Captives and Ransom at Bent's Fort

A storm over Bent's Fort. Photo by N. Saxton, National Park Service.

Bent's Fort was the post of the trading company Bent, St. Vrain & Co. Its workforce included people whom the Bents and St. Vrain are known to have ransomed or bought from Native American groups.

Bought and ransomed

• In a letter of March 30, 1845, to Manuel Alvarez, Charles Bent said he had returned two Mexican captives of the Pawnees to their homes in New Mexico, one from San Miguel and one from Taos, named "Gerreatia Mondragon." Whether Bent paid their ransom or only escorted them home is unclear.
• George Bent recalled that his father "had several Mexicans whom he had bought from the Kiowas and Comanches." One was Jorge Gallabis, "an old Mexican captive from Casas Blancas that Bill Bent bought from the Delawares," known as "Indian George."
• As late as 1854, William Bent bought a man later called "Kiowa Dutch," taken as a boy by Kiowas from a German settlement in Texas.
• Lewis Garrard wrote that William Bent's brother George owned a Native American named Haw-he.

Mrs. Hawkins

The wife of John Hawkins, a trader for the company, had been abducted by Comanches from her home in the Mexican state of Durango. Years later she came to Bent's Fort with a party of Kiowas, and William Bent bought her. She joined Hawkins and by 1846 had a daughter with him.

That year a man from Durango arrived at the fort looking for his long-lost wife — Mrs. Hawkins. How he learned where she was, so many years later and so far away, is a mystery. He demanded that she come home. Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, then at the fort with the Army of the West, took it upon himself to settle the matter. His adjutant, Captain Henry Smith Turner, recorded that "the Colonel determined she should be given up to him, provided she was willing to join him. The woman was accordingly turned over."

The army moved on within days, and the rest of the story comes from George A. F. Ruxton: she agreed to go on "condition that she might carry with her the child, from which she steadily refused to be separated." Hawkins would not give up the girl, and "eventually the poor Durangueno returned to his home alone." Ruxton met the Hawkins family living at Pueblo in 1847.

A change of owner, or a path to freedom

For Native and Mexican captives especially, being ransomed often meant little more than a new owner. Guadalupe Bent, for example, appears in Taos baptismal records as a native woman "ransomed from the 'Indians of the North' and a servant of Carlos Bent." The Bents probably followed the New Mexican custom of letting such captives work off their ransom and eventually go free.

When the captives were white, the ransoms seem to have been acts of generosity by the company. James Hobbs, whose memoirs must be read with caution, claimed that he and a John Batiste were ransomed from the Comanches while they were trading at the fort, for "curtain calico...six yards of red flannel, a pound of tobacco, and an ounce of beads" — and he never mentions paying Bent back. Hobbs also described William Bent's effort to ransom four young Americans named Brown, two brothers and two sisters, from the Comanches. Bent bought the girls, but the younger, Matilda, had to leave her son behind; after a few days at the fort, "she declared herself unfit to live among white people, and returned to the tribe."

Families at the fort

Women and children were a constant presence. George Bent remembered that "many of the men had families. There were Indian women of a dozen different tribes living at the fort, and a large number of children." Alexander Barclay wrote to his brother from the fort on May 1, 1840, that employees had wives "of various tribes so that here you may find as diversified a sample of human nature as the most inquisitive traveller could wish to combine in so circumscribed a space." Marcellus Ball Edwards, a Missouri volunteer under Doniphan, noted that polygamy was not considered a crime at the fort and that the owners each kept several mistresses, Spanish and Native, but no American women.

Sources

• National Park Service, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site: "Human Trafficking in the Southwest Borderlands," adapted from Mark L. Gardner's 2004 NPS historic resource study, Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas. Nineteenth-century letters, journals and memoirs are quoted as printed there.