Southwestern Spectres, Sins, And Shadows.

The Tale of the Phantasm Colorado

This is a long tale, so let us begin at the beginning.

Chapter 1 Growing Pains of a Nation

In late 1854 the United States signed the Gadston purchase, in both Mexico City at the Pyramid of the Sun and in the courtyard of Fort Filmore, just 30 short miles from El Paso, Texas in what would later be known as "Old Mesilla", the first capital city of the Western Territories, home to one of the jails that held Billy the Kid and famous for having a stop on the Butterfield Stagecoach line. Named simply "La Posta" because it was one of the most important mail stops in the old west, it is still open and serving guests authentic Mexican food too this very day.

Located on the fertile but fickle muddy banks of the Rio Grande, ideal for growing the finest Egyptian cotton and later the best Chile in world. Ample deposits of gold, pelts and crucial elements to manufacture gun powder had already been discovered in California, leading a steady stream of settlers west seeking their fortunes.

Unfortunately, at the same time, most of the major Indian tribes had been pushed further and further west as white settlers, believing in manifest destiny. They were greedily claiming what had traditionally been the ancestral homes of both Pueblo and Migrant bands of Native Americans. There wasn't a lot farther West they could go, and something had to give, but that's a story for another day....

This led to numerous violent skirmishes between wagon trains and roving bands of Indians fighting desperately for the all-too-scarce resources to survive on. Territorial Governors were desperately beseeching the U.S. government for troups and protection to reach the West safely.

Wagon trains were being wiped out at an alarming frequency and with great brutality. The adults slaughtered and the children. (and sometimes women of childbearing age) Often taken in to bolster the faltering numbers of the once powerful nations.

Attacks so frequent and terrifying that just 12 miles out of Ft. Filmore, a large, imposing Mesa,with an easily defenseble flat top, earned the informal but telling name Massacre Mesa. It has been renamed 5 separate times from the 1800's to now, but the foreboding monicur has endured to this day.

Destroyed wagon trains, their occupant's bleached white bones scattered around burned Calistoga wagons, inter mingled Spanish ingots of gold, worthless to the tribes were still being found semi- regularly over 100 years later in the 1980's Clearly something needed to be done, and quickly as more and more settlers moved West only to find their deaths.

Enter the U.S. Calvary which began establishing forts and reinforcing old Spanish adobe missions, fitting them with large garrisons and stables at record speed. However the Calvary's horses, not being used to such rugged, hot, and dry, territory began to die in early April. Even horses brought in from the hot and humid deep South couldn't adapt to the long, dry days, unforgiving, sharp volcanic rock and complete abscense of shade.

The United States needed a solution and quickly. They were very concerned that the Indian nation's would set aside their differences, band together and push the settlers back East, choking off the essential flow of gold, cattle, and animal pelts. Congress called an emergency session to discuss possible solutions.

A calvary officer, one Major George H. Crossman, renowned for hunting Seminole Indians is largely credited with arguing for the use of camels as a solution. The that the suggestion was at first laughed at or met with bewildered gazes of Congress. Most Americans, if they had known what a camel was all had likely seen them relegated to curiosities at the circus or sketches in a child's book.

It wasn't until two years later when Jefferson Davis was made the Secretary of War, that the idea finally took hold. Congress was addressed by a Henry C. Wayne, a well traveled soldier who spent time in Egypt, began singing the praises of these so called "boats of the desert". He explained how camels could cover vast expanses of land at speeds a horse could only maintain for short distances, could carry the weight of a man and 3 mules and could travel days without a deep watering and wouldn't fonder when they did find water and sustain themselves on the scarce brush of the desert.