Salinas Pueblo Missions "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions Historic Structures Report

THE MOUND 7 CONVENTO AND SAN ISIDRO

In the summer of 1629 Fray Francisco Letrado arrived at his new assignment, the large pueblo of Cueloce, called Las Humanas by the Spaniards. Fray Alonso de Benavides had begun the evangelical effort in the pueblo with a brief visit two years earlier in the first half of 1627, and had established the advocation of the mission as "San Isidro" because of the date of that visit. [1]

Letrado was a new arrival in New Mexico. He had come from Mexico with the supply train of 1629, in the group of Franciscans that included the returning custodian Fray Estévan de Perea and Fray Francisco de Acevedo. During the chapter meeting held soon after their arrival in June, Perea assigned Letrado to Las Humanas and Acevedo to Abó. The lay brother Fray Diego de San Lucas, who had arrived in the same group, was probably assigned to help Letrado with the establishment of the new conversión. [2] Acevedo was destined for many years of service in the Piro speaking areas of the Salinas and Rio Arriba. The unfortunate Letrado, however, was to become a martyr to the Franciscan effort in New Mexico within three years.

Letrado and San Lucas stayed only a few months at the pueblo during this first visit. The first few days would have been spent in negotiations with the leaders of the controlling groups of the pueblo for rooms to be used as a first convento, storeroom, and chapel, and for a tract on which to build a permanent church and convento. These negotiations resulted in the assignment of eight rooms for their use on the southwest corner of mound 7. [3] The two Franciscans probably began changes to the rooms immediately, adapting them to the needs of a convento. [4] By the time the work was completed, it was so late in the year that Letrado saw no reason to attempt to move their two wagon loads of supplies to the pueblo before the roads became passable. Instead, they returned to Santa Fe for the winter. [5]

Figure 18. Plan of the pueblo and missions of Las Humanas. Mounds 1 and 2 form a plaza-like compound north of the second church and convento. They were apparently built after the beginning of construction on the second church in 1660. A Spanish road from the northwest apparently entered the pueblo through the gap between mounds 1 and 2. San Isidro, in use from its completion about 1635 until the mission was abandoned about 1671, stands south of its convento in mound 7. It was actually called "San Buenaventura" through most or all of this period. The kiva just north of San Isidro is kiva D, in use until about 1662. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

Most of Letrado's changes to the pueblo rooms were concerned with access and light. He and San Lucas sealed two doorways into other pueblo rooms and then enlarged four of the doorways between the rooms granted to them. However, they left three other doorways at the original width of 1 1/2 feet. They probably added larger windows to the outside rooms.

The two friars arranged the rooms as best they could for such limited space. In one of the front rooms (208) they built a simple altar for services, and replastered the walls with brown plaster. This room was the first church at Las Humanas and probably was dedicated to San Isidro. [6] The adjoining room (220) was the entrance to the "convento," and probably served as the portería. Letrado and San Lucas decorated it with a simple dado of red, black, and white painted plaster. [7] Room 217, with a central slab-lined fireplace, and the adjoining room 219 very likely served as the kitchen. Food was probably prepared by an Indian. Room 210 was the refectory for the two Franciscans, with food passed from room 219 through a small opening. This opening was intentionally left when Letrado and San Lucas partially filled the Indian doorway between 219 and 210. Letrado probably used room 211 as storage space, room 218 as an office, and room 193 as the sleeping room for himself and the lay brother.

Letrado and San Lucas apparently did most of the construction themselves. For example, the doorway between rooms 193 and 210 was widened by knocking out most of the wall from floor to ceiling, and then dressing the ragged edges with jambs of adobe brick. The use of brick adobe was a trait introduced by the Spaniards. [8] Letrado was not going to find anyone in the pueblo who knew how to do it. The bricks were not made in the usual fashion of being molded in wooden forms, however. They were hand formed in the shape of a loaf of bread and allowed to dry on a flat surface, so that the top, sides and ends were rounded and only the bottom was flat. These bricks were probably made by Letrado and San Lucas themselves and indicate that the two were making do as best they could. Having no forms and no tools to make them, the two friars molded individual adobe bricks by hand.

Figure 19. The first convento and churches of Las Humanas about 1635. This is the probable arrangement of the interior of the large church of San Isidro, based on the structural remains found by Gordon Vivian. The size and shape of the sanctuary area is almost identical to that of the first church at Abó and of the first church of San Miguel in Santa Fe. At San Miguel, enough of the stairs and platforms survived to demonstrate the purpose of the walls and floors uncovered by Vivian. Compare this figure with figure 3. Kiva D, just north of San Isidro, is located in precisely the right place to have been centered on a convento located north of the church. If kiva D was built with the permission and planning of the Franciscans, as the kivas at Abó and Quarai seem to have been, then its presence implies that Fray Francisco Letrado intended to build a convento here. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

Letrado and San Lucas went into Santa Fe for the winter, and returned in March of 1630 with two or three wagons loaded with the supplies and equipment allotted to them for the establishment of the new conversión. [9] They stored these in the existing "convento," probably in rooms 211 and 218, overcrowding an already too-small convento. With their tools now available, the two friars immediately began planning the construction of an additional eight rooms to enlarge the convento. [10]

Letrado negotiated with the pueblo groups most favorable toward a Spanish presence at Las Humanas to arrange for a construction crew. He arrived at an agreement with pro-Spanish factions of the pueblo, who provided people to help the Franciscans. [11] The workers removed the roofing from rooms 208 and 220 and stacked the beams. They then dismantled the south wall of room 208 and the south and west walls of 220, down to a little above grade. [12]

The workers laid out and excavated trenches for the walls of the rooms to be added to the convento. The collection crews gathered rock from local quarries and perhaps from mounds of ruined buildings, and the masons began constructing the new walls. First they built the walls of room 214 into the corner between the Indian rooms numbered 185 and 198. Then they built the cross wall on the south side of room 220, including a new doorway. After this the masons built the outside wall and four cross walls of the other seven rooms in one continuous operation. Finally they constructed the north wall of room 223, the partition between rooms 225 and 226, and the new wall between 215 and 208. All the walls were probably about seven feet high to the undersides of the roof beams.

During the construction, Letrado and San Lucas instructed some of the Indians in the use of the woodworking tools and made the door frames and doors for the new doorways. One of the doors, between rooms 221 and 220, was 2.35 feet wide and probably about 5.35 feet high. It was made from six pieces of wood carefully cut and fitted together. The door turned on wooden pintles set into sockets in the sill and lintel. The main door of the convento, in the south wall of room 221, was 4.25 feet wide and 5.35 feet high, made of eleven carefully shaped pieces of wood. Letrado and the Indians training to be carpenters cut a large tree in the nearest forest to supply some of the larger pieces. [13]

Working at the rate of about thirteen cubic feet of stone a day, the new construction would take one mason about 255 workdays to complete. With a standard crew of eight masons and thirty-seven other persons, the work of construction would take about thirty days, or 1 1/2 months at about twenty workdays a month. If Letrado began laying the stone in April using a construction crew of this size, the walls would have been completed about the middle of May. [14]

When the walls were completed, the construction crews began roofing the new and rebuilt rooms. The beams from rooms 220 and 208 were reused, as well as beams from other abandoned rooms nearby. No new vigas were used in the roofing. [15] The roofing took about a month.

Once the roof was finished, about the middle of June, 1630, Letrado and San Lucas established themselves in their new rooms. They unpacked the supplies and equipment and arranged them in the three rooms on the north (223, 225, and 226) that appear to have been designed as storerooms. These three long, narrow rooms probably had only very small windows, and were accessible only through one door from the residence area of the convento. Letrado seems to have designed room 224 to be the dispensary, where he would have given food, spices, small tools, and trinkets to the Indians. A small window-like opening communicated with the southernmost storeroom on the north. This window probably served as a pass-through for small items given to the Indians from the stores. Room 222 probably became the office, where most of the business between the Franciscans and the pueblo was conducted. It may also have been Letrado's residence. It was built with a vent-like opening through the wall near the northwest corner. This vent, 1 1/2 feet square with its base six inches above floor level, may have been associated with a small corner fireplace. Room 221 became the new portería, or entrance to the convento. Doors communicated with Letrado's office on the west, the temporary church on the east, and the residence area of the convento on the north.

Room 215 was built against room 208 so that the two could serve specifically as a church. Again, the new construction of rooms and interior arrangements was certainly dedicated to San Isidro. Letrado built several wooden constructions within room 215, but so little evidence was left that his arrangements and furnishings can only be guessed at. A symmetrical pattern of post holes at the south end of the room, directly inside the door, may have been some sort of communion railing or benches. A larger hole in the center of the room may have been the base of the baptismal font, a major item during the early years when emphasis was on conversion and baptism. The north wall had some arrangement for an altar. [16]

The altar apparently made use of the provisions in the next room on the north, room 208, which had been the first church in 1629. Letrado and San Lucas had rebuilt the wall between rooms 208 and 215, leaving a splayed window or niche through the wall, centered on the old altar in room 208. The splay opened inward, toward room 208. The base of this niche-like opening was 3.3 feet above the floor of room 215, just the right height to match the top of a table in the room. In room 208, which had a higher floor, the bottom of the opening was only 2.1 feet above the floor.

It appears that room 208 may have become the sacristy for room 215, but with an opening through the wall so that sacred vessels or a santo on the altar of the sacristy could also be used in the church in room 215. This arrangement seems to have had security in mind. The Franciscans may have been protecting the sacred items on the altar and in the sacristy from possible theft by members of anti-Spanish factions, or from any innocent mischief on the part of pro-Spanish Indians who were still unfamiliar with the proprieties of a church.

The other seven of the original rooms saw little change in their uses. Rooms 217 and 219 remained the kitchen, 211 kitchen storage, and 210 the refectory. Rooms 193, 218, and 220 (the old portería) were principally passageway rooms, connecting other spaces together, but were probably also used for such things as an infirmary and a schoolroom. There seems to have been no provision for a privy in any of the rooms, old or new.

Letrado planned room 214 as a residence, probably for San Lucas. It had a large corner fireplace, and its door opened through the east wall of the church, room 215.

The Construction of the Church of San Isidro

Letrado probably began work on the church immediately. The first step in the construction of the church was the selection and preparation of a building site. The obvious choice for the permanent church was the large clear area at the west end of the mesa, west of mound 7, but for some reason he was unable to acquire this area. Instead, the pueblo gave him permission to use the space on the hillside south of the convento below kiva D, which continued in use through most of the seventeenth century.

Letrado decided to build a church much like the first church at Abó. He increased the length by 25 1/2 feet to 108 feet, but left all the other dimensions about the same. Letrado located the sacristy inside the church near the altar, and the baptistry inside the front of the church under the choir loft. This was probably typical of the earliest plan of any new church. [17]

The slope of the hill created a major problem. Letrado and his construction crew had to cut a deep slot into the hill about eighty feet long and thirty-three feet wide in order to create a level platform on which they could build the new church. At the west end, this slot was eight to ten feet deep. Along the north and northwest sides, the crew had to cut into bedrock. Fortunately, this was composed of poor-quality limestone and a coarse sandstone, both rather soft, making the labor relatively easy. Before work began on the cut in the hillside, the masons excavated a footing trench into the refuse from the pueblo that covered the slope. Into this they built a retaining wall about five feet thick and five feet high along the line of the east end of the church, and a shallower foundation about two feet thick and one foot high along the eastern half of what would be the south wall. When work on the cut into the hillside began, most of the refuse and stone removed by the crew went into the space inside the retaining walls, raising the top of the fill until the surface was approximately level with the bottom of the slot cut into the hillside. When completed, the platform sloped slightly downward toward the east, dropping about three feet over the 108-foot length of the church. Eventually the altars would be placed at the higher end. Cutting and filling for the creation of this platform probably took about a year. [18]

Construction work stopped during the winter months of 1630-31. In the spring of 1631, Letrado apparently continued on the church at Las Humanas and began construction on a visita church at Tabirá. Here he conducted the same negotiations for cooperation and a tract of land, with somewhat more success. He was soon able to begin construction on the church that would become San Diego de Tabirá. [19] Letrado worked out a plan and the pueblo provided workers to help him dig the foundation trenches for a church fifty-four feet long and twenty-six feet wide on the interior, with walls 2 1/2 feet thick. They began construction on the church probably in April or May of 1631, and soon the walls were two to five feet high. [20]

At Las Humanas, the platform for the interim church was ready in about May, 1631. The construction crews began work on the walls of the church and the campo santo at its east end. This was a cemetery area measuring about ninety feet by sixty feet, surrounded by a low wall. The construction crew did little to alter the natural surface of the ground inside the campo santo. By the end of September, 1631, the walls had reached a height of no more than thirteen feet. [21]

Letrado had succeeded in convincing some factions at Las Humanas to support his efforts there, making a work force available and allowing him to complete the temporary convento. However, by 1631 he apparently realized that the very limited resources of Las Humanas would not support a full mission operation at the pueblo. The critical resource was the water supply. The amount of water was limited, and the Indians lived in balance with the supply. The pueblo could not support large herds, additional large fields, or perhaps even a major new construction effort that would require large quantities of water for the plaster and adobe of the construction. [22] Letrado would not be able to put together the large, complex organization of buildings, fields, and herds needed to keep a Franciscan mission going. Faced with this inescapable conclusion, Letrado apparently recommended that Las Humanas be made a visita, and requested permission to move on to a more promising pueblo sometime in mid-1631. He was reassigned to Hawikuh, probably during the annual chapter meeting about August. If so, Letrado would have left Las Humanas in September, and arrived at Hawikuh in October of 1631. He was killed during a conflict there in February, 1632. Later testimony stated that the conflict arose because Letrado had called the Indians to mass on one of their festival days. [23]

San Lucas, however, probably stayed on at Las Humanas. In 1633 Fray Estévan de Perea, writing at Quarai, was probably speaking of him when he described the plight of "one poor religious who is in one of the most miserable and needy conversions describable . . . where there is not even water to drink, and whither food has to be taken to him from neighboring convents (one of which is this one)." [24]

FRAY FRANCISCO DE ACEVEDO AND LAS HUMANAS

So Letrado left Las Humanas and San Lucas struggled on alone. In 1633 he petitioned the governor, don Francisco de la Mora, for assistance. The governor and Custodian Perea decided to reduce Las Humanas to a visita. About 1634, Letrado's companion on the trip from Mexico, Fray Francisco de Acevedo (stationed at Abó at the same time that Letrado was assigned to Las Humanas) became the visitador and inherited the problem of Las Humanas. With the status of Las Humanas changed to that of a visita, the Franciscan construction needs were considerably reduced, to a scale that the very restricted resources of the pueblo could support. Most of the starting supplies were probably transferred to storage at Abó when Letrado left Las Humanas in late 1631. [25]

The Completion of the Interim Church

Because Acevedo was also responsible for the construction of a visita church at Tabirá, as well as his other duties at Abó, he could not have been at Las Humanas continuously throughout the year required to finish the church. Either San Lucas (or some other lay brother) or an Indian mayordomo must have remained at Las Humanas during this time to oversee the work.

Acevedo would probably have had the same number of people working on the church as Letrado had. Using the standard procedures of crew organization and scaffolding, woodcutting and shear-legs lifting, he completed construction on the church in about a year. Acevedo apparently dedicated the finished church in late 1634 or early 1635. [36] Although Letrado probably intended that the church would be dedicated to San Isidro, Acevedo changed the advocation of the church to San Buenaventura either at the time of its formal dedication in 1634, or soon thereafter. Acevedo may have renamed the mission because of its change in status, since it had been made a visita after the absence of a minister for two years, or he may have had other, presently unknown reasons. [27]

Small though it was compared to, for example, the church of Nuestra Senora de Quarai, San Isidro de las Humanas loomed over the nearest of the low, huddled buildings of the pueblo of Las Humanas. Its adobe-plastered walls stood about twenty-eight feet high, so that the parapets were almost even with the tops of the highest buildings on mound 7. The plain facade would have been another ten feet higher, and would have looked much like that depicted by Gordon Vivian in his reconstruction drawing of the church, with no balcony over the main door, a window into the choir loft, and a bell wall at the top of the church with a single bell mounted in an opening through the wall.

The roofing of the church as proposed by Vivian does not match the practices in use in seventeenth-century New Mexico. Vivian's design was derived from his assumptions that the flat stones he found in the floor of the church were all pillar supports, that the pillars were to hold up roof vigas, and that the pillars were at the intervals of the roof vigas. If the fifth pillar support was nothing more than a random flat stone or the base of some other structure, then the four pillars near the east end of the church become nothing but standard choir loft supports. In this report, the roof is assumed to consist of the usual structure of vigas, latillas, matting and a clay surface, with the vigas at about two-foot intervals; see figure 20. The total length of these vigas would have been about 33 feet, shorter than those used in the other Salinas churches and certainly shorter than the thirty-eight-foot beams intended to be used in San Buenaventura, or even the thirty-five-foot beams that would have been necessary for the sacristy of San Buenaventura. Beams at closer intervals lessened the stresses on each one, making the supporting pillars proposed by Vivian unnecessary. The walls, averaging two feet thick and about thirty feet high, were thin but supported over part of their length by the slopes of the hill into which the church was cut, making the structure solid enough to stand for several decades. [28]

Inside the church, Acevedo constructed an interior very much like that of the recently completed first church at Abó. At the east end, over the principal entrance, he built a choir loft. It had two main crossbeams, each supported by two wooden pillars eight feet from the side walls of the nave. One of the two crossbeams was positioned to support the front edge of the choir loft, sixteen feet from the front wall, while the second crossbeam was eight feet from the front wall of the church. The two crossbeams were necessary in order to support several short flooring vigas at the north side of the choir loft, allowing Acevedo to insert a stairwell opening for the choir stairs. A wooden stairway against the north wall gave access to the choir loft. A second stairway or ladder allowed the sacristan to climb from the choir loft through a hatch in the ceiling to the roof where he rang the bell to announce activities in the church. [29]

Figure 20. Plan of San Buenaventura and its convento. This plan depicts the buildings after the final effort at construction ending about 1667. The convento had been roofed, and the choir loft built into the church, but the roofing of the church, sacristy and baptistry were never put on the building. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

Under the choir loft on the south side of the church near the entrance, Acevedo placed the baptismal font. He built a circular stone pillar base about two feet in diameter, with a hole in the center about ten inches across. The base was probably about three feet high, and supported a large baptismal basin of copper. [30]

At the west end of the church he placed two side altars on low platforms in the north and south corners of the sanctuary area, and a main altar on a higher platform in the apse. Each side altar platform was about one foot high, with a masonry edge and an adobe floor over packed earth fill. The side altars were masonry boxes also filled with earth, and with a stone or wood top about four feet above the platform. The main altar platform was about two feet above the floor of the church, with four steps each about six inches high leading up to it from the nave. Two of these steps had masonry risers, while the other two probably had wooden risers. The main altar itself probably followed the traditional arrangement. It would have been about four feet high, resting on a predella, or altar platform, about six inches high. Acevedo probably left a space behind it to allow the addition of a wooden retablo later. [31]

Against the edge of the platform of the southern side altar, Acevedo built a font and washbasin to carry out part of the activities usually conducted in a sacristy. The font was probably a copper basin, like the baptismal basin, placed on a similar masonry pillar. The priest would have used it to hold holy water to wash his hands before Mass. The masonry box next to it stood two or more feet high, and may have been used to dispose of the holy water in the approved manner. The robing room remained in the old convento farther up the hill. [32]

The interior of San Isidro was more colorful than the drab, adobe-tan exterior. The plastering crew coated the clay floor and stone walls with a layer of tan clay plaster, and then painted the walls with a thin white plaster coat. They also whitewashed the baptismal font, the altar platforms and altars, and probably the sacristy font and washbasin. Then the plasterers added a red dado along the walls, and a similar dado-like band around the base of the baptismal font, extending four inches out onto the floor around it. [33]

Behind the side altars, Acevedo designed retablos of white plaster on an armature or framework of small poles. It had a red dado along the base, topped by a black line and floral designs in black on the white plaster above the dado. The main altar probably had a similar retablo, although undoubtedly more elaborate, with perhaps a central niche for a statue of San Isidro or San Buenaventura. [34]

Tabirá

During the same period, Acevedo completed the church begun by Letrado at Tabirá. Letrado had begun the church, but abandoned the work while the walls were only two to five feet high and no interior structures had been built. Acevedo continued the construction. [35] The work crews, under the direction of a mayordomo, built the usual scaffolding and raised the walls to a height of about twenty-five feet. At this height they lifted roof beams, and finished the roof and parapets to a height of about twenty-eight feet. Acevedo had them build a room on the south side of the church, measuring fourteen feet by twenty-one feet, to use as the sacristy and his residence when he was visiting the pueblo. The sacristy had a door through the south nave wall in front of the altar through which the priest entered the church. The construction crew raised the floor of the church about two feet, making it slightly higher than the floor of the sacristy. As part of this construction, the workers built a flagged area at the main doorway through the east or front wall, with a flight of three stairs down to ground level in the campo santo on the east side of the church. After the floor fill was completed, the masons built a simple altar against the west wall of the apse. The altar, about four feet high, had no raised platform, unlike virtually every other known main altar in seventeenth century New Mexico. The visita church apparently had no choir loft. Total construction time was about two years. When it was completed, Acevedo dedicated the church to San Diego.

Administration of the Visita

During his visits to Las Humanas, Acevedo continued to use the convento rooms built by the late Letrado as his residence. When he was at Tabirá, he probably stayed in the sacristy of San Diego. He travelled, presumably by wagon, from Abó to Las Humanas as part of his rounds to the visitas of Abó, bringing the necessary vestments and vessels for the services, and perhaps a sacristan or cantor as an assistant. He would have stayed in the convento overnight during these visits. From Las Humanas he probably went on to Tabirá, then back to Abó. Acevedo would have spent about five days on the road or at a visita, and may have made the trip once a month perhaps or even more frequently. He followed this routine for almost thirty years.

He made the feast day of San Buenaventura a special celebration for the people of Las Humanas, and even brought Indians from Abó to help during the celebration. Usually Acevedo was accompanied by about twenty Indian cantors and sacristans, and brought along the appropriate vestments for the festival, which usually included a vesper service, a mass, and a procession. [36]

Changes to the Mission Buildings

Acevedo noticed that the north and west walls of the convento of San Isidro were settling and cracking. In order to assure that they did not collapse, he arranged for a construction crew to thicken the exterior wall along the entire west side of the convento, as well as along the west half of the north side. When completed, the lower portion of the wall was almost three feet thick. A gap was left for the vent in the west wall of room 222. [37]

During the 1650s Acevedo also extensively remodelled the visita church at Tabirá. He constructed an altar platform into the apse of the church by building a masonry wall across the mouth of the apse and filling the enclosed area with packed earth. He built up the altar until its top was about four feet above the surface of the platform, and added a flight of three masonry stairs for access. Both the edge of the platform and the edges of the stairs were formed by squared beams. The stairs, platform face, and lower five feet of the nave walls were painted red, while the rebuilt altar was painted white. [38]

In the late 1650s began a resurgence of the interest of the king and higher authorities in Mexico City in the northern frontier. This resulted in the decision in 1659 to expand the Franciscan effort in the frontier missions of New Mexico. The number of missionaries serving the province was returned to the maximum of sixty-six, and several missions which had been reduced to visitas were returned to full mission status. In this spirit of a new effort on the frontier, the custodian of New Mexico decided on a second attempt to make Las Humanas a permanent mission post.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF SAN BUENAVENTURA

At the end of July, 1659, Fray Diego de Santandér arrived at the headquarters of the Franciscan province of New Mexico at Santo Domingo, accompanying the new custodian, Fray Juan Ramirez. They and fourteen other new missionaries had travelled from Mexico City in the same wagon train that brought the new governor, Don Bernardo López de Mendizábal. [39] The new missionaries received their assignments at the chapter meeting held soon after their arrival, probably in August. Santandér was designated to return a permanent Franciscan establishment to the pueblo of Las Humanas. With this assignment the custodian raised Las Humanas once again from a visita to a doctrina, and Tabirá again became a visita of Las Humanas rather than of Abó.

Santandér arrived at Las Humanas in late August or September of 1659 with his wagon load of starting supplies. He moved into the convento built by Letrado and soon carried out a program of repairs and reconstruction on the buildings. In room 222, where Santandér lived, he built a large fireplace in the northwest corner. As part of the construction, the masons sealed off the vent through the west wall, leaving a niche in its place on the outside of the wall. At some time during Santandér's tenure at Las Humanas the small pass through opening between rooms 226 and 224 was also filled. [40]

Probably in this same period, the church of San Isidro (named San Buenaventura by Acevedo) was redecorated. During the redecoration, the floor, which had accumulated about 1 1/2 inches of dirt, was replastered and the baptismal font repainted in red and white. [41]

After completing the repair and remodelling of Letrado's church and convento, Santandér began work on the design of a full-sized mission compound. He wanted one appropriate for a doctrina with its own visita and preferably one somewhat more imposing than the other churches in the Jurisdiction of Salinas. Santandér and the surveying crew probably began to lay out the new design in the spring of 1660. Later testimony by Fray Nicolás de Freitas indicates that construction on the foundations had already begun by late 1660. [42]

Santandér, however, soon ran into a number of problems, both political and economic. The economic problems were the same as those that had defeated Fray Francisco Letrado thirty years before, centering around the shortage of water at the pueblo. This was destined to be the major recurring difficulty throughout the next decade. Santandér had arrived in New Mexico during a period of famine. The Salinas missions had already found it necessary to feed some of the people in their pueblos earlier in 1659, and perhaps during the winter months of 1658. The shortages continued into 1660. In February, 1660, Vice-Custodian Fray Garcia de San Francisco ordered those missions that had not already done so to begin feeding their pueblos from the convento storerooms, if they had sufficient supplies. Santandér, in what amounted to a new conversión, had no stockpile of supplies to draw on, and Las Humanas had to depend on whatever could be spared from the other Salinas missions. [43]

Figure 21. Section across the nave of San Buenaventura at its maximum height. The choir loft structure in the drawing is not hypothetical, but is taken directly from photographs, drawings, and the recorded measurements of visitors to the ruins. The opening above the choir loft was apparently intended to be only a window, since there is no evidence suggesting a porch along the front of the building. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

A mission usually used its herds of sheep and the excess grain not needed in the mission storerooms to finance the miscellaneous costs of constructing and furnishing a church. Like Letrado before him, Santandér found that he had very limited access to such income. Because the water supply was adequate only for the people and the fields of the pueblo, he could not maintain the usual herds of sheep, cattle, and horses at Las Humanas. Finally, in July, 1660, by order of Governor Mendizábal, his herds were moved to Abó. [44] This allowed Santandér some hope of profitable increase to be used to furnish his new mission appropriately, but such increase would be at the discretion of Abó, not directly under Santandér's control as he would have liked.

Santandér was unable to plant the usual fields of wheat to be used to supplement the food supplies of the mission and to add to the trade goods, again because of the closely-controlled water supply, which was aggravated by the drought conditions prevailing in much of New Mexico. Any fields Santandér planted were that much more of a drain on the limited water in the basins. The catch-basins on the hillsides and the large fields in the valley bottoms were badly dried out, so that the crops were falling short of their usual quantity. [45] One solution Santandér attempted was to plant wheat in the large fields near Quarai, but this made problems in harvesting and transporting the grain. [46]

The Indians had established larger areas of farming in the big basins on the floors of the surrounding valleys. Millennia of runoff from the hills had deposited thick layers of rich soil on the floors of these shallow limestone bowls. During times of good rain and snowfall, these basins probably retained enough moisture for dry-farming throughout the year. The Indians found that the basins were also a dependable source of water for drinking if they excavated pozos, or wells, in their centers. Fray Freitas, stationed at Quarai, later stated that there were about 32 pozos within 1/4 mile of Las Humanas. Most were about 22 to 28 feet deep, although some were as deep as 56 feet. [47] The pozos could supply only a limited amount of water, an amount undoubtedly precisely known by the people living at Las Humanas. The actual population of Las Humanas was controlled by the amount of water available. Before the Franciscans came, in dry years, some people probably had to move elsewhere.

The hillside catch-basins were artificial structures called jagueyes formed by building low retaining dams across ravines on the slopes of the mesa. The retaining walls trapped soil being washed from the top of the mesa, and the soil trapped moisture. Governor López de Mendizábal claimed that he had suggested the construction of these to Santandér in 1659. [48] The Indians, and presumably Santandér, farmed in and around these small pockets of moist earth. Nine of these have been located. Most are about 30 to 50 feet across and almost flat, while the two largest are each 120 feet across and several feet deep.

From Santandér's viewpoint, a far worse problem was the political situation. Governor López had quickly taken the position that the Franciscans exercised far too much civil authority, and he embarked on a campaign to restrict their legal powers to those of simple doctrineros, rather than the broad powers they presently wielded. As part of the conflict, severe restrictions were put on the use of Indian labor, and strong punishment was meted out to those who violated the governor's edicts. Santandér found that legally he could not have the usual work-crews of Indians unless he paid them one real a day instead of employing them on a volunteer basis. This must have seemed an exorbitant rate, especially when he was facing the fact that he had no appreciable income from which to draw funds. Requesting the usual Indian masons experienced in Spanish construction methods to serve as his mayordomos would be relatively expensive and legally difficult. Santandér was faced with the necessity of building his church surreptitiously with Indians he persuaded to carry out the work with little or no hope of pay and a very real chance of being whipped if caught by Aguilar. [49] The amazing thing is that Santandér got any work done at all.

Santandér managed to avoid the direct attacks Mendizábal made against priests like Fray Nicolás de Freitas and Fray Diego de Parraga, but still apparently aroused the enmity of both the conservative Franciscan clergy and the civil authorities. He brought some of his difficulties on himself. Governor López de Mendizábal remarked that he was very young and considered him to be a troublemaker and the cause of many of the problems in 1659 to 1660. [50]

Santandér had a heavy load of duties to carry out. In addition to conducting an occasional mass at Tabirá, twenty-five miles away to the northeast, he was also secretary to the custodian, all of which required that he travel frequently. He acted as the notary, officially recording many hearings and inquiries conducted by the Franciscans. Santandér is known to have made trips to Chililí and Senecú during 1660 and Isleta and Santa Fe during 1661 as part of these duties. [51] Because of Santandér's other activities, work on the church apparently went slowly and lacked the expert polish to be found in other churches built by more experienced friars. [52]

The Second Church of San Buenaventura

In the winter of 1659-60, Santandér evaluated the site he had selected for the church and convento. The only good location, on the west end of the small mesa of Las Humanas, sloped rather steeply down to the west and south. Santandér developed a ground plan and worked out a construction method that suited the location. He apparently had some training in surveying and construction, but only a theoretical knowledge of the structural needs of a mission. The church he designed was a little large, but not unusually so. The sacristy, on the other hand, was huge. When it came time to roof this room, beams about thirty-five feet long would be necessary for the vigas. This was only a foot shorter than the vigas that would be needed for the nave roof.

Santandér's lack of design experience showed most clearly in the plan of the friary. He laid out all the rooms the same size, about fourteen feet square, with no provision for different room sizes for different uses. Among other things, he left off any provision for a porteria. He did not allow for the thickness of partition walls in the layout. As a result, these walls were built approximately on the line between units. Sometimes they were centered, sometimes offset so that one face or the other was on the line. The partition wall locations would not cause any real problems during the construction, but the lack of room size variation according to the intended use of the room eventually required correction.

About March of 1660, Santandér was ready to begin the layout of the plan on the ground. The crews cleared the brush and cactus from the entire hillside and began to mark out the lines of the walls and courtyards. The slope created a difficult surveying problem for Santandér, because with the simple procedures for layout available to him, the slope tended to distort his plan as he marked it out. In most areas Santandér was able to keep the errors small, so that they showed up only as minor irregularities in wall alignments. In the church Santandér apparently intended to set the nave width at exactly ten varas or twenty-eight feet. [53] However, he did not get the long walls exactly parallel, so that at the mouth of the transept the nave was twenty-six feet, ten inches wide, while at the front it was twenty-nine feet, ten inches. [54] Santandér probably used a method involving a measuring cord and vertical poles, so that the measurements could be made in a series of increments down the hillside. Under the circumstances, the layout of the plan was carried out in an effective, fairly accurate manner.

Santandér realized that the somewhat steep slope would require the construction of a higher platform than usual. The platform would need retaining walls almost eight feet high along the west side and part of the north side, and six feet high along the south. Such a high platform would require much more foundation stonework than was used on Quarai or the two versions of Abó, and would add almost two years to the time needed to construct the buildings.

Once the wall and courtyard outlines were marked out, the work crews began the labor of digging through the shallow soil on the hillside until they hit bedrock or fairly solid limestone rubble. On the south side of the building site, crew members continued to dig into the hillside, cutting into the rock itself in the area of the northeast half of the second courtyard area. Fortunately, the second courtyard did not need to be as level as the first; in fact, a slope to the courtyard area aided in drainage, helping to keep this stable and barnyard area reasonably clean. This courtyard excavation had to be completed before the masons could begin construction on the retaining wall along the south side of the first courtyard area to the north, because that wall was to cover the north face of the cut. Probably, in order to save time, the masons began construction on other parts of the retaining walls and foundations while excavation crews dug out the second courtyard area, beginning with the area where the wall between the first and second courtyards would be built. Rubble from the excavations was probably piled in the middle of the first courtyard area to be spread out later as part of the levelling fill. Depending on how many people were available to remove the dirt and stone, the excavation could have taken anywhere from one to two months. [55]

When the foundation trenching were ready, the masons constructed the outside walls of the first courtyard of the convento and the church. When they had raised these to the point where the west and south sides had reached a height of about four feet, they stopped construction and began the first episode of filling and levelling. Crew members probably spread the dirt and rubble removed from the second courtyard excavation and hauled additional fill to the first courtyard and church in baskets. Several people would have been assigned to spreading the fill evenly and packing it down. When the fill reached a depth of about three feet along the retaining walls, filling stopped and the masons returned. With the fill surface to stand on, the masons did not need scaffolding during the construction of the platform and foundations. [56]

The masons laid out the interior walls of the convento on the approximately levelled surface of the first layer of fill. They then built these walls up along with the main outside walls. When all the walls had built up another three or four feet, the masonry work stopped and everyone hauled dirt again for the second episode of fill. In the area of the friary, this fill episode brought the platform surface up to within a few inches of the intended final floor level. The fill was continued up to the tops of all the retaining walls and foundations. With the completion of the second levelling fill, the platform was ready for the construction of the new convento and church buildings. Assuming that Santandér was able to keep the work moving at the same rate as Fray Gutiérrez de la Chica had at Quarai or as Acevedo at Abó and Las Humanas, he would have completed the platform in the fall of 1661.

During the building season of 1662, Santandér appears to have had the construction crews concentrate almost entirely on the convento. Probably the old convento in the pueblo was deteriorating and much too small, and San Isidro was still in acceptable condition. The builders were able to complete the walls of the main convento rooms by the fall of 1662, including the rooms along the east, west, and south sides of the patio. Of these, the refectory, kitchen, and principal cell were probably roofed. [57]

Little work would have been done on the church during this effort. The church would have remained a church-shaped outline of walls level with the top of the fill within it, but eight feet high on the outside at the west end. [58] The surface of the fill and the tops of the foundations were probably three to four feet lower than Santandér's intended final floor level. He apparently intended to have several steps up from the convento to the sacristy, and perhaps another step or two from the sacristy to the church. [59]

Changes to Santandér's Plan

Santandér built the retaining walls and foundations as they appeared on his original plan, but when he began work on the above-grade walls he did not follow the original layout. By the time construction could begin on the rooms in the spring of 1662, Santandér had realized that he needed some rooms larger than others. He revised the plan so that one cross wall did not get built, doubling the size of room 3, and he changed the location of the door to allow for the new room arrangement. He may have rearranged the entrances to other rooms so that some communicated with an adjacent room rather than with the ambulatorio. Finally, he built a porteria on the east side of the convento at the doorway of the entrance wall, with its walls butted against the already-completed friary walls.

Even after the adjustments, however, Santandér's odd approach to construction, apparently the result of inexperience, still showed. For example, he apparently built a window in every outside wall of every room, even those that would not face outside when the church was completed. He built a window in the south wall of room 4, even though it would eventually face into the second level of the storeroom in the second courtyard. In room 15, he built a window opening onto the area that would become the sacristy when work on the church resumed. Either Santandér's planning was faulty in some details, or he was expecting a long time to pass before the sacristy and storeroom would be completed. [60]

The changes allow functions to be deduced for each room. Rooms 3 and 4 were a single suite, within which room 4 was the kitchen and room 3 was the refectory. Santandér built a fireplace in the northwest corner of the refectory to warm it, and two fireplaces in the northwest and southeast corners of the kitchen. [61] He set up two suites as cells: rooms 10 and 11, and rooms 12a and 12b. Rooms 14 and 15 may have been a third cell suite, but were more likely schoolrooms or the infirmary. Room 2 may have been the residence for an Indian sacristan or porter and had a fire place in its north west corner. [62] Room 13 was probably a storeroom.

When completed, these rooms looked very much like those at Abó or Quarai. The undersides of the roof beams of these rooms were at a height of ten feet above the floor of the convento and the tops of the parapets at about 12 1/2 feet, except in rooms 1 and 16, where the roof vigas were set at 12 1/2 feet and the tops of the parapets at fifteen feet. None of the roofing vigas had corbels. The vigas over rooms 1 and 16 were carved square, but the roofing over the rest of the convento used round beams. [63] The room walls were coated with mortar and finished with a white plaster. Some of the more important rooms, such as the principal cell, may have had dados and other decorations painted on the walls. Every room had a splayed window opening inward, closed by a wooden grill probably glazed with selenite. [64]

Rooms 1 and 16 along the south wall of the church may have reached a height of eight to ten feet during the construction of 1662. Room 1 was to be a two-story structure containing the wooden choir loft stairs, and room 16 was the same sort of ambiguous room next to the church as found at the other two Salinas missions. Its probable use was to be sacristy storage. These rooms could not be finished because their roofs were supported in part by the wall of the church, still at about floor level at this time. [65]

In the second courtyard, room 6 was probably finished. Santandér built it as the principal storeroom for the mission. When completed, it stood about nineteen feet high to the tops of the parapets. It had a large doorway approximately centered in the west wall, with a double splay opening inward. This doorway was 5 1/2 feet wide on the outside and 9 1/4 feet wide on the inside. The doorway probably had a height of seven feet. Such a doorway was designed for a double door with each leaf about 2 3/4 feet wide and seven feet high. At the north and south ends of the storeroom, Santandér built lofts supported by large vigas fifteen inches square and twenty feet long, running east to west across the room. There were probably six vigas at each end of the room set approximately three feet apart, center to center, with the first viga at each end set against the end wall. This made two loft platforms about sixteen feet wide. [66] The undersides of the vigas were about six feet above the floor, with the floors of the lofts about 7 1/2 feet above the floor of the storeroom. Each loft was probably reached by a steep, solid wooden staircase. The underside of the roof vigas were about 10 1/2 feet above the loft floor, or 18 feet above the storeroom floor. The room was designed to be a secure storage area and granary, with some supplies stacked on the lofts and others piled on the floor beneath. The doorway was probably wide enough for a wagon to be backed into the room and tall enough for its high-stacked cargo to clear the lintel implying a height of perhaps eight to nine feet high. Through the east wall Santandér had two narrow, ventilator-like windows built which were 1 1/2 to two feet wide with a single splay opening toward the outside. The windows were low enough that on the east exterior of the building, where the ground sloped up, their bases were only a little above ground level. They were probably closed by thick wooden gratings. [67]

South of the storeroom, three other rooms (7, 8, and 8a) ran along the south side of the second courtyard. These were probably stables and workshops, where blacksmithing and wagon and harness repair took place. These rooms were probably left uncompleted in 1662.

When the main rooms of the convento were finished, Santandér moved his residence from Letrado's old convento in mound 7 into the new building. Most of the old convento was turned over to the Indians for their own use. Soon after, Santandér's old residence in mound 7 (room 222) was dismantled and apparently converted to a porch. The roofing was removed and probably some of the wall stone reused elsewhere in the pueblo. The large doors in the south wall of rooms 221 and 220 were removed from their frames and apparently left leaning against the wall. [68]

The sacristy and robing room remained in the old structure, however, just as the first church of San Buenaventura (San Isidro) continued to serve the pueblo for services. The doorway between room 221, now a pueblo room, and the sacristy (room 215) was filled, making the sacristy and the robing room (room 214) a separate suite within the rooms returned to Indian use.

Other Events in 1661 and 1662

Meanwhile during 1661, a new custodian, Fray Alonso de Posadas, arrived in New Mexico to take the place of Fray Juan Ramirez, who had returned to Mexico City with the supply train in the fall of 1659. Posadas acquired a dislike for Santandér and several other of the young activist Franciscans such as Nicolás de Freitas and Diego de Parraga, who were deeply involved in the conflict with Governor Mendizábal. In the second half of 1661 he began a campaign of ridicule and opposition later described as the "persecution" of these men. [69]

In early October, Santandér was seriously injured while travelling or at Las Humanas in an undescribed accident. He never fully recovered his health after the injuries. Because of his illness, he was unable to act as notary during official enquiries of the custody in October, and, in fact, he never served as notary again. In spite of Santandér's illness, or perhaps because of it and Posadas's ill will, the young priest was transferred three times in the next four years. [70]

Santandér probably left Las Humanas in 1662, perhaps after the Chapter meeting about August. He was transferred to San Marcos in the Galisteo Basin. In 1665, probably also in August, he was transferred again, this time to Senecú in the southern Rio Grande valley. In late 1665 or early 1666 he was moved a third time, to Acoma where he was the second missionary under the guardian Fray Nicolás de Freitas. By this time he was so ill that he had to be carried up and down the difficult climb to the top of the mesa on which Acoma stands. Finally his illness forced him to leave New Mexico, probably on the supply train that departed in the autumn of 1666. He returned to Mexico City, where he died in 1667. [71]

Santandér had been at Las Humanas for about three full years, although he was seriously ill during the last year. During this time he was able to complete the foundations of the new complex of San Buenaventura, as well as most of the convento. On Santandér's departure in 1662, Las Humanas was assigned a new missionary. His name is unknown. [72]

The Final Attempt to Finish the Church of San Buenaventura

During the administration of the unnamed friar, work continued on the unfinished convento rooms and on the church and sacristy. He constructed the roofs of the unfinished rooms along the south and west sides of the first courtyard and built the walls of the church, sacristy, and baptistry to a height of about eight feet by the fall of 1664. During the construction, the sacristy was used to stockpile some of the building stone and mortar materials. The collection and preparation crews built one of their puddling pits for mixing mortar in the middle of the sacristy. It was ten feet across and almost a foot deep. [73] Santandér's successor accepted Santandér's construction surfaces in the church and sacristy as the finished surfaces, and began final construction while leaving the sills and floor levels with a distinct downward slope of 4 feet towards the west. The church, sacristy, and baptistry masonry looks somewhat different from the stonework in the convento. It uses more large stones, and both the levels and vertical edges are somewhat off. This may be a sign of haste: the friar may have felt (quite accurately) that if San Buenaventura was going to be finished, it was going to have to hurry. Even cutting almost four feet off the final height of the foundations and platform, however, did not allow the church to be completed.

At the end of the season the construction crew raised and set in place the lintel beams over the large sacristy window, the doorway from the church to the sacristy, and the doorway from the church to the baptistry. Each lintel consisted of five beams, twelve inches square. The beam at the face of the interior wall of the church above the doorway to the sacristy was covered with decorative carving consisting of a series of diamonds and circles. The diamonds enclosed four-leafed floral elements, and the circles enclosed six-leafed elements. Semicircles with fleur-de-lis were carved along the edges of the beam. [74] A similar beam faced into the church over the baptistry doorway, and may also have been decorated. The baptistry walls were left at eight feet in height, awaiting the installation of roofing vigas.

During the first few months of the building season of 1665 the masons and carpenters raised the walls to eleven feet. At this height they began assembling the front entrance lintels and choir loft. The entrance lintel consisted of five beams, thirteen inches wide and fifteen inches high. The beams varied in length, with the outermost being about 27 1/2 feet long and the next somewhat shorter. [75] The interior beam of the entrance lintel was about thirty-two feet long, with decorative carving on the interior face. [76] The carving covered only the middle eighteen feet or so, centered over the doorway. On the tops of the side walls at the same height, the carpenters and lifting crews assembled the pieces of an intricately-carved cornice, and, extending across the church at twenty feet from the front, they placed the corbels and main crossbeam of the choir loft. [77] The main viga was sixteen inches wide and about ten inches high. It was supported by two square columns, each sixteen inches on a side about ten feet from the side walls.

The cornices, one on each side of the nave beneath the choir loft, were complex pieces of woodwork. Each appears to have consisted of two parts. The main section was a beam about twenty feet long and sixteen inches square, set about eight inches into the nave wall. Attached to the lower edge of this beam was a second section sixteen inches high and about four inches thick, placed against the surface of the nave wall. A portion of the west end of the lower section extended beneath the corbel of the cross beam. The exterior surfaces of both sections were covered with carved decoration, with the pattern on the main beam of the cornice very much like that on the entrance lintel beam and the sacristy lintel beam. The carpenters had carved the lower section of the cornice into a complex molding with a variety of floral and geometric details.

One of the best examples of the shoddy construction taking place during these last years of work on the church is the choir loft. Although it was a complex, carefully made, intricately carved structure, it was built with a slope of about seven inches down from the facade to the main cross beam, twenty feet to the west. This is approximately the same slope followed by the surface of Santandér's fill in the church. The same slope can also be seen in the coursing of the stonework on the walls of the nave. Apparently the friar or the mayordomo was not levelling the work, and errors were creeping into the construction. This is further evidence that the friar who replaced Santandér did not know the full details of Santandér's plan for the church. It is likely that all the beams for the lintels and the choir loft had been cut during Santandér's tenure at Las Humanas, and were kept in storage until the unnamed friar was ready to place them on the walls.

Figure 22. Section down the nave of San Buenaventura. The dashed line shows the probable intended height of the walls. Many of the edges and corners of the building as it stands today have been restored distinctly out of plumb, distorting the shape of the walls and doorways. Note that the ground surface inside the church, the tops of the walls, and the choir loft all slope downward at the same rate. This slope is echoed by the coursing of the stonework in the walls of the building. It is probably the result of the incomplete construction and filling of the church foundation before the above-grade walls were begun, and the failure to use a levelling device in the last stages of the attempt to finish the church. As designed, the church was probably intended to have a floor level with the sill of the main entrance. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

The lifting crews raised the eleven choir floor beams and the construction crew set them in place with one end on the main cross beam and the other on the entrance lintel beams. Each beam was about 8 1/2 inches wide and 10 1/2 inches high, set at intervals of about three feet. At the same time, the construction crews placed the roofing vigas for the convento rooms along the south side of the church. The masons then built up the stonework of the nave and facade to lock the beams, cornice, and lintels into place.

During 1666, the construction crews completed the choir loft floor and the roofs of the convento rooms. They built wooden stairs in room 1 to give access to the second floor and the choir entrance doorway, and they set the frames for the choir entrance door, the choir facade window, and the two large windows in the south wall of the nave. No doorway was made from the choir loft to the baptistry roof. Each of the windows was to be about eight feet square on the exterior, with an inward splay to a width of 12 1/2 feet. The choir doorway was to have been eight feet square with no splay. Once the frames were in place, the masons continued laying stone on the tops of the walls of the church and sacristy. Work stopped when they had raised the walls of the church and sacristy to a height of fifteen feet. The masons expected to set the roofing vigas of the sacristy and the baptistry in place during the next season of construction in 1667.

It was probably in late 1666, however, that the chapter elections assigned a new friar, Fray Joseph de Paredes, to Las Humanas and transferred the unnamed friar elsewhere. [78] Paredes would have examined the condition and plans for the new church of San Buenaventura as part of his familiarization during the winter of 1666-67. He was undoubtedly dismayed at the obvious difficulties left to him by the unnamed friar.

In 1667, Paredes made an attempt to continue the construction of the church, but agricultural problems took priority. Snowfall and the spring rains had been short, and the fields were dryer than they should have been. If rain continued short, food was going to be a problem for the pueblo by harvest time. Worse, many of the other pueblos in the province of New Mexico were having similar problems.

Construction on the church went slowly, perhaps because fewer people could be spared from trying to work the drying fields or hunting and gathering activities. On some sections of the walls the height reached about eighteen to twenty feet, but most areas rose only a few inches during this time. The transepts, apse and sacristy remained around fourteen to fifteen feet in height. At this point the work stopped and was never resumed. [79]

No crops were harvested in the fall of 1667. Stored supplies ran out quickly. It became obvious in 1668 that the famine was going to be severe, and Las Humanas had no time for anything other than the search for food. [80] During the year, 450 Indians died of hunger and thirst. No significant work on the church was carried out. Neat stacks of building stone and caliche mortar were left stockpiled in the sacristy, and the last batch of puddled adobe being mixed in the pit in the sacristy floor dried with the workers' footprints still impressed in its surface. [81] The maze of scaffolding obscuring much of the church and sacristy was left in place in hopes that when the emergency passed work could begin again, but these hopes were in vain. The emergency never passed, and the permanent church of San Buenaventura, with its beautifully carved beams and corbels and its intricate choir loft, was never to be completed.

Fray Joseph de Paredes and the Last Years of Las Humanas

Fray Joseph de Paredes served at Las Humanas for the triennium of August, 1666, to August, 1669. During the first of these years it became obvious that the drought was going to be severe. The production of the fields had fallen off badly, and the catch basins and bottom lands were drying out. Ten years earlier, similar conditions had occurred, and the missions had taken up the slack by supplying food to the Indians. The military situation worsened, and the entire province went to what amounted to martial law. In 1667, some missions began to distribute food to their pueblos and also began to feed military patrols stationed in the pueblos. As happened before, the convento at Las Humanas had no surpluses to distribute. Probably Abó helped Paredes out. [82]

The difficult situation demanded special measures. Hunger was becoming a common affliction among most of the inhabitants of the province, whether Indian or Spanish. The friars were concerned about the possibility of someone stealing the meager supplies of food being distributed among the missions to help feed the Indians and the military patrols. Any such loss could have been disastrous. To protect the supplies, about 1669 Paredes built a more secure storage area at Las Humanas, similar to the arrangements being made at Quarai and Abó.

As at the other two Salinas missions, the secure storeroom was built next to the kitchen of the convento. Inside the main storeroom in the second courtyard, Paredes constructed a partition wall from floor to ceiling, enclosing the southernmost beam of the northern loft and separating the north end of the room from the rest. Within the first-floor room created by this partition, he built a cross wall pierced by a narrow doorway. This wall supported the loft vigas, allowing Paredes to cut out a section of one of them in order to make a hatchway through the loft floor. A strong ladder-like stair was built beneath the hatch, providing access from the first level to the second. At the same time, Paredes had the masons build a flight of two stones steps under the useless south window in the kitchen (room 4) that opened into the storeroom. This allowed the friars to use the window to go from the kitchen to the second floor of the secure storage area.

The windows through the east side wall of the storeroom were filled or considerably reduced in size to prevent anyone from crawling through them. This insured that no person could enter the secure storeroom without permission and the keys of the guardian of the mission.

The famine and the presence of military patrols in the jurisdiction of Las Salinas continued for several years, from 1669 to at least 1672. Paredes was last mentioned at Las Humanas in testimony taken in April, 1669, but the chapter meeting held about August, 1669, probably continued him at the pueblo for the triennium to August, 1672. However, by August 1672 the pueblo of Las Humanas no longer existed. [83]

Time for the pueblo and the church was running out. The food supply was growing rapidly smaller at the same time that unrest among the Apache and anti-Spanish factions among the Pueblo Indians was growing stronger. On September 3, 1670, an Apache raid hit the pueblo, perhaps carried out at the prompting of an increasingly powerful anti-Spanish groups in the pueblo. [84] During the raid, Acevedo's visita church of San Isidro "was profaned and laid waste," statues and paintings on the altar destroyed, and vestments torn to pieces. During this raid the Apache killed eleven people and captured thirty others. [85] It is likely that the church and rooms 208, 214, 215, 220, and 221 in mound 7 were burned during the raid. The new convento rooms in San Buenaventura were apparently not damaged. [86]

The description of this raid was the last reference to Las Humanas as a living pueblo. Paredes and the pro-Spanish factions of the population abandoned the town and convento soon afterwards, perhaps in 1671. They probably moved to Abó first, and then on to one of the Piro settlements of the Rio Grande Valley. Most of them seem to have settled at Senecú, and the chapter meeting of August, 1672, made Paredes the guardian of Senecú. [87]

The buildings of the pueblo and convento of Las Humanas were left to collapse slowly into mounds of rubble. The unroofed permanent church slowly filled with sand and dirt blown in by the wind, and the scaffolding rotted and fell apart. Eventually the roofs of the convento collapsed, room by room, and wall rubble began to add itself to the growing fill in the rooms and church. The old convento rooms in mound 7 fell in much faster, helped by the destruction caused by the fire. Acevedo's visita church with its thin walls quickly became a mound of rubble. Within a century Las Humanas looked much like any other abandoned pueblo to the occasional brave explorer passing through the area.