Union Captain James ‘Paddy’ Graydon

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The Civil War was a study in contrasts — Northerner and Southerner, slave and free, West Point professional and homespun volunteer. The contrast extended even to geography. The conflict was played out on battlegrounds as different as the forested hills and valleys of Virginia, the Mississippi River’s mud flats, and the arid deserts of the Southwest. Some soldiers, transplanted from the familiar vistas of home, found their new environments more hostile than any human enemy. Others thrived in the unfamiliar climes and made the most of the opportunities they found there. Among these latter, more adaptable souls stood Union Captain James ‘Paddy’ Graydon, an Irish immigrant who made the desert Southwest his home and became the proverbial burr under the saddle to a Confederate general and would-be conqueror.

Graydon was an unlikely desert-dweller. Having fled the green shores of Ireland because of the devastating Potato Famine, he arrived in Baltimore in 1853. Four months later, he enlisted in the 1st U.S. Dragoons. After brief training at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, Graydon traveled west and joined his unit at Los Lunas, some 20 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico Territory.

The boundless vistas of the Southwest, dotted with the bleached bones of horses, mules, and men, must have been a shock to the young Irishman’s system. Nevertheless, the famine had prepared Graydon for suffering and cruelty, and his new commander easily made up for any misery that his life lacked.

Captain Richard S. Ewell, who would later achieve fame as a Confederate general, commanded Company G of the 1st Dra-goons. Ewell was such an iron disciplinarian that even frontier veterans were taken aback by his methods. Graydon’s first nine months of duty included eight full months in the field, chasing the elusive Apache from the freezing heights of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the burning Sonora desert along the Mexican border. The next year, campaigning took his company east to the Pecos River, where deep snows and the Mescalero Apaches, highly competent warriors, took a heavy toll on Graydon’s company. The Irishman learned not only to follow orders during these journeys, but also to speak fluent Spanish and to hate Indians.

From 1854 to 1856, Graydon was posted at Forts Thorn, Craig, and Union, usually in pursuit of the Mescalero. As a newly promoted corporal in September 1856, he followed his new commander, Major Enoch Steen, into the area around Tucson. There, in the recently acquired Gadsden Purchase (an area in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona, purchased from Mexico in 1853), the settlers were beset by Indian raiders, Mexican horse thieves, and renegade American opportunists seeking gold and silver.

Duty at Fort Buchanan, 60 miles south of Tucson, was grim, and two years of pursuing the Chiracahua Apaches through the surrounding mountains — for low wages — grew tiresome. In 1858, Graydon received an honorable discharge and soon opened the United States Boundary Hotel, three miles from his former duty station. He was 26 years old.

Graydon’s saloon attracted the toughest gamblers, prostitutes, filibusters, and gunslingers in the territory. He soon grew wealthy from his hotel and also thrived as a farmer, guide, interpreter, and horse-thief–catcher.

With the coming of the Civil War in 1861, the 1st Dragoons abandoned southern Arizona — and Graydon — to the Confederates. Graydon took action immediately. Drawing on his military experience, he led a wagon train with 70 fellow Union sympathizers through Apache ambushes to the comparative safety of the Rio Grande Valley. Then he hurried to Santa Fe, where Colonel Edward R.S. Canby, commander of Union forces in New Mexico, commissioned him as a captain in the newly organized New Mexico Volunteers. Graydon insisted on an independent command and received permission to raise a company for scouting duties. In October 1861, at the village of Lemitar, just north of present-day Socorro, he recruited 84 native Nuevo Mexicanos, who enlisted for 40 cents a day and provided their own horses and equipment.

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

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