THE PUEBLO REVOLT

A close look at one of the most bloody, mysterious episodes in the history of what’s now the Southwest.

On a single August day in 1680, Pueblo Indian nations throughout New Mexico and into present-day Arizona rebelled against their Spanish rulers, coordinating their attacks over hundreds of miles with astonishing precision. “No one in New Mexico was hated more bitterly than its thirty-three Franciscan friars,” writes historian/adventurer Roberts (Four Against the Arctic, 2003, etc.), “and so the cruelest executions were reserved for them.” Other Spaniards, soldiers and settlers, didn’t have it much better, and, after having waited out a siege at Santa Fe, they withdrew from northern New Mexico. The Spanish governor swore that he would avenge the deaths of the 380 Spanish citizens who had fallen to the Pueblos, which he called “a lamentable tragedy, such as has never before happened in the world.” His bosses were not so convinced of his abilities; they relieved the governor of his post, and the Spanish stayed away for a dozen years until embarking on a bloody campaign of reconquest. Nobody much talks about the events of 1680 these days, Roberts allows—strangely, given how transformative they were. Indeed, he adds, Indian peoples do not discuss them, at least not in public, which puzzles Roberts. “If the Jemez elders still knew exactly what had happened in, say, a.d. 1270, as their people made their way from the north and west to their present heartland, why might they not retain a comparably rich story of what had happened in 1680?” Why, indeed, and Roberts’s efforts to resolve that particular mystery make up the best part of a sometimes plodding, sometimes self-indulgent narrative, which mixes archaeology, history, and anthropology into a kind of you-are-there travelogue.

Certainly enticing stuff for buffs of things southwestern, but more so to readers with an eye to the ironies and paradoxes of history.