The Spanish in New Mexico – Tumacacori and the Salinas Pueblo Missions of Abo, Gran Quivera, and Quarai
March 29th, and April 6, 2024
Hello everyone. As many of you know I have recently returned from a six week road trip to Arizona and New Mexico. Most of those days I camped and so it was nearly impossible to write blog posts to share photos and my impressions of places visited. Out of necessity, my thoughts have now mostly turned to preparing for my upcoming five week trip to northern Scotland and the Orkney and Shetland Islands. That will be quite a different prospect from the Southwest! There will be some similarities though, including visits to many exciting historical and archeological sites, museums, and galleries, as well as plenty of quiet and lonely hikes with spectacular, far-reaching views.
I have decided to squeeze in one post now about my Arizona/New Mexico trip, and I hope to return to my photos, journal entries, and notes in the middle of a cold and wet Vancouver winter to create more posts then, and to warm myself up with desert memories.
About an hour south of Tucson, and close to the Santa Cruz River, one can visit the beautiful and tranquil Tumacacori National Historical Park with its mission church ruins, gardens, trails, and excellent Visitor Centre and museum that shed light on the history of the original inhabitants of this land, the O’odham people, and on the creation of this mission under the Jesuits and then the Franciscans during the often turbulent times of the Spanish exploration, colonization, and governance of “New Mexico”. I arrived right at opening time, 9:00 a.m., on a warm and sunny morning, and had the entire place to myself for a peaceful hour before any other visitors arrived.
The mission church with its white dome, beautiful front facade, and bell tower, was built between 1800 and 1822 by Spanish Franciscan monks and the local O’odham on a site where Jesuit monks first erected a small adobe church in 1757.
I toured the interior of the church which would have been brightly painted and adorned,
and then I walked around the grounds, reading every interpretive sign and trying to imagine life here during those colonial days when two vastly different cultures met, interacted, and co-existed for a time, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not.
I’ve often wondered how the missionary priests, who were an important part of the Spanish occupation, were successful at converting many to a new religion. Part of the answer to my question lies here, I think, in the large (once two-level) storerooms of the mission. The Spanish brought with them metal tools and many kinds of domestic livestock, including horses, sheep, cattle, pigs, goats, chickens, burros and oxen. They also brought seeds for grain, including wheat, rice, barley and rye, and they introduced new vegetables and fruits including apples, peaches, apricots, plums, pears, quince, pomegranates, figs, olives, limas, sour oranges, and grapes. These new food products, hides, wool, beasts of burden, and metal tools must have been very attractive indeed to the established agricultural communities who lived in the fertile Santa Cruz valley.
Next I walked through the beautiful heritage orchard where peach trees (the dark pink blossoms) and apricot trees (white blossoms) were blooming and happy bees were very busy. The planting of this small modern orchard of heritage varieties was inspired during restoration work on the mission church when two ancient peach pits fell out of a crumbling adobe brick! The orchard is located on the site of the former walled mission orchard and garden that covered nearly 5 acres and was irrigated by acequias, stone-lined ditches that brought water from the nearby Santa Cruz river.
I next walked on a trail to the river, through a forest of mesquite, cottonwood and willows, and then I walked for a short ways north on the Anza Trail towards Tubac, four miles to the north, where the Spanish built a military fort in the 1750s to defend against rebellions by some of the O’odham and attacks by the nomadic Apache. The Anza Trail was built to commemorate and follow, as closely as possible, the route taken by Juan Bautista de Anza in 1775-1776 when he and about 240 Spanish colonists, along with a thousand head of cattle, walked north from Sonora Mexico and then roughly northwest to found a mission at San Francisco, California, a journey of some 1200 miles!
After my walk on the trails, I spent time in the excellent small museum and was impressed by a film which featured many O’odham speakers sharing their connections to this place, both past and present, positive and negative. It was a very educational visit that added to my ongoing accumulation of knowledge about the Southwest and its peoples and history.
Just over a week later, this time in New Mexico, I toured the ruins of three more mission villages, the Salinas Pueblos, but not on a lovely warm sunny day like on my visit to Tumacacori. I had spent the previous night camped stealthily in a hotel parking lot in Socorro, having decided to not camp high in the mountains because of a winter storm warning, and that was a good decision as I woke up to tiny snow flakes, coming strangely from a blue sky, and blowing here and there at speed in a strong cold wind. They looked extra-cold somehow! I glanced west towards the mountains where I would have camped and their tops were completely obscured by dark and heavy snow-laden clouds. Brrrr!
After warming up with a fast food breakfast, I drove north and then west some fifty miles to the broad Estancia Basin (known by the Spanish Empire as the Salinas Valley) to arrive at the first of three ruined pueblo missions that comprise the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. Here are the ruins at Abo, where it had definitely snowed the previous night and where the wind was so cold that I had to put on all of my outdoor gear including my rain pants to cut the chill. Sometimes I wish that I produced videos instead of a blog with photos because then you could see and hear that ferocious wind! One visitor, who arrived to the ruins here at dusk in 1853, is quoted as saying, “The cold wind…appeared to roar and howl through the roofless pile like an angry demon.”
Despite the cold, I enjoyed my tour of the site which was a thriving village when the Spaniards first arrived here in 1581. The Spanish would have seen a large pueblo (village) of apartment-like connected homes, work shops, and kivas made of stone and adobe, and they would have encountered people who for centuries had farmed the land, hunted, and engaged in a wide network of trade that included salt, pinon nuts, buffalo meat and hides, flints, shells, and cotton goods. The Tiwa puebloans who lived here were also skilled weavers, basket makers, and potters.
Spanish Franciscan missionaries came to the valley in the 1620s to build a church and to preach to, convert, baptize, organize, and educate the native population. I spoke for a time with a Ranger at the Visitors Centre and at his recommendation I purchased a book called “A Harvest of Reluctant Souls.” It is a translation of a “Memorial”, written in 1630 by the Franciscan priest, Fray Alonso de Benevides, in the form of a letter to King Philip IV of Spain, in which he describes the various indigenous tribes throughout New Mexico. It is a fascinating first hand account of the inhabitants, landscapes, and resources of this land as well as of the work of the missionaries. There is much to be learned from his Memorial but one has to be mindful of his purpose for writing. He is petitioning the King of Spain for more missionaries, more supplies, and more security in order to continue the work of converting the indigenous population to Christianity. He refers often to how the conversion of each individual to the Catholic faith will help ensure the King’s own ascent into heaven. More earthly concerns are also at play as he describes the mineral wealth of the region and as he writes of recent conversions (at Jemez pueblo), “Your Majesty may still count here on more than three thousand newly assembled taxpayers.”
From Abo, I then drove the 35 miles south to visit Gran Quivera. The drive was beautiful, with the quiet highway passing through rolling sage- and juniper-dotted grasslands, scattered here and there with ranches, and with views of the snow-dusted Manzano Mountains to the west.
Gran Quivera was the largest of the Salinas pueblos despite its exposed position on a ridge and the absence of any nearby springs or streams. And yes, the wind here was still fierce and very cold. Of Gran Quivera, known to the Spanish as Las Humanas, Fray Benevides wrote, “It is a poor land, due to its frightful coldness and little water.”
The people here, though, were resourceful and additional water was accessed and stored using wells, roof-fed cisterns, and hollowed out shallow rock basins on a north-facing slope that would catch rain water. The agriculture practiced here was dryland farming of maize, squash and beans and was dependent on rains. Piñon nuts, yucca, prickly pear and other plants were gathered in the surrounding area, and rabbits, deer, pronghorn and bison were hunted. Gran Quivera was also a centre of trade between the settled peoples of the Rio Grande Valley and the nomadic Plains tribes.
The Spanish missionaries built a church and associated buildings here in the mid 1630s and again in the 1660s, but there was not a resident priest at this pueblo. Rather, visiting priests from other missions routinely travelled here to build, preach, teach, oversee, and organize. Many hidden kivas were found during excavations of this site. During the first years of contact, the Puebloans’ traditional ceremonial events and dances, held in circular kivas, were tolerated by the Spanish missionaries, but by the 1660s new Church directives attempted to force converts to abandon their traditional religious practices.
From Gran Quivera, I retraced my route north and continued on to Quarai, the third of the Salinas Pueblo Missions. Here are the ruins of the mission church and its “convento” buildings (kitchen, refectory, store rooms, and sleeping quarters for mission workers), likely constructed in the late 1620s and early 1630s.
Here again, the complex stories of contact, occupation, change, conversion, cooperation, coercion, and conflict unfolded. By the 1670s the Puebloans of Quarai, Abo, and Gran Quivera had begun to abandon their villages due to several years of severe drought, famine, and recurring deadly epidemics to which the native population had little resistance. Many moved to the Rio Grande Valley, or south to El Paso where they joined other Pueblo communities. Some resettlement and reconstruction took place at Quivera in the 1800s by the Spanish, but time and nature eventually took control at each of the abandoned missions, destroying roofs, felling walls, and covering foundations, until modern times when archaeologists, the Parks Service, and local indigenous advisors* brought these places to light again, if not to life.
*Certainly in the case of Tumacacori, but I don’t know about the Salinas Pueblos.
It’s difficult to impart only a few details of the long, complex, and important history of these highly evocative places. I learned many things during my visits to Tumacacori and the Salinas Pueblos, but I also left with many questions. As I headed north towards Albuquerque, somewhat tired and chilled from a long day out in the wind, but also feeling very happy and grateful, I looked forward to continuing my journey and to learning more about the peoples, history, and landscapes of the beautiful state of New Mexico.
