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The city of Santa Fe was left in charge of a garrison under Lieutenant-Colonel Willock. While the force was small and the volunteers without experience in regular warfare, yet all were nerved to desperation by the belief, since the Taos murders, that the only alternative was victory or annihilation.

He was warned to go back, or to get a military escort; but a trader all his life among the Indians, he flouted danger. Traders' rum had inflamed the Indians. They had crowded in from their pueblo town to the plaza of Taos. Insurrectionary Mexicans, who had cause enough to complain of the American policy regarding Spanish land titles, had harangued the Indians into a flare of resentful passion.

When spring came Jim Bridger and I went to Taos and visited Uncle Kit for about a month. This was now the spring of 1859 and the excitement over the gold mines around Pike's Peak was running high. We all knew where Pike's Peak was, for any day when it was clear we could see it very plainly from Bent's Fort or Taos, but we did not know just where the mines were.

Tobin played an important rôle in avenging the death of the Americans killed in the Taos massacre, at the storming of the Indian pueblo, but his greatest achievement was the ending of the noted bandit Espinosa's life, who, at the height of his career of blood, was the terror of the whole mountain region.

The town of Taos affords a fair sample of the markets, and as Kit Carson has many times been exhibited to the reader at that place, it is very proper that we should describe it. The town of Taos is located in a valley called by the same name. The town consists of a series of villages, which are scattered, and are known to the Mexicans by various names.

The men set up the sluice box, which the taos had brought along with labor and disgust, and giving me a revolver, commissioned me to see that the excavating department kept busy. So I sat on the edge of a twenty-foot bank clasping the Colt, and hanging my feet into vacancy. I hadn't felt so close to childhood for many a long year.

These estufas, which are used as places of council, and for the performance of their religious rites, are still found at all the present occupied pueblos in New Mexico. There are six at Taos, three at each house, and they are partly sunk in the ground by an excavation. They are entered through a trap-doorway in the roof, the descent being by a ladder.

The winter in Taos is too severe for him; then, he must go South, towards, or even to El Paso, where it is congenial to his disease. I prophesy that some day our internal continent will be the "Mecca" for pilgrims with this disease. The dress of the New Mexican is the same as in Old Mexico.

He took his purse from his pocket, counted me out one hundred and fifty dollars in gold; and not until then had I known that he had ordered me a fifty dollar suit of buckskin made at Taos, the fall before; and not until then had he told me that he was to be married on the tenth of July, and wanted Johnnie West and I to be there without fail. I asked him who he was going to be married to.

At Taos Carson was informed that Armijo had already sent out one hundred Mexican soldiers to seek his caravan and that the General himself, in command of six hundred more, was soon to follow after.