Bent's Old Fort and the Cultural Landscape of the Southwestern Plains
Before the arrival of Europeans, the broad Plains just east of the southern Rocky Mountains was an area sparsely occupied by pedestrian nomads. For thousands of years small groups of hunters and gatherers followed the banks of major rivers and streams like the Arkansas and its tributaries. Staying close to the water and its plant and animal resources, they seldom ventured into the inhospitable countryside. The names of these groups were never recorded. What became of their descendants we do not know.
After them came the wide-ranging equestrian Plains tribes. These populations had been displaced from ancestral lands much farther to the east by European intrusion: by the disease, social dislocation, and ensuing tribal warfare that became rampant during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among them were the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the Native American tribes most prominent in the history of Bent's Old Fort, who had been forced from their homes in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. The acquisition of the horse presented opportunities eagerly grasped by these refugees. Mounted buffalo hunting, raiding and warfare, and trade became the essential elements of a way of life which then developed.
The names of these tribes have been etched indelibly into the cultural landscape of the entire southwestern Plains. On maps one finds Cheyenne County. and Cheyenne Wells in Colorado, Cheyenne County in Kansas, Cheyenne, Oklahoma, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Colorado has Kiowa County, Pawnee and Comanche national grasslands, and the city of Arapaho. There are, as well, Brule, Arapaho, and Oglala, Nebraska; Comanche, Oklahoma; and Kiowa National Grasslands in New Mexico.
There are also names from a later, darker period in Native American history, when these peoples were violently obliterated from the landscape of the Southwest: Chivington, Colorado, memorializes the man most responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre. This atrocity took place only a day's march from Bent's Old Fort and Bent's New Fort. By the time of the 1869 massacre, William Bent was one of the few whites in Colorado willing to speak against the extermination of the Native Americans. Not far from Chivington is Sheridan Lake, named for General Philip Henry Sheridan, famed for saying, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead."
For the most part, however, it is as if the cartographers were most ac-
tive during the few years of the early nineteenth century when one could say that the Cheyenne and Arapaho were north of the Arkansas River, the Kiowa and Comanche to the southeast, the Shoshoni to the west, the Ute to the northwest, and the Apache to the south (see fig. 1). This arrangement of Native American occupation of the land, though, was contingent partly upon European and American interaction with Native American groups, interaction that grew in frequency and intensity as trails were developed and the trickle of emigration through these courses grew to a flood. It was also determined by the military prowess and fortunes of the various tribes. After the introduction of the horse in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the once sparsely inhabited region became the arena of ceaseless conflict between now mobile groups of Native Americans.
For more than one hundred years, from about the mid eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, all Plains Native American groups were transformed into something very like light calvary units. Striking out in all directions, they attempted, as Lewis and Clark noted of the Shoshoni, to "keep up the war from spring to autumn."[12]
The presence of the Spanish was one of the principal reasons for Native American interest in the southwestern Plains—the Spanish brought horses. The Comanche in particular quickly grew adept at "harvesting" horses from the Spanish herds. In the equestrian culture of the Plains Indians, the horse was not only an essential part of the technological basis of that culture; it was also, as Frank Roe and others have documented, the basic form of power and wealth.[13]
The horse played a large role in Comanche mythology. The traditional view of the world is one less segmented than (or segmented in ways different from) the modern one, and so the horse was seen as "valuable" in all ways. Regard for the horse was also religious. Horse riding provided a way to reenact mythological occurrence. The horsemanship of the Comanche awed all who observed it, even other Plains tribes. A Comanche could ride a horse bareback at full gallop in such a way as to conceal himself completely from an observer. To accomplish this, he could crawl under the belly of the horse and back up over either its head or tail. Because of such skill and their proximity to the herds of the Spanish, the Comanche generally held trade in disdain, unlike most other Plains groups and in sharp contrast with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. The Comanche felt they had no need of trade, they simply took what they wanted.
In no small part because of the depredations of the indios barbaros, the barbaric Indians, including not only the Comanche but the Apache, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and others, colonization on the northern
Figure 1.
Location of Native American groups in the early nineteenth century and their westerly
immigration trails. (Map by Steven Patricia.)
frontier of Spain's New Mexico territory was a very tenuous matter. The strategic importance of Spanish settlement (later, Mexican settlement) here was well recognized, however, by the seats of government farther to the south. Spain's anxiety regarding the security of her northern colonial boundaries was dramatically intensified by the purchase of the Louisiana Territory by the United States in 1803.
Despite Spanish efforts, the preservation of ties to these settlements or even of social order at the northern outposts proved extremely difficult. Of the Spanish who inhabited the northern frontier of colonial New Mexico, Father Juan Augustin de Morfi could only despair. In his report to church officials, "Account of Disorders in New Mexico, 1778," he observed that settlers "live isolated with no one to observe them [and] there are those who have no inhibitions about running around stark naked. . .. [O]ther moral disorders proceed which shock even the barbarous Indians. . .. [R]obbery is looked upon as a tolerable expedient . . . blatant violence is the rule."[14] Here we can see the contingency of occupation working in contradictory directions: The Native Americans were present because of the Spanish, but the hold of the Spanish and (that of the Mexicans after their independence in I821) on the area was made tenuous by that very presence.
Beginning about 1831, with the construction on the northern bank of the Arkansas River of the trading post eventually known as Bent's Old Fort, American traders undertook what proved a pivotal role in the theater of events in the Southwest. Operating from this post, just over the northern border of Mexico (see fig. 2), the Americans formed trading alliances with Native Americans. In doing this they encouraged raids upon Mexican settlements, if only by offering a ready market for livestock stolen in raids on rancherias. The resulting destabilization of the northern Mexican borderlands helped pave the way for the 1846 American takeover of the Southwest.
Previous forays by Americans into the area had been unsuccessful. Not only the Spanish had resisted but also Plains tribes that, unlike the Comanche, had developed a stake in the exchange of European and Native American goods. The Cheyenne and Arapaho in particular feared that the American newcomers would usurp their position in this trade. For their part, Spanish authorities routinely jailed or otherwise detained and harassed American traders and trappers attempting commerce in Spanish New Mexico, beginning with Zebulon Pike's visit in 1806. In doing so, they were heeding the warning given by the former lieutenant governor of Spanish Louisiana who said, in 1804, that the Americans were intent
Figure 2
Location of Bent's Old Fort. (Map by Steven Patricia.)
upon expanding "their boundary lines to the Rio Bravo." His immediate superior, Baron de Carondelet, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, had been greatly concerned with American attempts to expand their fur trade through "control" of Native American groups.[15]
As early as 1803 Spanish officials had come to see the Plains Indians as an essential buffer to American encroachment, provided their loyalty could be obtained through participation in the Spanish fur trade.[16] By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Spanish were trading with the Kiowa on the Arkansas, the Pawnee on the Platte, and the Arapaho in the area between the Arkansas and the Platte. Near the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire Rivers, almost at the spot where Bent's Fort would soon be built, the Spanish engaged in a regular trade rendezvous with the Plains Indians.
In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, then, the Plains Indians who frequented the territory of the southwestern Plains were enmeshed in a tenuous trading alliance with the Spanish. Even though this alliance was not enough to end raids by the Native American trading partners on Spanish settlements, it seems to have ameliorated them. The cautious alliance was enough to forestall American entry into the region, and this was of strategic importance to the Spanish. For example, in 1811, Manuel Lisa, renowned founder of the St. Louis-based Missouri Fur Company, sent Jean Baptiste Champlain to trade with the Arapaho in their southwestern home and the Spanish traders in Santa Fe, hoping to open the Southwest for this American company's trade. The Arapaho killed Champlain and two of his party. The Arapaho attacked many such contingents from the north who ventured into or near the Southwest in the years that followed. As late as 1823, several American trappers were killed near Taos. The resistance to American traders by Native Americans (particularly by the Cheyenne, their close allies the Arapaho, and the Kiowa) in the southwestern Plains, and in the Southwest, seems to have peaked in the 1820s.[17]
The buffer between Spanish and later Mexican (southern European) and Anglo (northern European) territories, judged crucial by Baron de Carondelet, was removed with Mexican Independence in 1821. Without Spain's strict prohibition of commerce with the United States, the floodgates were opened for American influence. The tide of American power surged, alarming the newly independent Mexican state and prompting efforts (described in chapter 4) to replace the barrier.
In the 1830s Native American resistance to Anglo-American presence in the southwestern Plains diminished. This can be attributed to the
construction of Bent's Old Fort in about 1831. A fictive kinship relationship was forged between the Anglo builders and their principal trading partners, the Cheyenne and Arapaho. The man most responsible for the fort's construction and operation, William Bent, then established actual kinship relations with the most influential family among the Cheyenne by marrying Owl Woman, daughter of White Thunder, the Keeper-of-the-Sacred-Arrows and therefore the Cheyenne's most important holy man. To White Thunder, the marriage of William Bent to his daughter may well have seemed an eminently logical extension of his control over sacred objects. For the Cheyenne, this kinship ensured an unending supply of European trade goods such as firearms, ammunition, knives, beads, and other manufactured items as well as providing a source of the power associated with these goods—the white man's medicine.
The alliance established a new order in the region. The Cheyenne and Arapaho realized major gains in military power and social prestige from their ties to Bent's Fort and became preeminent among the Native Americans in the area. They used this power and prestige to the advantage of the Anglo owners of the fort—and coincidentally to the advantage of United States interests—by imposing a roughly territorial arrangement on the nomadic, warlike tribes of the region. They laid claim to the immediate vicinity of the fort, north of the Arkansas River. The Kiowa were kept to the south, the Pawnee to the northeast, the Shoshoni and Ute to the east, the Sioux to the north, the Apache to the south. Within the trading empire of the Bent & St. Vrain Company—an area encompassing most of present-day Colorado, northern New Mexico, the panhandle of Oklahoma, the northern tip of Texas, southern Wyoming, southern Nebraska, and western Kansas—a measure of stability reigned, despite constant skirmishing among Native American groups. Depredations upon the Bent & St. Vrain Company, their wagon trains, and their employees and associates were minimized. At the same time, the Native Americans' trade-based ties with the Mexican population to the south were largely sundered as the Bent & St. Vrain Company usurped the position of the southern traders. Raiding on southern settlements increased (sometimes at the explicit urging of Anglo traders), further jeopardizing Mexico's hold on its northern borderlands.
In contrast to the Mexicans' inability to maintain order, the Bent & St. Vrain Company, operating from the fort that was called a "castle on the Plains" by the press of the day, embodied the notion of order. The implicit comparison of the Bents and their close associates with feudal lords is understandable. In their letters, the Bents speak of whipping those who had
violated the rules of the fort. The trappers and other employees of the company as well as the Cheyenne and Arapaho on several occasions served as a private army. The fort and grounds were a model of and modeled a new world—a world of modernity, capitalism, and individualism.
The construction of Bent's Fort tipped the balance of power in the southwestern Plains, and ultimately in the Southwest. By the time General Kearny's Army of the West marched to Bent's Fort in 1846 to reprovision and repair before the invasion of Mexico, the New Mexico territory, had been won. The army marched into Santa Fe and raised the American flag without firing a shot. The New Mexican governor, Manuel Armijo, had fled with the army that might have provided organized resistance. It is almost certain that Armijo, along with his second-in-command Colonel Diego Archuleta, had met shortly before the invasion with the American trader James Magoffin, who negotiated the terms of the Mexican military withdrawal under orders from President James Polk. Magoffin raced to catch General Kearny's army at Bent's Old Fort and advised Kearny to wait there before marching into Mexico, giving Magoffin time to meet with Armijo and Archuleta.[18] Juan Bautista Vigil, the lieutenant governor (and former employee of American traders), remained in Santa Fe and gave a speech that warmly welcomed the American troops. From Santa Fe, Kearny's troops marched westward to help secure the California territory, for the United States.
In early 1847, months after the American victory in Santa Fe, authorities in Chihuahua sent cadets from the military, academy there to Taos, to foment a revolution against the American occupation.[19] Charles Bent and other American traders and entrepreneurs were assassinated during the subsequent disturbances. Most of those killed were associated in one way or another with the Bent & St. Vrain Company. This selectivity was that of a planned military operation, although the incidents which transpired during the insurrection were portrayed then, and were even construed by the surviving members of the Bent & St. Vrain Company, as the behavior of an enraged local mob.
In the early morning of January 19, 1847, at Taos, groups of the local populace, many of them Pueblo Indians well primed by liquor and demagoguery, were directed to the homes of influential Americans and American sympathizers. Charles Bent, by then the first governor of the newly established New Mexico Territory,[20] was shot with many arrows and scalped in front of his family. His New Mexican wife and their children and New Mexican in-laws who were present (including Kit Carson's wife) were left unharmed. In the days that followed, other property owned or
associated with the Bent & St. Vrain Company was attacked, including ranches at Ponil and Vermejo. But by the end of January, the revolt had subsided, never having engaged the New Mexicans beyond those with special grudges against certain influential Americans. The disgruntled included individuals who had figured highly in the now crumbling power structure of New Mexico, particularly those representing the Catholic Church. Padre Martinez, for example, was always thought by Ceran St. Vrain and Kit Carson to have been involved in Charles Bent's death.[21]
The Bent & St. Vrain Company never recovered from the consequences of the American victory in the Mexican War. Charles Bent's death was one of many blows to the company, and was felt especially by William Bent himself. The fortunes of William Bent's allies, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, rapidly declined. As immigrants streamed into the territories secured by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, they brought sickness and depleted the herds of buffalo upon which the Native Americans depended in so many ways. Conflicts became increasingly bitter and violent. Many of William Bent's children sided with the Southern Cheyenne in the struggle that soon followed and became some of the most feared warriors in the tribe. One of William's sons' rage was such that he vowed to kill his father. The Plains tribes were soon regarded as demonic by the new Anglo majority, and attempts were made to eradicate them. The most infamous incident in the genocidal effort was the horrendous Sand Creek Massacre, in which many, including women, children, and old people, were killed and dismembered. Those Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and members of other Plains tribes who survived the violence were relocated over the next decade to reservations in what is now Oklahoma. In 1849, a year after the treaty that ended the Mexican War, William Bent abandoned Bent's Old Fort. By many accounts he attempted to destroy it as he left.