Kachina and the Cross by Carroll L Riley

the future San Juan Pueblo. The wagon train with the main Spanish party arrived on August 17, and Oñate made plans to visit all the major groups of Pueblos and to allot them among the missionaries. The first phase of the conquest and settlement of the upper Southwest was now underway.

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Chapter Five
The Pueblos and Their Neighbors in 1598
The native world of the Southwest in 1598 had changed somewhat from the cultural landscape seen by Coronado six decades before. At the time of Coronado there was an east-west extension of the Pueblos from Pecos and the Salinas towns to the Hopi mesas. The most northern town was Taos, and settlements extended southward down the Rio Grande and its tributaries to Milligan's Gulch Pueblo, some thirty-five miles north of modern Truth or Consequences. Downriver from Milligan's Gulch were the rancherias of the Manso Indians (discussed later in this chapter). To the east were the Querecho, ancestors to the Apache and Navajo, and the Teya, who may well have spoken a language similar to that of the Piro/Tompiro. The Querecho held the plains in the Canadian and upper Red River drainage in what is now the upper Texas Panhandle, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and sections of northeast New Mexico and southeast Colorado. The Teya lived on the Llano Estacado south of the Querecho and also along the Pecos River valley below the Santa RosaFort Sumner area.
West of the Pueblo world lived the various Pai groups and the lower Colorado River Yumans, both probably active in trade to the Hopi and Zuni towns, and both helping to form a link with the Pacific coast of California. To the southwest were the various Piman groups of the Gila River drainage, and south of them the Sonoran statelets, middlemen in an active trade network that extended throughout the Pueblo world and far to the south in western Mexico. On the northern frontier, there is a good possibility that Utes were situated in the Four Corners area, a region they held in later historic times.
During the fifty-six years between the time Coronado left the Southwest and Oñate arrived, the various Pueblos had pretty much continued living in the

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territories they held in Coronado's time. The Teya, now called Jumano, continued to control the southern part of the Llano Estacado and the Pecos River valley. During this period, however, the Querecho (ancestral Apacheans) began a series of migrations, still not clearly understood but reminiscent of those that had first brought them into the northeastern corner of the Southwest three centuries earlier. They started a move westward and at least by the early 1580s had reached the region around the Acoma and Hopi. It seems possible that Querecho began filtering into the Chama drainage at about this time. These Apachean forebears were also spreading southward in a line west of and paralleling the Jumano. The Apacheans gravitated to the mountains that fringe the Tularosa Basin to the east, and, indeed, some of them remain there today. As of Oñate's time, this penetration of the eastern New Mexico mountains may still have been in process. A little later on, Apaches were to threaten the Camino Real, especially along the Jornada del Muerto. During the seventeenth century the Apache continued to move southward, both to the east and to the west of the Pueblo world. They infiltrated groups such as the Jumano, Suma, Jova, and Jocome and gradually absorbed them. By the end of that century, the Apache were pressing on the Pima of what is now southern Arizona.
The Comanche as of the time of Oñate were still west of the Great Plains and made little or no impact on the Pueblo region. This Uto-Aztecan-speaking group did not reach the Plains and begin their love affair with the horse, and their reputation as fierce raiders, until after A.D. 1700. The Comanche did become important in the struggle for control of the western Plains in the eighteenth century, and they were a chronic threat to New Mexico. In the nineteenth