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  The Spanish disillusionment was terrible. El Turco was tortured until he confessed he had lied to Coronado, and although he screamed out promises of another, richer kingdom further east, Coronado ordered him garroted.

  After claiming the entire Wichita country in the name of the King, Coronado gloomily returned to the Rio Grande, this time led on a shorter path by Wichita guides. Unknowingly, he was at this time only about three hundred miles west of Hernando de Soto's contemporary entrada, which was seeking "Cíbola" from the east. De Soto had landed at Mobile Bay, fought his way through Indian tribes to Texas, finally raiding the granaries of the Caddoan Confederacy, which was as helpless before the warlike Spaniards as the Hopis. De Soto, unlike Coronado who had narrow escapes, was killed and buried in the river he discovered, the Mississippi. His party, reaching the Great Plains on the edge of Caddo territory, recoiled from them and returned east.

  Back in Pueblo country, Coronado's men spent a cold and hungry winter. The Indians had fled to the mountains; they offered no services or assistance, and the Coronado expedition nearly starved. In April 1542, Coronado, who had now been injured in a fall and who was sick mentally and physically, mumbled the order to return to New Spain.

  The three priests with his army—whatever their cruelty and intolerance, they were entirely sincere—chose to remain to convert the Indians. None was ever heard from again.

  On his way south, Coronado slaughtered some rebellious Mexican Indians in the Sonora Valley, then reported to Viceroy Mendoza. His reports, and his official letter to King Charles V, written in New Mexico, profoundly affected Spanish policy toward the north.

  Coronado found Texas and the Plains a "country of fine appearance," not unlike Spain. It was "full of cattle" in numbers impossible to estimate—bison, which the Spanish ironically came to call cíbolos. It was potentially rich for farming, especially the lands of the Wichitas to the east. But Coronado warned that there was no gold or any other metal, and the Indians were uniformly a poor lot, who owned nothing and spent their miserable lives following the "cows." There was nothing to be exploited or turned to ready cash; thus there was nothing in it for the Crown.

  The effect of this was that, although there were several contra bandos or unauthorized expeditions in the following years, Spain officially ignored the Cíbolo-Quivira country for many decades, and abandoned any attempt to colonize the Texas plains for 150 years. The violent, colorful, and cruel entradas into the land were successful explorations, but nothing more. They left a series of romantic accounts and a country dotted with exotic place-names, but, in the 16th century, Spanish ardor implanted no European seed in Texas soil.

  Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a magnificent failure as a conquistador, was relieved of his office of governor and brought to trial on charges of gambling, financial peculations, and "great cruelties upon the natives." The first two charges were patently trumped up, and ridiculous; the third was a crime under Spanish law, but not under the polity of an expanding Spain. A royal audiencia acquitted Coronado of all charges, and permitted him to die in bitter and disappointed peace.

  In 1598, when the memory of Coronado's rape of the upper Rio Grande was only a legend among the Puebloans, the Adelantado Don Juan de Oñate, future Governor and Captain-General of the province of New Mexico, which he officially named while pausing at the site of present El Paso, again carried Spanish power north. Again, Spanish armor, banners, crucifixes, and swords came into the land. Oñate repeated much of Coronado's old explorations, but he brought something new. Old Mexico was relatively "pacified" now, and Spanish civilization was creeping north, following the path of Indian corn thousands of years before. Four hundred soldiers and priests accompanied Oñate, the first to catch Indios and the second to Christianize them; but far more important, 130 families of soldiers went along. This was to be a permanent colonization, to set a Spanish peasantry in North American soil.

  Most important of all, though Oñate could not have known it, were the seven thousand domestic animals in his train, which included three hundred Spanish colts and mares. Oñate was introducing European cattle, and the Spanish mustang, to the Great Plains.

  The long history of the brutal conquest of the Puebloan tribes, the founding of Santa Fé and numerous missions, the dotting of the New Mexican country along the upper Rio Grande with Spanish villages and ranchos, the great revolt of the missionized Indians in 1680, and the hideous reconquest in the 1690s by Vargas, which implanted a stultified Mexican-Spanish culture, half Christian, half Indian, upon New Mexico for centuries, had little importance to the development of Texas. Oñate's introduction of horse herds in the Southwest did.

  Because the Puebloan cultures were fixed to the soil, and the gardening Indians were already bound to labor, the Spanish conquest was feasible and relatively successful. Puebloans, unlike the more savage tribes, allowed themselves to be captured, and also to be enslaved, either by the friars at the missions or by rancheros who needed hands. Oñate himself, however, turned up something ominous when he ventured out on the Plains to the east. The Spanish struck a war party of Wichitas, and although the armored, mounted Europeans won through a bloody battle, the Wichitas neither surrendered nor showed any fear of Spanish might. They could be killed, but not, like the Puebloans, easily cowed. The only real advantage the Spaniards enjoyed over these more warlike people was the fact that they were mounted; they had both mobility and the terrifying shock of the cavalry charge.

  No historian any longer believes that the entradas left horses among the Indians. Coronado and others lost horses, some of which went wild, and some of which were undoubtedly eaten—but the Indians learned to ride only when a permanent colonization of New Mexico placed a horse culture in close proximity to the High Plains. The Spaniards forced "tame" Indians to tend their horses, and such Indians naturally learned horsemanship. And some escaped into the mountains or plains, and took skills and stolen horses with them. In the first half of the 17th century, both passed into the hands of the Apaches and other tribes. What now happened was an absolute revolution on the Great Plains of North America.

  The hardy Afro-Arabian Spanish mustang was a small, unlovely beast, rarely more than fourteen hands high. It was shaggy, and often looked ill-proportioned—but no horse on earth was more admirably suited to life on the semiarid, grassy mesas. It was incredibly hardy, unbelievably swift, used to little water, and could thrive on a diet of grass alone; the European horse required gentler handling and regular feedings of grain. Thus the bison country and the Spanish mustang were beautifully matched; no region in the world was better suited than the warm Southwestern prairies for such a steed. Either domestically or wild, they multiplied.

  Sometime between 1600 and 1650, the entire horse knowledge of the Spanish was transmitted to the Apache tribes. And something else had happened: while the Spanish and Plains Indians at first were at peace with each other, the ancient feuds of the Apaches and the Puebloans were inherited by the conquerors, now living on the land of, and being the "protectors" of, the Puebloan Indians. In 1659, the appearance of a new, ominous cloud on the Spanish colonial horizon was first recorded—one that all the power of Spain in America never dispelled: Apaches—on horseback—were raiding Spanish-Indian settlements from both the northeast and west. Apache horsemen now could raid fast and far, striking deep into Spanish territory, and then run back to safety on the endless plains before they could be pursued. On one raid alone in the 1650s, Apaches carried off three hundred horses. They also made wholesale incursions on Spanish cattle, which they liked as much as buffalo.

  The authorities of New Mexico mounted many an expedition in reprisal—but out on the vast and unmarked plains of Texas these punitive raids had no success. One expedition penetrated halfway across Texas, without finding Indians, who obviously did not care to be found. Another, ironically, had its own horses stolen and nearly perished. The fearful Spanish ¡Adelante! was one thing to Puebloans or even Aztecs drawn up in ranks on foot with clubs or bows; it was
laughable to Indians who could ride away in all directions. The Spanish war cry ¡Sant'Iago! was swallowed in the vastness of the endless West Texas plateaus.

  For the first time in history, American Indians were equipped to meet European invaders on equal, and even superior, terms, on their own land. The history of the Southwest, so very different from that of Mexico or the English-settled Atlantic coast, was the result. Here, on the edge of mountain and semidesert, Amerinds were to hold out, and even conquer, for three hundred years.

  The Puebloans had survived intermittent Apache warfare for many years, perhaps centuries, but now the conflict reached a new intensity. Apaches did not breed their own horses; with considerable common sense, they came to look upon the Spanish ranchos as a permanent source of supply. Their sudden swoops and raids harried the conquered Puebloans unmercifully. Puebloan villages subject to the Spanish were wiped out. Mission Indians in some localities were exterminated. Caught between Spanish priests who ordered them whipped if they failed to work or ran away and Apaches who tortured and killed them whether they ran or stayed, the Puebloans finally rose in one last, despairing revolt in 1680. One reason was the forced imposition of Christianity and the suppression of their age-old customs, such as the rain dance. More important was the failure of Spanish protection.

  The Spanish fled the upper Rio Grande amid scenes of massacre and horror; only eleven priests and about 2,000 Europeans escaped. They left many thousands of sheep, cattle, and horses behind. The Puebloans had no need for horses, and the evidence is that these herds were traded to, or seized by, marauding Indians from the north and east. When the Spanish, ten years later, returned with fire, sword, burning stake, and smallpox, not only were the horses gone but many of the southern Pueblo villages were already wiped out by Apache terror.

  On their vengeful return, the Spanish pragmatically solved the religious problem by closing their eyes to Amerind religious customs practiced alongside the Mass; the majority of the Pueblo tribes were thus never fully Christianized. Apachería, however, as they called the dread stretches away from the Rio Grande, could not be handled so simply. The ironic fact was that it was not the European Spaniards but another American Indian people who destroyed the power of the Eastern Apaches, drove them from the plains, and pushed the Western Apaches deep into the mountains of Arizona.

  With the great horse dispersal of 1680, all the Texas tribes had learned about horses; the knowledge reached the Caddo country. But the knowledge, and the use, spread. A generation later, certainly by 1750, mounted Indians were common as far north as Saskatchewan in Canada. The seat of the horse culture, however, remained in the Southwest, near the Spanish ranchos on the edge of the Texas plains. Like a magnet, this area began to draw Amerind tribes, who heard of the new wealth to the south. In the year 1705 the first Utes appeared from out of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, begging horses from the Spanish. With these Utes came a few representatives of another mountain tribe—who, significantly, stole a horse herd before they left, and thus rode victoriously away, and into bloody history.

  The mountain Utes called these people by a word meaning "enemy." They called themselves The Human Beings. They were alien to the Southwest, speaking Shoshone, the language of the Rocky Mountains of the north; they lived somewhere beyond the headwaters of the Arkansas, in old Wyoming. They were a poor tribe, fruit- and berry-pickers, wanderers, and living off the scant game of the eastern Rockies. Their life was probably better than that of the Coahuiltecans in only small degree, and it was undoubtedly made worse by the bitter winters.

  The designation in the universal Plains sign language for these people was a backward, wriggling movement of the index finger, meaning "snake." The Spanish did not call them the Snake People, but named them from the Ute word Komantcia, or Comanches.

  The horse made the Apaches infinitely more dangerous to the Spanish frontier, but it completely revolutionized the entire life of the Comanches. They took to horseback as few people in history ever did; they not only rode, they made a fetish of the horse; man, woman, and child virtually lived in the saddle. Like certain other tribes that had lived on the fringes of the Great Plains—Dakotas, Cheyennes, Crows, Kiowas—they abandoned their old homelands and moved out on the plains themselves. The horse gave them freedom to become completely nomadic and follow the buffalo on its peregrinations; the buffalo gave them complete economic freedom. It became their food and clothing, meat and drink. Buffalo carcasses, hides, and bones, even buffalo chips, supplied everything the Plains Indian's primitive culture required, except the horse itself. Ironically, despite the popular belief, the horse created certain economic problems for the Comanche tribes. Horses became wealth, the only medium of value or exchange the Indians knew, and the Comanches never completely settled the growing problems of horse dowries and above all, horse inheritance, before their extinction on the plains. Understandably, the Comanches became the greatest horse thieves of them all, a palm universally granted them by every other tribe.

  The Comanches had never planted a seed, and they departed their cold mountain meadows—a country of incredible beauty but equal harshness for primitive people trying to eke a living from it—with no signs of regret. Instead, they gloried in their horses, and in the Plains. The new horse culture was intoxicating, for both the hunt and war. Astride a fleet horse, the skulking hunter and berry-picker now had both freedom and power. The horse gave many Amerind tribes a deep sense of pride and superiority, but apparently no people absorbed this feeling more thoroughly than the Comanches.

  Now, bands could gallop across the vast plains in the full panoply of war, or thunder alongside the fleeing buffalo herds, killing prime animals at will. Mounted, with horse-drawn travois, the entire tribe could take to the plains, follow the bison winter and summer, and live permanently, exhilaratingly, on the move. The new culture, the new technique, as so often happens, was now exploited not by tribes who had lived with one foot on the plains, but by people who had no vested interest in their old way of life. Utes and Wichitas and Apaches learned to ride; Comanches came to live on horseback.

  The Comanche horse culture was assiduously copied from the Spanish. The Indians mounted from the right, a habit the Spaniards had acquired from the Moors; they used crude replicas of Spanish bits, bridles, and saddles, made of bison hide. The only new—and deadly—development of the Comanches was the adoption of a thong by which a warrior could drop over the side of his horse while thundering in the circling charge, concealing and protecting himself from an enemy's shaft or bullet.

  No one, not even the scientists who study them, knows why human cultures develop in certain ways, and diverge along strikingly different lines. All peoples seem to start at one time with about the same potential; yet, even within subspecies of man, development rarely follows a similar path. Anthropologists call these differences "cultures" and let it go at that. The possibilities for cultural difference have been proven infinite, and climate or habitat is not determining, only limiting. Men make cultural choices by band, tribe, and nation, then live or die by them.

  Some cultures make fatal, if logical, mistakes. The Apaches had acquired a taste for beans and corn, and even after the coming of the horse, they continued to live in their comfortable rancherias beside rivers and streams. They sent warriors out to hunt the buffalo, but the tribes themselves did not cast loose their territorial anchors and move into the sea of grass. And now once again, just as when the fearsome Eastern Apaches had come upon the nascent Puebloan culture of Texas like a deadly plague, there were bloody scenes of cultural life and death on the High Plains.

  The stunted Comanches—they were always the shortest and smallest of Texas tribes—reveled in new riches. There was suddenly meat for all, a never-ending supply of food that only need be ridden down. A chief or strong warrior who had had one woman now could take two, or three, or four. There were few hungry winters, and no more infanticide. The dozen Comanche bands swelled. Soon each could mount five hundred or more warriors, and they pus
hed south toward the richest prize of all—the southern bison plains.

  They brushed certain other tribes, Wichitas and Pawnees, out of their way. Hardened by this skirmishing, the Comanches rode south, away from the Eastern Rockies, following the herds and the sun, driving deep into Apachería.

  The Comanche hordes debouched on the Texas plains around the year 1725. They came like a thunderbolt; one historian compared them with the mounted hordes of Genghis Khan. Man, woman, and child, they were among the finest horsemen ever known. They were armed with the long Plains lance and bison-hide shield, hard enough to turn a musket ball, and they could fire a shower of arrows with deadly accuracy from the gallop. There were probably more Eastern Apaches in those days than Comanches, but the Athapaskans were fragmented, and worse, they lived in scattered, semipermanent villages. Comanches rode to war by the light of the moon; their favorite tactic was to strike deep into enemy territory, two or even three hundred miles or more away, kill, despoil, take prisoners, and gallop back to the trackless plains.

  Indian wars are sometimes thought of as a sort of game, courage rites in which not much damage was ever done. Since Amerind society was not highly organized anywhere, its warfare could not be highly organized or regimented, either. Like all warfare, it developed customs and taboos, such as counting coups (touching an armed enemy in battle), taking scalps, and assessing the portents of one's "medicine," or luck. But this did not mean it was not vicious or bloody, or not fought for a basic purpose: to kill or despoil the enemy with the least damage to oneself, and to assume control of the hunting grounds, or land. The sum of a hundred small war parties in Apachería was the same as the result of pitched battles in Europe: someone won, someone lost, some people died or were driven away, some tribe took over the richest ground.