Glorieta Pass: The Gettysburg of the West

You're crossing a mountain pass that, in March of eighteen sixty-two, decided whether the Confederacy would control the American West.

The Santa Fe Trail had wound through Glorieta Pass for decades before the Civil War, carrying trade goods from Missouri to New Mexico. But in early eighteen sixty-two, a Confederate army under Brigadier General Henry Sibley marched north through Texas and into New Mexico Territory with a breathtaking ambition: to seize the silver mines of Colorado, capture the port of San Francisco, and give the Confederacy access to the Pacific. Albuquerque and Santa Fe fell without a fight. The Union seemed to be losing the West.

The decisive clash came over three days, from March twenty-sixth to March twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-two. Confederate and Union forces traded blows at Apache Canyon and then at Glorieta Pass itself. The Rebels held the field on the final day, but a Union detachment under Major William Chivington had hiked over the mountains and found the Confederate supply train unguarded at Johnson's Ranch. Chivington's men destroyed it completely: roughly eighty wagons of food, ammunition, and supplies, and about five hundred horses and mules. Some accounts say they bayoneted the mules to make sure they could not be recovered.

Sibley's army won the battle and lost the campaign. Without supplies and animals, the Confederates had no choice but to retreat south through a brutal desert, harried and hungry, back to Texas. They never returned. The Confederate dream of a western empire died in this pass.

The engagement is often called the Gettysburg of the West, though the scale was far smaller: roughly one thousand men on each side. But the consequence was just as large. Colorado's gold and silver remained in Union hands. California stayed out of Confederate reach. The war in the West was over after three days in a mountain gap on the old Santa Fe Trail.