Second Mission Period 1587
- 1616
Home - Missions - History - Missionaries - Indians - Links
30. ESPOGACHE
First mentioned as having a church during Bishop Altamirano's visit in 1606. In the various accounts of the killing of the friars and the punitive action by Canzo in 1597, there is no mention of Espogache that would suggest that it occupied the same site as Tupiqui at-that time. Espogache first appears in the records for this period as the Guale leader who was the first to make his submission. When Canzo sent an envoy he was said have gone to the town of Espogache with no indication that it vas Tupiqui as well. Ross may have originated the melding of Tupiqui and Espogache in remarking that, when the mico of Espogache and chief Tupiqui met Canzo during his 1603 visitation, they promised to rebuild their old towns and settle down and then adding that when the friars returned, only Guale and Talaxe received friars with the nearby settlement of Tupiqui or Espogache as a visita or substation of Talaxe. Lanning took this a step further in observing that when the Tolomato mission destroyed in 1597 was rebuilt finally in 1605, it was built in the village of Espogache. In an additional telescoping of Guale mission settlements, Lanning speculated from the record of Governor Ibarra's 1604 visitation that Espogache appears to be about where Tupique was (or identical with it) in 1597 and to have replaced it as a mission center after 1604. The Iharra record says only that the governor arrived at the village of which mico mayor Espogache was head, where, alongside the village, the mico of Espogache and the mico of Tupiqui and others of their vassal Indians came along the river in a canoe to receive the Señor General. Before leaving, Ibarra urged them to build a church there, chose a site for it, and promised to send a friar when one should become available. Two years later the bishop identified Espogache as one of his stops and noted that it had a church but no friar. It is worthy of note that Tupiqui's chief was not among the leaders mentioned as having been confirmed at Espogache or elsewhere. Espogache probably received special attention in the years just after 1600 because its chief had been the first to return to obedience after the 1597 revolt and his hands were clean in the sense that his village had not been directly responsible for the death of a friar in 1597. Bolton. Ross, and Lanning's identifications of the tabby ruins of the "Mansfield Place" as the site of either the Tupiqui or the Tolomato mission has, of course, been thoroughly discredited by archaeo1o research that demonstrated that they were nineteenth-century ruins.
< Previous - Next >
REFERENCES Dr. John H. Hann
"Summary Guide to Spanish Florida Missions and Vistas with Churches in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries"
© Copyright. John P. Walsh. April 24, 2002