The Winter of Eighteen Forty-Seven

We are coming down the road that history came up, so let me tell you what happened at the end of it in the winter of eighteen forty-seven. It is not a comfortable story and it is one that Taos still carries.

Set the scene. In eighteen forty-six the United States went to war with Mexico, and an American army marched into New Mexico and took it, essentially without a fight. The governor left. The Americans installed their own government, and the man they made civil governor was a trader named Charles Bent, who lived in Taos and had a Hispano wife and deep local connections. On paper, a sensible choice.

Underneath, it was not sensible at all. The people of northern New Mexico — Hispano villagers and Taos Pueblo alike — had just had their country taken by an army that arrived and announced they were now Americans. Nobody had asked them. There were immediate, credible fears about land: about the grants, about the common lands, about what these newcomers and their courts were going to do to titles that families had held for generations.

Those fears, incidentally, turned out to be entirely justified.

In January of eighteen forty-seven, it broke. A force of Taos Pueblo men and Hispano residents rose against the new government. They went to Governor Bent's house in Taos, and they killed him there, in front of his family. Several other Americans and officials were killed with him.

And then the army came.

The rebels — hundreds of them, along with women and children — took refuge in the thick-walled adobe church at Taos Pueblo. It was the strongest building they had. The American force brought artillery, shelled the church, breached the walls, and stormed it.

The number of dead is usually put at somewhere over a hundred and fifty. Many of them were not fighters.

The ruins of that church are still standing at Taos Pueblo. They did not rebuild it. They left the walls broken and they turned the ground inside into a cemetery, and it is a cemetery still in use. If you visit the Pueblo you will see it, and you will notice that the ruin is not presented as a picturesque relic. It is a grave.

Afterwards there were trials in Taos, of a kind. Men were tried for treason — for treason against a government that had existed for a matter of months, in a country they had never agreed to join — and they were hanged in the plaza.

I tell you this because you are driving through a landscape that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely pleasant, and it is easy to take the whole of northern New Mexico as scenery.

It is not scenery. It is three peoples' homeland, layered on top of each other, and the arrangement between them was settled by artillery within living memory of some families' great-great-grandparents. People here know exactly whose ancestors did what.

So go to the Pueblo. Go to the museums. Buy from the artists. And when you stand in front of those broken adobe walls, know what you are looking at.