By Keli Holt
While Rebels and Yankees battled at Chancellorsville, Vicksburg and Gettysburg east of the Mississippi River, violence also raged in the new territories and states west of what Lincoln called, “The Father of Waters.”
In fact, the American Southwest, so recently seized from Mexico in 1848, had been the proverbial straw that broke the Union’s back as arguments over whether these lands ought to be slave or free expedited the sundering of America. The resulting Civil War (1861-1865) rocked the country from coast to coast, not only profoundly affecting the relationship between North and South but also between Americans and the Native Nations that dominated western America.
Even while most of the fighting occurred in the East, Washington, D.C., was concerned about keeping California and its rich gold mines firmly attached to the Union. The Territory of New Mexico was a key transit point to the Pacific Coast, and as the budget, size and scope of the federal government ballooned and battlefield technology was perfected, the military leaders of New Mexico decided to apply these tools to what they called “The Indian Problem;” cycles of raids, reprisals and violence had plagued New Mexico since the arrival of the Spanish.
Previous columns here have already examined how Union Gen. James Henry Carleton took advantage of the state of martial law, which was declared when the Confederacy invaded New Mexico in 1862, to force the powerful Navajo Nation and the Mescalero Apache onto Bosque Redondo, a reservation in eastern New Mexico. Gen. Carleton, who had witnessed first hand the almost complete devastation of California’s Native Nations from disease, racist federal policies, environmental destruction and violent local gangs, believed the only way to “save” the Navajo and Apache was to confine them to a reservation and force them to become sedentary, Christian farmers. Carleton’s experiment failed and thousands of Navajo and Apache paid with their lives.
Like the Navajo, who before being removed to Bosque Redondo had taken advantage of America’s distraction with the war to increase their raids on New Mexicans, the powerful nomadic Comanche went on the offensive. Since roughly 1700, they had ruled Comancheria, a vast territory stretching from western Texas through eastern New Mexico. During the Civil War, the Comanche increased their raids upon settlements and traffic along the Santa Fe Trail, which was then the main thoroughfare for supplies and immigrants heading west. The Comanche had grown increasingly desperate as their main source of food, the buffalo, was growing scarcer. At the same time, more white settlers were arriving on their lands and demanding protection from the government. The Comanche also took advantage of the weakened state of their historical enemy, the Navajo, and attacked them at Bosque Redondo.
In November 1864, Gen. Carleton dispatched the famous mountain man Kit Carson (who had earlier been responsible for forcing the Navajo to surrender by decimating their food supplies) to attack deep into Comancheria to stop the raiding, which was limiting provisions to Bosque Redondo. Carson’s force attacked during the winter, when the Comanche and their Plain’s allies would be camped and accompanied by their families. Carson’s force annihilated an allied Kiowa village deep in Comancheria that they caught by surprise. The Comanche counterattacked in force at the ruins of Adobe Walls, an old trading fort in the Texas Panhandle, which had been abandoned ironically due to chronic raids by the Comanche decades earlier. It was only the power of Carson’s mighty artillery that saved his force.
The violence in Comancheria continued even after the guns in the east fell silent with the Union victory in 1865. As Reconstruction began – the period after the war in which the former Confederate states were slowly reinstated and the future of roughly 4 million formerly enslaved persons was being debated in the halls of Congress – the government posted the largest contingent of federal soldiers in Texas. The army had three tasks: to prepare Texas for reunification, protect white settlers demanding protection from the Comanche, and to keep an eye on Mexico. Mexico was currently ruled by a French puppet Emperor in a feeble attempt to reconstitute a French Empire in North America.
As Reconstruction staggered along, the Union Army was being quickly disbanded. To the men tasked with keeping peace among ex-Rebels (generals like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan ), citizens and Native Nations as their armies shrank, the solution to the Indian problem in a postwar world now seemed to be hitching the technology of war to the railroads being built across the west, primarily on Native lands. As America tried to heal after the bloodshed of the Civil War, a new nightmare was about to begin for Nations like the Comanche, which until recently had been the ultimate arbiters of power in the West.
My next column will examine some of the conflicts that raged in the 1870s.
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