Writing almost a hundred years later, Bernard DeVoto asserted that Frémont returned from Oregon “to seize California for the United States and wrap Old Glory round him, to give a deed to the greatness in him.” The historian maintained that the explorer needed honor and glory, “to seize the hour, take fortune at the full … to trust that the war which was certain to come would transform an act of brigandage into an act of patriotism, would transform the actor from a military adventurer, a freebooter, a filibuster, into a hero.”
Frémont had written home that “The nature of my instructions and the peaceful nature of our operations do not contemplate any active hostility on my part, even in the event of war between the two countries.” But forty-five years later, he contradicted himself, writing in his memoirs that he “knew the hour had come” before he turned south from Klamath Lake, even though he made a pretense of heading “home.” He said he was “but a pawn, and like a pawn, I had been pushed forward to the front at the opening of the game.”
9
War
1
When Gillespie and Frémont rendezvoused at Klamath Lake on May 9, 1846, four days remained before the United States and Mexico went to war, yet cannon smoke had already settled on one battlefield and was rising on another.
In Mexico City, Gillespie had witnessed the country’s furious reaction to America’s annexation of Texas and attempts to buy the provinces of New Mexico and California. Mexico’s President José Herrera, after refusing to meet with the United States’ special envoy John Slidell, ordered his top military man, General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, to organize an army and march north to subdue the Texans and reclaim the annexed territory. A rabid anti-American, Paredes stepped up his orders: he turned the army against Herrera, seized the government, and installed himself as president. His first act thereafter was to send a five-thousand-man army to Matamoros on the Rio Grande, and on April 23, 1846—while Frémont was heading his men north out of Sutter’s Fort—he declared a “defensive war” against the United States.
The army Paredes sent north, commanded by General Mariano Arista, had some of Mexico’s most experienced light-infantrymen and sixteen hundred lancers under a celebrated cavalry general, Anastasio Torrejón. When the commanding general of this Army of the North arrived at Matamoros on April 24, his American counterpart, General Zachary Taylor, had been waiting with his expeditionary force of three thousand men for nearly a month. When Arista sent a lancer patrol across the Rio Grande twenty-four miles upstream from Matamoros and dispatched a polite message to the American camp that “hostilities have commenced,” Taylor welcomed it and sent his own patrol of dragoons to meet Arista’s lancers.
On April 25, the as yet undeclared war began.
2
The President chose Zachary Taylor to “defend the Rio Grande” because Taylor, as commanding general at Fort Jesup in Louisiana, was closer to the river than any other of the army’s senior officers. Ever the political man, Polk the Democrat despised Taylor’s Whig politics but hated even more the idea of appointing the army’s top general, Winfield Scott, to command the expeditionary force. Polk considered Scott, also a Whig, a political intriguer and a man who, when not preening in his spotless blue uniform with its braided gold epaulettes and yellow sash, was preparing for a run at the presidency. Moreover, Scott wanted to take time to train and equip an army before moving it into battle. The President had no interest in such time-consuming matters. Quickness interested him—quick victories if diplomacy failed, a war ended quickly.
Scott was sixty-one, six-foot-four in height, a wounded veteran of Lundy’s Lane in 1814, a scholar of war, and a tireless, inspirational officer always in the thick of a fight. But because of his politics, his insistence that men should be trained before sent into battle, and his well-known vanity (his men bestowed the “Old Fuss and Feathers” sobriquet on him), he was temporarily left in the capital. There, while waiting the appointment he knew would eventually come to him, he said sagacious, presidential-sounding things such as, “I do not desire to place myself in the most perilous of all positions, a fire upon my rear from Washington and the fire in front from the Mexicans.”
Meantime, it was left to Zachary Taylor to start the ball, and no officer in the army stood in sharper contrast to the impeccable Scott than “Old Rough and Ready.” Born in Virginia and raised on the Kentucky frontier, he had a rudimentary wilderness education, but in his nearly forty years in the army, he had fought in the War of 1812, in the Blackhawk War in the Midwest in 1832, and against the Seminoles in Florida. He was sixty-one, short, solid, and as powerful as a bullock, with a face furrowed with deep lines, unruly gray hair, and big knotty hands. In the field, he commonly wore a filthy oilskin or straw hat mashed on his head, a long, mud-spattered linen duster, rumpled shirt, and baggy trousers. He was often taken to be a camp follower or sutler as he sat under a shade tree, an ammunition box for desk, gnawing a lump of salt pork or chewing a huge quid of tobacco.
He hated pomp, was quickly bored with paperwork—Scott thought him “slow” of pen and speech—and knew little of strategy or tactics. He had a perfect correlative in the British army, General Hugh Gough, a Tipperary Irishman who was fighting Sikhs in the Punjab region of northern India while Taylor was fighting Mexicans on the Rio Grande. Like Taylor, Gough knew little of grand designs in war. Once, on a battlefield against the Sikhs, he was informed that his artillerymen were running low on powder and shot. “Thank God,” Gough said. “Now I can be at them with the bayonet!”
Zachary Taylor and a certain dragoon general-to-be, Stephen Watts Kearny, had the same battle philosophy.
Taylor’s officers loved to tell stories of his perfect calm in battle, of how he slouched on his horse “Old Whitey,” chewing and spitting and growling orders amid musket balls, round shot, shrapnel, and cannon smoke. His men loved him.
Taylor brought his expeditionary force to the Rio Grande on March 28, 1846, and raised the Stars and Stripes on the bank of a horseshoe bend of the river. There he ordered the building of a fort from which his gunners could rake Matamoros with artillery fire. This pentagonal structure, its walls nine feet high and fifteen feet thick, with a bastion at each corner holding a cannon battery, was completed by the time General Arista came north to command the Mexican army of five thousand men opposing Taylor’s three thousand.
The fighting began on April 25 when an American patrol marched through the chaparral to some abandoned ranch buildings twenty-five miles upriver from their fort opposite Matamoros. In a skirmish with Mexican lancers, sixteen Americans were killed, several others wounded and taken prisoner.
Taylor sent a message by courier to Washington, two weeks away from the Rio Grande: “American blood has been spilled.”
More was due to be spilled before the President received the intelligence. On May 8, as the Americans were returning to their besieged fort from their supply base at Port Isabel on the Gulf Coast, Taylor met Arista’s army, spread out in the saw grass on the treeless prairie, blocking the road at a place called Palo Alto. The Mexican cannons opened fire at two-thirty that afternoon, their range too short, the round shot bouncing and ricocheting like croquet balls and rolling into the American lines so slowly that the ranks opened to let them pass. Taylor’s own big guns, eighteen-pounders loaded with grapeshot, were better manned and more accurate, and his “flying batteries” of small brass six-pounders and cast-iron twelves did murderous service among Torrejón’s advancing lancers.
The artillery duel ended at nightfall, and as the cook fires were lit and the surgeons in their bloody aprons sawed, cauterized, and wound dressings around stumps and torn flesh, the casualties were counted: Taylor had lost five dead, forty-three wounded; Arista, over thirty killed.
The next day, the day Gillespie and Frémont met at Klamath Lake, Arista’s battered army made a stand in a shallow ravine that formed an arc facing the road from Port Isabel to Matamoros. This roadway, called Resaca de la Palma, required more than cannon-shot to v
anquish the enemy, and Taylor warned his infantry, Gough-like, that their “main dependence must be upon the bayonet.” His flying battery advanced on the road, his infantry plunged through the tangle of chaparral, and as enemy grape and canister shot raked them, his dragoons charged Arista’s cannons with Taylor shouting through the din, “Take those guns, and by God, keep them!”
The Fourth and Fifth Infantries charged into the Mexican line and after firing their muskets once, and with no time to reload, began the furious hand-to-hand bayonet killing the old general had predicted would be necessary.
The attack routed Arista’s troops; they fell back south toward the river, leaving four hundred wounded behind.
The Americans lost thirty-three dead and eighty-nine wounded at Resaca de la Palma, but Taylor’s army had won the first two battles of the war with Mexico, the first battles against non-Indian forces since 1815.
On May 18, the army was ferried across the Rio Grande and after occupying Matamoros, Taylor began laying plans to move deeper into Mexico.
3
President Polk received the general’s “blood has been spilled” message on May 9, and with his casus belli in hand, sent his own message to Congress two days later. He asked that the legislators acknowledge that a state of war existed and provide “the means for prosecuting the war with vigor, thus hastening the restoration of peace.” He asserted that “the cup of forbearance had been exhausted” and that Mexico, by entering Texas, had invaded American territory and opened hostilities.
Despite Whig opposition, in which Polk was accused of fomenting war by sending Taylor to the Rio Grande in the first place, a war bill passed empowering the President to raise fifty thousand troops to serve for the duration of the war—said troops to furnish their own uniforms and horses—and appropriating ten million dollars to bring the “existing war” to conclusion.
On May 13, 1846, the war became official by a vote of 42 to 2 in the Senate, 174 to 14 in the House. The declaration was filled with high-minded words but many, especially Polk’s Whig opposition, saw the war as a plot by Southerners to spread the evil of slavery into the West. Others saw it as blatant aggression and a landgrab. In a Senate debate, Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio said that greed alone had created the war. “If I were a Mexican,” he said, “I would tell you, ‘Have you not enough room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine, we will greet you with bloody hands and welcome you to hospitable graves.’”
In the House of Representatives, Abraham Lincoln, the young Illinois Whig, called the President “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man” and spent much of his single term demanding that Polk prove his allegations that the Mexicans had provoked the war by attacking Americans on American soil.
But in the Brooklyn Eagle, poet Walt Whitman spoke for the political expansionists of the Polk and Benton stripe, and for a sizable portion of American citizenry, as he echoed the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in writing: “Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand.”
* * *
Soon enough, General Winfield Scott would plan and command the campaign to the Halls of Montezuma. In November, 1846, the President reluctantly appointed the man he considered “rather scientific and visionary in his view” to command the Vera Cruz expedition. Scott assembled his army at Tampico, engineered an amphibious landing at Vera Cruz, and captured the city in May, 1847. Then, without a dependable supply line, he led fourteen thousand men against superior forces into the mountainous gateway to Mexico City, emerged from the passes, and stormed Chapúltepec Castle, said to be impregnable, on September 14, 1847, to crown one of the most brilliant campaigns in American military annals.
(In the process of trying to identify a Democrat who could lead the army into Mexico, Polk had been visited by Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. The senator, who had no military experience whatever, had offered to command the American force if the President would appoint him lieutenant general—then the highest rank in the army, held by only one man: Winfield Scott. The President let this preposterous idea die.)
The seventeen months of warfare cost thirteen thousand American lives (seventeen hundred were killed in battle or died of wounds, the balance dying of “other causes,” mainly disease). It cost a hundred million dollars and changed the map of the United States more radically than any event after the Louisiana Purchase.
* * *
On the day of the war’s declaration, while Captain Frémont and his men were riding south from above the forty-second parallel and seeking out Klamath Indian villages to burn, the War Department made its first overt move toward capturing the biggest prize of the war. On May 13, 1846, War Secretary William Marcy sent orders to Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, commanding the First Dragoon Regiment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kearny was to prepare to march west, conquer and occupy the province of New Mexico and its capital at Santa Fé, and continue on to California.
10
Los Osos
1
A week after the war officially opened, Frémont and his men, with the marine courier Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie and his escort riding with them, were camped in the low hills known as the Buttes, sixty miles north of Sutter’s Fort. During the ride down from the Oregon border, still smoldering over the murder of Basil Lajeunesse and the others in the Klamath attack, the Americans had fallen on several small Indian villages, burning lodges and scattering the inhabitants. “The number killed I cannot say,” Kit Carson wrote later. “It was perfect butchery. Those not killed fled in all directions.…”
At Peter Lassen’s place and beyond, Frémont heard gossip and settlers’ tales claiming that the attack on his men on Klamath Lake was but a precursor of planned massacres and burnings of fields. This strategy, it was said, had been authored by General Castro and other Californios to drive the Americans from the valley. Furthermore, it was rumored, Castro was issuing bandos, arming the Indians, and organizing a huge army that would soon march north from Monterey.
The settlers were banding and they looked to Frémont, the man who had defied Castro at Hawk’s Peak, for guidance.
Everything came together, and fell apart, in June.
In the first week of the month, Frémont appears to have thrown in with the squatters while managing to keep up a pretense of neutrality. During that week, he later said, he had “decided on the course which I would pursue,” but as late as June 16, he wrote to Commander Montgomery of the sloop-of-war Portsmouth: “It is therefore my present intention to abandon the further prosecution of our exploration and proceed immediately across the mountainous country to the eastward … and thence to the frontier of Missouri.” Montgomery must have thought it remarkable that this return home would require the supplies Frémont requested through his emissary to the Portsmouth, Lieutenant Gillespie: eight thousand percussion caps, three hundred pounds of rifle lead and a keg of powder, along with flour, coffee, tea, tobacco, salt pork, and similar ordinary provisions.
What triggered Frémont’s decision to join the Sacramento Valley rebels, however furtively at first, is not clear. One important factor was the request by Kit Carson and others in his party to release them from service so that they could join the “Osos,” the name the rebels had adopted, inspired by the grizzly bears in the area whose “fighting spirit” they much admired. The explorer had instructions of some kind. He had them when he left St. Louis with his men and others had been brought to him by Gillespie. War, he knew—from Gillespie’s experiences and from information Benton and others had relayed to him—was a virtual certainty. The Californios were attempting to expel American emigrants from the province, and these settlers were rising. He could not leave California, could not overtly lead the rebels, but he could encourage and advise them in a silent partnership until his path became better defined.
He wavered, waited, talked with Sutter and listened to the couriers and news- and r
umor-bearers who beat a path in and out of New Helvetia.
Sutter himself was in a vise. The pinch was not so much a matter of divided loyalties—he was Swiss, not American—as his trying to find a footing amid the tremors of war between an impending American takeover and his loyalty to those who had trusted him. He was a Mexican citizen, had been given an enormous, profitable land grant, and the trust, to the degree that any foreigner was trusted, of Mexican authorities. He had been warranted as a departmental official. He had encouraged American emigration, employed many of the Americans who had made their way to the Sacramento Valley, and he foresaw the end of Mexican California and the old way of life, knowing that he had had a hand in ending it.
In June, 1846, the twilight of his loyalty to Mexico and, more specifically, to his immediate superior, José Castro, Sutter, in one last act of loyalty to his adopted country, notified the general that the whiskey salesman named Gillespie was in fact an American military officer carrying secret dispatches and urged Castro to consider sending a “respectable garrison” north in the event of trouble with the settlers.
Frémont, while enjoying Sutter’s hospitality and depending on him for supplies and mounts, did not trust him, knew of the empresario’s divided loyalties, but also knew where the teetering man would fall when California fell.
The man none of the Americans could gauge, the most influential personage in northern California, and to Frémont’s thinking, the most dangerous, was Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo of Sonoma. This thirty-eight-year-old aristocrat, former commanding general of California, had the peculiar distinction of being at once a respected Californio patriot and a man known to favor the United States’ intervention in California. At least he favored it over Mexico’s ruinous rule, and over other rumored contenders for annexation such as England.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 57
