico, and if there were local differences between their ways, still they solved common mysteries in much the same fashion and in their several responses to the waiting secrets of earth, sky and mind, they made much the same fabric of life for people together.

2.

The Cliffs

The fields were either on the mesa top above the cliff cities or on the canyon floor below. At sunup the men went to cultivate their crops. Corn was planted a foot deep, and earth was kept piled up about the stalks, to give them extra growing strength and moisture. Every means was used to capture water. Planting was done where flood waters of the usually dry stream beds came seasonally. But there were long summers without rain. The winter snows filtered into porous sandstone until they met hard rock and found outlets in trickles down canyon walls. The people scooped basins out of the rock to collect such precious flow, from which they carried water by hand to the growing stalks. The mesa tops were gashed at the edges by sloping draws which fell away to the valley floor, like the spaces between spread fingers. Between the great stone fingers the people built small stone dams to catch storm waters running off the plateau. Occasionally springs came to the surface in the veined rock of the cliffs and were held sacred.

Seeds were planted and crops cultivated with a stick about a yard long which could poke holes in the earth or turn it over. The prevailing crop was red corn, and others were pumpkin, beans and cotton. Wild sunflowers yielded their seeds which were eaten. When the crop was harvested it became the charge of the women, who were ready to receive it and store it in baskets which they wove to hold about two bushels. Flat stone lids were fashioned to seal the baskets, which went into granaries built by the men. Part of the seed was ground between suitably shaped stones, and part was kept for planting. If meal was the staff of life, it was varied by meat from wild game including the deer, the fox, the bear, the mountain sheep and the rabbit.

As they lived through the centuries learning how to work and build together, the ancient people made steady and continuous progress in all ways. If their first permanent houses had only one room with a connecting underground ceremonial chamber and storeroom, they increasingly reflected the drawing together of individuals into community life in a constantly elaborated form of the dwelling. The rooms came together, reinforcing one another with the use of common walls, and so did families. The rooms rose one upon another until terraced houses three and four stories high were built. The masonry was expert and beautiful, laid in a variety of styles. The builders were inventive. They thought of pillars, balconies, and interior shafts for ventilation. They made round towers and square towers. And they placed their great house-cities with an awesome sense of location, whether on the crown of a mesa or in the wind-made architectural shell of a long arching cave in the cliffside. The work was prodigious. In one typical community house fifty million pieces of stone were quarried, carried and laid in its walls. Forests were far away; yet thousands of wooden beams, poles and joins were cut from timber and hauled to their use in the house. From the immediate earth untold tons of mortar were mixed and applied—and all this by the small population of a single group dwelling.

The rooms averaged eight by ten feet in size, with ceilings reaching from four feet to eight. There were no windows. Doors were narrow and low, with high sills. The roof was made of long heavy poles laid over the walls, and thatched with small sticks or twigs, finally covered with mud plaster in a thick layer. The floor was of hard clay washed with animal blood and made smooth, in a shiny black. Walls were polished with burnt gypsum. Along their base was a painted band of yellow ochre, taken as raw mineral from the softly decaying faces of the cliffs where great stripes of the dusty gold color were revealed by the wearing of wind and water. Round chambers of great size and majesty were built underground for religious and ceremonial use. Many cities had a dozen or more such rooms, each dedicated to the use of a separate religious cult or fraternity. One had a vault with a covering of timber which resounded like a great drum when priests danced upon it.

In the ceremonial kivas men kept their ritual accessories and the tools of their crafts. They made tools out of bones—deer, rabbit, bird, and of deerhorn and mountain sheep horn. Their knives and hunting points and grinding tools and scraping tools for dressing skins and gravers for carving and incising and axes and chisels for cutting and shaping wood and mauls for breaking rock were made out of stone.

Baskets were woven for light, mobile use at first, when the people kept moving, and as they found ways to settle in their cities they continued to use baskets for cooking, storage and hauling. But more durable and more widely useful vessels could be made out of clay; and so the women developed in connection with domestic arts the craft of pottery. Their early attempts imitated the construction of basketry, with long clay ropes coiled into enclosing form which was not smoothed over on the surface. But for greater comeliness and better protection against leakage and breakage the surfaces of pots were eventually made smooth and fired with glazes. Natural mineral pigments gave each locality its characteristic pottery style—now red clay, again ochre, white gypsum, iron-black.

In warm weather the people lived naked; in cold they wore fur-cloth and feather-cloth robes and leggings, and dressed skins. Thread was made from yucca fibre. Both men and women wore ornaments created out of beads—stone, shell, bone. Feather tassels, bright with color, hung from garments. Small pieces of chipped or cut turquoise were put together in mosaic for pendants and bracelets. Fashion had its power, modifying out of sheer taste rather than utility various details of dress. The sandal fringe of one period was missing from the next.

For hundreds of years this busy life with all its ingenuities, its practices whose origins lacking written record were lost among the dead ancestors, its growing body of worship of all creation, its personal and collective sorrows, its private and communal joys, rose and flourished with the affirmative power of living prophecy. Were they being readied to imagine a greatness beyond themselves in the future? Already they had found for the material face of life a grace and beauty whose evidence would endure like the mountain stuff out of which they had made it. The people grew their nourishment on plateaus that reached toward the sun. They put about themselves like garments the enfolding substances of cliffs. They looked out in daylight upon breathtaking views of intercourse between sky and ground, where light and shadow and color and distance in their acts of change made in every moment new aspects of the familiar natural world. Amidst the impassive elegance of mountains, valleys and deserts they fulfilled their needs with intimacy and modesty in their use of natural things. With no communication through time but the living voice, for they had no records but their own refuse, the power of their hooded thoughts brought them a long way from the straggle out of Asia tens of centuries before to the flowering civilization of the cliffs, the plateaus and the canyons.

And at just the long moment in their story when all material evidence seemed to promise life more significant than that which they had so laboriously made so beautiful, mysteriously, in city after city among the plateaus, they left it never to return.

3.

To the River

Their departures were orderly. Not all occurred at the very same instant, but all took place late in the thirteenth century and early in the fourteenth, and all gave evidence of having been agreed upon. Their houses were left standing. Their rooms were neat and emptied of possessions needed for travel and new life elsewhere. But for occasional bits of corn and stalk and tassel the food bins were bare. The dead were left in peaceful burial according to regular custom. Few personal objects—clothing, jewelry, ceremonial effects—were left behind. Fires died in their proper places. There was no sign of the applied torch. Sudden natural calamity—earthquake, flood, lightning-set holocaust—played no part. The cities, one by one, at the point of their highest development, were left to time and the amber preservative of dry sunlit air.

Again the people left no record, and carried none with them, written, or even pictorial, to explain these abandonments. Perhaps for a few generations memory told the story, until gradually it was lost in the recesses of time. The only records which can be consulted are those of the natural world. They have been much invoked and disputed by experts.

The trees have testified. By counting the rings of annual growth in the cross section of a trunk, a system of dating has been devised. By comparing the thickness and thinness of the successive rings, periods of relative wetness or dryness have been tabulated. According to such information the century of the migrations from the plateaus coincided with a period of increasing dryness, until crops could no longer be watered, and the people were faced with living on the seed corn and finally starvation. A search for new watered lands was the only recourse.

Erosion has been blamed. Too much timber was cut for building use. Bared forest lands permitted too rapid runoff of storm-water. Gullies were lengthened until their waters became ungovernable for flood-farming. Old fields had to be abandoned and new ones begun farther from the houses and from water sources.

But erosion presupposes flow of water, and the drought theory contradicts the erosion theory. And though some scientists say that the entire region during its whole period of occupation by people has been slowly growing drier, they say further that the rate of desiccation would not in itself account for these migrations. And one of the greatest of the communities—in Chaco Canyon—was abandoned a century before the tree-ring evidence of the great drought. On top of this, lately, the whole responsibility of the tree-ring theory has been shaken by comparison of ancient rings formed when there were no written records with more recent rings which when checked against modern meteorological records show no consistent correlation with thickness and thinness of the rings in wet and dry periods as scientifically recorded. The drought theory holds no firm answer.

In the canyon of the Rito de los Frijoles the river is an ever-flowing stream. Yet the cliff dwellings there and the houses of the canyon floor were abandoned just like communities near streams which were intermittent and for the most part dry. Lack of water was not a motive for the silencing of the Rito.

The mystery has been attacked in other ways.

Did the soft rock of the cliff dwellings disintegrate too fast and force the people to move? But the rooms are still intact today.

Were there epidemics of other disease? Burials reveal no evidence of unusual numbers of deaths in any one period.

Was the prevailing diet of corn meal—hard and coarse, and especially when old as hard as gravel—the cause of disease? Recovered skulls show teeth ground down to the bone as a result of chewing the tough meal. Tooth decay led to abscesses, lodged poisons, rheumatism, arthritis and diet deficiencies. Did the people go to look in new places for other foods? But wherever they resettled, corn remained their staple food, and does today.

Did nomadic enemies cut off water supplies and drive the people from their towns? There would have been battles, and if defeated, the city dwellers would have left their homes in disarrayed flight. There was no evidence to indicate siege and defeat.

Did the pattern of community life become so complex as the towns grew that political quarrels between clans and religious fraternities broke apart the order of existence and made communal life impossible and migration imperative? If so, then why did not one or more clans survive dissension and continue in possession of the houses? But no one was left behind. And when the people found their new homesites, they recreated the same social pattern they had expressed in the cliff cities, in some instances building even larger cities with greater populations and more group divisions.

All efforts to explain the mystery on the basis of physical or material motives come to nothing. What is left? Where might the explanation lie? The people left beautiful cities and looked for new places to live. Consulting the favor of the natural world, many of them came at last through the barrier mountains to the river, the big river, P’osoge, or the big water, Hannyap’akwa, or just the river, Tšina, where they found scattered settlements of people raising corn and living in primitive pit-houses. Life was already blessed there. The new settlers joined the old. The Pueblos of the Rio Grande were founded. What drove the people from the silent cities they had left behind them might well have been something they carried within themselves; something with more power over their acts than heat or cold, rain or dust, sickness or war or dissension. If they had reason to believe that their gods had abandoned them where they lived, the people would have had to go and find them again, in order to live at peace with the world of nature. As everything had its abiding spirit, not only things that grew, but inanimate things, and places, so with the loss of that spirit would be lost blessing, protection, safety. In fear and trembling the people would have had to abandon a place, no matter how splendid, from which the ruling deity had withdrawn. Any event, natural or imaginary, which would withdraw the gods of a place would make it accursed, and dangerous to life; and no matter how great hitherto it may have become, it would be abandoned.

They told stories through the centuries of such a motive for migration from various places. What was believed true of one place could be so of another.

In cliff towns of the Pajarito Plateau west of the river the people said that A-wan-yu lived among them, their deity. He was the plumed snake, creature of both air and land. A time came when they lost favor with him. He abandoned them, retired to the sky, and became the major galaxy of stars which reached across the central heavens as the Milky Way. Without him the people were at a loss. They gathered their life and its objects and, leaving their rooms in modest order, went away to build new cities on the river.

At the greatest of cliff cities (Mesa Verde) the people began to build a temple to the sun. It sat upon a crown of the mesa between valley and sky. Using the skin-colored stone of the place, they quarried and shaped their blocks and raised their walls in expert masonry. The temple contained many rooms. The largest was a round one in the center. Little junipers whose shape echoed the pull of the wind grew all about the temple. Close to its doors the mesa’s cliffs swept away to the valley floor far below. It was a noble site facing the rising sun. To reach it with stone and timber took prodigious work. The work went slowly. The walls rose carefully to the same successive heights day by day or year by year. But they were never finished. Before they could be, all human life departed from the mesa, with its fields on top, its farms below in the valley, and its magnificent community houses high up in the faces of the cliffs. What if before the sun temple could be completed there was no god to receive in it? The people could only leave what they had partially done, with all of its walls unfinished at the same height, and go away.

Long later, in another ancient town, east of the river, the people kept a great black snake in the kiva, who had power over their life. They fed him the fruits of the hunt—deer, antelope, rabbit, bison, birds. From him they received all they needed to eat and to wear—corn, squash, berries, fruit of the yucca and cactus; shoes, leggings, shirts of soft deerskin. One night at midnight he left them. In the morning they found that he was gone. He left his track and they followed it. It took them down a dry river of white stones and clay (Galisteo Creek) which at last entered into the big river (Rio Grande), where the track was lost in the ever-flowing water. They returned to their town and discussed their trouble. The snake has gone. What are we going to have of those things which he gave us? He has gone away. Now we also must be going away, they said. They worked together at the sorrowful job of taking up their things, and went down the dry river to the big river, where they found another town already living. There they took up their lives again amidst the gods of that place.

Fear of their gods may well have sent the cliff people from the mesas to the river. Bringing their high culture from the plateaus, the people wedded it to the primitive human ways they found along the Rio Grande, and once again with the approval of the gods made for themselves a settled life, sure of land, water, and corn, and of what explained fear and what creation.

4.

The Stuff of Life

i. creation and prayer

Most intimately they could watch creation as a child was born. So from the womb of the earth itself they said all life came forth long ago. The underworld was dark and mysterious. People and animals lived there and knew their mother, who was kind and loving, even though she remained far from the daily lives of her children. So they accounted for the impersonality of nature. As all life came from the underworld, so it returned there in death. To come in life and go in death, people and animals had to pass through a lake between the underworld and the world. The first people climbed up a great fir tree through the waters of the lake and entered this world. The place where they emerged was in the north and was called Shipapu.* Emergence into the world was a tremendous act, full of awe for what was left behind, and of fear and respect for what was found above, on the earth and in the sky. A thing ever afterward could be made sacred simply by saying It came up with us.

With them came spirit, and could dwell in everything upon the earth. All spirit was like that of people. Rock, trees, plants; animals, birds, fish; places, directions, the bodies and acts of the sky; the live and the dead; things found or things made—all had the same spirit and behaved in the same ways as men and women. Some spirit was good and some bad, and accordingly had to be propitiated or guarded against. And sometimes spirit would leave its visible form and be gone. If it was bad spirit, people could rejoice; if good, they must mourn at having lost favor with the powers of their lives.

* With many variants, like all proper names in the myths.

Everything in the world was part of the same living force, whether thought, action, object or creature. Of all this the earth was the center, and all things existed in order to help people to live upon it. And the center of the earth—earth’s navel—was in the center of each group of people and their own city. All things reached out in widening circles of awareness from the very point of the self, individual, and the group, collective. From the center, then, of person and place, reached the six directions, each with its animal deity: north, with the mountain lion; west, with the bear; south, with the badger; east, with the wolf; the zenith, with the eagle; and the nadir, with the shrew. North and west produced the snow; south and east the rain. So the reach of Pueblo belief went across the earth, and into the depths underground and into the heights of the sky, and all tied to the place of emergence which was imitated with a stone-lined pit in the center of each ceremonial chamber, and sometimes out in the open in the very center of the town placita itself. All forces interacted to make life; and of these, none was greater in effect, sacredness and poetry than the sky, with its heroes, goddesses, and ancestors.

Our Father Sun, they said. Some said that even the sun had ancestors—two mothers, who before the people came from the underworld saw that people must have light in order to see. The mothers fashioned the sun out of a white shell, a pink abalone shell, a turquoise and a red stone. They carried him to the east and in the morning climbed a high mountain. They dropped the sun behind the mountain; and presently he began to rise, taking his way over trails that ran above the waters of the sky, toward the evening. He set toward the lake which lay between the world and the underworld. He went down through the lake and when it was night on the earth he shone dimly below in the underworld. In the morning again he arose and again the people saw him with joy. What they saw was not the sun himself but a large mask that covered his whole body. By his light everyone saw that the world was large and beautiful. The sun saw and knew, like any other person. And others said that he walked through the sky dressed in white deerskin which flashed with countless beads. His face, hidden by a mask, was beautiful. They said he was the father of the twin boys, Masewi and Oyoyewi, the young gods of war, who protected the people by killing their enemies. The concept of evil, menace, hugeness of danger was defeated by the dream of small, immature mortals—the very cast of hope in people who first imagined their survival and triumph, then willed it, and then achieved it through the spirit which towered to victory over threatening forces. Power and strength came from the sun, as they could plainly see in the daily life all about them. Our Father Sun governed the overworld.

But when he went down through the sacred lake at evening the world was dark. He needed a companion god in the sky at night. So they said that the two mothers who made the sun also made the moon, taking a dark stone, different kinds of yellow stone, turquoise and a red stone, and placed it in the sky, where it followed by night the same trails which the sun followed by day. The moon was a mystery, and some said it was a man, others a woman.

Because the moon travelled slowly, not always giving light, the stars were needed, and were made out of crystal which sparkled and shone. At morning a great star shone into the dawn, and at evening another flashed slowly in the west even before the daylight was all gone at the place where the sun went below. They were clear in the heavens, along with many others, hanging near in power and beauty when the night was clear and dark, making at least some things certain and pure in a world where evil spirit could bring about change among people and things, and cause fear.

When clouds came, they brought rain, which blessed the earth and made things grow. Who loved the people and blessed them? The dead ancestors, who once were people, and who came back as clouds to do good for those whose life they already knew, with its constant hope, need and prayer for rain. Clouds were prayed to. The prayers took many forms. Feathers were used to imitate clouds and were put on top of headdresses and sacred masks. Visible prayers were put together out of little sticks decorated with feathers. These could be set about and left as invocations from earth to sky. The dead who departed to life in the clouds were in some places prepared with white paint on the forehead, and feathers and cotton placed in the hair, so that cloud would go to cloud and come back bringing rain.

Lightning, they said, was born of mischief by Masewi and Oyoyewi. The twin war godlings once came to an empty kiva in a village of another world. While all the people were elsewhere the boys stole bows and arrows from the kiva wall and tried to escape unnoticed; but they were seen, their theft discovered, and they were chased by outraged people. Just where they had come from their own world to the other one, and as they were about to be taken, the adventurers were picked up by

Reviews for Great River

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A book detailing the influence of the major River valley of the southwest, being generally more acessable than the Colorado. Horgan creates a firm narrative background for students of the narrower questions of the history of the region. There is even some discussion of the imbalance of power between the USA and Mexico in volume two, to be read with some profit by modern Americans. This book is well worth your time, though there is not much in it for the fans of firearms minutiae.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A leisurely, comprehensive, and novelistic history of New Mexico and Texas from the earliest times up to the Mexican revolution. Some of the observations of national character are outdated, but these are obvious and more than made up for by passages of beautiful prose and brilliant storytelling.