Last week, the Civil War Preservation Trust issued a list of endangered and threatened battlefield sites. Near the top of the list was Glorieta Pass in New Mexico, the “Gettysburg of the West.”
As a patriotic Coloradan, I have long delighted in reading about that battle of nearly 144 years ago. Here was an invading army from Texas. Our boys marched down from Denver, met the Texans east of Santa Fe, and soundly defeated the Lone Star foes. What a wonderful example from history.
But the full story is more complicated. Russians talk about “General Winter” as the force that actually repelled the armies of Napoleon and Hitler, and out here, we could credit “General Thirst” with the defeat of the Confederate invasion.
It was conceived by Henry Hopkins Sibley, a Louisiana native and West Point graduate who served in the U.S. Army in the West. He invented the Sibley Tent and the Sibley Stove.
In 1861, he was 44 and a major in the U.S. Army. Like many officers, he resigned to join the Confederacy. He went to Richmond that summer and presented a plan to Jefferson Davis.
Sibley would recruit soldiers in Texas, then march north up the Rio Grande from El Paso. The population would welcome the Confederates. After defeating Union soldiers who held a few small forts along the river, and taking their supplies, his ranks would swell with local volunteers. Then they could capture the gold fields of Colorado Territory and march west to take California for the Confederacy. There would be gold to back Confederate money, and so much coastline that the Union could never blockade it all.
They ran into trouble almost from the start in January of 1862. The New Mexicans did not welcome this chance to be liberated from Yankee oppression, and did not rush to enlist in the Confederate cause. The Union soldiers retreated from the forts along the river – but burned the supplies they couldn’t take, to keep the material from falling into Confederate hands.
Sibley captured Valverde, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but he didn’t gain recruits or supplies.
Federal forces were under the command of Col. Edward Richard Sprigg Canby. As he retreated, he massed his forces at Fort Union, near Las Vegas, N.M. He issued a call for volunteers. William Gilpin, territorial governor of Colorado, had already issued $375,000 in drafts on the federal treasury (without authorization, which led to his removal from office) and organized the 1st Regiment of Colorado Infantry with 1,342 soldiers.
They marched south from Denver in early 1862, and on March 26-28, the Coloradans joined the battle at Glorieta Pass. Sibley’s Texans were headed for Fort Union. The pass was the best place to stop them, and the Coloradans did their share and more.
They hid in the rocks above the Texans before the federal cavalry advanced into the canyon. As the Texans rose to meet the horsemen, Colorado sharpshooters in the rocks were “shooting us down like sheep,” as a survivor wrote his wife. “They were regular Demons … in the form of Pike’s Peakers, from the Denver City gold mines.”
The battle was a draw, but during the action, about 300 Coloradans, led by John M. Chivington (later of Sand Creek infamy), sneaked around to the Confederate supply train. They captured the guard, burned 85 wagons of provisions, and bayoneted nearly 600 horses and mules.
In a hostile environment without a supply train, Sibley had no choice but to retreat back to Texas.
Even if it happened in New Mexico, the Battle of Glorieta Pass is an important part of Colorado history. But was it the “Gettysburg of the West”?
Not really. Suppose the Confederates had won at Glorieta. They still would have faced the same supply problems and the same hostile population, and if that wasn’t enough to compel retreat, Union forces could have easily been dispatched west from Missouri along the Santa Fe Trail.
So in the short term, Glorieta Pass was not that significant. And in the long term, note that our president is from Texas. So is our governor. So is a big chunk of our tourist income. The Lone Star list could go on – but the point is that the battle only delayed the Texans. Instead of preserving the site, perhaps we should just ignore it, since the battle did not keep Texans from taking over the territory of Colorado.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
