Taos, New Mexico: A Town Named for the Pueblo Next Door

Taos, New Mexico, took its name from Taos Pueblo, three miles away, and the pueblo’s own name came to Spanish from what its Tewa neighbors called it. For a long time the town had a longer name, too, with a Don Fernando in it that nobody in the old histories could quite explain.

A name borrowed twice

The Handbook of American Indians, put out by the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, describes Taos as a Tigua pueblo of two big house groups, North town and South town, on both sides of the Taos River. Its entry starts with the name: Taos is a Spanish adaptation, in the plural, of the pueblo’s “Tewa name.” Ralph Emerson Twitchell’s 1917 county history quotes another note by the Handbook’s editor, Frederick Webb Hodge, calling Taos “a corruption” of that Tewa name.

So the word reached Spanish secondhand. The Tewa are a different Pueblo people from the people of Taos, and the Handbook gives the Taos name for their own pueblo as Tuata. It says the pueblo is also called by a name meaning “Red-willow place.” The Navajo name it lists, Ta Wolh, is translated as “water gurgles.”

What does Taos itself mean? None of these sources says, so you won’t find a translation here. The willows and the gurgling water belong to other names for the same place.

Braba, Valladolid and San Miguel

The Spaniards tried out several names before Taos stuck. Coronado’s men, who reached the pueblo in 1540 and 1541, wrote it down as Braba, Yuraba and Uraba, and also called it Valladolid, “no doubt, on account of some fancied resemblance to the Spanish city of that name,” as the Handbook puts it. Juan de Oñate came through in 1598 and applied “its first saint name”: San Miguel. Later the mission there was San Gerónimo.

Twitchell says Taos “first appears by that name” in the documents with Oñate’s account of his visit on July 14, 1598. The saint names came and went. The pueblo’s own name, in its Spanish form, is the one that stayed, and the county took it too. Twitchell’s history of Taos County opens by saying the county got its name from the pueblo.

Don Fernando’s town

That’s where it gets interesting. The town you can drive into today wasn’t founded as plain Taos. Twitchell writes that because Indians from the mountains and plains liked to trade at Taos, “the Spaniards and others established the town of Fernandez de Taos, three miles from the pueblos.” A letter he prints from 1851 is headed “D. Fernando de Taos,” and in 1917 he still called the county seat Fernandez de Taos. The Handbook calls it “the near-by Mexican settlement of Fernandez de Taos” when it describes the Taos rebellion of January 1847, in which Governor Charles Bent was killed.

Who was Fernando? H. H. Bancroft didn’t know either. In 1889 he wrote that the town was “known as Fernandez de Taos or Don Fernandez de Taos, a corruption, I suppose, of San Fernando de Taos.” That “I suppose” is about as far as the old sources go.

The Fernando hasn’t disappeared, though. On the map above, you’ll find the Rio Fernando de Taos running just southeast of town and the Fernando Mountains farther out, while the town’s own label is just Taos. The Spanish name ended up on the river and the mountains, and the pueblo’s name ended up on the town.

Sources & further reading

• Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, part 2, “Taos,” pp. 688-689. Taos as a Spanish plural adaptation of the Tewa name; North town and South town; Tuata and “Red-willow place”; Braba, Yuraba, Uraba and Valladolid; Oñate’s “San Miguel”; the mission of San Gerónimo; the 1847 rebellion at Fernandez de Taos; and, in the list of names, Ta Wolh, “water gurgles” (from Curtis, 1907).
• Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, vol. 4 (1917). The county named from the pueblo and Hodge’s note calling Taos “a corruption” of the Tewa name (p. 395); Taos first appearing by that name in Oñate’s account, July 14, 1598 (p. 396); the founding of Fernandez de Taos three miles from the pueblo (p. 442); the 1851 letter headed “D. Fernando de Taos” (p. 444); Fernandez de Taos as county seat (p. 454).
• Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, vol. 1 (1911), p. 294, note 301. Fernandez de Taos as county seat, with the pueblo “only three miles to the northeast.”
• H. H. Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico (1889), p. 784. The county named for the pueblo, and “a corruption, I suppose, of San Fernando de Taos.”
• GNIS feature 911545 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record and coordinates for Taos.