Mora County, New Mexico: History
Prior to Spanish conquest, the Mora area was Native American country. Although not an area of heavy settlement by stationary tribes such as the Puebloans, the Mora Valley was often used by nomadic nations, including the Ute, Navajo, and Apache.
Hispano settlers had occupied lands within the Mora Valley without legal title since Governor Juan Bautista de Anza of Nuevo México (then under the authority of the Spanish Empire) made peace with the Comanches in the late 18th century, opening up the east side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for settlement. The Mora Valley then became a travel way for various Spanish explorers and others. It was not permanently inhabited by colonists until the early 19th century. The written history of the settlement of Mora dates to Christian missionary church building in 1818, three years before Mexican independence from Spain.
The creation of the Mora Land Grant by the Mexican government of New Mexico in 1835 began the legal and extensive settlement of the county. The settlers came primarily from Las Trampas, but also from Picuris and Embudo, then from Santa Cruz de La Cañada, Taos, and the Ojo Caliente area, and later still from the southern part of New Mexico, moving on from the San Miguel del Vado Land Grant, and also coming in via Las Vegas, New Mexico. The families each received a strip of property by a September 28, 1835, land grant of Centralist Republic of Mexico Governor of New Mexico Albino Pérez. The grant gave land title for over 800,000 acres (1,250 square miles; around 323,800 hectares, or 3,200 km2) in Mora Valley to various families willing to relocate; estimates vary from 25 to 76 families.
When the Republic of Texas seceded from Mexico on March 2, 1836, it claimed, but did not actually control eastern New Mexico, including what is now Mora County. The town of Mora was raided unsuccessfully in 1843 by a group of freebooters from the more narrowly defined Republic of Texas, on the pretext of stopping cattle rustling, but with a clear intent of horse theft and taking the local women and children as slaves. The annexation of Texas by the United States on February 19, 1846, and US General Stephen W. Kearny's taking of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in August of that year, made these lands subject to American control under the Kearny Code and the US provisional government of New Mexico, but the area remained in the minds of many long-term residents part of the Republic of Mexico under President Santa Ana.
During the Mexican–American War, beginning on April 25, 1846, much of New Mexico including Mora County was subject to the military occupation of United States under martial law. During the Taos Revolt of the war, Mexican nationalist Hispano and Puebloan militia fought the United States Army, repelling a small force in the First Battle of Mora on January 24, 1847, only to endure the village and surrounding ranches, farms, and crops being burned to the ground in the Second Battle of Mora on February 1, effectively ending active rebellion in the area. The provisional government's first legislature met on December 6, 1847, beginning American civil government in the region. …