Fort Wingate, NM Parade Ground
Donaciano Montoya
From El Rito to the Civil War
Soldier, Freighter, Interpreter and Territorial Politician, 1841–1906
El Rito History Project — El Rito Library
Donaciano Montoya's life carried him far from the small northern New Mexico village where he was born. Before he died, he had worn a Union officer's uniform, served on the western frontier, commanded troops at Fort Wingate, participated in the brutal federal campaign against Navajo people, hauled freight across the plains, worked as an interpreter in Colorado and New Mexico, sat in the territorial legislature, and moved among some of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century New Mexico.
Yet his story began in El Rito.
A biographical history published shortly after his death records that Donaciano Montoya was born at El Rito, Rio Arriba County, on February 28, 1841, the son of Marcos Montoya and María Ignacia Martínez. His mother was identified as a native of Taos, the community with which Montoya would later become most closely associated.
For El Rito, that single detail is significant. Montoya was born only about three decades after the documented beginnings of permanent Hispano settlement in the village. He belonged to a generation that grew up before railroads, before New Mexico became a United States territory, and while northern New Mexico still retained much of the social and economic world inherited from the Mexican period.
His lifetime would encompass an extraordinary transformation.
A Boy Born Under Mexico
When Montoya was born in 1841, New Mexico was still part of the Republic of Mexico.
El Rito was then a small agricultural community organized around family, livestock, irrigated fields and acequias. San Juan Nepomuceno had been established only about a decade earlier. Santa Fe lay more than a day's difficult travel away, and the political border of the United States was hundreds of miles to the east.
Montoya was about five years old when everything changed.
In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, General Stephen Watts Kearny marched an American army into Santa Fe and claimed New Mexico for the United States. Two years later, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally transferred New Mexico to American sovereignty.
Thus Montoya was born a Mexican citizen and came of age under the government of the United States.
That transition was not merely a change of flags. Northern New Mexico experienced political upheaval, violence, disputes over property and citizenship, and uncertainty over what American rule would mean for Hispano communities.
By the time Montoya reached adulthood, another national crisis was approaching.
The United States was breaking apart.
1861: War Comes to New Mexico
When the American Civil War began in 1861, New Mexico was not safely removed from the conflict.
Confederate leaders hoped to seize the territory, control the Southwest, capture federal military supplies, and potentially establish a route toward California. Texans entered New Mexico from the south, while federal commanders urgently recruited local men.
Thousands of Nuevomexicanos eventually served the Union.
Donaciano Montoya was one of them.
The biographical account published in History of New Mexico: Its Resources and People states that Montoya entered military service at approximately twenty years old and was mustered at Fort Union on July 4, 1861. The account describes him initially becoming a second lieutenant and eventually being promoted to captain.
There is, however, a small archival complication that should be acknowledged.
The 1907 biography simplifies his early unit affiliation as Company D of the First New Mexico Cavalry. A later federal pension act concerning his widow identifies Montoya's service more specifically with Company F, First Regiment New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry, and Company D, Battalion New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. The difference probably reflects the repeated reorganizations of New Mexico volunteer units during and immediately after the war.
What is not in doubt is that Montoya made the military a significant part of his early adult life.
The New Mexican Soldiers
The story of New Mexico in the Civil War is often told through Anglo officers—Edward Canby, John Slough and Kit Carson.
That can obscure the men who actually filled much of the ranks.
Native New Mexicans made up a large part of the territorial volunteer forces. Their motivations were not necessarily identical. Some defended their homes against a Texan Confederate invasion. Some sought military wages. Some followed local political leaders. Some had longstanding grievances against Texas dating to earlier invasions and raids.
Montoya joined this overwhelmingly complex world.
One later account preserved Montoya's own memory of Kit Carson, under whom he served. Montoya remembered Carson as a man whose soldiers trusted his word and whose anger was particularly aroused by dishonesty. He recalled Carson as courageous, intelligent despite limited formal education, and willing to learn by listening to others read to him.
That recollection is valuable because it gives us something rare:
Donaciano Montoya speaking across time.
He was not merely a name on an enlistment roster. He personally knew one of the most famous figures of the nineteenth-century American West.
From Civil War to a Different War
Here Montoya's story becomes more difficult—and more important.
The Confederate invasion of New Mexico had essentially failed by 1862. But military service did not end for many New Mexico volunteers.
Federal commanders redirected them into campaigns against Indigenous peoples, particularly the Navajo, Mescalero Apache and other Native communities.
By 1864 Montoya had been promoted to captain of Company F, First New Mexico Cavalry. Official Civil War records place Captain Donaciano Montoya and Company F at Fort Wingate during 1864–65.
This placed the young man from El Rito directly inside one of the darkest chapters of New Mexico history.
Fort Wingate and the Navajo Campaign
Federal policy under Brigadier General James Henry Carleton sought to force Navajo people from their homeland and confine them at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner.
The campaign involved destruction of crops and livestock, military pursuit, starvation, surrender, captivity and the forced removal remembered as the Long Walk.
Montoya participated in the military system enforcing that policy.
A National Park Service history based on original Army correspondence records a revealing episode from February 1865.
Some Navajo families had come near Fort Wingate hoping they might be permitted to remain there rather than move to Bosque Redondo. The military refused. When a group fled, Major Ethan W. Eaton ordered Montoya to take 25 men from Companies B and F and pursue them.
Montoya's men followed them on foot through a snowstorm.
The surviving military account says the pursuing force captured two women and a child and that a Navajo man who remained behind attempting to protect or rescue them was killed. Montoya submitted his own report to the assistant adjutant general on February 13, 1865.
Montoya served the Union during the Civil War, but Union service in New Mexico became intertwined with federal warfare against Native peoples.
Another Expedition
Montoya remained active in the field during 1865.
National Park Service research identifies another report submitted by Captain Montoya on August 22, 1865. During that expedition his command pursued Navajos toward Canyon de Chelly. The expedition captured four Navajo women but otherwise achieved little militarily.
A nineteenth-century New Mexico history gives an even harsher account of another operation in which forces associated with Montoya and Captain Edward Butler pursued Navajo people who had left Bosque Redondo. That later source claimed approximately sixty were killed and around one hundred captured. Because this is a retrospective account rather than the underlying field report, those numbers should be treated cautiously until checked against the original military correspondence.
What can be stated with confidence is that Captain Donaciano Montoya was an active officer in the coercive Bosque Redondo system.
Captain Montoya
By his mid-twenties, the boy born in El Rito had become a military officer commanding men on the New Mexico frontier.
Army organizational records repeatedly list:
1st New Mexico Cavalry — Company F — Captain Donaciano Montoya — Fort Wingate.
His military career apparently continued beyond the conventional end of the Civil War. A historical roster describes Donaciano Montoya as one of four captains in the First New Mexico Battalion, organized in August 1866 from remaining members of New Mexico cavalry and infantry units. Kit Carson served as lieutenant colonel.
This is another reason the simple description “Civil War veteran” understates his military career.
Montoya belonged to the generation for whom Civil War service and frontier military service flowed directly into one another.
Back to Civilian Life
War did not define the remainder of Montoya's life.
Like many nineteenth-century New Mexicans, he moved repeatedly between occupations.
The biographical history published shortly after his death describes him entering the freighting trade after military service. He hauled freight through Colorado and traveled as far east as St. Louis, later working around Denver and Cheyenne.
This was demanding work.
Before railroads transformed the Southwest, virtually everything that could not be produced locally—machinery, manufactured goods, military supplies, cloth, tools and other merchandise—had to move enormous distances by wagon.
Men such as Montoya connected New Mexico with the expanding commercial economy of the Great Plains.
His military experience probably made him particularly useful.
He knew routes.
He knew horses.
He understood military posts.
And he spoke the languages necessary to move between different communities and institutions.
Government Freight and Fort Defiance
Montoya's relationship with the federal government continued after uniformed service.
His early biography states that he obtained a contract carrying government freight to the Navajo country and Fort Defiance, work he reportedly performed for approximately two years.
The historical irony is striking.
Only a few years earlier, Montoya had operated from Fort Wingate as an officer pursuing Navajo people resisting removal.
Now he was returning west as part of the economic network supplying federal installations.
His life followed the expanding reach of American authority across the Southwest.
1868: Interpreter in Colorado
Montoya possessed another skill that became increasingly valuable under American rule:
language.
Many native New Mexicans spoke Spanish but little or no English. Territorial government, federal courts and commercial enterprises increasingly operated in English.
Interpreters therefore held considerable power.
According to the 1907 biography, in 1868 Montoya served as an interpreter for the Senate of the Colorado Territory.
This apparently coincided with his years in the freighting business.
It also foreshadowed a role he would perform repeatedly later in life.
Montoya became a bridge—linguistically, politically and culturally—between the Spanish-speaking society into which he had been born and the American institutions that increasingly governed the Southwest.
From Soldier to Legislator
Montoya next entered territorial politics.
In 1869 and 1870, he represented his district in the New Mexico Territorial Legislature, elected as a Democrat. Contemporary biographical material describes him as becoming active in political campaigns and public speaking.
The transition is remarkable.
Less than a decade after leaving El Rito as a young soldier, Montoya had become:
a captain, a western freighter, a government contractor, an interpreter and an elected territorial legislator.
His career illustrates one path by which Hispano New Mexicans adapted to American territorial government.
They did not simply disappear from public life after the United States conquest.
Men like Montoya learned how the new institutions operated and entered them.
Across the West
Montoya continued moving.
In 1871, according to the same early biography, he drove horses to California.
Consider the geography contained in his life by age thirty:
El Rito.
Taos.
Fort Union.
Fort Wingate.
Colorado.
St. Louis.
Denver.
Cheyenne.
Fort Defiance.
California.
For someone born in an isolated northern New Mexico village in 1841, Montoya became extraordinarily well traveled.
His life demonstrates how misleading it can be to imagine nineteenth-century El Rito as cut off from the outside world.
People moved.
Goods moved.
Soldiers moved.
Ideas moved.
And people born in villages such as El Rito participated directly in the transformation of the American West.
Leocadia
On July 7, 1873, Montoya married Leocadia Le Blanc.
The couple had one daughter, Josefina.
Leocadia survived her husband for many years.
Her later pension provides unusually strong federal confirmation of Montoya's military service. In 1926, Congress specifically increased the pension of Leocadia L. Montoya, widow of Donaciano Montoya, identifying his service in Company F of the First New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry and Company D of the New Mexico Volunteer Infantry Battalion.
Even twenty years after Montoya's death and more than sixty years after the Civil War, his military record remained part of the federal record.
Politics, Prisons and the Courts
Montoya continued in public employment.
He reportedly served for three years as a guard at the New Mexico territorial penitentiary. Later he worked in legislative and court settings as an interpreter and translator.
By 1902, four decades after his enlistment, Montoya was still working around the territorial legislature—this time as a translator.
That detail deserves attention.
The young bilingual soldier of 1861 became the elderly bilingual intermediary of 1902.
Language remained one of his principal forms of public service.
Return to Taos
Montoya eventually returned permanently to northern New Mexico.
The early biography says he resided in Taos County from 1894 and in the town of Taos beginning in 1899. He belonged to Carleton Post of the Grand Army of the Republic in Santa Fe, an organization for Union veterans.
By then, the world into which he had been born was disappearing.
Railroads crossed New Mexico.
American courts had transformed land ownership.
English was increasingly important in government.
The territory was campaigning for statehood.
The old wagon-freighting economy was fading.
Montoya had lived through all of it.
His Memory of Kit Carson
Late in life, Montoya's memories became historical evidence.
When he spoke of Kit Carson, he did not describe a legendary figure from a book.
He described a commander he had known.
Montoya remembered that Carson's men trusted him completely and that Carson was particularly intolerant of dishonesty. He recalled a man of limited schooling who compensated by listening carefully and absorbing information from others.
The recollection humanizes both men.
It also reminds us that an El Rito-born soldier stood close enough to major events of western history to leave eyewitness testimony about them.
Death of Captain Montoya
Donaciano Montoya died at his home in Taos on June 23, 1906, apparently suffering from what contemporary records called dropsy, an old term for severe fluid retention or edema associated with several illnesses. A burial register recorded his interment the following day and listed him as 64 years old, with El Rito associated with his origin and Marcos Montoya named in the entry.
The age independently supports an 1841 birth, rather than the erroneous 1811 date that appears in some OCR transcriptions of the historical biography.
The printed original itself clearly gives:
February 28, 1841.
He was sixty-five by the modern calculation from that precise birth date, though nineteenth-century burial records often vary by a year.
Why Donaciano Montoya Belongs in the El Rito Story
El Rito's history is sometimes presented principally through land grants, acequias, the church and the Normal School.
Montoya expands that story.
A child born in El Rito in 1841 went on to participate directly in the American Civil War and the military transformation of the Southwest.
His life connects the village to:
the Civil War, Fort Union, Kit Carson, Fort Wingate, the Navajo Long Walk and Bosque Redondo, Colorado's territorial government, western freighting, the New Mexico Territorial Legislature, and the bilingual political world of nineteenth-century New Mexico.
Few individual El Rito biographies connect the village to so many larger historical events.