Publisher's Synopsis
"Samuel Bowman Watrous was born in Vermont three years before the War of 1812. He traveled to the Mexican Province of Nuevo México in 1835 by wagon train along the Santa Fe Trail and ran a store for miners during a period of gold fever south of Santa Fe. He and his family homesteaded on the eastern plains in 1849, participated in the coming of the railroad in 1879, and died under suspicious circumstances in 1886. During his 76-year lifetime, Watrous witnessed massive upheavals in his personal life, in the life of New Mexico, and in the life of the nation. He had three wives, was widowed twice, fathered 11 children, and outlived four of them. He lived through the Taos Rebellion in which one of his mentors was killed, the Mexican-American War which changed his homeland from Mexico to the United States, the Civil War which caused him to flee from his home, and the Indian Wars in which another of his friends was killed. He also saw the open
