The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

by Andrew L. Knaut

Overview

In August 1680 the Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico arose in fury to slay their Spanish colonial overlords and drive any survivors from the land. Andrew Knaut explores eight decades of New Mexican history leading up to the revolt, explaining how the newcomers had disrupted Pueblo life in far-reaching ways - they commandeered the Indians’ food stores, exposed the Pueblos to new diseases, interrupted long-established trading relationships, and sparked increasing raids by surrounding Athapaskan nomads. The Pueblo Indians’ violent success stemmed from an almost unprecedented unity of disparate factions and sophistication of planning in secrecy. When Spanish forces retook the colony in the 1690s, freedom proved short-lived. But the revolt stands as a vitally important yet neglected historical landmark: the only significant reversal of European expansion by Native American people in the New World.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806129921
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	09/15/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Andrew Knaut holds the doctorate in history from Duke University. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

The Pueblo Revolt Of 1680

Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

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By Andrew L. Knaut

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 1995 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4881-6

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CHAPTER 1

Oñate's Entrada

Don Philip ... to don Juan de Oñate, resident of the city of Zacatecas: In consideration and appreciation of your personal quality and merits and of the services that you rendered for twenty years in the war against the Chichimecan Indians of the Kingdoms of Nueva Galicia and Nueva Vizcaya ... I appoint you as my governor, captain general, caudillo, discoverer, and pacifier of the ... provinces of New Mexico and those adjacent and neighboring, in order that, in my royal name, you may enter them with the settlers and armed forces, baggage, equipment, munitions, and other necessary things that you may provide for this purpose. You will endeavor to attract the natives with peace, friendship, and good treatment, which I particularly charge you, and to induce them to hear and accept the holy gospel; you will explain our holy Catholic faith to them through interpreters, if they can be obtained, so that we may have communication with them in the various languages and seek their conversion; Let it be done at the opportunity which the friars find most suitable. You will see to it that the latter are respected and revered, as ministers of the gospel should be, so that, with this example, the Indians may attend and honor them and accept their persuasions and teachings. Experience has demonstrated this to be very important, and also that all the people in your company act gently and kindly, without committing excesses or setting bad examples, or irritating those we seek to attract lest they adopt an unfriendly attitude toward the faith. You are to direct everything to this principal aim.

With these words, King Philip II of Spain officially sanctioned the opening of the province of New Mexico to colonial expansion in 1595. New Mexico, however, was by no means virgin ground for Spaniards in the final decade of the sixteenth century. Interest in the northern region among would-be conquistadores, profiteers, and Catholic missionaries in central Mexico dated from as early as 1536, when four survivors of Narváez's disastrous 1528 attempt to colonize Florida arrived in Mexico City with tales of their epic six-year trek across much of what is now Texas and the American Southwest.

The most vocal of the travelers, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, fired the imaginations of his listeners as he spoke of crossing the river that would come to be known as the Río Grande and there hearing stories of an advanced Indian civilization settled in large and prosperous cities to the north. As corroborative evidence, Cabeza de Vaca presented five malachite arrowheads given to him by a band of Ures Indians during his stay in the region. The stones' green color quickly transformed them into emeralds in the minds of Spaniards eager to believe that a "new" Mexico, a land of untapped wealth rivaling that of recently conquered Tenochtitlán, lay somewhere beyond the northern frontier.

The rumors precipitated a flurry of activity in the viceregal capital. Hernán Cortés set out immediately by sea up the Pacific Coast in a futile attempt to locate the northern riches. The newly arrived viceroy of Nueva España, Antonio de Mendoza, took steps of his own to verify Cabeza de Vaca's reports. Mendoza appointed Fray Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan veteran of the conquest of Peru, as head of a small scouting expedition to be guided north by one of Cabeza de Vaca's traveling companions, the black slave Esteban. The Franciscan's expedition departed from Culiacán, the northernmost Spanish outpost in Nueva España, on March 7, 1539.

Fray Marcos himself saw little of the territory that would later be called New Mexico. Instead, he based much of his testimony about the land on word sent back to him by Esteban, who had struck out in advance of the main party with a few Indian auxiliaries shortly after leaving Culiacán. Esteban's reports painted a glowing and, as it was eventually discovered, greatly exaggerated picture of the wealth and prosperity of the peoples he encountered as he moved north. His inflated accounts eventually spurred the friar to catch up with the advance party in all haste. News of Esteban's death at the hands of the Zuñi inhabitants of Hawikuh, however, forced de Niza to end the expedition and return south. The Franciscan himself caught only a glimpse of the pueblo from a distance before giving the word to retreat, but the image was sufficient for de Niza to conjure up tales of a wondrous site, "larger than the city of Mexico," upon his return to the capital in September 1539.

Encouraged by the friar's account, Mendoza authorized Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, governor of Nueva Galicia, to lead an expedition of conquest into the northern territory. Coronado's forces—close to three hundred European soldiers and more than eight hundred Mexican Indian auxiliaries pushing herds of a thousand horses and five hundred head of livestock—were large enough to cause concern over the security of the Spaniards left behind after its departure from Mexico City. The expedition headed north from central Mexico in February 1540. Advance forces entered Hawikuh on July 7, 1540, and over the course of the next twenty-three months Coronado and his followers moved extensively throughout the Pueblo world, wintering twice among the Tiwa pueblos in the central Río Grande valley.

As the months passed, the Spaniards found no indications of material wealth in the land or among its peoples, and disillusionment and hardship gradually replaced the expectations of wealth and fame that had fueled the expedition. After two long and difficult winters and a futile journey across the Great Plains in search of gold-laden settlements always rumored to lie just beyond the horizon, Coronado opted to abandon the region and return south in April 1542. For a time, bitter disappointment quieted the powerful European desire to press into the northern province.

Decades passed, though, and as dust slowly covered Coronado's reports in the archives of Mexico City and the royal courts of Spain, gilded mirages reappeared along the northern frontiers of the empire. By the 1580s, the Spanish realm had extended as far as the rich mining country of what is today southern Chihuahua, where frontier towns like El Parral, Santa Bárbara, and Zacatecas attracted profit-seeking entrepreneurs, fugitives from royal justice, and Franciscan friars zealous to push outward in their missionary efforts among the region's Indian groups. Eventually, the old rumors resurfaced in the area telling of advanced and populous cities to the north, ripe with goods and labor to be exploited and countless souls to be won over to the Christian faith. As a result, the push for a new expedition, or entrada, into the region soon began anew.

Since Coronado's time, however, the Spanish crown had changed its attitude toward the exploration and settlement of new territories considerably. Charles V, moved by the pleas of writers like Bartolomé de las Casas and their pointed condemnations of the destruction of the New World's Indian peoples and the abuses of the Spanish colonial system, had in 1542 passed the New Laws aimed at curbing the excesses that had characterized the conquests of the Aztec and Inca realms. On July 13, 1573, Philip II had strengthened that legislation with the Laws of Discovery, which expressly forbade "conquests" in the forms seen in the early days of the American empire and even prohibited the mentioning of the term in conjunction with the colonization of new lands. Spanish subjugation of Indians and their lands was now to be carried out in a Christian and humane manner; the blood baths of the past were to be avoided. Any new foray into the northern territories would henceforth receive royal sanction only under the pretext of establishing missions among the Indians and working to convert them to Catholicism. As the religious order with the strongest presence along the northern frontier, the Franciscans stood to benefit most from this shift in emphasis. They would now play a central role in any attempted settlement of New Mexico.

Under these changed political circumstances, an unusual and symbiotic relationship flourished between Franciscans and a number of well-placed profiteers in the frontier mining towns in the years from 1580 until the close of the century. Keen to press forward into new mission fields, the friars nevertheless recognized that any successful entry into New Mexico depended upon military protection and financial backing that only the region's wealthy entrepreneurs could provide. The latter, sensitive to varying degrees to the crown's changed position with respect to missions of conquest and to the royal edicts forbidding unauthorized expansion beyond the northern borders of the realm, realized that any commercial venture on their part into the new territories would have to be cloaked in the guise of an expedition dedicated to assisting the Franciscans in their efforts to pull more souls into the Christian fold.

The first in the new round of entradas into New Mexico departed Santa Bárbara on June 5, 1581, under the joint leadership of Fray Agustín Rodríguez and Captain Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado. This expedition of nine soldiers, three Franciscan friars, and nineteen Mexican Indian auxiliaries, with six hundred head of livestock and ninety horses, reached the southernmost Piro pueblo in August 1581, only to find the town abandoned by its people out of fear of the approaching Europeans. The group pressed on, eventually making contact with the land's native inhabitants, and over the next several months traveled extensively throughout the Río Grande valley. The party ventured as far as the Keresan pueblos in the north and the Zuñi pueblos and Acoma to the west, and it passed through the Tompiro pueblos east of the Manzano range on its return to Santa Bárbara in the spring of 1582.

The safe return of the expedition on April 15, 1582, sparked excitement and an immediate call to further action in the small mining town. Franciscan officials listened with alarm to the news that two of the friars, Rodriguez and Francisco López, had elected to remain without military escort in the pueblo of Puaray to begin missionary work among its inhabitants. Concerned for the safety of their brethren, the Franciscans immediately cast about in search of someone willing to lead a mission of rescue into the newly rediscovered territories. Fortune seemed to smile on the friars when they learned that Antonio de Espejo, a wealthy cattle rancher from Querétaro, was in the area and willing to lead such an expedition at his own cost.

Perhaps unbeknownst to the Franciscans, Espejo had fled to Santa Bárbara to escape criminal charges pending against him in Mexico City. The friars' predicament seemed to him to offer the perfect opportunity to go one step further in evading royal justice. At the same time, the entrepreneur could seek out sources of investment and mining prospects in the new land and perhaps even clear his name should he manage to appear as the savior of the two stranded friars. Anxious to get the expedition under way quickly, the Franciscans helped Espejo bypass royal channels in seeking approval to lead the mission by providing him with documentation signed only by a local alcalde mayor. On November 10, 1582, Espejo headed north from Santa Bárbara with fourteen soldiers and one Franciscan friar.

In his travels through New Mexico, Espejo retraced many of the steps taken by Chamuscado and Rodríguez the previous year. Word reached the party early on that the two friars had suffered martyrdom at the hands of Puaray's inhabitants, but Espejo continued his explorations and his search for signs of mineral wealth that would make a future large-scale colonization of the land profitable. After finding some evidence of copper deposits in the mountains west of the Hopi pueblos, Espejo returned south, reaching the frontier on September 10, 1583.

There, his soon-exaggerated tales of New Mexico's wealth and its prosperous Indian population sparked two more expeditions into the region, both undertaken without sanction by royal authorities in Mexico City and Madrid. In 1590, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa made headway in establishing an unauthorized Spanish colony among the Pueblos, only to be recalled the following year by royal officials for violating the crown's colonization laws. Similarly, Captain Francisco Leyva de Bonilla attempted an illegal entrada into New Mexico in 1593 but eventually lost his life at the hands of his own men during an expedition to the Great Plains. An unidentified group of Plains Indians killed the remaining Europeans of the party shortly afterward.

The Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico could now claim more than half a century of experience with European intruders. As wave after wave of unwanted visitors had passed through the land, each had managed to leave an indelible impression upon the region's native inhabitants, and not a few scars.

The earliest contact with outsiders—Esteban's 1539 visit to Hawikuh—had revealed the newcomers' true intent and charted a course for Pueblo-Spanish relations that was followed again and again with each subsequent arrival of the Europeans and their followers. The Zuñi inhabitants of Hawikuh had watched in amazement as the dark-skinned wanderer trampled without hesitation over the corn meal spread across the entryway to the village, a sacred welcome for travelers from the pueblo whose return from a pilgrimage coincided with Esteban's intrusion in May 1539. Not satisfied with the greeting extended to him by the pueblo's leaders, the stranger then demanded gifts of turquoise and women, warning his hosts that many of his brethren would soon follow and "that they had numerous arms." After three days of careful deliberation, the angered Zuñi leaders decided that only by killing this insolent visitor could they rid themselves of his presence and ensure that word of the pueblo's location never reached his followers to the south.

The arrival of Coronado and his large force at Hawikuh the following year, however, soon proved the futility of the Zuñi resistance. Village leaders had hoped to halt the intruders with yet another line of corn meal spread across the entrance to the pueblo. When this proved ineffective, they refused to acquiesce to Spanish demands for food and clothing, an act that prompted Coronado to sack Hawikuh on July 7, 1540. Coronado and his followers would repeat the scenario at Hawikuh often in their travels over the next two years. Unable to carry provisions sufficient to feed and clothe such a large expeditionary force, the Spaniards depended instead upon the Pueblos—particularly the Tiwas of the central Río Grande valley—to house and supply them during the difficult winters of 1540–41 and 1541–42. Pedro de Castañeda, a member of Coronado's forces, highlighted the stress that these demands placed upon the Pueblos when he told of an incident in which Coronado called on the leader of one of the Tiwa pueblos for supplies:

The General spoke with [the Tiwa leader], asking him to furnish three hundred or more pieces of clothing which he needed to distribute to his men. He replied that it was not in his power to do this ... that they had to discuss the matter among the pueblos, and that the Spaniards had to ask this individually from each pueblo.... As there were twelve [Tiwa] pueblos ... as soon as a Spaniard came to a pueblo, he demanded the supplies at once, and they had to give them, because he had to go on to the next one. With all this there was nothing the natives could do except take off their own cloaks and hand them over until the number that the Spaniards asked for was reached. Some of the soldiers who went along with these collectors, when the latter gave them some blankets or skins that they did not consider good enough, if they saw an Indian with a better one, they exchanged it with him without any consideration or respect, and without inquiring about the importance of the person they despoiled. The Indians resented this very much.

That resentment flared into open resistance several times during Coronado's years among the Pueblos, as the region's inhabitants lost patience with these strangers who took what was not offered them and never gave of themselves. The people of Arenal, for example, chose to defy the Spaniards' demands for provisions, a stance that prompted the Europeans to torch the pueblo and burn thirty of its inhabitants at the stake. In all, Coronado attacked and destroyed thirteen of the fifteen or so Tiwa pueblos in the region over the course of the two winters, leaving a first impression of the European intruders that few Pueblos would forget over the ensuing decades.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Pueblo Revolt Of 1680 by Andrew L. Knaut. Copyright © 1995 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Prologue. August 1680: "Now God and Santa Maria Were Dead",
Part I. Early Contacts in New Mexico: Conquest and Visions of Distance,
Chapter 1. Oñate's Entrada,
Chapter 2. "To Love and Fear Us",
Part II. Weathering the Storm: Pueblo Cultural Endurance,
Chapter 3. A Worldly Salvation: Early Pueblo Acceptances of Christianity,
Chapter 4. Kiva and Kachina: Pueblo Tradition Goes Underground,
Chapter 5. The Church-State Conflict: Pueblo Benefits,
Part III. A Dissolving Presence: The Disintegration of European Authority in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico,
Chapter 6. A Forgotten Province,
Chapter 7. Acculturation and Miscegenation: The Changing Face of the Spanish Presence in New Mexico,
Chapter 8. A Colony Lost,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,