The First American Revolution?

The wooden roof of the mission church in Pecos was engulfed in flames, but the massive adobe building, some 145 feet long, wouldn’t collapse on its own. So the rebels, intent on destroying this symbol of colonial power, tore down the church’s walls brick by brick — all 300,000 of them. “With an explosive vengeance, the Pueblos had reduced the grandest church in New Mexico to an imposing mound of earthen rubble,” wrote John L. Kessell in his 1979 study of Pecos history, “Kiva, Cross, and Crown,” conducted for what is now Pecos National Historical Park.

Over the course of a dozen days in August 1680, Pueblo people revolted against Spanish friars, settlers and soldiers. Under the leadership of Po’pay, a religious figure, they overwhelmed Spanish forces, forced them to leave the region, and put an end to many decades of oppressive rule. “They kicked the Spanish out,” said Michael Wilcox, the author of “The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest.” “I don’t think that ever happened anywhere else.”

The Spanish did return 12 years later, but the balance of power between the colonists and the Pueblos would be forever altered, with the latter retaining a degree of autonomy that would continue over the following centuries. Little known outside of New Mexico, the Pueblo Revolt “was, in effect, the first American Revolution with far-reaching consequences continuing today,” wrote Joe S. Sando, the late Pueblo historian, in “Po’pay: Leader of the First American Revolution.”

It was rumors of unimaginably wealthy cities that first lured conquistadors to northern New Mexico, and in 1540, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led a large expedition toward the country of the people the Spanish called the “Indios de los Pueblos.” One of the places Coronado would visit was Pǽkilâ, which the colonizers would refer to as Cicuye and later Pecos. The easternmost Pueblo city state, Pecos was accustomed to trading with Plains Tribes and would have been more inclined to treat the arriving Spaniards as equals rather than conquerors they needed to submit to.

“They knew that this was just another group who was coming into their territory,” said Wilcox, a Stanford University senior lecturer of Yuman descent who has focused much of his work on Indigenous history and archaeology in the Southwest.

One Spanish chronicler described Pecos as a pueblo consisting of four-stories-high buildings. A quarter of Pecos’ 2,000 inhabitants were warriors, and the pueblo was “feared throughout the land,” he wrote. The Spanish delegation and the residents exchanged gifts, and the conquistadors read out the Requerimiento, a declaration warning that Indigenous people would have to accept the authority of the Catholic Church and Spanish monarchy or face dire consequences. None of the locals understood a word of it.

The Spaniards enlisted guides at the pueblo and pushed as far as present-day Kansas, but they found none of the riches they were looking for and tortured and killed one of the Pecos guides. Pueblos to the west fared worse at the hands of Coronado’s troops, as hundreds of Native people perished and entire villages were burned in the so-called Tiguex War.

Over the next six decades, the Spanish made other forays into the area and reached Pecos again, but settlement didn’t begin in earnest until the arrival of Juan de Oñate in 1598. Oñate was the first governor of the New Mexico colony, and his rule was notoriously brutal. To crush resistance at Acoma Pueblo, for example, Oñate had his men kill countless residents, force many others into slavery and mutilate male survivors over the age of 25.

“They’re thinking that the only way to make these people do what they want them to do is using violence,” Wilcox said.

Franciscan friars exerted their own authority, and it was not always benevolent. They attempted to forcibly convert locals, and so they sought to root out what they considered devil worship. In Pecos around 1620, the friar in charge gathered all the ceremonial objects he could find and smashed them to pieces. “What ends up happening is that people’s religious beliefs, their spiritual practices, they all go underground,” Wilcox said.

Religious repression, forced labor and heavy tributes continued for the next half century, and in the 1670s, these harsh living conditions were exacerbated by drought. Tensions escalated further in 1675 when the Spanish governor rounded up 47 Pueblo religious leaders — Po’pay among them — on charges of witchcraft. All were harshly beaten, and several were killed. The Pueblos responded by sending an armed contingent to Santa Fe that threatened the governor with violence unless the captives were released. The governor relented, and the remaining prisoners returned home.

Po’pay and other Pueblo leaders met regularly over the next few years and eventually reached the conclusion that the only solution to their problems was to expel the colonists by force. To coordinate their effort, the group of leaders dispatched two runners on Aug. 8, 1680, to alert the region’s pueblos of the uprising slated to begin five days later. The runners were seen in Pecos, their first stop. They were later arrested at another pueblo, and they disclosed plans for the impending rebellion to the Spanish authorities.

Aware of the arrest, the Pueblos decided to move earlier than originally planned. On Aug. 10, the first of many priests was murdered, and the rebels soon attacked the Spanish all over the region, killing hundreds of them, burning their houses and destroying churches, including Pecos’ towering mission. Gov. Antonio de Otermín ordered settlers to retreat to Santa Fe, and the Pueblo warriors surrounded the colony’s capital. Pueblo and Spanish forces battled over the ensuing days, but Otermín realized that the besieged settlers would soon run out of food and water. And so, on Aug. 21, Pueblo rebels watched as the Spanish filed out of Santa Fe. The Pueblo Revolt had succeeded.

Though the Spanish weren’t ousted permanently, when they returned in 1692, they abandoned some of the more abusive labor practices and gave locals more religious freedom. While Pueblo people nominally accepted Catholicism, they were also able to maintain their traditional and religious practices — Pecos, for instance, had nine ceremonial spaces known as kivas in 1777.

Pecos’ importance as a trading center decreased as the Spanish established outposts farther east. Residents later suffered from famine, land theft and attacks from Plains Tribes. The pueblo’s population dwindled until 1838, when the last inhabitants moved to Jémez Pueblo some 60 miles to the west.

A national park unit since 1965, Pecos includes sites such as pre-revolt kivas, an 1850s trading post and a Civil War battlefield. Park staff engage “in ongoing Tribal consultation and ethnographic work with Jémez,” wrote Leah Schulson, the park’s interpretive ranger, and Jeremy Moss, its chief of resource stewardship and science, in an email. In 1999, some 2,000 human remains and almost 1,000 objects that had been removed during archaeological excavations and had been housed in museum collections were returned to Pecos. That repatriation “healed some past wounds,” and today “Tribal members visit Pecos to spiritually and culturally reconnect with their ancestral home and honor their ancestors,” Schulson and Moss wrote.

Meanwhile, the memory of the Pueblo Revolt is very much alive and has been invoked with pride by Pueblo activists and leaders in campaigns for causes that include land claims and heritage protection. In recent years, Pueblo advocates have also pushed for symbols of Spanish colonization, such as statues of Oñate, to be removed.

Wilcox said that by attempting to subdue Pueblo people by force centuries ago, the Spanish created the very conditions that made colonization more difficult. They inadvertently encouraged autonomous pueblos to establish connections that weren’t there before and to develop an ingrained identity of resistance that continues to this day.

“They had violence happen to them, but they’re still Pueblos, and they’re still here,” he said. “They were never really conquered.”