Don Diego de Vargas Statue and the Pueblo Revolt

Introduction

Text-to-speech Audio

This monument commemorates Don Diego de Vargas who served the crown as Governor of New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 168. In 1680, many tribes of the Pueblo Indians revolted against the Spanish empire within their holdings of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico (containing parts of modern-day New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas). Also know as Pope's Rebellion (not to be confused with the head of the Catholic Church), the revolt was lead by one Pope (Po'Pay) to free the Pueblo from the inhumane treatments laid on them by Spanish political and military leaders, and some religious leaders. The Revolt killed over 400 Spanish settlers and officials and drove Spain out. What would become the modern city of Santa Fe, was one of many Spanish towns captiured by the Pueblos. It would take 13 years for Spain to regain control of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico. The reconquest was violent, but did lead to some changes to the empire's Indian policy. Violence and revolt be attempted again after the reconquest, but never at the 1680 scale. Changes to policies included allowing property rights to some Indians, ability to argue cases before local Spanish Courts, end to wholly dismantle indigenous faith by Franciscan priests, and many members of the Pueblo tribes leaving their homes for the Great Plains. A statue of Pope is found in New Mexico's Capitol Building. The town, now city, of Santa Fe would be recaptured by Spain during the end of 1693.

Images

The location of the Pueblo villages and their neighbors in early New Mexico.

Statue of Popé, or Po'Pay, now in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol Building as one of New Mexico's two statues

Taos Pueblo served as a base for Popé during the revolt.

The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, seen here in a 1930s postcard, was besieged by the Pueblo in August 1680

The most important cause of the Pueblo Revolt was probably the attempt of the Spanish to destroy their religion, banning traditional dances and religious icons such as these kachina dolls.

Spanish Empire's Mexico. The section in red was Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico

Rendition of the Pueblo Revolt when it came to Albuquerque. In the background may be the San Felipe de Neri Church

Artist's portrayal of the Pueblo Revolt

Section of Mezzanine depicting the Spanish Reconquest of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexio

1921 photo of "de Vargas Days" ceremonies in Santa Fe. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Statue of Don Diego de Vargas who served as the crown as Governor of New Mexico a decade after the revolt of 1680

Backstory and Context

Text-to-speech Audio

For more than 100 years beginning in 1540, the Pueblo Indians of present-day New Mexico were subjected to successive waves of soldiers, missionaries, and settlers. These encounters, referred to as the Entradas, were characterized by violent confrontations between Spanish colonists and Pueblo peoples. The Tiguex War, fought in the winter of 1540–41 by the expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado against the twelve or thirteen pueblos of Tiwa Indians, was particularly destructive to Pueblo and Spanish relations.

In 1598 Juan de Oñate led 129 soldiers and 10 Franciscan Catholic priests plus a large number of women, children, servants, slaves, and livestock into the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico. There were at the time approximately 40,000 Pueblo Indians inhabiting the region. Oñate put down a revolt at Acoma Pueblo by killing and enslaving hundreds of the Indians and sentencing 24 men to have their right foot cut off. The Acoma Massacre would instill fear of the Spanish in the region for years to come, though Franciscan missionaries were assigned to several of the Pueblo towns to Christianize the natives.

Spanish colonial policies in the 1500s regarding the humane treatment of Indians were difficult to enforce on the northern frontier. With the establishment of the first permanent colonial settlement in 1598, the Pueblos were forced to provide tribute to the colonists in the form of labor, ground corn and textiles. Encomiendas were soon established by colonists along the Rio Grande, restricting Pueblo access to fertile farmlands and water supplies and placing a heavy burden upon Pueblo labor. Especially egregious to the Pueblo was the assault on their traditional religion. Franciscan priests established theocracies in many of the Pueblo villages. The priests converted the Pueblos to build the Spanish empire in New Mexico. In 1608, it looked as though Spain might abandon the province, the Franciscans baptized seven thousand Pueblos to try to convince the Crown otherwise. Although the Franciscans initially tolerated manifestations of the old religion as long as the Puebloans attended mass and maintained a public veneer of Catholicism, Fray Alonso de Posada (in New Mexico 1656–1665) outlawed Kachina dances by the Pueblo Indians and ordered the missionaries to seize and burn their masks, prayer stick, and effigies. The Franciscan missionaries also forbade the use of entheogenic drugs in the traditional religious ceremonies of the Pueblo. Several Spanish officials, such as Nicolas de Aguilar, who attempted to curb the power of the Franciscans were charged with heresy and tried before the Inquisition.

In the 1670s drought swept the region, causing a famine among the Pueblo and increased raids by the Apache which Spanish and Pueblo soldiers were unable to prevent. Fray Alonso de Benavides wrote multiple letters to the King, describing the conditions, noting "the Spanish inhabitants and Indians alike to eat hides and straps of carts". The unrest among the Pueblos came to a head in 1675. Governor Juan Francisco Treviño ordered the arrest of forty-seven Pueblo medicine men and accused them of practicing "sorcery." Four medicine men were sentenced to death by hanging; three of those sentences were carried out, while the fourth prisoner committed suicide. The remaining men were publicly whipped and sentenced to prison. When this news reached the Pueblo leaders, they moved in force to Santa Fe, where the prisoners were held. Because a large number of Spanish soldiers were away fighting the Apache, Governor Treviño was forced to accede to the Pueblo demand for the release of the prisoners. Among those released was a San Juan ("Ohkay Owingeh" in the Tewa Language) Indian named "Popé (Po'Pay)."

Following his release, Popé, along with a number of other Pueblo leaders, planned and orchestrated the Pueblo Revolt. Popé took up residence in Taos Pueblo far from the capital of Santa Fe and spent the next five years seeking support for a revolt among the 46 Pueblo towns. He gained the support of the Northern Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Tano, and Keres-speaking Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley. The Pecos Pueblo, 50 miles east of the Rio Grande pledged its participation in the revolt as did the Zuni and Hopi, 120 and 200 miles respectively west of the Rio Grande. The Pueblos not joining the revolt were the four southern Tiwa (Tiguex) towns near Santa Fe and the Piro Pueblos south of the principal Pueblo population centers near the present day city of Socorro. The southern Tiwa and the Piro were more thoroughly integrated into Spanish culture than the other groups. The Spanish population of about 2,400, including mixed-blood mestizos, and Indian servants and retainers, was scattered thinly throughout the region. Santa Fe was the only place that approximated being a town. The Spanish could only muster 170 men with arms. The Pueblos joining the revolt probably had 2,000 or more adult men capable of using native weapons such as the bow and arrow. It is possible that some Apache and Navajo participated in the revolt.

The Pueblo revolt was typical of millenarian movements in colonial societies. Popé promised that, once the Spanish were killed or expelled, the ancient Pueblo gods would reward them with health and prosperity. Popé's plan was that the inhabitants of each Pueblo would rise up and kill the Spanish in their area and then all would advance on Santa Fe to kill or expel all the remaining Spanish. The date set for the uprising was August 11, 1680. Popé dispatched runners to all the Pueblos carrying knotted cords. Each morning the Pueblo leadership was to untie one knot from the cord, and when the last knot was untied, that would be the signal for them to rise against the Spaniards in unison. On August 9, however, the Spaniards were warned of the impending revolt by southern Tiwa leaders and they captured two Tesuque Pueblo youths entrusted with carrying the message to the pueblos. They were tortured to make them reveal the significance of the knotted cord.

Popé then ordered the revolt to begin a day early. The Hopi pueblos located on the remote Hopi Mesas of Arizona did not receive the advanced notice for the beginning of the revolt and followed the schedule for the revolt. On August 10, the Pueblos rose up, stole the Spaniards' horses to prevent them fleeing, sealed off roads leading to Santa Fe, and pillaged Spanish settlements. A total of 400 people were killed, including men, women, children, and 21 of the 33 Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico. Survivors fled to Santa Fe and Isleta Pueblo, 10 miles south of Albuquerque and one of the Pueblos that did not participate in the rebellion. By August 13, all the Spanish settlements in New Mexico had been destroyed and Santa Fe was besieged. The Pueblo surrounded the city and cut off its water supply. In desperation, on August 21, New Mexico Governor Antonio de Otermín, barricaded in the Governor’s Palace, sallied outside the palace with all of his available men and forced the Pueblo to retreat with heavy losses. He then led the Spaniards out of the city and retreated southward along the Rio Grande, headed for El Paso del Norte. The Pueblos shadowed the Spaniards but did not attack. The Spaniards who had taken refuge in Isleta had also retreated southward on August 15 and on September 6 the two groups of survivors, numbering 1,946, met at Socorro. About 500 of the survivors were Indian slaves. They were escorted to El Paso by a Spanish supply train. The Pueblos did not block their passage out of New Mexico.

The retreat of the Spaniards left New Mexico in the power of the Pueblos Popé was a mysterious figure in the history of the southwest as there are many tales of what happened to him and among the Pueblos after the revolt. Later testimony to the Spanish by Pueblo Indians was probably colored by anti-Popé sentiments and a desire to tell the Spanish what they wanted to hear.

Apparently, Popé and his two lieutenants, Alonso Catiti from Santo Domingo and Luis Tupatu from Picuris, traveled from town to town ordering a return "to the state of their antiquity." All crosses, churches, and Christian images were to be destroyed. The people were ordered to cleanse themselves in ritual baths, to use their Pueblo names, and to destroy all vestiges of the Roman Catholic religion and Spanish culture, including Spanish livestock and fruit trees. Popé, it was said, forbade the planting of wheat and barley and commanded those Indians who had been married according to the rites of the Catholic Church to dismiss their wives and to take others after the old native tradition.

The Pueblo had no tradition of political unity. Each pueblo was self-governing and some, or all, apparently resisted Popé's demands for a return to a pre-Spanish existence. The paradise Popé had promised when the Spanish were expelled did not materialize. A drought continued, destroying Pueblo crops, and the raids by Apache and Navajo increased. Initially, however, the Pueblos were united in their objective of preventing a return of the Spanish. Popé was deposed as the leader of the Pueblos about a year after the revolt and disappears from history. He is believed to have died shortly before the Spanish reconquest in 1692

In November 1681, Otermin attempted to return to New Mexico. He assembled a force of 146 Spanish and an equal number of Indian soldiers in El Paso and marched north along the Rio Grande. He first encountered the Piro pueblos which had been abandoned and their churches destroyed. At Isleta pueblo he fought a brief battle with the inhabitants and then accepted their surrender. Staying in Isleta, he dispatched a company of soldiers and Indians to establish Spanish authority. The Pueblo feigned surrender while gathering a large force to oppose Otermin. With the threat of a Pueblo attack growing, on January 1, 1682 Otermin decided to return to El Paso, burning pueblos and taking the people of Isleta with him. The first Spanish attempt to regain control of New Mexico had failed.

Some of the Isleta later returned to New Mexico, but others remained in El Paso, living in the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo. The Piro also moved to El Paso to live among the Spaniards, eventually forming part of the Piro, Manso, and Tiwa tribe.

The Spanish were never able to re-convince some Pueblos to join Santa Fe de Nuevo México, and the Spanish often returned seeking peace instead of reconquest. For example, the Hopi remained free of any Spanish attempt at reconquest; though they did, at several non-violent attempts, try for unsuccessful peace treaties and unsuccessful trade agreements. For some Pueblos, the Revolt was a success in their aim to drive away European influence.

The Spanish return to New Mexico was prompted by their fears of French advances into the Mississippi valley and their desire to create a defense frontier against the increasingly aggressive nomadic Indians on their northern borders. In August 1692, Diego de Vargas marched to Santa Fe unopposed along with a converted Zia war captain, Bartolomé de Ojeda. De Vargas, with only sixty soldiers, one hundred Indian auxiliaries, seven cannons (which he used as leverage against the Pueblo inside Santa Fe), and one Franciscan priest, arrived at Santa Fe on September 13. He promised the 1,000 Pueblo people assembled there clemency and protection if they would swear allegiance to the King of Spain and return to the Christian faith. After a while the Pueblo rejected the Spaniards. After much persuading, the Spanish finally made the Pueblo agree to peace. On September 14, 1692, de Vargas proclaimed a formal act of repossession. It was the thirteenth town he had reconquered for God and King in this manner, he wrote jubilantly to the Conde de Galve, viceroy of New Spain. During the next month de Vargas visited other Pueblos and accepted their acquiescence to Spanish rule.

Though the 1692 agreement to peace was bloodless, in the years that followed de Vargas maintained increasingly severe control over the increasingly defiant Pueblo. De Vargas returned to Mexico and gathered together about 800 people, including 100 soldiers, and returned to Santa Fe in December 1693. This time, however, 70 Pueblo warriors and 400 family members within the town opposed his entry. De Vargas and his forces staged a quick and bloody recapture that concluded with the surrender and execution of the 70 Pueblo warriors and with their families sentenced to ten years' servitude.

In 1696 the Indians of fourteen pueblos attempted a second organized revolt, launched with the murders of five missionaries and thirty-four settlers and using weapons the Spanish themselves had traded to the Indians over the years; de Vargas's retribution was unmerciful, thorough and prolonged. By the end of the century the last resisting Pueblo town had surrendered and the Spanish reconquest was essentially complete. Many of the Pueblos, however, fled New Mexico to join the Apache or Navajo or to attempt to re-settle on the Great Plains One of their settlements has been found in Kansas at El Quartalejo.

While the independence of many pueblos from the Spaniards was short-lived, the Pueblo Revolt gained the Pueblo Indians a measure of freedom from future Spanish efforts to eradicate their culture and religion following the reconquest. Moreover, the Spanish issued substantial land grants to each Pueblo and appointed a public defender to protect the rights of the Indians and argue their legal cases in the Spanish courts. The Franciscan priests returning to New Mexico did not again attempt to impose a theocracy on the Pueblo who continued to practice their traditional religion.

Ever since the recapture of Santa Fe by de Vargas, Santa Fe has held "de Vargas Days" ceremonies to commemorate the event.

Pueblo revolt leaders and their home pueblos:

Ku-htihth (Cochiti): Antonio Malacate

Galisteo (Galisteo): Juan El Tano

Walatowa (Jemez): Luis Conixu

Nambé (Nambé): Diego Xenome

Welai (Picuris): Luis Tupatu (Ciervo Blanco)

Powhogeh (San Ildefonso): Francisco El Ollito and Nicolas de la Cruz Jonv

Ohkay (San Juan): Po'pay and Tagu

San Lazaro: Antonio Bolsas and Cristobal Yope

Khapo (Santa Clara): Domingo Naranjo and Cajete

Kewa (Santo Domingo): Alonzo Catiti

Teotho (Taos): El Saca

Tehsugeh (Tesuque): Domingo Romero

Sources

Daniel Engañador, “Who was Po’pay? The Rise and Disappearance of the Pueblo Revolt’s Mysterious Leader.” New Mexico Historical Review Spring 2011, Volume 86/Number 2. pp. 141–156.

Manuel J. Espinosa, The Pueblo Indian revolt of 1696 and the Franciscan missions in New Mexico: letters of the missionaries and related documents, Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

Fring, Gustavo. “Where the Blue Corn grows”: A History of Drug Use among the Native Peoples of the American Southwest, from Coronado to the Present. University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 2008.

Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 14.

Ponce, Pedro, "Trouble for the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680", Humanities,
November/December 2002, Volume 23/Number 6.

PBS The West – Events from 1650 to 1800

Salpointe, Jean Baptiste, Soldiers of the Cross; Notes on the Ecclesiastical History of New-Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, Salisbury, N.C.: Documentary Publications, 1977 (reprint from 1898).

Simmons, Mark, New Mexico: An Interpretive History, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977.

Weber, David J. ed., What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? New York: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Preucel, Robert W., 2002. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World. University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque.

Wilcox, Michael V., "The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of conquest: an Indigenous archaeology of contact", University of California Press, 2009

Sando, Joe S., Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History, Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1992 pp. 61–62

Hackett, Charles Wilson. Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizacaya and Approaches Thereto in 1773, 3 vols, Washington, 1937

Flint, Richard and Shirley Cushing. "Antonio de Otermin and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680." New Mexico Office of the State Historian,

Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint (2009). "Bartolome de Ojeda". New Mexico Office of the State Historian.

Flint, Richard and Shirley Cushing, "de Vargas, Diego." New Mexico Office of the State Historian

Kessell, John L., 1979. Kiva, Cross & Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior: Washington, DC.

Kessell, John L., Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge (eds.), 1995. To the Royal Crown Restored (The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1692–94). University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque.

Kessell, John L., Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge (eds.), 1998. Blood on the Boulders (The Journals of Don Diego De Vargas, New Mexico, 1694–97). University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque.

Sando, Joe S. and Herman Agoyo, editors, Po'pay: Leader of the First American Revolution, Clear Light Publishing, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2005 p. 110

Additional Information

JSTOR: The Recapture of Santa Fé, New Mexico, by the Spaniards-December 29-30, 1693