Charles Fletcher Lummis

“ Luckily the New World came just in time for him. If it had not been for Columbus, he might have lived and died a swineherd, and history would have lost one of its most gallant figures, as well as many more of those to whom the adventurous Genoese opened the door of fame. To thousands of men as undivined by themselves as by others, there was then nothing to see in life but abject obscurity in crowded, ignorant, poverty-stricken Europe. When Spain suddenly found the new land beyond the seas, it caused such a wakening of mankind as was never before nor ever has been since. ”

“ Columbus did little beyond finding America, which was indeed glory enough for one life. But of the gallant nation which made possible his discovery there were not lacking heroes to carry out the work which that discovery opened. It was a century before Anglo-Saxons seemed to waken enough to learn that there really was a New World, and into that century the flower of Spain crowded marvels of achievement. She was the only European nation that did not drowse. Her mailed explorers overran Mexico and Peru, grasped their incalculable riches, and made those kingdoms inalienable parts of Spain. ”

“ We have not been taught how astonishing it was that one nation should have earned such an overwhelming share in the honor of giving us America; and yet when we look into the matter, it is a very startling thing. There was a great Old World, full of civilization: suddenly a New World was found,—the most important and surprising discovery in the whole annals of mankind. ”

“ Then came the last century, a dismal hundred years of ceaseless harassment by the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, and occasionally by the Utes,—a harassment which had hardly ceased a decade ago. The Indian wars were so constant, the explorations (like that wonderful attempt to open a road from San Antonio de Bejar, Texas, to Monterey, California) so innumerable, that their individual heroism is lost in their own bewildering multitude.
More than two centuries ago the Spaniards explored Texas, and settlement soon followed. ”

“ The wilderness they conquered was savage enough, truly, but fertile, well wooded, well watered, and full of game; while that which the Spaniards tamed was such a frightful desert as no human conquest ever overran before or since, and peopled by a host of savage tribes to some of whom the petty warriors of King Philip were no more to be compared than a fox to a panther. The Apaches and the Araucanians would perhaps have been no more than other Indians had they been transferred to Massachusetts; but in their own grim domains they were the deadliest savages that Europeans ever encountered. ”

“ Many of the Spaniards perished by these grim, strange foes; some were crushed to pulp in the mighty coils of the snakes, and some were crunched between the teeth of the scaly saurians. Many more fell victims to lurking savages; in a single swoop fourteen of the dwindling band were slain by Indians, who surrounded their stranded canoe. Food gave out too, and the survivors were starving when Ruiz got back with a scant relief but cheering news. Very soon too Almagro arrived, with supplies and a reinforcement of eighty men. ”

“ From wandering, naked, starving, despised beggars, and slaves to brutal savages, they suddenly became personages of note,—still paupers and sufferers, as were all their patients, but paupers of mighty power. There is no fairy tale more romantic than the career thenceforth of these poor, brave men walking painfully across a continent as masters and benefactors of all that host of wild people.
Trudging on from tribe to tribe, painfully and slowly the white medicine-men crossed Texas and came close to our present New Mexico. ”

“ For the historian nowadays to look upon that Norse discovery as a myth, or less than a certainty, is to confess that he has never read the Sagas. The Norsemen came, and even camped in the New World, before the year 1000; but they only camped. They built no towns, and practically added to the world's knowledge nothing at all. They did nothing to entitle them to credit as pioneers. The honor of giving America to the world belongs to Spain,—the credit not only of discovery, but of centuries of such pioneering as no other nation ever paralleled in any land. ”

“ In the supreme moment all the crowding, jumbled thoughts of the full brain seem to be suddenly swept aside, to leave a clear space down which the one great thought may leap forward like the runner to his goal,—or like the lightning which splits the slow, tame air asunder even as its fire dashes on its way. Most intelligent persons have that mental lightning sometimes; and when it can be relied on to come and instantly illumine the [Pg 251] darkest crisis, it is the insight of genius. It was that which made Napoleon, Napoleon; and made Pizarro, Pizarro. ”

“ Some of the most valuable explorations have been made by men who had no more idea of being explorers than they had of inventing a railroad to the moon; and it is a striking fact that the first inland exploration of America, and the two most wonderful journeys in it, were not only accidents, but the crowning misfortunes and disappointments of the men who had hoped for very different things.
Exploration, intended or involuntary, has not only achieved great results for civilization, but in the doing has scored some of the highest feats of human heroism. ”

“ Broadly speaking, all the enterprise of Europe was confined to one nation,—and that a nation by no means the richest or strongest. One nation practically had the glory of discovering and exploring America, of changing the whole world's ideas of geography, and making over knowledge and business all to herself for a century and a half. And Spain was that nation. ”

“ When his men had sufficiently recovered from their wounds Vicente de Zaldivar, the leader of probably the most wonderful capture in history, marched victorious back to San Gabriel de los Españoles, taking with him eighty young Acoma girls, whom he sent to be educated by the nuns in Old Mexico. What a shout must have gone up from the gray walls of the little colony when its anxious watchers saw at last the wan and unexpected tatters of its little army pricking slowly homeward across the snows on jaded steeds! ”

“ These strange, vast forests of the tropics (forests as big as the whole of Europe) are Nature's most forbidding side; the pathless sea and the desert plains are not so lonely or so deadly. Gigantic trees, sometimes much more than a hundred feet in circumference, grow thick and tall, their bases buried in eternal gloom, their giant columns interwoven with mighty vines, so that it is no longer a forest but a wall. ”

“ The merciless gods of India, who are supposed to delight in the crushing of thousands under the wheels of Juggernaut, and in the sacrificing of babes to the Ganges, and in the burning alive of girl-widows, are fair examples of what the benighted can believe; and the horrors of India were fully paralleled in America. The religions of our North American Indians had many astounding and dreadful features; but they were mild and civilized compared with the hideous rites of Mexico and the southern lands. ”

“ That we have not given justice to the Spanish Pioneers is simply because we have been misled. They made a record unparalleled; but our text-books have not recognized that fact, though they no longer dare dispute it. Now, thanks to the New School of American History, we are coming to the truth,—a truth which every manly American will be glad to know. In this country of free and brave men, race-prejudice, the most ignorant of all human ignorances, must die out. We must respect manhood more than nationality, and admire it for its own sake wherever found,—and it is found everywhere. ”

“ Juan was a sympathetic figure, and distinguished himself by his great manliness and courage before he came to an untimely end. Gonzalo was a genuine knight-errant, fearless, generous, and chivalric, beloved alike in the New World by the soldiers he led and the Indians he conquered. ”

“ Zaldivar had desired to secure the surrender of the pueblo, demand the delivery to him of the ringleaders in the massacre, and take them back with him to San Gabriel for official trial and punishment, without harm to the other people of Acoma; but the savages, secure in their grim fortress, mocked the merciful appeal. It was clear that Acoma must be stormed. The Spaniards camped on the bare sands and passed the night—made hideous by the sounds of a monster war-dance in the town—in gloomy plans for the morrow. ”

“ America in particular, perhaps, has been the field of great and remarkable journeys; but the two men who made the most astounding journeys in America are still almost unheard of among us. They are heroes whose names are as Greek to the vast majority of Americans, albeit they are men in whom Americans particularly should take deep and admiring interest. They were Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveller; and Andrés Docampo, the man who walked farther on this continent than any other. ”

“ Geography in particular has owed almost more of its growth into a science to myths than to scholarly invention; and the gold myth, throughout the world, has been the prophet and inspiration of discovery, and a moulder of history.
We have been rather too much in the habit of classing the Spaniards as the gold-hunters, with an intimation that gold-hunting is a sort of sin, and that they were monumentally prone to it. But it is not a Spanish copyright,—the trait is common to all mankind. The only difference was that the Spaniards found gold ”

“ You see Pizarro always took the heaviest and hardest burden for himself, and gave the easiest to his associate. It was always Almagro who was sent back to the comforts of civilization, while his lion-hearted leader bore the waiting and danger and suffering. The greatest obstacle all along now was in the soldiers themselves,—and I say this with a full realization of the deadly perils and enormous hardships. But perils and hardships without are to be borne more easily than treachery and discontent within. At every step Pizarro had to carry his men,—morally. ”

“ So Pizarro had constantly to be will and courage not only for himself, who suffered as cruelly as the meanest, but for all. It was like the stout soul we sometimes see holding up a half-dead body,—a body that would long ago have broken loose from a less intrepid spirit. ”

“ To think of flies as a danger to life is strange to those who know only the temperate zones; but in some parts of the tropics the insects are more dreadful than wolves. From the swamps the exhausted Spaniards struggled through to a range of hills, whose sharp rocks (lava, very likely) cut their feet to the bone. And there was nothing to cheer them; all was the same hopeless wilderness. They toiled back to their rude brigantine, fainting under the tropic heat, and re-embarked. ”

“ Scarce a decade has gone by since an end was put to the Indian wars and harassments, which had lasted continuously for more than three centuries. When Spanish colonist or Spanish missionary turned his back on Old Mexico to traverse the thousand-mile, roadless desert to New Mexico, he took his life in his hands; and every day in that savage province he was in equal danger. If he escaped death by thirst or starvation by the way, if the party was not wiped out by the merciless Apache, then he settled in the wilderness as far from any other home of white men as Chicago is from Boston. ”

“ More than twenty men—nearly half the little force—died under their hardships; and all the survivors lost hope save the stout-hearted commander. When they were almost at the last gasp, a far light gleaming through the forest aroused them; and forcing their way in that direction they came at last to open ground, where was an Indian village whose corn and cocoanuts saved the emaciated Spaniards. These Indians had a few rude gold ornaments, and told of a rich country to the south. ”

“ Cortez was still captain-general when Cabeza de Vaca came into the Spanish settlements from his eight years' wandering, with news of strange countries to the north; but Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy of Mexico, and Cortez' superior, and between him and the traitorous conqueror was endless dissension. Cortez was working for himself, Mendoza for Spain.
As Mexico became more and more thickly dotted with Spanish settlements, the attention of the restless world-finders began to wander toward the mysteries of the vast and unknown country to the north. ”

“ It was now that Cortez began to show particularly that military genius which lifted him so far above all other pioneers of America except Pizarro. With only a handful of men,—for he had left part of his forces at Vera Cruz, under his lieutenant Escalante,—in an unknown land swarming with powerful and savage foes, mere courage and brute force would have stood him in little stead. ”

“ The little bands of three and four apiece bore the news to their countrymen; and by the end of the year 1598 all the surviving Spaniards in New Mexico were safely gathered in the hamlet of San Gabriel. The little town was built pueblo-fashion, in the shape of a hollow square. In the Plaza within were planted the rude pedreros—small howitzers which fired a ball of stone—to command the gates; and upon the roofs of the three-story adobe houses the brave women watched by day, and the men with their heavy flintlocks all through the winter nights, to guard against the expected attack. ”

“ Had America waited to be discovered by some one seeking a new continent, it might be waiting yet.
Despite the fact that long before Columbus vagrant crews of half a dozen different races had already reached the New World, they had left [Pg 26] neither mark on America nor result in civilization; and Europe, at the very brink of the greatest discovery and the greatest events in history, never dreamed of it. Columbus himself had no imaginings of America. ”