Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

  “Hold your fire!” Kit repeated. “Form up, boys! Take aim. Wait … Wait …”

  The Texas cavalry was coming at Selden’s men to our left, but angling toward our regiment of volunteers. They seemed to be somewhat uncertain as to the exact location of Hall’s battery, if indeed that was their goal, for the cannon were partially concealed by the timber of the bosque, and hard to locate at a full gallop. Another shot from Teel tore through the branches of the cottonwoods to our right.

  “Wait …” Kit said. “Pick yourself a target, boys …”

  I could see the faces of the Texans now. I could see unshorn locks streaming out from under their dirty hats. I could hear their horses snort as they leapt sand hills and came on. I could see fists gripping pistols pointed skyward. The moment those pistols began to angle down toward our boys, Kit gave the order.

  “Ready … Aim … Fire!” he yelled, in the same calm, commanding tone of voice he had used dozens of times on the training fields.

  The first volley sent horses and riders tumbling, and the charge veered more to our right. I drew my pistol and found a human target. My pony was prancing and the Texans were riding by fast, but I was an instinctive pistol shot, and I killed a man I never met, and whose identity I never knew, with a bullet that tore into his heart and sent him sprawling—a man who probably believed he was fighting for his homeland, the great state of Texas.

  Now a shell from McRae’s six-pounder landed on the other side of the charging Texans, upending a horse and rider in a spew of blood and body parts, driving the startled horses of the Texans even closer to our rifle range.

  Our second rank of riflemen had stepped forward, and knelt to aim.

  “Fire!” Kit yelled again, and the devastating barrage turned the charging Rebel cavalry into a stampeding retreat. Now Duncan’s waiting rifles opened up and his men further scattered the attackers, killing and wounding several of the Rebels, destroying the Texas cavalry assault aimed at Hall’s battery.

  “Reload and move forward!” Kit yelled. “Steady, boys. Steady!”

  Our sweeping maneuver resumed, slowed only a few minutes by the cavalry assault we had turned and now pursued. I was almost disappointed that the Rebel charge had been so easily repulsed, and I began to wonder what in the hell Colonel Green was thinking over there, across the lines. I felt an urge to press forward and finish this battle. We had our wing on the move, just as Canby had planned, and I wanted to beat the Rebels now and end it.

  But at this moment a huge roar of voices rose from our left—like no shout I ever heard—and fifteen hundred Texans leapt up from the old river channel, six hundred yards away. Hall was moving his battery and could not respond, but McRae was ready and fired a twelve-pounder into the Rebel line. I saw a strange thing happen to the Texas charge when the big gun roared. It disappeared. The attackers dropped as if every last one of them had fallen into a hole. After the shell exploded, they leapt back to their feet and came on again.

  I could see Canby’s battle plan crumbling. Our right flank was still strong and still sweeping the Texans around to our left, but our left flank was about to face a hellish firestorm of buckshot and pistol slugs. The Texas cavalry charge that had felt so desperate at the moment now seemed to have been nothing more than a dangerous feint by the Confederates. They had drawn us in pursuit to our right—perhaps farther than Canby had intended—away from the real battle that was about to transpire at McRae’s battery of big guns.

  We swept around to the left as ordered, and now I found myself on the rim of the old river channel, but most of the Texans had cleared out and moved away from our advance. Hall had his battery on the brink of the riverbed, as ordered, but found no one upon whom to fire. Outmaneuvered, we continued our pivoting movement, finding resistance only from a few Texans holed up in the rocks, some of them too badly wounded by earlier fighting to get in on the massive charge to the left, but still alive enough to shoot and reload.

  Amid the roar of cannon and musketry, I rode to the rim of a sand hill and watched the line of Texans sweep onward toward our left flank. Every time McRae’s guns flashed, the Rebels would instantly fall facedown until the artillery shells exploded, then they would leap again and continue their charge. I could do nothing but watch. My orders were to stay with Kit’s unit, and in fact I was out of position now. I should have been down in the old river channel, passing on orders in Spanish to Duncan’s Mexican troops, but there was little to pass along down there, and I was mesmerized by the spectacle of warfare—drawn to it in a worrisome way. I wanted in on it. It made me feel sickeningly denied. I wanted to ride into the maw of it. I feared this feeling, the way a man afraid of high places fears he might leap from one.

  I watched the cannon fire, the Texans drop, and spring again to their feet, the charge closing on the waiting Union rifles. I kept one eye on my unit down in the old river channel, but could not tear my attention away from the imminent bloodbath far to my left.

  And then the clash came at McRae’s battery. The Union gunners fought valiantly and stood their ground as the Pikes Peakers kept up a steady fire. Twice, they drove back charges by the Texans, supported by some companies of the New Mexico volunteers who had come forward to support the artillery. But finally the defenders around McRae’s battery began to fall to the increasing blasts of shotguns ripping buckshot into them at close range. The startled New Mexico volunteers behind McRae’s battery fell back and ran into Plympton’s regulars behind them. Even some of these regulars broke ranks and retreated, leaving McRae and his gunners to die. Only McRae’s men and a few volunteers from Colorado—the Pikes Peakers who had decimated the charge of the lancers—stayed to meet the final wave of Texans wielding scatterguns, Colts, and bowie knives.

  I watched from that sand ridge as slug after slug staggered Captain McRae himself. Yet he remained on his feet and his revolver continued to spew white smoke at enemy targets. At last, he was leaning on the wheel of a howitzer carriage when a young Texas Rebel ran by, pausing just long enough to blast the courageous artillery captain with buckshot.

  And all I could do was watch in horror. I saw our cause at Valverde on the verge of collapse. I saw Colonel Canby’s horse fall under him as he ran among the panicked troops, trying to restore order. A soldier brought him another horse, but the time wasted only made things worse. Volunteers and regulars alike retreated en masse to the river, and the Texans pursued. The Confederates were turning McRae’s cannon now—turning the captured Union guns on the Union soldiers themselves.

  I felt useless. I looked down into the old riverbed to my right and saw the line of soldiers continuing on their successful sweep of the right flank, but I knew we were too far out of position to help in the real battle at the other flank. As I watched helplessly, bullets occasionally thudded into the sand around me from snipers who lobbed errant pistol shots at me beyond effective range. I spotted Kit, still leading his men as ordered, advancing rapidly up the dry river channel. Yet his success on this flank was not enough to save the entire battle. I knew then that we should have forsaken that old channel like the Rio Grande herself had done long ago.

  At last I saw a courier riding furiously toward me and a wild-eyed private stopped at my side in a spray of sand and asked for Colonel Carson.

  “Down there,” I said, pointing. “Are we being called back?”

  The courier nodded and galloped on toward Kit.

  I did not wait for the rest of my unit. I rode immediately toward the melee at the ford. As I galloped I saw Captain Richard S. Lord’s reserve cavalry charging toward the McRae battery in an attempt to recapture it. I rode to join the charge. A grass fire made my mount balk, but I spurred and whipped that terrified beast on through the smoke and flames and crackling stalks of grass. Across the river, I could see Miguel Pino’s volunteers, the officers trying to get the soldiers to cross in support of the cavalry charge, the soldiers reluctant to wade into the battle just as so many other terrified volunteers were scrambling the other way acr
oss the river in retreat.

  As I galloped on, my horse seemingly anxious now to join the mounts of the cavalry charge, I closed in on the flanks of Lord’s riders. One of them saw me coming, and, mistaking me for a Texan, took a shot at me with a revolver, but missed. I shouted my identity and joined the cavalry charge, my own revolver at my shoulder, five shots left in its chambers.

  We charged on toward the artillery, but the front lines of the battle had become blurred, as Texans swarmed into retreating Union soldiers and overran them. We began to ride within range of the Rebels’ shotguns and pistols, but we were riding among our own men, as well, and the confusion kept me from finding a clear target. As I was on the right side of the cavalry charge, there were more enemy soldiers and I began to choose targets, looking for the Texans who might be leveling a shotgun barrel on me and my fellow riders.

  I saw a bloody Confederate soldier drop to his knees, seriously wounded, and let both barrels of his scattergun go before he fell facedown. He was out of deadly range, and so the buckshot from his muzzles scattered, one ball wounding my horse in the rump and causing him to ramp and crow-hop in abject terror. I found myself pulling leather as others charged by me, and managed to get my pony under control, but he favored his right hip, and could not keep up.

  As I fell back among the ranks on my wounded mount, shotgun and pistol and rifle fire began to pour into Lord’s cavalry from every direction. We had ridden right into a crossfire from ally and enemy alike, still short of recapturing McRae’s battery. The leading horses ahead of me began to drop, and I knew that our charge would fail. The vortex of this melee had sucked me in, and I heard lead hum past my head from every angle. Lord’s cavalry was about to suffer decimating losses for naught and my brain swam with fury and desperation.

  My mount, however, seemed to have gotten over the initial shock and pain of his minor hip wound, and I knew I must use what he had left, or die here in a hail of bullets. Something snapped and I went Comanche. My very thoughts started speaking the Comanche language. I saw a circle—the powerful symbol of Comanche existence in all its completeness. The enemy was too great to circle, so I decided to build a ring of hope around my own.

  I loosed a Comanche yell that came as much from the Shadow Land as it did from my own throat, then I dropped to the left side of my horse, leaving my right leg thrown over the cantle of my saddle. I held reins and mane in my right hand, while my left hand held my revolver under the neck of my horse. Around the fringes of Lord’s men I rode, taking my first shot to the east, hitting a Texan in the shoulder and staggering him back, spoiling his aim at me.

  I screamed again and continued northward, my pony instinctively making the curve of the circle for me, unwilling to leave the rest of the cavalry herd. When my pistol pointed north, I saw a lieutenant shouting orders no one heeded. Just as I fired at him my pony jumped a cottonwood limb, throwing off my aim, and my bullet merely grazed the lieutenant’s thigh. I got a good look at this enemy officer’s face.

  My right leg over the saddle was getting tired from holding my weight, but tired meant nothing in Comanche. My mount charged on around the cavalry herd, and men seemed to stop and stare. My circle seemed to gather Lord’s men closer, and they began to cover my circling maneuver with a determined fire.

  I circled to the west, where enemy soldiers were mixed with Union boys, some in hand-to-hand struggles with bayonets and knives. I chose a wild-eyed Texan as my target on the west and shot him through the midsection as he prepared to club a wounded Union regular with his spent shotgun.

  And on around to the south I charged, finding the enemy soldiers drawing back from Lord’s men. I pulled myself back into the saddle and sent my southerly shot skyward, having fired now to each sacred point of the horizon. With a final Comanche yell, I returned to the point where my circle had started, completing the protective spirit-shield I had cast around the cavalry. A bugle sounded retreat far across the river, and Captain Lord gave the order to withdraw. We rode out of that maelstrom of bullets as we had ridden in, pausing only to pick up unhorsed riders. After I made my circle, not a single man reported being struck by a bullet, and many a cavalryman would later credit my circling maneuver as our salvation.

  As we followed the bugled order to retreat, we could still hear the screams of men up the river, where the bloody Texans had begun to massacre the fleeing Union troops as they floundered across the river. Reaching the Rio Grande downstream of the massacre, I found the sandy water streaked with red. Kit arrived, having remounted his men and reluctantly followed the order to retreat. We crossed the river here in safety, away from the horde of Texans who had attacked and overwhelmed our left flank, and captured McRae’s battery. I began to feel the sickening feeling intensify in my stomach. I decided to ride upstream to see if I could reload and cover the retreat of some of our boys.

  Without asking permission of anyone, I turned upstream, and found a relatively safe place behind a row of willows to reload. As snow fell on my sleeves, and stuck there, my trembling fingers fumbled with powder flask, ball, and percussion cap. The sky seemed to have darkened quickly in the last few moments, and I knew nightfall was upon us. The cold and snow would spell misery for the wounded men tonight.

  After reloading, I continued upstream, still listening to shotgun blasts and the screams and pleading of shattered men. Coming around a bend in the river, I saw a Union soldier kneeling and taking aim through the willows. He fired at a Texan across the river, the soldier dropping and groveling on the ground after the shot. Now I recognized this Union sniper as Luther Sheffield.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  Sheffield’s head turned, his crazed eyes locking in on mine. “Now I’m going to kill you,” he said, as he bit the paper end off a load of powder and poured it down the muzzle of his Sharps carbine.

  “Not today,” I replied. I drew my pistol and showed it to him, but it seemed to make no difference to him.

  “Right now.” He pushed a patched ball into the muzzle and drew his ramrod from the holder under the barrel.

  “I will not simply sit here and let you kill me.”

  He glanced up at me, no semblance of human reason left in his eyes. He pulled the ramrod from the barrel, and I charged him. He was trying to cock the Sharps when my boot kicked him in the chest, the weight and power of the horse behind me. Sheffield rolled down the rocky riverbank, losing his hold on the rifle. I rode in between him and the firearm and swooped low to pluck the gun from the ground, Indian style. I heaved it over the willows and into the river.

  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.