Free Kachina and the Cross by Carroll L Riley Page A

granted in such frontier areas as New Mexico. In that colony they were to last throughout the seventeenth century.
A third factor was that of available arable or grazing lands. The expeditions from Coronado on seem to have given a somewhat exaggerated view of the fertility of New Mexico, but it was a country well suited for the rough-wooled and hardy churro variety of sheep bred in the northern Mexican area. Cattle were somewhat less adaptable to the New Mexican landscape, but still they were imported, and estancias , or ranches, quickly grew up in the riverine areas. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the great cattle herds were introduced in that large region where the Great Plains and Southwest mergeand that involved U.S. citizens rather than Spaniards or Mexicans.

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A fourth possible source of wealth was trade. Spaniards had been carrying on an active trade along the northern frontier for decades. They needed certain northern products, especially hides and other products from bison, antelope, and deer; slaves for the mines and ranches (though slaves may have seemed a chancy business in view of the recent colonization laws); and minerals and semiprecious stones.
In addition to those considerations, the Franciscans had in mind the conversion of large populations. They already had martyrsthree from the Chamuscado expedition alone. Forty years before Chamuscado, Father Juan de Padilla had been killed as a direct result of his southwestern trip, and probably Fray Luis de Ubeda as well. There was another reason why the Franciscans wished to go to the Southwest. The ecclesiastical province of New Mexico would surely resound to the missionaries' glory both in this world and the next. In this world it might lead to a Franciscan diocese.
The region of New Spain that had the most direct interest in colonization of New Mexico was the north, especially the province of Nueva Vizcaya (the new "Basque-land"). This had been formed out of the fuzzy northern boundaries of Nueva Galicia in 1562, and the governorship was given to Francisco de Ibarra, who spent four years (1562-66) exploring his new domain. Nueva Vizcaya included essentially what were later to be the states of Durángo, Chihuahua, and for a time Sinaloa. Its capital, Durángo, was located in the rich Guadiana Valley in the southern portion of the modern state of Durángo. The town, which was often called Guadiana in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was formally founded in 1563 apparently on or near a mission station established by the Franciscans a few years earlier. It quickly became a center for ranches that supplied agricultural goods and especially cattle and sheep products for the miners.
The Basques, whose homeland contributed the name Nueva Vizcaya, were an ethnic group living in the mountainous north of Spain and in southwestern France. They spoke, and still speak, an isolated language called Euskera, quite unlike the various Indo-European languages of historic and modern Europe. Indo-European, the family that includes most modern European languages, spread through the continent within the last three to four thousand years. The place of Basque in a classification of world languages is still unsure, but the Basque language represents a remnant tongue isolated in the rugged Pyrenees, possibly from Upper Paleolithic times. Some linguistic specialists even believe that Basque is related to Apache and Navajo languages, though of course on a very distant time level.
In any case, the Basques were important in the settlement of Nueva Vizcaya and surrounding regions of northern New Spain. Ibarra himself was Basque, as

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were such influential families as the Oñates, the Tolosas, the Urdiñolas and the Zaldívars. True to their mountain heritage, the great Basque families developed sheep ranching and mining interests in various parts of the north. They also entered politics; Ibarra, of course, was the first governor of Nueva Vizcaya, and