Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

“ If we add to this picture the little company of Spaniards with their uniforms, their horses, and their small artillery, we can imagine the entrance of Cortés into Cholula as a festival far less formal and ceremonious than most of the historians have represented it, but still extraordinary, gorgeous, and strange enough. I have found the first impression in all the Indian dances well-nigh overpowering, but the eye gradually becomes accustomed to regard the spectacle with indifference. ”

“ A man, nearly naked, with long tangled hair and beard, accompanied by eleven Indians and a negro, came to them, and spoke to them in Spanish, with warm emotion, expressing great joy that after eight years of wandering he had at last been permitted to meet white men, and Spanish countrymen. He bore the outer traces of great physical suffering, and spoke in so excited a manner that the other Spaniards at first regarded him and listened to him with suspicion. He gave his name as Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, and that of the negro who was with him was Estévanico. ”

“ Guzman was ambitious and avaricious; his outbreaks of cruelty were provoked by those passions. Where his interests demanded patience he could be gentle enough, but when excited by contradiction or negligence, he raged against his own Spaniards as well as against hostile Indians. Contrary to the orders of the Spanish Crown, he made slaves of a number of Indians in order that he might at least compensate himself for the disappointments he suffered in other respects ”

“ The river valley itself, seldom more than two miles wide, passes in summer like a green band among the dunes, which are then tinged with green, but in winter the fields are barren and the trees are leafless, and stand on the heights like white skeletons on a vast, bare waste. ”

“ These gypsum windows are of Spanish introduction; in their primitive condition the Pueblo Indians were acquainted only with holes for air and light. The fireplace of adobe or stone warms the long room in which large and small, in sweet innocence, eat and talk and sleep. This fireplace is one of the original possessions of the Indians, which they had before the time of the Spaniards. If it is stormy without, the fire will be smoking within, and staying there becomes unendurable. Yet winter is to me a very pleasant season to be in the pueblos. ”

“ The pueblo stood, as the ruins now show, on a hill. It could not turn out more than two hundred men of war, but the whole male population of all the villages, seven in number, which constituted the tribe of Zuñi, had come to its assistance and were awaiting the Spaniards on the little plain separating Oa-quima from the mesa south of it. The peaceful message sent to them by Coronado was answered with threatening gestures. The horsemen then dashed at them, and the Indians speedily fled from the sight of the strange, rushing figures. ”

“ Only in the case of a leader in the mystic service, a medicine-man, or shaman, being taken away, or of one of those whose function it is to work for the good of the tribe by mortification or sacrifice, would that tribe be moved to offer a ransom for his recovery. For while an administrative officer, even a warrior, can be easily replaced, the importance of the other one lies in his knowledge of the secret arts; if he is lost, the connecting link with the beings of a higher order is removed, and the pueblo is, according to its own striking expression, "made an orphan." ”

“ When the visitor stands upon the rocks which immediately surround the water-pool, he looks down from them into the valley upon the great mesas that surround them, and beyond these upon the massive pyramid of Mount Taylor, or the Sierra de San Matéo. ... As evening approaches the shadows lie deep upon the ground, and as they climb up the rockwalls, as cliff after cliff is swallowed up in darkness, his heart is oppressed with the feeling that all intercourse with the outer world is henceforth cut off. ”

“ In this letter, which Oviedo has preserved in abstract, Federmann wrote: "The stories about Meta are not wholly false, for that river does rise in the mountains that border the plain; and the House of Meta which was sought for so long is the Temple of Sogamosa, the holy objects in which the people of Santa Marta have now carried away in sacks." These words of an important eye-witness prove that it was the legend of the dorado which, transferred to Meta, distorted and diluted in many ways and spread throughout eastern South America, stimulated the bold enterprises we have sketched. ”

“ With the conquest of Cundinamarca was secured the last great treasure of gold that awaited the Spaniards in America. Their wild greed was, however, doubly excited by their success so far. and they thirsted for more and greater. The Minorite monk, Fray Toribio of Benevento, [17] wrote with truth in 1540: "And gold is, like another golden calf, worshipped by them as a god; for they come without intermission and without thought, across the sea, to toil and danger, in order to get it. May it please God that it be not for their damnation." ”

“ A week rarely passes that the drum is not heard sounding some noon, with the shrill notes of the long reed-pipe, and the rhythmical minor song of the exclusively male chorus. The dancers come marching into the plaza in pairs, a man and a woman, the former always with bare chest and shoulders, and the latter "modestly" half-clothed. All are elaborately painted, often disfigured in the most fearful manner with rainbow-colored stripes on their faces and bodies. ”

“ This sandy soil in the Valley of the Rio Grande is fruitful, extraordinarily productive. When it can be watered it rewards, and that always bountifully, even the feeble efforts which Indian agriculture puts forth. No doubt the Spaniards were not specially attracted by the view of an agriculture which did not, with more labor and in a more difficult because colder climate, afford them all the products of the tropical climate they had left, and into which they would have to introduce the grains and fruits of the temperate zone. ”

“ Venezuela had been so exhausted by the dorado expeditions of the previous period that it was only with extreme effort that it could supply two hundred and sixty poorly armed men.
Aguirre, who had in the meantime sunk both brigantines, confidently awaited the arrival of the expected ships at Margarita. In the excited and tense condition of his mind, delay was hardly possible without violent outbreaks occurring. Not only were Aguirre's own men exposed to his murderous caprices, but the defenceless people of the island stood in constant peril of death. ”

“ Then they all took to flight, for the people were searching the vicinity for them. They now implored the priest not to make any further effort to approach Cibola. Estévanico had been killed, and the inhabitants were in great excitement. Only rapid flight could deliver them all, for the braves of Cibola were already on their track.
After nearly reaching his aim, having come almost to the threshold of the place so long sought with so much toil and anticipation, Fray Marcos de Nizza could now feel the force of the warning, Back, thou canst serve thy friend no more. Then save thine own life. ”

“ Ruins of pueblos and imposing stone churches, burnt out, with their enclosures open to the sky and the clouds, remains of the modest prosperity which the pueblo Indians enjoyed under the guidance of the Franciscan monks, before their unfortunate insurrection, lie scattered on the cliffs. ”

“ Scarcity of water was the greatest privation they suffered. Intense thirst afflicted man and beast, and buffalo meat was all they had with which to appease their hunger, for the supplies of maize were exhausted.
The Teyas advised Coronado to return; they assured him that nearly forty days' march would still be required to reach Quivira, and that the scarcity of water and of vegetable food would destroy his little army on the way. Many soldiers had already disappeared by going from the camp to hunt, when they became lost and miserably perished. ”

“ The fact has not been without effect in the inquiry that no one has ever succeeded in finding among the Indian tribes of New Mexico a tradition, myth, or story, even in a distorted form, containing a reminiscence of the march, presence, or fate of the negro Estévanico or of the Franciscan. Both, the black and the monk, were prominent figures, well fitted to leave deep traces in the memories of the natives. ”

“ Burning through and through with hatred against the Spanish Government, at home, at the same time, in all circles and ranks, endowed with remarkable shrewdness and great physical and mental force-a logical and impressive speaker, withal—with clearly defied purposes, he was in every respect a dangerous man. ”

“ The Franciscan archives were thus carried into the dark back-room of an Indian house, where a blind man was their first guardian; but they are now in charge of an intelligent, tolerably clear-seeing citizen of the village. ”

“ At least eight of the Marañones fell victims to these feelings in the course of three months; and every new crime attached the rest, by the sense of common guilt, more closely to their leader, who, like an evil spirit, led them, with an iron will, to further crimes. No one dared to speak or hardly to think of the dorado; the men were permitted to entertain but one thought—that of the conquest of Peru. The island of Margarita was to afford the first base for this enterprise. Aguirre reached it in seventeen days, sailing around Trinidad. ”

“ The value of historical research on the American continent consists not only in the enrichment it affords to the fund of scientific knowledge, which has an indirect influence upon life, but also in the destruction it effects of deeply rooted errors, in which it acts immediately upon practical life. Accordingly as we represent to ourselves a people or a country when they first become known to us, so we shape our expectations of them when we go to establish our home among them. A correct notion of the past furnishes the basis for an intelligent forecasting of the future. ”

“ Few tribes in Spanish America have so readily and completely assimilated with the whites as the Opatas of Sonora. I am convinced, after a slow journey of three months through their whole country, that there are hardly two dozen of them who can and will speak their own language. The dress of the Opatas is white, customary in all Mexico, with the palm-leaf hat. Their houses are like the habitations of the Mexicans. They wear sandals or moccasins indifferently, although the latter are more common on account of the great roughness of the mountains. ”

“ The Brazilian coast, hardly touched at a few points by the Portuguese, was too far from the unknown interior, which was concealed in immense forests. The western coasts, particularly those of New Granada and of Peru, where the Amazon begins its course, not only lay geographically nearest to the region in question, but were also the seat of the strongest and richest settlements of the Spaniards in South America, the only ones from which any campaigns could now be undertaken. ”

“ Over a few members of the expedition Coronado had no power. These were the priests, who had come with him to this point; the Franciscan monks, Fray Juan de Padilla, Fray Juan de la Cruz, and the lay brother, Fray Luis de Ubeda, decided to remain in New Mexico, even without the protection of the army. It was indifferent to them whether there were treasures in the newly discovered regions or not; they thought only of the souls of the natives, and considered themselves pledged to devote their lives to the work of conversion. ”

“ The coast lands of Venezuela offered no hope of a profitable result; but golden reports came from the interior, and, clad in the alluring dress of the dorado legend, led the Germans on to those useless and destructive expeditions of which we have just described the last one. In pursuit of the gilded chieftain Dalfinger conducted his fatal campaign of desolation; after him Federmann pressed fruitlessly into New Granada; in the chase for the echo of the dorado in "Meta" Von Speyer sacrificed his fine troop and his own precious person ”