Juan de Oñate

Juan de Oñate y Salazar (* 1550 in Pánuco , Zacatecas , Mexico ; † June 3, 1626 in Guadalcanal , Spain ) was a Spanish conquistador , explorer, colonial governor of the province of New Mexico in the Vice Kingdom of New Spain and founder of settlements in the southwest of today's USA .

Equestrian statue of Juan de Oñates in Alcalde

biography

Oñate was born the son of Spanish- Basque colonists and owner of a silver mine in Zacatecas (state) in what is now Mexico. His father was the conquistador and silver baron Cristóbal de Oñate , his mother Doña Catalina Salazar y de la Cadena. During the Reconquista , his ancestor from the Cadena family took part in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in Spain in 1212 and was the first to break through the line of defense of the Almohads . His family, who were subsequently granted a coat of arms, has since been known as the Cadenas. Juan de Oñate married Isabel de Tolosa Cortés de Moctezuma, granddaughter of Hernán Cortés , the conqueror of Mexico, and Tecuichpoch , daughter of the Aztec Tlatoani Moctezuma II. With her he fathered two children, Juan de Oñate Cortés and Maria de Oñate Cortés.

On September 21, 1595 he received the Capitulación from the Spanish King Felipe II , the order to colonize the areas north of the colony of New Spain. Its declared aim was to spread the Roman Catholic faith by establishing new Spanish missions in what is now New Mexico . He began his expedition in April 1598 with the crossing of the Río Grande near today's El Paso and claimed all of New Mexico across the river for Spain.

In the summer he continued his expedition along the Río Grande to what is now northern New Mexico, where he settled in the neighborhood of the Pueblo indigenous people . He founded the province of Santa Fé de Nuevo México and became the first provincial governor. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá , a captain of his expedition, wrote the chronicle of his conquest of the indigenous peoples in his book Historia de la Nueva México in 1610 .

Battle of Acoma

Oñate quickly acquired the reputation of a strict commander both towards the Spanish colonists and the Indians. In October 1598, a skirmish broke out when Oñate led four hundred Spanish soldiers and settlers north from Mexico, demanding supplies from the Acoma that were vital to the Acoma's winter survival. The Acoma put up resistance, with twelve Spaniards dying in battle, including Juan Oñate's nephew, while another Spaniard fell from a mountain. Oñate then dispatched a retaliatory squad in January 1599 under the orders of the brother of the slain nephew. His order was: "Leave no stone unturned. The Indians are never allowed to inhabit this as an impregnable fortress" . In the massacre that followed, around 800 Indians were killed, including women and children; their village (pueblo) was completely torched and devastated. The approx. 500 to 600 survivors were rounded up by the Soldateska and brought to justice. Oñate even granted them a lawyer and the right to testify. Five of them said that his nephew and his troops had immodestly asked for food and blankets without being able to get enough of them. They were then killed. The Spanish defender asked Oñate for mercy "bearing in mind that they are barbarians" .

"For men over twenty-five years old, I give the following verdict: their foot will be chopped off and they will spend twenty years in personal service" - which meant nothing more than their enslavement by a Spanish soldier. Male residents between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and females over the age of twelve were also enslaved for twenty years. Two Hopis , who had taken part in the fighting on the side of the Acomas, had their right hand cut off and released, "so that they could carry the news of this punishment back home." As a further deterrent, the mutilations were carried out in public on different days and locations. Eighty men had their left foot amputated, twenty-four according to other accounts.

The first onate expedition

Oñate embarked on a long expedition to the Great Plains in 1601 . In his entourage were 130 Spanish soldiers, 12 Franciscan monks, as in the expedition to conquer the Aztec Empire , 130 indigenous warriors and servants and 350 horses and mules. He was guided by Jusepe Gutiérrez , an Indian who six years earlier was the only one who had survived the expedition of Antonio Gutiérrez de Umana and Francisco Leyba de Bonilla.

Oñate traveled east of New Mexico across the plains to find Quivira again . As with Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's march fifty years earlier, he met Apaches in the Texas Panhandle . He moved further east along the Canadian River to Oklahoma . Leaving the river behind in a sandy area that could not be passed by his team of oxen, he turned across the country through the arid land, where it became greener with walnut trees and oaks.

Jusepe Gutiérrez led Oñate possibly on the same route that he had chosen on the expedition of Gutiérrez de Umana and Leyba de Bonilla. He estimated the population at around 5,000 who lived in around 600 houses. They found a camp that Oñate called Escanjaques . The Escanjaques inhabited round houses of about 90 feet in diameter (= about 8 m), which were covered by buffalo skin. According to Oñate, they were hunters who depended almost exclusively on buffalo meat for subsistence and did not grow any grain.

The Escanjaques told Oñate that a large settlement of their enemies, the Rayados , was only about 20 miles away in the region they called Etzanoa . It seems possible that the Escanjaques had gathered in large numbers either out of fear of the Rayados or to go on a campaign. They tried to get the support of the Spaniards with their firearms by blaming the Rayados for the deaths of Umana and Leyba a few years earlier.

The Escanjaques led Oñate a few miles away to a large river, where he was the first European to describe the Tallgrass prairie . He spoke of a fertile land, much better than the one they had last roamed, and such "good pastures that the grass was high enough in many places to hide a horse." He tried a fruit whose name sounded like pawpaw and had good taste.

Near the river, Oñate, his Spaniards and his numerous Escanjaques saw 300 or 400 Rayados on a hill. The Rayados threw earth in the air as a sign that they were ready for war. Oñate quickly gave them to understand that he did not want to fight, but rather to make peace with this group of Rayados, who had proven to be kind and generous. Oñate preferred the Rayados to the Escanjaques. They were "united, peaceful and settled" . They showed deference to their tribal chief named Caratax; Oñate took him hostage but treated him "decently" .

Caratax led Oñate and the Escanjaques across the river to a settlement on the east bank about a mile or two from the river. The settlement was deserted and the inhabitants had fled. It comprised “about 1200 houses, all along the bank of another large river that flows into a large one [the Arkansas] ... The Rayados settlement seemed typical of the Quivira settlement described by Coronado sixty years earlier: the homesteads were spread out, Round houses covered with turf, big enough to hold ten people each, and surrounded by large granaries to store corn , beans and pumpkin that they raised in their fields. ”With difficulty, Oñate prevented the Escanjaques from setting fire to the settlement and sent them on You home.

The next day, Oñate's expedition took them eight miles through densely populated area without seeing many Rayados. At that point the Spaniards lost their courage. Apparently there were many Rayados nearby and the Spanish were warned that the Rayados were rallying an army. Oñates estimated that it would have taken 300 Spanish soldiers to face the Rayados, so he decided to return to New Mexico with his soldiers.

Oñate feared attack by the Rayados, but instead it was the Escanjaques who attacked him early on his way back to New Mexico. Oñate described a 1,500 Escanjaques battle - probably an exaggeration - in which many Spaniards were wounded and many indigenous people were killed. After more than two hours of fighting, Oñate withdrew from the battlefield. The Rayado chief Caratax was freed by an attack on the Spaniards and Oñate freed several slaves, but at the request of the Spanish priests he held back several slaves so that they could be instructed in the Catholic faith. The reason for the attack may have been the kidnapping of women and children.

Oñate's troop returned to New Mexico on November 24, 1601 without further incident of note.

The path taken by Oñates' expedition and the identity of the Escanjaques and Rayados are in dispute. Most scholars believe his route took him along the Canadian River from Texas to Oklahoma, across country to the Salt Fork Arkansas River , where he found the Escanjaque encampment, and then along the Arkansas River and its tributary, the Walnut River near Arkansas City, Kansas ) , where the Rayado settlement was located. A minority sees the Escanjaque camp on the Ninnescah River and the Rayado settlement at what is now Wichita, Kansas . Archaeological evidence supports the site on the Walnut River.

Scholars have speculated whether the Escanjaques were Apaches, Tonkawa , Jumano , Quapaw , Kansa, or other tribes. Most likely they were Caddoan , who spoke a Wichita dialect. The Rayados, however, are almost certainly Caddoan Wichitas. Their grasshouses, their scattered way of settling, a chief named Catarax, a Wichitat title, the description of their crops and their location all agree with Coronado's earlier description of the Quivirians. Still, they're not the same people that Coronado met. Coronado found Quivira 120 miles north of Oñates Rayados. The Rayados spoke of a large settlement called Tancoa - perhaps the real name of Quivira - in that northern area. Accordingly, the Rayados would be culturally and linguistically linked to the Quiviran, but did not belong to the same political unit. The Wichita were not united at the time, but a large number of tribes lived scattered across what is now the states of Kansas and Oklahoma . It is not implausible that the Rayados and Escanjaques spoke the same language but were enemies nonetheless.

The second Oñate Espedition

Oñate's last major expedition took him west from New Mexico to the lower reaches of the Colorado River. Three dozen men set out from the Rio Grande Valley in 1604. They took the route past the Zuñi-Pueblos , Hopi-Pueblos and the Bill Williams River to the Colorado, which they followed in January 1605 to the confluence with the Gulf of California before returning to New Mexico on the same route. The obvious reason for the expedition was to find a port that could be used to supply New Mexico as an alternative to the arduous overland route from New Spain .

This expedition to the lower Colorado River was significant as it was the only recorded European intrusion into the region between the expeditions of Hernando de Alarcón and Melchior Díaz (1540) and the visits of Eusebio Francisco Kino (1701). The explorers saw no evidence of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla , which appears in the Salton Sink shortly thereafter . The mistake that the Gulf of California somehow continued to the northwest gave rise to the seventeenth-century belief that California was an island.

Oñate reported on indigenous groups who lived on the lower reaches of the Colorado River. The historical settlement areas can be derived from his description, some of which differ from the territorial claims of the peoples in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Mohave and Bahacecha lived from north to south . The Osera made their home at the mouth of the Gila River in Colorado, a position that was later occupied by the Quechan . The Halchidhoma were seen from Oñate below the mouth of the Gila, but were later reported further upstream, in an area that Oñate described as being inhabited by the Coguana or the Kahwans, Agalle and Agalecquamaya or Halyikwamai and the Cocopah .

About such areas, which the explorers had not experienced directly, they reported fantastic races of human monsters and a fabulous wealth of gold, silver and pearls.

Later life and inheritance

Inscription Oñates on El Morro National Monument (1605)

In 1606 Oñate was called back to Mexico City to question his rule. After completing plans to found the city of Santa Fé , he resigned and was charged with cruelty to Indians and colonists. Sentenced to life in exile from the colony of Nuevo México he founded, he was acquitted of all charges on appeal . Eventually he returned to Spain, where the Spanish king appointed him head of all Spanish mine inspectors. He died in Spain in 1626. Occasionally he is referred to as the "last conquistador".

Oñate is honored by some for his exploratory expeditions, by others reviled for his cruelty towards the Acoma Pueblo. In the Oñate Monument Visitors Center on the northern outskirts of Alcalde northeast of Espanola is located since 1991 a bronze statue in honor of this man. Approx. The figure of a heroic-looking rider, modeled on Marcus Aurelius in Rome and resting on a high plinth, rises 3.50 m and forces practically everyone passing by on the highway to look up. In 1998, New Mexico celebrated the 400th anniversary of his arrival. In the same year the spurred right foot of the statue was amputated at night as a sign of protest by those who viewed the statue and the celebration as a provocation. They left the message: "Fair is fair" . Although a state police officer lives in a motor home right next to the statue, no one noticed who was making the cut with a saw. Neither the original foot nor the culprit was discovered. The sculptor Reynaldo Rivera poured the foot very skillfully so that the damage is barely noticeable. In an anonymous letter to the newspaper, some commentators explained the mutilation of the statue as a symbolic reminder of the cruel mutilation of "our brothers and sisters" at Acoma. Pueblo Indígenas then started a campaign to pay tribute to a San Juan indigenous, Po'pay , who killed hundreds of Spaniards in the great Pueblo revolt of 1680 and drove them from New Mexico for twelve years.

In 1997, the city of El Paso commissioned sculptor John Sherrill Houser to design a statue for the conquistador. In response to the protests, two city councils withdrew their support for the project. The production of the US $ 2 million statue took almost nine years and was placed in the sculptor's magazine in Mexico City. It was completed in spring 2006. Parts of it were transported to El Paso on flatbed trucks in the summer and set up in October. The controversy over the statue prior to its erection was the subject of the documentary The Last Conquistador , which was screened as part of the Public Broadcasting Service's point-of-view television documentary series in 2008 .

official landscape-historical guide: Paraje de Fra Cristobal

The city of El Paso unveiled the 18 t statue at a ceremony on April 21, 2007. Oñate rides his Andalusian horse, in his right hand the La Toma Declaration, in which the entire territory north of the Río Grande is declared a colony of Spain. This statue was welcomed by parts of the local population and by the Spanish Ambassador to the United States, Carlos Westendorp . According to the sculptor Houser, this is the largest and heaviest (bronze) equestrian statue in the world. Members of the Acoma tribe from New Mexico were present and protested against the statue.

The Oñate High School in Las Cruces, New Mexico and the Oñate Elementary School in Gallup, New Mexico were named after Juan de Oñate.

Web links

Commons : Juan de Oñate  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Juan de Oñate - Short Biography (English)

See also

• List of explorers
• Hernán Cortés

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marc Simmons: The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest , University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1991, p. 30
2. ^ Dan L. Thrapp: Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography: GO , University of Nebraska Press, 1991, p. 1083
3. ↑ Tony Horwitz: The true discoverers of the New World - from the Vikings to the Pilgrim Fathers Pieper Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-25462-5 , p. 225
4. ^ Marc Simmons: The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest , University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1991, p. 145
5. ^ Herbert Eugene Bolton: ed. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 , Charles Scribner's Sons , New York, 1916, pp. 250-267
6. ^ Herbert Eugene Bolton: ed. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 , Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1916, p. 257
7. ^ Herbert Eugene Bolton: ed. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 , Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1916, p. 253
8. ↑ Susan C. Vehik: Wichita Culture History , Anthropologist Plains, Volume 37, No. 141, 1992, 327th
9. ^ Herbert Eugene Bolton: ed. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 , Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1916, p. 264.
10. ↑ Susan C. Vehik: Onate's Expedition to the Southern Plains: Routes, Destinations, and Implications for Late Prehistoric Cultural Adaptations , Plains Anthropologist, Vol. 31, No. 111, 1986, 13-33
11. ^ Marlin F. Hawle: European-contact and Southwestern Artifacts in the lower Walnut Focus Sites at Arkansas City Kansas , Plains Anthropologists, Vol. 45, No. 173, Aug. 2000
12. ↑ Susan C. Vehik: Onate's Expedition to the Southern Plains: Routes, Destinations, and Implications for Late Prehistoric Cultural Adaptations , Plains Anthropologist, Vol. 31, No. 111, 1986, 22-23
13. ↑ George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey: Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico , University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1953; Don Laylander: Geographies of Fact and Fantasy: Oñate on the Lower Colorado River 1604-1605 , Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 4, 2004, 309-324.
14. ^ Marc Simmons: The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest , University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1991, book title
15. ↑ Tony Horwitz: The true discoverers of the New World - from the Vikings to the Pilgrim Fathers Pieper Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-25462-5 , p. 228
16. ↑ Tony Horwitz: The true discoverers of the New World - from the Vikings to the Pilgrim Fathers Pieper Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-25462-5 , p. 229
17. ↑ Tony Horwitz: The true discoverers of the New World - from the Vikings to the Pilgrim Fathers Pieper Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-492-25462-5 , p. 230
18. ^ POV - The Last Conquistador