The soldiers listening to him knew well enough the images of the land he chose for his own.
Fray Juan was going back to Quivira, where he had been with the General. Indian guides from the plains would return with him. One of the army’s Portuguese soldiers, Andres Do Campo, volunteered to go with him too, and a free Negro, a Mexican Indian and the two oblates. The General gave them sheep, mules and a horse. Fray Juan carried his Mass vessels.
Fray Luís de Escalona chose Pecos for his mission. He owned a chisel and an adze, and with these, he said, he would make crosses to place in the towns. He was not an ordained priest, and so could not administer the sacraments, except, as he said, that of baptism, which he would give to Indian children about to die, and so send them to heaven. Cristóbal, a young servant, volunteered to stay with him.
In their blue-gray robes, the little company of Franciscans set out for the east, escorted as far as Pecos by a detachment from the army. At Pecos, Fray Juan and his companions took leave of Fray Luís and advanced into the open prison of the plains.
A few days later a handful of soldiers went back to Pecos from Tiguex to deliver some sheep to Fray Luís, to keep as his own flock. Before they reached Pecos, they met him walking accompanied by Indians. He was on his way to other pueblos. The soldiers talked with him, and hoped that he was being well treated and that his Indians listened to his word. He replied that he had a meagre living, and that he believed the elders of the pueblo, at first friendly, were beginning to desert him. He expected that in the end they would kill him. The soldiers saw him as a saintly man, and said so many times. They never saw him again, or ever heard of him further, or of Cristóbal, his servant.
In the battles of Arenal and Moho the army had taken many Indian prisoners. The General now ordered these released. It was his last official act as lord of that river province. Early in April, 1542, the command was given to begin the long march down the river to the narrows of Isleta, and there turn west over the desert to retrace the trail to Mexico. Aside from a few Mexican Indians who decided in the end to remain in the Tiguex nation, the expedition had lost in its two years of movement and battle and privation no more than twenty men out of the whole fifteen hundred.
Travelling at times by litter, the General left behind him a vision changed and gone like a cloud over the vast country of the Spanish imagination in his century. A faith of projected dreams and heroic concepts gave power to the men of the Golden Age, a few of whom found even more than they imagined. The General, like many, found less. Having searched for the land of his imagining, and not finding it, he could have said, as Don Quixote later said, “… I cannot tell you what country, for I think it is not in the map.…”
The army, as it descended into Mexico, began to disintegrate. Officers and men fell away as it pleased them to find other occupations at Culiacán, Compostela, and all the way to the city of Mexico.
In due course reports of the expedition went to Madrid and came before the Emperor. The royal treasuries had supported the expenses of the undertaking. On learning of its outcome, Charles V ordered that no further public monies were to be allocated to such enterprises.
As for the governor of the Seven Cities, the Tiguex River and Quivira, the Emperor received another report during a legal inquiry a few years later. The Judge Lorenzo de Tejada, of the Royal Audiencia of Mexico, wrote on March 11, 1545:
“Francisco Vásquez came to his home, and he is more fit to be governed in it than to govern outside of it. He is lacking in many of his former fine qualities and he is not the same man he was when your Majesty appointed him to that governorship. They say this change was caused by the fall from a horse which he suffered in the exploration and pacification of Tierra Nueva.”
13.
Lords and Victims
If the early governors of the river came to poor ends, they were not alone in their last bitterness at the inscrutability of strange lands, the resistance of betrayed natives and the ingratitude of governments. There was hardly a conqueror for the Spanish crown who after his prodigies (whether of success or failure did not matter, for the very scale of colonial operations was prodigious in itself) was not stripped of power, or tried, or impoverished by fines, or imprisoned, or subjected to all these together. What amounted each time to a passion for probity in the crown’s affairs reached out to take hold of the adventurous lords of the conquests—but only after they had done their grandiose best or worst.
Of the administrators of the Rio de las Palmas, two were saved by death—Garay in the terrible mercies of Cortés, Narváez in the tempests of the Gulf.
Of the others, Nuño de Guzmán died first, in 1544, in Spain, penniless, while attempting to defend himself against grave charges of maladministration. Cortés was in Spain at the time and, hearing of the trials of his old rival who hated him, offered him money. In bitter pride the offer was refused.
The years between 1540 and 1547 Cortés passed in Spain on the profitless enterprise of trying to recall himself to the memory of a king who as a matter of policy preferred to forget him. If the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca was a great man before whom a hemisphere had trembled, he was yet not so great a man as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain. In vain Cortés submitted plans for new conquests, petitioned, presented himself at court, reminded the currents of cold air about the throne of what he had accomplished. The court officials were sensitive members that extended the monarch’s capacity to know; and in just the same relation carried as in gelid nerves the monarch’s messages to enact. Cortés never reached the Emperor—until one day as the royal coach was passing through the streets he detached himself from the crowd and before he could be prevented threw himself upon it, clinging to its leather straps, at last face to face again with the source of power or misery.
“Who is this man?” inquired the king who years before had seated him at his right hand, had ennobled him, and had known him well enough to deprive him of power.
“I am the man who brought Your Majesty more kingdoms than your father left you towns,” cried the desperate old conqueror.
The embarrassing scene ended quickly. The coach jolted on. Cortés fell back among the street idlers. However much longer he might live, he had come to the end. On December 2, 1547, in the village of Castillejo de la Cuesta, near Seville, while on his way to embark again for Mexico, he died at the age of sixty-two.
And in Mexico, where out of all his preferments he was left with only his membership on the city council, the Captain-General Francisco Vásquez de Coronado lived for twelve years after his return from the river. He was tried on various charges of crime and error in the conduct of his command, but was absolved, and the attorney for the Crown was enjoined by the court “to perpetual silence, so that neither now nor at any time in the future may he accuse or bring charges against him for anything contained… in this our sentence.” The judgment was handed down in February, 1546.
In the following year an amazing creature appeared in the streets of Mexico City. His hair was extraordinarily long, and his beard hung down in braids. What he had to tell soon became news everywhere. He was Andres Do Campo, the Portuguese soldier from the Tiguex River who had gone to the plains with Fray Juan de Padilla when the General turned toward home. For five years he had struggled to return to Mexico. One year he spent in captivity, the rest in wandering ever southward. He could speak of having witnessed a martyrdom, for five years before, when the