The Tiguex War: Fire and Blood

The winter of fifteen forty arrived early on the Rio Grande. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado had marched his army north from Mexico, searching for the seven cities of gold that a Franciscan friar had described from hearsay. What he found instead was the Tiguex Province: a string of Tiwa-speaking pueblos strung along the river north and south of present-day Bernalillo. He chose them for his winter quarters.

Coronado's force numbered roughly three hundred fifty European soldiers. They brought with them as many as two thousand Mexican Indian allies, weapons, horses, and an assumption that the pueblos would yield what they needed. The Tiwas had no written treaty with this army. The army demanded food, blankets, and labor. What was demanded was taken.

The account that survives was written by Pedro de Castañeda, a soldier who recorded events from memory years after the campaign. According to Castañeda, a Spanish soldier assaulted a Tiwa woman. The Tiwas responded by driving off forty to sixty of the expedition's horses and mules. Coronado declared a war of fire and blood.

The army moved on the pueblo of Arenal first. The defenders were killed or captured. The Spanish account records that approximately thirty Tiwa men were burned alive at the stake as a warning to the other pueblos. The remaining Tiwas abandoned their river villages and made a last stand in a mesa-top pueblo the Spanish called Moho. Coronado besieged it for eighty days. When the water inside ran out, in early March of fifteen forty-one, the Tiwa men tried to break the siege under cover of darkness. Most were killed. The women and children were enslaved.

Historians describe the Tiguex War as the first major armed conflict between European colonizers and Native peoples in what would become the American West. It was fought here, in this valley, in a winter cold enough to freeze the Rio Grande. The pueblo of Kuaua, whose ruins you can walk through at the Coronado Historic Site, stood nearby. Its painted kiva held seventeen layers of murals, some of the finest pre-Columbian art in North America. The army that burned Arenal camped within sight of those paintings.