Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  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 be
gan 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.

  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 wrot
e, “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.”