by Marc Simmons
There is a hidden story lurking in the shadows of Navajo history that
has never been fully told. Some pieces of the tale are missing, yet
enough remains, allowing a brief sketch to be drawn.
The matter begins with a Navajo headman known to the Spaniards as
Joaquín. It is uncertain how he acquired that name, but it may have been
borrowed from New Mexico Gov. Joaquín del Real Alencaster (1803 to
1805).
Joaquín, the Navajo, first appears on the scene in mid-July 1818,
when he showed up at Jemez Pueblo. This was at the tag end of the
colonial period, just three years before Mexico’s independence from
Spain.
According to records in the State Archives, Joaquín sought out the
Spanish alcalde, Ygnacio Sánchez Vergara, serving at Jemez. He informed
the official that the Navajo nation was making preparations for war
against the Spaniards.
The Navajo leader said that he had been strongly opposed to this, and
in council argued for keeping the peace. His main reason was that the
full weight of Spanish arms would be brought against them and could
spell disaster.
But Joaquín admitted that he had been overruled. So he led his band
of Navajos in a separation from the war faction that now dominated the
tribe.
Alcalde Sánchez Vergara was astonished and sent a message to Gov.
Pedro María Allande at Santa Fe. In it he wrote of the helpful and
friendly attitude of the headman and of his promise to accompany the
Spaniards in campaigns against the Navajos.
Historian Frank McNitt, a Navajo history expert, has written that
Joaquín’s defection produced a lasting division within the tribe. No one
at the time, however, fully understood that.
Immediately apparent, though, was the betrayal and the band’s new
alliance with the Spanish forces, which placed all of them in grave
danger, facing as they did, retaliation from their former co-tribesmen.
Joaquín’s answer to that threat was to pull his people out of their
mountain homes to the west and to relocate them in new encampments close
to Jemez Pueblo. That move was later approved by a Spanish treaty.
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