Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  As the day wore on, cold and gray-skied, fires were built and Captain Henry Turner, in temporary command of the army while the wounded Kearny was gathering his strength, wrote a letter to Stockton. He briefly described the fight, said that Pico’s force was still hovering nearby, and asked for reinforcements, supplies, and carts for the wounded. Kearny approved the message, and Alexis Godey, a lieutenant with Frémont’s California Battalion, was selected to make his way past Pico’s outposts to deliver it to the commodore in San Diego, forty miles distant.

  Before daybreak on December 7, accompanied by California Battalion volunteer Thomas Burgess and an Indian sheepherder, Godey and the others mounted the choicest mules available and set out for San Diego through the low hills south of San Pascual.

  At mid-morning, Kearny decided he could mount a horse despite his painful arm and buttock wounds and resumed command of the battered force, now consolidated into a single dragoon company under Captain Turner’s command. The general announced to his officers that he needed to move on toward San Diego and join whatever relief force and provisions Stockton had sent out—assuming that Godey reached the commodore safely with Turner’s letter.

  By early afternoon, the Americans were on trail down the San Pascual Valley. They crossed a dry streambed and after several hours, the mule-drawn travois slowing the march to a crawl, reached a deserted rancho known locally as San Bernardo. Kearny’s outriders had found a few head of stray cattle on the route and some chickens were captured on the property. After a brief respite at the rancho, during which the wounded were fed and their dressings changed, the column moved on to the San Bernardo riverbed, on the lookout for forage for the animals and for any enemy patrols in the vicinity.

  When they reached the foot of a low hill that overlooked the streambed, a detachment of Pico’s lancers burst from the brush and, at a distance too far for accuracy, opened fire on the dragoons. In the panicky seconds following the sudden gunfire, Emory and eight men scattered the Californians, then wheeled and scrambled through the tangle of cactus and thorny brush up the hill while Kearny and his officers led the balance of the army toward the summit on the other side. A number—Emory said forty—of Pico’s horsemen rode up the hill to intercept the Americans but were chased off by Emory’s men, and in minutes the Army of the West occupied the position with their two fieldpieces and the travois. The brief skirmish had cost no American casualties; Kearny reported five killed and wounded among the Californians.1

  The hill, while an excellent defensive position, could not long sustain a large force, but the general determined to camp his army among a battlement of boulders and cactus for the night. Holes were dug by a patrol venturing down to the San Bernardo bed and this resulted in a small seepage of muddy water. During the brief fight, the few head of cattle that had been driven in front of the dragoons ran off, and several of the mules had to be slaughtered, the meat roasted over brushwood fires and the scraps boiled to a broth in pots of muddy water. The men quickly dubbed their high ground “Mule Hill.”

  On the morning of the eighth, the siege of Mule Hill was interrupted briefly by the arrival of a courier, riding under a truce flag, with a message from Pico. The courier carried a bag of sugar and tea and a request for an exchange of prisoners. Kearny’s men had taken one Californian under guard from the San Pascual battlefield and the general was startled to learn that Pico had captured Alexis Godey, Thomas Burgess, and the Indian guide, the men who were to deliver Captain Turner’s message to Stockton in San Diego. Lieutenant Emory escorted the Californian prisoner on the ride back with Pico’s man and made the exchange, returning to the hill with Burgess. This man had disappointing news: he and his partners had delivered Turner’s message to Stockton and had been captured near the San Bernardo while making their way back with packsaddles of food and clothing. Burgess said that Stockton’s responding message had been cached in a tree to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy but that he knew its content: the commodore had said that he would be delayed in sending reinforcements until after sufficient horses were gathered, and that he had no carts or wagons for the wounded.

  As the daylight dwindled, Pico, in a gentlemanly gesture, sent the captured packsaddles to Mule Hill but kept Godey and the Indian under guard and the hill patrolled by his lancers. Kearny held another war council with his officers and Gillespie’s, the result of which was the writing of a second message to Stockton, to be carried to San Diego by Navy Lieutenant Edward Beale of the California Battalion. Beale asked Kearny for Kit Carson to serve as guide and at first the general resisted this. He said he needed Carson’s skills in the event the reinforcements did not arrive and the army had to fight its way off the hill and make its way west. Beale suggested that the scout’s presence would greatly improve the chances for the success of the mission, and Carson opined that while he considered the plan a “forlorn hope” (the old British army term for a suicide mission), especially since they had to travel afoot through Pico’s cordon of lancers, he hated to see the “boy”—meaning Beale—go alone. Kearny relented, and at dusk on December 8, Beale, Carson, and an Indian volunteer from among Gillespie’s men crept down the hill on their bellies to an oak grove where they split up, intending to reunite after a safe distance from the Californians.

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  Kearny waited two days on Mule Hill, during which time one of his dragoon sergeants wounded at San Pascual died. In addition, Antoine Robidoux, who had taken a lance wound in the back during the battle, suffered greatly in the night freeze on the hill and was thought to be dying. He had served Kearny as interpreter among the Indians and, with Kit Carson, had led the Army of the West on its Gila River journey to California. The general thought highly of him, as did Lieutenant Emory, who tried to comfort him by bringing him a steaming cup of coffee to help ward off the cold. Emory later recalled that Robidoux seemed to rally and in gratitude gave him a sort of cake, an emergency ration that Emory described as “made of brown flour, almost black with dirt,” that he said had “for greater security, been hidden in the clothes of his Mexican servant, a man who scorned ablutions.” The lieutenant ate more than half of the cake “without inspection.” Then, upon breaking off another piece, he said, “The bodies of the most loathsome insects were exposed to my view. My hunger, however, overcame my fastidiousness.”

  On December 10, as the Americans’ horses and mules were allowed to nibble on the withered grass at the foot of Mule Hill, Pico’s lancers drove a small band of horses into the grazing animals, intended to stampede them. Somehow, a number of dragoons scrambled down the hill in time to thwart this plan; a warning shot was fired from the Sutter cannon, and the general’s sharpshooters even managed to kill two of Pico’s horses, adding the meat to their near-empty larder.

  Kearny was determined that his force would fight its way off the hill the next morning and issued orders that everything that could not be carried be burned. He doubted that the three-man express party had reached San Diego and he could not continue to hold Mule Hill while awaiting reinforcements.

  * * *

  Beale, Carson, and the Indian apparently never regrouped after splitting up at the beginning of their mission, for the Indian—whose name, according to one of Stockton’s men, was Che-muc-tah—arrived in San Diego first, at about six in the evening of December 9. Beale followed the next morning, so exhausted by the journey and affected by exposure that he collapsed and was said to be “mentally deranged” for several days thereafter. Carson, who had taken a more circuitous route to the town, arrived on the eleventh, limping on torn and bleeding feet. By then, a relief expedition had already reached Mule Hill.

  An hour or two before dawn on December 11, as Kearny’s men slept fitfully among the brush and rocks of their encampment, sentries spotted movement below and shouted “Who goes there?” “Americans!” came the reply as Stockton’s aide-de-camp from the Congress, Lieutenant Andrew F. V. Gray, appeared in the moonlight at the San Bernardo riverbed leading a force of 215 sailors and mari
nes.

  The Army of the West and the relief force celebrated for hours among the hill’s breastworks. Gray’s men had brought coffee, tobacco, jerked beef, hardtack, and clothing; Kearny’s men offered steaming mule soup and long accounts of what had happened at San Pascual and their survival in the five days since the battle. Everyone managed to sleep an hour or two before dawn, at which time Kearny intended to resume the march.

  * * *

  The advent of Lieutenant Gray’s tars and marines ended whatever plans Andrés Pico had to prevent Kearny from entering San Diego. The Californians had received their own reinforcements since San Pascual, over a hundred men sent from Los Angeles by General José Flores, but Pico, his strength presently at least 250 “effectives,” made no use of them. By the time the Army of the West, now numbering about 350 with Gray’s men, returned to the San Bernardo rancho at daybreak on December 11, Pico had abandoned the field, reporting to General Flores that the “want of horses” prevented him from pursuing the Americans any further. H. H. Bancroft provided another unsatisfactory explanation for Pico’s action, or lack of it, writing that “the Californians had a pardonable aversion to charging on horseback up a hill to meet cannon-balls and rifle-bullets.” In fact, it is impossible to believe that Pico ever contemplated an “attack” either before or after Gray’s arrival, and least of all, up Mule Hill. He was too intelligent an officer to charge into the muzzles of the American howitzers. His “want of horses” explanation to his commander in chief was no more than a euphemism for his pardonable aversion to sacrificing his lancers to superior numbers and guns. With the addition of the hundred men from Los Angeles, he might have made it difficult for the Americans to continue to San Diego, but he could not have stopped them.

  In their haste to quit the field, the Californians left their small cattle herd behind and it was captured by Kearny’s men and driven ahead of the column. Camp was made at another abandoned rancho on the night of December 11, where the army was well fed for the first time in many days and fortified with confiscated wine by the time it resumed the march the next morning.

  At four in the next afternoon, Kearny led the advance guard of dragoons into the nondescript adobe village of San Diego, ending a thousand-mile march that had begun at Fort Leavenworth six months less four days past.

  Stockton and his officers from the Congress met the general on the eastern edge of the village and rode with him to the commodore’s quarters, which were graciously offered to the haggard Kearny, still tortured by his wounds.

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  “It is difficult to regard the affair at San Pascual otherwise than as a stupid blunder on the part of Kearny, or to resist the conclusion that the official report of the so-called ‘victory’ was a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts.” So wrote H. H. Bancroft forty years after the battle, when some of the participants (though not Kearny) were still living. The historian allowed that while the Americans had possession of the battlefield after Pico’s lancers fled, “this fact by no means sufficed to make of defeat a victory.…” There was no reason for the attack on Pico at San Pascual, especially with a small force of exhausted men, Bancroft insisted, asserting that Kearny could have joined Stockton in San Diego “without risk or opposition” and proceeded as commander in chief to devise plans to recapture the lost towns and complete the conquest of California. Instead, as the historian wrote:

  Coming in sight of the enemy, he orders a charge and permits a use of his men, benumbed with cold, their fire-arms wet and useless, their sabres rusted fast in the scabbards, mounted on stupid, worn-out mules and half-broken horses, to rush in confusion upon the California lances, presenting a temptation to slaughter which the enemy—even if they are as cowardly as their assailants believe—cannot resist.

  “Individually, the Americans fought most bravely; nothing more can be said in praise,” Bancroft said, but “many lives are recklessly and uselessly sacrificed. An irresponsible guerrillero chief would be disgraced by such an attack on Indians armed with bows and arrows.” But Kearny was no guerrillero chief, he was a brigadier general commanding regular troops of the United States and, said the historian, “Success would have brought him no glory; defeat would have brought him disgrace.”

  Apart from the lack of evidence that Kearny actually ordered a charge, the assertion that there would have been no glory had the attack been a success, and the ludicrous “rusted sabre” image (no dragoon would ever let his saber rust: it was his principal weapon and he oiled and sharpened it religiously), there is much that is undeniable in Bancroft’s polemic, much that is inexplicable in Kearny’s conduct.

  Why did he move, with men and animals decrepit from their fatiguing march, against an enemy force about which he was utterly ignorant? He did not know the number in Pico’s force, what arms they carried (he did not even know they were lancers), or what artillery might be supporting them. Of the deployment of the enemy and the ground over which it was deployed, he knew only what tidbits were told him by Lieutenant Hammond and the Indian spy when they returned from the disastrous reconnaissance patrol.

  Bancroft and others made much of Kearny’s dependence on the word of Kit Carson and Archibald Gillespie about the “cowardice” of the Californians, but no officer of Kearny’s experience would have regarded such opinion as more than campfire badinage. He had heard of the “cowardice” of the British who had wounded him and taken him prisoner at Queenston Heights in 1812, and of the “cowardice” of the Poncas, Mandans, and Comanches he had fought as an officer of dragoons on the Western frontier.

  Did Stockton’s message urging him to attack Pico and “beat up the camp if the general thought it advisable” cause Kearny to act so precipitously? Did he hope to impress Stockton by some glorious result at San Pascual? This too seems unrealistic. Bancroft reluctantly states that “we may charitably suppose that he [Stockton] did not realize the condition of Kearny’s force,” but in truth, Kearny had no need to impress a naval officer who would become his subordinate, and in any event, he was not the kind of officer who fought to make an impression on anybody but the enemy.

  His own biographer, Dwight Clarke, states that “General Kearny’s tactics on the night of December 5–6 were at fault. ‘Blunder’ is one word applied to them with reason.” But, Clarke argues, the chief blunder occurred when Hammond’s troopers alarmed Pico’s camp; the battle of San Pascual turned upon that happenstance and upon the overruling of Captain Benjamin Moore’s argument to attack the Californians while they slept.

  As would be expected, Kearny reported San Pascual as a “victory,” as did Gillespie, whose lance wounds attested to his being in the forefront of the fight.

  To Bancroft, San Pascual was a “criminally blundering” defeat for the Americans.

  Kearny’s biographer calls the fighting around San Pascual village a “check that came perilously close to defeat” and admits that the result was “a Pyrrhic victory” for the Americans.

  Based on the “conduct” of the thirty-minute battle by the Americans, the negligible gains in ground and advantage, and the resulting casualties of the two sides—twenty-two dead (including three officers) and eighteen wounded among Kearny’s force, perhaps a dozen wounded among Pico’s—the word “victory” must have given Kearny pause in the writing. But he could say no less; nor could Andrés Pico say the truth about why he left the field to the Americans after the fight.

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  San Gabriel

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  For the first several days after reaching San Diego, Kearny was content to rest and let his wounds heal. He wrote his official account of San Pascual and sent soothing letters to his wife Mary in St. Louis, assuring her of his good health and of his fondest wish: that he could be home with her and their seven children with the Christmas holidays drawing close.

  He had, pro forma, presented his War Department orders to Commodore Stockton but had not discussed the issue of command. In his thinking, there was little to discuss: when he could do so, he would assume both mili
tary and civil authority as his orders demanded. For the present, he would not interfere with the scheme of things.

  Neither, at first, did Robert Field Stockton give attention to the command matter. The entry of the wounded, sick, starved, and weary dragoons into San Diego had delayed his plans to pursue and force the surrender of the rebels. He had five hundred sailors, marines, and a gang of volunteers drilling daily in the scrub near his presidio headquarters; he had search parties in the countryside, and in Baja California, gathering horses, mules, and cattle; he had Frémont, now somewhere in the Monterey vicinity, adding recruits to his California Battalion and also searching for horses in preparation to march south. He had a firm grip on the helm, knew the course his ship was headed, and would soon correct the unfortunate but “temporary interruption” caused by the seizure of Los Angeles by the California mob of malcontents.

  Although Stockton’s position had something in it of a patrician military officer’s blind certitude of correctness, he had the history of the past five months of a sort of eminent domain at his advantage. His predecessor, Commodore Sloat, had raised the flag at Monterey on July 7—while Kearny was still en route from Fort Leavenworth to Bent’s Fort. Stockton had taken command of the Pacific Squadron on July 22, a month before Kearny had reached Santa Fé. Moreover, he had five hundred men in his command; Kearny had only about sixty “effectives” who could join the march to Los Angeles.

  The commodore did not question Kearny’s orders, dated June 3, 1846, and did not see them as superseding his own orders from the navy secretary, dated eighteen days later. The War Department had directed the general of dragoons that “Should you conquer and take possession of N. Mex. and Cal., or considerable places in either, you will establish temporary civil governments therein.…” The general had fulfilled only the first part of these tentative “should you” orders. He had taken possession of New Mexico. But in the matter of California, the issue now at hand, Stockton had stolen the march five months earlier.