Between Fray Juan’s departure for New Spain and the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, we have such unsatisfying scraps of information about Ácoma that the hope is ever present of making some discovery of additional manuscripts in the archives.

The same scarcity of detail applies as well to the whole Province of New Mexico for the period between 1598 and 1680. Everywhere in this part of New Spain the work of a whole century was blotted out by the uprising of the latter year. All records in local archives, civil or religious, were publicly burned and every symbol of the Christian Faith obliterated. The visible token of this was exemplified by the cleansing in the Santa Fé River of all Indians in the vicinity ever baptized by Christian padres.

The story of the Revolt, one of the most bloody and thoroughgoing this country has ever seen, had important consequences not only upon the Indians, but also upon the expansion of European civilization in this country. The researches of Hackett have changed in some details the accepted essentials of the uprising and therefore I have followed his narrative. The reader is referred as well to the more easily attainable books.[79]

The Spaniards had attempted to suppress not only the religious beliefs and practices of the Indians, but also their ancient customs of daily life so as to make something like Europeans out of these aborigines, a custom we have heard not a little about in recent years among other conquering nations. This resulted in New Mexico, as might have been expected, in a steadily cumulative discontent which broke out in rebellion several times between 1645 and 1675. All these abortive attempts were quickly, and harshly, overcome. No punishment, however, availed to make the Indians amenable to rule, and in 1675 Governor Treviño determined to stamp out their evil practices for all time. Taking prisoner forty-seven medicine men alleged to be guilty of sorcery, three were hanged as an example to the rest, and the remainder were imprisoned. After a time these latter were released. Among them was one from San Juan, Popé by name. Embittered still further by what he considered persecution in his own pueblo, he betook himself to Taos, northernmost of all the villages on the Rio Grande.

According to Bandelier the rebellion was more easily incited because of the disappointment the Indians felt in the failure of the new magic, Christianity, to do better for them than their old creed had wrought. No greater protection from their enemies, no more rain for their crops, no less wind and blight for their fruits had resulted from the new religion. Consequently Popé found it no difficult matter to make the men of Taos believe him one given supernatural knowledge by three infernal spirits in one of their kivas. In the kiva Popé plotted the wholesale destruction of every Spaniard in New Mexico, and afterward of every symbol of their rule, so that the Indians might return to their own methods of life and rituals of religion.

Popé was no ordinary Indian malcontent. He must have been a character of unusual force, with keen understanding of his fellows, and with a real gift for leadership. Let us even admit in him a sincere patriotism for his ancestral heritage. Thus he imposed his supernatural claims no less easily than his practical plans for the elimination of the conquering people. At the time of the outbreak the Christianized Indians were estimated at about sixteen thousand. To these Popé proposed to add a large number of tribes occupying districts lying more than a hundred leagues to the westward. This would include Zuñi and Hopi. By means of secret council meetings Popé stirred up a general sentiment of revolt over this great area and even succeeded in winning to his support the Apaches,[80] up to now age-long enemies of all pueblos. The Indians had learned through experience the necessity and the strength of unity, through which, indeed, their success was accomplished. Only the chosen leaders were allowed to know any details of the carefully systematized plot until all was ripe for its operation. Popé’s chief assistants were Jaca of Taos, Catití of Santa Domingo and Don Luís Tupatú of the Picuris tribe, men speaking the same language and wholly in each other’s confidence. Popé took such precautions not to be betrayed that when he suspected his son-in-law, the Governor of the pueblo of San Juan, of friendliness to the Spaniards, he killed him there in his own house.

At last all seemed to be ready. The Piros nation, being the only one that refused to join the movement, was left in ignorance of its arrangements. All the other tribes were informed of the day for the uprising by the clever device of knotted cords carried from pueblo to pueblo by relays of the swiftest runners. There has been some confusion about the full significance of these knots but Hackett is convinced that each knot merely signified a day. At each pueblo one knot would be untied[81] and the number of intervening days indicated by those still in place.[82] When the last knot should be straightened out, the Indians, wherever situated, were to rise as one man, and descend upon their unsuspecting prey, with the absolute order that no one—woman or child, priest or soldier—should be spared. All the pueblos were to be surrounded by their warriors, the mountain paths guarded and defended by Apaches, and if a few Spaniards should escape, the Mansos, living near El Paso, were to finish the slaughter as the Spaniards fled toward Mexico.

The moment chosen was particularly auspicious because the greater part of the Spanish soldiery had been sent to El Paso to meet there the supply train coming from Mexico under the leadership of Father Ayeta, with the result that the colony was comparatively undefended.

The Spanish population was distributed in two districts—Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo. The governor of the whole province, Don Antonio de Otermín, lived at Santa Fé, the capital, situated in Rio Arriba, but the larger number of the colonists were living at this period in the southern district where the second in command, Alonso García, served as lieutenant-governor.

Popé’s runners had met with a refusal, though the penalty was death, from certain chiefs of San Marcos, La Ciéñaga and Tanos, three towns a little south of Santa Fé. Two messengers, Catua and Omtua, were arrested and brought to the governor. They confessed the fact of the general uprising, but said they knew nothing of its causes, having taken no part in the councils of the leaders of the northern pueblos.

Enraged by this treachery, the news of which spread like wildfire, the Indian leaders were nothing daunted, and showed astonishing resourcefulness in bringing about the attack prematurely. Those who travel to-day over this wide, rough land by modern conveyance can hardly credit the truth that the scattered pueblos were so quickly informed of the nearly defeated conspiracy that they were able to rise almost simultaneously by daybreak on August 9, two days earlier than was planned.

Those colonists living near the Taos and Picuris settlements were the first victims; only two escaped and they eventually fought their way to where García’s band of refugees were halted below Isleta. From tribe to tribe, from settlement to settlement, the hideous slaughter was carried forward according to program.

The very day of the outbreak General Otermín heard from three different sources that a revolt of the tribes was under way, but he did not try until the twelfth to “roll back the tide of rebellion,” being up to that time unaware of the magnitude of the plot. By the thirteenth he and his comrades realized how critical was their situation. Many of the Indians were equipped with the guns of Spaniards whom they had already slain. Completely cut off from the outside world, a fight was inevitable. The Indians had successfully divided the Spaniards of Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo and each of these divisions had been assured that their friends were already dead.

All the Spaniards within the environs of Santa Fé, numbering about one thousand persons, were collected within the precincts of the Palacio Real. Otermín now told the religious adviser Father Gómez, to “consummate the Holy Sacrament,” and bring to the governor’s house all church vessels and adornments. For five days, between the fifteenth and the twentieth, the Spanish colony was besieged within the royal precincts. There were only about a hundred men capable of bearing arms, whereas the warriors amounted to at least two thousand. At daybreak on August 20, the small Spanish force rushed out from the Palacio Real, taking the Indians by surprise. A few hours’ struggle accomplished their conquest. Three hundred were killed, forty-seven captured, and the rest escaped by flight.

García, unable to reach his chief, rescued a large number of colonists in Rio Abajo, very few of whom, however, were able to bear arms. Just as Otermín was assured that none of those in the other division had survived, so was García deceived about the true fate of his friends, and after consultation with his subordinate officers he had decided that a retreat to Mexico was the wisest course. His colony of refugees started in that direction on August 14. By the twentieth he learned that he had been duped concerning the fate of Otermín’s contingent, and called a halt.

Meanwhile, by August 21st Otermín learned from captured Indians, not only that the whole region from Taos to Isleta, fifty-one leagues, was devastated, but what was more cheerful, that García’s colony had not been sacrificed.

By this time Otermín also realized that the condition of his survivors was hardly less critical than when they were besieged, and gave the order to march toward Isleta, where he hoped to find García, who, as we know, had already moved on. It was not until September 13 that they joined forces at Fray Cristóbal, and after some further marching and conferring a place called La Toma del Rio del Norte[83] was agreed upon for a temporary settlement from which tidings of their terrible reverses might be sent to the viceroy in New Spain.

Father Ayeta, custodian and procurador-general, was one of the great figures of the place and period. For a long time priest at the famous church in Cholula, he had been transferred to the New Mexican diocese. At this time he had been absent from the missionary field for nearly two years, having gone back to get help for the priests in the province. They were in sore need of men and horses, food and ammunition, to defend themselves against constant raids by the Apaches. Father Ayeta left Mexico City, September 20, 1679, with twenty-eight wagon loads of supplies and a goodly contingent of men and horses. Almost exactly eleven months later he arrived at El Paso (August 25, 1680), to be met by the disastrous tidings of the revolt and of the supposed fate of all the Spanish colonists.

Otermín had sent, some weeks earlier, a troop of thirty men under Pedro de Leiva to meet Ayeta at El Paso and give him necessary convoy for his supply train up river. Under the changed condition of affairs Ayeta hurried Leiva off with a part of the train to succor such fugitives as might be yet alive. Also an Indian runner was sent ahead with a letter to García informing him of the coming of the relief train. García was found at Fray Cristóbal on September 4, and sent the runners back the same day with messages for Father Ayeta. While these men were resting on a mountain off the main road they espied Leiva coming up the river. After signalling to him that the lower camp was but nine leagues farther on, the messengers went on their way and carried to Ayeta his first news that not all the settlers in the north were dead. Ayeta was the real savior of the refugee colonists. As soon as he had despatched the messengers to Otermín, he busied himself “at El Paso in making meal, hardtack, cocinas and bullets.”[84] In response to further requests from Otermín he, a little later, attempted to go to El Paso. The river was in flood and to cross it at “the ford” was impossible. The slow progress of the mule wagons on the west shore of the river was a discouragement, and on the morning of September 18, Ayeta determined to risk the supplies by fording the swollen tide. But the water was deeper and more dangerous than was foreseen and in mid-stream the wagon stuck fast. Ayeta, whose very life was in danger, cut loose the mules, and they gained the shore. Otermín’s men, by now arrived upon the east bank, saw the desperate plight of the heroic Father, swam out to the wagon and bore him on their shoulders to safety. This was at a halting-place named La Salineta.

Hackett says Ácoma at this period was the largest of all the Keresan pueblos, having a population of about fifteen hundred Indians, but “too far removed from the sphere of activity of the valley pueblos to exert much, if any, influence upon them,” and, according to the Spanish documents of 1680, it was also too far to coöperate successfully in the revolt. However, “Otermín learned from the Indian besiegers of Santa Fé that all the Spaniards there were dead.”[85]

We may be sure that although the Ácomas, because of their remoteness from the centre of the great revolt, played no very conspicuous part in it, they were in full sympathy with the movement, for we are told that they burned all the emblems of Christianity, putting to death in some nameless fashion, their priest, a Franciscan padre, Lucas Maldonado.[86]

During one of Otermín’s unsuccessful attempts to win back the territory of Spain he was told that Ácoma and Jémez were in arms and organizing an attack upon the granaries of Isleta, with the further purpose of killing the Indians there because they were friendly to the white men. Mendoza, maestro de Campo, had arrested Catití, one of Popé’s associates, and endeavored in public assembly to win his surrender to the pacific terms offered by the governor. But the listening throng of Indians, in which every tribe but Moqui was represented, made such warlike protest that it was futile. A few days later, however, pacts of peace were formulated and messengers were sent to Ácoma with this news.

Many of the Rio Grande pueblos were utterly destroyed while others were weakened beyond any recovery of their early strength. Bandelier says that of the forty pueblos in the eastern part of the Rio Grande valley, the only ruins that can be identified are Ako, Galisteo and Gran Quivira; and of sixty pueblos of the southern section, not one is in existence, though there are a few of later date. Because of his failure to reorganize the province Otermín lost his post as governor. Others who followed him had no better fortune, or did not attempt the task, with the result that the ancient pueblo rule held its supremacy for the following twelve years. No doubt the Indians believed themselves forever freed from foreign domination, but they did not long keep peace with each other, and inter-tribal wars broke out almost immediately. After the débâcle, Popé assumed powers and demanded honors almost identical with those the Spanish governor had employed, with the inevitable result that his rule became in its turn oppressive and was resented by his whilom followers.[87] Deposed, then re-elected, Popé soon died.

From all these occurrences we may be sure that the firm intention of at some time permanently conquering and ruling New Mexico was never abandoned. At length there arose the man ambitious, capable, dauntless and resourceful, a soldier and a leader of men, Diego de Vargas, who carried to victory the thorny task of establishing the over-lordship of Spain in the disrupted province. It was in 1692 that Vargas, with a small force of eighty-nine men, entered the country. If he met on the whole no very serious resistance from the pueblos, to whom the result of their great struggle for independence had been well-nigh as disastrous as to the invader, he likewise found it no pastime, for it was not until late in 1696 that Vargas could really say he had attained his goal. Hence we see that the Pueblo Revolt was actually a matter not of one year, 1680, but of continuous hostility and struggle for sixteen years.

As the general approached Santa Fé it was Tupatú, the third firebrand of 1680, who, dressed in Spanish clothes, rode to meet Vargas upon a Spanish horse. The chieftain brought promise of submission from his own tribe, the Tewas, but warned the General that the Keres, Pecos, Jémez and Taos people were rebellious and prepared to resist. From Santa Fé, Vargas proceeded westward to Isleta. On the third of November, 1692, he and his little army marched along a “bad bit of road” from a watering place called El Pozo (The Well) where they had camped, to a spot from which the hill of Ácoma was pointed out to him. Shortly afterward he writes, “We descried the smoke made by those traitors, enemies, treacherous rebels and apostates of the Queres tribe.” These epithets suggest that Ácoma had given evidence once more of peculiarly recalcitrant behavior. From this time on the Peñol appears to be the hotbed of sedition until its complete subjugation was achieved.

Five squadrons of soldiers were called up while Vargas halted “in view of the other great Rock, on the right side of the road and slope which appears to be higher.” Could this be Katzímo? Arrived within musket-shot of the Crag, the cry of “Hail” was exchanged between the Spaniards and the Indians on the mesa. Through an interpreter Vargas endeavored to persuade the Ácomas that he had come for no other purpose than to pardon them for past offences. But they were unconvinced, though friendly Indians were sent to tell the Keres how genuinely their forgiveness had already been granted to other pueblos. At length the Spaniards were permitted to mount the sandy slope, only to find at the top that the entrance to the village was barricaded and made impassable.

After long delay the messengers of peace returned to the point where the Spaniards were impatiently awaiting news. One of them, a Zuñi, named Ventura, and called “the Wolf,” brought as gifts watermelon, cooked pumpkin and cakes, but also the unwelcome message that the Ácomas would hold council that night and send their answer next morning. In vain Vargas used arguments to hasten affairs. The Ácomas warned him that the Apaches were lying in wait to kill him and all his force. There was nothing for it but to camp that night at the watering place, a league distant.

Next morning, the 4th, the Wolf was despatched with fresh offers of peace and the Holy Cross, only to return about ten o’clock with the verbal reply that the Ácomas would talk with the general on his way back from Zuñi! Exasperated by this subterfuge, Vargas reconnoitred to see whether there was enough available water near by “to subdue the enemy on said Great Rock, the strength of which is unassailable.” Finding no water, Vargas made the ascent of the sand-ramp a second time, only to find the face and trenches of the mesa crowded by a multitude of its inhabitants. Again the Ácomas were assured of the peaceful intent of the visitors. Their chief, Matthew, an educated Indian, made answer that his people had been warned of quite different designs. Vargas now dismounted, followed by his secretary and the military chiefs. They seated themselves upon flat stones near the fortified entrance. Rising to his full height he proposed that Matthew should swing himself down over the barricade, while Vargas and his few attendants would go on foot up the “impossible part of the approach.” The Indians seem to have agreed to this and there was general embracing when the two companies came together. Vargas then describes the flat top of Ácoma as divided into three sections, and along “the side of the Square a large race-track.”

Here was enacted one more of those picturesque ceremonies that we should like to visualize. Vargas stood upon the arena of that sanguinary struggle for possession of the Rock in Oñate’s time, almost a hundred years before, the memory of which we may be sure had been transmitted in fadeless colors through the generations. Only half convinced as yet that more disaster was not in store for them, tremulous and all unknowing what such forced submission might entail, the dusky throng of primitive folk knelt before the royal standard of Spain and watched the captain of the post of El Paso as he planted the Christian Cross in their midst.

Chief Matthew, acting as interpreter for these invading strangers, told them, as he was bidden, of the great sovereign so far away that they would never see him, yet so all-powerful that he claimed their land, their allegiance, their very lives for his own, while at the same time professing to advance their own best welfare.

Bewildered, supine before their leader, they made no protest when Matthew raised aloft the standard and pledged their fealty to this unknown Spanish king. Here, too, where only twelve years before the last Franciscan father had met his martyrdom in some unconfessed horror of revengeful hate, these native people, some of whom were doubtless participants in that crime, saw two other padres, garbed even as the one they had foully done to death, bidding them repent and promising them absolution of all their misdeeds. By a rite they understood somewhat better, the little children were next given baptism. No doubt the general in his handsome accoutrements was an awesome figure as he stood godfather to Matthew’s child and later to various other infants. Strange and moving scene, fraught with pregnant possibilities!

This business finished, De Vargas once again became the practical director, and in haste to make up for the delay these suspicious people had occasioned him, he wheeled about with a brief command that crosses should be erected at the pass and that prayers be said by the people before the cross now in the square, each day at sunrise and at sunset. Before he might descend to the plain a visit must be paid to the church and the titular saint of the pueblo. Vargas describes St. Stephen’s shrine as of great extent with walls “almost a yard and a half in thickness which stand firm in spite of the heavy rains that break the windows and skylights.” This controverts the ordinary statement that the church had been entirely destroyed in the Revolt of 1680, and makes it probable that in 1699 the ancient edifice was only restored and did not have to be entirely built anew.

De Vargas gives hearty thanks to God that he with “barely fifteen men,”[88] including his secretary and officers, had succeeded in the conquest of this most difficult of all pueblos. He mentions the cisterns on the summit, from which Ácoma is supplied with water. He was evidently impressed by the contrast of their abundance with the plight of his own force, for he says that as he made his way back to camp he felt no little anxiety as to how he should find them. When he arrived he found that his men during his absence had cleared out a nearly dry spring sufficiently to give their animals some water. Next day Vargas went on towards Zuñi. All through 1693, though some Keres villages aided Vargas, Ácoma was insubordinate, and early in 1694 made an alliance with Moqui, Zuñi, and certain Apaches.

By the end of 1694 New Mexico was believed to be once more pacified. The Franciscans busied themselves with the erection of new churches and other needful buildings. The Indians, however, continued restless and mutinous—a condition according to the padres due to Vargas, who had created hostility by appropriating for the use of the Spaniards fertile lands belonging to the natives.

At the beginning of 1696 the missionaries were once more appointed to their several charges, but in a rather long list the name of Ácoma does not appear. Everywhere in the region the Indians were growing sullen and hostile because of a famine that was decimating their population. As early as March the priests became aware of serious danger, through outrages perpetrated in the churches. Though appealed to for help Vargas would do no more than grant them permission to go to Santa Fé, if afraid to stay at their posts. Some went, but more of the missionaries, resenting the thinly veiled implication of cowardice in the curt refusal, stayed where they were and paid the price with their lives. On June 4, came the crisis. Five pueblos of the Rio Grande rose, killed the padres in residence and twenty-one other Spaniards. Abandoning their homes the Indians fled to the mountains. Ácoma was deeply implicated. Neither baptism nor kneeling at the cross morning and night had much availed to change the nature of this wily and treacherous tribe. Four days later the general received a letter from the senior captain of the Keres, governor of the village of Santa Ana, in which he described a meeting held at Ácoma where the warriors were waiting reinforcements from Moqui, Zuñi and the Utes. A little later Fernando de Chaves, senior judge of Bernalillo, sends the confirmatory intelligence that “a multitude of people and the trail of women are seen going toward Ácoma, wherefore we are taking every precaution.” Rebel smokes were watched by the Spaniards to see from what points the attack would come. On the twelfth Vargas heard from Don Felipe, governor of the Pecos, and certain friendly Indians, that throughout all the previous winter emissaries had gone from village to village, “not omitting the remote friendliness of Ácoma, the provinces of Zuñi and Moqui, to instigate a general revolt.” Two informants, men taken at Pecos, though one was from Nambé, were made prisoners and put through a grilling examination. In course of their confession it developed that “the Zuñis, Moquis and Ácomas were expected in their village of the Pecos to join the others and march upon Santa Fé. Furthermore, these three backed by the Apaches had advised the killing of all grown Spaniards, sparing only little children.” The priest of Jémez, Fray Francisco de Jesús, some Spaniards at San Juan and Nambé and certain friendly Indians, had already been massacred. The Indians from Ácoma and other villages had now fortified themselves at Chimayo, where a steep mountain ridge made approach on horseback impossible. As soon as the fields should be sowed all the nations were to unite, led by the Apaches, whose first task was to get possession of all the Spanish horses. Hunger had driven the Indians from San Cristóbal (one of the villages taken by Vargas from the natives) and they had sought refuge at Ácoma and at Zuñi.

On June 13 the second Indian prisoner, in course of a searching examination, confessed that the Keres of all the villages, and Ácoma, were already joined on the ridge of Sandía to attack the Spaniards who lived at Bernalillo, and from there were to go to Los Cerrillos. “They said to the young bucks, this day is already dawned and all must fight like men.” When asked how often he had been to Ácoma, the prisoner denied ever being there more than once, and then not for the purpose of any discussion.

Apparently the attack upon Santa Fé was halted by the rise of the river; but the General had further information that although “the Moquiños, Zuñians and Ácomas had now returned to their pueblos, in one hundred days they would come back,” when all the nations would unite in the uprising. A few days later Vargas learned from a woman of the Keres village of Sía that the Indians were trembling with fear because of the discovery of their plots. Consequently no renewal of this concerted action seems to have been undertaken. A fierce fight partly in San Diego Cañon and partly near San Juan, in which eight Ácoma warriors were killed, no doubt daunted their confidence in their own immunity, for the alliance between Ácoma, Jémez, and Zuñi was soon after dissolved. Ácoma still unsubdued, Vargas marched once more against the fortress city, but being unable to storm it, retreated, after taking prisoner five warriors, and destroying the crops.[89] Just as happened after the great revolt of 1680, the Ácomas, because of their remoteness and inaccessibility, were treated with less severity than was the case with most tribes, so again no further punishment appears to have been meted out to the Peñol.

Throughout the year there was need of constant watchfulness and active defence by the Spaniards, but this revolt of the summer of 1696 was the last serious one that occurred. Henceforth the more peaceful occupations of colonization were resumed with but little interference. The mutinous Keres of the Sky City, seeing all the other pueblos submitting to white rule, could do no otherwise, and on July 6, 1699, they yielded to General Cubero. Thereafter peace reigned in Ácoma, although in 1702 Captain Juan de Uríbarri and L’Archeveque[90] were sent there to investigate a rumored conspiracy.