rs of the buffalo robe trade—eventually altered the sexual composition of the herds.
Because Indians viewed horses as wealth, they naturally sought to acquire more, both through breeding and by stealing from their neighbors. Horse raids now became an important means for warriors not only to build larger herds but also to acquire status within their tribes. Needing grazing land for their growing number of horses, Indians often drove the buffalo from the prime grasslands, which further stressed the buffalo herds.
The use of horses also altered the traditional trading patterns of tribes such as the Nez Perce. Now when they traveled from their plateau homeland in Eastern Washington and West-central Idaho to the Montana prairie in order to hunt buffalo, they could carry more than just enough supplies to satisfy their subsistence needs. Packing their horses with excess salmon oil, salmon pemmican, camas bread, hemp twine and composite bows (laminated with horns from bighorn sheep), they traded with the Blackfeet, Crows and Assiniboines for catlinite pipes, war bonnets and similar truck. (It was common for tribes to put aside their traditional hostility with their neighbors in order to trade.) Just as free trade raises the living standard of nations worldwide, it did so for all trading-oriented tribes in North America.
Spanish Rule Returns
Although the wide use of horses began a renaissance among the tribes of the Great Plains and Northwestern plateau country, the same was not true for the Pueblos, who had traded off the Spanish stock. They had merely exchanged one despot for another. Popé ordered all churches destroyed and all Christian-sanctioned marriages absolved. Crosses, rosaries and everything else “tainted” with Catholicism were to be smashed or burned, and those Indians who had been baptized were commanded to wash themselves clean.
Decreeing that the Spanish language was never again to be uttered, Popé began wearing elaborate costumes and adorning his head with the horn of a bull. Pueblos who failed to heed the holy man’s dictates were imprisoned or executed.
As the Pueblos seethed under their new taskmaster, many noticed that the rain did not return as he had promised. The traditional crops of corn, squash and beans that Popé had ordered them to plant withered under the boiling sun just as the Spanish crops of peaches, melons and grapes had done before the revolution.
Popé died in 1688, whether from natural causes or at the hand of the Pueblos is unknown. Four years later, the new governor, Don Diego José de Vargas Zapata Luján Ponce de León y Contreras, led a retinue of 60 soldiers, 100 loyal Indians and several friars back to Santa Fe, arriving on September 13. The Pueblos at Santa Fe welcomed the Spanish, and by December, when Vargas returned to El Paso for more soldiers, over 2,000 Indians had been baptized.
Following Vargas’ arrival in Santa Fe late the next year, a number of Pueblos again sought to drive the Spanish out, but this time, they failed. By December 1696, all rebellion had been quashed.
Although the Pueblos were again under Spanish rule, their rebellion had ushered in a time of prosperity for the Indians of the Great Plains and Northwestern plateau country. As more and more tribes obtained the horses (or their offspring) that Popé had ordered out of New Mexico, intertribal trade increased and living standards rose. The first eight decades of the 18th century were the apex of the American Indian renaissance, a time of plenty that would be abruptly ended by the great smallpox epidemic of 1780-81.