The Igorot struggle for independence: William Henry Scott.

so expensive and so unproductive that after the failure of the
i668 entry into Lepanto, the Spanish Government never attempted
another one. By 1800, however, a new economic crisis arose with
the Igorots. In 1780 the government instituted a monopoly on
tobacco in the Philippines, and it was so successful that, for the
first time in 200 years, the colony actually showed a profit for
the home government. The monopoly promptly became an object
of sabotage by the Igorots'. They not only grew contraband tobacco
themselves, but carried it all the way froifi Cagayan to sell illegally
in the Ilocos. At first, this Igorot trade was winked at under a
hopeful policy of trying to attract them, and under the illusion
that not much money was involved. By 1836, however, it was
discovered that tobacco' taxes in Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur had
dropped off by 66'%. The government therefore sent Colonel
Guillermo Galvey through Benguet,' Lepanto, Bontoc and Ifugao
in 1829-39 to put an end to the tobacco smuggling and Igorot
independence. But still, even after their fields were burned,
their villages levelled, and their population decimated by the smallpox carried by the soldiers, the Igorots continued to evade the
monopoly.' So the government agreed to exempt them on the
understanding they would only sell their tobacco to a government
station. But a Spanish official reported in 1842: "Experience has
shown the uselessness of this arrangement because the pagans
carry ten bundles to the government and then sell a hundred
as contraband, for the price they get from the lowlanders is always
better than what they get from the government monopoly."
Galvey's decimation of Benguet, however, did make its
miserable survivors the first tribe of Igorots to be officially listed
as Spanish subjects. Lepanto soon followed, and Bontoc in 1859.
But not until the 1890's under energetic Governor General
Valeriano Weyler, the so-called "Butcher of Cuba," were troops
permanently quartered in Kalinga or Ifugao. The last Spanish
census of 1898 claimed 120,444 pagans recognizing vassalage to
the King of Spain. It must have been a tenuous sort of vassalage,
however, to judge from chance references by foreign travellers at
the end of the Spanish regime-a detachment of 40 men wiped out
on the march for example. Or two garrisons in the Saltan Valley
massacred 'one Sunday morning during mass. Or the number of

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