Overview

"The peaceable Pueblo Indians seemed an unlikely people to rise emphatically and successfully against the Spanish Empire. For eighty-two years the Pueblos had lived under Spanish domination in the northern part of present-day New Mexico. The Spanish administration had been led not by Coronado’s earlier vision of god but by a desire to convert the Indians to Christianity and eke a living from the country north of Mexico. The situation made conflict inevitable, with devastating results. Robert Silverberg writes: ""While the missionaries flogged and even hanged the Indians to save their souls, the civil authorities enslaved them, plundered the wealth of their cornfields, forced them to abide by incomprehensible Spanish laws."" A long drought beginning in the 1660s and the accelerated raids of nomadic tribes contributed to the spontaneous revolt to the Pueblos in August 1680. How the Pueblos maintained their independence for a dozen years in plain view of the ambitious Spaniards and how they finally expelled the Spanish is the exciting story of The Pueblo Revolt. Robert Silverberg’s descriptions yield a rich picture of the Pueblo culture."

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9780803292277

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Reviews

Silverberg's brisk clear style . . . should be appreciated by the reader . . . . He has provided a brief, attention-getting narrative of the history of a region often [overlooked]. -Choice

A very good popular history, excellently written. -Library Review * Library Review * Silverberg's brisk clear style . . . should be appreciated by the reader . . . . He has provided a brief, attention-getting narrative of the history of a region often [overlooked]. -Choice * Choice *

The prolific Mr. Silverberg has produced a competent account of a unique episode in the long, sad chronicle of the European conquest of the New World : the only revolt by Indians against white rule that won back real freedom for an extended period. The Pueblos of New Mexico, conquered and subjected to Spanish rule in 1598, their religion suppressed, their labor commandeered, and their freedom curtailed, rose up eighty-two years later (1680) in a carefully organized conspiracy and swept their province clean of the conquerors. For twelve years thereafter the Pueblo tribes kept the Spaniards at bay, defeating several invading forces, but finally they fell into disunity and disarray and, with little resistance, back under the Spanish yoke. Silverberg's narrative treats tire Indians with full sympathy, and the Spaniards are portrayed harshly only when specific acts of inhumanity warrant it, and the Spanish Governor Vargas who reconquered New Mexico is a hero for being a kind rather than cruel master. The account goes as far back as the early Indian migrations in the Southwest, covers the first Spanish incursions into Pueblo territory, the years of Spanish rule, the reconquest in 1692, and the last stirrings of Indian resistance. A couple of pages bring the Pueblos up to the present - They still live in their dusty, mud-walled villages, but television aerials sprout from the flat roofs, and shiny automobiles are parked in the narrow streets. Sometimes the style is journeyman, but the content should be of interest to an American history audience. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Introducing this Bison Books edition is Marc Simmons, a professional historian, editor, translator, and the author of Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism in the Rio Grande (1980), also a Bison Book.

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