‘Gettysburg of the West’
Little-noticed Civil War battle of Glorieta Pass a key Union win that halted Confederate occidental push
Looking down from the hilly forest, Byron Parker said 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 can almost always cover the scars that were borne,” Parker, a ranger at Pecos National Historical Park, said during a recent tour of the site.
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.
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 Parker said his fellow rangers aren’t fans of the “Gettysburg of the West” phrasing.
“Gettysburg was a full three horrific days of fighting without an intermission in the middle,”
Parker said. “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 U.S. Army’s victory at Glorieta Pass preserved the West and its resources for the Union.
People in the rest of the country didn’t fully realize at the time the significance of this theater of the war, Parker said. He shared a likely apocryphal story about how, when President Abraham Lincoln heard about the Union victory, he supposedly asked: “What is New Mexico?”
Although this anecdote likely isn’t true, it does speak to a real larger dynamic.
“Even in the East, they’re not necessarily taking what is happening here seriously,” Parker said.
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
Parker painted a portrait of 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: Parker said 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 Lt. Col. William R. Scurry. Peticolas fought in both the battle of Valverde, south of San Antonio, N.M., in late February, and at Glorieta Pass about a month later.
Peticolas left a diary that detailed the life of a Confederate solider 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 Maj. John M. Chivington and Lt. Col. 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 Parker said 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, Parker said.
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.
“Sometimes war is dumb pure luck,” Parker said with a smile.
Were there any war correspondents on hand for the battle? It’s unclear. The New Mexican’s coverage, of course, is lost to history. The Santa Fe Gazette ,a weekly that published from 1851 to 1869, in April 1862 ran a story 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 said “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, N.M., 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.
Lt. Col. 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.”
Parker called it a “tactical victory” for the Confederates because their soldiers drove the Union troops from the field. But, he said, 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.
Parker said he does not like to rewrite history and think about what would have happened if the Confederates had won the battle.
“One of the biggest things every historian wants to do is ‘what if,’ and it’s sort of the bane of our existence,” he said with a laugh. “But at the end of the day that’s not what happened.”