history

HARDSHIP AND COURAGE Symbolize a Desert March

Two Union soldiers lay dead and another, shot through the neck, writhed in agony under the blistering afternoon sun at Picacho Pass. In the distance, a small hard-riding group of mounted Confederates fled south toward Tucson, leaving a choking cloud of alkali dust in their wake.

How was it that the Civil War stretched to this raw frontier? Not long after the first shots of the conflict were fired, U.S. Army regulars stationed at military posts in the Southwest were brought east to quell the insurrection. President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America seized this opportunity to try winning for the Confederacy the entire American Southwest and the northern Mexican states.

If successful the Confederates would gain ports on the Pacific Ocean, access to gold and silver fields, new military recruits, and recognition by the nations of Europe. They would become a power to rival the United States.

While Confederate forces in the East forced the Union armies to come to them, Texas rebels invaded the Territory of New Mexico, what is now Arizona and New Mexico, seizing military posts and cutting off the Southern Overland Mail route.

In December, 1861, Union Col. James Henry Carleton received orders to organize, train, and equip a volunteerarmy of Californians at Fort Yuma and march 800 miles east to the Rio Grande. There they would link up with Col. Edward Richard Sprigg Canby's force of New Mexico and Colorado volunteers and attempt to drive the rebels back to Texas.

The Civil War Saga of Colonel Carleton and the California Column

Then, on February 21, 1862, the Texans defeated Canby's forces at Valverde along the Rio Grande and continued north, capturing Albuquerque and Santa Fe. To the west, Confederate Capt. Sherod Hunter and 200 mounted riflemen occupied Tucson on February 28, without firing a shot. Opposing Hunter were Carleton's 2,000 Union volunteers, the California Column, including 15 infantry companies, five cavalry companies, and an artillery battery. Supplying the column's men and animals on their desert march proved to be a serious problem. Carleton ordered his units to march one or two days apart to conserve the desert well water along their sun-blasted route.

He also made plans to establish a sub-depot near the friendly Pima and Maricopa Indian villages along the Gila River south of present-day Phoenix. Ammi White, a flour mill and trading post owner who lived among the Indians, had busily stockpiled a large supply of grain and flour for the column.

Having heard nothing about recent rebel movements from his scouts in Tucson, Carleton ordered a squad commanded by Capt. William McCleave to protect the supplies at the villages. Meanwhile, a group of Confederates under Captain Hunter marched north from Tucson and took trader White prisoner, confiscating 1,500 sacks of wheat, and partially destroying his mill. On March 6, McCleave and two of his men rapped on White's door and were admitted. Hunter, dressed in civilian clothes and pretending to be White, asked the whereabouts of other Union troops in the area. McCleave, thinking he was in the company of Union friends, replied, "I have six more at the next station."

Hunter then leveled a gun at McCleave's chest, announcing, "I am Captain Hunter of the Southern Army. If you make a single motion, I'll blow your brains out." The Southerners also captured the remaining Union soldiers.

Some of Hunter's men returned to Tucson while the rest rode along the Gila River burning haystacks that were left for the Union column at abandoned stage stations.

In late March, the rebels ran into two Union sentinels 80 miles east of Fort Yuma near Stanwix Station and ordered their surrender.

L. Boyd Finch, author of Confederate Pathway to the Pacific, wrote, "The lookouts took to their heels amid the whang of Confederate bullets" to warn the Union captain at Stanwix Station. The captain ordered his cavalry to pursue the Texans, just as another company of Union cavalry arrived from Fort Yuma and gave chase. However, the tired California horses could not overtake the faster Texas mounts.

On April 15, a Union scout located another small rebel group in a thorny thicket of saguaros and mesquite near Picacho, a 1,500-foot monolith 40 miles north of Tucson. Instead of ordering his men to dismount and encircle the Texans, a brash lieutenant led his mounted squad on a charge single file through the chaparral, shooting his pistol and ordering the rebels to surrender. The Confederates cut down several of the bluecoats with a hail of deadly fire before fleeing. Three Union soldiers, including the lieutenant, died in the brief battle. Three rebels were captured.

"Our loneliness [was] indescribable," recalled Union trooper J.C. Hall. "We were cut off from all communication with the civilized world. Ahead of us was an enemy of whose numbers we knew little, and behind a forbidding desert." Graves were dug that night, and the dead were buried by morning. "We covered their graves with wild cactus," said Hall, "so the wolves would not disturb them."

HARDSHIP AND COURAGE

The skirmish warned Captain Hunter of the California Column's approach, preventing a surprise attack on Tucson, and delayed the Union forces, which returned to regroup at the Indian villages. This delay frustrated mountain man and scout Paulino Weaver, who left the troops, growling, "If you fellers can't find the road from here to Tucson, you can go to hell."

When the column finally set out for Tucson, the desert unleashed its fury. "Men and animals suffered acutely from the heat and alkali dust," wrote Carleton in a report the following year. "Their thirst reached such proportions that they were willing to drink water from a well from which the fragments of a murdered man had been fished."

Faced with the Union column's superior numbers, Hunter's forces withdrew from Tucson on May 4 and traveled east to link up with the now retreating Confederate army, which had recently lost a battle at Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe. On May 20, the Californians liberated Tucson without a fight.

On June 8, Carleton, now a brigadier general, issued a proclamation at Tucson in which he proclaimed Arizona a Union Territory, declared martial law, and named himself military governor. He also levied taxes on the locals to help pay for the war. Outlaws who had taken over the town after the rebels retreated were seized and imprisoned at Fort Yuma. Twenty of the town's alleged Confederate sympathizers also were rounded up and incarcerated.

On June 21, Carleton sent Lt. Col. Edward R. Eyre and a detachment of 140 soldiers on a reconnaissance mission east from Tucson along the old Butterfield stage road across southwestern Arizona to the Rio Grande Valley of southwestern New Mexico. Eyre described the journey as a "march of about 300 miles through a broiling sun, and over country utterly destitute of water for distances running from 25 to 60 miles."

Halfway to the Rio Grande, Eyre and his thirsty men reached the abandoned Butterfield stage stop near the springs of Apache Pass. Located in the middle of the traditional homelands of the Chiricahua Apaches, where Cochise and his band had been fighting a guerrilla war against the Americans for nearly a year and a half, the Union soldiers found a band of 100 Chiricahuas camped near the vital waters. Feigning peace and friendship in exchange for tobacco and food, the Apaches initially kept their distance from the larger American force. However, upon returning to his troops, Eyre discovered that three soldiers had disobeyed orders and wandered off. After an hour's search, he found them "stripped of all their clothing, and two of them scalped. Each was shot through the chest and lanced through the neck." Regrouping, Eyre and the rest of his men moved on across the old stage road to the Rio Grande Valley, occupying Fort Thorn on July 5.

A few weeks earlier, three Union couriers had been ambushed by Chiricahuas while trying to reach General Canby. Two were killed, and the survivor was captured by Confederates near Mesilla and jailed.

On July 15, 1862, another column detachment, numbering 126 men, traveled along the same route taken by Eyre through Apache Pass, a narrow mountain gorge between the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas mountains.

In the mountains overlooking the soldiers, lurked Cochise and his father-in-law, Mangas Coloradas, a Mimbres Apache chief. They knew the soldiers, desperate for water after marching 40 miles in the heat, would head to the spring at Apache Pass. As the soldiers entered the pass, 500 Apache warriors ambushed them. Two soldiers died in a volley of bullets and arrows.

The detachment responded by training two wagon-mounted 12-pound howitzers on the hills overlooking the pass. The howitzer shells screamed toward the Apache breastworks and exploded, killing a number of Apaches and causing the rest to flee. Mangas Coloradas received a serious gunshot wound, shattering his aura of invulnerability, but survived. Estimates of casualties range from 10 to as many as 75, depending on whose accounts you read.

The battle marked the first time howitzers were used against the tribe. A month after the battle, General Carleton ordered Fort Bowie organized near the Apache Pass spring to control the strategic trail and water source.

Carleton reached Fort Thorn on August 7, and within weeks his forces also captured Fort Bliss in New Mexico and Fort Quitman and Fort Davis in west Texas. The Confederates abandoned the region and never returned.

"I felt a great burden fall from my shoulders when I saw the Rio Grande," wrote Carleton in a letter to a California senator. "I assure you that I would not encounter the same anxiety again for ten major generals' commissions."

The California Column's successful march to the Rio Grande and the rebels' crushing defeat at Glorieta Pass left the Confederates' dream of a Southern Southwest unrealized.

While the battles in Arizona and New Mexico pale when compared to those waged at places like Gettysburg, their significance to the Southwest rests not only with the creation of the Arizona Territory, separating it from New Mexico, but also in the heroic marches the Union volunteers endured.

One correspondent for the San Francisco Weekly Bulletin wrote, "When troops have to march hundreds of miles over a barren desert, almost utterly destitute of vegetation beneath a torrid sun and amid suffocating clouds of alkali dust, they suffer hardships and privations which will find few parallels in history."

In a letter extolling the accomplishments of his army, Carleton wrote: "The march of the Column from California in the summer months across the great Desert, in the driest season that has been known for thirty years, is a military achievement creditable to the soldiers of the American Army. The success was gained only by the high physical and moral energies of that peculiar class of officers and men who composed the Column from California. With any other troops, I am sure I would have failed."