Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail (Classics of the Old West)

On September 1, 1846, Garrard, then only seventeen years old, left Westport Landing (now Kansas City) with a caravan, under command of the famous trader Céran St. Vrain, bound for Bent's Fort (Fort William) in the southeastern part of present-day Colorado. After a lengthy visit at the fort and in a camp of the Cheyenne Indians, early in 1847 he joined the little band of volunteers recruited by William Bent to avenge the death of his brother, Governor Charles Bent of Taos, killed in a bloody but brief Mexican and Indian uprising in that New Mexican pueblo. In fact, Garrard's is the only eyewitness account we have of the trial and hanging of the "revolutionaries" at Taos.