Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (40 page)

This sortie proved overly bold, however. Burgwin left himself exposed to direct fire from the rebel loopholes, and he was promptly cut down by a sniper within the church. With their captain slain, Burgwin’s men redoubled their efforts and finally managed to chip away a small hole in the wall with their axes. Some lit fused shells with matches and tossed them into the church by hand while others propped crude ladders against the walls and ascended with torches to ignite the roof.

By three o’clock in the afternoon an inferno was blazing from the rooftop. Colonel Price rolled his six-pounder—a howitzer that fired a six-pound shell packed with grapeshot—within fifty yards of the mission. The artillery piece pummeled the building with ten rounds, and when the dust thinned it was discovered that one of the shells had directly struck and enlarged the ragged hole that Burgwin’s ax-men had initiated; the breach was now nearly wide enough to admit a person. Encouraged by this, Price had his artillerymen draw the six-pounder within ten yards and blast away at the fissure until it was a yawning gap. This point-blank bombardment resulted in a wholesale slaughter inside; scores of Taos Indians packed in the mission were sliced to pieces by hot shrapnel, and the Americans outside could clearly hear their pitiful cries of agony. As one participant recalled, “The mingled noise of bursting shells and the shrieks of the wounded was most appalling.”

Now Price’s soldiers stormed through the breach. One of the first to leap inside was Dick Green, Charles Bent’s black slave. Inside the mission it was intensely hot and thick with acrid smoke, and mangled forms lay moaning on the floor. Most of the defenders were either dead, wounded, or fast quitting the church through a back door and fleeing east toward the mountains. Those who still dared to put up a fight were soon gunned down or killed in hand-to-hand fighting. There was a suicidally brave Delaware Indian married into the Taos tribe who was, according to one account, “a keen shot and the most desperate of the enemy.” The Delaware refused to surrender even as the blackened church rafters creaked and sagged in imminent collapse. The Americans chased him to a back room behind the altar and riddled him with thirty balls.

The church had become a charnel house, the smoke inside “so dense it was impossible to exist in it,” wrote one young artillery officer. Eager to declare victory, the troops planted the Stars and Stripes in one of the sturdy mud walls of the church, but several retreating Mexicans stopped long enough to shoot it to tatters.

East of the Pueblo, hidden in the brush, their weapons loaded and cocked, Ceran St. Vrain’s volunteers waited. As the insurgents scurried for the foothills, the company slaughtered more than fifty of them, dropping the first wave with well-placed bullets, then chasing down the rest with clubs and knives. One of the men succinctly recalled, “They fled in every direction. Not much quarter was asked or given.” St. Vrain himself was nearly killed by an Indian who, playing dead, suddenly sprang upon him with a steel-tipped spear.

Later, one of the escaping Taos Indians emerged from a thicket of sage and cringed before St. Vrain’s lynching squads, calling out,
“Bueno! Bueno! Me like Americanos.”

One of the trappers curtly replied in Spanish, “If you like the Americans, take this sword and return to the brush, and kill all the rebels you find there.”

The terrified Indian accepted the sword and disappeared into the sage as he’d been told. A few minutes later he returned with his blade “dripping with gore,” according to one trapper account.

“I have killed them,” the Pueblo Indian reported, although the blood on the sword may well have been from the body of a fellow countryman—or a Mexican ally—who had already fallen in battle.

The American trapper who had dispatched him on his errand raised his Hawken rifle in disgust and replied, “Well, then you ought to die for killing your own people,” and shot the Indian dead.

The battle for Taos raged the rest of the day and into the next. Colonel Price’s soldiers went door to door, ransacking the place in search of holdouts. They camped inside the northern pueblo, which the Indians had abandoned, and feasted on the Taos cattle and corn and wheat. They lowered Captain Burgwin into a grave, and then buried thirty other Americans en masse in a long trench near the still-smoldering church, not far from where they’d fallen. Price’s lieutenants arrested scores of rebels, Pueblo and Mexican alike, including Tomacito Romero, the man who had scalped Governor Bent alive. Tomacito was confined in a cell to await a formal trial, but an angry dragoon visited him under the pretense of questioning him. The soldier promptly drew his pistol and shot the Indian leader in the head.

Finally, on the third day, the distraught women of the pueblo emerged from the southern apartment complex bearing white flags and sacred relics to offer the Americans. As one witness put it, “They kneeled before the colonel to supplicate for the lives of their surviving friends.” Colonel Price accepted their surrender under the condition that these Pueblos turn over other leaders of the insurrection.

Nearly two hundred Pueblo Indians had lost their lives and many more lay wounded. The Pueblos had been utterly defeated. The day after the battle, a young Cincinnati writer named Lewis Garrard walked over the charred and rubbled remains of the village. Garrard, who had traveled to Taos with a group of trappers from Bent’s Fort, captured the desolation of the village with pathos. “A few half scared Pueblos walked listlessly about, staring in a state of gloomy abstraction,” he wrote. “Their leaders were dead, their grain and cattle gone, their church in ruins, the flower of the nation slain or under sentence of death. In the superstitious belief of the protection afforded by the holy Church, they were astounded beyond measure that they should be forsaken in the hour of need. That
los diablos Americanos
should, within the limits of consecrated ground, trample triumphant, was too much to bear.”

A few weeks later a government wagon was parked beneath a leafless cottonwood tree. Two mules were harnessed to the vehicle, and they stood still on this bright cold morning, unaware of their present purpose. A long plank was set across the rear of the wagon, overlapping each side by several feet. From a gnarled gray branch of the tree dangled six rope nooses, recently moistened with soapy water to make them pliable.

People were crowded on the rooftops, trying to get a glimpse of the first public hanging Taos had ever known. A guard of soldiers led the six condemned Pueblo Indians through the town and to the gallows. During the trial, the prisoners had been confined to a cold, dark, filthy room, and now their appearance was deplorable. Lewis Garrard described them as “trembling wretches…miserable in dress, ragged, lousy, greasy, and unwashed.” They were marched to the tree and told to climb up in the wagon. They had to be careful to balance the plank just right. Two stepped on the middle of the board, while the two other couples offset each other, perching on the overhanging ends. Now the six stood facing the mule-driver, so close together that their arms touched. The sheriff adjusted the nooses around their necks.

“Mi madre, mi padre,”
one of the doomed was heard to mutter. Then another yelled, through gritted teeth:
“Carajo, los Americanos.”

Their trials had been crude. Judge Carlos Beaubien, whose own son had been murdered in the revolt, presided. Ceran St. Vrain served as court interpreter. And the jury box was packed with vindictive Americans who’d had loved ones die and property stolen.

Ignacia Bent and Josefa Carson had testified convincingly in court, sharing the grisly details of the governor’s murder. Yet many of the insurgents had been convicted not for murder, but for treason—quite a feat of legal legerdemain when one considers that Mexico was still at war with the United States. Lewis Garrard, who observed the trials, was puzzled and then incensed by the charge. “To conquer a country and then arraign the revolting inhabitants for treason,” Garrard wrote, “certainly was a great assumption. What did these poor devils know about their new allegiance?”

Whatever the charge, the sentences had all come down the same, pronounced by the solemn voice of Judge Beaubien—
“Muerto, muerto, muerto.”

The massacre of Governor Bent had been instigated by Pueblo Indians, it is true—by several dozen of the most desperate members of the tribe. But the larger revolt, the province-wide revolution, had been smiled upon—and in all likelihood masterminded—by a few well-placed Mexican leaders and Catholic priests who would forever remain in the shadows, their identities unknown, their conspiratorial roles suspected but never proven.

So the Pueblo Indians would pay the price. Precisely what they had been promised for defying the Americans, precisely what they had expected to gain in return, no one knows—the Taos Indians never wrote their own account of the revolt. (Even today, if you visit the lovely Pueblo, with its old mission church still moldering in ruins, the locals will gently admonish you for even asking if such an account exists. “Everything is oral here,” they say, the old days are not open for study, and those events of 1847 are never to be spoken of, except perhaps in the smoky safety of the kivas.)

Now the American sheriff gave the signal, and the driver
hawed
the mules forward. The doomed kept their feet on the board until the last possible moment. With a sudden snap, the men fell in unison and the nooses yanked tightly. Garrard described how their bodies swayed back and forth, and how in coming in contact with each other, they shuddered convulsively. “The muscles would relax and again contract,” he wrote, “and the bodies writhed most horribly.”

But in this random twisting, the hands of two of the Taos Indians found each other. Garrard noticed that their fingers became locked in a firm grip, a handshake of brotherhood, “which they held till the muscles loosened in death.”

St. Louis, the roistering frontier capital, lay at the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi, whose snaggy brown waters were filled with steamships. The humid city climbed off the alluvial banks, its streets of dirt and cobblestone crammed with dray wagons and dearborns and lined with locust trees, its huddled neighborhoods radiating west from the wharves in an orderly grid that had been established by the city’s French founders. For such a remote city in the hinterlands, St. Louis was a surprisingly cosmopolitan place of more than fifteen thousand souls, a city with its own peculiar Creole culture. Its taverns were filled with French and Spanish and queer Indian tongues—and, more recently, with the tongues of the newer immigrants, the Germans and the Irish, who had come west in droves looking for good work and free land.

The last time Carson passed through here, in 1842, St. Louis was a smallish town perched at the edge of the United States, capital of the westernmost state. Now, in the spring of 1847, the city was almost unrecognizable. Without the residents knowing it, St. Louis had effectively become the geographical center of the country. In only a few short months, through far-flung military events Carson had himself witnessed, the fulcrum of the nation had shifted west more than a thousand miles. The margin had become the middle.