Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  The American military response to the murders of Euro-American civilians and government officials was immediate and unequivocal.87 While the native resisters fought mostly with bows and arrows along with a few guns, the Americans responded with cannons. Over the course of a few weeks, the U.S. Army engaged in battles against the native population at Santa Cruz de la Cañada, Embudo, Mora, Taos Pueblo, and Las Vegas. Four days after Bent’s murder, Colonel Price left Santa Fe with 353 men and four 12-pound cannons (supplemented soon thereafter with two more howitzers), to be employed against an enemy that Price estimated to number roughly 1,500 men.88 The winter of 1846–47 was especially harsh, with deep snow on the ground in the Taos area in January and February, a special hardship for soldiers on foot (only the company of volunteers rode horses).89 The natives had the advantage of knowing the local terrain, but they were outgunned by the Americans, resulting in lopsided casualty numbers. For instance, eight Americans were killed or wounded at Santa Cruz, but more than four times that many Mexicans and Indians lost their lives.90 The Americans headed north toward Taos, and in the village of Embudo, which lies at the bottom of the canyon that is the principal route into Taos, encountered more than six hundred resisters on January 29, according to Price. By this time, Price had 479 troops and six cannons. He reported that one American and twenty natives were killed.

  While Price was moving toward Taos, another American contingent was moving from the northeast to the village of Mora, near where Waldo’s trading party had been murdered January 19. Five days after these murders, the Mora rebels successfully repelled the American forces, which then retreated. But the Americans returned a few days later, this time under the command of Captain Jesse I. Morin and anxious for revenge. The Americans reported no enemy casualties from this attack, but it is likely that many villagers were killed, save those who could escape to the mountains. In addition to razing the village, the Americans destroyed communal food supplies, which probably resulted in the later starvation of those who initially fled to the surrounding mountains.91 The New Orleans Daily Delta portrayed Morin, a native of Platte, Missouri, as a hero for his attack on Mora, saying he “burned to ashes every house, town and rancho in his path [and that was] just retribution for assassination of innocent people [in Waldo’s party].”92

  Price continued moving toward Taos, reporting that he arrived at the summit above Taos in two feet of snow on February 1, the same day that Morin’s forces razed Mora. It took Price and his troops another two days, marching down the mountain through the snow, to reach Taos, where Bent had been murdered.93 At this point, Price learned the rebels had barricaded themselves in the San Geronimo Catholic church at Taos Pueblo, north of the village where Bent lived. Price described the Pueblo’s church as well-fortified: “calculated for defense, every point of the exterior walls and pickets being flanked by some projecting building.” According to Price’s report, the troops arrived at the Pueblo midday on February 3 and, starting at two o’clock, pounded the western side of the adobe church with five cannons for more than two hours. Meanwhile, a company of volunteers on horseback, led by one of Bent’s longtime trading partners, Charles St. Vrain, blocked access to those who might have escaped to the mountains. The next morning, Price stationed cannons on the west and north sides of the church and continuing pounding it for two more hours. After an unsuccessful effort to storm the church at midday, Price moved the largest cannon, a six-pound howitzer, from a position 250 feet west of the church to one 60 feet away and then continued firing until there was a large opening in the adobe wall of the church.

  At least two hundred Mexicans and Pueblo Indians died that day at Taos Pueblo, including fifty-one killed as they tried to flee to the mountains.94 But the number of officially reported deaths only begins to tell the story. Because Taos Pueblo itself was destroyed, along with all food supplies, many more Taos Pueblo residents (including women, children, and elderly men) must have starved to death over the months to come. Never once in the official reports did Price express concern that he had stormed a church to achieve his end. But a young American adventure seeker named Lewis Garrard described what it was like to visit the ruins of Taos Pueblo shortly after the battle:

  [We entered] the church at the stormers’ breach, through which the missiles of death were hurled. Above, between the charred and blackened rafters which leaned from their places as if ready to fall on us, could be seen the spotless blue sky of this pure clime—on either side, the lofty walls, perforated by cannon ball and loophole, let in the long lines of uncertain gray light; and strewed and piled about the floor, as on the day of battle, were broken, burnt beams and heaps of adobes. Climbing and jumping over them, we made our way to the altar, now a broken platform, with scarce a sign or vestige of its former use. . . . A few half-scared Pueblos walked listlessly about, vacantly staring in a state of dejected, gloomy abstraction. And they might well be so. Their alcalde dead, their grain and cattle gone, their church in ruins, the flower of the nation slain or under sentence of death, and the rest—with the exception of those in prison—refugees starving in the mountains.95

  The First American Trials in the Southwest

  The first American trial in New Mexico was the court-martial of one of the leaders of the Taos Revolt. Price reported capturing alive the two reputed leaders of the uprising, Tomás Romero of Taos Pueblo (whom Price refers to by first name only, a sign of his inferior treatment of Indians) and a Mexican named Pablo Montoya. Romero was “one of [the enemy’s] principal men, who had instigated and been actively engaged in the murder of Governor Bent and others,” according to Price; his capture was a principal goal of bombing the church at Taos Pueblo. Price reported that Romero was killed in military custody by a “Private Fitzgerald.” Price did not provide any additional details or indicate that Fitzgerald was punished or otherwise reprimanded for Romero’s murder, perhaps a further indication of Price’s low value of Indians.96 Montoya was captured at Taos Pueblo, court-martialed, and executed a day later.97 Newspaper accounts describe the court-martial charges against Montoya as murder (the January attack on Bent) and “exciting the people to rebellion,” based on a letter he authored a week after the assassination.98

  In the aftermath of these military executions, New Mexicans witnessed their first trials under U.S. civil law. It was these trials that culminated in the Easter hangings of 1847 described at the outset of this chapter, as well as eleven to sixteen additional executions.99 Stemming from the uprising by Mexicans and Pueblo Indians against the Americans, more than one hundred native men were arrested and jailed under military guard in Santa Fe and Taos. The Euro-American prosecutor sought an incredible seventy-nine indictments against Mexican and Pueblo Indian men for Bent’s murder.100 The two resulting sets of trials—one series in Santa Fe in March 1847 and one series in Taos in April of that year—were conducted as civilian trials, but they occurred very much in the shadow of military rule. It does not appear that the “superior court” constituted by Kearny so early in the American invasion had functioned prior to these trials. The war did not end until May 1848, and Congress did not authorize a civil government and legal system in the region until late 1850. Thus, these trials fell somewhere between martial and civil law.

  The trials would have seemed foreign not only to Mexicans and Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, but also to those in the rest of the United States. We can therefore understand the trials by comparison to two relevant benchmarks: the Spanish-Mexican legal system that predated the American occupation and the criminal justice system that Americans aspired to in the mid-nineteenth century.

  Under Spanish and Mexican authority, the local alcalde system was the primary means for adjudication of disputes, and, by Kearny’s design, this system remained in place during the U.S. military occupation. As with the early American justice of the peace, formal legal training was not a requirement for being an alcalde; instead, men were chosen for this role because they were prominent in their community, literate, and probably frequently r
elatively wealthy due to ranching or mercantile enterprises.101 Rather than relying on procedural formalities or legal precedent, the alcalde system put a premium on reaching a settlement that maintained the relationship between the parties in a land where life was challenging and highly interdependent on kin, neighbors, and community.102 There were no lawyers (although parties occasionally brought along an adviser to assist them in making their case), nor were there juries or other mechanisms for public participation, outside the parties and witnesses. The community, however, which was generally small and interdependent, functioned as a check on the alcalde, since the efficacy of resolutions depended on their widespread acceptance in the community.103

  A second benchmark against which to understand these first American trials in the Southwest is to consider how trials looked elsewhere in the United States at the time.104 As they do today, prosecutions of persons for major felonies (burglary, robbery, arson, major fraud, manslaughter, assault, rape, and murder, among them) involved juries composed of laypersons at two major stages: (1) at the indictment stage, a grand jury composed of laypersons decided whether or not to accept a prosecutor’s recommendation to indict and what crime(s) to charge;105 and (2) at the trial stage, a petit jury of laypersons decided whether the defendant was guilty or not and sometimes had the discretion to determine punishment in cases of guilt.106 Looking at the United States as a whole, we know that all grand and petit jurors were men and that the vast majority of them were white.107

  One distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century criminal trials was that the defendant frequently was not represented by a lawyer, especially when less serious crimes were involved.108 Perhaps the irregular presence of lawyers influenced the pace of criminal justice in the nineteenth century. In one California county, researchers found that the average criminal trial in the 1880s lasted a day and a half,109 and in some jurisdictions, entire trials concluded in less than an hour.110 Finally, a convicted defendant had the right to appeal—to ask an appellate court to review and reconsider his conviction.111

  Another aspiration of the U.S. trial system was that the trained legal experts, in the form of prosecutors and presiding judges, and the laymen who served as jurors would hold each other in check. Citizen grand juries checked the power of the prosecutor and petit juries checked the power of the trial judge. Writing about nineteenth-century trends, legal scholar Lawrence Friedman argues that, over the course of the century, judges became less powerful as jurors gained power, even as what he terms a “fundamental ambiguity” about Americans’ beliefs of juries persisted: “Juries were, on the one hand, supposed to reflect popular norms; but, on the other hand, they were not supposed to indulge in popular stereotypes. On the one hand, they were lionized; on the other, mistrusted.”112

  These two benchmarks—the Mexican legal system that existed prior to the American invasion and the practices that governed criminal trials elsewhere in the United States—reveal what the expectations of the native people of New Mexico and of the Americans in the region would have been on the eve of these first American trials in the Southwest. The trials themselves unfolded in ways that would have seemed foreign to both audiences. This is true because the trials ultimately must be seen as “war trials,” in that they aimed to accomplish the ends of war, rather than in any sense meet the standard of being a coherent adjudication system. They were war trials despite the fact that Mexicans participated in them as grand and petit jurors, defendants, and witnesses. Indeed, it may have been precisely the fact of Mexicans’ participation that resulted in the successful imposition of American colonial rule in New Mexico in the decades to come.

  During his brief stay in New Mexico, Kearny appointed three judges to the “superior court”: Antonio José Otero, Charles Beaubien, and Joab Houghton. Otero was a well-to-do Mexican merchant and rancher, who had served in the Mexican legislature and helped draft Mexico’s constitution.113 Beaubien was a French Canadian trapper and trader who had become a naturalized Mexican citizen and married a Mexican woman, and who had served as an alcalde under the Mexican government.114 Of the three, only the Euro-American merchant Houghton had no prior legal or governing experience.115 It is hard to believe that Kearny imagined the newly conceived American court actually conducting business during the wartime occupation, but that opportunity came with the Taos uprising. The previously inactive court system provided a way both to mete out punishment to the surviving rebels and to consolidate American rule. The Americans probably expected the trials to result in an undeniable display of American authority and a dramatic warning—in the form of public hangings—to any natives still contemplating rebellion.

  There were numerous ways in which the trials were illegitimate as judged by American standards of the time. Despite the fact that his son Narciso had been killed along with Bent, Beaubien convened the Taos court as judge. He appointed George Bent, brother of the slain governor, as foreman of the grand jury, though typically the grand jury would have elected its own foreman. Not surprisingly, given the judge’s and foreman’s relationships to the murder victims, the grand jury returned indictments against thirty-eight of the forty men brought before it. Yet the nineteen-man grand jury also included fourteen or fifteen men with Spanish surnames, likely members of high-status Mexican families in the Taos area.116 Given the relative isolation and small size of these villages, we can assume that these and other jurors were related to or otherwise connected to those charged with crimes (several shared surnames with defendants).

  Although the majority of the grand jurors were Mexican men, Euro-Americans seem to have been overrepresented, given their small numbers in New Mexico at that time. It appears that virtually all Euro-American men present in Taos who were not part of the occupying military force served as jurors. Thus, the presiding judge very likely overlooked any requirement of residency for jurors (under typical rules, only men who had resided in the region for six or more months would have been eligible). Amazingly given their numbers, the juries in at least three murder trials involving a total of ten defendants—those of José Manuel García, of the five Pueblo Indian defendants tried jointly, and of the four Mexicans tried jointly—were composed entirely of Euro-Americans. An American eyewitness reported that several juries included a Frenchman who spoke very little English and whom he characterized as “with not two ideas above eating and drinking.”117 He reported overhearing the French juror ask the jury foreman what he should do, to which the Euro-American foreman’s response was, “Why, hang them, of course; what did you come here for?”118

  In Taos, more than thirty men were indicted for serious crimes. Five were indicted for “high treason” for their activities on January 19: Polo Salazar, Francisco Ulibarri, Varua Tafoya, Felipe Tafoya, and Pablo Guerrera. Of these five, only Salazar was convicted of treason; he was tried, convicted, and hanged within a few days without the opportunity to appeal his conviction. Ulibarri was tried for treason April 12, but his case ended in a hung jury and the court ordered him released. Perhaps the jury was influenced by the hangings of five native sons they had witnessed three days earlier. More than a week into the court session, prosecutor Frank Blair dropped the treason charges against the remaining three men, and they were released. Although the high number of returned indictments suggests that the grand jury chose not to exercise its authority to “check” the prosecutor’s power in this case, the petit jury in the Ulibarri case did. Because at least one juror refused to acquiesce in the conviction for treason (which, from the hanging of Salazar three days earlier, they knew would result in death to the defendant), the Euro-American prosecutor received the message that it was not worth pursuing treason charges against the remaining men accused of that crime.

  Seventeen men were charged with Bent’s murder. This charge suggests that Blair put forward a theory that the men were accomplices in the murder of Bent. This theory would seem implausible under these circumstances, since it was not known who Bent’s actual killers were, since substantial time had passed since t
he murders, and since potential witnesses would have been unavailable because they had been murdered at Taos Pueblo or left the region to elude murder or capture by the Americans.119 On April 7, José Manuel García was convicted of murder and sentenced to die; he was hanged at Taos plaza two days later. Pedro Lucero, Juan Ramón Trujillo, Manuel Romero, and Isidro Romero were tried jointly, convicted, and sentenced to death all in the same day. On April 8, Francisco Naranjo, José Gabriel Samora, Juan Domingo Martínez, Juan Antonio Lucero, and “El Cuero” were convicted of murder and sentenced to die.120 On April 10, Manuel Miera, Manuel Sandoval, Rafael Tafoya, and Juan Pacheco were jointly tried, convicted, and sentenced to die. A defendant listed in the court records only as “Asencio” was tried and acquitted of murder on Monday, April 12. Juan Antonio Avila was convicted of murder and sentenced to die on April 13. In addition to the treason and murder cases, the grand jury indicted sixteen other native men for property crimes (larceny, theft of animals, receipt of stolen property) in connection with the Taos uprising.121