Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The Fresno River attack prompted Governor Burnett to authorize the raising of a militia battalion. It took a while. Even under attack, most of the miners didn’t want to miss any days gathering gold. And the Indians had stolen most of the horses and mules, so replacements had to be found. But two hundred men eventually enlisted in the Mariposa Battalion, secured mounts, and set out.

  James Savage served as the battalion’s guide. “From his long acquaintance with the Indians, Mr. Savage has learned their ways so thoroughly that they cannot deceive him,” battalion member T. G. Palmer remarked. “He has been one of their greatest chiefs, and speaks their language as well as they can themselves. No dog can follow a trail like he can. No horse can endure half so much. He sleeps but little, can go days without food, and can run a hundred miles in a day and night over the mountains and then sit and laugh for hours over a camp-fire as fresh and lively as if he had just been taking a little walk for exercise. With him for a guide we felt little fear of not being able to find them.”

  Savage knew the Indians would be on the lookout, and as he brought the battalion close to where the Indians had camped near one of their villages, he had them dismount. He chose sixty men to advance on foot. “About two o’clock”—in the morning—“we started in Indian file, as still as it was possible for sixty men to move in the dark,” Palmer recalled. “For three long hours did we walk slowly and cautiously over the rocks and bushes, through the deepest ravines and up steep and ragged mountains, until within half a mile of the enemy. Here every one took off his boots, when we again pushed forward to about two hundred yards from the camp. Another halt was called to wait for daylight, while Savage went forward to reconnoiter.”

  There were more Indians than Savage had expected. He had hoped to strike the village by surprise, take some hostages, and use them as a bargaining chip toward a reestablishment of peace. But his band was badly outnumbered. He reconsidered his strategy.

  The men shivered as day began to dawn. “We had been lying in our stocking-feet on the ground on the top of a mountain within a few paces of the snow for more than an hour, almost frozen by the intense cold, not daring to move or speak a word,” Palmer remembered. “It was not yet light enough to see the sight of our rifles, when an Indian’s head was seen rising on the hill before us. For a moment his eyes wandered, then rested on us, and with a yell like a coyote he turned for the rancheria”—the Indian village. “Never did I hear before such an infernal howling, whooping and yelling, as saluted us then from the throats of about six hundred savages, as they rushed down the hill into the gim-o-sell bushes below.”

  Savage didn’t want to take on the whole camp of warriors, but he and his men had no choice. “Finding we were discovered, we charged on their town,” Palmer said. “Fifty rifles cracked almost instantaneously; a dozen Indians lay groaning before their huts, and many supposed we had undisturbed possession. Our firing had ceased and we were looking around for plunder, when a rifle fired from the bushes below struck a young Texan, Charley Huston, standing by my side. He fell with a single groan, and we all supposed him dead.”

  This came as a particular shock to the battalion men, as they did not think the Indians had guns. “We were only expecting arrows,” Palmer said. Palmer and the rest fled for their lives. “Before that shot was fired, I had always entertained the idea that I could run about as fast as common men (and I was one of the first in the charge), but by the time I had collected my wandering senses, I was nearly alone, the majority of the party some thirty paces ahead, and running as if they never intended to stop.”

  Eventually the Mariposa Battalion regrouped. And it adopted a new strategy—one that exploited the principal advantage the whites possessed over the Indians in the gold country. The Indians had women and children to protect; the whites didn’t. The whites didn’t have to catch and kill the Indian warriors; they could starve out the women and children.

  Which was precisely what the Mariposa Battalion did. After the Indian warriors had moved farther into the mountains, the battalion entered their village. “We burned a hundred wigwams, several tons of dried horse and mule meat,” Palmer explained.

  And so the Mariposa war proceeded. The whites seldom killed or even encountered the Indian fighters, nor did they find the women and children, who remained in the mountains. But the Indians couldn’t stay in the mountains forever. Their food stores—the acorns, pine nuts, wild grains and dried meat that would sustain them through the winter—were back at the villages, unguarded. These and the Indian houses were put to the torch. “Burnt over 5000 bushels of acorns, and any quantity of old baskets,” one of the battalion men wrote at the end of a busily destructive day. After a similar outing: “We burnt over 1000 bushels of acorns and also a good many old Rancherias, some of which were not long deserted.”

  The scorched-earth policy worked. With starvation staring them in the face, the tribes came out of the mountains, one by one, and sued for peace.

  ONLY A SINGLE BAND OF YOSEMITES REMAINED. THE MARIPOSA militia captured an old Yosemite chief named Teneiya. He asked to see the body of his son, who had been killed by the whites. The son had surrendered, then was allowed to break his fetters so he could be shot trying to escape. Seeing his son dead, with bullet wounds in his back, the old chief turned to the officer in charge. “Kill me, sir captain!” he cried. “Yes, kill me, as you killed my son; as you would kill my people if they would come to you! You would kill all my race if you had the power.”

  The chief proceeded to cast a curse on his tribe’s tormentors. “When I am dead I will call to my people to come to you,” he said. “They shall hear me in their sleep, and come to avenge the death of their chief and his son. Yes, sir American, my spirit will make trouble for you and your people, as you have caused trouble to me and my people. With the wizards, I will follow the white men and make them fear me. You may kill me, sir captain, but you shall not live in peace. I will follow in your footsteps; I will not leave my home but be with the spirits among the rocks, the water-falls, in the rivers and in the winds. Wheresoever you go I will be with you. You will not see me, but you will fear the spirit of the old chief, and grow cold.”

  Indians in that part of the mountains believed in the spirits the Yosemite chief summoned. The home ground of the Yosemites was a deep valley guarded by unscalable cliffs and thought to be enchanted. “We are afraid to go to this valley, for there are many witches there,” the chief of another tribe told the Mariposa men.

  But the Mariposa men didn’t fear the spirits. Some of them forced Teneiya to show them the way to the valley. Initially he balked, but then he concluded that only surrender would spare the Yosemite women and children from starvation.

  The Mariposa contingent was the first group of whites to enter Yosemite Valley. They marveled at its waterfalls, its soaring granite ramparts, and the dark forests along the Merced River at its bottom. Some began to think it might be enchanted after all. And they appreciated why the Yosemites were so reluctant to surrender—to trade this wonderland for the comparative wastes of the low country.

  But the Indians had no choice. “Where can we now go that the Americans will not follow us?” one of their chiefs said. “Where can we make our homes, that you will not find us?”

  VI

  STEEL RAILS AND SHARPS RIFLES

  32

  STEPHEN DOUGLAS’S BRAINSTORM

  JAMES MARSHALL’S 1848 GOLD DISCOVERY, BESIDES triggering a mass rush of peoples to California, making that place the most cosmopolitan spot in America, transforming San Francisco from a quiet village into a raucous city, causing the Industrial Revolution to hurtle half a continent from America’s East to its Far West, and sealing the demise of California’s Indians—besides all this, the gold discovery set America on a course that ran rapidly downhill to the Civil War.

  The Compromise of 1850 let California into the Union as a free state, but it said nothing about slavery in the other territories taken from Mexico. Its very silence provoked an uproar,
especially among that Northern majority in the House of Representatives that had repeatedly endorsed the Wilmot Proviso, a measure that would bar slavery from the new territories. The South stymied the proviso in the Senate, so it never became law. But it signaled that a majority in Congress thought the West—save Texas—should remain free of slavery.

  Stephen Douglas thought otherwise. The Illinois senator wanted to build a railroad to California. One reason was to keep California from spinning out of the Union. It occurred to more than a few Californians that their new home might be better off as an independent country. Americans had seceded from the British empire in 1776 in part because of the great distance that separated the colonies from the seat of government. Thomas Jefferson had suspected, after the Lewis and Clark expedition, that America’s Western slope had a political destiny separate from that of the East. Distance and difficulties of travel aside, California had something that made going it alone seem entirely plausible and attractive—namely, all that gold. Douglas judged that a railroad would neutralize California separatism. Once forty-niners who had walked or ridden horseback or wagon for five or six months to make the journey west discovered that they could make the return trip east in four days, they would remember what they loved about the land of their birth.

  The second reason for the railroad was that it would be good for the business of Douglas’s home state. Chicago was becoming the gateway to the West, linking the Eastern seaboard, via the Erie Canal, to the prairies and plains of the upper Mississippi and Missouri valleys. Douglas determined to expand Chicago’s reach to the Far West: California. The fact that he had business interests that would prosper from Chicago’s boom simply strengthened his desire to build a railroad to the Pacific.

  Yet no one had ever built such a long railroad, through such largely unpopulated regions. Potential investors demanded governments that could secure land titles and guard against Indian attack. Douglas proposed to give them just that. He sponsored a bill that would create territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska, through which the railroad would run.

  Southern members of Congress asked what was in the bill for them. The railroad would benefit the West and the North, not the South. Why should they approve?

  Douglas had an answer. His bill would repeal the Missouri Compromise’s ban on slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, including Kansas and Nebraska. Some Southerners actually considered emigrating with their slaves to Kansas, whose eastern portion looked much like next-door Missouri, a slave state; more important to most Southerners was the principle of nondiscrimination against slave property. The Douglas bill promised just that, and Southerners were pleased to support it.

  Northern antislavery groups recoiled in horror. They had thought they had slavery quarantined in the South. The Douglas bill would let it spread to the West and, if the underlying principle caught on, even reinfect the North.

  Douglas cleverly cast his bill as an exercise in democracy. “Popular sovereignty,” he called the concept. Americans would travel from other parts of the country and settle in Kansas and Nebraska. Some would take slaves; some would not. When the population of the territories reached the threshold for statehood, residents would vote. If they wanted slavery, they would have it. If they didn’t want it, they would not. What could be more democratic?

  And so the Douglas bill became the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. America’s attention, lately riveted on the Far West of California, abruptly refocused on its Near West, in Kansas.

  ON A DARK NIGHT IN MAY 1856 JOHN BROWN SET OUT FROM A camp near Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, a two-days’ ride southwest of the bend in the Missouri River from which the early emigrant trains to Oregon embarked. Several men accompanied him, including four of his sons. Brown alone knew the purpose of their mission, but the others, attached to Brown by filial devotion and his strange charisma, would obey his orders, whatever they might be.

  Brown had opposed slavery all his life. At first his opposition had been moral and private; he spoke against slavery among friends. But in 1837, when he was thirty-seven years old and living in Ohio, an abolitionist editor was murdered in Illinois by a mob of slavery sympathizers, and Brown took the killing personally. He stood up in church and said, “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”

  Brown joined the Underground Railroad, the network of roads, buildings and people that transported fugitive slaves from the South to freedom in Canada. He settled in upstate New York among free black homesteaders. He trained his children—there were twenty altogether, by two wives—to despise slavery and work for its abolition.

  Yet progress came too slowly for John Brown. He passed the half-century mark of his life, and slavery seemed to be gaining strength, not losing it. The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the West to slavery. Brown realized he might die with nothing to show for his life’s mission.

  But the Kansas law also pointed a way forward for Brown. The two sides—proslavery and antislavery—recruited men and some women to travel to Kansas and settle there, so that when the residents voted to make Kansas a slave state or a free state, their side would win.

  The proslavery side had the advantage of proximity. Kansas abutted Missouri, and the first settlements in Kansas were an easy ride from Missouri towns. Missourians could pitch tents in Kansas or even throw up hasty houses, establish residence of a sort, and return to their real homes in Missouri by nightfall.

  The antislavery side had the advantage of zeal and organization. Antislavery groups established emigrant aid societies that helped get free-state settlers to Kansas. They provided the settlers with “Beecher’s Bibles”—rifles named for the abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher, who said that in the struggle against slavery, one rifle was worth a hundred Bibles.

  John Brown joined the fight. He traveled to Kansas and with his boys looked for a chance to strike a blow for freedom. They arrived in time to learn of a raid on Lawrence, a free town, by a crowd of slavery men. The only person killed in the raid was one of the raiders, who was hit by falling bricks, but newspaper offices were looted, printing presses smashed, and a large hotel burned. The point of the raid was terrorism: to scare the antislavery settlers and drive them away.

  John Brown, whose theology favored the Old Testament over the New, vowed to take an eye for an eye, and then some. He gathered his sons and the other men and proceeded, under cover of night, to a small community of proslavery settlers on the north bank of Pottawatomie Creek. At Brown’s direction the raiders forced their way into three cabins and seized several men. Five were selected for execution. Under Brown’s implacable gaze, the victims were slashed to death with broadswords. Leaving the mangled corpses for their loved ones to find, Brown and his men disappeared into the night.

  THE POTTAWATOMIE MASSACRE OUTRAGED THE SOUTH AND sparked an escalation in the Kansas struggle. Proslavery militias poured into Kansas and hunted for Brown and his band. In a fight at Osawatomie, they killed several of Brown’s followers, including one of his sons. Brown became a hero to the abolitionists, who called him “Osawatomie Brown”—in preference to “Pottawatomie Brown,” since even the archest abolitionists had trouble owning the slaughter of that dark night.

  The violence in Kansas transfixed the country. “Bleeding Kansas,” headlined the New York Tribune. The paper’s editor, Horace Greeley, an abolitionist, extended the leader: “Startling News from Kansas. The War Actually Begun.” The New York Times chimed: “The War in Kansas. Murders Thickening.” Southern papers reported much the same thing. The image of Kansas drenched in blood etched itself in American minds.

  The image was misleading. Both sides in the slavery debate had an incentive to exaggerate the violence in order to motivate and mobilize their supporters. And the newspaper owners and editors, like their counterparts in California amid the Joaquín Murrieta scare, knew that lurid headlines sold papers.

  But even if the violence was exaggerated, the
struggle in Kansas said something significant about the West and its relation to the rest of the country. When Americans in the 1850s thought in sectional terms, they usually thought of North versus South. But that struggle had suddenly and dramatically spilled over into the West. The West had always seemed the future of America, and until recently that Western future had excluded slavery. It no longer did so, and the bloody trail left by John Brown was the evidence.

  33

  NORTH, SOUTH, WEST

  AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN, ABRAHAM LINCOLN MADE THE grand tour of the West, as it existed then and as his means allowed. He traveled as a flatboat deckhand down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Feeling the power of the great river, and observing the armada of boats and barges bringing produce, lumber, minerals and other goods from the far reaches of the Mississippi Valley, he understood how central the West was to America’s present and future.

  A quarter-century later, as a Springfield lawyer of some reputation and a politician of unfulfilled ambition, Lincoln read of the struggle in Kansas and thought, once more, that as the West went, so the country would go. Lincoln’s single term in Congress, as a Whig, hadn’t led to anything more in the political field by the time the Whigs disintegrated in the early 1850s. Lincoln joined the new Republican party, along with many former Whigs and Free Soilers. He scored points for the party and for himself by criticizing Stephen Douglas on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Being a man of peace and a moderate among the opponents of slavery, he shuddered at the news of the Pottawatomie massacre and watched with concern as the violence in Kansas escalated.

  Lincoln grew alarmed when the Supreme Court in 1857 handed down a decision that threw nearly the whole West open to slavery. In the Dred Scott case, the court decreed that Congress had no power to prevent slaveholders from taking their slaves into the Western territories. The Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along. By this decision, the court cut the ground from under Republican moderates who, while granting that the Constitution protected slavery in the states where it existed, held that Congress could, and must, keep slavery out of the Western territories. The Dred Scott verdict killed this option.