Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (63 page)

Another thing became apparent to Carson: The Texans and their animals, having left the Rio Grande on the eighteenth, were now desperate for water. The rocky topography largely blocked their access to the river, and no other watering holes were to be found for many miles. The Texans, being primarily a cavalry force, were especially vulnerable. In another day, Carson knew, their situation would be critical. The Confederate horses and mules would literally grow mad with thirst. They would become jittery and unpredictable and subject to bolt at the slightest disturbance.

Recognizing the predicament the Texans were in, Colonel Canby authorized a bold mission. The adventure was led by a colorful Irishman—and former saloon-keeper—named James “Paddy” Graydon. For the past several months, Graydon, as the head of a self-styled reconnaissance unit called Graydon’s Independent Spy Company, had been gathering intelligence for the Union forces. Known for employing various ruses and disguises, he had once ventured into a Confederate camp as an apple peddler.

A man with a gift for unorthodox solutions and, as one Civil War historian put it, “a widely acknowledged reputation for the spectacular,” Graydon came up with a plan for shocking the Confederate animals and setting off a major stampede. He filled two boxes with mountain howitzer shells and improvised two fuses. Then he cinched the boxes to the backs of two mules. Under cover of night, he led the mules across the Rio Grande and crept up to within a few hundred yards of the Confederate camp, close enough that Graydon could hear the Texans talking and laughing around their fires. All around the bivouac site he could make out the silhouettes of the Confederate mules and horses, hundreds of them hobbled or picketed for the night.

Graydon took a deep breath and lit the two fuses. Then with a loud
“Yawwwww!”
he swatted the mules’ rumps, sending them off on a suicide gallop toward the Rebel campfires.

The mules arrowed across the field, with the long fuses steadily fizzing on their backs. But as the two animals approached the Texan camp, something stopped them: some unfamiliar smell, perhaps a realization that they did not belong there. In an instant they turned around and started galloping
back toward Graydon
. Spotting this most inconvenient reversal in his plan, Graydon started running for his life. The doomed animals would have overtaken their master, but the fuses ran out.

Boom! Boom!
The night skies lit up, and the Confederates turned their heads in panic as mule meat splattered over the chamisa fields.

Amazingly, Graydon’s plan seems to have worked: At the noise, the Confederate animals stampeded. Mad for water, wild-eyed and snorting, they broke their pickets and dashed for a gap in the rocky terrain that led down to the river, where Union soldiers were waiting.

After the animals got their fill, the troops easily collected them and led them back to Fort Craig. In just a few bewildering minutes of pyrotechnics, the Texans had been relieved of more than 150 valuable horses and mules—a loss that an invading army so far from home could not afford.

Valverde was a tranquil bend in the Rio Grande choked with copses of willow and cottonwood. In recent years, by the mysterious logic of rivers, the main current had deviated and found a new course, so that at Valverde the Rio Grande curled beside the sandy dry bed of its former channel, like a snake beside its own shed skin. Because the banks here were gently sloped, and the river broad and shallow, Valverde had for centuries been an important ford on the Camino Real. Towering over the ford was an imposing mesa of dark volcanic rock.

Valverde—“green valley” in Spanish—had also been a village of some importance during the colonial period. But in the early 1800s it had fallen on hard times. After repeated attacks by Navajos and Apaches, the settlers abandoned the place. Valverde became a ghost town, and now its walls were listing and cracked, its roofs collapsed, its baked adobe bricks crumbling back into the earth from which they had come.

Kit Carson knew Valverde well and probably detested it—for this was the same spot where he had met General Kearny during the Mexican War, and where the general had so unceremoniously turned him around for California. Once again, the ruined village was about to impress itself upon his career—this time with Carson playing a central role on the westernmost battlefield of the American Civil War.

Early on the cold and cloudy morning of February 21, the Texans struck their camps on the back side of the mesa and began marching toward Valverde. General Sibley was no longer effectively in charge; he was having one of his bouts with “colic,” or drunkenness—or both—and once again he confined himself to his ambulance. The Texans were enraged by their general’s incapacity in this hour of need—one called him “an infamous coward and a disgrace to the Confederate States.”

Sibley’s second-in-command, Col. Tom Green, was left to pick up the pieces. Sensing that battle was imminent, Green exhorted his men: “You’ve come too far from home hunting a fight to lose now—you must win or die on the battlefield!”

By eight that morning the Texan vanguard had taken up a position on the east bank of Valverde, and soon Union troops from Fort Craig arrived on the west bank to contest the Confederate claim on the ford. An intense firefight erupted, and the Federals quickly seemed to gain the upper hand. Among the Union troops was Capt. Alexander McRae, a stalwart artilleryman who, although a native of North Carolina, “had given his allegiance to country rather than to state,” according to Valverde historian John Taylor. McRae’s six-gun battery of howitzers pounded the Texan positions across the river, and his shells ignited the dry grama grass all around the Confederate artillery. In the late morning, fighting through intermittent snow flurries, Union troops crept across the icy-cold river and pursued the enemy into the bosques on the east side.

Now the cottonwoods pinged with hot lead. The Texans were able to absorb the Union assault, but not without significant casualties. According to one Union soldier, “Their cavalry was completely destroyed, their horses and men dead and dying on the field.” The Union troops captured a Confederate twelve-pounder artillery piece, lassoed it “cowboy style,” and hauled it back to Union lines. One Texan who had been shot in the mouth produced a knife and cut out a large piece of his own tongue that was “hanging ragged.”

In desperation, the company of Texan lancers decided to mount a charge on Union positions. The flamboyant cavaliers carried nine-foot-long staves fixed with twelve-inch blades from which festive red pennants were hung, supposedly for the purpose of “drinking the blood” of impaled enemies. These stubborn horsemen had honed their skills after recognizing how surprisingly effective lancers were during the Mexican War. Now they hid with their animals down in the old river channel and prepared for battle. Bugles sounded, and suddenly more than fifty of these latter-day knights popped up from behind the sandy embankment and galloped toward the Union infantry three hundred yards away.

The Federals patiently waited until the Texans had drawn within a hundred yards. Then an officer was heard crying out—“They’re Texans—give ’em hell!” The Federal troops fired volley after volley and mowed down the onrushing lancers. Soon the field was a bloody tangle of horses and men. One Union participant wrote that it was “fun to see the Texans fall. On they came and fierce looking fellows they were with their long lances raised, but when they got to us we were loaded again and then we gave them the buck and ball. After the second volley there were but a few of them left. One of them got away. The others were shot and bayoneted.”

It lasted only a few minutes, but the Texan assault—widely considered the only lancer charge in the Civil War—ended in a complete slaughter. Nearly every one of the fifty horsemen was killed or wounded. The Texans would later mythologize the action—Colonel Green would call it “one of the most gallant and furious charges ever witnessed in the annals of battle.” Yet the surviving lancers recognized the impotence of their weaponry in the face of modern firepower. Enraged and humiliated, they collected their once-beloved lances in a pile and put them to the torch. And then they armed themselves again, with shotguns.

When Col. Kit Carson received word, in midmorning, that a withering firefight had broken out at Valverde, he and his volunteers hastened the seven miles to the ford and awaited orders. Carson thought that his unit should wait on the west side of the Rio Grande; if his green troops could stay removed from the fray long enough to study the action in relative calm, Carson suggested to Canby, they would be less likely to panic and bolt when their time came to fight. Canby saw wisdom in the idea, and so for an hour Carson and his men hugged the west bank—and watched.

On the east side of the river the firing raged on through midday. The Union forces seemed to have lost the momentum they had enjoyed in the morning, and for a time the battle smoldered in stalemate. Then Canby devised a plan to turn the tide: Using Alexander McRae’s howitzer battery as a hinge on the Union far left, he would swing the bulk of his forces toward the right like an enormous slamming door, trapping the Confederates in an enfilading fire.

To function as the center-right of his “door,” Canby ordered Carson and his men to wade across the river and take up active positions on the battlefield. Carson’s idea of waiting in reserve across the river had seemingly paid off: Unlike many of the volunteer and militia units up and down the battlefield, his men were already mentally immersed in the action and now, in their hour, did not flinch. Carson advanced about five hundred yards, swinging toward the right as planned. At one point his men successfully checked a concerted Texan charge on a Union 24-pounder howitzer. Carson described the action: “As the head of the enemy’s column came within 80 yards of my right, our whole column poured a volley into them and caused them to break in every direction. Almost at the same time a shell from the 24-pounder was thrown among them with fatal effect.”

Through it all, Carson was a calm, unflinching presence. Canby, in his official report, praised him for his “zeal and energy.” Carson paced up and down his line of volunteers, yelling,
“Firme, muchachos, firme”
—steady, boys, steady. His volunteers responded magnificently. The column, Carson said, “moved forward to sweep the wood near the hills.” Just as Canby had hoped, they had arranged themselves in an enfilade position—one in which they could rake deadly fire across the length of the enemy line. Capt. Rafael Chacon, who fought with Carson’s unit, later wrote that the volunteers “fought full of courage and almost in a frenzy, driving the enemy back through blood and fire…we put them to flight and drove them clear into the hills.”

But on the left, the Union lines were plunged in panic and disarray. Tom Green and the Texans, letting out a Rebel yell, had mounted an assault on Alexander McRae’s battery. More than a thousand Confederates charged on foot with what was later described as “wild ardor.” It was a frantic sprint, and the Rebels fully expected, as one of them later put it, that “raking fire would slay the last man of us.”

The initial Union response was thunderous—one Confederate officer recalled that his men charged into “a driving storm of grape and musket balls.” But the Federals were not prepared for the fury of the Rebel onslaught, and many of the New Mexico volunteers began to shrink before “the unsavory diet of canister” being hurled at them from Confederate artillery pieces hidden in the dry riverbed. As the Texans charged in a second wave, and then a third, the Union lines faltered and many Federal troops bolted for the river. Complained one Union soldier: “Down they came upon us, rushing through the fire poured into them, with maddened determination.” (Some Texans later admitted that much of their “maddened determination” was born of their desperation for water—many were dying of thirst and were thus willing to risk anything to reach the river.)