Location: Mora County, NM Map
Built: 1851
Area: 721 acres (292 ha)
Fort Union National Monument is a national monument-type
memorial in northeastern New Mexico, United States. It preserves
a historic military base established in 1851 to control New
Mexico territory conquered during the Mexican-American War of
1846-48 and to protect merchant trains on the Santa Fe Trail
from Indian raids.
Built under difficult conditions with
the simplest means, the fort was expanded several times before a
new fortified position about one and a half kilometers away was
moved into during the American Civil War. This was expanded and
rebuilt after the Civil War and played an important role in the
Indian Wars of the 1870s. The fort was abandoned in 1891 when
the railroad made the site obsolete and the Indian threat was a
thing of the past.
The Santa Fe Trail was the most important trade
route from the settled regions of the United States on the Missouri
River through the steppes and deserts of what later became Kansas
and Colorado to Santa Fe, the capital of the Mexican province of
Nuevo Mexico. The trade had only started in 1822, after Mexico's
independence from Spain, and experienced a significant boom until
the 1840s. The Mexican-American War, which Mexico lost in 1848,
began in 1846 as a result of conflicts between the Republic of
Texas, Mexico and the USA, which had been independent since 1836. In
the following Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico had to cede the
territories of today's US states of California, Arizona, Nevada,
Utah, parts of Colorado and Wyoming and also New Mexico to the
United States.
New Mexico belonged to the Ninth Military
Department (from 1853 then New Mexico Military Department), which
had been assigned 10% of the total manpower of the US Army since the
war. After the war, the US Army initially had eleven small bases
scattered throughout the Southwest, which turned out to be
impractical in 1850/51; individually they were too weak against the
Apaches and Comanches, and they were too far apart for coordinated
action. In a remote region with an extreme climate, the posts were
not considered attractive. This had negative consequences for the
discipline and clout of the troops.
The Army then, under the
coordination of Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner, constructed
two new forts at the junctions of the Santa Fe Trail: 1850 Fort
Atkinson (later Fort Dodge) at the northeast junction and 1851 Fort
Union where the two alternative trails rejoined.
As an
outpost on the frontier of civilization, the Military Department and
its main fort were largely self-sufficient. Since orders from
Washington would have been on the road for months, commanders had to
make decisions themselves. Fort Union was an early command in the
careers of some officers who later rose to high positions. Among
them were James Henry Carleton, Brevet Brigadier General and author
of military textbooks, at Fort Union 1852, William T. H. Brooks,
Major General, at Fort Union 1852, George Bibb Crittenden, Major
General, at Fort Union 1860-61, John R. Brooke, Major General , at
Fort Union 1867–68, John Irvin Gregg, Brevet Brigadier General, at
Fort Union 1870–73.
Fort Union is about 2000 m above sea level on the
slopes of the up to 3000 m high mountains of the Sangre de Cristo chain,
about 150 km south of the Raton Pass and about 175 km northeast of Santa
Fe. The location was personally chosen by Sumner, who knew the area from
the Mexican-American War.
Regiments of infantry and dragoons were
stationed in Fort Union from the start, from 1852 a battery of light
artillery was added, from 1856 also mounted rifleman (mounted infantry).
First in command was Captain Edmond B. Alexander of the 3rd Infantry
Regiment.
The first fort from 1851 was an open construction of
individual wooden huts, it was expanded several times and in 1861 with a
maximum of 1669 soldiers was the largest base west of the Mississippi
River and an important economic factor for the region because of the
soldiers' salaries and lucrative supply contracts. Initially, the fort
was only planned as a temporary facility and was built by the soldiers
themselves using the simplest of log houses. The buildings were soon in
poor condition, and Sumner's attempt at self-sufficiency through a farm
run by the soldiers failed under the climatic conditions of New Mexico.
Despite this, Fort Union did its job. The troops organized patrols
on the Santa Fe Trail and escorted individual wagon trains. Trader and
author William Davis reported his pleased impression of the fort in 1857
when, after the deserted steppes, he reached the base responsible for
the security of his business.
Fort Union, 175 kilometers from
Santa Fe, lies in the lovely valley of Moro Creek. It's an open post,
without any stockades or ramparts, and were one not to see the officers
and soldiers it would appear more like a quiet frontier village than a
military station. It is laid out with wide, straight streets crossing at
right angles. The huts are built of pine wood cut in the neighboring
mountains and the quarters of both the officers and the men make a neat
and pleasant impression.
After the start of the American Civil War in 1861, the
old site was converted into a depot and a kilometer and a half away, a
fort protected against light artillery fire, with large star-shaped
earthen ramparts based on the tenailla system, was built. The central
depot of military supplies (weapons, ammunition, food) for the southwest
was created at Fort Union. Volunteer units and militias were also
stationed at Fort Union until the end of the war. They came mainly from
New Mexico and neighboring Colorado, and even from California towards
the end of the war.
In 1862, after the defeat of the Union Army
at the Battle of Valverde, the fort was the only barrier between
Confederate forces and the Colorado goldfields of importance to the war
effort. Ironically, Henry Hopkins Sibley, commander of the invading
Confederate army before joining the Confederacy, had himself been
interim commander of the fort in 1861. The fort's garrison was
reinforced by Colorado militias under Colonel John Potts Slough. Slough
advanced on the Confederates with the bulk of his troops and defeated
their advance guard about 100 km south of the fort at the Battle of
Glorieta Pass. The Confederates then withdrew, the New Mexico campaign
had failed.
The maintenance of the earth walls was soon
considered too expensive in times of peace. The third fort was built
just off the ramparts with simple, native adobe walls. It was expanded
several times, starting in 1867 with a military hospital. Construction
costs and the stationing of troops brought orders for the local
population and contributed significantly to the economic boom in the
region.
There were already individual campaigns against the
Indian peoples in the immediate vicinity of the fort before the civil
war, and several campaigns in the context of the Indian wars went out
from Fort Union in the late phase of the Civil War and afterwards. To
this end, Kit Carson was enlisted briefly in 1866 as a brevet brigadier
general at Fort Union to make his knowledge of the country and its
people available to the army. Carson was one of the most famous trappers
and scouts, distinguished for his role in the Mexican-American War and
Civil War, and had experience in military campaigns against Native
Americans since leading the 1864 campaign against the Navaho, which
resulted in what was dubbed the " Long March” which has become known. At
Fort Union he led a campaign against the Mescalero Apaches.
The
Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche were forcibly moved from their
traditional hunting grounds to Indian reservations in Indian Territory,
present-day Oklahoma, in 1867. The occasion was some raids on white
settlers, farms, traders and last but not least on the railroad, which
was advancing further and further into the prairies of Kansas. The
peoples only partially kept to the treaties imposed on them, they could
not or would not give up their hunting grounds and the only way of life
they knew.
The army responded with smaller campaigns throughout
the southwest and against almost all peoples of the region. From 1871,
the soldiers of Fort Union were also used to prevent illegal trade
between residents of New Mexico, mostly of Indian descent from the
Pueblo peoples, and the Plains Indians, primarily the Comanche. On the
one hand, the Plains Indians were to be protected from alcohol, which
was forbidden for them, and on the other hand, it was in the interest of
the US government to keep the people dependent on the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and its agencies.
Conflicts escalated in the summer of
1874: after several Kiowa raids and conflicting reports of attacks by a
group believed to be Southern Cheyenne on settlers in New Mexico and
Texas, the Army intervened. Troops from Fort Union also took part in a
campaign against the Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne on
the Red River between Texas and the Indian Territory in modern-day
Oklahoma, which was one of the largest military actions against the
Native Americans as the Red River War . In the years that followed there
were repeated reports of Indians on the way to raids, but the army could
find no traces. There are indications that the danger of Indian raids
was systematically exaggerated by the settlers in order to bring troops
into the region with whose supplies the settlers could do good business.
The army was also called upon against outlaws among
the white population. After small gold discoveries, in 1869 in Cimarron,
about 60 km north of the fort, conflicts broke out between the Ute,
settlers who had previously shared the land peacefully with the Indians,
and a company called the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company, which
was funded by British and Dutch financiers and considerable political
backing claimed the entire floor for themselves. A vicar who supported
the settlers was murdered by gunslingers, a constable suspected of
involvement in the first murder was tortured and murdered. The judiciary
was powerless because all sides got backing. The Indians were completely
defenseless. Fort Union officers tried to investigate, but were
unsuccessful when the sole suspect, after making a partial confession,
was snatched from them by a supposedly spontaneous mob and lynched on
the way between court and jail.
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe
Railway line reached Fort Union in 1879, after which the depot became
redundant and closed. By this time, Fort Union and the other forts that
had been built against the Indians were already disputed. However, it
was not until February 21, 1891 that the site was completely abandoned.
Coincidentally on the same day General William T. Sherman, a hero of the
Civil War and later Commander-in-Chief of the US Army responsible for
the Indian Wars, was buried in New York City. The time of the "Wild
West" was over: The colonization of the American prairies had progressed
so far that the frontier, the frontier of civilization, no longer
existed.
After World War II, interest in western settlement
history increased, and in 1955 the Union Land and Grazing Company
donated the fort's grounds to the federal government for a national
monument, which opened the following year. It is now one of the small
protected areas of the National Park Service in terms of area and number
of visitors and consists of a visitor information center and a circular
route through the ruins of the third fort with some historical exhibits
such as covered wagons and cannons. Even after more than 150 years,
traces of the large covered wagons of the Santa Fe Trail, called ruts,
can still be seen in several places in the area.
The ruins stand
on a short-grass prairie with a strikingly small-scale mosaic of diverse
plant communities. The diversity of the protected area, which is small
in terms of area, is due to the absence of grazing for five decades
now.[6] Adjacent areas grazed by a cattle ranch are significantly poorer
in species and plant communities. A total of 142 plant species and
sixteen plant communities were recorded, as well as 33 species of
reptiles and amphibians and 16 species of mammals (shrews and bats could
not be recorded with the methods used, but are present in the area).
Typical of the structures are cottontail rabbits, silver badgers, coyote
and pronghorn.