Table Of ContentGreat River
by Paul Horgan
N O V E LS
The Fault of Angels • The Habit of Empire • No Quarter Given
The Common Heart • Main Line West •JGive Me Possession
A Lamp on the Plains • Memories of the Future • A Distant Trumpet
Far from Cibola • Whitewater
Mountain Standard Time
(containing Main Line West, Far from Cibola, and The Common Heart)
Mexico Bay
T HE R I C H A RD T R I L O GY
Things As They Are • Everything to Live For • The Thin Mountain Air
O T H ER F I C T I ON
The Return of the Weed • The Saintmaker's Christmas Eve
Figures in a Landscape • Humble Powers • The Devil in the Desert
Toby and the Nighttime (juvenile)
One Red Rose for Christmas
The Peach Stone: Stories from Four Decades
HISTORY AND OTHER NON-FICTION
Men of Arms (juvenile) • From the Royal City
New Mexico's Own Chronicle (with Maurice Garland Fulton)
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History
The Centuries of Santa Fe • Rome Eternal • Citizen of New Salem
Conquistadors in North American History
Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch from Life • Songs After Lincoln
The Heroic Triad: Essays in the Social Energies of
Three Southwestern Cultures • Maurice Baring Restored
Encounters with Stravinsky: A Personal Record • Approaches to Writing
Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times
Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West
COLLECTIVE VOLUME
Of America East & West
Selections From the Writings of
Paul Horgan
Great River
The Rio Grande in
North AmericanHistory
Paul Horgan
VOLUME ONE: Indians and Spain
VOLUME TWO: Mexico and the United States
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
© 1984 by Paul Horgan
All rights reserved
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7
CIP data appear at the end of the book
To
Charles Arthur Henderson,
1907-1972,
and to the
students in my seminar
on the American Southwest held at
Wesleyan University
This page intentionally left blank
Preface to the Fourth Edition
i
In its length of nearly two thousand miles and its cultural evidence encom-
passing ten centuries and more, the Great River remains the unifying vein of
history not only of the life adjacent to its banks, but also of the greater
Southwest. There, if often far afield, the political, social, and geographical sig-
nificance of the river can be traced through the times of five sovereignties —
those of the Indian, Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States.
To do my subject anything like justice, I have hoped to produce a sense of
historical experience rather than a bare record. This required me wherever pos-
sible to see events, societies, and movements through human character in ac-
tion. While respecting the responsibilities of scholarship, I took every oppor-
tunity, when the factual record supported me, to stage a scene. Moreover, if
here and there I halted the narrative of events to describe the various ways and
customs of the people, then I had precedent for it, for Herodotus did the same,
to our enrichment. Only when events are rooted in the soil of the culture might
they seem to have a reality that endures.
ii
In manners of living, a long, slow sequence unfolded for the early river
peoples. Prehistoric intuitions among them gradually gave way to knacks and
simple ingenuities —primitive technologies to do with water, fire, agriculture,
shelter, travel, weaponry. For centuries all these were developed without that
sense of shock that accelerated rates of discovery produce. But with the waves
of activity and means of control of the natural world that rose with the indus-
trial revolution and the migratory imperatives of the nineteenth century, man's
impact on the environment brought swift and radical change within a single
human lifetime.
vii
viii Preface to the Fourth Edition
Into the Rio Grande country, ranging through the area of what became three
immense modern states and touching the great length of the river's immediate
course, came railroads, electricity, exploitation of mineral resources, coloniza-
tion, urbanization at key points, and —not to be undervalued — the popular
discovery of the natural aesthetic of generally benign climate over a landscape
of most desirable beauty.
In modern days, therefore, population not only changed in character, it grew
in a few generations to a size that threatened to create a dangerous imbalance
between what was available to sustain life and what was demanded by headlong
social increase. The problem was not exclusive to the Southwest, it plagued the
nation and, indeed, with Latin America included, it invaded the hemisphere.
But it was in the Southwest that technological change became most rapidly
visible. The desert country, having sustained sufficiently the modest require-
ments of the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Mexican, now had to meet the
environmental levies of the United States genius for industry. Added to these
were a foreshortened vision of the good life, which the American citizen and
his suppliers made commonly necessary without much common foresight for
the future effects of the technological society on such matters as pollution of air,
earth, and water, and —most significant for the Southwest — dangerous deple-
tion of the very sources of water itself.
The Rio Grande, long an adequate though never a voluminous river except
in flood tide, has been attended in modern times by concerned management in
its government conservancy districts; but in many places the river has become
only a trickle, and in others entirely dry, to be replenished only by flood from
otherwise dry or meager local tributaries and by diminishing ground water, this
always in the face of increasing needs of its resources in both the United States
and Mexico.
in
In the late twentieth century, the cultural history of the Rio Grande country
turned toward the devices and applications of science for a redefinition of its
modern character. None of these has had a stronger regional association than
the fateful development of nuclear science.
Before the mid-century in several nations, searching experiments in the revo-
lutionary process of creating nuclear fission worked to bring vast new powers
of energy within man's grasp. It took fears and antagonisms and the stakes of
war for the United States to apply atomic energy with all haste as a means of
destruction on behalf of victory. The ultimate site for this development in
weaponry was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in rugged mesa country west of
Preface to the Fourth Edition ix
the Rio Grande, and the history of the atomic bomb and its allied technical sup-
ports found location at other stations in the river empire such as Albuquerque,
the White Sands, Alamogordo, and the Jornada del Muerto* in central New
Mexico, where the first test detonation of the bomb took place in August, 1945.
The welcome clarity of the sky brought another world-changing technic to
a Rio Grande tributary, the Pecos River, when Robert Hutchings Goddard
chose Roswell, New Mexico, in the Pecos Valley for the continuation, and the
eventual fruition, of his experiments in liquid fuel rocketry, which directly led
to the achievement of space travel.
Added to these technical disciplines, with their ultimate administrative
sprawl, was the wide use of southwestern lands for training the armed forces
in World War II.
Through all such energies the Southwest, the Rio Grande ambience, was dis-
covered by the nation at large, and the characters of its traditional life, with
all the vestiges of its previous centuries still holding to the commingled styles
of three races, was changed more swiftly and radically than ever before. The
chronicle of life in the region always could be told in terms of change, whether
at the pace measured by geology, archaeology, exploration, or successive na-
tional conquests; but the changes wrought by machine technics over life in the
southwest desert empire have come so fast that designs for its future integrity
seem almost to be overtaken before they can be effected.
To retain the past of the Great River, a course through historical time, re-
mains the aim of the chronicle here.
*Translated as the Day's March of the Dead Man, the grim suitability of this
place name could not have been lost on the ironic and poetic genius of
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the bomb's production at Los Alamos.
iv
In order to give the reader an immediate sense of locality in the vastly scat-
tered backgrounds of the river empire, I have in many cases used recent or
modern place names in speaking of persons or events belonging to earlier times.
For example, "Mexico," properly speaking, was not the name of a nation or a
whole integral area until 1821, but I use it for events before that date rather than
the designation "New Spain" because I hope to give the reader a more ready
sense of where he is on the map. Similarly, pressing ahead with early events
near the site of modern river towns, I use their modern names (e.g., "near
Eagle Pass") as a quick means of orientation. On the other hand, intending to
revive a period atmosphere, I have on occasion used older forms: the modern
