Jennifer Bohnhoff's Blog, page 28

The Battle of Mesilla

Isaac Lynde: The Wrong Man for the Job

If there was ever a man who suffered by being placed in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was Isaac Lynde.

Lynde was born July 27, 1804, in Williamstown, Vermont. He must have been a promising lad, for in 1822 he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The Academy’s records describe him as "an intelligent, sprightly lad," handsome, and well educated,” and he graduated four years later, thirty-second in a class of thirty-eight.

Lynde’s early career was typical for the time. He served in a number of frontier posts in the Northwest and the far plains, and took part in the Mexican-American War. Unlike many of his time, though Lynde’s record includes no battles or distinction of any kind, and in thirty-four years of service he had risen only three full grades, to Major. All of his promotions were routine, and based on time of service, his appointments to posts that were out of the way and relatively underutilized. Why this was the case cannot be said with any certainty. Perhaps he was not as promising as his youth had indicated, or perhaps his problem was that he was an infantry man in an Army that was giving all its plum assignments to the cavalry. At any case, by the time the Civil War was brewing, Lynde was at the end of his career and looking forward to retiring on a pension and settling into obscurity.
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Circumstances, however, were not going to allow Lynde to retire quietly. In June 1861, the Union Army in New Mexico Territory faced a huge dilemma. Many officers and soldiers, including William Loring, the Commander of the Department of New Mexico, had resigned their posts and joined the Confederate Army. This left such a serious shortage of troops that E.R.S. Canby, Loring’s replacement, was forced to close forts created primarily to protect settlers from Indian attack and concentrate men in those forts most likely to lie along the path an invading Confederate army might take. Canby ordered Major Isaac Lynde then in command of the 7th Infantry, to abandon Fort McLane, south of Silver City, and take command of Fort Fillmore, six miles from the town of Mesilla. Canby warned Lynde that his new post was endangered not only by a possible invasion from Texas, but because the civilian population of Mesilla Valley sympathized strongly with the Southern cause. It was a crucial post to hold because it controlled the stage road on which U.S. troops would use to withdraw from Arizona. It was also the last Union holding that officers leaving New Mexico to join the Confederacy passed through, and the first objective for a Confederate advance into New Mexico. Lynde was given full responsibility for the area, including the right to decide whether to attack or ignore El Paso’s Fort Bliss, forty miles to the south and in secessionist hands. 
When Major Lynde arrived at his new post in the first week of July, he found it woefully inadequate. Lynde noted that Fort Fillmore was located in a basin surrounded by sand hills, so that artillery could fire down into it.  The hills were covered by dense growth that would allow a thousand men to approach undetected to within 500 yards.  Next to the fort, a sweep of level land was ideal for attacking cavalry. Furthermore, the fort had no walls or ramparts. Shaped like a U, its open end faced the river and the road from El Paso. Because water had to be carried up from the river, a mile and a half to west, the fort could not stand a siege. He wrote to Canby that he thought the fort was poorly situated for defense, and it was not worth the exertion it would take to hold it.
On July 25, Lynde was forced into action when Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John Baylor brought his 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles to Mesilla. Lynde left one company of infantry and the band to hold the fort. He crossed the Rio Grande with a force of three hundred and eighty men and four howitzers.  He lined his men up in a cornfield, then sent his aide forward with a white flag to demand that the Confederates surrender. The Confederates replied that if Lynde wanted Mesilla, he was to come and get it. Lynde then fired his howitzers, whose shells burst short in the air. The Mayor of Mesilla came out and reminded Lynde that killing the women and children who sheltered in the town would look very bad and would not win Lynde any allies among the people. After a few exchanges of musket fire, and a small number of casualties on both sides, Lynde withdrew to the fort as evening fell. 
That night, Lynde decided that the only hope of saving his troops from capture was in abandoning the fort and reaching another military post. He ordered the evacuation, set the fort on fire to stop it and its supplies from falling into enemy hands, and at one in the morning began the march up and over the Organ Mountains to Fort Stanton.  Lynde had never taken this road, but he believed that San Augustine was only twenty miles away, just over a pass in the mountains. The march went well until the sun rose on a hot July day. Then the distance proved to be much longer and the water much scarcer than Lynde had believed. As Baylor’s men followed along, they found the road lined with guns, cartridge boxes, and men who were almost dying from fatigue and thirst. The memoirs of Hank Smith, a private soldier on the Confederate side, suggest that many of the men were drunk, and suggests that, unwilling to abandon their supply of whisky, the soldiers filled their canteens with it before the march. Since no other accounts mention this, it’s unlikely that it’s true.

When Baylor finally caught up with Lynde at San Augustine Springs, Lynde surrendered his entire command without firing a shot. Twenty-six Union soldiers joined the Confederates, and sixteen chose military imprisonment, becoming prisoners of war. The rest, 410 men, were paroled out of the war. Baylor gave them enough rifles and food to travel through Indian country to Canby's headquarters at Santa Fe, where Lynde's command broke up. Many of the men were sent to New York and spent the war as harbor guards or performed other non-belligerent duties.

Lynde himself also journeyed east, to Washington where he was expected to explain his actions. Despite conflicting testimony, he was dismissed from the Army, a scapegoat for Union failure in the southwest during the early days of the war. Lynde spent the next five years fighting this decision, which was finally reversed. He was reinstated to his rank in September 1866. 

It remains unclear why Lynde surrendered the fort and his command without putting up much of a fight. Perhaps Lynde really harbored sympathies with the Confederates, as some people suggested. Or it could be that Lynde was truly incompetent and indecisive. But perhaps Lynde just lacked the experience and training to make the decisions that his situation required. Whatever the reasons, the old soldier, who was within sight of honorable, pensioned retirement after a long and uneventful career saw his plans go up in smoke in the smoldering ruins of Fort Fillmore. Like the road to San Augustine Springs, his road to retirement was longer and harder than he had expected.
Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and author who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her novel Valverde takes place at the time of Lynde’s abandonment of Fort Fillmore. If you would like to read more about the Battle of Mesilla, click here and here. For more about Lynde and his court marshal, go and here. If you would like to know more about Ms. Bohnhoff and her books, go to her website. 

Us vs. Them

A few years back, I was standing behind a table stacked with my books at an arts and crafts festival when something magical happened. A woman who was walking by stopped, put her finger on one of my books, and said that she wished she could meet the author. When I told her that was me, she came around the table, hugged me, and declared that my book was the best one she'd ever read. She told me that if everyone in the world read my book, there would be no more war. 

Let me tell you right now that this kind of thing doesn't happen very often to me. For everyone who likes one of my books, there's someone else who hated it. This particular title is the one that really polarizes people.

The big idea in Swan Song is how we determine who is US and how we exclude those who aren't. They either get it, or they don't. If they get it, they might love it. (They might not. It has its flaws.) If they don't get it, they'll probably hate it. Us vs. Them is an old problem. We determine who is us and who is them in a number of ways, religion, language, color of skin or hair or eye, nationality, regionality, sex: they all can serve to separate or unite us as we choose. Lately, at least in America, the biggest lines have been drawn between people of color and between political parties. It's gotten ugly.

But this ugliness is not new. I was teaching English as a Second Language back in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed. and the wave of patriotism that swept the nation also swept my school. Some of that wave was lovely. Other aspects were not. Some of my students received nasty anonymous notes in their lockers, telling them to go home. Some got spat on in the halls. The crazy thing is, not all of these students were even Arabic or Muslim. They just looked different, foreign and were therefore part of them and not included in us .  https://www.focusonthefamily.com/pro-... In the January 9, 2016 edition of The Wall Street Journal,  columnist Robert M. Sapolsky reported on the results of a neuroimaging study of responses in our brains to faces of different races. The study, by Eva Telzer of the University of Illinois and written in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2013, uncovered a result they called "other-race effect, or ORE. When we see faces different than our own, within a tenth of a second our brain activates the amygdala, a brain region that produces fear and anxiety. When this happens there is less activation of the fusiform, a part of the brain that helps us recognize individuals, read their expressions, and make inferences about their internal state. Our brains are wired to see them as a group and us as individuals.

The good news in this study was that children who saw lots of different faces very early in life did not have as big an ORE response. But by early, the study meant really early. If we want children to not grow up with racist tendencies, we must lay the building blocks long before they learn about King's I Have a Dream speech in kindergarten or even learn the word equality. Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer and retired teacher who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. She has written a number of books, most of which are suitable for readers from the middle grades on up. She recommends Swan Song to an older audience of 16 and up. You can read more about Swan Song here.

Visiting the WWI Battlefields of Belgium

In 2019 my husband and I were lucky to join a guided tour of World War I Battlefields. The war may have ended over a hundred years ago, but the landscape is still scarred by it, and by the war that followed.  These pictures were taken near an area known as Hill 60. If you've ever wondered, the numbers designate meters above sea level. There are four hill 60s, but are in different sectors, so it wasn't confusing to planners during the war.

The hill 60 in the Ypres area was subject to a lot of mining, much of it done by Australians. Hundreds of tons of explosives were planted under German emplacements. Much of it (but not all of it) was detonated. When farmers returned to their land after the war, they rebuilt. Some of them didn't know they were rebuilding 90 feet above 20 thousand pounds of unexploded materials. One cache went off in a 1950s thunderstorm, the theory being that plowing had exposed the wires to a lightning strike.

Our guide for the day was Ian, a retired soldier from Northern Ireland who has written books on WWI. He led us past old German bunkers, showed us bomb craters 85 feet across, and answered (quite patiently) my thousand questions.
Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. She is currently working on an historical novel set in New Mexico and France during the time of the Pancho Villa Raid and World War I. You can learn more about her books by signing up for her newsletter here, or visiting her website here. 

The Only Lancer Charge in the Civil War

When Major General H. H. Sibley invaded New Mexico in 1862, he brought with him two companies of lancers.

Handsome and chivalrous heirs of medieval knights, the lancers were the darlings of the parade through San Antonio on the day the Army of New Mexico headed west. Bright red flags with white stars snapped from their lances. Lances had been common on Napoleonic battlefields, and were used by Mexican cavalry during the conflicts against the Texans in the 1830s and 1840s. The lances that these two companies carried were war trophies captured from the Mexicans during the Mexican American War thirteen years earlier Colonel Thomas Green On the day of the Battle for Valverde Ford, Colonel Thomas Green peered across the battlefield and saw uniforms that he couldn't identify. Knowing they weren't Union regulars, he guessed that these men on the Union extreme right were a company of  inexperienced New Mexico Volunteers who would break and run from a lancer charge. 

He turned to the commanders of his two lancer companies, Captains Willis Lang and Jerome McCown, and asked which would like to have the honor of the first charge. Captain Willis Lafayette Lang ​The first hand up belonged to the leader of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment's Company B.  Captain Willis L. Lang was a rich, 31 year old who owned slaves that worked his plantation near Marlin in Falls County, Texas.

​Lang quickly organized his men. Minutes later, he gave the signal and his company cantered forward, lowered their lances, and began galloping across the 300 yards that divided his men from the men in the unusual uniforms. The plan called for McCown's company to follow after the Union troops had broken, and the two lancer companies would chase the panicking Union men into the Rio Grande that stood at their back. Captain Theodore Dodd But Colonel Green was wrong. The men in the strange uniforms were not New Mexican Volunteers. They were Captain Theodore Dodd’s Independent Company of Colorado Volunteers. Dodd's men were a scrappy collection of miners and cowboys who were reputedly low on discipline but high on fighting spirit. They coolly waited until the lancers were within easy range, then fired a volley that unhorsed many of the riders. Their second volley finished the assault. More than half of Lang's men were either killed or wounded, and most of the horses lay dead on the field. Lang himself dragged himself back to the Confederate lines because he was too injured to walk.  Lang's charge was the only lancer charge of the American Civil War. The destruction of his company showed that modern firearms had rendered the ten-foot long weapons obsolete. McCown's men, and what remained of Lang's men threw their lances into a heap and burned them. They then rearmed themselves with pistols and shotguns and returned to the fight. The day after the battle, Lang and the rest of the injured Confederate were carried north to the town of Socorro, where they had requisitioned a house and turned it into a hospital. A few days later, depressed and in great pain, he asked his colored servant for his revolver, with which he ended his suffering. Lang and the other Confederate dead were buried in a plot of land near the south end of town that has now become neglected and trash-strewn. The owners do not allow visitors.   This derelict field was once a Confederate Cemetery. The Charge of Company B of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Valverde Ford is included in Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel, Valverde. The author is a former New Mexico history teacher who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. You can read more about her and her writing here.

My New Shadow

In Super Hec , which is on sale on Amazon right now, nerdy middle schooler Hector Anderson convinces his mother that the family would be in better shape if they had a dog to walk. The family goes to a shelter and gets a new friend who - - well, I"ll let you read for yourself what happens when the Andersons adopt a dog. Life imitated life recently, and I got a dog. His name is Panzer, and he is a Rottweiler. My husband and I drove 200 miles to pick him up from a woman in Farmington, New Mexico who specializes in rescuing Rottweilers and other pure breeds. 

Panzer is between 1 1/2 and 2 years old, and he acts like a goofy teenager most of the time. He has become my shadow and follows me from room to room. For as big as he is, he is surprisingly gentle and loves little things, including our 15 year old cat (who does not return the love) and our 7 year old granddaughter. One little thing I'm not so sure Panzer loves is Kamikaze the squirrel. We have lots of squirrels up here in the mountains. We have Antelope Squirrels, which look like very small chipmunks. We have Alberts Squirrels, which are dark gray and have lovely, tufted ears. And we have Rock Squirrels, one of which we've named Kamikaze. This particular squirrel acquired his name because he seems to have no fear. He come up to the glass door in the study, stands on his hind legs and looks Panzer directly in the eye. He runs across the road when Panzer and I are out for a walk. Maybe he wants to be another of Panzer's little friends.

Sports in a Time of Quarantine

Spring is here, and my husband is very unhappy. What is spring without baseball? 

A lot of people are feeling frustrated over the cancellation of sports due to COVID-19 restrictions. Races cancelled. Little League and kid's soccer put on hold. I am mourning the fact that this spring has seen warm, balmy weather, little wind, and I am NOT out on the track with my runners and throwers. It's been a tough spring. 

But if you can't participate in organized sports, at least you can read about them in Super Hec, book 3 of the Anderson Chronicles.

When Mom decides that the Anderson family needs to do a little spring training, she tells everyone that they have to get in shape. Little brother Stevie decides he wants to be a triangle, but signs up for T-ball. Big sister Chloe becomes a yoga enthusiast. Hector has no idea what he should do, but when his friend Eddie loans him an old Superman t-shirt and the guys in the locker room call him Super Geek, Hec decides to become faster than a speeding bully. Can he dig deep and pull up the super powers he needs to run a 5K and win the heart of the girl of his dreams?

If you’ve read Tweet Sarts and Jingle Night, you’ll love seeing what Hec and his wacky family are up to in Super Hec. This is reading the whole family can enjoy - and maybe be inspired to do a little spring training of their own. 

Super Hec will be on sale on Amazon from May 2-9. Download a copy and enjoy!

My Bad-Weather Flower

A fair-weather friend is one who stays with you for the good times, but isn't around to support you through the hard times. We all probably have a fair-weather friend, and I am ashamed to say that I've been one before. I can think of numerous friends I let down when they really needed me. It's not something I'm proud of, and I wish I could go back and fix it.

I guess the opposite of a fair-weather friend is a bad-weather friend. That would be someone who is willing to weather the storms of life with you, to be by your side when life is painful. I have a few of these, and they are treasures. One of my bad-weather friends came and visited me during one of the lowest points in my life. My husband had just lost an election, which meant that he also lost the job that he'd dreamed of for his entire life. It seemed that all our hopes for the future were shattered and we had no idea where to go or how to proceed. Enter said friend, with a boxed amaryllis. 

The thing about amaryllises, or any other kind of boxed bulb, is they give you something to look forward to. They are hope in a box. But this one had waited too long, and had started to bud while still in the box. It looked pretty hopeless, but it surprised us an bloomed anyway. You can read about it here.   But that stubborn little flower wasn't done. It gave us another show after that, which you can read about here. 

And now it's blooming again! This is the first time I've ever had a forced bulb repeat. The picture at the top of this post was taken this morning.

This is my bad-weather flower. It seemed to know that this was a hard time, and I needed some cheering up. Here's wishing that you have some bad-weather friends and bad-weather flowers to brighten up your darkest days.

William Marshall: A Case Study in the Difficulty of Writing Accurate Historical FICTION

Historical fiction, when written well, has equal parts truth and fiction to it. It not only tells a good story, but helps readers understand a period in time. One of the most interesting and satisfying parts of writing historical fiction is researching the history and portraying it accurately.  This can also be one of the most frustrating parts of writing historical fiction, especially when readers point out inaccuracies and anachronisms that in a work. It's happened to me many times. Sometimes the reader is wrong, like the editor who told me that there were no Germans in France during World War II. More often, though, they are right, and I have slipped something in that isn't accurate.  Sometimes, however, the problem isn't with a misinformed reader or a gaffe on my part. Sometimes the problem goes farther back than either the writer or the reader. Such is the case with the cause of death for William F. Marshall. There are parts of William F. Marshall's story that we do know. We do know, for instance, that he was elected by the men in Company F of the Colorado Volunteers to the position of 2nd Lieutenant. Several of my readers have questioned this, but it is true that companies elected their officers during this period. We know that he was not universally liked by his men. Some diaries left by men call him imperious or haughty. Finally, we know that he was the last man to die during the Battle of Apache Canyon, the first day and portion of the Battle for Glorieta Pass.  Historical records provide us the names of both the first and the last man shot in the Battle of Apache Canyon. The first was the company's captain, Samuel Cook, who received a buck and ball wound to the thigh. He continued to fight and was injured several times before being carried off the field. He recovered from his wounds.

William Marshall was not so lucky. We know that he was the last man shot on that fateful day. We know that he was carried to Pigeon's Ranch, where a hospital had been established.  We know that he died early in the morning of the next day. But the details of his death are sketchy.
The reason the details are sketchy are that the sources we have for this battle are largely military reports or the memoirs of those who were there. Military reports may be very good at telling us who was on the right flank and who led a particular assault. They tell us who died, but they don't include the particulars of that death. Memoirs often tell the particulars, or at least what the veteran who wrote them remembers. One source that I read said that Marshall was supervising the destruction of confederate arms abandoned on the battlefield when he picked up a rifle by its muzzle and hit it against a stump in order to bend the barrel. The gun discharged into his stomach and he died just before dawn of the next day. However, another account tells it differently. According to this man, Marshall took a handgun from a Texas prisoner when it discharged in his face. Face or stomach? Handgun or rifle? While a writer may never be sure, he or she had to choose one story or the other to include in his or her work of historical fiction. William Marshall's death is part of the story that Jennifer Bohnhoff includes in Glorieta, book two of the series Rebels Along The Rio Grande, which tells the story of the Confederate invasion of New Mexico. A New Mexico native, she hopes she chose the right set of circumstances for the 2nd Lieutenant's death.

Johnson's Ranch, the Third in Glorieta: The Battle of Three Ranches

Johnson Ranch, 1917 Three ranches figure prominently in the action surrounding the March 26-28, 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass. The first was Martin Kozlowski’s ranch. Situated at the eastern entrance of this narrow pass in the mountains east of Santa Fe, this location served as headquarters for the Union Army. The second, Pigeon’s Ranch, sits near the top of the pass and is where the main battle took place. The third site, Johnson’s Ranch, is located at the western end of Glorieta Pass, and was where the Confederate camp was located. All three ranches were also waypoints along the Santa Fe trail, which wended through Glorieta pass before dropping out of the mountains to its western terminus in Santa Fe.

Like the other two ranches, the owner of Johnson’s Ranch, a Missouri native named Anthony D. Johnson, was known to be strong Union supporter.  At the first appearance of the Southern Army, Johnson took his New Mexican-born wife, Cruz, and their five children, and fled into the hills, where they camped in the frigid weather until it was safe to return home.  An etching of the burning of the Confederate supply train, with Confederates fleeing toward Santa Fe. If you look closely, you can see a line of Union Soldiers on the left, climbing away from the flames. On March 28, the second day of the battle, Confederate Major Charles L. Pyron and Colonel William thought their camp, far to rear, was safe. Thinking no Union forces could get by them through the narrow pass, they left their 80 supply wagons lightly defended with just one canon and a small contingent of soldiers. Most of the remaining men in camp were either injured or ailing.

It never occurred to the Confederates that the Union Army could attack their supply train, but that is exactly what Colonel John M. Chivington did. He led a flanking party over Glorieta Mesa, on the south side of the pass.  Chivington’s men then climbed down the steep bluff and captured the Confederate guard. They spiked the cannon and burned the Texan supply train. He also ordered that Confederate’s draft mules be bayoneted.

When the Confederate Army, fighting at Pigeon's Ranch, learned the fate of their supply train, the battle ceased. The Confederates began the slow process of withdrawing, first to Santa Fe, then down the Rio Grande to Texas. After the battle, Johnson later testified that after the battle, he was forced to transport sick and wounded Texans back to Santa Fe.

For the Johnson family, the invasion proved an economic disaster. They returned to find that Confederate soldiers had looted the house and ranch. They had taken a barrel of whiskey, ten bags of flour, 20 bushels of corn, sugar, molasses, soap, his clothing, and even his canned oysters. They had burned his furniture and fences as firewood. His house and the stagecoach station had nothing left to them but their bare walls. Johnson filed a claim against the U.S. government for $4,075, but there is no record that his claim was ever paid. Luckily, he had the foresight to drive his cattle into the hills, so he had not lost everything.

Eventually, the Johnsons recovered and got back to the business of operating their stage stop and cantina on the old Santa Fe Trail. He acquired wagons and ran a freight service that hauled goods to and from Fort Union on the edge of the plains. In late 1869, he moved his family to Trinidad, Colorado, just north of Raton Pass. Soon, Johnson hauled ties for the advancing Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. In early 1879, Johnson was attacked and killed by highwaymen at a river crossing just east of Springer. His body was never found, and although the culprits were captured and brought before a federal judge in Santa Fe, the trial record has been lost and it is unknown what happened to the highwaymen.
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The historic Johnson’s Ranch building lasted nearly 90 years longer than its owner. The building which had been a stage station on the historic Santa Fe trail and sheltered a Confederate Army for a few days was bulldozed in 1967 to make room for Interstate 25, that connects Denver to El Paso. Johnson's Ranch is one of the settings for Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel Glorieta, which is available in ebook and paperback. Glorieta is the second in a series of novels about the Civil War in New Mexico. The first is Valverde.

Mrs. Bohnhoff lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. From her north-facing windows she can see Santa Fe and the mountains through which Glorieta Pass travels.