Captive Women and Children of Taos County

Most writers spell her Villalpando, after the family whose fortified house at Ranchos de Taos the Comanche overran in August 1760, taking some fifty-six women and children; the panel drops a letter. One account ties the raid to a dance at Taos Pueblo said to have used Comanche scalps. She was later sold to the Pawnee and bought by the trader Jean Baptiste Salé dit Lajoie, whom she married in St. Louis in 1770, and died there in 1830. On New Year's Day her descendants and other Genízaro families still dance Comanche dances on the Ranchos church plaza.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Captive Women and Children of Taos County In August 1760, around sixty women and children were taken captive in a Comanche raid on Ranchos de Taos. That raid is an example of the danger of living on New Mexico's frontier during the 17th and 18th centuries, for Hispanic and Indigenous communities alike, raided each other and suffered enormous consequences. Thousands of women and children were taken captive. Most were never returned. Official Scenic Historic Marker María Rosa Villapando, (ca. 1725-1830) One known captive of this raid, María Rosa Villapando was traded to the Pawnees and, after ten years, was ransomed by her future husband, a French trader from St. Louis. She was reunited with her New Mexican son, Joseph Julian Jaques in 1802. Her grandson, Antoine Leroux, returned to Taos and married into the Vigil family, making her the ancestral matriarch of several prominent Taos families.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos — 7.6 mi
  The adobe church at Ranchos de Taos that artists always paint from behind, kept standing by the mud its parish spreads over it every June.
• Rio Grande Gorge Bridge — 12 mi
  A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.
• Taos Pueblo — 14 mi
  Two terraced adobe houses facing each other across Red Willow Creek, lived in for something like a thousand years, with no electricity or running water inside the old walls.
• El Santuario de Chimayó — 24 mi
  A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.

More markers nearby

• Pilar — 4.3 mi
• Maria Ramita Simbola Martinez, Cora Durand and Virginia Duran — 7.5 mi
• San Francisco de Asis Church — 7.6 mi
• Pueblo of Picuris — 8.2 mi