 the founding of Santa Fe, various Spanish governors, settlers and their priests systematically looted the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Not only did the Spanish steal Pueblo land and labor, but they also raided the Apaches for slaves to export to Mexico’s silver mines. In retaliation, the Apaches, who also sold captives to the slavers, stepped up their attacks on the Spanish-controlled Pueblos.
During the 17th century, smallpox, measles, diphtheria and other European diseases also beset the Pueblos. In 1638, one-third of all Pueblos—perhaps as many as 20,000 people—died, most probably from smallpox. Two years later, disease claimed another 10,000. And then in the 1660s, the rains stopped, as the Pueblos’ homeland entered a period of prolonged drought.
Frustrated, small pockets of Pueblos began lashing out at their Spanish masters, who retaliated in 1675 by charging 47 Indian leaders with witchcraft. All were beaten and three were hanged when they refused to submit to Spanish authority. The Spanish would have sold the surviving prisoners into slavery, including Popé, the Tewa holy man, Ward writes, had not a large group of armed Pueblos interceded on their behalf. Rather than risk his outnumbered soldiers (at the time, there were fewer than 3,000 Spanish of all ages in New Mexico) in a lopsided fight, New Mexico Gov. Juan Francisco de Treviño released Popé and the other captives.
On August 10, 1680, the Pueblo Indians revolted en masse, killing 21 of New Mexico’s 33 Franciscan priests and 375 (some reports say as many as 500) Spanish settlers. Terrified, the remaining Spanish barricaded themselves in the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe, while Pueblo warriors laid siege to the building and razed the rest of the town.
For 11 days, the Spanish huddled together inside their adobe fortress before finally fighting their way through the Pueblos and fleeing southeast to the mission at El Paso del Norte. It would be 12 years before the Spanish would regain control, but during the dozen years they were gone, Popé initiated the Plains Indian renaissance.
“Sacred dogs” increase mobility
Having orchestrated the Spanish defeat, Popé appropriated the governors’ palace in Santa Fe for his own. Vowing that the good life would return to their homeland if the Pueblos abandoned all things Spanish, he ordered his followers to embrace their traditional religious ceremonies and renounce Catholicism. He also demanded that the Pueblos destroy the Spanish-introduced fruit orchards and other European crops and that they cast aside their metal hoes—which helped produce more bountiful harvests—in favor of those made from antler and bone. And most significantly for the Indians of the Great Plains, Popé insisted that the Pueblos empty the Spanish rancheros of their vast horse herds.
Almost overnight, what had once been a trickle of stolen horses in the Indian trading network became a floodtide of horseflesh. Native Americans acquired most of their horses “as a result of the Pueblo Indian uprising of 1680,” writes Herman J. Viola in After Columbus: The Smithsonian Chronicle of the North American Indians.
As more and more tribes obtained horses, their mobility increased. The Sioux, who lived in the Minnesota lake country, changed from what Viola describes as a “canoeing people” to some of the “greatest light cavalry history has ever known.” Pressured by their Ojibwa neighbors, the Sioux began a multi-year exodus from their traditional homeland to the Western Plains. Buffalo became their staple, as they increasingly hunted from horseback.
Horses now allowed Plains tribes to travel farther afield and much faster than ever before. Horses also altered native hunting patterns. Instead of killing buffalo at buffalo jumps, Indian warriors could kill them from horseback. Because a buffalo cow’s meat was more tender to eat than a bull’s and a cow’s hide was easier for Indian women to tan, mounted Indians began hunting more selectively, especially when buffalo were plentiful. This changing ratio of cows-to-bulls-killed—especially from 1830-60, during the peak yea