J.R. Willis Murals

This mural pictures the Long Walk of the Navajo of 1864, the forced removal of over 8,000 Diné (Navajo) Indians from their ancestral home in Canyon de Chelly in Arizona to the reservation of Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. They walked over 300 miles, hundreds dying along the way from starvation and exposure and still more from the bleak conditions of the reservation, where they lived for four years before being allowed to return to their homeland. As in other areas of the American West, the US military and Native American tribes had a history of conflict, as the government encroached on Indigenous lands during a period of westward expansion alongside territorial competition with Mexico in the mid-1800s. Colonel Kit Carson led the operation, a scorched-earth campaign in which he and troops burned crops, killed livestock, destroyed villages, and starved the Navajo into submission. In this mural, Carson has rounded up the Navajo, and a long line of people begin the excruciating march.

Learn more about the events and impact of Long Walk from several descendants of its survivors, and discover the layered history of Canyon de Chelly from the National Park Service. 

How does Willis’s depiction of the Long Walk deviate from this account? Consider how Willis portrays Kit Carson and how he portrays the Navajo people. What adjectives would you use to describe these representations?

Though subsequently published titles treated this scene as a more generalized narrative of westward settlement, The Gallup Independent, in anticipation of the murals’ unveiling in the spring of 1936, referred to this painting as The Coming of the Americans after the Treaty of Hidalgo. This treaty (more commonly called the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) was signed in 1848 between the United States and Mexico and effectively signaled the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The agreement resulted in Mexico ceding a significant amount of its territory in what is now the American Southwest and led to the delineation of a new US-Mexico border. Read the original text from the treaty here, and consider its lasting effects.

In Willis’s scene, covered wagons carrying women and children wend their way through the newly acquired land, the yoked oxen goaded on by the sharp whips of frontiersmen guides. A mountain man—his attire capped off by the fringe on the chest of his buckskin jacket— rides atop his horse in the center of the scene. Their path is not a new one: well-worn tracks suggest the passage of people before them. The geographical backdrop, as the newspaper article mentions, resembles the Pyramid Rock and Church Rock formations near Gallup.

Take some time to observe the figures in the painting. Several of the male figures stride forward, directly toward the viewer, with fixed gazes. How does this impact how you perceive the story? What position does it put you in, as the viewer? How do the gestures and facial expressions of the other figures in the scene add to the message?

The sandstone bluff called El Morro stands over 200 feet tall in western New Mexico. Today a national monument, the site has been a crossroads for centuries, from the times of the Ancestral Puebloans to early-20th-century tourists. Willis pictures the formation as a backdrop for Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, who violently colonized New Mexico in 1598 and became its first governor. In 1605, while traveling on an expedition toward the Gulf of California, the Spaniard and his company of men passed the site, and he became the first European to inscribe his name into the rock. But Oñate wasn’t the first to leave his mark: ancient Native American petroglyphs predate his arrival, and passersby continued to add their signatures until 1906, when federal law banned it. 

Another image of El Morro from Gallup’s New Deal art collection is an etching by Albert Lorey Groll. Titled Inscription Rock (another name for the site), the scene is empty of human presence or historical significance. Instead, the varying textures and grand scale of the rocks are its subject.      

Consider the composition of this painting. Notice the scale of Don Juan de Oñate in relation to the majestic rock beside him. His gaze is steadfast and he is in full command of his horse, his men obediently lined up behind him while others lead the caravan with supplies. What message is Willis sending?

Willis’s characterization of Oñate in this painting is further illuminated by what he excludes from his public art historical narrative—what he doesn’t picture from Oñate’s colonial enterprise in New Mexico. The artist ignores  Oñate’s role in the Acoma Massacre, which occurred at Acoma Pueblo, east of El Morro National Monument, in 1599. This battle between Spanish colonizers and Native peoples resulted in the death of over 800 Pueblo Indians, and Oñate ordered the amputation of one foot from dozens of young Pueblo men who participated in the violent skirmish. He faced trial in Mexico City in 1606 for his cruelty. Learn more about contemporary reactions to Oñate’s violent legacy and the call to remove public statues of him here. 

Willis eschews any allusions to violence in his painting of Oñate, creating instead a non-confrontational image of order and calm that contrasts  with the broader historical colonial reality of which Oñate was a part. Why do you think he made this choice? What are the repercussions of such cherry-picking from the historical record?

In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and his men set out for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola, rumored to be filled with gold and other riches. The entourage arrived during summer ceremonies, and when the Zuni resisted Spanish orders, chaos and conflict ensued. It is this moment that the mural pictures: Coronado rushes forward on horseback, sword raised aggressively in the air. His armored men similarly raise their weapons and take aim at the Zuni people in the pueblo above. They, in turn, throw stones and shoot arrows at their advancing enemies. After capturing Hawiku (the ancestral site of the Zuni Pueblo, different from the modern-day Pueblo’s village at the base of the mesa; both sites are still considered sacred today), and wreaking death and destruction on other nearby pueblos, the Spanish realized that the rumors were unfounded, as neither gold nor other treasures were found. 

This image is a product of Willis’s imagination. What aspects of the story does Willis emphasize? What parts appear unrealistic? If you were to give a play-by-play account of the action, how would you narrate the scene?

A rumor (from the voyage of Cabeza de Vaca) of seven cities to the north of New Spain with riches rivaling even those of the ancient city of Teotihuacan in Mexico, spurred a Spanish reconnaissance mission in 1538 to find them. Led by Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, who was accompanied by Estebanico (the enslaved African who survived alongside Cabeza de Vaca), the group embarked for the legendary cities of “Cibola” the following year. Though they never reached their destination—Estebanico was killed while advance scouting, and Fray Marcos kept his distance for fear of confrontation with the A:Shiwi (Zuni) people—the friar’s report of having seen the fabled cities would lead to the large-scale exploration of the region by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540.

Willis pictures Zuni people in a primitivist—and inaccurate—fashion, wearing loincloths. How else does he fictionalize the first encounter between A:Shiwi people and Spanish conquistadors?

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer on the ill-fated expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. In 1527, the fleet departed Spain with a mission to colonize lands to the west of Florida. Despite natural disaster (a hurricane off the coast of Cuba) and shipwreck, wanderings by sea and by land, food shortages, and illness, Cabeza de Vaca and three others survived the long journey through Florida, across southern Texas and, ultimately, to Mexico. 

Willis depicts the four survivors of the original hundreds-strong expedition wandering through a Southwestern landscape. Climbing onto a small stone precipice, Cabeza de Vaca strides forward with his walking stick, looking more like a desert hermit than a Spanish gentleman. Behind him are Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and an African slave, Esteban (also referred to as Estebanico). To the right, a group of Native Americans similarly makes their way across the landscape, but they do not engage with or acknowledge the presence of the four men. 

Cabeza de Vaca wrote about the survivors’ experiences and adventures in a book known as La Relación (1542), one of the earliest published narratives about the Southwest. 

How did Willis depict the various roles and figures in this episode of history? What artistic choices did he make in illustrating the Spanish “explorer,” enslaved African, and Native people in this scene of Spanish colonization?

This map illustrates significant travel routes and cities in Spain’s colonization of the Americas from J. R. Willis’s perspective and sets the stage for the historical events depicted in the six other murals of the series. Note how all of South America is simply labeled “Brazil.”