Diego de Vargas
Diego de Vargas was the Madrid nobleman who, as governor of a New Mexico that had no Spaniards in it, rode into Santa Fe in September 1692 with a few dozen soldiers and got the Pueblo leaders to submit without a shot, brought the colonists back the next year and took the town by storm when the submission turned out to mean less than he had reported, and governed the reconquest that the Pueblos and the Spanish settled on terms neither had had before 1680. He was born in Madrid in 1643 into a family of the minor nobility with more lineage than money, went to New Spain in 1672 leaving a wife and children he never saw again, held posts in the mining districts, and bought the governorship of New Mexico in 1688 for a province the crown had lost twelve years before, when the Pueblos under Popé had killed four hundred colonists and twenty-one friars and driven the rest to El Paso. He reached El Paso in 1691 and in August 1692 went north with sixty soldiers and a hundred Indian allies. At Santa Fe on 13 September the Pueblo occupants, after a day of talk and a night of siege, let the friars in to absolve and baptise, and he went on to every pueblo doing the same, which he reported to Mexico City as a bloodless reconquest and Spain celebrated. In December 1693 he came back with seventy families, eight hundred people, and found the town held against him. He stormed it on the 29th, hanged seventy of the defenders and gave four hundred to the colonists as servants, and spent the next three years reducing the pueblos one by one, with the Pecos and the Keres as allies and a second revolt in 1696 that killed five friars. What emerged was not the old order. The encomienda was not restored, the mission fathers were told to leave the kivas alone, and the Pueblo governments kept the canes of office the Spanish gave them, which they still hold. His successor had him jailed for three years on charges of embezzlement that Spain dismissed, and Spain made him Marquis of the Nava de Barcinas. He died on campaign against the Apaches in April 1704. Santa Fe's fiesta re-enacts the entry of 1692 every September, and since 2018 without the pageant.
- Lived: 1643 CE – 1704 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: governor, soldier
