Editing Kit Carson (section)

=== Rounding up the Mescalero Apaches ===
[[File:James Henry Carleton.jpg|thumb|upright=1|alt=|General James Henry Carleton]]

To confront the Texans, in 1861, Canby had consolidated his available force by pulling in the garrisons from posts built to control the Apache and Navajo Indians. When Canby ordered his troops to abandon Fort Stanton (about eighty miles east of Fort Craig) in August 1861, about two hundred of the approximately five hundred Mescalero Apache Indians were subsisting on rations distributed to them by the army. With those supplies no longer available, some of the nine bands of Mescalero Apache Indians began raiding ranches and communities near their homeland in the Capitan Mountains.

Brigadier General James Carleton, of the First California Volunteer Cavalry, succeeded Canby as military commander of the territory in the fall of 1862. He then sent Carson and five companies of his regiment to occupy and re-build Fort Stanton. Carleton's confidential orders of October 12, 1862 to Carson, in part, read:

"All Indian men of that tribe [Mescalero Apache] are to be killed whenever and wherever you find them: the 
women and children will not be harmed, but you will take them prisoners and feed them at Fort Stanton..."<ref>Carleton to Carson, in: {{cite book |last1=Kelly |first1=Lawrence C. |title=Navajo Roundup: Selected Correspondence of Kit Carson's Expedition against the Navajo, 1863-1865 |date=1970|publisher=The Pruett Publishing Company |location=Boulder, Colorado|isbn=0-87108-042-7|page=11}}</ref>

Carleton felt that "this severity in the long run will be the most humane course that could be pursued toward these Indians." He intended to re-settle the Mescalero Apache Indians from their traditional lands in the Capitan Mountains to a reservation along the Pecos River at Bosque Redondo, near present-day Fort Sumner. In Carleton's vision, the government would teach the hunting-and-gathering Mescalero bands the arts of agriculture, thereby keeping them from marauding outside the reservation.

Before Carson arrived at Fort Stanton, Company H, commanded by Captain James Graydon, encountered a band of about thirty Mescalero Apache Indians under chiefs Manuelito and Jose Largo at Gallinas Springs on October 20, 1862. According to Major Arthur Morrison, Graydon "deceived" the Indians by offering them provisions and then shot and killed the two chiefs and nine others and wounded another twenty. Carson's inquiry into the matter came to naught when Graydon, months later, died of a wound received in a duel.

However, the shock of these killings, along with the fight between two companies of the First California Volunteer Cavalry from Fort Fillmore and a band of Apaches in Dog Canyon near Alamogordo, induced most of the surviving Mescalero chiefs to surrender to Carson. By March 1863, the army had settled the few hundred surviving Mescalero Apache Indians on Bosque Redondo near the newly built Fort Sumner. Perhaps a hundred of the Mescalero Apache Indians, such as the band led by Santana, either fled to Mexico or joined other Apache tribes to the west.