It had been bad for a while, but I guess in the mid-1770’s it got really bad.

From 1772 to 1776, a drought seized Nuevo Mexico, and thin food and water resources became even more scarce in the desolate territory.

For those Spaniard colonists who took a chance and settled north of the Sonora Frontera in the barely protected spaces in New Mexico, they were eventually greeted with violence, like the natives who had been in the land long before them, settled in their pueblos.

Because of the drought, though, the raiders became more petulant and brazen- more treacherous and destructive.

Before then, the marauders had settled with stealing the livestock, securing additional horses and cattle to feed and support their wandering bands. They had simply come to take what they needed- food, tools, supplies.

During the drought, however, their incursions were harsher on everything, and they became more aggressive, storming into Spanish settlements and the pueblos of their native allies, with new motives- to burn down buildings and to take captives- women and children- that they could exchange for ransoms. During the decade surrounding the drought years, the raiders had taken over 200 Spanish lives.

They were harsh and intolerable like the desert sun and swept in and out of settlements like a fiery wind, rolling waves of noise and heat and violence, burning crops in the fields, killing cattle to stymie and starve the garrisons of troops who were charged with securing the vast uncontainable land from them, from the Comanches and the Apaches and the Utes and the Navajos raiders who followed the clouds and made the territory uninhabitable, riding rulers and robbers with their own dark history of violent conquests.

And the colonists wondered if they would be able- or should even try- to remain in that unforgiving country.