The Tepehuán people lived on the rugged eastern slopes and valleys of the Sierra Madre Occidental, primarily in the future state of Durango.

The Tepehuán, Acaxee, and Xixime to their west shared common traits such as the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, chiles, and cotton adjacent to dispersed, small villages and settlements;...frequent warfare with associated ritual cannibalism; polytheism and worship of idols; the presence of shamans or ritual specialists (hechiceros); and a decentralized political structure that relied on the leadership of elders in peacetime and on war leaders to deal with outsiders.

The Spanish failed to defeat the Chichimeca militarily and instituted a new policy called "peace by purchase" in which Catholic missionaries would be a major tool in pacifying hostile and semi-hostile native peoples.

Nevertheless, by 1615, a Jesuit declared that the Tepehuanes “showed great progress and were in the things of our holy faith muy ladino" (much like the Spanish).

Quaultlatas traveled throughout the mountains, his symbol a broken cross, preaching that the gods were angry because the Tepehuan had abandoned them and that they must kill or expel all Spaniards, especially the missionaries, from their lands.

“Ever since the Spanish settled here, there has been an abundance of food, clothing, riches, and other material comforts,” said the priest Andres Perez de Ribas.

On November 16, 1616, a wagon train traveling to Mexico City was attacked by the Tepehuán just outside Santa Catarina de Tepehuanes, a small village in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

Thus began what Jesuit historian Andrés Pérez de Ribas called the revolt "one of the greatest outbreaks of disorder, upheaval, and destruction that had been seen in New Spain...since the Conquest."

Before it was finished four years later, more than 200 Spaniards, 10 missionaries, an unknown number of Amerindians, black slaves, and mestizos allied with the Spanish, and perhaps 4,000 Tepehuán died, many of hunger and disease, with destruction to property valued as much as a million pesos.

At the first report of the outbreak, and fearing an attack on Durango itself (Guadiana), Governor Gaspar de Alvear arrested 75 local Indigenous leaders and ordered them executed.

Another expedition consisting of 67 Spanish cavalry and 120 Indigenous Concho allies set out from Guadalajara in March 1617 and engaged and won several battles with the Tepehuán.

[18] Despite their initial successes, the Tepehuán were unable to persuade neighboring native groups to join their revolt and the Spanish prevailed.

[19] The revolt was officially declared at an end in 1620 but the Jesuits spent years trying to persuade many of the surviving Tepehuán to come down from the mountains to live at mission stations.