It was midsummer 1820 when nineteen-year-old David Meriwether searched for a campsite along one of the many tributaries of today’s Canadian River in northern New Mexico. With him was a black cook named Alfred and a few Pawnee Indians, led by their chief, Big Elk.
Meriwether, born in Virginia and raised in Kentucky, was a distant kinsman of Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Since New Mexico was still under the control of Spain, an archenemy of the United States, Meriwether knew that his trip could be dangerous.
Meriwether was experienced for his age. The previous year, he had been hired as a trader and sutler for Colonel Henry Atkinson’s Yellowstone Expedition. Following his service with Atkinson on the upper Missouri River, during which he met his companion, Alfred, he returned to Council Bluffs, anxious to make a trip to New Mexico to investigate stories of abundant gold there.
As Meriwether looked about the campsite he had selected, he noticed many horse and mule tracks in the sand and mud. Alarmed, he reported the tracks to his Pawnee companions and suggested that they move on and camp elsewhere. But Big Elk studied the stream bank himself and declared that the tracks were old and so their presence posed no danger. Unconvinced, Meriwether and Alfred crossed the stream and pitched their camp in the hills several hundred yards away.
Attack At Dawn
The following morning at dawn, the sound of gunfire awakened the two men. The Pawnees, who despite Meriwether’s apprehensions had spent the night on the riverbank, were under attack. Soon, Big Elk and another man rode into camp and told the American that Spanish soldiers had raided his camp and killed most of the other Pawnees.
Under a flag of truce, Meriwether and Alfred ventured toward the Spanish encampment, where they were disarmed and stripped of all valuables. The following day, after spending “a miserable night,” Meriwether and Alfred were marched westward, on foot, by the soldiers. When Meriwether refused to move on after a rest stop because his feet were sore, he was given a mule to ride.
Several days later, the entourage arrived in Santa Fe, where Meriwether was presented to the governor. Following a brief audience—the American could speak no Spanish and the governor could speak no English—Meriwether was thrown into a prison cell “with only a small window about the size of a pane of eight by ten glass to admit a little fresh air and light.”
The Misery Of Bedbugs And Fleas
After a couple of days of prison life, during which time he was harassed by bedbugs and fleas, Meriwether was visited by a French-speaking priest. Since Meriwether spoke French, he could now complete his interview with the governor.
The priest acted as interpreter, and the young American attempted to explain the purpose of his visit to the disbelieving official. He spent several more days in the squalor of his dark cell before his friend, the priest, visited him again. In another interview with the governor, Meriwether was more or less placed under house arrest. He was left free to explore the town in the daytime but obliged to report back to jail at night. Later still, the governor freed Meriwether altogether, provided the priest accounted for his whereabouts.
As autumn approached, an old Mexican man hired the American to help harvest peppers and beans from his garden. Then, Meriwether later recalled, “one evening this good priest came in and said he had good news for me; he had had a long conversation with the Governor that day, and he thought that I would be permitted to return to my friends very shortly.”
Leave, And Don’t Come Back
The next day, in yet another interview, the governor told Meriwether he could return to the United States if he promised never to enter New Mexico again.
Vowing to follow the governor’s orders, Meriwether and Alfred left Santa Fe with enough supplies to get them back to the United States. After spending an extremely cold winter on the Great Plains when the two men nearly starved and froze to death, the pair reached the Pawnee villages in February 1821. The following month, they arrived at their final destination, Council Bluffs.
Eventually, Meriwether returned to the area around Louisville, Kentucky, where he married and sired thirteen children. He pursued various business interests until 1852, when he was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, created by the death of Henry Clay.
The Prisoner Becomes The Governor
In 1853, Meriwether broke his thirty-year-old promise never to return to New Mexico when President Franklin Pierce appointed him governor of that faraway land. Since his 1820 visit, the country had won its independence from Spain only to be occupied by the American army during the recent war with Mexico. Now an American territory, it needed a governor who understood the land and its people and who could peacefully settle the boundary dispute between the two nations.
The reception for Meriwether in New Mexico was grand. According to the Santa Fe Gazette, “The procession . . . moved on in calm and stately dignity to Santa Fe, through the principal entrance to the city until it reached the plaza in front of the Palace, or speaking more democratically, until the cortege was drawn up in front of the State, or Governor’s house. Here the procession debarked, and thousands congregated to witness the formality of a public introduction of distinguished officers and the inauguration of the new Governor.
Meriwether served his territory well at an extremely difficult time in its existence. Animosities between the United States and Mexico remained, and the border was still in dispute. But the governor endured the storm until 1857, when he resigned and returned to Kentucky. Meriwether lived out his life at his home near Louisville, where he died in 1893, at the age of ninety-three.
James A. Crutchfield can be reached at TNcrutch@aol.com
