SALINAS "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions

THE CONSTRUCTION OF SAN BUENAVENTURA (continued)

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.