Come Sundown (26 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Come Sundown
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Sheffield struggled to his feet. “Goddamn you, you little son of a bitch!” He pulled a dagger from his belt and ran at me. I avoided him easily on the horse, but he kept coming, crazed by battle and hatred. He chased me until he was almost exhausted, so I jumped down from my mount to face him and put an end to this ridiculous conflict.
He came at me with the knife and I leveled my pistol on him. I suppose I should have shot him right then, but for some reason, I could not. Instead, I grabbed his wrist as he made his thrust at me, and clubbed him smartly over the head four times until he dropped to his knees, then fell facedown, unconscious. I kicked the knife away, picked it up, and threw it in the river.
I stood there, breathing hard, looking down on Lieutenant Luther Sheffield's battered and bleeding head. A cheer rose from across the river, as if an audience had seen me defeat my demented nemesis. I looked around until I found my horse standing a short distance away, hip-cocked. Wearily, I trudged toward him and realized that the gunshots had ceased. When I reached my mount, and looked downstream, I saw a white flag of surrender waving on the road to Fort Craig. Now I understood the cheer of the Texans. The battle was over, and Canby had admitted defeat. Yet there was strategy in his surrender. Now, the Union troops could fall back and hold the fort and its supplies—the truly important mission.
I holstered my sidearm and mounted. My mount's wounded hip had become sore, and he limped so on the way back to Kit's unit that I finally just got down and led him. When I reached the First New Mexico Volunteers, I found Blue Wiggins and asked him what our orders were.
“We're to pick up the wounded men and make fires to keep them warm until the surgeons can work on them. We're to pick up the dead, too. Both sides. It don't matter now.”
So I recrossed the Rio Grande with Blue, wading knee deep across the Valverde Ford. We turned upstream, where the worst fighting had occurred. Suddenly, a young Confederate soldier appeared on top of a little sand hill. “Hey, you boys!” he said. “Come help me.”
He disappeared behind the sand hill, and Blue and I followed, peeking over the hill cautiously. We saw the Texan cradling a regular Union soldier in his arms. “I knifed him just before I seen the white flag,” he said. “I wish to God now I hadn't done it.”
The Union soldier was conscious, but staring in shock as blood from a belly wound darkened his shirt.
“What'll we do with him?” The Texan's youthful voice was frantic. “Where's the doctors?”
“Let's carry him over toward the timber where we can start a fire to keep him warm,” I said.
Blue and the Texan grabbed the wounded soldier's arms, and I hooked my elbows under his knees as if he were a wheelbarrow. His face made grimaces as we moved him, but he did not speak or cry out. We had to carry him over two hundred yards until we found some men stoking a fire with a few other wounded soldiers already stretched out on the sand nearby. The man we were carrying died before we laid him down. I watched his head fall slowly back, and felt the life go right out of him.
“Now you'll be fine,” the young Texan said to the dead man. “You just wait and see.”
Blue and I looked at each other and walked away to find another body. As darkness fell over the valley and cold sank in, we wandered the battleground and picked up casualties, occasionally helping other soldiers—Union and Confederate—as they carried wounded to the fires. Dead men could simply be dragged. The work did not take as long as I had expected, for there were several hundred men doing exactly what Blue and I were doing. There were about two hundred dead on both sides, and about two hundred fifty wounded, total. The majority of the dead and wounded were Union men, but not by a great margin. Both sides had suffered terrible losses.
When finally we could find no more casualties, Blue and I decided to walk to the nearest fire to warm ourselves before we figured out what to do next. I was tired and hungry and thirsty. My body ached all over, and I began to feel a rare need to sleep. We joined a dozen men grouped around a fire, avoiding eye contact with the Texans. There were soldiers from both sides around that fire and they were talking about the charge of the lancers.
“I will never forget such a sight,” one of the Texans said. I glanced up and recognized his face—it was the lieutenant I had shot in the leg while riding a circle around the Union cavalry, my bullet's path through his limb amounting to little more than
a flesh wound. “There should be an epic poem penned about it,” the lieutenant continued, “more famous and recited more often than ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.'”
“Those men died heroically,” I replied, feeling my fatigue sink in. “Such valor is unforgettable.”
The lieutenant looked at me. “Perhaps we should all introduce ourselves,” he suggested. “I am Lieutenant Joseph Sayers.”
I nodded. “Honoré Greenwood.” And the rest of the men gave their names. I would never forget the lieutenant's.
Years later, Joseph Sayers would run for governor of Texas and win as a former Civil War hero. He would serve at the turn of the century, about ten years after the governorship of Sul Ross, whom I had also shot at, and winged ever so slightly, at the Pease River massacre of Peta Nocona's meat camp peopled mostly by women and children. This would make me the only man I know of in Texas history to have wounded two governors-to-be on the field of battle. The Lone Star State is lucky that I am not a perfect marksman, for both men proved to be adequate leaders.
I
slept but a few hours after returning to the fort. Gunfire woke me early in the morning—the first of many salutes—followed by a mournful rendition of taps which would play again and again that day. After breakfast, I grabbed a shovel and started digging graves with a hundred other soldiers. Entranced in the routine of the chore, and thinking of the battle the day before, I almost missed Luther Sheffield sneaking up on me.
I looked up barely in time to see the shovel he wielded swinging toward my head. I reacted just quickly enough with my own shovel to deflect the blow, but it knocked me into the grave I had been digging. As I looked up at Sheffield's crazed grin and maniacal eyes, he raised his shovel once again to bash
in my skull. I was helpless, hemmed in by the sides of the shallow grave. Just as he prepared to kill me, a soldier shoved him aside, and others pounced on him and took his weapon away. I crawled out of my grave. Sheffield was dragged away to the guardhouse and locked up. He was eventually court-martialed and busted down to corporal, but he remained in the service.
Anyway, after I crawled out of the grave that Sheffield almost forced me to adopt as my own, Kit found me and ordered me to ride back to the battleground and keep an eye on the Texans. So I rode up onto Mesa de la Contadera and watched the enemy pass the day digging their own graves. They didn't leave Valverde until the following day, crossing the ford they had won, and moving north with their wounded. They made no attempt to take Fort Craig. We would learn soon enough through dispatches that the enemy had established a hospital at Socorro, left a small guard there, and moved north on Albuquerque. Later, I would hear the stories of how many a mortally wounded Rebel breathed his last in that hospital. It was there that Captain Willis L. Lang, severely wounded while leading the charge of the Texas lancers, put his own pistol to his head and by his own hand ended his suffering and his life. His second in command, Lieutenant Demetrius M. Bass, also died there from his seven wounds. So much for the glory of that charge.
The Texans beat us at Valverde, but they didn't win much. They had failed to capture any provisions, and in fact had lost food and supplies due to the persistence of Colonel Miguel Pino and his Second New Mexico Volunteers, who had harassed the Texas supply train for hours and destroyed one of their wagons. Ironically, Colonel Canby blamed Pino and his volunteers for the loss on the battlefield.
Well, a commander has to blame somebody to keep his military career intact after a defeat, but it wasn't fair for Canby to put the onus on Pino. In his official report, Canby said that Pino's men had failed to cross the river to support McRae's artillery when the massive Texas charge came. The truth is that by the time they got the order to move forward, a river crossing would have been suicidal. Canby also blamed the volunteers
under Hubbell and Mortimore for breaking and running in the face of the Texas charge. Well, they did break and run after repulsing the Texans three times and then getting overrun with buckshot and pistol slugs and suffering the heaviest casualties of any unit on the Union side of the battle. Hell, I'd have broke and run at that point, wouldn't you?
Many a Federal soldier who fought that battle has said to me over the years since that if Colonel Ben Roberts had been left in command on the battlefield, the Union would have won. When Canby finally came down from the fort, he made rash moves, placed our artillery in vulnerable places, and failed to respect the leadership of the Rebels' Colonel Tom Green and the tenacity of the Texans themselves.
By the by, Colonel Green's tactic of ordering his charging Texans to hit the dirt when they saw the flash of cannon fire was a stroke of genius. Many a Rebel saved his own hide by taking a dive before the artillery shells burst among the lines.
In my opinion, as I look back, Canby's pivoting maneuver took those of us on the Union right too far out of action to be of much use in repulsing the Texas charge. Then, when we were ready to move left to recapture McRae's battery, we were ordered instead to retreat. Also, Canby had three horses shot out from under him while the Texans were charging. He was in the thick of it, and you have to give him credit for that, but he couldn't get his orders to his subordinates in time when the charge came. Seven hundred Texans charged seven hundred yards in seven minutes. It happened just that fast and Canby failed to, or was unable to, react. So he made scapegoats of the New Mexico volunteers. Except for Kit's regiment. Oh, he spoke highly of Kit and the First New Mexico Volunteers.
Colonel Carson became the new temporary commander of Fort Craig as Canby took to the trail of the Texans. I stayed at the fort with Kit for a time. We were entrusted with protecting the supplies and ammunition there, and also saddled with the responsibility of turning back any Confederate reinforcements that might come up from El Paso. Kit kept mounted patrols constantly afield, but we encountered no threat from the enemy.
Dispatches from the north kept us loosely informed on the progress of the Texans, and they did indeed make progress.
They sacked villages along the Rio Grande and marched unopposed into Albuquerque, then Santa Fe, raising their Rebel flag over the old Spanish Palace of the Governors. Kit had sent Josepha and his children back to their home in Taos, so they were safe for the time being, but he worried. The news from the north was often conflicting, and our information incomplete, so I volunteered to carry dispatches and gather intelligence, and to return to Fort Craig when I could. I looked over Kit's shoulder and instructed him on spelling and grammar as he penned several letters to his fellow officers. Then he sent me on my way with the correspondences.
I rode northeast, avoiding Albuquerque by riding to the east of the Manzanos and the Sandias until I came to Galisteo, a village about twenty miles south of Santa Fe. As far as I knew, the Rebels were still in Santa Fe, so I avoided the old city and took a road I knew well from my days as a courier during the Mexican War. The road led from Galisteo northeastward over Glorieta Mesa, joining the Santa Fe Trail at the east end of Glorieta Pass. Glorieta Pass—the gateway to the West in New Mexico—was of huge strategic import, so I thought I should ride there to see which army might have possession of it, before I went on up the Santa Fe Trail to Fort Union to deliver my dispatches.
The Galisteo Road was a rough cart path that ran over Glorieta Mesa. Along this road, I found no sign of the passing of either army. But I decided to ride down some woodchoppers' trails I knew of to reconnoiter the west end of Glorieta Canyon. There was a place there called Johnson's Ranch, which I knew I could spy upon by looking down from the bluffs of Glorieta Mesa. I dismounted a mile from Johnson's Ranch, and sneaked forward on foot.
Keeping a close watch for sentries, I sneaked up to the edge of the mesa and looked down on Johnson's Ranch. There, I saw some eighty wagons—the supply train of the Texas invaders. These were more wagons than the Rebels had had at Valverde, and I reasoned that they had commandeered equipment and supplies on their march up the Rio Grande, though the Union troops had tried to destroy everything they left behind in their retreat to Fort Union.
I saw a single six-pound cannon on a little knoll opposite the canyon entrance from me. This, and about two hundred guards, judging from the number of cook fires I counted, were all that had remained to guard the supply train. I had to reason that the rest of the Texans had entered the canyon—a narrow, nine-mile defile that led up to and over Glorieta Pass, and down to the east entrance of the strategic canyon.
Having reconnoitered Johnson's Ranch, I sneaked back to my mount and hastened on to the east entrance of the canyon. There was a place there, at the end of the Galisteo Road, called Kozlowski's Stage Stop. I was anxious to see which army held it, so I trotted on up the Galisteo Road, watching far ahead for sentries, until I came to the bluffs overlooking the Santa Fe Trail where it entered the east end of the canyon. Peering cautiously over the brink, I found the advance guard of the Federal Army of the Department of New Mexico at Kozlowski's Stage Stop. I knew the geography of the area. The Union Army would have to hold this position at the east end of the canyon of Glorieta Pass to prevent the Texans from attacking Fort Union and perhaps pressing on to Colorado.
Now I had a grasp of the situation. The Rebel Army had left Santa Fe, heading for Fort Union, and the advance Federal troops, mostly Colorado volunteers, had intercepted and blocked them at Glorieta Pass. The bending canyon through which the Santa Fe Trail led here was nine miles long. The Texans were somewhere in that canyon, prepared to press eastward and capture Glorieta Pass as they had taken Valverde Ford.
I hailed a sentry and identified myself. As he led me to the commander of Union resistance, this sentry told me that sporadic fighting had been going on for a couple of days, the two armies alternately pushing each other up and down the strategic canyon.
I was introduced to the Union commander at Kozlowski's Stage Stop, Colonel John Slough, of the First Colorado Volunteers, recently arrived from Denver. We shook hands, and I delivered my dispatches from Kit. Slough turned them over to a courier of his own who would take them on to Fort Union. This suited me, as I was tired of riding, and sensed that something
of significance would take place here at Glorieta Pass, and I didn't want to miss it.
Colonel Slough and I talked a while about enemy movements. He struck me as a man of intelligence and good qualities. He was direct and confident, appeared temperate and healthy, his thoughtful eyes set close under a handsome brow, his full black beard parting into two long branches. I liked him automatically, for he made me feel free to speak and express my opinions. He was a lawyer from Denver, who now found himself in charge of the Federal resistance at Glorieta Pass. With his command of thirteen hundred soldiers, he seemed to have the east end of the strategic canyon pass well guarded. As we stood conversing between some adobe buildings and a row of cottonwoods, we heard occasional sniper fire up in the canyon.
“Those Texans keep testing our front,” he said, looking up the old trade road that led from Missouri to Santa Fe. It snaked gracefully along the canyon floor, bluffs pinching it in on either side. “I'm afraid they're spoiling for a fight.”
“What will you do?”
He smiled. “Spoil 'em. They've pushed us back this far with some hard fighting, but tomorrow we're going in to retake the canyon. We must. We've lost five good men, and I won't let their lives go for naught. If we hold this pass, we hold Colorado.”
Just then I heard the footsteps—
felt
them, in fact—of someone marching up behind Colonel Slough and me. I turned to behold a bear of a man descending upon us, his whole body and every movement bespeaking impatience, resolve, and more than a touch of arrogance. The man had a chest a barrel maker would admire, and arms that strained at the seams of his sleeves. His anvil of a chin sported a good crop of whiskers.
“Colonel Slough,” he said, making a salute that could have cracked a skull had someone gotten in the way of it. The earth ceased to shake as he came to a stop beside us.
“Major Chivington,” Slough said, returning the salute.
In spite of the polite formalities, I could feel some tension between these two leaders of the Colorado volunteers.
“I've an idea,” Chivington announced, glancing suspiciously at me.
“This is Mr. Greenwood, chief scout for Kit Carson's regiment,” Slough explained.
Chivington looked me over, apparently finding me trustworthy, for he continued. “You intend to engage the enemy on the morrow, do you not?” His voice carried like that of a trained actor.
“I do.”
“My scouts tell me that Sibley's supply train has come up from Santa Fe and is encamped at the other end of Glorieta Pass, at a place called Johnson's Ranch.”
“Mr. Greenwood, here, has just told me the same story,” Slough said.
Chivington looked down on me, standing a foot taller. “You saw them with your own eyes?”
“Yes, sir. Not three hours ago. There are eighty supply wagons guarded by two hundred men and a single cannon.”
The major turned back to the colonel. “Give me four hundred men, and I'll cross that mesa.” He pointed up the steep road that had delivered me hither. “We'll take their supply train by surprise from the rear. If we destroy Sibley's supplies, he's finished.”
Slough looked skeptically up at the piñon-studded mesa. “That road leads to Galisteo, Major.”
“There must be a way to cut across to Johnson's Ranch.”
“I know the way,” I said.
Chivington swiveled his gaze around on me like two bayonets. “How do you know so much?”
“I carried dispatches for General Kearny in the war with Mexico. Sometimes Glorieta Pass was occupied by enemy guards, so I'd go over Glorieta Mesa. There are some old woodcutter's trails that lead from Johnson's Ranch to the Galisteo Road. If you cut straight over the mesa, due west, it's only about seven miles from here.”
“You'll go as my guide,” Chivington said to me. He turned to Slough. “Colonel?”
“Mr. Greenwood has orders to return to Fort Craig with my dispatches,” Slough said, pausing to look back up at the mesa.
He smiled, and it seemed to me that he liked the idea of getting the hulking Major Chivington out of his way for a while. “But I see no harm in his leading you over the mesa to harass the enemy rear on his way back to his regiment. Meanwhile, I'll attack the Texans' front in the canyon.”

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