Maria Bent was the sister of Kit Carson's wife, Josefa, and the wife of Charles Bent, the first Civil Governor of the territory of New Mexico. During the Taos Rebellion, her husband was murdered, but she and her daughters were able to escape by digging through an adobe wall to an adjoining building. Also buried in the Kit Carson Cemetery are all the grandchildren of Governor and Maria Bent: Laura, Albert, Odella, Amelia, and Louis R Scheurich and Mercedes Scheurich Ellis.

Charles Bent

by Wiliam H. Wroth

Charles Bent was the first civil governor under American rule in the territory of New Mexico. Bent was born in Charleston, Brooke County, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1799 and moved with his family to St. Louis, Missouri in 1806. Although Bent and his brothers were to become the stereotypic traders and mountain men of the West, their father Silas Bent, originally from Massachusetts, was a prominent land surveyor and Supreme Court judge for the Missouri Territory. Charles Bent attended college for a brief time at Jefferson College in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania. He then began working for the Missouri Fur Company in 1822, probably fur trading on the upper Missouri River. In 1825 he became a partner with Joshua Pilcher in a re-organization of the company. In 1827 he and his partners traveled to the Green River on a trapping and trading expedition, but the company was not very successful in competing with the American Fur Company. As a result, Bent turned his attention to the Santa Fe trade....

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