Location Description and History

The general area encompassing Fort Union National Monument has been used historically by travelers along what would become the Santa Fe Trail. They include various American Indian groups of several different tribes, Spanish explorers and settlers, New Mexicans both traveling through the area and using it for grazing for both sheep and cattle, Frenchmen seeking riches in Santa Fe and New Mexico, Americans benefiting from trade with New Mexico, an army of invasion, civilian and military personnel associated with the three Fort Unions and the Santa Fe Trail, and ranchers. The reason for the existence of Fort Union arises from the Santa Fe Trail, whose ruts radiate north and south of the Forts. Indeed the area has long been an area traversed by people. Perhaps the earliest travelers were Pueblo Indians who traveled east over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and down along the Mora River, out to the plains to hunt buffalo and trade with the plains tribes. A pueblo type structure has been found along the Mora River near Watrous which dates to circa 1200 indicating that at least

It is probable his expedition on the way out, passed within one hundred miles of Fort Union, and it is generally accepted that on his return to Mexico, he followed close to the future course of the Cimarron branch of the Santa Fe Trail, possibly passing within ten miles of the future site of the fort. Later Spanish expeditions to the plains in 1696 (DeVargas) and 1715 (Hurtado) crossed the Sangre de Cristo Mountains from Picuris Pueblo, and headed down the Mora River out onto the plains. In 1739, the first recorded group of Frenchmen, led by Paul and Pierre Mallet encountered the people of New Mexico when they arrived at Picuris Pueblo, after a journey across the great plains from the present-day site of Kansas City. Their arrival at Picuris indicates a journey up the Mora River valley and over the mountains to Picuris.

Aerial Photograph of the 3rd Ft. Union. Star formation in the bottom center is the remains of the second fort.

William Becknell, the American entrepreneur from Franklin, Missouri, who chanced a journey into the unknown in 1821, passed close to the future site of the fort, was discovered by Captain Don Pedro Ignacio Gallego and over 400 militia troops just south of Las Vegas and escorted into San Miguel and Santa Fe, where he was welcomed with * great joy.* Thus the American phase of the Santa Fe Trail was born.

The junction of two rivers about seven miles south of the site of the fort was well known to New Mexicans and travelers on the trail. The area had been used by New Mexicans to graze cattle and sheep on the extensive grasslands during the summers. The joining of the Mora and Sapello Rivers and surrounding area became known as La Junta, or the junction. This lush area between the rivers provided both wood and grass for grazing of animals, plentiful water, and a meeting place for caravans heading east on the Trail. Perhaps because of these qualities and the surrounding terrain, it also became the juncture, heading west, of the Mountain and Cimarron branches of the Santa Fe Trail.

Although Kearny's occupation of Santa Fe and New Mexico was accomplished without firing a shot, New Mexicans revolted against the occupation in January of 1847, killing Governor Charles Bent and others in Taos and several American traders in Mora.

One Officer wrote at the time, that the whole of Northeastern New Mexico was in revolt except for Las Vegas, only because of the military force stationed there. The New Mexican patriots were crushed by the American military forces and an uneasy peace settled over the area with American volunteer forces stationed in Taos, Las Vegas, and Santa Fe among other towns. The attention of the military was then turned to the various tribes of Indians who not only raided New Mexican settlements and their cattle and sheep herds, but also caravans on the Santa Fe Trail. Increasing pressure by westward movement of the United States, in turn, caused dislocation of tribes from their traditional homelands. Hunting grounds and food gathering activities were severely restricted and in order to survive, food was taken from any available sources.

Resentment at the loss of their homelands and the long-time practice of capture of Indians for slavery, also added to the motivation of raiding. Active campaigns were conducted against the Ute, Apache, and Navajo Nations without much success. With the end of the Mexican War in 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, New Mexico became an American territory and the Army found that maintaining soldiers in the new territory was expensive.

Fort Union was established in July, 1851, several miles north of the junction of the two main branches of the Santa Fe Trail. Several reasons are commonly given for its establishment including a desire on the part of the new district commander, Colonel Edwin V. Sumner, to remove the troops from the *morally degrading* influences of Santa Fe. The most likely reason was economics, however, and Sumner moved numerous New Mexico garrisons out of leased quarters and directed that self-sufficient operations, such as troop constructed buildings and post farms be initiated. Problems with Commanche, Ute, and Jicarilla Apache tribesmen along the southern-most reaches of the Trail constituted another reason for a post away from the Sangre de Cristos and out on the Great Plains. From such a point, troops could more readily patrol the area and react to trouble in a more timely manner than had been the case.

The first Fort Union had been constructed by troop labor with indigenous materials. The results, predictably, proved to be false economy, and the extensive post began to disintegrate as soon as it was completed. Troops took to sleeping on the parade ground during fair weather. Ordnance and Quartermaster officers complained of inadequate shelter for their stores. As 1860 approached, it was clear to everyone that improvements had to be made.

The socioeconomic atmosphere of the time, however, soon provided the solution to Fort Union's structural ills. Secession and Civil War reached far west. Regular officers discussed, then debated the political issues; finally breaking into rival factions. Suspicion and mistrust permeated the army, far from the momentous activities then taking place. When Southern sympathizers suggested turning Fort Union, its depot supplies, and troops over to the Confederacy, William R. Shoemaker, Ordnance Depot commander, entrenched his storehouses and prepared charges to blow everything into oblivion, issuing an invitation to the would-be rebels to try something.

To defend against a conventional foe, the second fort better fit the dictionary definition of the word. Rather than the typical frontier fort that consisted of structures distributed around a parade ground, the second fort incorporated earthen walls, gun positions, infantry positions, and bunker like quarters and storehouses. Built for a force of 600 troops, it was deemed sufficient to stop anything the rebels could throw at it. Its frenzied construction, obviously, was done under conditions rife with suspense and anxiety. The work force consisted largely of New Mexico volunteer troops who worked round the clock in four-hour shifts. By the time the Rebels began advancing up the Rio Grande in January of 1862, the second fort earthwork was largely ready.

Colonel E.R.S. Canby, commanding Federal forces in New Mexico, gathered a force of about 3,800 men from the few regular troops remaining in the territory and the New Mexico Volunteer regiments. Defeated at Valverde in February, 1862, Canby pulled his force into Fort Craig while the Rebels sidestepped him and continued their drive north. Albuquerque and Santa Fe fell quickly, the Federal forces and even the Territorial Capital retreating to Fort Union.

The defensive earthwork fort was never used for its anticipated purpose. In March, 1862, a force made up of a regiment of Colorado troops, U.S. Regular infantry and cavalry, departed Fort Union with the intention of meeting the Rebels nearer Santa Fe. A two-day engagement in and around Glorieta Pass resulted in the destruction of the Confederate supply train and forced their abandonment of the campaign. By summer, 1862, Civil War action in New Mexico was over.

Military activity in the Southwest, however, was not over. Almost concurrent with the Rebel defeat came Indian warfare of unprecedented proportions. To the south Apache bands attempted to halt travel on stage and mail routes. To the west, the Navajos aggressively struck at outsider intrusions. And to the north and east the Comanches, Kiowas, and Southern Cheyenne all but halted travel on the Cimarron Route. Military escort or trains consisting of 100 armed men were considered requisites for making the trip, and, for a brief period, regular escort service was instituted by cooperating units from Fort Union and Fort Larned, Kansas. Military activity and military supply grew, and the Fort Union Depot began its zenith years.

Major campaigns were mounted by district commander Brigadier General James Carleton and Colonel Christopher (Kit) Carson against the Navajo nation to the west and the Comanche/Kiowa coalition to the east. Carson's 1st New Mexico Cavalry, along with California volunteers then stationed in the territory, fought a pitched battle at Adobe Walls in the Texas panhandle, marched the defeated Navahos to Bosque Redondo, and established Camp Nichols on the Cimarron Cutoff, halfway between Forts Union and Larned. The massacre of the Cheyenne winter camp at Sand Creek, Colorado by Glorieta Pass hero John M. Chivington in November, 1864, only served to intensify the resolve of the Plains tribes.

In the midst of all of this the Confederacy crumbled and the huge Federal armies began the mustering out process. The remaining 50,000 man Regular Army responded to Congressional priorities and was doled out to reconstruction duty in the South. Not until 1866 did regular troops return to duty in the Southwest. The arrival of the 3rd Cavalry, 37th Infantry, and 57th U.S. Colored Troops in New Mexico in mid 1866 finally permitted the discharge of the New Mexico troops. The regulars picked up where the volunteers left off, and Fort Union's role as a staging and supply area for campaigning troops continued. Fort Union based units participated in the 1868 winter campaign, attacking a Commanche village at Soldier Spring in present western Oklahoma on Christmas Day. Overshadowed by the better known Washita battle of George A. Custer's 7th Cavalry a month before, Soldier Spring ended the five-year battle for control of the Southern Plains and forced the tribes onto reservations.

The "peace" that followed was a temporary situation. By the early 1870s the Comanches and Kiowas longed for the old life and began to roam. The inevitable clashes, killings, and raiding occurred, and the army was directed to solve the problem. A five pronged campaign was organized to enter the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains area of the Texas Panhandle, the favorite haunt of the warring bands. One of these columns originated at Fort Union and consisted of three companies of the 8th Cavalry, commanded by Major William R. Price. Having departed Fort Union in August, 1874, the column campaigned into the early months of 1875 before the troops finally returned. The Southern Plains was finally considered free of *Indian threat,* and Fort Union settled into a period of *reservation watching its troops held in readiness for future troubles. Not until 1879 did the area witness its final clash with Native Americans.

In 1876 Apache raiding in southern New Mexico and Arizona intensified. The 9th Cavalry moved from Texas to New Mexico, and several companies of the regiment were stationed at Fort Union. The 9th was one of four army regiments (the others being the 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantries) made up entirely of black enlisted men. In response to the frequent Apache flare-ups, the Fort Union based companies moved in and out of the post. The *Victorio War* of 1880 ended with Victorio's death and the companies of the 9th at Fort Union were re-stationed at New Mexico posts in the immediate vicinity of the Apache reservations. Troopers of the 9th Cavalry won nine medals of honor for gallantry in New Mexico engagements. When not campaigning against Apaches, these black soldiers often found themselves involved in quelling the civil disturbances and violence of the *Colfax County War* that raged just north of Fort Union during those turbulent late 1870s.

Though Fort Union saw its share of excitement during this period, the principal activity continued to be the operation of the Quartermaster's Depot. By the mid-1860s as many as three thousand wagon loads of military supplies arrived annually over the Santa Fe Trail, to be stored and redistributed. The Fort Union Depot serviced all the garrisons in New Mexico as well as several as far away as Colorado and Arizona.

To receipt, inventory, unload, stock, care for, recrate, invoice, and ship the enormous amount of quartermaster, subsistence, and ordnance stores that passed through the depot took a very large staff. Three sets of offices processed a blizzard of bills of lading, receipts, vouchers, requisitions, abstracts, and other paperwork. Laborers packed and unpacked arriving and departing wagon trains. Transportation officers supervised wagon parks, mule corrals, and up to 200 wagonmasters and teamsters. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, farriers, painters, tinsmiths, carpenters, and plasterers kept buildings, wagons, and draught animals in repair. The vast majority of depot personnel were civilians, many of them local Hispanics who found government employment advantageous.

The depot and the army logistic system in the Southwest, in fact, had a dramatic impact on the New Mexico economy in both direct and indirect ways. Where possible, quartermaster and subsistence needs were procured by local contract. Forage for animals, beef cattle, heating fuel, flour, lumber, and vegetables were all procured locally, providing federal dollars for everyone from the small grower to the large contractor. Government trains and troops stopped at dozens of contractor run forage agencies along main travel routes for meals and rest. Though not the stuff of Hollywood westerns, the day-in-day-out operation of supplying the military had a far greater impact on the territory than any Indian battle. Even the Wheeler Expedition, one of the *Great Surveys* of the 1860s and 70s, was supplied from Fort Union Depot while it worked the surrounding area.

The Santa Fe Trail, of course, was one of the main reasons for Fort Union's existence. Though some users traveled the Mountain route during its early years, the *main* route was always the shorter Cimarron route, from the Trail's acknowledged start in 1821 up into the 1860s. The Cimarron route passed the site of Fort Union only five miles to the east, converging with the Mountain Branch in the Mora Valley at La Junta de los Rios Sapello y Mora (present day Watrous), with cutoffs to Fort Union both north and south of the Turkey Mountains. Here Samuel B. Watrous arrived in 1849 and established a store and trading post little more than a mile from the competing operation of Alexander Barclay. This area witnessed the passage of practically all Santa Fe Trail traffic, both east and west bound, up to Fort Union's establishment in 1851. It served as a campground and gathering point for east-bound trains as it was one of the last areas that offered wood, water, and grass in abundance before crossing the dry Cimarron route.

Colorado in 1873, and the railhead towns of Granada and West Las Animas became the shipping points, and the wagons still struck south on what was known as the Fort Union þ Granada Road. This route, generally ignored by Trail historians, was the Santa Fe Trail for a number of years, carrying massive amounts of freight, both civilian and military.

The railhead shipping points also spelled the end for the overland freight firms. The reduced distances into New Mexico no longer produced a profit. In their stead came *forwarding and commission houses,* an operation that resembled what would happen today if UPS branched off into the hardware and grocery wholesale business. Many such firms appeared, setting up their mobile warehouses wherever the end-of-track happened to be. Chick, Browne & Company and Otero, Sellars, & Company were the giants among them.

With regard to military shipments, the Quartermaster's Department continued to contract the shipping out to civilians. The contractors then subcontracted with the forwarding and commission houses, who, in turn, further hired out the actual transportation, first to the railroad and then to small freighters and even individuals. Far and away the majority of the teamsters and freighters were Hispanic New Mexicans, who had always been heavily represented on the Santa Fe Trail, but, for its final decade, had nearly total domination of the Trails actual operation.
The proximity of the rails after 1873 also caused a decline in the magnitude of the Fort Union Depot operation. The army found it cheaper and less complicated to send supplies directly from the railhead to the posts for which they were bound. The transportation contract for the 1876-77 Fiscal Year reverted to routing all military shipments through the Fort Union Depot, but this proved to be the last gasp of glory for the operation. Use of the depot dropped dramatically thereafter.
From West Las Animas, Colorado the railhead moved to La Junta and Pueblo in 1876 and El Moro (near Trinidad) in 1877. The Mountain route then carried virtually all wagon traffic to and from the railroad. Though the eastern-most seven hundred miles of the Santa Fe Trail lay abandoned across Missouri, Kansas, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico, the two hundred mile stretch still in use was as active as ever. Rushing the railroad over Raton Pass prolonged the Trail's life, but when the rails reached the New Mexico plains at Raton in 1879, the end came rapidly. On July 4th, the first regularly scheduled passenger train steamed into Las Vegas, and in February, 1880 reached Lamy, near Santa Fe. The Santa Fe Trail was no more.

Slowly the Fort Union depot operation was dismantled, and in 1883 ceased operations altogether, along with the Arsenal. The garrison at Fort Union stood alone. The post spread its elbows and assimilated the former depot structures.
Virtually every historian has dated Fort Union's death warrant as 1879, the year the railroad passed by at Watrous, yet the post remained active for an additional eleven years. What happened during that voided decade that contains 25% of Fort Union's history? One of the current museum exhibits claims the post was "reduced to caretaker status." The official National Park Service handbook marks the era with the brief statement "Fort Union had outlived its usefulness."

Exert from Monumental Ghosts by Alice Bullock

With all the killing during robberies, fights over gambling games, it seems strange that the ghosts at Fort Union do not turn to these violent deaths. Instead, the final Fort was well built, with parade grounds, officers' homes, mess halls, a hospital jail, recreation hall, and shooting ranges.

Soldiers told of seeing parties, dances, etc., going on in the recreation building after it was torn down. It frightened them and they quickly made their way back to the barracks, and usually didn't mention it until something got one of the men to talking, which led others to confess to the same experience. Reports of the ghostly parties are rare today, but reports of Gen. U.S. Grant continue to surface fairly often.

Reports were uniformly casual - a caretaker, visitor, whatever, asks about the tall man in the Civil War period uniform who walks from the parade ground to the hospital, walks through the door space, and simply cannot be located when followed. There doesn't seem to be a particular time of day - or night - for this completely solid looking apparition.

The Union Land Grand and Grazing Company had charge of the Fort Union acreage for some time after the Fort was closed, as it was no longer necessary to protect travelers and act as a supply depot for other forts in the state. Camp. E.B. Wheeler was agent in charge for the Cattle Company. He had earned his Captain's bars at the Fort before it closed.

Wheeler loved the old Fort site and protected the ruins as best he could. His officers were in the upstairs portion of People's Saving Bank in Las Vegas but he kept men patrolling the Fort Union acreage. His men had told him about the heavily bearded man walking to the old hospital but he dismissed the story as inconsequential until he saw him himself. "It can't be, of course, but it was General (later President) Grant so I just don't talk about it. People would say I was getting senile," he told me.

Now Fort Union is a National Monument, with a nice headquarters building that is offices and a Museum, people who protect and care for the ruins of Fort buildings. It's well worth the visit, and is located on a turnoff just north of Watrous, New Mexico, which is fun, too. The whole village is a National Landmark.

Due to the presence of approaching thunderstorms and the space weather, our instrumentation was not reliable. Therefore we performed witness and history interviews and strolled around the fort taking photographs.

Photographs

Click on the thumbs to view the larger image

Filed for future reference