“The Pueblo Revolt” in Issues and Controversies in History.

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The Pueblo Revolt, 1680 Kevin M. Gannon (2013) Issues and Controversies in History.

Were the Pueblo Indians Justified in Rebelling Against the Spanish?

The Issue

The 1680 Pueblo Revolt in the Spanish colony of New Mexico was the first—and only— successful rebellion of Native American peoples against the Europeans who ruled them by force during the colonial period of American history. Spanish colonizers and their Pueblo subjects embraced diametrically opposed beliefs about the world and their place within it; the tensions that sprang from this opposition would culminate in an extraordinary outbreak of violence and insurrection in the summer of 1680. The Spanish believed that their colonial presence in New Mexico was eminently justifiable, and that Spanish colonization was a mandate from God. To the Pueblo, the Spanish used religious conversion as a vehicle of oppression, abused the native population, and were powerless to protect the Pueblos from the numerous threats they faced to their very survival.

• Arguments that the Spanish Presence in New Mexico Was Legitimate and Just: The Spanish justified their conquests in the “New World” by arguing that the conversion of Native Americans to Roman Catholicism was of paramount importance—the true Word of God was being spread, and Indian souls were saved. Inherent in this view was a belief that indigenous Americans were inferior to Europeans. By demonstrating the proper ways to exploit the bountiful resources of the Americas (including plentiful amounts of silver) and to worship the Christian God, the Spanish were undertaking a mission to “civilize” what they saw as backwards, ignorant, and savage Indians.

• Arguments that the Spanish Presence in New Mexico Was Intolerable and that the Spanish Must be Expelled by the Pueblo: For decades, the Pueblo had seen their land and people mercilessly exploited by the Spanish. The Spanish had forced the Pueblo to give them a share of their crops and other goods, leaving them with scant provisions to sustain themselves and their families. The efforts of the Spanish Franciscan priests to convert them to Catholicism also meant the often violent suppression of their native religious practices. The Franciscans’ message of a loving and merciful Christian God did not match the harsh and violent reality of Spanish colonization, which seemed to grow worse over time.

Background

For Pedro Hidalgo, August 10, 1680, started out as probably most days did. A Spanish soldier, Hidalgo served as a one-man security detail for Fray Juan Pío, a Franciscan missionary to the Indians of the Tesuque Pueblo, one of many native pueblos in the Rio Grande region claimed by the Spanish as part of the colony of New Mexico. Early in the morning, Hidalgo and Pío had set out from the capital of Santa Fe toward Tesuque, where the priest was to say mass. At dawn, the two Spaniards reached the pueblo, only to find it empty; even the livestock was gone. Baffled, the soldier and the priest decided to search for the villagers, and a quarter-league from the

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pueblo, they found some of them—armed and wearing war paint. Pío approached the pueblos. “What is this, children,” he asked, “are you mad? Do not disturb yourselves; I will help you and die a thousand deaths for you.” Pío’s imploring produced no discernible effect. Hidalgo and Pío split up in an attempt to flank the main body of Pueblo, who were headed toward a nearby sierra, and convince them to return to the village. As Hidalgo would later testify, he soon encountered two Indians called El Obi and Nicolás by the Spanish; El Obi was carrying the shield which Fray Pío had originally possessed, and Nicolás was menacingly painted and “splattered with blood,” presumably Pío’s. These two, and other Pueblo who quickly came up from behind them, “assailed” Hidalgo,

grasping the reins of the horse he was riding; they surrounded him, taking away his sword and hat, whereupon he grasped his harquebus, and, making good his escape, spurred his horse down the hill, dragging along those who had hold of him. He broke away from them and descended to the plain, where they followed him, discharging many arrows, none of which reached or harmed him, and he escaped safely.

Hidalgo assumed Pío was dead, and thus sped off toward Santa Fe to deliver the news that the worst nightmare of the Spanish colonists was now a reality: The Pueblo Indians were rebelling.

How did things arrive at this point, where the Pueblo decided to conduct a coordinated assault and violently expel the Spanish out of New Mexico? Almost as soon as it was clear that the Pueblo were indeed engaged in a full-scale uprising throughout New Mexico, the questions and recriminations among the Spanish began. What had driven the Pueblo to revolt? Why were the Spanish, almost a century after their arrival, being visited with the scourge of native rebellion? For the Pueblo, the answer to that question was simple: The accumulated weight of Spanish oppression had become unbearable. For the Spanish, though, there had to be another reason; after all, they were the “civilizers” of the Americas, who had saved Pueblo souls by introducing Catholicism into the previously “benighted” societies of New Mexico. The rebellion they were faced with had to come from opposition to that divine mandate. By this logic, their presence among the Pueblo was not the problem; it was the Devil—manifested through Pueblo deities and religious practitioners—that had to be at the root of this unnatural uprising.

Spanish North America

The Spanish presence in New Mexico dated from 1598, when an expedition led by Juan de Oñate entered the northern Rio Grande Valley and claimed the land for God and the Spanish King. Previous expeditions had passed through the region, and either traded for or stole foodstuffs from the native Pueblo peoples. The most notable was led by Francisco de Coronado, who was searching for the fabled “seven cities of gold” that he was sure existed in what is now the southern Great Plains region of North America. Oñate had mineral wealth in mind (he was heir to a large Mexican mining fortune), but unlike Coronado, he also envisioned a permanent Spanish settlement to the north. He had been appointed governor by the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City, who was the King’s direct representative in Spanish North America. Thus, the New Mexico colony had a mandate from the Spanish crown to extend the authority of both Spain and the Roman Catholic Church into the northern hinterlands of New Spain.

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Members of Order of St. Francis—probably the most powerful religious order in colonial Mexico—had themselves been looking at New Mexico by the 1580s. The Franciscans realized, though, that only with financial and military support would an expansion of missionary activity into the Rio Grande region be feasible. Future Spanish ventures to the region would thus be joint undertakings between the Franciscans and colonists who operated from more worldly motivations—particularly a desire for land and mineral wealth. Brief expeditions into the northern frontier of New Spain in 1581 had laid the groundwork for the permanent, proprietary colony established under Oñate’s leadership in 1598. Emphasizing the royal Laws of Discovery, the viceroy enjoined Oñate’s expedition of colonists to make sure they carried plenty of supplies and provisions, to prevent clashes with natives over Spanish seizures of foodstuffs and other commodities (as had occurred in previous Spanish entradas—military and/or exploratory expeditions—to the North). Accompanying the expedition were some 20 Franciscan friars and lay brothers. Oñate’s force arrived at the Rio Grande in April 1598, and he “repossessed” the province of New Mexico in the name of God and King Phillip II.

Figure 1. Routes of Major Expeditions of Juan de Oñate.

As for the Pueblo, memories of previous encounters remained strong enough to condition their response to this latest Spanish incursion into their lands. The first villages the expedition

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encountered were abandoned, the inhabitants having fled rather than face what they believed would be bitter depredations from the Europeans. Once the Spanish were able to interact with some of them, Oñate ascertained that the Pueblo were indeed loath to impede the Spanish, having experienced retaliation for such efforts previously, during Coronado’s entrada. This lack of resistance remained consistent as the expedition began to create settlements; several Spanish would record their amazement at the apparent docility of the Pueblo. They “are so peaceful and obedient,” wrote one official in amazement.

Not all of the Pueblo were as willing to tolerate the Spanish presence as these early impressions might have conveyed, however. There were challenges to the Spanish that occurred in areas on the periphery of their colony, but these were quickly met and put down, often violently. [See An Earlier Pueblo Rebellion: The Battle of Acoma, 1599] Except for the suppression of indigenous resistance, though, the colony of New Mexico was unsuccessful. As they established their authority over the Indians, the Spanish had instituted a system of tribute obligations whereby Pueblo villages were to produce a certain amount of maize and cotton blankets for the Spanish every year. But this set of obligations did not provide nearly enough to sustain the Spanish, while its burdens destroyed the Pueblo’s ability to produce an agricultural surplus to carry families through winters or seasons of lean harvests. The hoped-for deposits of mineral wealth failed to materialize, food supplies dwindled, and Spaniard and Indian alike found the times extremely difficult. By 1607, many Spanish settlers were ready to abandon New Mexico. Ultimately, though, Franciscan pressure on both the viceroy and the Council of the Indies (the king’s council for colonial policy) kept the colony alive by producing additional royal support for the venture. A new governor was appointed, and New Mexico began to limp along into an uncertain future.

But the initial phase of permanent Spanish settlement in New Mexico was of crucial significance; it set the patterns that would decisively shape the colony’s development through the 1600s and ultimately converge in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. First, Oñate’s tactic of rendering the Pueblo docile by intimidation and force became standard operating procedure for subsequent Spanish administrators. When faced with resistance, the first inclination of the Spanish would be violence. Second, the establishment of the encomienda (a grant of control over designated lands and the produce of the natives who resided upon them) created a class of Spanish landholders who—though technically prohibited from doing so—held Indians (both Pueblo and members of tribes further north and west) in a state of de facto slavery. The expectations and demands of this class would be powerful elements in shaping the policies of future governors, who were themselves landowners and aspirants to the control of native labor. Third, the expropriation of labor, goods, and even people begun in New Mexico’s early colonial period would, as it continued and increased, profoundly disrupt trade networks between the Pueblo and the Athapaskan peoples (nomadic Apache and Ute) to the north. The Athapaskan depended on this trade to augment their restricted food supply; when Spanish demands upon Pueblo agriculture diverted these foodstuffs away from the established channels of indigenous trade, the northern tribes would be forced to resort to such desperate and disruptive tactics as raids and plundering. Finally, the Pueblo, already inclined from experience to expect the worst from Spanish colonists, were stretched to the breaking point by pressures upon their resources and by harsh treatment and cultural prejudice at the hands of the Spaniards. During the period of the Oñate entrada, this Spanish pressure—though still high—had been kept to at least manageable levels because of the

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paucity of colonists (less than two hundred). In later years, when the number of Spanish settlers increased, this pressure would prove unmanageable.

The Struggle for Control

New Mexico’s Spanish population through the bulk of the 17th century was an unwieldy combination of a small, dedicated core of Franciscans (and a few associated lay brothers) and a larger number (approximately 1,100 by 1670) of settlers concerned with matters more of this world. The two groups often worked at cross-purposes—but not always. The Franciscans were not above accumulating wealth and labor as they spread the word of God; documents from the colony’s records are rife with complaints from civil officials about the friars’ abuse of indigenous labor. Of course, these complaints were motivated not by concern for the Indians’ own welfare, but from resentment over the Franciscans’ use of labor that the governors and other colonists sought to employ themselves. This is the issue that splintered the Spanish into opposing factions throughout the 1600s: The battle to control and exploit Indian labor and tribute. And it is here where the divergence between the stated goals of the Franciscans and the other settlers became more evident. For if natives were to be converted into good practicing Catholics, they could not be bound to labor on the hacienda of a secular colonist. Rather, the Franciscans wanted the Indians to reside in their own communities, with the friars enjoying full access to them and other colonists being left out of the matter altogether.

This ideal came into direct conflict with the wealth-producing goals of the other settlers, dependent as they were upon Indian labor and produce for their fulfillment. If the physical conquest of the Pueblo was harsh, then the attempts at spiritual conquest by the Spaniards were even more so. The Franciscans’ initial efforts at conversion undertaken during the Oñate entrada were only marginally successful. In the early years of the 17th century, those Indians that accepted Catholic baptism seemed to have done so more out of a desire to have access to missions’ food supplies during times of famine or to avail themselves of Spanish military protection in the face of raids from the Athapaskan peoples to the north. As the Franciscans continued their efforts, more Pueblo accepted conversion, though they seem to have done so with less of a wholehearted embrace than the friars would have liked. From the Pueblo perspective, accepting the teachings of Catholicism was often a strategic choice. The appearance of embracing Catholicism brought access to Spanish food reserves and military protection, while still offering enough wiggle room for those so inclined to covertly practice their own faith traditions. The Franciscans, however, were all too aware of this set of motivations. Scholars disagree over the extent to which the Franciscans tacitly allowed the Pueblo to practice their own religious rituals and observances, but even if the clergy winked at some token remnants of the Pueblo’s “idolatry,” the documentary record suggests that to a significant degree, the Franciscans not only sought to suppress expressions of indigenous religion, but often did so forcefully and even violently.

Seeds of Rebellion

As the burdens of the physical world became heavier, the Pueblo turned increasingly to the world of their native religious traditions for solace. The 1660s and 1670s were disastrous ones for many Pueblo. This 20-year span saw rising average temperatures combined with dramatically lower

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amounts of rainfall, even by the meager standards of arid New Mexico. These climatic changes led to waves of poor harvests—or no harvests at all in some years—resulting in famines that devastated the Pueblo population. The Athapaskan peoples to the north—especially the Apache—were also stricken by famine, and resorted to violent raids on Pueblo villages to take by force what they otherwise did not have. In this unsettled state of affairs marked by drought and warfare, the Pueblo turned increasingly toward their ancient religious rites and rituals to restore balance to their world. This entailed significant risk, however. In the atmosphere of renewed repression and strife that pervaded the 1660s and 1670s, assertions of native religious traditions on the part of Pueblo were bound to bring forceful responses from the Franciscan clergymen.

In 1675, a major Pueblo religious revival spread throughout the Rio Grande Valley. Dancing of the kachina, and gatherings in the villages’ sacred kivas (below-ground ceremonial rooms that were the functional center of the Pueblo faith tradition) multiplied, as the Indians sought to find a way to reassert control over an increasingly dangerous environment. From the Spanish capital of Santa Fe, Governor Juan Francisco de Treviño issued a decree banning all forms of native religious expression. To enforce the measure, he dispatched soldiers to the Pueblo with orders to arrest those identified as religious leaders. Forty-seven shamans were rounded up, charged with witchcraft and sorcery, and brought to trial. The verdict in these proceedings was foreordained; the purpose of the trials was to extract and isolate these religious leaders from the native community. To reinforce the point, four Pueblo accused of “bewitching” a Franciscan priest were sentenced to death. Three were hanged in Santa Fe’s central plaza; the fourth committed suicide in his jail cell before the Spanish could carry out the sentence. The other 43 were publicly flogged and then jailed while arrangements were made to sell them into slavery.

Figure 2. Interior of a Reconstructed Kiva at Mesa Verde National Park

The Pueblo’s response to these proceedings was a powerful tipping point in the balance of power in New Mexico. A large, armed band of Tewa Pueblo came to Santa Fe and demanded that Treviño release the captives, promising to kill him and every other Spaniard in Santa Fe if their people remained imprisoned. The governor attempted to negotiate, offering pardons if the Indians swore to “forsake idolatry and iniquity.” The Tewa refused to bargain and restated their demands. Treviño thus faced the choice of freeing the captives or triggering a slaughter of the outnumbered Spanish. He freed the captives. With this confrontation, there was a seismic shift in the balance of power between the Spanish and the Pueblo. The myth of Spanish superiority was

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decisively punctured, and the Pueblo’s decision to collectively challenge the Spanish yoke had produced the desired results. For the Spanish colonists, this was an ominous precedent.

Figure 3. Popé

The roots of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt were within this struggle over spiritual and cultural dominance. One of the medicine men arrested and whipped in Treviño’s campaign was Popé, a shaman from San Juan pueblo. Those Pueblo caught in the 1675 dragnet doubtlessly carried their share of resentment away from the experience, but Popé’s animosity toward the Spaniards was of a surpassing degree. The events of 1675, despite the eventual Tewa “victory” that had released him from Santa Fe’s jail, convinced Popé that the time had ended when the Pueblo people could maintain their traditions yet coexist with the Spanish. Still suspicious in the eyes of the Spanish, Popé relocated from San Juan to Taos, on the northern fringe of the colony, far from the main centers of Spanish population. Popé was already a man of significant spiritual power among the Pueblo, and the pronouncements issuing from the kiva in Taos, where he spent most of his time, only added to that reputation. Caudi, Tilini, and Tleume were katsinas (Pueblo divine beings) who resided in the Taos kiva, who came out into the open after prayers, offerings, and summons from Popé. According to Spanish accounts of subsequent Indian testimony,

it happened that in an estufa [kiva] of the pueblo of Los Taos there appeared to the said Popé three figures of Indians.… They gave the said Popé to understand that they were going underground to the lake of Copola. He saw these figures emit fire from all the extremities of their bodies.… They told him to make a cord of maguey fiber and tie some knots in it which would signify the number of days that they must wait before the rebellion.

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The knotted cord was taken from pueblo to pueblo throughout the Rio Grande valley, as Popé and a few trusted lieutenants gathered allies in their planned expulsion of the Spanish. The uprising of 1680 would not be a series of unconnected attacks on specific individuals, it would be a simultaneous uprising on a scale and scope that would have simply been impossible a generation before. Disparate Pueblo groups were united—and even some Apache groups as well, antagonized by Spanish slaving raids—in what would be a concerted effort to not just retaliate, but to eliminate the Spanish from their lands. Popé, as the carrier of the sacred katsinas’ message, promised the Pueblo rebels that after they eliminated the Spanish oppressors, they would be able to live “free from the labor they performed for the religious and the Spaniards.” This message of liberation was coupled with threats of dire consequences for those Indians who did not undertake this sacred work of rebellion and restoration.

Rebellion and the Expulsion of the Spanish

In August 1680, as runners fanned out from Taos bearing the knotted cords counting down the days to rebellion (which was to begin on August 11, the first night of the new moon), foreboding rumors began to reach the Spanish at Santa Fe. While these reports created a sense of anxiety among the Spanish, initially there was not enough specific information to allow for preventive measures. That changed on August 9. Three leaders from pueblos close to Santa Fe and loyal to the Spanish notified Governor Antonio de Otermín (who had replaced Treviño in 1677) that they had been approached by two messengers from the Tesuque pueblo with orders from Taos for the villages to participate in the uprising; the messengers also carried the knotted cords that served as the conspiracy’s timetable. Otermín immediately sent a detachment to Tesuque and had these two couriers arrested. They confessed to carrying the cord to the three villages, and that one town refused to participate in the rebellion, despite Popé’s threats of death for those who did not rise against the Spanish. The messengers pled ignorance of anything further about the plot, averring that they were not from the northlands where the councils had been held and thus knew nothing more about the plans that had emanated from Taos.

While the Spanish authorities in Santa Fe spent the afternoon and evening of August 9 attempting to discern the outlines of the apparent plot, the Pueblo of Tesuque sent a host of messengers speeding toward Taos and the other villages alerting the Indians that their plans for commencing their uprising on August 11 had been compromised. In the flurry of communication that ran between the villages, a consensus to begin the attack as soon as possible emerged. Thus, at daybreak on August 10, the Pueblo began their war of extermination against the Spanish. And Pedro Hidalgo and Fray Juan Pío, on their way to Mass at Tesuque that morning, rode directly into it.

When Pedro Hidalgo rode into Santa Fe and reported what had befallen him and the now- martyred Fray Pío, Governor Otermín knew that every Spanish settler in the entire New Mexico colony was in mortal danger. Slightly less than 1,000 Spanish men, women, and children were several hundred miles north of the more settled portions of New Spain, over 1,100 miles from the viceregal capital of Mexico City, and surrounded by over 17,000 Pueblo Indians who were now acting in almost complete concert with one another to exterminate them. Otermín immediately dispatched messengers to the alcaldes mayors (the heads of the Spanish towns in the colony) to muster their male residents into militias to defend their settlements, especially the churches.

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Otermín then ordered a detachment of troops to attempt to verify some of the reports he had already received through a reconnaissance of nearby pueblos, and took measures to establish contact with his lieutenant governor, who was in one of the colony’s southern districts. With these actions, Otermín had basically done as much as he could to deal with a situation whose overall scope and contours were still unknown to him. The Pueblo of New Mexico had the initiative, and as Popé’s plans unfolded, they were the ones who would control events. All that the governor and the townspeople of Santa Fe could do was barricade themselves in the governor’s palace (except for a cluster of soldiers defending the town’s church) and wait; Otermín knew that it was not a matter of if, but rather when, the Pueblo would descend upon the colonial capital.

Over the next 48 hours, piece after piece of bad news for the Spanish made its way into Santa Fe. Late in the afternoon of August 10, two Spanish soldiers arrived in the villa of Santa Fe after escaping from the rebellious Indians of the Tegua pueblos; they had come through that region from further north, where the Taos and Picurís pueblos had also taken up arms against the Spanish. The soldiers also carried a message from the alcalde mayor of Santa Clara, warning of “a large number of the rebellious Christians [Indians who had earlier accepted conversion]” from the surrounding villages who had massed in Santa Clara, using the pueblo as a base from which they were “going out in mounted squadrons and gathering up the cattle and property from the fields and houses of the Spaniards, committing such iniquities, atrocities, and robberies quite shamelessly.”

Otermín’s reconnaissance patrol returned to the villa on August 12, and its commander recounted the evidence of a litany of violence against not only settlers, but symbols of Spanish ecclesiastical authority as well: “all the people of the pueblos from Tesuque to San Juan are in rebellion … [and] have robbed the holy temples and the cattle haciendas of the countryside, and sacked the houses of the Spaniards.” The soldier described an encounter with one of the Indians, where the Spanish had asked him to surrender peacefully, promising safety in return. The Indian “said pertinaciously and rebelliously that he wished to die and go to hell.” The commander, as well as other Spaniards who straggled into Santa Fe in these chaotic hours, also revealed that much of the Franciscan clergy of the countryside had been killed by the Pueblo. “They were saying that God and Santa Maria were dead, that they were the ones whom the Spaniards worshiped, and that their God whom they obeyed never died.” For the Spanish, this bloody rejection of Christian faith and authority must have added a chilling dimension to an already- developing feeling of being forsaken in a mortally dangerous frontier wilderness.

By August 13, Otermín was able to conclude that those Spanish clergy and settlers from Taos to Isleta who had not made their way to Santa Fe were dead. Thus, Santa Fe had become a lonely enclave of European refugees in a land that was raging with insurrection. The next day, news arrived that over five hundred Indians were only one league away from Santa Fe, waiting to join bands from several other Pueblo as well as a detachment of Apache, “so as to sack the said villa all together and kill within it the señor governor and captain-general [Otermín], the religious [Franciscan clergy], and all the citizens.” Early the next morning, lookouts reported that this army had arrived outside Santa Fe.

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Barricaded inside the villa, the Spanish were able to see the Natives’ army move into the surrounding maize fields, looting and destroying Spanish houses on the outskirts of Santa Fe. A squadron of Spanish cavalrymen was dispatched to survey the proceedings, whereupon they encountered a native leader who returned with them to parley with Otermín. Otermín recognized this Indian; he was a Tagno Pueblo named Juan who had previously been one of the messengers sent on August 10 to investigate events in the outlying villages. He now wore part of the raiment of a Franciscan priest, and was heavily armed with Spanish weapons. Juan offered a choice to the Spaniards by demanding they choose from one of two crosses carried by the Indians—one red and the other white; the red meant war, the white meant surrender and the Spanish leaving New Mexico. Otermín attempted to stall, offering general amnesty if the Pueblo laid down their arms, but he was dealing from a position of weakness and both he and the Indians knew it. When Juan rode back to the Pueblo army and conveyed Otermín’s offer, the natives’ response was clear: “[t]hey derided and ridiculed this reply and received the said Indian [Juan] in their camp with trumpets and shouts, ringing the bells of the hermitage of San Miguel,” a friary outside of Santa Fe that they were in the process of ransacking. The Pueblo then set the hermitage on fire and continued to destroy Spanish houses and property closer and closer to the town’s perimeter.

In a desperate attempt to blunt the Pueblo’s assault, Otermín led a band of soldiers (less than 100 men) in a charge upon the Indians. The clash lasted most of the day; though many of them were themselves wounded, the Spanish inflicted much more damage on the Pueblo. Just as the Spanish began to seize momentum, however, Indian reinforcements from the northern pueblos (including Taos) arrived. The day thus ended with a frantic Spanish retreat back to the confines of the governor’s palace, where they were surrounded by hundreds of hostile Pueblo. Then followed a standoff, which lasted several days. Huddled inside the palace, the Spanish could only watch as the number of Pueblo surrounding Santa Fe swelled to over 2,500. The natives cut the aqueduct outside of the town, and the Spanish spent the standoff without water. Deciding to make one last attempt at fighting rather than die of starvation and thirst, the Spanish—led by Otermín— charged out of the palace on the morning of August 20, catching the Pueblo by surprise and routing most of them out of Santa Fe entirely. By midday, the Spanish had killed more than 300 natives, captured almost 50, and sent the remaining couple thousand into a retreat. Otermín, despite wounds to his head and chest, interrogated the captured Pueblo before having them shot as traitors to the King.

The Spanish realized, though, that their victory was destined to be short-lived. Other than those present in Santa Fe, there were no Spaniards alive in the 150-mile span between Taos and Isleta. Additionally, the Santa Fe refugees were nearly out of provisions, they had no access to water, most of the colony’s horses had been seized by the native rebels, and those Pueblo were bound to return sooner rather than later. The situation for the Spanish was bleak indeed. There were, however, reports that some survivors had made their way to Isleta, and Otermín believed that the best course of action was for the Spanish in Santa Fe to retreat south to join forces with whatever compatriots they could find near Isleta. Accordingly, Otermín and some 2,000 refugees commenced their retreat south from Santa Fe on August 21.

This southward retreat revealed the extent of the rebellion’s destruction. Pueblo were abandoned, haciendas were smoldering, churches that had been razed contained artifacts and vestments that had been defaced in ways that shocked the Spaniards. Along the road to Isleta, numerous

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unburied corpses lay, testament to the Pueblo’s animosity. The pueblo of Isleta was abandoned when Otermín’s caravan arrived, a devastating blow to the hungry, sick, exhausted, and demoralized Spaniards. Desperate and out of supplies, Otermín sent riders ahead to catch the Isleta refugees, whom he knew were led by the lieutenant governor Alonso García. In early September, some two weeks after the Spanish retreat from Santa Fe had begun, the advance riders caught up to García’s party approximately 50 miles south of the Socorro pueblo. The forced exodus was over.

Figure 4. Pueblo Rebellion

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The Case that the Spanish Were Justified in Their Rule over the Pueblo

The Spanish presence in New Mexico—and the resulting oppression of the Pueblo peoples— seems impossible to justify by modern standards. Indeed, the Pueblo Revolt proves that this presence was impossible to justify by native standards as well. How could such brutal colonial rule, with its attendant violence toward native peoples, be undertaken in the name of God and the Roman Catholic Church? After all, the Spanish had couched their arguments for the expansion of their American empire in primarily religious terms. By the standards of 16th-century European Christianity, though, the Spaniards had compelling reasons—moral imperatives, as they saw them—to justify their occupation of the Pueblo lands.

Foremost in the Spanish rationale for subjugation of the natives was the Indians’ supposed childlike nature; “incompetent” in the legal sense of the term, these benighted “savages” needed the Christian stewardship that the Spanish provided in order to prevent a relapse into their barbarous natures. [See Antonio de Otermín, Auto, August 13–20, 1680 (primary source)] Just as mankind in general had to overcome the burdens of the Original Sin, so too did Indians have to escape the “original sin” of their uncivilized and heathen natures. Viewing the Indians as a dangerous and inferior “Other” came naturally to the Spanish; during their centuries-long reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, Spaniards employed the same characterization towards the North African Muslims (the “Moors”) who they overran and ultimately sought to expel from their borders. As the “barbaric” and “heathen” Muslim ultimately had to give way to the superior nature of Spanish Catholic civilization, so too did the Indian. This persistent cultural framework was a key part of the Spanish rationale for empire over the Pueblo peoples, as well as a primary motivation for those who favored a counterattack on the Pueblo rebels. Pedro de Leiva, governor of El Paso de Norte, for example, informed the viceroy of New Spain, Payo Enriquez de Rivera Manrique, that he and his men were ready to “attempt to liberate our governor [Otermín], the religious, and the Christians … and to restore everything, as did those of [Iberia] against the Moorish dogs.” [See Pedro de Leiva, Letter to Payo Enriquez de Rivera Manrique, Viceroy of New Spain, August 29, 1680 (primary source)]

Given their view of Indian peoples as savage, uncivilized “Others,” the level of contempt exhibited by the Spanish towards the Pueblo rebels is unsurprising—since these were Indians who refused to recognize their subordinate roles and dared to upset the Spanish order, which was in turn mandated by heaven. One provincial governor argued that the Pueblo rebels ought to be subdued and then enslaved, even though Indian slavery had been illegal for almost a century and a half by that point. [See Don Bartolomé de Estrada, Letter to Payo Enriquez de Rivera Manrique, Viceroy of New Spain, July 22, 1680 (primary source)] This proposal, drastic in its remedy, to deal with the Indian “problem” reflected the Spanish conception of natives as childlike and barbarous, and their especial contempt for the “idolatries and superstitions” of Pueblo religious practices. [See Antonio de Otermín, Report, September 13 or 14, 1680 (primary source)]. What better proof of the ultimate inferiority of the natives than their benighted spiritual state? The only way these people could survive—and have any hope of avoiding eternal damnation—was for them to accept the yoke of Spanish dominion and the one true Catholic Church. This was the fundamental precept the Spanish justification for their appropriation of indigenous labor and their often violent means of religious conversion: These heathens needed a firm hand to keep them on the proper path. Indeed, Spanish officials believed, the natives ought

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to be thankful for what, after all, amounted to a light burden compared with the alternative of lapsing back into savagery and infidelity. [See Antonio de Otermín, Letter to Payo Enriquez de Rivera Manrique, Viceroy of New Spain, November 20, 1680 (primary source)] The Spanish clung tightly to this justification—and the larger worldview that lay behind it—to the point where Indian rebelliousness became inconceivable. Small wonder that the Pueblo Revolt came as such a surprise, and that the Spanish nurtured a furious contempt for the ungrateful, traitorous “devils” who defied their carefully crafted and divinely justified order.

Figure 5. San Miguel Church

The Case that the Spanish Presence in New Mexico Was Intolerable and Rebellion Was Necessary

The Pueblo who followed Popé left no written record; what we know about their motives and actions comes from Spanish records—testimony collected from either captured rebels or “Christian” Pueblo who remained loyal to the Spanish. Thus, significant filters are in place between indigenous motivations and the Spanish interpretation thereof, and that must be borne in mind as one approaches these documents. Nevertheless, several key points clearly emerge regarding the motivations of both leaders and rank and file in the Pueblo rebellion.

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Figure 6. Kachina Dolls

Religion was perhaps the most contested area of Spanish-Pueblo interactions. The behaviors mandated by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism conflicted directly with the Pueblo’s cultural norms in areas from dress to labor practices to relations between the genders. The actual behavior of the Spanish, both regular settlers and the Franciscan clergy, exacerbated this cognitive dissonance for the Pueblo—it became apparent quite early that the Spanish injunctions regarding moral behavior exemplified the proverbial “do as I say, not as I do.” For example, despite their demands for Pueblo males to practice monogamy and adopt the Catholic sacrament of marriage, several friars had sexual relations—sometimes consensual, often times coerced— with native women (despite the Catholic church’s longstanding rule regarding clerical celibacy). All the while, expressions of indigenous religiosity were suppressed, with transgressors receiving brutal punishments for their “idolatry.” Unsurprisingly, then, the rebels were unsparing in their violence towards any and all expressions of the hated Spanish religion. Franciscan demands for labor and obedience had created a festering resentment among many natives, manifested in the executions of numerous Spanish clergy during the rebellion. [See Pedro Garcia (of Tagno Pueblo), Testimony, August 25, 1680 (primary source)] Moreover, that resentment had grown over the decades of Spanish dominion in Pueblo country. Punishments for those caught practicing their native traditions increased in their appalling brutality over the years [See Pedro Nanboa (of Alameda Pueblo), Testimony, September 6, 1680 (primary source)]; as we have seen, this was a direct impetus for Popé himself to foment rebellion. Testimony from native and Spanish alike describes the extent to which the Pueblo rebels sought to slake their thirst for revenge on Spanish religion, often with jarring levels of violence borne out of years of bitterness towards the Catholic regime. [See Juan and Francisco Lorenzo (from near San Felipe Pueblo), Testimony, December 20, 1681 (primary source)]

The campaign to expunge any trace of Spanish religion from Pueblo lands was duplicated in other areas. Indeed, the defining characteristic of the Pueblo Revolt was the systematic effort to eradicate anything—tangible or abstract—that smacked of Spanish influence. Catholic iconography and practices were a prominent part—but not the whole—of the rebels’ focus. They also destroyed Spanish haciendas and killed their owners, who were also sources of irksome

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demands for labor and tribute. [See Pedro Naranjo (of San Felipe Pueblo), Testimony, December 19, 1691 (primary source)] Popé himself went so far as to order the uprooting of Spanish crops and abandonment of Spanish trade goods (like certain textiles and metal implements), an extent to which even many of his followers were unwilling to go. But the rebels’ unity was unshaken when it came to cultural cleansing; casting off Spanish authority led to a reassertion of Pueblo identity. The stark levels of violence in the Pueblo Revolt were no accident—the violence was targeted at what the natives saw as the principal supports for the odious Spanish regime. [See Cabildo of Santa Fe, Opinion, October 3, 1680 (primary source)] With their selection of these targets—churches, clergy, icons, haciendas—the Pueblo spoke volumes about their intentions. The Spanish could no longer be tolerated in Indian lands; the Pueblo’s survival depended upon removing every last vestige of the Spanish presence from among them.

Outcome and Impact

The survivors of Spain’s now former colony of New Mexico arrived at La Salineta, north of El Paso del Norte, on September 19, 1680, 40 days after the outbreak of the Pueblo rebellion. This was as complete a defeat that any European colony in North America would ever see at the hands of Native Americans. The Spanish colony of New Mexico was no more; the Pueblo had killed or expelled every Spaniard from the Rio Grande Valley. The bedraggled remnant of settlers convalesced for several months in El Paso, until Otermín attempted a reconquest of New Mexico in November 1681. It went poorly. Otermín’s force was too small, the territory too vast, and the Pueblo too buoyed by their successful expulsion of the Spaniards the previous year for this attempted reconquest to have even the remote chance of success. After this unsuccessful entrada, Otermín returned to El Paso in January 1682, bringing with him a few Pueblo converts from Isleta, but leaving the rest of New Mexico firmly within Pueblo control. And there it would remain until the middle of the next decade.

For their part, the Pueblo were engaged in eradicating any trace of the Spanish tenure in their lands. Popé ordered not only the destruction of Spanish haciendas and churches, but even went so far as to mandate the destruction of Spanish crops and a return to exclusively Indian methods of agriculture. This resurgence of Pueblo nativism was appealing to the region’s indigenous inhabitants. Important evidence of the religious dimension to Popé’s nativist mandates is in the number of destroyed churches and defaced artifacts encountered by the Spanish on their retreat from the colony, as well as his admonitions for Pueblo to bathe in the Rio Grande and its tributary streams while scrubbing themselves with yucca root to cleanse themselves of the spiritual corruption visited by the Franciscans (a profoundly symbolic reverse baptism).

The problem for the Pueblo, however, was that once the unifying element provided by the desire to expel the Spanish disappeared with Otermín’s exiles, factionalism and conflict ensued relatively quickly. Not helping matters was the behavior of Popé, of whom it was reported that he wore the vestments of the conquered Spanish (in spite of his orders to burn Spanish relics) and declared himself ruler of all the Pueblo peoples. He demanded tribute from Pueblo villages in much the same manner as the Spanish had, and apparently forfeited the allegiance he had won through his leadership of the 1680 rebellion. By the time of Otermín’s attempt to re-enter New Mexico, Popé had been overthrown. This change in leadership did not improve matters, however. The expulsion of the Spanish had not alleviated the problems of drought and famine

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that had plagued the Indian peoples of the regions. The Athapaskan who had fought alongside the Pueblo against the Spanish now turned once again on their erstwhile allies and renewed their raids on Pueblo fields and food supplies. Given these difficult circumstances, it is not surprising that word of major dissension amongst the Pueblo had reached the Spanish in El Paso by the summer of 1683.

The wretched circumstances of the Spanish community, as well as other indigenous-Spanish violence in the Nueva Vizcaya region, prevented the Spanish from taking advantage of the Pueblo’s disarray. It was not until the presence of French explorers in the lower Mississippi and Texas regions, as well as English incursions toward Spanish Florida, that the reconquest of New Mexico became a priority once again for the officials of New Spain. Don Diego de Vargas, who became governor in 1692, began a series of expeditions into the Rio Grande Valley that ultimately brought the reimposition of Spanish authority in New Mexico. As if to demonstrate how factionalism and schism had rent Pueblo unity, an attempted revolt against the Spanish in 1696 was smothered almost at its inception. With Vargas’s consolidation of Spanish authority in the once and future colony of New Mexico, the lone chapter of successful indigenous resistance to European colonization came to a close.

But New Mexico after 1696 was different in several important respects from the pre-1680 version of the colony. Gone was the hated institution of the encomienda and much of its attendant tribute obligations. The Franciscan clergy was now keenly aware of the delicacy with which it had to tread when it came to proselytizing among the Pueblo. Even though the power dynamic between Spaniard and Pueblo may have looked on the surface like it had before 1680, in practice things had changed dramatically. While the Spanish still ruled New Mexico, they did so in a chastened manner, more heedful of the potential dangers of a Pueblo population pushed too far.

What if there had not been a leader such as Popé to organize the Pueblo villages for rebellion?

Had there been no leaders such as Popé, would the Pueblo Indians have launched their revolt against the Spanish in August 1680? Would New Mexico have become more integrated into the Spanish Empire? Would the Indians have seen their conditions change any, or would the bleak status quo have continued for them?

The question of individual leadership is an important one for understanding the Pueblo Revolt. Popé, by all accounts, was powerfully charismatic and a gifted organizer of people. The diplomacy involved in Popé’s conspiracy was complex, as there were some Pueblo villages whose leaders were seen as too close to the Spanish to be trusted, while others would refuse overtures to join the rebellion. Overall, Popé and his associates united some 17,000 Pueblo, dispersed among 24 villages spread throughout the Rio Grande valley behind the rebellion. This was no easy task, as New Mexico’s Pueblo spoke six different languages, and several distinct dialects within these linguistic groups, which were often “mutually unintelligible” across different regions of the valley. To get these disparate groups to act in concert, even when the plans for the rebellion were altered at literally the last minute, was no mean feat.

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Even without Popé, though, there is ample reason to believe the Pueblo would have rebelled against the Spanish. Conditions were more ripe for an uprising in 1680 than at any other time in New Mexico’s colonial period. Drought and famine had persisted continuously for almost 20 years. Athapaskan raids were intensifying in both number and level of violence. The Pueblo’s world was coming undone, and they saw that process accelerating by the mid-1670s. When these external factors are coupled with the internal dynamics between Spanish and Pueblo, it is clear that the breaking strain was fast approaching in New Mexico. The renewed and intensified crackdowns on Pueblo religious practices by both civil and clerical authorities exacerbated what were already significant resentments on the part of the Pueblo about Spanish conversion efforts. [See The Franciscans’ Conversions by Violence] The 1675 incident was a key development in this regard. Leaving aside Popé’s involvement, the very fact that the Tewa Pueblo were able to force Governor Treviño to release the imprisoned religious leaders demonstrated where the real balance of power lay in the colony if the Pueblo undertook collective resistance. So large-scale rebellion lay not only in the realm of possibility, but also probability, by 1680.

That rebellion, however, might not have possessed the timing, scale, or coherence of the August 1680 revolt without Popé’s leadership. Yet, before we assume the Popé was an indispensable figure, it should be recalled that he was overthrown in 1681 by the very people that he had led in revolt the previous year. It seems reasonable to assume that given the unprecedented levels of tension within New Mexico, that revolt was almost a given, and a leader would have emerged. Perhaps one of the other 40-plus Shamans who were confined in Santa Fe in the wake of the 1675 Spanish crackdown on Pueblo religious practices would have emerged if Popé had not. Popé drew much of his power and reputation from his spiritual abilities and connections; certainly other Pueblo religious leaders could lay claim to these as well. And the conditions in the Rio Grande Valley—famine, threats of war, and Spanish persecution—were variables completely independent of Popé’s presence.

Even though the Spanish were able to “reconquer” New Mexico in the mid-1690s, the circumstances surrounding the renewal of their colony were fundamentally different than had been the case before 1680. The reassertion of Spanish power, in fact, was possible not because the Europeans had grown stronger, but rather the Pueblo people had continued to grow weaker even after the expulsion of the Spanish. Droughts and famine persisted, the unity forged by rebellion devolved into factionalism and strife, and nomadic raids continued to make the Pueblo’s existence a precarious one. Indeed, many outlying Pueblo villages were abandoned due to population decline and fear of attacks. The return of the Spanish, if they conducted themselves better, and provided much-needed protection, looked more and more reasonable to Pueblo by the decade after the rebellion. The Spanish understood these implicit conditions; the Pueblo may have been weakened by the 1690s, but they still outnumbered the Spanish. A 1696 rebellion against the returning Spaniards, though quickly suppressed, also demonstrated just how powerful the combination of difficult conditions and strong leadership had been for the Revolt of 1680. Not all Pueblo welcomed the Spanish back in the 1690s; indeed, it is likely that the majority of New Mexico’s indigenous peoples accepted the Spanish back only grudgingly, if at all. But the 1680 rebellion had altered the colonial dynamic enough to make the Europeans’ presence at least a palatable one. The Spanish remained a small presence numerically, and their figurative “footprint” in New Mexico was a softer one now as well. The harsh labor practices of the colony’s early years were gone; the encomienda was not reinstated when the Spanish returned,

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and tribute demands were scaled down significantly. Additionally, Spanish interference in Pueblo’s religious lives was also mitigated to a significant degree. Though the Spanish still proclaimed the necessity of conversion to Catholic practices, the enforcement of this mandate lacked the force and violence of the earlier era. The history of colonial New Mexico after 1696 demonstrates the significance an event such as the 1680 Pueblo Revolt could possess in redefining the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

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