Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (37 page)

Ignacia handed the governor his pistols, but he shook his head. “It’s pointless—there’s too many out there,” he said. “If I use these, they’ll massacre all of us.”

“Then why don’t you jump on one of those and go somewhere?” Ignacia pleaded, pointing out the window at the horses corralled in the courtyard.

“Ignacia, no,” Bent said. “It wouldn’t do for the governor to run away and leave his family. If they want to kill me, they can kill me here.”

Above them, they heard a terrific scraping and digging sound. Some of the mob had clambered onto the parapets; they were trying to tear away the dirt roof and bore through the ceiling. By now everyone in the household had risen—the Bents’ daughter Teresina, their son Alfredo, Josefa Carson, Rumalda Boggs, as well as an Indian servant who was probably a kidnapped Navajo. They huddled together, sobbing and shivering in fright.

One of the women devised a plan. The Bent home happened to be connected to another residence by a shared wall of thick adobe bricks. Grabbing whatever tools they could find—a fire poker, large metal spoons—the women scrambled to a back room of the house and began to claw their way through the wall. They pried the bricks apart and scraped at the mortar until they could see light on the other side.

As they worked in a frantic fury, the governor tried to buy time with the rabble outside. Shouting through a broken window, he offered them money, but they only laughed in derision. Bent’s son Alfredo appeared at his side. The boy was holding a shotgun in his hands. He peered up at his father with a determined grimace and said, “Let’s fight them, Papa.” But Bent told the boy: No, it was too late for that, hurry back to the women and help them dig.

The governor resumed his attempts to stall for time. He still clung to the hope that he could pacify the crowd. Bellowing out the window, he promised to set up a committee to hear all Indian grievances, and then offered himself up as a prisoner if they would take him away peaceably.

They would have none of it. “We will start with you,” one of them yelled back, “and then we will kill every last American in New Mexico!” A blast of musket fire drilled through the front door. One of the ricocheting bullets pierced the governor in the abdomen, another creased his chin.

By this point the women in the back room had scraped and gouged the hole until it was just big enough for a person to squeeze through. Teresina and Alfredo crawled through first, then Josefa and Rumalda. Realizing that the hordes outside were on the verge of breaking in, Ignacia insisted that Governor Bent go next.

“You’re the one they want,” she said. “Not me.”

Reluctantly, he agreed. But the governor had forgotten about the arrows buried in his head and face, and now they pinched and buckled and tore at him as he squeezed into the tight passage. In a rage, Bent stood up and plucked the arrows from his head and crushed them against the plaster wall. Then he dived back into the hole, gingerly holding his bleeding pate with one hand as he forced his stout body through to the other side.

By then the Taos Indians had broken into the house and were storming through the rooms. They seized Ignacia and one of them raised his rifle to shoot her, but the Navajo servant woman, who had lived as a peon with the Bent family for much of her life and was as loyal as she was brave, stood in front of her mistress in an attempt to shield her—and was promptly gunned down.

The Indian attacker then turned on Ignacia, striking her on the back with the butt of his gun and bringing her to her knees. He and his comrades moved on without causing her further harm. They discovered the hole in the wall and began crawling.

In the house on the other side of the wall, Governor Bent fumbled through his pockets for his memoranda book, with the notion of writing his last words, or possibly a will. He had lost a great deal of blood and was growing faint. Rumalda Boggs cradled him in her arms as he tried to compose his thoughts. He knew the invaders were pressing in on all sides, and that it was only a matter of time. Before he could write anything down, the Taos Indians stole into the building—some streaming in through the passageway from his house, others digging through the dirt roof and dropping down through the
vigas
.

And then, with Teresina, Alfredo, Rumalda, and Josefa watching in horror, they set upon him. The mob’s main instigator, a firebrand from the Taos Pueblo named Tomacito Romero, hoisted the governor by his suspenders and hurled him onto the hard dirt floor. They shot more arrows into his body, then riddled him with bullets. The children pleaded for mercy, but, as Teresina Bent later recalled, “Our sobbing had no power to soften their enraged hearts.” Tomacito leaned over the governor’s still-living form and raked a bowstring over his scalp, pulling away his gray hair in a glistening sheath. As Rumalda described it, the skin was “cut as cleanly with the tight cord as it would have with a knife.”

Gloating over their triumphs, crying in a drunken delight, the attackers stripped Governor Bent of all his clothes and then slashed and mutilated him until he ceased to breathe. Someone brought a board and some brass tacks. They stretched out the governor’s scalp and nailed it taut to the plank. And then they brought their trophies out into the dawn light and marched toward the town plaza and the mazy mud streets of Taos.

Bent’s children were still cringing on the floor with their Aunt Josefa, all of them cursed to be American by blood or marriage—and believing they were next.

The rampage continued all that day and into the next. The Taos Indians and their Mexican allies had vowed to kill every American in the territory, and they were making good on their promise. The entire party in which Governor Bent had traveled from Santa Fe was now marked. Prefect Cornelio Vigil was hacked to pieces. Sheriff Stephen Lee was killed on the roof of his own house. U.S. Circuit Attorney James Leal was stripped and tortured for hours in broad daylight, and then thrown, blinded but still breathing, into a ditch where he was eaten by hogs.

Next the mob set upon Narciso Beaubien and Pablo Jaramillo, apparently ignoring the fact that these boys were not American. The two young friends were hiding under a straw-covered trough in a stable not far from the Bent house when an Indian servant tipped off the rebels, saying, “Kill the young ones, and they will never be men to trouble us.” The Pueblo Indians slashed and pierced the boys with lances until they were unrecognizable.

 

End of the Trail: A Missouri caravan arrives in Santa Fe after a journey of nearly one thousand miles; a lithograph from the 1840s.

 

 

“Not so much a place as a new kind of existence”: Merchant ox and mule teams crowd the streets of Santa Fe, 1867.

 

 

“Nature’s Gentleman”: One of the earliest known portraits of Kit Carson, taken in the early 1840s.

 

 

“It was all over a squaw”: An artist’s conceptualization of Kit Carson’s 1835 duel with the French trapper Chouinard at the Green River mountain-man rendezvous.

 

 

“A good girl, a good housewife, and good to look at”: An idealized portrait of Carson’s first wife, the Arapaho beauty Singing Grass.