Heroes of the Santa Fe Trail

by Randy D. Smith

  The Invincibles waited for several weeks along the river. They had reason to believe that the spring caravan from Missouri, composed mainly of Mexicans, was returning to Santa Fe. They intended to seize and plunder it. Warfield knew from his scouts that Governor Manuel Armijo had consigned for such a caravan. No man, other than Santa Anna, was more hated by the Texans after the failed Santa Fe expedition.

  When a caravan arrived, it was the American Bent brothers with stock for Bent’s Fort to the west. The Texans met with the Bents and finally learned what happened to McDaniel and the Missourians. John McDaniel had assembled a small force of fourteen hooligans. Sometime between the 7th and 10th of April, about 240 miles west of Independence, he encountered a rich and influential Mexican merchant, Don Antonio Jose Chavez, traveling east to purchase goods. Chavez was late because of losses of men and livestock suffered during the harsh winter weather. McDaniel forced Chavez off the trail. He robbed and brutally murdered Chavez in spite of objections from several members of the gang against the killing. The servants were set afoot to walk three hundred miles back to Bent’s Fort without arms, supplies or horses. It was a certain death sentence if the weather turned against them. After part of the band withdrew because of the disagreement over the killing of Chavez, McDaniel and seven companions proceeded as far west as the Big Bend of the Arkansas. At that point McDaniel turned around, apparently because of hostile Indian signs.

  The Chavez family was popular with Santa Fe traders and the New Mexican government. An international incident arose over the affair. McDaniel and several of his group were captured. They were awaiting execution in Missouri. Worse yet, the entire frontier was looking for Snively and Warfield. New Mexicans had passed around the Mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail to avoid the Texans, using the Cimarron Cutoff. Washington had deployed dragoons to escort all merchants to the banks of the Arkansas and New Mexico was providing a military force of six hundred, under command of Armijo himself, from the other direction.

  After allowing the Bents safe passage, Snively formed his plan. He sent Warfield out with approximately half his men to delay Armijo’s force. The boundary between Mexico and the United States was roughly conceded as the Arkansas River east of the 100th meridian.

  If Warfield could delay Armijo long enough, the dragoon escort would have to stop at the river, allowing the Mexicans to proceed without escort down the Cutoff. Snively would then hit the caravan on soil claimed by Texas.

  Warfield’s force had advanced only approximately fifteen miles down the Cutoff when it ran into an advance guard of one hundred militiamen from the Armijo force, under the command of Captain Ventura Lovato. A pitched battle followed and the Texans killed or captured all but two Mexicans. When brave Governor Armijo learned of the rout, he turned tail back to Santa Fe.

  Another week passed without any sign of the Mexican caravan. Over seventy of Snively’s men decided to go home. On the final day of June, a force of 160 dragoons under the command of Captain Philip St. George Cooke, rode upon the Texans. Cooke had met Snively before when the later was a clerk in a shop in Nacogdoches, Texas. Cooke had little regard for Snively as a man or a leader of men. Cooke informed Snively that he was on U.S. soil. A hot argument over jurisdiction and boundary lines followed. Cooke settled the affair when he ordered his dragoons to either disarm the Texans or shoot them. The choice was left to the Invincibles with one of Cooke’s loaded canons aimed at them.

  Snively ordered his men to stand down and disarm. It was one thing to rob and kill Mexicans on Texas soil. It was quite another to fire upon troops flying the flag of Old Glory in U.S. Territory. Houston had explicitly ordered that no action be taken that would antagonize the American government or infringe upon its territory. After Snively surrendered, Cooke allowed the force to return to Texas without making any arrests.

  ***

  On July 1, 1843, an eastbound caravan from Santa Fe, which included the brother and nephew of Chavez, reached the Missouri frontier. The group had slipped past the Arkansas crossing before Snively’s arrival. The caravan was composed of 42 wagons, 180 men and carried over $250,000 in bullion. It would have been a rich prize for the Texans had they been a little earlier reaching their destination.

  The Texas Republic took immediate actions to disassociate the Warfield expedition from the actions of McDaniel. McDaniel, in spite of his Texas commission, was disavowed as a Missouri brigand committing a murder without the knowledge or approval of Warfield. The fallout of the incident could not be totally removed from Warfield’s shoulders. The St. Louis press issued a demand for the arrest of Warfield and urged Houston to “disavow having commissioned him for the business in which he has engaged.” Texas denounced Warfield because of his recruiting activities in Missouri, which violated the rights and neutral obligations between Texas and the United States. A letter was dispatched to Warfield on August 4, 1843, revoking his powers. By that time, Warfield and Snively were well on their way back to Texas. There is no record of whether Warfield received the letter while in the field. No apology was offered for the murder of Chavez since the Texas official position was that McDaniel’s deed was totally the act of an outlaw.

  On August 7, 1843, Santa Anna issued a decree closing all customhouses to Americans and commerce by way of the Santa Fe Trail. Missouri reacted with shock and outrage. A large part of the state’s economy depended on the Santa Fe trade. Influential native merchants in New Mexico and Chihuahua were equally dismayed. A faction threatened to side with Texas unless the decree was repealed. Revolution was openly advocated if the customhouses remained closed. Santa Anna’s rash reaction almost resulted in what Warfield had so miserably failed to accomplish.

  Once Santa Anna learned of the arrest of the McDaniel gang and the expelling of Snively’s command by Cooke, he changed his mind. On March 31, 1844, he reopened the ports and sent official notification to Washington. The affair was generally concluded. Santa Anna is said to have stated that “it was the first time the United States had shown a friendly spirit toward Mexico.”

  Warfield and Snively returned to obscurity. Warfield had ruined his chances of business with Santa Fe. Biographers make little mention of the incident in recalling the dramatic career of Sam Houston. The Warfield-Snively action is, by most standards, a minor incident in the history of the United States. Had things gone just a bit differently on the diplomatic front, or had Warfield’s grand plan been even remotely successful, Houston may have initiated a major international incident or even war, by issuing Warfield’s commission. As events turned out, discounting the brutal murder of Chavez, the Battalion of Invincibles provides almost grandiloquent comedy to the history of the Santa Fe Trail.

  Chapter 10

  Fort Garland’s Tom Tobin

  Tom Tobin

  Destined to remain in the shadows of men with greater reputations, trapper, scout and Indian fighter Tom Tobin was a major figure in the turbulent history of the Southwest.

  In 1979, a group of workmen were cleaning out several years of accumulated debris in the basement of the Colorado State Capitol building. As the mounds of refuse were being sorted, one of the men opened an old wooden box. What he found raised a minor storm of controversy and began several weeks of mystery until a satisfactory explanation could be determined. The box contained the skulls of two men wrapped carefully in a cloth. Eventually it was claimed that the skulls were the grizzly remains of two desperadoes, the Espinosa brothers, long thought lost in the history of early Colorado. Although the proof connecting the skulls to the Mexican outlaws has never been verified, it reawakened the memory of another man who had been generally neglected by Southwestern historians. If the skulls were genuine, they were the products of the actions of one man, Thomas Tate Tobin, of Fort Garland. During the early years of Colorado history, Tobin was directly linked with men such as Kit Carson, William and Charles Bent, Ceran St. Vrain and Dick Wootton. Always in the shadows of such men as these, his memory has remained a minor footnote in history. Tobin was an instr
umental figure in several famous incidents and was considered to be the last of the famous group of mountain men who blazed the trail of white settlement of the Southwest.

  Tobin was a man of swarthy complexion who claimed to be the half-breed son of an Irishman and a Delaware Indian woman. He was born May 1, 1823, in St. Louis, Missouri, and came west in the late 1830s with his half-brother, Charles Autobees. He spent several years trapping and scouting for the Bent-St. Vrain Company, headquartered at Bent’s Old Fort along the Arkansas River at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. During this time he became acquainted with another young adventurer, also employed by the Bents, named Christopher Carson. The men hunted and trapped together in a loose relationship that typified the on-again, off-again partnerships of most of the earlier trappers who explored the mountains looking for the riches of the beaver trade. They were among several buckskinners of the day who have come to be referred to as the Taos trappers. They used the old Spanish mission settlement of Taos, New Mexico, as a base for purchasing supplies and as an outlet for selling furs and hides. Few men ventured into the Colorado Rockies alone. The dangerous threats of the Indian and nature were real. These men formed into companies for mutual protection and partnerships to get the most money for their products.

  By 1838, the lucrative market for beaver pelts had failed and the number of beavers has fallen so drastically that most of these men turned to other means of making a living.

  Trading with Indians, buffalo hunting, small ranching operations and guiding along the Santa Fe Trail were the most lucrative ventures, although beaver were still trapped and sold well into the 1840s.

  During this period of time, Tobin became an expert tracker and earned himself the reputation of being a dead shot with a rifle or pistol. He was also known as a hot head. Although a man of his word and possessing a charitable nature, it was common knowledge that he would fight “at the drop of a hat.”

  War broke out between Mexico and the United States in 1846. In September of 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West took Santa Fe without opposition, and before moving on to California, appointed Charles Bent the first governor of New Mexico Territory. Charles had married a Mexican widow, Maria Ignacia Jaramillo, and had taken up residence in Taos. His brother, William, was managing the fort in Colorado and their partner Ceran St. Vrain was based in Santa Fe, to the south. Because of Bent’s excellent connections with the Mexican population and his knowledge of both the American and Mexican cultures, he was the perfect choice for the position. No doubt, most Americans, including Tobin and Carson, felt that the change from Mexican to American dominance of the area would be easy and amicable.

  Less than five months after Santa Fe’s surrender, January 20, 1847, Tobin and several other mountain men were spending some time relaxing a few miles north of Taos at Turley’s Mill, at Arroyo Hondo. Simeon Turley used the location as a distillery for “Taos lightning,” a whiskey that was used for bartering with Indians for furs. Liquor was a forbidden trade item to the Indians in the territories to the north of New Mexico. Turley made good profits selling his liquor to traders who smuggled the whiskey into Colorado for the illegal trade. Tobin and the others were sampling the wares to keep out the chill of the New Mexico winter.

  The group found themselves the victims of a surprise attack by over five hundred angry Mexicans and Indians. An Indian named Tomacito and a Mexican, Pablo Montoya, had fomented a revolt throughout Taos. Charles Bent had been murdered in his home during the night, as were most white office holders in the settlement. For several hours, the mountain men fought valiantly to defend their position and their lives. When it became obvious that the rebels were too strong, three men tried to escape for help. John Albert made his way on foot toward Pueblo, Colorado, while Tom Tobin was able to secure a horse and ride for Santa Fe. The third man was Simeon Turley. He only made it a few miles before he was discovered and executed by the rebels. While Tobin and Albert raced for help, the embattled survivors of the mill held out for two days. But time, distance and numbers were against them and all were massacred. The mill was reduced to a smoldering ruin.

  Tobin brought word of the rebellion to the military commander of the territory, Colonel Sterling Price, who was stationed in Santa Fe. Price made immediate preparations to march on Taos. Tobin joined a group of mounted volunteers that included Carson, Dick Wootton and several other mountaineers under the command of Ceran St. Vrain. On February 3, 1847, Price’s troops entered the settlement and regained control. They immediately swept on to Taos Pueblo, three miles north of the city, and the center of rebel activity. The Indians barricaded themselves in the old mission church within the confines of the pueblo. St. Vrain, Tobin and the other volunteers took positions on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the pueblo while the army undertook a direct assault. When the rebels tried an escape from the rapidly advancing American troops, the volunteers took a savage toll. Tom Tobin had been an instrumental figure in the rebellion but is completely left out of most accounts of the incident.

  In later years, Tobin applied for bounty land, citing his service during the Taos revolt. There was no official army record of the volunteers and his application was denied.

  Two years after the Taos rebellion, Tobin’s services were again called upon. In October, 1849, James M. White, a prominent trader from Jackson County, Missouri, left New Mexico on route to Missouri with thirteen loaded wagons. Ute massacred the men and took Mrs. White, an infant daughter and a black nurse captive sometime between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, near Wagon Mound. News of the kidnapping and massacre spread immediately to Taos. Major William Grier was the military commander of the settlement. He began a rescue effort with mounted dragoons but was delayed by a severe snowstorm and extremely cold weather. He needed the best trackers and scouts that he could find to locate the Indians after the snowfall. Kit Carson, Antoine Leroux, Dick Wootton and Tom Tobin were recruited.

  The men started tracking the Ute at the site of the massacre and through over 400 miles of snowy landscape, followed a difficult trail. Several times the sign was completely lost but the trackers’ knowledge of the terrain kept the party in pursuit. The feat remains one of the greatest accounts of tracking skills in annals of the West. After several days, Carson noticed a concentration of crows hovering in the distance. Experience told the scouts that this was usually a sign of an Indian village. Crows fed on the remains of butchered meat that was discarded by the Indians. While Wootton went after Grier and his troops, Tobin and Carson crept up on the village and determined that it was the Ute. When the men met with Major Grier, it was decided that their best course of action was to get as close as possible to the village and spring a surprise attack. The scouts felt that it was the only way to rescue the captives before they could be murdered. The troops carefully crept into position for attack.

  Grier changed his mind telling the scouts that he wanted to parley with the Indians and reduce the chances of the women being killed. Carson and Tobin were enraged by the decision. Even the Frenchman, Leroux, is said to have informed Grier of his ancestry in his native tongue. Carson said that he wanted no part of such a strategy. He told Grier that the women would be dead for sure if the Ute received any kind of warning.

  Grier’s mind was made up. He advanced ahead of his column toward the Indian village. The Indians could be seen hastily preparing a defense and making preparations for escape, but Grier ignored his scouts’ warnings. As Grier neared the Ute position, the warriors opened fire. Grier clutched his breast and fell to the ground. The troops launched an attack and swept through the village.

  After the battle, Tobin found the body of the Ute chief, White Wolf. The victory was marred because the ten-minute delay had given the Indians enough warning for most of them to escape. Mrs. White was found near one of the lodges, her still-warm body shot through with three Ute arrows. Her daughter and the servant were never recovered. Grier, on the other hand, had been lucky. Heavy leather riding gloves stuffed in his vest preve
nted him from being seriously wounded. For the rest of his life, Tobin blamed the failure of the rescue on Grier’s incompetence. In 1852, Tobin moved north to serve as a scout at newly established Fort Massachusetts in southern Colorado. He would spend the remainder of his life in that general location. For the next decade he served as a part time scout and guide for the post that was created to protect the settlers and Mexicans of the San Luis Valley. He also began a small ranch near the Fort. When the military took over the fort, it was moved and renamed Fort Garland. Tobin’s old companion, Kit Carson, was promoted to colonel at the beginning of the Civil War and was named post commander of Fort Garland. Carson led his famous campaign against the Navajo from this post.

  Fort Garland

  Tobin did not go with Carson. He was detailed for a manhunt that would bring him his greatest fame. A series of brutal killings of settlers throughout southern Colorado caused the panic-stricken populace to demand military action. After several months, a teamster who had survived an ambush identified the killers as the Espinosa brothers. Two brothers were the sons of a wealthy Mexican landholder who owned vast herds of cattle and sheep in New Mexico. Whether they sought vengeance for American confiscation of their father’s lands, as one story goes, or the rape of a sister by an American, is uncertain. The Mexican population that felt persecuted by American racism and unequal legal treatment held the Espinosas in high regard.