At dawn on March 30, 1854, Lieutenant John W. Davidson made the decision that would define his career and destroy the lives of twenty-two of his men. He ordered his sixty dragoons to dismount at the mouth of a narrow, steep-walled canyon in the Embudo Mountains of northern New Mexico, and to advance on foot toward a Jicarilla Apache camp they had located the night before. Davidson had been explicitly ordered not to provoke a fight.
His men carried only twenty rounds of ammunition each, a quantity the army deliberately limited to ensure he understood the mission was reconnaissance, not combat. Yet he gave the order to attack anyway. Within hours, he would be in full retreat, leaving his dead behind in a canyon that would come to be known as the site of the worst defeat of American cavalry in the Southwest before Little Bighorn. To understand what happened in that canyon above the Río Grande, one has to understand the people who lived there.
The Jicarilla Apache called themselves the Tinde, “the People. ” Their homeland stretched between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Canadian River, and they lived in small bands of forty or fifty, hunting elk and antelope, planting maize where the soil allowed, and trading pottery and baskets with the Pueblo villages along the Río Grande. The Spanish who encountered them named them Jicarilla, “little basket,” after those goods. By the 1850s, their world was collapsing.
The buffalo herds on the eastern plains were thinning. The elk were harder to find. Anglo settlers were pushing up the Río Grande valley, and Spanish villages were expanding from the north. Year by year, the land the People had walked, hunted, and buried their ancestors in grew smaller.
When food ran out and trade failed, young warriors did what warriors have always done in such circumstances. They took what they needed: a few head of cattle, a stray horse, enough to feed the old people through another winter. The United States government called it theft. In February 1854, a government contractor supplying beef to Fort Union reported that part of his herd had been taken by Jicarillas under a leader named Lobo Blanco, “White Wolf.
” Whether the elderly war leader had actually taken the cattle was never established, but it no longer mattered. Lieutenant David Bell was sent with a detachment of the Second Dragoons to find him. They caught up with Lobo Blanco on the Canadian River on March 5. What happened there was so brutal that some of the men who wrote about it afterward refused to put the details on paper.
When the shooting stopped, five Jicarilla warriors lay dead. Lobo Blanco was among them, his corpse so mutilated that surviving records refuse to describe it, noting only that it left an impression on the men who witnessed it. Two American dragoons also died in the fight. The Jicarilla learned of it within days, and the tension that had been building between the tribe and the army for years finally snapped.
On March 6, warriors from Lobo Blanco’s own band, joined by Ute allies, attacked a cattle herd near Fort Union and killed two herders. Word traveled up and down the Santa Fe road. In the last week of March, orders landed on the desk of a young lieutenant at Cantonment Burgwin, a small adobe post ten miles southeast of Taos. His name was John Winfield Davidson.
He was a West Point graduate from a military family, ambitious and confident, and while stationed at Fort Union he had acquired a reputation for contemptuously dismissing the Jicarilla as cowards and thieves. He boasted to fellow officers that no band of Jicarillas could stand against his dragoons. When Lieutenant Bell, who knew the tribe better than most, warned him not to underestimate them, Davidson dismissed the warning. His orders from Major George Blake were clear.
The raiders he was not being sent after were the Llaneros, or Plains people, who had already vanished eastward. The group Davidson was assigned to observe was a different Jicarilla faction, the Olleros, or Pottery People, who lived quietly along the upper Río Grande and were, at that very moment, sending word to Santa Fe that they wanted peace and needed food. Davidson was to take Companies F and I of the First Dragoons, sixty men total, locate them, and prevent them from crossing the river westward. He was under no circumstances to bring on an engagement.
To guarantee this, each soldier was issued just twenty rounds of ammunition. On March 29, Davidson’s column left Cantonment Burgwin. The weather was cold; snow still lingered in the high shadows of the Sangre de Cristos. They rode to the village of Cieneguilla, now called Pilar, on the west bank of the Río Grande, and camped.
That evening Davidson sent two men to scout the mountains ahead: a civilian guide named Jesús Silva and a soldier named Jeremiah Maloney. Before dawn, the pair reached the Embudo crossing on the Río Grande and found no sign of any Jicarilla movement. But when they turned and looked back toward the high country, they saw campfires, many of them, glittering against a dark hillside. In the early hours of March 30, Davidson made his decision.
Instead of reporting back and waiting for reinforcements, he ordered his sixty men to mount up and ride into the mountains. His dragoons were armed with muzzle-loading Springfield smoothbores, heavy and slow, effective at close range and useless beyond it. They carried single-shot horse pistols and, some of them, Colt Dragoon revolvers. Along the steep, tree-covered slopes of the Embudo range, where visibility was measured in yards and every jingle of harness carried through the dry mountain air, they made no secret of their approach.
In the camp above, the Jicarilla had two war leaders that morning, Francisco Chacón and Flechas Rayadas, which means “striped arrows. ” They had about 250 warriors, plus Ute allies, but they were not a raiding party. They were a whole village, with women and elders and horses that meant survival. When their scouts reported soldiers climbing the trail, they did not panic.
They chose their ground. The site was almost perfect: a narrow canyon with steep walls rising ninety feet above the floor. Any force advancing on the village had to pass through it or climb the surrounding ridges. The Jicarilla took positions behind rocks and fallen pines on both sides of the trail.
Bows were strung. The few firearms they had were loaded. Then they waited. Around eight in the morning, the head of Davidson’s column reached the mouth of the canyon.
He saw the ground rising above him on both sides. He saw smoke from the village fires. He saw movement on the ridges. A prudent commander would have withdrawn.
Davidson ordered his men to dismount. He detailed a small party to hold the horses in the canyon bottom and formed the rest into two platoons. Sergeant First Class William Holbrook took the right, Sergeant William Kent the left. They started up the slope on foot.
The first thing they heard, according to the surviving soldier James Bennett, was a coordinated shout from a large body of warriors, echoing off the canyon walls. Then the arrows began to fall. The Jicarilla fired from cover, from higher ground, at targets exposed on the slope below. The dragoons could see smoke puffs from Apache rifles but, most of the time, not the men firing them.
Arrows made almost no sound. By the time a man heard the thud of one hitting a tree, a saddle, or a body, it was too late. The dragoons returned fire, but their muskets were designed for close work, and the targets on the ridges were beyond effective range. Men began to fall.
Holbrook was hit. Kent was hit. The surgeon, David McGruder, was overwhelmed. The twenty rounds per man began to run out.
Within half an hour of the first shot, some dragoons were reaching into their cartridge boxes and finding nothing. When the revolvers were empty, men crawled from body to body, searching the cartridge pouches of the dead. Some of what they found was the wrong caliber, useless in their smoothbores. The arrows kept falling.
The Apaches needed no reloading. They had brought hundreds of arrows. The fight lasted two hours, perhaps three; some accounts claim four. What is certain is that by late morning the men in the canyon understood they were losing, and that many of them would not get out alive.
Davidson himself behaved bravely. He moved between the platoons, shouting orders, holding the line together. But his line was collapsing, and the Jicarilla were swinging around both flanks. Once they cut him off from the horses, everything would end.
Davidson turned to the wounded Holbrook, and they made the decision together. The survivors remembered Davidson’s words as simple: “Mount your horses and save yourselves. ” The bugler brought up the lieutenant’s horse, and the order moved through the ranks. The dragoons fell back to the canyon bottom, mounted, fired what remained in their pistols into the smoke behind them, and spurred their horses up the steep bank on the far side, a 150-foot slope at a sharp angle.
Wounded men clung to their saddles with one hand and fired behind them with the other. Men whose horses had been hit ran alongside, gripping the stirrups of their comrades. Some never got out of the canyon at all. The Jicarilla did not pursue far.
They had won. Twenty-two dragoons lay dead in that canyon. Thirty-six more were wounded, some so badly they died in the following days. William Fell of Philadelphia, wounded at Cieneguilla, died on April 6.
Of the sixty men, only a handful escaped without injury. The Jicarilla lost perhaps twenty warriors, though the exact number was never known. The survivors returned to Cantonment Burgwin within twenty-four hours. Surgeon McGruder worked without sleep for two days.
Word went to Santa Fe, and Brigadier General John Garland, commanding the entire department, ordered a punitive expedition. He put Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, a thirty-year veteran of the Mexican War, in charge. Cooke knew the country and knew the folly of chasing Jicarillas through mountain snow.
He also knew he had no choice. He assembled about 200 cavalry, 100 infantry, and 32 Pueblo and Hispanic scouts who knew the land better than any white officer. To guide the whole campaign, he sent for a man who was already a legend in the Southwest: Christopher “Kit” Carson. Carson was in his mid-forties, married to a Taos woman, and knew the Jicarilla leaders by name.
There is a terrible irony in what happened next. On the morning of the battle at Cieneguilla, Carson was not in the mountains. He was in Santa Fe, sitting in a meeting with the acting territorial governor, William Messervy, arguing that the Olleros Jicarilla wanted peace, that they were hungry, that they needed food. He was still in Santa Fe when word arrived that war had already been declared anyway.
The punitive expedition set out April 1. The snow in the high passes was four feet deep. On April 8, Carson found the track he was looking for along the upper reaches of the Ojo Caliente. The battle that followed ended almost before it began.
Five Jicarilla warriors were killed and six wounded. Cooke did not lose a single man. But the real damage was not from bullets. It was from what came after.
The Jicarilla fled, leaving everything behind: tents, winter food stores, buffalo robes, horses. They escaped into country where the snow was still four feet deep, without shelter. Seventeen of them, by the count that reached the army, died in the snow in the days that followed. The tribe that had won at Cieneguilla scattered into small, starving groups moving through winter mountains they were not equipped to survive.
At some point during Cooke’s pursuit, a message came from Flechas Rayadas himself. The Jicarilla were prepared to return every horse and weapon they had taken from Davidson’s command if peace was made. General Garland’s answer was refusal. The pursuit continued.
In May, Francisco Chacón sent word to Santa Fe that he was ready to surrender. He came to the trading post at Abiquiú and laid down his arms. The Jicarilla War, as historians later called it, was effectively over. In the years that followed, the tribe was moved through a succession of reservations that were taken away or reduced one after another.
Not until 1887, thirty-three years after the battle, did they receive a permanent homeland at Dulce in the high country of northern New Mexico, where their descendants live today. As for John W. Davidson, his official report was a work of fiction. He claimed he had found the Apaches, who immediately raised war cries; that he had been outnumbered four or five to one; that he had fought a heroic defensive action; and that, when his ammunition ran out, he had extricated his command by a skillful fighting retreat.
The Santa Fe Weekly Gazette called it one of the fiercest battles ever fought between American troops and any tribe. General Garland praised his military skill. But Lieutenant David Bell knew the truth. On December 27, 1854, Bell wrote a long letter detailing his objections: Davidson had disobeyed orders, had launched an attack he could have avoided, in terrain he had not properly scouted, against a force he despised.
And the retreat, Bell wrote, was not a disciplined fighting withdrawal but a panic in which the men abandoned their wounded to save themselves. A court of inquiry convened in Taos in March 1856. It exonerated Davidson completely, finding he could not have avoided the fight. Davidson went on to a long military career, served in the Civil War and the Indian wars of the 1870s, and retired as a brigadier general.
He died in 1881, a respected old officer. David Bell died in 1861, and his objections were quietly archived. More than 150 years later, archaeologists from the Forest Service entered the canyon above Pilar with metal detectors and shovels. They spent a year locating the battlefield alone.
There, beneath the pines and junipers, they found the story Bell had tried to tell: the place where the dragoons dismounted, the spent cartridges and musket balls marking the American line, where it bent and where it broke, and, above it on the ridges, the carefully positioned Apache fighting positions, beyond the effective range of American weapons. The archaeological evidence did not match Davidson’s report. It matched Bell’s. The dragoons had attacked uphill, been surrounded, and forced to retreat.
In the blunt language of the modern report, they suffered a decisive defeat. The archaeologists also spoke with descendants of the Jicarilla. The tribal elders said, according to the Forest Service team, that Cieneguilla was not an ambush the Jicarilla had planned. It was a battle forced on them by an officer who refused to turn back.
Their ancestors chose their ground because they had to; sixty armed men were coming up the canyon toward their village, and behind them were women and elders and nowhere else to go. Cieneguilla is now part of the Río Grande del Norte National Monument, established in 2013. The canyon is quiet. The pines have grown back.
A visitor can walk up onto the ground where the dragoons dismounted and stand there, hearing nothing, seeing little, while the wind moves through the valley exactly as it did on that March morning. Sixty dragoons, roughly 250 Jicarilla and Ute warriors, twenty-two soldiers dead, perhaps twenty warriors dead, one lieutenant who told a lie that became a legend, one lieutenant who told the truth and did not live to see it proven, a legendary scout in the governor’s office pleading for a peace that had already been broken, and a people who won a battle and bought themselves only more suffering.