Shortly after American troops invaded New Mexico in Autumn 1846, they discovered four pieces of Mexican artillery in a village south of Santa Fe. Apparently, Governor Manuel Armijo had taken the guns with him when he fled, but abandoned them at Galisteo. One of these pieces was of special interest to the Americans because it had arrived in New Mexico by way of Texas.
The cannon, made in Springfield, MA, had accompanied the ill-fated 1841 Texan expedition to New Mexico. A brass six pounder, it had been cast with a Texas star on its breach and paid for by “patriotic ladies” of the newly formed republic. When the Texans straggled into eastern New Mexico in Fall 1841, they still had the gun with them, despite its weight and their exhaustion.
New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo confiscated the cannon, of course, and reportedly displayed it in the Santa Fe plaza after he sent the captured Texans on to Mexico City. It was still there in 1846, when it and other artillery pieces were transferred to Apache Pass during the runup to the impeding American invasion.
When Armijo decided to flee instead of fight, he took the Texan gun and other artillery with him. Three of the gun carriages apparently broke down at Galisteo, and the governor was forced to abandon them as well as the weapons they carried. This included the Texan six-pounder, which the American troops dubbed the “Lone Star of Texas.”
They transported the gun back to Santa Fe, where it was apparently once again placed on the plaza. Lt. Richard Smith Elliott says it was used in early November to assemble the officers for training drill.
We have no official record of the Texas cannon again until Brigadier General Sterling Price took it with him to Chihuahua. There, it saw action at Santa Cruz de Rosales, the last battle of the Mexican war, on March 16, 1848.
However, there is a possibility that this was not the first battle in which the Texan cannon was fired. A six-pound cannon played a conclusive role in the February 1847 battle at Taos Pueblo, when it was used to breach the walls of the church where the insurrectos were holed up. This gun may well have been the Lone Star.
After the battle at Santa Cruz de Rosales, the Texan cannon was returned to Santa Fe, where it was stored alongside other Mexican artillery pieces in La Castrense, the old military church on the south side of the plaza. It and the other guns were presumably cleared out when the Americans decided to use the building as a courtroom. What happened to it after that remains a mystery.
Sources: Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, Eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Silver City New Mexico Enterprise, October 9th 1891, courtesy Silver City Library.
© Loretta Miles Tollefson
Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico 
Interesting article. I wonder if it was one of the cannons that was given up during the patriotic furor when the US entered WWI. Several cannons in Santa Fe were donated to the war drive then, and it’s been conjectured that two of the six cannons that the Confederates had abandoned in Albuquerque during the Civil War were among these. Two remain in Albuquerque, and two went up to Fort Garland in Colorado, where I believe they are still on display, but the two that were sent to Santa Fe have disappeared.
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That’s a logical explanation. It does seem to have thoroughly disappeared.
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