by Mike Blakely
Bowles sighed. “Very well!” He turned and stomped back to his regiment.
O’Brien slipped his boot into the stirrup of the Ringgold saddle and mounted. “Move the battery, Sergeant Moore. Quickly!”
O’Brien’s gunners mounted the draft horses or rode on the limbers and caisson boxes. As the guns trundled closer to the enemy line, another barrage from the Saint Pats exploded just over the heads of the Indianans. Poor bastards. He hoped they would follow him closely and get out from under the trajectory of the big Mexican artillery pieces, at least for a while.
* * *
Within five minutes, he had established his new position and targeted the enemy musketeers on the mountain slope above him. The rifles of the Kentuckians were still holding tenuously to the head of the gully that slashed down the mountain and defined the left flank. But new waves of Mexican musketeers had inched closer and now threatened to break the resolve of the volunteers from Kentucky.
“We will fire in battery, gentlemen,” he said, as his men tamped the loads in the guns. “Prime … Ready … Fire!”
This time, his three rounds of spherical case shot sailed directly into the front lines of the Mexican assault, relieving the beleaguered Kentucky riflemen.
“Reload!”
Now, from here, he could do some damage to the enemy until the Mexican batteries once again ranged his new position and drove him from this ground. His men hustled and loosed a second volley, then a third. O’Brien drew a breath of pride. His little battery had succeeded in stalling the Mexican advance on the flank. All his life he had endeavored to live up to his namesake, John Paul Jones. Now, finally, he thought he might be getting his chance to prove himself.
“Lieutenant O’Brien!” his first sergeant shouted. “The Hoosiers are not coming to support us!”
Looking back, he saw the Indiana Volunteers milling about in confusion. He spit on the ground. “Damned Bowles!”
“It looks like the whole regiment has volunteered to take the dead and wounded to the rear!” Moore said sarcastically.
“We will stay here and fire as long as we are able, Sergeant. Keep the horses close at hand in case we have to withdraw.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are the Bulldogs primed?”
“They are, sir.”
“Ready! Fire!”
The cannon roared. Again and again, with machined precision, his men sponged the tubes, rammed cartridges down the muzzles, timed fuses on the exploding shells. Because of their deadly fire, the left flank held.
But how long can we hold this ground before some enemy battery ranges us? And what of the Mexican infantry? The cavalry? When will they emerge from the ravines wrapped around our little peninsula of the plateau?
O’Brien’s eyes swept the edges of the barranca. He saw nothing at first glance. Then … Wait … What the hell?
“Sergeant Moore! Do you see what I see? There! Patches of white on the ground, moving. Coming up from the ravine.”
“By God, that’s their white shoulder belts, sir! They’re crawling into position to fire on us. There are hundreds of them!”
Dread plummeted into O’Brien’s guts. “No. Thousands.”
The first volley of musket fire swarmed through his battery, splintering crates and wheel spokes. A horse squealed and fell, kicking. A gunner howled as a ball hit his hip.
“Load grape! Grapeshot!”
In the hailstorm of bullets, the gunners loaded cartridges packed with powder and .70-caliber spheres of lead.
“Hurry! Turn the guns! Man the elevating screw! Lower the tubes!”
The musket fire only increased. Two more men fell. The blood of horses gushed into pools of human blood.
“Prime! Ready!”
The private nearest to him dropped his lanyard and fell dead. O’Brien rushed forward to grab the cord.
“Fire!” He pulled the lanyard, setting off the charge of the twelve-pounder. The six-pounder followed. The four-pounder, on a crippled carriage with busted wheels, also fired. Grape-size hunks of lead spewed into the enemy, wreaking horrible damage on human bodies. But, to O’Brien’s alarm, another throng of Mexicans charged up from the ravine, more numerous than the first. Musket fire rained sideways through his battery. O’Brien heard his men screaming, cursing, moaning.
Then the first round of enemy artillery fire hit them, exploding just overhead.
“Reload! Double-shot the guns!”
“Hell, throw in some stones to boot!” Sergeant Moore added.
“Hurry! They’re coming! Fire at will!”
The trio of field guns sprayed the enemy with double blasts of grapeshot, mowing down part of the charge. But more attackers came to replace the fallen ones. Artillery shells continued to explode all around the Bulldogs.
O’Brien was now manning the primers and lanyard himself, as most of his men were dead or wounded.
“One more time, boys! Give ’em hell!”
As the men loaded and the Mexicans charged, he took stock. Three horses and several men were down. O’Brien seemed to be the only man not wounded, and at least six men were killed.
“Sergeant, bring the horses! We will leave the four-pounder behind. After this volley, pull the six and the twelve back by the prolonges!”
“Yes, sir!” Moore sang.
“Fire, damn it!”
The volley blasted the nearest Mexicans backwards with its terrible force. And still, more came, stunning him with their unaccountable courage. At the tailpiece of the twelve-pounder, he uncoiled the prolonge—a rope with an iron hook tied to the end. He tossed it out to its full length, toward the rear.
“Here is the prolonge, Sergeant! Hurry!”
O’Brien now feared he might lose his guns to the enemy, though his men were frantically leading the horses to the guns. He put his hand on the wheel of the twelve-pounder and drew his saber. The first brave man to reach him ran at him with his bayonet. O’Brien sidestepped and hacked at the man, fairly cutting his arm off. He made a thrust for the heart as the man screamed and died.
Another volley came. He felt a bullet tear through the flesh of his calf, another through his thigh, and a third across his cheek and through his earlobe. He fought off the next attacker, crippling the man with a slash to the knee.
“We’re ready, Lieutenant! Let’s move! Mount the wheel horse! Your saddle horse is dead!”
O’Brien turned, ran past the cannon and the prolonge, and leaped aboard the only vacant saddle on the team of horses. The two guns began to roll at the end of the prolonges. He looked to both sides, saw dead or wounded soldiers draped over the thighs of other riders. Still other wounded men rode the limbers and a caisson someone had managed to hitch up. The limping horses struggled to pull. They left a trail of blood behind them as they narrowly escaped the oncoming hoard of Mexican patriots.
The attackers fell upon the four-pounder and cheered over its capture. Stray musket shots still hummed through O’Brien’s bedraggled escape party, but the distance widened between his battery and the enemy. The Indiana Volunteers were nowhere in view. It seems they had broken ranks and run for Hacienda Buena Vista.
This was a disaster. He wondered if he would face court-martial for moving forward without orders. Every man in his unit was either dead or wounded, including himself. Was it his fault? No! By God, he had orders to support the left flank, and he could only fulfill those orders by getting closer.
He set his jaw and vowed silently to redeem himself yet on this day. This was not over. He had kept the two best guns out of the hands of the Mexicans. He had fought the enemy face-to-face and survived. But now he looked back at them through the chunks of mud kicked up by the splintered wheels. They were still coming. Thousands upon thousands of them. They had punched a gaping hole in the American line. The left flank was swinging back like a huge gate along the base of the mountain.
Is this battle lost? We are outnumbered! Where are the reserves? The dragoons? More artillery? Where the hell is everybody
? I need more gunners, and sound fieldpieces to replace these crippled carriages.
He remembered the immortal words of his namesake: I have not yet begun to fight!
“Sergeant Moore!” he yelled. “We must find an ambulance wagon for the men. Then you and I will ride to Captain Washington to get a couple of six-pounders. Sergeant? Do you hear me, damn it?”
A private’s voice spoke meekly over the rattle of the carriages. “Sergeant Moore is dead, Lieutenant.”
O’Brien looked over his shoulder and found the wounded private holding on to the body of Moore—clinging to him to prevent his tumbling off of an ammunition box. Blood had poured out of a bullet hole in Moore’s chest and was now dripping down the caisson and onto foreign soil.
Private
SAMUEL E. CHAMBERLAIN
Buena Vista
February 23, 1847
With his heart pounding like some wild animal trying to escape a cage, he pushed the lever on the side of his Hall carbine. Smoke from the last shot trailed out as the block pivoted upward, revealing the cylindrical tunnel of the breech. Tearing open a paper package with his teeth, he poured the gunpowder from the paper tube into the open breech, trying to concentrate as musket bullets hummed past his ears. Now he reached into his ammunition pouch for a musket ball, which he pushed in on top of the powder. He closed the breech. Hands shaking with excitement, he managed to secure a percussion cap on the nipple under the hammer.
Now he looked up for a target, coughing at the bank of smoke that obscured his view.
“Get down, Sam!” Boss Hastings yelled. “You can see under the smoke!”
Private Samuel Chamberlain dropped to his belly beside Hastings and aimed at the X of a Mexican soldier’s white cross-belts. It was an easy shot. The man was only forty yards away. He pulled the trigger and watched the soldier tumble forward. It was his second kill in the past few minutes of terrifying chaos.
Five minutes ago, he had been sitting on the ground, resting, holding the reins of his mount, watching Lieutenant O’Brien hurl shells from an advanced position to the left of his regiment of dragoons. Then came the attack. Santa Anna had sent an entire division of infantry, under General Lombardi, up the barranca. The enemy first appeared to him just fifty yards from where he sat.
“Look there!” Boss Hastings had yelled.
The white cross-belts of the Mexican foot soldiers had popped up over the brink of the ravine by the hundreds. The sun had risen over the mountain and its rays struck the polished barrels of the Mexican muskets.
A forest of glistening tubes, he thought. That will ring true in my book, should I survive this.
“To horse!” an officer had screamed.
Smoke and musket balls had belched forth from the rim of the gully. As O’Brien vaulted into his saddle, he had noticed the way the Mexicans fired. Some took careful aim, with the butts of their weapons held against their shoulders. But many of them held the old Brown Bess muskets against their hips to absorb the mule-kick recoil of the weapons launching the .71-caliber balls.
His company commander, Captain Steen, had drawn his saber and waved it at the men. “Fall back and rally on me!”
The entire regiment had charged at a gallop to safer ground, a furlong back.
“Halt! Fours hold the horses!” Steen had ordered. Chamberlain was a three, so he had handed his reins to a messmate numbered four. Every fourth man took the reins of four horses to hold, farther back, while the bulk of the dragoons prepared to fire. Captain Steen had ridden back and forth behind his company, shouting orders.
“Cock your weapons and hold your fire. Do not fire until I order it!”
When that order came, Private Chamberlain made his first kill. Now he had killed his second enemy soldier and was reloading for a third shot, hoping he and his fellow dragoons could hold off the massive wave of attackers.
Somewhere behind him, he heard a bugle call for a charge and knew the order had come from General Joseph Lane, the brigade commander along this stretch of the front line. But, just as quickly, he heard the voice of Colonel Bowles, commander of the Second Indiana Volunteers, to his left. “Cease firing and retreat!”
The Indianans wasted no time obeying, even though Bowles immediately tried to countermand his own order. “No, not retreat. I meant retire. Retire firing! Halt! Do not retreat!”
It was too late.
The bulk of the Hoosiers reminded Chamberlain of a fleeing herd of deer as he watched them sprint for the rear, many of them dropping their weapons. Almost the entire regiment disintegrated in seconds. Only a dozen or so stood their ground with Colonel Bowles. The Mexicans saw the gaping breach the retreat created in the American line and veered toward it, streaming into the void, cutting off the extreme U.S. left—the Rackensackers and the Kaintucks—from the rest of the army.
To his horror, Chamberlain saw Captain Sherman’s battery of artillery limber its guns to join the retreat. Now, noticing that they would have no artillery support, some panicked soldiers from the Illinois Volunteers also went the way of the Hoosiers, running for the rear.
Chamberlain saw a rider on a huge bay horse charging to the gap in the front line as canister and musket balls rained all around him. He recognized the man as Major Roger Dix. As the army paymaster, he was a popular officer. Dix seized the regimental colors from the Illinois standard-bearer and rode back and forth across the breach in the line to rally the men. As Chamberlain watched in admiration, a bullet hit Dix in the stomach and a second projectile penetrated his skull, killing him instantly. He dropped the battle flag and fell from the horse, but his brave act had emboldened the Illinois Volunteers, and they returned to the line to lift the regimental banner.
Still, Mexican foot and horse soldiers continued to charge the gap left by the Second Indiana, and Chamberlain wondered if this battle was not already lost. What remained of the left flank was melting away to the north, curving toward the rear in the face of the Mexican onslaught. The Arkansas and Kentucky skirmishers were left isolated and abandoned on the mountain slopes.
He finished reloading his carbine and looked for a target. Before he could fire, General Wool’s adjutant, Captain Lincoln, galloped to the First Dragoons’ position with orders.
“Captain Steen! Mount your dragoons and round up those damned cowards! Drive them back to the front!”
“To horse!” Steen shouted.
With musket balls and shrapnel humming around him, Sam Chamberlain was more than happy to fetch his mount.
“Catch those retreating men!” Steen ordered. “Run them down if you must!”
As he galloped toward the outbuildings of Hacienda Buena Vista, he saw General Wool leading the Second Illinois Volunteers from the right in an attempt to shore up the hole in the line left by the Indianans. Within a minute, Private Chamberlain’s fleet sorrel, Soldan, had overtaken the fleeing men on the outskirts of the rancheria.
“Halt, there, you cowards!” he yelled.
The men ignored him, so he rode swiftly in front of the leading fugitives, took his right foot out of the stirrup, and kicked a couple of the men down. Boss Hastings and others troopers did the same, slowing the rout.
“Stop or you’ll all have C for ‘coward’ branded on your cheeks!”
Chamberlain cut off about half of the leaders, like a vaquero turning a cattle stampede.
“Turn around and march back! Pick up your damned weapons!”
Many of the men, winded from their headlong sprint, obeyed the orders and stopped running. Others, however, charged into the regiment protecting the supply wagons at Buena Vista or disappeared into the barns, sheds, and adobe houses that made up the little village surrounding the ranch.
Chamberlain saw five men continuing toward the buildings and rode into their path. Two of the soldiers were helping a third to the rear.
“Halt, there!” Chamberlain shouted. “Your orders are to go back to the front line!”
“Damn you!” a private said. “You ain’t no officer! Any
way, this man is wounded in the foot!”
“Well, it only takes two men to carry him. What are you other two boys tagging along for?”
“I’m carrying his weapon,” a private said, brandishing two muskets.
“What about you?” Sam asked the last man in the procession.
“I’m carrying his hat. And I’m a corporal. I outrank you!”
“Aw, hell, Sam,” Hastings said, having ridden up. “Let ’em go. They might do some good yet, if the damned greasers attack the supply wagon.”
Chamberlain frowned and turned back toward the battle line. Small arms continued to crack all along the front and cannon shook the very air. He and Hastings rode up behind the volunteers who had been rallied to return to the fighting.
“Come on, soldier!” Chamberlain shouted down at the Hoosier nearest to him. “March back to the front. The Mexicans are still coming. You’d best pick up a musket on the way. You boys dropped plenty of them when you turned tail!”
Hastings rode up beside him. “We done good, Sam. There’s probably a hundred here that we rallied.”
Chamberlain nodded at his friend and looked around for his company commander, Captain Steen. He saw that Steen had overtaken Sherman’s battery and had shamed the gunners into returning to the front. Chamberlain began to hope his army might survive, even though hordes of enemy infantry had broken through and were still pushing toward the supply train at Buena Vista. If they got there, they could capture the supplies and flank the entire U.S. force, surrounding it with superior numbers.
“Gentlemen!” Captain Steen shouted, returning to his dragoons at a lope. “We have new orders from General Lane. Our skirmishers on the far left flank have been cut off by the enemy advance. Look there, on the mountainside.” He pointed southeast.
Chamberlain gazed over the spearhead of the oncoming Mexican assault that had penetrated the U.S. line. Through the musket smoke, he saw the stranded skirmishers fighting for their lives as a regiment of lancers approached them on the steep mountainside.
“Our orders are to ride through the Mexican ranks and bring the Kentucky and Arkansas skirmishers back to guard the supply train.”
