Contents Foreword Preface The Invaders 1540-1542 The New Mexico: Preliminaries to Conquest 1542-1595 Oñate's Disenchantment 1595-1617 The "Christianization" of Pecos 1617-1659 The Shadow of the Inquisition 1659-1680 Their Own Worst Enemies 1680-1704 Pecos and the Friars 1704-1794 Pecos, the Plains, and the Provincias Internas 1704-1794 Toward Extinction 1794-1840 Epilogue Abbreviations Notes Bibliography |
Escalante as Historical Researcher During the last quarter of the enlightened eighteenth century, when the Spanish crown's pragmatic interest in history and geography pervaded every corner of her vast and vulnerable empire, an intense young Franciscan received permission from the governor in Santa Fe to examine the provincial archives. This was a collection which, in the governor's estimation, "contained nothing but old fragments." Undaunted, Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, not yet thirty but already in failing health, spent hours poring over, copying, and abstracting what documents he could. Among those from the period of the great revolt, he came across a formal complaint by the Santa Fe municipal council against Gov. Antonio de Otermín. Not only did this document present a different version of the outbreak, notably at variance with Otermín's own account, but it also suggested that the Indians of Pecos were their own worst enemies. [1]
Revolt Laid to Governor Otermín The cabildo put the blame for the revolt of 1680 squarely on Governor Otermín. Because he was either unable or unwilling to govern, or both, Otermín relegated all authority to his secretary of government and war, Maese de campo Francisco Javier, "a man of bad faith, avaricious and sly." Well built, with very gray hair and the scar of an old wound across the left side of his forehead, the cruel Javier had driven the Indians of New Mexico, in the words of the cabildo, "to the ultimate exasperation." A short while before the general uprising, Javier had seized at the pueblo of Pecos a camp of Apaches to whom he had given assurance of safe-conduct. Coolly, he distributed some of these captives to his friends and shipped the rest off to Parral for sale. To the Pecos, who gained much of their livelihood from trade with Apaches, the treacherous act of Francisco Javier was grounds for rebellion, or so Fray Silvestre implies. Yet, in the very next sentence without the least explanation, he tells how the Pecos—or the pro-Spanish faction at Pecos—warned Maese de campo Francisco Gómez Robledo of the impending rebellion well in advance, twenty days, by one account.
Gómez Robledo of course told Otermín. Later he appeared before the governor with the native messengers from Tesuque. "My lord," he explained, "here are the two Indians, who freely confess that the uprising is certain." To which Otermín is alleged to have replied, "Have them put in prison until Maese de campo Francisco Javier arrives." A fine way to react in a crisis.
Double Role of the Pecos
Even after the outbreak, the Pecos played a double role, or rather, they acted in the interest of at least two factions, one of which chanted, "Death to the Spaniards!," and another which evidently did not. The Pecos did not kill their minister, old Fray Fernando de Velasco. Instead, they disclosed to him the plot, and saw him off to Galisteo, where the Tanos promptly dispatched him. By most accounts, the Pecos did kill Fray Juan de la Pedrosa and at least one Spanish family. And they did join Tanos and Keres before Santa Fe on August 13 "armed and giving war whoops." The Siege of Santa Fe As news of widespread death and devastation in the outlying districts accumulated in Santa Fe, Otermín ordered the residents of the villa to come together and fortify the casas reales, that is, his thick-walled "palace" and the other government buildings on the north side of the plaza. Fray Francisco Gómez de la Cadena, guardian of the Santa Fe convento, and his assistant, Fray Francisco Farfán, consumed the Blessed Sacrament, packed up the objects of divine worship, and joined the others. When two Indians sent to scout the Galisteo Basin reappeared out of breath with word that "all the Indians of the pueblos of the Pecos, San Cristóbal, San Lázaro, San Marcos, Galisteo, and La Ciénaga, who numbered more than five hundred, were one league from this villa on the way to attack it and destroy the governor and all the Spaniards," the defenders dug in for a siege.
Leading this first wave of rebellious Pueblos was a Spanish-speaking Tano named Juan, whom Governor Otermín had sent out three days before with a letter for Alcalde mayor José Nieto at Galisteo. He rode a horse and sported a priest's sash of red taffeta. Armed like a Spaniard with arquebus, sword, dagger, and leather jacket. Juan agreed to parley with Governor Otermín in the plaza. He was not intimidated. He presented the governor with an ultimatum. Many more Indians were on their way to attack Santa Fe. They were bringing two crosses, one white and the other red. If the Spaniards chose the white cross, they would be spared to leave New Mexico. If they chose the red cross and war, they would surely die.
Otermín countered with an offer of pardon. Juan laughed and spurred his horse back across the Río de Santa Fe to the Analco district where the rebels greeted him "with bugle, with solemn pealing of the bells of the San Miguel chapel, and with hurrahs, mocking the Spaniards." When the natives began pillaging the abandoned houses of the Mexican Indians who lived in the barrio of Analco and then set fire to the chapel of San Miguel, Otermín dispatched a troop of soldiers to disperse them. But the rebels, taking cover in the gutted houses, put up such a fight that the governor was obliged to join the action himself.
The battle lasted most of the day. Just as the Spaniards put the Pecos and Tanos to rout, hundreds of newly arrived Tewas, Taos, and Picurís, threw themselves at the villa from the other side, drawing the defenders back to the casas reales. When the sun set, the Pecos and Tanos, having suffered heavy casualties, withdrew, leaving the siege of Santa Fe to the Indians of the north. After all, the revolt was their idea. The siege lasted a week. The Pueblos cut the water supply to the casas reales. They had already begun their victory celebration when a do-or-die force of mounted Spaniards suddenly broke out, caught the besiegers off guard, and trampled some of them under the hoofs of their horses. They claimed to have killed more than three hundred in all. They captured forty-seven. The rest were soon in flight. Next day, August 21, after he had interrogated and executed the prisoners and provisioned everyone for the road from his own stores, Governor Otermín led the orderly exodus of a thousand refugees out of the villa that had served as seat and symbol of Spanish authority for seventy years. By the Blessed Mother of God, he would be back. [4]
Spaniards Retreat down the Rio Grande Filing past Santo Domingo, they looked in vain for signs of life. There was evidence of a struggle in the convento. The bodies of three friars, among them ex-custos Fray Juan de Talabán, had been dragged into the church and buried in a common grave. Five more bodies lay outside. All along the valley, similar scenes of carnage greeted the forlorn column. They halted at the narrows south of San Felipe, not far from the home of swaggering Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán, who had risen to the rank of sargento mayor despite his trial by the Inquisition. His naked body and those of his wife, six children, and several other persons were heaped up at the front door. The revolt had wiped out the entire Anaya clan, save one. Sickened by the sight, Francisco de Anaya, a brother of Cristóbal wounded in the fighting at Santa Fe, thought of his own family. All of them dead. Unlike many of the refugees, don Francisco and a third wife would later return to New Mexico in the train of Diego de Vargas. In 1694, the reconqueror would name him alcalde mayor of the Pecos. [5] A Tano Relives the Outbreak Near the estancia that had been Cristóbal de Anaya's, Otermín summoned a Tano Indian known as Pedro García to appear before him. It was August 25. The day before, while a pack of rebels harried the rear of the retreating cavalcade, this Tano, "who did not want to be a rebellious traitor," tried with his wife and another woman to catch up. The rebels grabbed the two women but he eluded them and, covered by Spaniards, reached safety. Born, reared, and employed in the household of Alcalde mayor José Nieto, whose estancia lay only a league or so from Galisteo, Pedro now related to Otermín what he had seen and heard during the first days of the revolt. Like a brush fire in the wind, word of the planned uprising had spread from San Cristóbal to all the Tano pueblos, and to Father Custos Juan Bernal. Bernal had alerted Alcalde mayor Nieto and the other Spaniards, who gathered up their families and made for Galisteo. The next day, while Pedro was chopping weeds in a plot of maize on the Nieto estancia, he looked up to see Bartolomé, cantor mayor of the pueblo of Galisteo, coming toward him, his eyes filled with tears. "What are you doing here?," asked Pedro. The hysterical reply, if Pedro's memory served him, went something like this:
Governor Otermín asked Pedro if he knew why the Indians had rebelled. Pedro recalled what Bartolomé had said. The Pueblos were tired of all the work they had to do for the Spaniards and the missionaries. It rankled them that they did not have time to plant for themselves or to do the other things they needed to do. Fed up, they had rebelled. Later Pedro had learned that the rebels had put to death Custos Bernal and Fray Domingo de Vera at the pueblo of Galisteo. They had martyred Fray Manuel Tinoco of San Marcos and Fray Fernando de Velasco of Pecos within sight of the pueblo as the two missionaries hurried to join Bernal. The roll of Spaniards killed that day included Alcalde mayor Nieto, Juan de Leyva, Nicolás de Leyva, their wives, and their children. Several of the women they kept alive. They ransacked the Spaniards' homes. Meanwhile, the Pecos arrived. Joining forces, Tanos, Keres of San Marcos, and Pecos had marched off to assault the villa of Santa Fe. Defeated there, they had come back in foul humor. Because six Tanos of Galisteo had been killed and many others badly wounded, the Indians of that pueblo vented their rage on the women captives they held. Three of them, Lucía, María, and Juana had belonged to Pedro, or so he said. Another named Dorotea was the daughter of Maese de campo Pedro de Leyva. All died. Concluding his testimony, Pedro explained why he had fled to overtake the retreating Spaniards. Word had come from the Tewas, and from Taos, Picurís, and Utes, that they would annihilate any Indian, or pueblo, who refused to participate in the revolt. For that reason, and because he was a Christian, Pedro had resolved to throw his lot with the Spaniards. [6] Evacuation of Río Abajo As Otermín listened to Pedro's story near the pillaged Anaya house, two hundred and eighty miles downriver Father Francisco de Ayeta received at El Paso the first jumbled reports of the disaster. They came from the Río Abajo. Ever since about 1660, the kingdom of New Mexico had been divided for purposes of administration and defense into two major districts known as the Río Arriba and the Río Abajo, literally the upriver and the downriver sectors of the Rio Grande Valley. The governor commanded upriver, and the lieutenant governor downriver. At La Bajada, where the road from Santa Fe wound down the black basalt descent to the valley just above Santo Domingo, the traveler passed from Río Arriba to Río Abajo. The uprising of 1680 had cut all Spanish communications between the two regions. In the Río Abajo, the scared survivors, fifteen hundred of them, had flocked together at Isleta. Assuming that Otermín and everyone else upriver were dead, Lt. Gov. Alonso García and the whole crowd had started south on foot to save themselves. They had with them "a multitude of small children." At El Paso, meantime, Father Ayeta, reacting with his usual vigor, unloaded some of his supply wagons and outfitted a rescue expedition of armed men, friars, and provisions.
A Tiwa Explains the Revolt When Governor Otermín learned that the Río Abajo people were already retreating downriver, he sent riders ahead with orders for them to stop and wait for him. At Alamillo, north of Socorro, the governor interrogated another Indian, an aged Southern Tiwa man of Alameda captured on the road. What had possessed the Pueblos to forsake their obedience to God and king, Otermín demanded through an interpreter. The old man's reply was direct. "For a long time," he said,
United at Fray Cristóbal, the entire Hispanic community of New Mexico—less some 380 colonists and twenty-one Franciscans dead—resumed their inglorious trek southward through the dry Jornada del Muerto. [7] Upriver, the rebels were celebrating. Pretentions of El Popé
Just what the Pecos were doing is difficult to determine. If, as Fray Angelico Chavez suggests, a strapping mulatto named Naranjo, with big yellow eyes and a burning hatred of Spanish injustice, did assume the clever guise of the Pueblo "ancient one" Pohé-yemo and engineer the revolt from a kiva at Taos, he kept to the shadows. The conspicuous leader was El Popé, an ambitious, embittered San Juan medicine man flogged in 1675 at Governor Treviño's orders and harried from his pueblo by Francisco Javier. Once the Spaniards had gone, he took all the credit himself. [8] El Popé was a paradox. He lashed out against everything Spanish, and he did it as only a Spaniard would. The Pueblos, driven to exasperation by demands for tribute and work and by the persecution of their native religion, had joined together to cast off their oppressors. For a few days or weeks, they had coordinated their efforts. But beyond that, they had no tradition of united political action. It was the Spaniards who had imposed a common sovereignty. Thus El Popé, in his effort to hold together what had been wrought against the Spaniards, ruled in the manner of a Spaniard. He even swaggered like one. Testifying late in 1681, during Governor Otermín's bootless attempt at reconquest, several Pueblo captives described the administration of his would-be native successor.
They hacked santos, tore up vestments, and fouled chalices with human excrement. To erase their Christian names and cleanse themselves of the water and holy oils of baptism, El Popé commanded that they wash in the rivers with yucca-root soap. Anyone who harbored in his heart a sympathy for priests or Spaniards would be known by his unclean face and clothes, and he would be punished accordingly. They must not even speak the name of Jesús or Mary or the saints, under pain of whipping or death.
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