Union Captain James ‘Paddy’ Graydon

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The following night, as the Texans camped across the Rio Grande within earshot of the fort’s adobe walls, Graydon worked on a weapon he hoped would bring the invasion to an abrupt end. It was something like a guided missile — and yet nothing like it at all. He loaded boxes of 24-pounder howitzer shells on the backs of two old mules and led them through the icy waters of the river to the edge of the enemy camp. Assuming the mules would naturally join their Confederate counterparts tethered among the Rebel tents, he lit the fuses and sent the unsuspecting beasts trotting toward the Texans’ campfires.

Graydon’s assumption was dead wrong. The mules decided their fortunes lay with the last hands that had fed them: the Yankees. Graydon jogged toward Fort Craig, and the mules, with their sputtering fuses, trotted after him. He ran; they ran. Soon, explosions lit the night sky. Both Graydon and his intended victims escaped harm; the mules were not so lucky.

The next day, Sibley’s men met Canby’s small force at Valverde, a ford four miles upriver from Fort Craig. Graydon’s irregular troopers began fighting before sunrise and went on to halt a Rebel advance by mid-morning, help burn part of the enemy’s wagon train at midday, and repel an attack on Canby’s left flank late in the afternoon. One of Graydon’s men later recalled that ‘at the battle of Valverde we discharged our duty with…effort and perseverance, battling face to face from nine o’clock in the morning till six in the evening when we received orders to retire.’

The battle ended in a stalemate. Canby retired behind the walls of Fort Craig and Sibley marched north, capturing Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Graydon’s small company hung on Sibley’s flanks, stealing hundreds of mules — the non-exploding variety — and sending Canby valuable intelligence. While the increasingly desperate Confederates foraged for food in the inhospitable desert, Graydon’s Spy Company buzzed around them like an annoying swarm of mosquitoes, picking them off piecemeal. On March 9, Graydon rode into Fort Craig leading 60 head of cattle that he had ‘liberated’ from the Rebels at Lemitar. At the end of the month, he arrived with 40 prisoners and 91 mules, and four days later he captured an entire Rebel picket of 10 men and an officer at Los Lunas. Graydon entered the fort on April 8 with 94 mules and two prisoners. At one point, he captured a Confederate quartermaster in Tijeras Canyon, where the Rebels had gone to forage.

Sibley’s invasion was blunted in the Battle of La Glorieta Pass, March 26-28, 1862, and the Rebels began a 300-mile retreat to Texas. Canby followed cautiously, not giving battle, on the theory that he could not afford to feed any Rebel prisoners in that long, despoiled valley. Graydon was more active in urging the Texans southward — harassing their rear guard, capturing their wagons, and making their lives generally miserable. One night at Socorro, Graydon and a single Federal soldier came upon a houseful of Rebels. Shouting commands to two imaginary companies of reinforcements, Graydon persuaded the Texans to surrender without firing a shot.

South of Socorro, Sibley’s troops left the Rio Grande Valley and traveled southwest through the waterless canyons of the rugged Magdalena Mountains, apparently to avoid possible capture by Canby. Even here, Graydon’s men hung on Sibley’s flanks, urging the thirsty and starving Texans ever farther south in a desperate retreat through arid ravines and even drier mountain passes. As the fleeing Confederates struggled southward, their trail was littered with castoff equipment, including 19 wagons, 10 ambulances, six caissons, and three howitzers. Graydon found dozens of Confederate corpses in shallow graves; they were already being eaten by wolves as he passed by. Sibley’s ragged survivors staggered into El Paso, never to return. In May 1862, Canby gave Graydon command of a company in the reorganized 1st New Mexico Cavalry. Graydon was assigned to fight the newly resurgent Mescalero Apaches in the mountains of central New Mexico, and he departed for Fort Stanton with his company in October 1862.

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Tags: 19th Century, American Civil War, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts

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