Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The town also naturally changed. From a somnolent mission of under a thousand priests, soldiers, and Indios in 1820, after Mexican independence and the opening of trade, Santa Fé grew to a thriving commercial center. Shadowed by the snowcapped Sangre de Cristos, it was gathered around a 250-foot-square plaza of packed dirt, had a scattering of cottonwood trees, and an acequia (irrigation ditch) ran along two sides of it. The plaza was dominated by the governor’s palacio. This unprepossessing building was constructed of the same adobe as all the other town dwellings and places of business but roofed with pine and spruce logs. It formed part of a presidio that enclosed a garrison barracks, drill ground, chapel, and calabozo.

  The plaza of Santa Fé also offered access to the great cathedral and several other smaller churches, a customshouse, a hotel, houses and shops of whitewashed adobe, and the La Fonda Inn. The latter did a thriving business in liquor, gambling, and “painted women” (who were actually painted—wearing a white flour paste on their arms and faces as protection against sunburn) who smoked corn-shuck cigarillos and lounged in the shade of the portales (arcades).

  By 1830, the sleepy plaza had been transformed into a great open bazaar, a raucous, odoriferous square seething with horses, mules, oxen, wagons, babbling traders and buyers (“Los Americanos! Los carros! La entrada de la caravana!” the Mexicans greeted the American traders and their trains of wagons), gamblers with tables for faro, monte, and dice games, beggars, Pueblo Indians selling pots and blankets, watchful Mexican soldiers and town authorities, kids playing under the cottonwoods, and women cooking and baking in open-air ovens. At night, there were the bailes—fandangos and other dances to the accompaniment of fiddle, guitar, and drum; on Sundays and feast days, there were cockfights, and vaqueros chasing bulls in a wild game called the coleo, in which the horseman attempted to overturn a running bull by seizing it by its tail.

  For a decade, Americans with their goods and money were welcome in the teeming capital and no frontiersman who visited the place in “the earlies”—before the war with Mexico—ever forgot the experience. In 1826, when he was seventeen, Kit Carson had run away from home and work in Franklin, Missouri, to join a Santa Fé trade train as a “cavvy”—horse wrangler. As he rode with his employers into the town for the first time, the Mexicans shouted at the small and frail figure, “Un muchacho Americano! Mira!”—“Look at the American boy!” He loved the town, and New Mexico, as no other place in his life of wanderings.

  With its newfound prosperity and flow of American and Canadian traders, mountain men down from the Rockies, mule drivers and bull-whackers, business agents, speculators, smugglers, gamblers, and outlaws, Santa Fé’s monied citizenry came to resent the raucous intruders in their once-placid, remote, church-oriented community. It naturally followed that the Americans began finding their own reasons for resentment, particularly over the fickle method of levying tariffs on trade goods brought into the town. In general terms, the Mexican method was to charge what the traffic would bear, send as little as possible to the ruling government in Mexico City, and pocket the balance.

  One particular nemesis of the gringos in Santa Fé was Manuel Armijo, thrice governor and a man the Americans called “His Obesity.” He was a huge, brusque, rapacious character, a former sheep-rustler who had clawed his way from obscurity, who wore a spectacular self-designed uniform with gold epaulets and a helmet with a white ostrich plume as he traveled about his town in a gilded coach. When afoot, he had a propensity for caning any citizen who failed to doff his hat quickly enough in the imperial presence.

  Never averse to taking a bribe, Armijo levied outrageous tariffs—often a flat five-hundred-dollar tax on each wagonload, large and small, of trade goods—and grew rich in the process.

  As in the pattern of Texas and California, the Americans, at first welcomed in New Mexico, became worrisome in their numbers and defiant independence, and Mexico City, racked by its own internal tumult, gave scarce attention to its old, remote province and the encroaching dangers it faced.

  And now, in the summer of 1846, Governor Armijo, commandante-general of New Mexico, faced the same crisis as his California brethren, José Castro and Pío Pico: the Americans were on the march and there was little he could do but plan his escape.

  2

  Doniphan’s Missourians cleared their camp on August 1 and proceeded south in advance of the main army to the Purgatoire River, first leg of the hundred-mile march to Ratón Pass, gateway to Santa Fé. Kearny led the balance of the force past the walls of Bent’s Fort the next day.

  All made slow progress in the suffocating heat, which rose on several days to 120° as horses, pack animals, and wagon bullocks lumbered along the waterless trail through mesquite and prickly pear, a hot wind carrying a pumice-fine dust that scoured eyes and clogged noses and throats. Some of the animals collapsed, wagons overturned, and gun limbers fell off the trail, to be labored aright by cursing teamsters and soldiers, many of whom themselves fell, prostrated by heat and exhaustion.

  As each sweltering day waned, water and forage parties fanned out into the scrub to find likely campsites; cook fires were lit, half-rations and half-cups of tepid water from dwindling casks were doled out, and sentries posted. At nightfall, the Army of the West fell into a fatigued sleep wrapped in their blankets in the welcome night chill. The wolves and coyotes, after following the army from afar during the day, came closer, brushes up, sniffing the edges of the camp, howling into the starry night, awaiting the time when they could scramble and scavenge among the scraps left behind.

  A hundred hard miles out of Bent’s, the army made its ascent of Ratón Pass, the rarified air at seventy-five hundred feet and the narrow, unstable trail slowing the march to as little as a mile a day. From the summit could be seen a brilliant panorama: the Wah-to-Yah to the northwest, and beyond it the peak named for its discoverer, Zebulon Pike; the white-capped Sangre de Cristos (Blood of Christ) mountains on the southwest; and directly below, where the pass debouched, piney hills, fields of wildflowers and corn, a sluggish stream or two winding through red earthbanks, and, visible through the officers’ telescopes, the heat-shimmered, mirage-like outlines of old adobe villages.

  The descent of the pass, only slightly less painstaking and dangerous than the climb, was accomplished on August 14, and on that day a Mexican officer and an escort of three lancers rode into Kearny’s camp to deliver a message from the governor-general of New Mexico. Armijo acknowledged having received the colonel’s demand for surrender but said he intended leading his people in arms to resist the invasion and suggested that he and Kearny meet in the village of Las Vegas to discuss there vital matters.

  Kearny asked the officer to convey a message to the governor: “The road to Santa Fé is now as free to you as to myself. Say to General Armijo I shall soon meet him, and I hope it will be as friends.”

  They were never to meet.

  * * *

  All manner of rumor—none of it dependable—had reached Kearny from the time he departed Bent’s Fort to his march south to Las Vegas, sixteen miles from the foot of Ratón Pass. There were stories that two thousand Pueblo Indians were being armed to help defend Santa Fé—very reminiscent of the rumors of General Castro’s enlisting Indians in California. Other tales said that the citizenry of the entire province was rushing to assist in repelling the American invaders, that Mexico had dispatched a force of dragoons to reinforce Armijo’s garrison, that the Americans would have to fight for every inch of ground on the road to the capital. The warnings became so alarming that several of Kearny’s officers who had been left behind at Bent’s rushed out to intercept him and offer their services. (One of them brought news of Kearny’s official promotion to brigadier general.)

  In fact, Armijo, who appealed to the military commanders of Chihuahua and Durango for reinforcements and was promised assistance, received none; as well, most of the citizenry of about sixty thousand—as in California—were either ignorant of the invasion because of their remoteness from
the seat of government in Santa Fé, apathetic about it, or in favor of American intervention.

  In Las Vegas, Kearny issued a blunt proclamation that was posted in two languages at every village on his route of march to the capital. “I have come amongst you by the orders of my government, to take possession of your country and extend over it the laws of the United States,” he said. “We come amongst you as friends—not as enemies; as protectors—not as conquerors.”

  He “absolved” the citizenry of all allegiance to Mexico and General Armijo and announced that he, Stephen Watts Kearny, was now governor of the new United States territory of New Mexico. He promised religious freedom, protection against thievery and misconduct by his army and from Indian depredations, and pledged safety for all who did not take up arms against him and execution by hanging for all who did.

  Captain Philip St. George Cooke, who had escorted James Magoffin to Santa Fé on August 1 to deliver the American ultimatum to Armijo, rejoined Kearny’s force on August 15. He reported that the governor and his ninety-man bodyguard had fled the capital into Chihuahua, but, Cooke said, the militia Armijo had raised to defend the province was reported ready to oppose the Americans at Apache Canyon, twelve miles from the capital.

  This defense never materialized, and on the morning of August 18, a man named Nicholas Quintaro rode into Kearny’s camp astride a mule and shouted, “Armijo and his troops have gone to Hell and the canyon is all clear!” Quintaro, secretary of state in the new government, carried a letter from Acting Governor Juan Bautista Vigil y Alarid welcoming the Americans to New Mexico.

  3

  On August 18, 1846, fifty days and 850 miles from Fort Leavenworth and in a sudden squall of rain, Lieutenant Thomas C. Hammond of the First Dragoons led the vanguard of the Army of the West into Santa Fé.

  The town, with its jumble of low, flat-roofed adobe jacales, seemed to fit the “more a prairie-dog village than a capital” description. A few townspeople gathered along the route to the governor’s palace to witness the arrival of the Americans, the army and its train of equipage strung out for miles behind Hammond’s advance guard. If the townspeople were awed by the spectacle, they made no outward expression of it. Except for the clop and snort of horses and the screech of wagon wheels on ungreased axles, the army rode in silence through the pelting rain.

  At the one-story adobe Palace of the Governors, Vigil y Alarid had arranged a thirteen-gun salute to welcome General Kearny and his army and the raising of the American flag over the plaza. After the courtesies and abrazos, and wine and brandy served the general and his officers, Kearny read a notice to the governor, his staff, and the townspeople gathered at the entrance to the palace. In it, in proper monotone, he instructed the people of New Mexico to “deliver their arms and surrender absolutely to the government of the United States” and promised protection to the “persons, lives and property” of those who did so, “and in this manner I take this province of New Mexico for the benefit of the United States.”

  The governor responded, “In the name of the entire department, I swear obedience to the Northern Republic and I tender my respect to its laws and authority.”

  Kearny was eager to proceed to California but he had duties to perform as the first American governor of New Mexico, and five anxious weeks passed before he could gather his force for the march south and west. He ordered construction of a fort, named Fort Marcy for the secretary of war, above the Santa Fé plaza. He attended mass (he was an Episcopalian) in the St. Francis Cathedral. He conferred with the governor and his staff and met often with his own officers to plan the security of the vast province after he left it. He visited the sick troops at Dr. Griffin’s improvised hospital. He pored over the primitive maps of Mexican territory, planning his forthcoming march. He attended to a vast correspondence, keeping his Washington superiors informed of his every plan and pronouncement. He sponsored a public fandango at the palace in which five hundred people attended, dancing what one American described as “a kind of swinging gallopade waltz,” and feasting and drinking until dawn.

  On August 22, the day another American conqueror, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, was setting up his civil government in California, Kearny issued a more formal proclamation. He declared New Mexico a territory of the United States, repeated his warnings to those who would oppose him and his promises to those who did not. Alexander Doniphan’s lawyerly skills were put to work drafting a legal code and bill of rights for the newly annexed region.

  Between September 2 and 11, the general, with an ostentatious seven-hundred-man escort, toured the southern settlements—the Río Abajo—of New Mexico. In the villages of Bernalillo, Albuquerque, Peralta, San Tomé, and others, he reiterated to local alcaldes and jefes políticos that he and his army came “as friends, protectors, not as conquerors,” and that no one would be molested who tended his fields and herds and did not take up arms. “Not a pepper, not an onion, shall be disturbed or taken by my troops without pay or by the consent of the owner,” he said, adding the grave warning, “But listen! He who promises to be quiet, and is found in arms against me, I will hang!”

  * * *

  Last arrangements were made. Garrisons were set up in Santa Fé and several other towns; patrols were sent out to protect New Mexicans from predatory Indians; Charles Bent, a Taos lawyer and one of the founders of Bent’s Fort, was selected to serve as the first civilian governor of the territory.

  Two of Kearny’s support forces—a second regiment of Missouri volunteers commanded by Colonel Sterling Price, and the Mormon Battalion under Captain James Allen—were en route to Santa Fé as the general prepared to leave the capital. He had promised to send surplus troops to Chihuahua to join Brigadier General John E. Wool’s force two hundred miles south of the Rio Grande, and he picked Colonel Doniphan to lead the Second Missourians to a rendezvous with Wool. Another favorite officer, Philip St. George Cooke, stayed behind to take command of the Mormon Battalion and march the five hundred volunteers to California. Colonel Price, a well-connected, Virginia-born Missourian who had resigned his seat in the House of Representatives to serve in the war, was designated military governor of New Mexico.

  (Three weeks after Kearny departed, Cooke marched his battalion out of Santa Fé with a dozen wagons and oxcarts and moved down the Rio Grande. He led his force along a route considerably south of Kearny’s and reached Tucson on December 14 to find that the Mexican garrison there had abandoned the town. With replenished supplies, the Mormons marched north along the Santa Cruz River and in late December, struck the Gila. They struggled into San Diego in the last days of January, 1847, nearly naked and shoeless, but with most of their wagons.)

  4

  The general departed Santa Fé on September 25, 1846, with three hundred of the First Dragoons, now mounted on mules—he believed them better adapted to the southwestern desert terrain than horses, surer to make what Captain Cooke described as “a leap in the dark of a thousand miles of wild plain and mountain.” With Tom Fitzpatrick as guide, the troopers and their pack train moved down the east bank of the Rio Grande to Albuquerque, then crossed to the west bank as they neared the town of Socorro.

  The dragoon column made good progress in cool weather down the Rio Grande Valley despite the tendency of the mules to wander off into the lush cornfields and the time taken to haggle with wary villagers in buying food, forage, and spare pack animals. A band of Navajo marauders had recently raided some of the pueblos on the line of march and Kearny sent a patrol ahead to locate them, but to no avail.

  On October 6, two hundred miles south of Santa Fé and ten miles below the village of Socorro, there occurred an astonishing coincidence, one that Kearny’s biographer said recalled Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the Greek Fates who spun, determined the length, and cut the tread of human destiny.

  Kearny, several of his officers, and Fitzpatrick, riding ahead of the column, spotted what appeared to be a large dust devil in the distance, then heard a shout and watched as a band of horse
men galloped toward them. Broken Hand instantly recognized the lead rider as his old comrade of trapping days in the mountains, Kit Carson.

  Thirty days earlier, with fifteen men, including six of Frémont’s Delawares, and a small pack train, Carson had ridden out of Los Angeles, bound for Washington with dispatches from Commodore Stockton announcing the capture of California. The scout had estimated that the journey would take sixty days, and his “express” party had traveled eight hundred miles over dim or nonexistent trails through hostile country when it spied the dust cloud of Kearny’s column.

  The meeting between the general and the scout was to be fateful for each, far beyond the coincidental timing of their encounter below Socorro.

  Kearny read the dispatches Carson carried and the news stunned him: California had fallen to Stockton and his naval force and Frémont’s volunteers. The Mexican governor and commandante-general had fled the province. A civil government under Frémont was in the making. The war in the West was over.

  This was crushing news, but Kearny recovered from it in old-army fashion: he had orders and he intended to follow through on them. Four months earlier, the War Department of the United States had instructed him that he was to have “a large discretionary power” in commanding the Army of the West, and that while it was expected that American naval forces would soon be in possession of the coastal towns of California, Secretary Marcy had been clear that the navy would “co-operate with you in the conquest of California.” The secretary had stated unequivocally what he expected of the general: “Should you conquer and take possession of New Mexico and Upper California, or considerable places in either, you will establish temporary civil governments therein.…”