The name “Taos” conjures many things. An ancient pueblo. A Mexican outpost. Gringo mountain men. A violent revolt. A funky 21st century village. But the village and pueblo are two separate places. There are Spanish villages and Indigenous pueblos side by side all over New Mexico. As far as I know, only in the Taos valley do the two settlements carry the same name.
And where does the name come from and what does it mean? Now there’s a question. According to F.R. Bob Romero in Santistevan and Moore, Taos, A Topical History, it’s been attributed “to an Indian word meaning ‘Red Willow’ or ‘people of the Red Willow.’” But no one knows for sure. All we know is that it’s what the pueblo was called after the Spanish arrived. Romero says it’s likely a “Tiwa Indian term that perhaps began with the T sound and was Hispanicized as Taos.”
So that explains (or doesn’t!) that. But then there’s the question of the name of the village which is three miles southwest. We call it “Taos,” but it was originally called Don Fernando de Taos, San Fernando de Taos, San Fernandez de Taos, and various forms of these three names, such as Don Fernando, San Fernando, San Fernandez, or simply Fernando or Fernandez. Although the latter two don’t appear very often in the historical record. Even then, if the name is shortened, it becomes simply “Taos.”
As far as I know, Don Fernando de Taos is the only location in New Mexico which has the honorific “Don” attached to it. The Don Fernando for whom it was named was actually a Don Fernando Durán y Chávez, who had a hacienda near Taos Pueblo in the late 1600s. He and his son fled south during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and didn’t return. In 1795, the grant was ceded to settlers from the nearby Cañon area, but the village didn’t really start to thrive until French-Canadian and American mountain men [post link here] began to trickle in in the 1820s.The village was a restocking and trading point for the fur trappers. Some of them stayed to set up mercantile businesses and intermarry and the community became the center of americano settlement in the valley.
Ironically, the location that developed in response to the American presence became the flash point of resistance to the 1846 American invasion. Maybe the locals just got sick of us.
© Loretta Miles Tollefson
Sources: Source: Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate, Roadside History of New Mexico; Robert Julyan, The Place Names of New Mexico, Revised Edition; F.R. Bob Romero in Santistevan and Moore eds., Taos, A Topical History; http://taoscountyhistoricalsociety.org/taoshistory.html, accessed Jan 3, 2017
Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico 