Category: New Mexico History

Oral History as Distant Memory

3/30/2025

Back when I was writing The Last Song of the Swan, my novel retelling the Beowulf story in both the distant past and the present, one of the major questions I wanted to answer is whether oral history remembered events from long ago. I wondered then if Grendel, the monster in Beowulf, could be a Neanderthal.

I am now working on In the Shadow of Sunrise, a novel set in New Mexico 11,000-10,000 years ago, during the time that the people now called Folsom man wandered the area, and the same question, in a slightly different context, has popped up again.

Can old stories remember events from thousands of years before their telling?

In his book Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs asks the same question. He points out that many Native American oral traditions refer to giant, dangerous animals who walked the world when it was new. In most of those stories, there are heroes who are monster slayers, or who drive the beasts into the underworld so that man can live unmolested by them. Childs wonders if these heroes are the Clovis people, who left evidence that they were here 12,000–11,000 years ago. If so, the monsters might be the megafauna that lived in North America at the close of the last Ice Age. He wonders, particularly, if these monsters aren't the mammoths and mastodons that roamed the grasslands.

Childs shares a story shared in 1934 in American Anthropology. According to a Penobscot legend from Maine, there was once a hero named Snowy Owl who discovered that watercourses were drying up. When he sought the reason why, he found great animals with backs like hills and long teeth, who drank for half a day at a time. Snowy Owl shot them all, restoring water to the valley.

Backs like hills? Long teeth? Could these monsters be mammoths or mastodons?

In 1781, Thomas Jefferson learned of a Mr. Stanley, who had been taken prisoner by Indians, but escaped and returned east. Stanley had been taken somewhere west of the Continental Divide, where he claimed to have seen bones bigger than any known living land animal. The natives described the animal these bones came from, and said that it still existed in the northern part of the territory. Mr. Stanley believed they were elephants.

In the 1700s, fossils were often said to be the remains of animals that had not gotten on the ark when Noah had save the earth's fauna from the great flood. But what if some of them had survived? What if they still existed in the wilds of the American west?

Jefferson had already heard of a place named Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, where mammoth bones had been found. The bones were just that: bones. They had not been mineralized into fossils.

Jefferson was so intrigued that he sent Meriwether Lewis to Big Bone Lick in 1803, with the purpose of collecting some of the mysterious bones. He was so pleased with the results that a year later, he sent Lewis and William Clark west in the hopes of finding more than just the bones of these magnificent creatures.

Drawing of an early 19th century attempt at a mammoth restoration. Note the upside-down tusks. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

While the Lewis and Clark expedition didn't find any mammoths, the animals were still in the memory of the people they encountered. More than a century later, an anthropologist collecting stories in the Northwest was still hearing about them. In a footnote to his 1918 study, James Teit wrote that he was told of a very large animal, built like a hairy elephant, These animals, he said, had not been seen for several generations. but their bones were still found occasionally .

Several generations? Since mammoths are thought to have gone extinct approximately 11,000 years ago, those are very long generations, indeed. But longer still is the memory of the people who were still telling stories about these creatures.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle school and high school history and language arts teacher. She lives in the mountains of central New Mexico and write historical and contemporary fiction for middle grade through adult readers. She is available to lecture on the history behind her stories.

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Who were the Folsom People?

12/5/2024

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Wild Horse Arroyo, location of the Folsom Site

Between about 10800 BCE and 10200 BCE, a group of people lived throughout much of central North America. These Paleo-Indians left enough artifacts that archaeologists were able to recognize that their culture was distinct from that which came before them, and that which came after. The discovery of Folsom artifacts, particularly those first found at Wild Horse Arroyo, are significant enough to site have been called the "discovery that changed American archaeology."

It took early scientists quite a while to figure out what they were finding.

Biblical tradition asserted that the world was created 6,000 years ago. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in geology and paleontology began to challenge that date. European discoveries of human bones and artifacts in association with extinct Pleistocene mammals proved that human beings existed side by side with Ice Age mammals. However, most scientific experts thought that humans had been in North America for only a few thousand years. Ales Hrdlicka and William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution suggested that no one was in the Americas 3,000 years ago. Any scientist who advocated a longer antiquity for inhabitants of the Americas risked being blackballed from academia.

Carl Schwachheim, left, and Barnum Brown are examining the first Folsom point found in situ, circa 1927. Jesse D. Figgins snapped the photo. (Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science)

In 1922, two amateur naturalists, a Raton blacksmith named Carl Schwachheim, and a banker named Fred Howarth visited a section of Wild Horse Arroyo where a cowboy named George McJunkin had discovered extremely large bison bones after a monsoon in August of 1908. McJunkin had recognized that these bones were not from modern bison, and had tried to interest paleontologists in the site, but hadn’t been able to convince anyone to visit the site before he died in 1922.

Schwachheim and Howarth collected bones and took them to Jesse Figgins, director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and to paleontologist Harold Cook. Figgins and Cook were already proponents of human antiquity in the New World. Cook had found a human tooth among the bones of extinct mammals at Snake Creek in Nebraska in 1922. Two years later, excavators at Lone Wolf Creek in Texas reported to Figgins that they had found three projectile points associated with a bison skeleton. However, since Schwachheim and Howarth had presented nothing but bison bones to Figgins and Cook, the two scientists didn’t believe there was anything significant about the site in Wild Horse Arroyo.

In 1926, v Schwachheim, and Howarth took Figgins and Cook to the Folsom site. They began excavations, with the intention of collecting full skeletons of bison antiquus to take back to the museum. But on August 29, 1927, they found man-made stone projectile points in the same layers, and therefore of the same age as, the bison bones. Other archaeologists were invited to see the findings in situ and they agreed that the bison bones and the spear point were contemporaneous.

However, no one could pinpoint when bison antiquus had lived. At a December 1927 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, archaeologists speculated that the evidence from the Folsom site suggested that man had arrived in the New World 15 to 20 thousand years ago. Speculation about the exact antiquity of Folsom continued until radiocarbon dating came into use in the 1950s and the bison bones at the site could be dated more precisely. Even without an exact date, the Folsom point demonstrated conclusively that human beings were in North America during the last ice age—thousands of years earlier than Hrdliča's 3,000-year limit. Hrdlička, angry at having his theory criticized, managed to make Figgins and Cook were not invited to any of the seven academic symposia devoted to American antiquity which took place from 1927 to 1937.

The points Figgins and Cook discovered at the Folsom Site in Wildhorse Arroyo were distinctive. Figgins called the culture which created these points the Folsom Culture, named after the small town of Folsom, New Mexico which was nearby. Soon after the Folsom Culture was discovered, an earlier group, the Clovis Culture, was found. Folsom projectiles have a concavity running down their center that Clovis projectiles did not have. Statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates suggest that the earliest Folsom dates overlap with the latest Clovis dates, so the two technologies overlapped for multiple generations. This points to Folsom Culture being an outgrowth of Clovis Culture. It might be that the extinction of most species of megafauna marks the boundary between Clovis and Folsom Cultures. Clovis artifacts are associated with mammoth bones, while Folsom people hunted Bison antiquus, which became extinct about the same time that Folsom evolved into cultures relying on greater dependence on smaller animals and plant foods. It is unknown whether the extinctions of megafauna were caused by climate change or by over-hunting, or both.

Although the Folsom culture is associated with the kill site in Northern New Mexico, it flourished over a large area on the Great Plains, in what is now both the United States and Canada, eastward as far as what is now Illinois and westward into the Rocky Mountains. There is even one Folsom site in Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas.

In the Shadow of Sunrise, Jennifer Bohnhoff's middle grade novel about the Folsom People in what is now New Mexico, Texas and Colorado will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing in April 2. It can be preordered in ebook and paperback here.

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Disaster Leads to Stunning Archaeological Discovery

11/28/2024

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On August 28, 1908, disaster struck Folsom, a ranching and farming town on the plains in north- eastern New Mexico. It was late summer, which is often monsoon season. The hay had been cut and harvested. Leftover stalks littered the fields.

Monsoons can bring stunning amounts of water to the parched plains in short amounts of time. A cloudburst on August 28 dumped 14”, an unusually large amount of rain, even for monsoon season. The waters collected the hay stalks and other debris and swept it down the arroyos and rivers that are often dry. When the water reached the small railroad bridges that crossed those arroyos and dry rivers, the debris got caught and created impromptu dams. Under pressure from the swelling river, the dams gave way, resulting in a huge surge of water.

Residents up river from Folsom realized that the town was in danger. They called Sarah J. "Sally" Rooke, the Folsom telephone operator to warn of the coming danger. In 1908, telephones were not yet automated and connections could only be made by hand, sticking wires into holes for each telephone. Rooke stayed at her station and continued to call as many residents as she could to alert them to the impending wall of water. When the flood hit the town, Ms. Rooke was washed away. She was one of 18 people who died in the disaster.

On the day after the flood, a cowboy named George McJunkin was riding the range above the ravaged town of Folsom. He was looking for cattle that had gotten bogged down in the mud and fences that had been broken down. Instead, he found something that eventually changed the story of humans in North America.

McJunkin had been born a slave on a ranch in Midway, Texas. He was born in about 1856 and was probably around 9 years old when the Civil War began. Although he never received a formal education, he had a quick and inquisitive mind. Other cowboys taught him to read and write, speak Spanish, and play the fiddle and guitar. An enterprising man, when he was freed at the end of the war, he worked many jobs, including hunting buffalo and working on ranches in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. He also spent some time loading bison bones onto boxcars.

Hundreds of thousands of bison had been shot during the time that the railroads were coming west. Their carcasses were left to rot where they had fallen. When it was discovered that bone meal strengthens concrete, many of those piles of bison bones were loaded into boxcars and shipped east, to New York City, where the first skyscrapers were beginning to rise.

At the time of the Folsom flood, McJunkin was the foreman of the Crowfoot ranch, which lay upstream from Folsom. McJunkin was riding through Wild Horse Arroyo when he saw some bones sticking out of the soil some 11 feet below the surface of the mesa. McJunkin knew that the deeper an object was found, the older they usually were. These bones must be older than the ones typically found on the high-country grasslands. Furthermore, they were much larger than any bison bones he’d seen during his time loading bones onto railroad cars. Recognizing the significance of the find, McJunkin left the site undisturbed. He spent the rest of his life trying to get scientists to visit Wild Horse Arroyo. In 1918 he sent sample bones and a lance point to the Denver Museum of Natural History, who sent paleontologist Harold Cook to look at them the following spring. Cook and McJunkin did some exploratory digging but found nothing that Cook deemed important. When McJunkin died in 1922, the site was still considered just a place where bison antiquus had died.

Scientists already knew that giant bison, far larger than modern ones, once roamed North America. Their bones were first discovered at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in the 1850s. One of the many megafaunas, or giant animals that existed during the Pleistocene period, or the last Ice Age, Bison Antiquus could reach 7.4 ft tall, be 15 ft long, and weigh up to 3,501 lbs. Their horns were considerably larger than those of living American bison and differed in shape, some looking more like longhorn cattle than the small, curved horns of modern bison. These giant beasts had a large range. Specimens of Bison antiquus have been discovered in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. They went extinct sometime around 9,000 years B.C.E.

Four years after McJunkin’s death, the Colorado Museum of Natural History sent a crew of paleontologists to Wild Horse Arroyo with the intention of excavating a prehistoric Bison skeleton for their museum. Instead, they discovered something that changed archaeologist's understanding of man in the North American hemisphere. The Museum workers found stone projectile points that are now known as “Folsom points.” One, actually embedded in a rib, proved that the points were left by men who were hunting bison these bison. By studying the site and the angles of the cut marks in the bones, scientists have been able to determine that ancient men herded the bison into the arroyo, then attacked them from above. Scientists have found the skeletons of 32 bison. Cut marks in the bones show that some of the choicest meats where butchered off the animals, but much was left in place.

An illustration by Ian Bristow, from Jennifer Bohnhoff's In the Shadow of Sunrise, a middle grade novel about the Folsom people.

Until this discovery, scientists had believed that men had crossed the Bering Strait into North America about 2,000 b.c.e. George McJunkin’s find showed that man was here 7,000 years earlier than previously thought. Since then, Folsom points have been found in many places in North America, and other finds have pushed back man’s arrival on the continent even further.

Sally Rooke and George McJunkin are both buried in the Folsom Cemetery, which occupies a windy and isolated hill outside of town. The town itself has a museum that is housed in an old mercantile. The Historical Society sponsors trips to the Folsom Site twice a year.

A former New Mexico History teacher, Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of a number of books for middle grade through adult readers, many of which are set in her home state of New Mexico. Her latest book, In the Shadow of Sunrise, tells the story of Folsom people in Colorado, Texas and New Mexico and includes the Folsom site. It will be published in April 2025 and is available for preorder.

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The Colorado Contribution to New Mexico During the Civil War

10/11/2024

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Colorado came to be a territory of the United States in a piecemeal fashion. Its present-day eastern and central areas were part of the Louisiana Purchase, made 1803, while the western portion of the state was acquired during the Mexican War (1846-1848) from Mexico, who had gained control over the area in 1833 when it had won its independence from Spain. Even after all the land was firmly under U.S. control, the area was divided. Parts of present-day Colorado were included in New Mexico and Utah Territories, both organized in 1850. Others were of Kansas and Nebraska Territories, organized in 1854.

Until the late 1850s, when gold was discovered in Russellville Gulch in present-day Douglas County and along Cherry Creek near where it joins with the Platte River, Colorado only had about 7,500 settlers. By 1859, an estimated 100,000 men had entered the gold fields. Because many of these men came from Georgia and other southern states, the area had a distinctive lean towards southern sympathies.

Five days before Abraham Lincoln became President on 4 March 1861, his predecessor, James Buchanan signed the law that made Colorado a Territory. Two weeks after his inauguration Lincoln, who wanted a pro-Union governor for Colorado Territory, proposed William Gilpin to the Senate, who appointed him, but then recessed before passing any appropriations for the new Territory. Gilpin was left with just a $1,500 contingency fund with which to run the new territory. He arrived in Denver before June and toured the mining camps, discovering that the boom had passed and a new census showed only about 25,000 people including 4,000 white females and 89 Negroes in the territory, most of them concentrated in the Clear Creek, Boulder, and South Park mining districts and in the small but growing town of Denver.

On April 12, Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumter. The U.S. government’s focus shifted to calling up troop in the east, and the needs of Colorado was forgotten. Concerned that the Confederacy would try to conquer the territory for its vast mineral deposits as well as its strategic location, Gilpin began organizing the Territorial military that summer. Morton C. Fisher, his newly appointed Purchasing Agent, was immediately sent out to buy and collect all the arms he could, both supply the new troops and to keep those arms out of the hands of Southern sympathizers. Not having the money to organize and equip the men, Gilpin issued $375,000 worth of drafts, known as Gilpin Scrip, directly upon the United States Secretary of the Treasury. These drafts were used as money in the Territory and were passed along to Washington, who honored payment for some of the script at a value considerably below face value. A year later, this illegal action would cost him his position as Territorial Governor, and he was forced to resign the next year.

Gilpin’s intent was to use the money to create the First Regiment of volunteers consisting of ten companies. He appointed John P. Slough to be its Colonel and Samuel F. Tappan, to be Lt. Colonel. Gilpin had planned for John M. Chivington, an elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to be the Chaplain, but when Chivington turned down the appointment and requested a fighting commission, he was made Major. The troops were ordered to Camp Weld, a new installation being built about two miles south of Denver. Gilpin’s Script paid for the building of Camp Weld as well as uniforms, arms, supplies and equipment for the troops.

One of the first men to join Gilpin’s new militia was Samuel H. Cook, who convinced 80 men from the gold fields of the South Clear Creek mining district to join with him on a ride to Kansas, where they would join the Union Army and serve under General James Lane. As they were passing through Denver in the middle of August, Cook met Governor Gilpin, who persuaded him to remain in Colorado and join what was becoming the First Regiment of the Colorado Volunteers. Cook’s men became a mounted troop, designated as Company F.

In December of 1861, news came from New Mexico that Confederate troops under H.H. Sibley had invaded over the Texas border, two companies of Colorado Volunteers set out for New Mexico. These companies were Captain Theodore H. Dodd’s Independent Company, Colorado Volunteers and Captain James H. Ford’s Independent Company, Colorado Volunteers. Dodd’s Company was sent to Fort Craig, where they resisted a charge of lancers in the battle of Valverde on February 21, 1862. Ford’s Company was sent to Taos and then Santa Fe before being ordered back to Ft. Union.

On February 14, 1862 orders arrived that asked that all available forces that Colorado could spare be sent south to aid Colonel Canby, the commander of the Department of War in New Mexico. On February 22, the main body of the First Colorado Regiment, including Captain Cook’s Co. F, set out amid intense snow storms. They arrived at Fort Union on March 10th and were joined the next day by Ford’s Company. Slough would march most of these men south, where they participated in the Battle of Glorieta before joining forces with Canby to shepherd the retreating Confederates back to their own territory, ensuring that both New Mexico and Colorado Territories would remain in Union hands.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's trilogy, Rebels Along the Rio Grande, is written for middle grade readers who are interested in the Civil War in New Mexico.

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Annabel Lee Watkins: A Character in The Famished Country

8/9/2024

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The Famished Country, book 3 in Rebels Along the Rio Grande, my trilogy of middle grade historical novels set in New Mexico Territory during the American Civil War, comes out this fall. If you've read Where Duty Calls or The Worst Enemy, books 1 and 2, you will know that, while the main characters are fictitious, many of the background and supporting characters are not. I developed my main characters by blending the experiences of several real people, so that my characters could be all the places I wanted them to be, but I set them into a world that was real and filled with real people. Here is an introduction to one of the principal characters and the real and fictious people in her life:

Annabel Lee Watkins is the beautiful teenaged daughter of a Major in the Union Army. Her mother died giving birth to her, and her father has been dragging her from fort to fort her whole life.

Annabel's father named her after the last poem Edgar Allen Poe wrote. It was about his great love for a dead woman, and has always made Annabel wonder if her father actually sees her, or the shadow of her dead mother.

Annabel despises the rustic forts of the American West and longs to be sent back east to a finishing school where she will learn the manners and make the connections that will allow her to live a much more refined life.

When Colonel Canby, the Commandant of all Union troops in New Mexico Territory learns that a Confederate Force is advancing towards Fort Craig, he sends the fort's women and children north to keep them out of harm's way. Wagons filled with these refugees lumber up the Camino Real, the old Spanish Royal Road that stretched up the Rio Grande. Some of the riders are bound for Fort Union, the great supply depot that guards the final stretches of the Santa Fe Trail, but Annabel's journey ends in Santa Fe.

Annabel is the reason that Raul Atencio becomes trapped in Fort Craig in book 1, Where Duty Calls. The nephew of a prominent Socorro merchant, Raul is delivering corn to the fort when he first lays eyes on the girl that he only knows as 'The Major's Golden Daughter.' Smitten with the haughty beauty, Raul finds excuses to visit the fort. On one of those visits, he finds Annabel gone and the Confederates present. He is forced to stay, and ends up participating in the Battle of Valverde as a runner for Kit Carson, the famous mountain man and scout who is leading a group of New Mexico Volunteers.

In Santa Fe, Annabel finds shelter in the home of Louisa Canby, the wife of Colonel Canby. Annabel expects life with the officer's wife to be a whirl of balls, teas, and social events, but Mrs. Canby is a practical woman and has turned her home into a hospital for wounded Confederates as a way to keep Santa Fe from being looted.

Annabel sees Jemmy Martin, a wounded Confederate, as a way out of her circumstances. But Jemmy, and fate, has different plans for her.

Annabel Lee
By Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
   I and my Annabel Lee--
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
   Went envying her and me--
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we--
   Of many far wiser than we--
And neither the angels in Heaven above
   Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea--
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a retired teacher who now writes historical and contemporary fiction for middle grade and adult readers.

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New Mexico, the Famished Country

5/30/2024

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At the beginning of the Civil War, Henry Hopkins Sibley had a grandiose plan. Because he'd been stationed at Fernando de Taos and at Fort Union, he thought he knew the territory of New Mexico. But he didn't know it well enough, and his grandiose plan failed. He later blamed his failure not on his incompetence or lack of knowledge, but on the land itself.

When the Civil War broke out, Sibley was serving under the commander of the department, Colonel William W. Loring, a career Army officer who'd lost an arm during the Mexican American War. Loring, whose home state was Florida, had already sent his own letter of resignation to Washington when Sibley, a Louisiana native, tendered his resignation to him an April 28th.

Impatient to leave because of circulating rumors of high-ranking commissions in the Confederate Army, Sibley asked for “the authority to leave this Dept. immediately.”

When May 31 arrived and he still had not heard anything, he took seven days’ leave of absence, bid his command goodbye, and left Fort Union on the next stage. He accepted an appointment to colonel in the Confederate army. By June, 1861, Sibley had been promoted to brigadier general.

Sibley's promotion was prompted by his visit to Richmond, Virginia, where he persuaded Confederate President Jefferson Davis that he could sweep through New Mexico and seize Colorado and California for the Confederacy.This bold plan would not only increase the size of the Confederacy, but it would achieve the dream of Manifest Destiny, making the rebel nation stretch from sea to shining sea. Gold from Colorado and California's gold fields would enrich the Southern war chest, and the deep water port of Los Angeles would help supply the army with materiel that was not getting through the Atlantic Union blockade. The proposal sounded too good to be true, especially since Sibley claimed he could do it without encumbering the Confederacy for his supplies. Sibley claimed that he could live off the land during his trek through New Mexico. He believed there was enough water, fodder for the animals, and food for his men. He had heard enough New Mexicans complain about the army presence that he believed New Mexicans would willingly support a Confederate army. Sibley was wrong, both about the amount of supplies available and about the people's opinion of the Confederate army that he led.

Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley's supply problems began long before he entered New Mexico Territory. Sibley began assembling his small army in San Antonio late in the summer of 1861. He quickly discovered that outfitting his troops would take far longer than he had anticipated. There were few available weapons, uniforms and military supplies for his 2,500 man force, which he had named The Army of New Mexico, and so when the men finally began the trek to the territories, many did so wearing their civilian clothing and carrying whatever weapons they had brought from home. This included squirrel guns, shotguns, and ancient blunderbusses.

One of the reasons Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley was so wrong about New Mexico's ability to sustain his army was a matter of timing. Since outfitting and training his troops took far longer than expected, Sibley's force didn’t begin the 600-mile march across Texas until November. The landscape of West Texas provided very little grass and other forage for the Army's horses and mules, and there was so little water that Sibley's line of march spaced itself so that each regiment was a full day behind the next, allowing the springs to recover somewhat between regiments. Still, the going was rough and the army began losing hoof stock.

After the war, William Lott Davidson, a 24-year old private in Company A of the 5th Texas, recalled that “‘Chill November’s surly blast’ came down upon us as we camped upon the Nueces. There was no timber to shield us and the wind swept at us, and the boys on guard at night must have had a hard time pacing their beats on the cold frozen ground. We were tasting the bitter delights and mournful realities of a soldier’s life. We are now for the first time beginning to find out that we are engaged in no child’s play.”

map by Matt Bohnhoff

Nothing became easier after The Army of New Mexico entered New Mexico Territory. The weather at New Mexico's higher elevations was brutal. Firsthand accounts recall repeatedly waking up covered in snow. Davidson wrote that the sentries "paced in rags and tatters, their weary best through the long tedious hours of the night, with bare-feet over the frozen and ice-covered ground. ‘Found dead on post’ and ‘froze to death last night’ were sounds we often heard, as a poor, stiff, lifeless body was brought into camp, the dauntless spirit having gone to sleep, to rest with the brave.”

Blizzards, combined with too little food and forage led to illness among both men and beast. Measles and pneumonia ran rampant through the troops.

map by Matt Bohnhoff, from Where Duty Calls

After failing to take Fort Craig in a frontal assault, Sibley decided to execute what he called "a roundance on Yankeedom" and bypass the fort. This flanking march forced the Confederate Army away from the Rio Grande, the only source of water in the area. Both the men and their animals suffered intense thirst. Private Laughter of the 2nd Texas recalled that “The dry beef we had for supper needed moisture. The fact was, if one of us coughed you could see the dust fly.”

The old western saying that “whiskey is for drinking, but water is for fighting” proved true. The Battle of Valverde occured when the Confederate Army finally returned to the river on the other side of Contadora Mesa and found their access to water blocked by Union troops.

To add to the misery, a major sandstorm, one of many recorded in soldier's diaries and memoirs, hit just before the battle of Valverde. These brutal storms were more proof that Sibley's men were campaigning in the extreme and inhospitable environment of the upper Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts.

illustration by Ian Bristow in The Worst Enemy

The Confederate's problems continued as the Army continued to head north. In Albuquerque, where they had hoped to pillage the government storehouses. They found that the Union soldiers had burned the supplies before retreating north. Running low on everything, Sibley was once again forced to split his forces in order to maximize their ability to forage on the sparse winter grass. Private Davidson was part of the army that was sent into the Sandia Mountains, where it was believed that grass was abundant. He found that what grass there was was buried beneath deep snow. "The army was marched out in the mountains east of Albuquerque and camped, as I thought, for the winter as the weather was very cold, sleeting and snowing all the time. At this camp we remained a week and we buried fifty men, and if the weather and exposure had continued much longer, we would have buried the whole brigade.”

The weather was no kinder in the mountains east of Santa Fe, where the Santa Fe Trail snaked through Glorieta Pass on its way to Fort Union, where the Confederate Army hoped to capture a wealth of Union supplies. The Texans won another tactical victory at the Battle of Glorieta, but returned to their supply train to find it burned. That night, Davidson wrote that “a severe snow storm arose and snow fell to the depth of a foot and several of our wounded froze to death.”

illustration by Ian Bristow in The Famished Country

Weakened by two battles, long marches, extended exposure, repeated winter storms, and insufficient supplies, it became clear that the Confederate Army had no choice but to to withdraw back down the Rio Grande. With the exception of a couple of cannonade skirmishes at Albuquerque and Peralta, Colonel Canby, the cautious commander of Union forces in New Mexico was content to not engage in any more battles. Instead, he allowed the weather and terrain to finish off Sibley’s army while he skirted alongside the Rio Grande, herding the pitiful remnants of The Army of New Mexico out of the territory they'd hoped to conquer.

map by Matt Bohnhoff, included in The Famished Country

Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley had launched an invasion force of 2,500 men in a grandiose scheme to take the Colorado and California goldfields, establish a port on the Pacific coast, and open a route for a coast to coast railroad system, all of which would have dramatically expanded the Confederacy’s presence in the Southwest and perhaps changed the trajectory of the war. By the time his disastrous retreat was completed in the summer of 1862, he returned to San Antonio with less than a third of the men he had begun with. Davidson wrote that, “We left San Antonio eight months earlier with near three thousand men ….And now in rags and tatters, foot-sore and weary, we again march, if a reel and stagger can be called a march, along the streets of San Antonio with fourteen hundred men. I can furnish a list of four hundred and thirty-seven dead, but where are the other sixteen hundred?” While not all the the unrecorded can be accounted for, many deserted on the long retreat, heading for California or hiding in the hills.

In a letter to John McRae, the father of Alexander McRae, a native South Carolinian who fought for the Union, General Sibley blamed the countryside itself for his retreat.

“You will naturally speculate upon
the causes of my precipitate evacuation
of the Territory of New Mexico
after it had been virtually conquered.
My dear Sir, we beat the enemy
whenever we encountered him.
The famished country beat us.”

Sibley's New Mexico Campaign was small in comparison to the battles waged in the east. But on a percentage basis, it was one of the most devastating campaigns any Civil War army suffered through without surrendering. That outcome is even more dramatic when we consider the fact that each of the engagements was a tactical victory for the Confederate forces. Ultimately, Sibley was driven back, far short of his ambitious goals, by the sparsely populated territory's brutal terrain and unforgiving distances. It was, indeed, the famished country that beat him.

The Famished Country, a phrase taken from Major Sibley's letter to John McRae, is the title of Book 3 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande, a trilogy of historical fiction novels for middle grade through adult readers. Published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, The Famished Country will be available in October, 2024.

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Pancho Villa and the Raid on Columbus

2/29/2024

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In 1915, the Mexican Revolution had been going on for five years. The decades-long regime of President Porfirio Díaz had ended, and a power struggle between elites and the middle classes, in addition to labor and agrarian unrest had led to armed uprisings resulting in the assassination of Diaz’ successor, Francisco I. Madero under the orders of the next president, Victoriano Huerta. Huerta’s counter-revolutionary regime was opposed by a coalition of leaders from the Mexican states, including a Constitutionalist Army led by Governor of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata who was leading an armed rebellion in Morelos, and the governor of Chihuahua, Francisco "Pancho" Villa, who led his own army in the northern part of Mexico. However, once Carranza took power, the alliance he’d had with Villa, Zapata and others dissolved and they began fighting among themselves.

By spring of 1916, Villa’s army was little more than a disorganized band, wandering northern Mexico in search of supplies. The 1915 Battle of Celaya had been a great defeat for Villa, and his army lacked the military supplies, money, and munitions needed to pursue his war against Carranza. While the reasons for the raid have never been established with any certainty, it is likely out of desperation that Villa planned the raid on the New Mexican border town of Columbus and the adjoining Camp Furlong. He camped his army of an estimated 1,500 horsemen outside of Palomas on the border three miles south of Columbus and waited for the right time to surge over the border and steal the supplies he so desperately needed.

Columbus was a small town of about 300 Americans and about as many Mexicans. Located just three miles north of the border with Mexico. It sat side by side with Camp Furlong, a small garrison intended to patrol and protect the border. It consisted the headquarters troop, one machine gun troop, and seven rifle troops, totaling 12 officers and 341 men, of which approximately 270 were combat troops.

Before the raid, Villa sent spies into the town to assess the presence of U.S. military personnel. They reported that only about thirty soldiers were garrisoned at Columbus. This was a significant error. On the night of the raid, approximately half of the 362 soldiers were out of camp on patrol, leave, or other assignments, but even at that reduced number, there were far more troops than Villa anticipated. Not knowing this, Villa moved north and crossed the border about midnight. Maude Hauke Wright, an American kidnap victim who was travelling with the raiding party, stated that Villa only sent 600 of his 1,500 men into the attack because he lacked the ammunition to arm them all.

Early in the morning of March 9, 1916, Villa divided his force into two columns. At 4:15, when it was still dark, he launched a a two-pronged attack on the town and the garrison. Most of the attacker approached on foot, their mounts left safely back with the rest of Villa’s troops. Some claim that Villa never crossed the border, but remained in Palomas. Others swear that he directed the attack from Cootes Hill, a small promontory overlooking Columbus.

The clock in the Columbus train station,, stopped when struck by a Villista bullet.

The Villistas entered Columbus from the west and southeast shouting "¡Viva Villa! ¡Viva Mexico!" and other phrases. The townspeople awoke to find their settlement in flames and the Mexicans looting their homes and shops. The raid soon escalated into a full-scale battle between Villistas and the United States Army. 2nd Lt. John P. Lucas made his way barefooted from his quarters to the camp's barracks, where he organized a hasty defense around the camp's guard tent, preventing the Villistas from stealing the troop’s machine guns. The troop's four machine guns fired more than 5,000 rounds apiece during the 90-minute fight, their targets illuminated by fires of burning buildings. Soldiers joined with Springfield rifles, and many of the townsfolk had shotguns and hunting guns of their own.

Finally, a bugler sounded the order to retreat and the Villistas disappeared back over the border, pursued by the regiment's 3rd Squadron until it ran low on ammunition and water.

Villa announced that the raid was a success, and that he’d captured 300 rifles and shotguns, 80 horses, and 30 mules. However, he’d also lost between 90 and 170 men, 63 killed in action and at least seven more who later died from wounds during the raid itself. The sixty-three dead Villa soldiers and all the dead Villa horses that were left behind in Columbus after the raid were dragged south of the stockyards, soaked with kerosene and burned. Of those captured during the raid, seven were tried and six hanged. Although records are inconsistent, the American dead seems to range between 8 to 11 soldiers and 7 or 8 civilians.

The tents at Camp Furlough when it was at its height. Photo by author, taken at display in Pancho Villa museum

The American public was outraged by Villa’s attack and the United States government wasted no time in responding. First on the scene were elements of the New Mexico National Guard. Other National Guard units from around the United States were called up. By the end of August 1916 over 100,000 troops were amassed on the border, with 5,000 headquartered at Camp Furlong. Camp Furlong also had supply facilities and repair yards for the early motor trucks used in Mexico when General John J. Pershing moved the Punitive Expedition into Mexico to track down Villa. Columbus also had the first tactical military airfield in the United States. The 1st Aero Squadron's Curtiss JN3 Jenny biplanes provided aerial observation and communications for the expedition.
Following the withdrawal of the Punitive Expedition, the importance of Camp Furlong declined. By 1920, when the Mexican Revolution ended, only 100 men were garrisoned there. All troops were gone by 1923.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel A Blaze of Poppies is the story of a young female rancher who is trying to keep her family's ranch and a member of the New Mexico National Guard who is in the area to protect the border. Agnes Day and Will Bowers both get drawn into Pancho Villa's raid, the ensuing Punitive Expedition, and World War I. Inspired by real stories set in the time and area, this is a work of fiction that will inspire and educate as well as entertain.

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Remembering WWI, and Forgetting New Mexico

11/23/2023

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Most years I pick up a book or movie to read to commemorate Veteran's Day. This year, my choice was To Conquer Hell, by Edward G. Lengel.

It seems most Americans don't understand what Veterans Day is and what other commemoration it grew out of. In the United States, Veteran's Day is observed every year on November 11. Its purpose is to honor military veterans of the United States Armed Forces. Prior to 1954, the day was called Armistice Day, and recognized the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, when the Armistice with Germany went into effect., ending major hostilities during World War I. In South Africa, the day is called Poppy Day. In Britain, France, Belgium and Poland.it is called Remembrance Day.

Ernest Wrentmore

Lengel's book deals with the American Expeditionary Force's role in the Meuse-Argonne offensive which came at the end of the war. The book sometimes focuses on specific soldiers, including famous ones like Alvin York and Charles Whittlesey, and lesser known ones like Ernest Wrentmore, who joined up when only 12 years old and went on to serve in WWII and Korea. .

Pattonn in front of one of his tanks.

I found some of Lengel's writing quite informative and amusing. For instance, he calls George Patton "wealthy, athletic, and brilliantly insane." When explaining Patton's work establishing the First Army Tank School at Langres, France, he includes the interesting fact that there were no lights in Renault tanks, so crews had to operate in the dark when the hatches were closed. "A tank commander signaled the driver with a series of kicks: one in the back told him to go forward, a kick on the right or left shoulder meant he should turn, and a kick in the head signaled him to stop. Repeated kicks in the head meant he should turn back."

For me, a New Mexican, Lengel's book was a bit of a disappointment. New Mexico hadn't been a state very long when World War I broke out, and it was a very sparsely populated place, with only 345,000 inhabitants. Despite that, more than 17,000 men stepped up to serve. All 33 counties were represented. Tiny as we were, New Mexico was ranked fifth in the nation for military service by the end of the first World War.

Men leaving for military training camp in 1917 parade on Palace Avenue near Sena Plaza. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archive, Negative No. 149995

Of especial note was Roswell's Battery A, 1st New Mexico Field Artillery. Renamed Battery A, 146th Field Artillery Brigade of the 41st Infantry Division when the National Guard was "federalized" and mixed into the regular army, this devision had served Pershing well in Mexico during the Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa. In France, they fought at Chateau-Theirry, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne Forest. The unit's four guns fired more than 14,000 rounds in combat, surpassing all other U.S. heavy artillery units. So why wouldn't Lengel mention them?

I cringed when Lengel said that Douglas MacArthur grew up at Fort Selden, Texas; Fort Selden is in New Mexico, just north of Las Cruces.

A picture of the MacArthur family that hangs in the Ft. Selden visitor center. The future general is the child on the left.

While To Conquer Hell certainly encompasses the full span of operations by the American Expeditionary Force, I found it difficult to read in parts. I wish the narrative had referenced the maps that are strewn throughout the book, so that I could have found the right map to go with each engagement.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a native New Mexican, and proud of it. A former history teacher, she now writes full time from her home in the remote mountains of central New Mexico. Her novel, A Blaze of Poppies, is set in the southern part of the state and in France in the years just before and during America's involvement in World War I. .

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The Thiepval Memorial

9/14/2023

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Back in 2019, when I was researching World War I for A Blaze of Poppies, I had the honor of touring battlefields and memorials in Belgium and France. It was a sobering experience, and one of the most sobering was the memorial outside the little town of Thiepval, in Picardy, France.

The Thiepval Memorial is dedicated to the men of the British Commonwealth who went missing in the Battles that occurred in the Somme between 1915 and 1918 and whose bodies have not been found. Designed by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, one of the most famous architects of the time, it is the only memorial that Edward VIII ever dedicated, since he abdicated soon after.

Inside the memorial, a large inscription on an internal surface of the memorial reads:

Here are recorded
names of officers
and men of the
British Armies who fell
on the Somme battlefields
July 1915 February 1918
but to whom
the fortune of war
denied the known
and honoured burial
given to their
comrades in death.

Piers of Portland stone
are engraved with over 72,000 names. 90 per cent of these soldiers died in the first Battle of the Somme, between 1 July and 18 November 1916.

Because the monument is reserved for those missing or unidentified soldiers who have no known grave, a soldier’s name is excised from the wall by filling in the inscription with cement when his body is found and identified. The remains are then given a funeral with full military honors at a cemetery close to the location at which they were discovered. This practice has resulted in numerous gaps in the lists of names. 80 names came off the monument 2018.

Just behind the Thiepval Memorial lies two cemeteries that commemorate the joint nature of the 1916 offensive. One side of the cemetery holds 300 soldiers of the British Commonwealth under rectangular, white stone headstones inscribed with "A Soldier of the Great War / Known unto God". The other side holds the graves of 300 French soldiers under grey stone crosses that bear the single word "Inconnu" ('unknown'). Most of the soldiers buried here – 239 of the British Commonwealth and 253 of the French – are unidentified. Their bodies were found on the battlefields of the Somme and as far north as Loos and as far south as Le Quesnel, then reburied here between December 1931 and March 1932.

I'm not a numbers person, but over 72,000! Even if I can't really conceive a number that large, I know it is huge. And that's not the number of men who died in the area: it's the number of men who died and whose bodies were never recovered. It's astounding and beyond comprehension.

World War I was supposed to be the Great War: the War to End All Wars. Yet here we are, over a hundred years later and wars rage throughout the globe. Clearly, we have not yet learned the lesson such carnage should have taught us.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of a number of historical novels for middle grade through adult readers. A Blaze of Poppies is set in New Mexico and the French Battlefields in the time leading up to and including the American involvement in World War I. Her intent in writing the book was not to glorify war, but to give readers a taste of what life might have been like during that tumultuous period.

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Pigeon's Ranch: Important Site in the Battle of Glorieta

4/20/2023

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The Battle of Glorieta Pass ranged through a narrow mountain divide in the Sangre de Cristo mountains just east of Santa Fe on March 26-28, 1862. The pass was part of the Santa Fe trail that had connected Old Santa Fe to Franklin, Missouri for nearly half a century. The three ranches involved in the battle were also used as way stops along the trail. Three very different characters owned and operated the ranches.

Union troops were headquartered at a ranch on the eastern end of the pass that was owned by a Polish immigrant named Kozlowski. You can read more about him and his ranch here.

The Confederate base was at Johnson's ranch, located at the western mouth of the canyon.

Pigeon's Ranch in the 1880s.

Between Kozlowski's and Johnson's place sat Pigeon's ranch, which operated a hotel and saloon and was a popular watering hole along the trail. Pigeon's Ranch was the frequent venue for fandangos, the local dances.

Pigeon's ranch was owed by a French immigrant whose very name is a matter of speculation. Some records list him as Alexander Pigeon. Some sources, however, say that Pigeon was a nickname he received because he strutted and flapped his elbows when he danced, making him look rather like a pigeon. On some documents, he is named Alexander Valle. Some historians suggest that Valle is less a surname as a placename given to him because his establishment was in the center of the valley. Both Pigeon and Valle are names that can be found in France, so either may be the man's actual name.

An old postcard showing Pigeon's Ranch.

Early in the morning of March 26, a Union scouting party led by Lt. George Nelson encountered and captured a Confederate scouting party near Pigeon's Ranch. The two armies clashed west of the ranch later that day. By nightfall, Union Forces had fallen back to Pigeon's ranch, which had become a hospital for wounded and dying men on both sides. Two days later, the ranch was the center of the battle, its short adobe walls shielding Union soldiers from the oncoming Confederates. In 1986, a mass grave with the skeletons of 31 Confederate soldiers was discovered on the property.

Pigeon's Ranch continued to be a waystop along the Santa Fe trail for years after the battle, as evidenced by the photo and old post card shown above. The ranch's fortune began to dim when the railroad came through in 1879, when the New Mexico and Southern Pacific Railroad constructed a railroad through the pass, effectively reducing the need for wagon trains. The automobile made the journey to Santa Fe a much faster proposition, eliminating the need for overnight stays. Today, all that is left of Pigeon's Ranch is one building abutting state road 50 as it makes its way to Pecos, New Mexico.

In this depiction of The Battle of Glorieta Pass by Roy Anderson, Pigeon's Ranch is depicted in the background.

The Battle of Glorieta Pass is sometimes called 'The Gettysburg of the West" because it is the battle that marks the farthest north the Confederate Army got during the New Mexico Campaign. Had H.H. Sibley's forces not been turned back here, they might have taken the Colorado gold fields, then turned west and taken the gold and harbors of California, and the Civil War might have ended very differently. But this battle could easily have been called The Battle of Three Ranches because of where it was fought.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and author who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. The view from her backyard includes the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Part of her novel The Worst Enemy, book 2 of Rebels Along the Rio Grande Series, takes place at Pigeon Ranch.

The Worst Enemy i is scheduled to be published by Kinkajou Press on August 15, 2023 but can be preordered at Bookshop.org.

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Oral History as Distant Memory

Can old stories remember events from thousands of years before their telling?

Who were the Folsom People?

Disaster Leads to Stunning Archaeological Discovery

The Colorado Contribution to New Mexico During the Civil War

Annabel Lee Watkins: A Character in The Famished Country

Annabel Lee
By Edgar Allan Poe

New Mexico, the Famished Country

Pancho Villa and the Raid on Columbus

Remembering WWI, and Forgetting New Mexico

The Thiepval Memorial

Pigeon's Ranch: Important Site in the Battle of Glorieta

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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Can old stories remember events from thousands of years before their telling?

Annabel Lee By Edgar Allan Poe

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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Annabel Lee
By Edgar Allan Poe