Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser Jerry Thompson Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands. William S. Kiser. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8061-6026-9. 288 pp., cloth, $32.95. William S. Kiser, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, is emerging as one of the leading scholars on the nineteenth century history of the American Southwest, particularly New Mexico. Fresh on the heels of his thought-provoking and widely acclaimed Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest, Kiser now gives us an equally significant volume on Manifest Destiny in the New Mexico Borderlands. Using a wide array of impressive primary sources, he has produced a compelling volume that is informative and amounts to a first-rate analysis of a crucial period in the era of American expansionism. Although New Mexico was frequently marginalized in the national consciousness and seen as a distant backwater populated by backward peoples, Kiser points out that the territory played "an important role in the sweeping nineteenth-century transformation of American capitalism and democracy" (284). Kiser has a superb understanding of Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley's New Mexico Campaign and the Confederate's ill-fated attempt to seize the territory in 1861–62 that led to the bloodletting at Valverde and Glorieta. Unlike previous accounts that portray General Sibley and his zealous Texas farm boys as having a real chance [End Page 328] of seizing not only New Mexico but also Colorado's silver mines and even California's gold fields and its warm weather ports, Kiser concludes that the Rebels, laying Sibley's inept leadership aside, had little hope of success from the outset. He is correct. The entire Confederate adventure in New Mexico was little more than suicidal, a badly flawed example of Sibley's and Jefferson Davis's grandiose ideas of a Confederate Manifest Destiny in the Southwest. Had Col. Edward Richard Sprigg Canby's regulars and New Mexico Volunteers been unable to expel the Texans, the Pikes Peakers, as the Texans called the men from Colorado, along with Gen. James Henry Carleton's California Column, who were arriving on the Rio Grande in large numbers, would certainly have done so. In fact, a company of Pikes Peakers had fought at Valverde in February 1862, and a larger force of Coloradoans turned the Rebels back at Glorieta Pass five weeks later. During the brutal and genocidal campaign against the Navajos in the winter of 1864, Carson's New Mexico Volunteers, Kiser writes, flushed "the Indians from the impregnable" Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto (172). Although Carson did indeed deal the Navajos a devastating blow, even destroying their hogans, slaughtering thousands of sheep, and razing 4,150 peach trees, as Kiser aptly points out, many Navajo never capitulated and remained behind in the vast recesses of the twisting sandrock canyons. These Diné escaped the Long Walk and the despicable and deadly concentration camps of the Bosque Redondo, where they were subjected to disease, starvation, and exposure, in what amounted to one of the most disgraceful social experiments in American history. Kiser is also spot-on in his discussion of Carleton's attempt to suppress the Kiowa and Comanche in the Texas Panhandle in 1864. In the largest battle between the US Army and Native Americans in the history of Texas, Col. Kit Carson came close to losing his entire expedition of 335 California cavalrymen and New Mexico Volunteers, alongside 75 Jicarilla Apache and Ute auxiliaries, at Adobe Walls on November 25, 1864, but for two small mountain howitzers. In fact, Adobe Walls came very close to being an early version of Little Big Horn, although Carson never admitted it. In one place, when discussing Gen. Stephen Watts Kearney's conquest of New Mexico and preparations by Governor Manuel Armijo to defend Santa Fe, Kiser refers to Apache Pass when he probably means Apache Canyon (46–47). When detailing the fighting between Texas Confederates and Colorado Pikes Peakers in the same general area in March 1862, he again refers to Apache Pass...