INCIDENTAL CONQUEST:

The United States Seizes New Mexico, 1846

by

Ray Shortridge

In August, 1846, an American army commanded by Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny conquered New Mexico in one of the military campaigns the United States government conducted against Mexico. A few weeks later, Kearny reported to the War Department that there was no need to fear from an open revolt in New Mexico. Kearny then left the territory with a column of troops to assist in the conquest of California, leaving several companies of the 1st Dragoons and the 2nd Missouri Volunteers to occupy New Mexico.

Before departing, Kearny established a civil government for the territory. He issued a judicial code and appointed a governor, district attorney, and a secretary to administer the territory. In January, a rebellion broke out in Taos in which the governor and several other Americans were killed. The army suppressed the rebellion, using artillery to blast through the adobe walls of the Catholic church at Taos Pueblo to roust out the insurrectionists. Later, the military convicted seventeen of the rebels of treason, including Pueblo Indians and New Mexicans, and hanged them.

How did the American conquest of New Mexico degenerated so quickly from a bloodless surrender of Santa Fe to an armed insurrection, murder, combat, and executions?

In mid­June, 1846, a military courier arrived at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with written orders from Secretary of War William Marcy for Kearney, commander of the 1st United States Dragoons. Kearny would note the date the letter was written, June 3, 1846, and sense the urgency that had expedited its thousand mile journey by train and steamboat from Washington, D.C. The orders directed Kearny to conduct an overland campaign to conquer California, a province of Mexico.

It has been decided by the President to be of the greatest importance, in the pending War with Mexico, to take the earliest possession of Upper California. An expedition with that view is hereby ordered, and you are designated to command it. 1

En route, he was to take possession of Santa Fe “and with it will be included the department or State of New Mexico…” Marcy informed Kearny that additional Missouri volunteers would follow his invasion 2

force, and those troops would occupy New Mexico while Kearny pushed on to California. For the Polk Administration, the main prize was California, New Mexico was incidental.

1 Dwight L. Clarke, Stephen Watts Kearny, Soldier of the West, (Norman, OK, 1961), 394.2 Clarke, 395.

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Military Campaign to Conquer New Mexico

Kearny would not have been surprised that the United States government intended to conquer California. Polk and his Congressional supporters had publicly called for adding California to the Union. Kearny was aware that Polk had ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy the area between the Sabine and the Rio Grande River, country that the Mexican government regarded as Mexican soil.

As Polk intended, that deployment led to skirmishing between the Taylor’s force and the Mexican Army. In early May, Taylor defeated Mexican forces along the Rio Grande at the battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de Palma. Not only Kearny, but the entire nation knew that a wider war with Mexico was inevitable.

A few days earlier, Kearny had received a copy of the Declaration of War against Mexico passed by the United States Congress. He had also received a copy of Polk’s order to the governor of Missouri to raise a regiment of mounted volunteers to fight in the war. Polk instructed the governor to mobilize the new regiment at Fort Leavenworth where Kearny would take command.

Marcy also referred to an additional source of manpower that was gathering near Fort Leavenworth at Council Bluffs, Iowa. A party of Mormons were preparing to migrate west to escape persecution in the United States. “It has been suggested here, that many of these Mormons would willingly enter the service of the United States, and aid us in our expedition against California.” 3

For several months, the government had been negotiating with Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormon diaspora. Having sold their farms and other property at distressed prices, the Mormons lacked sufficient cash to purchase wagons, livestock, and supplies in quantities necessary for their trek. Young agreed to permit Mormons of military age to volunteer for the army if the government paid the enlistment bonuses and monthly pay to the Mormon elders. About five hundred men volunteered to serve in what came to be called the Mormon Battalion. Marcy did not contrive his plan from scratch. Nine months prior to the declaration of war against Mexico, in August, 1845, the Adjutant General of the Army requested the Commissary of Subsistence in St. Louis, Major Richard Bland Lee, to prepare a plan for the conquest of New Mexico.

Lee scoped out a table of organization for a force not to exceed one thousand men that included a corps of regulars and one of volunteers. He stipulated artillery, dragoons, and infantry, along with staff officers to supervise the quartermaster, commissary, and engineering functions. He itemized the provisions, including flour and bread, barrels of pork, pounds of sugar, coffee, salt, etc. and the heads of beef and sheep on the hoof. Lee listed the number of wagons and beasts of burden and provided for their grain and hay. Lee estimated that the logistical costs for the expedition totaled one million three hundred and forty eight dollars. 4

By and large, Marcy incorporated the main points of Lee’s proposed plan in his orders. The Secretary

3 Clarke, 395.4 George Winston Smith and Charles Judah, eds., Chronicles of the Gringos, The U. S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846 - 1848, Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Combatants, (Albuquerque, NM, 1968), 107 - 111.

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of War provided Kearny with an invasion force that included his own command, the 1st United States Dragoons, the First Missouri Volunteers, along with some Indians and mountain men serving as scouts. Upon receiving Marcy’s orders, Kearny began sending the companies of the Dragoons down the Santa Fe Trail. He spent about three weeks in June at Fort Leavenworth drilling the 1st Missouri volunteers as they arrived.

On June 29, Kearny reported to the Adjutant General that he had, through the month, sent one thousand five hundred and twenty soldiers on the trail to Bent’s Fort and would personally leave Fort Leavenworth with his staff on the next day. This invasion force totaled about 1,700 men, including teamsters and other supernumeraries. 5

After conquering New Mexico, Marcy’s orders instructed Kearny to march on to California with his invasion force. The Polk Administration was ordering the Governor of Missouri to raise a second regiment of mounted volunteers to follow the invasion force to Santa Fe. Kearny was to deploy the 2nd Missouri to retain “safe possession” New Mexico after the invasion force left that territory for California.

Kearny assigned regular officers to remain at Fort Leavenworth to command and train the Mormon detachments as they mustered into government service after the main force had departed. The commander of the battalion died along the Santa Fe Trail, and when it arrived in Santa Fe in October, Karny assigned Philip St. George Cooke to command the unit. The Battalion added about five hundred men to Kearny’s force in California when it arrived in San Diego later in the year.

Lee had proposed that the army establish a supply depot at Bent’s Fort, about five hundred and fifty miles west of Fort Leavenworth and two hundred and fifty miles northeast of Santa Fe. Constructed in the 1834, the fort was the largest American structure between Fort Leavenworth and Sutter’s Mill in California, near Sacramento.6

5 Clarke, 113.6 In the early 1830’s, the price for beaver skins plummeted from about $6 per pelt to about $1 when men’s hat fashions turned from beaver fur to silk. William Bent was in the beaver trade. Foreseeing the end of that business, he perceived a growing market for buffalo hides. Manufacturers in the east used the leather from these hides to form the drive belts for steam driven factory machines. To enter the buffalo hide trade, Bent needed to establish a trading post that was central to the Plains Indian tribes who killed the buffalo and cured the hides. At that post, Bent would trade manufactured goods, firearms, ammunition, liquor and other American made products to the Indians for the hides.

During the same period, Bent’s brother, Charles Bent, and his partner Ceran St. Verain were making several round trips per year from Missouri to Santa Fe. They traded manufactured products and luxury goods purchased in Missouri for Mexican materials, such as silver and woolen blankets woven by Navajo Indians and New Mexicans. They needed need to establish a warehouse between the two markets so that they could control the supply and, thereby, set the prices in both markets.

With their business needs aligning, Charles and William Bent and St. Verain completed built a trading post/warehouse that was enclosed by fifteen foot tall adobe brick walls and anchored by two towers armed with artillery pieces. They sited what became known as Bent’s Fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River, about six miles downstream from present day La Junta, Colorado. The Fort was along the Raton Pass branch of the Santa Fe Trail and centrally located on American soil among the Plains Indian tribes, their suppliers of buffalo hides. Mexican territory began on the south bank.

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After receiving Marcy’s orders, Kearny met with Charles Bent who was at that time at Independence, Missouri, conducting business. Kearny secured permission for his force to rendezvous at the fort.

Bent was well positioned to advise Kearny about the Mexican government’s capacity to defend New Mexico. As one of the leading men in the Santa Fe trade, Bent would know how many soldiers the Mexican government had deployed in New Mexico and how capable they were in defending the wagon trains along the trail from bandits and Plains Indians. He had engaged in business with New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo, so had an insight into how competently and aggressively the governor would lead the Mexican forces.

The units in Kearny’s Army of the West took about thirty days to traverse the five hundred and fifty miles to Bent’s Fort. As they arrived, the Dragoon companies camped on the north bank of the Arkansas, while the Missouri Volunteers camped on the south bank, in Mexican territory.

At the end of July, Kearny arrived and began collecting intelligence about the size of the Mexican forces in New Mexico and whether Armijo would fight. Also, an emissary from President Polk rode into Santa Fe to meet with Armijo and, perhaps, bribe the governor to offer no resistance to the invaders. A the Army of the West deployed at Bent’s Fort, the forewarned Armijo liquidated his personal assets in New Mexico and sent the proceeds south to Chihuahua.

Kearny also engaged in psychological warfare. He let three Mexican spies examine his army camps and then released them to spread the word about the power that was about to descend upon New Mexico. On July 30, Kearny sent an envoy into New Mexico to distribute a proclamation that the Americans would preserve the Mexicans’ property, respect their liberty to practice the Catholic religion, and protect them from marauding Indians.

On August 2, two months after receiving his orders from Marcy, Kearny’s Army of the West invaded Mexico. The preceding day, Kearny had sent William Bent and six others ahead as scouts. The army followed the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail from Bent’s Fort south and crossed the rugged Raton Pass. On August 15, at Las Vegas, Kearny publicly issued his proclamation. The provision regarding protecting the New Mexicans from Indian raids was timely ­­ Indians had killed a local shepherd and rustled several hundred sheep only a few days before he arrived. As Kearny moved on toward Santa Fe, he issued the same proclamation at San Miguel.

Armijo had gathered the Mexican force at Apache Canyon, a narrow gap between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Glorieta Mesa. (Sixteen years later during the Civil War, Colorado volunteers and Union regulars would defeat a Confederate force at this place in the Battle of Glorieta Pass.) He brought one hundred and fifty dragoons of the regular Mexican Army to join about three thousand New Mexico militia.

Armijo encountered mutinous divisions in the militia units. Many of the Pueblo Indians rebelled at fighting for the Mexican government that taxed them heavily but provided little in return, specially defense against the Navajo, Apache, Comanche, and other Indians. Facing the impending arrival of Kearny’s

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army, Armijo sent the militia home and fled to Chihuahua with his fortune protected by an escort of dragoons.

On August 18, Kearny led his 1st Dragoons, artillery, and the 1st Missouri Volunteers through Apache Canyon and, later that day, into Santa Fe. He drew the army up in the plaza and proclaimed:

I, Stephen W. Kearny, General of the Army of the United States, have taken possession of the province of New Mexico in the name of the government of the United States…and in this manner I take this province of New Mexico for the benefit of the United States.” 7

With Governor Armijo fleeing to Chihuahua, Lieutenant Governor Juan Bautista Vigil became the temporary head of the Mexican territorial government. Facing up to the military reality, Vigil swore “obedience to the Northern Republic.” Over the next few weeks, Kearny had his troops build a fort named for the Secretary of Defense on a bluff overlooking Santa Fe.

From the ramparts of Fort Marcy, American artillery commanded the capital of New Mexico. Kearny had carried out the first military mission that Marcy had assigned him ­­ to conquer New Mexico. To gather a host of one thousand five hundred soldiers, artillery, and supplies, along with a supply train of hundreds of wagons, and move them across five hundred and fifty miles was a tribute to the effectiveness of the army’s military planning and Kearny’s capabilities.

Kearny understood he was not to linger in New Mexico. Marcy’s orders pointed out that it was President Polk’s “cherished hope that you will be able to reach the interior of Upper California before winter.” Five weeks after entering Sante Fe, on September 25, Kearny departed with his dragoons to 8

conquer California.

Political Governance Planning

Unlike the military plan, the Polk Administration’s political governance plan did not lay out clear objectives or allocate adequate resources for its success. Of the thirteen paragraphs comprising Marcy’s orders, only two pertained to the civil governance of New Mexico. The first paragraph authorized Kearny to “establish temporary civil governments” in New Mexico and Northern California. In doing so, he advised Kearny to “continue in their employment all such of the existing officers as are known to be friendly to the United States, and will take the oath of allegiance to them.” 9

The most enthusiastic support for the war came from Southern politicians who hated a protective tariff. To retain that support, Marcy ordered Kearny to reduce customs rates to a level that only covered the operating expenses of the custom houses “without yielding any revenue to the government.”10

Marcy then addressed the political future the government held out to the Mexicans inhabiting the

7 Clarke, 143.8 Clarke, 396.9 Clarke, 396.10 Clarke, 396-7.

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conquered territory.

You may assure the people of those provinces that it is the wish and design of the United States to provide for them a free government, with the least possible delay, similar to that which exists in our territories. They will then be called on to exercise the rights of freemen in electing their own representatives to the territorial legislature. 11

As far as Kearny’s conduct, Marcy instructed the colonel to “act in such a manner as best to conciliate the inhabitants, and render them friendly to the United States.” 12

Marcy had succeeded in the rough and tumble world of New York politics, so he was not naive regarding the reception the Mexicans might provide Kearny. “It is foreseen that what relates to the civil government will be a difficult and unpleasant part of your duty…” Given the likely hostility that Kearny might face, Marcy evaded providing clear objectives for governing New Mexico. He wrote Kearny that “much must necessarily be left to your own discretion.”13

Experienced in army politics, Kearny could see that the Polk Administration was pinning the responsibility for establishing civil government in New Mexico entirely on him. The government did not provide a draft for constitutional government, a lawyer to advise him on legal matters, or an experienced territorial politician to serve as interim governor of New Mexico. The United States government had given little thought to how it would govern New Mexico, and instead, elected to let Kearny play it by ear.

Washington’s principal guidance to Kearny for establishing civil government was the proclamation that he was to deliver to the people of the territory. The proclamation sought to assure the Mexicans that the Army of the West “come amongst you as friends ­­ not as enemies; as protectors ­­ not as conquerors. We come among you for your benefit ­­ not your injury.” New Mexicans came to disbelieve that claim 14

and subsequently rebeled, in large part because the Americans failed to provide the guarantees laid out in the proclamation.

First Guarantee ­ Personal Property

The proclamation guaranteed that the invaders would respect the property of the New Mexicans. “...not a pepper, not an onion, shall be disturbed or taken by my troops, without pay or by the consent of the owner.”15

Officially, Kearny stood by that guarantee. Commissary officers and individual soldiers were expected to pay for food and services or barter for them. However, New Mexico was a poor high desert and mountainous land. The relatively small amount of arable ground barely provided a bit above a subsistence living for the New Mexicans and Pueblo Indians.

11 Clarke, 397.12 Clarke, 397.13 Clarke, 397.14 Clarke, 134.15 Clarke, 135.

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The American army arrived into New Mexico with meagre commissary supplies. In August, Kearny marched in with about one thousand seven hundred mouths to feed. In early October, the 2nd Missouri arrived, bringing another thousand hungry men. Later in October, the Mormon Battalion came in to Santa Fe increasing the burden of another five hundred men onto the meagre surplus of the Mexicans. Each of these contingents also brought along hundreds of hungry horses that were accustomed to abundant pasture, hay, and corn in Missouri. The American forces severely pressured New Mexico’s scant food and forage reserves.

Kearny’s instructions to compensate New Mexicans for food and fodder were largely ignored. The commissary officers lacked sufficient specie to pay for the needed supplies. Moreover, the army paymasters failed to arrive, so the men also lacked the means to pay the New Mexicans.

The American’s money soon ran out. Missourians turned to barter, trading buttons, pins, and needles for food for themselves and fodder for their horses. However, that was a short term remedy, at best. The situation was aggravated by the poor discipline imposed on the volunteers. Soon, to survive, the Americans stole corn, sheep, and fodder.

Kearny dispersed the units in his army across the arable parts of New Mexico to keep the horses from over­grazing the region around Santa Fe. As a result, the army plundered Mexican farmers throughout the Rio Grande and Chama river basins. All New Mexicans experienced the hard hand of the American army and realized that Kearny’s promise that the army would compensate them for their onions and other foodstuffs was false.

Second Guarantee ­ Real Property

Despite Kearny’s assurances that the Americans would safeguard the property rights of New Mexicans, the Kearny Code of law that he issued in September, 1846, undermined existing titles to real property. The long­standing law in New Mexico, Spanish and Mexican provided for the right of the members of a community to use communal lands and issued land grants to individuals and communities. The Kearny 16

Code imposed American law and procedures on these New Mexican legal practices.

Marcy’s orders to Kearny did not instruct him to follow New Mexican real estate law. The American government was silent on this point, although, as lawyers, both Mary and Polk would know that the issue was sure to arise. The Polk administration also neglected to advise Kearny whether existing New Mexican laws were to be followed or overturned. The Kearny Code, drafted by Missouri lawyers in the Army of the West, largely overturned the real estate laws and customs New Mexicans had followed for centuries.

The Spanish government issued land grants to Pueblo towns that gave the community title to a defined tract of land. While the tract was smaller than the Pueblo Indians had been using prior to the entry of the Spanish, the grant did reserved the land for the use of the members of the Pueblo community. Pueblo governing councils allocated some of the land to families to farm, but the title to the land remained in the 16 See: Malcom Ebright, Land Grants and Law Suits in Northern New Mexico, (Albuquerque, NM, 1994). Malcolm Ebright, ed., Spanish and Mexican Land Grants and the Law, (Manhattan, KS, 1989).

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name of the Pueblo. Land not allocated to specific families was available for all members of the Pueblo to use for grazing, hunting, and gathering. Mexican law sided with the rights of the Pueblo in land ownership against the putative right of a farmer to retain his land if he chose to leave the Pueblo.

Mexicans settling in New Mexico also received land grants from the Spanish and, later, the successor Mexican government. Some of the grants were to individuals. Others were made to communities and allocated specific tracts to individuals, with the land not immediately granted to individuals to be used by the community members in common. The Mexicans, like the Pueblo Indians, grazed livestock harvested nuts, fruit, firewood and timber, and hunted game on the common lands.

The Kearny Code replaced the traditions and precedents of Spanish and Mexican law in New Mexico with laws that the Americans were familiar with, those of Missouri and nearby territories

The code established a Register of Lands charged with recording “all papers and documents of and concerning lands and tenements situated in this territory, which were issued by the Spanish or Mexican governments, remaining in the archives of the secretary of the territory, or which were in any of the offices of the department of New Mexico under the Mexican government.” This formal process for 17

documented land title was totally alien to the informal locally based process followed by the New Mexicans.

The Kearny Code placed a burden on every landholder to prove his claim to a tract of land.

“Every person claiming lands in this territory, by virtue of any Spanish or Mexican grant, may deliver to the register of lands a notice in writing stating the nature and extent of his claim, and shall also at the same time deliver to the register of lands, for the purpose of being recorded, the grant, order of survey, deed, conveyance or other written evidence of his claims, and the same shall be recorded by the register...”18

Adding to the burden in a cash­strapped rural agricultural economy, the register charged the claimant twelve and one­half cents per hundred words contained in such written evidence of the claims.

The Kearny Code also provided a mechanism for the many cases in which the landholders lacked written documentation for their claims.

“...the claimant may take evidence in writing, before some officer having authority to administer oaths showing the nature and extent of his claim, how much of the land claimed has been actually cultivated and inhabited by himself and those under whom he claims, and for what length of time; and also as to any grant, deed or conveyance relating to said land having ever existed, or any record thereof having ever been made, and as to the loss or destruction of the same, and how and when such loss and destruction happened.” 19

17 New Mexico - Laws for the Government of the Territory of New Mexico; September 22, 1846 (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/kearney.asp), Register of Lands, Section 4.18 New Mexico - Laws for the Government, Section 5.19 New Mexico - Laws for the Government, Section 6.

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The American lawyers who drafted the code based the registration process on their experience in Missouri and elsewhere in the United States. They were familiar with a county level bureaucracy, typically housed in a courthouse at the county seat. Judicial records were housed there along with a sheriff who enforced the law and a judge who adjudicated criminal matters and civil disputes. In sparsely settled areas, the judge rode a circuit through adjacent counties amidst a bevy of lawyers seeking clients in the cases awaiting the adjudication. A process and bureaucracy was also in place to handle appeals through state appellate and supreme courts.

However, New Mexico was too impoverished to support a bureaucracy of this kind, and the residents too poor to attract professionally trained lawyers to address their legal needs. The village administrative officer, the alcalde, typically was a local man of means who was trusted by the community to handle a legal matter fairly. To some degree, the alcalde used whatever understanding of the law he had to reach a decision. More commonly, he drew upon the customs of the community – how it had always been done in that locality to decide land ownership, water rights, grazing privileges, damage to crops from wandering livestock, and other issues that frequently arose in small agricultural societies.

If a party to the matter disagreed with the alcalde’s decision, he could appeal it to the governor. However, the governor in New Mexico was not legally trained and had other matters to attend to. In some cases, the governor might ask for clarification of testimony, and the matter might bounce back and forth between the village and Santa Fe several times without the authorities reaching a decision. Frequently, the appellant might wait for years for a decision, and the governor usually confirmed what the alcade in the community had decided in the first place.

New Mexicans would see no need to register their land claims, since everyone in their community knew who had the right to use each tract of land. Their suspicion that the new American land policy threatened their property rights would be heightened with a stipulation in the Kearny Code that the claimants had five years from January 1, 1847, to register their claims. If they neglected to do so, their claims were void.20

To New Mexicans, the American land policy jeopardized their title to the tracts explicitly granted to them and to their use of lands held commonly by the community. It was also costly and lawyer­ridden. Adding to the sense of injustice, Americans living in New Mexico were already squatting on common lands and grabbing vast tracts of land through grants by their former governor, Armijo, who was known to be corrupt. New Mexicans had grounds to view the American land policy, the heart of an agricultural community, and practices as a danger to their individual and common land rights.

Third Guarantee ­ Protection from Nomadic Indians

Kearny’s proclamation also asserted that, unlike the Mexican government it was overthrowing, the United States would protect the New Mexicans from Indian raiders. “The Apaches and the Navajoes come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep, and even your women, whenever they please.” Kearny assured the Mexicans. “My government will correct all this. It will keep off the Indians…”21

20 New Mexico - Laws for the Government, Section 6.21 Clarke, 135.

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Not for the last time, Washington committed the United States military to step in and resolve a long­lasting local conflict among peoples that it did not understand. The New Mexicans and the Pueblo Indians faced several frontiers with Indian tribes in the surrounding areas. Navajos, Utes and Jicarilla Apaches to the north, Kiowas and Comanches to the east, Apaches to the south, and, Navajos to the west. The frontiers were not geographically fixed lines on the ground and did not demarcate borders between fixed cultural or economic peoples. Individuals on either side of the frontier traded with one another, inter­married, and stole livestock from each other.

The greatest threat to the New Mexicans was the Navajo Indian tribe. The interactions and exchanges between the two peoples are instructive to the complexity of the several frontiers that the United States government publicly proclaimed that it would defend. The Navajo Indians, an Athabascan language speaking group, had moved into the Colorado Plateau region prior to the Spanish Entrada of Coronado in 1540.

While interacting with the Pueblo tribes, the Navajo Indians incorporated agriculture into their economic base, notably corn and beans. After the Spanish entrada into New Mexico, they further adapted their culture to include the horse for riding and as a beast of burden, as well as the Churro sheep. Earlier, in central Mexico, the Spanish had brought the Churro sheep from Spain to use for mutton. But, when introduced into the colder regions of New Mexico, the sheep adapted by adding an inner coat of fine fibers that became valued by weavers.

Prior to the American conquest, for more than five or six generations, the Navajos and the New Mexicans had faced off across the geographic frontier that separated the two peoples. Both peoples competed for scarce grazing lands and water for their flocks in an arid country that provided scant grasslands west of the Rio Grande.

Year after year, for more than a century and a half, the two peoples raided, rustled, enslaved, inter­married, and killed one another. Beginning in the mid­seventeenth century, the Spanish government from time to time sent military forces against the Navajo. After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government also regularly conducted military strikes into Navajo country. Yet, the Navajo continued to raid into the more settled lands to steal sheep, hostages, and horses.

The frontier was more than a scene for mutual violence. Culture moved back and forth between the peoples. Navajo Indians picked up on the Spanish language; New Mexicans learned the Navajo language. The two peoples inter­married, and both peoples inter­married with Pueblo tribes and shared one anothers’ languages.

Horses stolen by Navajo from a Rio Grande Pueblo or New Mexican ranch were purchased a hundred miles away by New Mexican ranchers, no questions asked. Sheep seized in a raid by the Spanish, or later, the Mexican government, from one group of Navajo Indians were re­purchased by other Navajo Indians a hundred miles away with, again, no questions asked. The Pueblo Indians saw a portion of their crops taxed by the Spanish/Mexican government, but did not see government’s soldiers effectively

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protecting their flocks or stores of corn from Navajo Indian marauders.

Many of the New Mexico wool blankets esteemed by the Missouri traders were woven by Navajo women who had been enslaved by the Mexicans. Many of the so­called Missouri mules that powered the Army of the West had been rustled by Comanches in their raids in New Mexico and far to the south of the Rio Grande in Mexico and then sold to Missouri traders for guns and ammunition.

Shortly after being appointed governor, in the fall of 1838, Armijo conducted a series of raids into Navajo country to bring an end to the marauding. After two months in the field and killing seventy­eight warriors and enslaving several dozen more, plus rounding up more than two hundred horses and two thousand sheep, the governor felt he had the upper hand. Yet, the Mexican government lacked the military power to crush the Navajo Indians, and the marauding continued.

In July, 1839, Armijo recognized the failure of punitive raids as a solution. He negotiated a treaty with several leading men of the Navajos that addressed the leading issues facing the two peoples. However, the Navajo political structure did not permit the headmen of one band to speak for the men in other bands. A leading figure in one band could not even control the actions of the others in his own band. He could only suggest and lead by moral suasion. Accordingly, a treaty was binding, in the eyes of the Navajo Indians, only upon those individuals who had signed it.

After Armijo’s treaty, the killing and rustling committed by both peoples continued. Then, in 1846, the Army of the West arrived. During the first few weeks of American control, Navajo Indians raided Mexican towns and farmsteads throughout New Mexico. Kearny responded by deploying troops to protect outlying settlements.

Marcy’s orders mandated that once he had subjugated New Mexico, Kearny should move on to conquer the main prize, California. In late September, Kearny reported that his work in New Mexico was complete, except for subduing the Navajo, and he prepared to leave for California.

En route, Kearny encountered Kit Carson, who was on his way east with dispatches from California and learned that American forces had taken control of that territory. Accordingly, Kearny left three companies of the 1st Dragoons in southern New Mexico under Colonel E. V. Sumner (later a Major General in the Union Army during the Civil War) to fend off Navajo raiders and left for California with about one hundred men.

Kearny appointed Doniphan of the 1st Missouri Volunteers to command the American forces in New Mexico. He ordered Doniphan to secure the peace with the Navajo Indians and recover prisoners and livestock that had been seized since the American army arrived in New Mexico in August.

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Doniphan instructed the American forces deployed west of Albuquerque to notify Navajo head men to meet with him at Ojo de Oso (east of present day Gallup) in early November. He then sent a column under Gilpin north from Abiquiu to reach the San Juan River and then then march west, turning south into the Chuska Mountains and on to Ojo de Oso. Along the way, Gilpin was ordered to urge Navajos to rendezvous with Doniphan to establish a treaty between the Americans and the Navajo.

In late November, Doniphan met with several principal Navajo head men at Ojo de Oso. He demanded that Navajo attacks on the Pueblo Indians and Mexicans must cease or the Navajo faced war with the United States. The Navajo Indians replied that they had fought the New Mexicans, their traditional enemies, for generations. They did not see why the Americans could, after warring against the New Mexicans, view them as friends, and were turning on the Navajo Indians. 22

In this initial encounter, neither the Americans nor the Navajo Indians understood one another’s position. Despite that, the two sides subscribed to a treaty that contained five articles. The first three were similar to those in the treaty Armijo had negotiated with the Navajo a few years earlier and that were immediately ignored by both the New Mexicans and the Navajo Indians.

The first article declared a lasting peace between the Navajo Indians and the Americans. The second called for mutual trade and protection for those engaged in the trade. The third mandated that property and persons taken by both sides since the arrival of the American army in August were to be restored.

The new concepts were contained in the fourth and fifth articles. The fourth laid out that New Mexicans and Pueblo Indians were contained in the terms referring to “Americans” but that the Navajo were not. According to this provision, the United States government would view Navajo Indian predations against New Mexicans or Pueblo Indians as if they were committed against Americans, but that the United States was not bound to protect the Navajo Indians from raiding by New Mexicans or Pueblo Indians.

The fifth article called for a mutual restoration of all prisoners. Doniphan made no effort to implement this provision or any of the other articles in the treaty. He was eager to march his 1st Missouri south down the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Mexico, and link up with American forces that were fighting the Mexican army.

In his haste to depart, Doniphan did not send a copy of the treaty to the American civil governor Bent or to his successor as military commander of the territory, Colonel Sterling Price, of the 2nd Missouri Regiment. (During the Civil War, Price was a major general in the Confederate Army.) As a result, neither the civilian nor military leaders of New Mexico had an inkling about what Doniphan had committed the American government to do about the Navajo Indians.

22 Frank McNitt, Navajo Wars, Military Campaigns, Slave Raids, and Reprisals, (Albuquerque, NM, 1990), 118.

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Drafting a treaty with a few Navajo leaders and then failing to enforce it was the same failed strategy used by Armijo a few years earlier. Many of the Missouri soldiers in their letters and diaries wrote that the treaty was worthless, as did Bent when he finally learned of it. 23

The Navajo Indians were not impressed by the American force that they had encountered. They saw that they had more warriors than the Americans had soldiers in the territory. Moreover, the Navajos observed that the Missouri horses, accustomed to lush pastures and corn for feed, fared poorly on the sparse high prairie grasses available to them in New Mexico. Based on these facts, the Navajo Indians did not believe that the American military could enforce the terms of the treaty.24

Even while Doniphan met with some Navajo Indians at Ojo del Oso, others were raiding Pueblo and New Mexican communities along the central and lower Rio Grande. After Doniphan headed south into Chihuahua, the Navajo raids intensified throughout the territory. The sporadic pursuits by small elements of the American Army failed to stem the predations waged by the Navajo Indians against their sedentary neighbors that had been on­going for two centuries. The Americans failed in their commitment to protect the New Mexicans from the Navajo.

Fourth Guarantee: Religion

In the proclamation Kearny had distributed in New Mexico prior to his invasion, and in his proclamations issued verbally at Las Vegas, San Miguel, and Santa Fe, Kearny pledged that the United States would safeguard the people in their Catholic religion. In Las Vegas he said:

I repeat again, [the United States government] will protect you in your religion. I know you are all great Catholics… My government respects your religion as much as the Protestant religion, and allows each man to worship his Creator as his heart tells him best. Its laws protect the Catholic as well as the Protestant…25

To demonstrate his commitment to respecting Catholicism in New Mexico, Kearny, although a Protestant, regularly attended services at a Catholic church in Santa Fe.

Despite Kearny’s rhetoric and personal behavior, New Mexicans soon saw tangible evidence of limits the government’s tolerance for different religions. In mid­October, the Mormon Battalion arrived in Santa Fe confirming the rumors the New Mexicans had heard that civil governments in the United States had not protected Mormons from the intolerance of their neighbors.

Terrorized from state to state, that summer the Mormons began their trek away from the settled regions

23 McNitt, 123.24 McNitt, 120.25 Clarke, 135.

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of the United States, ultimately to settle in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Despite Kearny’s proclamations, New Mexicans could well wonder whether they, too, might be driven from their homes.

Errors in Governance:

Marcy’s instructions to Kearny acknowledged that “what relates to the civil government will be a difficult and unpleasant part of your duty, and much must necessarily be left to your own discretion.” 26

Kearny, a life­long soldier, looked to Charles Bent for advice about New Mexico politics.

Upon moving to Santa Fe in the early 1830’s, Bent married into the influential Jaramillo trading family. (Kit Carson married Bent’s wife’s sister.) He traded goods with the Navajo, Jicarilla Apache, and other roaming Indian tribes, the Pueblo towns, and the New Mexicans. Bent, along with a Mexican partner, prevailed upon Armijo to cede him a land grant (later to be known as the Maxwell Grant) along the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that exceeded 1,700,000 acres. With that experience, Bent was well positioned to counsel Kearny about economic and governmental affairs in New Mexico.

Eager to comply with Marcy’s instructions to hasten on to California, Kearny appointed men to the top positions in the territorial civil government. He named Bent as governor and a close friend of Bent’s, Francis P. Blair (later a major general in the Union Army in the Civil War), as district attorney .

The only New Mexican appointed by Kearny as a senior officer was Donaciano Vigil as territorial secretary. He was engaged in the Santa Fe Trail trade and had for some time urged that New Mexico expand its commercial ties with the United States by lowering customs duties and other barriers to trade.

Understandably, Kearny put these offices into the hands of friends of the United States. However, all of these men viewed commercial ties with Missouri as an unmixed blessing to New Mexico. Perhaps leaning too much on Bent’s advice, Kearny neglected to appoint men who, while friendly toward the United States, were aware that some aspects to the American business presence in New Mexico were bitterly resented by some New Mexicans and that the new territorial government should address them.

Kearny and the Polk Administration did not know about the growing estrangement between the Americans settling in the territory and the New Mexicans. Originally, the Americans came as fur trappers and traders and were a negligible presence in the New Mexico economy. Beginning in 1821, the Santa Fe Trail traders brought in goods from Missouri and exchanged them for New Mexico products or specie. They paid tolls, conducted their business, caroused, and left.

By the mid­1830’s, an increasing number of Americans, such as Bent, settled year round, married into local families, and expanded their business enterprises into the heart of the New Mexico economy. They established stores in mining towns, traded directly with Navajo and other Indian tribes, and even established a distillery ­­ Taos Lightning whisky was commonly used as a medium of exchange throughout the Rocky Mountains.

26 Clarke, 397.

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Moreover, some squatted on land granted to Pueblo Indians, notably in the Taos area. Others worked with the corrupt Mexican governor, Armijo, to acquire land grants. Many New Mexicans regarded the land given to the Americans as commons for the use of their communities and could not be handed over to the Americans. By the 1840’s, tensions between New Mexicans and Americans increased as New Mexicans resented American intrusion and Americans fretted at New Mexican opposition to their initiatives.

An example of this friction surfaced in a criminal legal matter. A mercantile store owned by an American in the mining town of Delores del Oro, south of Santa Fe, discounted the price of the gold that the Mexican miners dug from the earth and inflated the prices of the goods sold to the miners. During a robbery, two miners murdered an American clerk in the store. The authorities found them with the few dollars worth of stolen merchandise on their way to their home villages and confessed to the crime. However, for a year, the authorities made no further attempt to apprehend the men as the legal file on the matter gathered dust on a desk in Chihuahua.

Frustrated Americans took the men into custody and demanded that Armijo bring them promptly to justice. The governor threatened to call out the militia against the American mob, but he did jail the murderers, briefly. The legal file made its way several times back and forth between Santa Fe and Chihuahua as the Mexican officials sought to pin down the evidence and testimony. Five and a half years later, both men were at large, having never set foot in a courtroom.27

In 1841, a column of Texas adventurers attempted to conquer New Mexico and annex it to Texas. Armijo discovered correspondence between some Americans living in New Mexico and the governor of Texas in which the Americans welcomed the invasion. In response, a mob of irate New Mexicans invaded the American Consul’s office in Santa Fe and stabbed him with a knife. Many New Mexicans thought Bent was one who was conspiring with the Texans. 28

Bent wrote several letters to the American Consul presenting American grievances that murders and robberies committed by New Mexicans against foreigners went unpunished. The Americans could not understand the slow pace of Mexican justice and the lack of a formal criminal justice system. They did not perceive that impoverished New Mexico could not afford to pay for sheriffs, prosecutors or judges.

From the perspectives of New Mexicans, Kearny had appointed an avid practitioner of the rapacious American ways, Charles Bent, as governor. He also appointed Blair, a crony of Bent’s, to be the official to enforce the Kearny Code. Blair was unpopular before holding office. A few months earlier, an angry crowd of New Mexicans encountered a drunken Blair wandering the streets of Taos and and severely beat him.

New Mexicans, then, would have little confidence that the Americans Kearny appointed to govern them would address their grievances and cease exploiting New Mexico. The failure of the Polk Administration to provide Kearny with guidance in establishing civil government in New Mexico and its

27 Jill Mocho, Murder and Justice in Frontier New Mexico 1821 - 1846, (Albuquerque, NM, 1997), 124 - 144.28 Stephen G. Hyslop, Bound for Santa Fe, The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest, 1806 - 1848, (Norman, OK, 2002), 282 - 283.

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focus on California resulted in the conquest of New Mexico that was incidental to seizing California.

Kearny’s failure to fulfill the guarantees that the United States made to New Mexicans ­­ safeguarding their property and title in real estate, preserving their Catholic faith, and protecting them from nomadic Indians ­­ was a failure of providing the basic functions of government. Kearny’s appointments to lead the government were so out of touch with the interests and concerns of New Mexicans that dissatisfaction with the American regime was bound to fester.

However, Kearny’s failure to establish an effective government in New Mexico stemmed from the orders he received from Marcy. The orders stressed that California, not New Mexico, was Kearny’s primary objective.

The Polk Administration did not realize that the Navajo Indian tribe posed an existential threat to the New Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. Having witnessed Navajo raids in the few weeks he had been in New Mexico, Kearny learned that the army should eliminate that menace. However, Kearny departed for California before dealing with that threat in order to fulfill Polk’s “cherished hope” to arrive on the Pacific coast before winter.

Kearny ordered Doniphan to establish a treaty with the Navajo tribe to safeguard the New Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. However, he also ordered Doniphan to march south into Chihuahua to join with an American column fighting the Mexican army in that territory. Doniphan struck a treaty with several leading Navajo Indians but, in his haste to march to glory, left for Chihuahua without enforcing the peace treaty. The American force remaining in New Mexico, the 2nd Missouri Regiment, lacked the strength to prevent Navajo raids.29

The Polk Administration failed to provide Kearny with guidance on governing New Mexico. Washington appeared to be ignorant of the friction between the New Mexicans and Americans that increasingly erupted in violence. Marcy’s instructions brushed off governance “difficult and unpleasant” and did not provide Kearny with men experienced in establishing and operating territorial government.

As a result, many New Mexicans lost confidence in the usefulness and intentions of the civil government Kearny hastily established. Warned in advance, the Americans broke up an initial rebellion, the so­called “Holiday Conspiracy,” in December, 1846. Undeterred, New Mexicans and Taos Pueblo Indians launched a second revolt, the Taos Rebellion, in January 1847, that culminated in the murder of the governor and others. The American army crushed the rebellion and hanged several insurrectionists.

The Polk Administration focused on California and, following orders, so did Kearny. New Mexico was a conquest incidental to seizing California. Governor Bent and several other Americans and the New Mexican and Pueblo Indian rebels paid the price for Polk’s indifference to governing New Mexico.

29 The American government did not allocate resources sufficient to subdue the Navajo tribe until 1863 when Kit Carson rounded up about eight thousand Navajo Indians and interned them on a reservation at Bosque Redondo.

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