The Ghosts of Palmito Ranch
RIO BRAVO NEAR BOCA CHICA
“SANTIAGO’S WAITING FOR US,” HOPE REMINDED ME. “WE’VE got to go.” We started the car, found the hardened tracks, and headed back toward pavement. All the U.S. fishermen had gone home and there were no other cars on the beach. At the blacktop we got a phone signal again, and Hope called the number. Santiago answered on the first ring. He said he was on Route 4 at a spot we had whizzed past less than an hour before. He said he would be waiting in an old Ford pickup at the end of the dirt road near the Texas historical marker.
It had been impossible to see much of anything running eighty on the way in, but heading back, the metal sign under a grove of mesquite caught the headlights. I pulled off for a few seconds to take a photo of that old marker, not knowing whether I would get another chance. The marker’s text began, “Battle of Palmito Ranch, The last land engagement of the Civil War was fought near this site . . .” I read it by our headlights, knowing that this was the ranch where we would be staying the night. Then just as my camera flash lit up the dusk, I saw Santiago up the road, standing at his truck and waving to us.
Santiago, with his assault rifle, peers into the Rio Grande at Palmito Hill Ranch.
I had wanted to camp out in a tent on our first night in Brazos Island State Park at the south end of the Texas outer banks, though there were no camping facilities anywhere nearby—just sand and salt marsh. Hope and I had different views about it. I didn’t want to sleep in a motel in Brownsville. She hated the thought of mosquitoes and no bathrooms. I argued that the Union forces had camped at Brazos Island prior to their confrontation with Confederates at the last battle. The area was so historically important, I said, and besides we would have a mosquito net on our tent. That argument got me nowhere. Then one phone call changed everything.
For several nights in March we had sat together at the kitchen table looking at maps and making calls, searching for places to stay along the border route. I called the number of a bed-and-breakfast in Del Rio, Texas, anticipating we might be there on the fourth night of the trip. Until then, most arrangements had been tentative. Then I reached Sarah Boone.
Hailing from Alabama, Sarah exuded a sense of warmth that made me want to tell her everything. When she asked why we were interested in going to Del Rio, I gave her my whole clumsy spiel. “We’re traveling the full length of the border to help us understand immigration and the border wall, and get to know what people who live near the border think about their lives and the places surrounding them. I’m especially concerned about farmworkers where I live and I wanted to make a pilgrimage to the border for education, for connection, and in tribute to them.”
I said it all in one breath and braced for her reaction, knowing it could cause her to go silent or worse. I had already endured a not-so-friendly response from a B&B owner in Marfa, Texas, who blurted out, “They should all be deported.” She was the same one who said that the Gulf oil spill had been natural and harmless—her husband worked on cleaning up oil spills. Further dialogue had been impossible. So I cringed a little as I awaited Sarah’s response.
She nearly shouted into the phone, “Honey, I love what you’re doing and I want to help you! I’m going to give you a discount for our place and I’m part of a whole border network all along where I can get you in touch with people and find places to stay and I’ll help introduce you to them, too. Send me something in writing about you and your trip. And give me a few days. For starters, I’ve got a great guy I can put you in touch with at Brownsville.” I couldn’t believe our luck. I got off the phone pumping my fist, and told Hope, “It looks like you won’t be camping in a mosquito marsh after all!”
As promised, emails from Sarah with contact information began to arrive the next day, along with copies of her notes to her friends, many of them including her glowing introduction. One email included a spreadsheet with names, addresses, and phone numbers, along with Sarah’s commentary on all of them. The list existed nowhere else; she had made this one for us with people she had met. “Many of these folks are friends of mine; these are excellent resource people who can help you get to know the border firsthand.” Suddenly she had turned maps and websites into people, and she was making appointments with us and for us. Overnight, Sarah had become our border angel.
The contact list spread from the Gulf of Mexico to California. Names of mayors, priests, human rights activists, environmentalists, journalists, and others in small border towns accompanied lists of places to stay and eat. The names included several professors—people whose scholarship encompasses border and immigration studies. Professor Tony Zavaleta of Brownsville was one of them.
Tony’s first message to Sarah conveyed pure Texas hospitality: “They are welcome to stay at my ranch house which has charm, electricity, a toilet, beds, a refrigerator and telephone.” In follow-ups with Tony, I learned he was dedicated to the border, both as the director of the Center for Border and Transnational Studies at the University of Texas at Brownsville and as the owner of Palmito Ranch, the southernmost ranch in the entire United States. With his older relatives passed away, he had become the sole caretaker of this important historical place that few have heard of. Santiago, meeting us on Route 4, was his ranch hand and host when Tony couldn’t be there.
After planning to stay with us, Tony was called away unexpectedly by his work. Apologizing profusely, he assured me that Santiago was both savvy about life on the border and a good cook. “He will take care of you for the night.” Once Tony learned that we spoke Spanish, he was confident we would get along fine.
When we drove up next to Santiago’s beat-up but stout four-wheel-drive pickup, it made our rental car look like a shiny toy. I could tell by the truck’s knobby tires that the road we were headed to could demand something more substantial than a sedan made for pavement. But the car had already passed the sand dune test. How much worse could it get?
Santiago, sixty-eight, was built like his truck: worn but strong. He was beside our car and reaching in to shake hands before we could get out to meet him. Packing a black 9 mm pistol clearly visible in a belt holster on his side, he smiled and said, “Buenas noches, bienvenidos a Palmito!” A minute later we were following him down the dirt road to the Palmito entrance. The banged-up truck had a Texas tag; on the tailgate was a cartoon of the “Virgencita de Guadalupe,” and on the bumper was an old black-and-white sticker that read, “No border wall.” Someone had tried to scrape it off, but it was still legible.
Santiago stopped and opened the gate, and we pulled into the driveway behind him. We cut through tough, dry weeds that scraped the bottom of the car like they were made of steel. I wondered if they were taking the paint off the sides as I tried only half-successfully to straddle the deep ruts carved by hard rains. You could tell that cars as low as ours hadn’t entered the road for years.
. . .
I HAD NEVER HEARD of the Battle of Palmito Ranch, I confessed to Tony when we first talked on the phone. When he began telling the story, I was riveted. The place had been in his family for seven generations, he said. His ancestors had lived there tending their goats and corn when Civil War troops began shooting at one another in the field out in front of the house.
He also told me details from stories he had written about the numerous ghosts he and others had seen around his place. Dozens of them have appeared here, he said, including an apparition of La Llorona, the crying woman who had allegedly killed her children and now wandered forever looking for them, a Maya king who had died on a knoll overlooking the Rio Bravo after traveling there from Mesoamerica, and, connected to the battle, a number of black Union troops killed here.
I asked him if he had seen any ghosts himself. “All the time,” he replied. He also had physical evidence. One day an Indian-head penny had appeared on his porch—minted in 1865. Another appeared the next day—it was from 1863. No one could have come onto the porch without his knowing it, he said. After exhausting every other possibility, Tony was convinced that soldiers killed in the Civil War battle had left them as a message. I’d heard of ghost sightings like he described at other battlefields; they seem especially commonplace where there are unresolved deaths and no closure. Palmito Ranch—actually the whole border—seemed rife with the unsettled. Of course there would be stories of ghosts.
The last battle of the Civil War was fought there on May 12 and 13, 1865, an entire month after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9. It ended in a Confederate victory—an ultimately meaningless one, but a clear victory nonetheless. There were at least sixteen Union casualties and over a hundred more captured, all for naught.
The conflict began when three Union regiments—the Sixty-Second U.S. Colored Troops made up of free blacks and former slaves, the Second Texas Union Cavalry, and the Thirty-Fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry—were mustered from their camp on Brazos Island at Boca Chica and sent toward Brownsville, Texas. Their commander, Colonel Theodore H. Barrett, had set his sights on taking possession of a Confederate trading post at a Mexican border boomtown named Bagdad, located across the river near Matamoros. According to the historian Jeffrey Hunt, Barrett wanted to enhance his reputation before the war ended, though his maneuver was “in direct violation of orders from headquarters.”1 Barrett believed he could wrap up the skirmish fast and with minimal casualties. Colonel Rip Ford, commanding officer of the Second Texas Cavalry of the CSA, at Bagdad, begged to differ.
The only strategic justification for the battle was to end the shipments of munitions, medicines, and supplies from Mexico still flooding across the river into Confederate camps near Brownsville. Union troops had already blockaded the flow of war materiel in the East. Even the routes on the Mississippi River had been stopped. Bagdad, however, was still sending shipments into the Confederacy. With Union troops ordered to keep clear of the border so as to prevent any conflicts with Mexico, rebel troops had moved into a location south of the Rio Grande and the port had flourished. By the spring of 1865, Bagdad had become the South’s main seaport, and the Second Texas Cavalry was stationed there to protect it.
The river was much deeper then—before drought, irrigation, and municipalities siphoned off the Rio’s water upstream. Blockade-runner ships anchored at Bagdad hauled Confederate cotton into the Gulf and eventually to England, returning from Europe with every type of good available for resale. Professional traders took advantage of the flowing water and money, and the town mushroomed. Over twenty thousand people lived in Bagdad’s makeshift shanties in its heyday. Bars and brothels opened there as well. Local critics compared Bagdad to the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.
By mid-May officers on both sides surely knew of Lee’s surrender a month earlier, but the Confederates held on in Bagdad because of the economic importance of the site, and they saw the potential of the place after the war’s end. Commerce, they surmised, would be as important in the war’s aftermath as it had been during it. They were not about to abandon the site because of the surrender in faraway Virginia. This was about the economy beyond the war.
Barrett’s main unit was the Sixty-Second U.S. Colored Troops, a group of 250 infantry. Some of them had once worked under the whip on plantations, and now they fought in uniform for the U. S. government—for freedom. Some of the survivors would go on after the war to make a name for themselves as Buffalo Soldiers. When first conscripted these soldiers had served in the First Missouri Colored Infantry stationed in Louisiana, one of the worst assignments possible in the U.S. military due to the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. After many died of disease in the swamps, the surviving troops were transferred to Brownsville—not exactly a healthy climate either—to serve out the remainder of the war. Even in May we welcomed air conditioning in our car in the morning. We could only imagine how their woolen uniforms and high boots must have felt as the troops marched across the wetlands in close formation toward Bagdad.
Also fighting for the Union that day was the unit some called the Texas Yankees—the Second Texas Union Cavalry. Though the Texas Confederates hated former slaves, they hated Texas Yankee whites even more. To the Texas rebels, the Texas Union loyalists were homegrown traitors. But many of these particular Texans had no cause to fight against the Union. Some were of Mexican origin and had even fought for President Benito Juárez, defending Mexico against the invading French. Some were small landholders or sharecroppers who had chosen to be annexed by the United States in 1848 following the Mexican-American War. When the slaveholders of Texas and their allies revolted against Lincoln and the North, these former Mexicans had no reason to join them. In fact, many had more in common with the slaves than the owners. After living through Mexico’s difficult times, inclusion in the United States was likely a good deal for them.
Joining these units of blacks, Latinos, and Texas white Yankees was the Thirty-Fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, an all-white unit of farm boys from the Midwest. When combined, these Union troops reflected perhaps the greatest ethnic diversity ever fielded during the Civil War. Tragically, however, this assortment of troops was on a suicide mission for Barrett’s vainglory.
Adding to the strangeness of the scene, Mexican nationals and even French soldiers were also on site that day in 1865. At that time, the democratically elected Juárez was in exile in Paso del Norte, later called Ciudad Juarez. The French-born self-appointed emperor, Maximilian, who had deposed Juárez, had taken power. His reign was at its apex in 1865. Ignoring France’s insistence that he step down, Maximilian pushed north to the Rio and gained control of all of Mexico. Though his influence would soon wane, Maximilian’s soldiers stood at the ready near Bagdad, making sure they lost no territory in the American battle. They only observed that day, but as Mexico had already seen American land-grabbing in decades prior, they had just cause for being there.
As the first foot soldiers in the Yankee units reached the river without cavalry support, Ford’s Confederate cavalry charged across the water, outflanked them, and then bore down on the Colored Troops, killing at least sixteen and capturing over a hundred more. This sent the Union forces retreating back toward Padre Island. As the Northern troops fell back, the rebel cavalry overtook them at Palmito Hill, routing the lines and sending the whipped Union force back toward the Gulf. The Union cavalry never gained ground.
The mission Barrett had thought would be a cakewalk ended in bitter defeat. Some of the Indiana infantry troops wrote that the whole debacle was a humiliation for them—a sad ending to a stellar fighting record throughout the war. We have no known written record left by members of the black regiment. But as the ghost stories collected on the Zavaleta ranch reveal, they apparently haven’t let us forget they were there.
Some of Tony’s ancestors at Palmito Ranch had been born in Mexico, but by the time of the battle they were U.S. residents, having gone nowhere. Following continuous skirmishes and then a full-blown war in the years between 1845 and 1848, the U.S. border had been pushed over eighteen hundred miles southward to its Rio Grande location, all by force. Mexico had once extended all the way to what is now California’s northern border. Now the river some two thousand miles south of there was the line. In 1865, the Rio Grande was back in the middle of conflict, and the family who owned the ranch beside it could only wait out one of the strangest battles ever to take place on U.S. soil.
When the U.S. Civil War’s end finally came to Texas—helped along by the presence of large numbers of Union soldiers who arrived to clean things up following the battle—some Confederates went to Mexico and volunteered for Maximilian’s army. But even with their help, Maximilian failed to stand against the renewed Juarista forces that had been boosted back to power by both a popular domestic uprising and financial aid from the U.S. government. Maximilian was captured and executed by firing squad in 1867. Since then Mexico has remained under home rule and the border at the Rio has not moved. But that is not to say it has been stable.
. . .
JACINTO, A PRESENT-DAY HUICHOL SHAMAN, had visited the ranch at Tony’s invitation a few years before us. It didn’t take long for him to make contact with the spirits there; he went into a trance as soon as he stepped onto the deck. He saw scores of spirits wandering across Palmito Hill and told Professor Zavaleta the following: “There are spirits everywhere, and some are very old. There are indios like me and a prince of Mayan people.” Tony recalled Jacinto’s report in writing: “There are negritos, called buffalo soldiers as well as many other people who lived and died there. I can see that there was once a time when great armies roamed this place. . . . A great battle ensued—white against black—while a third army observed the carnage from the southern bank of the river but did not engage.”2
Jacinto asked the legion of wandering souls why they had chosen Palmito. They replied that the ranch is a portal between the past and present, a place where much remains untold and unsettled. Traveling through the passage were the ghosts of indigenous peoples, Tejanos, Mexicans, Americans, Northern and Southern, black and white, all of whom had died somewhere on the site, Jacinto reported. He saw soldiers of three armies; some spoke English, some Spanish, and some French. Along the banks of the lower Rio Grande valley, Tony concluded, “Life, suffering, and death are equally guaranteed.”3
We approached the old unpainted wooden house after dark and climbed the stairs to the deck where Tony had found the coins. Having read the ghost stories before arriving, my senses were primed for possible sightings. I had no idea what would be in store for us that night. Part of me was eager to find out.
Notes
1. Jeffrey W. Hunt, The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch, 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Antonio Zavaleta, “The Ghosts of Historic Palmito Hill Ranch,” 3.