Blood and Thunder

Chapter 37 describes the siege of Fort Craig and the battle of Valverde in February 1862.

The Confederate commander, Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley, was more romantic and ambitious than practical, and his “love of liquor exceeded that of home, country, or God” (364-5). He had pitched a harebrained scheme to Confederate leadership of securing all of the Southwest, including Colorado and California, for the Confederacy. The capture of Fort Craig was vital to the continued effort. Sibley’s supply line was already stretched thin, and they were in desperate need of food and ammunition.

Sibley had gone to school with and fought the Indians with the Union commander, Colonel Edward Canby. Canby was even the best man at Sibley’s wedding. Unlike Sibley, who tended toward laziness, Canby was thoughtful and cautious, if not exactly brilliant. He believed himself in a poor position, with decoy cannons to deter the Confederates and only 1,200 of his 4,000 men being army regulars. The rest were volunteers. 

One advantage Canby enjoyed was Kit Carson, now a colonel in the Union Army. Carson was a somewhat awkward officer at first, but he soon proved a capable enough leader. His joining the Union was likely tied to his loyalty to the army and to Fremont, now a staunch Unionist, rather than any abolitionist sentiment. Carson himself owned three Indian slaves.

On February 16, 1862, Sibley realized he could not lure Canby from the safety of the fort. His officer, Tom Green, hatched a plan: The Confederates could go around and take the ford of Valverde behind Fort Craig, cutting off the Union supply line. It offered great reward at great risk; it would force Canby’s surrender, but they would cut themselves off from the river, and thirsty animals spook easily. A Union eccentric named James “Paddy” Graydon took advantage of this. He sent two mules with dynamite into their camp, a somewhat botched but successful suicide mission. The explosion caused 150 Confederate horses and mules to stampede.

Even so, the ensuing battle at the ford of Valverde was a Confederate victory. Although Carson’s men did enormously well thanks to his cool-headed leadership and the formidable Texan cavalry was decimated in the brawl, Canby ordered a retreat due to substantial Union casualties and to prevent the Confederates from storming the Fort Craig.

The battle of Valverde hobbled both sides. Although the Confederates had succeeded in luring Canby from the fort and inflicting heavy casualties on the Union, they failed to do the most important thing: take Fort Craig itself. Canby had made the right decision to retreat when he did; the Confederates were left “starving, freezing, and running out of ammo” (386-7). They attempted to loot the Union supply station of Albuquerque, making quick enemies of the locals, but Canby had the supplies torched before they could take them. He was “happy to turn the defense of the territory into a war of attrition” (388-90). The Confederates easily took Santa Fe on March 13 but remained in desperate need of supplies.

Canby called for reinforcements from California and Colorado to crush Sibley once and for all. The Coloradans were led at a blistering pace by Major John Milton Chivington and John Potts Slough. Known as the “Fighting Parson,” Chivington was a staunch abolitionist and a battle-loving zealot, about whom something was “distinctly off.” Slough was technically the commander of the Coloradans, but his tyrannical ways had made him so unpopular that his own men often plotted to kill him.

Upon arrival at Fort Union, Slough immediately took command and ordered his men to engage with the Confederates at Santa Fe. This move contravened Canby’s orders to stay in the fort until they could join their forces. The ensuing skirmishes at Apache Canyon and Glorieta Pass were touch and go but resulted in advantage to the Union. Chivington in particular distinguished himself for his bravery.

Chivington would be the key to the final defeat of the Confederates in the Southwest. Together with Manuel Chaves—the commander who had massacred the Navajo at Fort Fauntleroy—the Fighting Parson stumbled on an incredible find: the entire Confederate supply train, hidden in the Apache Canyon. Chivington destroyed the train and mercilessly slaughtered all the Confederate horses and mules by bayonet: “The canyon walls echoed with the shrill neighing of horses wild-eyed with fright, with the low groans of stuck animals” (397-9). He would have killed the captive Confederates, too, had the situation warranted it.

The loss of this supply train broke Confederate power in the Southwest. On April 11, under Canby’s watchful escort, Sibley and his men began limping back to Texas. Hundreds died of thirst in the unforgiving New Mexico desert.

With settler attention turned to repelling the Confederates, the Navajo escalated their raids. Thoughts of a peaceful settlement were set aside; now there were talks of completely annihilating the Navajo. Canby was called back east and his replacement, General James Henry Carleton, had definite plans about how such a displacement could take place. Carleton had good qualities—he was a hard worker, an abolitionist—but “his entrance upon the stage of New Mexico during the late summer of 1682 resulted in one of the most tragic collisions in the U.S. government’s long, sorry relationship with the Native Americans” (404-5).

Like Carson, Carleton was well connected, having served under Kearny, Zachary Taylor, and others, and he was ambitious. He had, since his youth, been fascinated by the Indians, and after the death of his wife Henrietta in 1841, threw himself wholly into his military career in the West. He spent time on the frontier in the 1840s, witnessing the change brought by white settlers firsthand, and fought in the Mexican-American War. He wrote an enormously popular book about his experiences in the battle of Buena Vista; his account of Taylor helped launch Taylor to the presidency.

In the early 1850s, Carleton struck up a friendship with Carson, having saved him and his daughter Adaline during a dispute with an angry group of Cheyenne. Carson was impressed with Carleton’s education and connections, as he had been with Fremont’s; Carleton was convinced of Carson’s worth when Carson tracked a group of Jicarilla Apache with remarkable precision.

In 1852, Carleton was on assignment to charted the Pecos River. He stumbled on a life-changing place in Comanche country. The Spanish called it Bosque Redondo, the Round Forest. A verdant valley near the border with Texas, Bosque Redondo would play an important—and tragic—role in Carleton’s plans for the Navajo.

Carleton’s outlook on the Navajo “problem” was deeply influenced by an episode in 1859. A group of settlers from Arkansas was killed in Utah in an event known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In his investigation, Carleton concluded that the mass execution of more than 120 people was almost certainly carried out by the local Mormon community. Brigham Young, he argued, sanctioned the killing as revenge for the killing of a popular prophet in Arkansas a year before. No one was brought to justice for the murders. The episode hardened Carleton’s view of the West as a savage, dog-eat-dog place, to which order must be brought forcibly.

Holed up in Fort Tejon, Carleton hatched his plan for the Navajo. Inspired by a similar operation being tested by Ned Beale, Carleton decided that the Navajo must be separated wholly from white people, for the good of both parties. They would be relocated to a remote plot of arable land, where they would be “civilized” under guard. “The new policy was tantamount to apartheid, to be sure” (425), but it was also powered by a paternalistic drive to save the Indians and their cultures from extinction. In that sense, Carleton’s approach signaled a shift from a “punishment” model of interaction to “a noblesse oblige […] the white man’s burden” (429). Carleton was also motivated by less noble motives. He believed, for no particular reason, that there was gold on Navajo land. To reach it, he needed to remove the Navajo.

Carleton decided the Navajo would be uprooted and moved to Bosque Redondo, a location Carleton continued to romanticize despite unfavorable reports on the living conditions. The Navajo were adept at ghosting away into the desert; to wear them down, Carleton recruited a man who had “spent his life hounding Indians and honing his ideas on how to do the grim business better, more efficiently” (430-1): Kit Carson.

As a warmup for the larger Navajo war, Carleton had Carson first starve out and round up the Mescalero Apache. He ordered Carson to kill all the men “whenever and wherever you can find them” and take the women and children prisoner (436-7). Carson refused but did succeed in a month’s time in rounding up and moving the entire tribe to Bosque Redondo, where they were forced into farming. 

His work done, Carson attempted to resign on February 3, 1863. He supported the idea of separating the Indians from the whites, as he believed there was nothing to be done for them now that the settlers were here to stay. He saw the devastating impact white culture—particularly liquor—was having on the Native Americans, and had specific ideas he thought might ease the transition (e.g., keeping the tribes as close to their homeland as possible). Yet Carson felt his age keenly and wanted to spend time with his wife and family. Carleton refused his resignation and convinced him to stay.