242 Kansas History the Second Colorado Cavalry and the Conquest of the Central Plains by Christopher M

Col. James Ford, regimental commander of the Second Colorado Cavalry. Image is courtesy of History Colorado. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 42 (Winter 2019–2020), 242–255 242 Kansas History The Second Colorado Cavalry and the Conquest of the Central Plains by Christopher M. Rein ecent scholarship on the Civil War era emphasizes the connections between the sectional conflict and the larger Reconstruction that followed, especially in the Trans-Mississippi West.1 While the Trans-Mississippi theater had a minimal impact on the course and conduct of the Civil War, the war profoundly influenced events on the CentralR Plains. Historians have long acknowledged the central role played by questions about the expansion of slavery in both the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican cession in fomenting the Civil War, not least in “Bleeding Kansas,” where sectional violence fla ed first. However, accounts after 1861 shift the focus to the narrow corridor between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, where Union and Confederate armies clashed in the largest and best- known battles of the war. Some historians have tried to refocus attention on the western theater between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, but events west of the river have long escaped scholarly attention.2 More recently, historians of the Civil War have made limited forays onto the Plains, staking out territory that defines events in the Trans-Mississippi West, though studies of guerrilla violence in Missouri and the international and borderlands aspects of warfare in the American Southwest currently dominate the field 3 Since the publication in 1998 of Elliott West’s magisterial and award- winning The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, scholars have largely steered clear of the Central Plains during the Civil War, perhaps believing that West has already said everything that needs to be said. However, more recent examinations have revealed holes in the literature and flawed interpretations of the “settler colonialism” that transformed the region, arguably more than any other event in the natural or recorded history of the Great Plains. Older histories of western settlement characterize the dispossession and repeopling of the Great Plains as a “natural” event that fits neatly within the broader sweep from the Atlantic to the Pacific. However, “locking the frame” on the region brings the enormity of change into sharper focus. Euro-Americans used force to displace indigenous inhabitants, supplanted unbroken pasturage with gridded farms, and replaced buffalo with cattle, all within a relatively Christopher M. Rein is the managing editor at Air University Press at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He is the author of three books: The North African Air Campaign (University Press of Kansas, 2012); Alabamians in Blue: Freedmen, Unionists, and the Civil War in the Cotton State (LSU Press, 2019); and the forthcoming The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), from which this article is excerpted. He earned his doctorate in history at the University of Kansas in 2011 and served as an associate professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he taught courses on the Civil War and the American West. 1.In the Trans-Mississippi West, the Civil War was both a continuation of the struggle for the conquest of the continent and a setting for sectional healing and reconciliation, largely, as David Blight has argued, over visions of white supremacy shared by northerners and southerners alike. See, especially, Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Pekka Hamalainen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains: The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (December 2016), 481–509. 2. Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 3. See Thomas Cutrer, Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Andrew E. Masich, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Janne Lahti, Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Matthew M. Stith, Extreme Civil War: The Second Colorado Cavalry 243 This map of Kansas and the central plains, including portions of Texas, Indian Territory, and the territories of Colorado and New Mexico, was created by the Engineer Bureau of the War Department in 1867. Its geographic references and location of Indian nations would have been familiar to the Second Colorado Cavalry. short period spanning perhaps a quarter of a century. This working years just as the Panic of 1857 hit. Many of the was far from a “natural” process or a peaceful settlement. future troopers could not find employment or survive Change occurred because men and women willed it to the economic downturn in the small towns that dotted occur and devoted substantial energy and resources the Old Northwest (today’s Midwest) and responded to to making it happen. Among them were the soldiers of the news of gold strikes in the Colorado foothills in 1858. the Second Colorado Cavalry Regiment, a Civil War These “’59ers” made up the rush to Colorado that, as West volunteer unit initially raised to protect the new Colorado has detailed, placed unsustainable demands on limited Territory against Confederate incursions into New Mexico environments, leading almost directly to conflict with the but whose service typifies the blending of the Civil War indigenous Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche and Indian Wars periods into a single act of conquest, peoples and eventually to the Sand Creek Massacre, one especially in the strip of land between the Platte and of the worst atrocities in the history of western settlement. Arkansas River valleys that is now part of the states of When the Civil War began in early 1861, many who Kansas and Colorado. had still not recovered from the economic downturn, as The soldiers of the Second Colorado were not all, William Marvel has recently argued, became some of as one author has suggested, “hunters, trappers, and “Lincoln’s mercenaries” who responded to calls for troops Indian fighters. 4 They were mostly farmers and men in order to improve their condition.5 Ovando Hollister, a of skilled trades unlucky enough to begin their prime miner on South Clear Creek, recalled, “Judging from the Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier Household in Civil War Missouri (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). 2016), 183. 4. Joseph Beilein Jr., Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the 5. William Marvel, Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation among 244 Kansas History appearance of the country and people, mining at that time allace’s words say much about how the men was not exceedingly inviting or profitable.” He reported viewed themselves and why they believed that to the organizers of his company, “the idea of taking they were fighting. Though many soldiers advantage of the patriotic uprising of the nation’s heart highlightedW their attachment to the Union and opposition and of the hard times in the mines, to raise a company to the disloyal insurrectionists, many of whom shared of volunteers for the war, thus securing commissions for their mining camps, practical considerations were never themselves, struck them as being a lode, which, once open, far below the surface. In addition to the food, clothing, and might be worked with ease and profit. 6 shelter the army promised, the men undoubtedly felt that The soldiers, like their comrades to the east, also the Union program of “free soil, free labor, and free men” expressed ideological motivations for their service. In a offe ed the best prospects for personal success, preventing letter begging his department commander to reassign his competition with slave owners and their cheaper labor on regiment to a more active theater, Private Oliver Wallace, the open plains and removing indigenous peoples from who later edited the regimental newspaper, the Soldier’s the region, thus opening more land to settlement.8 Letter, argued, Not surprisingly, the new state of Kansas figu ed The Reg’t to which I belong was raised in the prominently in the regiment’s composition and service. Rocky Mountains and is formed almost entirely Many men had been “freestaters” before the war and of men who have been accustomed to severe were involved in the struggle against proslavery forces in hardships, toils, and privations from one to three the territory. Irving Stanton later recalled that in 1855 he years, laboring men, frequently packing their had travelled to Pawnee City, just outside Fort Riley and provisions and bedding for hundreds of miles, over site of the first territorial legislature, because he “wanted to become a pioneer settler and assist to make Kansas a the rugged mountains, toiling through snowdrifts, 9 storms of rain and snow, with no other guide save free State.” But others did more than just settle. Writing the sun, and the surrounding cliffs, sleeping on the from his retirement home in Santa Ana, California, in 1909, ground, with no other covering, save a blanket, and Pvt. George Havens recalled for readers of the National the sky above them, and no earthly guard, save their Tribune how he had participated in the Battle of Black Jack trusty rifle, and faithful Bowie knife, or, wielding under the leadership of John Brown against a proslavery the pick and shovel, through wet and cold, often company led by Henry Pate.

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