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Camino al norte/The Road North
Don Juan de Oñate’s Journey of 1598 (Adapted from a draft film script by Stephen Lamoreux and Ricardo Dolz) "The explorers who saw this country for the first time were men who believed in miracles, who accepted the universe as a mystery to be revered rather than as a problem to be solved."--Harvey Ferguson It was the first month of the year 1598, a hundred years after Columbus, and this was the Spanish frontier, the Chihuahua Desert in northern Mexico. Jamestown was still to come: the Pilgrims wouldn’t get to Plymouth Rock for another twenty-two years. Chihuahua City, Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, none of these existed, but when Juan de Oñate left the frontier city of Santa Barbara, Mexico, he blazed the Royal Road, El Camino Real, a route for commerce and conquest, that 400 years later is still in use. He was a rich man, hoping to get richer. Although he was a soldier with much Indian-fighting experience, he did not lead a trim fighting force for conquest; he headed a domestic expedition, equipped for settlement. He had no idea of what faced him geographically, even though some bold Spaniards had wandered across part of the route. Some had returned with rumors of great wealth to be had but with no specifics. Some had fallen victim to the vast expanses of the desert or to the Indians. Don Juan thought that he would encounter the South Seas bordering New Mexico. He had in his contract the right to dock two ocean-going ships a year for his trade purposes. His peaceful expedition had instructions to treat the Indians justly and to trade with them. He also had the right and the full intention to use the Indians as a source of labor and revenue. The expedition stretched for four miles. It had 130 men, most of them with wives and children: arms, implements, eighty-three wagons, carts, and carriages, and some 7,000 head of livestock--pigs, sheep, goats, oxen, and beef cattle, horses, and mules. In a good day, the caravan could travel more than 12 miles; on a bad day, maybe four or five–so that the caravan's tail sometimes got no farther than the previous night’s camp for the head of the column. January is a good month for crossing the Chihuahua Desert; the weather usually is mild, and sometimes a lifesaving rain will fall. The Oñate expedition, delayed by two years of government red tape, was not able to leave until January and thereby enjoyed probably the best climatic conditions possible. Still there was near-starvation, and there were times when there was no water, or water was so scarce that when it was encountered by chance, it was deemed a miracle. It took half a year, from January to July, to make the journey to San Juan de los Caballeros in northern New Mexico, near the origins of the Rio Grande. Midway through their progress, the expedition came to the Rio Grande where it begins its modern career as an international border. Here the company held worship services and a feast of thanksgiving. With full pomp, Oñate claimed possession of the northern territory. On May 4, he led the way across the river into his new kingdom. The worst was yet to come, the dead man’s trail across mostly flat, sometimes gullied, waterless terrain, which the Spaniards called "el jornada del muerto." This was so debilitating and the wagons so slow that starvation faced the travelers here. Rescue, Socorro in Spanish, came from the friendly Indians to the north, and Socorro has been the name of the place ever since. In July they came to the end of the trail, a well-watered locale, with wood in the nearby mountains, and with gold and silver, surely, in abundance. They looked for signs of ore, assayed the few samples that they found, and tamped down their feelings of disappointment that their new Mexico was not the same as the old. Their settlement was pitched precariously at the end of a supply line almost a thousand miles long. El Adelante, Don Juan de Oñate, reigned in despotic fashion, using force to hold his colony together. Dissidents accused him of mismanagement, murder, and fornication, among other things. When he returned to Mexico after more than a decade of disappointment and occasional dissembling over the failure to discover great treasures, Oñate faced many charges and was banished forever from the realm of Nuevo Mexico that he had worked so hard to establish. He is called the last conquistador by his biographer, Western historian Marc Simmons. He led the last great entrada into land that is now the United States, to establish a new kingdom within the Spanish empire. And yet his name, as Simmons points out, is hardly a household word, even in the Southwest. Americans today have some acquaintance, however scant, with his predecessors–Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, DeSoto–men who merely passed through, or scarcely touched upon, New Spain’s far northern frontier; but unless we live in El Paso or New Mexico, we do not know the one who came and stayed for a decade, bringing others with him who have stayed ever since. He failed most egregiously at finding a new Mexico, to match the exploits of his predecessor, Fernando Cortés, but his accomplishments deserve notice and honor. Marc Simmons states that he is "the godfather of the Franciscan missionary program on the northern frontier," which finally stretched from the Texas Gulf coast to the Pacific shores of California. He blazed El Camino Real, the royal road to the north that continues to this day as a major trade route; he "launched the livestock industry of the Southwest," and "inaugurated mining and the processing of ores." But most of all, Simmons suggests, through his wide-ranging explorations, he contributed to "an understanding of the true geography of western America." The content of this essay is based upon these sources: Hammond, George P., and Agapito Rey. Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595-1628. Albuquerque: Univ. of NM Press, 1953. |