Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  By mid-August, Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny’s forces were only a few days’ march away from Santa Fe. Passing through the tiny towns of Tecolote and San Miguel and then following the bends of the Pecos River, Kearny heard so many rumors about Armijo that he resolved to ignore them all. Apache Canyon might be the Scylla and Charybdis of the Southwest, but he was pressing on—averaging 20 miles a day, a frenetic pace for an army that had already logged 800. Two-thirds of the horses had died along the way, a fact that Kearny, the equine sentimentalist, found hard to bear. Most of his cavalry had become infantry, joining the larger body of Missouri volunteers who had slogged it on foot all the way from Fort Leavenworth.

  Kearny’s blistered men were now practically starving; they had been on one-third rations since Bent’s Fort, and they grumbled about the smiting heat. “Our guns become so hot we cannot handle them,” Pvt. Jacob Robinson wrote, “and the sand burns our feet. The dreaded Sirocco blows as from a heated oven, burning us even through our clothes. The discontented men say, ‘Let us be anywhere rather than in this desert.’” The land was so parched, wrote another soldier, that “it appeared as though it had not been refreshed by a shower since the day of Noah’s flood.”

  To make matters worse, water on the trail was hardly potable. Marcellus Edwards of Missouri’s Company D described a pool of rancid water his thirsty comrades dived into one early August morning: “It was so bad that one who drank it would have to shut both eyes and hold his breath until the nauseating dose was swallowed. Notwithstanding its scarcity, some men allowed their horses to tramp through it, which soon stirred it up to a thick mud. And to give it still greater flavor, we found a dead snake with the flesh dropping from his bones.”

  Kearny dismissed all such whining and pushed on without a break. He understood the salient fact of invasion, that delays almost always favor a defense. He kept receiving strange letters from Armijo, letters maundering on in elegant phrases that said everything and nothing. Army of the West lieutenant John Hughes described one such letter as “very politely dictated, and so ambiguous in its expressions that it was impossible to know whether it was the Governor’s intention to meet Gen. Kearny in council, or in conflict.”

  Still, Kearny was worried about Apache Canyon. The Santa Fe traders traveling with him knew all about the narrow pass and had been warning him since they were at Bent’s Fort that this was the most likely place where the New Mexicans would put up a fight. He sent spies ahead and kept moving as fast as he could.

  Another advantage of maintaining a high rate of speed, Kearny believed, was that it kept his forces out of trouble: The pace of their march gave the men focus, it harnessed them to the task at hand, it kept their appetites from wandering. With such a large and unruly army of green volunteers spread out over a hundred miles of trail, there was every opportunity for a devolution of military order. As the war progressed in other provinces of northern Mexico, Gen. Zachary Taylor’s volunteers were acquiring a reputation for “sexual terrorism,” as one historian put it. But the Army of the West simply had no time or energy for rape or pillage.

  Riding up and down the ranks, the stern Episcopalian general set a tone of probity. John Hughes saw Kearny as a “sagacious officer well-fitted for command of veteran troops,” but he believed the general unfairly expected the same high standards of “rigid austerity” from the Missourians as he did from his seasoned dragoons. The volunteers, Hughes thought, “are bred to freedom and fired by feeling, principle, and honor” rather than “the study of arms.” These young bucks feared and respected Kearny, but they did not much care for his discipline. The punishments Kearny meted out could be severe, even Sisyphean. One Army of the West diarist reported a case in which a group of five soldiers, having committed some minor infraction, were “court-martialed for insubordination” and then each sentenced to lug forty pounds of sand for a week.

  After trekking all this way across the scorched continent, most of the Missourians were itching for a fight. One volunteer wrote that he and his comrades were “full of ardor, burning for the battlefield, and panting for the reward of honorable victory.” As rumors of the coming engagement at Apache Canyon spread, a palpable excitement gathered in their ranks. The pace of their march quickened, and they erupted in war songs—Oh, what a joy to fight the dons and wallop fat Armij-O! So clear the way to Santa Fe, with that we all agree-O!

  In contrast to his hot-blooded volunteers, however, General Kearny did not want to engage the enemy unless he absolutely must. In fact, he preferred not to view the New Mexicans as enemies at all. Kearny hoped to take New Mexico without firing a shot—it would be a “bloodless conquest,” he vowed. He understood that if the United States intended to occupy this province and eventually absorb it into the Union, he would have to win the people over.

  And so in every settlement he passed, he met with the local leaders and gave some variation of the speech he had delivered from the rooftop in Las Vegas. His men would harm no one, he said. The United States was not hostile to Catholicism. The American army would protect them against the savage tribes. Their women were safe. No one would be branded like a steer. With his interpreters, Kearny wrote up a proclamation in Spanish that conveyed all these points and then sent riders ahead to tack up copies in every town square. In several instances Kearny’s troops captured Mexican spies who had been dispatched by Armijo. But rather than hold them as prisoners, the general decided the better course was to show mercy and release them. By doing so, he hoped they might return to Santa Fe and spread stories of American beneficence. More cynically, he trusted that they would report back to Armijo and exaggerate the might of the American forces; Kearny knew from experience that an enemy’s size had a way of growing in the excitement of retelling.

  On the night of August 17, Kearny camped near the ruins of the ancient pueblo of Pecos, in a grassy valley where the Pecos River came spilling from a cleft in the mountains. Pecos had been occupied for five hundred years, and until recently it was the largest of all the Pueblo Indian villages. At one time as many as three thousand people had lived there. The pueblo had a legend that concerned the “fire of Montezuma.” The Indians believed they were related to the great Aztec leader, and that one day long ago Montezuma instructed them to build a permanent fire in a subterranean chamber. Under no circumstances was the fire to be extinguished until a certain people arrived from the east to liberate them from the tyrannies of Spanish rule.

  And so for hundreds of years, as they languished under conquistadors and friars, the Pecos people secretly fed the fire in a special kiva, a round ceremonial room with a smokehole, built underground. Over the patient centuries, tending the fire remained a kind of druidic ritual for them, a symbol of their longing for the prophesied deliverers. The rites were dutifully maintained until the year 1838, when some rash of diseases, doubtless borne on the wagon trains that passed the pueblo on the nearby Santa Fe Trail, decimated the Pecos population. Then a series of Comanche raids nearly finished them off. Facing extinction, the last seventeen Pecos Indians vacated their once-great pueblo and took up residence in the safety of the Jemez Mountains sixty miles to the west, joining a kindred tribe that spoke the same language. The fire was left to die at Pecos, but it was said that a dedicated group of the exiles transported the last embers to their new home in the Jemez and continued the tradition there.

  Kearny’s soldiers were amazed by the Pecos ruins and liked the sound of the legend—particularly the part about a certain people coming from the east to liberate the long-suffering Indians. Pecos had been a thriving village when the first conqueror, Coronado, passed through these parts in 1540, claiming this kingdom for the Spanish, who were sure that somewhere nearby there existed seven cities of gold, which could be dismantled, melted into ingots, and shipped home to feed the great empire. The golden cities never materialized, however, and the Spaniards turned their attentions to the considerably more prosaic task of winning the souls of Pueblo Indians—while simultaneously enslaving them.


  The Americans had their own ideas about New Mexico’s worth. If metals could not be teased from the alkaline dirt, then at least wagon roads could be sunk into its barren ribs, connecting the Eastern cities to California, which Kearny was scheduled to conquer next. Perhaps the Americans were not as metal-obsessed as Coronado had been, but they were just as determined to find their own kind of gold.

  Though exhausted, many of Kearny’s soldiers tramped over the listing walls of the Pecos ruins, blinking at the grandeur of history, and their own place in it. One of the soldiers who kept a journal, Pvt. Frank Edwards from Illinois, was told that the Pecos ruins had been built by a master race of white giants who stood fifteen feet tall. The idea did not seem completely preposterous to Edwards. “The bones which have been dug from the floor of the church are, certainly, of gigantic size,” he wrote. “A thigh bone that I saw could never have belonged to a man less than ten feet.”

  As he was examining the giant’s femur, a mule that Edwards had tied up outside broke loose from its picket and clopped into the ruined mission church. “Apparently as anxious to satisfy his curiosity as I was,” the mule climbed up to the place where the altar had once stood. “It gravely turned around,” Edwards wrote, “and gave vent to his pious feelings in a long EEE-haw.”

  Chapter 18: YOUR DUTY, MR. CARSON

  The windswept grass on the jumbled hills had crisped to a fine summer gold when Kit Carson guided his mule down through the gambrel oak thickets and into the tiny village of Sonoma, California. He rode with Fremont at the head of a ragtag column of 160 volunteers, most of them American settlers from the Sacramento Valley. They were, according to one observer, “very much sunburnt and the most un-uniform and grotesque set of men ever seen.”

  Cows mashed their cud in the surrounding pastures while the town dogs yipped at the strangers. Sonoma’s dirt streets thronged with rabbles of American men drunk on liquor—and drunk on a newfound power. They shouted out “Liberty!” in slurred cries that frightened the local townsfolk, who did not know there was a war on and did not want one.

  It was June 25, 1846, and Carson tried to make sense of this chaotic scene. A week and a half earlier, on June 14, a well-armed posse of American hotheads, citing outrages mostly imagined, had risen up against the Mexican authorities and seized this adobe village not far from the shallows of northern San Francisco Bay. Calling themselves Osos—Bears—these self-styled revolutionaries took Sonoma’s leading citizens as prisoners, cleaned out the modest-sized armory, stole all the horses they could find, and then declared the birth of an independent nation-state: the Bear Flag Republic.

  The Osos carried out this spontaneous revolt with a giddy sense of melodrama—as though it were the Boston Tea Party of the West. They called their movement “high and holy,” and one of the revolt leaders, a Dr. Semple, said that “the world has not hitherto manifested so high a degree of civilization.” But in truth the episode was little more than opera buffa, fueled by impulses that could not be called high-minded. The Osos were little more than a mob, without organization or clear aims. One of Fremont’s own men thought that most of the rebels were “moved by nothing but the chance of plunder without the slightest principle of honor.”

  Using Sonoma as a base, the Bears planned to sweep southward and take over Monterey, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and the rest of California. But for now they were content to consolidate their initial victory while savoring their new symbol of solidarity: Over the town plaza a new flag flapped in the breeze, a slightly deformed banner fashioned from scraps of ladies’ undergarments, with a grizzly bear (or “something they called a bear,” as one early historian of the revolt put it) rising on its haunches, the crude image dribbled in berry juice. (Today’s state flag of California draws its design from this improbable standard.)

  John Fremont’s role in this uprising was tangential but nonetheless crucial. His presence in California was the catalyst that made it possible. Ever since he had led his exploring party out of the Oregon wilds and back to the Sacramento River, he had been carefully gauging the unrest among the American expatriots. Constantly entertaining visitors at his camp, Fremont had strongly encouraged the Americans to revolt; at the same time, he stressed that he could not officially intervene in the conflict until the settlers provoked the California authorities into committing a clear act of war. Nor would he permit any of his own men to detach from the expedition.

  Still, there was a certain cognitive dissonance to Fremont’s moves and positions: The settlers couldn’t figure him out. He feared the consequences of his own involvement while also fearing the consequences should accelerating events leave him behind. And so for more than a month he vacillated, brooded, schemed in his tent, sending mixed signals as he waited for the right moment to insert himself into the drama.

  Now that moment had arrived. Fremont learned that Gen. Jose Castro in Monterey, as a direct (and understandable) response to the Bear Flag Revolt, had issued an ultimatum demanding that all American foreigners “leave the country or be driven out by force.” Not only that, Castro had sent a certain Capt. Joaquin de la Torre north to drive the Bear Flaggers from Sonoma. Here was the provocation Fremont felt he needed: As a U.S. Army officer, he was not authorized to attack the Californians, but he could certainly defend American citizens from Californian attack. So Fremont quickly gathered up an army consisting of his exploring expedition plus some one hundred other volunteers and hastened to Sonoma to rebuff de la Torre’s offensive.

  Fremont’s “army” was a strange multinational force of buckskin rogues and filibusterers. One noncombatant observer described them as “Americans, French, English, Swiss, Poles, Russians, Chileans, Germans, Greeks, Austrians, Pawnees. If the Mexicans can whip this crowd they can beat all the world, for Castro will whip all nations, languages and tongues!”

  By the time Fremont and Carson rode into Sonoma that fine June day, the Osos had already successfully repulsed Captain de la Torre, and the situation seemed calm. But Fremont was now at last committed to the Bear Flag cause—and impatient to marry it with the larger American cause. Without his help, the army of settlers would face “inevitable disaster,” he feared, in the teeth of the more numerous forces the Mexican Californians would soon muster. His own expedition party represented “the Army and the Flag of the United States,” a fact that Fremont thought “gave to my movements the national character which must of necessity be respected by Mexico.”

  Quickly Fremont seemed to undergo a personality transformation. He chucked all pretense of being an explorer and now took to signing his dispatches “Commander of United States Forces in California.” He wore a felt hat and more flamboyant garb, surrounded himself with Delaware Indians as bodyguards, and tied natty green ribbons around his horse’s tail and neck. He reorganized the various combatants into a unit he called the California Battalion. Employing a bit of chronological legerdemain, he had the Bear Flaggers effectively forward-date the official “start” of the revolt to coincide with the moment he joined it, thus arranging for his leadership to “begin at the beginning,” as he later put it. Declaring himself “Oso 1,” Fremont began to issue imperious, even ruthless, demands. He told one of his subordinates to “iron and confine any person who shall disobey your orders—shoot any person who shall endanger the safety.” When a former ally, a Swiss-born trader and ranch-owner named Johann Sutter, questioned his new authority, Fremont snapped back: “If you don’t like what I’m doing, then you can go and join the Mexicans!”

  Joaquin de la Torre and his small army of one hundred men had retreated only a few miles from Sonoma. When Fremont learned this, he and his California Battalion gave chase, pursuing the captain to the mission of San Rafael near the shores of San Francisco Bay. But the Californian managed to escape by a clever ruse. He wrote a false note disclosing a plan to outflank Fremont and reattack Sonoma. He sent the dispatch by a courier he deliberately arranged for the Americans to intercept—thus buying him time so that he could sneak with his army across San F
rancisco Bay in a schooner, vanishing in the fog.

  Then Fremont learned of a tragedy that had befallen a pair of Bear Flag insurrectionists. A few days earlier an American named Fowler and another named Cowie secretly ventured north from Sonoma to secure gunpowder at a small coastal outpost called Bodega. But a band of Mexican guerrillas captured and brutally lynched the two Americans. The two men were tied to trees and slashed with knives, their limbs pulled apart with lariats.

  It was an outrageous crime, and the worst bloodshed in what had thus far been a placid and uneventful revolt. But now the Bear Flaggers cried out for retribution, as did Fremont and Carson.

  On Sunday, June 28, Fremont spotted a small boat crossing the bay and ordered Carson to intercept it. The boat landed near San Quentin and three men stepped ashore. They were two twenty-year-old twins, Ramon and Francisco de Haro, and their elderly uncle, Jose de los Berreyesa. They were prominent citizens—the two young men were the sons of the mayor of Sonoma.

  What happened next is subject to some debate, and different accounts stress different points. But Carson apparently arrested the three men and demanded that they hand over any dispatches they might be carrying. They appeared nervous and uncooperative, but insisted they harbored no messages. Though it was obvious these three men were not soldiers, Carson was suspicious. He called to Fremont and asked him what he wanted to do with them. “Captain, should I take these men prisoner?” he yelled from a distance.

  Fremont waved his hand dismissively. “No,” he replied, “I have no use for prisoners.” Then he added, cryptically, “Do your duty.”

  Carson was not sure what his commander meant by that. He lingered for a moment, then had a “brief consultation” with some of the other men who had accompanied him to the boat landing. They gradually realized that Fremont intended for these three captives to pay for the deaths of Fowler and Cowie. Fremont would not carry out the deed himself—and later disavowed having any part in it—but he insisted that his loyal scout follow through. He yelled, “Mr. Carson, your duty.”