the land could be used as laborers for a specific number of days per year. The majority of encomenderos abused their Indian charges, brutally forcing them to work for nothing more than mere token wages and showing not the least concern “for their health.
The cruelty of the encomienda system was, to some degree, balanced by the beneficent intentions of the Spanish missionaries. It is true that the Indians were given no choice in deciding whether or not they wanted to be “saved” by conversion to Christianity, but the best of the missionaries, beginning with Las Casas, did have an abiding concern for the spiritual as well as physical welfare of their charges. Ironically, such concern may have served to perpetuate the horrors that Onate and others visited upon the Indians. On economic grounds alone, it is not likely that Spain would have continued to support its colonial outposts north of the Rio Grande. Gold was not forthcoming, and agricultural enterprises produced marginal profits at best and, in most cases, ruinous losses. But all during the Spanish experiment in the Southwest, the friars had been creating a population of new Christians, whose now-sanctified souls, they argued, could not simply be abandoned.
The First American Revolutions
By the middle of the 17th century, after half a century of tyranny, certain of the Pueblo Indian groups were moved to a desperate action. They forged an alliance with their hereditary foes, the Apaches, who were envied and feared for their skill as warriors (the very word apache comes from a Zuni term meaning “enemy”). After several abortive attempts at rebellion, the Apaches seized the initiative and, during the 1670s, terrorized the Spanish Southwest. In this they were soon joined by people of the pueblos, who waged a long and disruptive guerrilla war against their Spanish masters. At last, Governor Antonio de Oterrmin moved against 47 so-called medicine men whom he identified as ringleaders of the rebellion. He hanged three and imprisoned the remainder in Santa Fe, the territorial capital. Among the prisoners was an Indian leader from the Tewa pueblo named Pope. Released after several years of cruel imprisonment, Pope went into hiding in Taos and began covertly organizing what he planned as a final, decisive rebellion.
Despite almost universal outrage among the pueblos, achieving unified action was no easy task. Pope managed to persuade all but the most remote pueblos (which were least oppressed by the Spanish) to join him. Next, in order to coordinate action, he sent runners to the various towns, each bearing a knotted cord designed so that the last knot would be untied in each pueblo on the day set for the revolt: August 13, 1680. So determined was Pope to maintain secrecy that he had his brother-in-law murdered when he suspected him of treachery. Despite such precautions, word of the rebellion leaked to the colonial authorities, and Pope was forced to launch his revolution early, on the 10th. Despite the sudden change in schedule, the rebellion was devastating to the Spanish. The major missions at Taos, Pecos, and Acoma were burned and the priests murdered, their bodies heaped upon the altars of their despised religion. The lesser missions were crushed as well, and ranches were destroyed. Those who did not flee were killed. At last, on August 15, Pope led a 500-man army into Santa Fe. Four hundred settlers and 21 of 33 missionaries perished. Although the armed garrison at Santa Fe consisted of only 50 men, they were equipped with. a brass cannon, which they used to resist the invasion for four days before evacuating—Governor Oterrmin included—on August 21. Some 2,500 survivors of the onslaught fled as far as present-day El Paso, Texas, abandoning all their possessions to looters.
Sadly for the Native people of the pueblos, Pope capped his triumph by installing himself as absolute dictator and one who was as oppressive as any Spanish overlord had been. For the next eight years, he extorted a ruinous tax from his people, executing anyone who resisted. By the time of Pope’s death (from natural causes) in 1688, the pueblo region was in a state of chronic civil war. The Indians were vulnerable, and, a year after Pope’s death, the Zia Pueblo was retaken by the Spanish. In 1692, Governor Don Diego de Vargas laid siege to Santa Fe, entirely cutting off its water and food until it collapsed in surrender. During the course of the next four years, all of the pueblos submitted once again to Spanish rule, except for the Hopis, who were somehow simply overlooked by colonial authorities.
All was not entirely quiet. In 1695, the Pima Indians of lower Pimeria Alta-the region of present-day Sonora, Mexico, and southern Arizona-looted and burned Spanish settlements. The uprising was quickly suppressed, and more than 50 years would pass before the Pimas—these of upper Pimeria Alta, many descended from earlier rebels who had fled north—staged another uprising, which degenerated into a century and a half of smoldering guerrilla wars—first against the Spanish, then the Mexicans, and finally the Americans.
From Black Legend to Black Robes
Enslavement and warfare were not the sole legacies of the Spanish in the American Southwest. The priests—the Indians called them “black robes”—who accompanied the conquistadors not only brought their religion to the Americas, but also created a Euro-Indian culture centered around the many missions they established. The first of these, in New Mexico, were founded during the administration of Onate in 1598. In the course of the next century, Franciscan friars founded more than 40 more, mainly along the Rio Grande. By 1680, missions had been built among most of the Indians in New Mexico as well. As the presence in California of the Englishman Sir Francis Drake had stirred Spanish concerns in 1579, a French landing led by Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, on the Texas coast in 1684 prompted the Spanish to build missions in that area.
Between 1687 and 1711, Father Eusebio Kino established many missions in northern Mexico and Baia California as well as some in southern Arizona, the most famous of which was Mission San Xavier del Bac. But it is for the chain of 21 Franciscan missions, linked together by El Camino Real (“The Royal Road”), extending along the California coast from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, that the Spanish missionaries are best known. The first, Mission San Diego de Alcala (at San Diego) was founded by Father Junipero Serra in 1769. Serra would go on personally to found nine more.
The missions were communities, and, like any other communities, they varied widely in their success. Some faltered and collapsed, while others spawned fertile fields, vineyards, and vast herds of cattle. By bringing large numbers of Indians into a small space, the missions also tended to spread epidemic disease, and they disrupted native culture and traditions.
The way of the conquistador and the way of the Black Robe represent two distinctive aspects of the Hispanic Southwest. But whereas the conquistadors treated the Indians as bestial enemies, to be subdued and enslaved, the Catholic padres regarded them as miscreant children to be supervised and regulated. Neither extreme admitted a full appreciation of their humanity, but both traditions shaped the character of the Southwest in an enduring fashion. Both, too, created enmities between white and red, leaving scars on the history of the region so deep that they would not begin to fade until the end of the 19th century. As to the missions themselves, the last one, San Francisco Solano, in the Sonoma Valley of Northern California, was built in 1823, and the mission system endured until 1833-34, when the revolutionary Mexican Republic-which then encompassed the American Southwest-secularized Church properties.
The Least You Need to Know
The sensational exploits of Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru inspired exploration of the “borderlands” (the area of the present American Southwest).
Don Juan de Onate was typical of the oppressive colonial authorities who ruled the borderlands.
In addition to a hunger for wealth and power, the Spanish colonizers were also driven by a desire to convert the Indians of the New World to Christianity.
