This week in history: Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site

175 years ago: “In the early morning hours of January 19, an armed mob of Mexicans and Taos Pueblo Indians brutally killed six individuals who were either American or thought to be closely associated with the Americans. These were Charles Bent, Pablo Jaramillo (Bent’s brother-in-law), Narciso Beaubien (son of Charles Beaubien, land grant partner of the Bents and St. Vrain), James White Leal (a former Missouri volunteer serving as district attorney), Stephen Luis Lee (Taos sheriff), and Cornelio Vigil (Taos prefect, a partner in land grants with Bent and St. Vrain, and an uncle of Bent’s cohabitant Maria Ignacia Jaramillo).

Led by Pablo Montoya, who called himself the “Santa Anna of the north,” and Tomasito, a Taos Indian, the insurrectionists pounded on the doors of Bent’s home and tore at its roof. Bent went to the portico and confronted the mob.

According to Bent’s daughter, Teresina, who vividly recalled the details of that bloody morning, the insurrectionists told the governor, “We want your head gringo, we do not want for any of you gringos to govern us, as we have come to kill you. Father told them what wrong have I done to you, when you come to me for help I alway[s] helped you and your families. I have cured you people and never charged you anything.” But the mob would have nothing to do with Bent’s attempts at reason, and they commenced firing their guns and arrows at their fellow townsman and governor.

Bent retreated inside and crawled into an adjoining room through a hole carved out of the adobe wall by Mrs. Kit Carson, Mrs. Tom Boggs, and an Indian servant (Guadalupe Bent?). The insurgents followed the governor, killing the Indian woman as she shielded Maria Igancia Jaramillo (Bent’s common law wife).

“Father went with all of us to a little room,” Teresina remembered, “and he sat and took his memorando book suppose he wanted to write something, but by that time the whole crowd of Mesicans and Indians got to the room where we were so they commence to shoot at him and scalp him and strip him of his clothes and when they killed him, some of the crowd wanted to kill all the family but some of the Mesicans said, no, women folks and children we must not kill....””(Gardner, Mark L. Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Pgs. 290, 291)

That same night, American stores in Taos were looted and burned. The Revolt came about because of the American takeover, however, many of the causes had been simmering for decades, since the first American businessmen arrived in New Mexico and began to get involved in the local community, using money and influence to control huge tracts of land years before the military invasion. In a time of extreme turmoil both public and private differences were brutally settled.

Governor Bent’s assassination was merely the first step in the larger revolt. Many more on both sides would die before it was over.

This article originally appeared on LA Junta Tribune: This week in history: Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site