New Mexico Historical Review Volume 81 Number 1 Article 3 1-1-2006 Comanchero: José Piedad Tafoya, 1834–1913 Thomas Merlan Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr Recommended Citation Merlan, Thomas. "Comanchero: José Piedad Tafoya, 1834–1913." New Mexico Historical Review 81, 1 (). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol81/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. Comanchero JOSE PIEDAD TAFOYA, 1834-1913 Thomas Merlan and Frances Levine ose Piedad Tafoya is generally known as a comanchero who traded with Jthe Native people of the Southern Plains during the mid- to late nine teenth century. Born in a New Mexican village on the then far northern frontier of Mexico, he died in a village scarcely twenty-five miles away in the new U.S. state ofNew Mexico. The label comanchero, however, was an inadequate description of Tafoya, for he was also an army scout, farmer, rancher, man of property, and family man. Later, like a number of his New Mexican contemporaries who observed the changing character of territo rial New Mexico, he sent his son to be educated at St. Michael's College in Santa Fe. The purpose here is not only to review an<;l supplement the facts ofTafoya's life as a comanchero but to offer a biographical essay on a man whose life spanned two major economic and cultural networks.