James Henry Carleton
James Henry Carleton (December 27, 1814 – January 7, 1873) was an officer in the US Army and a Union general during the American Civil War. Carleton is best known as an Indian fighter in the Southwestern United States.
James Henry Carleton
December 27, 1814
Lubec, Maine
January 7, 1873 (aged 58)
San Antonio, Texas
- United States
- Union
1839–1873
author
Mountain Meadows Massacre[edit]
In May 1859, Maj. Carleton and K Company of the 1st Dragoons out of Fort Tejon, California, were detailed to escort Maj. Henry Prince, a paymaster with government funds, to the Southern Utah Territory. Arriving at Mountain Meadows, the command rendezvoused with the Santa Clara Expedition of the Department of Utah from Camp Floyd under the command of Capt. Ruben Campbell.[2] With orders from Gen. Newman S. Clarke, commander of the Department of California, to bury the victims of the September 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre,[3] the dragoons gathered and buried the remains of 34 in a mass grave.[4]
A crude monument was constructed of rocks, with a cedar cross and an engraved marker. Assistant Surgeon Charles Brewer of the Santa Clara Expedition was in charge of a burial detail that had interred the remains of 39 in three mass graves a few days before the arrival of K Company.[5]
After investigating the incident, Carleton felt his findings were significant enough to deliver as a special report[6] to Maj. W. W. Mackall, Assistant Adjutant-General, U.S.A., San Francisco, California. Carleton concluded that Mormons, some dressed as Indians, and assisted by Paiute tribesmen, had murdered and plundered the possessions of 120 men, women, and children of a California-bound emigrant train.
In 1860 Carleton, with a reinforced 1st Dragoons, Company K, led the Bitter Spring Expedition, which attacked and killed several suspected Paiute raiders along the Los Angeles – Salt Lake Road and Mojave Road.
Later life, literary efforts and death[edit]
After his discharge from the Volunteer Army, Carleton was promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 4th U.S. Cavalry in July 1866.
Carleton wrote several books on the military: The Battle of Buena Vista (1848), Diary of an Excursion to the Ruins of Abo, Quarra, and the Grand Quivira in New Mexico in 1853 (1855) and The Prairie Log Books (posthumous, 1944). Partly on the strength of The Battle of Buena Vista Carleton received an appointment from Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in 1856 to make a study of European cavalry tactics. Carleton did not make the trip abroad himself, but based his report on the observations of Capt. George B. McClellan, recently returned from Europe.
Carleton died January 7, 1873, aged 59, in San Antonio, Texas, serving with the 4th Cavalry Regiment in his permanent rank of lieutenant colonel. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts; his son Henry was later buried beside him.