Kachina and the Cross by Carroll L Riley Page A

century, Comanche war parties were deflected somewhat from the latter province, but they harried both northern Mexico and the Anglo-American settlements of Texas. They were not finally defeated until the 1870s.
The two Spanish expeditions of the 1580s found large numbers of pueblos, some thirteen or fourteen in the Piro area alone. In Tiguex there seems to have been at least fifteen and perhaps twenty or so pueblos, up from the twelve counted by Coronado forty years earlier. Individual pueblo size may have been somewhat less, however, for it seems unlikely that the aggregate population had increasedthough from the Spanish figures one might think so. Since large numbers of Indians (and for the Church, large numbers of converts) inflated the importance of the new province in Spanish governmental eyes, there was always some inclination on the part of the governors and the Franciscans to exaggerate populations. This was true especially in the early period of Spanish control when dreams of establishing an important Spanish presence in New Mexico were high. For example, Oñate in a letter dated March 2, 1599, commented, "Here [among

Page 52
the Tewa] and in the other above-mentioned provinces there must be, being conservative in my reckoning, sixty thousand Indians, with towns like ours and with houses built around rectangular plazas.'' Fray Alonso de Benavides in his 1630 Memorial was even more generous, counting more than 68,000 Pueblos, not to mention vast numbers of Apaches who ''form the largest tribe in the world."
What the population was at the time of Chamuscado and Espejo is unknown, but the population estimates of Espejo suggest that the Pueblo area was still flourishing as of the early 1580s. Whether there had been a drop in numbers is uncertain because of the considerable inflation of the Espejo figures. But if Spanish impact caused the population drop in the second half of the sixteenth century, much of that impact must have been due to the large Coronado expedition rather than the smaller ones of the 1580s and 1590s. Coronado's soldiers surely introduced some diseases, though perhaps not smallpox, which became such a killer in later decades. Probably, depopulation of the Pueblo area by Coronado's party was caused as much by war and the looting of food supplies as by disease.
The Chamuscado and Espejo expeditions were disruptive, but unless there was a introduction of epidemic disease for which we have no records, they likely did not significantly affect the demography of southwestern peoples. However, diseases may have crept northward from the interior of Mexico, brought by slavers or even by traders. Such diseases could have reached the Suma, Manso, and such southern Pueblos as the Piro before the Spanish entradas of the 1580s.
My own estimate for the Pueblo population of the Southwest in Coronado's time is around 60,000. In other parts of Spanish America, populations fell drastically when native peoples were first introduced to Euro-African disease. Although firm figures are lacking, I believe that this most likely happened in the Southwest. Here I will give a very tentative estimate of 50,000 Pueblo Indians at the end of the sixteenth century. This decline, as said above, was due partly to disease and partly to the economic disruptions of the Coronado and later expeditions.
Another factor could have been weather. Beginning about 1560 and lasting through the 1580s, there were a number of years with below-average rainfall. If climatic patterns from other parts of the Northern Hemisphere are any indication, the sixteenth-century Southwest likely had winters that increased in severity as the century wore on. It is not clear what effect, if any, these climatic hard times had on population. Certainly, this "Little Ice Age" changed a number of economic and social patterns in Europe.
In 1935, archaeologist Frederick W. Hodge compiled an astonishing list of pueblo names in the Oñate documents, more than 150 in all, even