The Pueblo Revolution—Kicking Spanish Butt

A depiction of the Pueblo uprising from a Spanish perspective.

On August 21, 1680 the embattled Spanish at Santa Fe, New Mexico broke a week long siege by members of several Pueblos and fled south to El Paso del Norte abandoning the northern province of New Spain to the native residents.  Despite repeated efforts the Spanish were not able to retake control of the district for twelve years.  It was the first successful expulsion of Europeans by a native people in North America and only one of a handful of instances it was ever accomplished even briefly.

Spanish settlement of New Mexico dated to 1598 when several hundred Europeans established the settlement of San Gabriel across the Rio Grande from San Juan Pueblo. About 1608, they moved their capital 25 miles north to Santa Fe.  Although there were frictions between the peace loving Pueblos and their new neighbors, relations were generally amiable until the Spanish began to treat the people as peons—virtual property of the Church, state, and those holding royal land grants.

By the mid-17th Century the dual systems of encomienda—a tax on food and other resources to support the Church, military, and civil institutions that was so high it frequently caused great want in the Pueblos—and repartimiento—the compulsion of set numbers of days per year of forced labor in the service of the Church, the state, and as field laborers and domestics on the haciendas caused rising resentment. Still, the Pueblos remained peaceful, grateful at least to the Spanish for protection from raids by their traditional enemies the Apache and the Navaho.  They also adopted some Spanish agricultural practices.

This Pueblo Kachina dance in the early 20th Century was little changed from the practice that drew the wrath of Catholic priests.

When Padre Alonzo de Posada arrived about 1760 to become the chief Priest in New Mexico, he made open war on traditional Pueblo culture, particularly the kachina dances that were at the center of communal life.  He ordered his priests to seize and destroy all of the elaborate kachina masks they could find and forbid the practice.

In 1675, Governor Juan de Trevino arrested 47 Pueblo men and charged them with sorcery. Four were condemned to death, three were hanged and the fourth committed suicide. The rest were publicly whipped in the plaza in Santa Fe and sentenced to slave labor.  When much of Trevino’s garrison left to pursue Apache raiders, members of near-by Pueblos descended on the capital and feed the prisoners including Popé, a shaman of the San Juan Pueblo.

Popé began a slow, methodical organization of the Pueblos to rise against the Spanish.  It took five years of secret meetings at dozens of Pueblos and persuading those with closer ties to the Spanish or who had more deeply adopted Catholicism to join him.  A prolonged drought during this period aided him because the Spanish refused to let up on the demands of encomienda even as crops failed. 

The drought also affected the more nomadic Apache and Navaho whose game became scarce bringing increasing raids against the Pueblos and Spanish alike.  The small Spanish garrison, far from the capital at Mexico City, received scant reinforcements from the Viceroy and were spread thin over thousands of square miles.  The inability of the Spanish to protect the Pueblos removed one of the few continuing reasons to remain under their yoke and the tattered veneer of military power made even the un-warlike Pueblo believe that they could rise up.

The knotted ropes that were sent to the Pueblos to coordinate the time of the insurrection.

After a final meeting at Tesuque on August 8, 1680 Popé, dispatched two messengers carrying knotted ropes showing the number of days before the revolt would begin to the Pueblos.  The chief of each Pueblo was to untie a knot each day and when the last knots were untied rise up against the local priests and haciendas making a coordinated attack across the province.  It was a brilliant plan, but the Spanish got wind of it and Governor Antonio de Otermin had the messengers arrested. 

When the people of Tesuque found out, they rose up and attacked the local church, expelling the priest and killing one Spaniard.  Padre Cristobal de Herrera returned the next day with one soldier to find the pueblo deserted.  He tracked the people into the hills where they found and murdered him.  The soldier fled to Santa Fe with news of an uprising. 

The rebels prepare to burn the body of a priest hung from a rafter of his destroyed church.

Within days the Rio Arriba area north of White Rock Canyon was devastated and depopulated.  Churches and haciendas were burned, any Spaniards who could be found—Priests (23 of who were put to death as their churches burned), men, women, and children were—were killed.  Survivors fled to El Paso del Norte or to the fortified governor’s palace at Santa Fe. 

The Santa Fe Pueblo and others near-by invaded the capital on August 13.  The Spanish—heavily armed with harquebuses (an early heavy matchlock musket), soldiers sheathed in armor plate and armed with steel swords—were able to hold off the lightly armed Pueblo who had only bows and arrows, clubs, knives, and stones.  The Pueblo, who were mainly used to defensive fighting around their towns against Apache raiders, were not used to being on the offensive, fighting in large groups or laying a siege. 

The Taos Pueblo, one of the largest in the uprising, as it appeared in a 1930's era post card and much the same as during the Revolt.

They persisted, but after a few days members of some Pueblos began to melt away.  But they were reinforced by others from Cochiti and Santo Domingo, led by Alonzo Catiti of Santo Domingo.  The Spanish reported later to being besieged by as many as 2,500 warriors, surely a wild exaggeration. 

The attackers damned the stream that brought water into Casa Reales, the governor’s palace.  Within a few days the Spanish began losing their horses and pack animals.  Gov. Otermin decided that they would have to make a run for it while the still could.  After executing 47 warriors who had been captured in fighting that morning, he led the break-out on the night of August 21.  

Over the next 12 years, Governor Otermin and his successor, Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzate, struck periodically at Pueblo country and once Santa Fe was briefly re-occupied.  But they could not regain control. 

Over time internal dissention wracked Pueblo unity.  Exactly what happened is unclear.  There are conflicting oral traditions and no Europeans were left alive to record the events.  We know that pressure from the Apache and Navaho, as well as from the Spanish continued.  

Some accounts claim that Popé became a brutal dictator, inflamed to uproot any vestige of Spanish religion or culture.  These stories say that not only did he order all crosses, Bibles, and other Christian artifacts burned, but he ordered that men who had been married by the Padres to abandon their wives and take new ones by Pueblo custom.  He also supposedly banned cultivation of European crops, adding to starvation.  These stories were, of course, circulated by the Spanish and by the few Pueblo who remained loyal to the Church. 

Other accounts have Popé retiring to his San Juan Pueblo to live in obscurity.  A third story has him disappearing into the mists of time but ready to return when his people need him, a variation of many hero legends. 

The Spanish--and some modern New Mexicans--honored Governor Diego de Vargas as a hero for his re-conquest of Santa Fe.

By 1692 the Pueblo were as dispirited as they were disunited.  A new governor, Diego de Vargas with only six Spanish soldiers, one cannon and a number of native allies from the Piro tribes of the lower Rio Grande and some loyal Catholic Pueblo were able to bloodlessly retake Santa Fe.  

There were more battles, some furious and bloody, followed by a general persecution.  New Mexico was firmly back under Spanish rule within a year. 

But the Pueblo did, in the long run, win a lot.  The Spanish never again tried to impose encomienda or repartimiento.  Priests allowed traditional cultural practices and tried to find ways to adapt them to Catholic worship instead of crushing them.  The Spanish recognized the land claims of the Pueblo and their local self-government.  

A statue of Pope in the New Mexico state museum.

As a result to this day of all of the tribes in what is now the United States, only the Pueblo have been able to retain most of their own land while maintaining their rich culture and much of their religious identity. 

There were two other long lasting side effects of the uprising and its aftermath.  The agricultural Pueblo traded the many Spanish horses that came into their possession to the north enabling the flourishing of the Plains Indian culture that developed in the 18th Century.  Secondly, many Pueblo forced to flee the Spanish and the raiding Apache eventually went to join another ancient enemy the Navaho, whose culture was greatly affected by the infusion.

Proud Boys, White Nationalists and Antifa—One of These Things is Not Like the Other—With Murfin Verse

Proud Boys and Neo-Nazi allies marching in Portland.

The Proud Boys, allegedly White Nationalist lite “western chauvinists” descended on Portland, Oregon over the weekend for what was billed as a “End Domestic Terrorism” march and the largest such demonstration yet of the neo-fascist right.  The frat boys of the so-called alt-right were joined by the harder edged Three Percenters, a patriot movement militia, the American Guard, and assorted officially unaffiliated loners and losers scraped up in neo-Nazi chat rooms on the dark web.  The Domestic Terrorism that they were protesting was not that which has left scores dead in multiple recent mass murder shootings, but the Antifa who have done such despicable things as throwing a milk shake at rabid right Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, punching alt-right spokesman Richard Spencer, and demonstrating at speaking events.

Portland, a city that The Guardian described as having “a liberal laid-back hippy vibe” was the target of the march for two reasons.  First, it is the home of the largest groupings of the amorphous Antifa which sprang up from a robust local anarchist scene and the Black Block street fighters that first came to prominence in the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests up the coast in Seattle.  Secondly, it is convenient the compounds, bunkers, and training camps of the Patriot Militias, White supremacists, and anti-government radicals that dot eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho, and Montana

The two sides have faced off in Portland before.  As the city prepared for what was expected to be the largest confrontation ever, Donald Trump stirred the pot.  Of course he did.  The Resident Tweeted, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.  Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!”

Not only did the Cheeto-in-Charge not mention or condemn the White Nationalist with a proven history of violence—the Proud Boys were prominent in in the Charlottesville clashes two years ago that left anti-Nazi protestor Heather Heyer dead—but he explicitly endorsed their stated cause much to the delight of organizers Joe Biggs and Enrique Tarrio of the planned non-permitted march.

Proud Boy spokes bigot Enrique Tarrio was the most visible leader to actually make the march.

Predictably much of the American mass media, trained like Pavlov’s dog to spout on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand equivalency in the name of journalistic neutrality, treated the Proud Boys and the Antifa equally “dangerous extremists of the far right and far left.”

In the end Portland Police kept the two sides mostly separated preventing violent clashes.  But the march leaders mostly failed to show up to their own event fearing arrest and left their followers with no plans or support.  They were forced to march back and forth across the long Morrison Bridge over the Willamette and then were steered to a riverfront industrial area where cement barricades police in full riot gear kept them separated from the Antifa who were also largely neutralized except for shouting back and forth.

In one of many street theater performances counter protestors proclaimed "White Flour," "Wife Power," and dressed as hot dogs to mock the white nationalist marchers.

But that doesn’t mean that the marchers were unopposed.  Large numbers of creative and non-violent Portlandians got ahead of both the police and marchers preemptively occupying most of the squares and public places in the downtown area where the marchers could gather with dancing unicorns, clowns, jugglers, puppets and derisive signs.  The counter protests also featured Buddhist and Jewish prayers, speeches, a poop emoji costume parade organized by the PopMob group, and music.  Their mood was joyful and triumphant. Meanwhile the leaderless marchers were steered through hostile minority neighborhoods where they were frequently given wrong directions and where local businesses refused to sell them water or food or allow them to use restrooms.  When they finally found a place to gather the planned three hour rally was cut to half an hour as speakers were drowned out by counter protestors’ jeers, chants, and songs.

The exhausted marchers had to retrace their steps under humiliating police protection and were left where they had to walk additional miles to return to the busses and cars that brought them.  Over the entire day a handful on each side had been arrested, mostly in isolated incidents after the main march broke up.

A lone Black Antifa marched alongside the massive police presence that separated the two sides.

The local press depicted the day as a humiliating defeat for the White Nationalists.  But Proud Boy leaders declared victory anyway and vowed to return to the city with new marches every month with the stated aim of bankrupting the city until the Mayor and Council “cracked down and eliminated the Antifa.”  Blackmail by attrition if you will.

With calls for suppression not of White Nationalists or Neo-Nazis on the rise including legislation in Congress to declare the Antifa as terrorists, comes the difficult question of defining just who Antifa are and who are other opponents of the Right.  Are the Black Block and the Antifa on the streets of Charlottesville, Portland, New York, Boston, the Bay Area, and other places really identical?  Clearly there is some overlap and the cosmetics are similar—the use of black clothing, banners, and sometimes masks.  But the Antifa are clearly much broader and focused more directly on community self-defense and direct confrontation with racist thugs than on mindless rampage.  The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), my old radical labor union and its General Defense Committee (GDC) which have been among the most cohesive and visible elements of the Antifa movement has clearly made that distinction.  Many of those now joining the Antifa movement have no ties at all to the Black Block. 

A typical red and black Antifa flag carried in many actions.

Two years ago in Charlottesville the Antifa were a very visible presence in the protests organized to protest the planned removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee.  They were pointedly not included in Trumps famous declaration that there were “good people on both sides.”  But the Antifa famously came to the defense of religious leaders including Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray and several other UUs who linked arms around the perimeter of the block where the Lee statue stood to prevent the Neo-Nazis from rallying there.  The ministers came under attack and feared for their lives.  They were rescued and protected with masked Antifa including IWW members.  One participant, famed Black scholar Cornel West said frankly.  “The antifascists, and then, crucially, the anarchists…saved our lives, actually. We would have been completely crushed, and I’ll never forget that.”

Antifa including members of the IWW--note flag to the right--to the rescue shielding besieged ministers and religious leaders in Charlottesville two years ago.

A few days later we held a vigil on the grounds of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois.  A couple of hundred folks showed up on short notice.  As the crowd formed a solemn circle before moving to line Bull Valley Road with lighted candles I spoke.

After remembering the blood sacrifice of 32 year old anti-fascist hero Heather Heyer and the needless deaths of Virginia State Police Lt. H. Jay Cullon and Trooper Pilot Berk M.M. Bates in a helicopter crash responding to the violent chaos unleashed by the organized forces of bigotry, I said that it fell to me to be the voice of anger and outrage.  I was not there to lead a chorus of Kumbaya.  I noted West’s appreciation of the Antifa--the same anti-fascists that Trump and far too much of the media held to be equally guilty for the violence.  And I was moved to recall others who had confronted Nazism.  The poem I wrote and read at the time may have made some gathered that evening uncomfortable.  But it had to be said.

Communists and Brown Shirts brawling in a Munich beer hall in 1932.  No one else physically stood up against growing Nazi power.

Munich and Charlottesville

August 13, 2017

So is this how it felt on the streets of Munich

            when the strutting Brown Shirts 

            in their polished jackboots,

            Sam Browne belts, and scarlet arm bands

            faced the scruffy Commies 

            in their cloth caps

            and shirtsleeves rolled up 

            and battled in the beerhalls,

            parks and streets.

All of the good people, the nice people

            cowered behind closed doors

            and wished it would go away—

                        all of the liberals, the Catholics,

                        the new-bred pacifists of the Great War,

                        the professors and doctors,

                        editors and intellectuals,

                        the Social Democrats,

                        even—my God!—Jews 

                        who had not gone Red—

            a pox on both your houses they solemnly intoned.

Hey, buddy, in retrospect those damn Bolshies

            look pretty good,

            like heroes even.

Things look a little different in Charlottesville,

            in brilliant color not grainy black and white

            and the Fascists can’t agree on a

            Boy Scout uniform and array themselves

            golf shirts and khakis, rainbow Klan hoods,

            biker black and studs and strutting camo.

But the smell, you know, that stench,

            is just the same.

The question is—do you dare be a Red today

            or will you close your doors

            and go back to your game consoles

            and cat videos.

Which will it be, buddy?

—Patrick Murfin

Philo T. Farnsworth—Number One Suspect in DNA Test for Father of Television

Philo T  Farnsworth displays his television receptor for the press,

Inventor Philo T. Farnsworth was born in a log cabin on his grandfather’s remote ranch in southwest Utah on August 19, 1906.  His family was of pioneer Mormon stock.  Despite the classic 19th Century pioneer circumstances of his birth, Farnsworth would help reshape the modern world with his inventions.

By 1918 the family was ranching on its own in southern Idaho.  The new homestead had its own small generator and was primitively wired for lighting and some farm equipment.  Young Philo, a tinkerer in the great tradition and a devotee of Popular Mechanics was soon busy adapting other gadgets and appliances to being run by electricity.

He proved to be a whiz in high school in Rigby, Idaho at advanced math, chemistry, and physics. But he stunned Justin Tolman, his high school science teacher, with sketches for electron tubes.  He demonstrated how pictures might be transmitted and received wirelessly over a distance by filling several chalkboards with equations for his awestruck teacher.  That teacher’s memory of these early events later became key testimony in Farnsworth’s epic patent battles with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Farnsworth's high school science teacher Justin Tomlin saved his sketch of an electron tube which eventually proved the inventor's priority over competitors.

After graduating from high school early, Farnsworth worked for the railroad to raise money for tuition to Brigham Young University.  In 1923 he joined his family, which had moved to Provo, Utah.  But when his father died less than a year later, 16 year old Philo was forced to quit school to support his family.

But his dreams never died.  He seized another opportunity to get a quality education when he tested number 2 in the nation and was recruited to the U.S. Naval Academy.  But when he discovered that the Navy would own any patents he developed during his continuing research, he resigned and returned to Utah.

An unsuccessful business venture brought him to Salt Lake City, where he took classes at the University of Utah.  He also caught the eye of George Everson, a professional fund raiser and philanthropist to work with local Community Chest.  Philo’s project so excited him that he agreed to pay for him to move to Los Angeles where he would be provided housing and a small laboratory space.  

Pem Farnsworth, the inventor's wife, has been called the first TV star because he broadcast her photo in his public press presentation.

Farnsworth leapt at the opportunity.  He married his sweetheart, Elma “Pem” Gardner, the sister of an associate of Everson.

After a period in L.A., the Farnsworth’s moved to San Francisco to be closer to Everson.  Despite Everson’s support, it was difficult to keep up the research and support the family.  Farnsworth worked mostly alone and the strange looking apparatus that were brought into his apartment/laboratory aroused suspicion and the place was raided by local police suspecting he was running a distillery.

After only a few months in California, however, Farnsworth was far enough along in his work to file patents.  Others were developing television systems, based on mechanical scanning devices.  Farnsworth proposed an entirely electronic system to produce images that could be received on another devise.  These early patent applications gave him a lead over others who were experimenting with electronic systems.

In September, 1927 Farnsworth transmitted his first image in his San Francisco lab, a simple line inscribed on a black plate back illuminated by a powerful arc lamp to a receiving device which reproduced the image by an electronic scan.  He demonstrated his device to the press a year later.

In 1930 Farnsworth’s patents were approved.  He was also visited by Vladimir Zworykin, who had been developing his own television system in Pittsburg for Westinghouse for some years.  Although his system was promising, it never functioned well enough.  Impressed, he made copies of Farnsworth’s Image Dissector for his own use.  He would eventually abandon that technique because of the extremely bright lighting required and turn his attention to developing the Iconoscope.

Farnsworth's nemesis David Sarnoff of RCA.  The two fought bitterly over patent rights in a series of law suits that lasted years and nearly ruined Farnsworth despite winning them.

Meanwhile Farnsworth turned down an offer by David Sarnoff of RCA to buy his patents and work for them.  Again the inventor balked at having his patents held by others.  Instead he moved to Philadelphia where he found what he hoped would be a congenial home at Philco.

RCA acquired Zworykin’s patents, which Zworykin had already used to challenge Farnsworth’s.   The company renewed the objections, but in 1934, based on evidence from that high school teacher and others, the Patent Office ruled that Farnsworth established priority for electronic television with his Image Dissector.  In the meantime Farnsworth applied for additional patents, including one for color transmission and reproduction.

Despite the Patent Office decision, litigation between Farnsworth and RCA dragged on for year, greatly distressing the inventor.  Finally in 1939 RCA agreed to settle the dispute by licensing Farnsworth’s patents for a million dollars.  That led directly to the famous public demonstration of the RCA television system, based on several different patents, including Farnsworth’s at the New York World’s Fair on April 20, 1939.

But before that Farnsworth had struggled.  He parted ways with Philco in 1933 and then went to England in hopes of raising money for his expensive litigation with RCA.  There he met John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor who had given the world first public demonstration of a working television system in London in 1926 using a mechanical rotating disc device.  The two joined forces and Baird’s company began to market a system to the BBC in competition with EMI, which used Zworkink’s patents.  Eventually the BBC opted for the EMI system.  

Farnsworth also demonstrated his system in Germany, where it was used for experimental broadcasts of the 1936 Olympics.

Farnsworth showing off components for his television system including the critical cathode ray tube.

Back in America, Farnsworth continued his experimentation and filed several patents both for the improvement of television and in new areas, including  a ray for airplanes and ships to penetrate fog.  During World War II in combination with other patents on an improved cathode ray tube to be used as an image receptor, it led to radar.

He founded his own company, Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation based in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1936.  The company took on numerous defense contracts during the World War II, including the development of radar and improvements to sonar.  But the small, undercapitalized company struggled to make deliveries on time.

In 1951 International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) bought his company and kept Farnsworth on a chief researcher working from a small basement laboratory known as The Cave.  His improvements to the radar circular sweep screen made possible modern air traffic control systems.

ITT agreed to modestly fund Farnsworth’s basic research into a new area, nuclear fusion.  He developed a specialized set of fusion reaction tubes called fusors.  Although he was able to produce micro scale fusion reactions in the lab, he could not figure out how to create large enough reactions to become a potential power source.  ITT soured on the expense of the project and cancelled its support, causing Farnsworth to leave the company in 1966.

Farnsworth was never a household name like other inventors.  He stumpped the panel on I've Got a Secret on the medium he pioneered.

Disillusioned and drinking heavily, Farnsworth transferred his research back to Utah where he worked in a laboratory provided by Brigham Young University.  He started a new, small firm, Philo T. Farnsworth and Associates and lured some former colleagues from ITT to join him in Utah.  He secured a contract with NASA, but his bank called in its loans, which Farnsworth had secured with his home and pension.  The company collapsed and the Internal Revenue Service padlocked his lab for failure to pay back taxes. 

Despite the failure of his fusion system to be commercially viable, it has become an invaluable tool in basic research and fusors are used to produce particles for use in cyclotrons and for other basic particle physics research.

With his family reduced to poverty despite fathering one of the great industries of the century, Farnsworth fell into deep depression and drank heavily, destroying his always fragile health.  He died of pneumonia on March 11, 1971, largely in obscurity.  His widow Pem campaigned relentlessly after his death to promote his place in the birth of television.

Fame is fleeting.  A statue of Philo T. Farnsworth has represented Utah in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capital since 2010.  He joined Mormon patriarch Brigham Young in what has been called a national hall of fame.  But this year the Utah legislator voted to remove the statue in 2020 and replace it with one of Martha Hughes Cannon,  a suffrage pioneer and first woman elected to a state legislature.  Copies of the Farnsworth statue will still be on display in his home town and in an upper gallery of the Utah capitol building.

Farnsworth was not THE inventor of television.  Many inventors contributed to what would ultimately be the operating system that became practical and which after World War II exploded changing society and culture in ways Farnsworth could never have imagined when he began sketching ideas for tubes as a 14 year old in an Idaho science class.