Glorieta Pass: The Gettysburg of the West

The gap in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains visible to the north is Glorieta Pass, and it was here in late March of eighteen sixty-two that the Civil War's most consequential western battle was fought, a confrontation that stopped the Confederacy's most ambitious strategic gamble and locked the war east of the Rockies.

The plan had been conceived by Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley of Texas. His Army of New Mexico had invaded the Union territory along the Rio Grande corridor in the winter of eighteen sixty-one to sixty-two, driven by a vision that would have transformed the war. If Confederate forces could seize New Mexico and Arizona, push through to Colorado's gold and silver fields, and reach the Pacific coast at California, the Confederacy would break the Union naval blockade by gaining its own seaports and access to western mineral wealth. Sibley's Texans had already won at Valverde in February and occupied both Albuquerque and Santa Fe by early March.

The collision at Glorieta Pass on March twenty-sixth through twenty-eighth came down to a single afternoon's work by a detachment of Colorado volunteers. While the main battle raged at Pigeon's Ranch along the Santa Fe Trail, Major John Chivington led roughly four hundred men on a flanking march over two-thousand-foot Glorieta Mesa. Guided by local Unionist scouts, they descended unseen onto the Confederate supply camp at Johnson's Ranch and destroyed it completely: eighty to ninety wagons of food, ammunition, medical supplies, and forage burned, and close to five hundred horses and mules killed.

The Texans had won every tactical exchange of the day. But when word reached Confederate commander William Scurry that his entire supply train was gone, the victory dissolved. Without food, ammunition, or transport, there was no possibility of advancing on Fort Union. Sibley began withdrawing south, eventually retreating all the way to Texas. New Mexico remained Union territory for the rest of the war, and the western Confederacy died here in this mountain pass.