SALINAS "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions

The Last Days

Fray Alonso Gil de Avila was forced to abandon the pueblo and church of Abó in about 1673 after the Indians burned the convento. [15] Gil de Avila was transferred to Senecú, where he was killed in the convento by Indian arrows during an uprising in January, 1675. [16] Senecú survived only another year and a half and finally fell between March, 1676, and November, 1677. [17]

Between late 1676 and early 1677, Chililí and Quarai were given up, the Christian populations of both moving to Tajique. [18] The Indians of Quarai insisted on taking the body of one of their favorite missionaries (presumed in the 1750s to have been Fray Gerónimo de la Llana) with them on the move. The Franciscans reinterred the body at an unspecified location in the church of San Miguel de Tajique. [19]

The government of New Mexico made a desperate plea to the viceroy for aid in 1676. Reinforcements and weapons arrived in late November or early December 1677, but too late for Tajique. It was abandoned shortly before the arrival of the supply train. [20]

Fray Francisco de Ayeta, the procurador for the supply train from 1674 to 1680, made a heroic attempt to save the province. He made three round trips between Santa Fe and Mexico City in the period from late 1675 to mid-1680. During this time he carried mission supplies in the standard dispatch of 1675, arriving in Santa Fe in December, 1675. Upon arrival in New Mexico, he quickly realized that the situation was very precarious and he was determined to take action. He left Santa Fe in March, 1676, with the petitions for help from the government of New Mexico, and returned to Mexico City, arriving in late August or early September. He petitioned the viceroy to supply the province with soldiers, equipment, and food; the Franciscan order would cover the costs of food and transportation for fifty men and one thousand horses. The viceroy approved the plan. Ayeta helped gather the men and equipment and left Mexico City with the special supply and reinforcement train on February 27, 1677. Because of delays by bad weather, the train did not arrive in Santa Fe until late November. [21]

In December, Governor don Antonio de Otermín established a garrison of ten soldiers at Galisteo to aid in the reoccupation of the Salinas pueblos. Ayeta supplied the soldiers and Salinas refugees there with grain and meat. From this staging point Tajique was reoccupied in January or February 1678, but the attempt to recover Quarai was unsuccessful, probably because too few soldiers were available. [22] Tajique was resettled with more than two hundred families of Christian Indians and a small garrison. It was held until at least mid-1679, and perhaps until the Pueblo Revolt in August, 1680. [23]

Ayeta distributed men and supplies through the province until March, 1678. During this time he realized that the aid he had brought was not enough and that the situation was worse than anyone had thought. He left again on March 28, 1678, and arrived in Mexico City in September. On May 10, 1679, after receiving word from New Mexico that the Apache were again on the move, he petitioned for a second dispatch of fifty armed men and for the establishment of a presidio in Santa Fe. The petition was denied by the viceroy. This decision, which probably was directly responsible for the loss of New Mexico, was actually made by don Martín de Solís Miranda, Fiscal for the Viceroy. He recommended that the petition for reinforcements and military aide be refused on the grounds that "since such a short time has intervened [since the dispatch of military aid in 1677], it might be feared that [the King] would consider it to be a useless and unnecessary expense." Instead, don Solís Miranda recommended that the petition be forwarded to the king. The Viceroy accepted don Martín's decision not to make a decision, and the papers were sent on the next ship to Spain, where it arrived in January, 1680. On June 25, 1680, the King issued orders to do whatever was necessary to give aid to New Mexico. [24]

Meanwhile, Ayeta assembled his next regular mission dispatch and set out again for New Mexico in mid-1680. He arrived at the Rio Grande near present El Paso in early August, where he met the first refugees from the province. He immediately made the entire shipment of mission supplies available to the governor and did all he could to aid in the establishment of a refugee center in the area. [25]

So the province of New Mexico was lost, to famine, Apache raids, dissatisfaction, greed, and uncertainty. The demonstration that he had been right and the viceroy wrong was only bitter consolation to Fray Francisco de Ayeta.

Abandonment

Fray Diego de Parraga locked the doors of the church of Concepción de Quarai for the last time in mid-1677, and climbed on the wagon carrying the bell, the sacred vessels and vestments from the sacristy, and his personal belongings. [26] He joined the column of two hundred refugee families moving out of Quarai on the road to Tajique, eleven miles to the north. As the last stragglers disappeared around the hill, the days of Quarai as a living community came to an end. It was the last of the southern Salinas pueblos to be given up; it joined Abó, abandoned by Gil de Avila four years before, and Las Humanas, abandoned by Joseph de Paredes in 1671, in the slow process of decay that would eventually reduce it to mounds of scrub-covered rubble.

The churches and conventos, more substantially built, would resist the forces of time longer--except when those forces were aided by men. The convento of San Gregorio de Abó, burned by the Apache in 1673, was already well on its way to the ground, but the church would stand relatively unchanged for more than a century, until the Apache struck once again about 1830 and burned it, too. [27]

Concepción de Quarai was left whole, and time worked on it only very slowly. The roofs of some convento rooms rotted and fell in during the next century, but by 1800 most of the roofing remained on the church and much of the convento. The church of Concepción de Quarai, like San Gregorio de Abó, was burned out by Apache about 1830, after surviving earlier Apache raids and a century and a half of abandonment. [28]

At Las Humanas, San Isidro and the old convento rooms in mound 7, burned out in the Apache raid of September, 1670, probably collapsed. The new convento of San Buenaventura aged much more slowly, while the unfinished church changed little until beam robbers began pulling out its woodwork in the 1870s.

During the eighteenth century, Abó and Quarai were visited occasionally. Most of these visits were unrecorded, but others were official business. [29] During the period from 1751 to 1754, and probably from 1762 to 1767, Governor Thomas Vélez Cachupín stationed frontier patrols of cavalry from the Presidio of Santa Fe in the Salinas area. They formed an early warning network keeping watch on the southeastern approaches into the Rio Grande Valley and the main settlements of Pueblo and Spanish New Mexico. [30]

The patrol was of unstated size, but Governor Vélez implies that it was not small: "The troops which occupy this area are posted in the spot of Coara [Quarai], or Tafique [Tajique], and make the entry of the Apache impossible." [31] Unfortunately, his phrasing indicates that Governor Vélez was uncertain of the name of the old mission where the troops were stationed, and so gave both possible names. Because of this confusion, the actual location of the main post of the patrol is not known. [32]

Between Vélez's two terms as governor from 1754 to 1760, Don Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle served as governor. In 1759, Governor Marín decided, for reasons not entirely clear, to attempt the retrieval of the bodies of Fray Gerónimo de la Llana from the Salinas missions and Fray Acencio de Zarate from Pícuris. [33] By the time the expedition arrived at Quarai, on March 30, 1759, it consisted of the governor, two squadrons of soldiers, three officers, four Franciscans, fifty-five Indians, twenty citizens, and "all the equipment necessary for excavating."

They found the sanctuary partly filled with rubble and roofing debris. Apparently the double viga at the mouth of the apse, supporting the central vigas over the transept, had rotted and fallen. This would have brought down part of the main apse roof and nine transept beams in the central area of the transept roof. The beams, stonework, latillas, matting, and adobe covering layer would have fallen into the sanctuary, partly burying the main altar and altar steps beneath a tangle of whole and broken woodwork, stone rubble, and dirt. The upper apse roof apparently survived the collapse, so that only a rectangular area in the center of the transept was open to the weather. [34]

The governor used the testimony of Fray Nicolás de Freitas as a guide for the attempt to relocate the bodies. Freitas stated in 1706 that he had placed Fray Gerónimo's body in a coffin of pine "en la mesa del altar mayor (in the table or platform of the main altar)" of Concepción de Quarai. [35] The Franciscans and the governor had the rubble removed from the sanctuary until the main altar was cleared. They opened the altar table but found no body.

Thinking that Freitas may have meant the altar platform rather than the altar table itself, they demolished the altar and excavated a hole fourteen feet deep into the sanctuary platform beneath it. The excavation destroyed most of the sanctuary platform and the altar steps. Still no body was found.

At this point, several people in the expedition came forward with information that could explain why Fray Gerónimo's body was not in the altar. According to several Hispanics, the next mission north was actually Quarai, and this mission was Tajique. According to several Indians, the people of Quarai removed a friar's body, possibly that of de la Llana, when they abandoned Quarai and fled to Tajique. These people considered Tajique to be the next mission to the north. [36] The expedition moved north to examine the ruins of Tajique.

Again, quiet settled over the abandoned pueblo. The rubble of the main altar and the dirt from the pit beneath it slowly washed back into the hole over the years. Finally, in the first years of the nineteenth century, settlers began moving back into the Salinas area and the pueblo of Quarai.