Category: Valverde

Civil War Mules in Fact, Fiction, and Poetry

7/27/2022

Mules were the backbone of both Confederate and Union Armies during the American Civil War. According to a page on the Stones River Battlefield site, about three million horses and mules served in the war. They pulled the supply wagons, pulled the limbers and caissons for cannons, and moved the ambulances.

Although mules died in battle, just like the soldiers they supported, a greater percentage died of overwork, disease, or starvation. Rarely was the daily feed ration for Union cavalry horses, ten pounds of hay and fourteen pounds of grain, available during the long campaigns.

Jemmy Martin, one of the lead characters in Where Duty Calls, my middle grade novel about the Civil War in New Mexico, loves the two mules who work on his family's farm. When his brother sells them to the Confederate Army, Jemmy decides to travel with them to protect them. He tries hard to find good forage for his mules after Major General Henry H. Sibley's army crosses into barren New Mexico territory on its way to capture the gold fields of Colorado.

But Jemmy couldn't protect his mules from Union trickery. The night before the battle of Valverde, a Union spy named Paddy Graydon concocted a plan for killing the Confederate hoofstock using a couple of run-down mules as weapons. While his plan didn't work, he managed to spook the Confederate's pack mules. The animals, who'd been denied access to water for several days, stampeded down to the Rio Grande, where Union soldiers rounded them up. Jemmy finds himself continuing to follow the army even though his reason for being with them is gone.

While Jemmy and his mules are fictional characters that I created for my novel, the story of Paddy Graydon is true. Graydon really did spook the Confederacy's pack mules, and the Union Army did really collect over 100 of the beasts when they broke to gain access to water. They lost over 100 animals and had to reconfigure their supply train. Before they left camp, the Confederates burned what they could no longer carry.

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!

The Stones River Battlefield Website stated that roughly half the horses and mules employed during the Civil War didn't survive. Jemmy Martin loses his to Paddy Graydon's plan. He spends the next two books in the Rebels Along the Rio Grande series trying to find them and return them to his home near San Antonio, Texas.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a retired middle school English and History teacher. She has written several novels, most of which are historical fiction for middle grade readers. Where Duty Calls is the first book in Rebels Along the Rio Grande, a trilogy set in New Mexico during the Civil War.

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The Battle for the Valverde Guns

2/24/2022

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Not many people know about the Civil War Battle of Valverde these days. Most people assume that all the battles in the Civil War happened east of the Mississippi. Some might include Kansas. But there were battles out here in the Southwest, and one of the biggest and most important was the Battle of Valverde Ford, fought on February 21, 1862.

The Battle of Valverde, fought a few miles north of Fort Craig, along the Rio Grande in New Mexico Territory, was a victory for the Confederates, who were trying to fulfill a manifest destiny for the south that would stretch all the way to California. Like all battles, its story is made up of many smaller, poignant stories. One of the most dramatic is the taking of the Federal guns.

This etching, from a Harper’s Weekly that came out soon after the battle, shows a Union soldier perched atop of cannon while Confederate soldiers threaten him. It’s a fanciful and dramatic picture, and it fevered the minds of Northerners throughout the Union, but it’s factually untrue. The man depicted on the cannon is Captain Alexander McRae, and though he did not actually sit on his artillery piece, his story is compelling.

Alexander McRae was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on September 4, 1829, and he was educated at the United States Military Academy at West Point. After graduating, he served in Missouri and Texas.. In 1856, he was posted to New Mexico in 1856. McRae spent some time at Bent's Fort, in what is now Colorado, then was moved south to Fort Union, Fort Stanton, and finally, Fort Craig. He steadily rose up the promotion ladder, becoming Captain of Company I, 3rd Cavalry Regiment in August of 1861.

When the Civil War broke out, McRae's father wrote to him, urging him to change sides. Captain McRae retained his commission and stayed faithful to his country. His four brothers, James, Thomas, John, and Robert, served the Confederacy.

As reports began to trickle into New Mexico of a Southern invasion, Colonel Edward R.S. Canby, the commander of forces in New Mexico Territory, hastily formed an artillery battery. He placed six pieces at Fort Craig, the most southerly of the forts held by the Union Army, and gave Captain McRae charge of this unit.
On the day of the battle, McRae's battery was dragged out of the fort and up toward the small town of Valverde, where a low spot in the Rio Grande created a natural crossing point which the Confederates wished to cross in their march north. McRae’s battery was placed on the western side of the river, and for the morning hours managed to keep the Confederates pinned down behind a sandy berm 800 hundred feet east of the river. During the afternoon, Colonel E.R.S. Canby, the commander of Union forces in New Mexico Territory, ordered the battery to cross the river. Soon after, the Confederates charged the guns.

One of the men leading the charge was Samuel A. Lockridge. Lockridge had been a Colonel in the private army of William Walker, an American physician, lawyer, journalist and mercenary, who was trying to establish an English-speaking colony in Nicaragua, but he and Walker had parted ways before Walker was defeated by a coalition of Central American armies and executed. He was also part of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret Southern society that advocated the extension of Southern institutions into new territory. When the Civil War broke out, Lockridge joined the Fifth Texas Cavalry, one of the divisions in Sibley’s Army of New Mexico. He was given the rank of Major.

At the Battle of Valverde, Lockridge led one of the in three separate waves that stormed the Union battery. Screaming the Rebel yell, the nearly 750 man force advanced on the guns. Athough they were armed with only short-range shotguns, pistols, muskets, and bowie knives, the Confederates had been told to dive to the ground whenever they saw a flash from the artillery. This strategy made them appear to be suffering a high casualty rate even though they avoided being hit. This spooked the men manning the Union guns, particularly the inexperienced and ill-trained New Mexico Volunteers. Both Volunteers and regular Army broke and splashed across the Rio Grande in a disorganized retreat.

Once the Texans reached the battery, fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued among the remaining Union soldiers and the advancing Confederates. According to eyewitness accounts, Samuel Lockridge shouted, "Surrender McRae, we don't want to kill you!" McRae supposedly replied, "I shall never forsake my guns!" Soon after, McRae was shot. Some sources suggest that Lockridge himself shot him. Supposedly, Lockridge then laid his hand on the muzzle of one of the cannons and shouted “This one is mine!” He was shot dead soon after, perhaps by McRae.

The captured guns went to San Antonio when the Confederate forces retreated. They became known as the Valverde Battery and were used against Union troops for the remainder of the war.

Because he fought for the Union, McRae's service record went unrecognized in his home state. In their story on the battle at Valverde, the Fayetteville Observer did not even report his death. However, McRae became an honored figure in New Mexico history. There are streets named after him in the New Mexican towns of Las Cruces and Las Vegas, and a canyon named for him in Sierra County. The remains of Fort McRae, a late Civil War and Indian War Army post named for him, now lay beneath the waters of Elephant Butte Lake. I could find some earlier reports of it being a destination for scuba divers, but the adobe walls have probably succumbed to time and water by now.

Alexander McRae's body was exhumed in 1867 and transported to West Point for burial. McRae’s large black tombstone is only four markers away from the one dedicated to George Armstrong Custer. Guides frequently note it as the resting place of one who stayed with the Union.

Lockridge was buried on the battlefield. The whereabouts of the grave is unknown.

The story of McRae and Lockridge meeting at the battery is told in Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel Where Duty Calls. This book is written for middle grade readers and will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, in June 2022. It is available for preorder here.

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160th Anniversary of a Significant Battle

2/21/2022

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Brig. Gen H.H. Sibley

February 21, 2022 is the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Valverde, the first major battle of the American Civil War fought in New Mexico territory. It was a Confederate success, but did not give the invading southern army the advantages it had hoped to attain with such a victory.

On January 3, 1862, Confederate brigadier general, Henry Hopkins Sibley left El Paso with a little more than three regiments of mounted Texans. This brigade, which he called the Confederate Army of New Mexico, totaled 2,510 officers and men. He headed north, with the intention of defeating the Union forces at Fort Craig, capturing the capital city of Santa Fe, taking the heavily provisioned Fort Union, and then marching into Colorado to take control of the gold and silver mines before finally heading westward to conquer California. If his plan had succeeded, Sibley would have fulfilled the Confederacy’s dreams of Manifest Destiny while giving the south warm water ports on the Pacific and a huge boost to its treasury.

Col. E.R.S. Canby

Fort Craig, 140 miles north of El Paso, was the first obstacle in Sibley’s path, and taking it was an important objective. Sibley’s army traveled light, with the hope of acquiring food, arms, ammunition, and other supplies as they went. He needed the provisions within Fort Craig to replenish his already dwindling supplies. However, Colonel Edmund R.S. Canby, the commander of Federal troops in New Mexico, was hunkered down in the fort, waiting with 3,800 men. Only 1,200 of Canby's men were professional soldiers. The remainder were militia and volunteers from New Mexico and Colorado. Kit Carson, the famous Indian fighter, mountain man and scout, commanded the largely Hispanic First Regiment of New Mexican volunteers.

Sibley arrived at Fort Craig in the middle of February. Scouts, fooled by Canby’s use of “Quaker cannons,” logs painted black to imitate artillery pieces, reported that the fort was too heavily fortified to be taken. Hoping to lure the Federals into the open, Sibley moved his men into an arroyo south of the fort. The cautious Canby refused to be provoked.

The black line on the horizon is Contadoria Mesa. The battle happened just to the left of it.

When the Confederate supplies could only hold out for a few more days, Sibley decided to abandon his plan to take the fort. Instead, he decided upon a “roundance on Yankeedom,” in which he would cross to the east side of the Rio Grande, flank the fort under cover from surrounding hills, including Contadoria Mesa, then recross the Rio Grande at Valverde ford, six miles north of Fort Craig and continue on to the town of Socorro. Sibley planned to be able to cut Union communications between the fort and their headquarters in Santa Fe this way, making further conquests more achievable.

Lt. Colonel William Read Scurry

On the morning of February 21, Sibley sent an advance party consisting of four companies of the Major Charles Pyron’s 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles and Lieutenant Colonel William Read Scurry’s 4th Texas Mounted Rifles to scout the ford at Valverde. To their surprise, Canby had anticipated their move and had secured the ford with cavalry commanded by Major Thomas Duncan. The Texans took cover in an old river bed, which served as an excellent defensive position, with Scurry to Pyron's right, and their artillery on their left. The Confederates possessed numerical superiority, but were armed with short range shotguns and pistols which could not reach the Union positions three hundred yards away. The Confederate howitzers also could not reach the Union artillery, which had remained on the western bank of the river.

As the day progressed, more soldiers arrived on both sides of the battle line. Colonel Benjamin S. Roberts reinforced the Union cavalry with the 5th New Mexico Infantry. When Colonel Canby arrived with most of Fort Craig’s remaining garrison, he ordered all but First New Mexico Volunteers under Carson and the Second New Mexico Volunteers under Colonel Miguel Piño to cross to the eastern side of the river.

Maj Lockridge

The remainder of the Confederate force, the 5th Texas Mounted Rifles under Colonel Thomas Green and a battalion of the 7th Texas Mounted Rifles under Lieutenant Colonel John Sutton, arrived at the battlefield early that afternoon. Sibley, who had fallen ill, most likely from drinking too much, relinquished command of the brigade to Green, who then handed over command of the 5th Texas over to Major Samuel Lockridge.

Illustration by Ian Bristow in Where Duty Leads.

Around 2:00 pm, Green authorized the first and last lancer charge of the American Civil War. Using lances they had captured from Mexico during the Mexican-American war, the lancers charged what they thought was an inexperienced company of New Mexico volunteers on the Union extreme right. They expected the New Mexicans to break and run. However, the Union soldiers were actually a company of rough and tumble Colorado miners, who withstood the charge. Twenty of the lancers and almost all of the horses were killed or wounded.

An etching from a Harper's Weekly showing McRae defending his guns.

By 4:00 p.m., when the Union appeared to have the advantage, Canby shifted his lines in order to attack the Confederate left. He ordered one of his batteries and several of his companies, including Carson's First New Mexico Regiment, to cross the river on his right. Unfortunately, weakened the center of the Union line, which Green then attacked with three successive waves which managed to overwhelm the Union guns. Samuel Lockridge, who led the charge and Alexander McRae, who commanded the guns, were both killed, and six Union artillery pieces were captured as the Union battle line crumbled into a panic-stricken retreat across the river. Canby then sent out a white flag, asking for time to remove the dead and wounded from the battlefield, and moved his forces back into Fort Craig.

Map by Matt Bohnhoff. A similar one will appear in Where Duty Calls.

Illustration by Ian Bristow, from Where Duty Calls.

Since the Union left the Confederate forces in possession of the battlefield, the Battle of Valverde is technically a Confederate victory. However, it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. The Confederates suffered sizable casualties: 36 killed, 150 wounded, and one missing out of their 2,590 men. They did not capture the fort’s supplies, which they desperately needed. And although they did cut Fort Craig off from their forces in the north, the Confederate supply chain to El Paso was also severed. Finally, the Texans had lost so many horses and mules in the battle and the days preceeding it that the 4th Texas cavalry had to dismount and become infantry and some of the Confederate supply wagons had to be abandoned. These loses, plus those which were to occur in the mountains east of Santa Fe a month later caused the Army of New Mexico to turn back to Texas before they fulfilled their goal. Sibley’s army had won the battle, but lost their war.

The climax of Jennifer Bohnhoff’s novel Where Duty Calls occurs at the Battle of Valverde. Where Duty Calls is the first in a trilogy of novels set in New Mexico during the Civil War and written for middle grade readers. It is scheduled to be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, on June 14, 2022. It is available for preorder here.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former New Mexico history teacher. The native New Mexican lives in the mountains east of Albuquerque.

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The Only Lancer Charge in the Civil War

6/1/2020

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When Major General H. H. Sibley invaded New Mexico in 1862, he brought with him two companies of lancers.

Handsome and chivalrous heirs of medieval knights, the lancers were the darlings of the parade through San Antonio on the day the Army of New Mexico headed west. Bright red flags with white stars snapped from their lances. Lances had been common on Napoleonic battlefields, and were used by Mexican cavalry during the conflicts against the Texans in the 1830s and 1840s. The lances that these two companies carried were war trophies captured from the Mexicans during the Mexican American War thirteen years earlier

Colonel Thomas Green

On the day of the Battle for Valverde Ford, Colonel Thomas Green peered across the battlefield and saw uniforms that he couldn't identify. Knowing they weren't Union regulars, he guessed that these men on the Union extreme right were a company of inexperienced New Mexico Volunteers who would break and run from a lancer charge.

He turned to the commanders of his two lancer companies, Captains Willis Lang and Jerome McCown, and asked which would like to have the honor of the first charge.

Captain Willis Lafayette Lang

The first hand up belonged to the leader of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment's Company B. Captain Willis L. Lang was a rich, 31 year old who owned slaves that worked his plantation near Marlin in Falls County, Texas.

Lang quickly organized his men. Minutes later, he gave the signal and his company cantered forward, lowered their lances, and began galloping across the 300 yards that divided his men from the men in the unusual uniforms. The plan called for McCown's company to follow after the Union troops had broken, and the two lancer companies would chase the panicking Union men into the Rio Grande that stood at their back.

Captain Theodore Dodd

But Colonel Green was wrong. The men in the strange uniforms were not New Mexican Volunteers. They were Captain Theodore Dodd’s Independent Company of Colorado Volunteers. Dodd's men were a scrappy collection of miners and cowboys who were reputedly low on discipline but high on fighting spirit. They coolly waited until the lancers were within easy range, then fired a volley that unhorsed many of the riders. Their second volley finished the assault. More than half of Lang's men were either killed or wounded, and most of the horses lay dead on the field. Lang himself dragged himself back to the Confederate lines because he was too injured to walk.

Lang's charge was the only lancer charge of the American Civil War. The destruction of his company showed that modern firearms had rendered the ten-foot long weapons obsolete. McCown's men, and what remained of Lang's men threw their lances into a heap and burned them. They then rearmed themselves with pistols and shotguns and returned to the fight.

The day after the battle, Lang and the rest of the injured Confederate were carried north to the town of Socorro, where they had requisitioned a house and turned it into a hospital. A few days later, depressed and in great pain, he asked his colored servant for his revolver, with which he ended his suffering. Lang and the other Confederate dead were buried in a plot of land near the south end of town that has now become neglected and trash-strewn. The owners do not allow visitors.

This derelict field was once a Confederate Cemetery.

The Charge of Company B of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Valverde Ford is included in Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel, Where Duty Calls, published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing in June 2022. The author is a former New Mexico history teacher who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. You can read more about her and her writing here.

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Real Characters

4/29/2016

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Where Duty Calls, the Middle Grade Civil War Novel set in New Mexico Territory that I published through Kinkajou Press last summer, is populated with a mix of fictitious and real people. All of the important events and dates are historical, the information gleaned from diaries, newspapers, and secondary sources. If I could have found real people who were always in the middle of the action, I would have made them my main characters. Since I couldn’t, I created Jemmy and Raul. The small, personal scenes depicting their family life are entirely made up. But when my sources described a scene I wanted to include in my novel, I often added the writer of the account into my novel.

Some of the real people whose diaries, letters and sources I used proved to be real characters, with wonderful stories of their own. One of these is Frederick S. Wade, who left the teaching profession to enlist as a private in the Army of New Mexico, the force Major General Henry Hopkins Sibley organized in Texas for the purpose of taking New Mexico Territory for the Confederacy.

Frederick Wade in his later years

Wade’s obituary,in the June 27, 1925 edition of the San Antonio Express says that he was the one who told Abraham Lincoln that Texas would secede from the Union. Born in Ontario, Canada, Wade was raised in Illinois, then moved to Texas in 1857. In 1860, he was visiting his parents in Illinois when Lincoln asked him about Texan opinion. The obituary states that Lincoln tried to get Wade to tour Texas and urge it to remain with the Union. Wade declined, and Texas joined the Confederacy. Wade then joined the Confederate brigade being formed by Tom Green. He continued to serve under Green until he became a prisoner of war in 1862.

While in prison camp, Wade helped a friend escape. His friend had contracted smallpox and was in the hospital. One day, Wade found him sitting in a coffin with a white sheet around him. Wade sprinkled the man’s face and hands with flour, then sealed the coffin and made sure it was loaded on the top of the other coffins in the dead wagon. After the wagon had left the prison, the man raised the lid of the coffin and called “Come to judgement” in his spookiest voice. The frightened driver ran away yelling “Ghosties! Ghosties!” Wade’s friend then stole one of the horses and escaped to Canada. You can read this story, plus some other remembrances here.

Who needs to make up characters when people like this already exist?

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle grade teacher. Where Duty Calls is the first book in a trilogy entitled Rebels Along the Rio Grande. Book 2, The Worst Enemy, will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, in August, 2023.

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Civil War Mules in Fact, Fiction, and Poetry

The Battle for the Valverde Guns

160th Anniversary of a Significant Battle

The Only Lancer Charge in the Civil War

Real Characters

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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