become amalgamated with the Mexicans and lose their identity.”6 A fifth informant, Kit Carson, revealed that “even before the acquisition of New Mexico there had always existed a hereditary warfare between the Navajoes and Mexicans; forays were made into each other’s country, and stock, women, and children stolen.”7
When these five men testified in the summer of 1865—with the nation still reeling from the deadliest conflict it has ever experienced—they doubtless realized the political, legislative, and juridical implications of the coercive labor systems that they described. Even so, all of them understated the extent of captivity in New Mexico. The decades following Mexican independence saw a noticeable increase in captive slaving throughout upper Rio Grande villages, as New Mexico’s absorption into capitalist commercial networks via the Santa Fe Trail increased the demand for uncompensated labor and contributed to the proliferation of slave trafficking.8 Triumphant military campaigns during the Mexican national period enabled soldiers and civilian auxiliaries to capture large numbers of women and children servants.9 In 1825, Juan de Abrego returned from a Navajo campaign in which his men took twenty-two “slaves of both sexes.”10 In a particularly destructive expedition during 1838, New Mexicans killed seventy-eight Navajo warriors near their Canyon de Chelly homelands and took another fifty-six captives back to the Rio Grande settlements, a devastating tragedy for the tribe.11
While New Mexicans continued to carry Indians into captivity throughout the 1820s and 1830s, peripheral tribes reciprocated and exacted a similarly heavy toll on Hispanic villages. When a civic leader, Donaciano Vigil, addressed the New Mexico Assembly in June 1846—just two months prior to the American invasion—he lamented the large number of captives living within Indian camps. Expressing particular concern about “young Mexican women who serve the bestial pleasures of the barbaric Indians,” he insisted that the national government provide a liberal supply of arms and ammunition so that Nuevomexicanos could protect themselves from Indian attacks.12 On some occasions, abductees managed to flee from their captors and found refuge at agencies or military posts. In 1855, New Mexico Indian agent Michael Steck received no less than six liberated captives at his Fort Thorn agency, including two boys aged fourteen and sixteen who arrived “nearly naked” after escaping from the Mescalero Apaches.13 That same year, James H. Carleton of the First Dragoons received four captive Mexican boys who absconded from the Comanches and sought refuge in his camp at Hatch’s Ranch near the Pecos River. Carleton sent the escapees—named Louis Martinez, Felix Bonciargo, Theodoro Garcia, and Ivan Salgado—to headquarters in Santa Fe, where the department commander arranged to have them reunited with family members.14 Like the thousands of so-called contraband slaves during the Civil War, who ran to Union troops for protection from recapture, these captives sought out the military in hopes that soldiers might assist them in their plight for freedom.
By the 1850s, sanctioned trade fairs rarely, if ever, occurred and captive exchanges took place predominantly through individual transactions. Hispanos made annual voyages to trade with Navajos and Utes and, during the course of those commercial expeditions, traders frequently bartered for Indian slaves among the tribes they encountered. “All children bought on the return trip would be taken back to New Mexico and then sold, boys fetching on an average $100, girls $150 to $200,” the western explorer Daniel Jones explained. Private James Bennett of the First Dragoons was surprised to learn that Indian captives brought to Santa Fe were “sold as slaves,” with prices ranging from $100 to $400 worth of trade goods each. According to Jones, exploitative Mexican slave traders “were fully established and systematic in this trade as ever were the slavers on the seas.” They especially targeted southern Utah’s starving Paiutes, who sometimes swapped a child for a horse and then killed the animal for food.15
Many masters placed a monetary value on their Indian servants, whom they sold and traded with greater frequency than the indebted peons being similarly held in bondage. The “domestication” of indigenous captives increased their market value, providing an incentive for assimilation through baptism and further exacerbating the frequency with which masters initiated intimate interethnic relationships and fostered filial connections. Writing about Paiute slaves in 1852, one Indian agent explained that their adoption into New Mexican families effectively bound them to that society and precluded most attempts at running away.16 The practice of selling and trading assimilated captives continued well beyond the initial American occupation of New Mexico in 1846. “There is no law of the Territory,” Steck confessed in 1864, “that legalizes the sale of Indians, yet it is done almost daily, without an effort to stop it.”17
New Mexico’s captive exchange favored females as the more valued commodity, owing not only to their usefulness as domestic servants, but also because of their appeal as potential wives and childbearers. Governor Calhoun attested to the value of women as both servants and concubines, noting that men purchased them based on their physical appearance. “The value of captives depends upon age, sex, beauty, and usefulness,” he explained. “Good looking females, not having passed the ‘sear and yellow leaf,’ are valued from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars each,” while boys typically brought only half that amount, a testament to the value that masters placed on a servant’s sex appeal.18 Thomas Farnham, a traveler during that time, reiterated that “the price of these slaves in the markets of New Mexico varies with the age and other qualities of the person,” alluding to sexual availability when noting that younger captives fetched higher prices. Once abducted, the Englishman wrote, captives “are fattened, taken to Santa Fe and sold as slaves … a ‘likely girl’ in her teens brings often £ sixty or £ eighty.”19 As Judge Benedict noted in 1865 when asked to testify about the nature of slavery in New Mexico, “a likely girl of not more than eight years old, healthy and intelligent,” would be valued around $400, because “when they grow to womanhood” they could be forced to serve in sexual capacities.20
The phrase “likely girl” implied a direct correlation between Indian slavery in the West and chattel slavery in the Southern states. In nineteenth-century parlance, professional slave traders and auctioneers used terms like “fancy girl” and “likely girl” to indicate sexual availability when advertising upcoming slave auctions in local newspapers. Whenever a potential buyer read an advertisement describing a slave woman as “likely” or “fancy,” he could be fairly certain that she was young, physically attractive, and vulnerable to being raped. Once purchased, such women took on a twofold purpose in that they not only labored as slaves, but also provided sexual services and, in many cases, bore children and future servants for their master.21 By using this terminology in reference to New Mexico’s Indian captives, Farnham and Benedict implicitly acknowledged two critical similarities between nineteenth-century America’s regional systems of slavery. First, that indigenous captives could be bought and sold like chattel slaves in the South, and second, that Hispano masters had sexual exploitation in mind when purchasing Indian girls.
Years of slave trafficking and ransoming had a noticeable cultural and demographic impact on the Southwest. Like many enslaved families in the antebellum Upper South, where a mass redistribution of chattels to the more southerly Cotton Belt propagated forced migrations that broke filial bonds through spatial disassociation, countless Indian families, whose kinfolk were forcibly redistributed among households across a large geographic area, underwent an indelible psychological imprint from this form of captivity.22 One U.S. special agent, writing to the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1867, lamented that he would not be able to locate and redeem many of the captives recently taken from the Navajo tribe. The abductees, he explained, were scattered throughout the northern New Mexico settlements of Tierra Amarilla, Ojo Caliente, El Rito, Arroyo Seco, and Taos, as well as Los Conejos in the Colorado Territory.23
As New Mexicans variously hoped and feared, the system of captive slavery that developed over the course of three centuries began to wane following the arrival of American troops in 1846. After New Mexico’s conquest in August of that year and the subsequent implementation of the Kearny Code (a set of civil regulations that his officers devised), the territory became subject to the laws of the United States.24
