In one respect the Indians and the friars were close together from the beginning. Both had profoundly religious character, and saw life’s essentials best explained through the supernatural. But as the friars believed that their faith enclosed all faiths and purified them in the fire of divine love, until God’s relation to man shone forth in the image of Christ Who was the Son of Man, so did they think to bring love to replace the fear that animated all objects, creatures and forces in the Indian’s pagan world. The gift they sought to give the Indian was the sense of his individual human soul, and the need, and the means, of its salvation.
But if the friar in himself was poor and managed with very little, his work in the aggregate required extensive organization. The friar’s immaterial mission was enclosed in a system that rested on a rigid hierarchy and showed itself in massive monuments. At the pueblo of El Agua de Santo Domingo, that stood on the banks of Galisteo Creek a short way east of the river, the Franciscan order established the religious headquarters of the whole kingdom of New Mexico. There resided the Father President, and there he held his yearly chapters when all his friars would come in from their lonely posts in the outlying missions. Santo Domingo was a little Rome, the seat of an authority that bowed to no secular power in matters of the spiritual welfare of men and women. In the mountains to the northeast was the new political capital of the colony at Santa Fe, founded in 1610, after Oñate’s recall. Between the river pueblo and the mountain capital much was in dispute throughout the seventeenth century and would be composed only in slowly gathering tragedy.
Meanwhile the work of the religious reached into the river towns to the north and south; into the pueblos of the west, and to the saline towns over the eastern mountains. Nominally, even the Apache nations who roamed the plains and alternately traded with and attacked the settled pueblo people were part of a missionary parish. The Apaches, wrote a Father President in his report, “are very spirited and belligerent… a people of a clearer and more subtle understanding, and as such laugh at other nations that worship idols of wood and stone. The Apaches worship only the sun and the moon.… They pride themselves on never lying but always speaking the truth.” It was an optimistic vision of mass murderers of whole towns. To such peoples went “missions of penetration,” consisting of a travelling friar who preached, converted where he could, and if he lived, returned to Santo Domingo, or to the settled “mission of occupation” to which he was assigned; for many of the outlying missions in Indian towns were organized as field headquarters from which faith and civilization were carried to other towns that had no permanent pastor. Such other towns were designated visitas,
Fifty churches were built in New Mexico by twenty-six friars in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. First came the word of God and the conversion of the Indians; and then, with no other power but example and patience, the solitary Franciscan father led his parishioners in building a church. In choosing the site for his church he considered many things. He looked into the hearts of the Indians and seeing all that mankind was capable of in good and evil, he felt that a church surrounded by the town was subject to being overwhelmed from within. He looked at the country beyond the town and he saw that the strongest fortress should stand first in the way of invaders. Considering ceremony, he saw how a church must have approaches for processions, and remembering functions, he knew it must be close to community life. Accordingly, at the edge of the pueblo he marked out a site for the church where it could stand by itself, yet be tied to the walls of the town.
He had large papers scratched with drawings. The people looked from these to his face and then to the straggled marks on the baked ground. He was all things: architect, engineer, carpenter, mason, foreman, building master to apprentices who themselves were masters of a building style. He did not scorn their methods or their designs. He saw their perfect economy of material and purpose in what they built. Remembering vast vaults of stone, the flutings of arches and echoing heights, sombre color in glass and every intricacy of grille and recess and carved screen, he saw that reduced to essentials, even the great churches of Europe and Mexico had a plain strong purpose, which was to enclose the attention of men and women in safety and direct it toward the altar. Here were wanted walls and roof as soon as possible. They must be made of materials already used and understood by the people, and to them must be added new methods understood by the friar. He had with him, assigned by the Father President at Domingo, and paid for by the King of Spain, ten axes, three adzes, three spades, ten hoes, one medium-sized saw, one chisel, two augers, and one plane; six thousand nails of various sizes, a dozen metal hinges, two small locks, several small latches, and one large latch for the main church door. With him, too, he brought the principle of the lever, the windlass and the block and fall. Out of his belief and his technique, combined with native materials and the Indian’s reproduction of earth forms in building, a new style was ready to come, massive, stark, angular, and powerfully expressive of its function.
Until they worked under Spaniards, the Indians built their walls of puddled clay and rock. Now the first lesson of the friar was to teach the making of adobes—earthen bricks. Clay was disintegrated rock. The adobe was a restoration of clay to coherent form—a sort of return to rock. With their new hoes, people went to work mixing water and earth in an excavated tray. Only Indian women did this work, for as theirs was the ancient task of enclosing life so they had always made the dwelling rooms of the family. Men, as craftsmen of arms and tools, learned carpentry, and made wooden molds after the friar’s instructions. Into the wet clay, straw was mixed as a binder, and the clay was then pressed into the molds to take the shape of large bricks. A brick weighed sixty pounds, and measured ten by eighteen by five inches. It was about all the load a man or woman could carry over and over, as the rows of drying bricks grew longer.
Sometimes foundations were dug and filled with loose stone footings, sometimes the walls rose directly from unopened ground. The walls were deep—six to nine feet thick, and one side wall was several feet thicker than the other. The people wondered why this was as the width was marked out on the ground, and as the walls rose they discovered why, but meanwhile the dried bricks were brought by a long line of workers, and laid in place. The entire pueblo worked on the church. While women mixed earth, and men molded bricks, other men and boys went to the mountains to bring back timbers. With rock and chisel they shaped these. The friar drew patterns for them to follow and out of the wood came beams, corbels, door panels, doorframes, window embrasures. If someone knew where deposits of selenite or mica were to be found, men were sent to bring in a supply so that thin layers of the translucent mineral could be worked into windowpanes. The days were full and the walls rose slowly but all could see progress, and it made them one in spirit. The church was from twenty to forty feet wide, and sixty to a hundred feet long. Its ceiling was to occur at about thirty feet. On one of its long flanks, against the thicker of the two walls, were laid out living quarters for the friar and his Indian staff in a row of little square rooms with low roofs. These formed one side of a patio, the other sides of which held more rooms or a covered cloister. In certain towns the walls of the convent quadrangle took in a round sunken kiva previously used by the Indians. Rooms in the patio were planned for teaching classes, for cooking, dining, and storage of grain and other supplies.
Nowhere in the church or its convento was there a curved wall line, or arch, or dome.* As the walls rose to their limit, the purpose of the wider wall became plain. Down on the ground the great tree beams were about to be hoisted up to span the church. Their weight needed a heavy support, and the dozens of men on top of the wall working to bring them up needed room to stand. The wide wall made a fulcrum for the great levers of the beams, and served as a broad platform on which men could work. Scaffolding was little used. Indians had ladders by which to enter their houses and kivas from the roof, and these were put to work too in acts of building. As the church walls achieved their height, carved wooden corbels were laid into the bricks to support crossbeams. Oxen dragged one timber at a time to the base of the walls and men hauled it upright, tipping it against the massive fulcrum at the top, and laying it across the nave. Such beams, or vigas, were of unequal length. Their ends projected beyond the walls and were often left so. Now between the beams were placed branches of uniform size to close the ceiling,