Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (64 page)

In the intense barrage, Union casualties mounted. As Canby surveyed the scene and gnawed his dormant cigar, his beloved warhorse, Old Chas, was shot out from under him.

The men in McRae’s six-gun emplacement held on as long as they could, but the Texans finally reached the battery. A fierce hand-to-hand combat commenced. Fighting with bowie knives, clubbed rifles, and revolvers, the Rebels soon overwhelmed the Union gunners. Captain McRae was killed while defending his own artillery piece—according to one account, he and a Texan died simultaneously while struggling over his howitzer, with the blood of the two enemies “mingling on the barrel.” A quick-thinking Union gunner, recognizing that capture was inevitable but determined to deny the Texans his stockpile of artillery shells, lit a fuse to his ammunition box and blew it (and everyone in the immediate vicinity) to smithereens.

Canby stood dazed beside the carcass of his horse and watched all this unfold with deepening gloom. Realizing that his crack artillery unit had now been enveloped by the enemy, and perhaps still unnerved by his own brush with death, Canby decided he had risked too much. (For a field commander with a lifetime of battle experience, he seemed unusually sensitive to the sight of his own casualties; a contemporary account noted that later “he went through the ranks of the wounded and wept.”) At around five o’clock he called for a general retreat, up and down the line. All Union forces were to cross back to the west bank and return posthaste to Fort Craig.

Kit Carson and his volunteers were dumbfounded by Canby’s order—from their point of view on the Union far right, the battle was faring well; in fact, they felt they were on the verge of victory. Capt. Rafael Chacon, fighting with Carson, wrote that he “could not understand the signals to retreat. We had penetrated the enemy zone and considered that our charge had won the battle.”

But a command was a command, so Carson called his men back to the river and made sure the crossing was executed in orderly fashion. As the volunteers wallowed across, Chacon recalled that the Texans “were shelling us with our own guns, but their fire fell short and did us no harm.”

Elsewhere along the river, however, the retreat took the form of a disorganized rout—“It looked more like a herd of frightened mustangs than men,” observed one Texan eyewitness. “We rushed up to the bank and poured a deadly fire upon them. The mortality in the river was terrible. The shot guns came into play and did great execution.” So many Union troops were shot dead in the water that, as one Confederate account put it, “the Rio Grande was dyed with Yankee blood.”

Even so, as nightfall approached, the Texans in their thirst-crazed legions descended on the river and drank their fill.

The next morning, a raw winter sun crept over the tablelands to reveal a desert battlefield strewn with corpses. On both sides of the cold, brown river, the bodies of men and animals lay mangled. A truce was declared so that both armies might bury their dead. In the morning stillness, the cries of the wounded could be heard up and down the river as surgeons labored in open-air hospitals.

The one-day battle of Valverde had ended in a Confederate victory—at least tactically. Just as they had hoped, the Texans had lured Canby away from his fort and then engaged him on their terms. They had driven the Federals from the field while capturing, in the desperate late afternoon charge, all six guns of Alexander McRae’s battery. And over the course of the battle, the Confederates had sustained fewer casualties: Canby’s army reported 263 dead, wounded, or missing, while Sibley’s total casualties numbered about 200.

On the other hand, Sibley’s army had failed to achieve its one vital strategic objective—the capture of Fort Craig. Canby’s forces were again safely ensconced behind the fortress walls; their ammunition stockpiles and crammed storerooms lay unharmed so that Canby might fight another day. The Union troops had ample medicine, plenty of fuel to keep them warm, and enough rations for months.

The previous night, some of the men had called Canby a traitor—to his face, even—for so ignominiously quitting the battlefield. But now, in the clarity of morning, the logic behind Canby’s retreat impressed itself upon his army. If he had not hastened back to the fort when he did, the Texans, reinvigorated by their successful assault on McRae’s battery, might have overrun the Federals and stormed the fort. Canby’s much-criticized conservatism had thus paid off: He had cut his losses in order to protect Fort Craig, the only prize that really mattered.

The “victorious” Confederates, camped along the river, were starving, freezing, and running out of ammo. They were also desperately short of horses. What with Paddy Graydon’s suicide-bomber stampede, the disastrous lancer charge, and the overall equestrian casualties on the field, the Texans had lost some 350 horses and mules. Prior to the battle the Confederate army had largely been a mounted force—Texans were ferociously proud of their horsemanship. Yet now, almost overnight, Sibley’s cavalry had effectively become an infantry.

Still, the Texans were buoyed by their victory at Valverde and optimistic about completing the campaign. Said one of Sibley’s officers: “If we can subsist our men and horses, there is very little doubt we will be conquerors of New Mexico, and have it in our power to establish Southern principles in the Territory.”

The seldom-seen General Sibley emerged from his ambulance that morning to congratulate the valorous troops he had failed to lead. His men were embarrassed by their apparently craven commander and angry at him for absenting himself in the heat of battle. Under their breath they said that a real Texan, not a Louisianan like Sibley, should be leading the campaign. Some accused Sibley of deliberately trying to lose the battle by colluding with his old pal Canby. Said one critic: “He was the very last man on earth who ought to have been placed in command…he had formed too intimate an acquaintance with ‘John Barley Corn.’”

Sibley did rise out of his bibulous stupor long enough to issue a demand that verged on the ridiculous. Via subordinate officers sent under a white flag, he instructed Colonel Canby to “capitulate” the fort—even though there were thirty-five hundred well-armed, well-fed Union men behind its thick walls. Sibley grandiosely thought that if he could not take the bastion in battle, then maybe his old friend Canby would just…give it up. Canby politely but firmly declined.

In feigned indignation, Sibley pulled together his tattered men and began marching along the river toward Albuquerque—
away
from Fort Craig. Creeping northward, using cow chips for campfire fuel, the famished army swallowed up the tiny villages along the Rio Grande and picked them clean. Finally, the Rebels had abandoned their original (and completely naïve) notion of “living off the land” in the embrace of friendly locals; they had now become an army of looters.

Sibley knew that Albuquerque was a major Union supply station, and he assured his men that they would soon enjoy this “promised land” of ammunition and foodstuffs. But when Sibley reached the outskirts, he was crestfallen to see three enormous columns of black smoke rising over the town: Canby had sent messengers on fast horses ahead of Sibley to instruct Union quartermasters to torch the Albuquerque depots rather than let them fall into Rebel hands.

Now Albuquerque was something of a ghost town, many of its residents having taken to the hills to escape the feared Confederate onslaught. Josefa Carson, who’d been temporarily living in Albuquerque while her husband trained his volunteers, fled with their children and servants back to Taos, where she hid family belongings and heirlooms much as Georgian belles would do, a few years later, in the path of Sherman’s despoiling march to the sea. Carson’s son Kit Jr. years later recalled how his mother “concealed her valuables in the garments of a faithful Navajo girl servant she had raised from babyhood [probably Maria Dolores].”

Sibley’s men entered Albuquerque in triumph and, though disappointed not to have captured Federal stores, proceeded to beg, borrow, or steal from the anxious townsfolk. The ravening army was terrorizing the very citizens whose hearts it needed to win over if the occupation was to have any chance of long-term success. Vaguely aware of this, Sibley issued a proclamation to the people of New Mexico that was equal parts forgiveness and threat. “Those of you who volunteered in the Federal service were doubtless deceived by designing officials,” he said. “But the signal victory which crowned our arms at Valverde on the 21st of February proves…our powers and ability.” He went on to declare “a complete and absolute amnesty to all citizens who have, or may within ten days lay aside their arms. Return with confidence to your homes and avocations, and fear not the result.”

Then the Rebels sprinted on toward the capital. On the snowy day of March 13, Sibley’s men entered Santa Fe without a fight and hoisted the stars-and-bars over the plaza for the Confederacy, and for Texas. Like Albuquerque, Santa Fe was largely abandoned, its Hispanic residents dreading the prospect of
Tejanos
living in their midst. Most of the Union spouses—including Canby’s wife, Louisa Hawkins Canby—had stayed behind in Santa Fe to treat the casualties they expected to come in war’s wake. But the territorial government had picked up and moved seventy miles east to Las Vegas (the same tiny high plains village where General Kearny had delivered his rooftop speech upon entering New Mexico in 1846).

Occupying Santa Fe did much for the army’s morale—this was the prize Texans had sought for generations—but it did little to satiate the men’s hunger. The Rebels were dismayed to find that most of the Federal supplies at Fort Marcy had either been destroyed or transported to another important army stronghold, located twenty-five miles beyond Las Vegas on the Santa Fe Trail, called Fort Union. In anticipation of the Confederate invasion, the Federals had strengthened the battlements of this “star fort” set on the edge of the plains in northeastern New Mexico. An officer stationed at the new and improved Fort Union judged it to be impregnable, boasting that “all Texas can’t take it!”

Sibley’s army was caught between two isolated forts: Fort Craig to the south, Fort Union to the east. He knew he could not successfully occupy the territory, or advance toward the goldfields of Colorado, without the supplies these two citadels so stingily held. His grand scheme to seize New Mexico seemed to be working magnificently—he held the capital, after all, and had not lost a single battle. But his army was withering from within.

Canby knew this. The Union colonel was still hunkered at Fort Craig, more than 150 miles from Santa Fe. He was happy to turn the defense of the territory into a war of attrition. His plan, cruel in its simplicity, was to stay put at Fort Craig—strategically situated to block the Confederate supply lines coming from Texas. From there, he would let the invaders savor the husks of their victory in Santa Fe until they slowly, surely starved. Periodically, Canby would dispatch guerrilla parties to harass Sibley’s advance and tear at his flanks. But otherwise, Canby resolved to withhold the mass of his men—including Carson’s unit—and wait.

Meanwhile, Canby requested reinforcements from faraway California and also from Denver, where Union loyalists were raising a sizable volunteer army from the legions of miners who had flooded to Colorado in the 1859 Pikes Peak gold rush. Canby expected these rough-and-ready reinforcements—“Pikes Peakers,” they were called—to arrive at Fort Union by mid-March. Once they did, Canby planned finally to emerge from Fort Craig, unite with the Coloradans, and drive Sibley’s weakened army from the territory for good.

The Coloradan volunteers
were
coming, and coming in record speed. Their four-hundred-mile trek from Denver City, through snow and howling winds, across plains and mountain passes, ranks as one of the most spectacular marathons of the Civil War.