Troops were also in motion from Taos, where Captain William Grier organized a joint force consisting of his own company of the 1st Dragoons, 42 men, as well as 40 mounted New Mexican Volunteers under Captain Jose M. Valdez and a battery of 6-pounders. Grier, an 1835 West Point graduate who had been brevetted major for gallantry during the Mexican War, had not been in New Mexico long. He wisely hired Antoine Leroux as his chief-of-scouts for the expedition. Leroux rivaled even Kit Carson as a mountain man and scout, and while the two men were lifelong friends, others constantly sought to build a rivalry between them. Leroux, born of French-Canadian parents in St. Louis in 1803, had gone west with William H. Ashley in 1822. An experienced trapper and mountain man, he had settled in New Mexico in 1833 and married into the prominent Vigil clan. During the Mexican War he had won further fame as a scout for Colonel Philip St. George Cooke's Mormon Battalion, helping to blaze a wagon road to California.

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Also attached to the command was 22-year-old German emigrant William Kronig, freshly minted orderly sergeant of Valdez's company. Kronig had migrated to the United States from Westphalia in 1847. Lured westward by gold fever, he had made it only as far as Santa Fe before running out of cash. In hopes of making enough money to continue on to the gold fields, he enlisted for two months' service in the New Mexico Volunteers and, since he was the only man in his company who could read or write English, was promptly promoted to sergeant. When the detachment was ordered out, he requested that Captain Grier provide him with a gun, but was dismissed with the statement that a saber was enough of a weapon for him. It was a telling comment on Grier.

On the third night out, Grier's detachment reached Rayado. The captain wanted well-known Kit Carson to join his party, even though Leroux was to be chief scout and he already had noted mountain men Robert Fisher, Dick Wootton, Jesus Silva and Tom Tobin in his company. Carson listened to Grier's plea. This was a familiar tale as old as the frontier. The rescue of his daughter from the Shawnees was one of the most famous stories from the life of Daniel Boone, and it in turn had provided the plotline for James Feni­more Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. These written manifestations of the tale were lost on Carson, who could not read or write, but the plight of the young mother certainly stirred him to action. Settling down with his own family would have to wait a while longer.

Carson was the first to reach the slaughter site on November 9, quickly finding the abandoned Apache camp as well. "The letters, papers etc. found strewed about this camp," noted Grier, "were conclusive evidence that here had been the hiding place of those Indians who, two weeks previously, had murdered Mr. J.M. White and his party." Even the rough mountain men were moved by the discovery of Virginia White's little rocking chair.

"It was the most difficult trail that I ever followed," Carson later declared. The Apaches would break into small parties every morning, rejoining at a designated campsite in the late afternoon. The trail, already cold, led Carson and the other scouts to many a dead end. Ann White was their great ally. "In nearly every camp we would find some of Mrs. White's clothing," Carson noted, "which was the cause of renewed energy on our part to continue the pursuit."

From Point of Rocks Carson trailed the Jicarillas to the southeast, toward their favored haunts along the Canadian River and its tributaries. After 200 miles they crossed the river only to realize that their quarry had circled back some 15 miles below the point of their crossing.

"It was the flight of the ravens, which led me to believe that we were nearing the hostiles of whom we were in pursuit," recalled frontiersman Dick Wootton. "The direction of their flight indicated the location of a camp, where they could find the carcasses of dead animals to feed on, and the time of their flight in the afternoon, indicated the distance of the camp from us."

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