The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, also known as Popé's Rebellion or Po'pay's Rebellion, was an uprising of the Indigenous Pueblo people against the Spanish colonists in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, a historic province that was larger than present-day New Mexico. Persistent Spanish policies, coupled with incidents of brutality and cruelty such as those that occurred in 1599 and resulted in the Ácoma Massacre, stoked animosity and gave rise to the eventual Revolt of 1680. Of the primers to this event, the most inflammatory was the persecution and mistreatment of Pueblo people who practiced native religions. Scholars consider it the first Native American religious traditionalist revitalization movement. The Spaniards were resolved to abolish pagan forms of worship and replace them with Christianity. The Pueblo Revolt killed 400 Spaniards and allowed the remaining 2,000 settlers to flee out of the province. The Spaniards returned to New Mexico twelve years later.
Background
For more than 100 years beginning in 1540, the Pueblo people of present-day New Mexico were subjected to successive waves of soldiers, missionaries, and settlers. These encounters, referred to as entradas (incursions), 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 Vázquez de Coronado against the twelve or thirteen pueblos of Tiwa Native Americans, was particularly destructive to Pueblo and Spanish relations.
In 1598, Juan de Oñate led 129 soldiers and 10 Franciscan 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 Native Americans inhabiting the region. Oñate put down a revolt at Acoma Pueblo by killing and enslaving hundreds of the Native Americans and sentencing all men 25 or older to have a foot cut off. A troop of seventy soldiers was dispatched to the cliff-top Pueblo of Acoma in 1599 to punish the Pueblo for the killing of twelve Spanish soldiers by a band of warriors. After two days of warfare, almost 600 Acoma men, women, and children were seized and enslaved, with many being legally convicted and disfigured as punishment for crimes against the Spanish Crown. The survivors fled as the Pueblo was destroyed by fire. The harshness with which the Acomas were punished left an unforgettable sense of Spanish cruelty. The Ácoma Massacre would instill fear of and anger at the Spanish in the region for years to come. 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 native citizens were often ignored 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 in corn plantations and textile mills. 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. In 1608, when 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 people and ordered the missionaries to seize and burn their masks, prayer sticks, and effigies. The Franciscan missionaries also forbade the use of entheogenic substances in the traditional religious ceremonies of the Pueblo. Some Spanish officials, such as Nicolás de Aguilar, who attempted to curb the power of the Franciscans were charged with heresy and tried before the Inquisition. The Pueblos by and large resented the missionaries, with the Hopis in particular referring to Spanish priests as tūtáachi, "dictator and demanding person."
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 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) native named "Popé". Po'pay's imprisonment and release five years before the Revolt led to his role in planning and orchestrating the events of 1680. Po'pay was considered a credible and respected provocateur by two dozen communities speaking six different languages and spread over a nearly 400-mile radius from Taos to the Hopi villages.
Rebellion
Following his release, Popé, along with a number of other Pueblo leaders (see list below), planned and orchestrated the Pueblo Revolt. Popé took up residence in Taos Pueblo, about 70 miles north of 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. Because of the language barrier separating the six tribes, the revolt utilized Spanish as the unofficial lingua franca. 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, of which a plurality were mixed-blood mestizos, along with native 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. Pedro Omtua and Nicolas Catua were the two young men. On August 8, 1680, two young men from Tesuque set out for Tanogeh (Tano villages) early in the morning. Their first contact occurred in Pecos. Unfortunately, Fray Fernandao De Velasco was informed right away by Christian Indians that two Tewa young men had visited the war chief's house. After leaving Pecos, the two Tesuque runners continued on to Galisteo, San Cristobal, and San Marcos.
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 Puebloans rose up, stole the Spaniards' horses to prevent them from 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. In the rebellion at Tusayan (Hopi) churches at Awatovi, Shungopavi, and Oraibi were destroyed and the attending priests were killed. 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 Puebloans surrounded the city and cut off its water supply. In desperation, on August 21, New Mexico Governor Antonio de Otermín, barricaded in the Palace of the Governors, sallied outside the palace with all of his available men and forced the Puebloans 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 Puebloans 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 Native American slaves. They were escorted to El Paso by a Spanish supply train. The Puebloans did not block their passage out of New Mexico.
Popé's land
The retreat of the Spaniards left New Mexico in the power of the Puebloans. Popé was a mysterious figure in the history of the southwest as there are many tales among the Puebloans of what happened to him after the revolt.
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 Puebloan 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 natives 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.
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 Puebloan crops, and the raids by Apache and Navajo increased. Initially, however, the Puebloans were united in their objective of preventing a return of the Spanish.
Popé was deposed as the leader of the Puebloans about a year after the revolt and disappears from history. He is believed to have died shortly before the Spanish reconquest in 1692.