Thirty-three miles north of Santa Fe on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway is the village of Española, where a plain but comfortable hotel makes a convenient base for visiting several points of interest in the upper Rio Grande Valley. A mile to the south is Santa Clara pueblo,[8] long famous for its beautiful shining black pottery almost Etruscan in shape. The clay naturally burns red, but a second baking with the fuel (dried chips of cattle manure), pulverized finely and producing a dense black smoke, gives the ware its characteristic lustrous black. Seven miles further down the river but on the other side, is another pueblo, San Ildefonso, a picturesque village of 125 Indians, near the base of La Mesa Huérfana. This is a flat-topped mountain of black lava, on whose summit in 1693, several hundred Pueblos entrenched themselves and for eight months stubbornly resisted the attempts of the Spanish under De Vargas to bring them to terms. That was practically the last stand of Pueblo rebeldom, which thirteen years before had driven every Spaniard from the land. San Ildefonso has public fiestas on January 23 and September 6. Six miles north of Española and close to the Rio Grande is San Juan pueblo, with a population of about 400 Indians. Here one is in the very cradle of the white civilization of the Southwest. At this spot in the summer of 1598, Don Juan de Oñate—he of the Conquest—arrived with his little army of Spaniards, his Franciscan missionaries, his colonist families, a retinue of servants and Mexican Indians, his wagons and cattle, to found the capital of the newly won “kingdom” later to be called New Mexico. The courtesy of the Indians there, who temporarily gave up their own houses to the Spaniards, was so marked that their pueblo became known as _San Juan de los Caballeros_ (Saint John of the Gentlemen). Oñate’s settlement—of which no vestige now remains—is believed to have been situated just across the Rio Grande from San Juan, about where the hamlet and railway station of Chamita now stands. San Juan pueblo is further distinguished as the birthplace of Popé, the Indian to whose executive genius is due the success of the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. A picturesque figure, that same Popé, of the timber dramatic heroes are made of. It is said that, while meditating the rebellion, he journeyed to the enchanted lagoon of Shípapu, the place where in the dim past the Pueblos had emerged from the underworld and whither they return at death. There he conferred with the spirits of his ancestors, who endued him with power to lead his people to victory.[9] The San Juan women make a good black pottery similar to that of Santa Clara. On Saint John’s Day, June 24, occurs a public fiesta, with procession and dances, attracting visitors, white and red, from far and near.