Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  4

  On the day these two highest-ranking political officers departed the capital, Thomas O. Larkin rode into Los Angeles, sent ahead by Stockton with messages, now undeliverable, to General Castro. On August 13, with the news that Castro had fled, the commodore rode into the town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, a clamorous brass band from the Congress in the vanguard, followed by the trudging force of marines and sailors, the baggage train, bullock carts, and ox teams pulling the ponderous artillery caissons. Stockton’s force was followed by Major Frémont and his scary, scruffy California Battalion of mountaineers, Indians, and former Osos.

  The invaders were unopposed; the ship’s band attracted many cheering Angelinos to the procession route.

  At La Mesa, on the way to the capital, ten pieces of artillery were found at Castro’s abandoned camp, only four of the guns spiked.

  On August 17, Stockton, by this time referring to himself as “Commander-in-Chief and Governor of the Territory of California,” issued a new proclamation, announcing that California was now a part of the United States, the people of California American citizens. He promised that a civil government would soon be established and that elections would be held. The document imposed a 10:00 P.M.-to-sunrise curfew, and warned that any person found armed outside his home during those hours without permission would be treated as an enemy and subject to deportation. Thieves would be punished, life and property would be protected.

  This proclamation read and posted in two languages, Stockton ebulliently reported to Secretary of State Bancroft on August 22 that “The Flag of the United States is now flying from every commanding position in the Territory, and California is entirely free from Mexican dominion.” In a burst of fantasy, he said that in under a month he had “chased the Mexican army more than 300 miles along the coast, pursued them 30 miles into the interior of their own country, routed and dispersed them, and secured the Territory to the United States, ended the war, restored peace and harmony among the people, and put a civil government into successful operation.”

  The commodore deemed the conquest at an end, and it had been a bitter disappointment. He was a man of action, seeking the exhilaration, the promise, of glory—and promotion—that “active service” offered. These emoluments had been denied him since 1812, the Barbary Wars, the pirate pursuits off the African coast and in the West Indies. The California command had been a bright hope, but in a month he had seen little more than the ashes of the enemy’s campfires. He had grown tired of writing proclamations, was anxious to remove his sailors and marines from the now-conquered territory—“to leave the desk and camp and take to the ship and sea”—and find something worthy of his energy and talents.

  One matter beckoned. Stockton had studied his maps and begun to fear the possibility of attacks on American commercial vessels in the Pacific by Mexican privateers based in Acapulco. He had alerted American ship captains on the availability of San Francisco Bay as a sanctuary harbor, and he began making plans to sail south to put an end to the privateer menace. Acapulco, he reasoned, would give him a base of operations for an even more ambitious plan that would put his name on the forefront of the war’s heroes: he would raise a force of a thousand men and make an overland march “to shake hands with General Taylor at the Gates of Mexico.”

  Stockton took Frémont into his confidence on his scheme and said that upon his departure from California, the explorer would assume the governorship of the territory.

  On September 2, 1846, the commodore divided California into three military districts. A few days earlier, he had named Frémont military commandant of the new territory and had installed Gillespie as alcalde of Los Angeles. He assigned the marine a garrison of fifty men and issued instructions that until further notice, Gillespie would continue imposing martial law, enforcing the curfews, and overseeing the other regulations that had been imposed.

  Stockton also authorized Frémont to enlarge the California Battalion to three hundred men to provide both a mobile field force and garrisons for the main California settlements. The two officers made arrangements to meet at Yerba Buena on October 25 to make further plans for the governance and protection of the territory.

  Among his last duties before departing Pueblo de los Ángeles on September 2, 1846, Stockton ordered Kit Carson to Washington with a full report to President Polk and Secretary Bancroft on the conquest. Letters to Jessie Frémont and Senator Benton were included in the dispatch pouch, and Carson was authorized to take a pack train of mules and handpick fifteen men to ride with him. Kit estimated that he could get the job done in sixty days—and that included a brief visit with his wife Josefa in Taos, New Mexico.

  * * *

  On September 5, the commodore ordered his sailors and marines back aboard the Congress at San Pedro and set sail for Monterey. There, as Frémont and his men were making their way north toward the Sacramento Valley, the commodore had time to further study his grand scheme to shake hands with Zachary Taylor in Mexico City. He decided that he needed more men and sent word ahead to Frémont to raise seven hundred volunteers in the north to join him.

  Finally, he sailed and arrived in San Francisco Bay in the last week of September. At Yerba Buena, where an official greeting had been arranged for him by Colonel Mariano Vallejo, Stockton— resplendent in full uniform—came ashore in a barge to meet the erstwhile Bear Flagger prisoner, himself elegantly arrayed and wearing his medals. A large welcoming committee lined the wharf to see the conqueror of California and to follow his procession along the rutted streets of the village. The parade ended at the home of Vice Consul Leidesdorff, where a speech was made by William “Owl” Russell, a Kentuckian, veteran of Seminole battles in Florida, former U.S. Marshal, Frémont crony, and major of artillery in the California Battalion. He spoke generously of the commodore’s illustrious career.

  But Stockton had only a few days in which to enjoy the accolades. His plans to meet with Frémont, recruit men for his overland march, and sail for Acapulo were abruptly halted on October 1 with the arrival in Yerba Buena of a courier named John Brown. This man, known as “Juan Flaco” (Skinny John) had made the ride from Los Angeles—a distance of five hundred miles—in six days to carry the news that a force of armed Californios had risen in the capital and was besieging Gillespie’s garrison.

  Stockton treated the news dubiously but ordered Captain Mervine to sail for San Pedro on the Savannah and dispatched an express to Frémont’s camp near Sutter’s Fort ordering the explorer to bring his men down to Yerba Buena.

  His plans gone awry, the commodore told his officers that if harm came to Gillespie or his men, he would “wade knee-deep in blood to avenge it.”

  PART THREE

  CONQUEST

  13

  Kearny

  1

  On the Congress, the conqueror of California pored over his sea charts and maps. At last he had time to perfect his plan to make a sensational sortie against privateers off the Pacific coast of Mexico and an overland march to the enemy capital. He would take a thousand men—a full regiment of marines, sailors, and volunteers—down Baja California, sail around Cabo San Lucas, take on supplies at Mazatlán, and proceed south by southeast around the elbow of Mexico, past San Blas and Manzanillo to Acapulco. There he would disembark his men and lead them the two hundred and fifty miles north to Mexico City. The idea of merging his force with Zachary Taylor’s for a march into the ancient heart of Mexico—it was something a lesser man might find too daunting to contemplate.

  Robert Field Stockton dreamt of a glorious apogee to his career as his flagship butted through blue-green Pacific swells on that splendidly clear September day of 1846. The Congress made its passage north from San Pablo roads to San Francisco leisurely. The commodore was at ease, if not at peace, thinking of what the future held for him, while outside his comfortable cabin, momentous events were unfolding in Mexico, New Mexico, and, just behind him, in Los Angeles.

  Between September 20 and 25, as the Congress neared the
Golden Gate, General Zachary Taylor’s army of six thousand was fighting a Mexican army of similar strength in Monterrey1 just two hundred miles south of the Rio Grande. It would be a full year before General Winfield Scott, leading a force of fourteen thousand, reached Mexico City.

  In Los Angeles, meantime, Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie and his fifty-man garrison were under attack by an unorganized, angry band of Californios who had quite suddenly decided not to yield to conquest as docilely as expected.

  And in the province of New Mexico, another military officer had begun a march down the valley of the Rio Grande, a thousand miles out of Fort Leavenworth, leading three hundred dragoons and an enormous wagon and pack-animal train, headed south to the Gila River.

  * * *

  Of the triumvirate of conquerors of California, Stephen Watts Kearny was the last to arrive at the seat of conquest. Frémont had entered Sutter’s Fort in December, 1845; Stockton had sailed into Monterey Bay in July, 1846; but it was Kearney’s fate to be the first of the three to engage in battle on California soil and to throw a handful of grit into the well-oiled machinery set running by his predecessors. Between the time he arrived in California in December, 1846, and left six months later, Kearny annexed and secured the territory for the United States once and for all and placed his own reputation and career, and those of Frémont and Stockton, in peril.

  Ninety-five years after Kearny’s California adventure, Bernard DeVoto said of him: “In the vaudeville show of swollen egoism, vanity, treachery, incompetence, rhetoric, stupidity, and electioneering which the great generals of the Mexican War display to the pensive mind, Kearny stands out as a gentleman, a soldier, a commander, a diplomat, a statesman, and a master of his job, whose only superior was Winfield Scott.”

  A newly appointed brigadier general with thirty-three years of army service at the time he led his dragoons toward the Gila, Kearny was the youngest of thirteen children of a prominent lawyer and landowner in Newark, New Jersey. As a lieutenant in the Thirteenth Infantry, he had fought his first (and until California, only) battle on October 13, 1812, at Queenston Heights on the Niagara frontier, where he was wounded and taken prisoner by the British. In 1819, then a captain, he had joined a regiment in Iowa and begun his long tenure in the Western territories—Council Bluffs, Iowa; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Fort Atkinson, Nebraska; St. Louis—with brief service in Detroit and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and expeditions across the Missouri River to the Yellowstone.

  Except for minor skirmishes against Winnebagos in Wisconsin, Poncas and Mandans on the Missouri River, and Choctaws on the Texas border, he had seen nothing of the “active service” career that officers had pined for since 1812. In 1836, however, he did receive an important promotion, to the colonelcy and command of the First Dragoon Regiment at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis.

  He knew the great city on the Mississippi, had been assigned there before, and had married there. His bride was a lively eighteen-year-old named Mary Radford Clark, and Kearny had fallen in love with her the instant they were introduced. She was the stepdaughter of the great soldier-explorer William Clark, who with Meriwether Lewis had led the first expedition across the trans-Mississippi west to the Pacific in 1804. They were married in September, 1830, at Clark’s Beaver Pond estate, just outside St. Louis.

  In 1842, Kearny had been elevated to command of the Third Military Department of the Army, headquartered in St. Louis, and made responsible for guarding a thousand miles of frontier with little more than six hundred infantry and cavalry to patrol it. His duties were to keep the tribes at peace, inspect the reservations, and oversee escorts, patrols, and expeditions into troubled areas. In St. Louis, he came to know Missouri’s foremost citizen, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, his vivacious teenage daughter Jessie, and in May, 1843, Jessie’s husband, John Charles Frémont of the army’s Topographical Corps. Colonel Kearny, probably out of his friendship with Benton and Jessie, had magnanimously authorized the issuance of some Hall carbines and a twelve-pounder brass cannon to the young lieutenant, then en route to Oregon on his second expedition into the far West. He never saw the gun again, but he would see the explorer later, under the most trying of circumstances, in California.

  In 1845, Kearny took five companies of the First Dragoons on an expedition along the Oregon Trail to the South Pass of Wyoming, holding a council with the Lakota tribes near Fort Laramie and returning to Fort Leavenworth by way of Bent’s Fort and the Arkansas River.

  The expedition had been particularly timely, giving his dragoons a long march, experience in the daily travails of the wilderness, and familiarity with the Santa Fé Trail. In under a year, he and his heavy cavalry would retrace the trail to Bent’s great rest-and-outfitting oasis on the Arkansas.

  On May 13, 1846, on the day President Polk declared hostilities against Mexico, Secretary of War William Marcy ordered Kearny to ready his three hundred First Dragoons for travel and be prepared to accept a thousand volunteers for the purpose of organizing an Army of the West. This army was to march to Santa Fé, capture the capital, and annex the province of New Mexico to the United States.

  Kearny, soon to receive his brigadier general’s star, had earned it and the command. Bernard DeVoto’s assertion that he was “not only a practised frontier commander but one of the most skillful and dependable officers in the army” would be sorely tested in California—and his skill, at least, called into question.

  Now age fifty-two, his physical appearance had not changed much since the time he had courted Mary Clark in St. Louis. He had a long, noble head with a fine crown of reddish-brown hair shot through with gray and combed forward, Roman-like, at the temples. His blue eyes retained their fire—his officers were often withered by his stare. He was clean-shaven, slim, and walked and sat erect—“tall, straight, bronzed, lean as a sea cusk,” a contemporary described him.

  In over three decades of army service, he had evolved into the prototypical “by-the-book” soldier and had a reputation as a martinet, this perhaps having had its origin among the volunteers in his army. These men, many of them hardscrabble farmers and ungovernable wanderers, could not abide Kearny’s standard that they receive the same exacting discipline that kept his regular troops in order. One of his officers said of Kearny’s iron disciplinary policies: “During the whole time he commanded the First Dragoons, no soldier ever received a blow [from flogging] except by the sentence of a general court-martial for the infamous crime of desertion … though the strictest disciplinarian in the service, there was less punishment in his corps than any other.” And Ulysses S. Grant, who as a young lieutenant saw the dragoon commander in St. Louis in the early 1840s, called him “one of the ablest officers of the day” and said that his disciplinary measures were “kept at a high standard but without vexatious rules or regulations.”

  But while Kearny’s twenty-five years on the windswept prairies of the Western frontier had browned and toughened him, it had also scoured him clean of humor and afflicted him with a certain plodding grimness like that of a blindered plow horse in a furrow. Kearny knew survival in lands unrelentingly hostile to humans; he was a gritty, demanding commander and had a righteous sense of duty. But his imagination, whatever there had been of it, had eroded, and occasional Indian skirmishes had not educated him in the skills of war.

  And as a proconsul-in-the-making in New Mexico and California, he demonstrated considerable adeptness in dealing with conquered people when operating without specific direction from his superiors. But in an arena that required political delicacies among peers who held differing views, he saw no nuances, wielded his authority sullenly, and entertained no argument.

  2

  Kearny’s original May 13, 1846, orders from Secretary of War Marcy were supplemented on June 3 to make clear the objective of the Western campaign: “It has been decided by the President to be of the greatest importance, in the pending War with Mexico, to take the earliest possession of Upper California,” Marcy wrote. He advised Kearny that “in case you conqu
er Santa Fé,” it was expected that New Mexico would be garrisoned before the march continued to California. Kearny was to have “a large discretionary power” in conducting the campaign: choosing the route to the Pacific, taking on volunteers, organizing supplies, and procuring animals to carry them. Marcy said that the President was desirous “that the expedition should reach California this season” but should the President be “disappointed in his cherished hope,” Kearny was assured that he would be “left unembarrassed by any specific directions in this matter.”

  Significantly, Marcy’s “Confidential Instructions,” written one month before Commodore Sloat occupied Monterey, contained the news that “it is expected that the naval forces of the United States which now, or will soon be, in the Pacific, will be in possession of all the towns on the sea coast, and will co-operate with you in the conquest of California.” In addition to making clear who would “cooperate” with whom, the secretary added, “Should you conquer and take possession of New Mexico and Upper California, or considerable places in either, you will establish temporary civil governments therein.…”

  Kearny was notified that his promotion to brigadier general would take effect “as soon as you commence your movement towards California.”

  The secretary’s “instructions” were similar in vagueness to those sent to Commodores Sloat and Stockton in California. The War Department’s knowledge of New Mexico was sketchy—there were no dependable maps of it—and critical questions were unanswerable in Washington or anywhere else. It seemed unlikely that Mexico would deliver without a fight a province of a hundred thousand square miles that had been held for three centuries, but how defiantly would the Mexicans defend New Mexico? What manpower and arms lay awaiting an invading force?

  At least it was clear to Kearny that he would command the entire conquest of Mexico’s western territory and that the navy would cooperate with him as he took charge of all military and political efforts once he reached the Pacific.