† Aside from the Indians, California had at this point a population of about 5,000 living there, 4,000 of them Mexicans; of the rest about half were Americans and the others were mostly Europeans.
‡ Many of these missions have been at least partially restored, and the most famous is probably the one at San Juan Capistrano, now a tourist attraction immortalized in the song “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” recorded first by the Ink Spots in 1940. Stretching along some 650 miles of coastal California, the missions were located so as to be roughly a day’s donkey travel from each other.
§ Moreover, it was also because the government was trying to extricate itself from the grip of the Catholic Church, which had become too intertwined in Mexican culture for the new nation’s liking.
‖ Being ports of call, all of California’s cities had healthy populations of foreigners as well—Americans, British, continental Europeans, Russians, and Asians—who had arrived by ship and for one reason or another stayed on.
a Sutter’s Fort became famous for its connection with the Donner expedition, and even more so shortly thereafter with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill and the consequent California gold rush.
b Before being shot dead by somebody. Frémont estimated that the beast weighed at least a thousand pounds.
c The “Horse-Thief Indians” were tribes or bands composed at least partly of former “mission Indians” gone wild again, who preyed on ranchers’ livestock, mostly horses, some of which they rode or traded but most of which they ate. Rustled cattle proved too slow for fast getaways from Mexican posses, but also it was said these Indians actually preferred horseflesh to beef.
d There was additional bitterness attached to this because all of them knew the Indians were being supplied with processed metals for axes, arrowheads, spear tips, etc., by the British at the Hudson Bay Company outposts in the Oregon country, and there was suspicion that the Englishmen were suggesting to the natives that they use these more sophisticated weapons on Americans.
e It remains Denny’s Creek today, just off Oregon’s Highway 140, close by the Rogue River National Forest.
f A few modern historians have suggested that it was not Klamaths who attacked Frémont but a band of Modocs, with whom the Klamaths were at war, and so Frémont and his people wrongly murdered the Klamaths. But there is no reputable evidence of this, and one is disposed to believe that Frémont, Carson, and the other mountain men, who had encountered the Klamaths on previous expeditions as well as this one, could easily tell the difference.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kearny’s March
On May 14, 1846, the day after Congress passed the declaration of war against Mexico, President Polk had orders sent to Colonel Stephen W. Kearny at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to march his Army of the West—numbering all told no more than two thousand—down the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico and capture that vast Mexican province in the name of the United States of America.
This was a grave decision for the administration, since New Mexico actually consisted of what is now the heart of America, running all the way up from New Mexico and Arizona to Utah and Colorado. Furthermore, once that was accomplished, Kearny’s orders were to push on across uncharted territory to California and capture it, too, so long as war between the two powers existed. It was a tall order with colossal implications. There are times in history when things can be done, and there are times when, for one reason or another, they simply cannot be done. Here was where history collided with chance.
On that same day, the president became embroiled in another row with his timorous secretary of state. James Buchanan had been a Pennsylvania lawyer and senator with presidential aspirations when Polk tapped him for the post, though he must have regretted it almost from the outset, as Buchanan turned out to be a contrarian and a quibbler. As noted, Buchanan had engineered disputes with the president in 1845 over his handling of the Oregon question for fear the British would declare war. This time the argument was over language Buchanan proposed to send U.S. ambassadors abroad about the administration’s war aims.
In Buchanan’s view, specific wording needed to be included that denounced any notion that the United States intended to acquire California, New Mexico, “or any other Mexican lands.” Polk was appalled, telling Buchanan he thought such declarations would be “unnecessary and improper.” In fact the acquisition of those Mexican territories was exactly what the president had in mind.
Buchanan countered by warning that if the American ambassador to Great Britain did not formally deny that the United States had any territorial aims with respect to Mexico, “he thought it almost certain that both England and France would join with Mexico in a war against us.”
At this, Polk went into a rare fit of pique. He told Buchanan, somewhat disingenuously, that while his administration had not entered the war for conquest, the taking of California was probably going to be the result since Mexico was broke and had no other way of indemnifying the United States for the costs of the war, nor for paying the large number of claims against her held by American citizens.
Here was where he further informed the by now startled secretary of state that the U.S. war with Mexico was none of the business “of England, France, or any other power,” and, for that matter, that he was not afraid of “war with all the powers of Christendom.”
At this point the rest of the cabinet weighed in loudly on the side of the president, including his secretaries of the treasury and navy and the postmaster and attorney generals, and a chastened Buchanan stalked out without another word. Next day he sent over a new draft of ambassadors’ instructions minus the language Polk felt was offensive.
Just as this uproar was winding down, Polk also became embroiled in an unseemly to-do with Winfield Scott, general in chief of the army.
Scott was a larger-than-life figure in every sense of the word. For one thing, as a young man he was a gigantic six-foot-five weighing 230 pounds, but by the time of the Mexican War he had become enormously corpulent. He was a genuine hero of the War of 1812 and gained in rank through the Black Hawk and Seminole wars, and he had supervised the removal of the Cherokee Indian nation from the South until, in 1841, he finally attained the nation’s top military post. Known by then as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” for his gaudy uniforms and insistence on elaborate martial ceremonies, Scott was tremendously vain and easily angered and was among those with strong aspirations to become president. He was also a shrewd military scholar and tactician with an excellent grasp of strategy.
On the same day that Polk got into his argument with Buchanan over the wording of the ambassadors’ instructions, he placed Winfield Scott in charge of army operations in Mexico. The government would provide as soon as possible some 20,000 volunteers from the southern and western states,* with a further 30,000 men from northern states if circumstances demanded it.
Yet even then a tension had already developed between the two men based primarily on the mutual political distrust between Polk, the committed Democrat, and Scott, who was a dedicated Whig. To his diary that night Polk confided, “Though I did not consider him in all respects suited to such an important command, yet being commander-in-chief of the army, his position entitled him to it if he desired it.”
So it was with surprise and annoyance when, less than a week later, Polk learned that Scott did not intend to go to Mexico and take command until September, which was nearly five months distant. The president, anxious to get on with defeating the Mexicans, told his secretary of war, William Marcy, to order General Scott down to Mexico forthwith or relieve him of command. This brusque send-off unleashed a firestorm of vituperation from the oversensitive general in chief, who set the tone of his response to Marcy by this sentence: “My explicit meaning is, that I do not desire to place myself in the most perilous of all positions, a fire on my rear from Washington, and the fire in front from the Mexicans.” Scott further went on, in the opinion of Nevins, the editor of Polk’s diary, “in a highly offensive and
egotistical letter,” fraught with “extraordinary indiscretions,” which accused the Polk administration of “ill-will” and “pre-condemnation” as well as the almost treasonous charge of doling out military officers’ commissions to Democrats as political payback.†
Polk, Marcy, and others in the cabinet were astonished and incensed by Scott’s outburst, and Polk himself sat down with Marcy to craft a response, which condemned the general in chief in what one historian of the period called “a masterpiece of pained condescension.” It charged Scott with “bad faith” toward the president, the government, and himself, as well as “a reckless disregard for the interests of the country,” and concluded by rescinding the president’s offer that Scott lead the American armies in Mexico.
This put a severe quietus on Winfield Scott’s presidential aspirations, which would have been a shoo-in had he returned victorious from the Mexican War. The sobering reality of his predicament caused Scott to embarrass himself yet again in responding to the secretary and the president, opening his letter with a remark that would hold him up to ridicule for the remainder of his political life. He complained that he had digested Secretary Marcy’s rebuke “as I sat down to a hasty plate of soup,” and went on to explain that the “fire in his rear” was ignited not by the president but instead by certain congressmen, as well as by the secretary of war himself, which of course only made matters worse. The press had a field day. In May of 1846, as Frémont made his way back from Oregon to California, and Kearny prepared to start down the Santa Fe Trail, Polk nominated Zachary Taylor to command the armies fighting in Mexico, while Scott remained in Washington, floundering furiously in his hasty plate of soup.
It took Kearny less than six weeks to organize, train, equip, and provision his Army of the West, and on June 26, 1846, its leading elements marched out of Fort Leavenworth and turned southwestward onto the vast plains of Kansas toward the New Mexican capital, traveling 962 miles. The trick was to reach Santa Fe quickly, and occupy it in the name of the United States of America, before the government in Mexico City could send an army to reinforce its garrison.
The 620 men of the First U.S. Dragoons, the nation’s first cavalry regiment, formed the core of Kearny’s command. They would be accompanied by a 220-man battalion of artillery, commanded by Major Meriwether Lewis Clark, a West Point graduate and son of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame; a 200-man battalion of foot infantry; 800 Missouri volunteer mounted infantry, many of them riding on Missouri mules, commanded by Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, the St. Louis attorney who had saved the Mormon elders from execution in 1838; a detachment of topographical engineers; and, finally, a wagonload of presents for any Indians who might be encountered.
There was also a caravan of a hundred covered wagons led by longtime Santa Fe trader James Wiley Magoffin, another of the administration’s covert emissaries, who had presented himself to Kearny following a long and secretive conference in the White House a month earlier with President Polk himself and a letter of introduction from Secretary of War Marcy for Kearny, stating that Magoffin might well be able to offer the expedition “important services” in its mission of capturing New Mexico. Just how important will be revealed farther along in the story. In addition, a 600-man regiment of New York volunteers would make the trip to California aboard ships that left from Hoboken, New Jersey, timed to meet Kearny’s planned expedition to the coast by land. The 500 men of the Mormon Battalion would follow down the trail after several weeks of crash military training at Fort Leavenworth and link up with, it was hoped, Kearny and his command.
These men were mostly young and hardy, the volunteers having been long warned of the hardships of the trail: the forced marches, sometimes without water or firewood; the dangers of crossing so many rivers; and the menace of wolves, rattlesnakes, grizzlies, and wild Indians. But few of them were prepared for what they saw as Leavenworth, the last outpost of the frontier, faded into the distance and finally out of sight and they were on their own.
“The march of the Army of the West as it entered upon the great prairies, presented a scene of the most intense and thrilling interest,” wrote Private John W. Hughes of the Missouri Volunteers, a schoolteacher. “The boundless plains, lying in ridges of wavy green not unlike the ocean, seemed to unite with the heavens in the distant horizon. As far as vision could penetrate, the long files of cavalry, the gay fluttering of their banners, and the canvas-covered wagons of the merchant train glistening like banks of snow in the distance, might be seen winding their tortuous way over the undulating surface of the prairies.”
The Santa Fe Trail itself has become the stuff of legend, celebrated in story, song, and motion pictures, often quite incorrectly.‡ By the time of Kearny’s march, the trail had been in use for a quarter century as a trading route from the Midwest to Santa Fe, whose population, because of distance, was practically isolated from Mexican commodities, even such as they were. In fact, although it took about six weeks for a Missouri wagon train to reach Santa Fe, it took much longer for one to arrive from the interior of Mexico, and then it was usually filled with inferior goods that were much more expensive.
By the mid-1840s a typical American trading caravan might consist of a hundred or more wagons owned by a dozen or so proprietors, carrying $100,000 to $200,000 worth of goods ($2 million to $4 million in today’s money). The load typically consisted of various finished cloth, ribbon, and thread from New England mills; pots, pans, pottery, and utensils from Pennsylvania and elsewhere; glassware; medicines; hardware such as nails, needles, screws, brass, iron, chisels, files, hatchets, saws, and locks and chains; coffee grinders; guns, knives, swords; items of clothing such as caps and hats, aprons, shoes; finished dry goods and assortments of groceries: rum, gin, brandy, port, Madeira, whiskey, bourbon, moonshine, syrup, sugar, candies, peppers and spices; cigars and chewing tobacco; soap; tinned oysters, sardines, mackerel; and playing cards.
The New Mexicans flocked to buy the American wares. In the beginning, traders reported making profits of up to 2,000 percent, returning to Missouri with leather thongs of Mexican silver and gold coins and herds of Mexican mules and donkeys.§ They brought back huge bundles of buffalo skin robes, which they bought for twenty-five cents apiece and could sell in St. Louis for $6 to $8.‖ During these early years of the trail Mexican gold and silver were the coins of the realm in Missouri, and the frontier towns prospered as more traders made it to Santa Fe.
In time, however, especially after the revolution deposed the rule of Spain in 1821, the Mexican authorities began imposing tariffs on imported American goods, making them more expensive, and profits fell—first they settled around 30 to 100 percent and then they dropped below that as tariffs increased. They declined further over time as Santa Fe’s citizens acquired more of the American goods and needed fewer of them.
So trade slowed. The thousand-mile trek was not only arduous and expensive but naturally could be extremely dangerous.a Sometimes trading caravans were wiped out almost to a man by unexpected blizzards or by marauding Indians. There were Pawnee, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, but the most dreaded of all were the Comanche, who, in the words of the historian Bernard De Voto, “were not only professional marauders and murderers, they were also practicing sadists.… They did a profitable business in white captives, whom they brought back by the score from their raids. No one has ever exaggerated the Comanche tortures. The authenticated accounts fill thousands of pages, and some are altogether unreadable for men with normal nerves. They had great skill in pain and cruelty was their catharsis. In short the Comanche killed and tortured more whites than any other Indians in the West, stole more horses and cattle, and were a greater danger.” Gang rape of women was de rigueur, “and the many captive children could be entertainingly dismembered.”
Now that was the righteous view of a highly educated and celebrated white historian of the mid-twentieth century.b De Voto’s sentiments tend to beg a conversation over what might be termed the “temporal fallacy,” which is to
say an assignment of present-day ethics, values, and morals upon people, tribal or otherwise, who lived in centuries past.c In other words, it is tempting to conclude that since the Indians grew up as savages they didn’t know any better, and thus it is wrong to condemn them for brutality. However, by the same token it follows that it would be equally wrong to denounce behavior of the whites, who often reacted to Indian raids and depredations by wiping out whole villages in retaliation, since it had been ingrained in the culture for hundreds of years that Indians were more or less a subhuman species who understood only brutality.
There is plenty of room for rubs in all this philosophizing but it is also beyond the scope of this book to conduct a moralizing seminar on nineteenth-century standards of behavior; suffice it to point out how treacherous the Santa Fe Trail could be. Consider, for example, the fate of Jedediah Smith, one of the most famous of the storied mountain men, who, after a short lifetime of spectacular western exploits and discoveries, at last met his end at the hands of a band of Comanche.
Smith, then only twenty-five, had been one of the early fur trappers along with such characters as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and John “Liver-eatin’ ” Johnson, blazing trails from the Missouri frontier to California and Oregon, facing down grizzly bears, blizzards, starvation, and thirst, when in 1831 he decided to give up trapping and enter the Santa Fe trading business and got up a caravan with his brother, Austin, and fellow trappers William Sublette and Thomas Fitzpatrick. It went well until they reached the Cimarron Cutoff, when Indians killed a member of the party who had been hunting antelope.
A few days later Jedediah and Fitzpatrick went ahead of the party to look for a watering hole. They reached a spot that looked promising and Fitzpatrick began to dig, but Smith continued ahead to see if he could locate a better source. He never returned and a search turned up nothing. When the cavalcade reached Santa Fe a few weeks later, Austin Smith was shocked to discover his brother’s rifle and pistols offered for sale by Mexicans. Confronted, the Mexicans said they had purchased the weapons from some Comanche who claimed they obtained them from a white man they had killed on the Santa Fe Trail.