Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4
Editor's Note: Few episodes in the long, bloody chronicle of the subjugation of the Indian were more violent than the Pueblo uprising of 1680. Organized and led by the mysterious medicine man, Popé, the New Mexico Indians drove an entire Spanish colony from their land- the one completely successful revolt against the rule of the white man in American history. The story of Popé and the struggle of his people Is taken from Alvln M. Josephy, Jr.’s book on great Indian chiefs.
In the year 1598, two decades before the English Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, an expedition of several hundred Spanish colonists—led by Don Juan de Ofiate, and complete with eleven Franciscan friars, a herd of seven thousand bawling cattle, a column of helmeted troops in metal and leather armor, and a long, creaking line of supply carts—lumbered north across the burning deserts of Mexico to the fabled Rio Grande. On the banks of that river, on April 30, slightly south of the future townsite of El Paso, they paused in a sheltering grove of dusty cottonwoods, and before a cross and the royal standard of the king of Spain took possession “once, twice, and thrice,” of all the “lands, pueblos, cities, villas, of whatsoever nature now founded in the kingdom and province of New Mexico … and all its native Indians.”
For eighty-two years thereafter, in that remote and curtained part of the continent far beyond the horizon of the European colonies being created on the Atlantic seaboard, successive generations of Spanish governors, priests, troops, and settlers extended their reign over a beautiful but harsh wilderness of mesas, plateaus, and river valleys, forcing Indians to submit to the two majesties of church and state, and impressing thousands of them into a cruel encomienda system of serfdom. Then, suddenly, in 1680, it was all over. In one of the most dramatic uprisings in American Indian history, the oppressed natives struck furiously for their freedom. Streaming from pueblos and cornfields in every part of the province, they slew 400 Spaniards, drove 2,500 others in shock and terror back to Mexico, and in a few weeks swept their country clean of the white man’s rule.
Their stunning triumph, never again matched by natives in the New World, was organized and led by a shadowy Pueblo Indian medicine doctor called Popé, who is still little known to history. To the battered Spaniards, who spent the next twelve years trying to regain the province, defeat was humiliating enough. But it was added gall that an idolatrous medicine man, obviously an agent of the powers