Boys in the Bag - August 1997 Civil War Times Feature

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Boys in the Bag

The 7th U.S. Infantry’s most powerful foe was John Barleycorn.

BY THOMAS P. LOWRY

In July 1861, three months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the 7th Infantry was in southern New Mexico Territory. Companies A, B, D, E, G, I, and K garrisoned Fort Fillmore, the regiment’s headquarters. Companies C, F, and H were on their way there from Fort Craig to the north and Fort Buchanan to the west (in present-day Arizona).

Meanwhile, menace was heading north from Texas in the form of Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor and the 350 men of the newly formed Texas Mounted Rifles. Baylor knew that the 700 Federals already at Fort Fillmore outnumbered him, but he marched up the Rio Grande Valley anyway.

He need not have worried about the U.S. Army Regulars of the 7th Infantry. Although their commander, Major Isaac Lynde, a 34-year veteran of infantry service, had been informed of the Confederate advance, he posted only the usual sentinels and no outlying pickets. Baylor was able to camp a mere 600 yards from the Union fort on the night of July 24 while he prepared for a dawn assault. During the night, a Confederate soldier who had served in the U.S. Army before the war felt a twinge of nostalgia, perhaps, and crept through the darkness to warn the Union forces.

When Baylor realized he had lost the element of surprise, he fell back to Mesilla, a village that his troops occupied, just northwest of the fort, and prepared for an attack by the 7th. Some of the village’s inhabitants–mostly Confederate supporters but a few Texan-haters–gathered on a nearby hill to watch the fight they knew was coming.

Sure enough, Lynde advanced on the village that day and ordered a charge on the Confederates. But when four of his Federals were killed and seven wounded early in the fight, Lynde called off the attack and withdrew. He had the post at Fort Fillmore burned, and the next day, his seven companies of infantry and two companies of mounted rifles began a 150-mile march northeast over steep mountains and dry piñon forests toward Fort Stanton.

On July 27 Lynde’s 700-odd Federals stopped to eat at San Augustin Springs in the San Andres Mountains. Displaying what a Union officer later called “a sublimity of majestic indifference,” Lynde failed to post pickets. An advance guard of Texans soon made him pay for that oversight. The Texans first encountered the 200 troops of Lynde’s rear guard. Many of these Union soldiers had filled their canteens with whiskey before leaving Fort Fillmore–and emptied them along the march. The Texans found the Federals strung out along the trail, dehydrated, too drunk to walk–much less fight–and barely able to comprehend that they were being captured. The drunken prisoners were hauled back to Mesilla in wagons, like sacks of wheat.

Next, the Texans reached Lynde’s main force and demanded surrender. The Federal officers knew their troops far outnumbered the ill-trained Texans, and they implored Lynde to let them defend their position and their honor. But Lynde chose to surrender. In an attempt to salvage, literally, some shred of honor, the Union officers saved their regimental colors from capture by tearing them up and distributing the pieces among themselves as keepsakes.

Three days later, the Union prisoners reached Las Cruces, where they were paroled and began a 300-mile march to Fort Union, the Union’s key military post between Missouri and California, located in the northeast corner of New Mexico. The northward route was a formidable one through areas short on food, forage, and water. Even today, landmarks along the route are known by names like “Starvation Peak.” When the parolees reached the fort, they were immediately put to work, even though they had just hiked most of the length of New Mexico.

Fort Union was an attractive target to Trans-Mississippi Confederates. It was a huge supply depot with adobe warehouses full of gunpowder, rifles, artillery, uniforms, and food–and there were no fortifications to protect these valuables. So there they sat for the taking, only a two-day ride from the border of Confederate Texas. Attack could come at any time across the Oklahoma panhandle, or through the windswept grassland of western Texas’s Llano Estacado, or up the Rio Grande Valley. To make matters worse for the Federals, Confederate agents had enticed Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs along the Santa Fe Trail to take the warpath for Jefferson Davis, thereby cutting off Fort Union from the eastern states.

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