Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West Read online

  That was good enough for Carson. Without another apparent thought, he turned and gunned down the de Haro twins and their uncle in cold blood. (Some accounts say that several men fired along with Carson.)

  Fremont seemed satisfied by the execution and the retribution it afforded. “It is well,” he proclaimed after he heard the rifle reports. According to one eyewitness, Carson then searched the bodies and, as he’d suspected, found dispatches on one of them.

  Neither Carson nor Fremont mentioned anything about this little atrocity in his memoirs. It remains one of the more unfathomable episodes of Carson’s life. One cannot easily attribute his actions to the sort of ignorant racism that animated so many jingoistic soldiers who would fight in the Mexican War: Carson was married to a Hispanic, was a Catholic, spoke Spanish, and had for two decades enjoyed wide circles of Mexican friends. People who otherwise loved Carson had trouble accepting his role in this incident. Years later one of his close friends, W. M. Boggs, would condemn it as “a cold hearted crime.”

  But in this murder, as in the attack on the Klamath village, a certain troubling pattern had shown itself, one that would recur in Carson’s later campaigns. It was a kind of dark symbiosis between authority and action: Fremont needed Carson to carry out his dirty work, and Carson needed Fremont, apparently, to tell him what to do. Modern psychiatry might call these two men codependents. Together they were far more lethal than when apart. Unwilling to disappoint a superior, Carson seemed incapable of resisting an order he personally disagreed with. When given a command, he was the good soldier; in such situations, his trigger-finger did not communicate with his conscience.

  Two weeks later Fremont’s California Battalion made its way to the provincial capital of Monterey. Warships of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron had already sailed into the magnificent harbor and, in a bloodless takeover, claimed the town for the United States. Now weighing anchor in the bay were two American transport ships, three frigates, and three sloops—each of which was fixed with forty-four guns. The Stars and Stripes flew uncontested over Monterey’s scallop of shoreline.

  The new commodore of the Pacific Squadron was Robert Field Stockton, the pompous seaman aboard whose ship Sen. Tom Benton was almost killed by errant cannon fire. A wealthy businessman from New Jersey who had enrolled in Princeton at the precocious age of thirteen, Stockton was a good-looking officer of fifty-one years, with cool, calculating eyes, a determined face, a nest of curly hair, and frizzled scimitars for sideburns. He had sailed much of the world, from the Mediterranean to the horn of South America, and while stationed in West Africa had helped negotiate a treaty that led to the creation of the state of Liberia. When home, he nursed eclectic ventures—canals, real estate, naval architecture, politics (he would later become a U.S. senator from New Jersey, his tendency for long-winded speechmaking earning him the nickname “Gassey Bob”). Ever since he arrived in Monterey and assumed command of the Pacific Squadron, Commodore Stockton held an exaggeratedly high opinion of his status in California. “My word is at present the law of the land,” he wrote President Polk. “My person is more than regal.”

  If it is possible, the commodore nursed even greater ambitions for personal glory than did Fremont: Upon learning from a Mexican newspaper account that the U.S.-Mexican War was officially on, Stockton became impatient to mop up operations in California as soon as feasible so he could stage an amphibious invasion of Acapulco and then march all the way to Mexico City—a project he apparently concocted on his own without authorization from Washington. Restless, ready to bend rules, and forever solicitous of his own immortality, Stockton was a man cut from Fremontian cloth. It was little surprise, then, that the two men should instantly like each other and would become allies.

  Stockton proposed to join forces with Fremont’s men and quickly conquer Los Angeles and the rest of California. The commodore dashed off an obnoxious declaration of war against Gen. Jose Castro, a document as inflamed as it was untruthful. Stockton claimed that he was receiving “daily reports from the interior of scenes of rapine, blood, and murder.” (A lie, of course—Cowie and Fowler were the only known deaths, and, thanks to Carson, they had been more than avenged.) General Castro, Stockton went on, “has violated every principle of international law and national hospitality, by pursuing…with wicked intent Capt. Fremont who came here to refresh his men after a perilous journey across the mountains, on a scientific survey.” For these “repeated hostilities and outrages,” Stockton concluded, “military possession was ordered to be taken of Monterey and San Francisco until redress could be obtained from the government of Mexico.”

  Stockton soon reorganized Fremont’s army as the “Naval Battalion of Mounted Riflemen.” Improvising as he went, the commodore designated Fremont a major, Gillespie a captain, and Carson a lieutenant. Although at first most of the expeditioners seemed happy to become regularized, they began to chafe at the restrictions and protocols laid down by Stockton. Fremont writes in his Memoirs, “Living an uncontrolled life, ranging prairies and mountains subject to no will but their own, it was a great sacrifice for these border chiefs to lay aside their habits of independence.”

  By late July the commodore told Fremont to prepare for his first assignment—to sail for San Diego, from which he was then to fan out and conquer Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California. There was some urgency to the assignment, Stockton felt, for the commodore was acutely worried about British meddling. The evidence was not far at hand: Anchored alongside the American ships in Monterey Bay was a single British man-of-war, the Collingwood, a formidable vessel armed with eighty guns.

  For Stockton and Fremont, the presence of this British flagship was proof enough that the English had planned to take over California and that American Anglophobia had been justified all along. Fremont said he and his men “looked upon the Collingwood with the feeling of a racer” who had crossed the finish line a hair ahead of his opponent. In truth, though the British were keenly interested in California, the Collingwood had sailed into Monterey primarily to gather intelligence and to ensure that English mercantile interests were not being encroached upon. The Collingwood’s commander, Adm. Sir George Seymour, exchanged pleasantries with officers of the U.S. Pacific Squadron and gave no signs of aggression.

  The British sailors were intrigued by Fremont’s motley army of mountain men. The English seemed to marvel at the trappers as though they were some fabled elite—like French Legionnaires, perhaps, or samurai warriors. One officer aboard the Collingwood thought Carson and his comrades were “a curious set…who had passed years in the wilds, living upon their own resources.” Dressed in “long, loose coats of deerskin,” many of them were “blacker than the Indians.” The Englishman continued, “One or two enjoy a high reputation in the prairies. Kit Carson is as well known there as the Duke of Wellington is in Europe.”

  The two groups swapped stories and played games. Carson set up coins at a distance of 150 paces and tested his marksmanship against some of the English sailors—for bets. Early Carson biographer Edwin Sabin notes that his “long, true barrel and remarkable eyesight kept the Britishers poor in pocket.”

  On July 25, Fremont’s battalion boarded the Cyane, a navy sloop, and set sail for San Diego. It was an amusing notion to think of Fremont’s men as “sailors.” Many of them had never seen an ocean before, let alone sailed on one.

  Carson, certainly, was a confirmed landlubber. He had been looking forward to the voyage, but soon found that maritime life did not agree with him. As the Cyane heaved in the Pacific swells, with the headlands of Big Sur shimmering off to port, he grew seasick. For him, the four-day sail to San Diego was pure hell. He told a friend he would never again board an oceangoing vessel, “not as long as mules have backs.” Carson said, “I swore it would be the last time I would leave sight of land,” adding: “I’d rather ride on a grizzly than on this boat.”

  But he wasn’t the only one—the decks of the Cyane positively writhed with vomiting, sallow-faced mou
ntain men. A navy chaplain, the Reverend Walter Colton, found it hilarious that these “wild savages” under whose “heavy tramp the ground seemed to tremble” should be so helpless at sea. Wrote Colton: “They are laying about the deck in a spirit of resignation that would satisfy the non-resistant principles of a Quaker. Two or three resolute old women might tumble the whole lot of them into the sea.”

  Fremont’s men arrived in San Diego harbor on July 29 and were met with no resistance whatsoever. A brace of Marines marched ashore and raised the American flag over the town. For a week Fremont was entertained by the leading citizens of San Diego while Carson went out to scour the surrounding countryside for horses that would be needed for the attack on the pueblo of Los Angeles. As they waited for Commodore Stockton to sail south from Monterey, Fremont luxuriated in the Southern California summer. “The days were bright and hot,” “the sky pure and entirely cloudless, and the nights cool and beautifully serene.”

  Commodore Stockton tacked out of Monterey Bay on August 1 with 360 sailors aboard the Congress. (That same week, Kearny’s army was arriving at Bent’s Fort.) Stockton dropped anchor off Santa Barbara only long enough to claim the town and raise the Stars and Stripes. By the time he arrived in the waters off Los Angeles, General Castro had already composed a formal letter to Gov. Pio Pico stating that he did not think it was possible to defend the pueblo. General Castro wrote, “After having made on my part every sacrifice that has been in my power to prepare for the defense of the Department and to oppose the invasion that by land and sea has been made by the United States forces, today I find myself in the painful necessity of informing Your Excellency that it is impossible for me to do one or the other.”

  On August 13, Fremont and Stockton consolidated their forces and marched into Los Angeles without contest. “Our entry,” boasted Fremont, “had more the effect of a parade of home guards than of any enemy taking possession of a conquered town.” The Americans learned to their delight that Castro had disbanded his army and escaped to the San Bernardino Mountains and then south to Sonora. Governor Pico, meanwhile, had left for Baja California. The Americans were somewhat disappointed that they had no one to fight, and that all the Mexican soldiers had, as Carson put it, “departed to any part of the country where they thought they would not meet with Americans.”

  Four days later Stockton declared California to be United States soil and named himself both commander in chief and governor. It seemed that the conquest was complete, although, unbeknownst to him, a resistance movement was already quietly building. The commodore sat down and wrote a self-congratulatory letter to President Polk in which he trumpeted that he had “chased the Mexican army more than three hundred miles along the coast, pursued them thirty miles in 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.”

  Stockton planned to leave California as soon as possible to pursue his planned invasion of the west coast of Mexico proper. Upon his departure, he would name Fremont the new governor of California.

  Both Stockton and Fremont were anxious to get the glorious news of the conquest to Washington—and to place their version of events in the hands of President Polk himself. Fremont suggested that they write dispatches and send them overland, placing them in the able hands of none other than Kit Carson.

  Carson would “insure the safety and speedy delivery of these important papers,” Fremont reasoned, and the plum assignment would be “a reward for his brave and valuable service on many occasions.” The journey would route him through New Mexico, allowing him to see his wife Josefa. “It would be a service of high trust and honor and of great danger also,” Fremont said, but Carson would enjoy “going off at the head of his own party with carte blanche for expenses and the prospect of novel pleasure and honor at the end.”

  Carson accepted the assignment, of course, and pledged to make the journey in sixty days. As usual, the feat would be accomplished on the backs of mules. Cussed though they assuredly were, mules, not horses, were “winning” the West. The sterile cross between a horse mare and a jackass, mules were stronger, sturdier, surer-footed, and less liable to spook. They could carry greater loads longer on less feed—and on feed of a poorer quality. Although they were usually slower and seemed to be designed by committee, they could better withstand temperature extremes and other vagaries of weather.

  People like Carson, who had been among them all his life, were superstitious about their mules. Some people insisted mules could detect water five miles away. They could tell if a hailstorm was approaching. They could smell blood. They were even clairvoyant: The literature of the mountain men is rife with stories of mules who saved their owners by sensing the coming attack of hostile Indians—and by clearly communicating their apprehension through one anxious tic or another. Later accounts celebrating Kit Carson’s great rides almost invariably place him on a fleet and noble “steed,” but that was a bit of equestrian chauvinism; every time Carson aimed for the other side of the continent, he was on a mule.

  On the morning of September 5, Stockton and Fremont stuffed his saddlebags with all manner of correspondence. Then Carson, the scout-turned-transcontinental-courier, mounted his mule and headed east toward the sunrise with fifteen men, including six Delaware Indians.

  Chapter 19: DAGGERS IN EVERY LOOK

  With Kearny only a day away from the capital, Armijo flew into a dither of inspired play-acting at Apache Canyon. As the vital hours slipped by, the governor grew more unpredictable, and at the same time more grandiose. He gathered together the members of the legislative assembly on the steep hills and sat them in the cool shade of the juniper trees. Instead of exhorting them, however, he presented a series of questions.

  “You tell me what I should do,” he said, Pontius-like.

  They looked at him with puzzled expressions.

  He cast about for the most delicate way to phrase the question. “Should I fight or treat with the enemy?”

  One of the legislators stood up and spoke for the others. “The question you have posed is improper,” the man resolutely said. “We came here as soldiers, not as legislators. Our duty is to act as such, and obey orders.”

  This was not the answer Armijo was looking for. He stiffened up and nodded vigorously, grumbling something along the lines of, “Of course we are soldiers.” With that, he took his leave.

  Then he turned to the officers of the militia and floated the same question. Again, the answer failed to satisfy him. “We have assembled to fight,” one of his interlocutors stated, “and that is what we should do. That is our only wish.”

  Armijo again nodded, commending the man for his patriotism. He paced and stewed and sulked, and then suddenly spun around, having worked his actor’s face up into a fit of feigned indignation. “With the regular army I would of course meet any enemy,” he assured them. “But not with these volunteers.” He gestured deprecatingly at the peasants and peons working down in the canyon, still slaving away on the fortifications, felling trees to construct a crude abatis. “Look at them—they are all cowards! I shall not compromise myself by going into battle with people who have no military discipline!”

  Then to everyone’s mute astonishment, the governor formally disbanded the defenders of Apache Canyon, the whole lot of them. As he did so, he affected a look of intense exasperation, as if they were the ones who had let him down. He was, he said, a victim of circumstance; he had done all that could be done, but it was entirely out of his hands now. A militia captain vowed to kill him for deserting the homeland, but the threat came to nothing. For the next several hours the canyon was a scene of dusty disarray, with people stampeding this way and that. The three thousand men—bewildered and most of them, in truth, greatly relieved—hopped on whatever mules or burros immediately presented themselves and scurried toward home to see to the safety of their families.

  Then Arm
ijo sat down and dictated a final letter to Kearny. A syrup of emotion flowed from his lips to the pen of his mystified amanuensis. “My heart is grieved with pain on seeing that from my hands the country in which I first saw light will pass to another nation,” he dictated. The governor went on to suggest that Kearny hadn’t seen the last of him, that Armijo would return in due time to avenge the American conquest. “I do not deliver to Your Excellency the province of New Mexico,” he explained. “I only make a temporary military retreat, until I shall receive further orders from my government.”

  Finishing the letter, and leaving it in the hands of a messenger, Armijo assembled his bodyguard of one hundred soldiers and galloped for Santa Fe. From the Palace of the Governors he took all the money and gold plate he could cram into his trunks and then mounted his horse. According to one account, an angry throng materialized and tried to prevent him from leaving. Digging into his overstuffed pockets, the governor tossed out several handfuls of gold and silver coins, strewing them at the crowd’s feet. While the people jostled for the money, he spurred his horse and sped away toward Chihuahua, never to be seen in Santa Fe again.

  At that very moment a large force under Colonel Ugarte was hastening up the Rio Bravo to reinforce Armijo’s defenses.

  Armijo’s second-in-command, Diego Archuleta, did not rise in Armijo’s absence to take the reins of the army. James Magoffin, President Polk’s secret agent, had met with Archuleta, too, and apparently offered him a separate deal. Magoffin quite disingenuously told Archuleta that Kearny was interested in annexing only the eastern half of New Mexico, to the banks of the Rio Grande. The details of their meeting are frustratingly vague, but it appears that Magoffin promised Archuleta that if he acquiesced in the American invasion and did not put up any resistance, he could have all of western New Mexico—an attenuated domain that nonetheless encompassed Arizona and parts of present-day Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. It is not known whether Archuleta accepted this offer, but, like Armijo, the proud soldier declined to defend his country, a tack quite uncharacteristic of him. He retreated to his ranch on the lower Rio Grande, near Albuquerque, to ride out the invasion.