Glorieta Pass: Where the Confederacy Lost the West

In the winter of eighteen sixty-one and sixty-two, the Confederacy made a serious attempt to win the entire American Southwest. The plan was to push north through Texas, capture New Mexico Territory and Colorado, seize the gold and silver mines, and eventually reach California and its Pacific ports. If it worked, the Confederacy would have both the mineral wealth to fund a long war and access to foreign markets that the Union naval blockade was trying to strangle.

Brigadier General Henry Sibley led roughly twenty-five hundred Texan troops north into New Mexico. He captured Albuquerque and Santa Fe with relatively little resistance. By late March of eighteen sixty-two, his army was advancing through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains toward Fort Union, the last major Union stronghold in the territory.

The mountain pass they entered on March twenty-sixth was called Glorieta, a narrow canyon with walls close enough on either side to funnel an army into a column. Confederate forces under Lieutenant Colonel William Scurry clashed with Union troops at Pigeon's Ranch on March twenty-eighth in fighting that the Confederates actually won on the field. Scurry's men pushed the Union troops back and held the pass.

But while the main battle raged, Major John Chivington led a Union flanking force over the mesa to the Confederate rear. What Chivington found was the Confederate supply train: eighty wagons carrying all of Sibley's reserve ammunition, food, medicine, and forage. Chivington's men destroyed every wagon. They drove the artillery horses off the cliffs. They burned everything that would burn.

The Confederates had won the fight and lost the campaign in the same afternoon. Without supplies, Sibley had no choice but to retreat to Texas. The march back was brutal. Hundreds of Texans died of thirst and exposure in the desert. By early summer, the last Confederate forces had left New Mexico. The West remained Union territory for the rest of the war, and the Confederacy never again had the resources to attempt the campaign.