Exhibit to educate visitors about Fort Marcy’s history
Panels tell of early days of U.S. rule in N.M.
Mention Fort Marcy, and most Santa Feans probably think of the place where they work out, where the Fuego play ball and where Zozobra burns every September.
But that recreation complex never housed the troops or the fort, which overlooks the city just above the Cross of the Martyrs. History buffs and local officials are unveiling a new interpretive exhibit at 10 a.m. Saturday that will help both locals and visitors learn more about this site.
“The idea was conceived 10 years ago,” said Joy Poole, la alcadesa (president) of the End of the Trail Chapter, the Santa Fe Trail Association. “The idea was to identify historical sites along the trail that had significance.”
The exhibit panels, which will be arrayed at a cul-de-sac overlooking the fort site, were funded with $16,876 from the National Park Service, matched with $17,876 (most of that in-kind services) from the city, according to John
Murphey, a senior planner with the city.
And some of what Santa Feans and visitors learn might be a little surprising.
For one thing, the fort itself rarely, if ever, was occupied by more than a handful of troops, according to Michael E. Pitel, who put together a brief history as publicity coordinator of the End of the Trail Chapter.
And while most of us think of military bases as protecting our residents from invaders, Fort Marcy was built mainly to protect invaders from the populace.
“Who was going to try to take on (soldiers on) a hill that had a cannon range far beyond Santa Fe city streets?” said Pitel in an interview. At the time, the city reached about as far as the current Santuario de Guadalupe, at Agua Fria and Guadalupe streets, he said.
What residents didn’t know is that, in a fort built of rammed earth and adobe bricks, “the recoil of the guns would turn the bricks into dirt, and rammed earth into uneven surfaces,” Pitel said. Still, the guns could have caused major damage to the city before the fort itself crumbled from their force.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
Under U.S. rule
On Aug. 18, 1846, Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny swept into Santa Fe with his 1,600man Army of the West, declaring that New Mexico now belonged to the United States and no longer to Mexico. The next day, he ordered that a fort be built.
In the days before procurement codes and bidding rules, a public works project apparently didn’t take long. The fort was finished by the end of September.
When the soldiers working on the fort grumbled that they came to fight, not to lay bricks, Kearny boosted their pay by 18 cents a day during construction, according to Pitel. On an infantryman’s pay of $7 per month, Pitel calculated, that raise was 77.2 percent on a day’s work.
At the time, troops were worried that Mexican Gov. Manuel Armijo, who had fled south before Kearny’s advancing army, would come back to try to retake Santa Fe. But that didn’t happen.
And fears of a local uprising turned out to be — at least partly — unfounded.
Many people most connected to the Mexican government already had fled south with Armijo, Pitel said. “Many of the folks here had no objection to U.S. rule,” he said.
“After Mexican independence from Spain, there was very little coming north from Mexico to help the folks up here,” Pitel explained. “There were more goods and produce coming from the U.S. down the Santa Fe Trail than there had been even from Old World Spain.”
So when the U.S. came to take over New Mexico, many local business people thought, “This isn’t a bad deal. That’s where we’re going to make money,” Pitel said.
So a little over a month after arriving in Santa Fe, Kearny took troops on to California, while later in October Col. Alexander Doniphan took a contingent to Chihuahua, Mexico. That left Sterling Price serving as military governor, backed by his Missouri volunteer cavalry.
Symbol of dominion
Pitel noted that the volunteers were not formally trained members of the military. “They were kind of undisciplined, rowdy, prowled the bars and probably were rude and disrespectful to the Mexican citizenry,” he said.
That behavior made the locals restless and unhappy, eventually leading to an uprising in December, Pitel said. Troops arrested several people, and followed other fleeing rebels, engaging them and other residents in fights at Santa Cruz de la Cañada, Embudo, and then Taos. There, insurrectionists killed territorial Gov. Charles Bent and fled to the church at Taos Pueblo, where troops set the building afire and killed most of the people huddled inside.
The troops based in Santa Fe also headed out to Mora to quell an uprising there.
But Fort Marcy, itself, was pretty much unnecessary except as what Pitel called “largely a symbol of U.S. dominion and protection.”
That protection consisted mainly of repelling Indian raids along the Santa Fe Trail and in New Mexico, mainly by Navajo, Apache and Comanche tribal members, he said. Those earlier inhabitants, of course, were reacting to being pushed off their lands by the advance of the Europeans.
As mentioned earlier, the troops didn’t live at Fort Marcy, Pitel said, except perhaps for a contingent to raise and lower the flag, play reveille and taps, and guard against thieves or vandals.
The quarters for the troops actually were set up downtown, stretching from Washington Avenue and the federal courthouse, west through Sheridan to Grant Avenue, Pitel said. The military headquarters was on land where the New Mexico Museum of Art now stands. Two houses where officers lived still stand: the A.M. Bergere House, 135 Grant Ave., and the Edgar L. Hewett House, 116 Lincoln Ave.
Incidentally, according to Pitel’s history, the Bergere House had the distinction of a visit from former President Ulysses S. Grant on July 7-16, 1880. He stayed there while vacationing with family members.