Category: Paddy Graydon

Civil War Mules in Fact, Fiction, and Poetry

7/27/2022

Mules were the backbone of both Confederate and Union Armies during the American Civil War. According to a page on the Stones River Battlefield site, about three million horses and mules served in the war. They pulled the supply wagons, pulled the limbers and caissons for cannons, and moved the ambulances.

Although mules died in battle, just like the soldiers they supported, a greater percentage died of overwork, disease, or starvation. Rarely was the daily feed ration for Union cavalry horses, ten pounds of hay and fourteen pounds of grain, available during the long campaigns.

Jemmy Martin, one of the lead characters in Where Duty Calls, my middle grade novel about the Civil War in New Mexico, loves the two mules who work on his family's farm. When his brother sells them to the Confederate Army, Jemmy decides to travel with them to protect them. He tries hard to find good forage for his mules after Major General Henry H. Sibley's army crosses into barren New Mexico territory on its way to capture the gold fields of Colorado.

But Jemmy couldn't protect his mules from Union trickery. The night before the battle of Valverde, a Union spy named Paddy Graydon concocted a plan for killing the Confederate hoofstock using a couple of run-down mules as weapons. While his plan didn't work, he managed to spook the Confederate's pack mules. The animals, who'd been denied access to water for several days, stampeded down to the Rio Grande, where Union soldiers rounded them up. Jemmy finds himself continuing to follow the army even though his reason for being with them is gone.

While Jemmy and his mules are fictional characters that I created for my novel, the story of Paddy Graydon is true. Graydon really did spook the Confederacy's pack mules, and the Union Army did really collect over 100 of the beasts when they broke to gain access to water. They lost over 100 animals and had to reconfigure their supply train. Before they left camp, the Confederates burned what they could no longer carry.

In Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life, Civil War veteran John D. Billings shares the story of another mule stampede. During the night of Oct. 28, 1863, Union General John White Geary and Confederate General James Longstreet were fighting at Wauhatchie, Tennessee. The din or battle unnerved about two hundred mules, who stampeded into a body of Rebels commanded by Wade Hampton. The rebels thought they were being attacked by cavalry and fell back.

To commemorate this incident, one Union soldier penned a poem based on Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade.

Charge of the mule brigade

Half a mile, half a mile,
Half a mile onward,
Right through the Georgia troops
Broke the two hundred.
“Forward the Mule Brigade!”
“Charge for the Rebs!” they neighed.
Straight for the Georgia troops
Broke the two hundred.

“Forward the Mule Brigade!”
Was there a mule dismayed?
Not when the long ears felt
All their ropes sundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to make Rebs fly.
On! to the Georgia troops
Broke the two hundred.

Mules to the right of them,
Mules to the left of them,
Mules behind them
Pawed, neighed, and thundered.
Breaking their own confines,
Breaking through Longstreet's lines
Into the Georgia troops,
Stormed the two hundred.

Wild all their eyes did glare,
Whisked all their tails in air
Scattering the chivalry there,
While all the world wondered.
Not a mule back bestraddled,
Yet how they all skedaddled--
Fled every Georgian,
Unsabred, unsaddled,
Scattered and sundered!
How they were routed there
By the two hundred!

Mules to the right of them,
Mules to the left of them,
Mules behind them
Pawed, neighed, and thundered;
Followed by hoof and head
Full many a hero fled,
Fain in the last ditch dead,
Back from an ass's jaw
All that was left of them,--
Left by the two hundred.

When can their glory fade?
Oh, the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Mule Brigade,
Long-eared two hundred!

The Stones River Battlefield Website stated that roughly half the horses and mules employed during the Civil War didn't survive. Jemmy Martin loses his to Paddy Graydon's plan. He spends the next two books in the Rebels Along the Rio Grande series trying to find them and return them to his home near San Antonio, Texas.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a retired middle school English and History teacher. She has written several novels, most of which are historical fiction for middle grade readers. Where Duty Calls is the first book in Rebels Along the Rio Grande, a trilogy set in New Mexico during the Civil War.

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Paddy Graydon, Wild and Crazy Spy Captain

2/9/2022

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"A Jurilla" Library of Congress

There aren't too many Civil War characters more colorful Captain James (Paddy) Graydon. He was a hard drinking, disagreeable man who was quick with his fists and short on temper, but his recklessness has earned him a place in American history.

Graydon was born in 1832 Lisnakea a poor, isolated Irish village. He emigrated to the United States to escape the Potato Famine when he was 21 years old. Like many poor immigrants of the time, Graydon joined the army soon after arriving, and was posted to the southwest with the elite 1st Dragoons. They took the Santa Fe, and arrived in New Mexico in August of 1853. Graydon was posted to Los Lunas, a village south of Albuquerque along the Camino Real.

Richard Stoddert Ewell in his Confederate Uniform

Grayson, a fair skinned, blue-eyed man who stood about 5 feet 7 inches tall, was quick to adapt to the rigor of military life. Under the command of Richard Stoddert Ewell, a West Point graduate who was to become a general in the Confederate Army, Graydon learned to speak Spanish and Apache. For five years, he fought Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Jicarilla Apaches, Navajos, bandits, renegades, and claim jumpers in an area that stretched from north and south from Santa Fe to the Mexican border and as far west as Fort Buchanan, in what is now Arizona.

When he was discharged from the Army in 1858, the seasoned veteran opened a hotel and saloon a few miles south of Fort Buchanan in Sonoita, Arizona. The whitewashed adobe, which became known as “Casa Blanca,” or “The White House,” attracted a rough crowd of patrons. His establishment boasted round-the-clock poker games and housed the region’s top prostitutes. But all this was still too sedate for Graydon, who tracked horse thieves and murderers, rescued captives from the Indians, and guided army patrols and U. S. military expeditions in his spare time.

In 1861, when Confederate General Henry H. Sibley threatened to bring the Civil War into New Mexico, Graydon abandoned Casa Blanca and rode to Santa Fe to offer his services to the Union. Territorial Governor Henry Connelly awarded him with a commission to recruit a company of spies that would operate virtually independently of the Army. Graydon rounded up 100 of the “hardest cases” he could find, then reported to Colonel E.R.S Canby, the Commander of the Army in the territory, at Fort Craig. Many of the men Graydon recruited were former patrons of his saloon. They were an undisciplined lot, mean and nasty, but very good at collecting information and doing the kind of sabotage work that regular Army soldiers could not. Canby gave Grayson the mission of infiltrating the Confederate lines and sending back news about troop movements and numbers.

There are no pictures of Graydon or of his Company of spies, but the Library of Congress sketch entitled "A Jurilla" that is shown at the top of this article is probably a good representation of what a member of the spy company would look like. They wore no uniforms, rarely bathed, and refused to participate in parades and drills like regular soldiers. The bottom corners of this lithograph, from an April 9, 1863 Harper's Weekly, shows a company of spies taking two sentries prisoners. Graydon's spies did this kind of work. They were also well known for wandering into the Confederate camp and sitting around the campfires, drinking coffee and gathering information.

But the action that Graydon is most famous for happened on a bitterly cold night in February, 1862. Sibley's Confederate Army was encamped about four miles east of Fort Craig, where Canby's Army and a large number of New Mexico Volunteers awaited. Under cover of darkness, Graydon and four of his roughest men left the fort and crossed the icy Rio Grande. When they got close to the corral that enclosed Sibley's pack train, Graydon lit the fuses on pack boxes filled with explosives that he had put on two old mules, then shooed them towards the Confederate lines.

From Steve Cottrell's book Civil War in Texas and New Mexico Territory.

Graydon's scheme did not go as planned. His mules turned back. As Graydon and his men rode for their lives, the explosives blew up, killing no one but the mules they were attached to. However, the explosion caused Confederate pack mules to stampede down to the Rio Grande, where Union troops rounded them up. The Confederate Army lost over 100 animals, and had to abandon many of the supplies that they desperately needed if they were going to conquer New Mexico and the rich gold fields of Colorado and California. Graydon’s outrageous scheme had not stopped the Confederate invasion of New Mexico, but it had seriously crippled it.

also from Steve Cottrell's book Civil War in Texas and New Mexico Territory.

Graydon continued to command his spy company for another year and a half. In October of 1862, he was involved in an altercation with Mescalero Apaches at Gallinas Springs. At least eleven Apaches, including their Chief, Manuelito, were killed. The next month, he was in Fort Stanton when Dr. John Marmaduke Whitlock, an Army surgeon and Graydon got into a fight over the killings. Whitlock shot Graydon, and then Graydon’s men shot Whitlock. Graydon is buried in the Veteran’s cemetery in Santa Fe.

James Graydon is one of the historical people who appear in Where Duty Calls, an historical fiction novel for middle grade readers by Jennifer Bohnhoff. It will be published in June 2022 by Kinkajou Press, an imprint of Artemesia Publishing.

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Civil War Mules in Fact, Fiction, and Poetry

Paddy Graydon, Wild and Crazy Spy Captain

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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