The Pueblo Uprising of 1680 - United Pueblo Tribes vs Spanish Conquistadors

The Pueblo Uprising of 1680 - United Pueblo Tribes vs Spanish Conquistadors On the night of August 10, 1680, a cord of knotted yucca moved from village to village along the Rio Grande, and towns that had never answered to the same leader rose together before sunrise. Juan de Oñate led 400 men and thousands of head of livestock north in 1598 into a settled world of adobe farming towns with corn in the storehouses and irrigation ditches that had fed the same fields for generations. The submission declared on the riverbank that spring was never really granted. The encomienda counted every household first, then billed it: a fanega of corn, about a bushel and a half, plus a woven cotton manta and hides, then labor drafts that pulled men out of their own fields at planting time and put women at Spanish looms making cloth that left the pueblo and never came back. Men built and maintained the Camino Real and carried loads on their backs for days. The Franciscans pulled down the kivas at each mission and burned the masks and prayer sticks inside, flogged religious leaders in the plaza, and in 1675 the governor arrested 47 of them in one sweep. Po'pay of San Juan Pueblo was among the 47, whipped in public and sent home, then given a mission posting that let him walk village to village under a friar's nose. Word went out in six languages, and a runner carried a knotted cord onward, one knot untied each morning, until two men from Tesuque put the plan into Spanish hands and Po'pay moved the date up. The northern pueblos rose before dawn, churches went up in fire, and by August 15 Santa Fe was ringed and its water cut. Otermín answered with a cannon, then marched his whole province south on August 21, close to 1,000 civilians walking 300 miles to El Paso del Norte while southern villages fired on the column from their houses. Roughly 400 Spaniards died, along with 21 of the 33 Franciscan missionaries, and the baptismal books and land grants burned with the churches. Kivas were dug out and roofed again, dances and planting rites came back on their own calendar, and whole villages pulled up onto high ground for four years with no tribute and no draft. Then the drought came, the raiders came, Popé ruled from Santa Fe the way the governors had, and Diego de Vargas rode north in 1692 with Pueblo allies who had left with the Spanish twelve years earlier. The encomienda never returned. Nineteen pueblos still stand.