by Mike Blakely
Private Hogan stepped in to turn the elevating screw under the breech, raising the trajectory of the tube as Riley continued to sight along a line described by the tangent scale and the muzzle of the gun.
“Alto! Stop there!” He looked at Colonel Moreno, who was peering through the telescope at the distant riders. “This gun is ready to fire, Colonel. Listos!”
Moreno continued to peer through the scope as he replied in a conversational tone of voice. “They have halted to look over the ground. General Taylor has foolishly exposed himself. Remind him of the perils of such carelessness, Captain. You may fire at your discretion.”
“Prime!” Riley barked. He watched impatiently as one of the Mexican gunners inserted the friction primer into the vent hole. The same man stretched the lanyard attached to the primer out to the left of the gun.
“Listos!” He checked the positions of the men around him as some covered their ears with their palms. “Fuego!”
The eighteen-pounder roared, lurched backwards, and belched an instant plume like a silk flower from the sleeve of a magician. The heavenly scent of scorched powder filled his nostrils. As wind pulled the smoke aside, Riley saw a faraway puff of dust kicked up by the solid cannonball, to the right and short of the target.
“Turn the gun left! Izquierda! Halt!” He took hold of the elevating screw with his own hands and gave the tube a touch more elevation.
“Sponge!” He watched and waited as men sponged the bore.
“Load!”
A soldier pushed a cartridge containing a powder charge and an eighteen-pound cannonball into the muzzle of the weapon.
“Ram!”
As he continued issuing the orders, a gunner poured priming powder into the touchhole, inserted the primer, and stretched out the lanyard. He imagined his next shot taking Braxton Bragg’s head off.
“Listos!” He checked his crew. “Fuego!”
His eyes blinked at the percussion, then strained to see. A spray of dirt obliterated the enemy riders, and his heart swelled to think that he might have accomplished a direct hit on Bragg or Taylor. Such a shot at this range would become legend! He looked at his commander.
Moreno chuckled as he peered through the telescope. “That one landed a few paces short and bounced right over Taylor’s palmetto hat.”
Riley sprang for the elevating screw to make the slight adjustment. “Sponge!” he shouted, desperate to get another shot. “Hurry!” His frustrated mind scrambled for the Spanish translation, but he couldn’t conjure the word. “Load … Ram … Prime…”
“Cease fire, Capitan,” said Colonel Moreno. “General Taylor has chosen to retire from the field.”
Riley felt the old rage well up in his viscera. He wanted to bend the steel tangent scale in his hand but knew he needed it intact. He slammed the scale back into the tool kit and kicked toward an ammunition crate, but he stopped short lest he damage the loads. Still his anger swelled. Then he saw the sandbags. Making his hands into fists, he released his ire on a bag, hitting it again and again with his left fist and his right until the fabric ripped open and spilled sand onto the toes of his boots.
“God curse you bastard American heretics!” He saw his own saliva spray from his lips as he railed. “Spawn of the bloody British hordes!” He tore into the next sandbag stacked on the parapet, punching it until his knuckles bled. And still the lifelong ire stewed inside.
Forced out of Ireland! Chased from America! Treated like a dog. No more! No more! This is John Riley’s last stand!
He stopped and stared at the sandbag he had beaten to tatters, his lungs heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows. He felt his heart pounding furiously in his chest. His muscles strained against the seams of his uniform. Collecting himself, he turned and looked at the men around him, finding them gawking at him as if looking upon a madman. His breath came and went in huge gales.
Colonel Moreno stepped forward and put his hand on Riley’s shoulder. “Save your fury for tomorrow, Captain. The enemy will return.”
Major General
ZACHARY TAYLOR
Walnut Springs
September 19, 1846
The Mexicans called it Bosque de San Domingo—a pleasant picnic ground situated in the timber surrounding a clear creek. The Americans had dubbed the place Walnut Springs. Zachary Taylor—brevetted to major general after Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma—figured some Yankee volunteer had misnamed the place. As he slipped through the hardwoods with his camp chair, his spare pair of boots, and his polishing kit, he easily identified the big trees towering over him as pecans, not walnuts.
Finding a relatively secluded place out of sight from his headquarters tent, he sat on his chair and opened the bootblack’s kit. He was within shouting distance, should some emergency arise. Otherwise, he sought a few minutes’ solace from the constant solicitudes of his subordinates—particularly the very thorough William “Perfect” Bliss, who had been brevetted to a major after the recent victories.
Taylor had a second reason for desiring a modicum of aloneness. Four days ago he had looked at his calendar to see the date September 15 taunting him like a haughty stare from the grim reaper. September 15 invariably caused the general great, lingering sorrow. His daughter, Sara, had died on that day, eleven years ago. Now, in his grief, he sought solitude, though solitude was difficult to find in an army camp of 6,600 men.
The boots were his excuse, but both pairs did need polishing. Taylor detested flashy uniforms—he dressed in common civilian clothes, thinking of himself more as a Louisiana planter than a general in the army—but he insisted on keeping his clothing shipshape. This usually entailed sewing on buttons, darning socks, and patching rips with his own hands.
“You know, General, sir,” Bliss had told him two days ago, “we can pay a laundress to patch that shirt for you. That woman the men call the Great Western is said to be enamored with you, sir. I am certain she’d be honored to serve as General Taylor’s tailor.”
“Nonsense,” he had replied, ignoring Bliss’s jest. “I’ll have it patched myself before a laundress could find her needle and thread. Besides, it gives me something productive to do while listening to these blasted volunteers whine about who should have rank over who.”
Opening his kit, he removed the stiff-bristled brush and vigorously knocked the Mexican dust from one of his spare boots. Walnut Springs was situated only a few miles north of the fortified city of Monterrey, where the Mexican Army waited. The enemy might attack at any time, and even if they did not, Taylor planned to begin his offensive against them at dawn tomorrow. He had no qualms about dying with his boots on, so long as they wore a proper military shine.
After brushing the boots, he removed his palm leaf hat and threw it on the ground behind his chair. He was in the shade here, and there was a nice breeze to cool the sweat on his brow. Now he opened his tin of boot polish and grabbed a clean rag from the kit. He began at the toe of the boot, smoothing the black paste over the leather. As he finished the first boot and prepared to begin on the second, he sensed someone walking his way. Looking up from his task, he saw a man in uniform, wearing the insignia of a captain. Taylor knew all the West Pointers. This captain was a stranger to him—an officer from one of the new volunteer units.
“Good morning, old-timer,” the captain said, stopping in front of his chair.
“Mornin’, Captain,” Taylor drawled, a bit puzzled by the familiar tone.
“Say, you look like you’ve been marching along with this man’s army quite a spell. I’ll bet you can tell me where I might find General Taylor’s headquarters tent. I’ve just arrived to join my regiment and I need to report.”
Taylor smirked, realizing that the man did not recognize him as the commander of the army in his civilian attire. “Wal, Captain, the general’s tent is just over yonder a ways,” he said, affecting a pronounced drawl. He pointed, the rag dangling from his hand. “You can see Old Glory a-poppin’ in the wind.”
“I see. Thank you, old-tim
er.” The volunteer took one step toward the headquarters tent, then stopped and turned back. “Say, what do you charge for a shine?”
Taylor looked at the captain’s footwear. “Fifty cents a boot, but those look right shiny already.”
“Not these; my others. I’ll run get them.”
Taylor chuckled as the captain trotted back the way he had come. He finished working on his spare boots and removed the pair he wore, to polish them next. He wondered if he would actually get away with tricking the captain into paying him fifty cents for bootblack services.
These volunteer officers included all sorts. Some were reliable leaders of men, but many had been elected to their commanding roles based on popularity or wealth, though they might possess scant military knowledge. As a rule, their volunteer units lacked the discipline of regular army men. Back at Matamoros, where the volunteers began to flood his ranks, Taylor had had to crack down on shenanigans ranging from needless gunfire to brawls to abuses of Mexican citizens. He was satisfied that his disciplinary actions had made an impression, but the question remained: Could the volunteers fight?
That uncertainty had dogged him on the hard road from Matamoros, through Camargo and to Cerralvo. Deeming the road too rough for wagons or heavy artillery, he had used pack mules and had brought only light field guns with him. The bull batteries that had served so well at Palo Alto had to be left behind.
At Cerralvo, however, things began to improve. The troops found freshwater in abundance, along with groves of trees and productive pastures. The inevitable illnesses—dysentery and fevers—that had buried more than 1,500 men back on the Rio Grande proved less lethal at Cerralvo.
Even so, new concerns of a political nature began to mount. President Polk and Secretary of War Marcy wrote to Taylor constantly, demanding a long-range strategy for the war. Taylor would commit only to the next objective: Monterrey, the capital city of Nuevo León. He hoped that the Mexicans would sue for peace, should he take Monterrey.
This seemed to infuriate Polk. The state capital of Nuevo León impressed the president very little. He insisted on a plan of war that would include the conquest of Mexico City—the national capital. General Taylor could read between the lines written to him by Polk. He knew, from the glowing newspaper accounts of his leadership at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, that he had become a hero to the citizens of the United States.
Plain old homespun Zach Taylor had begun to receive eager missives from power brokers inside the Whig Party. There was talk of running him for president in 1848. If he knew this—here on the lonely Mexican frontier—certainly Polk and the Democrats had realized that he had become a political threat. Taylor was savvy to the ways of politicians. He considered it quite possible that Polk and his cabinet might rush him into an embarrassing defeat that would ruin his chances as a presidential candidate. Taylor did not intend to let this happen. He would not risk the lives of soldiers for the ambitious whims of politicians.
Old Rough and Ready understood that the enemy needed to feel fear and respect for the United States Army, but not hatred. He had seen hatred toward the Mexicans in the eyes of the Texas Rangers, in the words they used and in the way they fought. That ire was the result of the slaughter at the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad, the Black Bean Incident at Salado. Taylor knew that he could have ordered the killing of hundreds more Mexican soldiers as they fled from their defeat at the resaca and floundered across the Rio Grande. That would only have ignited a nationwide fury in Mexico. Even in war, there were rules of honor, and commonsense reasons to adhere to them.
The realization that he might actually become president of the United States in the next election would make him more cautious rather than more reckless. He owed more to his men and to the citizens of the United States than he owed to the president.
He glanced up for the captain he had just met, but he didn’t yet see the man coming back with his boots. He did, however, recognize a familiar personage walking through the grove in the distance. Just catching sight of the man brought back the old familiar sorrow, touched with a morsel of anger that made him feel ashamed. It was Colonel Jefferson Davis, commander of the Mississippi Rifles. That he should have to share this camp with Jeff Davis almost exactly eleven years after his daughter’s death seemed a cruel accident of fate.
He remembered how he had first met West Pointer Jeff Davis at Fort Crawford on the northwestern frontier, just after the Black Hawk War in 1832. Taylor had taken command of the First Infantry, in which Davis served as a second lieutenant, and had engaged in a skirmish with Black Hawk’s warriors.
Later, when Taylor’s family moved to the fort, Lieutenant Davis would meet his commander’s daughter, Sara Knox Taylor, who was only eighteen. A relationship developed between the two, despite Taylor’s objections. He had no desire to see his daughter marry a soldier. Taylor himself felt he scarcely knew his own children due to his military service. So young Jeff Davis resigned his commission and became a civilian so he could marry Knox, as she was usually called. Still Taylor objected, hoping the infatuation between the two would wane.
But three years passed and Sara Knox Taylor turned twenty-one—old enough to make her own decisions about whom she should marry. Still against the union, Zachary Taylor stubbornly refused to attend his daughter’s wedding, though the ceremony occurred at his own sister’s home in Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Davis moved to Mississippi and began preparations to farm on eight hundred acres of plantation land given to Jeff by his older brother.
Then the horrible news came, just three months after the wedding. Jeff and Knox had decided to visit Jeff’s sister and her husband at Locust Grove, in Louisiana. There, both of them came down with malaria. Knox did not survive. Remembering the reading of the letter that told of his daughter’s agonizing death still caused a withering melancholy to well up in Old Rough and Ready’s heart.
Jeff Davis had barely survived the disease himself. And then, what did he do? Took off on a trip to Cuba. Cuba! Then New York! He had gone on to become a successful planter in Mississippi, then a senator. A few years after the tragedy, Taylor and Davis had accidentally crossed paths in New Orleans. Over lunch, they talked and reconciled. But still …
Rationally, Taylor knew that disease was to blame for Knox’s death. Emotionally, he could not shake the notion that Jeff Davis had taken his daughter away from him and gotten her killed. His inability to forgive made him feel terribly ashamed. Until the day came that he could embrace Jeff Davis as a son, he knew he was not fit to call himself a Christian.
Movement caught the corner of his eye to the right and he looked that way to see his new acquaintance, the captain of volunteers, trotting toward him with a pair of dirt-caked boots. He had finished shining his own boots, so he pulled them on as the volunteer approached.
“Here they are, old-timer,” the captain said, slowing to a walk and dropping the boots on the grass. “I’ll be at the general’s headquarters if you care to bring them to me. I have your fifty cents in my pocket.”
“Wal, they’re a bit dirtier than you let on, but I guess a deal’s a deal, Captain.”
“I’ve an extra ten cents for a job well done.”
“Fair enough, sir. By the way, the general sometimes wanders off from his headquarters, but he’s never gone too long. Wait a spell and he’ll wander back.”
“Your advice is appreciated.” The captain began to drift backwards toward the general’s tent. “I will wait at least as long as it takes for you to finish those boots and bring them to me.”
“He will surely be back by that time,” Taylor said, with an air of authority in his tone.
The captain nodded and walked away.
Taylor knocked the dirty boots together to dislodge some of the dried-on mud. From his kit he produced a small knife that he used to scrape away the stubborn clods that clung to the soles. Meticulously, he brushed clean and then polished the boots to an enviable sheen.
Picking up his hat, his bootbla
ck kit, and the two pairs of boots, he sauntered to his headquarters. He caught sight of the captain conversing with some other officers. He paused until the volunteer looked his way.
“Ah, there you are,” the captain said, striding toward him. “Thank you, old-timer. The boots look brand new.”
The general glanced about to see the astonished expressions on the faces of the officers within earshot. He gave the boots to the captain and held his hand out for his pay. The captain dropped sixty cents into his waiting palm.
Now Taylor drew himself to attention, jutted his chin, and threw his shoulders back. “Major Bliss! Where are you?”
Bliss appeared from the headquarters tent. “Yes, sir, General Taylor! I’m here!” He rushed to Taylor’s side.
Taylor saw the color blanch from the captain’s face. “Major Bliss, this officer of the volunteers wishes to report. See that he finds his regiment.”
The mortified captain dropped his boots, came to attention, and saluted. “Begging the general’s pardon, sir … I had no idea that you were … Sir, will you accept my most sincere apology?”
Taylor returned the salute and felt a good, hearty laugh roar up from his belly. “No apology needed, Captain. You caught me out of uniform. You are now the only captain in this man’s army who can afford to pay a general to shine his boots!”
For a moment, as he listened to the nearby officers guffaw at the captain’s expense, he felt no worry, no sorrow, no guilt. Then he saw Colonel Jefferson Davis approach the gathering and he remembered the anguish of his loss and the burdens of his overwhelming responsibilities.
Lieutenant Colonel
SAM WALKER
Monterrey, Mexico
September 21, 1846
Rain-soaked and hungry, he watched dawn break across the valley. To the south, through the gray morning haze, he could just make out the road to Saltillo hugging the north bank of the Santa Catarina where the river and the road both sliced between two imposing peaks—Federation Hill on the south bank and Independence Hill on the north. His lips curled in a vengeful smirk as he remembered the last time he had passed between those two hills. Four years ago he had marched down the Saltillo road as a prisoner of war. Now he was back, and this valley looked much more appealing through the eyes of a conqueror than those of a captive.
