Photograph of Territorial Governor Charles Bent at the Bent Home in Taos, New Mexico

Sign directing visitors to Governor Bent Home/Museum and Gallery in Taos

Charles Bent (November 11, 1799 – January 19, 1847) was appointed as the first Governor of the newly acquired New Mexico Territory by Governor Stephen Watts Kearny in September 1846. Though his office was in Santa Fe, Bent maintained his residence and a store in Taos.

Bent was born in Charleston, West Virginia (then Virginia), and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. After leaving the army, he and his younger brother William in 1828 took a wagon train of goods from St. Louis to Santa Fe. There they established mercantile contacts and began a series of trading trips back and forth over the Santa Fe Trail which resulted, in 1832, in a partnership with Ceran St. Vrain, a local fur trader, called Bent & St. Vrain Company. The trading company established a series of "forts" (fortified trading posts) to facilitate trade with the Plains Indians, including Fort Saint Vrain on the South Platte River and Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River, both in Colorado, and Fort Adobe on the Canadian River. Bent's Fort, outside La Junta, CO, has been restored and is now a National Historic Site.

He was assassinated and scalped alive on January 19, 1847, during the Taos Revolt. The women in the Bent home escaped to safety through a hole in the parlor wall.

Bent and renowned frontier scout Christopher "Kit" Carson married sisters. Maria Ignacia Bent outlived her husband by thirty-six years; she died on April 13, 1883. The Bents had a daughter, Teresina Bent Scheurich. Charles and Maria Bent and the Carsons are interred at Kit Carson Cemetery in Taos.^[1]

The Bent house is now a museum. An elementary school in northeast Albuquerque is named in Bent's honor.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Encyclopedia Britannica
• New Mexico Office of the State Historian
• Santa Fe Trail Research
• Lecompte, Janet (1978) Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn: Society on the High Plains, 1832-1856 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, ISBN 0-8061-1723-0
• Dunham, Harold H. (1965) "Charles Bent" in Hafen, LeRoy R. (ed.) (1965) The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade Vol. II. Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendale, Calif., OCLC 5504216
• Lavender, David (1954) Bent’s Fort Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., OCLC 26332056

[edit] See also

• William Bent
• Ceran St. Vrain
• List of assassinated American politicians

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