The Fourth Regiment was organized in February 1863, with Spruce Baird himself commissioned as Colonel and placed in command of the regiment. Other field officers were Major Edward Riordan and Lt. Colonel Daniel Showalter.27
Lt. Colonel Showalter, who would later command the Fourth Regiment after Baird resigned in early 1864, was a California politician and ardent Southern sympathizer who had been captured and imprisoned by Union authorities in November 1861 while attempting to leave California on his way to join the Confederate army in Texas. Released from his enforced confinement at Fort Yuma after five months, Showalter made a second attempt to defect, this time successfully. Slipping through the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Showalter made his way to Texas, where he took a commission in the Fourth Regiment.28
Baird’s recruiting efforts were never as successful as those of Baylor, and Baird was forced to move his recruiting efforts yet again in early 1863. He set up headquarters near the Pecos River, in far west Texas, and his recruiters signed up draft evaders, deserters, and other riff-raff who had drifted into the no-man’s-land between Confederate Texas and Union-held New Mexico. Naturally, the discipline and quality of the regiment suffered as a result.29
The Fourth Regiment only took to the field in late 1863, due to the slowness with which its ranks were filled. The regiment was not assigned to a specific brigade or division for most of the war, but rather was used as a sort of “mobile reserve” force, to be moved wherever it was needed. And shortly after it took the field, it was apparently divided into two Battalions of five companies each. One of these, under Lt. Colonel Showalter, was ordered to Fort Washita, Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and the other, under Colonel Baird, was sent to Brazoria County, on the Texas Gulf Coast.30
Little is known about the activities of the two battalions prior to December, 1863. In September 1863, while stationed in the Indian Territory, Lt. Colonel Showalter’s Battalion apparently engaged hostile Indians in north Texas, and 30 November 1863 the battalion was ordered to report to Brigadier General H. E. McCullouch at Bonham, Texas. On December 15, 1863, the regiment was ordered to consolidate once again in the region of San Antonio, in response to the threat of a Union sea-borne invasion. The regiment was to serve in a command called “The Cavalry of the West,” under the command of Colonel John Salmon Ford (popularly known as “R.I.P.” Ford due to his habit, when filling out death certificates, of adding the abbreviation “R.I.P.”...for “Rest in Peace”... after the names of those men under his command who had “gone to meet their maker”). However, this consolidation did not apparently happen at that time, because although Baird’s Battalion was apparently with Ford at San Antonio as of February 5, Showalter’s Battalion apparently did not join the rest of the regiment until March 31, 1864.31
Fran Bolton