Confederates Invade the West
The American Civil War was marked by a series of huge and bloody battles that did little to advance the cause on either side. A fight that took place on March 28, 1862, was the opposite—small but consequential. On this day 145 years ago the Confederate dream of establishing a Western empire fell victim to a Pyrrhic victory in rugged mountains of northern New Mexico.
Like their Northern counterparts, the Southerners imagined they had a “manifest destiny” to span the continent. Confederate president Jefferson Davis was convinced that a relatively small force led by an aggressive commander could push aside the Union troops on Indian duty in the West and take control of New Mexico, Colorado to the north, and perhaps even California.
Davis found his commander in Henry Hopkins Sibley, a 45-year-old veteran who had resigned his U.S. Army commission early in 1861. Brigadier General Sibley assembled a force of about 2,600 Texas volunteers and crossed the state to Fort Bliss, near El Paso. In December 1861 he began his winter invasion of New Mexico Territory, which included the present states of New Mexico and Arizona.
Commanding the Union forces was Col. Edward Canby, who had graduated from West Point a year after Sibley and had campaigned with him against the Mormons five years earlier. Most of the regular troops under Canby had been summoned east, and he had raised a volunteer force from the largely Hispanic population of the area. He was determined to hold Fort Craig, which protected the Rio Grande valley south of Albuquerque, and Fort Union, 200 miles to the north, which guarded the Santa Fe Trail and Santa Fe itself. Both forts were sturdily built.
When Canby would not at first send his green troops out of Fort Craig to fight in the open, Sibley decided to cross the Rio Grande at the Valverde ford a few miles to the north. Canby took the challenge. The February 21 initial clash between the two forces was the largest Civil War battle in the far West, but it didn’t last long. A confused fight ended with Canby’s men retreating to the safety of the fort. Sibley’s victory left him short of supplies and faced with the prospect of leaving a force in his rear as he advanced on Santa Fe, the territorial capital.
Calculating that he could not reduce Fort Craig, Sibley decided to head north. His men rode into Albuquerque and Santa Fe with minimal opposition and gathered needed supplies. Canby pinned his hopes on a contingent of about 900 Colorado volunteers who were marching on the double from Denver and would soon arrive at Fort Union. This force was commanded by Col. John Slough, a Denver lawyer with little military experience.
Sibley dallied until March 22 before sending a contingent under Maj. Charles Pyron along the Santa Fe Trail and another under Col. William Scurry along a southern route, both headed for Fort Union. Meanwhile Slough and his Coloradans had reached the fort and were marching down the trail through the high canyon known as Glorieta Pass that cut through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
On March 26 Maj. John Chivington, a sometime preacher who was leading a 400-man cavalry and infantry detachment at the head of the Union forces, encountered Pyron’s 80 men and fought a brief battle marked by a heroic if ineffectual Union cavalry charge. Casualties were light, but a quarter of Pyron’s men were taken prisoners by the “devils from Pike’s Peak.” Pyron fell back to a farm and urgently summoned Scurry to reinforce him. Both sides spent the next day regrouping.
At about 11 a.m. on March 28 the opposing forces encountered each other advancing along the trail on the floor of the canyon. The terrain was rough—a Confederate soldier remembered “steep cliffs of rocks thick with cedar brush on each side of the road.” The fighting was even rougher. “The character of the country was such as to make the engagement of the bushwhacking kind,” Slough wrote in his report. Confederate Capt. Charles Buckholts, after emptying his pistol at a group of Union soldiers, “killed two with his knife.” The Texans used double-barreled shotguns to lethal effect. They made several desperate charges on the Union artillery but were beaten back each time.
The fight at Glorieta Pass was largely an affair of amateurs. Most of the volunteers had never seen combat before. Their officers included a frontier sheriff, a probate judge, and a real estate agent. Slough’s men were outflanked a couple of times and retreated in stages more than a mile up the canyon during the six-hour fight.
Earlier, Slough had sent Major Chivington across Glorieta Mesa to attack the Texans in their rear. The cavalrymen came upon the Confederate camp largely undefended and climbed down the steep canyon walls to capture it. They burned all the Texans’ supplies and killed or ran off hundreds of their mules.
Neither commander was aware of this development when they agreed to a late-afternoon truce to gather the dead and wounded from the rocky crags. Because the Texans lacked shovels, the Union men they had been fighting an hour earlier lent them theirs. Likewise, the Confederate wounded who made it back to Santa Fe were nursed by the wives of Union officers.
Casualties were nearly identical, 42 killed on the Southern side, 47 on the Northern. But after what the Confederate assistant adjutant general, Thomas Ochiltree, called a “glorious victory,” Sibley found himself between two hostile forts without supplies or pack animals. He had little choice but to head back to Texas. “We beat the enemy,” he wrote later. “The famished country beat us.”
After a long, dry trek, the Sibley Brigade straggled into Texas. The grand expedition had achieved nothing. Confederate hopes in the far West were ended.