Heroes of the Santa Fe Trail

by Randy D. Smith

  In 1851, Secretary of War C. M. Conrad directed Lt. Col. Edwin V. Sumner, 1st Dragoons, to take command of New Mexico with specific commands to take the troops out of the towns and station them nearer the frontier and the Indians. Sumner had been with Kearny during his invasion of New Mexico and selected a site for the major new fort to be near some prairie ponds used by the force in 1846. The site was also located near the junction of the Mountain Branch and Cimarron Cut-off of the Santa Fe Trail. Moreover, it was over a hundred miles from the temptations of Santa Fe and had access to water, hay and timber. The new Fort Union was established next to springs along a pinon-clad mesa on the west side of the valley, about a mile west of the ponds. Built entirely by soldiers to save money the post took on the appearance of a rough-hewn frontier village.

  Throughout the 1850s the fort was never garrisoned with more than a handful of troops, usually one to three companies of infantry, dragoons, or mounted rifleman. It served as a base of operations for the Apache War of 1854, the Ute War of 1855, and was constantly called upon to deploy troops in pursuit of plains Kiowa and Comanche.

  The Civil War started in April, 1861. Fort Union was garrisoned by the Regiment of Mounted Rifles, officered almost entirely by Southerners. When news of the war came, many of the officers immediately resigned and left to join the Confederacy. Major Confederate officers such as George Crittenden, James Longstreet, Richard Ewell and Henry Sibley were all stationed in New Mexico at the outbreak of the war. After a brief period of command chaos, Col. Edward R. S. Canby took command of United States forces in New Mexico.

  Henry H. Sibley became a Brig. General of the Confederacy and immediately made plans for the invasion of New Mexico. Sibley had authorization to raise a brigade of Texas Mounted Rifles and strip stores of Federal arms, ammunition and provisions from Albuquerque and Fort Union. His long-range plans called for a drive into Colorado and California, placing enormous mineral wealth and an outlet to the Pacific Ocean into Confederate hands.

  In July 1861, Lt. Col. John Baylor and three hundred mounted Texans swept across Fort Bliss, at El Paso, Texas and into southern New Mexico. Five hundred Federals surrendered to him at San Augustine Pass after the fall of Fort Fillmore. By August 1, the Confederacy held everything south of the 34th parallel in Arizona and New Mexico. In the meantime, Sibley organized 3 regiments, twenty-five hundred strong, at San Antonio and moved to establish Fort Bliss as a Confederate stronghold. There was the threat of a complete Union route by the Confederacy in the Southwest.

  Fort Union, it was quickly decided, was in no position to withstand a determined invasion by Confederate troops. The crude little village was situated next to a mesa and could be pounded to smithereens by artillery from the heights above. A massive earthen star fort was hastily constructed across the river on a gentle rise to the east. Parapets with angles shaped like arrowheads jutted out two hundred feet from a center square. In these angles were storehouses, barracks and officers’ quarters. The fort was designed to protect magazines and provide a platform for artillery defense. In geometric design the fort resembled an eight-pointed star. The fort was designed to be impregnable but when experienced artillery officers arrived they had a far different opinion. Confederate cannon could fire on the fort from the mesa and have full access to the interior of the defenses. More dangerously, Federal cannon mounted on the parapets could not reach the heights of the mesa. The entire design and location of the post was a boondoggle, doomed to failure if Southern troops could take the mesa and position artillery from the top.

  Sibley’s brigade swept toward Albuquerque and Santa Fe in January 1862. The Texans attempted to by-pass Fort Craig where Canby had assembled four thousand men. Canby managed to block the maneuver on the east side of the Rio Grande Valley. On February 21, 1862, at the Battle of Valverde, badly outnumbered Texans drove Canby’s force of untested volunteers out of the valley and back to Fort Craig for a last ditch defense. Sibley swung north to Albuquerque where the quartermaster detachment burned the military supplies before retreating. On March 5, Santa Fe was evacuated by the Federals as Sibley’s force swept north to occupy every major settlement of New Mexico. Only the fallible star fort remained to defend against a major invasion of Colorado.

  Canby immediately sent out pleas for assistance from Colorado. On the day Santa Fe was evacuated a force of Colorado volunteers commanded by Col. John P. Slough, romantically calling themselves the Pike’s Peakers, assembled on the Arkansas River near Pueblo and struck south on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. Realizing the desperation of the situation, the volunteers made an average of forty miles a day including the always tough, snow-clad Raton Pass between Trinidad, Colorado and Raton, New Mexico. After braving a blizzard and furious dust storm on a ninety-two mile march in thirty-six hours, the force staggered into Fort Union at dusk, March 11, 1862.

  Col. Gabriel R. Paul, commander of Fort Union, met with Slough to plan a defense. Slough wanted to take the offensive and the fight to the Confederates in the mountains to the south. Paul conservatively argued that their orders were to defend the star fort and only harass the Confederates. After a stalemate, the men compared dates of commission into service, which gave Slough the advantage of rank. Slough claimed command of the entire force and laid plans to meet the enemy in the mountain passes. He moved out of the star fort with thirteen hundred of his volunteers, infantry, cavalry and artillery. By March 25, he was at the eastern end of Glorieta Pass on the Santa Fe Trail, a rugged narrow passage through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, preparing for a defense. Major Charles Pyron led a Confederate force toward Glorieta Pass with a reduced force of 4th and 5th Texas cavalry, most of whom were on foot. General Sibley remained behind in Albuquerque and held back part of the 5th Texas to occupy Santa Fe.

  Colonel Slough ordered Major John M. Chivington to reconnoiter the Pass with a force of four hundred infantry and cavalry. On the 26th, Chivington’s force encountered Major Pyron’s Confederates at the west end of Apache Canyon. Pyron opened fire with two mountain howitzers. Chivington split his infantry force up the either side of the canyon and was able to press the artillery back. As the guns were attempting to deploy, Chivington ordered a cavalry charge up the canyon. The Confederates were unable to position the howitzers and fell back. By nightfall Chivington had withdrawn to Pigeon’s Ranch on the east summit of Glorieta Pass.

  Fully expecting a Federal assault, Pyron assembled a defensive position and waited for reinforcements from Lt. Col. W.F. Scurry and the 7th Texas. Scurry’s men made a forced march and reached Pyron very early in the morning of March 27. Scurry waited for a Federal attack throughout the day. When nothing came, he decided to move against the pass in force with seven hundred men.

  Slough had also expected an attack on the 27th and moved his own force of nine hundred up the pass. Chivington was deployed with four hundred Colorado troops to pass over the ridge above the pass and attempt to strike the Confederates from the rear. The forces met at Pigeon’s ranch at mid-morning. The Federals took up a defensive line and the Confederates pounded away at it throughout the day, attempting attacks to the right flank, then the left, then across the face of the entire line. By late afternoon, both forces were exhausted.

  Chivington led his force into the forested rim south of the pass. By early afternoon, he had located the Confederate supply wagons and quartermaster detail at Johnson’s Ranch near Apache Canyon. He swept down on the ranch and seized the supplies. Eighty wagons full of supplies and ammunition were burned and 30 horses killed.

  Scurry’s force was on the verge of overrunning Slough when word came of Chivington’s assault on the supply wagons. Scurry sent a flag of truce to Slough asking for a cease-fire which the Federal commander gladly accepted. The battered Union troops withdrew to Kozlowski’s Ranch, a few miles to the north.

  Loss of the supplies ruined Sibley’s plan and eventually caused a collapse of the entire Southwest Confederate strategy. Sibley withdrew his forces to Albuquerque and eventually was
forced to withdraw in the face of Canby’s superior numbers. The final retreat by battered Texans across rugged, waterless mountains took a heavy toll in causalities.

  Compared to the horrendous battles raging in the east, Glorieta Pass was a minor affair and the Confederacy did not have the manpower or resources to waste on another Southwest invasion when it was so sorely pressed elsewhere. The battle at Glorieta Pass also made a hero of John Chivington, now reviled for his bloody attack upon innocent Cheyenne at Sand Creek. Canby’s successful effort also earned him a new assignment in the East.

  The new commander of Fort Union and the Department of New Mexico became Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton. Carleton began a third Fort Union immediately northwest of the old star fort. This third facility was a very well ordered military post configuration of adobe on stone foundations, with large supply and ordinance facilities. Fort Union was laid out to accommodate four companies of cavalry, infantry or a combination of both. It had a large parade ground, officers’ row, supply depot, expansive stables and 36-bed hospital.

  Reenactors at Fort Union

  Carleton was a tough, aggressive officer with abundant frontier experience. He was an advocate of a strategy of relentless pursuit and punishment for Indians who were raiding extensively to take advantage of Federal shortfalls of troops to protect the Rio Grande Valley. For his principal field commander he chose Colonel Kit Carson of the 1st New Mexico Cavalry. No other man in the history of the West can rival the accomplishments and contributions of Kit Carson. As a mountain man, businessman, Indian expert, rancher and soldier, Carson remains the most overlooked and underrated western figure of the first half of the 19th century.

  In the winter of 1862-63, Carson warred on the Mescalero Apache in south central New Mexico. He had the tribe subjugated by March. By June he was moving against the mighty Navajo nation, a tribe that had proven invincible to Spanish and American attempts to control them. Throughout the summer and autumn, Carson pursued the tribe with dogmatic persistence. Without fighting a single engagement, Carson burned resources, destroyed crops, captured stock and refused to abandon his pursuit of the tribe. After sweeping through the Navajo stronghold at Canon de Chelly, Carson forced resistance to collapse. Eight thousand Navajos capitulated to Carson. Although modern day revisionist historians criticize Carson for brutal tactics, he provided a service to the Southwest that cannot be underrated. His tactics were no different than those eventually adopted by Grant to defeat the Confederacy.

  The Santa Fe Trail carried the heaviest traffic of its history during the Civil War years of 1861-65. These were also the last years of the trail’s importance. In 1866, the Kansas Pacific Railroad reached out from the Missouri River. As the rails advanced west, the eastern end of the trail retreated from railhead to railhead. In 1878 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad construction crossed Raton Pass. Two years later, the first engine entered Santa Fe, ending the need for an overland Santa Fe Trail. For Fort Union, the end was evident. The post served for another ten years but other than chasing occasional bandits, Fort Union functioned as little more than a supply depot. The post was abandoned on February 18, 1891.

  Fort Union today is an eerie jumble of deteriorated walls and ruins maintained by the National Park Service. It can be visited by the public and has an excellent museum.

  Visitors may wander among the ruins, walk above the worn mounds of earth that were once the Union star fort, and gaze across the valley at the ruins of the original buildings under the mesa.

  As one looks toward the northeast from the hospital ruins or to the southeast across the valley, the dim remains of the Santa Fe Trail wheel ruts can be recognized. They are little more than dark lines of vegetation, snaking across a high, still, ancient plateau. If one stands quietly, listens hard and uses just a little imagination, the sound of cracking whips and the dim visage of wagons rolling toward the pinon-clad mesas can almost be perceived.

  Fort Union as it is currently preserved near Wagon Mound, New Mexico

  That is all that is left of the Santa Fe Trail and Fort Union. Time and the advances of civilization have gone on with little use or appreciation for either. Only the stories of the human struggle, crumbling remains of formerly grand structures and a few patterns in the earth remain to remind us of the years of incredible adventure, pain, death, hope and life that were so important to the growth of the American Nation.

  Chapter 22

  Ham Bell, The Quiet Lawman

  Elephant Stable

  An acquaintance of the likes of Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman and Pat Sughrue during Dodge City’s most turbulent era, Hamilton Butler Bell served as a lawman for thirty-six years, during which time he arrested more people for warrants handled than any other western lawman and never shot a man.

  It was eleven o’clock at night in the summer of 1873 when two cattlemen named Ben Hill and Lew Evans confronted each other after a dedication supper at the Drover’s Cottage at the corner of Main Street and Forrest Avenue, Great Bend, Kansas.

  Ham Bell

  “They were in the middle of the intersection, calling each other everything they could lay tongue to,” remembered old-timer Don Dodge sixty-five years later in the Great Bend Herald. Twenty-year-old Great Bend assistant marshal Ham Bell and Dodge were walking the street when they happened upon the confrontation. Bell walked to where the men were trying to “outswear” each other and Dodge stayed back.

  Pretty soon they began drawing their guns,” Dodge remembered. “They were very close together. Ham edged in close too, and every time a gun came up Ham would push it gently aside.

  At length Evans and Hill had emptied themselves of words ‘Now,’ said Ham to Evans. You go that way and don’t look back.’ He said the same thing to Hill, indicating the opposite direction. Both men knew that he meant it and obeyed. Ham stood there for a while to see that the cattlemen had put sufficient distance between them, than came over to where I stood.

  He said: ‘Those two fellows knew they had gone too far with their quarrel and were looking for an excuse to quit. I gave them their excuse.’ That was the way Ham preferred to work.

  Bell remembered the same incident September 8, 1938 in the Dodge City Globe:

  Both men were good friends. Lew frequently had a little more than he could handle. When he was so drunk that he could not handle himself he would usually come to me and say, ‘Ham, I’ve just got to roll and holler. Take me to the edge of town and let me cut loose.’ So I would take him to the edge of town and let him roll and holler until he had sobered up enough to know how to behave himself…The tough men of Great Bend were no harder to handle than the “toughs” of Dodge City. In fact it was usually the buffalo hunters and cowboys who started things popping; and I never found any of either who would not listen to reason if they were sober.

  The scene we envision from the story is a far cry from the two-gun shoot out melodramas so often related of the period. Yet, it is representative of the career of Ford County Sheriff and Deputy U.S. Marshal Ham Bell. Bell was no pushover, however, and enforced his will at the point of a gun on several occasions. Bell gained early notoriety, while serving in Great Bend under Marshal James Gainsford, for his ability to settle a situation. The story goes that a ruffian during a saloon confrontation stated that Bell would not shoot and was bluffing because he was just a “kid.” Ham is said to have looked the fellow straight in the eye and said, “A kid will shoot quicker than a man.” At those words the ruffian backed down and allowed Ham to make his arrest.

  Several years later, while serving as a U.S. Deputy Marshal, Bell served an arrest warrant for murder on a member of a circus troop while it was performing in Dodge City. When he made the arrest several of the troop challenged him. He held them at bay with drawn revolvers while he backed out of the big top with his prisoner and escorted him to jail.

  Bell was also in Dodge City when the gunfight took place that resulted in the death of Ed Masterson, a brother of Bat Masterson. In April,
1878, Jack Wagner was one of a half dozen cowboys off the trail from Texas. There was a ruckus and several shots were fired. Wagner, mortally wounded, staggered into Peacock’s Saloon, found Ham Bell, threw his arms around him and groaned, “Catch me, I’m dying.”

  Bell shoved him away saying, “I can’t help you now.”

  Wagner, dropping down, lay on the floor until some Texans carried him away. The next day he died after confessing that he shot the marshal.

  Wagner’s Boss, a man named Walker, also entered the saloon, his gun arm useless from the fight. He went directly to Bell, who was widely known in town because of his ownership of the Elephant Stable, a popular resting and keeping place for Texas cowboys. Walker offered to surrender his gun to Ham but Bell refused to accept it. Walker threw down his gun and staggered out of the saloon. Even when he wasn’t an official lawman, men gravitated to Bell because they perceived a sense of fairness and cool-headed judgment in him. They did so throughout his life.

  Ham Bell was born July 31, 1853 in Pleasant Valley, Maryland. His mother died when he was twelve weeks old and his father when he was twelve years old. He was raised by his uncle but worked in a clothing store to support himself. In 1872, Ham and a cousin, Dan Bell, decided to try to make their fortune in the West. He worked his way west by repairing watches and clocks. In Kansas, he worked from Lawrence, then to Abilene, Ellsworth and Great Bend (then known as Big Bend) in July 1872. At that moment, Great Bend was at end of track for the Santa Fe Railroad.