Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands by James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely (review)

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• Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlandsby James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely
• Jerry D. Thompson

Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands. By James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. 228. Notes, maps, photographs, bibliography, appendix, index.)

After a proliferation of scholarship on the Civil War in West Texas and New Mexico Territory in the last several decades, any Civil War historian might conclude there is little left to seriously research. Veteran scholars Glen Sample Ely and James Bailey Blackshear have proven this idea to be erroneous.

Much of the scholarship on the subject started with Martin H. Hall’s fascinating 1960 account of Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley’s far-reaching attempt to seize New Mexico Territory at the beginning of the war, allegedly as a steppingstone to the Colorado gold and silver mines and, eventually, California’s ports and gold fields. Historians of the Civil War in the Southwest are fond of retelling how the Rebel Texans won the field at Valverde and how General Sibley made the fatal mistake of bypassing the Union bastion of Fort Craig, proceeding up the Rio Grande, and falling on his face at Glorieta Pass when a band of determined “Pikes Peakers” led by Maj. John Chivington destroyed the Rebel supply train in the depths of Apache Canyon, not far from Santa Fe. As a result, the Texans were forced into a disastrous retreat during which many proud cavalrymen walked all the way back to San Antonio. But they were lucky; a third of the zealous Texas farm boys who so confidently marched out of San Antonio in the summer and fall of 1861 never saw the Lone Star State again. Jefferson Davis’s dreams of a Confederate Manifest Destiny and trans-continental nation stretching from Charleston to San Francisco that would bring with it formal British and French diplomatic recognition and independence went up in smoke.

Most of the books that followed Hall’s work, as well as the previous work of William A Keleher, continued to concentrate on the failures of the poorly led and misguided Confederate invasion. Several books focused on the troops from California that marched across the heart of the Sonoran Desert in 1862 and arrived on the Rio Grande too late to help expel the Texans. Some scholarly studies of the Indigenous Peoples caught up in the violence, such as biographies of the great leaders Mangas Coloradas and Cochise, recall Gen. James H. Carleton’s wars with the Chiricahua, Mimbres, and Mescalero Apache. A number of good books ably record Col. Kit Carson’s genocidal war on the Navajo in 1863–1864, which led to the unforgivable tragedy of the Long March of the [End Page 473]Diné to Bosque Redondo, possibly the worst social experiment in the history of the American West. A more recent book recounts Carson’s near disastrous campaign against the Comanches and Kiowas in the Texas Panhandle in the summer of 1864. In all, more than fifty books on the Civil War in the Southwest have appeared, many commendable, others superficial, poorly written, full of errors, and not worthy of publication.

Blackshear and Ely’s Confederates and Comancheros makes for compelling reading and details the history of eastern New Mexico and West Texas well beyond 1865. Well-written and nicely constructed, there are new and insightful details on what the authors call “skullduggery and double-dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands.” Here is the story of New Mexico’s Comancheros, mostly Hispanos, who carried no political allegiance and were only interested in eking out a living by the age-old tradition of trading with the Comanches of the Llano Estacado. In the process, the Comancheros often stole Texas livestock while selling guns, ammunition, and trade goods to the Comanches and Kiowa. The authors convincingly document how some of New Mexico’s leading merchants were able to enrich themselves and live like feudal lords by their involvement with the thousands of head of cattle that flowed into New Mexico, many of the beeves intended to feed the hungry...