THE CAPTIVE OF CICUYÉ
On August 29, while Cárdenas was marching
northwest toward the Grand Canyon, Coron-
ado dispatched Hernando de Alvarado and 20
men eastward across what is now central New
Mexico. Alvarado’s guide was a chieftain the
Spaniards nicknamed Bigotes, or “Whiskers,”
because of his long mustaches. Bigotes had
come to Háwikuh with a friendly delegation
from a pueblo some 250 miles to the east
called Cicuyé, whose inhabitants invited the
Spanish to visit them.
Four days into their journey, Alvarado’s
men became the first Europeans to see the
Acoma pueblo, a Keres Indian town built on
top of a flat-topped land formation called a
mesa (Spanish for “table”). Gazing up at the
fortresslike pueblo, the Spaniards were
unaware that Acoma had existed for at least
500, possibly 1,000 years before their arrival.
The town still exists today, making Acoma one
of the oldest continuously inhabited commu-
nities in North America.
Acoma was “a rock with a village on top,
the strongest position that ever was seen in
the world,” wrote the anonymous author of
the Relación del Suceso. The inhabitants
“came out to meet us peacefully, although it
would have been easy to decline to do this
and to have stayed on their rock, where we
would not havebeen able to trouble them.
They gave us cloaks of cotton, skins of deer
and of cows, and turquoises, and fowls and
other food.”
When Alvarado reached the Río Grande
near the present site of Albuquerque, New
Mexico, deep in the Indian region then
known as Tiguex, he sent word to Coronado
that he had found a suitable place for the
expedition to spend the winter. After explor-
ing northward along the Río Grande as far as
Coronado and the Seven Cities B 115