Holding down the Fort

Abstract

In August of 1846, U.S. Army General Stephen Watts Kearny climbed atop a low, flat-roofed adobe building over- looking the plaza of Las Vegas, New Mexico. From his earthen podium he proclaimed I to the citizens of the village that they no longer owed allegiance to Mexico. It was Kearny’s first official stop on his way to Santa Fe with the “Army of the West” to announce that henceforth, the northern territories of Mexico were now under the control of the United States govern- ment. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, a vast territory—includ- ing most of present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Utah—suddenly demanded attention, and the U.S. Army found itself obligated to a vast, arid, sparsely populated region, inhabited primarily by immigrants from Spain and Mexico, and by American Indians, who considered the settlers of European heritage to be interlopers.