The Little-Noticed Civil War Battle

As a lover of all things related to the Civil War, I have read many accounts of battles, leaders and overall historical accounts. I have always been fascinated with movies, documentaries and television shows focusing on some aspect of the Civil War and have a long-time family friend who once attended reenactments all over the east. I have visited famous battlefields, such as Gettysburg, Manassas and Antietam in my quest to absorb as much information as possible and "see" the locations where soldiers fought and somehow place myself in their shoes.

When I lived in New Mexico, I would drive past a nondescript roadside monument along Interstate 25 in a mountain pass just east of Santa Fe during my daily commute. I never really paid much attention to it, as there is no sign along the highway even acknowledging its presence. My Civil War calendar makes mention of the event on March 28 as the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Long known as the Gettysburg of the West, despite getting a footnote in most books about the Civil War, it is where Union forces protected New Mexico Territory from a Confederate invasion.

Looking down from the hilly forest above, it is difficult to believe that the landscape below once was scarred by violence, blood, bullets and cannon balls.

In many ways, it was a Civil War battlefield as foreboding as those in better-known, more celebrated places: Antietam, Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg. Here in the high southern Rockies, Union and Confederate troops waged a three-day battle for control of Glorieta Pass - and ultimately, New Mexico and the West.

Trees and bushes have retaken the ground that in 1862 was disfigured by one of the most influential fights of the war.

Nature may have muted the physical damage done to the area, but the voices of soldiers from both armies still call out to today’s historians via diaries, letters and then-contemporary news accounts.

Santa Fe's newspaper of record, The New Mexican, founded in 1849, almost certainly provided news of the battle, but no record from the paper exists. A fire at the newspaper in the 1880s destroyed several years of copies, from September 1859 to November 1863, depriving historians of the ability to see how Glorieta Pass was covered.

Still, the fight in New Mexico’s mountains remains vibrant to those who study the war and the state. “The Gettysburg of the West,” as some historians have dubbed the Glorieta fight, was key to the Union cause. Its victory here stopped the Confederate push to conquer the West.

But, this battle's nickname often grates on historians. Gettysburg was a full three horrific days of fighting without an intermission in the middle. The Glorieta battle, in contrast, ran a day, stopped for a day and then picked up for another day.

The number of men who fought at Glorieta Pass was tiny compared to Gettysburg or any other major eastern battle, and the casualty counts were dramatically lower as well - roughly 7,000 soldiers died at Gettysburg; about 100 died at Glorieta.

But where the comparison could work is in the significance of the battles in their theaters - much as the Union victory at Gettysburg foiled the South’s plans to invade the North and spelled the beginning of the end for the Confederacy, the United States Army’s victory at Glorieta Pass preserved the West and its resources for the Union.

People in the rest of the country did not fully realize at the time the significance of this theater of the war. One likely apocryphal story says that, when President Abraham Lincoln heard about the Union victory, he supposedly asked: “What is New Mexico?”

Although this anecdote likely is not true, it does speak to a real larger dynamic. Even in the East, they were not necessarily taking what was happening there seriously.

The Confederacy’s original plan to fund the war with cotton had failed due to the Union blockade of Southern ports and Great Britain obtaining the commodity elsewhere rather than extend recognition to the South. Blunted on that front, the rebels’ leaders planned to take the gold-rich states of Colorado and California to fund the war.

The battle of late March 1862 was at times a matter of confusion: the roar of cannons echoed off canyon walls; troops from both armies wandering this way and that in search of the enemy.

Confusion, missteps and dumb luck were the order of business in Glorieta, which involved a series of skirmishes and encounters in which soldiers from both armies sometimes rode past one another without realizing their rivals were so near.

Northern New Mexico’s dawn and dusk seemed to play tricks on soldiers’ eyes, as did the dust and dirt of the fight. Soiled uniforms could have made some of the Union troops look Confederate. Some of the rebels even wore at least parts of Union uniforms, as a mass grave discovered near the battlefield in the late 1980s confirmed. Either way, some front-running soldiers were bound to overshoot their lines and end up in enemy territory.

Such was the case with A.B. Peticolas, a native Virginian who worked as a lawyer and school teacher and who served as a sergeant in a Texas Confederate unit under Lieutenant Colonel William R. Scurry. Peticolas fought in both the battle of Valverde, south of San Antonio, New Mexico, in late February, and at Glorieta Pass about a month later.

Peticolas left a diary that detailed the life of a Confederate soldier in the New Mexico campaign and included an anecdote of moving far ahead of his comrades and landing smack dab in the center of a line of Union troops during the heat of the Glorieta battle.

Amazingly, the Union officer in charge mistook Peticolas for one of his own men and warned him that “those fellows” (i.e., the Confederates) would shoot him if he kept wandering around.

Realizing his predicament and playing a game of bluff in the midst of disarray, dust and death, Peticolas calmly announced he would head over to the Confederates’ area and “take a shot at them.” Though he expected a musket ball in his back as he moved away, he managed to get back to his own lines “thanking an overriding Providence for my escape.”

Another such goof may have been responsible for the Union’s ultimate victory, when troops under Major John M. Chivington and Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Antonio Chaves are credited with sneaking behind enemy lines and destroying the rebels’ supply wagon train, which essentially crippled the Confederate forces.

Dubbed El Leoncito, the Little Lion, Chaves was a native New Mexican who knew the area around Glorieta Mesa well, having held a position of command there some 20 years before as a Mexican officer preparing for an advance of Texans in an 1841 invasion. Some historians believe Chaves deliberately led Chivington and his troops well behind enemy lines to a spot directly above the Confederate supply train of wagons.

But they overshot a planned target area to stage an attack from the rear and instead ended up in the mountainous canyon above those wagons by sheer chance.

The Confederate troops below were at rest or play, engaging in sports and clowning around as the battle raged some miles away from them. They were bored.

Regardless of whether it was deliberate or perhaps just a happy accident, the Union troops moved down the hillside and burned the roughly 70 wagons below (some sources say the number was 60; others say it was closer to 80), denying the Confederates much-needed supplies.

The battle was basically over at that point, though fighting continued through the day.

Whether or not there were any war correspondents on hand for the battle is unclear because the archives of The New Mexican are lost to history. A rival paper The Santa Fe Gazette, a weekly that published from 1851 to 1869, ran a story in April 1862 on the two major Civil War battles in the state - Valverde and Glorieta. The paper noted no one from its staff observed the battles firsthand and stated “our account of what has occurred ... will be made from what fall within personal observations, other matters will be related form hearsay which we believe to be reliable.”

In any case, Glorieta was seen as a Union victory simply because the army managed to stop the Confederates, who had to abandon their plans to march on to Fort Union near Las Vegas, New Mexico, and, ultimately, to Colorado. Instead, they moved back to Santa Fe, which they had captured in early March. The Confederates then spent the next few months on a grueling retreat south through New Mexico and back to Texas. By the summer of 1862 they were gone, ending the fight between North and South in New Mexico.

Lieutenant Colonel W.R. Scurry, who commanded the Confederate forces on the battlefield, issued a proclamation on March 29, 1862 - one day after the battle ended - declaring it a Southern victory.

Scurry said the battle “will take its place upon the roll of your country’s triumphs” and said it ensured “not a single soldier of the United States [Union] will be left on the soil of New Mexico.”

It is considered by some as a “tactical victory” for the Confederates because their soldiers drove the Union troops from the field. But strategically it was a victory for the Union in that it did what it set out to do: stop the Confederate advance into New Mexico, Colorado and other points west.

As you visit the battlefield today, it is hard not to notice the traffic whizzing by on nearby Interstate 25.

The nearby community of Pecos has been on a travel corridor for a long time. In 1862, it was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail, with several inns where travelers could get a hot meal, a glass of whiskey and a bed for the night.

These are four of the men whose stories are forever intertwined with the battle of Glorieta Pass.

Alejandro Valle, the owner of Pigeon’s Ranch, where some of the fiercest fighting took place on March 28, 1862. He arrived in Northern New Mexico in 1850, where he established a farm and inn on the Santa Fe Trail near Pecos. Both armies plundered his ranch, leaving him ruined. He sold it in 1865 and in 1870 filed a damage claim with the federal government.

Martin Kozlowski, an immigrant, born in occupied Poland, fought for freedom against Prussia in 1848 and, fled to England and then to America. He joined the United States Army and, after his enlistment, built a trading post and tavern in Pecos. The earliest portion of the building dates to 1858, some of it built with timber and bricks from the pueblo the Pecos Natives had abandoned 20 years before.

The Union Army camped next to his store, using his property as a hospital and a prison. Kozlowski appears to have had a better experience with the boys in blue than his neighbors Valle and Anthony Johnson, who both sought compensation after the war for damage the soldiers wrought.

Colonel John Chivington, who is best remembered for the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, the murder and mutilation of several hundred defenseless Cheyenne and Arapaho by cavalrymen under his command. He combined a willingness to stand up for his antislavery beliefs with a sadistic hatred of Native Americans. He is also, arguably, the man who saved the Southwest for the Stars and Stripes, turning the Battle of Glorieta Pass into a “strategic victory” for the North.

Major John Shropshire, a Kentucky native who moved to Texas in 1854, was a wealthy man with a 750-acre plantation and 61 enslaved people in 1860. He opposed secession, but when his state left the Union he went along, organizing a cavalry unit to fight for the South.

After the Battle of Valverde, Shropshrie wrote a letter to his wife Caroline that included a list of men in his company killed and wounded in the fight. He would not make it back to her. While giving a rousing speech to rally his troops at Glorieta Pass, a Union private shot Shropshire in the forehead, killing him.

In 1987, a man building a house near the former Pigeon’s Ranch discovered a mass grave of 31 Confederate soldiers. Archaeologists were able to positively identify three of the soldiers; one of them was Shropshire.

According to a 1988 Albuquerque Journal article in the state archives, New Mexico politicians and historians pushed to have the soldiers buried at the battlefield, while Texans wanted them returned home. While Shropshire would be reinterred next to his parents in his native Kentucky, the rest were reburied at Santa Fe National Cemetery. The two others who had been identified got their own graves; the other 28 were reburied in a mass grave at the national cemetery in 1993.

The monument marking the mass grave notes that 34 men from the 4th, 5th and 7th regiments of the Texas Mounted Volunteers died at Glorieta Pass but only 31 have been located and pays respects to the “three others whose burial site remains known only to God.” Perhaps they still lie somewhere near the field where they died, waiting to be found.