Trying To Blow Up A Confederate Camp With Exploding Donkeys
War has always been a place of bold innovation and wild gambles, but every now and then, a plan comes along that is so truly bizarre, it sounds more like a joke than an actual military strategy.
In 1862, during the early days of the American Civil War, one Union officer came up with an idea that was as daring as it was unconventional.
It involved a nighttime operation, a group of unsuspecting mules, and a whole ton of explosives.
In todays episode we’ll see just how, as with many ambitious war plans, things don’t always go quite as expected.
James “Paddy” Graydon was born in 1832 in a remote village in the Irish countryside. As a teenager, he and his family emigrated to America with the hope of finding work, and the promise of a better life.
Things would, unfortunately, not go exactly to plan in this regard, and so at the age of 21, struggling as he was just to survive, he joined up with the U.S. Army.
He found himself a natural fit in this new environment and soon had been elevated to the army’s elite 1st dragoons unit in early 1853.
For years he moved around different forts and stations all across the American west and in 1858, at just 26 years of age, he was already considered a seasoned veteran of the frontier campaigns.
Even for someone so young, he commanded a lot of respect from those around him, owing in large part to his exploits on the battlefield. In campaigns against the Apaches, Navajos and even the odd outlaw raid his men came to know him as both fearless and reliable. But while he may have been those two things, the men who knew him were also quick to add that he had an ego big enough to match. He was described in multiple sources as being arrogant, a braggart, and an unstoppable daredevil. And yet ask any of them, and they would all say that they revered him.
Paddy however, decided that he’d grown weary of the military life and so decided to pack up his things and use the little money he had earned to settle down in a little town near Fort Buchanan in Arizona. There, he would open his own hotel and saloon. His establishment became rather popular and if you’ve seen any kind of wild west movie, it was pretty much exactly like one of those. Rooms upstairs, bar downstairs, 24 hour poker games, horse stables and a gin distillery out the back, not to mention the affordable company of the women in his employ. Gunfights were a regular occurrence and full tavern brawls happened about once a week, but the money was good and the living was easy.
Paddy was still well known in the area as a man who could handle himself in a fight and was someone you could count on to get the job done. So naturally, local law enforcement would often come to him, looking for assistance rounding up horse thieves and murderers, while also accompanying them in running down Native American raiding parties and rescuing hostages.
These escapades kept him sharp and so after just 3 years of this new life it was maybe no surprise that Paddy began contemplating a return to action.
And he wouldn’t have to wait long. On the 12th of April 1861, the American Civil War broke out, and Paddy knew he didn’t want to miss out. He left his hotel and saloon in the care of someone else and immediately set out for New Mexico to offer his services to the Union Army.
Owing to his elite experience mixed with his tracking and special operations work in the intervening years, he was commissioned to recruit 100 of the hardest men he could find and with them create a specialist company of spies who would work under his command alone, virtually independent from the Union Army command structures.
Now at the same time as all of this was happening, Confederate forces in Texas were beginning to mobilise their own forces. For many years they had claimed large swathes of New Mexico as their own but up until the war broke out, had no official means by which to claim it.
Now, unconstrained by the compromise of 1850, these confederate Texans marched into Southeastern New Mexico in July 1861, claiming it for themselves. Over the next six months more and more confederate forces began to join them until in February 1862 a Confederate Brigadier General by the name of Henry Hopkins Sibley decided the time had come to mobilise. He led 2500 of these men, calling themselves the Army of New Mexico, in a broad reaching campaign to not only overrun and claim the rest of the New Mexico territories, but to eventually push all the way to the Colorado Gold Fields and establish a fort there for themselves.
Standing in his way however, was a group of 1250 US army soldiers and a hastily assembled group of 1350 regional militia who had joined forces under the command of Colonel ERS Canby.
Canby’s troops had stationed themselves at Fort Craig in South-Central New Mexico and awaited the advance of Sibley's confederate troops. They wouldn’t have to wait long as by the 16th of February the Texan army had pushed to within just a mile of the Fort.
Sibley sent out some scouts who reported back to him that there was no way they’d be able to take the fort as it was too well fortified and they were outnumbered anyway.
Sibley determined to push on first sent a messenger to Canby, demanding that they come out and face his army on the open plains outside the fort. As I’m sure you would have too, Canby sent the messenger back with the 1862 equivalent of “lol, no thanks.”
Sibley, knowing his options were limited, decided that they would simply retreat south some seven miles and cross over there back to the east bank of the Rio Grande. They would then turn northwards again, effectively bypassing Fort Craig, going a further 6 miles past them, and then cross the river once again in order to carry on with their campaign without the fort being in their way. I hope that all made sense, and if not I’ll be putting up a map explaining their movements across my social media channels if you’d like to check that out.
But Sibley had miscalculated how long it would take his troops to march the long return journey north to the crossing point at Valverde Ford. He had not accounted for the deep sand and rough terrain that they were set to encounter and so on the evening of February 20th, they were forced to make a dry camp for the night.
Paddy Graydon and his spies had by this point managed to infiltrate some of their covert unit into the confederate ranks, and had been monitoring and assessing their movements, sending regular reports back to Canby at Fort Craig.
It wasn’t long before Canby received word that the Confederates had had to make an unplanned camp that night, and had not had adequate time to set up proper battlements to protect them from attack. Canby, realising that this was an opportunity too good to pass up, began to mull over his options.
They didn’t have enough time to get thousands of his men across the river and to their encampment in order to ambush them, but maybe Paddy and his men could come up with a plan to sabotage them in some way.
Paddy didn’t need to be asked twice.
While he didn’t have the numbers for an all out attack, he did have enough experience and cunning to come up with a truly outlandish plan.
Paddy gathered up a few of his men and informed them of his plan. They were going to send some guided missiles into the confederate camp.
Look, sure he probably didn’t use that exact terminology as they wouldn’t be invented for a long time still, but in theory that's exactly what his plan was, send a self-propelled explosive device towards an enemys position.
The only difference was, in this case, that the self-propelled mechanism of choice were two of his unit's oldest donkeys.
He got to work immediately finding large wooden boxes and a few empty 24 pounder howitzer artillery shells. He poured gunpowder into each of these empty shells, filling them to the brim and then placing them inside the wooden boxes. Fuses were set into each shell and tied together by a single longer timer fuse that would be lit beforehand. Two boxes, each one filled with a few packed artillery shells were tied loosely together with rope. Once they had been securely fastened with some slack in the middle the boxes were lifted up and over the donkeys back, with one box resting on either side of the poor animals flanks, essentially appearing as if the donkey had two incredibly dangerous saddlebags.
The donkeys in question, if it helps in any small way, were chosen specifically because of their old age and depleted usefulness to the unit as they were becoming slower and weaker in general. Paddy saw it as one last grand hurrah for them, and a way to give their lives for the greater good.
As the darkness of the night grew ever deeper, Paddy, his men and their two homing missiles, waited just out of sight of the confederate camp. At some point, once it seemed like all but the guards on watch duty had finally gone to sleep that night, Paddy signalled to his men that it was go time.
Paddy and four of his men set out for the confederate camp. He led quietly in front, with two men assigned to each donkey, one on each side of it to make sure the wooden boxes full of explosives didn’t come loose or jostle around too much.
They would very slowly, in part to accommodate the elderly donkeys, but also to make sure they weren’t seen or heard in their approach. Once they reached a certain point, Paddy held up his hand, signalling his men to stop. This was it.
Quietly, and making sure to have his back turned to the confederate watchmen, he lit a match and slowly touched it to the long fuses dangling from the wooden saddlebags. Once they had all been lit, he gave the two donkeys one last pat on the nose and then slapped them on the backsides and pointed them in the direction of the camp.
The theory was that they would be drawn to the lights, fires and cooking smells and plod their way towards it.
Unfortunately for Paddy and his men, this theory turned out to be false.
As he and his men scurried as quietly as they could back up the track, they paused behind a rock to catch their breath and laugh about the sheer absurdity of their plan. All of a sudden his men froze as they heard footsteps approaching from around the corner. Paddy leant out carefully to inspect who was approaching and to his horror he was met with 2 large smiling faces, and the faint hissing sound of fuses slowly making their way towards an enormous payload.
It seems that no-one had mentioned the plan to the donkeys, and they had simply followed their friends back they way they had come.
Paddy wasn’t sure how long exactly the timer fuses had left and so in a panic he and his men set out into a full sprint down the path. The donkeys, obviously thinking it was all great fun and games, summoned whatever energy they had left in their legs and began to gallop behind the fleeing men.
Paddy shouted at the donkeys, telling them to stop or turn around, but it was either his thick Irish accent, or the fact that neither of the donkeys could speak English, but they seemed to completely ignore him.
With time running out, he shouted at his 4 men to split up and run in all different directions, and maybe the donkeys would get confused and stop. In a flash all 5 men split from one another praying that if the donkeys did end up following, that it wouldn’t be after them.
This seemed to do the trick as the donkeys slowed down, trying to work out for themselves which of the men they most wanted to follow.
Unfortunately for them, they would never get the chance to find out.
An almighty boom erupted from the place where just a second ago two donkeys had stood. The force of the blast knocked each of the men to the ground as they continued running, but luckily for them they had all made it far enough away so as not to have suffered any injuries.
As small bits of charred donkey rained down upon him, Paddy reflected on what in theory had been an amazing plan.
But despite appearances the operation was not at all a total failure. Unbeknownst to Paddy and his men the sound of the explosion had rang out so loudly amongst the surrounding hills that it had not only woken up the Confederate troops, all rushing out of their tents expecting to see an approaching army, but it had in fact spooked their own herd of pack donkeys so badly that they all stampeded through the camp and down towards the river.
150 of these terrified animals just so happened to run directly towards another group of union soldiers who gratefully rounded them up and swiftly led them across the river towards the safety of Canby’s fort.
So while no casualties had been inflicted, besides the two poor donkeys, what the operation had achieved was a severe hampering of the Confederate Army’s ability to move their equipment and supply wagons, making their northward advance even slower than it had already become.
So, in the wild, unpredictable chaos of war, sometimes even failure has unexpected benefits. It's a perfect example of how, in war, even the most absurd blunders can shape the course of battle in ways no one could have predicted.
SOURCES
DesertUSA. "Paddy Graydon: The Man Who Strapped Bombs to Mules." DesertUSA. https://www.desertusa.com/desert-people/paddy-graydon.html.
Wikipedia. "Battle of Valverde." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Valverde.
New Mexico Geological Society. "Battle of Valverde." Guidebook 34 (1983): 85-88. https://nmgs.nmt.edu/publications/guidebooks/downloads/34/34_p0085_p0088.pdf.
U.S. Army. "Mule Bombs at Valverde." Army.mil. https://www.army.mil/article/16624/mule_bombs_at_valverde.
Cody Polston. "The Battle of Valverde." Cody Polston’s Website. https://www.codypolston.com/the-battle-of-valverde/.
