Cecilio and Juan Valerio fought for North in the Civil War

 

Palo Alto was home to the Valerio clan before the Civil War.

(A few days ago, someone posted on Somos De Duval about her ancestor Cecilio Valerio. Many members took an interest, so I thought I would share an excerpt from my upcoming book on the nineteenth-century history of Duval County.)

Tejanos Serving with Blue Coats

In 1863, Cecilio Valerio was among thirty-five Mexicanos and Tejanos fighting with the Union Army under Captain James Speed’s command. In December, Speed’s men raided the King Ranch on the Santa Gertrudes, killed one Francisco Alvarado, and scattered all the horses at the ranch.

Afterward, Valerio, who had a large herd of horses before the War, led a cavalry company of 126 men, including his son Juan. The company mainly targeted the Confederate cotton trade along the border but occasionally waged guerrilla warfare against the Nueces Strip’s Rebels. In addition, as a Union officer, Cecilio Valerio coordinated with the Union Army on the Río Grande border and the Union Navy (Thompson, A Wild and Vivid Land, 111).

Rebel Operations in Duval County Area

Meanwhile, the Rebels established several installations in the area. Camp Patterson was a Rebel operations headquarters on the San Fernando Creek west of present-day Driscoll in Nueces County. They also had plans to “establish a depot and shops at San Diego,” where the Confederates planned to store twenty days of rations for 2,000 men. The rebels also maintained a camp at Barroneño in western Duval County under Lt. Col. Daniel Showalter (John Salmon Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, 359; United States, War Department, and Scott, The War of the Rebellion, 1985, 26:1033, 1106, 13120.

In January 1864, Confederate Col. John “Rip” Ford, the Río Grande Military District commander, devised a strategy to retake Brownsville from Union forces. Ford’s plan called for the Confederate troops to muster at Fort Merrill, on the Nueces River banks, in southeastern Live Oak County. Then, they were to head to San Diego, La Sal del Rey in north-central Hidalgo County, and Brownsville (Thompson, Vaqueros in Blue & Gray, 102).

Rebel Col. Santos Benavides, based in Laredo, advised Ford that going through San Diego was not advisable. Such a trip would render their mounts unserviceable and disable them for active operations. Ford received a similar cautionary note from Major L. M. Rogers. “You cannot imagine how desolate, barren, and desert-like this country is,” Rogers wrote to Ford.

No vegetation was available for the horses to forage because the area had been under a severe drought. Riders saw “bones of hundreds of livestock piled up in dry water holes” (Thompson, 102; Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, 347–48). Ford took their advice and decided to march to the Río Grande from San Antonio to Fort Ewell in La Salle County, further upriver from Fort Merrill Thompson, (Vaqueros in Blue & Gray, 103).

First, however, Ford took his troops down the Nueces River to Camp Patterson in Nueces County between present-day Discoll and Alice, arriving in late March. Capt. Nolan brought the colonel up to date on recent activities.

Nolan’s unit, consisting of sixty-two soldiers, had engaged the enemy at Los Patricios within the San Francisco land grant in Duval County. The battlefield straddled the Duval and Nueces County (now Jim Wells County) boundary line. The captain claimed to have “routed” a Union force of 125 men under Cecilio Valerio’s command in a “fierce” battle that lasted fifteen minutes. Valerio’s men, Nolan said, were armed with Burnsides, revolvers, and sabers. Cecilio Valerio’s son, Juan, commanded part of the Union troops, consisting of eighty men. While Nolan claimed to have done short shrift of the enemy, he conceded to Col. Ford that the Union band had fought “gallantly” with the “fierce battle costing much blood and loss of property” (Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, 353–54; Thompson, A Wild and Vivid Land, 111).

The battle had proved indecisive, so the Valerio company moved on to Laredo. On their way, it raided a ranch ten miles south of San Diego and drove off sixty cattle belonging to the King Ranch. In addition, they hung one of the ranch’s vaqueros named Lucas. Perhaps it was 1st Cpl. Lucas García, a fifty-eight-year-old Banquete man, serving with the Texas State Troopers in San Diego (Thompson, Vaqueros in Blue & Gray, 28, 56–57, 102–3, 130–32; Grear, Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, 96; Thompson, A Wild and Vivid Land, 111; Scott, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 34, 1, 11, 1106; Scott, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 48, 1, 1, 1312; Thompson, Mexican Texans in the Union Army, 22, 26, 36; Marten, Texas Divided Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874, 123; Menchaca, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants, 42; Thompson, Sabers on the Río Grande, 208, 210; Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, 347–348, 350, 353–554, 359, 636–639).

After the war, the Valerios settled at La Rosita in Duval County.

After the War, Cecilio Valerio went to La Rosita in Duval County to raise horses. Valerio family folklore tells of Indians kidnapping Cecilio as a young boy and holding the lad captive for several years before escaping. Before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Valerio clan lived at El Palo Alto close to Driscoll in Nueces County and in Camp Patterson’s vicinity. Valerio was a successful rancher with a herd of 400 horses and mules and the admiration of newly arrived Americano neighbors. However, during the breakout of hostilities, Valerio likely lost his herd to the Rebel War effort, which may have prompted him to join the North in the War. 

In his final years, Valerio returned to Camargo, where he died. Valerio’s thirty-six-year-old son Juan remained in La Rosita, supporting a family by hauling wool from San Diego to Corpus Christi (Jerry D. Thompson, Mexican Texans in the Union Army, 1st ed, Southwestern Studies, no. 78 (El Paso, Tex: Texas Western Press, 1986), 36; Miguel A. González-Quiroga, War and Peace on the Río Grande Frontier, 1830-1880, New Directions in Tejano History, volume 1 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 1570).

[Postscript: The Valerio clan remains in La Rosita. Until recently, Rene Valerio, my friend and classmate, served on the San Diego ISD school board. Up to the 1960s Felipe and Juanita Valerion, parents of another friend and classmate Mario Valerio, served as Duval County Commissioner.)