Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/312

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JEAN L'ARCHÉVÈQUE.

Mexico. It was probably with Don Diego de Vargas, the reconqueror of the province. l'Archévèque and Meunier were soldiers, while Grollet came as a settler. All three were in Santa Fé as early as 1696. In the next year l'Archévèque was married to Antonia Gutierrez, who was born at Tezonco, near the City of Mexico, and was the widow of a certain Tomas de Yta, who had been murdered three years previously near Zacatecas. In the year 1701 he bought a land estate in Santa Fé, but still continued a soldier, and in that capacity visited in the next year the distant Indian villages of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuñi. His wife died in the first year of the eighteenth century, and he continued a widower till 1719, when he married as his second wife the daughter of the Alcalde Mayor Ignacio de Roybal. The second marriage was solemnized in the church of the pueblo of San Ildefonso, and the governor of New Mexico at the time, General Don Antonio Valverde Cosio, was one of the witnesses. l'Archévèque, or, as he now began to call himself, Captain Juan de Archibeque, stood in high credit. He had left the military service with honor, and had become a successful trader, or peddler. His trading journeys extended to Sonora, and he occasionally visited the City of Mexico on business. His notes[1] were current everywhere, and were even accepted and endorsed by men connected with the government. He was a man in easy circumstances—for New Mexico, a wealthy man. His son by his first marriage,

  1. I saw the head of one of them, which was for 800 pesos a large sum for the conditions in New Mexico at that time.