IN THE WAKE OF THEIR VICTORY, Angelenos prepared for the struggle to come. The Americans controlled the seas and the ports, and occupied the northern half of the department. They would surely make another assault on Los Angeles. The Californios would make no attempt to expel them, but by guerrilla tactics would seek to prevent them from obtaining horses, confining the Americans to the ports while they awaited assistance from Mexico or word of negotiations to end the war. There were few available firearms, so Flores focused on equipping his squadrons with the lances traditionally carried by Mexican mounted cavalry. The call went out to local blacksmiths to produce as many lance points as possible from available scrap iron. Those ten-inch blades were attached to eight-foot shafts, cut from stands of willow or ash in the surrounding hills. Within weeks Angelenos were equipped with more than four hundred of those deadly weapons. Women crafted colorful banderolas, or pennants, which they attached to the lances of husbands, sons, and lovers. Antonio Coronel, appointed quartermaster by Flores, managed to salvage two of the cannons left by Gillespie in San Pedro harbor, but the only gunpowder he had was of local manufacture and unreliable. The artillery would be reserved as a last means of defense if the Americans succeeded in mounting an assault on Los Angeles.
In the meantime, while the invaders languished aboard the Savannah, still anchored at San Pedro, the trading vessel Vandalia sailed north with the melancholy news of defeat. Stockton had already departed San Francisco with a full complement of sailors and marines, scheduled to stop first at Monterey, where he would shore up defenses before continuing south. Frémont and the men of the California Battalion took sail at the same time in a merchant vessel, planning to land at Santa Barbara, where they were to round up horses and supplies and head south for San Pedro and a rendezvous with Stockton. But on his way down the coast, Frémont encountered the Vandalia, and learning of Mervine’s defeat, as well as the success of the Californios in keeping horses out of the hands of the Americans, he made the decision to return north where horses were more plentiful. He would make an overland trek to Los Angeles.
When Stockton arrived at San Pedro, he was shocked to learn what had happened. Consulting with Gillespie, he concluded that the “very bad defeat” had resulted from Mervine’s “haste and confusion.” From the deck of his frigate he could see mounted Californios swarming the adjacent Palos Verdes Hills, and he estimated the size of the rebel force at better than eight hundred men. In fact, Carrillo’s squadron numbered under one hundred and fifty, but by mixing hundreds of riderless horses among his mounted lanceros, and keeping them in constant motion, he created the impression of many more. Stockton was outraged by the “boasting insolence” of the Californios, and he vowed to land a force of marines “to hoist the glorious stars in the presence of their horse-covered hills.” But planting the flag on the beach proved easier than moving his men inland. “The enemy had driven off every animal, man, and beast, from that section of the country,” Stockton wrote, “and it was not possible by any means in our power to carry provisions for our march to the city.” Without word from the absent Frémont, he reembarked his marines and sailed south for the sheltered harbor at San Diego, still under the control of a small American force. There he would make the preparations necessary for an advance on Los Angeles.
Stockton urgently needed horses and cattle for transport and sustenance, and the Californios did all they could to prevent him from obtaining them, taking advantage of their mobility to drive livestock away from the coast and annoy the Americans with sniper attacks and running assaults. In mid-November, after weeks of skirmishing, Carrillo led his squadron south and attacked San Diego in an attempt to force Stockton back onto his vessels. But he found the Americans too heavily entrenched. In truth, many of the Californios at San Diego had aligned themselves with Stockton and were providing him with critical intelligence. They guided a company of Americans south into Baja California, where they located herds of livestock. The horses and mules were in bad shape, however, and Stockton estimated it would take until the turn of the year before they were fit for battle service.
If the Americans needed livestock, the Californios were equally desperate for arms and ammunition. Shortly after Carrillo’s failed attack on San Diego, Commandante Flores dispatched Quartermaster Antonio Coronel to Mexico with the captured American flag and detailed reports of the victories at Chino, Los Angeles, and San Pedro, hoping that these triumphs would persuade the authorities to send additional men and matériel to assist in the defense of the department. Accompanied by a small party and several dozen saddle and pack animals, Coronel traveled the Sonora Road southeast across the mountains and desert, arriving on November 21 at the crossing of the Colorado River, where he was greeted by an excited group of Quechans, the native residents of the area. A large American force was approaching from the east, they warned. Coronel was unable to confirm the report, but he realized that this was intelligence Commandante Flores must know. Entrusting the dispatches to a reliable scout, Coronel turned his men and animals around and headed back across the desert toward Los Angeles.
THE FIRST REGIMENT of U.S. Dragoons had pulled out of Fort Leavenworth five months earlier, commanded by Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny, a veteran officer with thirty-five years of Army service. “General Kearny is a man rising fifty years of age,” wrote one admirer. “His height is about five feet ten or eleven inches. His figure is all that is required by symmetry. His features are regular, almost Grecian. His eye is blue, and he has an eagle-like expression.” More to the point, “he appears the cool, brave, and energetic soldier.”
Kearny received his orders from Secretary of War William L. Marcy in late May 1846, two weeks after the declaration of war on Mexico. His instructions were to raise a half dozen companies of several hundred volunteers, including a battalion recruited from the thousands of Mormon migrants who at that moment were preparing for a trek across the plains and mountains to Great Salt Lake. Kearny was to add these forces to his command, henceforth to be known as “the Army of the West,” and lead them down the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico, which he was to secure for the United States. Then he was to press on to California, where he would assume command of American ground forces, suppress all remaining resistance, and organize a temporary territorial government. The Mormon Battalion would follow in his wake, opening a military wagon road from Santa Fe to southern California. Additional troops, arms, and provisions would be sent by vessel around Cape Horn. “Much must necessarily be left to your own discretion,” Marcy instructed Kearny, but “in your whole conduct you will act in such a manner as best to conciliate the inhabitants and render them friendly to the United States.” The assignment presented the general with the greatest challenge of his career, but also his greatest opportunity for advancement and glory.
The Army of the West—1,701 soldiers and teamsters, 1,556 supply wagons, and several thousand horses, mules, oxen, and cattle—took possession of Santa Fe, New Mexico, without resistance in August. A month later, leaving the volunteer companies to garrison that province, Kearny set out for California with 300 dragoons hauling two mountain howitzers. As one of his officers put it, it was “a leap in the dark of a thousand miles of wild plain and mountain.” Less than two weeks out of Santa Fe, the company met Kit Carson, Frémont’s chief of scouts, returning east with a party of 15 men, carrying dispatches for officials in Washington. Carson and company had departed Los Angeles shortly after it fell to the Americans but before the insurrection of the Angelenos, about which they knew absolutely nothing. “The American flag was flying from every important position in the territory,” Carson reported to Kearny, and “the country was forever free from Mexican control, the war ended, and peace and harmony established among the people.” Few of Kearny’s officers were happy at that news. “The general feeling was one of disappointment and regret,” regimental surgeon John S. Griffin wrote in his journal. “Most of us hoped when leaving Santa Fe that we might have a little kick-up with the good people of Califo
rnia, but this totally blasted all our hopes.” Griffin needn’t have worried. There would be plenty of kick.
Acting on Carson’s intelligence, Kearny sent three companies of dragoons back to Santa Fe, reducing his force to two companies of 50 each, a total of 121 men including officers, teamsters, and servants. And hearing Carson’s description of the hard travel ahead on the Gila River trail, Kearny ordered the scout to turn about-face and guide him to California. Carson was anxious to see his wife and family, only a few days away in Taos, New Mexico, but he followed orders. Pushing westward, the travel indeed turned difficult. “It surprised me to see so much land that can never be of any use to man or beast,” Kearny wrote. The horses and mules were pressed to their limit and many dropped in their tracks, leaving a trail of carcasses marking the route west. By the time they approached the Colorado River in late November, nearly eight hundred miles from Santa Fe, most of the dragoons were afoot.
At the crossing they encountered a party driving a herd of two or three hundred horses and mules to Sonora, part of the Californio plan to keep horses out of American hands. Kearny requisitioned several dozen unbroken animals for his men and interrogated the vaqueros. They were evasive, but after being plied with brandy one of them boasted of the insurrection in Los Angeles. Carson refused to believe it. The following day, however, while still encamped with the vaqueros, the Americans captured Coronel’s scout and discovered the Mexican dispatches and the captured American battle flag, which confirmed everything the vaquero had said and more. Seeing the distress this created for Kearny and his officers, the vaqueros turned joyful, “bragging like the devil of having whipped some 450 sailors with 80 Mexican dragoons,” according to Griffin. A serious reversal of fortune had taken place following Carson’s departure. “The young men of the country are perfectly furious,” one vaquero bragged. “They are fiends incarnate.” This rekindled Griffin’s martial interest. “I suppose we may expect a small chunk of hell when we get over there,” he wrote happily.
ON NOVEMBER 25 the dragoons forded the Colorado and began the trek across the desert. After five days of hard travel, with neither grass nor water for the animals, they began the gradual ascent of the Cuyamaca Mountains in an early winter storm. “We are still to look for the glowing pictures drawn of California,” Lieutenant William H. Emory complained in his diary. “As yet, barrenness and desolation hold their reign.” But on the afternoon of December 2, traveling in the face of a stiff, cold wind, they crested a pass in the mountains and descended into a beautiful, grass-covered valley fringed with live oaks and tall pines. A few miles more and they came to a cluster of adobes, the headquarters of Warner’s Ranch, named for its proprietor, Jonathan Trumbull Warner, a Connecticut Yankee who came west as a trapper and trader in 1831, became a Mexican citizen under the given name of Juan José, and married into the Pico family, which resulted in the grant to him of this strategic piece of property.
That evening and the following day the dragoons enjoyed a well-deserved rest. “Poor fellows!” wrote Captain Abraham Johnston, Kearny’s aide-de-camp, after conducting an inspection. “They are well-nigh naked—some of them barefoot—a sorry looking set.” Warner’s Ranch was famous throughout southern California for the nearby agua caliente, or hot springs, and some of the dragoons spent time soaking their weary bones in the steaming, sulfurous pools. Meanwhile, Kearny and his officers spoke with William Marshall, an American extranjero who ran a store at the Indian ranchería of Cupa, located at the springs. Marshall reported that Warner, owner of the rancho, had been arrested after refusing to provide the Americans with any information on the whereabouts of his kinsman Governor Pico. At Kearny’s insistence, Marshall went to fetch a neighboring ranchero named Edward Stokes, an Englishman married to the daughter of José Joaquín Ortega, proprietor of nearby Rancho Santa Maria.
They returned several hours later. Stokes was dressed in the fashionable costume of the country—black velvet jacket with matching pantaloons, open to the knee, exposing drawers of spotless white, leather chaps and deerskin boots, with a pair of oversize silver spurs. He greeted Kearny and the officers in a friendly, open manner, but told them candidly that his social position required that he remain neutral in the conflict. The Californios controlled the countryside, he warned. “The country people,” added Marshall, were exhibiting “vastly more courage than they did at the commencement of difficulties.” Stokes said he planned a trip to San Diego the following day and would be happy to carry a message from General Kearny to Commodore Stockton.
Rancheros like Stokes and Warner, John Griffin noted in his diary, lived “in feudal style,” employing the Indians from nearby rancherías to do their bidding. Lieutenant Emory conversed in Spanish with some of the emancipados at Cupa. Following the arrival of the Spanish, they told him, the Franciscan missionaries from Mission San Luis Rey had established an outpost near the hot springs. Working for the mission fathers, they said, all the Indians had been “comfortable and happy.” But “since the good priests had been removed, and the missions placed in the hands of the people of the country, they had been ill-treated.” With secularization the property had passed into the possession of the Pico family, who exploited them mercilessly, then to Warner, who treated them little better. The Indians knew Warner, who stood six foot three, as Juan Largo (Big John), as much for his imperious style as his height. Under Warner’s management, wrote Captain Johnston, the Indians were “stimulated to work by three dollars per month and repeated floggings.” Griffin, a native of Virginia, believed the Indian workers were treated “worse by far than the worst treated slaves in the United States.”
The headman at Cupa, whose Christian name was Antonio Garra, spoke to Kearny in Spanish, with Emory translating. The Californios were their oppressors, he explained. If the Americans had come to wage a just struggle against his enemies, then they were his friends, and friends must be supported. Garra proved his point by supplying Kearny with some useful intelligence. A day or two earlier, he reported, a company of Californios with a large herd of horses and mules had taken refuge in a mountain canyon a few miles northwest. Garra did not know it, but it was the party of Quartermaster Antonio Coronel, hurrying back to Los Angeles with the intelligence of Kearny’s arrival in California. As the winter storm continued to rage, Kearny dispatched an officer and twenty-five dragoons to attack the Californio camp and seize the animals.
Coronel was sitting before a campfire in his drawers, waiting for his soaked clothing to dry, when he heard the approach of the American dragoons. He quickly climbed a cottonwood and watched undetected as they stormed into camp, arrested his companions, and confiscated everything in sight, including his trousers and shoes. Once they departed, Coronel fled into the forest and after several hours of barefoot travel reached an isolated Indian ranchería. The headman provided him with blankets and sustenance, but noting the suspicious looks and whispers of the residents, Coronel concluded that the people “were getting restless, wanting to go over to the Americans.” Supplied with sandals and an old horse by the headman, he set out for Los Angeles, to report the unexpected ground invasion of southern California by an American army. The situation of the Californios was now desperate.
•
CHAPTER 9 •
SAN PASQUAL
COMMODORE STOCKTON had been alerted to the imminent arrival of the First Regiment of Dragoons a month earlier in a dispatch from Washington. It nevertheless came as something of a shock when Stokes arrived with Kearny’s note on the evening of December 3. Stockton dispatched Captain Archibald Gillespie with thirty-seven mounted volunteers—some of the same men who had served with him at Los Angeles, including James Barton—as well as two naval officers in charge of a brass field piece. Gillespie carried a message from Stockton. He had received intelligence from his spies that an enemy squadron of Angelenos had positioned themselves somewhere along the route from San Diego to Warner’s Ranch. “If you see fit,” Stockton wrote, “endeavor to surprise them.”
Eighty
lanceros commanded by Andrés Pico had come south to monitor American movements. Pico was well acquainted with the southern countryside, having served several years at the San Diego presidio, and like Stockton, he relied on a network of spies. Within hours of Gillespie’s departure for Warner’s, Pico knew the size and composition of the force. The American must be in search of horses, he reasoned, and would likely make camp at Edward Stokes’s Rancho Santa María. To keep a watchful eye on them, Don Andrés moved his squadron to the adjacent valley of San Pasqual, where an ancient Indian ranchería could provide succor for his men and horses. Soon after his arrival there, Pico’s Indian hosts told him that Gillespie’s company was encamped across a range of hills, only a few miles away.
Pico’s men loathed Gillespie—the tyrant of the American occupation, the man who had broken his solemn oath on the beach at San Pedro—and were spoiling for a fight. But Don Andrés ordered his men to pasture their horses in a grassy meadow some distance from the ranchería. He had no intention of engaging the Americans. He was, in fact, rapidly losing confidence in the Californio cause. Before departing Los Angeles, he had quarreled with Commandante Flores over the disposition of the American prisoners, Wilson, Rowland, and the others. Flores wanted to send them to Mexico, precisely what the insurgents had threatened in their pronunciamento. But Pico and other Angeleno leaders objected. A number of the prisoners were married to local women and counted kinsmen among the Californios. It was one thing to confine them for the duration, something else altogether to send them hostage to Mexico. What if the Americans retook Los Angeles? Flores could beat a hasty retreat to the mother country, but Angelenos would have no place to hide. The outraged Americans, Don Andrés worried, “would send them all to Cape Horn.” Pico’s dispute with Flores dampened his ardor and intensified his caution.
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