[1] The Acaxee and their neighbors shared common features of culture identified by scholar Susan M. Deeds as the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, chilies, and cotton adjacent to small villages and settlements…; frequent warfare with associated ritual cannibalism; polytheism and worship of idols; the presences of shamans or ritual specialists…; and a decentralized political structure that relied on the leadership of elders in peacetime and on war leaders to deal with outsiders.

[5] Jesuit missionaries assisted in concentrating the Acaxee in larger settlements, a Spanish policy called reductions, to Christianize, control, and exploit the labor of the Indians.

In the "Peace by Purchase" plan to resolve the Chichimeca War in 1590 the Spanish had recognized the utility of missionaries in the pacification of the northern frontiers of Nueva Espana.

The rebellion "was characterized by messianic leadership and promises of millennial redemption during a period of violent disruption and catastrophic demographic decline due to disease."

In 1603, the Spaniards gathered an army of encomenderos and Indian allies and suppressed the Acaxee, executing Perico and 48 of their leaders and selling others into slavery.

[9] In the aftermath of the war the Jesuits assumed even greater influence, consolidating the Acaxee into a few settlements, appointing their leaders, and attempting to educate Indian children.

In 1607, a smallpox epidemic combined with the simultaneous appearance of Halley's Comet, a portent of disaster, seems to have erased most remaining traces of the Acaxee's independence, although a few joined the Tepehuán Revolt in 1616.