 If there was ever a man who suffered by being placed in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was Isaac Lynde. Lynde was born July 27, 1804, in Williamstown, Vermont. He must have been a promising lad, for in 1822 he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The Academy’s records describe him as "an intelligent, sprightly lad," handsome, and well educated,” and he graduated four years later, thirty-second in a class of thirty-eight. Lynde’s early career was typical for the time. He served in a number of frontier posts in the Northwest and the far plains, and took part in the Mexican-American War. Unlike many of his time, though Lynde’s record includes no battles or distinction of any kind, and in thirty-four years of service he had risen only three full grades, to Major. All of his promotions were routine, and based on time of service, his appointments to posts that were out of the way and relatively underutilized. Why this was the case cannot be said with any certainty. Perhaps he was not as promising as his youth had indicated, or perhaps his problem was that he was an infantry man in an Army that was giving all its plum assignments to the cavalry. At any case, by the time the Civil War was brewing, Lynde was at the end of his career and looking forward to retiring on a pension and settling into obscurity. Circumstances, however, were not going to allow Lynde to retire quietly. In June 1861, the Union Army in New Mexico Territory faced a huge dilemma. Many officers and soldiers, including William Loring, the Commander of the Department of New Mexico, had resigned their posts and joined the Confederate Army. This left such a serious shortage of troops that E.R.S. Canby, Loring’s replacement, was forced to close forts created primarily to protect settlers from Indian attack and concentrate men in those forts most likely to lie along the path an invading Confederate army might take. Canby ordered Major Isaac Lynde then in command of the 7th Infantry, to abandon Fort McLane, south of Silver City, and take command of Fort Fillmore, six miles from the town of Mesilla. Canby warned Lynde that his new post was endangered not only by a possible invasion from Texas, but because the civilian population of Mesilla Valley sympathized strongly with the Southern cause. It was a crucial post to hold because it controlled the stage road on which U.S. troops would use to withdraw from Arizona. It was also the last Union holding that officers leaving New Mexico to join the Confederacy passed through, and the first objective for a Confederate advance into New Mexico. Lynde was given full responsibility for the area, including the right to decide whether to attack or ignore El Paso’s Fort Bliss, forty miles to the south and in secessionist hands.  When Major Lynde arrived at his new post in the first week of July, he found it woefully inadequate. Lynde noted that Fort Fillmore was located in a basin surrounded by sand hills, so that artillery could fire down into it. The hills were covered by dense growth that would allow a thousand men to approach undetected to within 500 yards. Next to the fort, a sweep of level land was ideal for attacking cavalry. Furthermore, the fort had no walls or ramparts. Shaped like a U, its open end faced the river and the road from El Paso. Because water had to be carried up from the river, a mile and a half to west, the fort could not stand a siege. He wrote to Canby that he thought the fort was poorly situated for defense, and it was not worth the exertion it would take to hold it.  On July 25, Lynde was forced into action when Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Baylor brought his 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles to Mesilla. Lynde left one company of infantry and the band to hold the fort. He crossed the Rio Grande with a force of three hundred and eighty men and four howitzers. He lined his men up in a cornfield, then sent his aide forward with a white flag to demand that the Confederates surrender. The Confederates replied that if Lynde wanted Mesilla, he was to come and get it. Lynde then fired his howitzers, whose shells burst short in the air. The Mayor of Mesilla came out and reminded Lynde that killing the women and children who sheltered in the town would look very bad and would not win Lynde any allies among the people. After a few exchanges of musket fire, and a small number of casualties on both sides, Lynde withdrew to the fort as evening fell. That night, Lynde decided that the only hope of saving his troops from capture was in abandoning the fort and reaching another military post. He ordered the evacuation, set the fort on fire to stop it and its supplies from falling into enemy hands, and at one in the morning began the march up and over the Organ Mountains to Fort Stanton. Lynde had never taken this road, but he believed that San Augustine was only twenty miles away, just over a pass in the mountains. The march went well until the sun rose on a hot July day. Then the distance proved to be much longer and the water much scarcer than Lynde had believed. As Baylor’s men followed along, they found the road lined with guns, cartridge boxes, and men who were almost dying from fatigue and thirst. The memoirs of Hank Smith, a private soldier on the Confederate side, suggest that many of the men were drunk, and suggests that, unwilling to abandon their supply of whisky, the soldiers filled their canteens with it before the march. Since no other accounts mention this, it’s unlikely that it’s true. When Baylor finally caught up with Lynde at San Augustine Springs, Lynde surrendered his entire command without firing a shot. Twenty-six Union soldiers joined the Confederates, and sixteen chose military imprisonment, becoming prisoners of war. The rest, 410 men, were paroled out of the war. Baylor gave them enough rifles and food to travel through Indian country to Canby's headquarters at Santa Fe, where Lynde's command broke up. Many of the men were sent to New York and spent the war as harbor guards or performed other non-belligerent duties. Lynde himself also journeyed east, to Washington where he was expected to explain his actions. Despite conflicting testimony, he was dismissed from the Army, a scapegoat for Union failure in the southwest during the early days of the war. Lynde spent the next five years fighting this decision, which was finally reversed. He was reinstated to his rank in September 1866. It remains unclear why Lynde surrendered the fort and his command without putting up much of a fight. Perhaps Lynde really harbored sympathies with the Confederates, as some people suggested. Or it could be that Lynde was truly incompetent and indecisive. But perhaps Lynde just lacked the experience and training to make the decisions that his situation required. Whatever the reasons, the old soldier, who was within sight of honorable, pensioned retirement after a long and uneventful career saw his plans go up in smoke in the smoldering ruins of Fort Fillmore. Like the road to San Augustine Springs, his road to retirement was longer and harder than he had expected.  Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and author who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her novel Valverde takes place at the time of Lynde’s abandonment of Fort Fillmore. If you would like to read more about the Battle of Mesilla, click here and here. For more about Lynde and his court marshal, go here and here. If you would like to know more about Ms. Bohnhoff and her books, go to her website.
In 2019 my husband and I were lucky to join a guided tour of World War I Battlefields. The war may have ended over a hundred years ago, but the landscape is still scarred by it, and by the war that followed. These pictures were taken near an area known as Hill 60. If you've ever wondered, the numbers designate meters above sea level. There are four hill 60s, but are in different sectors, so it wasn't confusing to planners during the war. The hill 60 in the Ypres area was subject to a lot of mining, much of it done by Australians. Hundreds of tons of explosives were planted under German emplacements. Much of it (but not all of it) was detonated. When farmers returned to their land after the war, they rebuilt. Some of them didn't know they were rebuilding 90 feet above 20 thousand pounds of unexploded materials. One cache went off in a 1950s thunderstorm, the theory being that plowing had exposed the wires to a lightning strike. Our guide for the day was Ian, a retired soldier from Northern Ireland who has written books on WWI. He led us past old German bunkers, showed us bomb craters 85 feet across, and answered (quite patiently) my thousand questions.  Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. She is currently working on an historical novel set in New Mexico and France during the time of the Pancho Villa Raid and World War I. You can learn more about her books by signing up for her newsletter here, or visiting her website here.
  When Major General H. H. Sibley invaded New Mexico in 1862, he brought with him two companies of lancers. Handsome and chivalrous heirs of medieval knights, the lancers were the darlings of the parade through San Antonio on the day the Army of New Mexico headed west. Bright red flags with white stars snapped from their lances. Lances had been common on Napoleonic battlefields, and were used by Mexican cavalry during the conflicts against the Texans in the 1830s and 1840s. The lances that these two companies carried were war trophies captured from the Mexicans during the Mexican American War thirteen years earlier  Colonel Thomas Green On the day of the Battle for Valverde Ford, Colonel Thomas Green peered across the battlefield and saw uniforms that he couldn't identify. Knowing they weren't Union regulars, he guessed that these men on the Union extreme right were a company of inexperienced New Mexico Volunteers who would break and run from a lancer charge. He turned to the commanders of his two lancer companies, Captains Willis Lang and Jerome McCown, and asked which would like to have the honor of the first charge.  Captain Willis Lafayette Lang The first hand up belonged to the leader of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment's Company B. Captain Willis L. Lang was a rich, 31 year old who owned slaves that worked his plantation near Marlin in Falls County, Texas. Lang quickly organized his men. Minutes later, he gave the signal and his company cantered forward, lowered their lances, and began galloping across the 300 yards that divided his men from the men in the unusual uniforms. The plan called for McCown's company to follow after the Union troops had broken, and the two lancer companies would chase the panicking Union men into the Rio Grande that stood at their back.  Captain Theodore Dodd But Colonel Green was wrong. The men in the strange uniforms were not New Mexican Volunteers. They were Captain Theodore Dodd’s Independent Company of Colorado Volunteers. Dodd's men were a scrappy collection of miners and cowboys who were reputedly low on discipline but high on fighting spirit. They coolly waited until the lancers were within easy range, then fired a volley that unhorsed many of the riders. Their second volley finished the assault. More than half of Lang's men were either killed or wounded, and most of the horses lay dead on the field. Lang himself dragged himself back to the Confederate lines because he was too injured to walk. Lang's charge was the only lancer charge of the American Civil War. The destruction of his company showed that modern firearms had rendered the ten-foot long weapons obsolete. McCown's men, and what remained of Lang's men threw their lances into a heap and burned them. They then rearmed themselves with pistols and shotguns and returned to the fight. The day after the battle, Lang and the rest of the injured Confederate were carried north to the town of Socorro, where they had requisitioned a house and turned it into a hospital. A few days later, depressed and in great pain, he asked his colored servant for his revolver, with which he ended his suffering. Lang and the other Confederate dead were buried in a plot of land near the south end of town that has now become neglected and trash-strewn. The owners do not allow visitors.  This derelict field was once a Confederate Cemetery.  The Charge of Company B of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Valverde Ford is included in Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel, Where Duty Calls, published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing in June 2022. The author is a former New Mexico history teacher who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. You can read more about her and her writing here.
 In Super Hec, which is on sale on Amazon right now, nerdy middle schooler Hector Anderson convinces his mother that the family would be in better shape if they had a dog to walk. The family goes to a shelter and gets a new friend who - - well, I"ll let you read for yourself what happens when the Andersons adopt a dog.  Life imitated life recently, and I got a dog. His name is Panzer, and he is a Rottweiler. My husband and I drove 200 miles to pick him up from a woman in Farmington, New Mexico who specializes in rescuing Rottweilers and other pure breeds. Panzer is between 1 1/2 and 2 years old, and he acts like a goofy teenager most of the time. He has become my shadow and follows me from room to room. For as big as he is, he is surprisingly gentle and loves little things, including our 15 year old cat (who does not return the love) and our 7 year old granddaughter.  One little thing I'm not so sure Panzer loves is Kamikaze the squirrel. We have lots of squirrels up here in the mountains. We have Antelope Squirrels, which look like very small chipmunks. We have Alberts Squirrels, which are dark gray and have lovely, tufted ears. And we have Rock Squirrels, one of which we've named Kamikaze. This particular squirrel acquired his name because he seems to have no fear. He come up to the glass door in the study, stands on his hind legs and looks Panzer directly in the eye. He runs across the road when Panzer and I are out for a walk. Maybe he wants to be another of Panzer's little friends.
 Spring is here, and my husband is very unhappy. What is spring without baseball?
A lot of people are feeling frustrated over the cancellation of sports due to COVID-19 restrictions. Races cancelled. Little League and kid's soccer put on hold. I am mourning the fact that this spring has seen warm, balmy weather, little wind, and I am NOT out on the track with my runners and throwers. It's been a tough spring. But if you can't participate in organized sports, at least you can read about them in Super Hec, book 3 of the Anderson Chronicles. When Mom decides that the Anderson family needs to do a little spring training, she tells everyone that they have to get in shape. Little brother Stevie decides he wants to be a triangle, but signs up for T-ball. Big sister Chloe becomes a yoga enthusiast. Hector has no idea what he should do, but when his friend Eddie loans him an old Superman t-shirt and the guys in the locker room call him Super Geek, Hec decides to become faster than a speeding bully. Can he dig deep and pull up the super powers he needs to run a 5K and win the heart of the girl of his dreams? If you’ve read Tweet Sarts and Jingle Night, you’ll love seeing what Hec and his wacky family are up to in Super Hec. This is reading the whole family can enjoy - and maybe be inspired to do a little spring training of their own. Super Hec will be on sale on Amazon from May 2-9. Download a copy and enjoy!  A fair-weather friend is one who stays with you for the good times, but isn't around to support you through the hard times. We all probably have a fair-weather friend, and I am ashamed to say that I've been one before. I can think of numerous friends I let down when they really needed me. It's not something I'm proud of, and I wish I could go back and fix it. I guess the opposite of a fair-weather friend is a bad-weather friend. That would be someone who is willing to weather the storms of life with you, to be by your side when life is painful. I have a few of these, and they are treasures.  One of my bad-weather friends came and visited me during one of the lowest points in my life. My husband had just lost an election, which meant that he also lost the job that he'd dreamed of for his entire life. It seemed that all our hopes for the future were shattered and we had no idea where to go or how to proceed. Enter said friend, with a boxed amaryllis. The thing about amaryllises, or any other kind of boxed bulb, is they give you something to look forward to. They are hope in a box. But this one had waited too long, and had started to bud while still in the box. It looked pretty hopeless, but it surprised us an bloomed anyway. You can read about it here. But that stubborn little flower wasn't done. It gave us another show after that, which you can read about here.
And now it's blooming again! This is the first time I've ever had a forced bulb repeat. The picture at the top of this post was taken this morning. This is my bad-weather flower. It seemed to know that this was a hard time, and I needed some cheering up. Here's wishing that you have some bad-weather friends and bad-weather flowers to brighten up your darkest days.  I love writing historical fiction. And I really love doing the research. I read over 20 books as I researched The Worst Enemy, the second in my trilogy about the Civil War in New Mexico. One of the books that I really enjoyed was Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis.I couldn't use much of what I read in The Worst Enem; by the time Curtis came to New Mexico in 1862, the Confederates had already lost and were heading back south to Fort Bliss, on their way home to San Antonio. Some of What I read might end up in The Famished Country, the third and final book in my series. Charles Curtis came to New Mexico with the 5th United States Infantry. He stayed here on garrison duty until 1865. Years after his service, Curtis wrote a memoir of his time in New Mexico and Arizona while he was president of Norwich University. His memoir was serialized and published in a New England newspaper. Alan and Donald Gaff compiled those stories into a book that is heavily and informatively footnoted so that the reader knows who Curtis is referring to. There are also lots of pictures and maps to help orient the reader. But what I really found interesting were Curtis' descriptions of places in New Mexico that I could identify. One place he talks about is the aguas termales in the Jemez mountains, hot springs so hot that he claims to have frequently boiled eggs in them.Curtis says that in the river opposite the spring was an island about a hundred feet long and encrusted with sulfur so pure that it would burn when lighted with a match. Anyone who's ever been to the Soda Dam knows exactly what he is talking about. Another interesting episode is the building of winter quarters near Peralta, New Mexico. Curtis describes how the whole command goes into a low area near the river and cuts terrunos (turfs) using axes and spades. The thick, clayey turf is scored with long parallel lines, cut across every nine inches. Each terron was about six inches tall. These were stacked six feet tall, using local mud as mortar to make huts that were the same size as the tents the men used in summer. Stout spars were lashed together and set over the hut and a wall tent was pitched over the top of the spars to make a roof. No windows were necessary since light came through the canvas. Each hut had a wide, open fireplace in the back wall and a wooded door hung on hinges at its front. Curtis says that the alkali soil from which the huts were made dried white and crusty, making the huts look like they were covered with frost. After the hut was made, water was poured on the floors and more dirt added until the floor was a foot higher than the outside. When dry, Curtis said the floor was hard and solid. I have seen lots of pictures of Fort Craig and Fort Union, but this description of how quarters were built really brought the process to life for me.  Jennifer Bohnhoff is an author and educator who lives in the mountains east of Albuquerque. You can read more about her books here.
Ordered West is available from the Albuquerque Public Library, on Amazon, and through independent bookstores.  My critique partners can attest that sometimes I don't remember my own books. They've been through so many revisions that I can't remember what's in them and what's been expunged. I forget sub-plots. I can't remember characters' names. Often I've forgotten whole scenes. This became a bit of a problem for me this past week. I'd had the honor of being asked to guest-write a post on Project Mayhem, a fabulous blog on writing hosted by a wonderful group of Middle Grade authors. I decided to address how little historical details can help readers grasp what a period of time was like, and how even the littlest of details could lead to some big questions. As an example, I decided to use a quirky little historical detail from my Civil War novel, The Bent Reed, which will be published in both paperback and ebook in September. The quirky little historical detail in question is from a laundry scene; After washing Pa and Lijah's shirts, Ma dips them into a vat that contains the water left over from boiling potatoes. Why would she do this, you ask? Because the left-over potato water would have had starch suspended in it, and the starch would have made ironing the shirts easier, and the ironed shirts more crisp. I remember learning this little historical detail in a Civil War era book of hints for housewives and being fascinated. I delight in little bits of trivia like this. I thought that it could lead to many interesting discussions about resource use and thriftiness. As I wrote my post last week, I decided that this detail was a perfect example of how little bits of trivial information about everyday life in an historical period could not only bring that period to life for readers, but help readers ask big questions about how history informs the present day. And so I pulled out my manuscript and began searching for the scene. And this is where I ran into a problem, because the scene wasn't there. I searched using potato and starch and laundry as key words. I found several scenes with laundry, but none involved a vat of potato water or even an iron. Apparently, at some point in my rewriting and revision process I had cut this beloved little bit of trivia from my story and then forgotten about doing so. Thinking about it now, I'm not surprised that I'd thrown out the vat of potato water. Even the most interesting bits of historical trivia have to either move the plot along or illuminate the characters. Although I cannot remember thinking so, I must have decided at some point that the potato water did neither. Now that I think of it, I'm convinced that using the water left over from boiling potatoes show just how frugal Ma was. Like most women in her era, she used a good deal of her own elbow grease and determination to make sure to turn everything to good account. Maybe I threw out the baby with the potato water.   Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and writer who lives in New Mexico. She has written two novels set in the Civil War: The Bent Reed, which takes place at Gettysburg, and Valverde, set in New Mexico. The sequel to Valverde, Glorieta, will be published this spring. This post was originally published July 14, 2014.
 Maryland has one of the most unusual war monuments ever created. It doesn’t show a heroic charge or the valiant defense of a fortified position, but a soldier carrying a bucket and cup.
The battle of Antietam was raging, and the boys from Ohio had been fighting since morning. Their spirits and their energy were waning. But then a 19-year-old private named William McKinley appeared, hauling a bucket of hot coffee. He ladled the steaming brew into the men’s tin cups. They gulped it down and resumed firing. “It was like putting a new regiment in the fight,” their officer recalled. When McKinley ran for president three decades late, people remembered this act of culinary heroism and voted him into office. Coffee was such an important staple in the Union soldiers’ diet that the Army issued about 35 pounds of it to each soldier every year. They drank their hefty ration before marches and after marches, while on patrol, and, as McKinley proved, even during combat. Men ground the beans themselves, often by using their rifle butts to smash them in their tin cups, then brewed it using any water that was available to them. “Settling” the coffee, getting the grounds to sink to the bottom of the vats in which it was boiled, was so important that escaped slaves who were good at it found work as cooks in Union Army camps. The Union blockade assured that most Confederates soldiers were not so lucky. The wide variety of attempts at creating substitutes speak to how desperately they wanted a cup of joe. Southerners tried making coffee substitutes from roasted corn, rye, chopped beets, sweet potatoes, chicory, and all sorts of other things. Although none of these brews were good, enjoying them was a source of patriotic pride. Gen. George Pickett, whose failed charge at Gettysburg is also a source of Southern pride, thanked his wife for the delicious “coffee” she had sent by saying that “no Mocha or Java ever tasted half so good as this rye-sweet-potato blend!” Coffee may not have won the war nor earned McKinley his presidency, but it certainly was one of the small determining factors in both endeavors. Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in rural New Mexico. The soldiers in her Civil War novel, Valverde, drink a lot of coffee. Glorieta, the sequel to Valverde, will come out this spring. A recipe for Union Camp coffee and Confederate acorn coffee will be included in Salt Horse and Rio, a companion cookbook of Civil War recipes that will come out later this year. This article was originally published April 23, 2017. |
ABout Jennifer BohnhoffI am a former middle school teacher who loves travel and history, so it should come as no surprise that many of my books are middle grade historical novels set in beautiful or interesting places. But not all of them. I hope there's one title here that will speak to you personally and deeply. 
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