Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson & the Conquest of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  When Colonel Canby got wind of what was going on, he promptly sent Kit Carson and several companies of volunteers to the east bank of the river to occupy a high point from which they could keep a closer eye on the Confederate movements. Canby feared that Sibley’s pullout might be an elaborate feint, and that the Rebels were actually planning to veer suddenly, cross the river again, and attack the fort. He needed Carson’s forces to check this possible scenario.

  Carson took the eminence without incident and from his higher vantage was able to follow Sibley’s crawl north. Carson correctly guessed that the Texans were bypassing the fort and instead heading toward Valverde ford—and this was the message, sent via runners and semaphore signals from high points on the mesa, that was relayed to Canby.

  Another thing became apparent to Carson: The Texans and their animals, having left the Rio Grande on the eighteenth, were now desperate for water. The rocky topography largely blocked their access to the river, and no other watering holes were to be found for many miles. The Texans, being primarily a cavalry force, were especially vulnerable. In another day, Carson knew, their situation would be critical. The Confederate horses and mules would literally grow mad with thirst. They would become jittery and unpredictable and subject to bolt at the slightest disturbance.

  Recognizing the predicament the Texans were in, Colonel Canby authorized a bold mission. The adventure was led by a colorful Irishman—and former saloon-keeper—named James “Paddy” Graydon. For the past several months, Graydon, as the head of a self-styled reconnaissance unit called Graydon’s Independent Spy Company, had been gathering intelligence for the Union forces. Known for employing various ruses and disguises, he had once ventured into a Confederate camp as an apple peddler.

  A man with a gift for unorthodox solutions and, as one Civil War historian put it, “a widely acknowledged reputation for the spectacular,” Graydon came up with a plan for shocking the Confederate animals and setting off a major stampede. He filled two boxes with mountain howitzer shells and improvised two fuses. Then he cinched the boxes to the backs of two mules. Under cover of night, he led the mules across the Rio Grande and crept up to within a few hundred yards of the Confederate camp, close enough that Graydon could hear the Texans talking and laughing around their fires. All around the bivouac site he could make out the silhouettes of the Confederate mules and horses, hundreds of them hobbled or picketed for the night.

  Graydon took a deep breath and lit the two fuses. Then with a loud “Yawwwww!” he swatted the mules’ rumps, sending them off on a suicide gallop toward the Rebel campfires.

  The mules arrowed across the field, with the long fuses steadily fizzing on their backs. But as the two animals approached the Texan camp, something stopped them: some unfamiliar smell, perhaps a realization that they did not belong there. In an instant they turned around and started galloping back toward Graydon. Spotting this most inconvenient reversal in his plan, Graydon started running for his life. The doomed animals would have overtaken their master, but the fuses ran out.

  Boom! Boom! The night skies lit up, and the Confederates turned their heads in panic as mule meat splattered over the chamisa fields.

  Amazingly, Graydon’s plan seems to have worked: At the noise, the Confederate animals stampeded. Mad for water, wild-eyed and snorting, they broke their pickets and dashed for a gap in the rocky terrain that led down to the river, where Union soldiers were waiting.

  After the animals got their fill, the troops easily collected them and led them back to Fort Craig. In just a few bewildering minutes of pyrotechnics, the Texans had been relieved of more than 150 valuable horses and mules—a loss that an invading army so far from home could not afford.

  Valverde was a tranquil bend in the Rio Grande choked with copses of willow and cottonwood. In recent years, by the mysterious logic of rivers, the main current had deviated and found a new course, so that at Valverde the Rio Grande curled beside the sandy dry bed of its former channel, like a snake beside its own shed skin. Because the banks here were gently sloped, and the river broad and shallow, Valverde had for centuries been an important ford on the Camino Real. Towering over the ford was an imposing mesa of dark volcanic rock.

  Valverde—“green valley” in Spanish—had also been a village of some importance during the colonial period. But in the early 1800s it had fallen on hard times. After repeated attacks by Navajos and Apaches, the settlers abandoned the place. Valverde became a ghost town, and now its walls were listing and cracked, its roofs collapsed, its baked adobe bricks crumbling back into the earth from which they had come.

  Kit Carson knew Valverde well and probably detested it—for this was the same spot where he had met General Kearny during the Mexican War, and where the general had so unceremoniously turned him around for California. Once again, the ruined village was about to impress itself upon his career—this time with Carson playing a central role on the westernmost battlefield of the American Civil War.

  Early on the cold and cloudy morning of February 21, the Texans struck their camps on the back side of the mesa and began marching toward Valverde. General Sibley was no longer effectively in charge; he was having one of his bouts with “colic,” or drunkenness—or both—and once again he confined himself to his ambulance. The Texans were enraged by their general’s incapacity in this hour of need—one called him “an infamous coward and a disgrace to the Confederate States.”

  Sibley’s second-in-command, Col. Tom Green, was left to pick up the pieces. Sensing that battle was imminent, Green exhorted his men: “You’ve come too far from home hunting a fight to lose now—you must win or die on the battlefield!”

  By eight that morning the Texan vanguard had taken up a position on the east bank of Valverde, and soon Union troops from Fort Craig arrived on the west bank to contest the Confederate claim on the ford. An intense firefight erupted, and the Federals quickly seemed to gain the upper hand. Among the Union troops was Capt. Alexander McRae, a stalwart artilleryman who, although a native of North Carolina, “had given his allegiance to country rather than to state,” according to Valverde historian John Taylor. McRae’s six-gun battery of howitzers pounded the Texan positions across the river, and his shells ignited the dry grama grass all around the Confederate artillery. In the late morning, fighting through intermittent snow flurries, Union troops crept across the icy-cold river and pursued the enemy into the bosques on the east side.

  Now the cottonwoods pinged with hot lead. The Texans were able to absorb the Union assault, but not without significant casualties. According to one Union soldier, “Their cavalry was completely destroyed, their horses and men dead and dying on the field.” The Union troops captured a Confederate twelve-pounder artillery piece, lassoed it “cowboy style,” and hauled it back to Union lines. One Texan who had been shot in the mouth produced a knife and cut out a large piece of his own tongue that was “hanging ragged.”

  In desperation, the company of Texan lancers decided to mount a charge on Union positions. The flamboyant cavaliers carried nine-foot-long staves fixed with twelve-inch blades from which festive red pennants were hung, supposedly for the purpose of “drinking the blood” of impaled enemies. These stubborn horsemen had honed their skills after recognizing how surprisingly effective lancers were during the Mexican War. Now they hid with their animals down in the old river channel and prepared for battle. Bugles sounded, and suddenly more than fifty of these latter-day knights popped up from behind the sandy embankment and galloped toward the Union infantry three hundred yards away.

  The Federals patiently waited until the Texans had drawn within a hundred yards. Then an officer was heard crying out—“They’re Texans—give ’em hell!” The Federal troops fired volley after volley and mowed down the onrushing lancers. Soon the field was a bloody tangle of horses and men. One Union participant wrote that it was “fun to see the Texans fall. On they came and fierce looking fellows they were with their long lances raised, but when they got to us we were loaded again a
nd then we gave them the buck and ball. After the second volley there were but a few of them left. One of them got away. The others were shot and bayoneted.”

  It lasted only a few minutes, but the Texan assault—widely considered the only lancer charge in the Civil War—ended in a complete slaughter. Nearly every one of the fifty horsemen was killed or wounded. The Texans would later mythologize the action—Colonel Green would call it “one of the most gallant and furious charges ever witnessed in the annals of battle.” Yet the surviving lancers recognized the impotence of their weaponry in the face of modern firepower. Enraged and humiliated, they collected their once-beloved lances in a pile and put them to the torch. And then they armed themselves again, with shotguns.

  When Col. Kit Carson received word, in midmorning, that a withering firefight had broken out at Valverde, he and his volunteers hastened the seven miles to the ford and awaited orders. Carson thought that his unit should wait on the west side of the Rio Grande; if his green troops could stay removed from the fray long enough to study the action in relative calm, Carson suggested to Canby, they would be less likely to panic and bolt when their time came to fight. Canby saw wisdom in the idea, and so for an hour Carson and his men hugged the west bank—and watched.

  On the east side of the river the firing raged on through midday. The Union forces seemed to have lost the momentum they had enjoyed in the morning, and for a time the battle smoldered in stalemate. Then Canby devised a plan to turn the tide: Using Alexander McRae’s howitzer battery as a hinge on the Union far left, he would swing the bulk of his forces toward the right like an enormous slamming door, trapping the Confederates in an enfilading fire.

  To function as the center-right of his “door,” Canby ordered Carson and his men to wade across the river and take up active positions on the battlefield. Carson’s idea of waiting in reserve across the river had seemingly paid off: Unlike many of the volunteer and militia units up and down the battlefield, his men were already mentally immersed in the action and now, in their hour, did not flinch. Carson advanced about five hundred yards, swinging toward the right as planned. At one point his men successfully checked a concerted Texan charge on a Union 24-pounder howitzer. Carson described the action: “As the head of the enemy’s column came within 80 yards of my right, our whole column poured a volley into them and caused them to break in every direction. Almost at the same time a shell from the 24-pounder was thrown among them with fatal effect.”

  Through it all, Carson was a calm, unflinching presence. Canby, in his official report, praised him for his “zeal and energy.” Carson paced up and down his line of volunteers, yelling, “Firme, muchachos, firme”—steady, boys, steady. His volunteers responded magnificently. The column, Carson said, “moved forward to sweep the wood near the hills.” Just as Canby had hoped, they had arranged themselves in an enfilade position—one in which they could rake deadly fire across the length of the enemy line. Capt. Rafael Chacon, who fought with Carson’s unit, later wrote that the volunteers “fought full of courage and almost in a frenzy, driving the enemy back through blood and fire…we put them to flight and drove them clear into the hills.”

  But on the left, the Union lines were plunged in panic and disarray. Tom Green and the Texans, letting out a Rebel yell, had mounted an assault on Alexander McRae’s battery. More than a thousand Confederates charged on foot with what was later described as “wild ardor.” It was a frantic sprint, and the Rebels fully expected, as one of them later put it, that “raking fire would slay the last man of us.”

  The initial Union response was thunderous—one Confederate officer recalled that his men charged into “a driving storm of grape and musket balls.” But the Federals were not prepared for the fury of the Rebel onslaught, and many of the New Mexico volunteers began to shrink before “the unsavory diet of canister” being hurled at them from Confederate artillery pieces hidden in the dry riverbed. As the Texans charged in a second wave, and then a third, the Union lines faltered and many Federal troops bolted for the river. Complained one Union soldier: “Down they came upon us, rushing through the fire poured into them, with maddened determination.” (Some Texans later admitted that much of their “maddened determination” was born of their desperation for water—many were dying of thirst and were thus willing to risk anything to reach the river.)

  In the intense barrage, Union casualties mounted. As Canby surveyed the scene and gnawed his dormant cigar, his beloved warhorse, Old Chas, was shot out from under him.

  The men in McRae’s six-gun emplacement held on as long as they could, but the Texans finally reached the battery. A fierce hand-to-hand combat commenced. Fighting with bowie knives, clubbed rifles, and revolvers, the Rebels soon overwhelmed the Union gunners. Captain McRae was killed while defending his own artillery piece—according to one account, he and a Texan died simultaneously while struggling over his howitzer, with the blood of the two enemies “mingling on the barrel.” A quick-thinking Union gunner, recognizing that capture was inevitable but determined to deny the Texans his stockpile of artillery shells, lit a fuse to his ammunition box and blew it (and everyone in the immediate vicinity) to smithereens.

  Canby stood dazed beside the carcass of his horse and watched all this unfold with deepening gloom. Realizing that his crack artillery unit had now been enveloped by the enemy, and perhaps still unnerved by his own brush with death, Canby decided he had risked too much. (For a field commander with a lifetime of battle experience, he seemed unusually sensitive to the sight of his own casualties; a contemporary account noted that later “he went through the ranks of the wounded and wept.”) At around five o’clock he called for a general retreat, up and down the line. All Union forces were to cross back to the west bank and return posthaste to Fort Craig.

  Kit Carson and his volunteers were dumbfounded by Canby’s order—from their point of view on the Union far right, the battle was faring well; in fact, they felt they were on the verge of victory. Capt. Rafael Chacon, fighting with Carson, wrote that he “could not understand the signals to retreat. We had penetrated the enemy zone and considered that our charge had won the battle.”

  But a command was a command, so Carson called his men back to the river and made sure the crossing was executed in orderly fashion. As the volunteers wallowed across, Chacon recalled that the Texans “were shelling us with our own guns, but their fire fell short and did us no harm.”

  Elsewhere along the river, however, the retreat took the form of a disorganized rout—“It looked more like a herd of frightened mustangs than men,” observed one Texan eyewitness. “We rushed up to the bank and poured a deadly fire upon them. The mortality in the river was terrible. The shot guns came into play and did great execution.” So many Union troops were shot dead in the water that, as one Confederate account put it, “the Rio Grande was dyed with Yankee blood.”

  Even so, as nightfall approached, the Texans in their thirst-crazed legions descended on the river and drank their fill.

  Chapter 38: THE SONS OF SOME DEAR MOTHER

  The next morning, a raw winter sun crept over the tablelands to reveal a desert battlefield strewn with corpses. On both sides of the cold, brown river, the bodies of men and animals lay mangled. A truce was declared so that both armies might bury their dead. In the morning stillness, the cries of the wounded could be heard up and down the river as surgeons labored in open-air hospitals.

  The one-day battle of Valverde had ended in a Confederate victory—at least tactically. Just as they had hoped, the Texans had lured Canby away from his fort and then engaged him on their terms. They had driven the Federals from the field while capturing, in the desperate late afternoon charge, all six guns of Alexander McRae’s battery. And over the course of the battle, the Confederates had sustained fewer casualties: Canby’s army reported 263 dead, wounded, or missing, while Sibley’s total casualties numbered about 200.

  On the other hand, Sibley’s army had failed to achieve its one vital strategic objective—the captu
re of Fort Craig. Canby’s forces were again safely ensconced behind the fortress walls; their ammunition stockpiles and crammed storerooms lay unharmed so that Canby might fight another day. The Union troops had ample medicine, plenty of fuel to keep them warm, and enough rations for months.

  The previous night, some of the men had called Canby a traitor—to his face, even—for so ignominiously quitting the battlefield. But now, in the clarity of morning, the logic behind Canby’s retreat impressed itself upon his army. If he had not hastened back to the fort when he did, the Texans, reinvigorated by their successful assault on McRae’s battery, might have overrun the Federals and stormed the fort. Canby’s much-criticized conservatism had thus paid off: He had cut his losses in order to protect Fort Craig, the only prize that really mattered.

  The “victorious” Confederates, camped along the river, were starving, freezing, and running out of ammo. They were also desperately short of horses. What with Paddy Graydon’s suicide-bomber stampede, the disastrous lancer charge, and the overall equestrian casualties on the field, the Texans had lost some 350 horses and mules. Prior to the battle the Confederate army had largely been a mounted force—Texans were ferociously proud of their horsemanship. Yet now, almost overnight, Sibley’s cavalry had effectively become an infantry.

  Still, the Texans were buoyed by their victory at Valverde and optimistic about completing the campaign. Said one of Sibley’s officers: “If we can subsist our men and horses, there is very little doubt we will be conquerors of New Mexico, and have it in our power to establish Southern principles in the Territory.”

  The seldom-seen General Sibley emerged from his ambulance that morning to congratulate the valorous troops he had failed to lead. His men were embarrassed by their apparently craven commander and angry at him for absenting himself in the heat of battle. Under their breath they said that a real Texan, not a Louisianan like Sibley, should be leading the campaign. Some accused Sibley of deliberately trying to lose the battle by colluding with his old pal Canby. Said one critic: “He was the very last man on earth who ought to have been placed in command…he had formed too intimate an acquaintance with ‘John Barley Corn.’”