Free Kachina and the Cross by Carroll L Riley

arrived in mid-March 1591 to arrest him and to return the expedition to New Spain. Morlete led the two groups, including the wagons, down the Rio Grande to around modern El Paso and then apparently on to La Junta and up the Conchos. Because of the wagons, his expedition may have been forced to traverse the Jornada del Muerto, if so, making it the first Spanish party to go by that route.

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Spanish exploration in the Southwest, 1581-83
     

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The Spanish government was now beginning to consider a long-term colonization plan for the Southwest. As early as 1568, Juan de Troyano of the Coronado expedition, who had brought home a Pueblo girl and married her, pleaded for a chance to take part in a new expedition to the north. In 1583, King Philip II of Spain issued a call for a wealthy settler who would undertake the settlement of the new area. Several individuals responded, including Cristóbal Martin, Antonio de Espejo, and Francisco Diaz de Vargas. In 1589, a well-to-do citizen of Nueva Galicia named Juan Bautista de Lomas y Colmenares actually had his proposal approved by the viceroy. Like the earlier proposals, however, it eventually died of neglect in the Spanish royal court. Castaño's attempt to settle New Mexico in defiance of the government was quickly checked, but it indicated the rising interest in the Southwest on the part of Spanish frontier settlers.
While the various government officials in Spain and Mexico pondered the fate of the Pueblo world, at least one other clandestine expedition thrust itself into the Southwest. In 1593 the governor of Nueva Vizcaya, Rodrigo del Rio de Losa, sent the entrepreneur Francisco Leyva de Bonilla from Santa Bárbara northward on a trip to punish Indians who had been raiding border ranches. Marching with Leyva was a small group of soldiers and a vice-commander (or perhaps co-commander) Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña. The expedition unilaterally and illegally extended its field of operation to the Pueblos, spending about a year, mostly at San Ildefonso in Tewa country.
The party then departed to look for Quivira and reached perhaps as far as the Arkansas River, where there was a large Indian settlement. Humaña murdered Leyva in a quarrel, and the group seems to have been eventually dispersed by the Indians. At least nothing else was heard of it except for an Indian servant of Humaña named Jusepe, who fled after the murder and was held captive by the Apaches for a year before escaping "near a pueblo of the Pecos," perhaps a Pecos summer town. Jusepe was still in that area when Oñate arrived in 1598, as were Cristóbal and Tomás, two Indians from somewhere in northern New Spain who remained at Santo Domingo after the collapse of the Castaño expedition.

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Chapter Four
Oñate
The struggle for the honor and profit of settling New Mexico was long and bitter. There was little doubt from the time of Castaño that sooner or later such an attempt would be made. The different players in this southwestern sweepstakes had various reasons for wanting a part in the colonization. Later in this chapter I talk about the geopolitical considerations of the Crown, based on faulty geography but nonetheless real to the Spaniards. The primary reason for settlement, however, was silver, the engine that drove the expeditions of the 1580s and 1590s. Rich strikes of this precious metal had been found in Nueva Vizcaya; why not in New Mexico? Also important was the now well-known fact that the Pueblo Indians consisted of large numbers of peoples living in compact towns. The possibilities of exploiting this economic source must have played an important role in Spanish planning. One way was through the encomienda, an institution introduced at the very beginning of the Spanish period in the New World through which individual Spaniards were given grants of the labor and tribute of specific Indian groups. Encomiendas, though frowned on more and more by the Spanish government, were still