Eradication for Kearny, however, did not equate with extermination, as it did with some frontier whites. Instead, Kearny issued invitations for the chiefs of the various tribes to come to Santa Fe for a council of peace between them and the Mexican (now American) citizens of the territory. Many of the chiefs came, including some Apaches, but not the Navajos, who remained defiant and aloof.
The latest outrage prompted Kearny to consider a major change in plans. He sent instructions to Colonel Doniphan that before he left for Chihuahua he was to organize a punitive expedition against the Navajos, “who had continued killing the people and committing depredations on their property,” the purpose of which was to reclaim all possible stolen livestock and kidnapped persons.‡ Furthermore, Doniphan was ordered “to require of [the Navajos] such security for their future good conduct as he may think ample and sufficient by taking hostages or otherwise.” It was a tall order, since never in living memory had these Indians been tamed, but Doniphan took it in stride.
Trouble with the Indians, mainly Navajos, had been brewing for years, ever since the Mexicans ejected the Spanish, who at least had made efforts to protect the province. Accordingly, the fertile areas of New Mexico were slowly being depopulated by Indian raids, which everyone agreed had greatly increased in brutality under Armijo’s rule. According to Captain Cooke, the sheep population had decreased by about 80 percent—amounting to hundreds of thousands—due to theft and raids, and “the people are almost confined to the villages.” Worse, it was said—and by more than one person—that Armijo was using the Indians as “a check to any resistance [by citizens] on his arbitrary oppression,” and it was a fact that Armijo had forbidden the citizens from making war on the Navajos without special permission.
Accordingly, Colonel Doniphan sent out several mounted columns to fan out and chastise the recalcitrants within a 200-mile arc west of Santa Fe, then converge in six weeks at a place called Ojo del Oso, or Bear Springs, with as many hostage chiefs as possible, for the purpose of making a peace treaty. Most of the Indian bands lived in the remotest part of the province, barely accessible through steep mountain passes that became treacherous as the weather turned. Here is one striking account, by the regiment’s self-styled historian Private John Hughes, of a party of Doniphan’s men attempting in early November to reach Bear Springs, which was said to lie in a mysterious secret valley, across mountains 6,000 to 7,000 feet high.
“They encamped on a rivulet whose waters came leaping down in foaming cascades from the mountain and disappeared into the sands of the valley. Having no tents the soldiers quartered on the naked earth in the open air, but so much snow fell that night that at dawn it was not possible to distinguish where they lay until they broke the snow which covered them, and came out as though they were rising from their own graves. In less that 12 hours the snow had fallen 13 inches deep in the valleys and 36 inches in the mountains.
“On the 17th they marched more northwesterly over the Sierra Madre. When they came to ascend the steep spurs and bench lands which led up to the mountains a horrid, dreary prospect opened up above them. The men and their commanders were almost up to their waists toiling in the snow, breaking a way for the horses and mules to ascend. The lowest point in the main mountain rose to a sublime height, and to the right still towering far above this projected stupendous, colossal columns of ragged granite and iron-colored basalt.”
After an all day and night struggle the soldiers reached the other side, and it was only then, when they saw that the stream flowed west, toward the Pacific, that they realized they had just crossed the western Continental Divide. They continued on across “gently rolling hills, then rocky bluffs, then bench lands, then crags and bleak knobs, and then barren, naked giant masses of gray granite and dark basalt and a heavy forest of pines and cedars, always verdant, spreading over the low lands. In many cases these colossal granite peaks shoot almost perpendicularly out of the plain more than 6,000 feet high.” In two days at last they came to an enchanted-looking glade. “Here the Navajos pasture their immense droves of horses and mules and keep their numerous flocks of sheep and goats.” This was Bear Springs.
Along the way, Doniphan’s men had encountered various tribes of Indians without serious incident, except that a number of soldiers died of typhoid fever, cholera, or exposure. In much of the territory there was no wood for coffins, so the corpses would be buried wrapped in blankets and the grave “covered in broad stones to prevent the wolves from disturbing the dead.”
One hundred miles north of Taos, one of Doniphan’s columns encountered a village of “Yutas [Utahs], a fierce and numerous tribe of Indians, with the view to conciliate them and dispose them to a friendly intercourse with the Americans.” Sixty of their chiefs were taken to Santa Fe by the soldiers, where a treaty of peace was signed. Others came across a tribe of six thousand Zunis, as well as seven villages of Moquis, each with the same results. They crossed vast deserts and steep mountains and lands that looked like they belonged on the moon. They discovered a petrified forest and ancient ruins from who knew what or when, which remained vibrantly deserted in the rarefied desert air, and they chanced on flora and fauna unknown to Western civilization.§
At Bear Springs Doniphan held a powwow with a dozen Navajo chiefs, the object being to make an official, permanent peace between themselves, the Mexicans, and the Americans. One hundred and eight U.S. soldiers and five hundred Navajo warriors were present. The negotiations went on all day, and into the evening, with each chief having his say. After a time it became apparent that the Navajos had no ax to grind with the Americans and were willing to make peace, but they detested the Mexicans. One chief named Sarcilla Largo, who seemed to speak for the others, summed up the situation in logic that was hard to defeat.
“We have been at war with the Mexicans for years,” he explained. “We have plundered their villages and killed many of their people and made many prisoners. You [Americans] have lately commenced war against the same people, and now you turn upon us for attempting to do what you have done yourselves. This is our war,” he said. “We have more right to complain of you for interfering in our war than you have to quarrel with us for continuing a war we had begun long before you got here.”
A lesser man might have been nonplussed by this straightforward argument, but not Doniphan. In his firm, lawyerly manner he explained to Largo and the other chiefs that the Americans’ war with the Mexicans in this territory had ended; that the Mexicans had surrendered and were now American citizens; and that everyone in the territory, including Navajos, would be accorded equal protection under the laws of the United States. He went on to say that New Mexico was now part of the United States and that stealing from or killing the Mexicans was the same as stealing from or killing Americans. Furthermore, Doniphan said, the Americans would now open a trade with the Indians in New Mexico and everyone would prosper.
Largo digested all this, then made his pronouncement. “Then let there be peace between us,” he said and promised to stop the wars against the Mexicans and everyone else. Shortly afterward, a formal document of peace was drawn up, containing five articles, including promise of free travel, exchange of prisoners, return of stolen property, and an agreement for “mutual trade.” Doniphan signed it as did two of his battalion commanders and the Navajo chiefs, each of whom made his X mark at the bottom. Following this ceremony, Doniphan began distributing gifts that he had brought from Santa Fe, “explicitly stating they were made, not by way of purchasing the [Indians’] friendship, but as a testimony of personal good will.” To his surprise, the chiefs in turn presented Colonel Doniphan with several fine Navajo blankets, then among the most prized textile fabrics in the world, and with that the Treaty of Bear Springs became history, and the Indian troubles in New Mexico were at an end, or so it was hoped.
Around the same time that General Kearny ordered Doniphan on his Indian-pacifying mission, on October 7, 1846, the 300-wagon trading caravan, which included Susan Magoffin’s party, rumb
led out of Santa Fe toward Chihuahua in hopes of selling its wares before war came to that province. But three weeks down the trail the train’s new wagon master, Susan’s husband, Samuel Magoffin, was instructed by the army to wait for Colonel Doniphan’s regiment to escort it into Mexico. The train’s former wagon master, Samuel’s brother James Magoffin, had gone ahead down to Mexico on another secret mission.
In the meantime rumors flew like trail dust in the wind: General Wool has taken Chihuahua. General Wool has not taken Chihuahua. Paredes is still president of Mexico. Santa Anna is president of Mexico. Frémont and Commodore Stockton have taken California. Armijo has organized an army of three thousand men and “the Chihuahuans will rise en masse and murder us all.”
Susan was actually glad to be back on the trail. “I am most tired of Santa Fe, and do not regret leaving,” she told her diary. But now, as they were stuck waiting for the army, a pathetic episode presented itself one morning when a Mexican boy of nine or ten began asking if someone would buy him. Three years earlier, it seems, Apaches had murdered the boy’s father and kidnapped the boy. His mother had died earlier, so he was orphaned. “After three years of hard servitude among the Apaches,” Susan said, “the little fellow ran off, and found his way to the house of an old Mexican, who resides here on the bank of the river in a lone hut, the picture of misery.” But the boy soon discovered that life under the old Mexican was as bad if not worse than under the Indians, and he was looking for somebody to pay $7 (about $200 in today’s money) that he owed to the old man and he would become their servant. The Magoffins were so touched that they paid the money and gained a serving boy.
Then a chilling rumor came flying up out of Mexico that Samuel’s brother James—who had arranged for the capture of Santa Fe—was in jail in Chihuahua, on trial for his life, charged with being a spy. The rumor turned out to be true.
After pulling off the stunning coup of persuading Armijo to abandon his province to the Americans, James Magoffin had ridden along with Kearny and his dragoons on the first leg of his march to California. When they reached the village of Socorro near where the latest Navajo atrocities had occurred, Kearny’s army met up with, of all people, Kit Carson and a party of Indians and mountain men headed east with urgent dispatches from California. These contained the staggering news that Americans had conquered the province and that Old Glory was flying from every important California port and town.
Kearny’s reaction to Carson’s report is not recorded, but it is safe to guess that his feelings were mixed. He had been handed a golden opportunity to conquer one of the great prizes on the North American continent, only to discover that others had beat him to it. If Kearny was disappointed he did not show it, but some of the younger officers openly lamented that they would no longer be permitted to fight Mexicans. Since Kearny had no clear idea how to get to California, and Carson had just come from there, he told the recently commissioned U.S. Army officer to hand over his dispatches to one of Kearny’s officers and join the general’s staff as chief scout.
It was a severe blow to Carson, who had a home, wife, and child in Taos, only a few days away, whom he had not seen in more than a year. He had been looking forward to a well-deserved homecoming, as well as traveling to Washington and meeting the president and other dignitaries. Carson, whose sole military training had come from watching Frémont, protested that he had given his promise to deliver the dispatches personally and could not relinquish them to anyone else.
This was not the kind of response that commanding generals wish to hear from second lieutenants and, despite Carson’s indelible reputation, Kearny abruptly ordered him to turn over the dispatches to his own chief scout, who would carry them to the nation’s capital. There was apparently a moment—probably more than a moment—in which Kit Carson considered slipping away and meeting his wife. But this he did not do, prompting Captain Johnston, Kearny’s aide-de-camp, to declare, “It requires a brave man to give up his private feelings thus for the public good; but Carson is one such! Honor him for it!”
In the face of Carson’s momentous news, Kearny made a fateful decision. After consulting with Carson on the nature of the route to the Pacific, the deserts, the barrens, the mountains, and so forth, he concluded that the more men he took, the more perilous the trip would become owing to the scarcity of food, water, and fodder. So he ordered two hundred of his dragoons to return to Santa Fe, while he would carry on the journey with the remaining hundred men. With California conquered, it seemed a logical judgment, so long as California stayed conquered. As we shall see, this was not a given certainty by any stretch of the imagination.
In the meantime, suave James Magoffin, who had been traveling with Kearny, made his departure to the south with a party of four men. His purpose, according to letters and other documents, was to perform the same charismatic sleight of hand in Chihuahua that he had in Santa Fe and persuade the governor to hand over control to General Wool with nary a shot fired.
Thus charged, Magoffin wended his way down the Rio Grande to El Paso del Norte (Juárez), and then another 250 miles south to Chihuahua City, where he expected to be feted by the governor with dinner and cordial conversation. This time, however, his wit, charm, and repartee failed him utterly. Soon as Magoffin set foot in town he was arrested for espionage, a crime that in Mexico, as elsewhere, is a capital offense. And it seemed they had him dead to rights.
The evidence was a letter signed by General Kearny that detailed Magoffin’s surreptitious role in the surrender of Santa Fe. Authorities in Chihuahua were in no laughing mood about the loss of the New Mexico province and had in fact court-martialed Armijo for dereliction and cowardice when he’d skulked into town after the American conquest. The fact that Armijo was acquitted in no way assuaged the Mexican authorities—they had been snookered.
Kearny’s letter had been captured from the personal effects of a friend of the Magoffin brothers, a Dr. Henry Connelly, longtime resident of Chihuahua, to whom Samuel Magoffin had entrusted it for delivery to James in Juárez. Unfortunately, Connelly had arrived before Magoffin and was arrested, and his possessions were searched.
The letter was sufficiently damning that James Magoffin was condemned to the firing squad. Nearly at the stage of saying his final prayers fate intervened in the most unlikely form of Governor-General Armijo himself, who, recently cleared of similar charges, interceded on behalf of Magoffin and managed to arrange a temporary stay of execution. Still, Magoffin was not yet off the hook and remained in the Chihuahua calaboose, awaiting developments.
Captain Philip St. George Cooke, as we have seen, was a capable, earnest army officer, somewhat patrician, somewhat conventional, who kept a daily journal that he liked to sprinkle with Dickensian allusions. So far during Kearny’s march he had performed admirably in command of his troop in the First Dragoons and in his role as military escort for James Magoffin in the Santa Fe subterfuge. But beneath his masterful West Point bearing and confident mien Cooke was roiled and discontented.
Like many company-grade officers at the onset of war, Cooke’s blood was up, as the expression went, to get into the thick of battle. And that was precisely where he and his dragoons had been headed—down the Mississippi on a steamboat to the seat of war in Matamoros under Zachary Taylor—until, as Cooke put it, Kearny had “demanded” two additional troops of cavalry for his Army of the West, of which Cooke’s was one. This left him “inexpressibly disappointed,” since the sole object of Kearny’s column at that point had been New Mexico, which Captain Cooke considered a backwater to the real fighting war.
Soon new orders arrived extending the mission all the way to California, which might present a more proper martial challenge for a West Point–trained officer. Traveling down the Santa Fe Trail, Cooke mused in his diary about what might lie in store for a mounted troop crossing unknown mountains and deserts and, once in California, to engage in battle with the vaunted Mexican lancers, some of the finest light cavalry in the world.
So it was
all the more a surprise—or shock—to Cooke when, into the camp along the Rio Grande from which Kearny had sent orders for Doniphan to march against the Indians, there arrived a dispatch from Colonel Sterling Price, commanding the Second U.S. Missouri Volunteers, who had just entered Santa Fe. Among other things he reported the good news that the Mormon Battalion was marching behind and would be in Santa Fe directly. The bad news was about the death of Lieutenant Colonel James Allen, which left the battalion without a proper commander. It did not take long for Kearny to locate his favorite special detail man, Captain Cooke, and bestow upon him the title of lieutenant colonel and command of a battalion of five hundred Mormons.
It was a terrible time in the short history of the “Saints,” as Mormons sometimes described themselves, whose existence dated back to 1830 when a man named Joseph Smith put on sale a 500-page religious tract called the Book of Mormon. Its revelations were so original that even Mormons still refer to themselves as “a peculiar people,” a characteristic that at the time did not endear them to their fellow citizens. Mormons, Smith had informed his followers, were the true descendants of a lost tribe of Israel, alone chosen by God to inherit the earth. This news Smith had divined from a book of golden plates that he told people he had found in 1823, when he was eighteen years old, in a box buried on a hill near Manchester, New York.
The plates were engraved in an ancient hieroglyphic that Smith said was of Egyptian origin, and that after he had translated them into English, with the aid of magic eyeglasses given to him by an angel named Moroni, he returned them to the angel and proceeded to incorporate the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with himself as chief prophet and revelator. According to the golden plates, the Mormons had arrived in America fourteen hundred centuries earlier and formed a Hebrew tribe in Central America, but in time the group separated into two factions, Nephites, who were fair-skinned, intelligent, and industrious, and Lamanites, who were so lazy, mean, and warlike that God had cursed them with dark skins.