Distant Bugles, Distant Drums by Flint Whitlock

Author:Flint Whitlock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2006-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. Official Record, 9:647.

2. Nolie Mumey, ed., Bloody Trails along the Rio Grande—A Day-by-Day Diary of Alonzo Ferdinand Ickis (Denver: Old West Publishing, 1958), 33–34.

3. Daniel B. Castello, “Life of Capt. [Richard Charles] Deus,” unpublished manuscript (interview of Captain Deus), undated (Mss Box 205, FF 25 and 26, CHS).

4. Ibid.

5. Over the years, much speculation has centered on the relationship, if any, between Canby and Sibley, particularly regarding the possibility that the two men were somehow related by marriage. Much of this speculation evidently stems from William Whitford’s strange assertion that “the suspicion was entertained that, since . . . [Canby] was a brother-in-law to General Sibley.” William C. Whitford, Colorado Volunteers in the Civil War: The New Mexico Campaign in 1862 (Glorieta, NM: Rio Grande Press, [1906] 1971), 131. Martin H. Hall further relates that Canby had been Sibley’s “classmate at West Point, his best man at his wedding, and the husband of his [Sibley’s] wife’s cousin.” Martin H. Hall, The Confederate Army of New Mexico (Austin: Presidial Press, 1978), 25. The contention that Canby was Sibley’s best man seems spurious at best. As pointed out in Chapter 2, Sibley married Charlotte Kendall, daughter of William Kendall of Massachusetts, on January 8, 1840, at Fort Hamilton, New York. At that time, Canby was stationed in Florida and was the only officer, other than the captain, in his company. It seems beyond the realm of possibility that Canby, then just a second lieutenant stationed in an active war zone, would have been given several weeks leave to attend a wedding hundreds of miles away. It should also be remembered that Canby sat on the board of Sibley’s court-martial in Utah in July 1858. If Canby were related by marriage to Sibley, participating in the court-martial would have been a conflict of interest, and Canby’s ethical standards were too high for him to have allowed such a relationship to go unmentioned. Further, in his biography of Sibley, Jerry D. Thompson states: “Sibley and Canby had come to know one another quite well during the Utah Expedition. Canby had served on Henry’s court-martial and had later commanded Fort Bridger.” Jerry D. Thompson, Henry Hopkins Sibley: Confederate General of the West (Natchitoches: Northwestern Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 178. This is hardly the kind of statement a careful biographer would make if Sibley and Canby had been related by marriage for some eighteen years. Other than official orders while Sibley was serving under Canby at Fort Bridger and in New Mexico, there appears to be no existing correspondence between the two men—odd if the two were somehow related. Perhaps Max L. Heyman in his biography of Canby will finally put the matter to rest: “The present author [i.e., Heyman] has found no evidence to support this assertion of their relationship, which Whitford leaves unsubstantiated. The only way they could have been related is for Sibley to have been married to one of Canby’s sisters, about whom little is known. It is usually claimed, however, that Mrs.

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