Sometime in 1862 or early 1863, a priest from Taos reported to New Mexican military authorities the robbery and beating of a freight runner named Juan Flugencio Gonzales. According to one story, Gonzales was hauling goods for the priest when he was stopped on a road by masked thieves, beaten, and tied to his wagon. The robbers then took the horses and the wagon’s contents. After Gonzales was found, he implicated the Espinosa brothers and a third unknown person in the crime. The priest sent word to Santa Fe about the attack; military officers at Fort Garland were, in turn, notified, which triggered Lieutenant Nicholas Hodt and a company from the 1st New Mexico Cavalry to be sent to the Espinosas’ plaza sometime in mid-January 1863. When Hodt spotted Vivián Espinosa, he asked if the two could talk. In an effort to arrest the brothers peacefully, Hodt concocted a reason for his visit: With the Civil War now entering its second year, he would tell the Espinosas that this was part of a military recruiting trip. Vivián asked Hodt to return in the morning.
It took five days for the soldiers to return to the plaza. By then, any pretense of military recruitment had disappeared: Hodt and a deputy marshal named George O. Austin found the brothers at home and held them in a room. Hodt left to gather his men. When he returned, the brothers had broken through a wall and “procured arms, guns, pistols and bows and arrows, and commenced firing the arrows from the doors and windows,” Austin—writing under the pseudonym “A”—reported in a letter to the Rocky Mountain News.
The lieutenant at some point ordered the home to be set on fire. In Austin’s newspaper report, the Espinosas “made a rush out of the door, discharging a shower of arrows.” The aftermath would have been a comedy of errors had it not been so serious. (One soldier was killed during the fight.) Hodt, according to Austin, fired “all the charges from one pistol” but apparently didn’t hit anyone. He drew a second weapon, but it wouldn’t stay cocked. Frustrated, Hodt threw the gun, which discharged when it hit the ground. The lead ball struck Hodt in the forehead, wounding him. Austin chased the Espinosas across the frozen Conejos River, but his horse slipped and fell, breaking Austin’s leg above the ankle. Soldiers followed the Espinosas into the San Juan Mountains but eventually gave up.
With at least one Espinosa home burned, the Army and a marshal confiscated the family’s belongings, including 11 cows and oxen, one steer, four beds, one trunk, and two water buckets. The decision to seize virtually everything left the Espinosas’ wives, children, and extended families destitute. The incident also likely incited the brothers to their murderous rage.
Within two months of the plaza assault, dead settlers began to turn up across the central Rockies. Felipe Espinosa wrote letters and poems in which he asked for protection from the Virgin Mary and from various Catholic saints. Among his writings, he drafted a letter to John Evans, Colorado’s territorial governor. Americans, Espinosa is said to have written, “ruined our families—they took everything in our house; first our beds and blankets, then our provisions…. These were the reasons we had to go out and kill Americans—revenge for the infamies committed on our families…. Pardon us for what we have done and give us our liberty so that no officer will have anything to do with us, for also in killing, one gains his liberty. I am aware that you know of some I have killed, but of others you don’t know. It is a sufficient number, however. Ask…if any other two men have killed as many men as the Espinosas. We have killed thirty-two.”