Massacre, Murder, and Mayhem in the Rocky Mountain West

An Emigrant Train Attacked by Hostile Indians on the Prairie, Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 13, (August 15, 1857): 104–105. Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District (257-6331).

Myths and Massacres:

An Incident on the Santa Fe Trail

Michael L. Olsen

One of the early pulp fiction adventure tales published in mid-19th century America, a so-called dime novel, featured Kit Carson saving a white woman from the clutches of Indian captors. Soon after it appeared, this story and Kit Carson’s actual exploits at the time proved to be a case of art imitating life, or perhaps more accurately, life imitating art. The book was entitled Kit Carson, The Prince of the Gold Hunters, or, The Adventures of the Sacramento. A Tale of the New Eldorado, Founded on Actual Facts, by Charles Averill. It went on sale in 1849. Mrs. James M. White, who was involved in a massacre on the Santa Fe Trail that very year, purchased a copy and evidently read it as she traveled west.

The fate which overtook Mrs. White and her family is one of the most famous incidents in the history and heritage of the Santa Fe Trail. It reverberated throughout the American Southwest at the time and has continued to be retold and reviewed in the 160 years since. The narrative begins with Mr. James M. White, a Missouri merchant and trail trader. He was freighting goods to Santa Fe in 1849 with the intention of opening a store and maybe settling there permanently. His wife and their young daughter, along with at least one family slave, accompanied him.

Trouble began with Mr. White’s decision to forge on ahead of his wagon train, which covered less than 20 miles a day, and make a dash for Santa Fe. He wanted to arrive before other traders on the trail that season to rent a well-situated storefront on the plaza. The small party, including other traders, with the White family riding in a carriage, left the safety of their caravan in what would become the Oklahoma Panhandle. Then, on or about October 24th, near Point of Rocks, New Mexico, east of present-day Springer, a band of Apaches attacked. They killed everyone but Mrs. White and her daughter, Virginia. Traders coming on the scene several days later raised the alarm, putting soldiers at U.S. Army posts in Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Taos on alert. On November 4th, an army detachment left Taos to track the Apaches in the rugged barrancos of the far eastern New Mexico high plains. Kit Carson joined this force as it passed through Rayado, New Mexico, his home at the time.

The soldiers caught up with the Apaches on November 17th and attacked. Mrs. White, apparently while attempting to run toward the troops, was shot in the back with an arrow and killed. No trace of Virginia ever was found though the United States Congress in 1850 offered a $1,500 reward for her rescue. In a serendipitous development, Mrs. White’s baggage was discovered in a search of the camp. In it was her copy of Kit Carson, The Prince of the Gold Hunters. The actual Kit Carson years later dictated his autobiography and in it, recalling this occasion, said, We found a book in the camp, the first of its kind I had ever seen, in which I was represented as a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundred. I have often thought that Mrs. White must have read it, and knowing that I lived nearby, must have prayed for my appearance in order that she might be saved.¹

This episode in the history of the Santa Fe Trail and the Rocky Mountain region offers an interesting opportunity to study the interpretation of an altercation between Native peoples and white Americans on a western frontier. Was it a massacre? Or should it be regarded as an incident, or perhaps a tragedy? Were the Apache savages and the members of the White party innocents, or were the Apache defending their homeland against incursions along the Santa Fe Trail? All of these terms have been used in scholarly studies and popular literature. Not surprisingly, the cultural characterization of the incident began early, as for example with the Santa Fe Gazette newspaper of November 27, 1852, which called Mr. and Mrs. White and the others with them a company of unfortunates, but also labeled the affair as a massacre.

This essay will consider how the story of the White party and the Apaches has been depicted from its inception into the 21st century. It might be thought that as time passed and frontier memories waned, Americans would develop new language for these occurrences, these massacres, but that has not proved to be the case. While our culture has developed a more sensitive appraisal of such events in our national history, looking in from all sides and points of view, the term massacre in particular is still widely used, applied, and evidently accepted.

What do we mean by the word massacre? What is the history of its use? Does it connote today what it did in 1849, or at the time of the other massacres being considered at this symposium and the papers published from it? As always in such reflections, the answers to these questions illuminate our contemporary understanding of who we are and how we look at the world.

For the most authoritative etymology of the word massacre, we can turn to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in this case the Second Edition, published in 1989. Massacre obviously can be used as a verb or a noun—to massacre or a massacre. In either case, the term can be traced back only to 13th century France, where it signified a shambles, a slaughterhouse, or a butcher. The definition in the OED for the noun is, The unnecessary indiscriminate killing of human beings; a general slaughter, carnage, butchery; also occasionally the wholesale killing of animals. For the verb, as might be expected, the OED says, To kill indiscriminately; to make a general slaughter or carnage of.²

One of the earliest uses of the noun comes from a French source in 1586: There is no corner of this kingdom where the people have not committed infinite and cruel massacres. In English, Shakespeare in 1588 in Titus Andronicus wrote, I must talk of Murthers, Rapes, and Massacres. In America, Capt. John Smith in his book The General History of Virginia in 1624, observed, They made a massacre of Deere and Hogges. And perhaps in a more familiar vein, Cadwallader Colden, lieutenant governor of the English province of New York and author of The History of the Five Indian Nations, published in 1747, expressed sentiments that have echoed down the centuries, writing, Your Warriors . . . have Massacred Men, Women, and Children. There is no doubt that Europeans and Americans have known for 500 years exactly what they meant when they talked of massacres.³

Most Americans can probably reel off the names of half a dozen massacres with little effort. In fact, a search of the Internet site Wikipedia produces a list of nearly 500 such atrocities when the term massacres in history is typed into a search box. From the Bible we have the Massacre of the Innocents. The French have their St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. In Scottish history there seems to be a massacre every other year or so. In U.S. history we can stretch from the 1770 Boston Massacre to the My Lai Massacre. Here in the Mountain West we have the Sand Creek, Mountain Meadows, and Ludlow massacres, among others.

The Internet provides additional information on the use of the word massacre, via a tool known as Google Ngram. This website quickly surveys millions of books in English scanned by Google, looking for usage of a word or phrase over time. With reference to massacre the indication is that the incidence has dropped from .0088 percent in 1850, the year after the White massacre, to .0066 percent by 1910, and under .0044 percent by 1950. It essentially has remained at that point into the 21st century. In general, then, the use of the word massacre dropped by 50 percent over a period of 150 years. Several reasons might be suggested for this decline. One might be that the era of frontier expansion around the world, as in the United States, Canada, and Australia, where massacres were more likely to have occurred and been so named in the 19th century, came to an end. Or, perhaps there have been fewer events to classify as massacres—although given the violence of the 20th century this seems unlikely. More probable is that new designations have come into use, such as holocaust, atrocity, genocide, mass murder, and mass extermination. It would be interesting to plot the use of these terms against the decline of massacre.⁴

In this regard, a consideration of the White Massacre as it has been portrayed from its own time in the 1850s, through reminiscences, memoirs and histories published in the 1890s, and on into accounts written into the 21st century, is illuminating—as the following references demonstrate.

The sad event at the ‘Point of Rocks’ has caused the delay of several of my communications with you.

James S. Calhoun, October 29th, 1849

James S. Calhoun assumed his duties as United States Indian agent in Santa Fe in the summer of 1849, just a few months before the attack on the White party. He was one of the first public officials to receive word of the murders, along with Col. John Munroe, commandant of Fort Marcy, the U.S. Army post at Santa Fe. Over the next six months, many of Calhoun’s reports to the Commissioner of Indian affairs at Washington, D.C., summarized the developments surrounding the affair and detailed the steps to rescue Mrs. White and then to locate Virginia. His language was measured for the day. Besides calling it a sad event, he observed,

The liberation of Mrs. White and her daughter is, to me, a matter of deepest concern. But being entirely destitute of the means necessary to an efficient and prompt action in the premises, I am left to lament the impotency of my arm, and if the two captives are not to be liberated, it is to be hoped they are dead.

Of the Apache, who had recently signed a peace treaty, he noted, That when they broke the old treaty they were forced to do so from the fact, that they were in a starving condition. Calhoun did not deal in hysteria or hyperbole.⁵

The Indians who committed the outrage are said to have been a party on their return from the South.

W. W. H. Davis

William Watts Hart Davis published one of the earliest historical accounts of the new United States Territory of New Mexico. His volume, El Gringo; or, New Mexico and Her People, issued in New York by Harper & Brothers, appeared in 1857. Davis had arrived in New Mexico in 1853 and served both as a U. S. District Attorney there and, for a few months, as territorial governor. As with Calhoun, Davis too takes a dispassionate approach, calling the White murders an outrage. Further on in his account he does use what we would consider a pejorative term, savages, though it of course reflects the language of the day. He says,

When the affair was known in Santa Fé, a company of dragoons with Kit Carson as guide were sent in pursuit. They struck the trail, and followed it for three or four days, when they came up with and attacked the Indians. They succeeded in killing several of the savages, but during the fight the latter murdered both Mrs. White and her child.

Davis never refers to the White affair as a massacre.⁶

That of course brought the stage and baggage wagon to a stop, and the massacre of the entire party was an easy matter.

Richens Lacey Uncle Dick Wootton

Uncle Dick Wootton is one of the more colorful characters in Colorado history. He is best known for his construction of a toll road over Raton Pass in 1866, but he was a famed mountain man and early merchant in fledging Denver. W. E. Dibble & Company of Chicago published his memoirs, as dictated to Howard Louis Conard, in 1890. Wootton’s memory proved imaginative and downright faulty. For example, he places Mr. and Mrs. White and Virginia as passengers in a stagecoach and includes himself as riding to Mrs. White’s rescue, though he was not there. He also, now 40 years on from the events of 1849, used language which later generations might find offensive and intolerant though it was common for the day when reviewing the history of the American frontier from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown on west. It was how white Americans saw themselves and their manifest destiny. He called the attack on the White party a massacre and went on to say, Not one of them escaped from the merciless savages. . . . The horribly mutilated remains of the victims were gathered up and buried in one grave. Of the trooper’s pursuit of the Apache he recalled—again placing himself falsely at the center of the action—I began to think then that we were getting close to the red skins, and that the plan was one of capturing or annihilating the band of Indians. It was characterizations such as those of Uncle Dick which fed the film and radio stereotypes of Native peoples in the 20th century.⁷

Out dashed the savages, gorgeous in their feathered war-bonnets, but looking like fiends with their paint-bedaubed faces.

Henry Inman

Henry Inman, an army officer who served at numerous posts on the plains from the Dakotas to Kansas and was court-martialed four times before finally being drummed out of the service, wrote the first comprehensive general history of the Santa Fe Trail, published in 1899. He knew his market and spared no adjectives in describing events along the trail. He also was a hopeless romantic, re-arranging the facts to suit his interpretations. As with Uncle Dick, he places the White family aboard a stagecoach outbound from Independence, Missouri. Having conjured up the paint bedaubed savages he continues his narrative:

Stopping the frightened mules, [the Apache] pulled open the door of the coach and, mercilessly dragging its helpless and surprised inmates to the ground, immediately began their butchery. They scalped and mutilated the dead bodies of their victims in their usual sickening manner.

For him this is a massacre. As he recalled, The terrible news of the massacre was conveyed to Taos. Inman’s history today is chiefly consulted to characterize the culture of his time.⁸

An even more shocking tragedy was the massacre of a small party headed by Dr. White of Santa Fe.

R. L. Duffus

Although over 80 years has passed since it was first published in 1930, Robert L. Duffus’ history The Santa Fe Trail has usually been in print and has remained the best popular account of trail days. Duffus duly nods toward the White’s misfortunes, devoting two pages to it. He classes it as a tragedy, but also calls it a massacre. Something of Duffus’ spirited writing comes through in his account, for example, when considering the fate of Virginia White: A blinding snow-storm made further pursuit impossible. The fate of the child was never known. It disappeared forever behind the curtain of the falling snow. Duffus also provides one detail which does not appear in other accounts, asserting, Kit Carson himself is the authority for the statement that the Apache chief responsible for these murders appeared in Santa Fe some time later wearing a necklace made from Dr. White’s teeth. By the 1930s times had changed and particularly lurid accounts such as those of Uncle Dick and Henry Inman are dated, but the fate of the White party could still arouse a touch of purple prose.⁹

Just east of Point of Rocks one of the most famous tragedies of the trail occurred—the White massacre of October 1849.

William E. Brown

William E. Brown was a U.S. National Park Service historian. He compiled the first comprehensive catalog of important places along the Santa Fe Trail and of its heritage in his The Santa Fe Trail—The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings Series, issued by the National Park Service in 1963. Given the caution taken in most government reports, it might be expected Brown’s language would be a bit measured, but he, as with other writers in the 20th century, calls the event a tragedy and a massacre. He also uses verbs such as attacked, and killed, though, to reiterate, as with Duffus, he reflects 20th century sensibilities. This report, of course, appeared just on the cusp of the cultural and ethnic upheavals of the 1960s, when any episode in American history called a massacre might be challenged from one side or the other by the actual or self-identified descendants of the factions originally involved. Given the battles about to erupt in American society, it should be added that Brown’s reference to Virginia White is especially touching: The little girl disappeared with the fleeing Indians, never to be heard from again.¹⁰

The dead had not been scalped or mutilated, which was unusual for a Plains Indian attack.

Hampton Sides

Although the fate of James White and his party lies outside of his primary focus, Hampton Sides does glance at it in his recent best-seller Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, published in 2006. Very interestingly, he never uses the term, massacre with reference to the event at the Point of Rocks. The closest he comes is to say, Then the Indians pounced. He tells a good story, though, writing, The travelers attempted to flee but did not get far. Soon the bodies of White and his two other guides bristled with shafts. As with the rest of his book, he passes no major judgment on anyone, leaving conclusions to his readers. His book has been almost unanimously praised by both professional critics and his readers. The 250-plus reviewers who have posted their comments online at Amazon.com give it 4.5 stars out of five, saying, for instance, that it is, thoroughly engaging and brilliantly written. Perhaps more than any other popular treatment in recent years, Blood and Thunder is shaping contemporary thought on the opening of the West, and on Sides’ specific targets, the history of the Navajo in the 19th century and the life of Kit Carson.¹¹

It is a popular story. It involves the capture of an American woman by Indians . . . , a massacre on the Santa Fe Trail, and a poignant rescue attempt. In short, it is a dramatic story of conflict and death.

Harry C. Myers

Harry Myers’ article, Massacre on the Santa Fe Trail: Mr. White’s Company of Unfortunates, is the most comprehensive and empathetic treatment of James M. White, his family, his fellow travelers and the Apache. It was published in the February 1992 issue of Wagon Tracks, the quarterly magazine of the Santa Fe Trail Association. Myers does what any good historian should do: he places the affair firmly within its time and culture. Beginning in 1846, he analyzes the unfolding situation regarding the relationships among the newly-arrived conquering Americans in New Mexico, the Hispanic population—resident there for 250 years, and the indigenous Plains Indian peoples. More specifically, he demonstrates that the U.S. Army had a difficult time understanding the centuries-old accommodation of raiding and trading that had evolved between Hispanic famers and pastoralists and the nomadic tribes such as the Ute, Apache, and Comanche. From the American point of view, and America’s own 200 years of frontier experience, Indians were to be pacified and corralled on reservations. Beginning in January 1849, Myers chronicles over a dozen depredations by Indians on Hispanic settlements east of the Sangre de Christo Mountains and on traffic along the Santa Fe Trail. He traces the army’s increasingly active but frustrated response. In the end, the White Massacre is just one of many such episodes that year and, Myers implies, James M. White should have known better than to leave his caravan and set off on his own.

Myers’ account touches on the two aspects of the White Massacre—to use the designation that has persisted for 160 years—that have emerged in recent decades. It is both a thrilling tale and an instructive chapter in the relationship between Indians and non-Indians in the American West. As Myers says in his conclusion,

The story of the White massacre has indeed become a modern-day legend. The fascination with the story in all its variations reveals its popularity. Perhaps that is because we are reminded of a time and place where people faced physical danger and hardship daily along the Trail. Perhaps, in our fascination with the story, we long for that daily excitement. And perhaps it is because of such excitement that the Santa Fe Trail today has called to so many.

It can be added here that Myers was for many years the superintendent of Fort Union National Monument on the Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico and later served as Association Manager of the Santa Fe Trail Association.¹²

The great stampede [the 1859 Colorado gold rush] changed the plains at least as much as the mountains, and we have kept our gaze on what was rushed to rather than on what was rushed over.

Elliott West

Elliott West’s ground-breaking study The Contested Plains—Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, published in 1998, is not remotely concerned with the White Massacre or developments in New Mexico. It is set in the 1850s and 1860s and concerns particularly the impact of the Colorado gold rush emigration on the environment and Native peoples of the high plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado. But its message is one that is reverberating now in serious histories of the American West and, more to the point here, is reflected in the changing interpretations of the White Massacre. Lurid or romantic as past histories of western massacres might have been, we now realize there were at least two sides involved in any dispute, that each side had reasons for acting as it did, and whether we empathize with those reasons or not the point is to understand the circumstances and reflect on them. The term massacre rarely carries with it any opprobrium today—in southeastern Colorado for example, we have the officially named Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site maintained by the National Park Service in collaboration with the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. But it is to be hoped that at this point in the American story, the term massacre does not conjure up unfettered emotionalism but instead draws us into history.¹³

Michael L. Olsen has a BA in history from St. Olaf College and a MA and PhD from the University of Washington. He is retired as a professor of history from New Mexico Highlands University, where he taught for 30 years. He currently lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His primary research interest is in the social and cultural history of the Santa Fe Trail and the Smoky Hill Trail. He has published extensively on the story and heritage of both trails. He has served as vice president of the Santa Fe Trail Association and president of the Smoky Hill Trail Association. During the summer of 2013 his book, That Broad and Beckoning Highway: The Santa Fe Trail and the Rush for Gold in California and Colorado was published by the National Park Service.

NOTES

1. Charles Averill, Kit Carson, The Prince of the Gold Hunters, or, The Adventures of the Sacramento. A Tale of the New Eldorado, Founded on Actual Facts (Boston: G. H. Williams, 1849); Milo Milton Quaife, ed., Kit Carson’s Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1935, 1966), 135. The events of the White Massacre as summarized here are found in the sources cited in this essay.

2. J. A. Simpson, ed., The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 11:436.

3. Ibid.

4. Google Books Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngrams, search for massacre (accessed March 25, 2013).

5. Annie Abel, ed., The Official Correspondence of James. S. Calhoun, While Indian Agent at Santa Fe and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), 64, 65, 169, http://archive.org/details/officialcorrespo00unit (accessed March 23, 2013).

6. William Watts Hart Davis, El Gringo; or, New Mexico and Her People (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1857), 45–46, http://archive.org/details/elgringoornewmex00davirich (accessed March 23, 2013).

7. Howard Louis Conard, Uncle Dick Wootton, The Pioneer Frontiersman of the Rocky Mountain Region (Chicago: W. E. Dibble & Co., 1890), 207–212, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89066075789;view=1up;seq=5 (accessed August 6, 2014).

8. Henry Inman, The Old Santa Fé Trail, The Story of a Great Highway (Topeka: Crane & Company, 1899), 160–163, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015024822838#page/n3/mode/1up (accessed March 23, 2013).

9. Robert L. Duffus, The Santa Fe Trail (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1934), 230–231. There have been numerous editions of this book.

10. William E. Brown, The Santa Fe Trail—National Park Service 1963 Historic Sites Survey (n.p.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1963). Also issued at St. Louis: The Patrice Press, 1988. See pp. 131–132.

11. Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder, The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 247–248.

12. Harry Myers, Massacre on the Santa Fe Trail: Mr. White’s Company of Unfortunates, Wagon Tracks 6:2 (February 1992), 18–23, http://www.santafetrail.org/publications/wagon-tracks/online.html (accessed March 23, 2013).

13. Elliott West, The Contested Plains—Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), xvii.

Camanchee Camanch, George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians: Written During Eight Years’ Travel Amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1857), op. 505.

The 1761 Comanche Massacre

Rick Hendricks

Background to a Massacre

In November 1751, Tomás Vélez Cachupín, governor of the Spanish province of New Mexico, met the Comanche Indians in battle at a place called San Diego Pond on the Llano Estacado and scored a stunning victory. With a force of only 164 men, Vélez Cachupín defeated a sizeable Comanche force, demonstrating personal courage and martial prowess during the battle and compassion in dealing with those who surrendered after the fighting stopped.¹ In 1752, Governor Vélez Cachupín concluded a peace treaty with the Comanches.

Word of the governor’s actions passed into Comanche oral history and was remembered long afterward. Almost a decade after the battle, the carefully wrought peace Vélez Cachupín brokered was a shambles. Taos Indians, who maintained a more stable relationship with the Spanish than the nomadic Comanche did, held a scalp dance in 1760, ostensibly to entertain Comanche visitors.² At the conclusion of the dance, the Taos people announced that they had danced with Comanche scalps, provoking predictable results. On August 4, 1760, 3,000 Comanches descended on the settlements of the Taos Valley, where Spanish settlers and Taos Indians lived side by side.³ Forewarned of the Comanches’ approach from the east, the Hispano settlers took refuge in the fortified hacienda of Pablo de Villalpando, one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens in the Taos Valley.⁴ Villalpando ran large herds of sheep and grew abundant crops in his fields. His full storerooms were probably a tempting target for raiding, but his solid adobe house was a formidable structure. The house boasted four defensive towers, or torreones; tall, thick walls; and a sturdy gate. Usually, would-be plunderers passed by the Villalpando hacienda on their way through the Taos Valley, but the loss of honor the Comanches recently suffered emboldened them and fed their fury.

Excerpted composite map (not to scale) from a 1769 map of the Spanish Province of New Mexico. Taos Pueblo is at the far north (top) and the presidio of Paso del Río del Norte is at the far south, west of the Río Grande. The eastern plains, frequently described as the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, is identified as the Tierra de los Cumanches (Comanche Lands). José de Urrutia and Nicolas de la Fora, Mapa, que comprende la frontera, de los dominios del Rey, en la America septentrional, primera parte. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. (g4410 ct000539).

After a suitable display of bravura and horsemanship, the attackers might have spared the occupants of the Villalpando hacienda and ridden on to Taos Pueblo to confront the people who had mocked them had the defenders not fired on them.⁵ Instead, the Comanches assaulted the hacienda and eventually breached the walls. Once inside the compound, the Comanches set fire to the house and began to capture the terrified children. Fourteen Hispano men were killed along with an unknown number of women and children. When the battle was over, the Villalpando hacienda lay in ruins, and the victorious Comanches carried off 56 (or 64, depending on the source) young women and children, some of whom remained captive for the next decade. Forty-nine Comanches were slain in the fierce fighting. When Pablo de Villalpando returned from a business trip, he found his family was no more and his home destroyed.⁶

Gov. Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle, who succeeded Vélez Cachupín and served as governor from 1754 to 1761, soon led a retaliatory expedition into the field in pursuit of the Comanches.⁷ His force, including Apache auxiliaries, numbered 1,000 men. After chasing the Comanches for 200 leagues (600 miles), the Apaches grew hungry and dispirited. Marín del Valle and his men spent 40 days seeking the perpetrators of the Villalpando raid to no avail before returning to Santa Fe. The governor was ill and requested permission from the viceroy to resign his position, which was granted by January 1761.⁸ His replacement was to be former governor Vélez Cachupín, but he was in Spain and had to arrange passage to New Spain and then New Mexico.⁹ In the meantime, Manuel Portillo Urrisola arrived to replace Marín del Valle and take the post of interim governor of New Mexico in the spring of 1761. Portillo Urrisola arrived on May 13, and the transfer of office took place the next day.¹⁰

Once the incoming interim governor arrived in Santa Fe, Marín del Valle informed Portillo Urrisola about Comanche activities. In June 1761 Portillo Urrisola reported to the viceroy that the Comanches had promised to return the captives from the Villalpando raid in May, but nothing had happened yet.¹¹ He and the entire colony were prepared for action with horses, weapons, ammunition, and provisions at the ready. He wanted to go on campaign and strike a blow at the enemy Comanches. The newly arrived governor soon took to the field, traveling as far as Taos with 400 men to await the arrival of the Comanches.¹² He camped there for about a month but accomplished nothing.

Before being named to the governorship of New Mexico, Portillo Urrisola had a long and solid, if not exactly stellar, career in the military and civil service. He was probably approaching 60 years old when he took over in Santa Fe, a rather advanced age for the time. He had previous experience working in areas of New Spain with significant Indian populations but did not appear to have any frontier experience. There was nothing in his service record that would suggest he would attempt to govern with an iron fist or that he was in any way prepared to deal with an implacable foe such as the Comanches.

A Biographical Sketch of Manuel Portillo Urrisola, 1702?–1763

Given his role in the 1761 Comanche massacre, Manuel Portillo Urrisola’s career as a Spanish military commander and government official is important to note. Portillo Urrisola was a native of Valencia, Spain.¹³ He entered the Spanish royal service in 1717, joining the army. Assuming he was 15 years old when he enlisted, which was the typical age of cadets in the Spanish army, Portillo Urrisola would have been born around 1702. He continued as a soldier and cadet in the Dragoons of Belgium until January 20, 1735. During that time he participated in the Navarra and Catalonia campaigns in 1719. The following year he formed part of the expedition to Ceuta, a city on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast near Gibraltar, battling with Moroccan Alaouites for Spanish control of the city. In 1732, Portillo Urrisola took part in the capture of Orán, Algeria, from Ottoman-Muslim troops, whence he went from garrison duty to the plaza of Ceuta. There he remained 33 months with his regiment. Portillo Urrisola retired with the permission of José de Flodorp, colonel of the regiment, on January 20, 1735.

After Portillo Urrisola traveled to New Spain, Francisco de Aísa, the Marqués del Castillo de Aísa, governor and captain general of Nueva Vizcaya, former president of the Audiencia (royal court) of Guadalajara, named him corregidor (magistrate) of the pueblos of Colimilla and Matatán on September 4, 1738, for one year. Colimilla and Matatán were located in the southwestern part of the jurisdiction of Tecpatialán, which was just east of Guadalajara.¹⁴ He was so punctual and efficient in the collection of royal revenues that on October 8, 1739, he was extended in office for another year.¹⁵ When that second year was up, Portillo Urrisola continued until May 25, 1741. At the conclusion of his residencia (the judicial review of a public official’s service and conduct at the end of his term in office) the Audiencia of Guadalajara pronounced him a loyal and able official on August 29, 1741.

The Marqués de Castillo de Aísa named Portillo Urrisola alcalde mayor (chief magistrate and administrative officer) of the villa of Santa María de los Lagos and Pueblos Llanos in Nueva Galicia on September 4, 1741, for the period of one year.¹⁶ He was also alcalde of the Santa Hermandad, the rural constabulary, for the villa of Santa María de los Lagos and its jurisdiction. In the jurisdiction of Santa María de los Lagos were many haciendas where livestock was raised. Because of the considerable distance from there to Guadalajara, many stock owners did not obtain the appropriate licenses for brands or for butchering.¹⁷ The same was true for wool producers and people curing hides. The effect of avoiding licenses was a loss of revenue for the crown. On September 14, 1741, Portillo Urrisola received a commission to see to it that the royal treasury was not defrauded of license fees.

Portillo Urrisola made a significant contribution to the construction of a new church in Santa María de los Lagos. The Bishop of Nueva Vizcaya praised his efforts in a letter of November 7, 1741. Revealing his compassion, Fray Francisco de la Resurección, president of the Bethlehemite Hospital of Guadalajara, certified Portillo Urrisola’s charity to the poor, noting on June 6, 1749, that during the general epidemic of Matlazahuatl in 1738, he spent an entire year caring for the ill day and night.

When the president of the Audiencia of Guadalajara issued an order to ready horses to be sent to Veracruz, Portillo Urrisola gathered 238 horses from his and other jurisdictions and dispatched them to their destination. The president thanked Portillo Urrisola for his efforts in the name of the king on January 10, 1742. Subsequently he prepared 100 lances to be carried into battle in the Valle de Banderas. Portillo Urrisola’s term was extended on November 4, 1742. After that term concluded on December 4, 1743, Portillo Urrisola underwent his residencia. He became an alcalde ordinario in 1746.¹⁸ Again the Audiencia of Guadalajara found him to have been an upright official and approved his conduct in office on August 17, 1746.¹⁹ In November 1754 he was residing in Guadalajara.

Portillo Urrisola was back in Spain when he received the title of corregidor of Nochixtlán and Los Peñoles in New Spain in 1757.²⁰ On August 2 he was granted permission to sail for New Spain with his personal belongings and one servant, Ramón Berges Grau, a 23-year-old native of Barcelona. At some point after 1743 the jurisdiction of Iscuintepec Peñoles was annexed to Nochixtlán, which doubled its size.²¹ During the period Portillo Urrisola served there, Nochixtlán and Los Peñoles had very few non-Indian inhabitants.

Portillo Urrisola arrived in New Mexico to take up the post of interim governor to replace Gov. Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle in 1761. He completed his interim governorship at the end of January 1762 a term of little more than eight months. He then made his way to the viceregal capital of Mexico City where he died the following year. Portillo Urrisola was interred in the church of Santo Domingo with the permission of the Archbishop of Mexico City on February 19, 1763. He was survived by his wife, Bernardina Gómez Paradela, a citizen and resident of Cádiz, Spain.²² At the time of his death, Portillo Urrisola was living on the Calle del Esclavo in Mexico City.

Accounts of the 1761 Comanche Massacre

There are at least four extant accounts of the events at Taos Pueblo in 1761: a letter from Antonio Armijo to Gov. Tomás Vélez Cachupín dated December 28, 1761; a long letter dated February 24, 1762, in Santa Fe from Portillo Urrisola to Bishop Pedro Tamarón y Romeral of the Diocese of Durango; a letter from Governor Vélez Cachupín to Viceroy Marqués de Cruillas dated March 25, 1762; and an account by Juan Candelaria that was recorded in 1776. Portillo Urrisola, Armijo, and possibly Candelaria were witnesses to the events they described. Vélez Cachupín based his letter on interviews with participants and survivors of the massacre. The four accounts differ in many particulars and will therefore be examined carefully in chronological order. The Franciscan assigned to Taos, whose name is unknown, recorded his observations on the Comanche massacre, but his report has not surfaced.²³

Armijo

Antonio de Armijo apparently wrote to Vélez Cachupín, who was in El Paso (present-day Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico) at the time, because he knew the incoming governor would want to know how relations stood with the Comanches, given how much effort he had expended during his first term to establish a lasting peace.²⁴ Armijo stated that he accompanied Portillo Urrisola from Santa Fe to Taos, arriving there at three o’clock in the afternoon of December 21, 1761. He said that he heard the governor ask the Comanches to hand over the seven captives they had with them. In response, 10 Comanche captains who were in the governor’s presence told him to purchase the captives. This enraged Governor Portillo to such an extent that it humbled the Comanches, and they delivered the captives with no further resistance. The governor then detained the Comanche captains and disarmed them but did not imprison them, which proved to be a careless decision as events unfolded. Portillo Urrisola then left for the Comanche camp. There he caused such a commotion that, in Armijo’s words the honor of the might of the King of Spain hung in the balance. The uproar might have been why the handful of soldiers left to guard the captains in the casas reales at Taos Pueblo almost lost their lives. When Armijo and the rest of the troops returned to the pueblo from the Comanche camp, they found the Comanche captains in control of the casas reales.

The term casas reales when applied to a structure in an Indian pueblo in New Mexico referred to a building owned and maintained by the pueblo for use as accommodations for guests, such as government officials, or as a place to conduct business with merchants.²⁵ As Francisco Atanasio Domínguez described them in 1776, the casas reales at Taos were located in the south-side pueblo.²⁶ This structure was identical in appearance to the house blocks of the pueblo except for the fact that there was a defensive tower on the casas reales.

Armijo reported that the next day Portillo Urrisola ordered Lt. Tomás Madrid to launch an attack against the Comanches. When Madrid had his troops readied to carry out the governor’s order, a Comanche captain came out carrying a cross, kneeling down, and asking for peace. He promised to free all captives if the Spaniards preserved the Comanches’ horses and let their people live, including the women and children. All the Comanches men and women began to