Most of the pueblos had Ilokano presidentes. The Igorot say that the
Spaniards did little for them except to shoot them. There is yet a
long, heavy wooden stock in Bontoc pueblo in which the Igorot were
imprisoned. Igorot women were made the mistresses of both officers and
soldiers. Work, food, fuel, and lumber were not always paid for. All
persons 18 or more years old were required to pay an annual tax of 50
cents or an equivalent value in rice. A day's wage was only 5 cents,
so each family was required to pay an equivalent of twenty days' labor
annually. In wild towns the principal men were told to bring in so
many thousand bunches of palay -- the unthreshed rice. If it was not
all brought in, the soldiers frequently went for it, accompanied by
Igorot warriors; they gathered up the rice, and sometimes burned the
entire pueblo. Apad, the principal man of Tinglayan, was confined six
years in Spanish jails at Bontoc and Vigan because he repeatedly failed
to compel his people to bring in the amount of palay assessed them.

They say there were three small guardhouses on the outskirts of Bontoc
pueblo, and armed Igorot from an outside town were not allowed to
enter. They were disarmed, and came and went under guard.

The Spanish comandantes in charge of the province seem to have remained
only about two years each. Saldero was the last one. Early in the
eighties of the nineteenth century the comandante took his command
to Barlig, a day east of Bontoc, to punish that town because it had
killed people in Tulubin and Samoki; Barlig all but exterminated
the command -- only three men escaped to tell the tale. Mandicota, a
Spanish officer, went from Manila with a battalion of 1,000 soldiers
to erase Barlig from the map; he was also accompanied from Bontoc
by 800 warriors from that vicinity. The Barlig people fled to the
mountains, losing only seven men, whose heads the Bontoc Igorot cut