COLONIAL TRIFECTA.

Byline: CRAIG SMITH 

Craig Smith

The New Mexican

What's in a date? Quite a bit, when you're talking about a city's birthday anniversary. With Santa Fe's 400th coming up, discussions, arguments, and scholarly disputes have gone back and forth as to just when La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis was well and truly founded -- 1608, 1609, 1610, or perhaps even another year.

This discussion has been going on for a long time, but the rushing arrival of a multicentury anniversary has given it new stress. The sticky point is how to define "founding." Does it mean when the first explorers' footsteps came through here, as opposed to those of indigenous Pueblo inhabitants? Is it the point when colonists reached a certain number? Does it mark the date of the construction of the first building, no matter how ramshackle? Or, perhaps, it's the date on a formal viceroyal document permitting people to exploit as well as explore?

Santa Fe isn't alone in the multicentury birthday business: Jamestown, Virginia, celebrated its 400th in 2007 and Quebec, Canada, began celebrating earlier this month. The founding dates of both those cities, however, have been accepted without much dispute. All three sites are commemorated in the exhibit Jamestown, Quebec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings, which opens at the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History on Sunday, Oct. 26. Organized by the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and the Virginia Historical Society, it presents the artifacts, conflicts, and compromises that developed between each area's Native peoples and the colonizing representatives of England, Spain, and France.

The exhibit, according to its catalog of essays, discusses the three places from an analytical view rather than in terms of pure chronology. It also considers the European settling of North America as an unsettling of Native peoples due to battle, diaspora, and disease. And it explores how the exchange of people and ideas between Europe, Africa, South America, and North America embroiled cultures and lives in the three anniversary cities.

Pasatiempo spoke to James Kelly, director of the Virginia Historical Society and the exhibit's co-curator, by phone at his office in Richmond.

Pasatiempo: A show built around three notable anniversaries of three notable North American cities -- how did the idea come about?

James Kelly: We, of course, wanted to do something for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown in 2007. I knew, on the other hand, that most of the museums in Jamestown would want to keep their own things for 2007. So I wondered how we might make it work.

Then I thought of Quebec being founded in 1608, then of Santa Fe. The date I always associated with you folks was 1610, the date of the Palace of the Governors. I thought, what a pity it couldn't be 1609. I ended up contacting the Palace, and they said, "Well, we date it from the document signed in March 1609," which marked the official award of the status of villa. So we had the three years.

Then we hired David Weber from SMU [Southern Methodist University in Dallas] to write the Santa Fe essay, and he holds for 1608 for the founding! We, as a historic institution, deferred to our sister institution and acknowledged the different dates in the exhibition and the catalog book. We figured there would be argument, so we put that caveat in there.

What really surprised people here in Virginia was that New Mexico, regardless of Santa Fe, dates from 1598, which is nine years before Virginia or Jamestown.

Pasa: You have devoted a lot of discussion to how the indigenous people of each place interacted with the colonists.

Kelly: It's a basic part of the story of Jamestown and Quebec that in both of those places the indigenous peoples rapidly recede in the face of European immigration. In Quebec, there was a straightforward attempt to convert them to be good French Catholic peasants. In Virginia, they [the settlers] went to war pretty quickly against them.

In Mexico and later up in [what became] New Mexico, the Native presence remained much more dominant through the whole period we discuss and even today is demographically much more significant. There was a much more extended cultural exchange that led to the sustainability of a multicultural society in New Mexico.

Pasa: Some of the cultural exchanges came out in art and music, I know.

Kelly: We have some reference to that -- of paintings done by Mexican artists of mixed indigenous and African ancestry, who produced these straightforward, counter-Reformation Baroque paintings for various missions in New Mexico. One painting in the exhibit, among the most remarked on in the Virginia and Canada showings [of the exhibit], is a painting of St. Anthony of Padua on a buffalo skin: a straight counter-Reformation image taken from a print source, a book. The imagery is northern European, but the medium is traditional indigenous. Pottery in New Mexico is another example, where the pueblos had their own long-standing tradition of ceramics but certain new forms were adopted: bowls, chamber pots, spoons.

Cultural interchanges happened in the other colonies. Here [in Virginia], John Smith makes mention early on of the tomahawk as an Indian weapon. But it wasn't too long before Europeans realized that traipsing around Virginia with swords dangling from your waists, like gentlemen in London, wasn't such a good idea. They adapted the tomahawk as a weapon, and later it became also a fancy piece of decoration, with silverwork and so on.

Pasa: What about slavery, bondservants, and similar forced relationships between Natives and newcomers? Did the indigenous people have similar interactions between tribes?

Kelly: I'm not an expert on all three of the cultures, so I'm hesitant to say categorically. Some form of bondage existed in these [Native] societies, but it was usually the taking of prisoners in war. Often in North American societies, the men were killed [in or after battle] and the women and children often adopted into the other tribes. They were sometimes held as slaves for a period of time, but it wasn't a hereditary thing or particularly based on any racial history.

The Spanish, even when they were told by the crown in 1673 that people shouldn't be held in slavery, the rule was often honored in the breach rather than the observance. They developed other forms of peonage and feudal subordination [than outright slavery], like the encomienda system.

Pasa: Which was, I gather, the crown permitting Spanish settlers to become trustees for Native people.

Kelly: They [the Spanish] didn't usually take Puebloans as slaves, but people like Apaches and Comanches and other peoples who were not commonly under their control, they did. Of the nomadic peoples captured, the men were usually subject to being sent down to the silver mines in Mexico.

One of the fascinating things I learned in this exhibit is that the Pueblo people actually had six or seven different languages. But when they all acquired Spanish or some competency in Spanish as a second language, it allowed them to better coordinate their resistance against the Spanish. There's a great irony to it.

Pasa: The descendants of the original settlers here are very proud of their lineage -- First Families of New Mexico, as well as Virginia.

Kelly: Well, the real First Families of Virginia, the first ones all died! Those who survived, those called the FFV now, were really about the third generation.

Pasa: I presume no one talks about that now, though -- that break in time.

Kelly: Every colony like New Mexico or Virginia develops its own mythology. It is passed down. Usually the most unpleasant parts of it gradually get excised, and American history reflects that.

For example, the Jamestown experience was sort of excised in favor of Plymouth [Massachusetts]. Wasn't it nicer to talk about sitting down with the Indians and sharing their pumpkins at Thanksgiving than talking about what it was like in Virginia, where they were almost going to war from day one, killing each other? Let's talk about Pocahontas as an agent of peace. Let's talk about people stepping onto a rock in Plymouth, not into a marsh in Jamestown.

Instead of being establishmentarians, they were dissenters, and instead of fighting, they were peaceful. It's all over-romanticized. People forget that the Native peoples of New England died away as quickly as people were subjugated in New Mexico.

Pasa: I hadn't realized these colonies all started as business deals.

Kelly: They all started out as private ventures. In the case of New Mexico, that was Juan de Onate in 1598. By the time Santa Fe was founded, he realized he was not going to make any money and wanted to pull out. But by 10 years into it, the missionaries said, "We can't leave, we'll lose all these souls we've converted." The king was persuaded to fund it, so New Mexico started as a bailout.

They [the English] tried to settle Roanoke Island in South Carolina in 1607, but they eventually failed. It was a stock company, an investment scheme, and it lasted 17 years. In 1624, it went out of business and it became a royal colony. Henri IV of France didn't have any money to spare for Quebec; no king did. He wanted to have a colony in the New World, so he gave a private monopoly to fur traders in 1604. Quebec was founded in 1608. It was all a start-up company until 1663, when Louis XIV took it over. But really it had become a royal colony in 1635 when Champlain died. Cardinal Richelieu made it one.

Details

+Jamestown, Quebec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings

Sunday, Oct. 26; exhibit through March 29, 2009

Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, 2000 Mountain Road N.W.

$4, $3 New Mexico residents, $2 seniors 65, $1 children 4-12; no charge to children under 3, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sundays & first Wednesday of every month; 505-243-7255

+Barbara Clark Smith lecture, "New Perspectives on North America - the Views from Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe"

3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 25

St. Francis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, 107 W. Palace Ave.

No charge, 476-5072

1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 26, Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, 2000 Mountain Road N.W.

By museum admission, 505-243-7255

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16-0-what?

David Weber, who wrote the Santa Fe essay for the Jamestown, Quebec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings exhibit catalog, notes that Santa Fe's origins are the most obscure of all three sites. Nonetheless, he dates the city from 1608, when Juan Martinez de Montoya and a small group of people established "a tiny settlement at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at a place they named Santa Fe, after their holy faith."

The next year, the viceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco, referred to the place by name when he sent Pedro de Peralta to found a villa -- a class of town one step below a ciudad -- at "the site where settlers in New Mexico had already begun to build the new community at Santa Fe, some fifteen hundred miles north of Mexico City, the viceregal capital," Weber writes.

He also notes that while Spanish explorers had been in the region since the 1540s, when Coronado came searching for the cities of gold, "Santa Fe was the first town in the province that they built from the ground up." But many New Mexico scholars hold 1609 as the city's establishment date, since the formal decree authorizing Peralta to found the villa dates from March 30 of that year. Others support 1610, which is the year noted on the city's first charter. In an attempt at ensuring or enforcing collegiality, local celebrations will run from 2008 through 2010, thus taking in all three possibilities.

One of the interesting things about this exhibit is that it explains that early New Mexico ventures, like those in Jamestown and Quebec, were funded by private money. Explorations were horribly expensive and dangerous, but the potential reward was great. In time all three colonies were taken over by the royal governments, but even then, appointed viceroys or governors stood to make immense wealth from their posts.

According to Weber, the permanent occupation of New Mexico began in 1598 when Onate took about 130 soldiers, and their wives and families, to settle at Ohke, now Ohkay Owingeh. Two years later, with additional Spanish settlers and their indigenous servants, they moved across the Rio Grande to settle Yunge. By the time Peralta arrived in Santa Fe, Onate had spent half a million pesos from his family's mining fortune in a vain attempt to glean wealth from New Mexico.

Thus, Weber writes,"What had been a colony funded and administered by a licensed private entrepreneur, or adelantado, with a lifetime appointment (what the English would call a proprietor) became a royal colony headed by governors on the king's payroll with limited terms in office. The crown knew that remote New Mexico would be a nightmare to maintain. ... Rather than offend God, the crown invested ninety pesos for every peso New Mexico produced in revenue in the decade that followed."

When Peralta arrived with orders to establish a villa, he found plenty of natural resources. Weber notes, "Indeed, the fertile area in and around Santa Fe had attracted generations of Pueblo people and their predecessors, but happily for Peralta no Native settlement remained on the site. Since royal orders forbade Spaniards from building towns that displaced indigenous people, Peralta could proceed with a clear conscience."

Weber's essay, like the others in the catalog, seems to be a fine piece of studied scholarship. Certain of his statements might annoy local traditionalists.

For example, he writes of San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, "Claims that it is the oldest non-Native place of worship in what is now the United States have not withstood archaeological scrutiny. Although it occupies a seventeenth-century site, its walls and wood date from 1710. Several of New Mexico's mission churches are older, including those at the pueblos of Isleta and ccoma. The church of San Miguel is, however, the oldest church in Santa Fe."

Weber also agrees with other scholars who refute another popular belief: that the 1692 reconquest of Santa Fe, after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, was "bloodless." He cites information that shows some 70 Pueblo Revolt leaders were executed during and after the reoccupation and that resistance continued through 1694 and erupted again in 1696.

-- Craig Smith

CAPTION(S):

See pdf's for exact rendition, caption, graphics and photographer info.