trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
...After an amicable evening with his wife and family and several houseguests, Bent was awakened at the crack of dawn by someone warning that the Indian mob along with some Mexicans had reassembled, drunk and bloodthirsty, and was headed his way. Bent met them at the door and asked their purpose. The answer was direct and not good.
"We want your head, gringo, we do not want for any of you gringos to govern us, as we have come to kill you."
"What wrong have I done you?" Bent responded. "I have always helped you. I cured you when you were sick and never charged you."
"Yes," cried an Indian, "and now you must die so that no American is going to govern us!" With that, a shower of arrows enveloped Bent at his door, which he managed to slam shut and bolt. His family, now thoroughly alarmed but still dressed in nightclothes, was horrified to see three arrows sticking out of the governor's face and blood streaming everywhere.
The mob began breaking the thin mica windows of the Bent's adobe home while rocks and more arrows flew inside and cries of "Kill the Americans" rose to a pitch along with war whoops and curses in both the Spanish and Pueblo tongues. The family could hear people clattering on the roof, trying to smash through. In deperation, someone suggested they endeavor to break through the wall the adobe shared with the house next door, and the women frantically set at this task using fire pokers and kitchen tools. Bent, meantime, was shouting out a broken window, trying to reason with the mob, but they only laughed and cursed at him. Gunfire coming through either a window or the door hit Bent in the face and stomach, while the women hysterically beat and clawed at the soft adobe bricks.
Soon they had cracked a hole large enough for a human body and after the children had gone through Bent's wife, Ignacia, was adamant that the governor should go next. But the arrows sticking out of his head would not fit through the narrow opening and Bent was obliged to withdraw and pull them out from beneath his skin before reentering the hole "holding his hand on top of his bleeding head." Just then some Indians burst into the house and confronted Ignacia with a gun. Her servant, a Navajo woman, jumped in between her mistress and the gunman and was shot.
The shooter then struck Ignacia with the gun butt and was about to finish her off when one of his companions discovered the hole broken into the wall and crawled through. Other Indians had already broken into the next-door house and were wandering its rooms. By then Bent was enfeebled from his wounds and lying down, his head cradled by Mrs. Thomas Boggs, one of his houseguests. With his stunned and horrified family watching, a Pueblo named Tomás Romero burst in and seized Bent by his suspenders and jerked him up, only to smash him to the floor, pounce on him, and scalp him alive. Other Indians riddled Bent's body with arrows and still others finally put him out of his misery in a hail of gunfire.
The assailants stripped Bent of all his clothes and began to mutilate him with knives. Some reports said he was decapitated. A plank was brought and Bent's bloody scalp was stretched upon it, nailed with brass tacks. This was then proudly paraded through Taos by the drunken mob...
-Winston Groom
Kearny's March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846-1847
New York, N.Y. 2011.
I previously asked ( in AllardChardon's Seldom-Used Words thread) if anyone knows the author. He may be the most successful author nobody recognizes.
The book is worth reading. The years of its focus were pivotal in American history— a fact that is neither widely known nor generally appreciated. I read Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder a couple of years ago (which Groom cites as a primary source); the two books are enjoyable and somewhat duplicative but both are commendable.
