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Flint Whitlock is the co-founder of the newly formed Colorado Military History Museum, Inc.

Works by Flint Whitlock

Internal Conflicts (2009) 1 copy

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Capt. Jepp and the Little Black Book is the amazing rags-to-riches story of the son of Danish immigrants who did more to make flying safer than anyone else on the planet. But it is also the thrilling tale of barnstormers, wing walkers, the earliest days of the giant airline companies, and the charismatic man who lived it all. Here is a fascinating look at the beginnings of aviation in America and the colorful daredevils who risked their lives to entertain crowds, carry the mail, and carry passengers commercially. It is also the rags-to-riches story of the amazing life of Elrey B. Jeppesen--Capt Jepp--daredevil barnstormer and wing walker of the 1920s, intrepid airmail and airline pilot of the 1930s, creator of an aerial navigation system in use today worldwide, and founder of a business that grew from a ten-cent little black book into an international, multi-billion-dollar enterprise without equal. Every pilot will enjoy this story of aviation pioneer, entrepreneur and businessman Elrey Jeppesen, who literally made the skies safer for everyone. - Stephen Coonts… (more)
 
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MasseyLibrary | Feb 28, 2018 |
The first couple generations of books about the Big Red One have been done. This work represents a lot of detail done by painstaking research and a multitude of interviews. There is no doubt that the Big One Red has had a powerful history, much like the First Marine Division. It seems to have been in most important battles in the ETO, and usually in the thick of things. The author has avoided a sense of "you are there," focusing instead on the details, often gory. The loss of life was horrendous but American generalship seems to be someplace between the British and Russian. The former fought to avoid casualties and later seems to have ignored casualties. American generalship seems also to have been most interested in getting the job done as quickly as possible believing creating calamity was the quickest way to reach an objective. That book is yet to be written, or if it has I haven't heard about it.… (more)
 
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DeaconBernie | Jan 5, 2018 |
Picked up in New Mexico recently, this is the best book I’ve come across about the 1862 Confederate invasion of New Mexico and Arizona. (The Union territories were the same as the current states, except Arizona included a chunk of southern Nevada; the Confederate territories were divided latitudinally along the 34th parallel; thus Confederate Arizona was approximately the southern halves of modern New Mexico and Arizona and Confederate New Mexico was the other half). Author Flint Whitlock (possibly doomed by his name to be a military historian) does an excellent research job, tracking down old letters and newspaper reports to give first hand immediacy but also including modern maps of the campaign and battles.


The driving parties were Confederate Brigadier General Henry Sibley; Union Colonel Edward Canby; and Colorado Territorial Governor William Gilpin. The antebellum Regular Army was a fairly exclusive club, and Sibley and Canby had met in the Mexican War, in the Mormon Campaign (where Mormon farmers had to rescue the military forces which had run out of food on the way to suppress them) and in the 1860 campaign against the Navajo. Their acquaintance later led Federal soldiers dissatisfied with Canby’s performance to claim that they were related by marriage and that Canby had been the best man at Sibley’s wedding; Whitlock can’t disprove these claims but finds them highly unlikely (for example, at the time of Sibley’s wedding in New York Canby was serving in the Seminole campaign; while it’s not impossible Canby could have obtained leave it’s pretty unlikely).


Sibley had a reputation as an aggressive officer (and also as a thorough drunk – one of his prewar subordinates described him as a “walking whiskey keg”); Canby was thought of as a good administrator. Ironically, at the start of the war Sibley was in command at Fort Union in New Mexico; his sense of honor prevented him from turning over the fort to the Confederacy and he sent in his resignation instead. He then traveled to Richmond and proposed a grand offensive through the Southwest, with the goal of gaining New Mexico, Arizona, and California for the Confederacy – with the suggestion that his experience in the area would make him the appropriate commander for the expedition. Jefferson Davis approved and Sibley was sent back west with a brigadier’s star and authority to raise a force in Texas.


In the meantime, William Gilpin was appointed as the first territorial governor of Colorado (which had only recently been split off from Nebraska). When Gilpin left Washington for Denver, he claimed he was assured by Secretary of War Simon Cameron that he could count on the US Government to back up any expenditure he had to make to defend Colorado from the Confederacy. Unfortunately he didn’t receive this assurance in writing. On arrival, Gipin immediately began enlisting a regiment of volunteers, paying for supplies and equipment with sight drafts on the US Government. The Colorado Volunteers elected their own officers, set up a camp (near 8th and Vallejo in modern Denver) and then sat around waiting for orders to march south.


Canby, in the meantime, headed south to Fort Craig in New Mexico (now vacant land just off I-25). He sent a detachment south to Fort Fillmore on the Rio Grande near the Texas border and began a series of urgent messages to Gilpin asking for troops.


Sibley was in San Antonio, where he discovered that the authority to gather troops and supplies didn’t actually provide any troops and supplies. He eventually got his brigade together and set off for New Mexico. One of the things Whitlock points out is Sibley’s men had to march 675 miles from San Antonio just to get to their jumping off spot, and through West Texas at that. When Sibley finally got to Fort Bliss, he found that one of his subordinates, Colonel John Baylor, had already crossed the border and defeated a Union force under Major Isaac Lynde. Lynde had marched off from Fort Fillmore and attacked Baylor near Mesilla, New Mexico; after two cannon shots and some desultory musketry, Lynde lost his nerve, retreated to the fort, burned it, and attempted to march his whole command to Fort Stanton, 125 miles away. He was barely a day on the road when Baylor came up and demanded his surrender; Lynde agreed, even though he outnumbered Baylor by about 5 to 3.


Sibley appeared annoyed by Baylor’s success; he absorbed his command and ordered Baylor to raise new troops and march off to seize California. The irate Baylor did get as far as Tucson before meeting the oncoming California Column under Union General James Carleton, resulting in the westernmost land battle of the American Civil War (Battle of Picacho Pass; three Union soldiers killed to no Confederates but the Confederates retreated).


Relieved of Baylor, Sibley now headed north toward the next major Union post, Fort Craig (a number of smaller Union positions had been abandoned and burned to concentrate at Fort Craig). The Rio Grande River was the deciding terrain feature; Fort Craig was on the west bank and the Confederates were marching up the east side. There were three fords above the fort and Canby deployed to cover them; after some long range skirmishing on February 20th, 1862, the Battle of Valverde took place on February 21st, about three miles north of Fort Craig near the abandoned village of Valverde.


I’ve read of the “Battle of Valverde” described as “the Gettysburg of the West”, which is a real misnomer considering the number of troops involved – perhaps 3800 Federals versus 2500 Confederates (the apparent Union superiority is deceptive; most of the Union force was New Mexico militia and what regulars Canby had were almost all infantry, while the Texans were cavalry or mounted infantry). Despite the incongruity of comparison, you were just as dead if you stopped a Minie bullet in the New Mexico scrub as if you stopped it in Pennsylvania farmland. Things were generally going well for the Union; the Confederates committed their forces piecemeal and ineffectively in attempts to silence Union artillery. Lang’s Texas Lancers made what is believed to be the only lance charge in the Civil War and were shot to pieces, losing all but two men; Raguet’s cavalry company tried another charge against a battery but advanced diagonally instead of head on and were shot up by flanking fire. At this point Canby did one of the things that led his troops to believe he was a traitor; he withdrew the infantry support of his main battery. He never explained why, and Whitlock doesn’t offer an opinion; the infantry company had just been involved in stopping Raguet’s charge and perhaps they were low on ammunition. At any rate, the Confederates picked this time to finally do an all-out charge and overwhelmed and seized all six guns in McRae’s Union battery (McRae, who died fighting, was from North Carolina). Canby retreated back to Fort Craig. Whitlock’s maps of the battle are excellent, showing the positions at various stages in the fight.


At this point Sibley was left with a dilemma. Despite the capture of six more guns, he didn’t have anything like the siege train necessary to take Fort Craig; Canby was better supplied inside the fort than Sibley was outside of it. He therefore decided to leave the fort and Canby in his rear and head north toward Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Canby, in turn, could stay where he was until reinforced or head after Sibley; he decided to stay where he was. Sibley took Albuquerque and Santa Fe without any resistance (he stayed in Albuquerque; letters home from some of his soldiers suggest he developed a fondness for Mexican ladies and tequila). Whitlock notes the Texans spent two weeks in Santa Fe engaging in R&R and suggests if they had immediately marched on toward Fort Union they might have captured the enormous and poorly defended supply depot there. Hard to say; they were in the New Mexico mountains in the middle of winter, had already marched 1000 miles through West Texas and New Mexico, and fought a battle on the way. It would have been another 100 miles to Fort Union, then 300 miles more to Denver; to put that in perspective Berlin to Moscow is 1100 miles.


By now, the Colorado Volunteers were on the verge of mutiny. Gilpin had appointed John Slough as Colonel; Slough was a lawyer with no military experience. According to letters from his troops, he had a talent for rubbing people the wrong way. His soldiers allowed he was a competent administrator but had absolutely no tact in dealing with his command; there was an attempt to assassinate him in Denver. , As reports of Confederate victories piled up, newspaper editorials and letters to the editor began increasing virulent questioning of Slough’s loyalty and fitness to command. Eventually, he got orders from Canby to head south – but only to defend Fort Union; there was a clause, though, allowing him to “harass” the enemy. The Colorado Volunteers marched out – into a blinding snowstorm; they only made six miles the first day. Things picked up with a thaw; they were lucky enough the rest of the way, especially crossing Raton Pass. On reaching Fort Union, Slough took advantage of the “harass the enemy” clause in his orders to leave only a token detachment behind at the fort and take the rest of his troops west toward Santa Fe.


The Confederates (under Lieutenant Colonel William Scurry; Sibley remained in Albuquerque; Whitlock never explains how Scurry got his nickname “Dirty Shirt”) finally left Santa Fe marching east just in time to run into Slough marching west. The resulting battle is variously called the Battle of Gloriéta Pass, the Battle of Apache Canyon, the Battle of Pigeon’s Ranch, the Battle of Johnson’s Ranch, and the Battle of Kozlowski’s Ranch (Gloriéta Pass is the entire area; Apache Canyon is the western part. From east to west, the three ranches are Kozlowski’s, Pigeon’s and Johnson’s; there was some action at Kozlowski’s on the first day when the forces met; most of the main battle took place around Pigeon’s; the Confederate baggage train was at Johnson’s). Although some contemporary illustrations show the battle site as looking something like the Grand Canyon, it is nowhere near that dramatic; if you’ve ever driven from Las Vegas, New Mexico to Santa Fe on I-25 you’ve passed right over the battle site. It was (and more or less still is) rough and wooded enough to cancel the Confederate cavalry superiority. Slough’s lack of military experience didn’t hamper him very much, as his troops generally ignored his orders anyway; they deployed in the canyon until gunfire forced them to take cover, then shot back – which is more or less the same thing Scurry’s Texans did. The key player in the battle ended up being Major John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and now in command of a provisional battalion of Colorado Volunteers. Other histories I’ve read say Chivington was disgruntled at being held in reserve and set off on his own; however, Whitlock say Chivington and Slough planned his maneuver the night after the initial contact with Scurry. In any event Chivington took his detachment up the wall of the canyon, across the mesa at the top, and back down in the Confederate rear. His initial orders were to then advance and trap the Confederates between him and Slough; however, when he descended he was right on top of the Confederate baggage train, brushed aside the guard (who initially jeered, not believing that anybody could descend the steep canyon walls) and put his troops to work looting and burning. Chivington then retraced his route (almost; he was lost and wandering around on the mesa until a Catholic priest showed up – on a white horse, of all things - and guided him down).


Scurry, meanwhile, had pushed the enthusiastic but not especially tactically skilled Coloradans back until the battle broke off at dusk. (Somewhere in the middle of things a Colorado company had expressed their dissatisfaction with Slough’s leadership by turning around and firing a volley at him, which lead him to withdraw to the rear). Scurry was confident he’s achieved a victory until he came upon the mess Chivington had made of his baggage train; apparently the “acoustic shadow” effect meant that Chivington didn’t hear the battle going on east of him and Scurry didn’t hear his reserve ammunition blowing up to his west). Once again, Whitlock provides an excellent series of maps showing successive positions.


Scurry felt he had no choice to retreat to Santa Fe and resupply; at almost the same time a rider from Canby showed up at Slough’s headquarters with unequivocal orders to retreat to Fort Union. Slough, presumably somewhat discomfited by having his own troops shoot at him, resigned his commission “in protest” to Canby’s orders, and Chivington took over command (by acclamation; he was junior to Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Tappan).


The rest of the campaign was anticlimactic. With no supplies and no chance of pressing on to Fort Union, Sibley’s brigade retreated toward Texas. In the meantime, Canby left Fort Craig and ordered Chivington to leave Fort Union to try and catch Sibley in the middle; somehow the forces missed each other. The now combined Union army fought a minor action at Peralta, outside Albuquerque, then contented itself with sheparding the Texans. The Union troops grumbled at Canby for not being more aggressive; Canby invited one of them into his tent and asked him if he was getting enough to eat. The private allowed he wasn’t; Canby then pointed out if they captured the Texans, they would have to feed them. The private left and explained this to “the boys” and criticism of Canby stopped.


Whitlock goes on to follow the subsequent careers of some of the principals. Chivington, of course, went from hero at Glorieta to villain at Sand Creek. Canby survived the war but was killed by Captain Jack while trying to negotiate a treaty with the Modoc Indians. Sibley went on to be a general in the Egyptian Army, but his thirst and the Islamic prohibition of alcohol got better of him and he was dismissed after breaking into a British merchant’s house and consuming the entire supply of intoxicating beverages; his claims for patent revenues as the inventor of the Sibley Tent were disregarded by the US Government for the understandable reason that he had fought the Civil War on the wrong side. Fort Union is a National Historic Park (although the Civil War fort is overshadowed by the later post). Glorieta Canyon is mostly private property or under I-25 but there is still a remaining building from Pigeon’s Ranch. Valverde has a couple of Daughters of the Confederacy monuments; Fort Craig is mostly private but the BLM has a self-guided tour booklet. Fort Fillmore is long gone.


In the long term, the New Mexico campaign had little to no influence on the outcome of the war. Sibley presented the idea that the Confederates could build a railroad to the Pacific and bypass the Union blockade and that capture of New Mexico would prompt foreign recognition; both are farfetched. The Confederacy couldn’t even maintain the railroads it had, much less build a new transcontinental line, and foreign governments were unlikely to take the slightest interest in who controlled New Mexico. (To be fair, it’s possible that Richmond had grandiose ideas about their capabilities; after all, if they didn’t they wouldn’t have started the war in the first place). A more interesting speculation is what would have happened if Sibley had somehow managed to get all the way to Denver. During the war, the Colorado gold and silver deposits produced about four times the entire wartime revenue of the Confederate States of America. At this stage in the Colorado mining industry, “mine” is something of a misnomer; most gold was coming from placer deposits. The few “mines” in production were working with native gold in quartz veins; processing involved stamp mills, mercury amalgamation, and retorting. Sulfide ores that required smelting were dug out, crushed, loaded into barrels, shipped by oxcart to the railhead in St. Joseph, Missouri, transferred to riverboat, unloaded again somewhere at a Union-controlled railhead, shipped to an Atlantic port, loaded again on ship, and sent to Swansea in Wales where the then-secret ore processing technology was available. It’s unlikely the Confederacy could have extracted a significant amount of precious metal. Still, Whitlock notes that in 1862 there was about $1M worth of gold and silver in Colorado vaults waiting for shipment; a successful Confederate looting raid could have disrupted mining and hauled quite a bit of bullion back to the South. Hard to say.


As mentioned, the best book on the campaign, combining good maps with good text descriptions; can’t say I found any faults. There are a surprising number of books available considering how obscure the battles were; I suppose if I lived in Murfreesboro or Antietam I’d find a lot of local bookstores with volumes about Stones River or Sharpsburg. Whitlock’s other books are all about WWII, I’ll have to track some down.
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setnahkt | Dec 6, 2017 |

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