When the American arrived in New Mexico, he found a poor, backward area, hungry for trade and outside contacts. He found the Indians of the Southwest in open rebellion against the white men. The Navajo and other Apache groups, the Comanche, and some of the Pueblos were the primary offenders. This was to be the main problem occupying the time and energy of the American settler and soldier for forty years after 1846. Until the Indian situation was stabilized, there would be little economic and social development.
The method evolved for containing the vicious raids against friendly Indian, Spanish, and American communities was a series of forts placed at strategic passes or trails surrounding the traditional lands of the Apache. The Indian strongholds were located primarily in the mountainous regions of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. The line of forts stretched along the Rio Grande south of Socorro to the vicinity of Las Cruces, and west along the southern edge of the mountain escarpment into Arizona. Then the defense complex ran north across the desert to an irregular line running east from Flagstaff through Gallup and back to the Rio Grande. These forts were well garrisoned and provisioned and began to carry the fight to the Indian. Early success was halted by the conflict generated by the American Civil War.
The center of the Civil War in the west was in New Mexico. There was conflict, argument, and some small degree of fighting in other western states and territories as settlers from the north or south struggled to carry this territory or that state into the Union or the Confederacy. These were, however, local matters and as much political as military. In New Mexico, there was a war and there were battles, battles which deserve to be a part of the general Civil War story but that are usually forgotten in the smoke and roar of eastern cannon.
Two major battles were fought in New Mexico, the first a Confederate victory, the second a Union victory which saved New Mexico, and the west, for the Union. The aim of the Confederate forces was to capture, intact if possible, the forts in New Mexico and Arizona with their great store of military provisions, provisions badly needed by the Confederate army. Also, there was a feeling among southern leaders that success in New Mexico might also lead to success in California, badly split on the question of secession, and in Colorado, rich in silver and gold. An army recruited in Texas and commanded by General Henry Sibley was sent to accomplish Confederate aims.
This army entered New Mexico along the traditional route, moving up the Rio Grande from El Paso. It quickly subdued the forts and Union troops in southern New Mexico and continued up-river. On February 21, 1862, it met a Union army commanded by Colonel E. R. S. Canby at Valverde, a small community about twenty miles south of Socorro, New Mexico. Kit Carson, New Mexico’s famous trapper and scout, commanded the New Mexico Volunteers, a part of the Union force. Canby’s troops were beaten and dispersed at the Battle of Val Verde, leaving the upper Rio Grande Valley virtually without defense. Within a few weeks, the Texans had taken Albuquerque and Santa Fe. But one stronghold in New Mexico remained in the hands of the Union forces. Fort Union, northeast of Las Vegas, New Mexico, became the focal point of action by both north and south. Sibley, marching from Santa Fe, knew success depended on the fall of Fort Union. The Union forces, equally aware of the importance of the fort, hurriedly reinforced it with a number of volunteers from Colorado.
Within Fort Union, a crisis developed over differing opinions on strategy. The fort commander wanted to keep the garrison at full strength and fight the Confederates from within the fort. The Colorado Volunteers wanted to go out and meet the enemy. The latter won and a Union force moved into the passes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to meet the Confederates in a fateful battle that would decide control of the west. It was fought at Glorieta Pass on March 28, 1862. Despite the fact that the two armies met on this field, the contest was not decided there. Early on the morning of March 28, a force of 400 Colorado Volunteers, commanded by Colonel John M. Chivington, began a flanking action in hopes of hitting the Confederate rear. This group moved out of the Pass into the mountains, and by a very difficult route moved back toward the Pass behind the Confederate force. On a ridge overlooking Apache Canyon, they saw below them the entire Confederate supply train and cavalry horse herd. In a lightning hit-and-run attack, the supply train and horses were destroyed. When word of this reached Sibley at Glorieta Pass, there was little for him to do but to retire from the field. The Confederate force never recovered from this disaster and gradually retreated to Santa Fe, then back down the Rio Grande into Texas.
With the end of the Civil War, New Mexico and the Southwest returned, not to peace, but to war, war against the Apache. It took twenty years for the American with all his modern weapons and tactics to bring the Apache under control. For the Apache, it ended on September 3, 1886, when Geronimo and his few ragged followers surrendered to General Miles in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. Under the weight of steel and increasing numbers of white men, the Apache was doomed. Though civilization would swallow the Apache, as it has always succeeded against the barbarian, the Apache made a spectacular defense of his lands and his way of life against both Spaniard and American. He made himself master of the desert, and only the gods of science succeeded in overcoming him and his desert gods.
INDUSTRIAL BOOM
With the Indian situation settled, New Mexico underwent a boom in two important areas, mining and cattle raising. These industries, so much a part of the history of the American West, did and still play an important role in the well-being of the Southwest. Mining camps sprang up along the mountain fringes as new discoveries of silver and gold came to light. Around Socorro and Magdalena, in the Mogollon Mountains, at Hillsboro and Kingston in the Black Range, and hundreds of other places in New Mexico and the Southwest, men hungry for quick wealth swarmed over the hills and mountains and built their roaring camps. While miners were tapping the subsurface wealth, cattlemen were staking out their claims to the grasslands, both on the eastern plains and in the high mountain meadows. Cattle empires grew to staggering proportions, sometimes erupting into violent conflict over grazing and water rights, such as the Lincoln County War made famous by the participation of Billy the Kid.
