I’m pleased to announce that my Old New Mexico novel An Unhappy Country will be published in April 2025. A murder mystery, this novel is set during the Mexican American war and focuses on events in New Mexico, which was invaded by the U.S. Army in August 1846. It features Jessie Milbank, an American merchant’s daughter who can’t leave well enough alone. Here’s the book description:
August 1846. The U.S. army has taken Santa Fe without firing a shot. The Mexican American War is over in New Mexico. Or is it?
Two days after the Army arrives, seventeen-year-old Jessie Milbank and her friends stumble on a man with a knife in his back in the Santa Fe plaza. Then someone close to Jessie’s friend Juanita is murdered. When an insurrection is suppressed in December, Jessie begins to wonder if the three events are linked.
Were the murdered men part of a conspiracy to throw out the invaders? Were they the only ones hoping for a fight? After revolt does finally break out and the Americans suppress it at the battle of Taos Pueblo, yet another man is murdered. Will the reasons for his death provide clues to the earlier ones?
By Friday, February 5, 1847, the Taos insurrection against the American occupation of New Mexico was over. All that remained was the formal surrender of Taos Pueblo leader Tomás Romero.
The Americans had conditioned the end of hostilities on Romero’s surrender. And the people at the pueblo were eager for things to end. Their church, where the rebels had made their stand, was in ruins. Any further action put the massive housing complexes in danger.
So, Romero surrendered. But he was never tried for his actions in a court of law. While he made it to the Taos village jail, that’s as far as he got. A U.S. dragoon named Fitzgerald shot and killed the Taos leader that morning, instead.
Fitzgerald later bragged about the killing to seventeen-year-old Lewis Garrard, who reported that Fitzgerald killed Romero and three other men as vengeance for the death of his older brother Archibald Fitzgerald. Archie had been a member of the 1841 Texas Santa Fe Expedition and later died during a prison breakout. Why his younger brother thought the death of Romero and the others avenged him is unclear.
What is clear is that Tomás Romero’s death on February 5 was the last shot fired in the Taos Revolt. Other men would die, but they would do so after a cursory court case and the administration of at least the semblance of law. The Taos leader’s death was simple murder.
Fitzgerald was locked up afterwards in the Taos village courthouse, where he was allowed to escape a month later. On March 18 he was dishonorably discharged from his company at Albuquerque, apparently for desertion. He had fled east by that time and would eventually make his way to Geelong, Australia, become the owner/operator of the Western Sea bathhouse, and die in 1882.
Source: Find-a-Grave.com
Fitzgerald’s action at Taos was one of two links between the revolt and the 1841 Texas Santa Fe Expedition. The Texans had brought along a six-pound cannon which was captured along with them and left behind when they were marched south. The cannon ended up in Santa Fe and was still there when the U.S. Army arrived. They took it with them to Taos, where it was key to the action that breached the pueblo church walls.
While the use of this particular piece of artillery may simply have been convenient, its presence may also have sparked the younger Fitzgerald’s memories of his brother and triggered the subsequent shooting at the Taos village jail. Or maybe he’d planned Romero’s death all along. Or was simply a confused young man with a propensity for killing people.
Like most historical or even current events, it’s doubtful we will ever know why the U.S. dragoon did what he did and why Tomás Romero had to die.
Sources: James A. Crutchfield, Revolt at Taos, The New Mexican and Indian Insurrection of 1847; John Durand, The Taos Massacres; Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Lewis Garrard, Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico; Alberto Vidaurre,” 1847: Revolt or Resistance?” in Corina A. Santisteven and Julia Moore, Taos, A Topical History.
When Sterling Price set out from Santa Fe in late January to meet the Mexican insurgency from Taos, he was accompanied by a rag-tag group of men who would be instrumental to his ability to carry out his mission.
He had sworn the group of men Ceran St. Vrain called the Avengers into Federal service the Saturday they left and seen their worth at Santa Cruz de la Cañada they next day, when they were instrumental in keeping the rebels from seizing the U.S. supply wagons.
The Avengers were an interesting group of Mexican and American merchants, laborers, and mountain men. One of the mountain men was Jim Beckworth, son of a Virginia plantation overseer and a woman named “Miss Kill,” almost certainly a slave. Renowned for his exploits as a mountain man and his ability to tell a story, Beckworth had more than one thing in common with the Bent family slave who also signed up as an Avenger. Neither of them was supposed to be there.
By law, people of color could not join the U.S. military. They’d been banned from serving since the Federal Militia Acts of 1792. But there Beckworth and Green both were, marching with the rest of the Avengers.
Jim Beckworth, Source: Wild West Magazine, June 1993
And fighting. Although Dick Green was badly wounded at the battle of Embudo Canyon on Friday, January 29, there are reports that he also fought at Taos Pueblo the following week. The Bent family was so grateful for his service that they freed Green, his wife Charlotte, and his brother Andrew. The three of them headed east toward Missouri that summer and, hopefully, some place where they could live in peace.
We don’t know anything more about them. There are some tantalizing clues. The 1829 manifest for a schooner to New Orleans includes a five-foot-tall 14-year-old slave girl named Charlotte Green. Could she have ended up in the Bent household? And there’s an August 1863 New Orleans interment record for a “colored” man named Richard Green. Is this the man who was wounded at Embudo Canyon?
Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any definitive link between these pieces of information and the Dick Green who fought alongside his Mexican and Anglo cohorts in early 1847. And may have been one of only two Black men to enlist in the U.S. Army between 1792 and the Civil War.
Sources: James A. Crutchfield, Revolt at Taos, The New Mexican and Indian Insurrection of 1847; Ferguson, Paul-Thomas, “African American Service and Racial Integration in the U.S. Military,” http://www.army.mil/article/243604/, accessed 9/15/24; Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912, A Territorial History; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico; Alberto Vidaurre,” 1847: Revolt or Resistance?” in Corina A. Santisteven and Julia Moore, Taos, A Topical History.
On Friday, January 22, 1847, the residents of Santa Fe, in the occupied territory of New Mexico, were on high alert. News had arrived two days before that the U.S.-appointed governor, Charles Bent, was dead at the hands of a mob loyal to Mexico. This came as a surprise because Bent and the U.S. military commander, Sterling Price, had assured everyone that all opposition to the U.S. invasion had been quelledthe month before.
Apparently not. The outbreak had started in the early hours of Tuesday, January 19 during an altercation at the village jail about whether Sheriff Stephen Lee would release three men who’d been incarcerated for theft. Lee, intimidated, was about to let them go when Prefect Cornelio Vigil showed up and intervened. In the ensuing argument, friends of the jailed men killed Vigil and released the prisoners, while Lee escaped to his house.
But not for long. Despite the fact that he’d been willing to release the prisoners, Lee would die along with five other men, including Bent, his brother-in-law Pablo Jaramillo, and Judge Carlos Beaubien’s nineteen-year-old son Narciso.
Taos, January 1847. The crosses mark the location where people died. Source: The Taos Massacres, John Durend, 2004.
By the time news of the deaths reached Santa Fe late Wednesday, the fighting at Taos had spread north to Arroyo Hondo and the compound of whisky purveyor Simeon Turley. Of the nine men at Turley’s, seven had died and two escaped before Price could complete his arrangements to head north. He would march out on Saturday morning with 290 men, four howitzers, and a ragtag mob of about fifty men under mountain man Ceran St. Vrain.
It would not be an easy trek. January 1847 was an unusually cold month and there was snow in the north. There weren’t enough horses to carry Price’s men. Even the dragoons were on foot. And the rebels didn’t wait for the Americans to come after them. They mobilized and headed toward Santa Fe. Fortunately, they wouldn’t get that far. But it would still be a campaign to remember.
Sources: James A. Crutchfield, Revolt at Taos, The New Mexican and Indian Insurrection of 1847; John Durand, The Taos Massacres; Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912, A Territorial History; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico; Alberto Vidaurre, “1847: Revolt or Resistance?” in Corina A. Santisteven and Julia Moore, Taos, A Topical History.
Amy S. Greenberg’s A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico is a comprehensive look at the war America prefers to forget. The one undertaken in 1846-47 for the sole purpose of stealing territory. The one known in the U.S. as the Mexican American War and in Mexico as “the United States’ intervention in Mexico.” It would result in the annexation of what are today the U.S. states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado.
It would also be the impetus for the first national antiwar movement in the United States and the first of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches as a newly minted Congressman from Illinois. A Wicked War provides a comprehensive look at these events, the rationale and excuses for the invasion, the political campaigns and jealousies that affected its trajectory, and the maneuvering of President Polk and his wife to ensure it happened.
Along the way, we meet a young Abraham Lincoln; Nicholas Trist, the U.S. negotiator who disobeyed his instructions in favor of the enemy; Henry Clay in the last great action of his career; and Ulysses S. Grant, a young officer who later wrote that the conflict was one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a strong nation against a weaker one.
If you’re looking for a book that gives you both the background to and events of the Mexican American War, or just a good overview of the events during that period of U.S. history, I strongly recommend A Wicked War.
In 1846, early in the Mexican American War, General Stephen Watts Kearny led his Army of the West from Missouri to Santa Fe. He received no resistance in New Mexico and raised the American flag over the Santa Fe plaza in mid-August. By early November, he had moved on to assist in the subjugation of California, leaving troops behind to hold New Mexico. Local leaders laid plans to kick out the remaining troops, but the plot was discovered in mid-December and the most of them were apprehended.
One of the men jailed was Manuel Antonio Chaves, who seems to have been the only one who went to court for his activities. Maybe his was the first and last case at this time because his American lawyer, Captain William Z. Angney, got him off.
Manuel Antonio Chaves, courtesy of Gill Chaves, 2019
Angney’s arguments were powerful. Chaves had been charged with treason against the United States. Angney argued that, since the war was still in progress, New Mexico was technically still part of the country of Mexico, and therefore Chaves was not an American citizen. You can’t try someone for treason against a country they don’t belong to. In fact, it was not treason, but patriotism, that motivated his actions.
Chaves was acquitted and released. His experience with Angney and in the courtroom seems to have permanently changed his view of Americans. Six months earlier, he’d argued fiercely that New Mexico ought to fight the invaders. The month after his release, he was fighting alongside the Americans to suppress the New Mexican revolt that broke out in Taos. He went on to serve in the Civil War on the side of the Union, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and playing a key role in the pivotal battle of Glorieta Pass. All because his perceived enemy (Captain Angney) defended Chaves’s right to rebel.
Sources: Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons, eds., The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott; Rubén Sálaz Márquez, New Mexico, A Brief Multi-History; Marc Simmons, The Little Lion of the Southwest, a life of Manuel Antonio Chaves; Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico.
Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico 