Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (61 page)

Now the two armies formed battle lines on the plain. They sent out skirmishers and reconnaissance parties, each army initiating gambits to test the resolve and disposition of its foe. Slowly, tentatively, the Rebels and Federals moved within a thousand yards of each other, close enough that, in the shifting winds, they could hear bugles blaring and the mingled shouts of the men.

Then Sibley’s troops let out a Rebel yell, or at least their best approximation of one; since they had trained in Texas and had never fought in the East, few of these Confederates had actually heard the famous battle cry, though they had heard
of
it. Most of the Rebels were armed with little more than fowling pieces, squirrel guns, pistols, and other frontier weapons—one quixotic unit was composed entirely of lancers. But they were young and lustful for battle, and seemed supremely confident that it would all be over soon. One of their officers, a Major Lockbridge, saw the American flag flying over the fort and boasted: “I’ll make my wife a nightgown out of it!”

The commander of the 1st New Mexico Volunteers was none other than Christopher Carson, now a colonel in the Union Army. Encamped near the fort, in the cool shadows of its earthen walls, Carson and his eight companies now prepared for battle. Like Canby, Carson was personally acquainted with his adversary. Before the war, he and Sibley had spent time together in Taos—Sibley’s post was only a few miles down the road from Carson’s house. A soldier acquaintance of both men said that although Sibley had tried to convert many men to the Confederate cause, he never attempted to convert Carson. “I don’t think Sibley tried any missionary work,” the soldier recalled, “for [Carson] had his opinion on both the North and the South.”

Carson, who hated any sort of debate or quarrel, kept his feelings to himself. Said another pro-Union friend in New Mexico: “Kit was loyal, but he was like me and would not argue the point.”

Carson reported for duty in Albuquerque, and it was there that he trained his volunteers. Serving in the regular army was a new and trying experience for him; at first he was rather awkward at it. The protocols, the nomenclature, the dress codes seemed to run contrary to his nature. A volunteer from Colorado named Edward Wynkoop recalled that Carson’s “uniform did not set well on him at all.” Carson’s illiteracy caused embarrassment. Once a group of his men asked him to sign a commissary requisition for several kegs of molasses. He happily signed the request, only later to find some of his men good and drunk: The commissary order had been for kegs of
whiskey
. Humiliated by this little prank, Carson from then on never signed a requisition without first having his adjutant read it out loud.

We have no record of how he punished these particular malefactors, but in general Carson was not shy about disciplining his men. Wynkoop thought that he “had the utmost firmness and the best of common sense…and could punish a culprit with vigor. He had a beautiful mild blue eye which would become terrible under some circumstances and like the warning of the rattlesnake always sounded the alarm before the spring.”

Wynkoop tells another story from Carson’s army duty in Albuquerque, an incident that occurred on a day the colonel was away from his post. It was a Sunday morning, and a boat full of “gaily dressed senoritas” was crossing the Rio Grande on the way to mass. From the launching point, “a rough looking Mexican ranchero” hopped aboard. The boatman politely asked the stranger to await his turn, for the boat was now overcrowded and dangerously tippy. The man refused. Wynkoop says that Carson “then approached and in a mild manner pointed out to him his wrong doings, but without avail.” Carson then adopted a “peremptory” tone, but the man “was still obstinate.” Suddenly Carson sprang into action. “Like a flash of lightning Kit raised his sheathed sabre which he carried in his hand; struck him a tremendous blow along side of the head, knocking him headlong into the turbid waters of the Rio Grande. The fellow sunk like lead.” The man would have drowned, but “quicker than thought, Kit plunged after and dragged him out.”

It was classic Carson: In an instant he had performed an act of chivalry and then saved the man who gave the ladies offense.

Carson had been chosen to lead the volunteers for his fluency in Spanish and his high standing among the old families of New Mexico. From the start, his greatest challenge had been overcoming the natural apathy of his men. He was able to recruit them and keep them interested in their training only by drawing on an old dread: New Mexicans had long held a fear of and a revulsion for Texans, and, except for Sibley (who was from Louisiana), that was what these attackers were, almost to a man—Texans, having marched from San Antonio with the single-minded intent of claiming New Mexico for the Confederacy. The word “Confederate” meant nearly nothing to Carson’s volunteers, but the prospect of an invasion from the south set up a visceral reaction among them and kept them at their guns.

Colonel Carson peered across the plain at the dust clouds being kicked up by the Texans and studied their movements with his field glasses. He’d been hearing about their advance for months and had been trying to convince his men that the coming threat was real. These Texans were an uncommonly brazen people, his in-laws back in Taos had always said. In New Mexico, Texans were like bogeymen: Parents used to tell their children that if they didn’t behave, the
Tejanos
would come get them.

The canard was partly true. The “people of the single star” had long nursed an interest in New Mexico—in owning it and having it, on paper and in fact, even though Texans held great disdain for New Mexicans and considered their seared land hardly worth possessing. Their desire to absorb New Mexico was as curious as it was incorrigible. It had something to do with the immaculate tidiness of the Rio Grande as a concept: Ever since Texas became an independent nation in the 1830s, it had claimed, on no particular evidence, that its border extended all the way to the Rio Grande’s origins in Colorado, and that most of New Mexico, including the capital of Santa Fe, was thus rightfully part of Texas. In 1841 an armed party of Texans had actually invaded New Mexico in a half-cocked mission of conquest that ended in their prompt capture and brutal imprisonment in a notorious castle-like jail near Mexico City. And in the 1850s, when the New Mexico Territory was being formally established, Texas lawmakers had drawn up new county lines in New Mexico to claim some of the land for the Lone Star state. The Federal government put a stop to it.

But apparently the lust for New Mexico still burned deep in the loins of Texas, like a spurned love that had festered all the more bitterly for the fact that the suitor judged himself superior to his quarry. Sibley’s hopefully named “Army of New Mexico” had marched all the way from San Antonio, losing nearly five hundred men to smallpox, pneumonia, exhaustion, and attacks by Apache Indians. One Texan diarist wrote in despair, “The mountains here are full of Indians, and we dread them worse than we do the Lincolnites.” (The Texans managed to capture and kill at least one Indian horse thief, an Apache who was so thickly coated in dirt that he looked “like a horned frog”; the body was given over to a team of fascinated brigade surgeons, who fed their anthropological curiosity by dissecting the corpse.) Moving steadily westward, the Texans stole what they could not buy and engulfed Hispanic villages along the way, occasionally “appropriating” the local women, as one participant put it.

Now, here they were in the heart of New Mexico, pressing their old claim once again. It is remarkable the extent to which Sibley misread the mood of the New Mexican population—he truly seemed to expect that the local people would embrace his cause “with a sincere and hearty cooperation,” as he put it. In his delusions, Sibley believed that with Hispanic sentiment solidly behind him, his large army could easily “live off the land.” The Texans would quickly seize Fort Craig, and then take Socorro, and Albuquerque, and Santa Fe.

After Santa Fe, their designs grew more ambitious, transcending even New Mexico: Sibley’s men planned to continue on to Denver and capture the goldfields of Colorado for the specie-starved Confederacy. After that, they hoped to march through Utah to the Pacific, take over the California mining operations, and open up the Golden State to the Peculiar Institution—Cotton plantations on the Sacramento! Slave markets in Los Angeles!—so that Confederate railroads would connect the Confederate ports of Charleston, New Orleans, and Houston to the Confederate port of San Diego. While he was at it, Sibley also wanted to conquer (or purchase) the Mexican states of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California.

As grandiose as it seemed, General Sibley’s mission had the blessing of the Confederate high command. In fact, the previous year Sibley had traveled to Richmond to meet with President Jefferson Davis and unfurl his plan for conquering the West. Sibley’s optimism and hubris seemed to permeate his entire army. “Our leaders were crazy,” one of the Texan volunteers later wrote, “and believed they had the game in their own hands; no enterprise was too rash for them to undertake. Every man, from the general downwards, [was] confident of victory.”

For Carson, these territorial schemes must have sounded oddly familiar. The Texans aimed to cover ground that he had already covered for the greater glory of the United States, on routes that he himself had blazed. Theirs was a kind of Empire Retread. It was Manifest Destiny all over again—a Confederate Manifest Destiny.

But now Canby, Carson, and the four thousand men at Fort Craig stood in the way, the first true obstacle in Sibley’s singularly bizarre adventure.

Carson’s reasons for joining the Yankee fight are not altogether clear. He was from Missouri, a border state violently divided on the issue of secession. The people of Missouri had narrowly decided, after much debate and fighting, to follow the ambiguous course of staying pro-slavery but also pro-Union. Many if not most of Carson’s Missouri relatives were Southern sympathizers, and at least one of his brothers would fight—and die—for the Confederacy. Although New Mexico’s barren soil and arid climate had never encouraged agriculture on a scale large enough to make Southern-style slavery profitable, Carson had nonetheless been around enslaved Negroes all his life, both in Missouri and in New Mexico, and he was not known to be openly critical of the institution. (Nor was he an advocate of it—during his roving life as a trapper he had befriended many freed and mix-race blacks, including the legendary mountain man Jim Beckwourth.)

But certainly Carson was no abolitionist. On the contrary, he owned slaves himself—Indian slaves. He and Josefa had three Navajo servants: a boy named Juan, another named Juan Bautista, and a teenage girl named Maria Dolores. The precise terms and arrangements of their servitude are not known (relatives later suggested that they were actually adopted and considered full-fledged family members). Carson apparently purchased the three Navajos from other Indian tribes who had previously captured them in raids. He had all three baptized in the Catholic faith—“according to the custom of the country,” as the local church records state—and they lived in the Carson household for a number of years. Details about Juan Carson’s life are sketchy, but it appears that he was raised free like Carson’s other children and that he later married a New Mexican woman.

The enslavement of captured Indians was an old convention in New Mexico—as was peonage, another form of servitude in which poor, usually Hispanic workers became indebted to wealthy estate owners. Peonage was a kind of feudal arrangement that kept the landed class rich while the majority of the citizens, illiterate and powerless to improve themselves, stayed mired in a financial misery from which they could rarely escape. William Davis, who as the United States attorney for the territory made a close study of the practice in the 1850s, thought that peonage was “in truth but a more charming name for a species of slavery as abject and oppressive as any found upon the American continent.”