* Because they were closer and had more direct transportation to the scene of the action; many of these men were members of so-called state militias, which corresponded roughly to today’s National Guard.
† Although General George McClellan’s open hostility to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War runs perhaps a close second, Scott’s outburst in fact may have been the most insubordinate act by an American military chief until Douglas MacArthur’s contemptuous behavior toward President Harry Truman during the Korean conflict.
‡ The illustrious 1940 film Santa Fe Trail, for instance, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Ronald Reagan, has little to do with the Santa Fe Trail, other than a brief reference to abolitionist John Brown’s activities in Kansas. But the arbitrary use of the name as a title for the picture is an indication of just how famous the trail had become.
§ These the ancestors of today’s renowned Missouri mule, which is the envy of mule men—such of them as remain—everywhere.
‖ Alas, even by the 1840s some of the more “civilized” Indian tribes were complaining that the Cheyenne were killing off buffalo for their hides at such a rate as to litter the prairies with heaps of rotting meat, dangerously depleting the herds.
a In fact the trail split near the southern Colorado border; one route, known as the Cimarron Cutoff, was nearly a hundred miles shorter but it crossed a desert, while the other was longer as it crossed many streams and rivers.
b Bernard De Voto was a brilliant, if eccentric, scholar of western history, who will be cited from time to time in this story.
c Some historians refer to this as “presentism.”
d These would have been single-shot percussion cap pistols.
e Most of these freight wagons were known as Conestoga wagons, which had been introduced some one hundred years earlier by German Mennonites in the Conestoga Valley near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They were from sixteen to twenty-one feet long and four feet wide (to fit on bridges and ferries) and had long bows like a boat—thus the name “prairie schooner.”
f Emory blamed the horses’ deaths on the switch from a grain-fed diet to grass, which he said caused them to become “very weak.” However, he might also have considered the extra strain on a horse’s heart, unaccustomed to such exertions at that altitude.
g On such long marches the army supplied a limited amount of food that could be carried—usually salt pork and flour for bread and biscuits—as well as herds of beef cattle, but when these were consumed the soldiers were expected to forage for meat, water, and whatever fruits and vegetables they might stumble on. Buffalo would have been a godsend.
h From nineteenth-century photos it appears that Pawnee Rock has been dramatically altered, probably by a combination of erosion and human tinkering. Today the Rock is far less precipitous and craggy, as if someone had worked it over with earthmoving equipment. A large stone monument placed there in the early part of the twentieth century was toppled by a storm and remade shorter.
CHAPTER SIX
The Santa Fe Trail
About six weeks after departing Fort Leavenworth, following blazes, old ruts, abandoned vehicles, the bones of livestock, and other markings along the Santa Fe Trail, leading elements of the caravan reached Bent’s Fort, an imposing stockade that reared up out of the Rocky Mountain foothills like a great medieval citadel. Built in the previous decade as a trading station by three wealthy fur traders—the Bent brothers, Charles and William, and Ceran St. Vrain—the fort was the lone outpost of western civilization along the thousand miles of trail between Missouri and New Mexico.
The establishment was located in a nook on the headwaters of the Arkansas River, on ground nearly a mile high, where travelers could view the snowcapped 14,000-foot eminence of Pike’s Peak, about eighty miles to the northwest, where behind it rose “the dim outline of the great spine of the Rocky Mountain chain.”*
The post’s accommodations were spartan but positively elegant compared with what the voyageurs had been through on the trail. The main enclosure, several hundred feet square, was built of adobe, or sun-cured bricks, about four times larger than common bricks, with walls six feet thick and fifteen feet high, guarded at opposite ends by two large round bastions upon which lookouts were posted round-the-clock to spot for Indian trouble. The entrance was protected with stout gates and, like the Alamo, there was no back door. The walls were built with loopholes for shooting and there was also a small cannon for defense. To discourage sneak attacks, the tops of the walls were planted with cacti, precursor to modern-day razor wire.
Outside was a corral for horses, mules, and oxen, which could be herded in at night or in case of danger, and beside the river was an icehouse for the storage of meat, perishables, and the luxury of ice in the often scorching summer heat. Inside the hollow square of the fort were a blacksmith’s, barber’s, tailor’s, and carpentry shops, a kitchen, dining hall, armory, storeroom, an all-important trading room, and numerous private “apartments” or hotel rooms, with packed-earth floors, rude beds and mattresses, and a few bathtubs. The second floor contained a saloon with billiard tables and outside there was also a racetrack and cockfighting ring, everything—or almost everything—a jaded mountain man might want.
Susan Magoffin had been a tremendously good sport through all the hardships of the trail, even though for the past few days she had been unwell with problems associated with her pregnancy, which was entering its third term. Various “doctors” had prescribed so-called medicines for her, some of which seemed to help temporarily, but she, above all, understood that “mine is a case to be treated gently, and slowly, a complication of diseases. The idea of being sick on the Plains is not at all pleasant to me; it is rather terrifying.”
Thus it is easy to tell from her diary how relieved she was to get off the plains and into the comparative refinement of Bent’s Fort. “The outside exactly fills my idea of an ancient castle,” she wrote. “There is but one entrance, and that is to the east.
“Our room has a dirt floor, which I keep sprinkling constantly,” she wrote. “We have two windows looking out on the plain. We have our own furniture and we eat in our own room.† It is like keeping house regularly.” With her husband off periodically to see to the wagon train, Susan made friends with one of the dragoons, a Captain Benjamin Moore, also of Kentucky, who it turned out seems to have been a somewhat distant kinfolk. “Both yesterday and this evening,” she said, “we have taken a little walk up the River, such as we used to take last winter in N.Y., from Spring Street to Wall Street.”
But amid this tide of youthful enthusiasm there encroached too soon a terrible undertow of sadness.
On Thursday, July 30, Susan wrote, “Well, this is my nineteenth birthday! And what? I feel rather strange, not surprised at its coming, nor to think that I am growing rather older … but this is it—I am sick!”
As she lay there, day after day, with “strange sensations in my hips, my head, my back,” unable to rise, she all the while took time to set down in her diary the noises she heard through her window, “the shoeing of horses, neighing, and braying of mules, crying of children, scolding and fighting of men,” their own servants, “gambling off their own cloths till some of them are next to nudity,” and coming to her husband for loans, and “the arrival of a warrior band of Arapaho Indians.” All this for a solid week she dutifully recorded, until on August 6, 1846—she deliberately fixes the date and the year—“the mysteries of a new world have been shown me since last Thursday. In a few short months I should have been a happy mother and made the heart of a father glad, but the ruling hand of a mighty Providence has interposed.”
Susan’s baby had had to be aborted or she would have died as well. Throughout the ordeal she clung to her faith like a bat to a cliff—“To come unto Him when our burden is grievous and heavy to be borne”; that’s how she got through it, but it was a cruel experience for a girl who’d just turned nineteen on the Santa Fe Trail.
Captain Philip St. George C
ooke was a slim, six-foot-four-inch, thirty-seven-year-old Virginia gentleman who had graduated from West Point a decade earlier and spent most of his time on the frontier. When Cooke’s troop of First Dragoons arrived at Bent’s Fort, he was surprised to be summoned immediately into the presence of Kearny, who informed him that he was being detached and sent on a secret mission.
Under cover of a white flag of truce, Kearny told him, Cooke was to organize a detail and proceed to Santa Fe, escorting two men to the Mexican territorial governor, General Manuel Armijo, the corrupt, greedy functionary who presided over the province. The purpose of their mission, Kearny told him vaguely, was to “plant an olive branch” with the Mexican comandante, in hopes of securing a peaceful conquest of the territory. The two men whom Cooke was to accompany were one Señor Gonzáles, of Chihuahua, and James Magoffin, the longtime Santa Fe trader and Susan Magoffin’s brother-in-law. At play here were those “important services” previously alluded to by Secretary of War Marcy in the letter of introduction he gave to Magoffin.
Cooke’s journey, for which he picked a dozen of the best cavalrymen from his troop, as well as the two “emissaries,” took several weeks to reach Santa Fe, passing through some smaller Mexican villages as he neared the capital, which of course gave General Armijo fair warning of his coming. The closer to Santa Fe they got, the more spectacular was the mountain terrain, as Cooke describes in his memoirs: “The scenery of my piedmont route—from Raton [pass] to Santa Fe—is greatly improved; wooded hills, many bright streams, some natural parks. The buffalo grass under the stately pines and cedars looked fresh swept and washed; the air was exhilarating, but the charm over all was the almost dazzling sky.”
Like so many men of his class in those times Cooke was an accomplished writer, as well as a scientist, linguist, equestrian, and cold-blooded killer when necessary. He often sprinkled his prose with Dickensian references and other contemporary allusions, and as they approached Santa Fe many of his sentences seem to have been written with a wink and a smile.
“I was struck on the road, with the number of people passing, and their lively mood. We fell in with one very merry party; chiefly the family of an old man, as lively as a monkey, and not much larger; perhaps it was a wedding party—a very pretty girl rode on an ass …”
Also along the route they would frequently spot large detachments of Mexican cavalry, which appeared to be watching them in a quasi-threatening manner. And when they finally reached Santa Fe his entrance was blocked by a fierce-looking guard of horsemen, “who howled out their ‘alarm’ with so hideous intonation that I mistook it for a menace.”
For the first time, Cooke took out his white handkerchief and placed it on the point of his saber (a gesture he leads us to understand was distasteful for him), whereupon the commander of the Mexican guard escorted the party into the town plaza in which, “thousands of soldiers and countrymen called out en masse to meet our army [meaning his party].”
They were ushered into the governor’s “palace,” which Cooke described as a “large and lofty apartment with a carpeted earth floor,” in which they found General Armijo “seated at a table, with six or eight military or civilian officials standing.”
“There was no mistaking the governor,” Cooke said. “He was a large man.” In fact, he was once described by the English traveler George F. A. Ruxton as “a mountain of fat”! A former sheep thief and grafter, Armijo had risen to become alcalde (mayor), and then customs collector, before being appointed governor-general of the province. The governor, Cooke said, “wore a blue frock coat, with a rolling collar and a general’s shoulder straps, blue striped trowsers with gold lace, and a red sash.”
Cooke informed Armijo that he had a letter from General Kearny to give him “at his convenience,” and upon its delivery Cooke was given more or less the run of the town, as well as sleeping quarters, while Messrs. Magoffin and Gonzáles conversed in private, late into the night, with their longtime acquaintance—if not longtime friend—Governor Armijo, presumably dispatching their aforesaid “important services.”
If any American was equipped to treat with Armijo it was James Magoffin, who, unlike his brother—Susan’s husband, Sam—had gone to Mexico in 1828, after college, and lived there for nearly two decades, marrying into a wealthy and influential Mexican family. James Magoffin was active in Mexico as a trader and had held U.S. consul posts in two towns, including Magoffinville, which is present-day El Paso.
Tall and handsome, Magoffin was known to be charming, well mannered, an excellent host, and a stimulating conversationalist, fluent in Spanish and French. And if that was not enough, Magoffin was a frequent visitor in Santa Fe and enjoyed good relations not only with Armijo but with his regular army commander Colonel Diego Archuleta.
Kearny had made no bones about his intentions in the letter Cooke delivered to Armijo. The general informed the Mexican governor that while he came “as a friend,” his intention was “to take possession of the country over which you are now presiding.” This, Kearny said, he hoped could be done peaceably, but if not, “I have more troops than I need to overcome any opposition you may be able to make against us.” Advising Armijo to “submit to your fate,” Kearny warned the Mexican that “the blood which may be shed, the sufferings and miseries that may follow [armed resistance] shall fall upon your head, and instead of the blessings of your countrymen you will receive their curses.”
Next day, “soon after the sun rose,” Cooke’s party took its leave of Santa Fe, but not before the captain was feted by General Armijo with a morning breakfast of chocolates [“Chocolates such as only Spanish and Mexicans can make—served on a silver tray—it is an article of my culinary creed!”] and a promise from Armijo that upon the morrow he would march out of Santa Fe “with six thousand men” to meet General Kearny on the field of battle.
Exactly what had transpired between Armijo, Magoffin, and Don Gonzáles is, like the question of Lieutenant Gillespie’s alleged instructions from Polk to Frémont, shrouded in the fog of history-without-documentation. We shall meet the issue head-on farther along in the story, but in point of fact Armijo did turn out, presently, with his six thousand—or thereabouts—armed men to threaten General Kearny’s undertaking.
As he rode out of Santa Fe, Captain Cooke ruminated over Armijo, whom he saw as “distrustful of the population he has habitually fleeced” and “halting between his loyalty to his army commission, which has been lately bestowed [pride], and a desire to escape the dangers of war [cowardice] upon terms of personal advantage [stealing].” As Cooke passed through the gate out of town he could not resist a temptation.
“Rising in my stirrup I turn and with a defiant gesture, call out, in good English, ‘I’ll call again in a week.’ ”
Meantime, Kearny’s army had departed Bent’s Fort and was making its way to Santa Fe, on August 5 crossing the Purgatory River, otherwise known as the “River of Souls,” in Mexican territory.‡ Kearny had issued a proclamation and saw to it that Captain Cooke’s party and others distributed copies as they rode down the trail. Addressed to the general populace (excluding the Indians), Kearny decreed that he was entering Mexico “with a great military force, with the object of seeking union and to ameliorate the condition of its inhabitants.” His statement ordered all residents to “remain tranquil,” with the assurance that “they will not be molested by the American army, but on the contrary, they will be respected and protected in all their rights, both civil and religious,” and warned that those who resisted or took up arms “will be looked upon as enemies and treated accordingly.”
On the seventh they encamped near the entrance to the Ratón, a difficult fifteen-mile pass where Susan Magoffin took a “ramble” through the scenery. “On all sides are stupendous mountains,” she wrote, “forming an entire breast work to our little camp,” as she took in her surroundings, with her faithful dog, Ring, all the while keeping “strict watch for Indians, bear, panther, wolves, &c., and [who] would not even leave my side as if
conscious I had no other protector at hand.”
Travel down the valley of the Purgatory was anything but comfortable, Susan reported, owing to numbers of large stones strewn along the trail, “just the thing to bounce a wagon’s wheels [off], unless there is the most careful driving.” One of her companions wrote of the river, “We emerged from the gloomy solitude of its valley with a feeling somewhat akin to that which attends escape from a place of punishment.”
Emerging from gloomy solitude or not, once the expedition got into the 7,000-foot pass, the progress became fairly excruciating, with advance measured in yards per day instead of miles. The road was frequently so steep that the men had to unharness the mules and push or pull the wagons themselves. Susan Magoffin remembered: “And it takes a dozen men to steady a wagon with all its wheels locked—and for one who is some distance off to hear the crash it makes over the stones is truly alarming.”
Meantime, Kearny’s army had been capturing all sorts of “spies,” who had been sent out by Armijo to ascertain the strength of his forces. Most of these characters were policed up by the detachment of Charles Bent, of Bent’s Fort notoriety, who was acting as guide for the expedition. By now it was August 11 and the spies, who had been captured in bunches and who numbered all told about a dozen, were “mounted on diminutive asses, and cut a ridiculous figure alongside the thumping big dragoons,” wrote Lieutenant Emory, who also seemed dumbfounded that the Mexicans guided their donkeys by “beating them with clubs” instead of using a bridle and reins. A search revealed that the Mexicans were carrying a proclamation from Armijo’s government that called all men aged between fifteen and fifty to arms “to repel the Americans who were coming to invade their soil and destroy their property and liberties.”
All in all, according to Emory, the Mexicans offered a “pathetic appearance,” with grinning faces “almost of idiocy,” and instead of hanging them, which under military law he had every right to do, Kearny remarked to Emory, “If I have to fire a round of grape into such men, I will live with remorse the rest of my life.” He made the Mexicans sit and watch his army pass by, including the artillery, then, after informing them that much more was to follow, turned the spies loose to make their report to General Armijo.