Large numbers of weapons and ammunition were confiscated, including all of the enemy artillery, wagons, stores, livestock, $6,000 in gold, and seven fine carriages, as well as General Heredia’s own fancy writing desk and engraved stationery.b Also captured were a number of Mexican flags and regimental colors, including the infamous double-crossboned black flag of the previous battle.c That night, as after the Battle of the Brazito, the Americans camped on the bloody field and “feasted sumptuously on the enemy’s wines and poundcakes.” Next day, to the tunes of “Hail, Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle” played by the regimental band, they marched into the capital city and accepted its surrender, ran up Old Glory, and fired a twenty-eight-gun salute to the United States.
Doniphan’s expedition was one of the most singular feats of the Mexican-American War; with an army of barely a thousand he had captured the vast state of Chihuahua. More important, his entrance into that part of Mexico had tied up five thousand enemy troops at the Battle of the Sacramento, including regulars and artillery, which, had they not been required to remain and defend against Doniphan, would have been available to turn the tide at the crucial Battle of Buena Vista, on February 23, 1847, five days previous, against Santa Anna himself, which had been a near run thing for General Zachary Taylor.
* In international military parlance, a black flag is a signal that no prisoners will be taken or that no quarter will be given in battle.
† Doniphan, having no formal martial training himself, had borrowed some military handbooks from Kearny covering such subjects as drill, tactics, and strategy.
‡ Squirrel barking was a hunter’s technique from colonial days, when backwoodsmen discovered that the .50-caliber ball from their rifles would blow a squirrel to smithereens. So they learned to aim instead for the branch right below where the squirrel was perched, and the concussion and splinters from the bark would kill the animal.
§ Song of Solomon, 6:10: “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?”
‖ As the Mexican guns began to fire the Americans noticed a curious phenomenon. Owing most probably to a combination of poor Mexican gunpowder and the rarefied mountain atmosphere, the enemy cannonballs left a blue streak behind them, often allowing Doniphan’s men to dodge the danger. It struck the men as being so remarkable that afterward they began using the phrase “blue streak” to describe anything that had great speed or intensity, thus introducing a new expression into the common lexicon.
a These were said by some to be criminals released from Chihuahua jails in exchange for service to their country.
b It was said that the soldiers later delighted in using the general’s personal stationery to write their letters home.
c This “Take No Prisoners” black flag hangs now in St. Louis in the museum of the Missouri Historical Society.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Fight of Their Lives
While Doniphan’s force was savoring its victory, Kearny’s greatly reduced Army of the West was six hundred miles away, straining toward California in cold and high winds through a landscape of desiccated New Mexican barrens and tablelands so desolate they were forsaken even by the Navajos and Apaches. There was no road or trail, only the broken earth and compass and sextant. Thick mesquite and fremontia* made it doubly difficult for the wagons. The compass route led through gullies, ravines, buttes, and sharp escarpments, and Kit Carson informed Kearny that, if they continued with the wagons, at this rate it would take at least four months to reach California. After another frustrating day of it, Kearny ordered a halt and sent an express rider back to Santa Fe with orders to bring up mules and a couple of hundred packsaddles. The wagons were unloaded and sent back. The party waited. At night the thermometer dropped into the mid-twenties; in daytime it would rise to eighty degrees.
A week later they found themselves in high country, a long pack train snaking single file through the hills. Presently they came into a region of supposedly rich gold and copper mines that had been abandoned years earlier after Apaches descended on the place and killed the Mexican workers. They rode through the ghost town—twenty or thirty adobe houses and a dozen mine shafts were all that remained. Captain Emory, whose engineering detachment was mapping the expedition, named an exceptionally high and striking escarpment Moore’s Bluff, after his good friend in the First Dragoons, Captain Ben Moore, a recent widower with two young children. It was one of the perks of being a topographical engineer in uncharted territory—you got to name things. It did not mean superiors wouldn’t overrule you later, but at least for the moment you could officially name mountains, rivers, and anything else on your map as you wished.
On October 20 they reached the Gila River, which bent off southwestward toward California. That morning they were met in camp by a band of Apaches who claimed they came to trade. According to Emory, “They swore eternal friendship to the whites, and everlasting hatred to the Mexicans.” The head chief was Red Sleeve, who addressed Kearny with some version of this speech: You have taken New Mexico, go on then and take Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora. We will help you. You fight for land, we fight for Montezuma, and plunder. The Mexicans are rascals and we hate them, and we will kill them all.
Emory noted that the Apaches were “elegantly dressed, with beautiful helmets with black plumes, which, with the short skirt, waist belt, bare lags and buskins, gave them the look of pictures of antique Grecian warriors.” But, he added, “These men have no fixed homes. They hover around the beautiful hills that overlook the Del Norte, and woe to the luckless company that ventures out unguarded.” Kit Carson took one look and whispered, “I would not trust a one of them.”
Some miles behind, and on a parallel course farther south, struggled Colonel Cooke and his Mormon Battalion, charged not only with bringing the wagons along but with building a road all the way to California.
On November 15, “It blew a gale, with snow, sleet, rain and sunshine alternately,” Cooke wrote in his journal. “The despairing wanderer whose life depends on finding water, always turns with hope to a mountain, to a tree, or to broken ground.”
Their guide Charbonneau, Cooke said, “has come in. His mule gave out, he says, and he stopped for it to rest and feed for half an hour; when going to re-saddle it, it kicked at him and ran off, he followed a number of miles and finally shot it; partly I suppose from anger and, partly, as he says, to get his saddle back, and pistols, which he brought into camp.”
Cooke and his Mormons pressed on into the Mexican state of Sonora, far to the west, traveling past buttes and mesas from the tops of which ominous smoke signals rose to mark their passage. As on the Santa Fe Trail, the men soon were bewitched by mirages. “A distant mountain range became the shore of a luminous lake,” Cooke said, “in which nearer mountains or hills showed as a vast city—castles, churches, spires! Even masts and sails of shipping could be seen by some.”
At spots they had to lower the wagons down from precipices by blocks and tackle and ropes around rocks and other levers. On one of these occasions, Cooke reported, “I discovered Charboneaux near the summit, in pursuit of bears. I saw three of them up among the rocks. Soon he fired and in ten seconds again, then there was confused action one bear falling down, the other rushing about with loud fierce cries, amid which the hunter’s too, could be distinguished; the mountain fairly echoed. I much feared he was lost, but soon, in his red shirt, he appeared on a rock; he had cried out, in Spanish, for more balls [lead shot]. The bear was rolled down and butchered before the wagons passed.”
Suddenly bad things began to happen to them. On December 1 a Private Allen disappeared, and that night, “thick ice formed in the tents.” Next day they entered an enormous valley, ringed by mountains, and covered with mesquite, the site of a hundred-year-old plantation (“Nothing but the old adobe walls standing,” said Private Henry Bigler), now abandoned due to Apache depredations and said to have once contained 80,000 cattle.
The desce
ndants of those cattle still wandered the valley, eating and propagating, with few natural enemies other than the Indians, who would kill one when they felt like it. “The ox, in a perfectly wild state, abounds here,” Cooke reported. “As we descended an immense red bull rushed by in front, at great speed; it was more novel and exciting than the sight of buffaloes.”
It was apparently not a moment too soon, either, because by then the provisions they had brought with them had almost given out, including the cattle and sheep that had been driven behind the march. According to Private Bigler, “It had become a common thing to eat head, heels, hide, and tripe. Even the very wool was pulled off from sheep skins that had been used under the pack saddles, and the thin hide roasted and eaten. Poor give-out beef cattle that could not be driven another inch were killed, dressed and eaten to save men from starvation.” Bigler informed his diary that a Corporal Green from B Company had “lost his reason.”
As the battalion crossed the valley a band of Apaches appeared. “They are poor, dirty, Indians,” Cooke remarked, “[but] they wear fine moccasins, with tops or leggings attached. Their tongue,” he continued uncharitably, “is by far the most brutal grunt that I have ever heard; their lips scarcely move, and the words come out a stuttering, jerking, gutteral [sic].”
Cooke had hoped to employ some of the Indians as guides, but they did not come in as promised next day: however, the missing Private Allen did, and with a harrowing story to tell. It seems hunger had driven him to go off hunting. Almost immediately Allen—the only enlisted member of the battalion who was not a Mormon—lost his way. Next he came across the road the battalion had made but, as Cooke put it, “his great misfortunes seem to have turned on his taking for granted we could not have come that way.” Allen then encountered Indians who robbed him of his gun and clothes. Thus, five days and sixty miles later, according to Bigler, “he overtook us at this encampment naked, and almost starved to death.” To survive, noted Colonel Cooke, “having no knife, he had eaten of a dead horse, in the fashion of a wolf.”
The battalion’s ill luck continued when, several days later, while crossing a prairie “through a northwester that cut us to the bone,” they were attacked by, of all things, a herd of wild cattle. In battalion lore it became known as the “Great Bullfight.”
In midafternoon of December 11 the column was moving through a sea of tall grass when, without warning or provocation, dozens of wild bulls came charging out of the west, much as the herd of buffalo had attacked the First Missouri Volunteers along the Santa Fe Trail.
Wrote Colonel Cooke, “One ran on a man, caught him on the thigh, and threw him clear over his body, lengthwise; then it charged on a team, ran its head under the first mule, and tore the entrails out of the one beyond. I had to direct the men to load their weapons to defend themselves.”
A bull ran down a sergeant who narrowly escaped serious injury as he was struck between the animal’s horns. Another charged a horse tied behind a wagon, but the horse broke free and the bull hit the wagon head-on, knocking it out of the road. One bull killed two mules, then charged on a “Private Amos D. Cox of Company D, [who] was thrown several feet in the air, the bull passing on, taking no further notice of him,” according to Bigler, who noted that “Cox was severely wounded in the thigh.” Many of the bulls seemed to go for the wagons and the mule teams. “I saw a bull make a charge,” said Bigler, “and it appeared to me he threw the near mule slick and clean over his off mate.”
By now the men were shooting at the bulls, with mixed results. Lieutenant Stoneman, Cooke recorded, “was accidentally wounded in the thumb.” Another bull, “after receiving two balls through its heart, and two through its lungs, ran on a man. I have seen the heart,” Cooke said, after the animal was finally killed.
To escape being gored, a soldier “fell flat to the earth [and] the bull ran lengthwise over him, hooking down at the same time and caught the soldier’s cap on his horn, and carried it off, I suppose in triumph,” said Bigler. Colonel Cooke wrote, “I was very near Corporal [Lafayette] Frost when an immense charcoal-black bull came charging at us, a hundred yards. Frost aimed his musket, a flintlock, very deliberately, and only fired when the beast was within six paces; it fell headlong, almost at our feet.” According to Bigler, who saw the incident, “The Colonel turned round and swore that man was a soldier!”
After the dust had settled it was found ten bulls had been killed—tough meat but more than enough for several days on the march. After the bulls had been butchered, the wounded tended to, and the battalion settled down beside its campfires to assess the incident, Colonel Cooke, who was himself an accomplished topographer and in fact was making his own map of the journey, recollected that they had just crossed “a pretty stream.” He drew it in on his map as “Bull Run.”†
Two days later, well into Sonora, the scouts encountered a shack at a well in the desert, about twenty miles from the line of march, where some Mexicans and Apaches were operating a still to make mescal. The Mexicans informed them that about two hundred Mexican soldiers were garrisoned at a fort called Tucson, about sixty miles to the northwest. To avoid capture (or death) the scouts lied about who they were and what they were doing, and one returned to tell Cooke while the other went on to Tucson to see if the Mexicans had been telling the truth.
Cooke immediately ordered the march turned toward Tucson, about four days distant. On the way, the men began to encounter an “extraordinary” flora that none had seen before. It was “a straight column thirty feet high, near two feet in diameter, fluted very similar to a Corinthian column, only the capitol wanting,” Cooke marveled. “Some throw out one or more branches, gracefully curved and then vertical, like the branches of a candelabrum.”‡
That night a Mexican sergeant arrived with a request from the commandant at Tucson that Cooke avoid the fort and the town by marching either north or south of it. Cooke told the sergeant to go back and tell the people they wanted to buy flour. Then about sixteen miles from Tucson two officers from the garrison came to try to arrange an armistice before any fighting got started. Cooke told them they could surrender a few arms as a symbolic gesture and he would leave them be. Next morning the battalion was met by “a fine looking [Mexican] cavalryman, well armed,” who carried a message refusing Cooke’s offer.
Cooke therefore brought the battalion to arms and began marching on the garrison when a few miles out he encountered two peons who informed him that Tucson had been evacuated by the Mexican forces, which had carried off two brass cannons along with their stores and ammunition. That was okay by Cooke; his orders were to go to California, not get into a scrape with Mexicans in the desert. Besides, he had a wagon road to build.
Kearny’s army had reached the Gila, which snakes westward from New Mexico across Arizona to a confluence with the Colorado at the California border. They were 342 miles out of Santa Fe, and Kearny’s march continued with the men’s faces now turned due west toward the setting sun. Captain Henry Turner, Kearny’s aide, thought the Gila was “a beautiful mountain stream—perfectly clear water, and about 30 steps across, timbered in cottonwood principally, it abounds in fish.”
But soon the ground became difficult as they wound their way “over the most broken, stony, and precipitous road I have ever traveled over, making it most dangerous for our mules,” Turner complained. But when they camped that night the men were relieved to find abundant game and fish in the river bottom—partridge, turkey, deer, bear, and beaver. “The United States will place a high value on this country,” Turner wrote, “affording a highway from the United States via New Mexico to California.”
Almost everyone commented on the fresh air, how deep and clean it was, rarefied at the dry altitude. According to Turner, “There never was a purer atmosphere than I am breathing at this moment.”
To avoid an impassable canyon that the Gila flowed through, they entered sixty miles of mountain-studded semi-desert in what is now southern Arizona. Freezing at night and hot by day, it sustained
various small nomadic Indian tribes, which the Army of the West encountered from time to time. On one occasion they met up with an offshoot band of Apaches who called themselves the Pinaleños, which translates as “those who live in the pine forests.” Captain Turner, a harsh man, thought them “a worthless, squalid-looking set, their physical appearance greatly inferior to that of any Indians I have ever seen.” Among them was a middle-aged woman saddled on a fine gray horse and “wearing a gauzy white dress trimmed with the richest and most costly Brussels lace,” according to Captain Emory, “pillaged no doubt from some fandango-going belle of Sonora.”
Anxious to trade with the soldiers, the woman dashed about on her horse until her dress slipped off her shoulders and, seeing the soldiers laugh and shout, she then carefully removed the whole thing, tucked it between herself and her saddle, and sat on it. And, said Emory, “In this state of nudity she rode through camp, from fire to fire, until at last she attained a soldier’s red flannel shirt, the object of her ambition, and made her adieu in that new costume.”
They also came across a sad, complicated situation. “A boy of about 12 years of age,” Emory said, “of uncommon beauty, was among our visitors.”
The boy, obvious to everyone of Spanish origin, had been kidnapped by the Apaches at a very young age. Now he seemed to be the darling of the tribe—“an idol with the Apaches,” as Emory put it in his diary. “We tried to purchase him,” Emory continued, but “he said it was long, long, since he was captured, and he had no desire to leave his master who, he was certain, would not sell him for any money. All attempts were vain, and the lad seemed satisfied both at the offer to purchase, and the refusal to sell. Here,” Emory concludes, as if to block the incident from his mind, “we found the mountains chiefly of red ferruginous sandstone, altered by heat.”
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