Colonial North America and the Atlantic World

A History in Documents

Brett Rushforth, Paul Mapp

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315510316
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia americana temprana

A comprehensive collection of primary documents for students of early American and Atlantic history, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World gives voice to the men and women¿Amerindian, African, and European¿who together forged a new world.These compelling narratives address the major themes of early modern colonialism from the perspective of the people who lived at the time: Spanish priests and English farmers, Indian diplomats and Dutch governors, French explorers and African abolitionists. Evoking the remarkable complexity created by the bridging of the Atlantic Ocean, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World suggests that the challenges of globalization¿and the growing reality of American diversity¿are among the most important legacies of the colonial world.

1 Native North America

DOI: 10.4324/9781315510330-1

Combining written sources, archaeological findings, linguistic studies, and oral histories, historians and anthropologists have pieced together a surprisingly rich portrait of Native life in precolonial North America. The following documents—one a Native oral tradition and the others written by early Spanish conquistadors—provide glimpses of early Indian society in three distinct regions: the Northeast, the Southwest, and the Southeast.

1.1 Huron Creation Story^*

* Huron-Wyandot Traditional Narratives: In Translations and Native Texts (excerpt p.4), ed. Marius Barbeau, 1960. Canadian Museum of History, National Museums of Canada Bulletin, no.165.

This document, an oral tradition of the Huron Indians, offers an alternative explanation of the origins of North America’s Native peoples. Such stories were frequently repeated at wintertime gatherings where they passed from one generation to the next. This account was related by a Huron woman named Catherine Johnson in 1912. In many versions of this tale, the woman, named Aataentsic, gives birth to the twin boys and dies during the delivery.

The Young Woman Fallen from Above

Several brothers and sisters were living together. The only meal they had every day consisted of a single basketful of corn, the daily yield of their corn-patch.

Tired of gathering the corn for every meal, the young woman one day thought to herself, “Now, perhaps the easiest way is to cut the stalks [and gather the ears once for all].” So she cut down the corn-stalks and gathered them all. Her brothers, in their grief, spoke to her and said, “You have spoilt everything and ruined our subsistence! You have wasted it all!” They dropped her through a hole into the ocean.

Wild geese were roaming about on the waters. Their leader exclaimed, “A body is falling from above. Let us all gather close together!” And the woman from above fell gently upon the backs of the assembled geese, as they were together. After a while one of them said, “We are getting tired. Let someone else now take our place.” The turtle, emerging from under the waters, said, “It is I, the next!” And the body of the woman fallen from above now rested upon the turtle’s back.

Then the toad went [down] and came back with a mouthful of dirt. She gave the dirt to the woman fallen from above, saying, “Do this! Sprinkle it about at arm’s length where you lie.” The toad meant her to sprinkle the [grains of] earth all around her. So the woman did; and the land grew around her. She rose and began to walk about the new land.

The toad now gave the woman grains of corn, beans, pumpkin seeds, and seeds of all the plants that are reaped. That is what the toad did.

After a while the woman felt very lonely. She thought, “I wish to find a child.” It so happened that she found twin boys. Very soon she noticed, as they were growing in size, that the younger of the twins was not good, and that he only cared for the rain of whatever his elder brother had undertaken. The elder brother made all that is found in the lap of our land. He created all the living beings and also the people. The Indian people were created by him, the Good One. His younger brother then came forward and said, “I too will make some people.” And the monkeys he brought forth, as though they had been real human beings.

Of the twins, the elder is “Hamemdiju,” and the younger one the “Underground-dweller.”

Questions

1. How does this account differ from European explanations of the world’s creation? How is it similar? What do these differences and similarities tell us about the values of each society?
2. How does this account fit into modern historical accounts of the peopling of North America? Is it possible to reconcile these two approaches to the continent’s history?
3. What assumptions about gender and authority are implied in this account?
4. What can we learn from this tale about the relationship of the Hurons with their natural surroundings. If maize only reached the Northeast after about 700 A.D., why does it figure so prominently in a story of the world’s creation?
5. Describe the relationship between good and evil in this story. What about the concepts of balance and reciprocity?

1.2 Coronado Visits a Pueblo Town^*

* Frederick W. Hodge, ed., Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 350–366.

Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera accompanied Coronado’s 1540–1542 expedition into the American Southwest to Mexico and wrote one of the earliest European descriptions of the Pueblo Indians some years after his return.

Cíbola is seven villages. The largest is called Macaque. The houses are ordinarily three or four stories high, but in Macaque there are houses with four and seven stories. These people are very intelligent. They cover their privy parts and all the immodest parts with cloths made like a sort of table napkin, with fringed edges and a tassel at each corner, which they tie over the hips. They wear long robes of feathers and of the skins of hares, and cotton blankets. The women wear blankets, which they tie or knot over the left shoulder, leaving the right arm out. These serve to cover the body. They wear a neat well-shaped outer garment of skin.

They gather their hair over the two ears, making a frame which looks like an old-fashioned headdress.

The country is a valley between ridges resembling rocky mountains. They plant in holes. Maize does not grow high; ears from a stalk three or four to each cane, thick and large, of eight hundred grains, a thing not seen in these parts. There are large numbers of bears in this province, and lions, wildcats, deer, and otter. There are very fine turquoises, although not so many as was reported. They collect the pine nuts each year, and store them up in advance. A man does not have more than one wife. There are estufas or ‘hot rooms’ in the villages, which are the courtyards or places where they gather for consultation. They do not have chiefs as in New Spain, but are ruled by a council of the oldest men. They have priests who preach to them, whom they call papas. These are the elders. They go up on the highest roof of the village and preach to the village from there, like public criers, in the morning while the sun is rising, the whole village being silent and sitting in the galleries to listen. They tell them how they are to live, and I believe that they give certain commandments for them to keep, for there is no drunkenness among them nor sodomy nor sacrifices, neither do they eat human flesh nor steal, but they are usually at work. The estufas belong to the whole village. It is a sacrilege for the women to go into the estufas to sleep. They made the cross as a sign of peace. They burn their dead, and throw the implements used in their work into the fire with the bodies.

It is twenty leagues to Tusayan, going northwest. This is a province with seven villages, of the same sort, dress, habits, and ceremonies as at Cibola. There may be as many as 3,000 or 4,000 men in the fourteen villages of these two provinces. It is forty leagues or more to Tiguex, the road trending toward the north. The rock of Acuco, which we described in the first part, is between these.

Chapter 4

Of how they live at Tiguex, and of the province of Tiguex and its neighborhood.

Tiguex is a province with twelve villages on the banks of a large, mighty river; some villages on one side and some on the other. It is a spacious valley two leagues wide, and a very high, rough, snow-covered mountain chain lies east of it. There are seven villages in the ridges at the foot of this—four on the plain and three situated on the skirts of the mountain.

There are seven villages seven leagues to the north, at Quirix, and the seven villages of the province of Hemes are forty leagues northeast [northwest]. It is forty leagues north or east to Acha, and four leagues southeast to Tutahaco, a province with eight villages. In general, these villages all have the same habits and customs, although some have some things in particular which the others have not. They are governed by the opinions of the elders. They all work together to build the villages, the women being engaged in making the mixture and the walls, while the men bring the wood and put it in place. They have no lime, but they make a mixture of ashes, coals, and dirt which is almost as good as mortar, for when the house is to have four stories, they do not make the walls more than half a yard thick. They gather a great pile of twigs of thyme [sagebrush] and sedge grass and set it afire, and when it is half coals and ashes they throw a quantity of dirt and water on it and mix it all together. They make round balls of this, which they use instead of stones after they are dry, fixing them with the same mixture, which comes to be like a stiff clay. Before they are married the young men serve the whole village in general, and fetch the wood that is needed for use, putting it in a pile in the courtyard of the villages, from which the women take it to carry to their houses.

The young men live in the estufas, which are in the yards of the village. They are underground, square or round, with pine pillars. Some were seen with twelve pillars and with four in the centre as large as two men could stretch around. They usually had three or four pillars. The floor was made of large, smooth stones, like the baths which they have in Europe. They have a hearth made like the binnacle or compass box of a ship, in which they burn a handful of thyme at a time to keep up the heat, and they can stay in there just as in a bath. The top was on a level with the ground. Some that were seen were large enough for a game of ball. When any man wishes to marry, it has to be arranged by those who govern. The man has to spin and weave a blanket and place it before the woman, who covers herself with it and becomes his wife. The houses belong to the women, the estufas to the men. If a man repudiates his woman, he has to go to the estufa. It is forbidden for women to sleep in the estufas, or to enter these for any purpose except to give their husbands or sons something to eat. The men spin and weave. The women bring up the children and prepare the food. The country is so fertile that they do not have to break up the ground the year round, but only have to sow the seed, which is presently covered by the fall of snow, and the ears come up under the snow. In one year they gather enough for seven. A very large number of cranes and wild geese and crows and starlings live on what is sown, and for all this, when they come to sow for another year, the fields are covered with corn which they have not been able to finish gathering.

There are a great many native fowl in these provinces, and cocks with great hanging chins. When dead, these keep for sixty days, and longer in winter, without losing their feathers or opening, and without any bad smell, and the same is true of dead men.

The villages are free from nuisances, because they go outside to excrete, and they pass their water into clay vessels, which they empty at a distance from the village. They keep the separate houses where they prepare the food for eating and where they grind the meal, very clean. This is a separate room or closet, where they have a trough with three stones fixed in stiff clay. Three women go in here, each one having a stone, with which one of them breaks the corn, the next grinds it, and the third grinds it again. They take off their shoes, do up their hair, shake their clothes, and cover their heads before they enter the door. A man sits at the door playing on a fife while they grind, moving the stones to the music and singing together. They grind a large quantity at one time, because they make all their bread of meal soaked in warm water, like wafers. They gather a great quantity of brushwood and dry it to use for cooking all through the year. There are no fruits good to eat in the country, except the pine nuts. They have their preachers. Sodomy is not found among them. They do not eat human flesh nor make sacrifices of it. The people are not cruel, for they had Francisco de Ovando in Tiguex about forty days, after he was dead, and when the village was captured, he was found among their dead, whole and without any other wound except the one which killed him, white as snow, without any bad smell. I found out several things about them from one of our Indians, who had been a captive among them for a whole year. I asked him especially for the reason why the young women in that province went entirely naked, however cold it might be, and he told me that the virgins had to go around this way until they took a husband, and that they covered themselves after they had known man. The men here wore little shirts of tanned deerskin and their long robes over this. In all these provinces they have earthenware glazed with antimony and jars of extraordinary labor and workmanship, which were worth seeing.

Chapter 5

Of Cicuye and the villages in its neighborhood, and of how some people came to conquer this country.

We have already said that the people of Tiguex and of all the provinces on the banks of that river were all alike, having the same ways of living and the same customs. It will not be necessary to say anything particular about them. I wish merely to give an account of Cicuye and some depopulated villages which the army saw on the direct road which it followed thither, and of others that were across the snowy mountains near Tiguex, which also lay in that region above the river.

Cicuye is a village of nearly five hundred warriors, who are feared throughout that country. It is square, situated on a rock, with a large court or yard in the middle, containing the estufas. The houses are all alike, four stories high. One can go over the top of the whole village without there being a street to hinder. There are corridors going all around it at the first two stories, by which one can go around the whole village. These are like outside balconies, and they are able to protect themselves under these. The houses do not have doors below, but they use ladders, which can be lifted up like a drawbridge, and so go up to the corridors which are on the inside of the village. As the doors of the houses open on the corridor of that story, the corridor serves as a street. The houses that open on the plain are right back of those that open on the court, and in time of war they go through those behind them. The village is enclosed by a low wall of stone. There is a spring of water inside, which they are able to divert. The people of this village boast that no one has been able to conquer them and that they conquer whatever villages they wish. The people and their customs are like those of the other villages. Their virgins also go nude until they take husbands, because they say that if they do anything wrong then it will be seen, and so they do not do it. They do not need to be ashamed because they go around as they were born.

There is a village, small and strong, between Cicuye and the province of Quirix, which the Spaniards named Ximena, and another village almost deserted, only one part of which is inhabited. This was a large village, and judging from its condition and newness it appeared to have been destroyed. They called this the village of the granaries (silos), because large underground cellars were found here stored with corn. There was another large village farther on, entirely destroyed and pulled down, in the yards of which there were many stone balls, as big as twelve-quart bowls, which seemed to have been thrown by engines or catapults, which had destroyed the village. All that I was able to find out about them was that, sixteen years before, some people called Teyas had come to this country in great numbers and had destroyed these villages. They had besieged Cicuye but had not been able to capture it, because it was strong, and when they left the region, they had made peace with the whole country. It seems as if they must have been a powerful people, and that they must have had engines to knock down the villages. The only thing they could tell about the direction these people came from was by pointing toward the north. They usually call these people Teyas or brave men, just as the Mexicans say chichimecas or braves, for the Teyas whom the army saw were brave. These knew the people in the settlements, and were friendly with them, and they (the Teyas of the plains) went there to spend the winter under the wings of the settlements. The inhabitants do not dare to let them come inside, because they can not trust them. Although they are received as friends, and trade with them, they do not stay in the villages over night, but outside under the wings. The villages are guarded by sentinels with trumpets, who call to one another just as in the fortresses of Spain.

There are seven other villages along this route, toward the snowy mountains, one of which has been half destroyed by the people already referred to. These were under the rule of Cicuye. Cicuye is in a little valley between mountain chains and mountains covered with large pine forests. There is a little stream which contains very good trout and otters, and there are very large bears and good falcons hereabouts.

Chapter 6

Which gives the number of villages which were seen in the country of the terraced houses, and their population.

Before I proceed to speak of the plains, with the cows and settlements and tribes there, it seems to me that it will be well for the reader to know how large the settlements were, where the houses with stories, gathered into villages, were seen, and how great an extent of country they occupied. As I say, Cibola is the first:

Cibola, seven villages.

Tusayan, seven villages.

The rock of Acuco, one.

Tiguex, twelve villages.

Tutahaco, eight villages.

These villages were below the river.

Quirix, seven villages.

In the snowy mountains, seven villages.

Ximena, three villages.

Cicuye, one village.

Hemes, seven villages.

Aguas Calientes, or Boiling Springs, three villages.

Yuqueyunque, in the mountains, six villages.

Valladolid, called Braba, one village.

Chia, one village.

In all, there are sixty-six villages. Tiguex appears to be in the centre of the villages. Valladolid is the farthest up the river toward the northeast. The four villages down the river are toward the southeast, because the river turns toward the east. It is 130 leagues—ten more or less—from the farthest point that was seen down the river to the farthest point up the river, and all the settlements are within this region. Including those at a distance, there are sixty-six villages in...