US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0032/00326.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00326}
$Pretitle{35}
$Title{Fort Union National Monument
Part 3   Post-Civil War Operations}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Utley, Robert M.}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{fort
union
indians
new
mexico
warriors
cavalry
wagons
plains
supply}
$Volume{Handbook 35}
$Date{1962}
$Log{}
Book:        Fort Union National Monument
Author:      Utley, Robert M.
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 35
Date:        1962

Part 3   Post-Civil War Operations

The Mescalero Scout of 1867

     After bolting from the Fort Sumner Reservation in 1865, the Mescalero
Apaches hid themselves in the canyons of the Guadalupe and Sacramento
Mountains of southern New Mexico.  In small swift-riding bands their warriors
darted from the mountain hideouts to plunder, burn, and kill.  Settlers and
travelers along the Rio Grande and the Pecos from Texas to north-central New
Mexico lived in daily terror of Mescalero raids.  Although Fort Stanton played
the key role in contending with these Indians, Fort Union mounted one
memorable offensive against them.

     In September 1867 a Mescalero war party ran off 150 head of stock near
Mora, in the mountains west of Fort Union.  With Troop ID, 3rd Cavalry, Capt.
Francis H. Wilson rode out of Fort Union in pursuit.  The trail led south,
toward the Mescalero homeland.  Reinforced by another troop of the 3rd Cavalry
from Fort Stanton, Wilson now had 107 men.  The march led them to forbidding
Dog Canyon of the Sacramento Range, then across to the Guadalupes, and finally
south into Texas.

     The rugged peaks of the Sierra Diablo rise starkly from the desert of
West Texas, and here on October 18 Wilson finally caught up with the raiders.
He surprised 30 to 40 warriors, dropped 6 in the first fire, and galloped off
in pursuit of the fleeing survivors.  The cavalrymen kept up the chase for 15
miles, then suddenly stumbled on a winter camp of 300 to 400 Mescaleros. While
the women worked frantically to move the winter food supply to safety, the
warriors fought off their assailants.  For 3 hours the battle raged back and
forth in the canyon.  Wilson's men took casualties of wounded, but killed or
wounded 25 to 30 of the enemy before the Indians dissolved into the mountains.

     Wilson led his command to Fort Bliss for supplies and medical attention,
then marched back to Fort Union.  He arrived on November 12, having covered
more than 1,000 miles of mountain and desert in less than 2 months.  Although
he had dealt the Mescaleros a severe blow, not for more than a decade were
they conquered for all time.

     Meanwhile, the Kiowas and Comanches once more turned the attention of the
Fort Union garrison to the east.

The Campaign of 1868

     The plains war raged on through 1866 and 1867.  Kiowas, Comanches,
Cheyennes, and Arapahoes ravaged the settlements of Kansas and eastern
Colorado.  Military operations focused in Kansas, thus drawing the hostiles
away from the lower end of the Santa Fe Trail and affording New Mexico relief
from the plains warriors.  But Fort Union did not remain untouched by the war.

     In the autumn of 1868, Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan decided to organize a
winter campaign against the plains tribes.  He planned to have four columns
converge on the winter campgrounds of the hostiles in what is now western
Oklahoma.  One was to come from New Mexico.  Maj. A. W. Evans organized the
New Mexico column at Fort Bascom, 130 miles southeast of Fort Union.  It
consisted of six troops of the 3rd Cavalry, three of which were from Fort
Union, a company of infantry from Fort Union, and a battery of four howitzers.
(Two hundred Utes also joined up to fight their old enemies, but after drawing
arms, ammunition, and clothing at Fort Union, changed their minds and with
their new treasures went back home.)  Evans began his thrust down the Canadian
River on November 18, 1868.

     Building a supply depot 185 miles down the Canadian, Evans spent an
exhausting month scouring the country to the east.  He found abundant sign of
Indians but could locate none to attack.  Finally, on Christmas Day, he sent
Capt.  E. W. Tarlton and his troop to pursue two warriors who, from distant
hills, had been watching his movements for several days.  The chase led into
the narrow valley of the North Fork of Red River, on the western flank of the
Wichita Mountains.  Suddenly the 34 cavalrymen met head on a charging mass of
about 100 mounted Comanches.  A volley dropped four and turned the charge.

     Tarlton sent for help.  Joined by two more troops and two howitzers, he
pushed down the river.  In 2 miles he came upon a village of Go Comanche
lodges belonging to Chief Arrow Point.  The tepees covered the left bank of
the river on the edge of a grove of timber.  Low mountains rolled off to the
north.  The Indians were working frantically to remove their possessions from
the camp, but fled precipitously when a howitzer shell burst in their midst.
The cavalry rushed through the village and formed among some rocks atop a
ridge on the opposite side.  In their front, the warriors took position among
rocks on a parallel ridge.

     Evans now arrived with the balance of the command.  But the Comanches,
too, received reinforcements.  About 100 warriors from a Kiowa camp located
farther downstream joined the fight.  Some strengthened the Comanches
exchanging fire with Tarlton, while others threatened his right and rear from
across the river.  Evans extended the line along the river to meet the new
threat.  He later estimated that about 200 warriors now opposed him.  His own
force numbered about 300, one-fourth of whom were detailed to hold the horses.
While the two sides skirmished, troops were pulled from the line and sent to
destroy the village and its contents, including the band's entire winter food
supply.

     The Indians showed no desire to close in a serious contest and fell back
every time the troops advanced.  Major Evans knew that he could not sustain a
long pursuit with his worn out horses.  As night approached, he decided to
break off the battle and withdraw. The infantry company, however, occupied a
position from which it could not retire without exposing itself to a
destructive fire.  Evans therefore ordered Tarlton's three troops of cavalry
to drive the enemy from their ridge.  As the advance began, the warriors ran
down the reverse slope of the ridge and mounted their ponies.  Before the
Indians could scatter, the cavalry reached the top of the ridge and, from a
range of only 150 yards, poured a devastating fire from Spencer repeating
carbines into the compact mass of Indians below.  On Tarlton's left, Capt.
Deane Monahan and his troop caught another party of warriors at exactly the
same disadvantage.  In each group about a dozen men were seen to fall, but
their comrades carried them from the field.  All opposition now dissolved, and
the enemy galloped up the canyon leading to Soldier Spring.  Evans pulled out
that night.

     In the Battle of Soldier Spring, Major Evans estimated that he killed 20
to 25 warriors and wounded an unknown number.  His own loss was one man
mortally wounded.  In the destruction of their food supply, the Comanches
suffered a serious blow.  Rather than face starvation, most drifted east and
surrendered to General Sheridan.  Evans was back at Fort Bascom by the end of
January 1869, and the Fort Union units returned to their home base.

     The Battles of Soldier Spring and the Washita, where on November 27,
1868, Lt. Col. George A. Custer surprised the winter camp of Black Kettle's
Cheyennes, broke the resistance of the Plains tribes.  They agreed to give up
the warpath and settle on reservations.

The Red River War, 1874

     Sheridan's successful winter campaign of 1868-69 failed to produce
lasting peace.  Confined to reservations at Fort Sill, Darlington, and
Anadarko, in present Oklahoma, the Indians grew increasingly defiant as the
years passed.  More and more they indulged a favorite pastime of raiding
settlements on the northern frontier of Texas.

     In the summer of 1874, a Kiowa and Comanche war party besieged some
buffalo hunters in the same Adobe Walls where Kit Carson fought the Kiowas in
1864, but the high powered rifles of the hunters drove off the attackers. A
group of Kiowas conducted a vicious raid into Texas and clashed with a
detachment of Texas Rangers.  Kiowas also attacked the agency at Anadarko.
Murders multiplied in the vicinity of Fort Sill.  General Sheridan finally won
permission to separate the good Indians from the bad and to launch a
full-scale offensive against the latter.

     The hostiles - Kiowas and Comanches joined by a few Cheyennes and
Arapahoes - took refuge in the sterile, forbidding reaches of western Oklahoma
and the Texas Panhandle.  On the vast table of the Staked Plains and in the
surrounding maze of arroyos, canyons, and buttes, the Indians had usually been
safe from soldiers.  But Sheridan, repeating his strategy of z868, put columns
into the field to converge on this region from five directions.  The
commanders had orders to keep the Indians always on the move, allowing them no
time to rest or hunt for game.  As Kit Carson had shown in the Navajo
campaign, war of this kind so wore out the Indians that their surrender was
but a matter of time.

     One of the five columns came from New Mexico.  Three troops of the 8th
Cavalry, Maj. William E. Price commanding, left Fort Union on August 20, 1874.
At Fort Bascom, Price picked up another troop of the 8th Cavalry. With about
225 men, including 5 Navajo trailers, 2 howitzers, and a long wagon train, he
pushed down the Canadian River.

     Drouth had parched the land and dried up the waterholes.  Soldiers and
horses alike suffered intensely from heat and thirst.  Then on September 7 the
weather suddenly changed, and for several days torrents of cold rain drenched
the column.  Every arroyo ran full to the brim, and horses and wagons mired in
the sodden prairie.

     Besides the Fort Union column, a large force of infantry and cavalry
under Col. Nelson A. Miles was operating in the region, and Col. Ranald S.
Mackenzie with the 4th Cavalry was approaching from the southeast.  Major
Price cut loose from his supply train and scoured the valleys of the Canadian
and Washita Rivers.  On September 12 he discovered a band of hostiles moving
across his front.  Some 150 warriors drew up in line on a ridge to cover the
flight of the women and children.  The cavalry charged, and the Indians pulled
back to another position.  Again Price charged, and again the Indians
retreated.  In this manner the two sides skirmished for 3 hours over a
distance of 6 or 7 miles before the warriors, having given their families a
chance to escape, scattered in all directions.  Price lost several horses but
no men and estimated that he killed about eight of the enemy.

     The next day, as Price's command paused for lunch, a lone white man made
his way on foot into the lines.  He was the well-known scout, Billy Dixon. He
told how he and scout Amos Chapman, accompanied by four soldiers, had been
carrying dispatches for Colonel Miles.  Surrounded by Comanches on the morning
of the 12th, they had sought cover in a buffalo wallow full of water. All day
and night they held out, until the approach of Price's cavalry frightened off
the Indians.  The rest of the party, one dead and three badly wounded, still
lay in the muddy water.  Price immediately sent help.  In the history of the
Indian wars, the Buffalo Wallow Fight has earned almost legendary fame.

     During the afternoon of the 13th, Price and his men heard faint sounds of
firing.  Pickets went out to investigate and saw men on a distant ridge. They
were scouts from the wagon train of Capt.  Wyllys Lyman, whose 36 wagons,
bearing supplies for Miles, had been under siege for 5 days by swarms of
Kiowas and Comanches.  The approach of Price's column had caused them to
withdraw, but both Lyman's scouts and Price's pickets took each other for
Indians and beat a hasty retreat.  Price continued on his way, and Lyman had
to wait another day for relief.

     Their country now swarming with soldiers, the hostiles had to keep always
on the move and guard constantly against surprise.  Some bands grew heartily
sick of such a life, and Woman Heart, Satanta, and Big Tree led their people
east to surrender.  Others, under Lone Wolf and Mamanti, made their way to
Palo Duro Canyon, a great gash in the caprock of the Staked Plains.  Even here
they were not safe.  Colonel Mackenzie's troopers found them and at dawn on
September 27 charged into the sleeping camp.  The Indians managed to flee with
almost no casualties, but Mackenzie destroyed the tepees and their contents.
He also slaughtered 1,400 captured ponies, a shattering blow to the Indians.

     The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon utterly demoralized the hostiles.  They
scattered over the plains in small groups, many of which headed east to give
themselves up.  Other columns, under Lt. Col. John W. Davidson and Lt. Col.
George P. Buell, joined Miles, Price, and Mackenzie.  Mopping-up operations
continued for another 3 months.  By the end of the year the Red River War was
over.

     General Sheridan's strategy had worked.  Between mid-August and late
December 1874, the troops fought 25 separate skirmishes or engagements (in 4
of which the Fort Union column participated).  In terms of bloodshed, none was
decisive; in fact, the whole campaign produced remarkably few casualties. But
the Army had hounded the Indians so remorselessly that the detested
reservation grew increasingly preferable to the terrible insecurity of
fugitive life.  Never again did the tribes of the southern Plains make war on
the white man.

Military Supply

     General Kearny's bloodless conquest of New Mexico in 1846 opened the era
of military freighting on the Santa Fe Trail.  Through out the Mexican War,
1846 to 1848, the supply trains ate into the immense store of provisions on
the wharf at Fort Leavenworth and, winter and summer, made their way across
the plains to Santa Fe.  Thereafter, with a sizable army retained in New
Mexico to fight Indians, military freighting grew to impressive proportions.

     The need for a depot on the eastern frontier of New Mexico to receive and
distribute these goods among the scattered outposts seemed evident to the
military authorities.  Partly for this reason, Colonel Sumner chose a site
near the junction of the two branches of the Santa Fe Trail to found the first
fort in his program of revising the frontier defense system.  His order of
July 16, 1851, establishing Fort Union also designated it the principal supply
depot for the department.

     But the big campaigns of the 1850's, those that required elaborate
logistical support, were conducted in the southern and western reaches of the
territory.  The Fort Union depot therefore proved less satisfactory than
hoped, and throughout the 1850'S the chief quartermaster kept busy shifting
his headquarters and supply stores between Fort Union and Albuquerque.

     Nevertheless, plans for the new fort begun by General Carleton in 1863
provided for a sprawling quartermaster depot, complete with commodious
warehouses and well-stocked repair and maintenance facilities.  Fort Union
became and remained the supply center of the Army in New Mexico.  Not until
the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1879 did its supply functions begin to
diminish.

     A large force of civilian employees and quartermaster personnel staffed
the installation.  Indeed, they often outnumbered the garrison of the adjacent
post of Fort Union, and the chief quartermaster often ranked the post
commander.  Friction between the two officers seems to have been a permanent
condition of life at Fort Union.

     Many items the quartermaster obtained locally, but the bulk of goods,
food clothing, arms and ammunition, tools and building materials, came over
the Santa Fe Trail.  At the Fort Union depot, the wagons were unloaded and the
freight repacked and assigned as needed to posts to the south and west.
Sometimes, when wagons or entire trains contained shipments for one fort only,
they continued directly to the destination without unloading at Fort Union.

     The Army did little of its own hauling.  Virtually all military
freighting was performed under contract by civilian companies.  Waste and
inefficiency had characterized the Quartermaster Department's logistical
support of Kearny's Army of' the West, and in 1848 the Government turned to
the contract system.  For $11.75 per hundred, James Browne of Independence
agreed to transport 200,000 pounds of supplies to New Mexico.  The next year,
in partnership with William H. Russell, he contracted to haul all government
stores over the Santa Fe Trail for $9.88 per hundred.  In 1850, 278 wagons
laden with military freight passed over the trail.

     In 1853 another freighter made his appearance.  Alexander Majors made two
round trips to New Mexico, one with a consignment of goods from Independence
to Santa Fe, the other under government contract from Fort Leavenworth to Fort
Union.  In 1854 he sent 100 wagons in 4 trains from Leavenworth to Union.

     In 1855 Majors went into partnership with Russell, and the following year
the new firm had 350 wagons on the trail to Fort Union.  The company prospered
and in 1858 added a third partner, William B. Waddell.  Thus was born the most
famous freighting concern in the history of the West.  In this year, the firm
of Russell, Majors, and Waddell contracted to deliver all freight turned over
to it by the Government and by 1860 and 1861 was the biggest company operating
between Fort Leavenworth and Fort Union.

     The trains left Fort Leavenworth early in the spring, in order to take
advantage of the spring glasses.  A typical train, according to Majors,
consisted of 25 wagons, and the company ran as many trains as necessary to
haul the amount of freight under contract.  Each wagon carried 3 to 31552 tons
of merchandise.  Although mules were occasionally used to draw the wagons,
Russell, Majors, and Waddell preferred oxen.  They were cheap, reliable, and,
properly managed, could make the trip to New Mexico and back in one season.
Four oxen were required for each wagon, but for a time in the 1850's eight
were used and four left in New Mexico to furnish beef for the soldiers'
rations.  Skilled wagon masters, capable of maintaining discipline among the
teamsters, were a necessity.  Majors chose them carefully, paying 'particular
attention to the candidate's reputation for sobriety and morality.  To them,
he attributed much of his success as a freighter.

     Large-scale military freighting, dominated by Russell, Majors, and
Waddell, continued until 1866, when the railroad moved west into Kansas. Each
railhead town served briefly as the port of embarkation for freight wagons.
After the rails reached Denver in 1870, wagons continued to move supplies over
the Mountain Branch of the trail between Pueblo and Fort Union, but after 1879
the great freight wagons ceased to creep across the rutted plains to Fort
Union, and military freight now arrived at Watrous in railroad boxcars.

     Supervised by Captain Shoemaker, the Fort Union Arsenal took care of the
ordnance needs of the department.  The large arsenals in the East, such as
Frankfort and Springfield, sent weapons, ammunition, and related accoutrements
to the Fort Union arsenal for distribution to field units.  Old or damaged
weapons were returned to the arsenal for repair or condemnation and disposal.

     During his long service at Fort Union, Captain Shoemaker saw a striking
transition in the firearms serviced by his staff.  When he first came to the
fort in the 1850's the dragoons were armed with the Hall breech-loading
percussion-cap carbine and were just replacing the old Aston single-shot
"horse pistol" (so-called because it was carried in a holster slung on the
saddle pommel) with the new Colt's revolving pistol.  Infantrymen carried
heavy, muzzle-loading rifled muskets.  All these weapons fired a paper or
cloth cartridge, usually .58 or .69 caliber for shoulder weapons and .44 or
.38 caliber for pistols.  When Captain Shoemaker retired in 1882, the
ordnance had changed drastically.  Now the troops carried breech-loading
Springfield rifles and carbines, caliber .45-70, and Colt's or Remington
revolvers, caliber .45 or .44, all firing fixed metallic ammunition with
greater accuracy, velocity, and speed.

     As artillery often did good service in the Indian wars, the arsenal also
serviced cannon.  Light 6-pounder field guns and stubby 12-pounder howitzers,
the latter with pack carriages for mountain use and high-wheeled "prairie
carriages" for plains use, found great favor with Indian fighters throughout
the period of Fort Union's active service.  But, as a sign of progress,
Captain Shoemaker on the eve of his retirement displayed to a delegation of
Las Vegas citizens touring the arsenal two shiny new Gatling guns, forerunner
of the modern machine gun.