Stronghand; or, The Noble Revenge. Gustave AimardЧитать онлайн книгу.
of the old time which they alone still practise with a proud and simple majesty.
The Creoles, half-breeds, and Indians, in spite of the hatred they affect for their old masters, and the principles of so-called republican equality which they profess with such absurd emphasis in the presence of strangers, feel for these families a respect bordering on veneration; for they seem to understand inwardly the superiority of these powerful natures, which no political convulsion has been able to level or even bind, over their own vicious decrepit natures, which have grown old without ever having been young.
A few leagues from Arispe, the old capital of the Intendancy of Sonora, but now greatly fallen, and only a second-class city, there stands like an eagle's nest, on the summit of an abrupt rock, a magnificent showy mansion, whose strong and haughty walls are crowned with Almenas, which at the time of the Spanish conquest were only permitted to families of the old and pure nobility, and they alone had the right to have battlements on their houses.
This fortress-palace—which dates from the first days of the conquest, and whose antiquity is written on its walls, which have seen so many bullets flatten, so many arrows break against them, but which time, that grand destroyer of the most solid things, is gradually crumbling away by a continuous effort, under the triple influences of the air, the sun, and rain—has never changed masters since the day of its construction, and the chiefs of the same family, on dying, have ever left it to their descendants.
This family is one of those to which we just now referred, whose origin dates back to the first conquerors, and whose name is Tobar de Moguer—(Moguer was added at a later date, doubtless in memory of the Spanish town whence the chief of the family came.)
In 1541, Don Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, organized the expedition to Cibola, a mysterious country, visited a few years previously by Alvaro Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and about which the most marvellous and extraordinary reports were spread, all the better suited to inflame the avarice and unextinguishable thirst for gold by which the Spanish adventurers were devoured.
The expedition, consisting of 300 Spaniards and 800 Indian allies, started from Compostela, the capital of New Galicia, on April 17, 1541, under the orders of Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The officers nominated by the Viceroy were all gentlemen of distinction; among them as standard bearer was Don Pedro de Tobar, whose father, Don Fernando de Tobar, had been Majordomo-Major in the reign of Jane the Mad, mother of the Emperor Charles V.
We will only say a few words about this expedition, the preparations for which were immense; and which would have doubtless furnished better results, and proved to the advantage of all, had the chief thought less of the immense fortune he left behind in New Spain, and more of the immense responsibility weighing upon him.
After innumerable fatigues, the expedition reached Cibola, which, instead of being the rich and magnificent city they expected to see, was only a wretched insignificant village, built on a rock, and which the Spaniards seized after an hour's fighting. Still, the Indians defended themselves bravely, and several Spaniards were wounded. The General himself, hurled down by a stone, would have been infallibly killed, had it not been for the devotion of Don Pedro de Tobar and another officer, who threw themselves before him, and gave their chief time to rise and withdraw from the fight.
The Spaniards, half discouraged by the extraordinary fatigue they were forced to endure, and the continual deceptions that awaited them at every step, but still urged on by that spirit of adventure which never deserted them, resolved after the capture of Cibola to push further on and try their fortunes once again. Thus they reached, with extreme difficulty, the last country visited by Cabeza de Vaca, to which he had given the name of the Land of Hearts (Tierra de los Corazones)—not, as might be supposed, because the inhabitants had seemed so gentle and amiable, but solely because, at the period of his passing, the only food they offered him had been stags' hearts.
On reaching this place the Spaniards halted. Don Tristán de Arellano, who had taken the command of the army in place of Don Francisco Coronado, who was ailing from the wound received at Cibola, seeing the rich and fertile appearance of this country, resolved to found a town, which he called San Hieronima de los Corazones. This town was, however, almost immediately abandoned by the Spaniards, who carried the various elements further, and started a new town, to which they gave the name of Señora, afterwards corrupted into Sonora, which eventually became the name of the province.
During this long expedition Don Pedro de Tobar distinguished himself on several occasions. At the head of seventeen horsemen, four foot soldiers, and a Franciscan monk of the name of Fray Juan de Padella who in his youth had been a soldier, Don Pedro de Tobar discovered the province of Tutaliaco, which contained several towns, the houses being of several storeys. All these towns, or rather villages, were carried by storm by Don Pedro, and the province was subjugated in a few days.
When, twenty years after, the Viceroy wishing to recompense Don Pedro's services, offered him estates, the latter, who held Señora in pleasant recollection, asked that land should be granted him in this province, which reminded him of the prowess of his youth, and to which he was attached by the very fatigues he had undergone and the dangers he had incurred. During the twenty years that had elapsed since Coronado's expedition, Don Pedro had married the daughter of Don Rodrigo Maldonado, brother-in-law of the Duke of Infantado, and one of his old comrades in arms. As Don Rodrigo had settled in Sonora, Don Pedro, in order to be near him, took up his abode on the site of Cibola, which had long been destroyed and abandoned, and built on the crest of the rock the magnificent Hacienda del Toro, which, as we have said, remained for centuries in the family, with the immense estates dependent on it.
Like all first-class haciendas in Mexico, El Toro was rather a town than a simple habitation, according to the idea formed in Europe of private estates. It comprised all the old territory of Cibola. On all sides its lofty walls, built on the extremity of the rock, hung over the abyss. It contained princely apartments for the owners, a chapel, workshops of every description, storehouses, barracks, quarters for the pious, and corrals for the horses and cattle, with an immense huerta, planted with the finest trees and the most fragrant flowers. In a word, it was, and probably still is, one of those gigantic abodes which appear built for Titans, and of which the finest feudal châteaux in the Old World offer but an imperfect idea.
The fact is, that at the time when the conquerors built these vast residences, inhabitants were sparse in these countries, as is indeed the case now. The owners having their elbows at liberty, could take what land they liked, and hence each ultimately became, without creating any surprise, possessors of a territory equal in size to one of our counties.
It was in 1811, twenty-nine years before the period when our story begins, at the dawn of that glorious Mexican revolution the first cry of which had been raised on the night of September 16, 1810, by Hidalgo—at that time a simple parish priest in the wretched town of Dolores, and whose success, sixteen months later, was so compromised by the disastrous battle of Calderón, in which countless bands of fantastic Indians were broken by the discipline of the old Spanish troops—that the most sensible men regarded it as an unimportant insurrection—a fatal error which caused the ruin of the Spanish domination.
But on November 25, 1811, the day on which we begin this narrative, the insurgents had not yet been conquered at Calderón; on the contrary, their first steps had been marked by successes; from all sides Indians came to range themselves beneath their banner, and their army, badly disciplined, it is true, but full of enthusiasm, amounted to 80,000 men. Already master of several important towns, Hidalgo assembled all his forces with the evident design of dealing a great blow, and generalizing the insurrection, which had hitherto been confined to two provinces.
About two in the afternoon, that is to say, the time when in these climes the heat is most oppressive, a horseman, mounted on a magnificent mustang, was following at a gallop the banks of a small stream, half dried up by the torrid heat of the southern sun, and by whose side a few sickly cottonwood trees were withering.
The dust, reduced to impalpable atoms, formed a dense cloud round the horseman, who, plunged into sad and gloomy thought, with pale forehead and brows contracted till they touched, continued his journey without noticing the desolate aspect of the country he was