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Happy Birthday, Smokey Bear!

8/9/2023

Smokey Bear was authorized by the US Forest Service on August 9, 1944. His creation was part of the effort to protect forests during WWII when so many of the nation’s firefighters were serving in the armed forces. It took two months before artist Albert Staehle delivered the first poster for the campaign. On it, Smokey wears jeans and a campaign hat while he pours a bucket of water on a campfire. The message reads, "Smokey says – Care will prevent 9 out of 10 forest fires!"

The slogan "Remember ... only YOU can prevent forest fires." Was created by the Wartime Advertising Council (later called the Ad Council) in 1947. The words “forest fires" were replaced with "wildfires" in 2001 in response to a massive outbreak of wildfires in natural areas other than forests and to clarify that the campaign was advocating the prevention of unplanned fires, not controlled burns or prescribed fires for conservation purposes.

In May 1950, firefighters quelling the Capitan Cap Fire in New Mexico’s Lincoln National found a five-pound, three-month old American black bear cub high up in a tree. Because his paws and hind legs had been burned, the little bear was named Hotfoot Teddy. He was sent to Santa Fe, to live in the home of New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Ranger Ray Bell and his family while a local veterinarian helped him recover. After that, he lived with the assistant director of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish while the state game warden negotiated the cub to the Forest Service if he could be used in their conservation and wildfire prevention publicity programs. Somewhere along the line, the cub was renamed Smokey. At the end of June, 1950 the recovered, four-month old cub was flown to Washington, D.C., where a special exhibit was created for him in the National Zoo.

Smokey Bear lived at the National Zoo for 26 years. During that time he received millions of visitors. So many letters were addressed to him that he got his own ZIP code (20252) in 1964. Because Smokey and his mate, Goldie Bear, never had cubs, the zoo added "Little Smokey" to their cage in 1971. Interestingly, Little Smokey was also an orphaned bear cub from the Lincoln Forest.

Smokey Bear officially "retired" from his role as living icon on May 2, 1975, and Little Smokey was renamed Smokey Bear II. A year later, Smokey died. His body was returned to Capitan, New Mexico, where he is buried in the State Historical Park.

Author Jennifer Bohnhoff is a New Mexico native who remembers visiting Smokey Bear at the National Zoo when she was a child. Her book Summer of the Bombers tells a fictionalized story of the Cerro Grande fire that ravaged Los Alamos, New Mexico in 2000. An avid hiker, she asks you to help keep Smokey's memory by preventing fires while out in nature.

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Manuel Antonio Chaves, the Little Lion of New Mexico

8/3/2023

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Chavez in 1848

Manuel Antonio Chaves is an interesting person not only because he lived and was influential in three eras of New Mexico’s history. Born at the end of the Spanish colonial period, he grew to manhood in the rough and wild days of the Santa Fe trade when Mexico ruled the land. He spent his mature years during the period when New Mexico was a territory of the United States. He personally witnessed and was often an important part of almost every major historical event which occurred during the period, including the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition, the Mexican War, rebellion and uprisings, the Civil War, and skirmishes with Utes, Navajos, and Apache. Although just 5 feet 7 inches and 140 pounds, Chaves was such a tough fighter that he was called El Leoncito, The Little Lion. Although not everyone today honors him, he was a man of his time who worked tirelessly for his people.

An early map of Atrisco

Chaves was born October 18, 1818 in the village of Atrisco, which is now a part of Albuquerque. His family claimed lineal descendant from one of the Spanish conquistadores that came to New Mexico with Don Juan de Oñate in 1598. At the time of his birth, At that time, New Mexico was still a part of the Spanish Empire, an isolated northern border considered far from civilization. Hispanics and Native American tribes clashed, often violently in this frontier. As he likely spent most of his childhood tending the family’s sheep and working in their fields, he would have needed to keep a watchful eye out for raiding Navajos, who often stole livestock and children.

Navajos weren’t the only raiders in New Mexico at the time. Ranchers mounted raids against the Navajo, Ute, Apache and Comanche, stealing children to trade or sell as slaves. Chaves joined his first raiding party when he was only 16 years old. It was a disaster. His group, which had approximately fifty men, accidentally stumbled into a ceremonial gathering of thousands of Navajos in what was probably Canyon de Chelly. Chaves was wounded by arrows seven times. The only survivor, he managed to make the nearly 200-mile trek home with no provisions. Chaves’ bravery led him to be a leader whenever ranchers needed someone to organize attacks or to retrieve stolen sheep or horses. In 1851, Chaves led 600 men on a raid “to pursue the Navajo Nation to their extermination or complete surrender.” Although there is no record of how that particular campaign went, it is clear that over the years Chaves and his men killed dozens of Ute and Apache and stole horses, jewelry, blankets, weapons and slaves. Chaves’ household servants had been captured from the Comanches while still children.

Manuel Armijo

By the time he was nineteen, New Mexico had become a province of an independent Mexico and the handsome, steely eyed and soft-voiced Chavez had gained a reputation as a capable fighter and fearless under fire. He was a crack shot with his Hawken rifle and a cunning scout. In August 1837, he was under the command of his cousin Manuel Armijo, who was putting down an uprising in Santa Fe that resulted in the murder of the governor, Albino Perez. Armijo was appointed to take Perez’ place and within two years, Chaves was commissioned as an ensign in the rural mounted militia.

In 1841, he rejoined his cousin when New Mexico was threatened by a group of invading Texans. Governor Armijo and his militiamen managed to capture the hapless armed force known as the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition and Chaves, serving as secretary and interpreter, most likely negotiated the surrender of about half of the Texans, who were sent south to Mexican prisons. The Mexican government awarded Chaves the cross of honor for his service.

Stephen Watts Kearny

Chaves was prepared to fight as a militia officer for Armijo in 1846, when the United States invaded during the Mexican-American War, but this time, Armijo surrendered and the Battle of Santa Fe ended before it began. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny managed to take New Mexico without firing a shot. Chaves was jailed, on charges that he was attempting to foment an uprising in Santa Fe, but he was later acquitted of all charges.

In 1847, Chaves swore an oath of allegiance to the United States. He enlisted as a private in the U.S. “Emergency Brigade” that put down the Taos Revolt during which another New Mexican Governor, this time Charles Bent, was murdered. During the Siege of Pueblo de Taos, Chaves used his rifle butt to club down a Puebloan who was fighting with his captain, Ceran St. Vrain.

Once the U.S. was firmly in control of the territory, they found themselves just as beleaguered by Native incursions as the Spanish and Mexican regimes before them. In 1851, Chaves took part in military campaigns, leading an expedition against the Navajos. He was commissioned to Captain to lead one of six companies during the Ute-Jicarilla War in 1855. By 1860, he held the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Second New Mexico Mounted Volunteers, a unit that was formed to fight the Navajos and Apache. In 1861, he was placed in command of Fort Fauntleroy (later renamed Fort Wingate.) During his tenure there, a fight caused by allegations of cheating during a horse race led to several Navajo deaths. a fight between his men and visiting Navajos in which a number of Navajos were killed. Kit Carson arrested Chaves after the fight, but since the circumstances of the killings unclear and Confederate forces were threatening New Mexico’s southern border, Colonel Edward Canby suspended the house arrest after two months.

In 1862, Confederate General Henry Sibley led a force of Texans into New Mexico and Chaves found himself battling Texans once again. He and his militia fought at the battle of Valverde. Then, at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, he guided Major John Chivington's force to the Confederate supply train, where regular Union soldiers and New Mexico militia destroyed the supplies, forcing the Confederates to retreat back to Texas.

Manuel Chaves later in life.

After the Civil War, he was honorably discharged after allegations that he had sold Army wagons for his profit were dismissed. It seems from the record that Americans were constantly attempting to tarnish Chaves’ reputation but never had adequate proof to do so. But while the Civil War was over in New Mexico, the battle between Natives and Europeans was not. In 1863, a group of over 100 Navajos raided the Rio Grande valley near Socorro. They killed many people and drove off herds of cattle, horses, and sheep. When they took captive a son of Matías Contreras, a prominent local citizen, Chaves gathered a posse of 15 civilians. The Navajos attacked Chaves's group at a spring called Ojo de la Mónica. Chaves, recognized as the best marksman, fired his own rifle and also some of the others' while they reloaded for him. By nightfall, only Chaves and two other men remained alive and all their mounts had been killed. At dawn, with only three bullets left, the three men found that the Navajos had disappeared. Chaves later called the battle at Ojo de la Mónica his greatest fight. It most certainly helped result in the Long Walk, which ended the Indian wars in most of New Mexico.
In 1876, he relocated to San Mateo, New Mexico, where he ranched. He built a home within a hundred feet of oak trees where he had rested in his flight from Canyon de Chelly as a wounded teenager. Immediately behind those trees he built a family chapel where he was buried after he died in January 1889. The blind and frail 70-year-old was laid to rest with two musket balls in his pocket.

Manuel Antonio Chaves lived a tumultuous life, during which his beloved land was held by the Spanish Empire, the Mexican Republic and the United States. Both Native Americans and the Confederacy contested for the territory. Throughout it all, Chaves served as a staunch defender of his people, regardless of what flag he fought under.

Manuel Chaves plays a large part in the Battle of Glorieta and a small part in The Worst Enemy, Jennifer Bohnhoff's middle grade historical novel. The Worst Enemy is book two of a trilogy set in New Mexico during the Civil War. The author is available for class visits and talks to groups who are interested in the history behind the story.

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Cian's Scones

7/27/2023

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A replica of the Stone of Scone outside Scone Palace.

A recent cold, foggy morning inspired me to dig through my recipe box for the yellowed and tattered newspaper clipping that has a recipe for Traditional Irish Scones. I have no idea how long I've had this clipping, but if I had to guess, it's 20 years old.

Scones themselves are much older. They probably originated in Scotland in the earth 16th century. The first scones were most likely made with oats and baked on a griddle (or, as the Scots say, a girdle.)

How they acquired their name has been lost in the fog of time. Some have suggested that their name it comes from the Dutch word ‘schoonbrot’, which means beautiful bread. Others believe the name is related to The Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny,. This is a rock that Kings of Scotland were seated on when they were crowned, and it has an interesting history of its own. Perhaps both the food and the rock were both named after the town of Scone, which is close to Perth.

Anna, the Duchess of Bedford (1788 – 1861) is credited with making scones a part of the English tradition of Afternoon Tea when she ordered the servants to bring tea and some sweet breads one afternoon. The treats included scones, and they became popular throughout the United Kingdom and, eventually, the world.

The tattered and yellow clipping calls this variation Traditional Irish Scones. I have no idea how authentic the recipe is, but when I pulled it out, it occurred to me that the main character in my next novel, The Worst Enemy, is Irish. Would Cian's mam, I wondered, have made something similar to these for his breakfast? Cian learned to cook from his Mam, and this skill helped ingratiate himself to his fellow prospectors in Colorado's gold mining frenzy and his fellow soldiers in the Union Army. If Cian cooked scones in either place, it likely would have been in a dry, floured pan over a medium-low heat, turning once to brown both sides. You can try it this way, too!

If you don't have buttermilk, you can make an acceptable substitute by adding 3 TBS of Vinegar to 3/4 cup of milk and waiting for it to clabber, a fancy word for develop lumps.

Traditional Irish Scones

3 cups all purpose flour
3 TBS sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 TBS chilled unsalted butter
1 egg, beaten to blend
¾ cup plus 3 TBS buttermilk
1/3 cup dried currants (raisins, dried cranberries or dried blueberries can take the place of the currants.)

Preheat oven to 425

Mix flour, sugar, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.

Slice butter into pats and drop them all over the flour mixture. Use a fork, a pastry cutter, or your fingers to blend in the butter until the mixture resembles a fine meal.

Mix in fruit pieces.
Mix in egg and enough buttermilk to form a soft dough.

Turn the dough out onto a flour surface. Pat the dough into three ¾ thick rounds. Cut each round into quarters. Or you can use a round cookie cutter to cut out the scones.

Transfer scones to a lightly floured baking sheet. Brush tops with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until scones are golden brown and cooked through, between 18-20 minutes.

Makes 1 dozen scones.

Cian is a character in The Worst Enemy, book 2 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande, a trilogy of middle grade historical novels set in New Mexico during the American Civil War. Book 1, Where Duty Calls, came out in 2022. The third book, The Famished Country, will come out in 2024.

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Gabriel Paul, Civil War Hero

7/20/2023

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Just about anyone can name a general from the Civil War. Gabriel René Paul’s name doesn’t come as readily as others, but he was an important figure and his story is an interesting one.

Gabriel René Paul was born on March 22, 1813, in St. Louis, Missouri, a city that had been founded by his maternal grandfather, the prosperous fur trader René-Auguste Chouteau, Jr. His father, Rene Paul, was a military engineer who had served as an officer in Napoleon’s army and who was wounded at Trafalgar. Paul followed in his father’s military footsteps, entering the United States Military Academy, commonly known as West Point, when he was only 16 years old. He graduated in the middle of the Class of 1834, ranked 18th of the 36 graduates.

After graduating, Paul was commissioned as a lieutenant in the 7th United States Infantry. He served in Florida in the last 1830s and early 1840s, where he participated in the Seminole Wars. Like many of the other men who would become generals during the Civil War, he served under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War. He saw battle action at Fort Brown, Monterrey, Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Churubusco, Molino del Rey and Chapultepac. He was given an honorary promotion, or brevet, to the rank of major when he led a storming party and captured a Mexican army flag during the battle of Chapultepac. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Paul served in several different frontier army posts and participated in several expeditions up the Rio Grande and into Utah.

When the Civil War began, Paul was a Major in the 8th Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Union in the New Mexico Territory. In December 1861 he was appointed Colonel of the 4th New Mexico Volunteers and commander of the fort. After the Battle of Valverde, Colonel E.R.S. Canby, the commander of all Union troops in New Mexico, sent a message to Paul telling him to hold the fort at all costs. However, when Colonel John Potts Slough arrived with his Colorado volunteers, he announced that he outranked Paul because he had been commissioned a few days earlier than Paul had. Slough deliberately ignored Canby’s orders and proceeded south with his troops, who engaged in the Battle of Glorieta, leaving Paul to guard the fort.

A portrait taken after Gettysburg. If you look closely, it is clear that his eye socket is empty.

In late May 1862, Paul mustered out of the New Mexico Volunteers, and holding the rank of Major in the Regular Army, was sent east to work on the defenses of Washington. While he was stationed there, his wife went to the White House and pleaded President Lincoln for a promotion for her husband. Lincoln documented the meeting with a note that read “Today Mrs. Major Paul calls and urges appointment of her husband as a Brigadier [General]. She is a saucy woman and will keep tormenting me until I may have to do it.” Less than two weeks later, President Lincoln signed Gabriel Paul’s commission as a Brigadier General of volunteers. He was given the assignment of brigade commander in the First Army Corps, and he led troops at Fredericksburg and at Chancellorsville.

At Gettysburg, he was transferred to a brigade in 2nd Division, where he led the soldiers of the 16th Maine, 13th Massachusetts, 94th and 104th New York, and 107th Pennsylvania Infantries as they threw up makeshift barricades and entrenchments in front of the Lutheran Seminary building during the early parts of the first day of fighting. When some 8,000 Confederates backed with 16 cannons began making significant inroads into the Union First Corps’s exposed right flank along a prominent rise of ground known as Oak Hill Ridge, the Second Corps was called in. When Henry Baxter’s brigade was nearly out of ammunition, Gabriel Paul’s brigade was brought forward to take its place. It was soon after his men had arrived on Oak Hill that he was struck in the head by a bullet that entered behind his right eye, passed through his head, and exited through his left eye socket. The men who watched him fall believed that Paul had been killed and left him where he lay as the battle intensified. Late in the afternoon, the First Corps and Eleventh Corps troops surrounding Paul’s brigade broke and began to retreat. Baxter’s and Paul’s men followed. When the division reformed on Cemetery Hill, it was discovered that 1,667 of the approximately 2,500 men who had gone into battle that morning had become casualties. Paul was one of the 776 men killed, wounded, or missing from his brigade.

When soldiers returned to the field to search for living among the dead, they found Paul and carried him to a field hospital in the rear. Later, Paul was brevetted a Brigadier General in the Regular Army “For Gallant and Meritorious Service at the Battle of Gettysburg.” He was completely blind and his sense of smell and hearing were seriously impaired for the rest of his life, and he suffered frequent headaches and seizures, yet he refused to leave the service. He worked as Deputy Governor of the Soldier’s Home near Washington, and then was the administrator of the Military Asylum at Harrodsburg, Kentucky. On December 20, 1866, he finally retired.

For the next twenty-two years, Gabriel Paul’s health deteriorated. During the final years of his life, seizures were an almost daily occurrence, and he suffered up to six epileptic attacks a day. When he died on May 5, 1886 twenty-two years, ten months, and five days after the battle of Gettysburg, his doctor pronounced that the cause of death was an “epileptiform convulsion, the result of a wound received at the battle of Gettysburg, Pa.” He was buried in Section 1, Lot 16 of Arlington National Cemetery.

The Battle of Gettysburg claimed the lives of more generals than any other battle in the American Civil War. Six general officers fell either dead or fatally wounded at both Antietam and Franklin. By most accounts, nine generals were either killed or listed among the mortally wounded at Gettysburg. The casualties include four Union (John Reynolds, Samuel Zook, Stephen Weed, Elon Farnsworth) and five Confederates (Lewis Armistead, Paul Semmes, William Barksdale, Dorsey Pender, Richard Garnett.) If we include Strong Vincent, who fell atop Little Round Top and who was posthumously honored with a promotion to brigadier general, the number climbs to ten, five for each side. I think that Gabriel Paul should be included in this list, even though he didn’t die until much later. He represents the countless many whose lives ended due to the Civil War, even if they didn’t die.

Gabriel Rene Paul is a background character in The Worst Enemy, book 2 of Jennifer Bohnhoff's trilogy Rebels Along the Rio Grande. Written for middle grade readers and above, the trilogy tells the story of the Civil War in New Mexico Territory. It is published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing. Contact the publisher for class set discounts and teacher's guides.

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The Half Dime

7/13/2023

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Coins aren’t common currency anymore. In these days of debit and credit cards, most people don’t carry a pocketful of change. When they do, they find that cashiers don’t know what to do with coins. Computerized cash registers have made counting back change a lost skill.

But most of us still recognize coins. Pennies and dimes haven’t changed much in the past few years. The nickel got a bit of an update, with a larger, half forward facing Thomas Jefferson replacing the old side view. Quarters frequently change, with women and states replacing the eagle. Even with these changes of design, most Americans over the age of five can identify their country’s coinage.
America had some coins in the past that are no longer minted. The half dime is one of them.

The half dime, or half disme (pronounced deem), was a silver coin that had a value of five cents. It might have been the first coin struck by the United States Mint under the Coinage Act of 1792; some experts consider those first strikes to be practice pieces and therefore not real coins. It is a small coin, half the size of a ten-cent piece. Through the years, the pictures on the half dime changed. Early coins had a picture of the face of Liberty, her hair flowing backwards as if she were making great progress. By the 1830s, Liberty’s face had been replaced by a full Liberty seated on a rock (Plymouth Rock? I found no sources that told me.) and holding a shield. 84,828,478 Seated Liberty half dimes were struck for circulation in the mints at Philadelphia, San Francisco and New Orleans between 1837 and 1873.

In the 1860s, the use of nickel to replace silver in coinage became a popular lobbying point. In 1865m tge treasury became producing a new three cent coin made out of a copper-nickel alloy. The following year, a five cent pieces was added to American coinage. This new coin was larger than the silver half dime and less easily lost, making it the more popular of the two redundant coins. The half dime was discontinued in 1873.

In The Worst Enemy, Raul Atencio gives Jemmy Martin a half dime as payment for caring for his brother Arsenio. Since the Confederate soldiers and their teamsters had not been paid since leaving Texas, a half dime was a rare and useful gift. Later in the book, Jemmy uses that coin to pay for something that might save another boy’s life.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle and high school teacher who now writes novels for adults and middle grade readers.

The Worst Enemy, is book 2 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande, her middle grade trilogy set in New Mexico during the Civil War. It is scheduled for release by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, on August 15, 2023 but can be preordered on Bookshop.

The first book in the series, Where Duty Calls, was a finalist for both the New Mexico Presswomen's Zia Award and the Western Writers of America's Spur Award. It can be ordered in paperback or ebook here. A free, downloadable teachers guide is available through the publisher.

Book three, tentatively titled The Famished Country, will be published in spring of 2024.

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Civil War Gravestones

7/6/2023

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Some of the people in Where Duty Calls and and The Worst Enemy, my two historical novels set in the Civil War in New Mexico, are fictitious, and therefore have no grave markers. They were never born, and they will never die as long as readers keep them alive.

But other characters in both stories were real people, with lives that began long before I wrote about them - lives that were filled with events that I didn't include in my novels. After the war was over, many of them went on to do interesting things -- some good, some bad. Some continued to live in the public eye, while others dropped into obscure, private lives.

William Marshall, who has a small role in my novel The Worst Enemy, was the last man killed on the first day of the battle that raged on March 20 in Apache Canyon. He had survived the day's fighting and was collecting discarded Confederate weapons and disabling them when one went of, mortally wounding him. Exactly what weapon and how he died is up for debate. Click here if you want to read more about why. Marshall's grave marker is in the cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Frederick Wade and John Norvell, who both served with the fictional Jemmy Martin, survived the war and went on to live long and full lives. Both were newspaper editors and writers, and their memories, published in newspaper accounts, helped give life to my novels. They appear in all three of the books in this series: Where Duty Calls, The Worst Enemy (scheduled to be published August 2023), and The Famished Country (scheduled to be published spring 2024).

Pedro Baca shows up in Where Duty Calls and will also appear in the final book of the trilogy. The real Pedro Baca was married to a different woman than my fictionalize character, and he had many more children. He was an outstanding member of the Socorro community and is buried within the church there.

After resigning his commission with the Colorado Volunteers after the Battle of Valverde, John P. Slough was first given command of a brigade in the Shenandoah Valley, then was appointed brigadier general of volunteers and finally became the military governor of Alexandria, Virginia. When the war ended, President Andrew Johnson, appointed Slough to serve as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Court. Slough returned to New Mexico and helped fund the Civil War monument in Santa Fe that was recently torn down. He also was instrumental in the creation of the Veteran's Cemetery in Santa Fe.

Slough had a fiery temper and a keen sense of justice that often put him at odds with the locals. His decisions to accept Pueblo Indians as U. S. citizens who could testify in his court and his attacks on the peonage system led for some to call for his removal. Slough died when he got into a disagreement with a member of the Territorial Legislative Council, who shot him in a pool hall argument. He is buried in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Another character with a fiery temper was James "Paddy" Graydon, who appears in Where Duty Calls. Three years after the Civil War, Graydon was involved in controlling the Mescalero Apaches in southern New Mexico. After Surgeon John Whitlock accused him of needlessly killing a number of braves, the two ended up dueling at Fort Stanton. Graydon was killed, and Whitlock was then killed by Graydon's men. He was buried at Fort Stanton, but twenty-four years later his remains were reinterred at the Federal Cemetery in Santa Fe that Slough helped create.

Like most Federal Veteran's Cemeteries, the one in Santa Fe contains row upon row of white headstones, giving it a look as uniform as a rank of soldiers. But there are a few exceptions. The most unique marker does not come from the Civil War period, but it deserves notice. It belongs to a Private named Dennis O’Leary, who died at Fort Wingate in 1901. According to local legend, O'Leary himself carved the statue, then committed suicide on the date he had inscribed. However, military records say he died of tuberculosis, a common illness of the period.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and writer who lives in New Mexico. You can read more about her and her books here.

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Buried in a Bacon Box

6/29/2023

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Towards the end of The Bent Reed, my middle grade novel set in Gettysburg during the Civil War, the main character finds her father working in his carpentry shop. He is sawing planks to make coffins, using the wood from Rose's Wood Lot, a small field that stood near what became known as Devil's Den. The woodlot had been the scene of fierce fighting. Most of the trees had lost all their leaves. Many had never recovered. Pa laughs sadly and says that it is fitting for men to be buried in wood that had died the same day as they. As Pa works, others are exhuming bodies hastily buried in fields and roadsides throughout the area. A month after this scene, President Lincoln will come to dedicate a new cemetery. He gives the Gettysburg Address at that dedication.

Not every Union soldier got the benefit of being buried in a coffin. In I Married A Soldier, a memoir of Army life in the Southwest during the 1850s-1870s, Lydia Spencer Lane explains that wood was so scarce that it was customary to forgo burying coffins. She was told in Santa Fe that bodies were carried to the church in one, but removed and rolled in old blankets before being consigned to the tomb. Thus, coffins could be used and reused indefinitely.

This was not acceptable to people who had been raised in the East, who did everything within their power to create coffins for their dead. Ms. Lane explains that, when there was not enough lumber at hand to make a coffin, old packing boxes and commissary boxes were brought into requisition. She recalled one officer who died at a post in Texas and was carried to his final resting place in a very rough coffin which had marked, in great black letters along the side, "200 lbs. bacon."

In Where Duty Calls, the first book in Rebels Along the Rio Grande, my trilogy set in New Mexico during the Civil War, a Confederate soldier who dies on pneumonia while on the campaign trail is buried in a coffin created from packing crates. William Kemp, the dead soldier, is an actual person, and the record of his death is part of the official records of Sibley's campaign to capture the west and its gold.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of historical fiction novels for middle school readers through adults. Book two of Rebels Along the Rio Grande will be published by Artemesia Publishing in August, 2023 and is available for preorder on Bookshop.org.

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Pike's Peak or Bust!

6/22/2023

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The Pike's Peak Gold Rush, which began a decade after the California Gold Rush, attracted a hundred thousand miners and prospectors to the Pike's Peak Country of western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory. These men were known as the "fifty-niners."

Gold was first discovered a decade earlier, in July, 1848 by a group of Cherokee on their way to California over the Cherokee Trail. The Cherokee did not stop to work the stream beds, but they reported their find to members of their tribe. William Green Russell, a Georgian who was married to a Cherokee woman, was working in the California Gold fields when he heard about the reported gold in the Pikes Peak region. He organized a party that included his two brothers and six companions, and in February 1858 they set out for Colorado. They finally hit pay dirt in July at the mouth of Little Dry Creek on the South Platte, in the present-day Denver suburb of Englewood.

By the middle of the 1860s, most of the easy to get gold was gone. Placer deposits and shallow hard-rock mines were depleted. Men were giving up by the droves, selling their claims to richer men and companies who had the resources to acquire the materials required to go after ore that was deposited deeper in the ground or to chemically extract gold from mixed ore. Although there was still plenty of gold in them thar hills, the rush was over.

Jennifer Bohnhoff' is an educator and author who lives in the mountains east of Abuquerque, New Mexico. Her next novel, The Worst Enemy, begins in the gold fields of Colorado. It is now available as to preorder, and will be released on August 15th.

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William Marshall: A Case Study in the Difficulty of Writing Accurate Historical FICTION

6/15/2023

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Historical fiction, when written well, has equal parts truth and fiction to it. It not only tells a good story, but helps readers understand a period in time. One of the most interesting and satisfying parts of writing historical fiction is researching the history and portraying it accurately. This can also be one of the most frustrating parts of writing historical fiction, especially when readers point out inaccuracies and anachronisms that in a work. It's happened to me many times. Sometimes the reader is wrong, like the editor who told me that there were no Germans in France during World War II. More often, though, they are right, and I have slipped something in that isn't accurate.

Sometimes, however, the problem isn't with a misinformed reader or a gaffe on my part. Sometimes the problem goes farther back than either the writer or the reader. Such is the case with the cause of death for William F. Marshall.

There are parts of William F. Marshall's story that we do know. We do know, for instance, that he was elected by the men in Company F of the Colorado Volunteers to the position of 2nd Lieutenant. Several of my readers have questioned this, but it is true that companies elected their officers during this period. We know that he was not universally liked by his men. Some diaries left by men call him imperious or haughty. Finally, we know that he was the last man to die during the Battle of Apache Canyon, the first day and portion of the Battle for Glorieta Pass.

Historical records provide us the names of both the first and the last man shot in the Battle of Apache Canyon. The first was the company's captain, Samuel Cook, who received a buck and ball wound to the thigh. He continued to fight and was injured several times before being carried off the field. He recovered from his wounds.

William Marshall was not so lucky. We know that he was the last man shot on that fateful day. We know that he was carried to Pigeon's Ranch, where a hospital had been established. We know that he died early in the morning of the next day. But the details of his death are sketchy.

The reason the details are sketchy are that the sources we have for this battle are largely military reports or the memoirs of those who were there. Military reports may be very good at telling us who was on the right flank and who led a particular assault. They tell us who died, but they don't include the particulars of that death. Memoirs often tell the particulars, or at least what the veteran who wrote them remembers. One source that I read said that Marshall was supervising the destruction of confederate arms abandoned on the battlefield when he picked up a rifle by its muzzle and hit it against a stump in order to bend the barrel. The gun discharged into his stomach and he died just before dawn of the next day. However, another account tells it differently. According to this man, Marshall took a handgun from a Texas prisoner when it discharged in his face. Face or stomach? Handgun or rifle? While a writer may never be sure, he or she had to choose one story or the other to include in his or her work of historical fiction.

William Marshall's death is part of the story that Jennifer Bohnhoff includes in The Worst Enemy, book two of the series Rebels Along The Rio Grande, which tells the story of the Confederate invasion of New Mexico. It is scheduled to be released on August 15, 2023 and is available for preorder now.

A New Mexico native and former New Mexico History teacher, Mrs. Bohnhoff hopes she chose the right set of circumstances for the 2nd Lieutenant's death.

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The Charge of the Mule Brigade

6/8/2023

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Mules were the backbone of both Confederate and Union Armies during the American Civil War. They pulled the supply wagons, the limbers and caisons for cannons, and the ambulances. One of the reasons that the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico failed was that they couldn't keep enough mules to hauls supplies. Many of the Confederate Army's mules were lost to theft by Indians and locals, and death due to starvation and disease.

The night before the battle of Valverde, a Union spy named Paddy Graydon managed to spook the Confederate's mules, who stampeded down to the Rio Grande. There Union soldiers managed to round them up.

In Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life, Civil War veteran John D. Billings shares the story of another mule stampede. During the night of Oct. 28, 1863, Union General John White Geary and Confederate General James Longstreet were fighting at Wauhatchie, Tennessee. The din or battle unnerved about two hundred mules, who stampeded into a body of Rebels commanded by Wade Hampton. The rebels thought they were being attacked by cavalry and fell back.

To commemorate this incident, one Union soldier penned a poem based on Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade.

Charge of the mule brigade

Half a mile, half a mile,
Half a mile onward,
Right through the Georgia troops
Broke the two hundred.
“Forward the Mule Brigade!”
“Charge for the Rebs!” they neighed.
Straight for the Georgia troops
Broke the two hundred.

“Forward the Mule Brigade!”
Was there a mule dismayed?
Not when the long ears felt
All their ropes sundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to make Rebs fly.
On! to the Georgia troops
Broke the two hundred.

Mules to the right of them,
Mules to the left of them,
Mules behind them
Pawed, neighed, and thundered.
Breaking their own confines,
Breaking through Longstreet's lines
Into the Georgia troops,
Stormed the two hundred.

Wild all their eyes did glare,
Whisked all their tails in air
Scattering the chivalry there,
While all the world wondered.
Not a mule back bestraddled,
Yet how they all skedaddled--
Fled every Georgian,
Unsabred, unsaddled,
Scattered and sundered!
How they were routed there
By the two hundred!

Mules to the right of them,
Mules to the left of them,
Mules behind them
Pawed, neighed, and thundered;
Followed by hoof and head
Full many a hero fled,
Fain in the last ditch dead,
Back from an ass's jaw
All that was left of them,--
Left by the two hundred.

When can their glory fade?
Oh, the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Mule Brigade,
Long-eared two hundred!

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a Native New Mexican who writes in the high, thin air of the Sandia Mountains. Mules play an important role in Where Duty Calls, her historical novel set in New Mexico during the Civil War. Glorieta. The second book in the series, The Worst Enemy the sequel to Where Duty Calls, will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, in August, 2023.

This article was originally posted April 27, 2017.

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