But spring was advancing. The snowfalls ended. The water supply in the crippled town was finally vanishing. Moreover, the season of planting and propitiation, the birth of the future, were passing by, and if unattended, would end in physical hardship and spiritual sorrow for the Indians. One night at the end of March they began to steal away out of their walls toward the river. Forty mounted soldiers were on guard. The alarm was given. An Indian arrow pierced a soldier’s heart and he died at once. Another soldier was seized and taken and was never seen again. The soldiers attacked, the camp was aroused, and a battle followed in the darkness. Many Indians were killed, and soldiers were wounded, as the Indian retreat continued toward the river. The water was high and cold, the current fast. Hurrying for freedom, the Indians came to the bank and were pursued by the cavalry, and few escaped wounds or death. The river took away the bodies and blood of those killed while trying to cross. Some reached the east bank in the dark. It was an icy night, filled with the sounds of arms and voices. The investment of Moho was over. It had lasted fifty days.
In the morning, soldiers went over the river and found wounded and half-frozen Indians lying there, whom they brought back to be restored and treated as servants. Other soldiers entered the pueblo to see what they could find, for all provisions were to be gathered for the commissary. Soldiers looked out for jewels and other treasures, and discovered instead the ashes of mantles, feathers and turquoise strings burned to save them from the Spaniards. They found stores of maize, and recognized again that Indians of the river did not own anything except their food and their cotton clothes and their robes made of turkey feathers and rabbit fur.
The soldiers found something that, had it succeeded, might have prolonged the war indefinitely. It was a well, dug within the protection of the walls of Moho, but the well had caved in, and thirty Indians had died in it.
They explored further. In one section of the surrendered town there was a small group of people who still resisted. They would be taken in a matter of days.
And somewhere in the fallen town, the soldiers came upon a sight that awed them. They found the body of Captain Francisco de Ovando, dead forty days, naked, whole but for the wound of his death, white as snow, and incorrupt, “with no bad odor.”
The General commanded a portion of the pueblo of Moho burned as a warning to the people of Tiguex. He sent for Bigotes, the Turk and Isopete so they too might see. His policy was prevailing everywhere, for farther up the river during the last days of the siege, another pueblo had been taken by a mounted detachment who forced the Indians to abandon it. After a few days, in early April, the General heard that the people were returning to some of the upriver towns to fortify them. He sent Captain de Maldonado to do what needed to be done. A day or so later, the General saw smoke in the north over the valley, and asked what it meant. He was informed that Captain de Maldonado had burned a town. With that image—distant smoke rising from the mud-plastered timbers of a Rio Grande pueblo in the springtime groves of willows and cottonwoods far below the air-blue mountains—the Tiguex war was over.
11.
The Eastern Plains
The weather warmed, and then froze again, and solid ice reached across the river. If they were all going east it would be well to start while they could cross on the ice, the whole army of fifteen hundred people, and a thousand horses, and five hundred cattle, and five thousand sheep. On April 23, 1541, the train passed from Alcanfor over the frozen river and began the long march to the eastern plains in search of Quivira and its treasures. Bigotes and Isopete, freed of their collars and chains, were on their way to be restored to their pueblo of Pecos. The Turk was the principal guide, still raving of wonders to come. The slow procession went north along the east bank, passing the burned town of Arenal, empty like all the other pueblos of Tiguex. Rounding the northern end of the Sandia mountains, the army drew away eastward and out of sight of the river.
Seventy-seven days later, all but the General, his chaplain, and thirty mounted men and six footmen returned to the river to settle once again at Alcanfor. The town was still empty of Indians, like all the others, and so long as these Spaniards were in the nation of Tiguex, no Indians ever came back to live there.
The army returned in low spirits and unwillingly. On their march to the plains with the General they had met one disappointment after another, though they saw strange sights of passing interest. Farther and farther east the visions of the Turk had taken them to the very limit of caution. They left Bigotes at Pecos, and moved out to the plains where they saw Indians who lived in tents and used dogs as beasts of burden, and noticed that if his load was badly balanced the dog barked for someone to come and set it right. They heard of a big river to the east and many canoes. It was all familiar—the Turk had mentioned such. They came to flat highlands in whose irregular faces were deep-slashed canyons of red rock and scrub oak. In such places, the plains cattle stampeded, the army lost horses, Captain de Cárdenas broke his arm. Now and then they encountered groups of Indians who lived in straw huts on the prairies and hunted the buffalo for materials of food, shelter and arms. Among such a people they found an old blind man who told them something amazing. Six years ago, as they figured it, he and his people had been farther to the south, and there they were visited by four great doctors, one of them black, the other three white, who gave blessings, healed the sick and wanted to go toward the sunset. The army knew who these were—Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions. They were awed that in so great a wilderness they should come upon the trace of the man long gone who more than any other seemed responsible for their whole hard journey now.
What was wrong? Where was the gold? The Turk took them now in one direction, now in another, keeping up a flow of promises and explanations for his change of plans.
Isopete, the Indian slave brought from Pecos, declared that the Turk was lying. There was such a country as the Turk said, but there was nothing in it that the General sought.
But still they marched, seeing in one place a white woman with painted chin, and in another a wild hailstorm. The stones, as big as oranges, dented armor and killed animals. Trembling, the people wept and prayed and made vows. Each day they heard how far they had gone according to the soldier whose duty it was to count steps by which the leagues could be computed. In all that wilderness, they were appalled at how little mark so great a throng of men and women and beasts made upon the grasses of the plain. They left no trail, for the grass in the wind waved over their path like the sea over a galleon’s wake.
One day the General called a halt for a council of his captains. The leaders agreed upon a decision. The army was to turn back to the Tiguex River, there to settle at Alcanfor once again, and scour the valley for supplies against the next winter. The General and thirty picked horsemen and a handful of infantry, together with Fray Juan de Padilla, and Isopete, and the Turk, once again in chains for his ineffectual performance of his duties as guide, would go farther to the east to see what they could see. The General’s smaller force could proceed more swiftly than the long lumbering straggle of the burdened army, and could live off the animals of the plains more readily. The army begged to be taken along, saying they would rather die with the General than return to the river without him who might never return. He was firm, though he promised to send swift couriers to fetch them after him again if he came upon the treasure of Quivira. They saw him go, and waited a fortnight for word from him, while they hunted the buffalo, and killed five hundred bulls whose meat they dried for winter storage. The hunters often lost their way back to camp, for the land was so flat and so barren of marks that in midday with the sun overhead there was no way to know where to turn. At the end of every day the army in camp built fires, blew horns, beat drums, fired their muskets to