The Igorot struggle for independence: William Henry Scott.

In Pangasinan and Ilocos they traded gold, copper utensils
and counterfeit coins, wax, and rattan for rice, pigs and cattle.
The Ifugaos made their purchases with rice in the Cagayan aind
Magat valleys, anctwith iron tools they made from broken iron pots,
they got from the Ilocos, which the people of Nueva Vizcaya
considered superior to Manila bolos. Lowland merchants travelled
around buying up carnelian beads to sell them at a peso a piece.
Igorot G-strings were woven on Ilocano looms in-the 18th century
as in the 20th. Igorot miners refreshed themselves with basi carried
up from lowlands and molasses cakes. And Igorot traders themselves
moved freely back and forth across the Cordillera. They sold Ilocano
iron tools in Nueva Vizcaya as early as 1690, and in 1780 a missionary in Aritao sent a letter to a fellow friar in Bauang by some Ifugao
traders from Tinok. Nor were these Igorot traders completely
ignorant of lowland politics, either: a native of Kayapa told a
Spanish friar who was trying to convert him in 1785, "So what
about these Englishmen who captured Manila-they were white men
and Christians, weren't they?"
This untaxed trade was especially objectionable in the case
of the Igorot gold monopoly. Neither the king nor the missionaries
could put the gold out of their minds for,veryAong. Priests called
it a "magnet to men's hearts" and preached that God had hidden
the gold in the most remote parts of the pagan world to attract
greedy Christians there so the Gospel would be spread. When
King Phillip III foolishly took Spain into the Thirty Year's
War, he wrote the Archbishop of Manila: "With your experience
in the islands, you wel know the importance of maintaining them
not only.because of the Christian faith, which is the main reason,
but also because of the condition of our Royal treasury, and so,
because it is necessary above everything else to have the necessary
treasure or money for it, it is deemed that the only and chief solution must be to exploit those mines of the Igorots." When Governor
Salcedo sent out the 1668 expedition to Mankayan, he ordered
them, "Even if you come across the gold mines, make no show of
esteeming them, nor look for them, because it should not seem
that you, have any other aim than to reduce their souls to God;
save the exploitation of the mines for later."
These expeditions to the Igorot gold mines, however, were all

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