by Mike Blakely
I could just see old John Hatcher out there in the mountains, checking tracks and claw marks on the aspens. It was well in my heart that he had not ended a farmer.
THE NEXT DAY, Kit, Blue, and I took a stroll down to the camps to look over the Union troops. Colonel Carson, of course, was immensely popular among the soldiers of the First New Mexico Volunteers, which he commanded, and they virtually mobbed him as he made his unannounced inspection of the camp. Blue and I finally had to break away and continue our observations on our own.
Blue and I had always had a knack for getting ourselves into trouble when together, and we wandered into the camp of the Second New Mexico Volunteers. Both of us knew very well that Luther Sheffield had been elected a lieutenant in this regiment, and that we were quite likely to run into him, and we did.
We saw him carrying an armful of clothing to the laundry tubs situated downhill from camp.
“I’ll be damn,” Blue said. “There’s Luther.”
“Looks like he’s unarmed.”
“Not likely.”
“He sure has changed,” I said. “He doesn’t look like much of a dandy gambler now.”
“I think he’s seen some hard times. I heard he lost that gaming parlor of his in Santa Fe a long time ago.”
“Let’s go talk to him,” I suggested.
“Huh?”
“Maybe we can smooth things over.”
Blue shrugged, and went along. “Not likely.”
We approached Luther Sheffield as he sorted his clothing on a rude wooden table next to a collection of leaky wooden washtubs, and a metal caldron suspended over a bank of coals.
“Hello, Lieutenant Sheffield,” I said, still ten steps away.
Sheffield looked quickly my way, hawklike and suspicious. The years had drawn his facial features tight around his cheeks and jaw. The elegant gambler I had outsmarted years ago was gone. The hands that had once expertly palmed cards now fumbled with soiled uniforms. I saw the gleam of recognition flare in his eyes, and he reached for the pocket of his trousers, where he probably still carried that little revolver. I was wearing my Colt in a holster, and that alone stopped Lieutenant Luther Sheffield from pulling his gun on me, for he knew I would get to mine first.
“Just like you two bastards to gang up on me again.”
“We don’t want no trouble.”
“That’s what you said the night you ruined me.”
“Who ruined who first?” Blue said.
“Nobody made you sit down at my table.”
“Nobody turned me away when I came to win my money back.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “In games of chance somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose. That’s been years ago, and we’re on the same side now.”
“You’re not on my side, Greenwood. You ruined me. My luck went bad the night you walked out of my gambling parlor. You leave a trail of that goddamn Indian medicine everywhere you go. I couldn’t win enough in poker to keep my head out of water after you left. You busted me back to a whiskey peddler and a pimp.”
“I didn’t do any such thing, Luther. I helped a friend win some money back. I used the same kind of tricks you used.”
A tiny, shriveled old woman was walking up behind Sheffield, lugging two buckets of water. She had a hand-rolled corn-husk cigarette jutting from her mouth. The water buckets looked as though they weighed more than she did, and I felt sorry for her, but I couldn’t help her and keep an eye on Luther all at once.
“You don’t know a goddamn thing about my tricks, and you never will, you amateur. No professional would ever enter a colleague’s own gambling den and fleece him with the kind of rude cheating you used. There’s a code among professionals, and you broke it.”
“I’m not a professional gambler,” I said.
“You’re a dead man, is what you are.”
“Now, hold on—” Blue said.
I silenced Blue with a wave of my hand. I knew I was in no danger from Sheffield at the moment, but the rage was building in his eyes and I could tell he meant to kill me at his first opportunity.
The old laundry wench had come up to the tubs with her buckets of water. Her hair, streaked gray and black, was hanging in her face. She poured the water from the buckets into the caldron, and stooped to throw another stick or two of wood on the fire under the caldron. From the glance I risked at her, she struck me as witchlike.
“Cup of black coffee,” Sheffield said, shaking his head. “What a low grade of trickery. When that little whore who helped you fessed up about that coffee she kept bringing you, I gave her a beating she’d never forget. And every blow had your conscience on it, Greenwood.”
Now the old hag at the laundry fire paused in her toil, whipped her hair out of her face, and looked at me and Blue with beady black eyes. I scarcely recognized her.
“Isn’t that right, Rosa, my love?” Luther Sheffield gestured toward her as if he were an actor in a play.
I could not believe it was her. The young Latin sprite I had once known had aged three years for every one. She took the half-smoked cigarette from her wrinkled lips and gave me a sad little smile, then shot a glare at Sheffield.
“I am too busy for your shit,” she said.
“Busy, busy, busy,” Sheffield said in a singsong voice. “Washing all day, whoring all night. You made her a slut and me a pimp, Greenwood. I’m not proud of it, but how else is a man supposed to make a living when his gambling luck’s been tainted? At least a pimp can get elected lieutenant in the volunteers.”
Rosa refused to take another look at any of us. I felt sick to my stomach, and I could see the same look of self-disgust on Blue’s face when I glanced at him. I wanted to argue with Sheffield. I wanted to convince him that he had chosen his own path in life and that he had no right to blame me for his misfortune. The truth was that I would have to convince myself, first. In the end, all Blue and I could do was to back away until we were out of range of the pocket revolver we suspected Luther Sheffield carried in his pants.
“You’d better watch your back in the heat of battle!” was the last thing Sheffield shouted as we turned away from the pimp and the whore we had created.
THREE DAYS LATER, Kit sent me south with dispatches for Colonel Canby, at Fort Craig. Canby sent me farther south to look for the Confederates, who were supposed to be marching from San Antonio by way of El Paso del Norte. All this involved days of hard riding, which led me to the Confederates in camp at Fort Bliss. I knew better than to get captured by Confederate scouts, so I watched from safe distances, covering my tracks and sneaking around at night, Indian style, when I moved. I estimated the strength of the Confederate brigade at two thousand, five hundred men. With optics supplied by Colonel Canby, I spotted General Sibley, himself, and his second in command, Colonel Thomas Green.
The most peculiar discovery I made was a company of lancers. Yes, lancers! The lances seemed to be all of sixteen feet long, each with a fluttering red pennant, triangular in shape, and a steel blade that glinted in the sunshine. Each steel blade seemed a foot long. There were fifty-two of these Confederate lancers attached to the Fifth Texas Cavalry.
Certainly, I thought, this was all for show. All students of military history knew that lances wielded by charging British horsemen had helped break the Sikhs at Aliwal in the Punjab in 1846. The charge had been glorious, but costly, the lancers suffering forty percent casualties. Certainly General Sibley knew that galloping lancers would be mowed down like wheat by well-trained Union riflemen.
Anyway, with the information I had gathered, I slipped away to the north and rode hard back to Fort Craig.
Twenty-Three
FORT CRAIG, NEW MEXICO FEBRUARY 18, 1862
I woke from a sleep of two and a half days, finding myself in the bunk I had been given in Kit’s room of the officers’ quarters. I stared for a while at the writing table across the room, where Kit and I feverishly studied letters in our spare time. I rose finally, pulled on boots, walked g
roggily to the latrine and back, and tried to enjoy a cold breakfast consisting of jerked meat, hardtack, and water. Afterward, I strolled to the western extremities of the fort to check on the progress on the earthen breastworks Colonel Canby had ordered built to reinforce our defenses. The wind was out of the south today so the dust raised from all the digging drifted mostly away from the interior of the fort.
Fort Craig sprawled across the flats near the west bank of the Rio Grande, at the northern end of the famous Jornada del Muerto—a one-hundred-mile shortcut devoid of water. If not for the excitement of impending war about the fort, this place would have had nothing more to offer than sagebrush, dust, and coyote tracks. A lonely place—dry, stark, and foreboding—it was nonetheless striking. The river could not be seen down in its channel from the fort, but its presence comforted everyone in this parched valley.
Across the river valley, the bank rose abruptly into a bluff that discouraged attack from the east. To the west, foothills of the San Mateo Mountains loomed, pinching the roads and trails together here between river and mountain, making this a logical site for a fort established originally to guard the Chihuahua Road, long known as the Camino Real. In the distant south, the bare rock pinnacles of the Organ Mountains scratched at the horizon.
I climbed to the top of the newly made bulwark at the western edge of the fort to find hundreds of regular soldiers and volunteers busily picking and shoveling at a dry moat being dug around the perimeter. Mule teams pulling larger shovel-like contraptions gouged and scraped and carried tons of gravel and dirt to where it was most needed as the soldiers heaped and shaped it into an earthen bastion, several feet high.
Before this war, the grounds around Fort Craig had remained as the Great Mystery had created them, and an entire enemy battalion could have simply charged across level ground among the adobe barracks and magazines and commissaries. The earthen breastworks being hastily thrown up would vastly improve the defenses of the fort and complicate any enemy attack. Colonel Canby had designed them well, beginning by ordering his soldiers to set a solid row of cottonwood pickets vertically in a narrow trench. The tops of the pickets stood about waist-high to a man. Then a moat was dug in front of this row of pickets, and the dirt and rock dug up from the moat was heaped behind the pickets, sloping sharply upward from the upper stubs of the cottonwoods. An attacker would have to cross the moat, climb onto the top of the row of cottonwood pickets, then scramble up the steep earthen embankment made of loose gravel. This would prove especially difficult with rifles and cannon raining lead and canister among the attackers. Colonel Canby had ordered his men to stay off this rampart once built, lest it should crumble.
I looked with approval upon the preparations, and thought Canby wise to have ordered the improvements. Hunger still gnawed at my stomach after my tidy little breakfast, so I walked over toward the sutler’s store, hoping to find a tin of smoked salmon or oysters to top off my meal. As I came around the magazine, I noticed six soldiers laughing as they worked on some project near the carpenter and blacksmith shops. Veering that way to investigate, I saw that two of the men were using black paint to stain a large, straight cottonwood trunk that had been carved into the shape of a twenty-four-pound howitzer. Three others were patching an old cannon carriage that would, I presumed, carry the fake gun to the bastions in view of the approaching army of Texans. The sixth soldier was actually taking the time with a mallet and chisel to chip away at the muzzle of the wooden replica, making it just deep enough to cast a shadow and complete the deception.
“This will hardly win you boys a job at the armory,” I commented as I walked by.
They looked up at me and grinned.
“Beats the hell out of shoveling that dirt wall out there,” one replied.
I bought my tin of smoked salmon from the sutler, but before I could open it, I heard a cheer go up among the soldiers outside, and heard the bugler signaling “assembly” followed by “boots and saddle.” I rushed outside to find infantrymen running back into the fort with their shovels and picks as cavalry soldiers rushed for the corrals. I grabbed a passing private by the sleeve and asked what the commotion was about.
“The Texans are coming to fight!” he said, pointing to the south. He seemed quite elated at the prospect of a battle.
I rushed around the corner of the sutler’s store, ran past the entrance to the stables, and climbed up on the earthen breastworks at the south end of the fort. This part of the bastion had been completed first, as the Texans were expected to attack from this direction. When I reached the top of the bastion, I found Colonel Canby peering southward through his field glasses, an unlit cigar in his mouth. He was a big man—tall and of ample girth—but healthy and able to lead. I had seen him often with a cigar in his mouth, but had never seen him smoke one. I had, however, seen him light a pipe. He was clean shaven, with a full head of black hair that he never seemed to comb. At forty-four years of age, he was only a year younger than his opponent, the Confederate General H. H. Sibley, who was leading the Texas brigade to challenge Fort Canby. Sibley, known as “the Walking Whiskey Keg,” was the inventor of the the Sibley tent.
Canby gazed out across the desert to the south, as did the officers with him—his second in command, Colonel Benjamin Roberts, volunteer commander Colonel Kit Carson, and the commanders of the artillery companies, Captain Alexander McRae and Captain Robert H. Hall.
Canby slid a glance toward me as I came to Kit’s side. He had an arrogant way about him, but commanded respect. “To your guns, gentlemen,” he said, and the two artillery captains went separate ways, Captain Hall to his two big twenty-four-pounders to the west, and Captain McRae to his battery of twelve-pounders on the bastion to the east of us. “Don’t fire the Mormon guns!” Canby ordered, causing the excited young captains to laugh as they trotted to their positions.
The “Mormon guns” were the wooden dummies the soldiers had been building. They gave the impression that Fort Canby had twice the firepower it really had, for I could see several of the wooden replicas jutting toward the enemy.
As the artillery officers left the embankment, Captain Paddy Graydon, a fellow scout, joined the officers. “Hey, Greenwood,” he said.
“Paddy,” I replied.
“Well, lookee there,” Paddy said, peering south at the line of Texans that had drawn up in battle formation, just out of range of the cannon. Though they were almost a mile away, I could make out a vast commotion along their line of men as they thrust their arms into the air, waved their flags and guidons, and jeered us on to fight.
Meanwhile, Canby’s cavalry and infantry filed out in a long line of battle beginning at the fort, and stretching east. And here things stood, the two armies taunting each other like schoolboys wanting to fight, yet afraid of getting hurt.
Canby lowered his field glasses from his eyes. “I wish I could have seen the look on Sibley’s face the moment he laid eyes on our new battlements.”
Colonel Roberts chuckled. “I searched all over New Mexico for a Sibley tent we could set up as a target for artillery practice,” he said. “Wouldn’t that taunt hell out of the old rascal?”
“Mr. Greenwood, do you recognize their regiments?” He held the glasses toward me, but I did not take them.
“Yes, sir. That’s Sutton’s Seventh Texas Cavalry on their right. The Fifth Texas in the middle, afoot, under Green. And the Fourth Texas under Scurry on their left, with Teel’s light battery on the flank.” I had done quite a little bit of scouting and observing since reporting to Fort Craig.
Canby grunted as if impressed. “Do you agree, Captain Graydon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you think they’ll do, Ben?” Canby asked his second in command.
Colonel Ben Roberts had commanded Fort Canby for a time, and knew the surrounding terrain well. “They won’t make a frontal attack on the fort unless they’re more foolhardy than we think. According to Greenwood and Graydon they’re armed mostly with shotguns and revolvers,
with one company of lancers and only one equipped with rifles. Our rifles would mow them down before they could get in close to the fort. No, they’ll try to draw us out for a battle on the open field. All this is just for show.”
As Roberts spoke, a company of infantrymen trotted into position behind us, protected by the breastworks.
Canby turned to them and bellowed, “Come on up here and let them see you, boys!”
The company captains ordered the men forward and a long line of rifle-wielding Federals joined the officers on the top of the bulwark. One of the privates raised his rifle and gave a yell, and the whole line of Federals joined in. When the yell died down, we could faintly hear the southern breeze carrying the Rebel yells of the Texans to us from a mile away.
Canby chuckled a little. “Where will they attempt to draw us out, Ben?”
“I believe they’ll cross the river and pass behind the mesa, then try to recross above us at the Valverde Ford. Their spy company has reconnoitered the field there. Graydon’s boys have seen their tracks.”
“Kit?”
“I think Ben’s right. I wouldn’t attack this fort, would you?”
“Can we hold them at Valverde Ford?”
“We can and we must,” said Ben Roberts. “But we must secure the bosque where the cottonwoods will give us cover. We cannot let them get into position ahead of us. More important, we must hold this fort, with its supplies. The Texans are just about destitute after that long march from San Antonio, and we must die before we resupply them.”
Canby lifted the glasses back up to his eyes. “Our spy companies are watching them closely. We’ll know when they move. Between Graydon and Greenwood they haven’t made a move yet we didn’t know about.” He lowered the glasses and looked at Paddy and me. “I want you two back out there. You’re to be my eyes and ears. I must know the moment the enemy attempts to flank our fort and move north. There’s a supply train on its way here now from Albuquerque. Seventy wagons. If those supplies fall into the hands of the Confederates, we have failed miserably.”