Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/228

214 indelible stain on their memory, and which demanded in requital in later days the sacrifice of innocent persons. The Tiguas did not submit, but fled to the mountains, and notwithstanding Coronado's efforts to pacify them and recover their confidence, did not return to the Rio Grande so long as the Spaniards remained in the country.

It is true that this was the only instance during the whole continuance of the expedition in New Mexico in which the Spaniards behaved barbarously and cruelly, but their treatment of the Tiguas is not easier to explain on that account. I can find no ground of excuse for it; and the behavior of Coronado is in so complete contradiction with his previous and subsequent course that I cannot easily understand it, unless it be that necessity drove him to the first summary measures, and the severe cold (the Rio Grande was frozen) and the scarcity of provisions then provoked his soldiers to wild excesses. Yet single events occurred during the war with the Tiguas that indicated that cruelties were perpetrated in cold blood. First among them was the slaughter of the prisoners who surrendered in the first pueblo. Let it be said in behalf of Coronado that he was not privy to this atrocity, which was ordered by Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas, at the time in command in his stead. He was in quarters, and had just received the army which had come from Zuñi under Arellano, when the blood-stained conqueror returned. "It was snowing heavily, and the weather was bad for two months," says Casteñeda. Intense cold and a few heavy snow-storms occur every winter on the Rio Grande, but I have never known of continued severe