Megan Kate Nelson - The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

Also by Megan Kate Nelson

Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War

Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp

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Copyright 2020 by Megan Kate Nelson

Maps copyright 2020 by David Lindroth

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Interior design by Laura Levatino

Jacket design by Kristen Haff

Jacket artwork: Background: The Grand Canyon, 1909 (oil on canvas), Moran, Thomas (18371926) / Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, USA / Gift of Mrs. John A. Hadden in memory of Mrs. F. F. Prentiss / Bridgeman Images; Figures: The Pueblo of Acoma, New Mexico (oil on canvas), Moran, Thomas (18371926) / Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-5254-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-5256-6 (ebook)

For Mathilde Bodensieck Fritschel and Genevieve Miles Riddle and all of the grandmothers

I t was the first summer of the Civil War, and everyone thought it would be the last. Hundreds of thousands of Americans converged on train platforms and along country roads, waving handkerchiefs and shouting goodbyes as their men went off to military camps. Most of these men were civilian volunteers: farmers and laborers, doctors and lawyers who had never fought in any sort of battle. Some were professional soldiers: army regulars who were recruited into service in the 1840s and 50s, paid to fight first against Indians in Florida and then Mexicans across the border, and afterward, to garrison frontier forts from the Mississippi River to the Pacific.

In those first warm days of June 1861, there had been only a few skirmishes in the steep, stony mountains of western Virginia, but large armies of Union and Confederate soldiers were coalescing along the Potomac River. A major battle was coming, and it would be fought somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Richmond.

As the war was beginning in Virginia, the struggle over lands west of the Mississippi was also getting under way. In the Union War Department a few steps from the White House, clerks wrote out dispatches to commanders in California, Oregon, and the western territories. The federal government needed army regulars currently garrisoned at frontier forts to fight in the eastern theater. These soldiers should be sent immediately to the camps around Washington, D.C.

In New Mexico Territory, however, some regulars would have to remain at their posts. The political loyalties of the local populationlarge numbers of Hispano laborers, farmers, ranchers, and merchants; a small number of Anglo businessmen and territorial officials; and thousands of Apaches and Navajoswere far from certain. New Mexico Territory, which in 1861 extended from the Rio Grande to the California border, had come into the Union in 1850 as part of a congressional compromise regarding the extension of slavery into the West. California was admitted to the Union as a free state while New Mexico, which was south of the Mason-Dixon Line, remained a territory. Under a policy of popular sovereignty, its residents would decide for themselves if slavery would be legal. Mexico had abolished black slavery in 1829, but Hispanos in New Mexico had long embraced a forced labor system that enslaved Apaches and Navajos. In 1859 the territorial legislature, made up of predominantly wealthy Hispano merchants and ranchers with Native slaves in their households, passed a Slave Code to protect all slave property in the Territory.

In order to ensure that this pro-slavery stance did not drive New Mexico into the arms of the Confederacy, the commander of the Department of New Mexico would have to keep most of his regulars in place to defend the Territory from a secessionist overthrow. Louisa Canbys husband, Edward R. S. Canby (his wife and family members called him by his middle name, Richard), a colonel in the Union Army who had assumed command in Santa Fe after his superior officer resigned to join the Confederacy, was in his headquarters until all hours during the summer of 1861, organizing his troops and making defensive plans. Louisa was used to being alone at such busy times. She and Richard had been married for more than twenty years, and they had moved together with their daughter Mary to frontier posts in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, California, and Utah Territory. Living in Santa Fe at this moment, however, was different. Everyone was talking not only of a secessionist insurrection, but also a possible Confederate invasion of New Mexico. If that came to pass, Louisa would do whatever she could to help the Union win the fight.

The Lincoln administration had to retain control of the West in order to win the war. It was an immense region, making up more than 40 percent of the United States landmass. The U.S. government had purchased most of it from England, Spain, and France early in the nineteenth century and acquired the rest after defeating Mexico in 1848. New Mexico Territory was the gateway to southern California, and to much of the rest of the West. In 1861 it was also the only far western territory to share a border with the Confederacy. It was therefore vulnerable to invasion.

To move large armies through New Mexico Territory would be a challenge. It was a forbidding landscape, with rolling deserts breaking suddenly into volcanic ranges and mesas. Its lands averaged 5,700 feet above sea level. Newcomers immediately felt the effects of the elevation, and of the semi-aridity of the climate. Towns, farms, and ranches were clustered along three major rivers (the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and the Gila) and trails that led to other water sources: springs and wells, small creeks and arroyos. Bright green fields edged these waterways and were themselves crossed by acequias, irrigation ditches that brought water to the plants. The fields were a vivid contrast to the brown desert sands that surrounded them.

Like the regions scrub plants, the people who lived in New Mexico Territory had developed strategies of survival. They scattered across the landscape in order to use the regions scarce resources without depleting them. Those who were able to move quickly through the desert, and knew where there were steady supplies of meat, plants, and water, were those who endured in New Mexico. They hunted, farmed, staked claims in silver and copper mines, traded goods and sold slaves, and regularly raided one anothers horse and cattle herds.