can alone be judged properly.

We have now arrived at a period marking a great temporary change in the
condition of all the Pueblo Indians, and of those of the Rio Grande
especially. This is the insurrection, successful for a time, of the
Pueblos in 1680, against the Spanish domination. The material on this
eventful epoch is still largely in manuscript, the nearest approach to a
documentary presentation in full being the incomplete paraphrase
furnished by W. W. H. Davis in his _Spanish Conquest of New Mexico_,
published in 1869. No blame should be attached to the author for the
insufficiency of his data. He made the best possible use of his
materials with the help of my late friends David Miller and Samuel
Ellison of Santa Fe, but the archives of Santa Fe had already been
depleted through neglect and criminal waste, and what was and is left
(as I know from having handled it frequently and thoroughly) is a mass
of fragments, sometimes long, sometimes short, often disconnected and
therefore unsatisfactory. I shall refer to this material later. Of the
manuscript materials preceding and foreshadowing the insurrection, an
important letter by the Franciscan Fray Francisco de Ayeta, a copy of
which is in the national archives of Mexico, deserves to be specially
mentioned. To this indefatigable monk, whose timely warnings were too
lightly regarded by the Spanish authorities, are also due the data
concerning the lives and the awful fate of the Franciscan priests at
the hands of the Pueblo Indians on August 10, 1680. The original of
this tragic list is in manuscript in the national archives of Mexico,
where Vetancurt made use of it in his _Teatro_. The memorial sermon
preached and published in Mexico in 1681 (a copy of which exceedingly
rare print was procured by my friend the Honorable L. Bradford Prince of
Santa Fe) rests for its information upon the obituaries preserved by
Father Ayeta. That these obituaries are of direct value to the history
of the Rio Grande Pueblos is apparent.

The sermon alluded to is the earliest print, so far as known, concerning
the great Indian uprising of 1680. Next in date comes a publication
touching the various attempts made by the Spaniards to reconquer New
Mexico prior to 1693. In that year Carlos de Sigueenza y Gongora
published in the City of Mexico a kind of irregular newspaper bearing
the title _El Mercurio Volante_, in which appears a concise and
tolerably reliable sketch of the insurrect