Category: American West

The Takeover of New Mexico

The Takeover of New Mexico

Preparations for war were in full swing in Santa Fe that second week of August, 1846. Rumors of the approaching American army under Stephen Watts Kearny had been swirling all summer and became more concrete as time went on. New Mexico’s governor, Manuel Armijo, had fired letters off to the officials in Mexico City pleading for help and warning of the possibility that his paisanos would capitulate to the invaders without a fight.

Early in August, American trader Eugene Leitensdorfer arrived in Santa Fe with news. The U.S. Army was at Bent’s Fort. Armijo consulted with his council on Sunday, August 9, then sent out a call to New Mexico’s militia to assemble in Santa Fe. When they arrived, they headed for Apache Pass, east of the city, where they began digging trenches, throwing up barricades, and positioning cannon in. Things in Santa Fe were so tense that some of the American merchants there barricaded themselves in a store on the plaza, expecting to be arrested or even killed when the fighting began.

In the meantime, U.S. Army Capt. Philip St George Cooke and James Magoffin arrived in town on Wednesday, August 12. They carried a letter from Kearny and, rumor has it, a considerable amount of gold. They also brought news. Kearny’s army was not at Bent’s Fort any longer. It was already on New Mexican soil. In fact, Cooke was due to meet up with them at Las Vegas in the next couple days.

Philip St. George Cooke, circa 1860s. Courtesy of encyclopediavirginia.org

By the time that happened, on Saturday, August 15, it was clear to New Mexican officials that Governor Armijo was no longer anxious to defend the region from the invaders. He had gone from firing off letters, issuing bellicose proclamations, marshaling troops, and positioning cannon, to asking his officers whether he should really try to fight. When several of them said a vehement “yes!”, Armijo began complaining that the defenses he’d thrown up weren’t strong enough and that the men behind them were cowards who would run at the first shot.

Manuel Armijo, wearing the medal he’d received for his capture of the 1841 Texas Expedition to Santa Fe

Maybe word of Kearny’s takeover of Las Vegas and the number of U.S. troops had reached Armijo and he’d given up the idea of fighting. Or maybe he’d made his decision the night of August 12, during his conversation with Cooke and Magoffin. The only thing certain is that by the end of August 16th, the last Mexican governor of New Mexico had headed south toward Albuquerque and ultimately the interior of Mexico.

When Kearny and his men reached Apache Pass, they found it empty, although at least one of his officers thought the location could have been used effectively to at least slow them down.

But by then it was too late. The U.S. Army was in control of New Mexico and would quickly set up a new government to replace the old. All that excitement and fear had been for nothing. The New Mexicans had been completely cowed by America’s military might. Or so it seemed.

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: William A. Kelleher, Turmoil in New Mexico, 1846-1868; Marc Simmons, New Mexico; Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Military Occupation of New Mexico.

A Pretty Little House

A Pretty Little House

When Stephen W. Kearny’s Army of the West marched from Missouri to New Mexico in Summer 1846, they were trailed by a number of non-military wagons, most of them driven by merchants. One of these men was Samuel Magoffin, who brought along his wife of seven months, Susan Shelby Magoffin.

Once they reached Santa Fe, the Magoffins rented an adobe house that Susan called “quite a nice little place” with four rooms that included the kitchen, “our own chamber, [a] storage room, and the reception room,” or sala,  which Susan described as a combination parlor, dining room, and “room of all work.”

She also said the house entrance opened into a courtyard with portals all around, so apparently this was the typical four-sided square with doors opening into a plazuela. The portals around this space provided shaded workspaces as well as areas for resting and relaxing.

The Magoffins’ reception room was long and narrow, typical of a sala, and had a dirt floor, plank ceiling, and white-washed walls. The lower part of the walls was covered with calico cloth, which protected the occupants from getting whitewash on their clothes. The parlor end of the room contained cushioned benches and woven black-and-white“Mexican carpeting,” probably jerga. The “naked floor” at the end of the room held a dining table and chairs.

Susan described the bedroom as “a nice cool little room, with two windows, which we can darken, or make light at pleasure.” I take this to mean the windows had shutters which could be opened and shut from inside. She doesn’t say whether the windows had glass in them. Glazed windows were pretty rare in New Mexico at the time, though it seems likely that a Kentucky-bred young woman would have been startled by the lack of them and mentioned her surprise. The fact that the house ceilings were plank, not perpendicular or herring-bone pattern latillas, indicates the building may have been constructed with American sensibilities in mind. If that’s the case, there very well might have been glass in the window openings.

A latilla ceiling, still seen in New Mexico homes. Photo courtesy of OlquinsSawmill.com

The flat roof did leak at one point. On Tuesday, September 22, Kearney and a couple officers had come for a visit and were about to leave when a thunderstorm hit. Rather than brave the storm, the visitors remained in their seats and “we continued in pleasant and merry chat,” Susan reports, “when suddenly the rain came pating onto the General, from the ceiling … Soon we were leaking all around, the mud roof coming with the water.” The damage must have not been too terrible. Young Mrs. Magoffin was out and about with the General the next day, taking a tour of Fort Marcy.

The little house would be Susan’s home for another couple weeks, until the Magoffins headed south on October 7, leaving the “nice little place” behind. Susan would not live anywhere for long, until 1852, when she and Samuel settled in Kirkwood, Missouri, where she died after giving birth to her third child.  

            © Loretta Miles Tollefson, June 2025

Sources: Audra Bellmore, Old Santa Fe Today; Bainbridge Bunting, Early Architecture in New Mexico; Sheila Drumm, editor, Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico, Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847; John E. Sunder, ed., Matt Field on the Santa Fe Trail; El Rancho de los Golondrinas Guidebook; Chimayo Museum, Chimayo, New Mexico.

The Evolution of the Santa Fe Plaza

The Evolution of the Santa Fe Plaza

When the Spanish settlers created the Santa Fe, New Mexico plaza in 1610, it was roughly twice the size it is today, even though they didn’t have sufficient buildings to surround it. That would come later. Certainly the newcomers had high ambitions for their new town “square.” We can see from the map created by José de Urrutia about 150 years later that it extended from the church (la parroquia) to about where the western boundary is today.

The plaza was laid out in an approximate ratio of 2 to 3, width to length, as prescribed in Spanish law. It had a number of uses—military drills, mustering livestock, small-scale trading, and general commerce, as well as social and public events. Although there’s no sign of it on the 1776 map, in the early 1600’s an acequia ran along the north side.

The acequia may have been used to water trees in the plaza. We have written documentation of at least two plantings, one prior to 1837, when Jose Francisco Perea tells us there were three cottonwoods “of the mountain variety” in what was then the northeast corner. In the mid-1840s, Governor Mariano Martinez had more cottonwoods put in, although we don’t know what type. By the time he was done, trees circled the square and additional ones had been placed along the Santa Fe river.

The square had shrunk considerably by then, to the size it is today. The 1846 map created by U.S. Corps of Engineers Lts. W.H. Emory and J.F. Gilmer reveals that the eastern half of the plaza had been filled in with buildings by that point. It had apparently been this shape for at least the last ten years. Jose Francisco Perea tells us it hadn’t changed much during that period, except for the new trees. And the fact that the square was now seldom used as a camping place and stock corral.

According to James Josiah Webb, in the 1840s the northeast corner of the plaza contained the old Mexican customs warehouse. The eastern side of the square was lined with government buildings and anchored at the southern end by a store run by Don Juan Sena.

The Pino family lived across the street, on the south side of the plaza, alongside a couple more stores, including the one rented by Leitensdorfer and Company. The crumbling adobe military chapel lay in the center of this row of buildings.

The west side of the plaza was nearly all residences, except for the old Mexican post office, and the north side was defined, as it is today, by the long low adobe structure that had been there since the beginning. The compound it fronted had served over the years as a fort, barracks for the Presidio troops, local jail, housing for the civil governor, treasury, and other functions.

Known as “el palacio” by the locals, the Americans retained the building’s basic functions after they invaded in 1846. By 1857, it included the chamber for the territorial legislature, offices for the Secretary of the Treasury and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, the post office, and (still!) the calabozo, or jail.

The building, which is still called “el palacio,” has been renovated a number of times, most recently a few years ago, and now anchors the New Mexico History Museum. It’s well worth a visit if you happen to be in town. As is the plaza. It changed once again in the 1860s, when a bandstand was added, along with walkways that crisscrossed the space. This layout has been retained ever since then. You can see it in the birds-eye view map from 1882 as well as the current map.

As you can see from the map, the plaza in Santa Fe is still walkable. Trees still shade the paths, and there are still small-scale traders, most often now only under the palacio house portal. It’s the perfect place to spend a few hours on Sunday afternoon or any other time.

Sources: W.H.H. Allison, “Santa Fe During the Winter of 1837-38,” Old Santa Fe Magazine, Vol.3;Josh Gonza, The Streets of Santa Fe, A Walking Tour; Deena J. Gonzales, Refusing the Favor; David Grant Noble, ed., Santa Fe, history of an ancient city; Maurilio E. Vigil and Helen Boudreau, Donaciano Vigil; Paul W. Walter, “The First Civil Governor of New Mexico Under the Stars and Stripes,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 8:2; James Josiah Webb, Adventures in the Santa Fe Trade.

©Loretta Miles Tollefson

BOOK REVIEW: The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott

BOOK REVIEW: The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott

In a recent post, I mentioned Lt. Richard Smith Elliott, who was with General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West during the August 1846 invasion of New Mexico. Elliott was also a reporter. He started writing for the St. Louis Reveille before he left Missouri in June 1846 and continued sending articles to them until June 1847, when his enlistment ended.

In 1997, 150 years later, historians Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons compiled Elliott’s reports from Santa Fe and the sketches he wrote afterward and published them in The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott. The result is an intriguing account of events in New Mexico during this period.

The pieces the lieutenant sent East were often written and published as letters. Reading them can feel like you’ve been given access to someone’s diary. Much of his reportage sounds like that of any soldier anywhere. He includes lists of men who’ve died from measles and other diseases as well as bullets, reports on the weather, complaints about quartermaster supplies, and grumbling about the attitude, expertise, and morals of both his fellow and superior officers.

When Elliott turns to New Mexico specifically, his letters reflect the prejudices of his time. There are the usual disapproving descriptions of the local priest and of businesswoman and monte dealer Gertrudes Barceló, as well as commentary on the adobe housing and lack of glass windows.

However, I find the lieutenant most engaging when he describes his interactions with the locals. Among other vignettes, there’s a delightful description of a stroll with a couple señoritas. The women turn what the lieutenant thought was to be a social outing into a shopping trip, loading him and his male companions with chickens, onions, and other goods to haul back home for them.  

So the book is an interesting view of Santa Fe from the perspective of an American Army officer in 1846/47. Elliott was unwell a good part of the time and often displays an invalid’s irritableness. His illness kept him from participating in campaigns against the Navajo, expeditions to California and Mexico, as well as the suppression of the Taos Revolt in early 1847. By the time his enlistment was up, he was in a hurry to get home. The written record  he left behind reminds us that not every Anglo who arrived in New Mexico in the 1800s fell in love with the place or found it profitable to stay.

I recommend The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott to any student of New Mexico history, especially of the early portion of the American occupation. It’s a useful and fascinating look at the attitudes that I suspect the majority of Anglos brought with them to the land of enchantment.

What to Believe?

What to Believe?

If you’ve been reading my blog posts, you’ve probably noticed that I sometimes quote Lewis Garrard, the seventeen-year-old American who visited New Mexico in 1847.  His book about his adventures there, Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail, was published in 1850. It doesn’t seem to have made much of a hit at the time, but it’s now often used as a primary source for everything from how to make coffee on the trail to the April 1847 trials after the Taos insurrection was suppressed. In fact, Garrard’s report of the trials and subsequent hangings is the only firsthand account of them that we have.

Title page of Lewis H. Garrard’s 1850 edition, courtesy of archive.org

But Wah-to-yah also contains secondhand accounts. Of the insurrection itself and the battle at Taos Pueblo, as well as of the death of Taos leader Tomás Romero afterward. And this is where things get complicated.

The circumstances around Romero’s assassination are of particular interest to me because his death plays a role in my novel An Unhappy Country. Based on U.S. military records this is what we know about what happened:

  1. People from Taos pueblo sued for an end to hostilities the morning of Friday, February 5, 1847. Colonel Price agreed on condition that the remaining insurrection leaders be turned over to him.
  2. The only uncaptured leader alive and in the Taos area was Tomás Romero, who turned himself in later that day.
  3. Romero was taken to the jail in the village of Taos, where he was shot and killed by a U.S. Army dragoon private named Fitzgerald.
  4. Fitzgerald was arrested and jailed.
  5. About six weeks later, on March 18, 1847, Fitzgerald was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army. This was well before the expiration of his term of enlistment.

And that’s all we know from the official accounts.

According to Lewis Garrard, he met Fitzgerald in the second half of March, while Garrard and his party were camped roughly 55 miles east of Taos in the vicinity of today’s village of Cimarron, New Mexico. He says Fitzgerald told him that he’d come to New Mexico specifically to wreak vengeance on “the Mexicans” for the death of his older brother, who’d been a member of the 1841 Texas Expedition to Santa Fe.

According to Garrard, the older Fitzgerald had been killed by Damasio Salazar, the militia captain who supervised the Texans’ removal from New Mexico. The younger Fitzgerald boasted that he accomplished his mission when “in the fight at the Pueblo, three Mexicans fell by his hand; and, the day following, he walked up to [Romero] and deliberately shot him down.”  

Whether Fitzgerald did kill three men in addition to Tomás Romero is anyone’s guess. But Garrard’s report of Fitzgerald’s motivation raises a number of issues. Either he was confused, or Fitzgerald was.

You see, the only Fitzgerald with the 1841 Texas Santa Fe Expedition was an Irish/Anglo man whose first name was Archibald. And Archibald Fitzgerald didn’t die in New Mexico. He survived the trek under Captain Salazar as well as imprisonment in Mexico and was released in late February 1842.

Instead of returning home to Ireland, Archibald Fitzgerald went back to Texas. There, he joined the young republic’s forces and fought with them at the December 1842 battle of Mier. According to historian Noel Loomis, Fitzgerald was captured there and thrown into prison at Salado. He and his fellow Texans staged a successful breakout, but Fitzgerald was killed in the aftermath.

So, either Archibald’s younger brother didn’t know what happened to him, Private Fitzgerald told Lewis Garrard a tall tale in order to justify what he’d done, or Garrard misremembered/embroidered the story when he retold it in 1850. In any case, this is one portion of Wah-to-yah which does not hold up to verification by other sources.

The younger Fitzgerald apparently also told Lewis he’d escaped from his Taos prison one night by breaking through the roof of his cell, noiselessly creeping to the edge of the roof, and waiting until the guard pacing below turned his back. Then Fitzgerald swung to the ground and “with as much ease as possible” walked to a mess fire where his waiting friends provided him with a pistol and clothing. Fitzgerald headed into the mountains east of Taos and “when day broke,” Garrard says, “The town lay far beneath him.”

Whether this is what actually happened is open to question. I have to admit I’m skeptical. It sounds a little too much like something out of an Alexander Dumas novel.

But then, Garrard also says Fitzgerald told him he was one of five men who breached the wall of the Taos Pueblo church and that during this event the man ahead of him was killed. Somebody is conflating two events here: the first being the attempt to enter the church that resulted in the death of Captain John H.K. Burgwin, and the second successful assault later that day, when no one was killed.

I have incorporated a variation on Garrard’s report of Fitzgerald’s version of events into An Unhappy Country, but whether it reflects what actually happened is anyone’s guess.  But then, that’s why my novels are labeled “historical fiction.” Because no one knows for sure.

Sources: James A. Crutchfield, Revolt at Taos; John Durand, The Taos Massacres; Lewis H. Garrard, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Ed., Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail; Noel Loomis, The Texan-Santa Fe Pioneers; Michael McNierney, Ed., Taos 1847, The Revolt in Contemporary Accounts.

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Not As Simple As They Look

Not As Simple As They Look

If you’ve been fortunate enough to tour an adobe home here in New Mexico, you may have noticed the corner fireplaces which are a signature element in these houses.

Often built in a corner, the traditional fireplace, or fogón, had a low hearth, between six and eight inches high. The structure was usually roughly a quarter round with a narrow opening of about twenty inches. The firebox was relatively shallow. In fact, the wood was usually placed upright and leaned against the back of the space, instead of flat on the hearth.

Corner fireplace. Source: Bainbridge Bunting, Early Architecture in New Mexico

If one fireplace couldn’t warm the room sufficiently or wasn’t large enough to cook a meal for the entire family, there were several options. One was to build another cooking area in the opposite corner. Another was to build a larger bell-shaped one, up to four feet, four inches wide, that could accommodate more wood. A third alternative, especially useful when there was more than one cook, was to construct a double-arched bell-shaped structure.

Double arched fireplace. Source: Bainbridge Bunting, Of Earth and Timber Made

In every case, the arched opening was constructed using two large specially shaped adobe bricks. The chimney was usually a rectangular cuboid roughly 10 x 10 inches in diameter and made of thin adobe bricks set on edge with their ends fit into channels cut into the supporting walls

Not all adobe fireplaces were placed in the corner of a room. If a heat source was needed elsewhere, a “spur” of adobe would be extended out from the wall in the desired location and then a fireplace was constructed in the resulting corner.

As the Americans began to pour into New Mexico after 1846, they began remaking the traditional adobe houses to meet their Eastern expectations. This included encasing the adobe fireplaces with wooden chimney breasts and mantel shelves.

Source: Bainbridge Bunting, Early Architecture in New Mexico

Personally, I prefer the older style. All the little indentations in those fake pillars would have just collected dust. And probably soot. Give me the clean lines of traditional adobe anytime!

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: Bainbridge Bunting, Early Architecture in New Mexico and Of Earth and Timbers Made, New Mexico Architecture.

Aftermath of a Rebellion

Aftermath of a Rebellion

In mid April 1847, the Taos Valley was still experiencing the aftermath of the January 20 rebellion.

The U.S. Army had captured a total of 45 rebels. They released 24 for lack of evidence and tried 21. The trials were over, but the executions weren’t. Seventeen men would hang, one of them for high treason.

The high treason charge was questionable. An argument could be made that a person couldn’t rebel against a country to which they had not pledged allegiance. The war with Mexico wasn’t over. New Mexico was still officially part of occupied Mexico, and its people were still citizens of that country. There’d been a trial in early January which had found the high treason charge suspect. But that didn’t stop 26-year-old prosecuting attorney Francis P. Blaire, Jr. from continuing to use it.

In early March, Blaire filed the charge against three men: Antonio Maria Trujillo, Pantaleon Archuleta, Trinidad Barceló, and Pedro Vigil. Apparently the only rebel trials held in Santa Fe, the charges against Archuleta, Barceló, and Pedro Vigil were eventually dropped after the proceedings ended in a mistrial.

Trujillo was found guilty, but because he was elderly and unwell, the jury and judge requested that the sentence be commuted. Military Governor Sterling Price granted the pardon, and Santa Fe was spared a demonstration of the effectiveness of the gallows.

Taos wasn’t. Of the eighteen prisoners tried there, all were convicted and hung.

There had been a single execution on February 7 of Pablo Montoya, one of the rebellion leaders, but the remainder waited until April, when the formal trials began.

These hangings started on Friday, April 9, when Hipolito (Polo) Salazar, Jose Manuel Garcia, Pedro Lucero, Juan Ramon Trujillo, and the Romero brothers Ysidro and Manuel, age sixteen, were executed two days after their trials. Salazar had been convicted of high treason, but the rest of these men were found guilty of killing American-appointed Governor Charles Bent.

The eleven remaining convicted rebels had to wait to meet their end. Most of them would die three weeks later, on Friday, April 30. These executions seem to have occurred in two batches. The six men from Taos Pueblo—Francisco Naranjo, Jose Gabriel Romero (or Samora), Juan Domingo Martin, Juan Antonio Lucero, and a man called El Cuervo—were apparently hanged at the same time. They were buried at the Pueblo at the church which had been destroyed by the Americans in early February.

Ruins of the Taos Pueblo church. Source: Palace of the Governors Archives

Four other men—Manuel Miera, Juan Pacheco, Manuel Sandoval, and Rafael Tafoya—were also executed that day. Then, on the following Friday, Juan Antonio Avila was hanged for his role in the insurrection.

Why the week-long delay? There’s no information in the records. I’d love to know the answer to this question, just as I’d like to know why the trials of Trujillo, Barceló, Archuleta, and Vigil were held in Santa Fe and the reasons for the mistrials for latter three men. Was this a procedural issue? Was family pressure brought to bear?

I’m especially curious about the case of Trinidad Barceló. He was the older brother of businesswoman Gertrudes Barceló, who had assisted the U.S. occupiers in suppressing a revolt the previous December. Did her support of the regime play a part in her brother’s release?

What about the other two: Archuleta and Vigil? Were they related to Acting Governor Donaciano Vigil or some other prominent New Mexican who the Americans wanted on their side?

And then there are the stories of the men who died: their reasons for resistance, the impact on their families, the pain or joy they left behind.

So many stories, so little time.

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: David C. Beyreis, Blood in the Borderlands; Mary J. Straw Cook, Doña Tules; James A. Crutchfield, Revolt at Taos; Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Lewis H. Garrard, Wah-to-ya and the Taos Trail; Lucy Lippard, Pueblo Chico, Land and Lives in Galisteo since 1814; Michael McNierney, ed. Taos 1847, The Revolt in Contemporary Accounts; Alberto Vidaurre in Corina A. Santistevan and JuliaMoore, Taos, A Topical History.

How Mr. Polk Got His War

How Mr. Polk Got His War

The recent suggestion that the U.S. should annex Canada and Greenland sounds strikingly familiar. The same argument—that the land masses in question are strategically important and therefore must become part of the U.S.—was used in the runup to what we now call the Mexican American War.

Throughout the 1840s public sentiment grew in support of seizing what was “rightfully ours.” It was our manifest destiny to own everything to the Pacific Ocean. And it would be easy enough to do. After all, as Sam Houston put it “Mexicans are no better than Indians,” and we’d seized indigenous lands easily enough. Besides, Mexican leadership was corrupt and cowardly. George Wilkins Kendall had asserted this in his book about the 1841 Texas Santa Fe Expedition. So it must be true.

 The only question was how to make the war Mexico’s fault. First, we needed to elect a President who was committed to the Big Steal. This was accomplished when James A. Polk was elected. Then, we needed to aggravate Mexico into an angry response. This was initiated at Polk’s March 4, 1845 inauguration when he promised to annex Texas, the “Republic” which Mexico still considered in rebellion and not independent from it at all.

James K. Polk, Source: Library of Congress

In reply to Polk’s pronouncement, Mexico’s minister to Washington lodged a formal objection, closed his mission, and left for home. Mexico City severed ties. This gave Polk the excuse he was looking for. He ordered General Zachary Taylor to move his troops to the southern border and then into the Nueces Strip, which both Texas and Mexico claimed.

While Taylor was doing that, the President sent John Fremont to find a western route to California. He also ordered Major Richard B. Lee to Santa Fe. Lee’s subsequent September 1845 report to Washington included an invasion route, pertinent distances, recommended rendezvous points, estimated costs, and the proposed composition of the necessary military forces.

But the Mexicans still weren’t cooperating. They still hadn’t declared war. So, in December 1845, Polk upped the stakes by overseeing the formal annexation of Texas to the U.S. That did it. Four months later, Mexican soldiers crossed the Rio Grande and killed American troops. This and other bloody encounters gave the President the excuse he needed to present the U.S. House of Representatives with a declaration of war.

The bill he sent them wasn’t just a declaration of war. It also authorized funding for General Taylor’s men. A vote against the war was a vote against the troops on the ground. This was the first coercive declaration/funding bill combination in American history. Former President and now Congressman John Quincy Adams was one of the courageous 14 who voted against the proposal. Everyone else caved. It took them two hours.

Polk still had to get the legislation through the U.S. Senate. The powerful Thomas Hart Benton, who agreed that the country should expand westward, was opposed to taking the land by force, at least not “without full discussion and much more consideration”. However, after much arm-twisting, he eventually voted in favor. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina didn’t. He abstained. Polk was “pregnant with evil,” he declared later, and what the Executive Branch had done by combining the two bills would “enable all future Presidents to bring about a state of things, in which Congress shall be forced, … to declare war, regardless of its justice or expediency.”

They called it “Mr. Polk’s War.” Not everyone supported it, of course. There were letters to the editor and other resistance, especially in abolitionist New England. In Concord, Massachusetts, abolitionists Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father) both refused to pay taxes because they saw what Polk and his faction were doing as a bid to expand slavery into the Southwest.

U.S. and Mexico Boundaries, 1846

None of the vituperations and protests did any good, though. The drive west continued, taking everything before it. In the end, President Polk had his way, and the U.S. annexed the land mass that became what is today the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California as well of parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

I’m not sure what the events of 1846/47 suggest regarding the current proposal to annex Canada and Greenland. That resistance is futile? That resistance is important even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful? Or, that we should try to make every effort to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself?

All I know is, this isn’t the first time an American President has pushed forward with his agenda regardless of the question of right or wrong. There are, of course, plenty of other examples of this approach to U.S. political life, though the runup to the Mexican War is perhaps the most explicit correlation to current events. Will we add the acquisition of Canada and Greenland to the list of sins we need to expiate? Only time will tell.

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: James A. Crutchfield, Revolt at Taos, the New Mexican and Indian Insurrection of 1847; Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico; W. Eugene Hollon, The Southwest: Old and New; Wilson in David Grant Noble, Santa Fe, History of an Ancient City; historyofmassachusetts.org/henry-david-thoreau-arrested-for-nonpayment-of-poll-tax

Shopping, Gambling, and Dancing, Oh My

Shopping, Gambling, and Dancing, Oh My

In my forthcoming novel set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the young people at the heart of the story don’t go home after church. They go to the plaza. They aren’t the only ones. In fact, American newcomers to the city were often shocked at what they saw as a desecration of the Sabbath. People weren’t merely walking. They were shopping, dancing, and gambling, and probably drinking as well.

This Sunday ritual didn’t change after the U.S. Army invaded in 1846. Lt. Abert tells us that “in the square all the people congregate to sell their marketing and one constantly sees objects to interest and amuse. It is filled with donkeys laden with immense packs of wood, fodder, melons, and other articles. The soldiers too are constantly passing and mingling in a motley group.”

Part of the reason for this activity on the plaza was that it was a pleasant place to be. Even Susan Magoffin, who had little else good to say about New Mexico, found that the square made for “a fine walk.” “The Plaza or square is very large,” she reported. The Governor’s Palace, or palacio, with a wide portal in front, formed the north side of the square, while a church and dwelling houses faced it on the south. “The two remaining sides are fronted by stores and dwellings, all with portals,” she added. “In rainy weather there is no use for an umbrella.”

The portales, or verandas, Magoffin mentioned provided shade for the buildings and were shaded themselves by what Magoffin described as a circle of trees around the square. These were cottonwoods which had been planted only a couple years before, probably using the pole planting method. A small irrigation ditch, or acequia, ran alongside the trees.

Under the portales, vendors sold everything from pottery to sweet onions. There were plenty of other ways to spend one’s money as well, namely gambling. One didn’t have to go indoors to indulge in this pastime.  Out-of-doors games included pitarria, which was played on smooth ground inside a marked square, with short sticks of two colors. Quoit pitching, using pegs driven into the ground, was also available.

Those who wanted to gamble could play monte, both with a full deck of Spanish cards, and a three-card version.  Roulette was also popular, as were various games of dice.

Later, if one liked, someone in town was apt to be holding a dance, and everyone was welcome, from the priest to the criminal released from jail for the evening. Everybody danced, the lady with the ragged farm worker, the old man with the little girl.

Newcomers also disapproved of the city’s open door dancing policy. Matt Fields tells us of a ball given by the Governor in 1839 which “all the beauty and fashion attended, and also all the rabble,” adding, “the dances, as well as all the manners and customs in Santa Fe, are of a demi-barbarian character”. Nineteenth century Americans, whose country was founded on democratic principles, were certainly quick to make negative social distinctions.

Some things never change. 

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: W.H.H. Allison, Old Santa Fe Magazine, 2:2, “Santa Fe During the Winter of 1837-1838”; Sheila Drumm, Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico, Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin 1846-1847; Janet LeCompte in Joan M. Jensen and Darlis M. Miller, New Mexico Women, Intercultural Perspectives; Clyde and Mae Reed Porter, Matt Field on the Santa Fe Trail.

Houses Made of Mud

Houses Made of Mud

In my March 5 post, I mentioned that one of the things that nineteenth century Americans disparaged when they first arrived in New Mexico was what they called “mud houses.” Newspaper correspondent Matt Field wasn’t the only person to describe Santa Fe as a “mud built city” of one-story buildings that reminded him “of an assemblage of mole hills.”

Technically, Field was right. The buildings, even the churches, were in fact built of a mixture of earth and water. These carefully formed bricks had evolved from the indigenous practice of puddled mud construction and by the 1800s were created by packing a stiff, dough-like mud into a rectangular wooden frame that was then lifted away from the resulting block. Two days later, the brick was dry enough to be turned on end and a week later, hard enough to be stacked and cured for another month. To speed up the drying process, adobe makers in the upper Rio Grande region often added straw.

Adobe bricks were used to construct one-story buildings but, with proper buttressing, the walls could be extended higher. Field noted that the Santa Fe parish church was built “as high and quite as large as any of our [U.S.] ordinary size meeting houses.”

He also noted that the adobe walls were strong and durable. In fact, they were so strong and durable that the Fort the invading Americans constructed on the hill overlooking the church in the Fall of 1846 was made of double walls of adobe bricks with a core of rubble between them.  

Diagram of Fort Marcy, constructed Fall 1846. Source: Fort Marcy Park interpretive signage.

Early the following year, the Americans got a taste of just how resilient adobe walls could be. After the January 1847 Taos uprising, the U.S. Army hauled four mounted howitzers and a six-pound cannon north to deal with the rebellion. The insurrectos had retreated to the mission church at Taos Pueblo, but the American artillery made little headway against its adobe walls.  Lt. Richard Smith Elliott reported later that the walls were so thick, the cannon balls would not go through them.

In fact, the artillery crews made little headway against the pueblo church until they positioned the smallest cannon closer to it and began using grapeshot in a spot already damaged by an axe-wielding soldier. Only then were the attackers able to enter the church.

Not even adobe could withstand the fury and tenacity of Americans with newly acquired land to protect.

© Loretta Miles Tollefson

Sources: Bainbridge Bunting, Early Architecture in New Mexico; Stella M. Drumm, Down The Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico, Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin 1846-1847; Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Michael McNierny, ed., Taos 1847, The Revolt in Contemporary Accounts; Clyde and Mae Reed Porter, Matt Field on the Santa Fe Trail.