By Ollie Reed Jr.
Tribune Reporter

PECOS - A hawk riding the air currents above Sharpshooters' Ridge is unconcerned about the three men climbing the rocks below, unruffled by the traffic rumbling past on nearby N.M. 50, oblivious to the history splattered on the boulders and soaked into the ground here.

Hawks can see the sun glint on a field mouse's whiskers from hundreds of yards away, but they're not so keen at looking into the past.

Lorenzo Vigil is more accomplished at that. Vigil, 31, a ranger assigned to Pecos National Historical Park and one of the three men working their way up Sharpshooters' Ridge near the town of Pecos, south and east of Santa Fe, can stare at the peaceful fields and hillsides here and see the turmoil that played itself out in those same places 140 years ago today. He can hear the roar and smell the gun smoke lost to the wind long ago.

"The Union troops were set up here," Vigil says as he gains the top of the ridge. "But the Southerners were able to get up here and flank them."

He points to a juniper growing out of a crevice in the rock.

"That tree was probably here then," he says. "You can see it in photographs taken in the 1880s when the railroad was coming through here."

It is a clear and sunny day late last week, but the wind is vigorous and insistent, and it snatches at Vigil's words.

He says it was misty, kind of cold and late in the day when Southern troops gained the upper hand and forced their Union opponents off this ridge on March 28, 1862.

"It was hand-to-hand combat," Vigil says. "Men are screaming; men are getting bayonetted. There is so much smoke, soldiers are afraid to shoot to their sides in case they hit their own men."

This was the Battle of Glorieta Pass, named for the natural gateway through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near which the toughest fighting took place.

It was the key battle in the West during the Civil War.

Confederate troops won the field but lost their supply wagons and thus the day.

Without ammunition, food and medicine, the Southern dreams of capturing the mineral wealth of the West and the blockade-free ports of California were as charred and useless as the Rebel wagons that had been overrun and burned by Union soldiers.

Both sides buried their dead (46 Confederate and about that many Union) and tended to their wounded (60 Confederate and about that many Union) near the battlefield.

But it was the Southerners who abandoned their campaign, turned around and limped back to Texas.

"And that's the end of the Civil War in New Mexico," Vigil said.

Vigil, a native of northern New Mexico, said he believes the New Mexico Territory remained loyal to the Union cause mainly because Texas was on the other side.

There had been bad feelings between Texans and New Mexicans dating back at least as far as 1841 when the Republic of Texas mounted the Texan-Santa Fe expedition, presumably for the purpose of exploring opportunities available in the profitable Santa Fe trade.

But New Mexico, still part of Mexico at the time, chose to view the expedition of Texas merchants and soldiers as an invasion force. New Mexicans met the Texans at the Pecos River, disarmed them, arrested them, treated them harshly and sent them to Mexico City, where they were eventually released.

In 1861, when rumors drifting about the Southwest suggested that Confederate troops made up of Texans were planning to march into New Mexico, hundreds of New Mexicans volunteered for the Union cause.

"It wasn't that the Civil War was coming to New Mexico," Vigil said. "It was that those damned Texans were coming."

Three thousand Southern troops - members of the 4th, 5th and 7th Texas Mounted Riflemen, commanded by Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley - pushed into New Mexico early in 1862.

On Feb. 21, 1862, the Confederates defeated Maj. Gen. R.S. Canby's Union troops, which included some New Mexico volunteers, at the Battle of Valverde near Fort Craig, 100 miles south of Albuquerque.

Continuing north, the Southern forces occupied Albuquerque on March 2, 1862, and by March 13 were in control of Santa Fe.

Gen. Sibley then ordered his men to move on the 800 Federal troops at Fort Union, north of Las Vegas, N.M. Sibley knew the fort well. Before resigning from the U.S. Army to side with the Confederacy, he himself had been the commander at Fort Union.

If the Southerners could take the fort, the supplies housed there would be invaluable to them in their ongoing campaign in the West.

But while the Texans were marching north toward Fort Union, the 1st Regiment of Colorado Volunteers, a Union force of 950 men, mostly miners, under the command of Col. John P. Slough, were marching south to reinforce the fort.

Slough's men marched 400 miles in 13 days and arrived at Fort Union on March 10, 1862. Slough knew the Confederates were in or near Santa Fe, so on March 22, he left Fort Union with 1,340 men - his own volunteers plus some regular infantry and cavalry troops stationed at the fort and some New Mexico volunteers - and set out to find the Rebels.

By March 25, an advance force of 450 Union soldiers, commanded by Maj. John M. Chivington, had arrived at and set up camp at the 600-acre ranch of a Polish immigrant named Napoleon Kozlowski. The ranch served as a stage stop on the westbound Santa Fe Trail and was not far from Glorieta Pass.

Meanwhile, 400 Confederate troops, commanded by Maj. Charles L. Pyron, left Santa Fe on March 25 and marched east along the Santa Fe Trail, camping that night in Apache Canyon near a ranch owned by Anthony P. Johnson, a man who had come to New Mexico from St. Louis and had been employed as a teamster at Fort Union.

The Confederate camp near Johnson's Ranch was just nine miles west of the Union camp at Kozlowski's Ranch. But that evening, each force was unaware of the others proximity. That would change the next morning.

On the morning of March 26, a Union scouting party from the Kozlowski Ranch camp encountered and captured four Confederate scouts at Glorieta Pass, which is about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe.

That afternoon, Chivington's men surprised Pyron's Confederates at nearby Apache Canyon and beat back the Southerners in a running battle that was relatively light in casualties but cost the Texans 71 men who were captured after fleeing into a box canyon during their retreat.

That night, the Union soldiers returned to Kozlowski's Ranch, and the Confederates got back to Johnson's Ranch. Both sides licked their wounds and girded themselves for some nasty fighting on March 27.

But the next day came and went without incident.

On March 28, however, 1,200 Confederates under the command of Col. William Read Scurry found Slough and 850 Union troops resting and getting water at Pigeon's Ranch, a mile east of Glorieta Pass.

Pigeon's Ranch, like Kozlowski's Ranch and Johnson's Ranch, was a stage stop on the Santa Fe Trail. It was owned by a Union sympathizer named Alexander Valle, whose unusual dancing style had earned him the nickname, the Pigeon.

The battle started at about 11 a.m. and lasted late into the afternoon as the Union troops fell back from a first defensive position to a second and then to a third on Sharpshooters' Ridge.

Fighting for control of the ridge was fierce and bloody.

Confederate Maj. Henry Raguet was killed when he took a rifle ball through the body while exhorting his men to drive the Union soldiers from the rocks.

The young Union private who shot Raguet died minutes later when a Texas bullet ricocheted off his rifle and passed through his heart.

Finally, the Southerners prevailed, dislodging the Union soldiers from their rocky perch and sending them and their wagons limping and rattling back to camp at Kozlowski's Ranch.

Did somebody say wagons?

The Confederates had left their wagons and a detachment of guards back at Johnson's Ranch.

When the fighting at Pigeon's Ranch started, some of the Confederates detailed to guard the wagons left their post to join the fray.

"You can almost hear them saying, `I didn't come this far to watch some stinking wagon,'" Vigil said.

The Southern wagons were defended by only a light force of sick and injured men when 450 Union troops, commanded by Chivington and guided by Lt. Col. Manuel Chaves of the 2nd New Mexico Volunteers, found them.

"You are right on top of them, major," Chaves is reported to have said to Chivington as they looked down on the wagons from the top of Glorieta Mesa.

The Union troops descended the steep hillside, overwhelmed the Confederate guards, burned the wagons and - according to some accounts - killed many of the Confederate mules.

It was nearly dark when the Southern troops at Pigeon's Ranch learned that their apparent victory had been lost with the wagons.

Two weeks later, Sibley ordered his men to return to Texas. It was a painful, costly retreat plagued by attacks by Union troops and Apaches, sickness, an unforgiving environment and desertion. Only about half of Sibley's original force of 3,000 made it back to Texas.

The Civil War's incursion into New Mexico was brief, but it left its mark.

In 1987, the bodies of 31 Confederate soldiers killed in the fighting were uncovered by a landowner digging a foundation for a cabin on property near Pigeon's Ranch. Most of the bodies were reburied in the Santa Fe National Cemetery.

Remnants of Kozlowski's stage stop stand off N.M. 63, not far from the visitors center at the Pecos National Historical Park. Not so many years ago, these remnants were part of the headquarters of the Forked Lighting Ranch owned by movie actress Greer Garson and her rancher husband. Now the buildings are used by park rangers.

Most of the Johnson Ranch site is now under a section of I-25. What's left of it - some foundations and a root cellar - is on private property owned by a couple named Judd.

One section of an adobe building is all that is left of the Pigeon Ranch facilities, and it sits perilously close to N.M. 5O, quaking to the vibrations caused by passing traffic, disintegrating bit by bit.

"It's sad that that building is just going to disappear one day," Vigil said.

A short distance to the north and east of Pigeon's Ranch there are large sandstone rock formations that the Union covered with canvas and turned into a field hospital.

Near these rock formations is a plaque dedicated by the people of Colorado to the courage of the Colorado volunteers and another dedicated by the Texas division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the memory of the Texas mounted volunteers.

The Colorado plaque is pristine and easy to read, but the Texas marker is pocked with what appears to be bullet holes.

"Some people around here," Vigil said, "still don't like Texans."

TRAIL GUIDEBooks about the Civil War in New Mexico and the Battle of Glorieta Pass include:

"The Battle of Glorieta Pass: A Gettysburg in the West, March 26-28, 1862," by Thomas S. Edrington and John Taylor, 1998.

"Colorado Volunteers in the Civil War: The New Mexico Campaign in 1862," by William Clarke Whitford, 1906, republished with additional material in 1971.

"The Confederate Invasion of New Mexico and Arizona, 1861-1862," by Robert Lee Kerby, 1958.

"Henry Hopkins Sibley: Confederate General of the West," by Jerry Thompson, 1987.

"The Little Lion of the Southwest: A Life of Manuel Antonio Chaves," by Marc Simmons, 1973.

"Rebels on the Rio Grande: The Civil War Journal of A.B. Peticolas," edited by Don E. Alberts, 1984.

Field expedition

Pecos National Historical Park is planning some special activities Friday through Sunday to mark the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Glorieta Pass.

There will be guided tours of the battlefield at 1 and 3 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m., 11 a.m., 1:15 p.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday; and 10 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. Sunday. Each tour is limited to six people, so reservations are recommended. Call (505) 757-6414, Ext. 1.

The 1st Colorado Volunteers, a re-enactors group, will do a living history demonstration about life in a Civil War military camp, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Starting at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, there will be a five-mile guided hike starting at Kozlowski's Ranch and tracing the route the 1st Colorado Volunteers followed to the battlefield. The hike is limited to 20 people. Call the number above for reservations.

Dr. Bob Mallin, a retired physician, presents "Cutting and Curing," his program on Civil War medical procedures, at 11:30 a.m. Saturday and 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

To get to the Pecos National Historical Park visitors center from Albuquerque, take I-25 north past Santa Fe and east toward Las Vegas until you reach the Glorieta-Pecos exit (No. 299). Go east on N.M. 50 into Pecos. At Pecos, turn right onto N.M. 63 and drive 2 miles to the park entrance.

Roll call

A look at what happened to some of the leading participants in the Battle of Glorieta Pass:

Union -

Col. Edward R.S. Canby: Commander of the Department of New Mexico. Was promoted to major general and continued to fight in the Civil War, leading the land campaign to capture Mobile, Ala., in the spring of 1865. In 1873, while assigned to the Pacific Northwest, he was killed by Modoc Indians during a peace parley. He is the only regular army general to be killed in the Indian wars west of the Mississippi. (George Armstrong Custer was officially a colonel when he was killed at the Little Big Horn.)

Col. John P. Slough: Of the 1st Colorado Volunteers. After the Civil War, he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court of New Mexico. On Dec. 15, 1867, Chief Justice Slough was shot to death in Santa Fe by Capt. W.L. Rynerson, a member of the territorial Legislature from Do¤a Ana County.

Maj. John M. Chivington: Of the 1st Colorado Volunteers. A Methodist preacher known as the "Fighting Parson," he was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 260 pounds. He commanded a force of Colorado militia and volunteers in the infamous November 1864 attack that killed more than 100 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians - mostly women and children - at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. He died in Colorado in 1894.

Lt. Col. Manuel A. Chaves: Of the 2nd New Mexico Volunteers. He fought with troops that put down the Taos rebellion of 1847 and took part in many campaigns against Navajos, Apaches and Utes. Numerous arrow wounds suffered during his fighting days contributed to his death in 1889 at his home in Valencia County.

Confederate -

Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley: Commander of Confederate forces in New Mexico. After the Civil War, he served as chief of artillery in the army of Khedive Ismail I of Egypt. A taste for alcohol made him less successful at this than he might have been. He returned to Fredericksburgh, Va., where he died destitute in 1886.

Col. William Read Scurry: Of the 4th Texas Mounted Volunteers. He was promoted to brigadier general in September 1862 and fought for the Confederacy until he bled to death at the Battle of Jenkins Ferry in April 1864.

Maj. Charles L. Pyron: Of the 2nd Texas Mounted Volunteers. He served with the Sibley Brigade for the remainder of the war, was wounded at the Battle of La Fourche and attained the rank of colonel. After the war, he raked in a fortune ranching near San Antonio but died in 1868 at the age of 52.

Ollie Reed Jr.'s Trail Tales is a collection of stories rooted in the rich history and legends of New Mexico and the Southwest. Reed can be reached at 823-3619 or by e-mail at oreed@abqtrib.com

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