24 Chapter 1 Alien Encounters: Europe in the Americas
viceroy of New Spain charged Don Juan de Oñate
with the task of conquering the Indians of New
Mexico and founding a colony in their midst. Oñate
led an expedition of 500 Spanish colonists and sol-
diers and a handful of Catholic missionaries across
the Rio Grande into the territory of the Pueblo
Indians, a farming people.
But the Pueblo were poor and their settlements
meager; a Spanish soldier described New Mexico as
“at the ends of the earth—remote beyond compare.”
When Oñate extorted maize, seized farmlands, and
allowed cattle and pigs to plunder the fields, the
Indians seethed. Eventually they ambushed and killed
a Spanish patrol. Oñate retaliated by butchering
800 Pueblo, including women and children, and
arresting another 500. The captured males over
twenty-five years of age were sold into slavery; to pre-
vent them from running away, one of each of their
feet was chopped off. Oñate’s brutality generated no
profits; in 1614 he was dismissed.
His successors found a surer source of wealth:
capturingnomadic Indians, especially the Ute and
Apache, and selling them as slaves to work in
Mexican silver mines. Spanish soldiers forced Pueblo
warriors to assist in slave raids; the Ute and Apache
retaliated against the Pueblo with furious attacks on
their settlements.
Franciscan missionaries were given the task of
Christianizing the Pueblo. The friars were, for the
most part, dedicated men. They baptized thousands
of mission Indians and instructed them in the rudi-
ments of the Catholic faith. They also taught Indians
to use European tools; to grow wheat and other
European crops; and to raise chickens, pigs, and
other barnyard animals.
The friars exacted a heavy price in labor from
the people they presumed to enlighten and civilize.
The Indians built and maintained the missions,
tilled the surrounding fields, and served the every
need of the friars and other Spanish colonists. For
this they were paid little or nothing.
For a time, the Pueblo accepted these condi-
tions. They were impressed by the friars’ religious
bearing, ascetic lives, and evident commitment.
That the Christian deity possessed wondrous pow-
ers, too, was manifest in the ease of Spanish domi-
nation. Indian shamans—spiritual leaders—often
conceded the potency of the Christian God but
considered it evil sorcery: Why else did so many
Indians die after a priest had ministered to them?
For their part, the Franciscans sought to destroy all
vestiges of pagan culture.
By the 1670s, after years of drought, the Pueblo
became restive with these arrangements. They espe-
cially resented being coerced to take part in slave
raids. Their shamans, too, increasingly called for a
revival of the traditional religion. In 1675 the
Spanish arrested forty-seven shamans; three were
hanged and the remainder whipped as witches.
One of the latter, named Popé, secretly organized
a rebellion. Without warning, some 17,000 Pueblo
rose against the Spaniards, driving them out of towns
and missions, destroying churches and killing priests,
and plundering farms. The Spaniards fled to Santa Fe,
escaping just before the Indians razed the town. The
Pueblo drove the survivors all the way back to El
Paso. Of the 1,000 Spanish in New Mexico, over 200
were killed.The legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe holds that in 1531 the Virgin
Mary appeared before an Indian on a hill near what is now Mexico
City and left an image of herself imprinted on cloth. This dark-
skinned Mary, illuminated by rays of light, shows a fusion of
European and native beliefs at that time.