The Year of Decision 1846, page 49
They started out down the Rio Grande, through hamlets which Kearny had visited on his earlier reconnoissance. On October 2 an express from Santa Fe caught up with them, reporting Price’s arrival and informing Kearny that Lieutenant Colonel Allen, the commander of the Mormon Battalion, had died. He detached Philip St. George Cooke, the Virginia martinet, to command the Battalion, making him a lieutenant colonel. The next day, learning that the Navajo had raided a village only twelve miles from his army, he sent orders to Doniphan to hurry up his Indian campaigns.
What is remarkable in Kearny’s march from here on is only the absence of remarkable events. Good management of expeditions, we are told, forestalls adventures. Kearny was a master of frontier craft and he had his own Dragoons, not only professional soldiers but veterans of the West. His one hard problem was how to maintain them as cavalry.
They passed through the little towns of the Rio Abajo, haggling with natives for food, forage, and horseflesh and holding councils with bands of Apache, the ill-favored suzerains of the region. And on October 6, just out of Socorro, they met Kit Carson, now a lieutenant in the United States Army by appointment of a naval officer. With a small party which included Frémont’s Delawares, Lieutenant Carson was riding hell for leather to carry to Senator Benton, President Polk, and the War Department news of the conquest of California.
Carson had left Los Angeles on September 5 and was trying for a record passage with his news. He described to Kearny the condition of the golden shore when he left it: native generals in flight to Mexico, all ports and principal towns occupied, people pacified and reconciled, Frémont “probably” civil and military governor. Kearny understood that the job set for him had been done by the navy, assisted by his young friend Frémont and resident Americans. He had only to go on, take command of the conquered province, and, as in New Mexico, carry out his orders to establish a government. If this development deprived his Dragoons of their chance for war service, it also simplified his immediate problem. One of the duties negligently given him by Mr. Polk was to locate a wagon road. Even before he met Carson, it had become likely that he would not be able to take the company wagons down this trail. Moreover, the sparse grass and the frightful condition of his mounts made it desirable to reduce the size of the expedition, which Carson’s news had now made safe. Kearny detached three of his companies of Dragoons, combing out their best animals for the remaining two companies, and sent them back to Santa Fe. With them he sent Tom Fitzpatrick, who was still his guide, to carry Carson’s dispatches to Washington. Fitzpatrick was not familiar with the Gila trail, whereas Carson had not only helped to open parts of it years ago but had just traveled it. The honest, outraged Kit, who had not seen his family since joining Frémont in the spring of ’45, contemplated going over the hill by night, but finally obeyed orders and turned back with Kearny.
Carson confirmed Kearny’s judgment that the wagons could be got to California along this route only by months of labor, if at all. So Kearny got packsaddles and sent the wagons back to Santa Fe, ordering Cooke, who was to follow with the Mormons, to locate a wagon road. The Dragoons would pack mules, horses, and even their few oxen. They did, and it was hard on livestock. Presently, Emory wrote, “every animal in camp is covered with patches, scars, and sores made by the packs in the unequal motion caused by the ascent and descent of steep hills.”
They left the Rio Grande and headed for the Gila, keeping mainly to the established trail, the lower and newer of the two by which the Spanish had communicated with California. The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation.
They were on rations hardly half-size by any decent standard. There were enough tents when they started — though there were no tent poles — but some of them could not be packed and the others wore out or tended to be left beside the trail. The animals wore down steadily, could not be recruited, had to be abandoned, had in part to be eaten. It was a march without glory, little more than attendance on a demon-possessed herd through a desert with no end. But the journals of Emory and Johnston and the letters of Turner, by which chiefly the march can be followed, contain little mention of sickness, exhaustion, or even annoyance. The Dragoons were doing a disregarded job authoritatively.
Through October and November they pegged along, not making very good time except in relation to their emaciated mounts and the two howitzers. These were two “light mountain guns” of brass, cumbersomely mounted on small wheels, which were always far to the rear and sometimes had to be taken entirely apart before they could be moved. Mostly they were on, or not far from, the swift, clear Gila. As they approached its great bend they reached a country whose ghosts were Father Kino, the great priest, and the Hohokam, the prehistoric people of whom a shadowy memory has tinged many Indian myths. More to the point were villages of the Pima and Maricopa, jovial, sedentary Indians who had established about the best social adaptation to this country that has so far been worked out. After the Apache and the itinerant Mexicans whom they had met, these people with their irrigated farmlands supplied an emotional lift. They had cantaloupes, watermelons, corn, wheat, honey, any amount of foodstuff, even a couple of bullocks for beef, but no horses to sell. They practised the communism of the desert: asked the price of their cornmeal cakes, they said “Bread is to eat, not to sell, take what you want.” Their sport was bartering, however, with loud laughter for Major Swords, the quartermaster, or for themselves when someone made a bad trade. They found Mr. Bestor’s eyeglasses extremely amusing (he was a topographer), and in fact liked all their white brothers. Captain Johnston summarized the general verdict on their superiority to “the Apaches who bayed at us like their kindred wolves.” Emory decided that they surpassed many of the Christian nations in agriculture, were but little behind them in the useful arts, “and immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue.”
They took the officers to the mysterious ruined dwelling of the Hohokam now known as Casa Grande, and recounted their version of a widespread myth. Myth of rain, genesis, and fertility. A beautiful maiden of the god-people lived in a green valley — a valley of cottonwoods, flowers, and the smell of water — where all men courted her in vain. She was vowed to chastity, and she stored the increase of her lands to be distributed to the valley people when the drouths came. But one day she lay asleep and the clouds passed and a drop of rain fell in her navel. From this conception her son was born, founder of the Ancients … Bear of the West, blue woman of the West, I ask your intercession with the cloud people.
The army lingered for a day or two, trading with these hospitable mystics and letting the herd rest, then moved on. The country got peeled down to naked rock and the jornadas — stretches without water — lengthened. The mules and horses grew more brittle, some of them died on the trail, and the First Dragoons had become infantry who had an added duty of veterinary nursing. So they came out to where the Gila empties into the Colorado. Twenty-one miles to reach that confluence on November 22, a hot day, the cavalry staggering on foot in the torrid dust and General Kearny, his horse exhausted, kicking his spurs into a mule’s flanks. Here they found a recently abandoned camp. There were signs of about a thousand horses and Carson, making a scout, estimated that there had not been time for them to go more than ten miles. The first guess, that this was a party of Indian horse thieves, changed to a guess that it was Castro coming back from Mexico with an army for a campaign against the conquerors of California. Emory made a reconnoissance, found the herd and its proprietors, and brought them in.
They really were Californians but whether they were rebels gathering up horses for their comrades in rebellion has never been determined. But they were accomplished liars and Kearny could make little of their stories. One refrain was consistent, however: there had been fighting in California since Carson left it and something had gone seriously wrong with the American cause. The next day, while Kearny was fitting out his Dragoons with half-wild horses from this herd, Emory made another scout. On the way back he picked up another Mexican, who represented himself to be one more humble horse-herder on peaceful business but turned out to be a courier. He was carrying dispatches from California to Castro and others who, in Sonora, were gathering forces for the maintenance of what the First Dragoons could now get a fairly clear idea of, the reconquest of California.
… For the shooting script of the Rover Boys in the Halls of Montezuma had got impaired. In early October there was a great reception for Commodore Stockton at Yerba Buena, with both the victors and the conciliated making fiesta and that new Californian, Owl Russell, filling the sky with oratory. Stockton also made a speech, a typical one. He had come back to these parts on business connected with his new picture, which involved enlisting a thousand Americans, transporting them to Mazatlán by sea, and thence marching them across the heart of Mexico to join Zachary Taylor, who would probably be waiting just outside Mexico City for him to arrive. (Frémont, recognizing the dreaming of a kindred genius, was out drumming up recruits for this new conquest.) But it now developed that the Army of Hollywood would have to let Taylor conquer Mexico unassisted for a while. Stockton learned that the conquered race had driven the conquerors out of the southern towns and he would have to begin all over and conquer them again. He made a start, between relays of the fiesta banquet, by loosing on the air, in reply to Owl Russell’s flowers, a speech of such gore-thirsty courage that it should have ended the war right there.
What had happened to the southward was simple. The Pueblo of Los Angeles, though populated by greasers whom Stockton knew to be cowardly and baseborn, had got bored with Lieutenant Gillespie’s arrogant ways and had driven him out. Even if Gillespie had used common sense his job would have been hard enough, conciliating both the tough malcontents and the orderly society of the region, who had lost a country in humiliation. But association with stars like Frémont and Stockton had had its effect: Gillespie thought of himself as representing the hochgeboren Anglo-Saxon race. By a series of arbitrary regulations and by the kind of personal strutting now attributed to the bite of the lens-louse, he had contrived to consolidate resentments against him. Surreptitious disorder and sabotage produced some gangs. These coalesced into larger ones and became openly aggressive. There was some armed skirmishing, suddenly a lot of people were in revolt, and Gillespie found his small command besieged. A force of California irregulars under “General” José Maria Flores and others who had been paroled by Stockton offered him battle or evacuation with the honors of war. On October 4 he took his command to San Pedro and embarked them on a merchant ship in the harbor. Los Angeles was Californian again and, in a snow of proclamations, the victors cleaned the American naval army out of Santa Barbara and San Diego as well.
Stockton got busy. He began summoning Frémont, who gave his recruiting assignment a new twist. The emigration had poured down from the Sierra. Frémont got recruits for the California Battalion to the number of three companies of emigrants. Among them were Bryant, Owl Russell of course, Hastings, Hudspeth, and James Frazier Reed. (Offered the captaincy of one company, Reed would accept only a lieutenancy. He had first to make his attempt to take food to his family and, while he headed toward the snow with McCutchen, was also on detached duty, advertising for enlistments.) There were also present in the Sacramento Valley some Wallawalla Indians who had come here on the unfinished business, reparation for murder, that Jim Clyman had tried to settle as their representative a year ago. They nursed their grievance but were patient and it was not till ’47 that the affair boiled over and their Cayuse cousins massacred Marcus Whitman’s mission at Waillatpu. Meanwhile they were willing to spoil the Californians; so they and some of the local Indians joined up with Frémont. No one ever doubted Frémont’s personal courage but as a commander of troops he set a high value on the delayed attack. It took him nearly two months to prepare his little army. He marched it south on November 30 — all the other conquerors had been vociferously calling for him for weeks — and he moved it with a most strategic deliberation. It was not his fortune ever to meet armed opposition in California. He did not reach this war till it also was over. But he was in time to make trouble.
Stockton had sent Captain Mervine with the Savannah to recapture Los Angeles. The force which Mervine landed at San Pedro numbered, with Gillespie’s men who were added to it, about four hundred. Something like a hundred Californian horsemen kept them from Los Angeles, with a small cannon and some homemade powder. Sailors and marines on foot could not compete with the irregular cavalry. They were stalled between Los Angeles and its port when Stockton — still denied the help of Frémont — reached San Pedro on October 27. He was under the same handicap, that there were no horses, but considering that he had at least eight times as many men as the revolutionaries were ever able to get together at any time, it seems odd that he did not take Los Angeles at once.
The navy is not gifted at operations inland, however, and besides, Stockton had Frémont’s gift for multiplying the opposition by twenty-five whenever he calculated his chances. The Californians, who were having a fine time and extending their little revolution throughout the south, practised on him all the hoary tricks of guerrilla deception, and after a few days he re-embarked his expeditionary force and sailed to San Diego. After three weeks on a whaler in the harbor, the American garrison there had perceived that the Californians were not occupying the town and had gone ashore again. Stockton intended to operate against Los Angeles from there but the revolutionaries had swept the countryside clean of horses. He spent November sending out patrols to find some, while the Californians rode about in a boisterous humor, taking long shots at any Americans they saw. Toward the end of the month he got some horses, and a few days later learned of Kearny’s approach.…
On the far side of the California desert, Kearny could not learn the details of this revolt. He could make out only that fighting had begun again and the conquest was in danger, if not already overthrown. He foresaw that he also would have to do some fighting — having sent back to Santa Fe, on receiving word that California was pacified, three fifths of his force. He had about a hundred and twenty-five men. He tried to mount them from the big herd he had intercepted, but the horses were unbroken and unused to desert travel.
On all trails to the West the last stretch was the hardest going. Beyond the Colorado River, which the army forded on November 25, ten miles south of the confluence with the Gila, the California desert began. It was one of the innumerable deserts called Jornada del Muerte by the Spanish, who also referred to the trail across it as the Devil’s Highroad — ample indications. Much of it is below sea level, and a great part of it has been reclaimed by the irrigation projects of the Imperial Valley. The Dragoons tied grass for the first day behind their saddles and got their first water at the end of thirty hours by digging out and deepening an old well. A fifty-four-mile jornada followed and they made it in two days, remarkable time for horses and mules so broken down. Many of the mounts died on that crossing and some were saved only “by one man tugging at the halter and another pushing up the brute by placing his shoulder against its buttocks,” to get them over the last stretch to the spring. They entered a country of cactus and bitter yucca and the weather was stifling. (An army post established here some years later appears to have originated the folk tale of the soldier who, having died and gone to his reward, wired back to the commandant for his blankets.) “The day was hot,” Emory says, “and the sand deep; the animals, inflated with water and rushes, gave way by scores.” He calls it a feast day for the wolves.
As always, human flesh had stood two months of desert travel better than horseflesh. The army was in excellent health and spirits. It was not, however, decently clothed. When Kearny sent the wagons back he had had to leave his meager quartermaster supplies with them. Cactus had ripped the uniforms to shreds and rimrock had done the same for boots. For some time there had been nothing to eat but unseasoned horse. “Meat of horses may be very palatable,” Emory remarks, “but ours are poor and tough.” No wonder that seven of his men ate a sheep at one meal, when they got to the first outpost of decency on the California side, Warner’s ranch.
They reached that oasis, which served the same function for travelers of the southern trail as Sutter’s in the north, on December 2, looking so much like Indians that the ranch crew started the herds precipitately toward the foothills. Warner himself — an American gone Californian in a lavish way — was reported to be a prisoner, and Kearny could learn little from his foreman. A neighboring English rancher named Stokes could tell him that the revolutionaries were in control of the situation and that Kearny was close to some of their forces. Stokes also reported Stockton’s presence at San Diego, and Kearny sent him there with a letter telling of his arrival and asking for information about the state of affairs.
