The Monsoon and the Raid

I became so engrossed in the maps cited in my last post and in recapping this year’s rainy season that I never quite got around to the point I wanted to make: the key role the 1881 monsoon played in Nana’s Raid.

Having spent more than 70 years living outdoors in the Southwest he needed no calendar to track the seasons. The monsoon traditionally runs from around the Fourth of July to the end of September, and the old fox planned his foray to take advantage of those rains. Filling springs and waterholes otherwise dry during much of the year offered the raiders a much wider selection of watering places for themselves and their stock. The Army had the advantage in manpower but a shortage of horses; by using his infantry to guard water sources, Col. Hatch might hope to thwart the raiders’ progress or even trap them as Col. Grierson had trapped Victorio at Rattlesnake Springs in Texas the previous year. Multiplying the number of water sources scattered across the territory greatly reduced the effectiveness of that tactic.

While the summer storms made the roads and trails more difficult to travel in localized and unpredictable ways, this affected their adversaries far more than the Apaches, who were justly famous for their ability to travel fast over the worst terrain. The Army’s wagons and heavy cavalry horses were more restricted in the routes they could travel, and so more likely to get mired in the muddier low country.

The newly-constructed railroads were particularly vulnerable to the rains as well, although Nana probably did not realize that at the time. The crude trestles bridging the numerous arroyos cutting across the right of way were washed out by local flash floods and as a result Hatch was unable to bring two companies of the 9^th down from Colorado to join in the chase.

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