Taos Canyon

The panel folds this fight into the reconquest. It belonged to a second rising: on June 4, 1696, the people of fourteen pueblos rose again, and at Taos they killed their friar, Antonio Carbonel. Vargas came north in late September; his campaign ran from September 22 to October 9 and ended when the Taos people came down from the mountains and returned to their pueblo. Four years earlier they had twice left the pueblo rather than meet him. The panel names the canyon this highway climbs; the record says only a canyon near the pueblo.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Taos Canyon In 1692, after having been driven from New Mexico by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Spanish began to re-establish their rule. In one of the last battles of the reconquest, in September 1696, Governor Diego de Vargas defeated the Indians of Taos Pueblo at nearby Taos Canyon.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Taos Pueblo — 4.1 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.
• San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos — 5.0 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 — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Kit Carson Memorial Cemetery — 3.1 mi
• Taos — 3.2 mi
• Taos — 4.7 mi
• San Francisco de Asis Church — 5.0 mi