Marching Through the Desert: One Day With the California Column

Your typical Civil War soldier spent very little time gloriously charging the enemy with fixed bayonets, firing crashing volleys of muskets, or in any way engaging in combat.

Understandably, the more dangerous and exciting parts of their war experience dominate what soldiers wrote about – and in turn, what we read, think, and write about. But a much more representative day for a Civil War infantryman was spent…walking from one place to another.

Occasionally a march was fraught with danger – Schofield slipping past John Bell Hood’s sleeping Army of the Tennessee outside of Spring Hill in 1864. It may have been rife with anticipation – Jackson’s corps may not have been privy to the exact details of the plan as they marched around the Union flank at Chancellorsville, but those veterans must have known something exciting was afoot.

But I have to imagine that most often, all of the marching was a slog, part of the job of soldiering that you just had to do, one step at a time. Burnside and the Army of the Potomac learned the hard way that sometimes, a march isn’t filled with anything but mud, mud, and more mud. Every now and then, I come across an account that really brings home just how brutal and grueling a long-distance march could be:

“Starting at 5 p.m., we marched all night and until 12.30 p.m. the following day on one cup of coffee, a portion of the way through mud and water half knee-deep; had two fights with the Indians; drove them both times, and after getting another cup of coffee marched that night fifteen miles, and back the next morning without breakfast; not getting a meal until past noon of that day, then giving the Indians another fight for the water, and after getting possession stood guard until night, when relieved by the cavalry.”[1]

This was just one coffee-fueled day in the California Column’s epic, months-long trek. They made their way across almost 1,000 miles of virtually empty desert, from the Pacific Coast to the Rio Grande River. They were trying to show up along the flank and rear of Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley’s invasion of the New Mexico Territory.

In the end, the California Column arrived after Sibley was defeated, and saw virtually no fighting, just a couple of skirmishes with Confederate detachments and hostile tribes. But just like the hundreds of thousands of other soldiers who saw more marching than action, that doesn’t in any way take away from the incredible, months-long feat of marching that they accomplished.

[1] United States. War Records Office, et al.. The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union And Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume L, Chapter LXII. 1897, 129.