The Year of Decision 1846, page 56
In a year of decision they had produced a decision. Chihuahua, one of the “Northern Provinces” of Mr. Polk’s concern, had been made secure for the duration. New Mexico was also secure; after Sacramento there would be no revolts like the one at Taos. Since New Mexico was secured, California also was secure. Doniphan’s work buttressed that of Sloat, Stockton, and Kearny, and the pieces of Mr. Polk’s objective in the Far West now made a map. Moreover, the southwestern Indians, the Navajo and the Apache, though far from dissuaded, had at least learned to be cautious. The western end of the Santa Fe trail and the southern route to California suffered no such massacres as the Comanche perpetrated on the eastern portions throughout 1847. Finally, by its mere presence in Chihuahua the First Missouri had turned a balance farther to the east. On February 22 and 23 Taylor’s subalterns won the battle of Buena Vista — but barely won it. It was a bloody battle and the excellent army which Santa Anna had raised lost it by an extremely narrow margin. If Santa Anna could have had the troops which faced Doniphan at Sacramento it is likely that Taylor’s army would have been chased in fragments through the state of Coahuila.
* * *
Susan Magoffin stayed at El Paso in great distress. Only her heavenly Father could protect her now. To the north the Taos revolt had filled the land with danger, and to the south her friends and courtiers in the army had disappeared into a terrifying silence. Susan read her Bible and did little charities for the servants, dressed in her best and dined with the “Dons,” clung to her husband and pretended that she did not see how anxious he was. Day by day worse rumors came out of the south. It seemed certain that Brother James would be executed as a spy, and there was always news that Chihuahua had annihilated the army. In tribulation Susan formed the habit of attending Mass and wondered if this made her an idolatress. The ceremonies seemed to comfort her a little, so she decided that her protestant heart was not corrupted by the images. Suddenly a subdued, arrogant triumph flared across El Paso. It must mean that Doniphan had been defeated. Susan and her husband were now almost certain to be murdered by the mob. Then on March 5, “we were struck with consternation about 12 o’clock today while quietly talking with our friend, Mr. White, Don Ygnacio Rouquia suddenly steped in at the door, with hair somewhat on ends and features ghastly. At once our minds filled with apprehensions lest the dread sentence [of death for James Magoffin] had been passed. Without seating himself and scarcely saying good morning, he took Mr. Magoffin by the hand and led him out of the room in haste and with tears in his eyes told him that ‘he was a Mexican and it pained him to the heart to know that the American army had gained the battle and taken possession of Chihuahua.’” She gave thanks to God, but there was no word from Brother James.
Susan’s alarm about James Magoffin was not justified. Don Santiago had saved his skin — with an expenditure of champagne closely calculated by his old companion, Philip St. George Cooke, at 3392 bottles. Mexican gourmets would not let a good host die, and the officer who got documentary proof of his treason courteously returned it to him. But they would not let him go. When Doniphan neared Chihuahua, they sent Don Santiago on to Durango as one of the consolations of defeat, and he was kept there, angry but still buying champagne, till the war ended.
At Doniphan’s approach, Chihuahua had, however, released other Americans who had been kept in custody for various reasons, including some of the traders who had hurried down the trail from Independence ahead of the army, last May. A group of these, among them Dr. Wislezenus, the romantic scientist, had spent six months under guard at a little silver town named Cosihuirachi. Wislezenus had been dreadfully bored there; the mines were in barrasca, the town was poverty-stricken and rotten with syphilis and “lepra.” He tried to botanize but it was barren country. He observed the natives’ fatalism when the Apache raided their herds and killed the herders, and grinned at their futile, discreet belligerence when they sent posses to ride a safe distance after the marauders. One ranger company, he decided, could clean out the Apache for good, but there wouldn’t be a Mexican ranger company. For months he expected Wool to raise the siege but Wool didn’t come and the doctor stoically heard all American armies obliterated in rumor. The battle of Sacramento freed him from boredom and captivity. He rode to Chihuahua and was shocked by the First Missouri’s rags. Still, “there was some peculiar expression in their eye, meaning that they had seen Brazito and Sacramento and that Mexicans could not frighten them even by tenfold numbers.” He joined up as a surgeon and completed the great march.
* * *
Sacramento and Chihuahua made the high moment of the First Missouri. From then on life was pleasant enough but an anticlimax of garrison duty, drill, abortive expeditions, rumors, rioting, and finally the march to the Rio Grande. They occupied Chihuahua through March till nearly the end of April, while Doniphan tried to get orders from the War Department or any superior officer. He had to protect the traders, who at last opened the commerce they had been anticipating for ten months. (By now the army was fed up with its wards and did not relish guarding them.) He had to negotiate customs arrangements for their protection and otherwise to conduct a civil government on behalf of the native officials. He had to arrange a future for his command, whose enlistment would expire in June, and held repeated councils of war with his officers. They could reach no agreement — whether to join Wool or Taylor, whether to go back the way they had come, whether just to sit here and wait for the government to remember them. Gilpin, still dreaming empires, conceived an idea that this handful of troops could go down El Camino Real to its terminus and take Mexico City for Mr. Polk, whose chosen instrument seemed unable to take it. Some younger officers agreed with him, and, on the showing so far, the First Missouri would probably have undertaken the assignment with confidence.
The troops took their ease in the capital city. It was the biggest city most of them had ever seen, and by far the oldest and richest. A beautiful city too, as the lush spring came on with smoky air and vistas of fruit blossoms. Doniphan could drill them, harass them with guard duty and target practice, and prod their officers to keep them busy, but there was plenty of time. Bullfights, much bloodier cockfights, gaming tables even on the sidewalks, cantinas and willing señoritas everywhere — they knew how conquerors should behave and Doniphan was afraid they would disintegrate. When money got short again (they were still unpaid) they formed an easy habit of taking it where they found it. They conceived a distaste for the wormlike, hairless dogs of the town, tied firecrackers to their tails, and roused many a scared citizen by night with an uproar that seemed to mean pillage but was only the persecution of his pet.
They got the news of Buena Vista and made the town reverberate. At last one of Doniphan’s patrols got through to Wool at Saltillo and came back with orders from Taylor to join him there. The night those orders came, Chihuahua rocked. “Every one to express his joy got drunk. There were hundreds fought and ’twas dangerous for a little fellow to poke about much. A fellow would hit his neighbor a thundering love pat and a fight would ensue, but [they would] soon be friends again. Such a motley crew of drunken men as the courtyard of the fonda presented I suppose never were together before. Some were crabbed and surly, others lively and good-humored; some for peace, others war; some making speeches, others remaining perfectly mute and sullen. This was not confined to the privates but [extended to the] officers of all grades.” The conquerors had caught up with the United States again, on the far side, and intended to tell the world about it.
Some of the traders prepared to stay at Chihuahua, others to go back to Santa Fe, still others to march through the interior with their custodians. Doniphan released his prisoners and discharged his governors, turning the city back to its officials. He got the First Missouri ready to move again. A few farm boys went over the hill to marry their señoritas and make homesteads in this valley. A few señoritas put on breeches and prepared to follow their farm boys. And on April 25, 26, and 28, in various divisions, the army left Chihuahua, heading south and east.
They had a diversified march to make — more jornadas, more mountains, more green valleys. But they were certainly the best marchers in the world by now and though, as always, some sickened and a few died, they put their shoulders into it. Dust, sand, swamps, summer heat, lizards, scorpions, snakes — nothing mattered now that they had turned east. Doniphan laid the gad to them and all their records toppled. As they marched they learned of Scott’s landing at Vera Cruz, the beginning of the campaign that ended the war, and his first inland victory at Cerro Gordo. They foraged liberally but also they chased Apache and Comanche for the natives, Mitchell and the indefatigable Reid riding the flanks in sweeping forays. As they got down into Coahuila they reached country where Taylor’s invasion had raised up guerrillas who harried Americans and Mexicans alike. And one day, “a Mexican courier came to the colonel with news that Canales [a guerrilla chief] had made an attack upon Magoffin’s train of wagons, and that Magoffin and his lady were likely to fall into his hands. A detachment of sixty men under Lieut. Gordon was quickly sent to his relief. They anticipated Canales’ movement.”
(Susan does not even mention this alarm. She has been too exhausted to write in her journal — the attempt to keep up with the marchers was back-breaking and heart-breaking. “Many nights I have layed down not to sleep for my bones ached too much for that, even had I had the time, but to rest an hour or two prior to traveling the remaining and greater portion of the night to get a little ahead of the command.” The Magoffins went to Saltillo with the First Missouri, then said good-bye to it at last and from there on were under the protection of other troops, as Samuel traded toward the Rio Grande. It was an endless anxiety and a long pain. James was reported killed, though at last they knew that he was free. Samuel caught a lowland fever. Susan was ill repeatedly. They moved through the backwash and along the periphery of the war, scared, stubborn, persevering. In August she knew that she was pregnant again and they crawled on through the fetid summer and ended their long journey at Matamoros. There Susan caught yellow fever and a son was born to her while she was sick. The infant died very soon. Brigham Young would have told her that she had come up through much tribulation.)
The army came down to the beautiful oasis of Parras and for the first time encountered a population who had learned to fear and hate American soldiers, a lesson they had taught no one. “Wherever we encamped, in five minutes women and children would roam through the tents to sell different articles, never meeting with insult or injury.” Wool’s and Taylor’s troops had given the natives wholly different emotions, and from now on the Doniphesias would see an ugliness of war that was strange to them. The West Pointers claimed that it was the volunteers’ fault, and it was at least the fault of the volunteer system, which prevented discipline. Also, of course, Taylor did not care to tarnish his candidacy.
Another hitch brought them to Saltillo and on to the battlefield of Buena Vista and the headquarters of General Wool. Doniphan tried to brush and curry them a little but it was no use. Drawing full rations at last, after eleven months, some of them refused soap, explaining that they had no clothes to wash. Doniphan got them into line long enough for Wool, the precisian, to review them, but again it was no use — they gaped and lounged and made remarks. Wool tried to re-enlist them for another year, which showed optimism. Even Meriwether Lewis Clark made comments on the way the War Department had treated them, and when Wool said he would take care of them Clark remembered out loud that they had heard the same story at Fort Leavenworth.
They got a chance to stare at Taylor too, near Monterrey, and found that they loved him and his great-commoner act. They left their sick here — lowlands and tropical weather were cutting them down — and marched on to the Rio Grande. At Cerralvo they saw some Texas Rangers execute a guerrilla who, they felt, was a brave man and entitled to protection as a combatant. The officers had difficulty restraining them from expressing their belief. Thereafter they did not like the “Texians,” though admitting that their habitual cruelties were justified by years of border raids. And as they came into contact with regular army outfits they fervently added their antagonism to the old quarrel. Finally, a few miles from Reynosa, they lost a sergeant to guerrillas and exacted a thorough revenge, in the manner of the Texians.
At Reynosa they had reached navigable water — by marching almost exactly three thousand, five hundred miles from Fort Leavenworth. Here, ending a feat of arms without parallel, they awaited transports in rain, swamps, and muggy heat. They were dirty, they were lousy, they had practically no clothes left, and they acquired a new set of grievances against the war. The government could not send their horses home by boat but would try to drive them overland — and could not transport their outfits. They burned their saddles and blankets and crowded aboard bad transports, to eat weevily hardtack, be seasick, and find themselves with as little drinking water as if they were making another jornada. So they came to New Orleans and down the gangplanks, some of them wearing only greatcoats, some just their drawers, all long-haired and bearded and burned black.
New Orleans, which was near enough to the war to recognize heroes at sight, went wild over them. They fed to repletion on good American food at last, though they were apt to get out their case knives and go for the roasts with both hands. They read newsprint about their adventures and perfected their reminiscences. They got paid, after twelve months — though paid less than they thought they had been promised. In the last week of June, ’47, they were discharged and started home to Missouri.
Missouri outdid New Orleans. St. Louis — where they found friends who had grown rich from the war, as they assuredly had not — broke out its bunting and illuminations and deafened the heroes with as much cannon fire as they had heard at Sacramento. They came off the river steamers and marched through hastily erected arches while the packed streets roared at them. Old Bullion loosed his oratory and Doniphan and his officers got a chance to resume the same art. Skyrockets, Roman candles, transparencies, mottoes, champagne, and good corn liquor — the boys were home from the war.
It was the same when dwindling little squads reached their home towns and the villagers made the most of them. The Ladies’ Aid baked cakes again, who had made their company guidons, and here was Betsy to walk with in the evening. They were heroes in their home town, the newspapers printed their adorned stories, the ecstasy lasted for a while. Then they were just farmers again.
Memory took over. They had made their march, thirty-five hundred miles of it, from Fort Leavenworth to the Rio Grande by way of Santa Fe and the Navajo country, El Paso, Chihuahua, and Buena Vista. As long as they lived, the twelve-months march would splash their past with carmine — prairie grass in the wind, night guard at the wagons, the high breasts of the Spanish Peaks and all New Mexico spread out before them from the Raton, fandangos at Santa Fe, glare ice above the Canyon de Chelly, the hot gladness of the charge at Sacramento, the grizzly that wandered through our camp that night, tongues swollen by the jornadas, Jim dying in the snow, the ammonia stench of the buffalo wallows, the campfires glimmering in a slanting line of rubies all the way up the pass, the señorita who looked in the wagon that day when I was sick and “oh the beauty of the exquisite Spanish word pobrecito when heard from such lips, the sweetest of all sounds.”
They remembered the campfires most of all, though Missouri has not chosen to memorialize them in the murals of its First Mounted Volunteers at Jefferson City. A campfire burns in the submerged memory of the Americans all the way west from Plymouth Beach, and the First Missouri had sat round three hundred and fifty campfires on their way. The fires illuminate the composite memory of the March of the One Thousand — thirty-five hundred miles of prairie, desert, and mountain, the faces of your squad ruddy in that light and some of those faces you would not see again, stories by firelight more memorable than any stories you would hear in Missouri, the ease of stretching out by the flames after the day’s ride, buffalo hump to eat or maybe just charred cakes of cornmeal, and sleeping under the peaks before dawn came up and the heat mirage began to shine.
They too had found the West and left their mark on it, an honorable signature.
XV
Down from the Sierra
SEVENTEEN members of the Donner party had composed “the Forlorn Hope” when it started from the huts at the lake on December 16. Two had turned back during the first day. Stanton had died on December 21, and Antonio, Dolan, Graves, and Lemuel Murphy during the Christmas storm. That left ten of them: Sutter’s Indians, Luis and Salvador; William Eddy, William Foster, and Jay Fosdick; Sarah Murphy Foster, Sarah Graves Fosdick, Harriet Murphy Pike, Mary Ann Graves, and Amanda McCutchen. Eddy was thirty years old, Foster twenty-eight, Fosdick twenty-three. Mrs. McCutchen, whose husband was at Sonoma trying to organize a rescue party, was twenty-four and had left her year-old daughter at the lake. The two Murphy girls, Sarah Foster and the widowed Harriet Pike, were twenty-three and twenty-one, respectively. Harriet had left two children behind her and the Fosters, one. The Fosdicks had no children. Eddy’s three-year-old son and year-old daughter were with his wife Eleanor at the lake.
Their story after leaving what they called “the Camp of Death” must be told briefly. A little strength restored to them, they started off again on December 30. They knew they were off the trail now but the good weather that succeeded the storm held. Furthermore, the snow was crusted hard enough for them sometimes to travel without their crude snowshoes and gradually they got down to where patches of bare ground showed through. “Gradually” is a word: the meaning is men and women who were all but dead falling forward step by step through a white desolation, the risk of tumbling into oblivion disregarded, their minds dim and submerged in terror. Five or six miles a day, a mile or two when the flame burned weaker. Fosdick was almost dead. The dried flesh of their companions was gone. Getting down to country where bare ground was common enough to justify it, they made another meal: they cooked and ate the rawhide of their snowshoes. After that there was nothing to eat. Everyone but Eddy wanted to kill the two Indians. Eddy would not; he told the Indians what was being considered and they silently disappeared.
