Short Pitch
It is called Jo Shelby’s Expedition Into Mexico
It is a Western Adventure
In the vein of The Outlaw Josey Wales
It is like 1883 meets Hell on Wheels.
It follows hard fighting general Jo Shelby
And romantic chronicler John Edwards
As they journey to Mexico to start a new life after the devastation of The American Civil War
Problems arise when the Union Army, outlaw bands and Native Americans warriors block their way.
Now together their military discipline and fighting skills learned during the war will help them survive a wild and hostile land.
The idea came to me when I saw illustrations of the adventures and escapades of Shelby’s men during their odyssey across the Lone Star State in books about Texas history.
My unique approach would be the rising obstacles facing Shelby’s men and increasing tension among them changing with the rugged geography through which they journey.
A set piece would be on July 4th when Shelby draws his men up in parade formation on the banks of the Rio Grande. Five of his officers take the Confederate flag, weigh it down with rocks and wade into the river. Then they gently lower it into the water. Former Confederate officers, officials and soldiers watch from the bluffs on the American side. Mexican soldiers look on from the southern bank. Shelby, in a rare show of emotion, tears off the black ostrich plume from his hat, wades out into the water and throws it into the folds of the flag. Tears run down the cheeks of hardened veterans as the flag disappears beneath the muddy waters. From now on, Shelby’s men will follow his ragged battle-scarred guidon. From then on, this stretch of the Rio Grande will be known as the Grave of the Confederacy.
Target audiences would be men, 30-80, fans of westerns, war movies, classic westerns, vintage television, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, The Rebel Johnny Yuma, and cowboys, students of the American Civil War, living historians, and Texans, Louisianans, Missourians, and Arkansans.
Audiences would want to see it for its adventurous journey, excitement, suspense, thrills, action, battle scenes, gunfights, political intrigue, epic scenery, swashbuckling characters, and fascinating history about the gray area during the closing days of the American Civil War.
Today’s subject I would like to pitch as a movie is Joshep O. Shelby’s Expedition into Mexico. Books I consulted were Shelby’s Expedition to Mexico: An Unwritten Leaf of the Civil War by John N. Edwards, who rode with Shelby, General Jo Shelby’s March by Anthony Arthur from Random House Publishing, and Fallen Guidon: The Saga of Confederate General Jo Shelby’s March to Mexico by Edwin Adams Davis, from Texas AM Univsiery Press
Former Confederate soldiers, or ones that refused to surrender, is a trope of the Western genre. They have been featured in good films, Vera Cruz (1954), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), lackluster ones, The Undefeated (1969), and just plain bad ones, The Proud and Damned (1972). Even one of the greatest Westerns of all time, The Searchers, nods to unreconstructed Confederates serving Maximilian I of Mexico. So, it is surprising that the actual story of General Joseph Shelby leading his men across the Rio Grande at the end of the war never hit cinemas or TV screens, with the possible exception of The Rebel Johnny Yuma, during the heyday of Westerns. Its influence can be seen in films like Josey Wales and Undefeated. Reading Edwards’ overly romanticized, “toxic” masculinity-filled account of Shelby’s Expedition into Mexico I am both disappointed that John Milius never tried adapting Edwards’s work into screenplay format.
Now with Westerns making a comeback, especially on streaming services and in the form of miniseries, I think that it is high time Joseph Shelby’s Expedition into Mexico Should Be A Western Miniseries.
Episode 1: Kirby Smithdom
The first episode could either open with the October 23, 1864 Battle of Westport, a Confederate defeat, which was the last major battle of the Trans-Mississippi Department, or a homage to The Outlaw Josey Wales in which a montage similar to the opening credits of Clint Eastwood’s film recounts Shelby’s military career and that of his Iron Brigade during the war – the major battles of Carthage, Wilson’s Creek, Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove, his 1,500 mile raid into Missouri, the capture of the USS Queen City, the Battle of Marks’ Mills during the Camden Expedition, Shelby’s wounding and five horses being shot from beneath him. The montage could end with Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition and General Price calling upon Shelby and his men to save the rear of his army at the Second Battle of Newtonia, October 28, 1864. (Western Trivia: General Sterling Price was the name of John Wayne’s cat in True Grit).
While his Iron Brigade is recovering from the failed expedition into Missouri, Shelby receives a letter from his friend Frank Blair who has sided with the Union. The letter contains an unusual and outlandish plan proposed by his father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr.: The Union and Confederate armies would stop fighting each other, unite, and invade Mexico to fight the French.
The target of this invasion would be the French Imperialists and the puppet they had installed as emperor, Austrian Archduke Maximilian I. While the United States government was distracted by the war with the Confederacy, France led a group of European powers to displace the liberal government of Benito Juárez and collect the debts on which his government had defaulted. However, France’s Napoleon III had more on his mind than collecting debts. He wished to start an empire in Latin America that would return the republics to monarchies. This was a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine in which the US Government would be opposed to European aggression in Central and South America.
This international situation affected Union military planning decisions throughout the war. The Texas border with Mexico allowed the Confederacy to trade cotton for military supplies with the French and British. The Union did its best to choke off this source of trade, including invading Texas via the mouth of the Sabine River, leading to the Battle of Sabine Pass, which also Should Be A Movie. One of the goals of The Red River Campaign, of which the Camden Expedition was a part, was one of two campaigns to put a US Army presence in Texas to keep the French from recognizing the Confederacy, pressure them into leaving, and provide support for Juarez. (Side Note: The Mansfield [Battlefield] Louisiana State Historic Site deserves more visiting and funding because it involves international history. And not just because the campaign’s target was Texas.)
The plan for a North-South joint expedition into Mexico had been toyed with by the Lincoln administration since 1862 and in January 1865 got as far as Blair, Sir., visiting Confederate President Jefferson Davis. During the meeting, Blair proposed an end to civil strife as Southerners and Northerners together embraced America’s manifest destiny to include all of Mexico. But the Confederate military was in no condition to defend their homeland, let alone launch an invasion of a foreign country.
Shelby’s Iron Brigade, now officially a division, is a microcosm of the misfortunes of the country. After finishing a three-hundred-mile march through wintery conditions, he finds it impossible to supply his men with food, flour and salt. The men are forced to slaughter horses and mules. Medicine is in short supply and dysentery rages. Shelby, suffering from a battle wound, shares in the miseries of his men as they camp in Clarksville, TX.
Spring finds him and his men in Pittsburg, Texas, about 260 miles northwest of Shreveport, the capitol of the Trans-Mississippi Department, where its commander Kirby Smith resides. Shelby sends for his wife, Betty, and their two sons who have spent the war in Kentucky to join him in Texas. He sends the division to Fulton, Arkansas where an expedition to liberate Little Rock is being organized. At the same time Missouri governor in-exile Thomas Reynolds, who is a friend of Shelby, wants General Price court-martialed for incompetency that resulted in the failed expedition. Smith arranges one to be held in Washington, Arkansas for April, 1865.
Then one morning the brigade is called to columns of twos an hour before dawn. For two hours Shelby does not arrive, very much unlike himself. When he does he delivers the news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox two weeks prior. After initial disbelief, Shelby gives a rousing speech to his cavalrymen. “I conjure you to stand shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and bid the tempest out…I promise to remain with you until the end. To share your dangers, your trials, your exile, your destiny, and your lot shall be my lot and your fate shall be my fate, and come what may, poverty, misery, exile, degradation…” The speech made several references to exile and never surrendering. And when he ends the speech with “death to dishonor,” the troopers cheer. Then the men mount their horses and head down Trammel’s Trace. Shelby and Edwards go to Marshall and receive news to march to Kaufman, a hundred and seventy-odd miles southwest of Fulton.
Then comes news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Shelby rebukes the cheers of his men, believing the Northern response will be a disaster for the South. On April 21 Kirby Smith delivers a similar speech to all of the soldiers of the Trans-Mississippi Department. It has little effect as desertions and mutinous activity rise. Louisiana governor Henry Watkins Allen, wounded during the war, rallies soldiers at Natchitoches. But as soon as he leaves, they begin deserting. Allen says he will seek asylum in Mexico.
In February Smith had sent a message to Maximilian saying he plans to seek asylum in Mexico should the Confederacy fall. He planned to bring “intelligent and daring soldiers.” On April 19th Smith writes Maximilian that he would bring 9,000 Missourians and 10,000 men from all the south who would gladly battle their former foe if the Union invaded Mexico. Rumor is Confederate Jefferson Davis is a fugitive looking to escape into Mexico.
Shelby sends Colonel John Thrailkill and Major R. J. Lawrence to Shreveport for orders and ammunition. He and Edwards go to Marshall, Texas, to be near the division. On April 29, 1865, a large group of Confederate officers and officials meet in Shreveport to discuss matters. Many orations are given in favor of not surrendering. When word comes that a Union officer is waiting a hundred miles southeast at the mouth of the Red River, Shelby, Price, and others agree that if Smith tries to surrender, they will arrest him and seize Shreveport.
Shelby approaches Smith’s chief of staff General Simon Bolivar Buckner, whom he believes has more ambition than Smith, for his help in the plot. Buckner assures assistance in seizing control, and then informs Smith of the conspiracy. With Price awaiting court-martial in Washington, Arkansas, Smith does not take the matter seriously. He assures Governor Reynolds that he would die before surrendering or submitting to any effort to displace him.
News arrives on May 8, 1865, of another Confederate surrender. The Union officers again offer terms to Smith, who puts them off. He and other officers meet on May 10 at the new Confederate capital in Marshall, TX. Many of the civilians like Governor Reynolds are resigned to surrender while Smith is authorized to surrender wha but to stall long enough for those who wish to prepare and escape into Mexico Shelby wants war to the hilt. “We should concentrate everything upon the Brazos River. Me must fight more and make fewer speeches. Fugitives from Lee and Johnston will join us by thousands; Mr. Davis is on the way here, he alone has the right to treat of surrender…every step over to the Rio Grande must be fought over…surrender is a word neither myself nor my division understand.”
After the meeting, Shelby and Smith have a private meeting. Shelby says that the army has lost confidence in him. Smith knows. The army does not wish to surrender. Smith does not wish to surrender either. “What would the army have me do,” he asks Shelby.
“Your withdrawal as its direct commander, the appointment of General Buckner as its chief, its concentration upon the Brazos, and war to the knife, General Smith,” Shelby tells him.
Shelby convinces Smith to hand control over to Buckner. Then Shelby will march to Shreveport and commence operations against the nearest Federals. Shelby returns to Kaufman to prepare his men.
No sooner does Shelby reach his men at Kaufman than word arrives that on May 26 Buckner on, his own authority, has surrendered in New Orleans. He has taken General Price along hoping to discourage the Missourians under him from continuing the fight.
“Soldiers, you have been betrayed. The Generals whom you trusted have refused to lead you…lift up the flag…unsheathe the sword…if you desire it, I will follow; if you demand it, I will follow…to talk of surrender is to be a traitor. Let us seize the traitors and attack the enemy. Forward, for the South and Liberty!”
He leads the men from their camp near Kaufman, Texas on a march to attack Shreveport and continue the war.
Episode Two: A Dead Sea Behind Them
Rains prevents the march. Bridges are swept out. Roads are quagmires. Water is up to the saddle girths. Shelby’s meen meet troops who had stacked arms in Shreveport and fled into Texas. According to Edwards, they convince Shelby that if he continues his attack, “you will only imperil the unarmed soldiers who even in their betrayal, they were true to their colors,”
Arriving in Corsicana, he hears wild rumors about Jefferson Davis arriving in Shreveport, about Bunker fighting. Anarchy reigns in west Louisiana and east Texas. Deserting soldiers and civilians break into warehouses and take what the government had long denied them. Shelby continues to keep his command disciplined and organized with guards, pickets, formation, movements, saber drills, and pistol practice. New recruits enlist. Some of them do not take kindly to the discipline and utiny. Shelby ties them up and sends them under guard to the nearest Federal post, claiming they had mistakenly enlisted in the wrong army.
Kirby Smith surrenders on June 2 in Galveston. On June 6 a currier arrives with orders from Smith for Shelby to march to Shreveport and surrender his command. The men fly into an angry rage at Smith with accusations of betrayal. Shelby calms his men.
On June 2 Governor Allen delivers his last message to the people of Louisiana. He will go into exile like the ancient Romans but encourages his people to look forward to the future. The Arkansans who served next to the Missourians during the war disband and return home. Word arrives that Jefferson Davis and his cabinet have been captured.
A bugle calls for the last organized military unit of the Confederacy still holding the Stars and Bars. Shelby forms his men around him on an open prairie and gives a speech about their hardships and struggles. He says he does not intend to surrender but to march into Mexico, there to establish a new Confederacy no matter with which of the warring factions he sides. and invites his men to join him. There is a call for volunteers. Several hundred men, a thousand according to Edwards, ride to the front. There are partings, leave-takings, embracing and tears glistening as veterans head to Marshall to receive their paroles. Then the remaining force is reorganized into New Iron Brigade. Lieutenants are promoted to majors. Majors are demoted to corporals. Shelby rides to the head of the column of the new brigade, raises his right hand, points ahead. “Forward Ho!”
Texas is one great arsenal. The brigade picks up military supplies, finding an abandoned wagon train filled with 6,000 new British Enfield rifles and Sharp’s Carbines. Then they find Napoleon cannons. Shelby is so excited that his men have to talk him out of dashing back to Shreveport with the Napoleons and “trying the range” by unleashing a barrage on the occupying Yankees. He calls a council of war. His officers Blackwell, Elliott, Gordon, Slayback, and others argued against his proposal to attack Shreveport. Their faces were pointed to Mexico.
They arrive in Waco, which Shelby puts under martial law. He mobilizes a group of leading citizens into a vigilante committee that drives out lawless bands for former soldiers. His own Missourians help rebuild the town, including a burned cotton mill. Shelby realizes that it is too dangerous for his wife and son, and perhaps Edwards reminds him that Francis Bacon said that “a man with wife and children is hostage to fortune,” and sends them back to Kentucky. Now with “a Dead Sea behind them,” Shelby and the New Iron Brigade begin their wilderness journey to what empire awaits them in a strange new land.
Meanwhile, the Union commander in Brownsville receives orders to secure the border and catch Confederates trying to sneak into Mexico.
Episode 3: One Great Arsenal
Texas is a land of desolation. Livestock is gone. Ex-slaves are struggling without food or shelter. During Shelby’s Texan journey, he declares martial law in the areas he passes through and dispatches small groups of men to deal with lawlessness.
In Tyler, an arsenal and a gun manufactory are under attack by “desperate deer-hunters and marauders” and “shirking conspirators” according to Edwards. Shelby sends Yandell Blackwell with forty-eight men to guard the buildings. The “mountain plunderers” demand surrender.
“We have yet to understand that word,” Blackwell says. “These are Jo Shelby’s soldiers, and they don’t know what being taken means. Pray teach it to us.”
The men have four blocks of separate structures containing rifles and gunpowder to guard. Blackwell concocts a plan. Each sentry will carry a keg of gunpowder, leaving a trail into the arsenal. When confronted by the gang about this action, Blackwell’s men reply, “We intend to blow you into hell, if you are in range while we are eating our supper.” The bandits leave, knowing that one spark would destroy the whole town.
Next, the people of Waxahachie send a plea for help. It is being tyrannized by a mob of Union and Confederate deserters. Shelby sends fifty men who sweep it bare of bandits with a broom of bullets. Maurice Langhorne, the officer in charge of the fifty, leaves a dozen men under Lieutenant Cochran, to guard the town as he takes the rest to secure a wagon train of flour. A mob attacks the dozen men guarding the town. Langhorne returns in time to counterattack with a wild cavalry charge, scattering the troublemakers.
There’s more trouble in Houston. After finding that the government warehouses have already been looted, former Confederate troops begin looting the city. Shelby sends fifty men under James Meadow and James Wood to “gallop oftener than you trot” and seize and hold the munitions and supplies at the arsenal. When they arrive the warehouses at the railroad depot are besieged by a mob of citizens. They order the mob to disperse. Some of the ex-soldiers will not do so without a written order from Shelby. Wood replies that without an order from Shelby, “Not so much as one percussion cap shall you take from [the arsenal]…” The mob disperses.
Shelby follows the Camino Real (the King’s Road). At a dance, two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, quarrel over a woman. According to Edwards, she was the captain’s by right of discovery, the lieutenant’s by right of conquest. A duel is challenged. It will be carried out on horseback. The captain rides down upon his adversary, firings as he comes. He fires three times. Misses. The lieutenant waits until the captain is almost abreast. Then he raises his revolver and sends a bullet through the captain’s head, who is dead before he hits the ground. A furious Shelby issues a general order for the court martial of the survivor of any future dual.
Then the men arrive in Austin in the rain. Robbers have broken into the Confederate sub-treasury after shooting down the guards and are breaking the safes open with sledgehammers and coal chisels. Church bells sound the alarm and the home guard musters. The major sends a message to Shelby, who joins the citizen posse.
His men surround the sub-treasury. The robbers, full of loot, rush out. The Missourians shoot down several robbers who refuse to surrender. The robbers rush back into the sub-treasury. Shelby’s men follow, charging through the door. The robbers not gunned down inside, they hunted following trails of gold out into the streets, including one man who had filled his pants with gold, tying his legs at the bottom like pantaloons.
Governor Pendleton Murrah encourages Shelby to take some of the gold, but Shelby, according to Edwards, replies, “We are the last of the race; let us be the best as well…I went into the war with clean hands and by God’s blessings, I will come out of the war with clean hands.” The governor, who is dying of tuberculosis, joins Shelby on his expedition to Mexico.
Near New Braunfels Shelby uses tactics from the war to fend off night raiders who try to steal their horses. Soon the Missourians are camped 20 miles from San Antonio. Due to its proximity to the trade routes across the Mexican border during the war, the Alamo City became King Cotton’s Royal Seat. It is filled with cotton speculators, profiteers, gamblers, draft dodgers and deserters.
Soon a group of concerned citizens sends word to Shelby that a mob of miscreants is trying to rob a store owner of his gold. Shelby and his men ride in and secure the city’s bars, boarding houses, and whorehouses. Then they roust the troublemakers from town. Those who resist are shot on the spot. Some fall into the river, causing Edwards to remark, “some men are born to be shot, some to be hung, some to be drowned.” Soon Shelby has the place under control with martial law.
He sets up his headquarters in the Menger Hotel. His men guard the hotel and patrol the street while former Confederate leaders who believe that the Union is setting out to imprison and persecute them for treason discuss Shelby’s expedition. Among them are Thomas Reynolds, Sterling Price, John “Prince John” Magruder, and Thomas Hindman.
One day Shelby is sitting on the balcony of the Menger when he observes a stooped Kirby Smith arrive incognito. Even though Smith is withdrawn to his room, Shelby has his men form up in the plaza outside his window and the band serenades him with “Hail to the Chief” and “Dixie.”
“That old man up there is Kirby Smith,” Shelby tells his men. “Shout for him until you are hoarse!”
Episode 4: Poor, Proud Fellows
Smith gives a short speech. Shelby, who had once criticized him, now looks forward to joining him in their Mexican venture. Also joining them on this endeavor is former Louisiana governor Allen, who has been given a silver goblet to remind him of his old friends at Natchez and Lake St. Joseph, and Judge John Perkins, Jr., a man who had burned his own home, Somerset, so the Yankees would not have it (As Rock Hudson’s character did in The Undefeated).
More ex-Confederates and other recruits swell the brigade into a thousand-strong force. One man who joins is a mysterious and enigmatic Englishman, a veteran of fighting in Algeria and the Crimea. Many of the new recruits are infantry who must be trained as cavalry.
The brigade with its freshly trained cavalrymen departs Sant Antonio June 25, 1865, for Eagle Pass, heading out toward Castroville along the Rio Grande Road. As Shelby’s men advance across the deserts of west Texas, he keeps up the military disciplines of pickets and scouts. They fight bandits, ambushing outlaws who plan to ambush the brigade from the mesquite at a stream crossing. Some are ex-Confederates who might have marched side by side with Shelby’s men just a dozen weeks earlier. During the gunfight, the old rebel yell rings out. Five of Shelby’s men are killed against twenty-seven of the bandits.
Shelby is pursued by Union General Federick Steele, who is seeking revenge after Shelby helped defeat him during the Camden Expedition. It is a race to see which column will reach Eagle Pass first. Shelby offers to meet with a colonel Johnson, who with three thousand men has approached within five miles of his thousand. Instead, Johnson offers battle. Then he withdraws his men at the last minute. These are the last few feints and maneuvers of the War Between the States as neither side is willing to shed their men’s blood in a war that had been over for three weeks (The Union pursuit of the Confederate exiles is partly portrayed in The Undefeated).
The men pass a small village that has been raided by three hundred renegades – a motley band of Americans, Mexicans, Indians, former Union and Confederate soldiers, fugitives from Mexico, dissenters, and deserters from as far away as California. All the cattle have been stolen from the village. Shelby sends Slayback out with two hundred volunteers to find the citadel of the bandits. They catch up with the raiders before they reach their fort. The robbers start killing the cattle to make a fort of beef and bones when Slayback leads the volunteers in a charge, a great rush of firing revolvers. They returned with the cattle without the loss of a single man.
As they approach Eagle Pass, the Missourians are joined by three men claiming to be from General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. It is strange that they have a familiarity with the Spanish language. Kirby Smith goes ahead of Shelby’s men and is ferried into Mexico with a detachment of officers and officials. A detachment of soldiers under Langhorne escorts Smith to the ferry. As Smith boards the ferry, he says to Langhorne, “With an army of such soldiers as Shelby has, and this last sad act in the drama of exile would have been left unrecorded.” Langhorne replies,“ And with a leader such as Shelby, and this last sad act in the drama of exile would have been left unrecorded.”
The Missourians arrive at Eagle Pass on June 29, 1865. The Confederate flag flies over the battalion as they march along the bluffs overlooking the Rio Grande. They camp in abandoned Fort Duncan. Shelby places his howitzers toward the Mexican town of Piedras Negras and sends a message to General Andreas Viesca, governor of Coahuila. If he denies Shelby’s entrance into the state, Shelby will fight his way into Mexico. He asks for volunteers to swim across the Rio Grande with the message and bring back boats.
Shelby and Viesca meet under a flag of truce. Shelby is blunt, outspoken, abrupt, Viesca is gracious, voluble and suave. Viesca knows that Benito Jaurez, supported by the United States, would forbid incursion by Mexicans into Texas to silence Confederate guns.
Viesca offers for Shelby to remain in Piedras Negras for a few months so more can Americans arrive and a larger army can be drawn up against Maximilian. Shelby would then march them 2,000 miles south and attack the French at Monterrey. His reward would be military control of Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo Leon, Northwest Mexico. To do this Shelby and his men would have to swear their allegiance to Juarez. Shelby will have to talk to his men.
“If you are all of my mind, boys, and will take your chances along with me, it is Jaurez and the Republic from this until we die here, one by one, or win a kingdom,” Shelby tells his men. “Determine among yourself.”
The men have a long meeting in which arguments are earnestly and resolutely presented. His men are not of his mind. Why support Juarez who had been friendly with Abraham Lincoln and even supported by the Union military that had just waged four years of war upon them and their families? Ben Elliot was chosen as their spokesman.
“General, if you order it, we will follow you into the Pacific Ocean,” he says. “But we are all imperialists and would prefer service under Maximilian.”
Shelby tries to direct the men to see reason. President Andrew Johnson would most likely send Grant to expel the French and once more they would be fighting for another lost cause, one more helpless than the last and a thousand miles from the sacred soil of their homeland. But to the romantic and chivalrous nature of his men, the romantic appeal of the Mexican Empire and the Empress Carlota was too strong. Shelby’s dream of a reunited north and south marching to the relief of Juarez was dead.
“Let no man repine,” he tells his men. “You have chosen the Empire. Your fate shall be my fate, and our fortune my fortune.” He would inform Visca of their unanimous decision the following day.
“Poor, proud fellows,” Shelby tells Edwards to the side. “They would rather starve under the Empire than feast in a Republic…They would all be lucky to escape death by famine if not by fusillade against a wall.”
Episode 5: Grave of the Confederacy
On July 4th Shelby draws his men up in parade formation on the banks of the Rio Grande. Five officers – Elliot, Williams. Gordon, Slayback, Blackwell – take the Confederate flag, wade into the river and weigh it down with rocks. Then they gently lower it into the water. Price, Magruder, Reynolds and others watch from the bluffs on the American side. Mexican soldiers look on from the southern bank. Shelby, in a rare show of emotion, tears off the black ostrich plume from his hat and casts it into the river. Tears run down the cheeks of veterans as the flag disappears beneath the muddy waters. From then this stretch of the river will be known as the Grave of the Confederacy. From now on, Shelby’s men will follow his ragged battle-scarred guidon.
Afterwards Shelby goes to Viesca to tell the bad news of his men’s choice. He tells Elliot and Slayback to come for him if he’s not back within an hour. Viesca, indifference and nonchalant overall about national politics, tells Shelby he’s a fool to join the French but advises him on which routes to take to Monterey, which were dangerous, one controlled by Juaristas, the other by Lipan Indians and armed bandits. Because the routes are not good for wagon trains, Viesca suggests that Shelby sell him his cannons and supplies. When asked by his officers about the wisdom of selling items when they’re surrounded by Juaristas, Shelby says, “we still have our side arms.”
Shelby’s officers, backed up by squads of soldiers, including those of Viesca, do business with local merchants. The merchants have little choice but to sell to or buy from the “Yanquis” officers, calling curses down on the Americans during the process. Shelby sells his supplies and puts some money in safe boxes in the custom’s house. Other money is divided up among his men. Some men are told they will be paid in Juarez script, which they will never see.
Discipline among men becomes relaxed. Coherence as a unit is becoming undone. Soldiers lounge around town, getting drunk. The soldiers who supposedly served with Lee are curious about horses that Shelby bought in San Antonio.
One day a soldier named Ike Berry is smoking a pipe while he sits on his horse when one of the supposed soldiers of Lee’s army, backed by his two friends and a young Mexican officer with thirty soldiers, claimed that the horse was his, and grabbed the bridle. He demands Berry dismounts. Some of Shelby’s men are in a cantina nearby and notice the confrontation over the horse. “They are in skirmishing order. Old Jo has delivered the arms; it may be we shall take them back again,” Jim Wood says to the other men.
Berry draws his saber, severs the man’s arm. The supposed soldier’s friends and Mexican soldiers back up, and surround Berry. About fifteen Americans rush to Berry’s aid. Jim Wood shoots the Mexican captain. Yowell breaks through the fifteen Mexicans that have fanned out around the Americans and rushes to find Shelby.
Shelby calls for his bugler to sound the rally. A dozen men led by Williams scatter the Mexicans guarding the artillery and wagons Shelby had just sold them. Other Americans under Langhorne dash to secure the silver at the custom’s house, locking sentinels in the back room. Another group secures the boats at the river. Shelby storms among his men, telling them to stop firing. Viesca rushes into the square, waving his hat, pleading and apologizing, asking his men to stop firing. Viesca hurries to calm Shelby has pointed his howitzers at the Mexican barracks. Viesca apologies and the two men begin diplomacy about returning the cannons to the Mexicans. When the shooting is over, a dozen members of the Mexican squad are dead. Two of “Lee’s soldiers” are dead and one is missing his arm.
A tense night passes almost without incident. Two of Shelby’s men found a polyglot- a speaker of many languages – and dragged him into the town. The man claims to be from Louisiana and had served with Union general Edward Canby of the New Mexico Campaign fame. Next morning a bag of money is missing. The Polylogt is suspected but not investigated due to his charm. Shelby returns the cannons to Viesca. And the Englishman who showed bravery in the gunfight is asked if he is afraid of dying. He says he is not afraid of dying in battle because he believes he will die in a trainwreck.
The next morning Shelby leaves, taking the more difficult route to avoid the Juaristas. As the soldiers march from Piedras Negras, Shelby calls a halt to the column. A Confederate flag is waving from the parade ground at the deserted Fort Duncan in Eagle Pass, placed there by some admirer or an old soldier unable to leave his homeland without his nation’s flag waving over it.
As a column advances, a Mexican rider catches with them. He does not want money or horses. Only the general’s ear. An American in Texas had once saved his life. Now he would repay that act with a word of caution.
Beware of the Sabinas!
Episode 6: Confederados
Riding two hundred miles toward Monterrey across a grassless prairie. Graves and empty fields line the way. The air is full of buzzards that circle overhead while lobo wolf and coyotes scamper among the brush. Temperatures soar past 100 degrees. Horses pick up their ears and pace at the smell of water. At night the soldiers drill, then settle down to sing songs like “Shelby’s Mule” while bats fly beneath the Comanche moon.
One day they ride through a burned-out village. Bodies litter the streets. There is evidence of torture. The men have been hung upside down from door frames and flayed alive. Others had their feet roasted over open fires. Women and children had been speared and slashed. In all forty people had been killed.
The men road silently. Usually the Apache allowed the villagers to live in peace so they could continue raiding them. Ben Elliot had fought the Lapin Apache in Texas and could clearly read the message: “Yanquis, go home!”
Now the men are more careful, more conscious of their surroundings at night. One evening their sentries bring in two Austrian deserters from the French Foreign Legion. The Legion is renowned for harsh discipline. Any deserters who return are routinely shot. But something more drives the deserters willing to hazard death at hands of the Apache in a desolate desert rather than stay with their units. Thomas Reynolds translates for them. “We do not hate the Mexicans. They never harmed Austria, our country.” Ironically, they are going to America “for freedom, for a country.”
Shelby asks about the Sabinas. The deserters say they had not seen anything except rocks and trees and had crossed the river unmolested. He believes that the Apache had allowed the men through so that he would let down his guard.
Shelby had made many river crossings during the war, sometimes under fire. As the column approaches the river, he sends D. A. Willaims to reconnoiter the possible crossings on The Rio Sabinas. The one he finds least guarded is because of rushing waters due to its approximately to a 50-foot waterfall and a canyon filled with rapids. Still, 800 Sabinas await Shelby and his men on the east bank.
According to Edwards, Shelby was caught between Scylla and Charybdis, though he himself would have probably just said “Boys, we’re caught between a rock and a hard place.” He knew that the fresh fires at the massacred village meant the attack had occurred only hours before he and his men arrived. He could not stay on the banks of the Sabinas because of the Apache on that side. He had to move forward to confront the Apache on the river’s other side.
Shelby orders Elliot to lead a forlorn hope charge. Elliot calls for volunteers. Two hundred men step forward. These men moved four abreast two hundred yards ahead of the column. Two hundred men will provide them coving fire as they cross the river.
“Have you said your prayers, Captain,” Cundiff asks Langhorne who rides at his side.
“Too late now,” replies Langhorne. “Those who pray best pray first.”
A sharp volley erupts as Williams and his reconnoitering party receives the first fire. Elliot’s men slide down the rough bank and thunder forth through the river in the face of a steady fire. Only ten of the men are unscathed. One man’s left wrist is hit. He presses the bridle between his teeth, firing the revolver with his right hand. They reach the safety of the opposite bank, charge into brush, sabers drawn.
As soon as Elliot’s men reached the east bank, Shelby had the charge sounded. Two hundred men, reigns in their teeth pistols in both hands, charged into the river, blazing away at puffs of smoke betraying the positions of the enemy. They clear the river and sweep up onto the bank. The attack becomes a storm of fire and saber strokes as rebel yells and Indian war whoops mix. The Englishman’s horse falls. He quickly gets another. In a mania he fights on despite a musket ball shattering his left leg. Then a ball to the chest knocks him from his mount.
The Sabinas throw away their weapons and flee. Many try escaping by jumping into the river but are picked off or carried over the falls. With the massacred village fresh on the men’s minds, Shelby’s men hunt down those hiding in the chaparral and mesquite, taking no prisoners, leaving the bodies unburied, knowing that the tale of their own savagery against the “savages” will spread fear and terror into other bands of warriors and guerillas. At least two hundred are killed.
Of Shelby’s men, nineteen bodies lay on the bank. Eight men are lost in the river, some going over the waterfall never to be found. Thirty-seven are wounded, several fatally. One of them is the Englishman.
Like the character Hatfield in John Ford’s Stagecoach, he asks for a priest and someone who speaks French. Governor Reynolds is called and to him the Englishman gives his confession. He was the youngest son of an English baron. He had been in the King’s Service in Ireland where in a lover’s rage he had killed another man in a duel. Court-martialed, he was cashiered from the army. He had become a wanderer, a soldier of fortune. There was much blood on his hands. With a death in battle he had found absolution.
“It is so dreary to die in the night,” he tells the governor. “One likes to have the sunlight for this.” Then he passes away.
Graves were dug, volleys fired and Kritzer’s bugle “gave clear liquid notes to night.”
To Be Continued…
