||Account by an Indian of the Flight of Umaņa and Leyba from New Mexico
||Hammond, George P. and Agapito Rey (editors and translators). Don Juan de Oņate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595-1628. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953). Volume 5, pages 416-419.
When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado returned empty-handed in 1540 (see AJ-086),
Spanish authorities were not eager to renew explorations toward
the north. A few travelers followed Coronados trail, however,
and their reports (AJ-004 to AJ-008) persuaded King Philip II
towards the end of the 1500s to found a colony in New Mexico,
from which gold or silver mines or other riches might be
discovered. The man chosen to head this effort in 1595 was an
experienced and well-connected Mexican mine owner named Juan de
Expeditions of 1596-1605
Oņate set out in January 1598 with about four hundred men eager to
find riches in the new territory, as had happened in Central
America. About a third of them brought along families and it
took more than eighty wagons to carry their belongings. They were
accompanied by more than seven thousand head of livestock and
ten Franciscan priests (see AJ-101).
When they reached the Rio Grande near present-day San
Elizario, Texas, on April 30, 1598, Oņate claimed all the lands
drained by the river for Spain. They crossed the Rio Grande
where downtown El Paso now stands, and proceeded two hundred miles
further north, where they established their capital near
present-day Los Alamos at the mouth of the Chama River (see
The colonists spread themselves out over the surrounding
Pueblo communities, where they were initially received with
generous hospitality. No gold or silver being found, however,
the authorities sent out a commission to investigate (see
and Oņate organized a series of expeditions to look for them.
Between 1598 and 1605 his men explored from Kansas in the east
to the Pacific in the west (see AJ-011 to AJ-015), but no riches
were to be found and the frustrated colonists grew restless. So,
too, did their Indian hosts; but when some of the residents of
Acoma Pueblo revolted, Oņate punished the entire population with
such inhumane brutality that no serious rebellion occurred for
eighty years (see AJ-104).
Things went from bad to worse at such a rate, however, that
Oņate resigned his governorship in 1607. The new governor moved
the capital to Santa Fe in 1610, and Oņate went back to Mexico
where in 1613 he was prosecuted for mismanagement. He spent the
rest of his life trying to clear his name, and died in Spain in
Five years before Oņate set out, two unauthorized adventurers
rushed ahead in 1593 to seize whatever glory and riches could be
secured. Francisco de Leyva Bonilla and Antonio Gutierrez de
Jumana, found their way first to the pueblo of Bove, on the
upper Rio Grande just east of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Finding
nothing of great value, they headed east for the buffalo plains
but during an argument Jumana stabbed Leyva to death. Not long
after, unidentified Plains Indians killed Jumana and nearly his
entire party. The deposition given here by a survivor is the
only information about their explorations to survive. The
original manuscript is in Archivo General de Indias in Spain.