Glorieta Pass: Gettysburg of the West

In March of eighteen sixty-two, this mountain pass outside Santa Fe decided the fate of the entire Southwest. Confederate General Henry Hopkins Sibley had marched an Army of New Mexico up from Texas, dreaming of capturing the region's mineral wealth, reaching the California coast, and splitting the Union in two. His Texan troops had already taken Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

All that stood between them and the federal supply depot at Fort Union were Union forces dug in at Glorieta Pass. On March twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-two, the armies clashed. While the main battle ground to a bloody draw, Major John Chivington led a flanking party over the mesa and destroyed the Confederate supply train, burning roughly eighty wagons and killing about five hundred horses and mules.

With no food, no ammunition, and no way forward, Sibley's army collapsed. By July, all Confederate forces had evacuated New Mexico. Historians call it the Gettysburg of the West: the battle where the South's gamble for the Pacific died in the high desert.