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Kearny’s organization of his Army of the West turned out to be a logistical masterpiece. Working with the quartermaster general in St. Louis, arms, munitions, 1,556 wagons, 459 horses, over four thousand mules, and fifteen thousand head of cattle and oxen were massed at Fort Leavenworth. Supplies were sent ahead in small pack trains to Bent’s Fort, rendezvous point for the invasion of New Mexico.
Answering the call sent out into Missouri and along the Santa Fé Trail to Bent’s, volunteers began pouring off Missouri River steamboats and into the fort in the first week of June. The First Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers came in under the command of Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, a handsome six-foot-four Clay County lawyer. He had his ragged assemblage of 860 shag-bearded farmers, hunters, and drifters under control—a fact not lost on the discipline-minded Kearny, who overlooked the Missourians’ tendency to call him “Ol’ Hoss” to his face. Soon after the arrival of Doniphan’s force, the Laclede Rangers, 107 men who would be attached to the First Dragoons, arrived, followed by two companies of volunteer infantry and two of artillery, all from St. Louis. Two additional companies of regular First Dragoons rode in from northern outposts.
An odd addition to Kearny’s gathering army came from the Mormon colony, camped at Council Bluffs, Iowa. In February, 1846, Brigham Young, the prophet and leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had led sixteen thousand of his people from Nauvoo, Illinois, across the ice-clogged Mississippi. In five harrowing months, during which six hundred “Saints” died, the congregation reached Council Bluffs on the Missouri River en route to founding the church’s new “Zion” somewhere in the Western wilderness. The Mormons were offered a chance to enlist in Kearny’s army and assured of quick discharges once they reached California. The “Mormon Battalion,” while having no direct role in the conquest of California, accomplished an epic march that would rival Kearny’s own.
With his army and supply train growing massively by the day, on June 6, Kearny sent two companies of the First Dragoons ahead on the trail southeast toward Bent’s Fort, 537 miles distant, and parceled out other units on the trail over the following three weeks. Doniphan’s eight companies of First Missourians departed Leavenworth between June 22 and 28; the bullock-drawn trade and supply wagons and eight hundred head of cattle followed along with them. On June 28, the balance of the six troops of First Dragoons moved out, together with a 150-man battalion of infantry, two companies of light artillery, the latter 250 men commanded by Major Meriwether Lewis Clark, General William Clark’s son, who also happened to be Mary Kearny’s stepbrother and former suitor.
The fragmenting of his force was Kearny’s plan to conserve the enormous amount of firewood and forage required to fuel the Army of the West.
By June 29, the colonel notified his superiors in St. Louis: “I have started fifteen hundred and twenty men from here on the Santa Fé Trail. I will leave tomorrow to overtake them and will concentrate the whole near the crossing of the Arkansas.” Then, on the morning of the thirtieth, he hugged his wife and children on the steps of his bungalow, mounted his bay horse, and rode with his staff officers out of Fort Leavenworth to rendezvous with his army.
In all, he commanded a force of over seventeen hundred men, counting a hundred or so civilian hunters and teamsters, sutlers, Santa Fé traders, and Delaware and Shawnee scouts. He had a contract surgeon, a remarkable Virginian named John S. Griffin, who kept a meticulous diary of the march; a small topographical corps headed by Lieutenant William H. Emory of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, a West Pointer and former artilleryman; and an interpreter, Antoine Robidoux, a naturalized Mexican citizen who had until recently operated a trading post in the desolate Uinta River region of Utah.
Kearny’s ordnance train consisted of four twelve-pounder and twelve six-pounder brass field howitzers.
The dragoons, Kearny’s and the army’s pride, rode as confidently, if less splendidly accoutred, as the British “heavies” under General George Yorke Scarlett at Balaclava ten years hence. They were big men on big horses—grizzled, squint-eyed veterans of the sun and wind of the Western plains. They wore blue-flannel shirts and trousers, broad-brimmed hats, huge skinning knives in sheaths cinched around their waists together with braces of cap-and-ball pistols, and carbines in leather boots strapped to their saddles. Except for their weaponry and ammunition pouches, the dragoons traveled light: all they needed—spare blouses, mess tin and utensils—they carried wrapped in a blanket roll behind their saddles.
3
Kearny and his officers swiftly caught up with the main body of the army, and despite the ponderous string of ox wagons, horse- and mule-drawn carts, and gun caissons—a dust-clouded tail miles long wagging the dog of the soldiery afoot and on horseback—managed to push an exhausting pace of twenty to thirty miles a day in the broiling summer heat. The column was slowed only in the tedious crossing of the Kansas River.
On July 7, while Commodore Sloat was forcing the surrender of Monterey, Kearny’s army, a hundred miles out of Leavenworth, reached Council Grove, the Santa Fé Trail gateway. The trail, already a fabled trader’s route, in its busy twenty-year history had never carried a multitude, military or civilian, close to the numbers of Kearny’s army.
Over the years, traffic on the trail had nearly denuded the countryside around it of timber, and game was scarce enough to force the civilian hunters hired to accompany the army to travel far afield to find meat. Kearny forbade the slaughter of any of the army’s beef herd as long as his hunters were able to bring in deer and buffalo to add to the meager rations each man carried.
At Pawnee Rock, after a march of 250 miles, hunters riding several hours ahead of the force found a buffalo herd, an undulating brown blanket of half a million animals spread out for miles before them, and solved the meat problem for the rest of the march to Bent’s Fort. The buffalo also supplied tinder for cook fires as troopers learned the value of dried bois de vache (buffalo chips) and how to skewer them with their ramrods without dismounting.
Water plagued the army in both its scarcity and abundance. Torrential rains burst on the crawling column with little warning, and those lasting a half-day turned the trail into a black porridge, burying the heavy wagons to their wheel hubs, balking mules and bullocks and filling the air with the crack of bullwhips, the shouted curses of the freightmen and the bellowing of the animals struggling forward. But often the rains were harmless cloudbursts that did little more than settle the dust plumes and add a steaminess to the day’s heat, frequently a hundred ten degrees and higher.
On July 22, three weeks out of Fort Leavenworth, a landmark came into view far to the northwest, shrouded by thunderheads. The Spanish Peaks, the Wah-to-yah (Breasts of the World) of the Indians, signaled to the jaded army that they were nearing the end of the first leg of their journey, nearing an outpost of civilization in the midst of the eternal plains, a place as fabled among Western travelers as Sutter’s New Helvetia—Bent’s Fort.
This outpost, built in 1833 by the fur-trading partners Charles Bent and his brother William of Virginia, and Cerán St. Vrain of Missouri, lay twelve miles upstream from the junction of the Arkansas and Purgatoire rivers of Colorado. The fort, called the “Big Lodge” by the Indians who frequented it and camped along the river nearby, had the configuration of a rough rectangle about 180 by 130 feet in size. Its yard-thick walls rose fourteen feet high, and at opposite corners of the square were two crenellated, martello-like towers, the battlements equipped with small field cannons. On the north side of the packed-adobe fort were two-story buildings, their roofs providing wide walkways to the ramparts. Above the gateway into Bent’s, a great iron bell was housed in a belfry above which the proprietors kept an American flag flapping in the breeze.
Inside the compound there were shady arcades of trading rooms, cooper, carpenter, and joiner shops, a wagon park, blacksmith’s forge, hide presses, water wells, warehouses, corrals, kitchens, apartments, the proprietor’s home—
even an icehouse and a billiard room. Built expressly to take advantage of the growing Santa Fé trade, the fort was the only permanent post between the Missouri River and the New Mexico capital and commanded the trade routes north and south along the Platte River and east and west along the Santa Fé Trail.
Bent’s traded in everything—furs, livestock, buffalo robes, blankets, nails, guns, galena, powder, spirits, knives and axes, wagon parts, saddlery, foodstuffs—and services for the broken wagon, the shoe-worn horse, the tired, hungry, and thirsty Indian, trapper, trader, and ordinary traveler.
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On July 29, 1846, the day in which Commodore Stockton was issuing his first bellicose proclamation as conqueror of California, Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick rode up from Bent’s and joined Colonel Kearny and his officers for the last leg of their march to the fort. The colonel and this white-haired native of County Caven, Ireland, were well acquainted. Just a year past, Fitzpatrick had guided Kearny and five companies of his First Dragoons along the Oregon Trail to the South Pass of Wyoming and back to the Arkansas. They had developed a mutual respect. Kearny knew that no man had better scouting credentials—not even Kit Carson—than this steadfast mountaineer who for more than twenty years had roamed the rivers, mountains, passes, and landmarks of the far West, from Missouri to the Pacific and from the disputed northern border with Canada down through Mexican lands to the Gila River.
Fitzpatrick brought the news circulating at the fort that Governor Armijo had called a war council in Santa Fé and was amassing a force to defend New Mexico.
The next day, July 30, Kearny and the vanguard of the Army of the West arrived on the Arkansas within sight of the great adobe walls of Bent’s Fort. As the teamsters and their ox wagons and pack mules straggled in, the tents of the big camp bloomed along the river east of the fort; Major Meriwether Lewis Clark set up his ordnance park, and Colonel Alexander Doniphan ordered the horses and pack animals to be turned loose to graze.
Captain Benjamin D. Moore, who commanded the advance party of dragoons in scouting the campsite, reported to Kearny the capture of four Mexican “spies” who admitted they had been sent up from Santa Fé to gather information on the advancing American army. The men were brought to Kearny’s command tent and questioned. The colonel shrewdly ordered they be given a tour of the massive camp—Major Lewis’s twelve howitzers were especially impressed on them—before being freed to return across Ratón Pass to report to Governor Armijo what they had seen.
Kearny was anxious to press on. At Bent’s on the last day of July, he issued a proclamation to the people of New Mexico, stamped from the same template as that written by Sloat in California. “The undersigned enters New Mexico with a large military force,” Kearny wrote, “for the purpose of seeking union with and ameliorating the conditions of its inhabitants.” He “enjoined the citizens of New Mexico” to “remain quietly in their homes and pursue their peaceful avocations” and said that as long as they did this, they would not be “interfered with by the American army,” but he warned that those who took up arms against him “will be regarded as enemies and will be treated accordingly.”
The freed spies carried copies of the proclamation to Armijo.
Meantime, an important courier arrived at the fort with messages for Kearny from President Polk and Secretary of War Marcy. This was James Wiley Magoffin of Kentucky, an eminent figure in Mexico who had been trading north and south of the Rio Grande since 1825. He had served as United States consul at Saltillo and Ciudad Chihuahua, married into a prominent Mexican family, spoke fluent Spanish, and had a wide circle of influential friends, including Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. It was Benton, in fact, who had pressed on the President the idea of sending Magoffin from Washington to intercept Kearny at Bent’s Fort. The messages delivered, which Kearny probably divined before reading them, urged him to do whatever was necessary to persuade Armijo to surrender New Mexico peaceably and said that Magoffin was to serve as emissary to the governor-general.
On August 1, Kearny assigned one of his favorite officers, Captain Philip St. George Cooke of Leesburg, Virginia, a thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate and Black Hawk War veteran, with twelve dragoons to escort Magoffin to Santa Fé bearing a letter for Governor Armijo. The letter bluntly said that the United States Army was on the march to annex all of New Mexico north and east of the Rio Grande and that if Armijo and his people presented no opposition, their lives, property, and religious practices would be honored and protected.
Magoffin, Cooke, and the dragoon escort, carrying a truce flag, entered the capital on August 12. Armijo read Kearny’s message and said he would not surrender.
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Santa Fé
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In 1846, Santa Fé stood as isolated as the Australian outback and had once been as forbidden to outsiders as Mecca and Timbuktu. The town was founded as La Villa Real de la Santa Fé (The Royal City of the Holy Faith) in 1610 and lay on an abandoned Tanoan Indian village in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos. Conscripted Pueblo Indians had built the mission-presidio there, and for 120 years it lay virtually unknown to the rest of the world, even to the Spanish authorities who governed it from fifteen hundred miles south in Mexico City. The mission-presidio population grew slowly and quietly in a vacuum of time and space as Franciscan fathers went about their work of converting the Indians of the region to Christianity and reducing the converts to the same agricultural serfdom as those in California.
Miscellaneous outsiders trickled into Santa Fé as the decades passed but were generally treated harshly—jailed, their possessions appropriated, ordered out of the province on instructions from the viceroy in Mexico City. Such a greeting met the explorer-soldier Zebulon Montgomery Pike. In an exploration of the lower Louisiana Territory, he set out from Belle Fontaine, Missouri, in July, 1806, with twenty-one men (“a Dam’d set of Rascals but very proper for such an expedition,” he said of them), explored the Republican River and the headwaters of the Arkansas, then moved south to present-day Colorado and built a stockade on the Rio Grande. In February, 1807, a patrol of one hundred Spanish soldiers took Pike and his men into custody and marched them to Santa Fé, where the expedition’s papers were confiscated. Pike was escorted to Chihuahua for questioning, then escorted back to United States territory near Natchitoches, Louisiana, after five months as a prisoner of the Spanish.
Not until 1821 was an American, by happenstance, welcomed to Santa Fé.
William Becknell, a thirty-three-year-old veteran of the War of 1812, migrated to Franklin, in far-western Missouri Territory, from his native Amherst County, Virginia. In September, 1821, he and four partners ventured westward on a somewhat daring expedition to trade among the Comanches. The party crossed the Little Osage and Verdigris rivers, picked up the Arkansas, and followed it across Kansas and into Colorado.
At some point in their journey, Becknell and his trading company learned, perhaps from trappers, buffalo hunters, or a Mexican patrol, that the “gates of Santa Fé” were open—Mexico had won its independence from Spain—and so changed directions, heading south across Ratón Pass and into the fabled town. He fully expected to be jailed there and his goods taken, but he and his partners were welcomed and treated cordially. Clearly, the new authorities in New Mexico were eager to make contact with Americans, particularly those who came to trade. Josiah Gregg, a chronicler of the Santa Fé Trail, said that up to Becknell’s time, the province had received all its goods and supplies from the internal provinces of Mexico and at such exorbitant prices “that common calicoes, and even bleached and brown domestic goods, sold as high as two and three dollars per vara (a Spanish yard of thirty-three inches).”
Becknell returned to Franklin in January, 1822, with his saddlebags full of Mexican silver.
There was but a single route from Missouri to the capital during the first year or so after Mexican independence and that over the treacherous Ratón Pass. The trail presented an obstacle for the heavy, wide-tracked and b
ig-wheeled Murphy wagons, which became the conveyance of choice in the Santa Fé trade, some of them carrying three thousand pounds of goods. They could not negotiate the steep and narrow trail Becknell had blazed with pack animals and so, armed with a pocket compass and the stars to guide him, he traced an alternate route, crossing the water-scarce and searing (120° in summer being common) Cimarron Desert to the headwaters of the Cimarron River. Ignorance of the hardships of the route nearly cost Becknell and his party their lives: a few days into the desert, their canteen water ran out and the traders were reduced to killing their dogs and scoring the ears of their mules for blood, a measure that only added to the madness of their thirst. Close to the Cimarron, the men found a wandering buffalo, its belly distended with water, killed it and drank from its stomach. Now sustained and having found the river, the party reached Santa Fé without further incident.
Although always perilous—heat, thirst, and raiding Indians foremost among the dangers—Becknell’s new route, called the Cimarron Cutoff, was shorter and flatter, and by 1824, when traders began traveling in caravans, it became favored over the Ratón Pass route.
The caravan system virtually eliminated the incidence of Indian attack and enabled traders to carry sufficient water and provisions to cross safely the fifty miles of the Cimarron Desert. Elimination of this hazard was aided by a Congressional bill sponsored in 1825 by Senator Benton that appropriated twenty thousand dollars from the Treasury to negotiate a treaty with the Osage and Kansas tribes for right-of-way through their lands and another ten thousand dollars to conduct a survey of the trail.
By the 1830s, caravans as large as one hundred wagons and two hundred men were wending westward out of Missouri to cross the prairies, mountains, and deserts to the New Mexican capital. They carried goods similar in their eccentric variety to the trade ships soon to be visiting the California coast: knives, axes, traps, kegs of nails, farm implements, glassware, thread, buttons, spoons, scissors, bolts of bright cloth, clothing, hats, spices, rifles, whiskey—all seemingly commonplace items such as were avidly sought in Santa Fé. Goods worth $35,000 were commonly traded for $200,000 in gold, silver, furs, horses, and mules.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 63
