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Sunday, September 19, 1999
The Army Marched in to Secure New Frontier
By James Abarr
For the Journal
The long column of soldiers, regimental flags flying, shuffled down the dusty main street of Las Vegas, signaling the beginning of a new era for frontier New Mexico.
It was Aug. 15, 1846, and the United States was at war with Mexico. As a result, Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West -- 1,650 strong -- had come to proclaim U.S. sovereignty over the Mexican province of New Mexico.
Kearny's arrival heralded the beginning of what, in the coming years, would be a great influx of Eastern emigrants. As they poured westward over the next two decades in a tide that would add more than a million people to the Southwest by 1870, they depended on the Army to protect them.
"For all its faults, the regular Army was an indispensable player in the American settlement of New Mexico and the Southwest," says Robert Utley, former assistant director of the National Park Service and one of the nation's foremost Indian and Western military historians.
"Without the soldiers, the settlers would not have come."
Kearny's arrival also marked the start of 40 years of sporadic Indian warfare. The scores of new ranchers, miners, farmers, merchants and others were adept at building new lives and fortunes, but they were ill-suited to dealing with the Indian tribes.
"The Army had fought and counseled with Indians since the beginning of the Republic," Utley writes in "The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1890."
"Soldiers had followed the Indian frontier over the Appalachian Mountains, across the prairies and woodlands of the continent's heartland, and finally to the plains, mountains and deserts of the trans-Mississippi West. Now, the Army prepared to play its part in the final extinction of Indian freedom."
Basic strategy
When he arrived in Las Vegas, Kearny climbed to the top of a low adobe house overlooking the plaza to inform the assembled residents that they no longer were Mexican subjects. They were now "American citizens, subject only to the laws of the United States."
Kearny promised them they would be free from Navajo and Apache raiders who had long terrorized the scattered ranches, farms and settlements of New Mexico.
The basic strategy of the military in dealing with hostile tribes involved an ever-changing network of small forts, most of them so weakly manned that they accomplished little. Many were located as much to meet the demands of settlers for protection as they were for strategic concerns. The little garrisons offered more the illusion than the reality of protection.
From such forts -- 20 were built in New Mexico between 1846 and 1872 -- the Army launched mostly small patrols, but sometimes it managed to concentrate enough force to field an offensive column. Some of these were successful, but many failed because the soldiers found it difficult to deal with the rugged landscape, a hostile climate and skillful Indian foes who declined to fight the white soldiers' style of warfare.
By the end of the 1850s, there was a three-way conflict over how to resolve the Indian question. It was a dispute that would continue for decades.
"Many settlers simply wanted to exterminate the tribes," historian Ralph H. Ogle wrote in "Federal Control of the Western Apaches." "The Army favored vigorous campaigns to round up the Indians, collect them near military posts and control them through the War Department. The Indian Bureau in Washington wanted to concentrate the tribes on reservations, keep them away from Anglo society and teach them to farm."
Confederate invasion
In 1861, however, the Indian controversy became secondary when the Civil War flared in the East and the bulk of Army regulars were withdrawn from the Western frontier.
In February 1862, a 3,500-man brigade of Texas cavalry invaded southern New Mexico with the objective of adding New Mexico and Colorado to the Confederacy.
Led by Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley, a former major in the Union Army and one-time commander of Fort Union near Las Vegas, the Confederates easily captured Fort Fillmore, south of present-day Las Cruces, when the outnumbered federal garrison of about 600 men abandoned the post to the invaders and later surrendered.
Pushing up the Rio Grande Valley, Sibley attempted to bypass the federal strongpoint of Fort Craig, garrisoned largely by New Mexico militia regiments and a contingent of Army regulars. The Confederate commander had decided he could not afford the casualties that a frontal attack on the walled and strongly defended fort would cost him.
However, Brig. Gen. Edward R.S. Canby, commanding the nearly 4,000 troops at Craig, had other ideas. He elected to challenge the Texans.
Leaving three companies of infantry to guard the fort, Canby ordered the remainder of his forces into the field. About two miles north of the post, near the base of a long, volcanic escarpment on the east bank of the Rio Grande, the federals attacked. The result was the two-day Battle of Valverde, named for the small, green valley in which it was fought.
At the end of the second day, Sibley's troops routed the federals, who retreated to the safety of Fort Craig. This left the Confederates free to continue their push northward up the Rio Grande. They swept on through Socorro, and in early March 1862, they occupied Albuquerque and Santa Fe. From the territorial capital, they prepared to march on Fort Union, the last federal outpost barring the Confederates from their ultimate objective -- the gold and silver mines of Colorado.
At Fort Union, 700 federal troops dug in to await the Rebel attack.
Aware of the threat to their own territory, officials in Colorado had acted swiftly. A volunteer regiment of infantry and cavalry, dubbed the Pike's Peakers, nearly 1,000 strong, was dispatched to the relief of Fort Union.
When the Coloradans arrived after a 92-mile forced march through a blizzard, it was decided that the Union forces, now totaling about 1,700 men, would not wait for the Rebels but would march south from Fort Union and meet Sibley's Brigade in the field.
On March 26, 1862, the two armies collided at Glorieta Pass, 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe. In a seesaw three-day battle, which some historians have dubbed the "Gettysburg of the West," Sibley's forces were routed.
Sibley began a long retreat down the Rio Grande Valley, and in late April, the remnants of his brigade crossed into Texas. As far as New Mexico was concerned, the Civil War was over.
The California Column
When the Confederate threat to the Southwest had been raised in late 1861, California responded by organizing a brigade of 2,300 volunteers to aid New Mexico, which then included what is now Arizona.
However, by the time the California Column of Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton arrived on the Rio Grande in the summer of 1862, it was too late to fight Rebels. It was unlikely that the South would attempt a new invasion, so the general, responding to increasing civilian demands for protection, focused on the Indian tribes that had taken advantage of the white man's distraction with the Civil War to step up raiding across New Mexico.
Carleton, who had dealt with Indians throughout the West since the 1840s, envisioned a two-pronged campaign. First, he would move against the Mescalero Apaches in southeast New Mexico, and then against the Navajos in the west.
To carry out his campaign, Carleton chose legendary mountain man and scout Christopher "Kit" Carson, now colonel of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry, to lead the effort in the field. Operating from Fort Stanton, near present-day Ruidoso, Carson crushed the overmatched Mescaleros in a three-month campaign. By early 1863, more than 400 had surrendered and been sent to Bosque Redondo, a new reservation at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico.
Turning to the Navajos, Carson defeated the long-feared raiders in six months of hard campaigning. The decisive blow came in January 1864, when Carson's troops invaded Canyon de Chelly, the key Navajo stronghold on the New Mexico-Arizona border. Unnerved by the strike at the very center of their homeland, nearly 8,000 Navajos surrendered over the next few months and were sent to join the Mescaleros at Bosque Redondo.
The Victorio war
With the Navajos and Mescaleros subdued, New Mexico enjoyed a brief respite from Indian warfare until the Army moved against Apache bands in southwest New Mexico and Arizona.
In the 1870s and 1880s, the focal point of military operations against the Apaches was in Arizona, which had been split off from New Mexico as a separate territory in 1863, but soldiers in New Mexico had their share of problems.
One was Victorio, leader of the Warm Springs Apaches, a band of the Mimbres.
Trouble brewed from the moment in late 1877 when the civilian-run Indian Bureau in Washington, against the advice of the military that it could bring an uprising, closed the Warm Springs Apache Reservation, also called Ojo Caliente. This reservation, created in 1859 and a favorite of the Apaches, lay in the heart of Victorio's homeland between the San Mateo Mountains and the Black Range, west of Truth or Consequences.
Victorio was ordered to take his people to the San Carlos Reservation in eastern Arizona, a hot and arid desert site that the mountain-bred Apaches hated.
For a time, Victorio tried to go along with the government, but life at San Carlos was a disaster. One of Victorio's followers remembered it as "that horrible summer. There was nothing but cactus, rattlesnakes, heat, rocks and insects. No game, no edible plants. Many, many of our people died of starvation."
At length, Victorio gathered his followers and fled from San Carlos. He led his people back to Ojo Caliente and pleaded with officials that he be allowed to remain "in the place where we are happy and contented," but his plea was rejected. He then sought to live on the Tularosa Reservation near Reserve and then with the Mescalero Apaches near Fort Stanton, but nothing worked.
Continually chased and harassed by the Army, and his patience at an end, Victorio turned to fight.
On Sept. 4, 1879, he launched a bloody, yearlong war when he led 60 warriors in an attack on a contingent of the 9th Cavalry, the famed Buffalo Soldiers. In the following months, ranging across a vast area that included southern New Mexico, West Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Victorio terrorized settlers and ranchers in attacks that extracted a heavy price.
Even with a full regiment of cavalry and eight companies of infantry, the Army, despite a number of clashes, could not corner the skillful Apache leader. However, with unrelenting pursuit, they did wear him down, and in the fall of 1880, Victorio and his band, weary after a year of fighting and short of food and ammunition, were driven into northern Mexico.
There, in October 1880, in the Tres Castillos Mountains of Chihuahua, the beleaguered Apaches were surrounded by a large force of Mexican soldiers. In a vicious, two-day battle that came down to hand-to-hand fighting when the outnumbered Apaches exhausted their ammunition, Victorio and 70 of his band were killed. The 80 survivors, mainly women and children, were sold into servitude in Mexico.
End of an era
While Victorio had been plaguing the Army in New Mexico, Geronimo, probably the greatest of the Chiricahua war leaders, was living quietly at San Carlos and thoroughly hating it.
Born in about 1829 on the upper headwaters of the Gila River in southwest New Mexico, Geronimo emerged as the most intransigent and feared of the Chiricahuas. Off and on, he had fought the Americans and the Mexicans since 1850, but now, beginning in 1881, he would lead the last efforts of his people to defeat the white tide.
In August 1881, when a medicine man preaching a new religion was killed by soldiers trying to arrest him, Geronimo had had enough of reservation life and the white man's restrictions. He gathered his followers and fled from San Carlos. Over the next five years, he would become the best-known and most feared Indian in the Southwest.
When Geronimo opened the final phase of the Apache struggle, the major military operations against him were in Arizona. Even so, Geronimo raided into southwest New Mexico, and an alarmed Army reactivated several abandoned forts to deal with the crisis.
By late 1886, even the indomitable Geronimo had been worn down by the more than 5,000 troops that had been mustered to defeat him. In September of that year, Geronimo, with only 17 warriors left, surrendered to Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon near the Arizona-New Mexico border and was sent into captivity in Florida. He remained a prisoner of war for 23 years and died of pneumonia at Fort Sill, Okla., in February 1909.
Thus, 40 years after Gen. Kearny arrived in Las Vegas, the Indian wars ended and his promise of peace had been fulfilled.
James Abarr, a member of the Journal staff for 39 years, is a longtime student of New Mexico history.
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