They came at dusk, as the low winter sun slipped behind the snow-capped rim of Mount Taylor. Moving softly into the adobe-muffled plaza while the villagers attended Christmas Eve Mass,los Comanchesfanned out to pilfermantas(cloaks), ropes, and tools from the various automobiles, buggies, and wagons parked around the village church. Numbering some twenty men clad in buckskin, beadedtewas(moccasins), and feather headdresses, they took orders from their chief, El Capitán. This man also led his young daughter, La Cautiva, by a rawhide thong tied about her wrist. Her white communion gown mirrored the small drifts of...

Fatigued with disappointment and bitter fighting throughout a hard winter among the Tiguex pueblos of the Río Grande, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado arrived at the Towa pueblo of Cicúye (Pecos) in the spring of 1541 with renewed hope. Situated on a high mountain pass that bridged the Río Grande valley with the Great Plains, the fortified town was perhaps the most powerful ally the enterprising conquistador might make among the peoples of the region. The Zuñi town of Hawikuh had failed to fulfill the riches promised by Cabeza de Vaca and Fray Marcos de Niza, tales that had inspired Coronado’s...

Less than one month after Comanche captain Ecueracapa and don Juan Bautista de Anza affirmed their historic treaty in Santa Fe, some eighty Navajos gathered at a crossing of the Río Puerco to negotiate treaty terms themselves with the governor. Like the Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas of the Plains borderlands, Navajos and the Pueblo and Spanish residents of the Río Grande valley were enmeshed in enduring patterns of contention and accommodation. Building upon and intensifying a mixed economy of trading and raiding for foodstuffs and captives that had characterized precontact Athapaskan / Pueblo relations, Navajos and New Mexican colonists developed...

Thrusting south between the plains and plateau landscapes across which were emerging the borderland societies of los llaneros and los pastores was a chain of mountain ranges that descended from the alpine massifs of Colorado into New Mexico for some two hundred miles. Breaching timberline for much of their length, the source for many of the creeks and intermittent streams that provided life to agricultural peoples along their courses, the Sierras de Sangre de Cristo, Jémez, Sandía, and Magdalena seemed a substantial geologic barrier between the histories unfolding to their east and west. But these thickly timbered, well-watered, and relatively...

The thin notes of a mourning song drifted in the winter air over the halfbuilt village. Smoke rose from untended cooking fires in several of the adobe jacales that clustered around the frozen confluence of the Rito San Carlos and the Arkansas River (Río Napestle). In brushcorralesat the edge of the village, sheep and oxen fed on remnants of dry forage gathered from the floodplain the previous autumn. In the strange calm of that morning, themaestro de los obreros, Manuel Segura, walked the deserted streets of the stillborn settlement and contemplated his report to New Mexico’s governor,...

Like their counterparts east of the Sangre de Cristos, in the relative calm after 1787 Navajos and New Mexicans gradually established a new mixed society in the lower Río Puerco region. Although the nineteenth-century mixed society would draw upon strategies of the preceding century, it differed in significant ways from the eighteenth-century pattern. NewMexican resettlement was much more condensed, concentrating in two major villages, Cebolleta and Cubero. New Mexican pastores employed a new grazing technique, blanket grazing, that put huge numbers of sheep, often in the tens of thousands, on the grasslands for whole seasons. Constantly under the care of...

Three years after the 1846 American conquest of New Mexico, United States Indian Agent James S. Calhoun received a visitor in his Santa Fe headquarters. This man, a vecino from the western border village of Cebolleta, complained of a recent Navajo raid in which he lost four horses, one mule, sixteen oxen, and an uncounted number of sheep. Only one month before, Navajos had struck a neighboring village, killing two men, wounding one, and “carrying off, as a captive” one New Mexican woman. When told that Calhoun could offer neither military nor financial remedies for such wrongs, the man became...

Ute headman Ignacio and his band of Weeminuches had allowed the passage of arrieros carting New Mexican produce to the San Juan silver fields since 1868. These seasonal journeys, much like the earlier sheep drives along the Old Spanish Trail, offered opportunities for small-scale bartering in furs and the occasional sale of a Paiute captive. Ute service as scouts in the Navajo wars had also nurtured generally good relations between Weeminuches, Capotes, and New Mexicans. Weeminuches visited their agency at Tierra Amarilla for annuity disbursements of grain, coffee, and sugar, as their Capote cousins did at Abiquiu. The Muache bands...

Not everyone turned out for the winter celebration of “Los Comanches” in New Mexican villages at the close of the nineteenth century. In San Fernando de Taos, Refugio Gurriola Martínez stayed at home, her hand-stitchedcortinasdrawn against the music and tumult.

Born in the village of Magdalena, Sonora, Refugio was captured by Yaqui Indians in 1858 at age fifteen. About one year later, her Yaqui captors sold her to Chiricahua Apaches, with whom she lived another five years, serving her Apache owner, Great Deer, along with six other captive Mexican girls. But among the men in Great Deer’s ranchería...