Discontented Colonists Plead Their Case for Desertion

By Miguel Encinias
For the Journal
By the time Juan de Oñate left for Quivira (Kansas) in June 1601, desertion was a forgone conclusion amongst discontented colonists.
The governor had left San Gabriel with the bulk of his army, so the discontents found themselves in the majority.
Moreover, all of the friars except Father Juan de Escalona, the commissary (head friar), were part of the movement. Escalona condoned abandonment but did not want to jeopardize the Franciscan presence in the province by joining.
With such leverage, the group appealed to Lt. Gov. Francisco Sosa de Penalosa to allow them to conduct a meeting to state their reasons for leaving. The group did not want to be branded as deserters and risk the customary penalty of beheading.
Penalosa was torn between the duty of his office and loyalty to the governor and an understanding of the reasons for the contemplated flight. He decided to allow the meeting but did not in any way participate.
At the meeting held in the church on Sept. 7, 1601, emotions ran high as Father Francisco de San Miguel, the oldest of the friars and confessor to the governor, stated: "Instead of coming to preach the word of God, we Spaniards have blasphemed it... . Our people do not leave anything in their (Indians) houses, nor any living thing, food or anything of value."
Capt. Gregorio Cessar testified that he found the land sterile, lacking in resources to support human life. He added that he believed his family was in danger of perishing.
Many other witnesses made similar complaints.
Escalona, in a letter to the viceroy, was much more critical of the governor:
"The first and foremost difficulty from which have sprung all the evils and ruin of this land is the fact that the conquest was entrusted to a man of such limited resources as don Juan de Oñate. The result was that after he entered the land, his people began to perpetrate many offenses against the natives, and to plunder their pueblos of the corn they had gathered for their own sustenance."
Oñate's loyalists, under the leadership of Capt. Geronimo Marquez and Capt. Alonso Gomez, knowing they lacked sufficient numbers to stop the defectors, also requested a meeting with the lieutenant governor to state their opposition to the planned desertion and to refute the reasons given for it.
In their interrogatory on Oct. 2, 1601, Capt. Cristobal Vaca, who had brought plowshares to New Mexico in the reinforcement expedition that had arrived on Christmas Eve of 1600, testified that conditions were not as bad as those planning to abandon the colony had stated.
The names of the conspirators were brought out for the record by others, who also contradicted what had been said at the Sept. 2 meeting.
On Oct. 5, Marquez left for Mexico City with a small troop to tell the loyalist side of the story.
On Oct. 25, the defectors started heading south.
NEXT: Under the wings of the viceroy.

Miguel Encinias is an Albuquerque historian. His novel, "Two Lives for Oñate," was published this year by the University of New Mexico Press.