It is August, 1680 in New Mexico. The rebelling Pueblo Indians have sprung their ambush and quickly killed 400 Spaniards. About 2500 survivors have concentrated in two groups, at the government buildings in Santa Fe, and 70 miles to the south at Isleta Pueblo. Each has reason to believe that everybody else has died, and they are alone. The Indians beseige Santa Fe, but Governor Antonio de Otermín leads a successful defense. Still, they are isolated and out of food, and determine to retreat to the recently established mission at El Paso. The southern group, under Lieutenant Garcia at Isleta, make the same decision. This is the history of that harrowing retreat, another amazing story of survival in the European settlement of today’s United States.

It is also the only time in American history that rebelling indigenous peoples entirely expelled an established European settlement from their territory. The Spaniards would, of course, eventually reconquer New Mexico, but not until 1692.

The settlement of the New Mexican refugees at El Paso would make it – for the moment – the third most populous settlement of Europeans in North America, and the functional beginning of the eventual New Spanish territory, Mexican state, Republic, and American State of Texas.

Maps of the Pueblo Revolt

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Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, October 1911.

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Retreat of the Spaniards from New Mexico in 1680, and the Beginnings of El Paso, I,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1912.

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Retreat of the Spaniards from New Mexico in 1680, and the Beginnings of El Paso, II,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January 1913.

In August 1680, an alliance of Puebloan peoples, led by a mysterious religious man named Po’pay (also spelled Popé), launched a surprise attack that forced the Spanish entirely out of New Mexico 82 years after they had first settled it. Po’pay’s rebellion would combine elements that will remind longstanding listeners of King Philip’s War in New England and Opechancanough’s surprise attack in Virginia in March 1622. Unlike the Wampanoags and the Pamunkeys, however, Po’pay would achieve his war aims.

Along the way we examine the causes of the revolt, the preparations for the ambush, and the terrible first days setting up the siege of Santa Fe, which will be taken up next time.

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#98 A Kingdom of God on the Rio Grande

Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, October 1911.

Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest

Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680

David Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spaniards

In 1677, the longtime residents of the old and remote county of Albemarle in northern Carolina, a collection of cranks and dissidents who had fled from Maryland and Virginia and were used to living free of interference from the Carolina proprietors and the Crown’s tax collectors, revolted against new attempts to collect duties on tobacco. Quite astonishingly, they succeeded! And not without some history comedy along the way.

In the long history of the Americans, it is easy to ignore Culpeper’s Rebellion. Virtually all surveys of American history do. Albemarle was small, a literal backwater, and not even the most important part of Carolina. Historians of North Carolina, however, see it as a truer reflection of the American Revolution, a century later, than the other colonial upheavals of the 1670s. The Albemarle rebels were an early example, in their democratic tax-avoiding free-trading don’t-tread-on-me resistance, of ideas that would later be taken up throughout English North America.

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#158 The Free County of Albemarle

#160 The Official Founding of North Carolina

Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

Hugh F. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle: the Story of Culpeper’s Rebellion, 1675-1689