Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  A few hours past midnight, the sentinels heard something awful—the deafening shudder of an approaching army’s footsteps. “Who goes there?” the guards cried anxiously into the darkness. Out of the shadows emerged a formidable sight: a force of nearly two hundred men marching in close formation up Mule Hill. Some of Kearny’s men groggily rose from their sleeping places, thinking they heard the sound of English coming from the valley floor.

  “Who goes there?” the sentries demanded again.

  “Hold fire!” boomed the reply from below. “We’re Americans!”

  The camp erupted in cheers. Word had gotten through after all—Stockton had sent reinforcements! One hundred twenty sailors and eighty Marines tramped into the bivouac site bearing tobacco and hardtack—“gallant fellows,” Emory thought, “distributing provisions and clothes to our naked and hungry people.” As the men whooped and celebrated, a Mexican musket ball sailed through camp but did no damage. It was, thought Kearny biographer Dwight Clarke, “the last mournful shot of disappointment from an enemy robbed of its prey.”

  In the morning, Kearny found that the enemy had completely vanished. Pico was surprised by the Americans’ sudden arrival and intimidated by this newly conjoined force of soldiers, sailors, and Marines—which, all told, numbered more than three hundred men. The siege had been broken.

  The newly fortified American forces all left for San Diego the next day and marched unmolested. They arrived in a cold, spitting rain on the afternoon of December 12. Kearny’s war was nearly over, though he did not know it yet. Several minor skirmishes would have to be fought before Los Angeles would return at last to American hands, but he would face nothing like his trials at San Pasqual. The reconquest of California was all but complete.

  The Army of the West had come as far as it could go, as far as the cardinal direction in its name would take it. Two thousand miles, from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the bitter end of the continent—there had never been a march like it in American history.

  The men came to a shaggy bluff and walked to the precipice. And there, for quite some time, they stood gaping at the kelp-strewn shores of an unfamiliar sea. Emory wrote, “The Pacific opened for the first time to our view, the sight producing strange but agreeable emotions. One of the men who had never seen the ocean before opened his arms and exclaimed: ‘Lord! There is a great prairie without a tree.’”

  General Kearny must have stared at the Pacific with mixed emotions. He wrote his wife Mary: “Take good care of yourself and kiss all my dear little ones for me. We have the ocean in sight and hear the rolling waves which sound like rumbling thunder.”

  Chapter 28: EL CREPUSCULO

  A month after General Kearny reached the California coast, Gov. Charles Bent of New Mexico made his way north on the icy, rutted road to Taos. Under leaden skies, his mules strained up the steep hills on the outskirts of Santa Fe and plunged into arroyos blanketed with snowdrifts. The animals snorted in the crisp desert cold, their nostrils shooting twin plumes of steam. The day was bleak and gusty, and as the governor crept through the small towns north of the capital—Santa Cruz de la Cañada, Chimayo, Trampas—the locals glowered at him. Off to his right, five thousand feet higher up in the winter mists, he and his small entourage could see the sharp triad of the Truchas Peaks, whose snaggled ridges bared themselves like a dog’s angry snarl.

  Charles Bent was a shrewd, determined man with a round face and a merchant’s eye for details. Short and squat and tough, he was forty-seven years old, and his receding hair had gone prematurely gray. Bent always had business to attend to in Taos, but mainly the governor was embarked on a personal errand: He wanted to see his wife, Ignacia, and their three young children. The governor still had his giant mud fort pitched on the edge of the plains, but he rarely went there. Like his friend and brother-in-law Kit Carson, his main home was in the mountain town of Taos, seventy miles north of the capital. Since her husband had become governor, Ignacia rarely ventured down to Santa Fe—she had a busy household to run, a rambling adobe off the Taos plaza, just a stone’s throw away from Carson’s place. Ignacia always kept her sala filled with relatives and the smells of savory Mexican food. Now, in the dead of winter, the governor wanted to be home.

  Traveling with Governor Bent were several Taos officials—Sheriff Steve Lee, Circuit Attorney James White Leal, and Ignacia’s uncle Cornelio Vigil, who was the Taos prefect. They had been in Santa Fe on official business and decided to ride north with the governor. Also in the party were Ignacia’s young brother Pablo Jaramillo, and another teenager named Narciso Beaubien, the bright-eyed son of a U.S. judge who’d just returned from boarding school in St. Louis. The two boys were close friends.

  It was January 14, 1847. The United States had occupied Santa Fe for more than four months. Still, Governor Bent knew that the American hold on the territory was extremely tenuous. The weak military garrison back at Fort Marcy was young and inexperienced, the Missouri troops so thoroughly bored they could not be called vigilant. With Kearny and Doniphan gone, the American command was led by an impressively mutton-chopped lawyer-politician, Col. Sterling Price, a stern Missourian who, though by no means incompetent, mistakenly believed that he had a firm handle on things. In truth, the territory was seething with hatred toward the Americans. Bent could feel the spite thickening in the air, could see it in the false grins and narrowed stares of the locals. The Mexicans had failed to fight at first, but they despised these foreigners just as surely as any occupied people must despise their oppressor. Their true feelings, harbored in secret, were now bursting to the surface.

  Their defiance was fueled by racial mistrust, religious zeal, and the desire to defend a country they still loved—even if their country, governed corruptly and indifferently from faraway Mexico City, had never particularly loved them. Up and down the Rio Grande the padres had fed the fires of resistance. These gringos sought to outlaw the Catholic religion, the priests warned. They would ban the Spanish tongue, scrap the fiestas and feast days, and jettison all the old ways of doing things. The priests were not above spreading wild untruths, but they had genuine reasons to feel threatened. With the Kearny Code, the Americans had already instituted radical concepts, such as the separation of church and state, and jury trials in which the padres would play no role whatsoever. What was to stop them from going even further? These Americans had godless ideas that sprang from the cold marble halls of a secular republic. The priests now understood that Washington was determined to reform the marooned Catholic world they had run for so long—and this reformation could only mean the steady erosion of their power.

  What’s more, the Americans were arrogant. They called the Mexican men “greasers,” sometimes to their faces, while at the same time they freely consorted with Hispanic women. The Americans brought venereal diseases. They caroused and fought, they mangled the Spanish language, they gorged themselves like hogs. They seemed to have no concept of family or of obligation toward their homes—they just skipped about like flies, rootless, always looking to advance themselves. Their bivouacs on the edge of town were sties of filth. An epidemic of measles, thought to have originated in an American camp, swept through the Mexican and Indian populations alike, infecting thousands and killing hundreds, most of them children. Nearly every day Santa Fe held another juvenile funeral—the dead child carried through the streets on a bier strewn with flowers and borne on the shoulders of four other children, with the grieving adults following behind, drinking brandy and singing doleful songs.

  Each week brought new outrages. The longer the Americans stayed, the more the people resented them—not only for the central fact of their conquest, but for the thousand little insults and daily humiliations committed by an uncouth foreigner who considered himself, in every possible way, superior.

  It was not entirely surprising, then, that only a few weeks earlier, Governor Bent had discovered a Mexican plot for a full-scale insurrection. The ringleaders were said to be Tomas Ortiz, Augustin Duran, and the eve
r-proud Diego Archuleta, who nursed an understandable grievance against the Americans that dated back to General Kearny’s promise—sweepingly tendered but quickly welched on and then forgotten—to give the colonel control of all of New Mexico west of the Rio Grande. The insurrection plans had called for all Mexicans to rise up on the day after Christmas and murder every American in the territory. The rebellion was to start at midnight with the tolling of church bells. Governor Bent and Colonel Price were to be assassinated, the artillery on the plaza seized, and the garrison at Fort Marcy stormed. In fact, the bloody scheme was only very narrowly foiled. Madame La Tules, the Santa Fe saloon-keeper loyal to the Americans, leaked news of the revolt to the American authorities only a few days before it was set to commence. The Americans soon arrested seven of the insurrectionists, but the three ringleaders managed to escape to the south, one of them disguised as a servant girl. Governor Bent and Colonel Price put the whole province under martial law. American soldiers redoubled their patrols, and impressive guns were strategically mounted along the parapets of the city. Price optimistically wrote to his superiors that “the rebellion appears to be suppressed.”

  Bent, for his part, was not too sure. Only a few weeks earlier he had issued a proclamation beseeching the people of New Mexico to “turn a deaf ear on all false doctrines and remain quiet, attending to your domestic affairs, so that you may enjoy the blessings of peace.” Bent seemed pleased that the insurgents’ “treason was discovered in time and smothered at its birth.” The governor was sufficiently confident in his own standing among the Hispanic population to believe that he could travel safely without a military guard (although his aides back in Santa Fe thought his trip extremely incautious). He had kept a home in Taos since 1832 and knew practically everyone in the village by virtue of his business dealings and his having married into the prominent Jaramillo family. Among his many other roles—trader, entrepreneur, politician—Bent over the years had established himself in the community as something of a family apothecary; although he had no formal medical training, he had a knack for diagnosing and treating health problems, and through his local store he dispensed medicines and tinctures and herbal cures to the poor of Taos, Hispanic and Indian alike, usually for no charge. Prudently or not, he did not worry for his own safety.

  But Governor Bent also recognized that, in general, the Mexicans still felt a “lasting antipathy” toward the Americans. He knew that the Catholic priests of New Mexico found American rule distasteful, and they had the power to stir up trouble among the faithful. There was a particularly influential priest in Taos, in fact, an erudite and somewhat Machiavellian man named Padre Antonio Martinez who, among his many endeavors, published a Spanish-language broadsheet called El Crepusculo de la Libertad (The Dawn of Liberty), the first newspaper printed west of the Mississippi.

  So powerful was Padre Martinez in the ecclesiastical affairs and political intrigues of northern New Mexico that he was known as “the Gray Eminence of Taos.” Martinez was a bitter enemy of Charles Bent. This animosity dated back many years and was perhaps related to the fact that Bent had neither forsworn his American citizenship nor converted to Catholicism when he married Ignacia. Kit Carson had shown proper deference by becoming Catholic and joining the padre’s church; Martinez, consequently, had presided over the marriage of Carson and Josefa and given the couple his formal blessing. But Charles Bent seemed to flout the protocols of the Church entirely and never sought to solemnize his common-law marriage with Ignacia. His children were, in the eyes of the Church, “natural”—that is, illegitimate.

  Martinez had other long-standing differences with the governor. For one thing, he was suspicious of the various sub rosa schemes pursued by Bent and other Americans to snatch up large tracts of pristine wilderness in northeastern New Mexico from old land grants that were, Martinez felt, based on dubious historical claims. In the padre’s estimation, Bent was just another American opportunist trying to make a fast buck without cultivating any true interest in New Mexico’s traditions or people. (Indeed, the governor once wrote in a letter that Mexicans were “stupid, obstinate, ignorant, and vain.”) The padre had long viewed Bent’s Fort and its trading networks as a corrupting secular force. As a successful Missouri merchant, dealing in whiskey and trinkets and pelts often trapped illegally from Mexican territory, Bent seemed to represent all that was pernicious about American influence years before Kearny ever set foot in New Mexico. What’s more, Martinez believed that Bent had sold guns directly to various Indian tribes who used the weapons to raid Spanish settlements.

  Bent, for his part, thought Martinez a corrupt and tyrannical man—and a drunk. Bent (who could be an atrocious speller in notes that went unproofread) once wrote of the Padre: “I think he is more sinsearly devoted to Baccus than any of the other gods.”

  Priests like Martinez were not the only enemies Bent had to keep an eye on. In the south there were many influential landowners who presided over large haciendas on the Rio Grande. They had a good life, by and large, with plenty of Indian peons to do the work and lazy river water oozing into their fields from the acequias. In the relative terms of New Mexico, these landowners in the Rio Abajo (the “Lower River”) were wealthy, and they seemed to fear that the coming of the Americans meant that their patrician existence would be forever upset.

  With so many potential flash points of discontent, Bent was understandably anxious about the future of the New Mexico territory. He worried that a new revolt might easily sprout, hydralike, from the severed neck of the old. “The principal movers,” Bent wrote to Colonel Price on Christmas Day, “may well not leave the country without a last desperate struggle.”

  If he had any time for reflection as he rode toward Taos, Governor Bent must have wondered why he had accepted this thankless post. He had spent four hard months ensconced in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, fretting over the intricate affairs of this volatile new U.S. territory whose many forms of turmoil were exceeded only by its poverty. He loved New Mexico for its raw beauty and wide-open ways, but it was quite another thing to try to govern this remote and benighted place. The province was a cauldron of conflict, its culture rich and old but stunted by hardship. The population of New Mexico was almost entirely illiterate and swayed by religious passions too potent to gauge, let alone manage.

  During its long isolation, New Mexico had preserved archaic traditions, vestigial dialects of Spanish, and fierce strains of a sometimes unorthodox Catholicism that dated back to the most hysterical days of the Inquisition. Throughout New Mexico there were families who carried on curious traditions—lighting nine-lamped candelabras, singing verses of Hebrew, refusing to eat pork. These were the “crypto-Jews,” as they’ve been called, descendants of Spanish Jews who had fled to Mexico in the 1600s to escape the rampant anti-Semitism of the Inquisition, and then had spread to the most isolated and (they hoped) more tolerant precincts of the empire. Heeding a stubborn cultural memory, these families pursued Hebraic customs in semisecrecy, often without knowing why.

  In the remote rural areas of the north were secret societies of flagellants who called themselves penitentes—pious men who went out into the countryside to enact dour passion-play processionals in which they whipped themselves to a bloody pulp and, in certain extreme circumstances, even erected wooden crosses and crucified those brethren who wished to know the fullest meaning of Christ’s suffering. (To die on the cross, some penitentes thought, guaranteed one’s place in heaven.) It was said that the floggings and other penitente rituals had only intensified since the American occupation, as though they feared that the kingdom was at hand—or at least that their religion was now under genuine threat.

  As for secular entertainment, the locals had few choices. Aside from horse races and card gaming and fandangos, the chief forms of amusement in this deadly dull province seemed principally to involve chickens. There were cockfights, of course, but also the immensely popular el gallo, an old blood sport in which a living fowl was buried up to it
s neck in the dirt of a hard-packed yard; horsemen would then take turns galloping by and attempt to yank the rooster up by the twitching wattles of its head in a single deft motion. Then, in a final free-for-all, the caballeros would fight over the chicken as though it were a football and, in the frenzy, invariably rip their quarry to pieces.

  New Mexico officials had long ago learned to accept their sorry lot and make do with very little—and so Governor Bent would also have to resign himself. The day he was appointed governor, Bent wrote a long letter to Secretary of State James Buchanan in which he complained of the sad state of affairs. The whole territory was “impoverished and undeveloped,” he said, and education was “criminally neglected.” He warned that “a rude and ignorant people are about to become citizens of the U.S.” There was no regular mail service, no law books or stationery, and not enough translators to conduct the work of government. The legal system was a joke, the bench stacked with incompetents. An army lieutenant summed up the primitive state of jurisprudence in a letter home: “All the judges of the New Mexico Superior Court together do not possess the legal knowledge of a single justice of the peace in St. Louis.”

  Little had changed with the coming of the Americans. Santa Fe had always been a neglected capital, among the last to receive the news of the world and the fruits of invention. It had been the forgotten tongue-tip of the Spanish empire, and now it was a mere outpost of an expansionist American republic. Far to the south, in the agave thickets of Mexico, the war raged, and the Americans were pressing toward the real prize: Mexico City. And out west, in California, Kearny and his dragoons were consummating President Polk’s fondest desire to make the United States a continental nation, with American ports on the Pacific. But Santa Fe, true to its forlorn past, had been forgotten again. It had been successfully invaded, but not entirely conquered. Bent’s rump government crept along in spite of its conspicuous wants: not enough money, not enough troops, not enough information—an extremity feeling only the feeblest pulse of the nation to which it was newly attached.