Great River. Paul Horgan
life. If they desired to bestow and maintain the standards of civilization in their wilderness, they had first to show the Indians the whole image of the cultivated life that came from Europe. Many of the friars were extraordinarily versatile, and most of them were wholly without that pride of learning which in the universities and coteries of the day often allowed both the scholar and his knowledge to die unused by life. The friars put their learning to work.
Lessons were organized and conducted with discipline. At dawn every day but Sunday the bellman went to ring the church bell for Prime. The pupils, young and old, came to the classrooms which they at once swept out. They then took their places and the pastor came to teach.
He was quick at languages, and for immediate understanding of the Indians, learned the native tongues rapidly, and taught the Christian story in the people’s own words. The earliest book to be printed in the New World appeared in Mexico in 1539 under the imprimatur of Zumárraga, the first Bishop of Mexico. It was a catechism in Spanish and Náhuatl. Some of the friars came to the river after preaching for years in Mexico in the native dialects. Once having reached the understanding of the Indian, they developed it with classes in many subjects. They first taught Latin, so that the responses at Mass and vespers could properly be made. Eventually they taught Spanish so that daily life might link the wilderness people to the all-powerful source of national life in Madrid. The Indians learned to speak and to write in those new ways, through which such amazing information came to them. The past found a way to exist in the Indian mind.
Along with words, the Indians learned music. Boys were formed into choirs and trained in the sacred chants of the Church. In one pueblo, out of a thousand people who went to school the pastor chose and trained a “marvelous choir of wonderful boy musicians.” In another, the singing boys “with their organ chants… enhanced the divine service with great solemnity.” Winter and summer, in the river dawns and twilights the heavenly traceries of the polyphonic style rose to the blunt clay ceilings of the coffinlike churches; and the majestic plainness of antiphonal chants echoed from sanctuary to nave as the people together stolidly voiced the devotions composed by Fray Geronimo Ciruelo and shipped north to the river in 1626. A little organ with gilt pipes went to Santa Fe in 1610, and a few decades later eighteen of the kingdom’s churches had organs. The friars taught how to play them, and how to make and play stringed musical instruments, and flutes, and bassoons, and trumpets, after the models shipped in from abroad. On great feast days, the level Indian voices were enriched by ardent stridencies from pierced cane, hollowed gourd, and shaped copper. A tradition lasting centuries had an imitation of nature at work in the worship of the Mass. From the choir loft over the main door of the church came first softly then mounting in sweet wildness the sounds of a multitude of little birds calling and trilling in controlled high spirits. On the gallery floor a dozen little boys lay before pottery bowls half-filled with water. Each boy had a short reed pierced at intervals which he fingered. He blew through one end while the other rested in the water, from which rose the liquid notes of songbirds adoring God. At the elevation of the Host or other moments of high solemnity it was proper on great feast days to fire a salute of musketry amid the rolling of the bells.
The Franciscan school taught painting. Indians learned not so much how to hold a brush or use color—they knew that—as how to see, look, formalize a representation. A whole new notion of what the world looked like came to the Indians; yet without greatly affecting their decorative styles, for they continued to draw more the spirit, the idea of a subject, than its common likeness.
Joy and laughter were praised by Saint Francis, and there was no reason why the river fathers should not by these means as well as any other reach into the minds and hearts of their taciturn children. The Spanish delight in theatre, scarcely a hundred years old, was already a deeply rooted taste; and the friars, like the lay colonists, gave plays on suitable occasions. In the pueblos, the comedies were meant to instruct as well as entertain. Ancient Nativity stories were acted out by well-rehearsed Indians, who took the parts not only of the Holy Family and their ecstatic attendants but also represented a little party of Indians in their own character. When in the play it was asked who were these strangers come to attend the birth of the Infant Savior, the answer said that they too were men for whom the Son of God was born on earth that He might save them. A dignifying love reached out to the Indians in the audience. Sometimes the plays were hilarious, and all could laugh at the embarrassments and defeats cleverly visited upon Satan, whose exasperation would know no bounds. Any play telling the story of people brought a sense of community and self-discovery.
The Franciscan teaching turned everywhere, lifted up the soil, planted new seeds, and put the soil back. Among the first new crops was one directly related to the Mass. Cuttings of fine grapevines were brought across the sea from Spain and sent up the long trail from Mexico—a light red grape and a purple one, from which the fathers made sacramental white and red wines. New fruits were set out in orchards-peaches, apples, pears, plums, cherries, quinces, figs, dates, pomegranates, olives, apricots, almonds, pecans, walnuts. Later when the missions rose by the river at the gateway to Mexico, lemons and nectarines were planted to thrive in the mild winters, and oranges, which had first been planted in the New World by Bernal Díaz del Castillo landing with Cortés. Together with the fields of newly introduced vegetables, the orchards were irrigated from the river with improved methods long known to the friars from their Mediterranean culture. With the foundation of horses, cows and sheep brought by the colony, the friars taught the Indians how to herd and how to breed the animals for improvement of the stock. There were workable resources in the kingdom observed by the well-educated priests, who said that with patience and labor much could be done with the ores in the mountains. The treasure hunters had come and gone, unwilling to work for what they wanted. New Mexico was officially reported as a poor country. But a Father President of the Franciscan province in 1629 disagreed: “As for saying that it is poor, I answer that there nowhere in the world has been discovered a country richer in mineral deposits.” He listed the very localities of the river kingdom where he had seen deposits, and went on scornfully to say that all such news meant nothing to the Spaniards in Mexico, who if they had merely a good crop of tobacco to smoke were content. It seemed odd to him that they should be so indifferent, when Spaniards “out of greed for silver and gold would enter Hell itself to get them.”
But the chance and toil of the freight trains to and from Mexico could not be lightly ignored. The regular service to supply the missions was established in 1617. Trains left for the north every three years, and took the better part of a year to complete the journey. Escorted by a handful of hard soldiers and driven by Mexican Indians about thirty cottonwood carts drawn by oxen came over the gritty trail in movements as slow as the high turns of astronomy by which like ships at sea they made their course. They passed among enemies and at the Northern Pass came to the Rio del Norte, whose source, they said, was at the North Pole. This was easy to believe, in the absence of maps visualizing the unknown country above New Mexico, for the river had an arctic character, “during the months of November, December, January and February… frozen over so solid that iron-bound wagons, heavily laden,” crossed on the ice, and “vast herds of cattle” went over it at full gallop. “To the same extreme,” they noted, “this land suffers from the heat during the months of June, July and August, for even in the shade of the houses tallow candles and salt pork melt.”
The freighters saw the Manso Indians about the river at the Pass, who ate their fish and meat raw and bloody, not even cleaning the entrails, but devoured it all “like animals.” With mineral powders of different colors rubbed on their nakedness they looked fierce, despite their “good features.” As the years passed, and the trains came and went in their crawling regularity, these people about the ford at the Pass came to know the Franciscans and in them grew the desire to be Christians. In time they were taken farther north on the river, near to the Piro pueblos which were the first of the river towns reached by northbound travellers, from Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to the supply trailers of the seventeenth century; and there they found their mission. It was the policy of the religious province wherever possible to bring together compatible Indian peoples, the better to instruct large numbers, and to insure common defense. Pueblos grew. Ways were traded. New dimensions of human life reached out from the river. Tucked away in the lumbering carts were richly printed little gazettes and random news sheets from the printing shops in Mexico. So came news of the great world, the gossip of government