I had one of those classic coming-of-age summers. I should know—I’ve been coming of age for decades. I spent thirteen weeks on Ghost Ranch, a 21,000 acre spread of sand and rock, roughly midway between Santa Fe and Taos in northwestern New Mexico. The ranch is a curious, life-and-death-by-murder kind of place: God’s country and Gulag, shadows and shades of red—a sort of desert Halfway House for Peculiar Adults. So I liked it very much right up almost to the very end.

Now I live in a small town in Galicia where the locals herd wild horses down from the mountains. It’s a poor town. There are no Starbucks or tourists. The shops close every afternoon and don’t open at all on Sundays. I am far removed from the seats of strife and striving. I like the idea that I will finish the book that I began in New Spain in Old Spain. I like the idea of finishing my book full stop. I’m nowhere near the writing stage where you can gently chip away at your hulk of raw material with a chisel. I’m using a mechanical digger and a dumpster.

There are ghosts in my book. There were ghosts on Ghost Ranch. The whole of New Mexico heaves with ghosts. There’s an ages-old feeling of death about the place. Georgia O’Keeffe said that, and she was right. Juan de Oñate y Salazar was the first governor of New Mexico and he brought the feeling of death with him on his skin. In 1598, he set off for el norte. He was then in his forties, a strikingly beautiful man with a neatly trimmed grey-streaked black beard. His eyes weren’t brown or blue; they were hazel, and they had in them the faraway look of a man who has known war. As a teenager, he had fought against the Chichimecs, a tribe that skinned their Spaniard prisoners alive and hung the bloody flesh on sticks along the roadside as a warning.

Oñate survived that war but he didn’t get a happy-ever-after. His wife Isabel, the life in his life, got sick and died. In the abyss of his grief, Oñate looked to go north, to the then unconquered territory of New Mexico, as a way of distracting himself from himself. He brought with him as his second-in-command, his young nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, along with two hundred soldiers and their wives and children. Oñate had to foot the costs of almost the entire expedition himself. In return the Spanish Crown granted him the title of Governor of New Mexico and an annual salary of six thousand ducats (about $2.4 million today according to some helpful players on the ParadoxInteractive games forum). The Spanish King also footed the bill for the cost of five Franciscan friars to accompany the expedition.

It took six months to reach Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo on the banks of the Rio Grande. Oñate renamed the village San Juan. (In 2005 the original name was finally restored but the friends I made at Ghost Ranch who live in the pueblo often still call it San Juan out of habit).

Oñate was a rare breed of conquistador—he wanted to conquer the territory without bloodshed or stealing land. He didn’t kill or injure any of the native people or seek to push them off their lands. And the natives at the pueblo were hospitable to the newcomers. One of the friars remarked that they were the best infidel people he had ever seen. 

After having built a church large enough to house the entire new colony, Oñate took a squad of soldiers with him on a survey expedition. He sent a messenger back, with instructions for his nephew, Zaldívar, to collect reinforcements and catch up with him on the trail. But Zaldívar never did catch up. He and ten of his men were ambushed and killed at Acoma Pueblo. The reputation of Spanish conquistadores had preceded their arrival in Acoma.

It was near nightfall in Oñate’s camp when the news of the ambush arrived. Oñate insisted on passing the night alone in his tent. And all through the long dark hours, he knelt before a cross, praying and weeping. To his men outside the tent, it seemed certain that the new governor and the new colony were finished.

But Oñate was once a soldier. At sunrise, he rose from his knees, kissed the cross and set about planning an attack on Acoma. It wasn’t an attack—it was an annihilation. In avenging eleven deaths, the Spaniards killed six hundred Indians and burned their village to the ground. All of the survivors (about 500 in all) were marched back to the new capital. In February 1599, Oñate handed down their sentence:

Men over 25 to have one foot cut off and to spend 20 years as slaves;

Men between the ages of 12 and 25 and all females over the age of 12 to spend 20 years as slaves;

Sixty girls under 12 to be sent to Mexico City for service in convents for the rest of their lives; and

Finally, two Hopi selected to each have a right hand cut off and be set free so that they might convey to the natives news of the Spanish Catholic retribution.

I think that the banishment for life for sixty little girls was the most chilling part of Oñate’s sentence. But of course, measured against the standards of our own time, the sentence seems relatively mild. Today, September 28, 2016, is the 898th day since the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls: 276, not 60, girls, effectively banished for life. Their fate is to be sex slaves in the jungle or groomed to become suicide bombers. A life on your knees scrubbing convent floors in Mexico City looks almost attractive in comparison.

And here we all sit on our comfortable couches, with all of our modern means, our social media campaigns, the six and a half million tweets (mostly by teenage girls), the protests held on the streets in Nigeria, the voice of First Lady, Michelle Obama, the provision of experts by foreign governments, and yet still, the government of one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources does not bring these girls home. Would these girls still be missing if they were rich . . . or if they looked like the girl in the photo?

The global economy would grind to a halt without the participation of women. If the women of the world joined together and went on hunger strike, the girls would most definitely be brought home. We should strike—if even for a day. Who will lead us?  Not Hillary! She’s too focused on her grab for personal power.

There are sixty little girl ghosts wandering through New Mexico, always seeking to find their way home. They will never make it. But there is still a chance for our Nigerian sisters and daughters. Here’s an opportunity for Pope Francis to remediate the wrongs done to indigenous girls in the past in the name of the Church. We need to petition the Pope to call for a global strike by women and girls. We can all starve for a day!