tradicion revista fall 2012 - LPD Press & Rio Grande Books

Los Pinos & the Military in the 1860s
by Francelle Alexander
By January of 1862 with Henry
Connelly as governor and General
Edward R.S. Canby as commander
of the Military District of Santa Fe,
the territory of New Mexico was
safely on the Union side. Connelly
held broad general powers to protect
New Mexico from the Confederates,
and Union men held the
majority in the legislature, where
they recently had repealed the act
providing for the protection of slave
property. 1 However, the Confederate
forces, hoping to easily secure
New Mexico, were moving up the
Rio Grande Valley from Texas. The
old hacienda at Los Pinos was to be
part of the military operations in
the Rio Grande Valley and would
suffer considerable damage as a result.
Later, more damage occurred
to Los Pinos when it was used first
as a military supply depot, then as
a staging area for the Navajo campaign,
and finally as a forwarding
post for Navajo prisoners enroute to
Bosque Redondo. 2 The military and
the new people who passed through
impacted the local area at many
levels, particularly at the economic
level, but also socially and culturally.
Meanwhile, during much of the
1860s the Chavez/Connelly family
lived in Santa Fe and Las Vegas, not
at Los Pinos.
Battle of Peralta
Although in late February of
1862 the Texans under Brigadier
General H. H. Sibley claimed vic-
82
Military Operations during the Civil War, 1862
Map by Warren Beck and Inez Haase in Historical Atlas of New Mexico, University
of Olkahoma Press, Norman, 1969. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights
reserved.
tory over the Union troops at the
Battle of Valverde in the southern
Rio Grande Valley, the Confederates
failed to capture the federal stores at
the nearby Fort Craig. Increasingly
short of supplies, Sibley’s Confederate
troops were forced to confiscate
food and other supplies from
villagers as they marched up the
Rio Grande Valley. 3 Governor Connelly,
after witnessing the fighting at
Valverde, rode north to Los Pinos,
where he distributed from his store
much of his cattle, merchandise,
and equipment to the people of the
Peralta area to prevent seizure by
Confederate forces. 4
Moving north, Sibley’s hungry
TRADICIÓN October 2012