James H. Carleton to Joseph R. West, September 9, 1862

Col. JOSEPH R. WEST, Commanding District of Arizona, Mesilla, Ariz. :

COLONEL: Captain Archer, commissary of subsistence at this post, informs me that he sent $5,000 subsistence funds to Lieutenant Baldwin at the time the Confederate prisoners went below a few days since. This must be transferred to your depot commissary or be disbursed under your direction. He informs me that he can send, on your estimate (dated September 1, 1862) for $19,986.66, $10,000 in drafts on the assistant treasurer in New York. The remainder will be sent to you as soon as Captain Garrison gives him further authority to make additional drafts. I have placed in his hands your estimates for stores, for expenditures, veterinary tools, and horse medicines, carpenters’ tools, stationery, miscellaneous tools, and for blank forms, and asked him to fill them as far as he can and send them on to me, to be completed at other depots when Veck comes up. The articles from Fort Craig will be sent down on the train which came up with me.

Your arrangement about sending Swilling as an expressman is a good one, and I have given Colonel Steen a memorandum of it, and will endeavor to have the time so fixed for other expressmen that there will be no delay in the transmittal of letters up and down the river. Please give Azbon C. Marcy, who took the oath of allegiance to Colonel Eyre, a free pass to California. I inclose herewith a list of the quartermaster’s property on hand at this post. I have asked Captain Archer to send one also of the subsistence stores, which will embrace many things received to-day.

Whatever you want to make your command efficient you shall have. Only bear in mind not to get a thing you do not need. I wish to accumulate but little of public stores below the Jornada.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,