M0OSET] PUEBLO REVOLT OF 1680 659 



immortal beings whose near advent had been foretold by oracles and 

 omens, wlH.se faces borrowed from the brightness of the dawn whose 

 glistening armor seemed woven from the rays of sunlight, and whose 

 godlike weapons were the lightning and the thunderbolt. Their 

 first overbearing demands awakened no resentment; for may not the 

 gods claim their own, and is not resistance to the divine w.ll a crime; 

 Not until their most sacred things were, trampled under loot, and the 

 streets of the holy city itself ran red with the blood of their slaughtered 

 princes, did they read aright the awful prophecy by the light of their 

 blazing temples, and know that instead of the children of an incarnate 

 o-od they had welcomed a horde of incarnate devils. "The light ot 

 civilization would be poured on their land. But it would be the light 

 „f a consuming the, before which their barbaric glory, then- institu- 

 tions their very existence and name as a, nation, would wither and 

 become extinct. Their doom was sealed when the white man had set 

 his foot on their soil." {Prescott, 3.) 



The great revolt of the Pueblo Indians in August, 1080, was one of the 

 first determined efforts made by the natives on the northern continent 

 to throw off the yoke of a foreign oppressor. The Pueblo tribes along 

 the Rio Grande and farther to the west, a gentle, peaceful race, had early 

 welcomed the coining of the Spaniards, with their soldiers and priests, 

 as friends who would protect them against the wild marauding tribes 

 about them and teach them the mysteries of a greater •• medicine ' than 

 belonged to their own kachinas. The hop.- soon faded into bitter dis- 

 appointment. The soldiers, while rough and overbearing toward their 

 brown-skin allies, were vet unable to protect them from the inroads ot 

 their enemies. The priests prohibited their dances and simple amuse- 

 ments, yet all their ringing of bells and chanting of hymns availed not 

 to bring more rain on the crops or to turn aside the vengeful Apache. 

 •• What have we gained by all this?" said the Pueblos one to another; 

 "not peace and not happiness, for these new rulers will not protect us 

 from our enemies, and take from us all the enjoyments we once knew. 

 The pear was ripe. Pope, a medicine-man of the Tewa, had come 

 back from a pilgrimage to the far north, where he claimed to have vis- 

 ited the magic lagoon of Shipapu, whence his people traced their origin 

 and to which the souls of their dead returned after leaving this life. 

 By these ancestral spirits he had been endowed with occult powers and 

 commanded to go back and rouse the Pueblos to concerted effort for 

 deliverance from the foreign yoke of the strangers. 



Wonderful beings were these spirit messengers. Swift as light and 

 impalpable as thought, they passed under the earth from the magic 

 lake to the secret subterranean chamber of the oracle and stood before 

 him as shapes of fire, and spoke, telling him to prepare the strings of 

 yucca knots and send them with tin- message to all the Pueblos far and 

 near, so that in every village the chiefs might untie one knot from the 

 string each day, and know when they came to the last knot that then 

 was the time to strike. 



