“We want your head, gringo, we do not want for any of you gringos to govern us, as we have come to kill you.”f
“What wrong have I done you?” Bent responded. I have always helped you. I cured you when you were sick and never charged you.”
“Yes,” cried an Indian, “and now you must die so that no American is going to govern us!” With that, a shower of arrows enveloped Bent at his door, which he managed to slam shut and bolt. His family, now thoroughly alarmed but still dressed in nightclothes, was horrified to see three arrows sticking out of the governor’s face and blood streaming everywhere.
The mob began breaking the thin mica windows of the Bents’ adobe home while rocks and more arrows flew inside and cries of “kill the Americans” rose to a pitch along with war whoops and curses in both the Spanish and Pueblo tongues. The family could hear people clattering on the roof, trying to smash through. In desperation, someone suggested they endeavor to break through the wall the adobe shared with the house next door, and the women frantically set at this task using fire pokers and iron kitchen tools. Bent, meantime, was shouting out a broken window, trying to reason with the mob, but they only laughed and cursed at him. Gunfire coming through either a window or the door hit Bent in the face and stomach, while the women hysterically beat and clawed at the soft adobe bricks.
Soon they had cracked a hole large enough for a human body and after the children had gone through Bent’s wife, Ignacia, was adamant that the governor should go next. But the arrows still sticking out of his head would not fit through the narrow opening and Bent was obliged to withdraw and pull them out from beneath his skin before reentering the hole “holding his hand on top of his bleeding head.” Just then some Indians burst into the house and confronted Ignacia with a gun. Her servant, an orphaned Navajo woman, jumped in between her mistress and the gunman and was shot.
The shooter then struck Ignacia with the gun butt and was about to finish her off when one of his companions discovered the hole broken into the wall and crawled through. Other Indians had already broken into the next-door house and were wandering its rooms. By then Bent was enfeebled from his wounds and lying down, his head cradled by Mrs. Thomas Boggs, one of his houseguests. With his stunned and horrified family watching, a Pueblo named Tomás Romero burst in and seized Bent by his suspenders and jerked him up, only to smash him to the floor, pounce on him, and scalp him alive. Other Indians riddled Bent’s body with arrows and still others finally put him out of his misery in a hail of gunfire.
The assailants stripped Bent of all his clothes and began to mutilate him with knives. Some reports said he was decapitated. A plank was brought out and Bent’s bloody scalp was stretched upon it, nailed with brass tacks. This was then proudly paraded through Taos by the drunken mob, as the early rays of sunlight dappled the adobe-lined streets. Before leaving, the Indians took all the belongings of the Bents and the next-door house, including all the food. The Bent family and their guests were then warned not to leave their house, and the townspeople were warned not to give them food or any other kind of assistance.
The mob then fell on the Taos sheriff, Stephen Lee, and murdered him on his rooftop as he sought to escape. They seized the United States attorney, J. W. Leal, stripped him naked, and paraded him through the town, singing, as they stuck him with lances and arrows before scalping him alive. “Praying them to kill him, he instead received arrows that drove delicately into his eyes, mouth and nose. He was thrown broken and alive to freeze in a ditch for several hours. At last the rebels in their terrible sense of virtue returned from other work and killed him with a few final arrows. His body was then given to hogs who feasted upon it.”
Taos prefect Cornelio Vigil was chopped into pieces. Two boys, Pablo Jaramillo, a nephew of Bent’s, and his friend Narciso Beaubien, who had just returned from boarding school in Missouri, had hidden under some straw in a stable when they were discovered. They were tortured, scalped alive, and killed. The mob then began to loot the town, cleaning out Bent’s store and Kit Carson’s home. Hundreds of others descended on a liquor distillery just north of Taos and murdered its American owner, Simeon Turley, and seven of nine mountain men who had been staying there on a toot. But not without a fight. The trappers held out all day, completely surrounded and picked off one by one, until the last two managed to get away that night. Likewise, another bloodthirsty horde fell upon an American pack train and massacred eight American men. Next day the mob, Mexican and Indian alike, now more than a thousand strong and drunker than ever thanks to the proceeds of the Turley distillery, marched on Santa Fe, gaining strength at every town and village and swearing to liberate the territory from American rule.
Next morning, word of the calamity and the impending rebel attack reached Santa Fe through Governor Bent’s personal slave, a black man named Dick Green, who had somehow escaped the Taos massacre. Donaciano Vigil, brother of the slain Taos prefect, was appointed acting governor by Colonel Price, and he and Price laid plans to strike the rebellion a mighty blow. Because of the lack of animal fodder at Santa Fe, it had been necessary for Price to scatter his troops as far as Albuquerque and the Pecos River. Now he began desperately calling them in. A furious Ceran St. Vrain, partner in the Bent’s Fort enterprise, organized a grim and grizzled company that included the trappers, mountain men, merchants, friendly Mexicans, and Dick Green, keen to avenge the murder of his master. Numbering sixty-five men, and mounted, they took the company name Avengers. For many of them, in addition to Green, it was personal, and their eyes must have glinted like the steel in their knives.
It took Price three days to organize his response force, which at that time consisted of 353 men, all dismounted except for St. Vrain’s company, as well as four small but effective mountain howitzers and a six-pounder gun. On January 23 he marched out of Santa Fe and early next day encountered fifteen hundred Mexicans and Indians, led by a Hispanic named Pablo Montoya who called himself “general,” waiting behind entrenchments at a village called Santa Cruz de la Cañada. With fire and maneuver, and furious infantry assaults with house-to-house fighting, Price soon scattered these people, killing thirty-six and driving the rest back toward Taos, at a cost to himself of two killed and eight wounded. Fortuitously, the U.S. Dragoons that Kearny had sent back from the California expedition arrived on the scene, led by Captain J. H. K. Burgwin. Price now commanded a not insignificant force of 480 men, some of them mounted regulars.
His task was immensely complicated by heavy winter snows, which clogged the high mountain passes and fell in clumps from green mountain pines. The Americans invariably met resistance by the rebels, who then fought a rearguard guerrilla-style action. At Embudo Pass in freezing cold Price drove the rebels again, slaying twenty and capturing sixty wounded and pressed them on again toward Taos, where he arrived February 2 to find the enemy, numbering in the thousands, drawn up at the Pueblo to make a final stand.
The thousand-year-old Taos Pueblo, about two miles north of the city in the shadows of the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, consisted of two massive facing adobe pyramids, seven stories in height, with a creek running between them. It was a formidable defensive position, with walls up to three feet thick and reached only by ladders, which could be drawn up. The Pueblo itself was enclosed by an adobe wall, forming a square, with a sturdy adobe mission, San Geronimo, along the north section of wall. The rebels had concentrated in the courtyard and in the mission church.
With his light mountain artillery, Price began to batter at the stout outer wall of this imposing citadel, but without much effect, and at sundown, to the jeers of the Pueblo’s defenders, he retired across the windy plain to Taos to rest and regroup. He was confident at this point that the rebels had no other place to go.
Next morning, Price ordered St. Vrain’s Avengers—as he had in the previous two engagements—to circle around behind the rebels so as to swoop down on any fugitives. Captain Burgwin’s dragoons were posted to the west of the mission, just out of gunshot range.
The artillery was positioned both east and west, in order to obtain a crossfire that converged on the church where a majority of the rebels congregated, apparently intending to make a last stand. At nine a.m. on February 4 the guns began to fire.
For the next two hours the artillery bombardment increased in intensity. At eleven o’clock Price ordered a cease-fire to assess the damage. When the smoke cleared he was disgusted to find that the mission appeared practically undamaged. Its thick adobe walls had simply absorbed the cannonballs without crumbling. Meantime, the rebels had punched out loopholes in the mission walls to shoot from and were also sniping from the roof. Having run out of options, Price ordered a plain old infantry charge. From the west Captain Burgwin’s two hundred dragoons dismounted and formed in ranks. Along the north wall a similar formation dressed ranks. At the signal, nearly four hundred U.S. soldiers moved out in perfect marching formation, “flags waving, drums and fife marking the tempo, with officers leading the way, drawn swords gesturing overhead.”
As they came within rifle range the American companies broke into a run until they were flat against the huge earthen walls of the church, which they immediately began attacking with pickaxes and crowbars. Others found ladders and managed to climb atop the church and light it afire. In the meanwhile, Captain Burgwin—who as described by a mountain man who knew him was “as brave a soldier as was ever seen on the frontier”—took a party round to the huge wooden entrance door, only to find it securely bolted. As the men undertook to break through, Burgwin was shot dead by a gunman in the adjoining pueblo, but this so enraged his soldiers that they managed to hack a hole in the wall, through which they pushed artillery shells with the fuses lit. Lieutenant Alexander Dyer, Price’s artillery officer, moved the six-pound gun to within fifty yards of the church and fired a dozen rounds, which blew a gaping hole in the building.
By midafternoon the roof of the mission was engulfed in flame, and amid all the roaring and banging and racketing Lieutenant Dyer wheeled his six-pounder to within ten yards of the ragged breach in the church wall and began blasting away with grapeshot. This produced a fearful slaughter inside the church, and the air was punctuated by the shrieks and howls of men being torn apart by the shot.
Dyer ceased firing and American soldiers stormed inside the mission through the gaping fissure to behold an appalling sight. The floor, walls, and bench pews were drenched in blood and pieces of flesh and the air was thick with gunpowder and hung heavy with the stench of gore. The nave and apse were strewn with scores of the dead and dying and those few still able to resist were quickly dispatched.
Nevertheless, in the face of the point-blank cannon fire, several hundred had managed to escape into the Pueblo apartments. Fifty-four of the insurgents ran through the back door toward the foothills of the mountains; unluckily for them, St. Vrain’s Avengers had stationed themselves in a large semicircle around that part of the Pueblo, in contemplation of just that eventuality. Hidden in brush or behind rocks with their weapons at the ready the Avengers made short work of these fugitives, mostly without quarter, slaughtering fifty-one out of the fifty-four in what amounted to a kind of impromptu turkey shoot. Those who weren’t gunned down outright were fallen upon with knives and hatchets.
By sundown the roof of the church had caved in and the blackened beams hung down crazily as clouds sailed overhead against the bright azure sky. An American flag was planted at the entrance to the church, which had become a smoldering ruin. While bodies were still being cleared, the U.S. troops bedded down for the night in and around the church, expecting the fight to continue the next day.
But upon arising Price noted a number of white flags flying from the rebel pueblos, and soon he was beseeched by elders of the tribe, accompanied by women and children, pleading for peace. This Price granted, “thinking that the severe loss they had sustained would prove a salutary lesson,” but only on the condition that they give up the instigators of the rebellion. This stipulation was agreed to and seventeen of the leading rebels were put on trial for murder and treason.
The battle at the Taos Pueblo had cost Sterling Price twenty killed and twenty-nine wounded, including several outstanding officers. It cost the rebels 150 killed and nearly that number wounded. Price left a powerful force to ensure the peace in Taos and returned to Santa Fe with the main part of the army. The revolt had turned into one of the bloodiest episodes of the Mexican-American War, and afterward there was speculation that the clergy had played a large hand in its instigation. Priests held huge sway among the Pueblos, nearly all of whom were illiterate and susceptible to influence. In particular a long accusatory finger has been pointed at Padre Antonio José Martínez of Taos by no less than Kit Carson, who remained convinced that the powerful priest was involved in the uprising and in Bent’s murder. The evidence is slim, but it was well known that Martínez disliked Bent and opposed his requests for land grants from the Mexican government. It has been suggested that the animus began when Bent refused to convert to Catholicism when he married Ignacia.
Others saw deeper involvements. The religious makeup of New Mexico nurtured many strange and almost inscrutable tentacles of Catholicism, including a branch or sect called Penitentes, a cult of self-flagellates that Padre Martínez oversaw. Then there were the so-called Marrano Jews of New Mexico, who seemed strangely evocative of the accursed Lamanites, who, according to the golden tablets of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, had lost all memory of their culture. Like all good Mexicans, the Marranos (or Crypto-Jews) were, by law, practicing Catholics, but still they atavistically washed their hands on Fridays and lit Hebrew candelabras without ever knowing why. It was said that they were descendants of converso Jews from Spain, who had converted to Catholicism but then, beginning in the fifteenth century, nevertheless became targets for the Spanish Inquisition. To avoid torture or burning at the stake, so the story went, these people joined up with the early conquistadors for expeditions to the new world and somehow managed to escape to the more remote parts of Mexico.
In any case the Church in New Mexico was deeply suspicious of Americans and America, with its secular policies and heavy concentration of Protestants. With good reason the priests feared a loss of power and influence and, like powerful and influential men everywhere, they came to hate what they feared.
The trials of the rebel conspirators took place in the spring of 1847. By modern judicial standards it could easily be deemed a kangaroo court, but in those times justice often worked with what it had, which, in the case of New Mexico, wasn’t much. Among the judges, for instance, were Charles Beaubien, father of the slain and scalped boy Narciso, and Joab Houghten, a close friend of the deceased governor. The foreman of the jury was none other than Charles Bent’s brother, George, and the jury was composed of a number of Bent friends as well as the famed trapper and mountain man Lucien Maxwell, who was married to Narciso Beaubien’s sister. The court interpreter was Ceran St. Vrain. The verdicts seemed foregone.
The two principal conspirators were Tomás Romero, the Pueblo who led the Taos mob and harangued Governor Bent on his doorstep, then scalped him alive, and Pablo Montoya, the Mexican who served as so-called general of the rebel band. However, on the day before trial an impatient dragoon named Fitzgerald murdered Romero in his cell, leaving Montoya to face the music alone. After a fair trial he was sentenced to death by hanging. Court was in session fifteen days, during which another fifteen rebels received the death sentence. The executions were carried out starting April 9 when six of the condemned, “miserable in dress, miserable in features, miserable in feelings,” were trundled to the town plaza in the back of a donkey wagon. Seventeen-year-old Lewis H. Garrard, who left his St. Louis home a few months earlier for a little western adventure, had joined up with St. Vrain’s Avengers and, along with a battalion of Price’s soldiers, had the duty of escorting the prisoners to the gallows, which was nothing more than a long, bare tree limb in the plaza square.
The sheriff had borrowed the lassos of Garrard and some o
thers to do the hanging and greased the nooses with Mexican soft soap to make the knot slip quickly. The method of hanging in Taos did not involve a proper gallows in which the condemned fell through a trap that instantly broke his neck. Instead it consisted of a prolonged, twisting strangulation when the donkey cart was moved out from beneath him.
Such was the fate of this first crew of six. About nine in the morning they were given a chance to say their last piece; then each turned to the others to bid adiós before the sheriff started the mules and, one by one, they were dancing on air in the bright New Mexico morning. There they twisted for a long while; as Garrard tells it, “The bodies swayed back and forth, and, coming in contact with each other, convulsive shudders shook their frames, the muscles contracting, would relax, and again contract, and the bodies writhed most horribly. While thus swinging,” he continued, “the hands of two came together, which they held with a firm grasp till the muscles loosened in death.”
This was the gruesome reality of life and death along the frontier, where the lofty thoughts of civilized men dwelled on putting down native rebellions and pacifying the Indians. And the Treaty of Bear Springs? It was broken almost immediately by the Navajos, who redoubled their outrages against the Mexican farmers and stockmen as soon as Kearny’s and Doniphan’s soldiers were safely out of sight.
* Military officers in those times were permitted to bring a servant along with them. Since Emory was from a slaveholding family in Maryland, it is highly probable that his servant was a bondsman. Likewise with Lieutenant Warner.
† In Santa Fe it had been learned that a map of sorts had been constructed of at least the central part of New Mexico. At that point, anything would have helped. When officers would ask villagers about trails, terrain, and directions they simply shrugged their shoulders. Few, if any, had ever been far outside their own village.