Last updated: April 24, 2024
Article
Human Trafficking in the Southwest Borderlands
NPS/N. Saxton
George Bent recalled that, “My father had several Mexicans whom he had bought from the Kiowas and Comanches.” One of these was Jorge Gallabis, “an old Mexican captive from Casas Blancas that Bill Bent bought from the Delawares.” He was known as “Indian George.” Even as late as 1854, William Bent purchased a man afterwards called “Kiowa Dutch,” who as a young boy had been stolen from a German colony in Texas by Kiowa Indians.
Lewis Garrard tells us that William Bent’s brother George owned an Native American named Haw-he. And the wife of Bent, St. Vrain & Co. trader John Hawkins was a ransomed captive, having been abducted by Comanches from her home in the Mexican state of Durango. Some years following her abduction she accompanied a party of Kiowas to Bent’s Fort, where William Bent purchased her. She had subsequently “taken up” with Hawkins, and by 1846 had borne the mountain man a daughter. That year of 1846 was one to be remembered for the Hawkins family, for it saw the arrival at Bent’s Fort of a Mexican man from Durango who came in search of his long-lost wife – Mrs. Hawkins! How he got the news after several years and such a great distance that his wife was to be found at the fort is a mystery. But regardless of her current circumstances, he demanded that she return with him to Durango. As Col. Stephen Watts Kearny was then at Bent’s Fort, he took it upon himself to adjudicate the matter. According to Capt. Henry Smith Turner, Kearny’s adjutant, “the Colonel determined she should be given up to him, provided she was willing to join him. The woman was accordingly turned over.” But as the Army of the West was at Bent’s Fort for just a few days, Turner only recorded the first part of this drama. George A. F. Ruxton tells us that although the Mexican woman consented to return to Durango, she did so on the “condition that she might carry with her the child, from which she steadily refused to be separated.” Hawkins, however, would not allow her to take their daughter, “and eventually the poor Durangueno returned to his home alone, his spouse preferring to share the buffalo-rib and venison with her mountaineer before the frijole and chile colorado of the bereaved ranchero.” The Hawkins family was living at Pueblo when Ruxton encountered them in 1847.
For some captives, particularly those who were Native American or Mexican American, their ransoming amounted to little more than a change of owners. A good example here is probably Guadalupe Bent, who is described in Taos baptismal records as a native woman “ransomed from the ‘Indians of the North’ and a servant of Carlos Bent.” It is likely, however, that the Bents followed the practice in New Mexico of allowing these captives to work off the price of the ransom to obtain their ultimate freedom. In cases where the captives were white, it appears that these ransoms may have been the magnanimous gestures of the company. James Hobbs, whose memoirs must be used with caution, claims to have been ransomed along with a John Batiste from the Comanches while that tribe was trading at Bent’s Fort. William Bent supposedly secured the captives for trade goods amounting to eight yards of “curtain calico...six yards of red flannel, a pound of tobacco, and an ounce of beads.” Hobbs makes no mention of repaying Bent for these goods, despite their “trifling” value. Hobbs also wrote of William Bent’s attempt to ransom from the Comanches four young Americans by the name of Brown, two brothers and two sisters. Bent eventually purchased the girls, but the younger sister, Matilda, was forced to leave her mixed-blood son behind, so that “after stopping at the fort three or four days, she declared herself unfit to live among white people, and returned to the tribe.”
As revealed above, some of Bent’s Fort’s workers were women. Indeed, a common fixture at the fort were the wives, concubines, and children of both the owners and their employees. George Bent recalled 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, writing from Bent’s Fort on May 1, 1840, informed his brother George that some of the company employees have 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, observed in his journal that polygamy was not considered a “crime” at Bent’s Fort and consequently the “owners or proprietors are at the same time owners or proprietors of several mistresses each. Some of them are Spanish and the others Indian, but I could see no American woman with them.”
Content adapted from Mark L. Gardner's 2004 NPS Historic Resource Study: "Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas."