Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (36 page)

Bent, for his part, thought Martinez a corrupt and tyrannical man—and a drunk. Bent (who could be an atrocious speller in notes that went unproofread) once wrote of the Padre: “I think he is more sinsearly devoted to Baccus than any of the other gods.”

Priests like Martinez were not the only enemies Bent had to keep an eye on. In the south there were many influential landowners who presided over large haciendas on the Rio Grande. They had a good life, by and large, with plenty of Indian peons to do the work and lazy river water oozing into their fields from the acequias. In the relative terms of New Mexico, these landowners in the Rio Abajo (the “Lower River”) were wealthy, and they seemed to fear that the coming of the Americans meant that their patrician existence would be forever upset.

With so many potential flash points of discontent, Bent was understandably anxious about the future of the New Mexico territory. He worried that a new revolt might easily sprout, hydralike, from the severed neck of the old. “The principal movers,” Bent wrote to Colonel Price on Christmas Day, “may well not leave the country without a last desperate struggle.”

If he had any time for reflection as he rode toward Taos, Governor Bent must have wondered why he had accepted this thankless post. He had spent four hard months ensconced in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, fretting over the intricate affairs of this volatile new U.S. territory whose many forms of turmoil were exceeded only by its poverty. He loved New Mexico for its raw beauty and wide-open ways, but it was quite another thing to try to govern this remote and benighted place. The province was a cauldron of conflict, its culture rich and old but stunted by hardship. The population of New Mexico was almost entirely illiterate and swayed by religious passions too potent to gauge, let alone manage.

During its long isolation, New Mexico had preserved archaic traditions, vestigial dialects of Spanish, and fierce strains of a sometimes unorthodox Catholicism that dated back to the most hysterical days of the Inquisition. Throughout New Mexico there were families who carried on curious traditions—lighting nine-lamped candelabras, singing verses of Hebrew, refusing to eat pork. These were the “crypto-Jews,” as they’ve been called, descendants of Spanish Jews who had fled to Mexico in the 1600s to escape the rampant anti-Semitism of the Inquisition, and then had spread to the most isolated and (they hoped) more tolerant precincts of the empire. Heeding a stubborn cultural memory, these families pursued Hebraic customs in semisecrecy, often without knowing why.

In the remote rural areas of the north were secret societies of flagellants who called themselves
penitentes
—pious men who went out into the countryside to enact dour passion-play processionals in which they whipped themselves to a bloody pulp and, in certain extreme circumstances, even erected wooden crosses and crucified those brethren who wished to know the fullest meaning of Christ’s suffering. (To die on the cross, some
penitentes
thought, guaranteed one’s place in heaven.) It was said that the floggings and other
penitente
rituals had only intensified since the American occupation, as though they feared that the kingdom was at hand—or at least that their religion was now under genuine threat.

As for secular entertainment, the locals had few choices. Aside from horse races and card gaming and fandangos, the chief forms of amusement in this deadly dull province seemed principally to involve chickens. There were cockfights, of course, but also the immensely popular
el gallo,
an old blood sport in which a living fowl was buried up to its neck in the dirt of a hard-packed yard; horsemen would then take turns galloping by and attempt to yank the rooster up by the twitching wattles of its head in a single deft motion. Then, in a final free-for-all, the
caballeros
would fight over the chicken as though it were a football and, in the frenzy, invariably rip their quarry to pieces.

New Mexico officials had long ago learned to accept their sorry lot and make do with very little—and so Governor Bent would also have to resign himself. The day he was appointed governor, Bent wrote a long letter to Secretary of State James Buchanan in which he complained of the sad state of affairs. The whole territory was “impoverished and undeveloped,” he said, and education was “criminally neglected.” He warned that “a rude and ignorant people are about to become citizens of the U.S.” There was no regular mail service, no law books or stationery, and not enough translators to conduct the work of government. The legal system was a joke, the bench stacked with incompetents. An army lieutenant summed up the primitive state of jurisprudence in a letter home: “All the judges of the New Mexico Superior Court together do not possess the legal knowledge of a single justice of the peace in St. Louis.”

Little had changed with the coming of the Americans. Santa Fe had always been a neglected capital, among the last to receive the news of the world and the fruits of invention. It had been the forgotten tongue-tip of the Spanish empire, and now it was a mere outpost of an expansionist American republic. Far to the south, in the agave thickets of Mexico, the war raged, and the Americans were pressing toward the real prize: Mexico City. And out west, in California, Kearny and his dragoons were consummating President Polk’s fondest desire to make the United States a continental nation, with American ports on the Pacific. But Santa Fe, true to its forlorn past, had been forgotten again. It had been successfully invaded, but not entirely conquered. Bent’s rump government crept along in spite of its conspicuous wants: not enough money, not enough troops, not enough information—an extremity feeling only the feeblest pulse of the nation to which it was newly attached.

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!