Captain Alexander McRae

 

Families divided, brother against brother. It's one of the themes of the American Civil War. Alexander McRae's story is an example of it. Alexander McRae was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on September 4, 1829. He had four brothers.   A West Point Graduate, McRae served in Missouri and Texas before coming to New Mexico in 1856, He served at Forts Union, Stanton, and Craig. McRae also spent some time at Bent's Fort, in what is now Colorado. He steadily rose up the promotion ladder, becoming Captain of Company I, 3rd Cavalry Regiment in August of  1861. When the Civil War broke out, McRae's father wrote to him, urging him to change sides. ​Captain McRae retained his commission and stayed faithful to his country while his four brothers, James, Thomas, John, and Robert, served the Confederacy.  As reports began to trickle into New Mexico of a Southern invasion, Colonel Edward R.S. Canby, the commander of forces in New Mexico Territory, hastily formed an artillery battery. He placed the six pieces at Fort Craig, the most southerly of the forts held by the Union Army, and gave Captain McRae charge of this unit.  ​McRae's battery performed with great success during the first hours of the Battle of Valverde, which took place at a Rio Grande crossing a few miles north of Fort Craig on February 21, 1862 .    Finally, Confederate Colonel Thomas Green led a charge on the Union guns. Screaming the Rebel yell, the Confederate forces advanced in three separate waves that totaled nearly 750 men. The Rebels, armed with short-range shotguns, pistols, muskets, and bowie knives, watched for flashes from the artillery, then dove to the ground for cover. This strategy made them appear to be suffering a high casualty rate,  yet they kept coming. This spooked the men manning the Union guns, particularly the inexperienced and ill-trained New Mexico Volunteers, who broke and splashed across the Rio Grande in a disorganized retreat. Despite McRae's remaining gunners firing shell and cannister as fast as they could, the Texans reached the battery. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued as the Union soldiers sought to defend their position. Samuel Lockridge, a Texan officer reportedly shouted, "Surrender McRae, we don't want to kill you!" McRae supposedly replied, "I shall never forsake my guns!" Both Lockridge and McRae were killed in the melee, some sources suggesting by each other.  The captured guns went to San Antonio when the Confederate forces retreated. They became known as the Valverde Battery and were used against Union troops for the remainder of the war. Because he fought for the Union, McRae's service record went unrecognized in his home state. In their story on the battle at Valverde, the Fayetteville Observer did not even report his death. However, McRae became an honored figure in New Mexico history. There are streets named after him in the New Mexican towns of Las Cruces and Las Vegas, and a canyon named for him in Sierra County. The remains of Fort McRae, a late Civil War and Indian War Army post named for him, now lay beneath the waters of Elephant Butte Lake. I could find some earlier reports of it being a destination for scuba divers, but the adobe walls have probably succumbed to time and water by now.  ​ Alexander McRae's body was exhumed in 1867 and transported to West Point for burial. McRae’s large black tombstone is only four markers away from the one dedicated to George Armstrong Custer. Guides frequently note it as the resting place of one who stayed with the Union. In his official report of the Combat of Valverde, Colonel Canby, wrote: Among the killed is one, isolated by peculiar circumstances, whose memory deserves notice from a higher authority than mine. Pure in character, upright in conduct, devoted to his profession, and of a loyalty that was deaf to the seductions of family and friends, Captain McRae died, as he had lived, an example of the best and highest qualities that man can possess. ​In time, the South also recognized Captain Alexander McRae. A marker now stands in front of the Old Historic Cumberland County Courthouse, which was built on land that was homesteaded by his grandparents. While he is not a speaking character, Captain Alexander McRae's death is part of the battle scene in Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel Where Duty Calls, the first in a trilogy of novels set in New Mexico during the Civil War and telling the story from both the Union and Confederate side of the conflict. Book #2 is named The Worst Enemy and is also available. Book #3, The Famished Country, is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2024 by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing.

Peanut Pie

 

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The author and her sons at Devil's Den, Gettysburg

During the summer of 2000, my husband and I took our three sons on an historical vacation. Among the places visited were Williamsburg and Gettysburg, both places where we ate peanut pie in local taverns, so that the pie is associated in our minds with American history. 

Many histories of peanuts say that they came to America in the 1700s, carried from Africa along with slaves. While that may be true, they are not originally from Africa. Peanuts seem to have originated in South America, in Peru. They were taken back to Africa by the Spanish before coming to North America.

Wherever they came from, I'm glad they made it into my family's repertoire. This recipe is adapted from the Chowning's Tavern Pie from historical Williamsburg. ​

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Peanut Pie

For the Crust: 

1 1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 C shortening

Cut shortening into flour and salt mixture until it resembles cornmeal in consistency, with some particles the size of small peas. 

3 TBS ice water
1/2 TBS vinegar

Mix water and vinegar and sprinkle over the flour mixture, 1 TBS at a time, mixing until the dough clumps together. You may not use all the liquid.

Press together, then place on a floured piece of waxed paper or parchment. Roll out until it is larger than your pie place. Invert the paper over the pie plate to fit in. Flute edged. 

For the Filling: 

3 large eggs, 
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
3/4 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 TBS melted butter

1 cup peanuts (you may use salted or unsalted, but I prefer unsalted, roasted Virginia peanuts with the skins removed.)

Beat the eggs, brown sugar, corn syrup and vanilla together in a large bowl. Add the melted butter and peanuts. Pour into the pie shell and bake in a preheated oven at 350 until the filling is set in the center and the pastry is lightly browned, about 45 minutes.

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Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer and educator who lives high in the mountains of central New Mexico. She wrote about Gettysburg in her novel, The Bent Reed, which is available in ebook and paperback.

George Washington Carver

 

 

When many people hear the name George Washington Carver, they think of peanuts. But the American agricultural scientist and inventor’s greatest contributions may have been in soil conservation, environmentalism, and helping the poor.

Carver was born a slave sometime in January 1864 in rural western Missouri, and freed at the end of the Civil War. When he was in his 20s, he moved to Iowa and began attending Simpson College, then Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University), where he was their first African-American student. Iowa State Agricultural College was the country’s first land-grant university, and its mission was to teach the applied sciences, including agriculture. Carver studied botany.

When he graduated in 1896, Carver became the first black man in the U.S. to hold a degree in modern agricultural methods. He took those lessons south to Alabama, where Booker T. Washington, the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute, was opening an agricultural school. What he saw as he rode the train south broke his heart. Instead of the golden wheat fields and the tall green corn of Iowa, he “scraggly cotton, stunted cattle, boney mules, and fields and hill sides cracked and scarred with gullies.” Because of his training, Carver knew that the poor condition of the land was due to the overplanting of cotton, a lucrative crop that depletes the soil. Carver knew that something had to be done to make the soil rich again. One of his solutions was peanuts.

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Because of a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria that live on their roots, peanuts produce their own nitrogen, fertilizing themselves and restoring nutrients to depleted soil. Additionally, their growing periods are different than cotton, so peanuts and cotton could be grown in the same fields on a rotating schedule. Finally, peanuts are high in protein and more nutritious than the “3M--meat, cornmeal and molasses” diet that was the foundation for most poor farmers’ diet.
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Most black farmers in turn-of-the-century Alabama were so close to ruination that they weren’t willing to try something new. Carter encouraged them by coming up with literally hundreds of recipes and uses for peanuts, including peanut bread, peanut cookies, peanut sausage, peanut ice cream, and even peanut face cream, shampoo, dyes and paints.

But Carver was not just pushing peanuts; he was pushing a lifestyle that connected the farmer to his soil, enriching both. He encouraged farmers to grow other vegetables so they would spend less money on food. Rather than going into debt buying fertilizer, he encouraged composting. Well before the hippies and back to nature movements reached the mainstream, Carver pushed the interconnectedness between the health of the land and the health of the people who lived on it. 

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"It has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of ‘my people’ possible and to this end I have been preparing myself these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.”

When Carver died on January 5, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “The world of science has lost one of its most eminent figures.” 

​Peanut Butter Cookies, two ways

Peanut Blossoms

George Washington Carver may have invented a recipe for peanut butter cookies, but it wasn’t this one. This cookie first appeared in 1957 as a prize winner in a Pillsbury Bake-Off contest.

1 ¾ cup flour
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp salt
½ cup shortening
½ cup peanut butter
2 TBS milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
 
¼ cup sugar, set aside in a shallow bowl
About 48 milk chocolate candy kisses
 
Preheat oven to 375°
 
Combine flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, shortening, peanut butter, milk, vanilla, and egg at low speed until stiff dough forms.
 
Shape into 1” balls. Roll in the bowl of sugar.
Place 2” apart on a cookie sheet.
Bake at 375°for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown.
Remove from over and immediately press a candy kiss into the center of each.
Let cool 2 minutes before removing to a cooking rack.
                                                                                Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

Variation:

Peanut Butter Criss Cross Cookies
Make dough, shape into balls and roll in sugar as above.
Place 2” apart on a cookie sheet.
Flatten each cookie by pressing a fork dipped in sugar into it in a crisscross pattern.
Bake at 375°for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown.
Immediately remove to a cooking rack from cookie sheet.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her books are written for middle schoolers and adults, and are mostly works of historical fiction. 

This article is, she believes, the first installment in a monthly series on famous Americans and cookies inspired by their stories. She intends to compile all the stories and recipes into a cookbook to give out to my friends, family and fans at the end of 2021. 

Louisa Hawkins Canby: The Angel of Santa Fe

 

 

Louisa Hawkins Canby earned the epithet Angel of Santa Fe by showing compassion to wounded Confederate soldiers during their 1862 occupation of Santa Fe, New Mexico. For this humanitarian act, some people have called her a traitor. They would do well to consider her a diplomat and a savvy negotiator, whose act of mercy saved the city and its inhabitants a lot of grief.

​Louisa Hawkins was only 19 years old when she met Edward Richard Sprigg Canby, a West Point cadet who had come home to Crawfordsville, Indiana on summer furlough. Edward, as he was called by most, and Louisa were both Kentucky natives, and seemed smitten with each other from the start. They married during the summer of 1839 after both had graduated: he from West Point and she from Georgetown Female College in Georgetown, Kentucky. Louisa then followed her husband through his many posts in California, New York, Wyoming and Utah. They had one child, a daughter they named Mary, but she died while still very young. By 1860, Canby was commander of Fort Defiance. He procured a large house in Santa Fe for Louisa to use during his many campaigns. 

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At the beginning of the Civil War, the one armed William Wing Loring was the Commander of the Department of
New Mexico, an area that covers what is now the states of Arizona, New Mexico and the southern tip of Nevada. Loring resigned his commission to join the Confederacy, and the post was given to H.H. Sibley, who also left to join the South. Edward R.S. Canby then received the post and a promotion to Colonel.

​Concerned of a Confederate invasion from Texas in the south, he stationed himself at Fort Craig a fort that protected the northern edge of the Jornada del Muerto, a dry section of the Camino Real. He left Louisa in the relative safety of Santa Fe, far to the north.

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Canby’s concerns proved real when a Confederate force led by Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley began moving up the Rio Grande River valley in late 1861. Finding Fort Craig heavily fortified, the Confederates bypassed Canby. The two armies engaged each other several miles upstream of the fort, at a place called Valverde Ford. The battle ended when the Union troops returned to Fort Craig and the Confederates continued north. Canby then commanded all troops in the northern part of the state to pull back and converge on Fort Union. The troops were to destroy or hide weapons, ammunition, food, equipment, and blankets prior to their retreat.
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Instead of leaving with the army, Louisa Canby and several other officers’ wives chose to stay in Santa Fe. When the Confederates marched into town on March 10, these women formed a delegation to meet them. Mrs. Canby asked that the city not be sacked, and that its citizens not be molested. In return she promised to aid the Confederate army’s sick and wounded and worked with Archbishop Lamy to provide shelter for the men. ​

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After a brief respite in the city, the Confederate Army continued its journey north, towards Fort Union, but when they heard distant cannon fire, the people of Santa Fe knew that a battle was taking place in Glorieta Pass, the narrow passage through the Sangre de Cristo mountains that held the Santa Fe trail. Soon, wounded Confederates were limping back into the capitol city.

When Louisa Canby heard that some soldiers were unable to return due to extreme hunger, exhaustion or loss of blood, she drove her carriage along the route, delivering food, water and blankets. Mrs. Canby then hired several farm wagons, which she rigged with tent cloth hammocks to transport the wounded more comfortably. Her home became a hospital; her dining room an operating room where Confederate surgeons dressed wounds and performed amputations on shattered limbs while she herself served as nurse.

She also showed the Confederates where stores of blankets and food had been hidden, greatly alleviating their suffering.

On either April 1 or 2, General Sibley rode up from Albuquerque and thanked Mrs. Canby for caring for his men. It is likely he also reminisced about their earlier encounters when he and her husband had been on the same side. Canby and Sibley had graduated from West Point within a year of each other and had served together in several different posts before the war divided them. Soon after, the rebel troops began retreating southward. The 100 critically wounded left behind remained under the care of Mrs. Canby and the other officer’s wives until the Union army returned and took them in as prisoners of war. It was not a moment too soon: by then, the food stores in Santa Fe had been seriously depleted.
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When some citizens objected to aiding the enemy, Mrs. Canby argued “Whether friend or foe, the wounded must be cared for. They are the sons of some dear mother.” What those citizens, and later detractors would fail to acknowledge was that, by providing aid to the wounded, Mrs. Canby and her group of women prevented the sack of Santa Fe. Its buildings and its people were left unharmed by the Confederate occupation because of her act of mercy. 

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“Whether friend or foe, the wounded must be cared for. They are the sons of some dear mother.” ​

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After the war, Louisa Canby continued to follow her husband to posts in Washington D.C, Louisiana, Delaware, Maryland, Texas, North and South Carolina. and finally, Portland, Oregon, where she continued to work in her community. When he was killed by a Modoc leader named Captain Jack on April 11, she refused to leave her bed for a week. The people of Portland were so grateful and devoted to her that they raised $5,000 as a gift to help supplement her modest widow’s pension. Louisa devoted the last sixteen years of her life to promoting the memory of her husband and his many achievements. When she died, on June 27, 1889 at the age of 70, she was buried beside her husband in Indiana. Her will returned the full $5,000 to the people of Portland. 

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Louisa Hawkins Canby is but one of many historical figures that appears in The Famished Country, the third book in Rebels Along the Rio Grande, Jennifer Bohnhoff's trilogy about the Civil War in New Mexico. Books 1 and 2, Where Duty Calls and The Worst Enemy, are also available in paperback and ebook.