Juan de Onate Expedition - 1598

🏛️The era

In the late 1500s, Spain was the most powerful empire on earth, and its reach into the Americas was vast. Mexico City had been a Spanish capital for more than seventy years. Silver mines in places like Zacatecas were pouring wealth into the royal treasury, and a long chain of mining towns, missions, and ranches was creeping steadily north toward lands that Europeans knew mostly from rumor.

Those rumors were powerful. Earlier expeditions, including Coronado's march in the 1540s and several smaller forays in the 1580s, had brought back stories of settled Pueblo towns, possible mineral riches, and thousands of people Spanish friars hoped to convert. By the 1590s, the far northern frontier had a name, New Mexico, even though no Spanish colony yet existed there.

There was also a rivalry to consider. Spain and England were bitter enemies in this era. English sailors had raided Spanish treasure fleets and ports, and the Spanish crown had good reason to worry that its rivals might someday plant a foothold in North America. Claiming the interior firmly for Spain was a way to stay a step ahead.

The land around present-day El Paso sat at a natural crossroads. Here the Rio Grande cuts through the mountains, offering water and a passage north after the dry country of northern Mexico. Whoever controlled this crossing held the door to everything beyond it.

👥People & events

Juan de Oñate was born into one of New Spain's wealthiest silver-mining families, and he was expected to pay for much of his expedition himself. That was how Spain often colonized its frontiers: the king granted titles and authority, and ambitious men gambled their own fortunes in hope of land, honors, and profit. Oñate won the contract in 1595, but years of delays, inspections, and court politics followed before he could finally set out.

When the column left Santa Barbara in January 1598, it was less an army than a moving town. Soldiers traveled with wives and children, Franciscan friars, servants, and large herds of livestock, along with wagons and carts creaking north. Rather than follow the river routes used by earlier explorers, Oñate struck straight across the Chihuahuan Desert. It was a grueling gamble in a land of little water, and the relief of reaching the Rio Grande must have been enormous.

On April 30, 1598, near the river, Oñate staged a formal ceremony known as La Toma, "the taking." In the language of the time, he claimed for the Spanish king all the land drained by the great river the Spaniards called the Rio del Norte. It was a legal act as much as a celebration, meant to establish Spain's claim in the eyes of Europe. San Elizario and other communities in the El Paso area celebrate the moment today, and some residents describe the feasting that accompanied it as a "first Thanksgiving," though that is a local tradition rather than a settled historical label. Historians also continue to debate exactly where along the river the ceremony took place.

Oñate then pushed north, founded a headquarters in the Pueblo country, and governed the new province. His rule was harsh and turbulent. The most notorious episode was the brutal Spanish assault on Acoma Pueblo in 1599 and the severe punishments that followed. Oñate eventually resigned, as the marker notes, and he was later tried by Spanish authorities for his conduct as governor. His legacy remains deeply contested, especially among Pueblo peoples.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

We often tell the story of America as one that moves from east to west, beginning at Jamestown and Plymouth. La Toma turns that story around. More than two decades before the Mayflower, and nearly a decade before Jamestown, Spanish colonists were already crossing into what is now the United States from the south, bringing their language, laws, and faith.

The route Oñate opened became part of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior Land, which linked Mexico City to northern New Mexico for centuries. Along it moved settlers, priests, soldiers, trade goods, livestock, and ideas. Much of the Hispanic heritage of the Southwest, from place names and adobe churches to family lineages many generations deep, traces back to that road.

It is also a story about conquest and its costs. The Pueblo peoples who already lived along the Rio Grande had their own governments, religions, and farming traditions long before any Spanish ceremony. Their resistance, most famously in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, is part of this same history. In recent years, monuments to Oñate have become flashpoints for that debate, a reminder that the events of 1598 still matter to people living in the region today.

🧭If you visit

San Elizario is a small, old community a short drive southeast of downtown El Paso, and it rewards visitors who slow down. The town sits in the fertile river valley, and you can feel how different this green strip of land is from the desert that surrounds it. That contrast helps you understand why a weary expedition would have welcomed this spot.

Take time to explore the historic heart of San Elizario, where adobe buildings and the distinctive whitewashed chapel give you a sense of the town's Spanish colonial and Mexican roots. As you stand near the marker, imagine hundreds of travelers, carts, and animals arriving after weeks in the desert, and the formal words of La Toma being read aloud by the river.

This marker fits naturally into a larger road trip along the old Camino Real. Nearby communities in the El Paso area have their own historic missions, and following the Rio Grande north into New Mexico lets you trace the path Oñate's colonists took. Allow time to reflect on both sides of the story: the courage of the journey, and the meaning of that journey for the people whose homeland it entered.