Free Kachina and the Cross by Carroll L Riley Page B

Cristóbal Oñate served as acting governor of Nueva Galicia during Coronado's expedition to the Southwest in 1540-42. His son Juan would be the first governor of New Mexico.
As mentioned in chapter 3, interest in settling New Mexico went back to the 1560s, but it reached fever heat by the 1590s. It was not all mining and missionary zeal, for the Spanish Crown also had a geopolitical interest. Crown officials had just heard of an English settlement at a latitude near that of New Mexico and were fearful that the English might eventually flank New Spain to the north, or that they might intrude on Spanish territory.
With our sophisticated map knowledge of today, this seems ludicrous, but it was taken seriously by the Spaniards. The English colony, though hardly successful, was real enough. It was Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast, where a town was attempted in 1585-87. Roanoke, near the thirty-sixth parallel, does lie directly east of the Santa Fe-Rio Chama area. But despite the de Soto explorations of the eastern United States a half century before, the Spanish authorities seemed not fully to comprehend the region between North Carolina and New Mexico. Though on the same east-west parallel, these two places were nearly two thousand miles apart, separated by a wilderness of mountains, forests, rivers, swamps, plains, and desert. More to the point, the easy water passage that sixteenth-century Europeans thought connected the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans simply did not exist. The contract made with Juan de Oñate contains a striking indication of Spanish ignorance of North American geography. Originally it allowed him to bring two ships across the Atlantic to the province of New Mexico "to provision the land and exploit the mines." This section of the contract was later canceled, not because of its topographic unreality, but for legal reasons having to do with royal control of the Atlantic shipping.
It is not clear just when Oñate first decided to make a bid for the New Mexico honor, though it may have been soon after the royal announcement of 1583 (see chapter 3). But the initial struggle to obtain this northern prize seems to have been between Juan Lomas y Colmenares, who had powerful ranching interests in central Nueva Vizcaya, and a former lieutenant-governor from the eastern part of Nueva Vizcaya named Francisco de Urdiñola. In 1594 Urdiñola was asked by Viceroy Luis de Velasco to head a New Mexican colonizing expedition. This plan fell through when Urdiñola was accused of wife-murder, apparently

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through the machinations of Lomas y Colmenares. By the time Urdiñola had cleared his name, the settlement contract had already gone to Oñate.
This latter man was the first generation of the Oñate family born in the New World. His father, Cristóbal de Oñate, originally from the Basque area of northern Spain, had come to New Spain as a young man. Born around 1504-5, he sailed to New Spain in 1524 as assistant to Rodrigo de Albornoz, the newly appointed accountant of New Spain's royal treasury. Oñate prospered in the new colony, following the savage Nuño de Guzmán to the west coast and becoming part of the brutal pacification of that region in the early 1530s. Oñate survived Guzmán's disgrace and eventually became Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's lieutenant governor of the new province of Nueva Galicia. In 1549 or 1550 he married Catalina de Salazar y de la Cadena, the daughter of a former royal factor, Gonzalo de Salazar. It was a second marriage for Catalina, and a daughter by her first marriage gave birth to the Zaldívar nephews who were so important to Juan de Oñate in New Mexico. This was an extremely tangled kin relationship, for these two nephews also had as a grandmother the sister of Cristóbal de Oñate. Catalina was interesting in another way. Like many upper-class Spaniards of the time, Doña Catalina had a converted Jewish ancestor, in her specific case