The Taos Revolt erupted in January 1847 as a coalition of Hispano militia members -- acting as Mexican nationals in territory the United States had recently occupied -- and their Puebloan allies rose against American rule in northern New Mexico. The violence was sudden and personal. In Taos and Mora, insurrectionists assassinated between 20 and 25 American government employees and traders. Captain Hendley's expedition to Mora on January 24 was a direct response to these killings, but he walked into a fight he could not win. The First Battle of Mora ended with Hendley dead and his forces defeated by superior numbers. The Americans had been humiliated, and in the logic of frontier warfare, humiliation demanded an answer delivered in kind.

Captain Morin's force arrived at Mora on February 1, 1847, with the firepower Hendley had lacked. The two sides were roughly equal in number this time, but the howitzer changed everything. When the Americans brought their cannon forward, noncombatants fled Mora for the surrounding mountains, understanding what was about to happen. The barrage targeted the old fort protecting the town, and it was devastating. American troops then attacked on foot, fighting through the dirt streets in close skirmishing. The insurgents refused to surrender until Mora itself was in ruins. Survivors -- both fighters and civilians -- fled up and over the mountains to other villages in northern New Mexico, where they remained for weeks. Morin's men had destroyed the crops and livestock, leaving no food source to sustain a return. The bodies of the American dead from the January battle were recovered and transported to the garrison at Las Vegas for burial.

The legal aftermath proved as troubling as the battle itself. The original Taos Revolt leaders, including Pablo Montoya, were executed immediately in Taos. At least 28 others were captured and put on trial for murder and treason. The proceedings were deeply compromised: the courts and juries were composed of friends, family members, and business partners of the American victims. The accused were convicted and hanged -- the first known executions by hanging in Taos Valley. Eyewitness Lewis Hector Garrard, who published his account in 1850, recorded the proceedings with evident unease. The American reaction was not universally supportive. One treason conviction was posthumously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court a year later, on the reasoning that people who had never been American citizens could not be guilty of treason against the United States -- a legal distinction that exposed the contradictions at the heart of the occupation.

Mora did not disappear. The village that Morin's troops reduced to rubble in February 1847 was rebuilt by the same families who had fled into the mountains. Captain Morin himself continued the campaign, fighting the final engagement of the Taos Revolt at the Battle of Cienega Creek near Taos on July 9, 1847. But the revolt's suppression settled nothing permanently. The questions it raised -- about the legitimacy of military occupation, about applying the conqueror's laws to the conquered, about what justice looks like when the judges are also the victims -- echoed through the decades that followed. Today, Mora sits quietly in its valley in Mora County, a small community whose peaceful appearance belies one of the more violent episodes in New Mexico's transition from Mexican to American territory. The dirt streets where soldiers and insurgents once fought are paved now, but the mountains that sheltered the survivors still rise on every side.