Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (65 page)

The Coloradans, nearly one thousand in number, were already on their way to New Mexico when they received word of the Union defeat at Valverde, and this served to quicken their already brisk pace to forty miles a day. Then they heard that the Rebels had captured Albuquerque, and even Santa Fe—further goads. They knew that whatever happened, they had to get to Fort Union before the Texans did. So the Pikes Peakers marched day and night, wearing out their shoes, wearing out their draft animals until they dropped in their harnesses. Near the end the men jettisoned all unessential belongings to “add wings to our speed,” as one private put it. Their pace became truly extraordinary: In a single thirty-six-hour stretch they covered ninety-two miles.

One of the officers leading this sprinting column was Maj. John Milton Chivington, a formidable man who would soon become one of the most notorious figures in the American West. Originally from Ohio, the forty-one-year-old Chivington was a Methodist preacher who brimmed with a sort of muscular Christianity. He had a bull moose physique—standing nearly six-feet five-inches and weighing 260 pounds. A soldier acquaintance once said that the thick-necked, barrel-chested Chivington had the most perfect figure of a man he’d ever seen in a uniform. His doughy face was set with hard, seedlike eyes that seemed to contain a yearning ambition.

Chivington had ability, intelligence, resolve, and stamina—and as a staunch abolitionist who had actively supported the Underground Railroad, he was deeply committed to the Union cause. He possessed ample stores of courage as well. A biographer once said that Chivington was “entirely a stranger to the emotion of fear.” But something about the man was distinctly “off.” Like most zealots, he was too literal-minded, too uncompromising, too eager to embrace tidy, extreme nostrums. He irritated people. As soon as Chivington came to Colorado in 1860 after a stint performing missionary work among Indians in Kansas, the preacher set about cleaning up the sin he saw everywhere in the mountain mining camps. He seethed and fulminated, he named names and pointed fingers, he cast his disapproving eye on the brothels and gambling halls. As a “circuit rider” traveling about the lawless and violent West, he came to view himself not only as a pastor but also as a one-man vice officer—God’s own enforcer.

Once, in Nebraska City, he took it upon himself to destroy the entire liquor supply of a saloon that had, by a perfectly legal deed, located itself in an abandoned church. A shocked witness demanded to know by what authority could he seize and destroy another man’s property. Chivington replied: “By the authority of Almighty God!” In one frontier settlement, angry townsfolk literally tried to tar and feather him. The following Sunday, Chivington lumbered to the pulpit brandishing two pistols. He laid them beside his open King James Bible, and then declared: “By the grace of God and these two revolvers, I am going to preach here today.”

Having heard stories like this, people in Colorado gave Chivington a wide berth. From him they felt the hot breath of an angry God; if they had no love for Chivington, they at least feared and respected him. He became a fixture around Denver and the goldfields of the Front Range. His sermons were of the fire-and-brimstone variety, his voice booming so loudly it could be heard three blocks away. Aside from his constant rounds of preaching, he founded Denver’s first Sunday school.

Everywhere he went, people called him “the Fighting Parson.”

When the territorial governor of Colorado called for Union volunteers in 1861, Chivington promptly signed up. Naturally enough, the governor offered him a post as chaplain. But Chivington balked at this—he didn’t want a “praying commission,” he said; he wanted a “fighting commission.”

And so he got one. Now the Fighting Parson was a major in the Colorado 1st Volunteers, racing toward New Mexico with a unit of cussing, irascible miners under his watchful eye.

The overall commander of the Colorado Volunteers, however, was a stern and woolly-bearded lawyer from Denver City named John Potts Slough. A native Ohioan like Chivington, Slough in 1857 made an unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Kansas before moving to Colorado to become the judge of a miner’s court. He was the scion of a distinguished military family (during the Revolutionary War one of his uncles was first colonel under George Washington). Perhaps because of his heritage, and the fact that he lacked military training or experience himself, it seemed to many that Slough had a chip on his shoulder—and something dramatic to prove. Whatever the case, he was not in sync with his men. Most of them viewed him as a distant and tyrannical martinet. Their distaste for him was not mild: Once during the march, and several times later in the campaign, his men would conspire to kill him.

On the freezing night of March 11, “with drums beating and colors flying,” Slough, Chivington, and their thousand men marched jauntily through the gates of Fort Union to the great relief of the small force of New Mexican volunteers nervously garrisoned there. Their long sprint was, in the estimation of Civil War in the West authority Alvin Josephy, “something of an epic.” In just thirteen days the Coloradans had tramped four hundred miles.

Slough wasted no time taking charge of the fort, which was then commanded by an experienced, West Point–educated colonel whom Slough outranked only by some obscure loophole of commission protocol. Showing not the slightest deference to his able predecessor, Colonel Slough announced his intention to march toward Santa Fe to engage the enemy. This contravened higher orders coming from Colonel Canby at Fort Craig. Canby wanted the Coloradans to stay at Fort Union until he gave explicit instructions for a junction of the two Federal armies, a complicated maneuver that would require sound communications, exquisite timing, and a clear chain of command.

But the impatient Slough couldn’t suppress the urge to dash ahead and capture the glory he felt was rightfully his—even if it meant facing an irate Canby and a possible court-martial. So on March 22, Slough, Chivington, and their men left the fort and headed west on the Santa Fe Trail.

The Texans, still stationed in the capital, were also spoiling for a fight. Their spies had informed them that a Federal force had left Fort Union, but they did not realize that the oncoming army was composed of recently arrived Coloradan reinforcements. Expecting an easy fight against poorly armed Hispanic volunteers, the Rebels believed they could make quick work of an apathetic enemy and push on to seize Fort Union.

General Sibley would not lead them. Again showing his knack for avoiding a battle, he remained at his headquarters in Albuquerque. Instead, the Rebels would be under the command of Maj. Charles Pyron, an extremely aggressive, no-nonsense Alabama native and veteran of the Mexican War. On March 24, Pyron’s small force of four hundred Texans left Santa Fe and soon found themselves in Apache Canyon, the storied defile where, sixteen years earlier, Gov. Manuel Armijo had put up his abortive stand against General Kearny’s invading army.

There, inside the canyon’s constricted walls early on the crisp afternoon of March 26, the Rebels ran right into Major Chivington, who, with some four hundred infantry and cavalry, was marching west as an advance guard of Slough’s force.

A brisk firefight erupted along the old ruts of the Santa Fe Trail. The Coloradans soon gained the upper hand, with Chivington galloping ahead, pistols blazing in each hand. While artillery pieces dueled from the canyon floor, dismounted troops on both sides scurried up the steep rock walls and took positions behind boulders and piñon trees, each army hoping to gain a higher vantage over its enemy. To stymie the Coloradan advance, the Texans destroyed a log bridge that spanned a steep arroyo, but the Pikes Peakers kept spurring on, forcing their horses to jump over the ravine.

By late afternoon Chivington’s men had pushed the Rebels back more than a mile and a half toward the western mouth of the canyon. At Chivington’s command the Coloradans drew their swords and mounted an audacious cavalry charge, which to one Rebel “looked like so many flying devils.” A Texan participant later wrote his wife: “On they came to what I supposed was [their] certain destruction, but no lead or iron seemed to stop them, for we were pouring it into them from every side like hail in a storm.”

The two forces fell into a hand-to-hand fight along the road. The Union troops captured so many Texans that Major Pyron thought better of the engagement and withdrew to find more reinforcements.

The canyon fell silent. With dusky light filtering through the ponderosa pines, Major Chivington and his men were left to savor a small turning point. It was only a skirmish, but their stand at Apache Canyon was the first Union victory in the Civil War of the West. Amazingly, they had taken seventy-one rebel prisoners while driving the rest of the Texans from the field.

The skirmish at Apache Canyon was an opening salvo, a sharp and violent throat-clearing before the larger contest could begin. The Federals had won, but the outcome easily could have swung the other way. It was precisely the sort of hot-and-bothered engagement that the prudent Canby would not have countenanced—and when he did learn about it, by messenger several days later, he was furious.

And yet a legend was born that day. In his first brush with battle, the Fighting Parson had distinguished himself as a bold and fearless leader. His men saw something in John Chivington they didn’t quite expect from a Sunday school teacher. One account described Chivington this way: “In action, he became the incarnation of war. The bravest of the brave, a giant in stature, and a whirlwind in strife, he had also the rather unusual qualities that go to make soldiers personally love [him], and eager to follow him into the jaws of death.”

Two days later the Texan and Coloradan forces regrouped and clashed again, this time a few miles to the east, in much bigger numbers and with far greater fervor. Pyron’s small contingent had fallen in with the larger forces of his superior, Col. William Scurry, a chiseled Mexican War veteran turned Texas lawyer, and now the Confederate forces numbered about 1,000. Leaving their supply train of some eighty wagons safely tucked in a protected stretch of canyon, Scurry pushed east in search of the Union troops.

By late morning he had found them: Some 1,500 men under Col. John Slough were advancing west along the trail. The main action took place in a pine-feathered mountain pass called Glorieta, a beautiful stretch along the Santa Fe Trail not far from the ancient ruins of Pecos. Bugles sounded, the boulder fields seethed with acrid blue smoke, and artillery shells sliced the tops off the trees. A savage fight raged all day in this stunning gold-green wilderness, with the Confederates driving Slough’s men several miles back through the pass to the adobe buildings and corral fencing of a settler’s ranch.

By dusk, however, the battle was inconclusive: The Texans had gained the most ground, but the Coloradans still blocked the Confederates’ path to Fort Union. The Rebels had lost 42 killed, 61 wounded, and 20 captured; the Union casualties were only slightly higher.

Possibly the most memorable action of the day concerned the widely hated Colonel Slough: At one point in the heat of battle, his own men became so disgusted with him for keeping so far to the rear of the action that they turned a howitzer on him and opened fire, raking the hillside with shrapnel in an attempt to frag him; the colonel barely escaped with his life.