HOW THE WEST WASN’T WON
The Texas lancers formed quickly alongside the mountain howitzers. Above the two-rank formation rose nine-foot medieval pikes—weapons peculiarly out of place in the mid-19th century. Just below each lance point flapped a red pennant emblazoned with a single white star—the symbol of the Republic of Texas, now the Confederate State of Texas, on its first sortie of conquest.
Ordered forward, the 50 horsemen advanced at a walk. Soon, though, they broke into a canter. A hundred yards from the enemy, they spurred their mounts into a gallop, lowered their shoulders, and leveled their steel-tipped lances. Onward they thundered like a bristling, seemingly unstoppable tide.
Sibley’s men had come to conquer an empire in the American Southwest.
In a war full of unusual events, Confederate brigadier general Henry Hopkins Sibley’s 1862 invasion of the New Mexico Territory stands out. One of the westernmost campaigns of the Civil War, it witnessed such oddities as a lancer charge and the only attempted “torpedo mule” attack in military history. The Battle of Valverde—the largest battle of Sibley’s New Mexico Campaign—featured unlikely combatants and rugged, mountainous terrain. On February 21, 1862, beneath the gaze of the huge Mesa de la Contadera, a force of U.S. Regulars, Hispanic volunteers, and the gold rush miners known as Pike’s Peakers battled a brigade of shotgun-wielding Confederate cowboys along the Rio Grande River. At stake during the fight were the Valverde fords of the Rio Grande, and the tenuous Union supply line that stretched north to Santa Fe.
The men of Sibley’s Confederate “Army of New Mexico,” though, were fighting for something greater. In the grand tradition of Spanish conquistadors Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and Juan de Oñate, they had come to conquer an empire in the American Southwest.
Texas Confederates inherited America’s dream of Manifest Destiny. Even before the war Southerners had clamored for the expansion of slavery into the Territory of New
