The Spanish Pioneers Part 7

[15] p.r.o.nounced Veel-yah-grahn.

VI.

THE PIONEER MISSIONARIES.

To pretend to tell the story of the Spanish pioneering of the Americas without special attention to the missionary pioneers, would be very poor justice and very poor history. In this, even more than in other qualities, the conquest was unique. The Spaniard not only found and conquered, but converted. His religious earnestness was not a whit behind his bravery. As has been true of all nations that have entered new lands,--and as we ourselves later entered this,--his first step had to be to subdue the savages who opposed him. But as soon as he had whipped these fierce grown-children, he began to treat them with a great and n.o.ble mercy,--a mercy none too common even now, and in that cruel time of the whole world almost unheard of. He never robbed the brown first Americans of their homes, nor drove them on and on before him; on the contrary, he protected and secured to them by special laws the undisturbed possession of their lands for all time. It is due to the generous and manly laws made by Spain three hundred years ago, that our most interesting and advanced Indians, the Pueblos, enjoy to-day full security in their lands; while nearly all others (who never came fully under Spanish dominion) have been time after time ousted from lands our government had solemnly given to them.

That was the beauty of an Indian policy which was ruled, not by politics, but by the unvarying principle of humanity. The Indian was first required to be obedient to his new government. He could not learn obedience in everything all at once; but he must at least refrain from butchering his new neighbors. As soon as he learned that lesson, he was insured protection in his rights of home and family and property. Then, as rapidly as such a vast work could be done by an army of missionaries who devoted their lives to the dangerous task, he was educated to citizens.h.i.+p and Christianity. It is almost impossible for us, in these quiet days, to comprehend what it was to convert a savage half-world. In our part of North America there have never been such hopeless tribes as the Spaniards met in Mexico and other southern lands. Never did any other people anywhere complete such a stupendous missionary work. To begin to understand the difficulties of that conversion, we must look into an appalling page of history.

Most Indians and savage peoples have religions as unlike ours as are their social organizations. There are few tribes that dream of one Supreme Being. Most of them wors.h.i.+p many G.o.ds,--"G.o.ds" whose attributes are very like those of the wors.h.i.+pper; "G.o.ds" as ignorant and cruel and treacherous as he. It is a ghastly thing to study these religions, and to see what dark and revolting qualities ignorance can deify. The merciless G.o.ds of India, who are supposed to delight in the crus.h.i.+ng of thousands under the wheels of Juggernaut, and in the sacrificing of babes to the Ganges, and in the burning alive of girl-widows, are fair examples of what the benighted can believe; and the horrors of India were fully paralleled in America. The religions of our North American Indians had many astounding and dreadful features; but they were mild and civilized compared with the hideous rites of Mexico and the southern lands. To understand something of what the Spanish missionaries had to combat throughout America, aside from the common danger, let us glance at the condition of affairs in Mexico at their coming.

The Nahuatl, or Aztecs, and similar Indian tribes of ancient Mexico, had the general pagan creed of all American Indians, with added horrors of their own. They were in constant blind dread of their innumerable savage G.o.ds,--for to them everything they could not see and understand, and nearly everything they could, was a divinity. But they could not conceive of any such divinity as one they could love; it was always something to be afraid of, and mortally afraid of. Their whole att.i.tude of life was one of dodging the cruel blows of an unseen hand; of placating some fierce G.o.d who could not love, but might be bribed not to destroy. They could not conceive a real creation, nor that _anything_ could be without father and mother: stones and stars and winds and G.o.ds had to be born the same as men. Their "heaven," if they could have understood such a word, was crowded with G.o.ds, each as individual and personal as we, with greater powers than we, but with much the same weaknesses and pa.s.sions and sins. In fact, they had invented and arranged G.o.ds by their own savage standards, giving them the powers they themselves most desired, but unable to attribute virtues they could not understand. So, too, in judging what would please these G.o.ds, they went by what would please themselves. To have b.l.o.o.d.y vengeance on their enemies; to rob and slay, or be paid tribute for not robbing and slaying; to be richly dressed and well fed,--these, and other like things which seemed to them the highest personal ambitions, they thought must be likewise pleasing to "those above." So they spent most of their time and anxiety in buying off these strange G.o.ds, who were even more dreaded than savage neighbors.

Their ideas of a G.o.d were graphically expressed in the great stone idols of which Mexico was once full, some of which are still preserved in the museums. They are often of heroic size, and are carved from the hardest stone with great painstaking, but their faces and figures are indescribably dreadful. Such an idol as that of the grim Huitzilopochtli was as horrible a thing as human ingenuity ever invented, and the same grotesque hideousness runs through all the long list of Mexican idols.

These idols were attended with the most servile care, and dressed in the richest ornaments known to Indian wealth. Great strings of turquoise,--the most precious "gem" of the American aborigines,--and really precious mantles of the brilliant feathers of tropic birds, and gorgeous sh.e.l.ls were hung lavishly upon those great stone nightmares.

Thousands of men devoted their lives to the tending of the dumb deities, and humbled and tortured themselves unspeakably to please them.

But gifts and care were not enough. Treachery to his friends was still to be feared from such a G.o.d. He must still further be bought off; everything that to an Indian seemed valuable was proffered to the Indian's G.o.d, to keep him in good humor. And since human life was the most precious thing an Indian could understand, it became his most important and finally his most frequent offering. To the Indian it seemed no crime to take a life to please a G.o.d. He had no idea of retribution after death, and he came to look upon human sacrifice as a legitimate, moral, and even divine inst.i.tution. In time, such sacrifices became of almost daily occurrence at each of the numberless temples. It was the most valued form of wors.h.i.+p; so great was its importance that the officials or priests had to go through a more onerous training than does any minister of a Christian faith. They could reach their position only by pledging and keeping up unceasing and awful self-deprivation and self-mutilation.

Human lives were offered not only to one or two princ.i.p.al idols of each community, but each town had also many minor fetiches to which such sacrifices were made on stated occasions. So fixed was the custom of sacrifice, and so proper was it deemed, that when Cortez came to Cempohual the natives could think of no other way to welcome him with sufficient honor, and in perfect cordiality proposed to offer up human sacrifices to him. It is hardly necessary to add that Cortez sternly declined this pledge of hospitality.

These rites were mostly performed on the teocallis, or sacrificial mounds, of which there were one or more in every Indian town. These were huge artificial mounds of earth, built in the shape of truncated pyramids, and faced all over with stone. They were from fifty to two hundred feet high, and sometimes many hundreds of feet square at the base. Upon the flat top of the pyramid stood a small tower,--the dingy chapel which enclosed the idol. The grotesque face of the stone deity looked down upon a cylindrical stone which had a bowl-like cavity in the top,--the altar, or sacrificial stone. This was generally carved also, and sometimes with remarkable skill and detail. The famous so-called "Aztec Calendar Stone" in the National Museum of Mexico, which once gave rise to so many wild speculations, is merely one of these sacrificial altars, dating from before Columbus. It is a wonderful piece of Indian stone-carving.

The idol, the inner walls of the temple, the floor, the altar, were always wet with the most precious fluid on earth. In the bowl human hearts smouldered. Black-robed wizards, their faces painted black with white rings about eyes and mouth, their hair matted with blood, their faces raw from constant self-torture, forever flitted to and fro, keeping watch by night and day, ready always for the victims whom that dreadful superst.i.tion was always ready to bring. The supply of victims was drawn from prisoners taken in war, and from slaves paid as tribute by conquered tribes; and it took a vast supply. Sometimes as many as five hundred were sacrificed on one altar on one great day. They were stretched naked upon the sacrificial stone, and butchered in a manner too horrible to be described here. Their palpitating hearts were offered to the idol, and then thrown into the great stone bowl; while the bodies were kicked down the long stone stairway to the bottom of the great mound, where they were seized upon by the eager crowd. The Mexicans were not cannibals regularly and as a matter of taste; but they devoured these bodies as part of their grim religion.

It is too revolting to go more into detail concerning these rites.

Enough has been said to give some idea of the moral barrier encountered by the Spanish missionaries when they came to such blood-thirsty savages with a gospel which teaches love and the universal brotherhood of man.

Such a creed was as unintelligible to the Indian as white blackness would be to us; and the struggle to make him understand was one of the most enormous and apparently hopeless ever undertaken by human teachers.

Before the missionaries could make these savages even listen to--much less understand--Christianity, they had the dangerous task of proving this paganism worthless. The Indian believed absolutely in the power of his gory stone-G.o.d. If he should neglect his idol, he felt sure the idol would punish and destroy him; and of course he would not believe anything that could be told him to the contrary. The missionary had not only to say, "Your idol is worthless; he cannot hurt anybody; he is only a stone, and if you kick him he cannot punish you," but he had to prove it. No Indian was going to be so foolhardy as to try the experiment, and the new teacher had to do it in person. Of course he could not even do that at first; for if he had begun his missionary work by offering any indignity to one of those ugly G.o.ds of porphyry, its "priests" would have slain him on the spot. But when the Indians saw at last that the missionary was not struck down by some supernatural power for speaking against their G.o.ds, there was one step gained. By degrees he could touch the idol, and they saw that he was still unharmed. At last he overturned and broke the cruel images; and the breathless and terrified wors.h.i.+ppers began to distrust and despise the cowardly divinities they had played the slave to, but whom a stranger could insult and abuse with impunity.

It was only by this rude logic, which the debased savages could understand, that the Spanish missionaries proved to the Indians that human sacrifice was a human mistake and not the will of "Those Above."

It was a wonderful achievement, just the uprooting of this one, but worst, custom of the Indian religion,--a custom strengthened by centuries of constant practice. But the Spanish apostles were equal to the task; and the infinite faith and zeal and patience which finally abolished human sacrifice in Mexico, led gradually on, step by step, to the final conversion of a continent and a half of savages to Christianity.

VII.

THE CHURCH-BUILDERS IN NEW MEXICO.

To give even a skeleton of Spanish missionary work in the two Americas would fill several volumes. The most that can be done here is to take a sample leaf from that fascinating but formidable record; and for that I shall outline something of what was done in an area particularly interesting to us,--the single province of New Mexico. There were many fields which presented even greater obstacles, and cost more lives of uncomplaining martyrs and more generations of discouraging toil; but it is safe to take a modest example, as well as one which so much concerns our own national history.

New Mexico and Arizona--the real wonderland of the United States--were discovered in 1539, as you know, by that Spanish missionary whom every young American should remember with honor,--Fray Marcos, of Nizza. You have had glimpses, too, of the achievements of Fray Ramirez, Fray Padilla, and other missionaries in that forbidding land, and have gained some idea of the hards.h.i.+ps which were common to all their brethren; for the wonderful journeys, the lonely self-sacrifice, the gentle zeal, and too often the cruel deaths of these men were not exceptions, but fair types of what the apostle to the Southwest must expect.

There have been missionaries elsewhere whose flocks were as long ungrateful and murderous, but few if any who were more out of the world.

New Mexico has been for three hundred and fifty years, and is to-day, largely a wilderness, threaded with a few slender oases. To people of the Eastern States a desert seems very far off; but there are hundreds of thousands of square miles in our own Southwest to this day where the traveller is very likely to die of thirst, and where poor wretches every year do perish by that most awful of deaths. Even now there is no trouble in finding hards.h.i.+p and danger in New Mexico; and once it was one of the cruellest wildernesses conceivable. Scarce a decade has gone by since an end was put to the Indian wars and hara.s.sments, which had lasted continuously for more than three centuries. When Spanish colonist or Spanish missionary turned his back on Old Mexico to traverse the thousand-mile, roadless desert to New Mexico, he took his life in his hands; and every day in that savage province he was in equal danger. If he escaped death by thirst or starvation by the way, if the party was not wiped out by the merciless Apache, then he settled in the wilderness as far from any other home of white men as Chicago is from Boston. If a missionary, he was generally alone with a flock of hundreds of cruel savages; if a soldier or a farmer, he had from two hundred to fifteen hundred friends in an area as big as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio combined, in the very midst of a hundred thousand swarthy foes whose war-whoop he was likely to hear at any moment, and never had long chance to forget. He came poor, and that n.i.g.g.ard land never made him rich. Even in the beginning of this century, when some began to have large flocks of sheep, they were often left penniless by one night's raid of Apaches or Navajos.

Such was New Mexico when the missionaries came, and very nearly such it remained for more than three hundred years. If the most enlightened and hopeful mind in the Old World could have looked across to that arid land, it would never have dreamed that soon the desert was to be dotted with churches,--and not little log or mud chapels, but ma.s.sive stone masonries whose ruins stand to-day, the n.o.blest in our North America.

But so it was; neither wilderness nor savage could balk that great zeal.

The first church in what is now the United States was founded in St.

Augustine, Fla., by Fray Francisco de Pareja in 1560,--but there were many Spanish churches in America a half century earlier yet. The several priests whom Coronado brought to New Mexico in 1540 did brave missionary work, but were soon killed by the Indians. The first church in New Mexico and the second in the United States was founded in September, 1598, by the ten missionaries who accompanied Juan de Onate, the colonizer. It was a small chapel at San Gabriel de los Espanoles (now Chamita). San Gabriel was deserted in 1605, when Onate founded Santa Fe, though it is probable that the chapel was still occasionally used. In time, however, it fell into decay. As late as 1680 the ruins of this honorable old church were still visible; but now they are quite indistinguishable. One of the first things after establis.h.i.+ng the new town of Santa Fe was of course to build a church,--and here, by about 1606, was reared the third church in the United States. It did not long meet the growing requirements of the colony; and in 1622 Fray Alonzo de Benavides, the historian, laid the foundations of the parish church of Santa Fe, which was finished in 1627. The church of San Miguel in the same old city was built after 1636. Its original walls are still standing, and form part of a church which is used to-day. It was partly destroyed in the Pueblo rebellion of 1680, and was restored in 1710. The new cathedral of Santa Fe is built over the remnants of the still more ancient parish church.

In 1617--three years before Plymouth Rock--there were already _eleven_ churches in use in New Mexico. Santa Fe was the only Spanish town; but there were also churches at the dangerous Indian pueblos of Galisteo and Pecos, two at Jemez (nearly one hundred miles west of Santa Fe, and in an appalling wilderness), Taos (as far north), San Yldefonso, Santa Clara, Sandia, San Felipe, and Santo Domingo. It was a wonderful achievement for each lonely missionary--for they had neither civil nor military a.s.sistance in their parishes--so soon to have induced his barbarous flock to build a big stone church, and wors.h.i.+p there the new white G.o.d. The churches in the two Jemez pueblos had to be abandoned about 1622 on account of incessant hara.s.sment by the Navajos, who from time immemorial had ravaged that section, but were occupied again in 1626. The Spaniards were confined by the necessities of the desert, so far as home-making went, to the valley of the Rio Grande, which runs about north and south through the middle of New Mexico. But their missionaries were under no such limitation. Where the colonists could not exist, _they_ could pray and teach; and very soon they began to penetrate the deserts which stretch far on either side from that narrow ribbon of colonizable land. At Zuni, far west of the river and three hundred miles from Santa Fe, the missionaries had established themselves as early as 1629. Soon they had six churches in six of the "Seven Cities of Cibola" (the Zuni towns), of which the one at Chyanahue is still beautifully preserved; and in the same period they had taken foothold two hundred miles deeper yet in the desert, and built three churches among the wondrous cliff-towns of Moqui.

Down the Rio Grande there was similar activity. At the ancient pueblo of San Antonio de Senecu, now nearly obliterated, a church was founded in 1629 by Fray Antonio de Arteaga; and the same brave man, in the same year, founded another at the pueblo of Nuestra Senora del Socorro,--now the American town of Socorro. The church in the pueblo of Picuries, far in the northern mountains, was built before 1632, for in that year Fray Ascencion de Zarate was buried in it. The church at Isleta, about in the centre of New Mexico, was built before 1635. A few miles above Glorieta, one can see from the windows of a train on the Santa Fe route a large and impressive adobe ruin, whose fine walls dream away in that enchanted suns.h.i.+ne. It is the old church of the pueblo of Pecos; and those walls were reared two hundred and seventy-five years ago. The pueblo, once the largest in New Mexico, was deserted in 1840; and its great quadrangle of many-storied Indian houses is in utter ruin; but above their gray mounds still tower the walls of the old church which was built before there was a Saxon in New England. You see the "mud brick," as some contemptuously call the adobe, is not such a contemptible thing, even for braving the storms of centuries. There was a church at the pueblo of Nambe by 1642.

In 1662 Fray Garcia de San Francisco founded a church at El Paso del Norte, on the present boundary-line between Mexico and the United States,--a dangerous frontier mission, hundreds of miles alike from the Spanish settlements in Old and New Mexico.

The missionaries also crossed the mountains east of the Rio Grande, and established missions among the Pueblos who dwelt in the edge of the great plains. Fray Geronimo de la Llana founded the n.o.ble church at Cuaray about 1642; and soon after came those at Abo, Tenabo, and Tabira (better, though incorrectly, known now as The Gran Quivira). The churches at Cuaray, Abo, and Tabira are the grandest ruins in the United States, and much finer than many ruins which Americans go abroad to see.

The second and larger church at Tabira was built between 1660 and 1670; and at about the same time and in the same region--though many thirsty miles away--the churches at Tajique[16] and Chilili. Acoma, as you know, had a permanent missionary by 1629; and he built a church. Besides all these, the pueblos of Zia, Santa Ana, Tesuque, Pojoaque, San Juan, San Marcos, San Lazaro, San Cristobal, Alameda, Santa Cruz, and Cochiti had each a church by 1680. That shows something of the thoroughness of Spanish missionary work. A century before our nation was born, the Spanish had built in one of our Territories half a hundred permanent churches, nearly all of stone, and nearly all for the express benefit of the Indians. That is a missionary record which has never been equalled elsewhere in the United States even to this day; and in all our country we had not built by that time so many churches for ourselves.

A glimpse at the life of the missionary to New Mexico in the days before there was an English-speaking preacher in the whole western hemisphere is strangely fascinating to all who love that lonely heroism which does not need applause or companions.h.i.+p to keep it alive. To be brave in battle or any similar excitement is a very easy thing. But to be a hero alone and unseen, amid not only danger but every hards.h.i.+p and discouragement, is quite another matter.

The missionary to New Mexico had of course to come first from Old Mexico,--or, before that, from Spain. Some of these quiet, gray-robed men had already seen such wanderings and such dangers as even the Stanleys of nowadays do not know. They had to furnish their own vestments and church furniture, and to pay for their own transportation from Mexico to New Mexico,--for very early a "line" of semi-annual armed expeditions across the bitter intervening wilderness was arranged. The fare was $266, which made serious havoc with the good man's salary of $150 a year (at which figure the salaries remained up to 1665, when they were raised to $330, payable every three years). It was not much like a call to a fas.h.i.+onable pulpit in these times. Out of this meagre pay--which was all the synod itself could afford to give him--he had to pay all the expenses of himself and his church.

Arriving, after a perilous trip, in perilous New Mexico,--and the journey and the Territory were still dangerous in the present generation,--the missionary proceeded first to Santa Fe. His superior there soon a.s.signed him a parish; and turning his back on the one little colony of his countrymen, the fray trudged on foot fifty, one hundred, or three hundred miles, as the case might be, to his new and unknown post. Sometimes an escort of three or four Spanish soldiers accompanied him; but often he made that toilsome and perilous walk alone. His new paris.h.i.+oners received him sometimes with a storm of arrows, and sometimes in sullen silence. He could not speak to them, nor they to him; and the very first thing he had to do was to learn from such unwilling teachers their strange tongue,--a language much more difficult to acquire than Latin, Greek, French, or German. Entirely alone among them, he had to depend upon himself and upon the untender mercies of his flock for life and all its necessities. If they decided to kill him, there was no possibility of resistance. If they refused him food, he must starve. If he became sick or crippled, there were no nurses or doctors for him except these treacherous savages. I do not think there was ever in history a picture of more absolute loneliness and helplessness and hopelessness than the lives of these unheard-of martyrs; and as for mere danger, no man ever faced greater.

The provision made for the support of the missionaries was very simple.

Besides the small salary paid him by the synod, the pastor must receive some help from his parish. This was a moral as well as a material necessity. That interest partly depends on personal giving, is a principle recognized in all churches. So at once the Spanish laws commanded from the Pueblos the same contribution to the church as Moses himself established. Each Indian family was required to give the t.i.the and the first fruits to the church, just as they had always given them to their pagan cacique. This was no burden to the Indians, and it supported the priest in a very humble way. Of course the Indians did _not_ give a t.i.the; at first they gave just as little as they could. The "father's" food was their corn, beans, and squashes, with only a little meat rarely from their hunts,--for it was a long time before there were flocks of cattle or sheep to draw from. He also depended on his unreliable congregation for help in cultivating his little plot of ground, for wood to keep him from freezing in those high alt.i.tudes, and even for water,--since there were no waterworks nor even wells, and all water had to be brought considerable distances in jars. Dependent wholly upon such suspicious, jealous, treacherous helpers, the good man often suffered greatly from hunger and cold. There were no stores, of course, and if he could not get food from the Indians he must starve. Wood was in some cases twenty miles distant, as it is from Isleta to-day. His labors also were not small. He must not only convert these utter pagans to Christianity, but teach them to read and write, to farm by better methods, and, in general, to give up their barbarism for civilization.

How difficult it was to do this even the statesman of to-day can hardly measure; but what was the price in blood is simple to be understood. It was not the killing now and then of one of these n.o.ble men by his ungrateful flock,--it was almost a habit. It was not the sin of one or two towns. The pueblos of Taos, Picuries, San Yldefonso, Nambe, Pojoaque, Tesuque, Pecos, Galisteo, San Marcos, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, San Felipe, Puaray, Jemez, Acoma, Halona, Hauicu, Ahuatui, Mishongenivi, and Oraibe--twenty different towns--at one time or another murdered their respective missionaries. Some towns repeated the crime several times. Up to the year 1700, _forty_ of these quiet heroes in gray had been slain by the Indians in New Mexico,--two by the Apaches, but all the rest by their own flocks. Of these, one was poisoned; the others died b.l.o.o.d.y and awful deaths. Even in the last century several missionaries were killed by secret poison,--an evil art in which the Indians were and are remarkably adept; and when the missionary had been killed, the Indians burned the church.

One very important feature must not be lost sight of. Not only did these Spanish teachers achieve a missionary work unparalleled elsewhere by others, but they made a wonderful mark on the world's knowledge. Among them were some of the most important historians America has had; and they were among the foremost scholars in every intellectual line, particularly in the study of languages. They were not merely chroniclers, but students of native antiquities, arts, and customs,--such historians, in fact, as are paralleled only by those great cla.s.sic writers, Herodotus and Strabo. In the long and eminent list of Spanish missionary authors were such men as Torquemada, Sahagun, Motolinia, Mendieta, and many others; and their huge volumes are among the greatest and most indispensable helps we have to a study of the real history of America.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] p.r.o.nounced Tah-_hee_-ky.

VIII.

ALVARADO'S LEAP.

If the reader should ever go to the City of Mexico,--as I hope he may, for that ancient town, which was old and populous when Columbus was born, is alive with romantic interest,--he will have pointed out to him, on the Rivera de San Cosme, the historic spot still known as El Salto de Alvarado. It is now a broad, civilized street, with horse-cars running, with handsome buildings, with quaint, contented folk sauntering to and fro, and with little outwardly to recall the terrors of that cruellest night in the history of America,--the _Noche Triste_.

The leap of Alvarado is among the famous deeds in history, and the leaper was a striking figure in the pioneering of the New World. In the first great conquest he bore himself gallantly, and the story of his exploits then and thereafter would make a fascinating romance. A tall, handsome man, with yellow locks and ruddy face, young, impulsive, and generous, a brilliant soldier and charming comrade, he was a general favorite with Spaniard and Indian alike. Though for some reason not fully liked by Cortez, he was the conqueror's right-hand man, and throughout the conquest of Mexico had generally the post of greatest danger. He was a college man, and wrote a large, bold hand,--none too common an accomplishment in those days, you will remember,--and signed a beautiful autograph. He was not a great leader of men like Cortez,--his valor sometimes ran away with his prudence; but as a field-officer he was as das.h.i.+ng and brilliant as could be found.

Captain Pedro de Alvarado was a native of Seville, and came to the New World in his young manhood, soon winning some recognition in Cuba. In 1518 he accompanied Grijalva in the voyage which discovered Mexico, and carried back to Cuba the few treasures they had collected. In the following year, when Cortez sailed to the conquest of the new and wonderful land, Alvarado accompanied him as his lieutenant. In all the startling feats of that romantic career he played a conspicuous part. In the crisis when it became necessary to seize the treacherous Moctezuma, Alvarado was active and prominent. He had much to do with Moctezuma during the latter's detention as a hostage; and his frankness made him a great favorite with the captive war-chief. He was left in command of the little garrison at Mexico when Cortez marched off on his audacious but successful expedition against Narvaez, and discharged that responsible duty well. Before Cortez got back, came the symptoms of an Indian uprising,--the famous war-dance. Alvarado was alone, and had to meet the crisis on his own responsibility. But he was equal to the emergency. He understood the murderous meaning of this "ghost-dance," as every Indian-fighter does, and the way to meet it. In his unsuccessful attempt to capture the wizards who were stirring up the populace to ma.s.sacre the strangers, Alvarado was severely wounded. But he bore his part in the desperate resistance to the Indian a.s.saults, in which nearly every Spaniard was wounded. In the great fighting to hold their adobe stronghold, and the wild sorties to force back the flood of savages, the golden-haired lieutenant was always a prominent figure. When Cortez, who had now returned with his reinforcements, saw that Mexico was untenable and that their only salvation was in retreat from the lake city to the mainland, the post of honor fell to Alvarado. There were twelve hundred Spaniards and two thousand Tlaxcaltecan allies, and this force was divided into three commands. The vanguard was led by Juan Velasquez, the second division by Cortez, the third, upon which it was expected the brunt of pursuit would fall, by Alvarado.

All was quiet when the Spaniards crept from their refuge to try to escape along the d.y.k.e.