Kearny's March

by Winston Groom

  As they took up the Gila again, for his part Captain Turner ruminated on the bleak fate of the Indians after coming across fresh tracks of cattle and mules, “supposedly stolen by the Indians from the settlements of Sonora.

  “Should this country ever be in the possession of the U.S. there will be much difficulty keeping these Indians in order,” he predicted, “their only subsistence is stolen cattle, etc. from Sonora, and if they are cut off from this resource I cannot perceive how they are to live—the U.S. may buy them up with annuities, and cause them to be subsisted, and in this way purchase permanent peace with them—they live in such rough country their hiding places are in such fastnesses that a war with them would be almost as endless as was the Florida war with the Seminoles.”

  It was here, in the floodplain of the Gila, that the men began to see signs of an ancient and lost civilization; shards of pottery, some of it exquisitely fired, littered the ground “for hours in every direction.” Then, on the morning of November 10, ahead and slightly southward, loomed the remains of a huge primordial structure, which Indians later told them was the ruins of the House of Montezuma, the sacred Aztec ancestor of all the peoples of the region.

  Several of Kearny’s more curious officers visited the place. The structure, about sixty feet square, had long ago been burnt out and consisted of four buildings three or four stories high, one of which was still standing, built of a kind of lime, pebble, and clay tabby with smooth plastered walls four feet thick. Neither the joists nor any other part had been made with modern tools. Nearby were two large man-made circular mounds about a hundred yards around. One seemed to contain a well in the center and the other a pyramid. On the second story of the main house Captain Emory noticed a line of hieroglyphics, which some of the men thought might be a curse.§ In any case, Emory said, “It was, no doubt, built by the same race that had once so thickly peopled this territory, and left behind the ruins.”

  That evening they stopped to make camp, 640 miles from Santa Fe, according to the primitive but effective little odometer that Captain Emory had affixed to a wheel of one of the two mountain howitzers attached to the army. It was only by the greatest strains and exertions that the 225-pound howitzers had kept up over so many miles of rough ground, and most of their carriage parts had been repaired or replaced more times than anyone cared to remember. The guns were usually still struggling along behind hours after everyone else had made camp, “under the charge of Lieutenant Davidson,” Emory recorded, “whose post has been no sinecure.”

  Not long after they got their campfires going, a large body of Indians appeared from the west. To everyone’s surprise and delight, these were not the suspicious and untrustworthy Apaches but men from a tribe of Pima Indians, bringing armloads of corn, beans, honey, and watermelons to trade. Kit Carson, scouting ahead, had found their village earlier, and when he tried to buy some fresh bread the chief informed him that “Bread is to eat, not to sell—take what you want.” Several thousand Pima lived in this part of Arizona and impressed Captain Johnston as “more industrious than I have ever found Indians—they have all the necessities of life, produced by their own industry—they raise cattle and horses, corn, wheat, beans, melons quite enough for their own consumption,” and also for trade. Turner found himself surprised by the sophistication of the irrigation system constructed by the Pima. Moreover, he said, they also “raise cotton and manufacture a very substantial blanket of that material.”‖ Unlike Navajos and Apaches, the Pima lived in houses, “resembling what is termed a root house in our country,” said Turner, and the people “generally have kind, amiable expressions” on their faces. Their only known enemies were the Apaches, but the Pima were a tough and substantial tribe, whom Apaches mostly left alone.a “Theft seemed to be unknown among them,” Captain Emory observed.

  Their chief was a tall, spare sixty-year-old named Antonio Llunas who, according to the normally critical Turner, “exhibit[ed] more of human kindness in his face, air, and manner, than I have ever seen in any other individual.” Through his interpreter Chief Llunas told Kearny how in the past he had tasted the whiskey of Sonora and of New Mexico, and he wondered “if he could have a sample of that of the United States.” The liquor was produced and, according to Captain Emory, “the effect was electric; brightened his eye and loosened his tongue.”

  Emory asked about the origin of Casa Montezuma and the chief waxed eloquent on the subject. As Emory noted, “The Indians do not know the name Aztec. Montezuma is the outward point in their chronology; and he is supposed to have lived and reigned for all time preceding his disappearance.” The great Montezuma, Emory went on, was as familiar to every Indian of the Southwest as Jesus Christ or George Washington was to United States citizens. “In the person of Montezuma,” he said, “they unite both qualities of divinity and patriot.”

  Whiskey glass in hand, Chief Llunas divulged, through the interpreter, the tradition of the ruins attributed to Montezuma, “that in bygone days a woman of surpassing beauty lived in a green spot in the mountains. All the men paid her tributes in devotion, gifts, food &c. but she did not return their love or favor. Then came a drought which threatened the world with famine, and in their distress the people applied to her. She gave freely of her food and the supply was endless, and her goodness abounded.

  “One day she was lying asleep with her body exposed and a drop of rain landed on her stomach, which produced conception. A son was the issue, who was the founder of a new race that built this house,” said Chief Llunas.

  Emory, who had copied down the hieroglyphics from the wall of Casa Montezuma, showed them to the chief and asked if he knew what it meant. He did not, he said, and the men continued to insist that it was a curse.

  Next morning, Emory and the chief’s interpreter were out riding, away from the column, when Emory “asked if he believed the fable he had relayed to me last night.”

  “ ‘No,’ said he. ‘But most of the Pimas do. We know, in truth, nothing of our origins. It is all enveloped in mystery.’ ”

  Kearny wrote out an official letter to the chief, stating that “he was a good man, and directing all United States troops that might pass his way to respect his excellency, his people, and their property.” They also left behind several broken-down mules for the Pima to bring back to serviceable use for Colonel Cooke’s Mormon Battalion, which was expected to pass by presently.

  Now the army was about to enter the Tesotal, a forty-mile jornada without water or grass. But first they encountered the nation of the Maricopa Indians, a tribe very similar to the Pima but with a different language, and its men had distinct aquiline noses. Like the Pima, they were a friendly people. To prepare for the jornada many of the soldiers tried to acquire gourds from the Indians to fill with water, and soon a brisk trade began and the value of gourds steadily began to rise. “One large gourd cost me four strings of glass beads, which was thought to be a high price,” Emory grumbled.

  They started across the desert at moonrise, three a.m., and as the sun came up so did mirages, the first this party had seen since the Santa Fe Trail. The most interesting was a mirage of the U.S. Capitol, “with dome, wings, and portico, all complete,” which presented itself in the far distance “for about twenty minutes,” Emory said, adding that he went hungry, “having given my breakfast, consisting of two biscuits, to my even more hungry mule.” By that evening they had crossed over the jornada and encamped at a spot with both water and forage for the animals, but they had been warned by the Indians that for the next three hundred miles, to where the Gila joined the Colorado, there would be no more grass. Six or eight mules had died during the jornada, “and those that survive give little promise of future service,” Emory warned. Kearny ordered that from here on half the command would dismount and walk and use the mules for packing purposes.

  The expedition now entered a landscape as foreign as another planet. Huge dark mesas, hundreds of feet high, trailed off in rows like a fleet of dreadnoughts, and the surface changed every so of
ten from sand or dust so fine “it felt as though we were marching through a bed of flour, or ground-up plaster of Paris,” to ground “strewed as far as the eye could reach, with black, shining, well-rounded pebbles.”

  November was ending, and day after day they plunged ahead, consuming the irreplaceable foodstuffs they had brought along, as well as any mule or horse that happened to die from hunger or exertion. Captain Turner lamented to his diary that “our animals are now in a half-starved condition, skin and bone. I really do not perceive how they will get to California.” The weather was mostly pleasant during the day, with noon temperatures in the mid-seventies, but at night in this desert it dropped into the twenties or below. At one point Kit Carson killed a mountain sheep near a protuberance that Captain Emory named Goat’s Spur. On the afternoon of November 22, General Kearny’s horse gave out, “and he was obliged to mount his mule.”

  Not long afterward, the forward elements of the march made a chilling discovery that “left every man straightened in his saddle.” About ten miles from the junction of the Gila and the Colorado they came across a freshly abandoned camp that appeared to have been occupied just that morning by at least a thousand men. Everyone concluded that “It was General Castro and his troops, who must have succeeded in recruiting an army in Sonora, and was now on his return to California.” Since there were only 110 dragoons, Kearny decided it would be foolhardy to try to fend off an attack by that many soldiers, so their only recourse was to go on the attack themselves and hope surprise would even the odds a little. As it was getting dark, Kearny put the dragoons into camp in a little depression in the ground where he hoped they would not be discovered. About nine p.m. Lieutenant John Davidson finally caught up with the party and brought his howitzers in. He reported seeing campfires about five miles north on the other side of the Gila. Kearny dispatched Captain Emory and his topographical party, as well as fifteen dragoons, to discreetly find out exactly what in hell they were up against.

  Emory and his men “thrashed around” in the dark and the mesquite for a while, finally nearing the enemy camp, where he sent a man up a tall tree who came down to report seeing not so many campfires but hearing the neighing of many, many horses. Pursuing this interesting development, Emory and his squadron eased up to one of the campfires in the dark and, to their relief and delight, discovered that it was not General Castro’s army at all but a party of Mexican wranglers with some five hundred California horses on their way to Sonora to mount an army that General Castro was supposed to be recruiting there.

  Emory and his men seized what appeared to be the four head horse herders and brought them before General Kearny. “But as usual,” Johnston reported, “they lied so much we could get very little out of them.”b

  One of the drovers claimed there had been a revolt in California and that the Americans no longer controlled the country. He even gave details, including a rumor that the Americans had been expelled from Los Angeles and were congregated at San Diego with three warships and a force of soldiers and sailors who were being challenged by a rebel Californio army. All of this was of course disturbing news and, if true, quite the opposite of the situation Kit Carson had described when he left. Kearny let the quartet return to their camp and next morning sent details to requisition new mounts from the Mexican herd. Nobody knew quite what to make of the revelations of the previous night, but it was obvious that from now on the army should be on its guard.

  Meantime, Captain Emory and his people were sent out to reconnoiter. Reaching the junction of the Gila and the Colorado, Emory found the remains of an old Spanish church, “whose mission was eventually sacked by the Indians and the inhabitants all driven off or murdered,” but he nevertheless concluded that, being at the confluence of two such important rivers, the site would “probably be the seat of a city of wealth and importance.c

  Emory discovered various tribes of Indians in the neighborhood, whose names per Emory are worth repeating: the Coyotaros, or wolf eaters; Cochinears, or dirty fellows; Tontears, or fools; and the Garroteros, or club Indians. “These last cultivate melons, beans and maize,” the captain noted.

  On his way back to the main party Emory made a valuable discovery. He came across a Mexican, mounted of a fine horse, who was carrying extra water and other items indicative of a long journey south through the Sonora desert. He also seemed nervous, so Emory invited him to return to the dragoons’ camp, “much against his taste.” There he was searched and determined to be an enemy courier, and in his satchel was a treasure trove of military intelligence in the form of letters the man was carrying to Sonora, including one to General Castro himself.

  From these letters it became apparent that indeed there had been a counterrevolution in California since Kit Carson had departed there, and that the Americans were no longer in firm control of the province. The letters, Emory said, “all spoke exultingly of having thrown off ‘the detestable’ Anglo-Yankee yoke, and congratulated themselves that the tri-color once more floated in California.” The letters were at least several weeks old and some much older than that, but to Kearny it was plain that a situation awaited him. Also it could have been overtaken by subsequent events. He made no mention in his official reports then, or afterward, of having regrets for sending back two hundred of his dragoon regulars soon after he met Carson. But on balance, with all the trouble he was having feeding and watering his present force, perhaps the question was moot.

  The story of the revolt was too true. Like the New Mexicans in Santa Fe and Taos, the Californios soon rebelled against American rule. In fact, they never considered themselves conquered in the first place, only that events had quickly subsumed them in the form of U.S. warships and upstart American settlers who had taken them by surprise.

  After the easy fall of Los Angeles, Commodore Stockton had named Frémont military governor and installed Lieutenant Gillespie as alcalde of Los Angeles, with a force of forty-eight men to keep order. Stockton decreed that California was now part of the United States, published a set of laws, established a newspaper and a school. Then he went off to Monterey. Frémont, with thirty-five of his mountain men, rode north to the Sacramento River valley. It looked like laurels were in store for everyone; California was certainly a jewel to be prized in America’s crown.

  Meantime, however, Gillespie mucked things up. In addition to Stockton’s laws he imposed a number of various unwelcome rules, curfews, and behavior-governing regulations that caused any goodwill between the freewheeling native Californians and the Americans to evaporate. Not only were the Mexicans unaccustomed to following strict rules, they quickly came to resent the superior attitude of their conquerors, who behaved as precisely that—just as the Missourians had in Santa Fe—and not as benevolent friends come to free them from the bonds of an oppressive government. From the outset, the Los Angelenos were the least pacified of any of the Californios, and two highly respected Mexicans, José María Flores, a captain in the regular Mexican army, and General Andrés Pico, brother of the former governor, began raising troops in the countryside. Gillespie was about to find out that you cannot hold a large section of populated country with harsh rules and forty-eight men.

  On September 30, a mere six weeks after the relatively bloodless American conquest of California, Gillespie found himself besieged in Los Angeles by Flores and a force of three hundred angry Californios. Seeing no other choice, he negotiated for himself a rather generous surrender, which allowed him and his forty-eight men to march out of the city to San Pedro, where they were picked up by an American ship and taken north to Monterey. It was a humiliating comedown for the Americans, and Flores capitalized on it by moving swiftly to reestablish Mexican rule in San Diego and Santa Barbara.

  Stockton was infuriated when word of the revolt reached Monterey. It spoiled his plan to sail his fleet south to begin capturing Mexico’s Pacific ports, then march overland and link up to shake hands with the American commander in chief who would by then have conquered Mexico City. Stockton immediately sent a
midshipman, Edward Beale, with a fleet of longboats to fetch Frémont out of the valley “with all the men, rifles and saddles” you can carry. The idea was to ship Frémont’s men south from Monterey. Frémont began preparations to move his California Battalion, now some 450-strong, when another messenger arrived informing him that the Californios had stripped the entire area around Los Angeles clean of horses and mules, which would make it impossible to mount the battalion once it arrived. Frémont then made the decision to bring his force to Los Angeles overland, already mounted, a distance of some 350 miles, a two-week march.

  Meantime, Stockton had assembled a naval battalion of nearly four hundred sailors and marines that he placed under the command of fifty-five-year-old Captain William Mervine, of the frigate Savannah. Mervine landed at San Pedro and marched his force afoot toward Los Angeles. They were met by a body of Flores’s Californios, “who almost playfully frustrated the Americans from the outset.”

  The Californios had brought with them a small piece of artillery from the garrison at Los Angeles. With this they fired on the Americans advancing across the open plain, wounding a few of them. But just as Mervine’s force stopped to return fire with their muskets the Californios—displaying their famously adroit horsemanship—would lasso the muzzle of the cannon and quickly drag it out of small-arms range, then set it up again to repeat the procedure.

  After losing four men killed and ten wounded this way Mervine gave up, realizing there was no way he could overcome this infuriating tactic. He withdrew his men to the ship to await Stockton. Upon his arrival, the commodore decided to make his base in San Diego, instead of San Pedro, where he could sweep the flat terrain with his naval guns and possibly find livestock to mount his men from farther south.

  Flushed with victory, Flores returned to Los Angeles to be elected provisional governor and commanding general by the Californio legislature. From there he sent a hundred men under Castro, who had at last returned, north of San Luis Obispo, and another hundred under Andrés Pico south to San Diego to keep Stockton in check. He himself remained in Los Angeles to await developments.