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sionary attack and scaling an unguarded wall
of its steep mesa, the Spaniards managed to
capture Acoma after a bloody battle. Oñate
was determined to make a frightening exam-
ple of the surviving inhabitants. He sen-
tenced every adult in the pueblo to 20 years
of slavery and further decreed that a foot be
amputated from every male over the age of
25, although it is unclear if the latter sen-
tence was carried out. The pueblo’s children
were taken from their families and given to
Christian missionaries.
RETURN TO QUIVIRA
After the Acoma battle, Oñate relocated his
colony across the Río Grande to a pueblo he
renamed San Gabriel and sent new expedi-
tions in search of the “South Sea” and min-
eral deposits. The results were always
disappointing. Cold and hungry colonists
became more interested in survival than
prospecting for gold. Settlers were so desper-
ate to find a profit in the inhospitable land
that they unsuccessfully tried to tame buf-
falo. In 1601 Oñate and 70 men headed east,
searching for Quivira. They reached the trad-
ing village along the Arkansas River, finding
no more riches than Coronado had. The
Quivirans did tell Oñate, however, that the
fugitive Gutiérrez de Humaña had been
killed by hostile Indians.
When Oñate returned to San Gabriel after
an absence of five months, most of the settlers
had fled. He ordered them arrested and
beheaded, but they were safely back in Mex-
ico. A handful of colonists maintained the
colony until meager reinforcements arrived.
While the settlers were disappointed by
the poverty of the land, missionaries grew dis-
gusted for other reasons. “The governor
[Oñate] has oppressed his people so that they
are all discontented and anxious to get away,”
wrote Fray Juan de Escalona in a letter to the
viceroy in Monterrey. Fray Escalona, who had
arrived in New Mexico in 1601 to assume lead-
ership of its Franciscan missionaries, favored
staying in New Mexico, but railed against
Oñate’s mistreatment of the Indians, “who
think that we are all evil and that the king who
sent us here is ineffective and a tyrant....
Because of these matters (and others I am not
telling), we cannot preach the gospel now, for
it is despised by these people on account of
our great offenses and the harm we have done
them. At the same time it is not desirable to
abandon this land, either for the service of
God or the conscience of his majesty since
many souls have already been baptized,
besides, this place where we are established is
a stepping stone and site from which to
explore this whole land.”FINAL GAMBLE
Ever desperate to succeed, Oñate left San
Gabriel in October 1604 in another attempt to
find the Pacific Ocean. By crossing Arizona
and following the Colorado River, he reached
the inland waters of the Gulf of California. Yet
he was still hundreds of miles from the ocean.
Oñate would report unconvincingly, “I discov-
ered a great harbor and clarified the reports of
extraordinary riches and monstrosities never
heard of before.”
On the way back to San Gabriel, Oñate
added his name to those of Indian travelers
who had carved inscriptions in the sandstone
of El Morro:Passed by here the Governor Don Juan de
Onate, from the discovery of the Sea of the
South on the 16th of April 1605The words remain today at El Morro, which in
1906 was designated a national monument to
preserve the thousands of Indian, Spanish, and
American signatures carved into the sandstone.(^136) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
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