The Gilded Man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America. Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

the strictest discipline. He caused one of his men who had stolen cloth from an Indian to be hung. This course secured him the good-will of the natives, so that many places received the Spaniards as liberators; for the country they had so far passed through was tributary to the Muysca of Bogotá, and, as was the case everywhere among the Indians, the subjected races hated the conquering tribe. The people were therefore not at all loath to point out to the strangers by signs the direction of Muequeta, the chief town of Bogotá, near the present Santa Fé, where, they intimated to the eager Spaniards, emeralds and gold were plentiful. The rulers of Bogotá witnessed with apprehension the approach of the strangers, and their braves having assembled for a campaign against Tunja, the whole force, in which there were five hundred uzaques, or chiefs, alone, turned against the Spaniards. The Muysca fell upon Quesada’s rear-guard near the Salines of Zippaquira, their xeques, or priests, carrying in front the bones of deceased chieftains, while in the midst of the host was the head chief of Bogotá, Thysqueshuza, on a gilded barrow. The first assault having been repelled by the Spaniards, the Indian warriors scattered in every direction; the zippa leaped from his barrow and fled to the woods, and each chief hastened back with his men into his village. Quesada took possession of Muequeta without meeting resistance, for the power of the tribe of Bogotá was broken forever. But he did not find the treasure he was in search of and had expected to obtain. The place had been stripped of everything valuable, and the conqueror surveyed the bare and empty rooms with no little disappointment. Every attempt to put himself in communication with the fugitive zippa miscarried, while no promises of reward, no torture, could extract from the Indians of Muequeta the secret of the spot whither the treasure had been taken. Muequeta became Quesada’s headquarters, and thence he sent out scouting parties to explore the country. A few villages surrendered to the Spaniards, but others, like Guatavitá, the home of the dorado, resisted them strenuously, and hid their gold or threw it into the lagoons of the páramos. The region subjected to the Spaniards in this way grew continuously larger, for the Muysca never offered a united resistance. The dissensions and the mutual hatreds of the smaller tribes contributed quite as much as the superiority of their own weapons to the victory of the conquerors. Out of hostility to that clan a rival uzaque informed a Spanish scouting party of the great wealth of the powerful tribe of the Tunja. Quesada himself went against them, and so quiet was his march that the uzaque of Tunja and all the chiefs of the tribe were surprised in their council-house. Quesada was about to embrace the chief, but the Indians looked upon this as an offence, and threw themselves, armed, upon the Spaniards. A savage combat ensued, within and without the council-house. By sunset the village of Tunja was in the possession of the whites, the uzaque was a prisoner, and the pillage was fully under way. The booty, when piled up in a courtyard, formed a heap so large that a rider on horseback might hide himself behind it. “Peru, Peru, we have found a second Cassamarca!” exclaimed the astonished victors.

      The Spaniards were less fortunate in Duytama than in Tunja. They were not able to capture the fortified position; but they anticipated a rich compensation for this failure when they beheld the glitter of the golden plates of the large town of Iraca. The Sugamuxi of Iraca submitted, but a fire broke out, through the carelessness of two Spaniards, during the pillage of the great temple of the sun, and consumed the whole building with all its treasure of gold and emeralds. Quesada returned to Muequeta, where the spoil was divided, and the royal fifth was set aside. Although it is certain that much gold had been stolen or lost or hidden by individuals, and the treasures of the wealthy tribes of Bogotá and Iraca had all disappeared, the prize was still worthy of the home of the dorado. It was officially valued at 246,976 pesos in gold and 1815 emeralds, among which were some of great value.

      The conquerors of Cundinamarca had, however, not yet found the dorado himself. Exaggerated stories were still current of Muysca chiefs rich in gold, and it was said that the fugitive zippa of Bogotá lived in the mountains in a golden house. That chief was hunted out and murdered in his hiding-place, but his death did not bring to light the gold of Bogotá. One reconnoitring party of Spaniards looked down from a mountain summit eastward upon the plain of the Upper Meta, and another party brought in a report that there or in the south lived a tribe of warlike women who had much gold. In this way the myth of the Amazons became associated in 1538 with the tradition of the dorado.

      Quesada felt himself too weak to go in search of the origin of these reports; it was necessary first to secure the conquered country. In August, 1538, therefore, the foundation of the present city of Santa Fé de Bogotá was laid, not far from Muequeta. Quesada intended then to go in person to the coast and obtain reinforcements; but before he could carry out this design news was brought to him from the south that caused him to delay his departure.

      He was informed that a number of men like his own, having horses, had come down out of the Cauca Valley into the valley of the Magdalena. A few days later it was said that this troop had crossed the Magdalena and was advancing into southern Cundinamarca. It was the force of the conqueror of Quito, Sebastian do Belalcazar, who, after driving the Peruvian Apu Rumiñavi out of Quito, and by his intervention making Pedro de Alvarado’s landing at Manta harmless, had gone northward through Pasto to Papayan. An Indian from New Granada had already, according to Castellano, told him in Quito the story of the gilded chieftain, and had thus induced him to undertake this march. From Papayan he had proceeded along the Upper Cauca to the tribes of Anzerma and Lile, which were rich in gold but addicted to the most abominable cannibalism, and thence following the path on which salt was brought down from the mountains to the high table-land of the interior.

      Quesada had hardly received this news when it was also reported to him that white men with several horses were approaching from the east out of the plain of Meta, and were coming up through the ravines of the mountain. These men were the German Nicolaus Federmann of Ulm and his company. On his return from Europe Federmann had received a position as lieutenant of Georg von Speyer in Coro. His chief was engaged in a campaign in the southern plains, and Federmann was to have gone after him with reënforcements, but had faithlessly struck out for the mountains, and was following on the track of Dalfinger to the home of the dorado.

      Thus, led thither by the same inducement, Quesada from the north, Belalcazar from the south, and Federmann from the east, found themselves at the same time on the plateau of Cundinamarca. The positions which the three Spaniards took formed an equiangled triangle, each side of which was six leagues long. Each leader had the same number of men—one hundred and sixty-three soldiers and a priest. None of them had been aware of the vicinity of the others, and therefore each of them thought he was the discoverer of the country. A fatal conflict seemed inevitable, but the encounter, which might have provoked a rising of the Indians and a massacre of the Spaniards, was averted by the wisdom of Quesada and the mediation of the priests. The three leaders agreed to submit their claims in person to the Spanish court, and in the meantime to leave all their forces on the plateau in order to hold the conquered land. The three—Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada, Sebastian de Belalcazar, and Nicolaus Federmann—then departed from Bogotá and proceeded together to Spain. Federmann was destined never to see America again, for the Welsers would not overlook the treachery which he had committed against his commander, Georg von Speyer. Quesada suffered the basest ingratitude from the Court. Nine years passed before he was allowed to return to the scene of his activity, and he received as the only reward for his great services the title of Marshal of the new kingdom of Granada.

      The brother of the conqueror, the avaricious and cruel Hernan Perez de Quesada, remained at Bogotá as the commanding officer of the Spaniards. He completed the subjugation of the Muysca. The unhappy natives suffered exceedingly cruel maltreatment, for the sake of gold, from him and his barbarous lieutenants. No means was too violent or too immoral if gold could be got by it. Hernan Perez made an unsuccessful attempt in 154O to drain the lake of Guatavitá in order to recover from it the gold of the dorado; but four thousand pesos was all the return he realized from the experiment. The Muysca, plundered and plagued by the whites amongst them, and warred upon on their borders by the Panches and Musos living around them, who were not subjected to the Spaniards till some time afterward, went down almost irresistibly to extinction. Their vigor was broken, and they had no hope of consideration or forbearance from their rulers. When the former Sugamuxi of Iraca was told that a new governor had come who was a friend to the Indians, he asked a Spaniard if he believed the river was going to flow upstream; when the white