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12. MUY GRANDE RIFLES
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+12+ MUY GRANDE RI FLES T H E O THER DAY Glenn Moreland, Bob Miles, and I were standing in front of the Fort Davis State Bank, passing the time of day, when the subject of the Confederate cannons buried in Limpia Canyon came up. Both Miles and Moreland share my interest in the Big Bend's past, so it was a natural topic for us to be discussing. Moreland said that he and some other men were fighting a grass fire in Limpia Canyon about twenty years ago and were taking a break around the watercooler when a M exican appeared from nowhere and asked them if they wanted to see some muy grande rifles-very big rifles- nearby. They told him they were too busy with the fire to go look, and he went on his way. Miles suggested that he was probably talking about the cannons that Barry Scobee had written about in his book Old Fort Davis. Scobee had the story from Uncle Billy Kingston, a Jeff Davis County rancher who came here in the 1880s. Kingston told Scobee that when the Sibley Brigade passed through Fort Davis in 1862 on their retreat from New Mexico to San Antonio, they were so weary and so short of draft animals that they abandoned two brass cannons, burying them about sixteen miles down Limpia Canyon from the fort. Kingston had heard the story from Adam Bradford, a cattle buyer who had accompanied the soldiers from EI Paso to Fort Davis. Kingston told Scobee that he had searched for the cannons for more than forty years and never found them. The Sibley expedition was one of the more foolhardy campaigns of the Confederacy. It was the brainchild of General Henry Sibley, who had been an officer in the US Army in the West before the C ivil War and who persuaded Jefferson Davis that a Confederate army based in Texas could capture New Mexico and use it as a springboard to conquer Colorado and California. Sibley contended that when that happened the states of Chihuahua and Sonora would leave the Mexican Republic and join the Confederacy. Davis authorized the expedition, and in November of 1861, Sibley and 3,200 men marched out of San Antonio headed for Santa Fe. It was impossible for an army of that size to carry enough supplies to sustain it on a nine hundred-mile march, and Sibley's strategy was dependent on his army being able to buy supplies at El Paso and capture Union supplies he knew were stored at Fort Craig and Fort Union in New Mexico. None of that happened, and on top of that, Union forces destroyed what few supplies the Confederates had managed to gather when they burned the entire Confederate supply train at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in March 1862. The depleted Confederate column had no choice but to give up the whole enterprise and straggle home on starvation rations. The artillery that they had taken with them, augmented by a Union battery that they had captured along the way, proved to be a burden on the march home and some of it was abandoned. Its disposition became the subject of a web of folklore that is still thriving in the Southwest, as my conversation in front of the Fort Davis State Bank proves. Sibley buffs have engaged in the sport of cannon-counting for the past fifty years, and there are stories about buried cannons all the way from Albuquerque to San Antonio. The problem is that while there is a newspaper account that describes the remnants of the army arriving in San Antonio with six cannons, no one can agree on exactly how many they started out from Santa Fe with. It is a matter of record that they buried eight in the middle of the night on the plaza in Albuquerque and that in 1889, Trevanion Tee!, Sibley's chief of artillery, supervis.ed [3.93.162.26] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:52 GMT) their exhumation. Six of the cannons ended up in museums in Colorado and New Mexico; it is not clear what happened to the other two. One of them may have become the famous McGinty cannon, which was used in the 1890s by an El Paso men's club to announce its revels and which was borrowed by sympathizers of Francisco Madero to playa minor role in the Mexican Revolution. That cannon now reposes at Eastwood High School...