THEY HAVE ABANDONED EVERYTHING
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SIBLEY AND HIS STAFF, ALONG WITH THE FOURTH AND SEVENTH REGIMENTS, LEFT Albuquerque and crossed by ferry to the west bank of the river while Green’s Fifth Regiment and Pyron’s men marched along the eastern bank, expecting at any time to meet Canby’s force. Once Pyron’s troops and the Fifth reached Peralta, some twenty miles south of Albuquerque, they planned to cross the Rio Grande and join Sibley and the others on the west bank. But there was no sign of the Federals.1
The rebels did not clash head-on with the bluecoats because Canby, who had marched his men to effect a linkup with Paul’s force, was now at their rear. The two Federal commands, totaling about 2,400 men, finally joined with much celebration on the evening of April 13 at Carnuél Cañon, near Tijeras and fifteen miles east of Albuquerque.2 It was here that a petition, signed by all the officers of the First Colorado, was presented to Canby. In it, the officers asked that Chivington be named Slough’s successor as commander of the regiment; Canby consented.3 Then, as Paul wrote, “Our combined forces moved against the enemy, who retreated before us.”4
Hoping to keep the rebels in his sights and hasten their withdrawal, Canby night-marched his command to Peralta, where Governor Connelly had his home and ranch. Canby discovered Green’s and Pyron’s men encamped on Connelly’s property, where they were taking great delight in stripping the home of its valuables and vandalizing that which was of no use to them. Wishing to avoid a clash in the dark, Canby decided to wait until daybreak before deciding whether or not to attack.5
The rebels were caught with their guard down. Charles Gardiner noted that on the night of April 14, “Some of our scouts went into the town, and even into the Fandango Room, where the [Confederate] officers were having a dance with the fair señoritas of Los Lunas.”6 Lieutenant Colonel Chávez reported to Chivington that his scouts had found the rebels drunk and with only a few guards around their encampment. According to Chivington, Chávez told him that “the First Colorado could go in and take their entire camp, and go up and capture all the officers—and he was exceedingly anxious for the fray.”7
Chivington went to Canby with this information and a request that his regiment be allowed to raid the rebel camp. But Canby replied no. “Night attacks are very dangerous,” he said, “and especially so to the attacking party.” The colonel pressed Canby but he would not yield: “You are flushed with victory; you now believe that you can do anything or whip anybody, but you may be mistaken. And if he captures you instead of you capturing him, what would become of me?”8
Chivington responded, “The enemy is now sufficiently reduced for you to drive him out of the country, even though he might capture us.”9
Canby was unpersuaded, not to mention low on supplies. Engaging the rebels in a full-scale battle was the last thing he wanted to do. He gestured toward the troops spread out across the plain. “You see my handful of regulars and Captain Dodd’s and Captain Ford’s independent companies of Colorado volunteers?” he asked Chivington. “That is all I have on which I can rely. These native troops will not stand the Texan fire.” Canby, however, promised to give the matter more thought. Chivington remained awake all night in anticipation of being given the order to attack, but it never came.10
As dawn broke the next morning, one of Canby’s orderlies built a fire to boil the coffee. The smoke was spotted by the rebels, who until that moment had no idea the Yankees were in the vicinity. The rebels immediately sprang to their guns and opened up on the Federals. In no time, the battle Canby wished to avoid was on. While Chivington and Canby stood discussing the situation near a Union mule team, “a solid shot from the enemy’s 6-pounder took the head of one of the headquarters’ mules clear off from the body.” Canby responded phlegmatically, “I think we had better retire to a little safer position.”11
At that moment, the two officers spotted a rebel detachment—seven wagons and a mountain howitzer—racing to reinforce the main body at Connelly’s ranch. Turning to the colonel, Canby said, “Now, colonel, you have been so anxious for something to do; capture that detachment.”12
Chivington detailed Companies F and H, who were already mounted for scouting purposes, to engage the Confederate train. “They gave us a pretty lively little fight and then surrendered,” Chivington noted.13
Ovando Hollister was part of the group dispatched to intercept the Confederate column. He recorded:
Observing by the glass that their escort was small—thirty-five—and having received the requisite orders, we went after it. Our horses had melted down to thirty-three, and these were in miserable heart. As we galloped across the bottom towards them, they fluttered like birds in a snare, and I think, had they consulted wisdom, [they] would have left the miserable overloaded train and proceeded leisurely to their command. Instead, however, part prepared to defend it by unlimbering and loading a brass howitzer in attendance, while the rest, under cover of the wagons, leaned on their trusty rifles for support. . . .
Intently observing their movements, we approached on the gallop to within two hundred yards, dismounted and deployed as skirmishers, and advanced on the train. Soon they let loose, and down, quick as thought, dropped every man, emptying his piece while in that position at any part of a human form exposed to his aim; then up, and forward—and down again to let their fire pass over us. Thus we proceeded till within fifty yards, when, with a yell, we rushed on them. Whereupon, something over a dozen stepped out in sight, dropped their arms and hoisted a dirty handkerchief on a ramrod, in token of surrender.
In addition to the prisoners, the Yankees captured the rebel howitzer, seventy mules, ten to fifteen horses, and seven wagons filled with quartermaster and commissary stores.14
The battle for Connelly’s ranch continued. Theophilus Noel recorded: “At sunrise, Gen. Canby’s forces appeared in front of our position on the east among the sand hills. Their force, at the lowest estimate, was computed at 5,000. Soon brisk and sharp skirmishing commenced along our whole line. Our artillery and that of the enemy’s exchanged the very warmest compliments.”15
At the sound of the firing from Connelly’s ranch, Sibley sent the two regiments on the west bank splashing across the river to aid their comrades. “The enemy tried in vain at various points to break our lines and force an entrance and drive us from the position we held,” Noel wrote,
but were foiled in every attempt by the gallant little garrison until 9 o’clock A.M., when the shouts of their comrades of the Fourth and Seventh Regiments were heard as they came at double-quick from the river to their assistance, the gallant Scurry at their head. Such heroic courage and zeal is seldom displayed as was by them in wading the river that morning up to their armpits in the water in which ice was floating. They crossed without a murmur, cold and freezing as it was, and with merriment and gaiety came, regardless of the wind or weather, the like of which is but seldom seen in the “Lone Star State.” After their arrival, the skirmishing was somewhat increased in fierceness for a time.16
The battle for Connelly’s ranch lasted all day. Canby divided his force into two columns, one commanded by himself and the other by Paul. Chivington, attached to Paul’s column, was caught in the open with plenty of iron hail being thrown his way. Paul ordered him to bring up the First Battalion, under Ned Wynkoop, now a major and second in command of the First Colorado. (Tappan had returned to Denver City following Slough’s resignation and Chivington’s promotion to regiment commander.) Wynkoop was to advance upon the rebel positions; Paul would stand ready to support the maneuver with the regulars. Chivington followed orders, and within minutes Wynkoop’s men, with the Second Battalion close behind, overran and captured the Texas battery that had been harassing the Yankees for hours. Once the guns were in Union hands, an angry Paul rode up to Chivington and demanded, “Why didn’t you call for me to support you with the regular infantry?”
“Why, colonel,” Chivington replied, “I didn’t need any support.”
“Oh, damnation!” Paul reportedly cried out petulantly, “You wanted the credit of the whole thing yourself!”17
Charles Gardiner’s letter to his parents provided a condensed version of events:
Early next morning, we were all marched to position in high spirits and full expectation of a glorious fight and victory that day. Canby opened his guns (4) on one side, and we ours (8) on the other, and a brisk cannonading from both sides was kept up all day, we losing 8 killed & wounded. What their loss was in killed we could not ascertain. We found several graves that looked as if they might contain 6 or [illegible]. . . . We found 16 wounded in the town next morning. They left that night about 2 o’clock. I was on picket and could plainly hear them leaving.18
What Gardiner heard was the splashing of Sibley’s Brigade across the ice-choked Rio Grande from Peralta to Los Lunas. Using a ferocious sandstorm that blew in ahead of a weather front to mask their movements, the Texans began crossing the river before the Federals knew what was happening. The spring storm, common in New Mexico at that time of year, swooped in with howling winds, plummeting temperatures, and a swirling maelstrom of dust and snow, which one Union soldier described as “one solid cloud of moving sand and dust in which one could scarcely breathe.”19
“The river was nearly eight hundred yards wide,” a Texan recounted. “That night ice had frozen four inches thick; ‘mush’ ice was running in the river, which was fast rising; the water on the ford was an average four feet deep. Yet what of that? In, in they went, regardless of personal feelings of comfort.”20
When dawn arrived, many of the Union troops were angry to learn that the rebels had slipped away and were quick to put the blame on the cautious Canby. Chivington growled,
There were many men and some of the officers of the First Colorado that were not slow to say that General Canby was either a coward or a rebel, because he had not made a more decisive fight, and this was only increased the next morning when we found that, under cover of the night, the enemy had crossed the Rio Grande, which was bank-full, and left us to ourselves in our glory.21
Hollister noted, also with some bitterness, that Peralta
was the most harmless battle on record, putting one in mind of two gamblers colleagued to do a greeny, betting and bluffing together with perfect recklessness to bait him, but suddenly finding their judgment when he put his foot into it. Canby and Sibley are comrades of old. . . . As it is always fashionable to abuse everything that looks like cowardice, the General was castigated unmercifully that night. And I think with good reason.22
Canby’s own report is devoid of self-blame:
During the night, the enemy abandoned his position and crossed to the right bank of the river, leaving his sick and wounded behind him, without attendance, without medicines, and almost without food. On the 16th, we had nearly overtaken the rear of his column, and the march was continued during the remainder of the day in sight and almost within cannon range, but on opposite sides of the river. At night, our camps were directly opposite, but during the night he abandoned a large portion of his train, 38 wagons and the supplies that they contained, and fled into the mountains.
Canby sent Graydon’s Independent Spy Company to keep them under watch, content to provide the Confederates with an armed escort out of the territory rather than risk the lives of any more of his men.23
Jacob Downing recalled that the Union force “immediately marched down the west bank of the Rio Grande, hoping to cut off their retreat. Though we made long marches, often in night and often taking from twelve to fifteen prisoners a day, yet we were not able to reach them, as our men had no rest and were much jaded.”24
Canby was reluctant to press his Texas foes too intently. His actions, or lack thereof, went unexplained for many years after the Civil War ended. A recently discovered newspaper article about William R. Beatty, a member of Company F, sheds light on Canby’s situation. Private Beatty had gone to Canby’s headquarters on business and started to leave when the colonel invited him into his tent. Beatty recalled their conversation:
“Sit down, boy,” [Canby] said. “I want to ask you a question and I want you to promise me you’ll answer it. What are the boys saying about me for not following the Texans?”
I hesitated a while and then I blurted out, “They’re calling you a coward.”
He just smiled. “Say, are you getting enough to eat?” he asked.
I said I wasn’t, not by a—well, by a lot.
“I’m not either,” he came back. “Those fellows [Texans] up in the hills aren’t either, and they’d like us to take them prisoners. If we did, we’d all starve, and that’s why I’m not following them.”
“When the boys got this through their heads,” Beatty concluded, “they quit their talk about him.”25
Sibley realized that continuing to follow the river could result in a clash with Kit Carson’s troops that Canby had left to garrison Fort Craig, and his troops were in no condition for another fight. The decision was made, therefore, to make a 100-mile detour through the mountains to the west; take their chances in the dry, inhospitable terrain; and then return to the river south of the fort. At 1:00 A.M. on April 18, after divesting themselves of everything except the barest essentials, the brigade began its arduous uphill climb to a pass through the San Mateo and Magdelenas Mountains.
If the 400-mile march of the First Colorado from Denver to Fort Union had been difficult, it was a stroll in the park compared to the hellish, agonizing effort by the Texans to escape New Mexico. Although the Texans possessed only seventy-eight rounds of artillery ammunition, they were loathe to abandon what few guns the brigade possessed. One of Sibley’s men recorded that his regiment had taken charge of the artillery pieces, which caused them no end of trouble:
Whenever they came to one of those hills up which a horse could scarcely go, the men would take hold wherever they could, and by pulling and pushing with ropes, they would get them up—Colonels, Captains, and all working alike—everyone determining that those guns should go through. . . . There was a company detailed to go with each gun, and in this manner we took them through, over some hills down and up, which a horseman would have thought impassable.
The Texans’ retreat from New Mexico, April 1862.
Three guns, however, were eventually buried along the route, the Texans keeping only the six Union pieces captured at Valverde.26
Noel’s diary also hints at the difficult conditions the Texans endured:
Arrived at 10 A.M. at a mountain creek; water brackish but how refreshing! None can tell, save those who, like myself, were feeble from effects of sickness and compelled to make the long marches from one point to another on foot. Here a portion of our caissons were destroyed, and the celebrated “Mountain Howitzers” of Val Verde and Gloriéta fame were consigned to the Mother Earth—buried in this mountain pass to prevent their falling into the hands of Canby & Co. The guns captured at Val Verde alone were kept, with caissons &c, to be taken across the “Apennines of New Mexico.” . . .
And now, reader, just substitute mules for camels and a dreary, barren, desolate, mountainous and “trackless waste” for the great Desert of Africa, and you have it. A caravan, indeed, not of adventurous and money-seeking individuals, but a caravan of care-worn, disappointed, foot-sore soldiers. Victorious on every battlefield, but defeated from want of supplies and the great distance from assistance, both in way of supplies and reinforcements.27
Even the normally acerbic Jacob Downing expressed compassion for the beaten foe:
When the chase commenced, fear gave them strength, and day and night their march continued, till at last, abandoning everything, batteries, arms, munitions, train stock, and even their wounded, sick and lame, they fled to the mountains [west of the Rio Grande], here thinking themselves safe and entirely beyond pursuit. To their surprise they soon found that their sufferings had just commenced, as for a day at a time they could obtain no water; their labors were excessive, many of them sinking by the way from sheer exhaustion, while a large band of Navajoes were hanging upon their flanks, and in their wake, like wolves watching for prey. . . . Woe to the poor Texan who became sick or foot sore, as the mangled corpse of many a poor fellow attests.28
Captain Paddy Graydon, pursuing the rebels at a safe distance, reported on the trail of carnage the Texans left in their wake: “On the road, they deserted one wagon and a camp and left three bodies half buried. In another place [we] found bones of a man’s arm, half eaten by wolves. I had all buried. . . . Left dead on the road [were] about 60 or 70 mules and horses.”29
An officer on Canby’s staff also gave an account of the Confederates’ harrowing and desperate flight:
Sibley . . . passed on the west side of the Sierra Magdelena, through the Sierra de San Mateo, until he reached the dry bed of the Rio Palomas, down which he continued until he reached the Rio Grande, where supplies had been sent from Mesilla to meet him. His command was entirely worn out and nearly famished. This distance from where he left the Rio Grande until he reached it again was over one hundred miles, and the Confederates were ten days accomplishing this distance, with five days of poor rations. The route was through the worst country in that territory, with no guides, trail, or road. What artillery they got through with was dragged up hill and lowered by the men, who used long ropes for that purpose. The undergrowth and brush were so dense that for several miles they were forced to cut their way through with axes and Bowie knives. Nearly all of the ammunition was abandoned on the way, as was nearly everything else, except what the men carried on their persons.30
With his own supplies running low, Canby halted the pursuit at Fort Craig, still under the temporary command of Kit Carson. The tired Union troops could now rest and refresh themselves at the fort—a respite that was denied Sibley’s men, still struggling through the sand and mountains out of sight to the west and fearful that the bluecoats remained hot on their trail.
Downing remembered, “We were ordered to discontinue the chase on account of the scarcity of provisions, and camped near Fort Craig on the Rio Grande, where we have been for some time past, consoling ourselves with the thought that the members of the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers have freed New Mexico from the polluted foot of the traitor and saved Utah and our own Colorado, which they so confidently believed was theirs by the right of conquest, from the devastating hand of the rebel pirate band.”31
With Graydon’s native troops keeping tabs on the retreating foe, Canby reported to Washington that Sibley’s force was “greatly demoralized,” and that “they have abandoned everything that could impede their flight. Sick and wounded have been left by the wayside, without care and often without food. Many of them have been collected [by the Union troops] and are properly cared for.”32
On April 23, Colonel Benjamin S. Roberts, commanding New Mexico’s northern military district, wrote to the army’s adjutant general:
It will gratify you to know that the Texan troops are in retreat out of the country, having been compelled by our operations to abandon most of their supplies of all kinds and to take the mountain route behind the Socorro range to avoid capture of their small remaining force of the 3,000 troops that invaded the Territory. They have abandoned their sick and wounded everywhere on their line of retreat, and are leaving in a state of demoralization and suffering that has few examples in any war. The long line of their retreat over the Jornada and wastes of country without water and that furnish no supplies will render their march extremely difficult and aggravate the ordinary sufferings of a disorganized army under defeat.33
Alfred Peticolas had about reached the end of his endurance and humor. “Today [April 27] we made a short journey of about 20 miles,” he wrote bitterly,
to meet the provision train Steele had started up to us. We ate for breakfast this morning a rib or two of an old broke-down work ox we had along, without salt. Yesterday, two men were left on the road, too sick to be moved. We also left two in the mountains near [Fort] Craig. They were thrown out of the wagons by Major [Richard T.] Brownrigg and one out of [the] end of Sibley’s wagon. Sibley is heartily despised by every man in the brigade for his want of feeling, poor generalship, and cowardice. Several Mexican whores can find room to ride in his wagons while the poor private soldier is thrown out to die on the way. The feeling and expression of the whole brigade is never to come up here again unless mounted and under a different general.34
Another disillusioned Texan wrote, “Among the soldiers, I hear ridicule and curses heaped upon the head of our gen’l. They call him a coward, which appears very plausible, too, for he had never been in an engagement or where there was any appearance of there going to be one.” Others observed that Sibley and many of his officers managed to stay drunk most of the way back to Texas and ruefully dubbed the retrograde movement, “The Famous Whiskey Retreat.”35
On April 28, Colonel William Scurry left the brigade in order to return to Texas more quickly. Theophilus Noel noted,
In [Scurry’s] farewell speech—the most eloquent of his life—he reminded us of what we had done, and in the most touching manner, reminded us of the green graves of our comrades and brothers left behind; and now that we were about to enjoy a season of inactivity, it was hoped that we would not be unmindful and forgetful of those of our ranks—our companions, our friends, our brothers—whose wrongs, as men, we were bound yet to avenge. Sleeping the great sleep that knows no waking were the heroes of Val Verde—Lockridge, Sutton, [Captain Marinus] van der Heuvel [Company G, Fourth Texas; killed at Valverde], and their kindred noble spirits who with them fell on the field of honor. Raguet, whom all loved; Shropshire, the pride of the Second; Buckholts, the bravest of the brave, sleep quietly beneath the frozen earth where the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains overlook Gloriéta’s battle plain!36
Although many officers and men on both sides would see further combat on far-flung battlefields in the coming months and years of the war, Sibley’s grandiose scheme to capture New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and California for the Confederacy had come to an ignominious end. Undefeated on the battlefield, the bleeding, blistered, and starving remnants of his once-proud force struggled desperately to reach Fort Bliss, their dreams of conquest crushed by the vast expanse of New Mexico.
The surviving Texans must have been stunned at the campaign’s outcome. They had done everything that honor and courage could have done. Their regimental commanders were the cream of the crop—hardy, brave, resourceful, and full of devotion to the Southern cause. They had seen the likes of Major Lynde surrender his Union command while barely putting up a fight. They had seen Canby’s men reeling from the charge at Valverde. They had pushed back Slough’s men at Pigeon’s Ranch. Yet, in spite of all their victories, they had failed. In their minds, they had been defeated by a variety of causes—the harsh weather, the pitiless terrain, the immense distances they were required to travel with inadequate provisions, their reliance on Hart’s and Magoffin’s broken promises to have mountains of supplies waiting for them at Fort Bliss, Chivington’s disastrous raid on their vital train at Johnson’s Ranch, and, perhaps most importantly, the ineffectiveness of Sibley’s leadership.
On the Union side, the soldiers saw Sibley’s retreat from New Mexico as proof positive that the outcome had been a resounding Northern victory. Canby was certain that his cautious, low-risk approach had paid off in the end, for he had allowed the rebels to overextend and, in effect, defeat themselves. Slough, Chivington, and Paul could point to the fact that their troops gave as good as they got in their baptism of fire in Apache Canyon, in the battle around Pigeon’s Ranch, and at the final skirmish at Peralta. After all, as many Unionists were quick to point out, the rebels had slunk off “like whipped curs.” What more proof did anyone need?
Canby, in Santa Fé on May 4, 1862, penned his gratitude to the Union soldiers under his command in General Orders Number 41:
The Colonel commanding desires to express his grateful appreciation of the conduct and services of the troops of this department, tested as they have been in the past four months by two general battles, many skirmishes, and much toilsome and laborious service.
Daring and energetic in action; patient and reliant when policy dictated a different course, enduring, with equal constancy and fortitude, privations of food, of clothing and of rest; forced marches; the snow storms of the mountains and the sand storms of the plains. They have driven a superior force of the enemy into the mountains, forced him to abandon his trains, his supplies, and his plunder; to leave his sick and wounded by the wayside without care, and often without food; and finally, to abandon a country which he had entered to “conquer and occupy,” leaving behind him, in dead and wounded, and in sick and prisoners, one half of his original force.
These results have not been attained without serious losses, and the laurels won at Valverde and Apache Canyon, hallowed by the blood of many brave and noble men, will ever be a bond of union and friendship between those who have struggled to free New Mexico from the domination of an arrogant and rapacious invader.37
In far-off Washington, too far for anyone to have heard the hoarse barking of cannon in Apache Canyon, the staccato crackling of muskets at La Gloriéta Pass, the shouts of men along the icy banks of the Rio Grande, the distant blaring of bugles, and the rolling of drums, the victory was barely noticed. The war was too uncomfortably close to home for Washington to celebrate events half a continent away.
In Richmond, however, the defeat was seen as a serious blow to Confederate hopes for eventual victory. The dreams of the besotted Sibley and the usually level-headed Jefferson Davis to create a Confederate empire in the Southwest—stretching from Texas to California—had been dashed. But had they ever been realistic dreams? Historians have debated whether Sibley’s 3,000-man brigade was capable of executing the grand strategy assigned to it. Carleton’s California Column (not to mention the U.S. Navy in control of the California ports) presented a formidable obstacle to rebel plans to forge a pathway to the Pacific. And Canby’s and Paul’s combined forces, plus the 5,000 men preparing to march to New Mexico from Fort Leavenworth, posed an even greater threat to a northward advance.
The only hope of a Confederate victory hinged on Sibley’s unrealistic belief that the Hispanic population of New Mexico and Arizona (despite its demonstrated dubious military value) would rise up against their Northern “oppressors,” take up arms, and join his ranks en masse. This gross miscalculation, along with his alcoholism, incompetence, and unfounded expectations that his brigade could live off a parched and desolate land—a land that he boasted he knew so well—doomed the expedition from the start.
It is an interesting exercise to contemplate what effects a rebel victory might have had. What impact would a greatly expanded Confederacy with Pacific ports have had on the overall strategy and prosecution of the war? How many guns would the millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver from Colorado have purchased for the South? What would the psychological impact have been on the North had the Southwest fallen into rebel hands? And imagine the consequences had England and France been enticed to support the South in the wake of such a stunning victory as a Confederate conquest of the Southwest. But the Confederacy did not conquer the Southwest, gain ports on the Pacific, or enlist the aid of England or France. And so these “what ifs” must forever inhabit the realm of conjecture.
The battle-torn National Colors carried by the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers at the Battle of Gloriéta Pass. (Colorado Historical Society, WPA-1203 #10028287)
Both sides had engaged in Herculean efforts to overcome distance, deprivations, and divisiveness to turn a small-scale campaign in a remote region of the continent into an engagement that some historians have grandiosely labeled “The Gettysburg of the West.”
In the end, the invader, his supplies gone up in smoke thanks to Chivington’s stroke of good fortune, was forced to retreat. The fact that the United States remains united today is in no small measure the result of a mere handful of stalwart regular troops and volunteer Coloradans, in the words of William Gilpin, their now former governor, standing “as firm and enduring as the loftiest mountain.”38
1. Martin H. Hall, The Confederate Army of New Mexico (Austin: Presidial Press, 1978), 35.
2. Official Record, 9:551, 665.
3. William C. Whitford, Colorado Volunteers in the Civil War: The New Mexico Campaign in 1862 (Glorieta, NM: Rio Grande Press, 1971), 130.
4. Official Record, 9:552.
5. After the fight, Connelly estimated the cost of the damage from the battle and the Texans’ vandalism of his home at no less than $30,000. Official Record, 9:673.
6. Charles Gardiner, “The ‘Pet Lambs’ at Glorieta Pass,” Civil War Times Illustrated (November 1976): 36.
7. John M. Chivington, “The Pet Lambs,” Chivington papers, CHS, 15–16.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 16.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 16–17.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ovando J. Hollister, Boldly They Rode (Lakewood, CO: Golden Press, 1949 [first published in 1863 as History of the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers]), 92–93.
15. Theophilus Noel, A Campaign from Santa Fe to the Mississippi; Being a History of the Old Sibley Brigade (Shreveport, LA: Shreveport News, 1865), 40.
16. Ibid.
17. Chivington, “Pet Lambs,” 15–17.
18. C. Gardiner, “The ‘Pet Lambs’ at Glorieta Pass,” 37.
19. Hollister, Boldly They Rode, 95.
20. Theophilus Noel, A Campaign from Santa Fe to the Mississippi, 40.
21. Official Record, 9:551, 665; Chivington, “Pet Lambs.”
22. Hollister, Boldly They Rode, 94–95.
23. Official Record, 9:550–551.
24. Rocky Mountain News, June 7, 1862.
25. Denver Post, July 2, 1916.
26. M. H. Hall, The Confederate Army of New Mexico, 36–37.
27. Theophilus Noel, A Campaign from Santa Fe to the Mississippi, 42.
28. Rocky Mountain News, June 7, 1862.
29. Official Record, 9:671–672.
30. Whitford, Colorado Volunteers in the Civil War, 134–135.
31. Rocky Mountain News, June 7, 1862.
32. Official Record, 9:688–689.
33. Ibid., 552–553.
34. Don E. Alberts, ed., Rebels on the Rio Grande: The Civil War Journal of A. B. Peticolas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 118.
35. Jerry D. Thompson, Henry Hopkins Sibley: Confederate General of the West (Natchitoches: Northwestern Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 302, 305.
36. Theophilus Noel, A Campaign from Santa Fe to the Mississippi, 45.
37. Rocky Mountain News, May 24, 1862.
38. LeRoy R. Hafen, “Colorado’s First Legislative Assembly,” Colorado Magazine, 20:2 (March 1943): 45.
