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.

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