Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson & the Conquest of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  “You are right on top of them, Major,” Chaves whispered.

  Chivington was surprised to find that the valley floor was almost perfectly quiet; the Confederate camp seemed all but abandoned. Scurry’s men had moved on well east of here, to engage Slough.

  Then, through his field glasses, Chivington spied something that must have made him salivate: Eighty wagons, piled high with supplies, the entire Confederate supply train, lay before him on the canyon floor. He couldn’t believe his eyes. This trove appeared to be casually guarded by only a hundred men—many of them sick and injured—armed with a single cannon. Not far away, corralled in various places, were hundreds and hundreds of horses and mules. Here, concentrated in one place, trapped by canyon walls, were the Confederate hopes and dreams: nearly all the rations, ammunition, medicines, blankets, and other essentials that were meant to sustain the Rebels all the way to Fort Union and beyond.

  Sensing a new opportunity, Chivington abruptly changed his plans. Instead of dropping into the canyon and heading east to attack the Confederate rear, he resolved to do something that would prove infinitely more costly to the Rebels: He would attack here and destroy everything.

  Securing themselves with ropes and leather straps, his men began to drop over the rim and slip as quietly as possible down into the gorge. Inevitably someone dislodged a rock, which, in turn, started a small avalanche. The Confederates in the canyon heard the commotion and promptly fired their one cannon, but their shots were ineffectual. Chivington’s men reached the floor without incident, seized and spiked the cannon, and then stormed the grounds of the ranch.

  The Texans had been caught almost completely off guard. Terrified by the sight of several hundred Colorado miners descending on them from the mesa, most of the Confederates bolted while the others—seventeen, in all—surrendered. Within minutes the ranch was in Union hands.

  The shuddering booms coming from the battle at Glorieta could be heard in the distance somewhere to the east, but Chivington couldn’t tell how far away the engagement was, or whether it might be moving in his direction. Anxious about the possibility of an ambush, Chivington issued a chilling order: The moment Scurry returned, the moment his vanguard was spotted in the canyon, all Confederate prisoners were to be shot on the spot.

  Some of Chivington’s men recoiled at the thought of it, but the Fighting Parson was adamant: Kill every one of them.

  The Texan prisoners heard the order and reeled in fear. Most of them were sick or wounded and had no possible means of escape. One Confederate officer thought that Chivington had “lost all sense of humanity.” Harvey Holcomb, a Texas soldier, considered Chivington “a contemptible coward” for issuing an order to have helpless prisoners “shot down like dogs.”

  Chivington posted pickets to scour the canyon for Rebel movements and then turned to the main business at hand: sabotaging the Confederate supply train. He directed his men to huddle the eighty wagons tightly together and torch them all. Soon a crackling fire licked the air and clouds of thick black smoke billowed from the canyon. One of the ammo wagons exploded in the intense heat of the flames, severely injuring one of the Coloradans. Nothing escaped the torch—tents, flour, Bibles, horsetack, bedrolls, cookware, coffee, clothing, tools, whiskey. Watching their belongings going up in smoke, the prisoners’ hopes sank.

  Chivington, meanwhile, stood and stared with perverse glee, the ruddy heat of the bonfire spreading over his face. This was a funeral pyre, he must have realized, a cremation. All the Confederate designs on the West were now turning to cinders.

  One Coloradan’s account characterized the destruction of the baggage train in more romantic terms: “We pierced the Confederate vitals and drew from thence the life blood.”

  Then Chivington turned to the enemy horses and mules, some five or six hundred of them corralled in various places around the ranch. Without flinching, Chivington ordered his men to kill them all. To save on ammunition, though, he instructed his men to do the work with bayonets. For the next half hour or so the canyon walls echoed with the shrill neighing of horses wild-eyed with fright, with the low groans of stuck animals, and perhaps with the nervous laughter of men lost in this unpleasant errand of slaughter.

  In his memoirs, Chivington boasted that his men bayoneted eleven hundred animals that day; it was certainly an inflated number—the Texans insisted it was about half that—but the fact that he would exaggerate shows something of his misplaced pride as well as his remorselessness.

  The Texan prisoners watched the massacre of their animals with deepening dread: They figured they were next. Luckily for them, their army never showed itself in the canyon. If it had, Chivington surely would have made good on his vow.

  The Confederates were broken. With their supply train destroyed, they had lost the will and the wherewithal to fight. The Texans retreated from the Glorieta battlefield and reconvened in Santa Fe to sift their dwindling options.

  In Santa Fe, the casualties from Glorieta began to stream in. Colonel Canby’s wife, Louisa, turned her own house into a hospital. When some of her Union friends castigated her for showing generosity to the enemy, she snapped: “Friend or foe, their lives must be saved if it is possible. They are the sons of some dear mother.” The Texans were moved by her kindness. One of them wrote of Mrs. Canby: “That Christian lady captured more hearts of Confederate soldiers than her husband ever captured Confederate bodies.”

  It took General Sibley a week or more to fully appreciate it, but his campaign was over. In his official military correspondence, he tried at first to put the best face on it. Cheerfully noting the tactical successes scored at Glorieta, he wrote his Confederate superior: “I have the honor and pleasure to report another victory.” But then he closed his letter with an understated cry for help: “I must have reinforcements.”

  In a letter to the governor of Texas, however, Sibley was considerably more blunt: “We have been crippled,” he said. Sibley’s pride would not let him admit that perhaps the Union Army had played a role in the crippling. “We beat the enemy wherever we encountered them,” he reasoned. It was, he claimed, “the famished country that beat us.” Sibley had grown to loathe New Mexico, asserting that the territory was “not worth one-fourth the blood and treasure we have expended in its conquest.” He felt a “dogged, irreconcilable detestation of the country and its people.” His great dreams of a Confederate West had withered.

  Sibley was already formulating plans for a total exodus from New Mexico. It was not to be a retreat, he euphemized, but rather a “precipitate evacuation.”

  Canby, meanwhile, decided to act. On April 1 he emerged from Fort Craig with a force of twelve hundred men and headed north along the river. Not yet realizing that Sibley had already resolved to quit New Mexico, Canby’s intention was to join forces with the Colorado Volunteers and drive Sibley from the territory. Canby left Kit Carson and ten companies of New Mexico Volunteers at Fort Craig, telling him to defend the stronghold “to the last extremity.”

  Canby marched north in a welter of emotions. News of the battle at Glorieta had left him both relieved and incensed. Yes, Chivington’s raid had hobbled the Confederates, but Colonel Slough had violated Canby’s clear orders not to leave Fort Union. As he told Colonel Slough in a series of irate messages, the defense of the territory might have been jeopardized by the Coloradans’ rash advance. In truth, Canby could have been tasting sour grapes: It’s possible that he resented Slough and his Pikes Peakers for stealing some of the glory that might have been his.

  In any case, Canby’s withering letters convinced Colonel Slough that he might well face a court-martial. To forestall this humiliating possibility, Slough resigned his commission and absconded to Denver, with Major Chivington replacing him as commander of the 1st Colorado. (In fact, Slough had another, more pressing reason for quitting the service: After the fragging incident at the battle of Glorieta, the unpopular colonel feared that his own men would succeed in killing him. As Slough himself acknowledged in a letter:
“I resigned the colonelcy because I was satisfied that a further connection might result in my assassination.”)

  By April 9, when Canby reached the outskirts of Albuquerque, he began to get a much clearer picture of just how desperately starved and anemic Sibley’s army had become. Canby made a brief show of attacking Albuquerque, but this was only a ploy to draw Sibley’s forces down from Santa Fe in order to protect the last Confederate reserves of supplies being held along the river. The ruse worked. As soon as Sibley’s men arrived in Albuquerque—having completely abandoned the capital—Canby slipped east under cover of night to meet with Chivington and the 1st Colorado.

  By executing this little sidestep away from the Rio Grande, Canby had deliberately left the way open for the Rebels to escape. Sibley took the cue, and on April 11 the Confederates began marching south toward Texas.

  Now that he was reinforced with the Coloradans, Canby knew he could easily destroy Sibley’s retreating army in a final, decisive battle; but he didn’t want to. Canby simply wanted the Rebels to leave the territory, quickly and forever. The Union Army could not afford to feed and house the many hundreds of sickly prisoners that would result from another battle. The territory simply didn’t have the resources.

  So instead of forcing another engagement, Canby resolved merely to “herd” Sibley south along the river—to nag and worry him, to keep a close eye on him, and to make sure he didn’t try to attack Carson at Fort Craig as a sort of parting gesture. Sibley’s army marched along the west bank of the Rio Grande while Canby marched along the east bank, the two forces proceeding for a hundred miles in a tense and awkward lockstep. Each night they camped across the river from each other, so close they could hear each other’s songs and revels and smell each other’s food. One Texan thought the sight of the enemy campfires burning so close together was “both grand and awful.”

  Many of Canby’s men hated this inglorious assignment of hounding the enemy without being allowed to fight. One Coloradan ridiculed the colonel’s strategy for being too kindhearted: “We do not want to take any unfair advantage of the Texans—that would not be chivalrous. God grant they may never get the same advantage over us.”

  When Sibley’s army drew near to Fort Craig in mid-April, he decided to make a hundred-mile detour into the parched mountains to the west rather than risk a possible engagement with Carson and his garrison. And so one night the Texans secretly burned and buried their last unnecessary belongings and vanished into the desert.

  The following morning Canby looked across the river and found to his surprise that the Texans had abandoned their camp, their fires still faintly smoldering. Canby sent scouts to follow them into the mountains, and their reports were grim. Under the unforgiving sun, the Texans were now dying of thirst and disease. Their trail was strewn with discarded clothes, ruined wagons, abandoned weapons, and the corpses of animals and humans alike, with a sprinkling of bones and the appendages of soldiers half-eaten by wolves. Their disgraceful march had become, as one Texan said, “every man for himself.” Since the expedition began, their numbers had dwindled by nearly one-third: Of the 3,500 men who marched out of San Antonio the previous year, more than 500 had died in combat or from disease, while another 500 had either deserted or surrendered.

  Sibley was now riding in his ambulance, doubtless drunk again, entertaining the wives of Southern sympathizers who were vacating the territory. The general had lost everything, even his sense of shame. As a newspaper back in Austin would later put it: “He was chasing a shadow in a barren land.” His campaign was in shambles, his name ruined, his future uncertain, and his men roundly hating him.

  It was a pitiful sight—so pitiful that at least one of the Coloradans was moved to feel sorry for the enemy as he dragged homeward, never to be seen again in New Mexico:

  Poor fellows! The climate and Uncle Sam’s boys have sadly wasted them. They are now fleeing through the mountains with a little more than a third of the number with which they first assaulted us at Fort Craig. Very many softly lie and sweetly sleep low in the ground. Let their faults be buried with them. They are our brothers, erring it may be, still nature will exact a passing tear for the brave dead. And doubt not there are those who will both love and honor their memory if we cannot. Any cause that men sustain to death becomes sacred, at least to them.

  Chapter 39: THE ROUND FOREST

  The Texans were gone, yet still the war was not over. In the welcome calm, New Mexico awoke to realize that while the army had been preoccupied with ejecting Confederate invaders from the territory’s front yard, the Navajos had been attacking from the rear. Manuelito and the other warriors did not understand why the two bilagaana armies were fighting one another. They could not have guessed the underlying concepts of secession, or states’ rights, or the hovering issue of slavery as it was practiced in a wet, green world that existed somewhere far to the east, beyond the Staked Plains.

  But the Diné quickly saw opportunities in the conflict. Many of the American forts were abandoned, and along the Rio Grande the flocks still grazed, ripe for the taking. The chain of logic wasn’t complicated: American soldiers were somewhere else, so the Navajos pounced. Emboldened by what they correctly perceived as a power vacuum, and still outraged over the massacre at Fort Fauntleroy, the Diné warriors raided almost without check through the drought-stricken year of 1862. William Arny, a former Indian agent who was now territorial secretary, estimated that New Mexico’s property losses to Indian raiders in 1862 amounted to $250,000; more than thirty thousand sheep were stolen by the Navajos that year. James Collins, superintendent of Indian affairs in New Mexico, reported that the record of murders committed by Navajos had become “truly frightful…This death list is not made up of a few lives lost. Its number will extend to nearly three hundred for the past eighteen months.”

  Something had to be done—the people of the territory cried out for retribution as never before. The Santa Fe Gazette clamored for all-out war, reminding its readers that “for months the bells of your sacred edifices have tolled the obsequies of your slaughtered citizens.”

  And so Col. Edward Canby, in his own slow and methodical way, turned his attention to the matter. In the late spring of 1862 he began to formulate plans for a campaign into Navajo country unlike any other. It would be ambitious, it would be decisive, and it would result in the creation of a true Navajo reservation far to the west, carved from Diné land, possibly along the Little Colorado River in what is now northeastern Arizona. As far as Canby was concerned, the time for half measures had passed; this would be the ultimate solution, the endgame. The colonel wrote to his superiors in Washington that “there is now no choice between the Navajos’ absolute extermination or their removal and colonization at points so remote from the settlements as to isolate them entirely from the inhabitants of the Territory.”

  Canby’s plan would not come to fruition, not exactly, not in the way he envisioned. History would have played out quite differently, for Edward Canby was above all a practical man, and the campaign he was planning, however ruthless, would have been far better for Navajos and non-Navajos alike than what was to come. But in the summer of 1862, Canby was promoted to general and recalled to serve in the East. His plodding but sensible mind was needed in the frantic halls of wartime Washington. That fall, Canby was replaced by another career frontier soldier, a formidable figure of the West who had his own deeply held notions about the Navajo conflict.

  How to describe the singular personality of Brig. Gen. James Henry Carleton? A pedant, a prig, a man who thought of everything and whose perfectionism seldom gave him an occasion to apologize. But also an officer of rare excellence, rigid ethics, fine manners, and multifaceted competence. An officer with a probing but perhaps overly tidy intellect. In another place, in another time, perhaps in another profession, James Carleton might have been a great man of towering good deeds. Instead, his entrance upon the stage of New Mexico during the late summer of 1862 resulted in one of the most tragic collisions in
the U.S. government’s long, sorry relationship with Native Americans.

  It would be facile to call him, as many have, a villain and a fiend and be done with it. But Carleton was a much more nuanced man than he is usually given credit for. He wasn’t an entirely unlikable man—many people found him extremely gracious and kind. As a friend he was steadfast to a fault. His hobbies and interests were refreshingly eclectic. He climbed mountains, collected rare seeds, read voraciously. He had a talent for waltzing. Though he did not attend college, he knew eminent figures of science and literature, men such as Audubon and Longfellow. He penned authoritative articles for the Smithsonian Institution about archaeological ruins, one of his great loves. He wrote the first comprehensive book on perhaps the most crucial engagement of the Mexican War, the Battle of Buena Vista, where he served with distinction under Gen. Zachary Taylor.

  Perhaps self-conscious about not being a West Pointer, Carleton had made it his life’s work to catch up with his better-connected colleagues by outdoing them in abstrusities of military science, natural history, and other fields befitting a gentleman officer of his day. Whatever it was that drove him, Carleton was a perpetual motion machine, always burrowed in some interesting pet project or cranny of amusement. He was, for example, the nation’s foremost military expert on the cavalry tactics of the Russian Cossacks, having made a formal study of the matter at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. From time to time, during his nearly constant Western travels, he took it upon himself to ship unusual minerals and specimens of flora and fauna to Harvard University. He had a facility for boat design—he was especially fond of building Mackinaws. Perhaps his greatest extracurricular hobby was meteorites, and while in Arizona he discovered an important one, a 632-pound hunk of cosmic metal—“discarded by Vulcan himself”—that he hauled all the way to San Francisco (to this day it’s still known as the Carleton Meteorite).