It was about this time that General Kearny and his tattered, worn-down, half-starved dragoons appeared on the scene.
After weathering yet one more jornada, this by far the worst of all, they staggered out of the desert to the civilization of Agua Caliente, an immense cattle and sheep ranch owned by an American named Warner, where, observed Captain Johnston, “the labor is performed by Indians, who are stimulated to work by $3 a month and repeated floggings.” The desert had been an appalling strain on man and beast, a hundred miles of fetid waterholes and footsore marching across a landscape strewn with the bones of livestock and the occasional human skull or bone. Near the end the dragoons themselves ran out of food and had begun to eat their own starving horses.
At Agua Caliente, near present-day Palm Springs and about a hundred miles from Los Angeles, they learned the latest news about military conditions in California, not the least of which was that they themselves had arrived within the enemy’s rear lines, for the Californios were busily recruiting food, livestock, and other stores from all the ranches in the area.
Kearny instantly realized they would need reinforcements for the remaining sixty miles to San Diego. Word came that an Englishman named Stokes, who lived on a nearby ranch, was headed to San Diego next morning. Kearny sent a dispatch rider to him, and three hours later a strange and striking apparition appeared in the dragoons’ camp. “His dress was a black velvet English hunting coat, a pair of black velvet trousers, cut off at the knee and open on the outside to the hips, beneath which were drawers of spotless white; his leggings were of black buckskin, and heels armed with spurs six inches long. Above the whole bloomed the broad merry face of Mr. Stokes, the Englishman.” So noted Captain Emory. Stokes confirmed that the Americans held San Diego and not much else and agreed to take a letter to Stockton when he left for the town—about forty-five miles distant—next day.
“The morning was murky and we did not start till 9’o’clock, about which time it commenced to rain heavily, and the rain lasted all day,” Emory began his diary for December 4. They were now in “a region of rains” and the vegetation had changed. Late next day on the march they met a detachment from San Diego in response to the letter Kearny had sent and the Englishman Stokes, true to his word, had faithfully delivered to Stockton. The force consisted of Captain Gillespie; Beale, now a lieutenant; a midshipman Duncan; and thirty-five members of the California Battalion who had been chased out of Los Angeles and found their way to San Diego with Gillespie. They had brought with them a small artillery piece that came to be known as the “Sutter Gun,” a four-pounder with a forty-inch-long barrel and three-inch bore. It was wheeled but also had handles and could be carried by two men.d
The rumor was, Gillespie said, that a party of Californio cavalry were encamped nine miles away. They pressed on, night fell, then fog rolled in; they were looking for grass for the animals. It began to rain again.
At last after nine o’clock they halted in a narrow canyon and a reconnaissance squad was sent out to scout the Californios, but it was discovered and “the enemy placed on the qui vive.” Captain Johnston wrote in his diary, “We heard a party of Californians of 80 men camped a distance, but the informant varied from 16 to 30 miles, rendering it too uncertain to make a dash on them in the dark, stormy night.”
About two a.m. the call to horse was sounded, and after a hasty breakfast they assembled, marching orders were given, packs stowed, and an attack formation got under way. Captain Gillespie remembered, “The weather had cleared, the moon shone bright as day, almost, but the wind coming from the snow-covered mountains made it so cold we could scarcely hold our bridal reins.”
It was Kearny’s intention to attack these horsemen, they hoped by surprise, and drive them back to Mexico. Soon they reached the upper edge of a large valley and caught sight of the enemy campfires, “which shone brightly,” about a mile away. “The general and his party were in advance,” Emory recorded, “preceded only by the advance guard of twelve men under Captain Johnston. He ordered a trot, then a charge, and we soon found ourselves in hand-to-hand conflict with a largely superior force.”
That was to say the least. Lieutenant Hammond, who had led the reconnaissance, told Kearny upon his return that the Californios had discovered his party, but the general was determined to attack regardless. Worse, Hammond had been unable to determine the size of the Mexican force before being exposed, so Kearny could not be sure of what he was up against. But both Captain Gillespie and Kit Carson had predicted that, based on their experience, the Mexicans would run at the first sign of an organized attack by a well-mounted, well-armed force of U.S. cavalry.
But Kearny’s men were anything but well mounted or well armed. Only a few of the dragoons had horses; the majority were riding bony and emaciated mules, jaded from more than a thousand miles on the trail from Santa Fe, including the last jornada. Indeed, one of Kearny’s reasons for attacking was to get trained horses from the Mexicans to remount his dragoons. Furthermore, “their Hall breech-loader carbines had become useless because of the rains of the previous night,” which had wet their paper cartridges.
It was under these obvious handicaps that Kearny set his force in motion before sunup toward the Indian village in the valley of San Pasqual, thirty-eight miles northeast of San Diego. Encamped in the village were 160 Californios, mostly cowboys, under the able command of General Andrés Pico. These men were gloriously uniformed, as most Mexican mounted militia were, and armed, principally, with lances, a holdover from European armies but deadly effective on the battlefield in close quarters. Before the age of firearms, lancers were the elite and most feared of an army’s troops. The lance itself was made of stout wood, about nine feet long, with an eight-inch razor-sharp blade embedded in its business end. The California cowboys used them to kill bulls and were highly skilled in their employment.
Kearny’s total command numbered 160 men, equal to Pico’s but, as we shall see, fatally disordered in battle. The thirty-six-year-old Pico, like his older brother, was a mixed breed of Indian and African, with a little Spanish and Italian thrown in, and he had an irascible temper. The discovery of U.S. forces operating this far out in these hills was both perplexing and disturbing, because all intelligence so far had been that the Americans were bottled up in San Diego under cover of their naval ships. There had been rumors among the Indians that a column of American cavalry was approaching from the east, but it was almost unthinkable that an army had come all the way from the east, considering the many jornadas, starvation stretches, hostile Indians, and other obstacles. Still, Pico could not discount the possibility. He roused his men before sunrise and had them saddle up. Scouts were sent out to the east, who soon reported an approaching force of mounted men.
Pico deftly placed a fourth of his horsemen in line astride the cart road leading into San Pasqual, then positioned another fourth in a hidden ravine to the left of the road and another in a ravine to the right. The rest he left in reserve as he awaited developments, which were not long in coming.
Just as the first gray streaks of dawn began to lighten the landscape, Captain Johnston suddenly shouted the charge, and twelve Americans—including Kit Carson—lunged forward at a gallop through a light fog. What apparently prompted Johnston to abandon the trot and go hell-for-leather was the sight of several of Pico’s forward mounted scouts, or pickets, in the roadway ahead. Of course the pickets dashed off ahead of the dragoons, but it was a full mile of flat-out running before Johnston’s men came into contact with Pico’s force, and when they did it was less a clash than a head-on collision. Johnston didn’t live to see it. A number of Pico’s horsemen carried firearms and some lucky shot toppled Captain Johnston with a bullet right between the eyes. Thus began the Battle of San Pasqual.
The mile-long dash had exhausted and lathered the horses and when the killing clash of man-to-man combat began they were not up to strength. The order to charge had also caught Kearny and his men off guard, but they spurred on at the gallop, to
o. The order of battle was as follows:
Advance Guard, led by Captain Johnston, mounted on horses.
General Kearny and his party: Captains Turner, Emory, and John S. Griffin, the surgeon. Scout Antoine Robideaux and Navy Lieutenant Edward Beale—all mounted on horses.
Main Attack Force: Captain Benjamin Moore and his brother-in-law Lieutenant Thomas C. Hammond, with about a hundred First Dragoons—mounted on mules.
Rear Guard: Captain Archibald Gillespie and George Gibson leading about thirty of the California Battalion volunteers—mounted on fresh horses and towing the little Sutter Gun.
Artillery: Lieutenant John Davidson and his two mule-drawn six-pounder howitzers with six to eight men to man them.e
About thirty men, led by Major Thomas Swords, the quartermaster, stayed behind on the lip of the valley to guard the pack train and baggage.
The same volley that killed Captain Johnston killed Kit Carson’s horse, vaulting Carson into the dirt and breaking the stock off his rifle. The air quickly filled with the violent racket of gunfire and the clang of steel against steel, the staggering thunder of hoofbeats, the screeching and snorting of horses, and ferocious hollering and frantic cursing.
Right then, as Kearny’s little party arrived at the fray, about forty of Pico’s lancers lurched up out of the gully on the left side of the road. Seeing this, many of the Americans began to dismount and tried to fight from the cover of large rocks, only to find that their paper cartridges were often damp and would not fire. Worse, they had outrun their main force, the First Dragoons, who hearing the shooting were desperately goading and kicking their mules in order to catch up. Behind them were the frustrated horsemen of Captain Gillespie, who had been ordered by General Kearny himself to stay in rear formation behind the mule-slow dragoons.
For a few intense minutes it appeared the Americans were doomed. Carson scrambled forward into the battle scene and, snatching a rifle and ammo box that lay next to a dead private, crouched behind a boulder and began firing away. Out of the ditch to the right came more Mexican lancers. Just when it looked like the end was near, Captain Moore and the leading elements of his strung-out dragoons arrived on their mules and pitched into the battle. An insolent-looking Mexican rode slowly in front of Lieutenant Beale, as if defying him to shoot. Beale shot him dead.
From Pico’s perspective, the arrival of Moore’s dragoons apparently put a new complexion on things. In the misty morning light the Mexican commander could see more and more Americans appearing ghostlike out of the ground fog, and he must have wondered just how many more they were. Because just then he told his bugler to blow retreat, seizing defeat from the jaws of what might have been a complete victory, seeing as how all his men were on the field, better horsed, better armed, and outnumbering the Americans about two to one at that point. He might have killed or captured the whole bunch. Instead, the Mexicans began falling back on the Indian village, behind a rocky point, which masked the scene beyond it.
Seeing this, horse-mounted Captain Moore corralled a couple of dozen dragoons and went flying off after the Mexicans, perhaps in a bid to cut off their route of escape. Instead, as he rounded the rocky point, Moore caught up short and immediately realized two things: he had completely outrun his mule-mounted dragoons and the Mexicans were not escaping. In fact there were scores of them, including Pico himself, waiting behind that rocky point.
Moore apparently fired his pistol and drew his sword, but was lanced a dozen times or more by the overwhelming force of enemy soldiers, who finally killed him, making orphans of his two young children. Lieutenant Hammond, Moore’s brother-in-law, arrived moments later and received the same treatment; he died shortly afterward, but somehow he was able to stagger off to the rear where reports have him pleading, “For God’s sake, men, come up!”
Charging after Captain Moore, General Kearny and his people arrived on the scene, where it must have also become suddenly clear that they had made a terrible mistake. Not more than twenty Americans faced nearly a hundred Mexican lancers, whose spears were more than a match for a three-foot American cavalry saber. The battle soon took on an almost medieval character as multiple lancers swarmed around lone dragoons, often stabbing them several times before they fell, and all too often finishing them off as they lay on the ground.
The dragoons soon began a fighting retreat back down the road from whence they’d come—only to be met by the furious and determined marine captain Archibald Gillespie, finally coming onto the battlefield, who now flew into the bloody chaos with his well-armed, horse-mounted volunteers of the California Battalion, shouting at the top of his voice to the crushed Americans, “Rally men, for God’s sake rally! Show a front, don’t turn your backs! Face them, face them, follow me!” But they paid him no heed and continued to the rear.
All this had taken place in under ten minutes, and the battlefield already littered with the dead, dying, and wounded, but there was more butchery to be done. Late as usual, the two six-pounder howitzers appeared on the field and were immediately attacked by the lancers before they could be unlimbered. The crew of gun number one fired a rifle volley at the Mexicans, which spooked the mules, who bolted away off the road. The lancers closed in, slaughtering the three-man crew as they pleaded for their lives. The young artillery commander, Lieutenant Davidson, was lanced several times but fought off his tormentors, shooting one with his pistol.
Kearny, who had thus far suffered a bad cut on his arm, saw some of this and started toward the gun with Captain Emory and Lieutenant Warner, but they were immediately assailed by a dozen lancers, one of whom stabbed the general in his rear end and would have stabbed him in the back, too, but for Emory intervening with a fatal pistol shot just as the lance was thrust. Captain Griffin, the surgeon, told the general to go to the rear where he could be treated, but Kearny refused and dashed back into the battle.
Other Mexican lancers massacred the crew of gun number two but were soon driven off by dragoons who were just now coming up to the fight. They began to unlimber the howitzer in preparation for bringing it into action when they encountered a dreadful sight. Lurching toward them afoot was red-haired Captain Gillespie, his uniform in tatters and smeared with blood from head to toe. He had been attacked by eight lancers in a savage confrontation that left him stabbed in the back, neck, arm, chest, and mouth. The lance to the chest had punctured a lung and the one to the mouth sliced his lip in two and broke off a front tooth. As he staggered up to the gun, almost faint from loss of blood, he heard someone shout, “Where is the match?” Came the unhappy reply, “There is none.” Gillespie reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigar match, which he lit and touched to the firing port, unleashing an instant cannon blast. As he handed the still lit match to a dragoon Gillespie fainted.
Other members of Gillespie’s force had by then arrived with the little brass Sutter Gun and, loading it with grapeshot, “cleared the field.” Willing and able to engage in mortal human combat, the Mexicans had no taste for standing up to artillery, however small, and Pico withdrew his force, along with its wounded and most of its dead, also dragging along one of the American howitzers by a lasso.
A brief stillness descended upon the battlefield as the panting, pulsing, amazed Americans took stock. Blue-jacketed bodies and dead horses lay in every direction, while riderless horses and mules, most of them lance-wounded and bleeding, wandered aimlessly or stood still, necks bowed low and reins drooping, as if themselves in shock. Meanwhile, more dragoons continued to arrive on the battlefield, appalled by and in despair at what they saw.
It was the kind of shattering experience that would almost have to be endured to be believed. All told, it lasted no more than twenty minutes, but Kearny had lost nearly 80 percent of those actively engaged in the battle, and 20 percent of his entire force. Nineteen Americans lay dead, including three officers, and fifteen men were badly stabbed or sliced with “from two to ten lance wounds,” and of these several more would die. Doc Griffin and his crew had set up a t
riage in a corner of the field and were treating the wounded, including Kearny. He would later characterize it as a victory on the strength of his men still holding the field, but if so it was certainly a Pyrrhic one.
Kearny quickly dispatched mountain man Alexis Godey and two others to San Diego to tell Stockton of the Battle of San Pasqual and that he urgently needed reinforcements. He also ordered that the slain be strapped to pack mules to be brought to San Diego, but he was forced to countermand that when it was pointed out there weren’t enough mules for both dead and wounded. It was then decided to bury the dead on the battlefield, which they did, around midnight, to “the distant howling of wolves,” in a common ditch beneath a willow tree.
The rest of the day went to reorganizing, foraging for food—of which none was found—and, with the guidance of the mountain men, building Indian-style travois to carry the wounded. Next morning, what was left of the California contingent of the Army of the West got under way toward San Diego, thirty-nine miles distant. But Pico and his lancers weren’t through yet, and figures of Mexican horsemen would appear tauntingly on the hills in front of Kearny’s march, then disappear as the Americans approached. This went on all day until they arrived at the Rancho San Bernardo, unoccupied, where they rested, watered their animals, collected some livestock, and “killed a few chickens for the sick.”
But as they moved out, “driving the cattle before us,” a “cloud of Mexican cavalry dashed from hills in our rear to occupy a hill by which we must pass,” recorded Captain Emory. “Thirty or forty of them got possession of the hill, and it was necessary to drive them from it. This was accomplished by a party of six or eight [led by Emory] upon which the Californians delivered their fire; and strange to say, not one of our men fell.” Emory was still mourning the loss of his good friend Ben Moore, for whom he had named the big striking bluff way back along the Gila River, an eternity ago, but there was still duty to be done. It was the army way. During a sharp gunfight Emory’s men burst over the crest of the hill and the enemy fled, leaving behind several badly wounded.