Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  And then, there were the Indians. The United States had in no way been able to make good on its promise to check the attacks of the marauding tribes. Every point of the compass brought danger. To the west, the Navajos, emboldened by the disappearance of General Kearny and Colonel Doniphan from New Mexico, had only stepped up their raids. The Apaches in the south, and the Kiowas and Utes in the north, were all testing the will of the Americans. On the east, the Comanches had declared open war, and wagon trains from Missouri were under constant attack along the Santa Fe Trail. The Comanches believed, with good reason, that the epidemics of smallpox and other diseases now running rife through their tribe had been brought by the Americans. As one historian put it, the Comanches blamed the white soldier “for having blown an evil breath on their children, and they were out for revenge.”

  The only group of Indians that did not seem to worry the governor were the Pueblos. Though they were secretive, they had a reputation for being docile and generally peace-loving. Scattered up and down the Rio Grande, huddled in their mud apartment complexes, they were stolid farmers who loved their corn and their kiva ceremonies and their complicated dances, and they mostly wanted to be left alone. The fact that they were Christians somehow made them seem more understandable, less foreign. They of course had never abandoned their own religion, but had found clever ways to intertwine the new with the old. Their stoic culture was thought to be even-tempered and nearly impervious to change. In 1680, the Pueblos had successfully risen up against the Spanish, ejecting their oppressors from New Mexico in a bloody purge. But when the Spanish returned twelve years later, they established an absolute reign over the Pueblos. Bent believed that at least the Pueblo Indians could be counted on to go along with the new dispensation handed down by America. And of all the Pueblo tribes, officers in the Army of the West thought that the Taos Indians were the most receptive to the Americans. Lieutenant Emory had written that a Taos man “may be distinguished at once by the cordiality of his salutations. That portion of the country seems the best disposed towards the United States…. They are our fast friends now and forever.”

  So it was with great surprise and some alarm that after four hard days of winter travel Governor Bent crested the brow of the sage-splashed hills and descended into his hometown of Taos, only to be accosted by a mob of hostile Indians from the Taos Pueblo. Fired with whiskey and in an uproar, they surrounded the governor and demanded that he release several Pueblo friends who were now stuck in the Taos jail. Their comrades had been arrested—wrongly, they felt—for theft.

  Governor Bent waved them aside, explaining that it was not a matter in which he could intervene. The processes of law were more powerful than any governor, Bent said. The issue would be handled in due time by the courts. Their friends would just have to wait in jail.

  This only incensed the Taos Indians more. As Bent pushed through the crowds, they shouted their displeasure and cut him sour looks.

  The governor safely reached his home and warmed himself by the fire with Ignacia at his side. His house was a foursquare piece of New Mexico architecture, a little gloomy on the inside, its walls three feet thick, its windows small and defensive in posture, paned with sheets of mica. It had an old floor of hard-packed dirt seasoned with ox blood and piñon ash, as was the custom. The flat roof was made of dirt as well, several feet of earth packed above the supporting pine vigas. The walls were whitewashed with a plaster fashioned from a local pale clay swirled in a milky liquid of pounded wheat. The Bent children found the chalky mixture so delicious that they had a naughty habit of licking the walls.

  Kit Carson’s wife Josefa was spending the night at the house, as was another young Hispanic wife of an American, Rumalda Boggs. Bent’s children were happy to have their father home, and their laughter filled the rooms. Food simmered on the corner hearth stove, and soon everyone would sit down to a convivial meal.

  Beyond Bent’s window, however, an unmistakable rancor hung in the air.

  Early the following morning, around six o’clock, a mob of Taos Indians and a few New Mexicans appeared outside Bent’s house. Roaring drunk and chanting war songs, they pounded on the door. In the crackly cold darkness, just before dawn, the stars shone as pinpricks in a black bowl.

  Bent awoke with a start, threw on some clothes, and shuffled out to the porch. “What do you want!” he demanded groggily.

  “We want your head!” came the answer. “We don’t want you to govern us!”

  Recognizing the ferocity of their emotions, Bent tried to reason with them. “What have I ever done to you?” he shouted. “When you came to me with your illnesses, I always tried to help. I gave you medicines and cures. I never charged you a cent.”

  The Indians answered not with words but with their bows. Feathered missiles shot at him from the shadows. It seemed as though they had drawn their weapons laxly, to maim him and make him suffer but not to kill. The governor staggered back into the house with three arrows lodged in his face—one of them buried at a queer angle in the skin of his forehead. He cursed in pain. Blood streamed down his temples and over his cheeks. Bent quickly bolted the door and turned to find Ignacia, wide-eyed with worry, dressed in her nightgown. She, too, had been slightly wounded by an arrow. The couple moved deeper into the safety of their house, trying to decide what to do. The arrows protruding from Bent’s head flopped awkwardly as he moved about the rooms. Windows were breaking all around them, and they could scarcely hear each other over the din of the pounding and shouting. Kill the Americans! The gringo must die!

  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.

  Photo Insert 1

  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.

  “Prompt, self-sacrificing, and true”: An illustration depicting Carson and Alex Godey triumphantly returning stolen horses (with the scalps of the Indian horse thieves dangling from Godey’s rifle barrel).

  “The finest head I ever saw on an Indian”: Narbona, Navajo elder, as sketched by expedition artist Richard Kern on August 31, 1849, the same day the great leader was killed by American troops.

  The sacred peak of the South: Blue Bead Mountain (a.k.a. Mount Taylor), a landmark of Narbona’s country, as sketched by Richard Kern on September 18, 1849.

  The great houses of Chaco Canyon, widely considered the most magnificent prehistoric ruins in the American West, as drawn by Kern on August 27, 1849.

  “What a wild life!”: Army explorer (and notorious glory hound) John Charles Fremont, a.k.a. the Pathfinder.

  “The better man of the two”: Jessie Benton Fremont, the explorer’s gifted—and utterly devoted—wife.

  “An aggressive patriotism”: Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, the roaring apostle of Manifest Destiny.

  “The hardest-working man in America”: President James K. Polk, land-hungry instigator of the Mexican War.

  “We will correct all this”: General Stephen Watts Kearny, conqueror of New Mexico and California, sometimes called the father of the American cavalry.

  “A year that will always be remembered by my countrymen”: Susan Magoffin, whose diary of the 1846 conquest has become a Western classic.

  “A beauty of the haughty, heart-breaking kind”: Josefa Jaramillo Carson with unidentified child.

  “Carson’s home, sentimentally if not in fact”: A lithograph of Taos, New Mexico, from the 1850s.

  “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.