Most early women are identified through relationships with men. Such is true of Kit Carson’s three wives. The first was an Arapaho girl named Waa-nibe; the second was a Cheyenne woman named Making-Out-Road. One gets the impression Waa-nibe was a good wife because she took care of Kit. Making-Out-Road was the belle of the southern Cheyenne and is said to have divorced him.

The third wife reflects the high incidence of intermarriage between Mexican women and American men during the mountain men era. Intermarriage was frequently a vehicle by which men gained community acceptance and economic well-being, but it also served women to be linked to men who would be powerful. One such alliance was that of Maria Josefa Jaramillo, who married Kit in 1843, just short of her 15th birthday. She is described as beautiful and gracious.

Both Waa-nibe and Maria Josefa died shortly after childbirth. In those times, deaths related to childbirth usually were the result of infection, high fevers, and/or bleeding to death. Early New Mexican women developed herbal healing methods for this and other illnesses.

William Bent, brother of the state’s first territorial governor, Charles Bent, and who cohabited with Maria Josefa’s older sister, Ygnacia, married three Cheyenne sisters. The story of William’s first wife, Owl Woman, who refused to live within Bent’s Fort (in Colorado), is best told by her son, George Bent in Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent, Caught Between The Worlds of the Indian and the White Man.

A woman of great interest in the 1800s was Maria Gertrudes Barcelo, Doña Tules, the lady gambler of Santa Fe. She was a most generous patron of the construction of the Catholic cathedral, a flamboyant dresser with her own gambling house, and an excellent business woman. Because of her relationship with
Gov. Manuel Armijo and the Christian view of unmarried, gambling women imported by American pioneers, Maria Gertrude is much maligned, despite her financial contributions to the U.S. military and the establishment of the territory.

Lozen

Unlike the Jaramillo sisters, Doña Tules was an older, self-made woman. The sisters were the product of New Mexico’s two most powerful families: the Jaramillos and the Vigils (their mother was Apolonia Vigil). Ygnacia lived with Gov. Bent in the 1830s until his death after the U.S. war with Mexico and the anti-American Taos Pueblo Revolt. She and young Josefa were in the house when Bent was shot and scalped, but escaped death when they were led to safety by an Indian servant.

Maria de la Luz Beaubien, born in 1827 in Taos, also came from a rich family. She was married at the age of 15 to the wealthy Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell.

American women brought with them another value system. Mary Donoho arrived in Santa Fe in 1833 and stayed four years. Susan Magoffin arrived in 1846 and stayed only 32 days, but is well remembered because of her diary describing travel on the Santa Fe Trail.

One of the first documented women of African decent is simply referred to as Jane in Susan Magoffin’s diary. Jane was probably Susan’s slave, but Charlotte Green had long been established as the cook at Bent’s Fort in what is now southeastern Colorado, and Charlotte was a viable influence. Mountain men, traders, and adventurers loved her cooking. This self-assured woman claimed to be “the only damn lady” in Indian Country. She, along with Andrew and Dick Green, were slaves of Charles and William Bent.

The women of early New Mexico lend much to its enchantment, its material and spiritual, social, and economic cultures. They contribute survival traditions and strategies, and make the stories of war and settlement more human. They lend faces to be admired. Today’s woman can be motivated by their courage, their perseverance, and the inroads they constructed, making it possible for us to live and work in this rich land.

Dr. Blea is a New Mexico native and a retired full professor of Mexican American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, with numerous articles, poems, and books on Hispanicwomen to her credit.