A COLD NEW MEXICAN JANUARY IN 1855

It was a chilly morning in southern New Mexico, as most mornings were in January. It was the morning of January 5, 1855 and a band Mescalero Apaches had disappeared into the Sacramento Mountains in the vicinity of Sierra Blanca, White Mountain, after stealing about 2,500 head of sheep. A large force of soldiers, with Captain Henry W. Stanton in command, had left Fort Fillmore, near Mesilla, to track them. 

Fort Fillmore was established less than four years before near Mesilla to protect settlers and traders traveling to California. Travelers heading west were plagued by Apache attacks, and a network of forts was created by the US Government to protect and encourage westward expansion. 

 Indians had been raiding, killing and stealing in southern New Mexico Territory since settlement began and in 1851 and 1852 treaties were signed with various bands by the United States government. These were to no avail and by 1854 Indian raids had become a real problem. 

 Captain Stanton, with a force of eighty men and three officers, as well as forty mules and eight packers, a guide and an interpreter, was to join up with Captain Richard S. Ewell and a force of soldiers from Fort Thorn by the middle of January. Fort Thorn was a settlement and outpost establish in 1853 near present day Hatch, New Mexico. Captain Stanton was instructed to ”…attack any party of Indians he may fall in with having sheep or cattle…” Stanton and Ewell, making good time, met up near the Rio Penasco on January 7 and set up camp. They began a regular patrol of the area because Ewell’s Dragoons had reported seeing an Indian running in the underbrush on the day they set up camp. The troop’s horses were spooked by something or someone on the night of January ninth. Mescaleros were assumed but, although the soldiers found some evidence, they found no Indians. 

The Mescaleros attacked the Dragoons’ camp on the night of the eighteenth, according to the New Mexico State Archives, stealing horses and setting the grass surrounding the camp ablaze. The soldiers woke up to the mocking of a band of Indians dancing around a fire on the hillside. Skipping breakfast, the troopers saddled up and went in pursuit of the warriors. Stanton and Ewell’s main force attacked along the banks of the Rio Penasco, while small parties of Dragoons maneuvered after various clusters of braves. This running battle lasted until about four o’clock that afternoon. Captain Stanton led a small detail of twelve men in pursuit of the Apaches while the main body of soldiers set up camp for the evening. They rode into a deep ravine, near the modern day town of Mayhill, where the Mescaleros waited in ambush. Upon hearing the gunfire, the soldiers in camp rushed to support Captain Stanton’s small force. A tough battle resulted but it lasted only twenty minutes. The warriors fled. 

 Having been shot in the forehead while attempting to cover the retreat of his soldiers from that hard fight, Captain Henry W. Stanton departed this life straight away. Private James A. Bennett, 1st Dragoons, recorded in his diary that Privates John Hennings and Thomas Dwyer were also killed in the Indian ambush. The soldiers wrapped their dead companions in blankets and buried their bodies, building fires over their graves in hope that the location would be hidden until they could make a return trip to recover the bodies. 

As the disheveled and grubby soldiers returned after four days of chasing Indians through the hilly, rocky and often precipitous terrain, they paused to recover the remains of Captain Stanton and the two Dragoons killed on the nineteenth. Someone had unearthed the bodies and stolen the blankets. Animals had mutilated the exposed bodies. The corpses were in a deplorable condition. While the horses and pack animals were given time to rest, the soldiers respectfully placed the bodies of their comrades-in-arms on piles of firewood and burned the flesh off the bones. The expedition, led by Captain Ewell, then took the remains back to Fort Fillmore for a proper military funeral. They arrived on February 2. 

Eagerly awaiting the return of her husband, Captain Stanton’s wife waited at her front door for over an hour before a soldier informed her of her husband’s death. 

The following day, the garrison buried the remains of Captain Stanton, Private Dwyer and Private Hennings with full military honors. According to John P. Ryan, author of Fort Stanton and Its Community, when a new fort was established on the banks of the Rio Bonito, later in that year of 1885, it was named in honor of Captain Henry W. Stanton

CHRISTMAS ON THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CIVIL WAR

“I should like to be home this Christmas night,” wrote Lieutenant Elisha Hunt Rhodes on Christmas day, 150 years ago.  Lt. Rhodes, of the second Rhode Island, spent Christmas Day in camp just like he did the year before, in 1861 and he would spend two more Christmas Days in camp before the Civil war was over.

Elisha Rhodes is one of the most famous of the diarists of the Civil War and his stunning accounts of the War Between the States was published in 1985 as "All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes"  by Robert Hunt Rhodes, his great-grandson.  Filmmaker Ken Burns featured Rhodes' war experiences in his 1990 documentary "The Civil War.”  Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

The son of a New England sea captain, Elisha Hunt Rhodes enlisted into the Union army as an eighteen year old private when fighting erupted in 1861.  Rhodes served with the Second Rhode Island Infantry for the duration of the war, and fought in nearly every major battle in which the Army of the Potomac was engaged.  Rhodes became an officer at age 20 and eventually rose from private to a 23 year old colonel commanding his own regiment. He fought hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox.
 

While we look back at the 150^th Anniversary of the Civil War, it is fitting that we celebrate this Christmas season with a first-hand look at what war was like so many years ago. Frequently cold, wet, tired and unfed, periodically the witness to death, destruction incompetence and poor generalship, Elisha Hunt Rhodes endured.

When in camp, Christmas was a welcome but short reprieve from the tedium of an army winter.  In between Christmases was battle after battle, shells screaming overhead, friends a few feet away wounded and dying.

Christmas 1862 was the second of Elisha Rhodes' four Christmases spent in the Army of the Potomac, and his location for each serves as a graphic representation of the progress of the army.   Rhodes spent his first two Christmases in the Army of the Potomac in camps around Washington, D.C.  He does not record an entry for 1861, and he remarks in 1862 that Christmas was a quiet day, a calm day in which the soldiers were excused from drill and he enjoyed a visit by his brother-in-law from Washington. 
  

On New Year’s Eve he wrote, “Well, the year 1862 is drawing to a close. As I look back I am bewildered when I think of the hundreds of miles I have tramped, the thousands of dead and wounded that I have seen, and the many strange sights that I have witnessed. I can truly thank God for his preserving care over me and the many blessings I have received. One year ago tonight I was an enlisted man and stood cap in hand asking for a furlough. Tonight I am an officer and men ask the same favor of me. It seems to me right that officers should rise from the ranks, for only such can sympathize with the private soldiers. The year has not amounted to much as far as the War is concerned, but we hope for the best and feel sure that in the end the Union will be restored. Good bye, 1862.”

In 1863, near Brandy Station in northern Virginia, Elisha Hunt Rhodes reported that he rode his recently acquired army horse, Kate, on Christmas Day, and gave a Christmas dinner celebration for other officers in the regiment, during which they endeavored to celebrate the holiday "in a becoming manner."

Elisha Rhodes spent his fourth and last army Christmas in a small hut in the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia.  The Union army was laying siege to the city, but there was little activity during the cold weather.  On Christmas Eve, Rhodes entertained officers from the 49th Pennsylvania, and after their departure officers from the 37th Massachusetts serenaded him. On Christmas morning, he took a ride and watched Union soldiers hauling logs to build warmer quarters.  Rhodes commented, "This is the birth of the Saviour, but we have paid very little attention to it in a religious way."  He closed his entry by writing, "This is my fourth Christmas in the Army. I wonder if it will be my last."

It was his last army Christmas.  Elisha Hunt Rhodes was mustered out shortly after the end of the Civil War in April 1865, and returned to his home in Rhode Island. He worked as a cotton and wool trader for the rest of his life and, like many soldiers, remained active in veteran affairs.  Elisha Hunt Rhodes died on January 14, 1917.