Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (39 page)

 

“My happiness directs me to my home and family”: The Kit Carson House, photographed in the 1930s.

 

 

Taos Pueblo: One of the oldest continually inhabited villages in North America—originally settled around
A.D.
1300—the pueblo was the site of the bloody American siege that ended the 1847 Taos Revolt.

 

Now the rebels swarmed in all directions. They broke open the jail and freed the two Pueblo Indian prisoners whose incarceration had sparked their ire. They smashed into Bent’s store and picked the place clean. They broke into Kit Carson’s house, too, and pillaged everything; if Carson had been home and not off in California, he almost certainly would have been attacked and killed.

The revolt spread to other parts of the north. Mexicans set upon U.S. pack trains and grazing camps, killing all Americans they could find and stealing large herds of animals. Every American trader, merchant, and mountain man was now in mortal danger. Near the town of Mora, some forty miles to the southeast, eight Americans traveling in a caravan were murdered in cold blood. In the tiny settlement of Arroyo Hondo, north of Taos, a force of several hundred Pueblo Indians surrounded the house of a well-known American named Simeon Turley, who ran the distillery that produced Taos Lightning, the pure-grain alcohol on which many of the Indians were now drunk. As it happened, nine American trappers were staying at the Turley mill that day, most of them friends of Charles Bent and Carson. The Indians encircled the place and, after a prolonged siege, killed all but two of the Americans, who managed to escape under cover of night.

All told, seventeen Americans were murdered in the opening hours of the revolt, but the rebels were not yet sated. Now a ragtag force of nearly a thousand insurrectionists, Indian and Mexican alike, were clamoring toward Santa Fe, collecting recruits as they marched south. Delirious from their initial success, they now planned to overtake Fort Marcy and storm the Palace of the Governors, driving out every trace of the American presence.

What had started as a localized Indian grievance had ignited into a full-scale Hispanic rebellion of the north. Yet it was not entirely spontaneous, for the revolution almost certainly was encouraged by certain Catholic priests around Taos—Padre Antonio Martinez was widely suspected—and possibly by influential
penitente
leaders as well. The revolt did not greatly differ in sentiment or design from earlier plots that had been laid for the December insurrection, the one that Bent and Price had narrowly thwarted just before Christmas. The Taos rebels had not formulated much of a plan other than to drive the Americans out, but with so much discontent on which to feed, that was enough.

For some reason the rebels spared the lives of the women and children huddled inside the Bent home. After stealing nearly everything from the house, the Indians told the family to stay put, that under no circumstances should they leave the premises or they would be killed. As Teresina Bent later recalled, “They ordered that no one should feed us, and then left us alone with our great sorrow.” The Bents only had their nightgowns to wear, because the mob had taken all their other clothes.

As the revolt fanned out over the north, Spanish women who were married to gringos prepared pastes of mud and spices to daub on their fair-complected half-American children so they might look darker. Whether Ignacia Bent went to these lengths with her own children, the record does not show. But that first night, Josefa Carson disguised herself as an Indian slave and slipped away to live at a friend’s house, where she ground corn at a metate and kept to other menial tasks expected of a New Mexico servant.

For two days the Bent family grieved and starved in their bare cold house while the governor’s scalped body lay naked on the floor in a congealed pool of blood.

On January 21, 1847, when Sterling Price learned what horrors had transpired in the north, he flew into action, swiftly mustering a force to put down the revolt. The colonel decided not to wait for the Taos rebels to come to him, but rather to meet them head-on, thus stanching their hopes of gathering more recruits as they swarmed south toward Santa Fe. It was a bold decision to leave the capital undefended and thus vulnerable to insurgents who might materialize from other quarters, but Price thought it was worth the risk. He left Fort Marcy on the frigid morning of January 23 with four mountain howitzers and five companies of Missouri soldiers. Also in his party was a company of New Mexico volunteers, commanded by Ceran St. Vrain, a legendary Missouri fur trapper of French-Canadian descent who was Governor Bent’s business partner and part owner of Bent’s Fort.

St. Vrain was a burly man from St. Louis with great appetites, a connoisseur of good brandy, bawdy stories, and French obscenities. Historian David Lavender describes him as a “convivial figure, with a glossy black beard and wide-set eyes that were quick to crinkle in humor.” The volunteers St. Vrain managed to call up were a spirited hodgepodge that included suspenders-wearing American merchants, hirsute mountain men, and a surprising number of Mexicans who had suddenly seen the advantages of demonstrating their allegiance to the United States of America. For his part, St. Vrain’s cause was intensely personal: Like his friend Kit Carson, he had learned the frontier code of loyalty and swift reprisal, and now the seasoned mountain man was determined to “count coup” on those who’d murdered one of his own.

Another unlikely enlistee in this ad hoc army was a black man known as Dick Green: He was Charles Bent’s slave, whom the governor had left behind in Santa Fe. Apparently moved by genuine sorrow and outrage, Green wanted to do his part to avenge his master’s death.

Sterling Price’s force, numbering nearly four hundred men, marched northward from the capital, fired by an urgent fury. “We were tiger-like in our craving for revenge,” one American trapper recalled. But the thick snow soon stymied their march. Many of Price’s men got frostbitten feet as they slogged through the same tiny settlements that Governor Bent and his entourage had passed through a week earlier. This time the villagers did not scowl at the Americans; in fact, they scarcely showed their faces at all. It was plain to see that this army was out for blood—and that little would be required to provoke it. Whatever their true loyalties, the locals were prudent enough to stay out of sight, keeping to their high-walled plazas and adobe compounds.

At half past one on the afternoon of January 24, the Americans met the forward lines of the Taos rebels outside the rural village of Santa Cruz de la Cañada. Price’s soldiers mounted a series of ferocious charges, fighting from hilltop to hilltop, and from door to door, until the insurgents were rooted from their holes and thrown back in retreat just before dusk. The American forces at La Cañada suffered only eight casualties. Thirty-six of the enemy lay dead.

Two days later Price’s men encountered another line of resistance in a canyon near a place along the Rio Grande called Embudo. “Soon the enemy began to retire, bounding along the rugged mountains,” Price reported with pleasure. In the fray, St. Vrain lost only two men while the rebels counted upward of twenty dead and another sixty wounded.

Other than deep snowdrifts, no further obstacles stood in the way of Price’s last push into Taos. Scouts brought word to the colonel that the insurgents had all fallen back to the safety of Taos Pueblo, where in their thousands they were barricading themselves behind the massive adobe walls, preparing for a final stand.

First settled around
A.D.
1300, Taos Pueblo was one of the oldest continually inhabited places in North America. The pueblo’s two enormous apartment complexes lay separated from each other by an icy creek that spilled from the looming Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The source of the people’s drinking water, the creek originated in a beautiful alpine lake that figured prominently in the tribe’s cosmology. With the two seven-storied buildings rising from the banks as though replying to one another, the village hunkered in an exquisite symmetry. The staggered rooflines were connected by scores of wooden ladders, and the long centuries had left the mud-slathered ramparts gracefully mottled and warped. Piñon smoke issued from the sunken kivas where the men gathered in council. Women scurried about in their bright blankets and doeskin boots, tending to their outdoor ovens, shaped like beehives, in which they baked the soft round bread that was a staple of the tribe. To the immediate east the snowy mountain peaks rose to a crowding height of nearly thirteen thousand feet, slabs and shards of rock arrayed in sublime confusion. Surrounded by high wooden fences and thick defensive walls, the village looked like a medieval Moroccan citadel set against the Atlas Mountains.

At the northwestern corner stood the enormous mission church of St. Jerome, whose twin belltowers rose thirty feet into the gray winter sky. It was a formidable building hugged close by an old graveyard jumbled with crosses. With bulging walls more than six feet thick, the St. Jerome mission offered an obvious refuge, and so it was here where most of the rebels massed. Perhaps the Taos Indians thought the American army would never dare attack a Catholic church—or even if it did, that the numerous holy relics and
santos
stashed along the vestibule walls and niches would protect them. If they had to die, they preferred to die here, closer to God; it was the one place in the world where they felt safe. Inside the dark and draughty cavern, bathed in the guttering light of votive candles, the rebels crudely punched loopholes into the walls from which to fire their weapons. And they waited.

When Colonel Price led his army to the walls of Taos Pueblo on the bitterly cold early morning of February 4, he was immediately impressed and daunted by the pueblo, finding it “a place of great strength, admirably calculated for defence.” From a tactical military standpoint, it presented puzzles of complexity he had never faced before. The ladders of the two great houses were all drawn up now, and, as one historian later put it, “their occupants waited within like creatures in burrows listening for a favorable change in the weather.” Price had Ceran St. Vrain and his trappers form a half circle around the eastern side of the town “to discover and intercept any fugitives who might attempt to escape toward the mountains.” Then the colonel ranged his artillery pieces around the mission and for two hours unleashed an intense bombardment. But the church walls were so thick and at the same time so soft that the shells did scarcely any damage—the friable mud bricks seemed to swallow up the balls and absorb the shock of their detonations.

Frustrated, Price told his artillerymen to cease fire, and then ordered a company of his soldiers under a Capt. J. H. K. Burgwin to charge the western and northern flanks of the church. Burgwin was one of Kearny’s best-trained dragoons, “as brave a soldier as was ever seen on the frontier,” according to one old trapper who watched him fight. Through withering fire, Burgwin’s men ran right up to the mission walls and began hacking into the adobe bricks with hatchets and axes. But Burgwin’s sappers were no more effective than the artillery shells had been at breaching the ramparts, so the captain hastened around to the front of the church with some of his men and attempted to break down the immense wooden door.