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Title: The road to glory
Author: E. Alexander Powell
Release date: October 22, 2024 [eBook #74621]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons
Credits: Peter Becker, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROAD TO GLORY ***
BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
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THE ROAD TO GLORY
[Illustration: On the decks above were three hundred desperate and
well-armed natives. (_Page 144_)]
THE ROAD TO
GLORY
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK:::::::::::1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1915
[Illustration]
TO MY SON
EDWARD ALEXANDER POWELL, III
FOREWORD
The great painting--it is called “Vers la Gloire,” if I remember
rightly--reaches from floor to ceiling of the Pantheon in Paris.
Across the huge canvas, in a whirlwind of dust and color, sweeps
an avalanche of horsemen--cuirassiers, dragoons, lancers, guides,
hussars, chasseurs--with lances levelled, blades swung high, banners
streaming--France’s unsung heroes in mad pursuit of Glory.
That picture brings home to the youth of France the fact that the
nation owes as great a debt of gratitude to men whose very names
have been forgotten as to those whom it has rewarded with titles and
decorations; it teaches that a man can be a hero without having his
name cut deep in brass or stone; that time and time again history has
been made by men whom the historians have overlooked or disregarded.
This is even more true of our own country, for three-fourths of the
territory of the United States was won for us by men whose names are
without significance to most Americans. Nolan, Bean, Gutierrez, Magee,
Kemper, Perry, Toledo, Humbert, Lallemand, De Aury, Mina, Long--these
names doubtless convey nothing to you, yet it was the persistent and
daring assaults made by these men upon the Spanish boundaries which
undermined the power of Spain upon this continent and paved the way for
Austin, Milam, Travis, Bowie, Crockett, Ward, and Houston to effect
the liberation of Texas. On the other side of the Gulf of Mexico the
Kempers, McGregor, Hubbard, and Mathews harassed the Spaniards in the
Floridas until Andrew Jackson, in an unofficial and almost unrecorded
war, forced Spain to cede those rich provinces to the United States.
In a desperate battle with savages on the banks of an obscure creek
in Indiana, William Henry Harrison broke the power of Tecumseh’s
Indian confederation, set forward the hands of progress in the West a
quarter of a century, and, incidentally, changed the map of Europe.
A Missouri militia officer, Alexander Doniphan, without a war-chest,
without supports, and without communications, invaded a hostile nation
at the head of a thousand volunteers, repeatedly routed forces many
times the strength of his own, conquered, subdued, and pacified a
territory larger than France and Italy put together; and, after a march
equivalent to a fourth of the circumference of the globe, returned to
the United States, bringing with him battle-flags and cannon captured
on fields whose names his country people had never so much as heard
before. A missionary named Marcus Whitman, by the most daring and
dramatic ride in history, during which he crossed the continent on
horseback in the depths of winter, facing death almost every mile from
cold, starvation, or Indians, prevented the Pacific Northwest from
passing under the rule of England. Matthew Perry, without firing a shot
or shedding a drop of blood, opened Japan to commerce, Christianity,
and civilization, and made American influence predominant in the
Pacific, though, a decade later, David McDougal was compelled to teach
the yellow men respect for our citizens and our flag at the mouths of
his belching guns.
Certain of these men have been accused of being adventurers, as they
unquestionably were--but what, pray, were Hawkins and Raleigh and
Drake? Others have been condemned as being filibusters, an accusation
which in some cases was doubtless deserved--but were Jason and his
Argonauts anything but filibusters who raided Colchis to loot it of the
golden fleece? Adventurers and filibusters though some of them may have
been, they were brave men (there can be no disputing that) and makers
of history. But it was their fortune--or misfortune--to have been
romantic and picturesque and to have gone ahead without the formality
of obtaining the government’s commission or permission, which, in the
eyes of the sedate and prosaic historians, has completely damned them.
But, as we have not hesitated to benefit from the lands they won for
us, it is but doing them the barest justice to listen to their stories.
And I think you will agree with me that in their stories there is
remarkably little of which we need to feel ashamed and much of which we
have reason to be proud.
Devious and dangerous were the roads which these men followed--amid
the swamps of Florida, across the sun-baked Texan prairies, down
the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-bound ridges of the
Rockies, into the miasmic jungles of Tabasco, along the pirate-haunted
coasts of Malaysia, across the Indian country, through the mined and
shot-swept straits of Shimonoseki; but, no matter what perils bordered
them, or into what far corner of the earth they led, at the end Glory
beckoned and called.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
SANTA BARBARA,
California.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD vii
I. ADVENTURERS ALL 1
II. WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER 55
III. THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR 87
IV. THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO 131
V. UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR 161
VI. THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE 195
VII. THE MARCH OF THE ONE THOUSAND 235
VIII. WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE 277
ILLUSTRATIONS
On the decks above were three hundred desperate and
well-armed natives _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming
troopers, broke and ran 84
Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and
plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another 178
In another moment the gun was pouring death into the
ranks of its late owners 260
ADVENTURERS ALL
ADVENTURERS ALL
This story properly begins in an emperor’s bathtub. The bathtub was
in the Palace of the Tuileries, and, immersed to the chin in its
cologne-scented water, was Napoleon. The nineteenth century was but a
three-year-old; the month was April, and the trees in the Tuileries
Garden were just bursting into bud; and the First Consul--he made
himself Emperor a few weeks later--was taking his Sunday-morning bath.
There was a scratch at the door--scratching having been substituted
for knocking in the palace after the Egyptian campaign--and the
Mameluke body-guard ushered into the bathroom Napoleon’s brothers
Joseph and Lucien. How the conversation began between this remarkable
trio of Corsicans is of small consequence. It is enough to know that
Napoleon dumfounded his brothers by the blunt announcement that he had
determined to sell the great colony of Louisiana--all that remained
to France of her North American empire--to the United States. He
made this astounding announcement, as Joseph wrote afterward, “with
as little ceremony as our dear father would have shown in selling
a vineyard.” Incensed at Napoleon’s cool assumption that the great
overseas possession was his to dispose of as he saw fit, Joseph, his
hot Corsican blood getting the better of his discretion, leaned over
the tub and shook his clinched fist in the face of his august brother.
“What you propose is unconstitutional!” he cried. “If you attempt to
carry it out I swear that I will be the first to oppose you!”
White with passion at this unaccustomed opposition, Napoleon raised
himself until half his body was out of the opaque and frothy water.
“You will have no chance to oppose me!” he screamed, beside himself
with anger. “I conceived this scheme, I negotiated it, and I shall
execute it. I will accept the responsibility for what I do. Bah! I
scorn your opposition!” And he dropped back into the bath so suddenly
that the resultant splash drenched the future King of Spain from head
to foot. This extraordinary scene, which, ludicrous though it was, was
to vitally affect the future of the United States, was brought to a
sudden termination by the valet, who had been waiting with the bath
towels, shocked at the spectacle of a future Emperor and a future King
quarrelling in a bathroom over the disposition of an empire, falling on
the floor in a faint.
Though this narrative concerns itself, from beginning to end,
with adventurers--if Bonaparte himself was not the very prince of
adventurers, then I do not know the meaning of the word--it is
necessary, for its proper understanding, to here interject a paragraph
or two of contemporaneous history. In 1800 Napoleon, whose fertile
brain was planning the re-establishment in America of that French
colonial empire which a generation before had been destroyed by
England, persuaded the King of Spain, by the bribe of a petty Italian
principality, to cede Louisiana to the French. But in the next three
years things turned out so contrary to his expectations that he was
reluctantly compelled to abandon his scheme for colonial expansion
and prepare for eventualities nearer home. The army he had sent to
Haiti, and which he had intended to throw into Louisiana, had wasted
away from disease and in battle with the blacks under the skilful
leadership of L’Ouverture until but a pitiful skeleton remained.
Meanwhile the attitude of England and Austria was steadily growing
more hostile, and it did not need a telescope to see the war-clouds
which heralded another great European struggle piling up on France’s
political horizon. Realizing that in the life-and-death struggle
which was approaching he could not be hampered with the defense of
a distant colony, Napoleon decided that, if he was unable to hold
Louisiana, he would at least put it out of the reach of his arch-enemy,
England, by selling it to the United States. It was a master-stroke of
diplomacy. Moreover, he needed money--needed it badly, too--for France,
impoverished by the years of warfare from which she had just emerged,
was ill prepared to embark on another struggle.
There were in Paris at this time two Americans, Robert R. Livingston
and James Monroe, who had been commissioned by President Jefferson to
negotiate with the French Government for the purchase of the city of
New Orleans and a small strip of territory adjacent to it, so that the
settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee might have a free port on the gulf.
After months spent in diplomatic intercourse, during which Talleyrand,
the French foreign minister, could be induced neither to accept nor
reject their proposals, the commissioners were about ready to abandon
the business in despair. I doubt, therefore, if there were two more
astonished men in all Europe than the two Americans when Talleyrand
abruptly asked them whether the United States would buy the whole
of Louisiana and what price it would be willing to pay. It was as
though a man had gone to buy a cow and the owner had suddenly offered
him his whole farm. Though astounded and embarrassed, for they had
been authorized to spend but two million dollars in the contemplated
purchase, the Americans had the courage to shoulder the responsibility
of making so tremendous a transaction, for there was no time to
communicate with Washington and no one realized better than they did
that Louisiana must be purchased at once if it was to be had at all.
England and France were, as they knew, on the very brink of war, and
they also knew that the first thing England would do when war was
declared would be to seize Louisiana, in which case it would be lost to
the United States forever. This necessity for prompt action permitted
of but little haggling over terms, and on May 22, 1803, Napoleon signed
the treaty which transferred the million square miles comprised in the
colony of Louisiana to the United States for fifteen million dollars.
Nor was the sale effected an instant too soon, for on that very day
England declared war.
Now, in purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson, though he got the greatest
bargain in history, found that the French had thrown in a boundary
dispute to give good measure. The treaty did not specify the limits of
the colony.
“What are the boundaries of Louisiana?” Livingston asked Talleyrand
when the treaty was being prepared.
“I don’t know,” was the answer. “You must take it as we received it
from Spain.”
“But what did you receive?” persisted the American.
“I don’t know,” repeated the minister. “You are getting a noble
bargain, monsieur, and you will doubtless make the best of it.”
As a matter of fact, Talleyrand was telling the literal truth (which
must have been a novel experience for him): he did not know. The
boundaries of Louisiana had never been definitely established. It
seems, indeed, to have come under the application of
“The good old rule ... the simple plan,
That they shall take who have the power,
And they shall keep who can.”
Hence, though American territory and Spanish marched side by side
for twenty-five hundred miles, it was found impossible to agree on
a definite line of demarcation, the United States claiming that its
new purchase extended as far westward as the Sabine River, while
Spain emphatically asserted that the Mississippi formed the dividing
line. Along about 1806, however, a working arrangement was agreed
upon, whereby American troops were not to move west of the Red River,
while Spanish soldiers were not to go east of the Sabine. For the
next fifteen years this arrangement remained in force, the strip of
territory between these two rivers, which was known as the neutral
ground, quickly becoming a recognized place of refuge for fugitives
from justice, bandits, desperadoes, adventurers, and bad men. To it,
as though drawn by a magnet, flocked the adventure-hungry from every
corner of the three Americas.
The vast territory beyond the Sabine, then known as New Spain and a
few years later, when it had achieved its independence, as Mexico,
was ruled from the distant City of Mexico in true Spanish style.
Military rule held full sway; civil law was unknown. Foreigners without
passports were imprisoned; trading across the Sabine was prohibited;
the Spanish officials were suspicious of every one. Because this
trade was forbidden was the very thing that made it so attractive to
the merchants of the frontier, while the grassy plains and fertile
lowlands beyond the Sabine beckoned alluringly to the stock-raiser and
the settler. And though there was just enough danger to attract them
there was not enough strength to awe them. Jeering at governmental
restrictions, Spanish and American alike, the frontiersmen began to
pour across the Sabine into Texas in an ever-increasing stream. “Gone
to Texas” was scrawled on the door of many a deserted cabin in Alabama,
Tennessee, and Kentucky. “Go to Texas” became a slang phrase heard
everywhere. On the western river steamboats the officers’ quarters on
the hurricane-deck were called “the texas” because of their remoteness.
When a boy wanted to coerce his family he threatened to run away to
Texas. It was felt to be beyond the natural limits of the world, and
the glamour which hovered over this mysterious and forbidden land
lured to its conquest the most picturesque and hardy breed of men
that ever foreran the columns of civilization. A contempt for the
Spanish, a passion for adventure were the attitude of the people of our
frontier as they strained impatiently against the Spanish boundaries.
The American Government had nothing to do with winning Texas for the
American people. The American frontiersmen won Texas for themselves,
unaided either by statesmen or by soldiers.
Though these men wrote with their swords some of the most thrilling
chapters in our history, their very existence has been ignored by
most of our historians. Though they performed deeds of valor of which
any people would have reason to be proud, it was in an unofficial,
shirt-sleeve sort of warfare, which the National Government neither
authorized nor approved. Though they laid the foundations for adding an
enormous territory to our national domain, no monuments or memorials
have been erected to them; even their names hold no significance
for their countrymen of the present generation. In short, they were
filibusters, and that, in the eyes of those smug folk who believe
that nothing can be meritorious that is done without the sanction of
congresses and parliaments, completely damned them. They were American
dreamers. Had they lived in the days of Cortes and Pizarro and Balboa,
of Hawkins and Raleigh and Drake, history would have dealt more kindly
with them.
The free-lance leaders, who, during the first quarter of the nineteenth
century made the neutral ground a synonym for hair-raising adventure
and desperate daring, were truly remarkable men. Five of them had
held commissions in the army of the United States; one of them had
commanded the French army sent to Ireland; another was a peer of France
and had led a division at Waterloo; others had won rank and distinction
under Napoleon, Bolivar, and Jackson. But because they wore strange
uniforms and fought under unfamiliar flags, and because, in some cases
at least, they were actuated by motives more personal than patriotic,
the historians have assumed that we do not want to know about them, or
that it will be better for us not to know about them. They take it for
granted that it is better for Americans to think that our territorial
expansion was accomplished by men with government credentials in their
pockets, and when these unofficial conquerors are mentioned they turn
away their heads as though ashamed. But I believe that our people would
prefer to know the truth about these men, and I believe that when they
have heard it they will agree with me that in their amazing exploits
there is much of which we have cause to be proud and surprisingly
little of which we have need to feel ashamed.
The first of these adventurous spirits who for more than twenty years
kept the Spanish and Mexican authorities in a fume of apprehension,
was a young Kentuckian named Philip Nolan. He was the first American
explorer of Texas and the first man to publish a description of that
region in the English language. He spent his boyhood in Frankfort,
Kentucky, and as a young man turned up in New Orleans, then under
Spanish rule, having been, apparently, a person of considerable
importance in the little city. Having heard rumors that immense droves
of mustangs roamed the plains of Texas and seeing for himself that the
Spanish troopers in Louisiana were badly in need of horses, he told
the Spanish governor that if he would agree to purchase the animals
from him at a fixed price per head and would give him a permit for the
purpose, he would organize an expedition to capture wild horses in
Texas and bring them back to New Orleans. The governor, who liked the
young Kentuckian, promptly signed the contract, gave the permit, and
Nolan, with a handful of companions, crossed the Sabine into Texas,
corralled his horses, brought them to New Orleans, and was paid for
them. It was a profitable transaction for every one concerned. It was
so successful that another year Nolan did it again. On the proceeds he
went to Natchez, married the beauty of the town, and built a home. But
along toward the close of 1800 the governor wanted remounts again, for
the Spanish cavalrymen seemed incapable of taking even ordinary care
of their horses. So Nolan, who was, I fancy, already growing a trifle
weary of the tameness of domestic life, enlisted the services of a
score of frontiersmen as adventure-loving as himself, kissed his bride
of a year good-by, and, after showing his passports to the American
border patrol and satisfying them that his venture had the approval of
the Spanish authorities, once more crossed the Sabine into Texas. For a
proper understanding of what occurred it is necessary to explain that,
though Louisiana was under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Foreign
Office (for this was before the province had been ceded to France),
Texas was under the control of the Spanish Colonial Office. Between
these two branches of the government the bitterest jealousy existed,
and a passport issued by one was as likely as not to be disregarded
by the other. In fact, the colonial officials were only too glad of
an opportunity to humiliate and embarrass those connected with the
Foreign Office. But Nolan and his men, ignorant of this departmental
jealousy and conscious that they were engaged in a perfectly innocent
enterprise, went ahead with their business of capturing and breaking
horses. Crossing the Trinity, they found themselves on the edge of
an immense rolling prairie which, as they advanced, became more and
more arid and forbidding. There were no trees, not even underbrush,
and the only fuel they could find was the dried dung of the buffalo.
These animals, though once numerous, had disappeared, and for nine
days the little company had to subsist on the flesh of mustangs. They
eventually reached the banks of the Brazos, however, where they found
plenty of elk and deer, some buffalo, and “wild horses by thousands.”
Establishing a camp upon the present site of Waco, they built a
stockade and captured and corralled three hundred head of horses.
While lounging about the camp-fire one night, telling the stories and
singing the songs of the frontier and thinking, no doubt, of the folks
at home, a force of one hundred and fifty Spaniards, commanded by Don
Nimesio Salcedo, commandant-general of the northeastern provinces,
creeping up under cover of the darkness, succeeded in surrounding the
unsuspecting Americans, who, warned of the proximity of strangers by
the restlessness of their horses, retreated into a square enclosure of
logs which they had built as a protection against an attack by Indians.
At daybreak the Spaniards opened fire, and Nolan fell with a bullet
through his brain. The command of the expedition then devolved upon
Ellis P. Bean, a boy of seventeen, who, from the scanty shelter of the
log pen, continued a resistance that was hopeless from the first. Every
one of the Americans was a dead shot and at fifty paces could hit a
dollar held between a man’s fingers, but they were vastly outnumbered,
they were unprovisioned for a siege, and, as a final discouragement,
the Spaniards now brought up a swivel-gun and opened on them with
grape. Bean urged his men to follow him in an attempt to capture this
field-piece. “It’s nothing more than death, boys,” he told them, “and
if we stay here we shall be killed anyway.” But his men were falling
dead about him as he spoke, and the eleven left alive decided that
their only chance, and that was slim enough, Heaven knows, lay in an
immediate retreat. Filling their powder-horns and bullet pouches and
loading the balance of their ammunition on the back of a negro slave
named Cæsar, they started off across the prairie on their hopeless
march, the Spaniards hanging to the flanks of the little party as
wolves hang to the flank of a dying steer. All that day they plodded
eastward under the broiling sun, bringing down with their unerring
rifles those Spaniards who were incautious enough to venture within
range. But at last they were forced, by lack of food and water, to
accept the offer of the Spanish commander to permit them to return to
the United States unharmed if they would surrender and promise not to
enter Texas again. No sooner had they given up their arms, however,
than the Spaniards, afraid no longer, put their prisoners in irons
and marched them off to San Antonio, where they were kept in prison
for three months; then to San Luis Potosi, where they were confined
for sixteen months more, eventually being forwarded, still in arms,
to Chihuahua, where, in January, 1804, they were tried by a Spanish
court, were defended by a Spanish lawyer, were acquitted, and the judge
ordered their release. But Salcedo, who had become the governor of the
province, determined that the hated _gringos_ should not thus easily
escape, countermanded the findings of the court, and forwarded the
papers in the case to the King of Spain. The King, by a decree issued
in February, 1807, after these innocent Americans had already been
captives for nearly seven years, ordered that one out of every five
of them should be hung, and the rest put at hard labor for ten years.
But when the decree reached Chihuahua there were only nine prisoners
left, two of them having died from the hardships to which they had been
subjected. Under the circumstances the judge, who was evidently a man
of some compassion, construed the decree as meaning that only one of
the remaining nine should be put to death.
On the morning of the 9th of November, 1807, a party of Spanish
officials proceeded to the barracks where the Americans were confined
and an officer read the King’s barbarous decree. A drum was brought, a
tumbler and dice were set upon it, and around it, blindfolded, knelt
the nine participants in this lottery of death. Some day, no doubt,
when time has accorded these men the justice of perspective, Texas
will commission a famous artist to paint the scene: the turquoise sky,
the yellow sand, the sun glare on the whitewashed adobe of the barrack
walls, the little, brown-skinned soldiers in their slovenly uniforms of
soiled white linen, the Spanish officers, gorgeous in scarlet and gold
lace, awed in spite of themselves by the solemnity of the occasion,
and, kneeling in a circle about the drum, in their frayed and tattered
buckskin, the prison pallor on their faces, the nine Americans--cool,
composed, and unafraid.
Ephraim Blackburn, a Virginian and the
oldest of the prisoners, took the fatal
glass and with a hand which did not
tremble--though I imagine that he
whispered a little prayer--threw 3 and 1 4
Lucian Garcia threw 3 and 4 7
Joseph Reed threw 6 and 5 11
David Fero threw 5 and 3 8
Solomon Cooley threw 6 and 5 11
Jonah Walters threw 6 and 1 7
Charles Ring threw 4 and 3 7
William Dawlin threw 4 and 2 6
Ellis Bean threw 4 and 1 5
Whereupon they took poor Ephraim Blackburn out and hanged him.
After Blackburn’s execution three of the remaining prisoners were set
at liberty, but Bean, with four of his companions, all heavily ironed,
were started off under guard for Mexico City. Any one who questions the
assertion that fact is stranger than fiction will change his mind after
hearing of Bean’s subsequent adventures. They read like the wildest and
most improbable of dime novels. When the prisoners reached Salamanca
a young and strikingly beautiful woman, evidently attracted by Bean’s
youth and magnificent physique, managed to approach him unobserved and
asked him in a whisper if he did not wish to escape. (As if, after his
years of captivity and hardship, he could have wished otherwise!)
Then she disappeared as silently and mysteriously as she had come. The
next day the señora, who, as it proved, was the girl wife of a rich
old husband, by bribing the guard, contrived to see Bean again. She
told him quite frankly that her husband, whom she had been forced to
marry against her will, was absent at his silver mines, and suggested
that, if Bean would promise not to desert her, she would find means to
effect his escape and that they could then fly together to the United
States. It shows the manner of man this American adventurer was that,
on the plea that he could not desert his companions in misfortune, he
declined her offer. The next day, as the prisoners once again took up
their weary march to the southward, the señora slipped into Bean’s hand
a small package. When an opportunity came for him to open it he found
that it contained a letter from his fair admirer, a gold ring, and a
considerable sum of money.
Instead of being released upon their arrival at the city of Mexico, as
they had been led to expect, the Americans were marched to Acapulco, on
the Pacific, then a port of great importance because of its trade with
the Philippines. Here Bean was placed in solitary confinement, the only
human beings he saw for many months being the jailer who brought him
his scanty daily allowance of food and the sentry who paced up and down
outside his cell. Had it not been for a white lizard which he found
in his dungeon and which, with incredible patience, he succeeded in
taming, he would have gone mad from the intolerable solitude. Learning
from the sentinel that one of his companions had been taken ill and had
been transferred to the hospital, Bean, who was a resourceful fellow,
prepared his pulse by striking his elbows on the floor and then sent
for the prison doctor. Though he was sent to the hospital, as he had
anticipated, not only were his irons not removed but his legs were
placed in stocks, and, on the theory that eating is not good for a sick
man, his allowance of food was greatly reduced, his meat for a day
consisting of the head of a chicken. When Bean remonstrated with the
priest over the insufficient nourishment he was receiving, the padre
told him that if he wasn’t satisfied with what he was getting he could
go to the devil. Whereupon, his anger overpowering his judgment, Bean
hurled his plate at the friar’s shaven head and laid it open. For this
he was punished by having his head put in the stocks, in an immovable
position, for fifteen days. When he recovered from the real fever which
this barbarous punishment brought on, he was only too glad to go back
to the solitude of his cell and his friend the lizard.
While being taken back to prison, Bean, who had succeeded in concealing
on his person the money which the señora in Salamanca had given him,
suggested to his guards that they stop at a tavern and have something
to drink. A Spaniard never refuses a drink, and they accepted. So
skilfully did he ply them with liquor that one of them fell into a
drunken stupor while the other became so befuddled that Bean found no
difficulty in enticing him into the garden at the back of the tavern
on the plea that he wished to show him a certain flower. As the man
was bending over to examine the plant to which Bean had called his
attention, the American leaped upon his back and choked him into
unconsciousness. Heavily manacled though he was, Bean succeeded
in clambering over the high wall and escaped to the woods outside
the city, where he filed off his irons with the steel he used for
striking fire. Concealing himself until nightfall, he slipped into
the town again, where he found an English sailor who, upon hearing
his pitiful story, smuggled him aboard his vessel and concealed him
in a water-cask. But, just as the anchor was being hoisted and he
believed himself free at last, a party of Spanish soldiers boarded the
vessel and hauled him out of his hiding-place--he had been betrayed by
the Portuguese cook. For this attempt at escape he was sentenced to
eighteen months more of solitary confinement.
One day, happening to overhear an officer speaking of having some
rock blasted, Bean sent word to him that he was an expert at that
business, whereupon he was taken out and put to work. Before he had
been in the quarry a week he succeeded in once more making his escape.
Travelling by night and hiding by day, he beat his way up the coast,
only to be retaken some weeks later. When he was brought before the
governor of Acapulco that official went into a paroxysm of rage at
sight of the American whose iron will he had been unable to break
either by imprisonment or torture. Bean, who had reached such a stage
of desperation that he didn’t care what happened to him, looking the
governor squarely in the eye, told him, in terms which seared and
burned, exactly what he thought of him and defied him to do his worst.
That official, at his wits’ end to know how to subdue the unruly
American, gave orders that he was to be chained to a gigantic mulatto,
the most dangerous criminal in the prison, the latter being promised a
year’s reduction in his sentence if he would take care of his yokemate,
whom he was authorized to punish as frequently as he saw fit. But the
punishing was the other way around, for Bean pommelled the big negro
so terribly that the latter sent word to the governor that he would
rather have his sentence increased than to be longer chained to the
mad Americano. By this time Bean had every one in the castle, from
the governor to the lowest warder, completely terrorized, for they
recognized that he was desperate and would stop at nothing. He was,
in fact, such a hard case that the governor of Acapulco wrote to the
viceroy that he could do nothing with him and begged to be relieved of
his dangerous prisoner. The latter, in reply, sent an order for his
removal to the Spanish penal settlement in the Philippines. But while
awaiting a vessel the revolt led by Morelos, the Mexican patriot, broke
out, and a rebel army advanced on Acapulco. The prisons of New Spain
had been emptied to obtain recruits to fill the Spanish ranks, and Bean
was the only prisoner left in the citadel. The Spanish authorities,
desperately in need of men, offered him his liberty if he would help
to defend the town. Bean agreed, his irons were knocked off, he was
given a gun, and became a soldier. But he felt that he owed no loyalty
to his Spanish captors; so, when an opportunity presented itself a
few weeks later, he went over to Morelos, taking with him a number of
the garrison. A born soldier, hard as nails, amazingly resourceful
and brave to the point of rashness, he quickly won the confidence and
friendship of the patriot leader, who commissioned him a colonel in the
Republican army. When Morelos left Acapulco to continue his campaign
in the south, he turned the command of the besieging forces over to
the ex-convict, who, a few weeks later, carried the city by storm. It
must have been a proud moment for the American adventurer, not yet
thirty years of age, when he stood in the plaza of the captured city
and received the sword of the governor who had treated him with such
fiendish cruelty.[A]
When the story of the treatment of Nolan and his companions trickled
back to the settlements and was repeated from village to village and
from house to house, every repetition served to fan the flame of hatred
of everything Spanish, which grew fiercer and fiercer in the Southwest
as the years rolled by. From the horror and indignation aroused along
the frontier by the treatment of these men, whom the undiscerning
historians have unjustly described as filibusters, sprang that movement
which ended, a quarter of a century later, in freeing Texas forever
from the cruelties of Latin rule. Thus it came about that Nolan and his
companions did not suffer in vain.
Though during the years immediately following Nolan’s ill-fated
expedition all Mexico was aflame with the revolt lighted by the patriot
priest Hidalgo, things were fairly quiet along the border. But this was
not to last. After the capture and execution of the militant priest
one of his followers, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, after a thrilling
flight across Texas, found refuge in Natchez, where he made the
acquaintance of Lieutenant Augustus Magee, a brilliant young officer
of the American garrison. Gutierrez painted pictures with words as an
artist does with the brush, and so inspiring were the scenes his ready
tongue depicted that they fired the young lieutenant with an ambition
to aid in freeing Mexico from Spanish rule. Magee was of a daring and
romantic disposition and accepted without question the stories told
him by Gutierrez. His plan seems to have been to conquer Texas to the
Rio Grande and, after building up a republican state, to apply for
admission to the Union. Resigning his commission, he threw himself
heart and soul into the business of recruiting an expedition from the
adventurers who made New Orleans--now become an American city--their
headquarters and from the freebooters of the neutral ground. A call
to these men to join the “Republican Army of the North” and receive
forty dollars a month and a square league of land in Texas was eagerly
responded to, and by June, 1812, Gutierrez and Magee had recruited half
a thousand daredevils who, for the sake of adventure, were willing to
follow their leaders anywhere. Most of them were “two-gun men,” which
means that they went into action with a pistol in each hand and a knife
between the teeth, and they didn’t know the name of fear. In order to
secure the co-operation of the Mexican population of Texas, Gutierrez
was named commander-in-chief of the expedition, though the real leader
was Magee, who held the position of chief of staff, an American
frontiersman named Reuben Kemper being commissioned major.
In the beginning everything was as easy as falling down-stairs.
The time chosen for the venture was peculiarly propitious, for the
Spaniards had their hands full with the civil war in Mexico, which they
supposed they had ended with the capture and execution of Hidalgo, but
which had broken out again under the leadership of another priest,
named Morelos. As a result of the demoralization which existed, the
Americans were almost unopposed in their advance. Nacogdoches fell
before them, and so did the fort at Spanish Bluff, and by November,
1812, they had raised the republican standard over La Bahia, or, as
it is known to-day, Goliad. Three days later Governor Salcedo--the
same who had attacked Nolan’s party a dozen years before--marched
against the town with fourteen hundred men. Though the Americans were
outnumbered more than two to one, they did not wait for the Spaniards
to attack but sallied out and drove them back in confusion. Whereupon
the Spaniards sat down without the town and prepared to conduct a
siege, and the Americans sat down within and prepared to resist it. It
ended in a peculiar fashion. During a three days’ armistice Salcedo
invited Magee to dine with him in the Spanish camp, and the American
commander accepted. What arguments or inducements the astute Spaniard
brought to bear on the young American can only be conjectured, but, at
any rate, Magee agreed to surrender the town on condition that all of
his men should be sent back to the United States in safety. To this
condition Salcedo assented. Returning to the town, Magee had his men
paraded, told them what he had done, and asked all who approved of his
action to shoulder arms. For some moments after he had finished they
stared at him in mingled amazement, incredulity, and suspicion. It was
unbelievable, unthinkable, preposterous, that he, the idol of the army,
the hero of a dozen engagements, a product of the great officer factory
at West Point, should even contemplate, much less advocate, surrender.
Not only did they not shoulder arms, but most of them, to emphasize
their disapproval, brought their rifle butts crashing to the ground.
For a few moments Magee stood with sunken head and downcast eyes; then
he slowly turned and entered his tent. An hour or so later a messenger
under a flag of truce brought a curt note from Salcedo reminding Magee
of their agreement and demanding to know why he had not surrendered
the town as he had promised. The message was opened by Gutierrez, who
ordered that no answer should be sent, whereupon Salcedo threw his
entire force against the town in an attempt to carry it by storm.
But the Americans, though sick at heart at the action of their young
commander, were far from being demoralized, as the oncoming Spaniards
quickly found, for as they reached the outer line of intrenchments the
Americans met them with a blast of lead which wiped out their leading
companies and sent the balance scampering San Antonio-ward. Throughout
the action Magee remained hidden in his tent. When an orderly went to
summon him the next morning he found the young West Pointer stretched
upon the floor, with a pistol in his hand and the back blown out of his
head.
Though Gutierrez still retained the nominal rank of general, the
actual command of “the Army of the North” now devolved upon Major
Reuben Kemper, a gigantic Virginian who, despite the fact that he was
the son of a Baptist preacher, was celebrated from one end of the
frontier to the other for his “eloquent profanity.” Kemper was a man
well fitted to wield authority on such an expedition. He had a neck
like a bull, a chest like a barrel, a voice like a bass drum, and it
was said that even the mates on the Mississippi River boats listened
with admiration and envy to his swearing. Nor was he a novice at the
business of fighting Spaniards, for a dozen years before he and his
two brothers had been concerned in a desperate attempt to free Florida
from Spanish rule; in 1808 he had been one of a party of Americans
who had attempted to capture Baton Rouge, had been taken prisoner,
sentenced to death, and saved by the intervention of an American
officer on the very morning set for his execution; and the following
year, undeterred by the narrowness of his escape, he had made a similar
attempt, with similar unsuccess, to capture Mobile. The cruelties he
had seen perpetrated by the Spaniards had so worked on his mind that he
had vowed to devote the rest of his life to ridding North America of
Spanish rule.
Such, then, was the picturesque figure who assumed command of “the Army
of the North,” now consisting of eight hundred Americans, one hundred
and eighty Mexicans, and three hundred and twenty-five Indians, and led
it against the Spaniards, twenty-five hundred strong and with several
pieces of artillery, who were encamped at Rosales, near San Antonio.
As soon as his scouts reported the proximity of the Spaniards, who were
ambushed in the dense chaparral which lined the road along which the
Americans were advancing, Kemper threw his force into battle formation,
ordering his men to advance to within thirty paces of the Spanish line,
fire three rounds, load the fourth time, and charge. The movement was
performed in as perfect order as though the Americans had been on a
parade-ground and no enemy within a hundred miles. Demoralized by the
machine-like precision of the Americans’ advance and the deadliness of
the volleys poured into them, the Spaniards broke and ran, Kemper’s
Indian allies remorselessly pursuing the panic-stricken fugitives until
nightfall put an end to the slaughter. In this great Texan battle, for
any mention of which you will search most of the histories in vain,
nearly a thousand Spaniards were killed and wounded. The Indians saw to
it that there were few prisoners.
The next day the victorious Americans reached San Antonio and sent in a
messenger, under a flag of truce, demanding the unconditional surrender
of the town and garrison. Governor Salcedo sent back word that he would
give his decision in the morning. “Present yourself and your staff in
our camp at once,” Kemper replied, “or I shall storm the town.” (And
when a town was carried by storm it was understood that no prisoners
would be taken.) When Salcedo entered the American lines he was met by
Captain Taylor, to whom he offered his sword, but that officer declined
to accept it and sent him to Colonel Kemper. On offering it to the
big frontiersman, it was again refused, and he was told to take it to
General Gutierrez, who was the ranking officer of the expedition. By
this time the patience of the haughty Spaniard was exhausted, and,
plunging the weapon into the ground, he turned his back on Gutierrez. A
few hours later the Americans entered San Antonio in triumph, released
the prisoners in the local jails, and, from all I can gather, took
pretty much everything of value on which they could lay their hands.
When Kemper asked his Indian allies what share of the loot they wanted,
they replied that they would be quite satisfied with two dollars’ worth
of vermilion.
After the capture of San Antonio, General Gutierrez, who, though he
had been content to let the Americans do the fighting, now that he was
among his own people swelled up like a turkey gobbler, announced that
he had decided to send the Spanish officers who had been captured
to New Orleans, where they would be held as hostages until the war
was over. To this suggestion the Americans readily agreed, and that
evening the governor and his staff, with the other officers who had
surrendered, started for the coast under the guard of a company of
Mexicans. When a mile and a half below the town, on the east bank
of the San Antonio River, the captives were halted, stripped, and
tied, and their throats cut from ear to ear, some of the Mexicans
even whetting their knives upon the soles of their shoes in the
presence of their victims. When Kemper learned of this butchery of
defenseless prisoners he strode up to Gutierrez and, catching him by
the throat, held him at arm’s length and shook him as a terrier does
a rat, meanwhile ripping out a stream of invectives that would have
seared a thinner-skinned man as effectually as a branding-iron. Then,
refusing to longer serve under so barbarous a leader, Kemper resigned
his commission and, followed by most of the other American officers of
standing, set out for New Orleans.
Of the American officers who remained Captain Perry was the highest
in rank and the most able, and to him was given the direction of
the expedition, Gutierrez, for reasons of policy, still retaining
nominal command. With the departure of Kemper came a relaxation in
the iron discipline which he had maintained and the troops, drunk
with victory and believing that the campaign was all over but the
shouting, broke loose in every form of dissipation. While in this
state of unpreparedness, they were surprised by a force of three
thousand Spaniards under General Elisondo. Instead of marching directly
upon San Antonio and capturing it, as he could have done in view of
the demoralization which prevailed, Elisondo made the mistake of
intrenching himself in the graveyard half a mile without the town.
But in the face of the enemy the discipline for which the Americans
were celebrated returned, for first, last, and all the time they were
fighters. At ten o’clock on the evening of June 4 the Americans,
marching in file, moved silently out of the town. In the most profound
silence they approached the Spanish lines until they could hear the
voices of the pickets; then they lay down, their arms beside them,
and waited for the coming of the dawn. Colonel Perry chose the moment
when the Spaniards were assembled at daybreak for matins to launch his
attack. Even then no orders were spoken, the signals being passed down
the line by each man nudging his neighbor. So admirably executed were
Perry’s orders that the Americans, moving forward with the stealth
and silence of panthers, had reached the outer line of the enemy’s
intrenchments, had bayonetted the Spanish sentries, and had actually
hauled down the Spanish flag and replaced it with the Republican
tricolor before their presence was discovered. Though taken completely
by surprise, the Spaniards rallied and drove the Americans from the
works, but the latter reformed and hurled themselves forward in a
smashing charge which drove the Spaniards from the field, leaving
upward of a thousand dead, wounded, and prisoners behind them. The
American loss in killed and wounded was something under a hundred.
Returning in triumph to San Antonio, the Americans, whose position was
now so firmly established that they had no further use for General
Gutierrez, unceremoniously dismissed him, this action, doubtless, being
taken at the instance of Colonel Perry and his fellow officers, who
feared further treachery and dishonor if the Mexican were permitted
to remain in command. His place was taken by Don José Alvarez Toledo,
a distinguished Cuban who had formerly been a member of the Spanish
Cortes in Mexico but had been banished on account of his republican
sympathies. A few weeks after General Toledo assumed command a Spanish
force, four thousand strong, under General Arredondo, appeared before
San Antonio. Toledo at once marched out to meet them. His force
consisted of eight hundred and fifty Americans under Colonel Perry
and about twice that number of Mexicans; so it will be seen that the
Spaniards greatly outnumbered the Republicans. Throwing forward a line
of skirmishers for the purpose of engaging the enemy, General Arredondo
ambushed the major portion of his force behind earthworks masked by
the dense chaparral. The Americans, confident of victory, dashed
forward with their customary _élan_, whereupon the Spanish line, in
obedience to Arredondo’s orders, sullenly fell back. So cleverly did
the Spaniards feign retreat that it was not until the Americans were
well within the trap that had been set for them that Toledo recognized
his peril. Then he frantically ordered his buglers to sound the recall.
One column--that composed of Mexicans--obeyed the order promptly,
but the other, consisting of Americans, shouting, “No, we _never_
retreat!” swept forward to their deaths. Had the order to retreat never
been given, the Americans, notwithstanding the disparity of numbers,
would have been victorious, but, deprived of all support and raked
by the enemy’s cannon and musketry, even the prodigies of valor they
performed were unavailing to alter the result. So desperately did those
American adventurers fight, however, that, as some one has remarked,
“they made Spanish the language of hell.” When their rifles were empty
they used their pistols, and when their pistols were empty they used
their terrible long hunting-knives, ripping and stabbing and slashing
with those vicious weapons until they went down before sheer weight of
numbers. Some of them, grasping their empty rifles by the barrel, swung
them round their heads like flails, beating down the Spaniards who
opposed them until they were surrounded by heaps of men with cracked
and shattered skulls. Others, when their weapons broke, sprang at their
enemies with their naked hands and tore out their throats as hounds
tear out the throat of a deer. Such was the battle of the Medina,
fought on August 18, 1813. _Of the eight hundred and fifty Americans
who went into action only ninety-three came out alive._ If the battle
itself was a bloody one, its aftermath was even more so, the Spanish
cavalry pursuing and butchering without mercy all the fugitives they
could overtake. At Spanish Bluff, on the Trinity, the Spaniards took
eighty prisoners. Marching them into a clump of timber, they dug a
long, deep trench and, setting the prisoners on its edge, shot them in
groups of ten. It was a bloody, bloody business. That our histories
contain almost no mention of the Gachupin War, as this campaign was
known, is doubtless due to the fact that during the same period there
was a war in the United States and also one in Mexico, and the public
mind was thus drawn away from the events which were taking place in
Texas. Indeed, had it not been for the war between the United States
and Great Britain, which drew into its vortex the adventurous spirits
of the Southwest, Texas would have achieved her independence a dozen
years earlier than she did.
Toledo and Perry, with all that was left of the “Army of the North,”
escaped, after suffering fearful hardships, to the United States,
where they promptly began to recruit men for another venture into
the beckoning land beyond the Sabine. Though the head of the patriot
priest Hidalgo had been displayed by the Spanish authorities on the
walls of the citadel of Guanajuato as “a warning to Mexicans who
choose to revolt against Spanish rule,” as the placard attached to the
grisly trophy read, the grim object-lesson had not deterred another
priest, José Maria Morelos, from taking up the struggle for Mexican
independence where Hidalgo had laid it down. In order to co-operate
with this new champion of liberty, Toledo, at the head of a few hundred
Americans, sailed from New Orleans, landed on the Mexican coast near
Vera Cruz, and pushed up-country as far as El Puente del Rey, near
Jalapa, where he intrenched himself and sat down to await the arrival
of reinforcements from New Orleans under General Jean Joseph Humbert.
Humbert, a Frenchman from the province of Lorraine, was a graduate of
the greatest school for fighters the world has ever known: the armies
of Napoleon. In 1789, when the French Revolution deluged France with
blood, he was a merchant in Rouvray. Closing his shop, he exchanged his
yardstick for a sabre and went to Paris to take a hand in the overthrow
of the monarchy, for he was a red-hot republican. His gallantry in
action won him a major-general’s commission, and four years later the
Directory promoted him to the rank of lieutenant-general and gave him
command of the expedition sent to Ireland, where he was forced to
surrender to Lord Cornwallis. Napoleon, who knew a soldier as far as
he could see one, made Humbert a general of division and second in
command of the ill-fated army sent to Haiti. But Humbert’s republican
convictions did not jibe with the imperialistic ambitions of Napoleon,
and the former suddenly decided that a life of exile in America was
preferable to life in a French prison. For a time he supported himself
by teaching in New Orleans, but it was like harnessing a war-horse to a
plough; so, when the Mexican junta sought his aid in 1814, the veteran
fighter raised an expeditionary force of nearly a thousand men, sailed
across the Gulf, landed on the shores of Mexico, and marched up to join
Toledo at El Puente del Rey. The revolutionary leader Morelos, who was
hard-pressed by the Spaniards, set out to join Toledo and Humbert,
but on the way was taken prisoner and died with his back to a stone
wall and his face to a firing-party. The same force which ended the
career of Morelos continued to El Puente del Rey and attempted to cut
off the retreat of Toledo and Humbert, but the old soldier of Napoleon
succeeded in cutting his way through them and in 1817, dejected and
discouraged, landed once more at New Orleans, where he spent the rest
of his days teaching in a French college, and his nights, no doubt,
dreaming of his exploits under the Napoleonic eagles.
The same year Humbert returned to New Orleans another soldier of the
empire, General Baron Charles François Antoine Lallemand, followed by
a hundred and fifty veterans who had seen service under the little
corporal, set out from the same city for that graveyard of ambitions,
Mexico. Baron Lallemand was one of the great soldiers of the empire
and, had Napoleon been victorious at Waterloo, would have been rewarded
with the baton of a marshal of France. Entering the army when a
youngster of eighteen, he followed the French eagles into every capital
of Europe, fighting his way up the ladder of promotion, round by round,
until, upon the Emperor’s return from Elba, he was given the epaulets
of a lieutenant-general and created a peer of France. He commanded the
artillery of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo and after that disaster
was sent by the Emperor to Captain Maitland, of the British navy, to
negotiate for his surrender. With tears streaming down his cheeks,
Lallemand begged that he might be permitted to accompany his imperial
master into exile. This being denied him, he refused to take service
under the Bourbons and, coming to America, attempted to found a colony
of French political refugees in Alabama, at a place which, in memory
of happier days, he named Marengo. The experiment proved a failure,
however; so in 1817 he led his colonists into Texas and attempted to
establish what he termed a _Champ d’Asile_ on the banks of the Trinity
River. But the Spanish authorities, obsessed with the idea that every
foreigner who appeared in Texas was plotting against them, despatched
a force against Lallemand and his colonists and drove them out. The
next few years General Lallemand spent in New Orleans devising schemes
for effecting the escape of his beloved Emperor from St. Helena,
but Napoleon’s death, in 1821, brought his carefully laid plan for
a rescue to naught. In 1830, upon the Bourbons being ejected from
France for good and all, Lallemand, to whom the Emperor had left a
legacy of a hundred thousand francs, returned to Paris. His civil and
military honors were restored by Louis Philippe, and the man who a few
years before had been pointed out on the streets of New Orleans as a
filibuster and an adventurer died a general of division, commander of
the Legion of Honor, military governor of Corsica, and a peer of France.
The next man to strike a blow for Texas was Don Luis de Aury. De Aury
was a native of New Granada, as the present Republic of Colombia
was then called, and had played a brilliant part in the struggle
for freedom of Spain’s South American colonies. He entered the navy
of the young republic as a lieutenant in 1813. Three years later he
was appointed commandant-general of the naval forces of New Granada,
stationed at Cartagena. At the memorable siege of that city, to his
generosity and intrepidity hundreds of men, women, and children owed
their lives, for when the Spanish commander, Morillo, threatened to
butcher every person found alive within the city walls De Aury loaded
the non-combatants aboard his three small vessels, broke through
the Spanish squadron of thirty-five ships and landed his passengers
in safety. For this heroic exploit he was rewarded with the rank of
commodore, given the command of the united fleets of New Granada, La
Plata, Venezuela, and Mexico, and ordered to sweep Spanish commerce
from the Gulf. Learning of the splendid harbor afforded by the Bay of
Galveston, on the coast of Texas, he determined to occupy it and use it
as a base of operations against the Spanish. Accompanied by Don José
Herrera, the agent of the Mexican revolutionists in the United States,
De Aury landed on Galveston Island in September, 1816. A meeting was
held, a government organized, the Republican flag raised, Galveston
was declared a part of the Mexican Republic, and De Aury was chosen
civil and military governor of Texas and Galveston Island.
Here he was shortly joined by two other adventurers: our old friend,
Colonel Perry, who had escaped to the United States after the disaster
of the Medina, and Francisco Xavier Mina, a soldier of fortune from
Navarre. Mina’s parents, who were peasant farmers, had destined him for
the law, but when Napoleon invaded Spain, young Mina threw away his law
books, raised a band of guerillas, and harassed the invaders until his
name became a terror to the French. He was captured in 1812 and, after
several years in a French prison, went to England, where he made the
acquaintance of a number of Mexican political exiles, who induced him
to take a hand in freeing their native country. In September, 1816,
Mina’s expedition, consisting of two hundred infantry and a battery
of artillery, sailed from Baltimore for Galveston, where he found De
Aury with some four hundred well-drilled men and Colonel Perry with a
hundred more. In March, 1817, the three commanders sailed for the mouth
of the Rio Santander, fifty miles up the Mexican coast from Tampico,
and disembarked their forces at the river bar. The town of Soto la
Marina, sixty miles from the river’s mouth, fell without opposition,
and with its fall the leaders parted company. De Aury returned to
Galveston, but, finding the pirate Lafitte in possession, sailed away
in search of pastures new. Mina, ambitious for further conquests,
marched into the interior, capturing Valle de Mais, Peotillos, Real
de Rinos, and Venadito in rapid succession. At Venadito, however, his
streak of good fortune ended as suddenly as it had begun, for while his
men were scattered in search of plunder a Spanish force recaptured the
town and made Mina a prisoner. So relieved was the Spanish Government
at receiving word of his capture and execution that it ordered the
church-bells to be rung in every town in Mexico and made the viceroy a
count.
When Colonel Perry learned of Mina’s plan for marching into the
interior with the small force at his disposal, he flatly refused to
have anything to do with so harebrained a business and, with fifty of
his men, started up the coast in an attempt to make his way back to
the United States. As the disastrous retreat began in May, when water
was scarce and the heat in the swampy lowlands was almost unbearable,
they suffered terribly. Just as the little band of adventurers reached
the borders of Texas and were congratulating themselves on having all
but won to safety, a party of two hundred Spanish cavalry suddenly
appeared. Perry, throwing his men into line of battle, received the
onslaught of the lancers with a volley which checked them in mid-career
and would doubtless have ended the contest then and there had not the
garrison of the near-by town sallied out and taken the Americans in
the rear. Clothed in rags, scorched by the sun, parched from thirst,
half starved, surrounded by an overwhelming foe, gallantly did these
desperate men sustain their reputation for valor. Again and again the
lancers swept down upon them, again and again the garrison attacked
them in the rear, but always from the thinning line of heroes spat a
storm of lead so deadly that the Spaniards could not stand before it.
Blackened with smoke and powder, fainting from hunger and exhaustion,
bleeding from innumerable wounds, the adventurers fought like men who
welcomed death. The sun had disappeared; the shadows of night were
gathering thick upon the plain; but still a handful of powder-grimed,
blood-streaked men, standing back to back, amid a ring of dead and
dying, held off the enemy. As the darkness deepened, a single gallant
figure still waved a defiant sword: it was Perry, who, true to the
filibusters’ motto that “Americans never surrender,” fell by his own
hand.
Probably the most remarkable of this long list of adventurers was the
Jean Lafitte whom De Aury found in possession of Galveston. A Frenchman
by birth and an American by adoption, he and his brother Pierre had,
during the early years of the century, established on Barataria
Island, near the mouth of the Mississippi, what was virtually a pirate
kingdom, where they drove a thriving trade with the planters along the
upper river and the merchants of New Orleans in smuggled slaves and
merchandise. Although both the State and federal authorities had made
repeated attempts to dislodge them, the Lafittes were at the height
of their prosperity when the second war with England began. When the
British armada destined for the conquest of Louisiana arrived off the
Mississippi, late in 1814, an officer was sent to Jean Lafitte offering
him fifty thousand dollars and a captain’s commission in the royal
navy if he would co-operate with the British in the capture of New
Orleans. Though Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, had set a price on
his head, Lafitte, who was, it seemed, a patriot first and a pirate
afterward, hastened up the river to New Orleans, warned the governor
of the approach of the British fleet, and offered his services and
those of his men to Andrew Jackson for the defense of the city. His
offer was accepted in the spirit in which it was made, and Lafitte and
his red-shirted buccaneers played no small part in winning the famous
victory. They were mentioned in despatches by Jackson, thanked for
their services by the President and pardoned, and settled down for a
time to a lawful and humdrum existence. But for such men a life of
ease and safety held no attractions; so, about the time that De Aury’s
squadron sailed for Soto la Marina, Lafitte, with half a dozen vessels,
dropped casually into the harbor of Galveston and, as the place suited
him, coolly took possession.
By the close of 1817 the followers of Lafitte on Galveston Island had
increased to upward of a thousand men. They were of all nations and all
languages--fugitives from justice and fugitives from oppression. Those
of them who had wives brought them to the settlement at Galveston, and
those who had no wives brought their mistresses, so that the society
of the place, whatever may be said of its morals, began to assume
an air of permanency. On the site of the hut occupied by the late
governor, De Aury, Lafitte erected a pretentious house and built a
fort; other buildings sprang up, among them a “Yankee” boarding-house,
and, to complete the establishment, a small arsenal and dockyard were
constructed. To lend an air of respectability to his enterprise,
Lafitte obtained privateering commissions from several of the revolted
colonies of Spain, and for several years his cruisers, first under one
flag and then under another, conducted operations in the Gulf which
smacked considerably more of piracy than of privateering. In 1819
Lafitte was taken into the service of the Republican party in Mexico,
Galveston was officially made a port of entry, and he was appointed
governor of the island.
By the terms of the treaty whereby Spain, in 1819, sold Florida to
the United States, the latter agreed to accept the Sabine as its
western boundary and make no further claims to Texas. Though this
treaty aroused the most profound indignation throughout the Southwest,
nowhere did it rise so high as in the town of Natchez. From Natchez
had gone out each of the expeditions which, since the days of Philip
Nolan, had hammered against the Spanish barriers. To it had returned
every leader who had escaped death on the battle-field or before a
firing-party. In it, as a great river town enjoying a vast trade with
the interior, was gathered the most reckless, lawless, enterprising
population--flatboatmen, steamboatmen, frontiersmen--to be found in
all the Southwest. So, when Doctor James Long, an army surgeon who had
served under Jackson at New Orleans, called for recruits to make one
more attempt to free Texas, he did not call in vain. Early in June
Long set out from Natchez with only seventy-five men, but no sooner
had he crossed the Sabine and entered Texas than the survivors of
former expeditions hastened to join him, so that when Nacogdoches was
reached he had behind him upward of three hundred men: veterans who
had seen service under Nolan and Magee, and Kemper, and Gutierrez, and
Toledo, and Humbert, and Perry, and Mina, and De Aury. At Nacogdoches
Long established a provisional government, a supreme council was
elected, and Texas was proclaimed a free and independent republic.
Realizing, however, that he could not hope to hold the territory thus
easily occupied for any length of time unaided, Long despatched a
commission to Galveston to ask the co-operation of Lafitte. Though the
pirate chieftain received the commissioners with marked courtesy and
entertained them at the “Red House,” as his residence was called, with
the lavish hospitality for which he was noted, he told them bluntly
that, though Doctor Long had his best wishes for success, the fate of
Nolan and Perry and Mina and a host of others ought to convince him
how hopeless it was to wage war against Spain with so insignificant
a force. Upon receiving this answer, Doctor Long, believing that a
personal application to the buccaneer might meet with better success,
himself set out for Galveston. As luck would have it, he reached
there on the same day that the American war-ship _Enterprise_ dropped
anchor in the harbor and its commander, Lieutenant Kearny, informed
Lafitte that he had imperative orders from Washington to break up the
establishment at Galveston. There was nothing left for Lafitte but to
obey, and a few days later the rising tide carried outside Galveston
bar the _Pride_ and the other vessels comprising the fleet of the last
of the buccaneers, who abandoned the shores of Texas forever.[B]
Doctor Long, thoroughly discouraged, returned to Nacogdoches to find a
Spanish army close at hand and his own forces completely demoralized.
Surrounded and outnumbered, resistance was useless and he surrendered.
Though Spanish dominion in Mexico was now at an end, Doctor Long and
a number of his companions were sent to the capital, where for several
months he was held a prisoner, the vigorous representations of the
American minister finally resulting in his release. The Mexicans had
no more intention than the Spaniards, however, of permitting Texas
to achieve independence, which, doubtless, accounts for the fact
that Doctor Long, who was known as a champion of Texan liberty, was
assassinated by a soldier in the streets of the capital a few days
after his release from prison. But he and the long line of adventurers
who preceded him did not fight and die in vain, for they paved the way
for the Austins and Sam Houston, the final liberators of Texas, who, a
few years later, crossed the Sabine and completed the work that Nolan,
Magee, Kemper, Gutierrez, Toledo, Humbert, Perry, Mina, De Aury, and
Long had begun. As for Lafitte, the most picturesque adventurer of them
all, he sailed away from Galveston and, following the example of that
long line of buccaneers of whom he was the last, spent his latter years
in harrying the commerce of the Dons upon the Spanish main. Along the
palm-fringed Gulf coast his memory still survives, and at night the
superstitious sailors sometimes claim to see the ghostly spars of his
rakish craft and to hear, borne by the night breeze, the rumble of his
distant cannonading.
“The palmetto leaves are whispering, while the gentle trade-winds blow,
And the soothing Southern zephyrs are sighing soft and low,
As a silvery moonlight glistens, and the droning fireflies glow,
Comes a voice from out the cypress,
‘Lights out! Lafitte! Heave ho!’”
WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
It is a curious and interesting fact that, just as in the year 1754 a
collision between French and English scouting parties on the banks of
the Youghiogheny River, deep in the American wilderness, began a war
that changed the map of Europe, so in 1811 a battle on the banks of the
Wabash between Americans and Indians started an avalanche which ended
by crushing Napoleon.
The nineteenth century was still in its swaddling-clothes at the time
this story opens; the war of the Revolution had been over barely a
quarter of a century, and a second war with England was shortly to
begin. Though the borders of the United States nominally extended to
the Rockies, the banks of the Mississippi really marked the outermost
picket-line of civilization. Beyond that lay a vast and virgin
wilderness, inconceivably rich in minerals, game, and timber, but still
in the power of more or less hostile tribes of Indians. Up to 1800
the whole of that region lying beyond the Ohio, including the present
States of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri,
was officially designated as the Northwest Territory, but in that year
the northern half of this region was organized as the Indian Territory,
or, as it came to be known in time, the Territory of Indiana.
The governor of this great province was a young man named William
Henry Harrison. This youth--he was only twenty-seven at the time of
his appointment--was invested with one of the most extraordinary
commissions ever issued by our government. In addition to being the
governor of a Territory whose area was greater than that of the German
Empire, he was commander-in-chief of the Territorial militia, Indian
agent, land commissioner, and sole lawgiver. He had the power to adopt
from the statutes upon the books of any of the States any and every
law which he deemed applicable to the needs of the Territory. He
appointed all the judges and other civil officials and all military
officers below the rank of general. He possessed and exercised the
authority to divide the Territory into counties and townships. He held
the prerogative of pardon. His decision as to the validity of existing
land grants, many of which were technically worthless, was final,
and his signature upon a title was a remedy for all defects. As the
representative of the United States in its relations with the Indians,
he held the power to negotiate treaties and to make treaty payments.
Governor Harrison was admittedly the highest authority on the
northwestern Indians. He kept his fingers constantly on the pulse of
Indian sentiment and opinion and often said that he could forecast
by the conduct of his Indians, as a mariner forecasts the weather by
the aid of a barometer, the chances of war and peace for the United
States so far as they were controlled by the cabinet in London. The
remark, though curious, was not surprising. Uneasiness would naturally
be greatest in regions where the greatest irritation existed and which
were under the least control. Such a danger spot was the Territory of
Indiana. It occupied a remote and perilous position, for northward
and westward the Indian country stretched to the Great Lakes and the
Mississippi, unbroken save by the military posts at Fort Wayne and Fort
Dearborn (now Chicago) and a considerable settlement of whites in the
vicinity of Detroit. Some five thousand Indian warriors held this vast
region and were abundantly able to expel every white man from Indiana
if their organization had been as strong as their numbers. And the
whites were no less eager to expel the Indians.
No acid ever ate more resistlessly into a vegetable substance than the
white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements
approached the nearest Indian tribes shrunk and withered away. The
most serious of the evils which attended the contact of the two
hostile races was the introduction by the whites of whiskey among the
Indians. “I can tell at once,” wrote Harrison about this time, “upon
looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet, whether he belongs
to a neighboring or a more distant tribe. The latter is generally
well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy,
and enfeebled by intoxication.” Another cause of Indian resentment was
that the white man, though not permitted to settle beyond the Indian
border, could not be prevented from trespassing far and wide on Indian
territory in quest of game. This practice of hunting on Indian lands
in direct violation of law and of existing treaties had, indeed, grown
into a monstrous abuse and did more than anything else, perhaps, to fan
the flame of Indian hostility toward the whites. Every autumn great
numbers of Kentucky settlers used to cross the Ohio River into the
Indian country to hunt deer, bear, and buffalo for their skins, which
they had no more right to take than they had to cross the Alleghanies
and shoot the cows and sheep belonging to the Pennsylvania farmers. As
a result of this systematic slaughter of the game, many parts of the
Northwest Territory became worthless to the Indians as hunting-grounds,
and the tribes that owned them were forced either to sell them to the
government for supplies or for an annuity or to remove elsewhere. The
Indians had still another cause for complaint. According to the terms
of the treaties, if an Indian killed a white man the tribe was bound
to surrender the murderer for trial in an American court; while, if
a white man killed an Indian, the murderer was also to be tried by a
white jury. The Indians surrendered their murderers, and the white
juries at Vincennes unhesitatingly hung them; but, though Harrison
reported innumerable cases of wanton and atrocious murders of Indians
by white men, no white man was ever convicted by a territorial jury
for these crimes. So far as the white man was concerned, it was a case
of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The opinion that prevailed along the
frontier was expressed in the frequent assertion that “the only good
Indian is a dead one,” and in the face of such public opinion there
was no chance of the Indian getting a square deal.
As a result of these outrages and injustices, the thoughts of the
Indians turned longingly toward the days when this region was held by
France. Had Napoleon carried out his Louisiana scheme of 1802, there
is no possible doubt that he would have received the active support
of every Indian tribe from the Gulf to the Great Lakes; his orders
would have been obeyed from Tallahassee to Detroit. When affairs in
Europe compelled him to abandon his contemplated American campaign,
the Indians turned to the British for sympathy and assistance--and the
British were only too glad to extend them a friendly hand. From Maiden,
opposite Detroit, the British traders loaded the American Indians
with gifts and weapons; the governor-general of Canada intrigued with
the more powerful chieftains and assured himself of their support in
the war which was approaching; British emissaries circulated among
the tribes, and by specious arguments inflamed their hostility toward
Americans. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, had our people
and our government treated the Indians with the most elementary justice
and honesty, they would have had their support in the War of 1812, the
whole course of that disastrous war would probably have been changed,
and the Canadian boundary would, in all likelihood, have been pushed
far to the northward. By their persistent ill treatment of the Indians
the Americans received what they had every reason to expect and what
they fully deserved.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century there was really
no perfect peace with any of the Indian tribes west of the Ohio, and
Harrison’s abilities as a soldier and a diplomatist were taxed to
the utmost to prevent the skirmish-line, as the chain of settlements
and trading-posts which marked our westernmost frontier might well
be called, from being turned into a battle-ground. Harrison’s most
formidable opponent in his task of civilizing the West was the Shawnee
chieftain Tecumseh, perhaps the most remarkable of American Indians.
Though not a chieftain by birth, Tecumseh had risen by the strength of
his personality and his powers as an orator to a position of altogether
extraordinary influence and power among his people. So great was his
reputation for bravery in battle and wisdom in council that by 1809
he had attained the unique distinction of being, to all intents and
purposes, the political leader of all the Indians between the Ohio and
the Mississippi.
With the vision of a prophet, Tecumseh saw that if this immense
territory was once opened to settlement by whites the game upon which
the Indians had to depend for sustenance must soon be exterminated
and that in a few years his people would have to move to strange and
distant hunting-grounds. Taking this as his text, he preached a gospel
of armed resistance to the white man’s encroachments at every tribal
council-fire from the land of the Chippewas to the country of the
Creeks. And he had good reasons for his warnings, for the Indians were
being stripped of their lands in shameless fashion. In fact, the Indian
agents were deliberately ordered to tempt the tribal chiefs into debt
in order to oblige them to sell the tribal lands, which did not belong
to them, but to their tribes. The callousness of the government’s
Indian policy was frankly expressed by President Jefferson in a letter
to Harrison in 1803:
“To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to
spare and we want for necessaries which we have to spare and they
want we shall push our trading houses and be glad to see the good and
influential individuals among them in debt; because we observe that
when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay they become
willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”
The tone of cynicism, inhumanity, and greed which characterizes
that letter makes it sound more like the utterance of a usurious
money-lender than an official communication to a Territorial governor
from the President of the United States. It is hard to believe that it
was penned by the same hand which wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson’s Indian policy was continued by his successor, for in 1809
Governor Harrison, acting under instructions from President Madison,
concluded a treaty with the chiefs of the Delaware, Pottawatomie,
Miami, Eel River, Wea, and Kickapoo tribes, whereby, in consideration
of eight thousand two hundred dollars paid down and annuities amounting
to two thousand three hundred and fifty more, he obtained the cession
of _three million acres of land_. Think of it, my friends! Perhaps the
most fertile land in all the world sold at the rate of _three acres for
a cent_! It was like stealing candy from a child. Do you wonder that
Tecumseh declared the treaty void, denounced as traitors to their race
the chiefs who made it, and asserted that it was not in the power of
individual tribes to deed away the common domain? This was the basis of
Tecumseh’s scheme for a general federation of all the Indians, which,
had it not been smashed in its early stages, would have drenched our
frontiers with blood and would have set back the civilization of the
West a quarter of a century.
Throughout his campaign of proselytism Tecumseh was ably seconded by
one of his triplet brothers, Elkswatana, known among the Indians as
“the prophet.” The latter, profiting by the credulity and superstition
of the red men, obtained a great reputation as a medicine-man and seer
by means of his charms, incantations, and pretended visions of the
Great Spirit, thus making himself a most valuable ally of Tecumseh in
the great conspiracy which the latter was secretly hatching. Meanwhile
the relations between the Americans and their neighbors across the
Canadian border had become strained almost to the breaking point, the
situation being aggravated by the fact that the British were secretly
encouraging Tecumseh in spreading his propaganda of resistance to the
United States and were covertly supplying the Indians with arms and
ammunition for the purpose. The winter of 1809-10, therefore, was
marked by Indian outrages along the whole length of the frontier. And
there were other agencies, more remote but none the less effective, at
work creating discontent among the Indians. It seems a far cry from
the prairies to the Tuileries, from an Indian warrior to a French
Emperor, but when Napoleon’s decree of what was virtually a universal
blockade imposed terrible hardships on American shipping as well as
on the British commerce at which it was aimed, even the savage of the
wilderness was affected. It clogged and almost closed the chief markets
for his furs, and prices dropped so low that Indian hunters were hardly
able to purchase the powder and shot with which to kill their game.
At the beginning of 1810, therefore, the Indians were ripe for any
enterprise that promised them relief and independence.
In the spring of 1808 Tecumseh, the prophet, and their followers had
established themselves on the banks of the Wabash, near the mouth of
the Tippecanoe River, about seven miles to the north of the present
site of Lafayette, Indiana. Strategically, the situation was admirably
chosen, for Vincennes, where Harrison had his headquarters, lay one
hundred and fifty miles below and could be reached in four and twenty
hours by canoe down the Wabash; Fort Dearborn was a hundred miles to
the northwest; Fort Wayne the same distance to the northeast; and,
barring a short portage, the Indians could paddle their canoes to
Detroit in one direction or to any part of the Ohio or the Mississippi
in the other. Thus they were within striking distance of the chief
military posts on the frontier and within easy reach of their British
friends at Malden. On this spot the Indians, in obedience to a command
which the prophet professed to have received in a dream from the Great
Spirit, built a sort of model village, where they assiduously tilled
the soil and shunned the fire-water of the whites. For a year or more
after the establishment of Prophet’s Town, as the place was called,
things went quietly enough, but when it became known that Harrison had
obtained the cession of the three million acres in the valley of the
Wabash already referred to, the smouldering resentment of Tecumseh and
his followers was fanned into flame, the Indians refusing to receive
the “annuity salt” sent them in accordance with the terms of the treaty
and threatened to kill the boatmen who brought it, whom they called
“American dogs.”
Early in the following summer Harrison sent word to Tecumseh that he
would like to see him, and on August 12, 1810, the Indian chief with
four hundred armed warriors arrived at the governor’s headquarters at
Vincennes. The meeting between the white man who stood for civilization
and the red man who stood for savagery took place in a field outside
the stockaded town. The youthful governor, short of stature, lean
of body, and stern of face, sat in a chair under a spreading tree,
surrounded by a group of his officials: army officers, Territorial
judges, scouts, interpreters, and agents. Opposite him, ranged in a
semicircle on the ground, were Tecumseh, his brother, the prophet,
and a score or more of chiefs, while back of them, row after row
of blanketed forms and grim, bepainted faces, sat his four hundred
fighting men. Tecumseh had been warned that his braves must come to the
conference unarmed, and to all appearances they were weaponless, but
no one knew better than Harrison that concealed beneath the folds of
each warrior’s blanket was a tomahawk and a scalping-knife. Nor, aware
as he was of the danger of Indian treachery, had he neglected to take
precautions, for the garrison of the town was under arms, the muzzles
of field-guns peered through apertures in the log stockade, and a few
paces away from the council, ready to open fire at the first sign of
danger, were a score of soldiers with loaded rifles.
In reply to Harrison’s formal greeting, Tecumseh rose to his feet,
presenting a most striking and impressive figure as he stood, drawn to
his full height, with folded arms and granite features, the sunlight
playing on his copper-colored skin, on his belt and moccasins of beaded
buckskin, and on the single eagle’s feather which slanted in his hair.
The address of the famous warrior statesman consisted of a recital of
the wrongs which the Indian had suffered at the hands of the white
man. It was a story of chicanery and spoliation and oppression which
Tecumseh told, and those who listened to it, white men and red alike,
knew that it was very largely true. He told how the Indians, the
real owners of the land, had been steadily driven westward and ever
westward, first beyond the Alleghanies, and then beyond the Ohio, and
now beyond the Missouri. He told how the white men had attempted to
create dissension among the Indians to prevent their uniting, how they
had bribed the stronger tribes and coerced the weaker, how again and
again they had tried to goad the Indians into committing some overt act
that they might use it as an excuse for seizing more of their land. He
told how the whites, jeering at the sacredness of treaty obligations,
systematically debauched the Indians by selling them whiskey; how they
trespassed on the Indians’ lands and slaughtered the game on which the
Indians depended for support; of how, when the Indians protested, they
were often slaughtered, too; and of how the white men’s courts, instead
of condemning the criminal, usually ended by congratulating him. He
declared that things had come to a pass where the Indians must fight or
perish, that the Indians were one people and that the lands belonging
to them as a race could not be disposed of by individual tribes, that
an Indian confederacy had been formed which both could and would fight
every step of the white man’s further advance. As Tecumseh continued,
his pronunciation became more guttural, his terms harsher, his gestures
more excited, his argument changed into a warlike harangue. He played
upon the Indian portion of his audience as a maestro plays upon a
violin, until, their passions mastering their discretion, they sprang
to their feet with a whoop, brandishing their tomahawks and knives.
In the flutter of an eyelash everything was in confusion. The waiting
soldiers dashed forward like sprinters, cocking their rifles as they
ran. The officers jerked loose their swords, and the frontiersmen
snatched up their long-barrelled weapons. But Harrison was quickest
of all, for, drawing and cocking a pistol with a single motion, he
thrust its muzzle squarely into Tecumseh’s face. “Call off your men,”
he thundered, “or you’re a dead Indian!” Tecumseh, realizing that he
had overplayed his part and appreciating that this was an occasion when
discretion was of more avail than valor, motioned to his warriors, and
they silently and sullenly withdrew.
But it was no part of Tecumseh’s plan or of the British who were behind
him to bring on a war at this time, when their preparations were as
yet incomplete; so the following morning Tecumseh, who had little to
learn about the game of diplomacy, called on Harrison, expressed with
apparent sincerity his regret for the violence into which his young
men had been led by his words, and asked to have the council resumed.
Harrison well knew the great ability and influence of Tecumseh and was
anxious to conciliate him, for, truth to tell, the Americans were no
more prepared for war at this time than were the Indians. When asked
whether he intended to persist in his opposition to the cessions of
territory in the valley of the Wabash, Tecumseh firmly asserted his
intention to adhere to the old boundary, though he made it clear that,
if the governor would prevail upon the President to give up the lands
in question and would agree never to make another treaty without the
consent of all the tribes, he would pledge himself to be a faithful
ally of the United States. Otherwise he would be obliged to enter into
an alliance with the English. Harrison told him that the American
Government would never agree to his suggestions. “Well,” rejoined
Tecumseh, as though he had expected the answer he received, “as the
Great Chief is to decide the matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put
sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up the
land. True, he is so far off that he will not be injured by the war. It
is you and I who will have to fight it out while he sits in his town
and drinks his wine.”
It only needed this open declaration of his hostile intentions by
Tecumseh to convince Harrison that the time had come to strike,
and strike hard. If the peril of the great Indian league of which
Tecumseh had boasted was to be averted, it must be done before that
confederation became too strongly organized to shatter. There was no
time to be lost. Harrison promptly issued a call for volunteers to take
part in a campaign against the Indians, at the same time despatching a
messenger to Washington requesting the loan of a regiment of regulars
to stiffen the raw levies who would compose the major part of the
expedition. News of Harrison’s call for men spread over the frontier
States as though disseminated by wireless, and soon the volunteers came
pouring in: frontiersmen from Kentucky and Tennessee in fur caps and
hunting-shirts of buckskin; woodsmen from the forests of Michigan and
Wisconsin, long-barrelled rifles on their shoulders and powder-horns
slung from their necks; militiamen from Indiana and Illinois, and
grizzled Indian-fighters from the towns along the river and the
backwoods settlements, who volunteered as much from love of fighting
as from hatred of the Indians. Then, one day, almost before Harrison
realized that they had started, a column of dusty, footsore soldiery
came tramping into Vincennes with the unmistakable swing of veterans.
It was the 4th Regiment of United States Infantry, commanded by Colonel
John Parker Boyd, who, upon receiving orders from Washington to hurry
to Harrison’s assistance, had put his men on flatboats at Pittsburg,
where the regiment was stationed, floated them down to the falls of
the Ohio, and marched them overland to Harrison’s headquarters at
Vincennes, accomplishing the four-hundred-mile journey in a time which
made that veteran frontiersman open his eyes with astonishment when he
heard it.
Boyd[C] was one of the most picturesque figures which our country
has ever produced. Born in Newburyport in 1764, the last British
soldier had left our shores before he was old enough to realize the
ambition of his life by obtaining a commission in the American army.
But his was not the disposition which could content itself with the
tedium of garrison life in time of peace; so, before he had passed
his four-and-twentieth birthday he had handed in his papers and taken
passage for India. The closing years of the eighteenth century saw
fighting going on from one end of Hindustan to the other. The British
were fighting the French, and the Hindus were fighting the Mohammedans,
so that men with military training found there a profitable market for
their services and their swords.
After serving for a time as cavalry instructor in the armies of the
Peishwa, as the ruler of the Mahratta tribes was called, Boyd obtained
a commission as colonel in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad,
distinguished himself in a series of whirlwind raids which he led into
the territory of the Sultan of Mysore during the campaign which ended
with the death of that tyrant in a last desperate stand at the gates of
his capital of Seringapatam, and was rewarded by the Nizam giving him
the command of a brigade of ten thousand turbaned troopers. Having by
this time accumulated a modest fortune as a result of the lavish pay he
had received from his princely employers, he resigned from the Nizam’s
service and organized an army of his own. The horses, elephants, and
guns were his personal property, and he rented his army to those native
princes who stood in need of its services and were able to pay for
them, very much as a garage rents an automobile.
Foreseeing the eventual conquest of India by the British and realizing
that it would mean the end of independent soldiering in that country,
he sold his army, elephants and all, to an Italian soldier of fortune
and turned his face toward his native land once more. At that time
soldiering was neither a very popular nor a very profitable profession
in the United States, so that Boyd, whose reputation as a daring leader
and a rigid disciplinarian had preceded him, had no difficulty in again
obtaining a commission under his own flag and in the service of his
own country, being offered by the government and promptly accepting
the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of foot. An October evening in 1811,
then, saw him riding into Vincennes at the head of his travel-weary
regulars, in response to Governor Harrison’s request for reinforcements.
The news brought in by the scouts that war-dances were going on in
the Indian villages and that the threatened storm was about to break
served to hasten Harrison’s preparations. The small, but exceedingly
businesslike, expedition which marched out of Vincennes on the 1st day
of November under the leadership of Governor Harrison, with Colonel
Boyd in direct command of the troops, consisted of the nine companies
of regulars which Boyd had brought from Pittsburg, six companies of
infantry of the Indiana militia, two companies of Indiana dragoons,
two companies of Kentucky mounted rifles, a company of Indiana mounted
rifles, and a company of scouts--about eleven hundred men in all.
Their uniforms would have looked strange and outlandish indeed to one
accustomed to the serviceable, dust-colored garb of the present-day
soldier, for the infantry wore high felt hats of the “stovepipe”
pattern, adorned with red-white-and-blue cockades, tight-waisted,
long-tailed coats of blue cloth with brass buttons, and pantaloons as
nearly skin-tight as the tailor could make them. The dragoons were
gorgeous in white buckskin breeches, high, varnished boots, “shell”
jackets which reached barely to the hips, and brass helmets with
streaming plumes of horsehair. Because the mounted riflemen who were
under the command of Captain Spencer wore gray uniforms lavishly
trimmed with yellow, they bore the nickname among the troops of
“Spencer’s Yellow-Jackets.” The only men of the force, indeed, who
were suitably clad for Indian warfare were the scouts, who wore the
hunting-shirts, leggings, and moccasins of soft-tanned buckskin, which
were the orthodox dress of the frontier.
Commanded by men of such wide experience in savage warfare as Harrison
and Boyd, it is needless to say that every precaution was taken against
surprise, the column moving in a formation which prepared it for
instant battle. The cavalry formed advance and rear guards, and small
detachments rode on either flank; the infantry marched in two columns,
one on either side of the trail, with the baggage wagons, pack-animals,
and beeves between them, while the scouts, thrown far out into the
forest, formed a moving cordon of skirmishers. After crossing the
Vermilion River the troops found themselves upon an immense prairie,
which stretched away, level as a floor, as far as the eye could see--as
far as the Illinois at Chicago, the guides asserted. It filled the
soldiers, who came from a rugged and heavily forested country, with the
greatest astonishment, for few of them had ever seen so vast an expanse
of level ground before. Shortly afterward, however, they left the
prairie and marched through open woods, over ground gashed and furrowed
by deep ravines. Here the greatest precautions had to be observed, for
clouds of Indian scouts hung upon the flanks of the column, and the
broken nature of the country fitted it admirably for ambushes.
Late in the afternoon of November 6, 1811, in a cold and drizzling
rain, Harrison gave orders to bivouac for the night on a piece of high
but swamp-surrounded ground on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, near
its junction with the Wabash, and barely five miles from the Prophet’s
Town. It was a triangular-shaped knoll, dotted with oaks, one side of
which dropped down in a sharp declivity to a little stream edged with
willows and heavy underbrush, while the other two sides sloped down
more gradually to a marshy prairie. The camp was arranged in the form
of an irregular parallelogram, with the regulars--who were the only
seasoned troops in the expedition--forming the front and rear, the
flanks being composed of mounted riflemen supported by militia, while
two troops of dragoons were held in reserve. In the centre of this
armed enclosure were parked the pack-animals and the baggage-train.
Though late in the night the moon rose from behind a bank of clouds;
the night was very dark, with occasional flurries of rain. The troops
lay on the rain-soaked ground with rifles loaded and bayonets fixed,
but they slept but little, I fancy, for they had brought no tents, few
of them were provided with blankets, and top-hats and tail-coats are
not exactly adapted to camping in the forest in November.
From his experience in previous campaigns, Harrison had learned
that, while in the vicinity of any considerable body of Indians, it
was the part of precaution to arouse his men quietly an hour or so
before daybreak, for it was a characteristic of the Indians to deliver
their attacks shortly before the dawn, which is the hour when tired
men sleep the soundest. Meanwhile, in the Indian camp preparations
were being stealthily made for the surprise and extermination of the
white invaders. Tecumseh was not present, being absent on one of his
proselyting tours among the southern tribes, but the prophet brought
out the sacred torch and the magic beans, which his followers had only
to touch, so he assured them, to become invulnerable to the enemy’s
bullets. This ceremony was followed by a series of incantations, war
songs and dances, until the Indians, now wrought up to a frenzy, were
ready for any deed of madness. Slipping like horrid phantoms through
the waist-high prairie grass in the blackness of the night, they crept
nearer and nearer to the sleeping camp, intending to surround the
position, stab the sentries, rush the camp, and slaughter every man in
it whom they could not take alive for the torture stake.
In pursuance of his custom of early rising, Harrison was just pulling
on his boots before the embers of a dying camp-fire, at four o’clock in
the morning, preparatory to rousing his men, when the silence of the
forest was suddenly broken by the crack of a sentry’s rifle. The echoes
had not time to die away before, from three sides of the camp, rose
the shrill, hair-raising war-whoop of the Indians. As familiar with the
lay of the land as a housewife is with the arrangements of her kitchen,
they had effected their plan of surrounding the camp, confident of
taking the suddenly awakened soldiers so completely by surprise that
they would be unable to offer an effectual resistance. Not a warrior of
them but did not look forward to returning to the Prophet’s Town with a
string of dripping scalp-locks at his waist.
The Indians, quite unlike their usual custom of keeping to cover,
fought as white men fight, for, made reckless by the prophet’s
assurances that his spells had made them invulnerable and that bullets
could not harm them, they advanced at a run across the open. At sight
of the oncoming wave of bedaubed and befeathered figures the raw levies
from Indiana and Kentucky visibly wavered and threatened to give way,
but Boyd’s regulars, though taken by surprise, showed the result of
their training by standing like a stone wall against the onset of the
whooping redskins. The engagement quickly became general. The chorus
of cheers and yells and groans and war-whoops was punctuated by the
continuous crackle of the frontiersmen’s rifles and the crashing
volleys of the infantry. Harrison, a conspicuous figure on a white
horse and wearing a white blanket coat, rode up and down the lines,
encouraging here, cautioning there, as cool and as quiet-voiced as
though back on the parade-ground at Vincennes.
The pressure was greatest at the angle of the camp where the first
attack was made, the troops stationed at this point having the greatest
difficulty in holding their position. Seeing this, Major Joseph H.
Daviess, a brilliant but hot-headed young Kentuckian who had achieved
fame by his relentless attacks on Aaron Burr, twice asked permission to
charge with his dragoons, and twice the governor sent back the answer:
“Tell Major Daviess to be patient; he shall have his chance before the
battle is over.” When Daviess for a third time urged his importunate
request, Harrison answered the messenger sharply: “Tell Major Daviess
he has twice heard my opinion; he may now use his own discretion.”
Discretion, however, was evidently not included in the Kentuckian’s
make-up, for no sooner had he received Harrison’s message than, with
barely a score of dismounted troopers, he charged the Indian line. So
foolhardy a performance could only be expected to end in disaster.
Daviess fell, mortally wounded, and his men, such of them as were not
dead, turned and fled for their lives.
[Illustration: The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the
oncoming troopers, broke and ran.]
The prophet, who had been chanting appeals to the Great Spirit from the
top of a rock within view of his warriors but safely out of range of
the American rifles (he evidently had some doubts as to the efficacy of
his charms), realized that, as a result of the unforeseen obstinacy of
the Americans’ resistance, victory was fast slipping from his grasp and
that his only hope of success lay in an overwhelming charge. Roused to
renewed fanaticism by his fervid exhortations, the Indians once again
swept forward, whooping like madmen. But the Americans were ready for
them, and as the yelling redskins came within range they met them with
a volley of buckshot which left them wavering, undecided whether to
come on or to retreat. Harrison, whose plan was to maintain his lines
unbroken until daylight and then make a general advance, and who had
been constantly riding from point to point within the camp to keep the
assailed positions reinforced, realized that the crucial moment had
arrived. Now was his chance to drive home the deciding blow. Boyd,
recognizing as quickly as Harrison the opportunity thus presented,
ordered a bugler to sound the charge, and his infantry roared down
upon the Indian line in a human avalanche tipped with steel. At the
same moment he ordered up the two squadrons of dragoons which he had
been holding in reserve. “Right into line!” he roared, in the voice
which had resounded over so many fields in far-off Hindustan. “Trot!
Gallop! _Charge!_ Hip, hip, here we go!” It was this charge, delivered
with the smashing suddenness with which a boxer gets in a solar-plexus
blow, which did the business. The Indians, panic-stricken at the
sight of the oncoming troopers in their brass helmets and streaming
plumes of horsehair, broke and ran. Tippecanoe was won, though at
a cost to the Americans of nearly two hundred killed and wounded,
including two lieutenant-colonels, two majors, five captains, and
several lieutenants. The discredited prophet, now become an object of
hatred and derision among his own people, fled for his life while the
victorious Americans burned his town behind him. Tecumseh, returning
from the south to be greeted by the news of the disaster to his plans
resulting from his brother’s folly, threw in his lot with the British,
commanded England’s Indian allies in the War of 1812, and died two
years later at the battle of the Thames, when his old adversary,
Harrison, once again led the Americans to victory. For his share in the
Tippecanoe triumph, Boyd received a brigadier-general’s commission.
Harrison was started on the road which was to end at the White House.
The peril of the great Indian confederation was ended forever, and the
civilization of the West was advanced a quarter of a century.
THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR
THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR
I wonder how many of the white-clad, white-shod folk who lounge their
winters away on the golf-links at St. Augustine or in wheeled chairs
propelled by Ethiopians along the fragrant pathways of Palm Beach
ever speculate as to how it happens that the flags which fly over the
Ponce de Leon and the Royal Poinciana are made of red, white, and blue
bunting instead, say, of red and yellow. Not many of them, I expect,
for professional joy hunters have no time to spare for history. I
wonder how many of those people who complacently regard themselves as
well-read and well-informed could tell you offhand, if you asked them,
how Florida became American or give you even the barest outline of the
conception and execution of that daring and cynical scheme whereby it
was added to the Union. I wonder how many professors of history in our
schools and colleges are aware that Florida was once a republic--for
but a brief time, it is true--with a flag and a president and an army
of its own. I wonder how many of our military and naval officers know
that we fought Spanish soldiers and stormed Spanish forts and captured
Spanish towns and hauled down Spanish colors (all quite unofficially,
of course) fourscore years before Schley and Sampson sunk the Spanish
fleet off Santiago. And, finally, I wonder how many people have ever
so much as heard of the Emperor McGillivray, who held his barbaric
court at Tallahassee and was a general in the armies of England, Spain,
and the United States at the same time; of Sir Gregor MacGregor, the
Scottish soldier of fortune who attempted to establish a kingdom at
Fernandina and died King of the Mosquito Coast; or any of those other
strange and romantic figures--De Aury, Hubbard, Peire, Humbert--who
followed him. It is a dashing story but a bloody one, and those who
have no stomach for intrigue and treachery and massacre and ambushes
and storming parties and filibustering expeditions had better turn
elsewhere for their reading.
Some one has aptly remarked that the history of Florida is but a bowl
of blood, and that, were a man to cast into it some chemical that
would separate the solid ingredients from the mere water, he would
find that the precipitate at the bottom consisted of little save
death and disappointment. Certainly the Spaniards were rewarded by
little more, for after they had ruled it for two hundred and fifty
years the net results of their labor were the beggarly settlements at
Pensacola and St. Augustine. In 1763 England ceded Havana to Spain in
exchange for Florida, and for a brief time that harassed country was on
speaking terms with peace and prosperity, for the English established
settlements and built roads and started schools, as is the quaint
Anglo-Saxon way. But with the loss of her American colonies, in 1783,
England suddenly concluded that it was not worth her while to retain
this now isolated province; so she ceded it back to Spain, and the
settlers found that their work had gone for nothing. A Spanish lethargy
promptly settled upon the land; grass sprang up in the main streets of
the towns; the noon-hour was expanded into a _siesta_ which lasted from
twelve to four; the indigo plantations started by the English colonists
were neglected and ran out; the injustice, cruelty, and oppression
which everywhere characterized Spanish rule entered upon a return
engagement; and Florida became a savage and lawless borderland, where
Indians, runaway slaves, filibusters, frontiersmen, and fugitives from
justice fought each other and united only in jeering at the feeble rule
of Spain.
At this time the colony was divided into two provinces, known as East
and West Florida. The former province was virtually identical with the
present State, extending from the Perdido River (now the boundary-line
between the States of Florida and Alabama) eastward to the Atlantic
Ocean, including the great peninsula lying south of Georgia and
stretching across almost six degrees of latitude. On its Atlantic
seaboard were the towns of Fernandina and St. Augustine, and on the
Gulf coast the ports of Pensacola and St. Marks. The province of West
Florida extended from the Perdido westward, according to the Spanish
claims, to the Mississippi and included the river town of Baton Rouge
and the Gulf port of Mobile. It will be seen, therefore, that Spain was
in possession of all that great semicircle of Gulf coast stretching
from Key West to New Orleans.
In 1803, Napoleon, hard-pressed for funds with which to continue his
European campaigns, sold the colony of Louisiana to the United States
as unconcernedly as though he were disposing of a suburban building
lot. This proceeding was typical of the utter indifference with which
the sovereigns of the Old World were accustomed to transfer their
colonies in the New. The colonists, however much they may have loved
their sovereign, their country, or her institutions, were bought,
sold, or given away, without their consent and often without their
knowledge. This enormous addition to the national domain made it not
only desirable but imperative that the United States acquire ports upon
the Gulf of Mexico, so that the settlers in Tennessee, Mississippi,
Alabama, and western Georgia might have an outlet for their products.
The gentlemen in frock coats and high black stocks who were at the
tiller of our ship of state determined, therefore, that the Floridas
must become American--peacefully if possible, forcibly if there was no
other way.
Now, it must be borne in mind that at this time Spain had no diplomatic
intercourse with the United States, the gigantic policy of Napoleon
having, for the time being, erased her from the list of nations. Thus
overwhelmed at home, her possessions in America were either in a state
of open revolt or in so defenseless a condition that they were ready to
drop like ripe plums into the hands of any nation which shook the tree.
It will thus be seen that the gentlemen in Washington quite evidently
knew what they were about when they chose a time when Mother Spain was
confined to her bed, as the result of the beating up she had received
from Napoleon, to elope with her daughter Florida.
Once set in motion, the machinery of conquest proceeded to pare off
slices of Florida with the neatness and despatch of a meat-cutting
machine. The plans of the American Government worked out as smoothly
as a church wedding which has been rehearsed beforehand. The
carefully laid scheme first manifested itself in October, 1810, when
a revolution broke out in that portion of West Florida bordering
upon the Mississippi. In that region there was a family of American
settlers named Kemper who had suffered many injustices under Spanish
rule. Two of these men, Samuel and Reuben (the same Reuben Kemper, by
the way, whose exploits in Mexico are described in “Adventurers All”),
determined to get rid of their hated rulers, incited the neighboring
settlers to rise in armed revolt. Assembling at St. Francisville, they
marched through the night, arrived before Baton Rouge at dawn, took
it by surprise, and after a skirmish in which the Spanish governor
was killed drove out the garrison and occupied the town. In order
to throw a cloak of legality over their acts, the revolutionists
organized a convention, issued a declaration of independence modelled
on Jefferson’s immortal document, elected Fulwar Skipwith, formerly
American diplomatic agent in France, president of the new republic,
and hoisted over the captured town a flag with a single star--the same
emblem under which the Texans were to win their independence thirty odd
years later. This done, the infant republic asked the United States to
recognize it as an independent nation. But President Monroe, instead of
extending recognition, asserting that the revolted province had been
ceded by Spain to France along with Louisiana in 1800, and therefore,
being part and parcel of Louisiana, belonged to the United States
anyway, declared the Territory of West Florida, as far east as the
Pearl River, an American possession.
Shortly after the capture of Baton Rouge Colonel Kemper, acting under
orders from the revolutionary government, led another expedition
against Mobile. Made overconfident by their easy triumph at Baton
Rouge, the filibusters encamped a few miles above Mobile and spent the
night in a grand carousal in celebration of their anticipated victory
on the morrow. But the Spanish governor, learning from a spy of the
Americans’ befuddled condition, sallied out at the head of three
hundred men, took the revolutionists by surprise, and completely routed
them. A major and nine men who were taken prisoners were transported
to Havana, where they paid for their affront to the majesty of Spain by
spending five years in Morro Castle. A few weeks later a strong force
of American regulars arrived off Mobile and coolly sat down within
sight of the Spanish fortifications. They explained their presence to
the Spanish governor by saying that they had been sent by the American
Government to protect him and his men from further attacks by the
insurgents. The gentlemen who were shaping the policies of the nation
in Washington certainly must have had a sense of humor. Though the
Spanish flag still flew over Mobile, the United States was now, to all
intents and purposes, in complete possession of West Florida. In the
spring of 1812, when the American Government finally determined on a
war with England, the strategic importance of Mobile became apparent
and President Monroe, deciding that the time had come to end the farce,
despatched an expedition under General Wilkinson to oust the Spanish
garrison and formally occupy the city. The United States was now in
full possession of one of the Gulf ports she had so long been coveting,
and the machinery of conquest was still in working order.
Meanwhile the American Government, having heard rumors that the British
were about to assume control of East Florida under the provisions
of a secret arrangement with Spain, asked permission of the Spanish
authorities to occupy that province with troops that it might not be
used by the British as a base of operations. (The occupation was to
be purely temporary; oh, yes indeed, the American troops would be
withdrawn as soon as the war-clouds which were piling up along the
political horizon lifted a little.) It is scarcely to be wondered at,
however, that Spain curtly refused the request, whereupon Congress,
in secret session, passed an act authorizing the seizure of East
Florida. But it would have smacked too much of highway robbery or of
burglary, whichever you choose to call it, for the United States to
have sent a military expedition into the province and taken it by force
of arms. That would have been just a little too coarse and crude and
might, moreover, have called forth a European protest. But surely no
blame could be attached to the United States because the settlers in
southern Georgia, exasperated, they said, by the lawless conditions
which prevailed in the adjacent Spanish province, suddenly determined
to follow the example of their neighbors in West Florida and organize
a republican form of government in East Florida as a preliminary to
applying for admission to the Union. It was a strange coincidence, was
it not, that the instigator of the revolution, General George Mathews,
a former governor of Georgia, had been appointed a commissioner, under
the secret act of Congress, to secure the province? Amelia Island,
lying just off the Florida coast and a little below the boundary of
Georgia, provided an admirable base of operations. The fine harbor of
its capital, Fernandina, was just becoming of considerable commercial
importance and in Spanish hands might prove a serious menace to
the United States in the approaching war with England. Hence the
acquisition of this island and harbor was regarded by the American
authorities as a military necessity. Early in 1812, therefore, a force
of some two hundred Georgian frontiersmen under General Mathews moved
down upon Fernandina and sent a flag of truce, demanding the surrender
of the town and island. As a flotilla of American gunboats, by a
streak of the greatest good luck, happened into the harbor at this
psychological moment, and a force of American regulars, by another
singular coincidence, appeared upon the scene and placed themselves
under Mathews’s orders, there was nothing left for the Spanish
commandant but to haul down his flag. Whereupon General Mathews,
assuming the attitude of a protector, took possession of the place in
the name of the United States. With the precedent of Baton Rouge to
guide him, Mathews naturally supposed that the secret and ambiguously
worded instructions under which he had gone to Fernandina meant that
he was to take possession of East Florida, and he was strengthened
in this supposition by the condition of affairs that he found there.
St. Mary’s River was filled with British vessels engaged in smuggling
British merchandise into the United States in defiance of the Embargo
Act, while Amelia Island was a notorious rendezvous for smugglers, upon
whom the Spanish authorities looked with marked tolerance, if, indeed,
they did not lend them actual assistance. As soon as the Americans
took possession a custom-house was established, the smuggling promptly
ceased, and over the fort was raised a flag bearing the inscription:
“_Vox populi lex salutis._” Though the uneducated frontiersmen were
a trifle hazy as to the motto’s meaning, it sounded well and lent
a certain air of dignity to the proceedings. The next move of the
insurgents, now become eight hundred strong by reinforcements from
Georgia, was to besiege the Spanish governor in St. Augustine, for
Mathews, confident that Congress would pass a bill sanctioning his
seizure of the province, ran things with a high hand. As a matter
of fact, such a bill was passed by the House in secret session, but
was rejected by the Senate, whereupon President Madison disavowed
the act of Mathews and ordered him to evacuate the territory he had
seized--probably because it was deemed unwise to provoke hostilities
with another power at the very moment we had declared war on England.
But the conquest of Florida was not abandoned--merely postponed.
A century ago the region south of the Tennessee River was popularly
known as “the Creek country.” Because it lay directly athwart the best
water communications between the settlements in Tennessee and the
outside world, and because its lands were among the most fertile in the
South, the eyes of the American pioneers were turned covetously upon
it. Now, no one realized better than the Creeks themselves that if they
were to hold their lands they must fight for them. Their decision to
resist American encroachments was strengthened by the appearance among
them of the great northern chieftain, Tecumseh. In October, 1811, this
remarkable man, in pursuance of his scheme for uniting the red men from
the Great Lakes to the Gulf in an Indian confederacy for the purpose
of resisting the white man’s further progress westward, suddenly
appeared at a Creek council held on the upper Tallapoosa. Perhaps the
most brilliant orator the Indian race has ever produced and gifted
with extraordinary personal magnetism, he held his audience spellbound
as, standing in the circle of light thrown by the council-fire,
ringed about by row on row of blanketed and feathered warriors, he
outlined his scheme for a union of all the Indians of the West in
a confederation powerful enough to bid defiance to the white man.
Standing like a bronze statue, the firelight playing on his haughty
features, his copper skin, and the single eagle feather slanting in his
hair, he held aloft his war-club; then, finger by finger, he slowly
relaxed his grasp until it crashed to the ground. By that significant
pantomime, so powerful in its appeal to the primitive intellects of his
hearers, he drove home with telling effect the weakness which comes
from disunion. Though a few weeks later, on the banks of the Tippecanoe
River, William Henry Harrison broke Tecumseh’s power forever and drove
him from American soil, he had aroused in the Creeks a determination
to retain their lands or to go down upon them fighting.
Meanwhile British agents had been secretly at work among the
discontented Creeks, whooping them on to a campaign of extermination
against the American settlers and supplying them with arms and
ammunition in return for the promise of their assistance in the war
which every one realized was now at hand. On the 18th of June, 1812,
Congress declared war on England, and a week later every Creek fighting
man was daubing the war-paint on his copper skin. Though the danger
of a war with the Creeks was perfectly understood in Washington, the
military authorities were too busy pushing forward their preparations
for an invasion of Canada to spare much thought for the settlers
dwelling along our unprotected southern frontier. But the Indians,
under the leadership of the half-breed war-chief Weatherford, had
nothing to divert their attention from the business in hand.
A pioneer farmer named Samuel Mimms had built a stockade for the
protection of his cattle on Lake Tensaw, twenty miles or so north of
Mobile, and here the settlers of the surrounding region had taken
refuge, Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, hurrying a small force of
militia under Major Beasley to protect them. In August, 1813, the
place, popularly known as Fort Mimms, sheltered within its log stockade
five hundred and fifty-three persons: soldiers and settlers, men,
women, and children. Although Governor Claiborne had himself visited
the post during the preceding month and had urged on its commander
the necessity for the most unrelaxing vigilance, Beasley and his men
evidently came to look upon the affair as a false alarm as the summer
days slipped by without bringing any signs of hostile Indians. So
cocksure did they become, indeed, that even after a friendly Indian had
brought word that the Creeks were preparing to attack the place they
continued to leave the gates of the stockade unguarded during the day.
They paid a fearful price for their negligence, however. At noon on the
30th of August, when the occupants of the fort were at their dinner,
a thousand fiends in paint and feathers slipped like shadows from the
gloom of the encircling forest, sped on noiseless, moccasined feet
across the strip of cultivated ground without the walls, and, before
the demoralized garrison realized what had happened, were pouring
through the unguarded entrance in a howling, shrieking wave like demons
pouring through the gates of hell. Though taken completely by surprise
and outnumbered five to one, the garrison put up a most desperate
and gallant resistance. The scene was dreadful beyond imagination.
It was hand-to-hand fighting in its bloodiest form: bayonets against
war-clubs, muskets against tomahawks, pistols against knives.
Increasing the horror of the situation a hundredfold were the women and
children, for there was no question as to their fate if the Indians
were victorious. Beasley fell at the first attack and every officer
died at the gateway in a vain attempt to stem the Indian rush. A young
lieutenant, badly wounded, was carried by two women to a blockhouse,
but when he was a little revived insisted on being taken back that he
might die with his comrades on the fighting line. Though hopeless from
the first, the defense was prolonged for hours; for after the men of
the garrison had fallen, the women and children shut themselves up in
one of the blockhouses, where they held off the yelling savages with
the courage of despair. Finally, however, the Indians, by means of
burning arrows, succeeded in setting the building on fire, and after
that it was no longer a battle but a butchery. Of the five hundred
and fifty-three people within the fort, only twelve escaped. It was a
dearly bought victory for the Indians, however, for piled around the
gateway were four hundred of their best fighting men.
From one end of the border to the other rose the cry for vengeance. Nor
was it long in coming. The legislature of Tennessee voted to raise men
and money to wipe out the Creeks, and called for volunteers. Jumping at
this chance to even up old scores with the Indians, the frontiersmen,
their long squirrel rifles on their shoulders and clad in their
serviceable buckskin dress, came pouring in to offer their services in
the campaign of retribution. The command of the expedition was given
to a brigadier-general of Tennessee militia who up to that time had
scarcely been heard of outside the borders of his own State. He was
a tall, emaciated figure of a man, with a clean-shaven, sallow face,
a jaw like a bear-trap, a great beak of a nose, eyes as penetrating
as gimlets and as cold as a winter’s morning, and a shock of unkempt
sandy hair just beginning to gray under his forty-seven years. He was
not at all the sort of man that a stranger would slap on the back and
address by his first name--at least he would not do it a second time.
His garments were as severe and businesslike as the man himself: a
much-worn leather cap, a short, Spanish cloak of frayed blue cloth,
and great unpolished boots whose tops swayed uneasily about his bony
knees. He carried his arm in a sling as the result of a pistol wound
received during a brawl in a Nashville tavern. Everything considered,
this man who had been chosen to strike terror to the Creeks was a
strange and striking figure. You may have heard of him--his name was
Andrew Jackson.
This was the extraordinary man who, early in the autumn of 1813, took
the field at the head of three thousand volunteers as rough and ready
as himself. A vast amount of nonsense has been written about pioneer
troops. Though some of the most brilliant and daring campaigns in which
Americans have borne a part were carried through by soldiers recruited
on the frontier and though the marching and fighting qualities of these
men have been surpassed by no troops on earth, they were, on the other
hand, nearly always insubordinate, contemptuous of discipline, impudent
to their officers, quickly homesick, and very dependent for success
on enthusiasm for their leaders. Jackson was the best man that could
possibly have been chosen to command such troops as these, for he had
been born and brought up on the frontier, he understood the men with
whom he was dealing, and managed them with energy, firmness, and tact.
He rarely had any difficulty in filling his ranks, for he permitted no
obstacles to deter him from reaching and crushing an enemy; hence the
men who followed him in his campaigns always had stories to relate and
were looked upon as heroes in the settlements. To be pointed out as
“one of Andy Jackson’s men” came to be looked upon as as great an honor
as the scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor is in France.
Jackson’s plan of campaign provided for the construction of a military
road, fifty miles in length, from the Tennessee to the Coosa, whence,
after building a fortified base of supplies, he planned to make a quick
dash southward, spreading death and destruction as he went, until he
dictated peace on the Hickory Ground. The Hickory Ground, which lay at
the junction of the Alabama and the Coosa, near the present site of
Montgomery, was the headquarters of the Creek confederacy and a place
of refuge, the Indian medicine-men having asserted that no white could
set foot upon its sacred soil and live. Jackson, as I have already
remarked, permitted no obstacles to deter him. So, when his engineers
reported that it was not feasible to build a road through the unmapped
wilderness, he took the matter out of their hands and built the road
himself. And when the contractors assured him that it was out of the
question to transport supplies for three thousand men to the Coosa
within the time he had specified, he commandeered horses and wagons
and did that, too. When one of his regiments attempted to settle a
dispute over the term of enlistment by turning about and marching home,
Jackson, his left arm still disabled and in a sling, snatched a musket
from a soldier with his right hand and, using the neck of his horse
for a rest, covered with his weapon the column of sullen, scowling
mutineers. With eyes flashing and frame quivering with passion, he
single-handed held the disaffected regiment at bay, shouting shrilly,
with a volley of oaths, that he would let daylight into the first man
who stirred. Colonels Reid and Coffee, learning of the mutiny, came
galloping up from the rear and took their stand by the side of their
commander, while some loyal companies formed up across the road with
weapons levelled, seeing which the mutineers changed their minds as to
the wisdom of going home and sullenly marched on.
He first met the Creeks on the 3d of November at Talluschatches--now
Jacksonville, Ala.--and promptly attacked them with a thousand mounted
men. No quarter was asked and none was given, and when the battle was
over not an Indian brave was left alive. Six days later, at Talladega,
he swooped down upon a war party of a thousand Creeks who had
surrounded a band of friendly Indians and sent a third of them to the
happy hunting-grounds. At the same time General John Floyd invaded the
Creek country from Georgia at the head of a punitive expedition, while
from the west also came an avenging column under Governor Claiborne, of
Louisiana. The latter discovered a town of refuge, called Econochaca,
on the Alabama. It was built on holy ground, the Indian prophets said,
and, as a result of the spells they had cast over it, it was safe from
paleface invasion. The Americans arrived not an instant too soon, for,
guided by the throbbing of the war-drums, they burst into the village
to find the Indians, their ringed and streaked bodies more fiendish
still in the glare of a great fire, whooping and capering about a row
of stakes to which were bound white captives of both sexes, ready to be
burned. When Claiborne’s men finished their work, the “holy ground” was
carpeted with Indian dead, and the medicine-men who had boasted that it
was immune from invasion were themselves scalped and staring corpses.
Nothing more graphically illustrates the savagery and determination
with which the American frontiersmen prosecuted their campaign against
the Indians than the story of Sam Dale’s canoe fight. Dale, who was a
veritable Hercules of a man, while scouting with some companions in
advance of Jackson’s army, saw floating down the Alabama a war canoe
containing eleven Creeks. Ambushing themselves amid the bushes on the
bank, the Americans poured in a volley as the canoe swept by and five
of the Indians fell dead. Then Dale pushed off in a small boat with
three men to finish up the business. Ordering one of his companions
to hold the boats together, the big frontiersman went at the Indians
with his bayonet like a field-hand with his pitchfork loading hay.
Throwing caution to the winds in his lust of battle, he advanced upon
the Indians single-handed, and before he had time to realize his peril
and retreat the current had swept the canoes apart, leaving him in
the larger one confronting the six remaining Creeks. Two of them were
shot by his companions in the other boat, three more he accounted for
himself, the only one left alive being a famous Indian wrestler named
Tar-cha-cha.
“Big Sam!” the Indian shouted, “I am a man!... I am coming!... Come
on!” Clubbing his rifle, he rushed forward, dealing Dale a blow which
broke his shoulder and nearly sent him into the river, but before he
could get in another the frontiersman drove his bayonet home and ended
the fight.
The early months of 1814 were a time of the most intense anxiety to
Jackson, for, the terms of enlistment of his volunteers expiring,
they insisted on returning to their homes, until at one brief period
he found himself in the heart of the Indian country with less than a
hundred men. Physical suffering as well as anxiety marked this period
of the campaign--privation, exhaustion, irritation, and the drain of a
slowly healing wound producing serious effects on a system which was
habitually on the verge of collapse. It was, indeed, only his cast-iron
will that sustained him, for during one period of anxiety he slept but
three hours in four nights. But with the coming of spring the feet of
the young men became restless for the forest trails again, and by the
middle of March, his ranks filled once more, he was ready to deliver
his final blow. The Creeks had by this time abandoned their campaign of
aggression and, falling back to their stronghold of Tohopeka, on the
Tallapoosa, known to the whites as the Horseshoe Bend, they prepared to
make their last stand.
On the morning of March 27, 1814, Jackson’s skirmishers came
within sight of the Indian encampment. On a peninsula formed by a
horseshoe-like bend of the river, a thousand warriors with three
hundred of their women and children were encamped. They comprised the
very flower of the Creek nation, or rather, all that was left of it.
The neck of the peninsula was only four hundred yards wide, and across
it the Creeks, profiting by the lessons they had received from their
Spanish and British allies, had built a zigzag wall of logs, eight
feet high and pierced by a double row of loopholes. The angles formed
by the zigzags enabled the defenders to sweep with a deadly cross-fire
the ground over which an attacking column must advance, while trees
had been felled at intervals in such fashion that their interlaced
branches provided admirable cover for sharpshooters. All in all, it
was a tough nut that Jackson found himself called upon to crack. But
cracking that particular kind of nuts was a specialty of Jackson’s. His
artillery consisted of two small brass field-pieces, not much larger
than those employed on yachts for saluting purposes. Sending Colonel
Coffee across the river with his cavalry to cut off the escape of the
Indians in that direction, Jackson planted his miniature field-guns on
a little hill only eighty yards from the Creek fortifications. Either
the guns must have been very weak or the fortifications very strong,
for after a two-hours’ bombardment no appreciable damage had been done.
Then Jackson, who was always for getting to hand-grips with an enemy,
told his men to go in and do the job with the bayonet. Whereupon the
Tennesseeans, who had been as fidgety and impatient as hounds in leash,
swept forward with a whoop. As regardless of the withering fire poured
into them as if it had been hailstones instead of bullets, they hacked
their way through the abatis of branches and clambered over the wall,
shooting, bayonetting, clubbing with a ferocity which matched that of
the Indians. And, imitating the customs of the savages they had been
fighting for so long, many of the frontiersmen paused to scalp the
Indians that they killed. For the Creeks it was a hopeless struggle
from the first, but they were not of a breed that, finding themselves
beaten, whined for mercy. Retreating to such protection as the place
afforded, they fought and kept on fighting even after a flag of truce
had been sent them with an offer to accept their surrender. By three
o’clock the battle of the Horseshoe Bend had become a part of the
history of the frontier. So completely had Jackson done his work that
only twenty Indians escaped. Eight hundred copper-colored corpses lay
upon the blood-soaked ground beside the Tallapoosa; the rest were
prisoners. It is a significant fact that there were no wounded among
the Indians. The Americans had nearly two hundred killed and wounded,
among the latter being Jackson himself and a youngster named Sam
Houston, who, in after years, was to win fame fighting a no less savage
foe on the banks of the Rio Grande.
The battle of the Horseshoe Bend broke the Creek power of resistance
for good and all. Since the commencement of hostilities they had lost
in battle nearly three-fourths of all their fighting men. The rest, not
much more than a thousand in all, fled to their cousins, the Seminoles,
in Florida, where they promptly began hatching plans for vengeance.
On the 1st of August, Jackson sent word to such of the chieftains as
had not fled into Spanish territory to meet him on the Hickory Ground.
Here he received their submission and here he imposed on them his
terms of peace. His demands were so rigorous as to bring a gasp of
astonishment even from the Americans, for he insisted on the cession of
an L-shaped tract of land which included more than half the territory
of the Creeks, thus forming a barrier between them and the Choctaws and
Chickasaws on the west and the Spaniards in Florida.
Jackson now turned his face toward Nashville. He had ridden out of
there an unpopular and almost unknown officer of militia. He returned
to find himself a military hero, the stories of whose exploits were
retailed in every settler’s cabin from one end of the frontier to the
other. In recognition of his services, the President commissioned
him a major-general in the regular army and gave him command of the
Department of the South, with headquarters at Mobile. Our second war
with England had now been dragging its tedious course along for nearly
two years, marked by British successes on land and American victories
on the sea. The air was filled with rumors of a great British armada
which was on its way to attack New Orleans, and these solidified into
fact when word reached Jackson that a portion of the British fleet
had anchored in the harbor of Pensacola and proposed, in defiance of
Spanish neutrality, to use that port as a base of operations against
the United States. Pensacola was in Florida, and Florida was still
owned by Spain, and Spain was professedly a neutral; but if the British
could violate that neutrality, argued Jackson, why, so could the
Americans. Without waiting for authority from Washington (and it was
well that he did not, for the city had been burned by the British and
the government had fled), Jackson crossed the Mobile River and invaded
Spanish territory at the head of three thousand veterans. On November 6
he was at the walls of Pensacola. A messenger was sent to the Spanish
governor under a flag of truce with a peremptory demand from Jackson
that the fortress be turned over to the United States until such time
as the Spanish were strong enough to maintain the neutrality of the
port. The governor, emboldened by the fact that seven British war-ships
were lying in the harbor, showed his defiance by firing upon the flag
of truce. But he didn’t know the type of man that he was defying.
Jackson was no more awed by the might of England or the majesty of
Spain or the sacredness of neutral territory than he had been by the
Indians’ “holy ground.” Instantly he ordered forward his storming
parties. So sudden was his attack that the British ships had no time
to up anchor and bring their guns to bear for the protection of the
town. The Spanish soldiery fought well, however, and a sharp battle
ensued in the streets, the batteries opening on the advancing Americans
with solid shot and grape while a heavy fire of musketry was poured
into them from houses and gardens. But the Spaniards were driven back
everywhere by the fierceness of the American assault, whereupon the
governor, seeing that further resistance was useless, sent a messenger
to the American commander to inquire what terms he would grant him.
“Nothing but unconditional surrender,” answered Jackson, and the
haughty Spaniard had no alternative but to accept his terms. Slowly
the flag of Spain, which had flaunted defiantly above the fort, sank
down the staff and in its stead rose a flag of stripes and stars. The
machinery of conquest, with Andrew Jackson at the crank, had pared off
another slice of Florida.
Jackson’s capture of the fortifications having made the harbor
untenable, the British blew up the Spanish forts at the Barrancas,
which commanded the harbor entrance, and departed, whereupon Jackson
evacuated the town. His work in Pensacola was finished. Eight weeks
later (January 8, 1815) he won his immortal victory at New Orleans,
with his untrained frontiersmen and scanty resources meeting and
annihilating the British regiments that had conquered Napoleon. At a
single bound he leaped from the status of a backwoods soldier to one of
the great leaders of his time.
But the victory at New Orleans and the treaty of peace with England
did not mean the end of fighting for Jackson. There were still several
odd jobs to be done. During the war a British colonel named Nicholls
had been sent on a secret mission to Florida in an attempt to incite
the Seminoles, the fugitive Creeks, and the runaway negroes who
infested the northern part of the province to harass the borders of the
United States. While in Florida he built a fort on the Appalachicola
River, not far above its mouth and well within Spanish territory, and
collected there a large store of arms and ammunition. When the war
ended and Colonel Nicholls was recalled, he turned the fort over to
the Seminoles in the hope that it would prove a thorn in the side of
the United States. From the Seminoles the place passed into the hands
of the negro refugees and quickly became a source of anxiety to the
American military authorities on our southern border. But, though it
was garrisoned by escaped slaves and was a constant menace to the
peace of the frontier, the Americans were powerless--according to
international law, at least--because it was built on Spanish soil. But
when the matter was referred to Jackson he showed how much he cared for
international law by writing to General Gaines that the “Negro Fort,”
as it was called, “ought to be blown up, regardless of the ground on
which it stands.” That was all the hint that Gaines needed, and in
July, 1816, he ordered an expedition under Colonel Duncan Clinch to
ascend the river and destroy the fort. As the flotilla approached, a
boat’s crew which had been sent forward to reconnoitre was fired upon,
whereupon the gunboats were warped up-stream until they were within
range. The bombardment was of short duration, for scarcely had the
gunboats opened fire before a red-hot shot struck the magazine of the
fort, where eight hundred barrels of gunpowder were stored. In the
explosion that followed, the fort vanished from the earth, and for
some moments it fairly rained negroes--or parts of them. Of the three
hundred and thirty-four inmates of the fort, two hundred and seventy
were blown to kingdom come, and of the sixty-four left alive, all but
three were so terribly injured that they died--which was just as well,
perhaps, in view of what happened to two out of the three survivors.
These, an Indian chief and Garçon, the negro commander, were handed
over to some friendly Seminoles to be put to death in the ingenious
Indian fashion in retaliation for the death by torture of one of the
American sailors, who had been taken prisoner a few days before. From
all accounts, the Seminoles performed their task well but slowly.
The destruction of the Negro Fort, though unimportant in itself,
served to stir up the uneasiness and discontent which prevailed along
the Florida border and which was shared in by Creeks, Seminoles,
Spaniards, and Americans. By March, 1817, several thousand whites had
settled on the rich lands that Jackson had taken from the Creeks, and
the friction which quickly developed between the new owners and the
old ones, now fugitives in Florida, resulted in a series of defiances
and depredations. While relations with the Indians were thus strained
almost to the breaking point there again sprang up the historic
irritation against Spain, whom the American settlers accused, rightly
or wrongly, of inciting the Indians against them. Meanwhile President
Monroe was negotiating for the purchase of Florida, for he fully
realized that there could be no permanent peace along the border
as long as that province remained in Spanish hands. Doubtful of his
success, however, he took care to see that an army under Jackson was
stationed within striking distance, for there is no doubt that the
government, now that the war with England was over, was determined to
take Florida by force if it could not be obtained by purchase. Nor
could anything give Jackson keener satisfaction than the prospect of
once more getting his hands on the rich prize which he had joyfully
held for a brief moment in 1814. Indeed, he frankly expressed his
attitude when he wrote to President Monroe: “Let it be signified to
me, through any channel, that the possession of the Floridas would
be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be
accomplished.” In other words, if the government wished to seize the
province but lacked the courage to take the responsibility, Jackson was
ready to do the job himself.
But suddenly a new element was injected into the already complicated
situation. The series of revolts against Spanish rule in South America
had attracted thither European adventurers, freelances, and soldiers
of fortune of many nationalities, and these, when the revolutionary
business grew dull in other places, turned their eyes toward Florida.
It had a fertile soil, marvellous vegetation, a healthful climate,
a notoriously weak government, and, everything considered, seemed
to have been made to order for the filibusters. The first to make
the attempt to “free” Florida was a Scottish nobleman, Sir Gregor
MacGregor. No more picturesque character ever swaggered across the
pages of our history. He was a prototype of Kipling’s “The Man Who
Would Be King.” Resigning his commission in the British army, he went
to Caracas in 1811 and offered his services to the Venezuelans in their
struggle for independence. He became adjutant-general to Miranda and,
upon the capture of that ill-fated leader, repeatedly distinguished
himself in the renewed struggle under Bolivar. He led a handful of
Venezuelans from Ocumare to Barcelona in one of the most brilliant and
skilfully conducted retreats in history and, upon Venezuela achieving
her independence, was publicly thanked for his services by President
Bolivar, commissioned a general of division, and decorated with the
Order of Libertadores. But an ineradicable love of adventure ran in
his veins; so, when peace settled for a time on war-torn Venezuela
MacGregor looked elsewhere for excitement. Florida was still under the
obnoxious rule of Spain, and Florida, he decided, needed to be freed.
Early in 1817, therefore, he fitted out an expedition in Baltimore and
descended upon Fernandina, which, as I have previously remarked, is
built on the twenty-two-mile-long Amelia Island, off Florida’s upper
right-hand corner. MacGregor declared that as soon as he achieved the
independence of the province he intended to hand it over to the United
States, which was certainly thoughtful and considerate, seeing how much
the United States wanted it; but nobody seems to have believed him.
His intentions were of small consequence, however, for a few months
after he had seized the island and raised the green-cross flag, along
came another adventurer, an Englishman named Hubbard, and drove him
off. Disappointed in his Floridan ambitions, MacGregor re-entered the
service of Venezuela, and in 1819, organizing an expedition in Jamaica,
he eluded the vigilance of the British authorities and made a most
daring descent upon Puerto Bello, which he captured after a desperate
assault, though subsequently he was surprised by an overwhelming force
of Spaniards and was forced to flee. In 1821 he quitted the service of
Venezuela--then become a part of the Colombian Republic--and settled
among the Poyais Indians, a warlike tribe on the Mosquito Coast of
Nicaragua, where he obtained a grant of a tract of fertile land
and, making himself ruler of the region, assumed the title of “his
Highness the MacGregor, Cacique of Poyais.” He organized a government,
established an army, encouraged commerce and agriculture, built roads
and schools, cultivated plantations, and for nearly twenty years ruled
in middle America as an independent and enlightened sovereign. But
misfortune finally overtook him; Great Britain declared a protectorate
over his little kingdom, which was not abrogated until 1905, and its
late ruler retired to Caracas, where the Venezuelan Government granted
him a pension and restored him to his rank of general of division, and
where he died, generally respected, in the early forties.
Shortly after Hubbard had ejected MacGregor from Amelia Island, along
came one of the latter’s friends and companions in arms, Commodore
Louis de Aury, who, as I have related in “Adventurers All,” had himself
been ousted from Galveston Island by Lafitte, and kicked out Hubbard.
De Aury’s plan was to make Florida a free and independent republic,
such as her sister provinces in South America had become. But it was
not to be. The government at Washington, which had other plans for
Florida, now decided it was time to interfere, for it seemed probable
that Florida might soon be sold to the United States, provided the
spirit of revolution and independence which was rapidly stripping Spain
of her colonial possessions left her Florida to sell. Nothing was
further from the intention of the United States, therefore, than to let
these South American adventurers get a foothold in the province she had
so long had a covetous eye upon; so, in the autumn of 1817, General
Gaines was ordered to march on Fernandina and eject De Aury, while a
fleet under Commodore Henley went down the coast for the same purpose.
Henley reached there first and successfully accomplished the ejection,
and the green-cross flag of the filibusters came down for good and all.
About this time Indian depredations had recommenced along the Florida
frontier, and in November, 1817, General Gaines despatched a detachment
of troops to an Indian village called Fowltown, the headquarters of
the hostile Seminoles and Creeks. The troops approached the town at
dawn and were fired upon, the village was taken and burned, and the
United States had another Indian war upon its hands. Jackson was
immediately ordered to take command of the operations. He jumped at
the chance, for was this not the very opportunity for which he had
been longing and praying? The Indians caused him no concern, mind you;
it was the Spaniards--and Florida--that he was after. Disregarding
his instructions to raise his command from the militia of the border
States, he recruited a volunteer force from the Tennesseeans who had
served under him at the Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans and whom he
could count on to follow him anywhere, and with these veterans at his
back straightway crossed the Florida border. On the site of the Negro
Fort he built and garrisoned another, which he called Fort Gadsden--all
this in Spanish territory, mind you, though the United States was
(officially, at least) at peace with Spain. Easily dispersing the few
Seminoles who ventured to dispute his progress, he pushed southward to
St. Marks (the port of Tallahassee), where a war party of Indians, he
heard, had taken refuge. The fact that his information was incorrect
and that there were no Indians in the town did not disconcert him in
the least: he took the place, hauled down the Spanish colors, replaced
them with the stars and stripes, and left an American garrison in
occupation. Not only this, but he captured two Englishmen who had
taken refuge in the town. One was a well-known trader named Alexander
Arbuthnot, who had had commercial dealings of one sort and another with
the Indians; the other was a young officer of marines named Ambrister,
a nephew of the governor of the Bahamas, who had been suspended from
duty for a year for engaging in a duel and who had joined the Florida
Indians out of a boyish love for adventure. Though captured on Spanish
soil, Jackson ordered both men tried by court martial for inciting the
Indians to rebellion. Both were sentenced to death. Ambrister died
before a firing-party; Arbuthnot was hung from the yard-arm of one of
his own ships. Needlessly drastic and unquestionably illegal as these
executions were, they brought home to those who were plotting against
the United States that Spanish territory could not protect them.
From St. Marks Jackson struck across country to Suwanee, which was
the headquarters of the notorious Billy Bowlegs; but in the skirmish
that ensued that chieftain and his followers escaped, though, by means
of a ruse unworthy of a civilized commander, he captured two of the
most celebrated of the Seminole chieftains, Francis and Himollimico.
Seeing a vessel enter the harbor, the two chieftains, who had just
returned from a visit to England, rowed out and asked to be afforded
protection. They were courteously received, laid aside their weapons,
and went below to have a drink with the commander, when they were
seized, bound, and, upon protesting at this breach of hospitality,
were informed that they were prisoners on an American gunboat which
Jackson had despatched to patrol the coast in the hope of intercepting
fugitives. The next day the two prisoners, by orders of Jackson,
were summarily hung. By such ruthless methods as these did the grim
backwoodsman, who well deserved the title of “Old Hickory,” which his
soldiers bestowed upon him, impress on Indians and Spaniards alike
the fact that those who opposed him need expect no mercy. He had
reached Fort Gadsden on his return march when a protest against this
unwarranted invasion of Spanish territory was sent him by the governor
of Pensacola, the same place, you will remember, which he had captured
three years before. Jackson, who always carried a chip on his shoulder
and lived in hopes that some one would dare to knock it off, turned
back on the instant, occupied Pensacola for the second time, captured
the governor and his troops, deported them to Havana with a warning
never to return, and left an American garrison in occupation. He
regretted afterward, as he wrote to a friend, that he had not carried
the place by storm and hanged the governor out of hand.
In five months Jackson had broken the Indian power, established peace
along the border, and to all intents and purposes added Florida to
the Union. Though the Spanish minister at Washington (for after
the fall of Napoleon Spain resumed the foreign relations he had so
rudely interrupted) vigorously protested against this invasion of the
territory of his sovereign, he nevertheless hastened--whether it was
intended or not that his movements should be thus accelerated--to
negotiate a treaty ceding Florida to the United States in consideration
of our paying the claims held by American citizens against Spain to
the amount of five million dollars. Though the historians dismiss
the subject with the bald assertion that Florida was acquired by
purchase--which, no doubt, is technically correct--I think you will
agree with me that “conquest” is a more appropriate word and that its
conqueror was the backwoods soldier Andrew Jackson. No wonder that the
land he gave us yields so many oranges after having been fertilized
with so much blood. No wonder that it has restored so many sick men
after having swallowed up so many well ones.
THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO
THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO
It was so hot that the little group of sailors under the forward
awnings lay stretched upon the deck, panting like hunted rabbits, while
rivers of perspiration coursed down their naked chests and backs. The
unshaded portions of the deck were as hot to the touch as the top of a
stove; bubbles of pitch had formed along the seams between the planks,
and turpentine was exuding, like beads of sweat, from the spars. Though
occasional puffs of land-wind stirred the folds of the American flag
which drooped listlessly from the taffrail sufficiently to disclose
the legend _Friendship, of Salem_ in raised and gilded letters on the
stern, they brought about as much relief to the exhausted men as a
blast from an open furnace door. Even the naked Malays who were at work
under the direction of a profane and sweating first mate, transferring
innumerable sacks of pepper from a small boat to the vessel’s hold,
showed the effects of the suffocating atmosphere by performing their
task with more than ordinary listlessness and indolence.
Half a mile away the nipa-thatched huts of Qualla Battoo, built amid
a thicket of palms on the sandy shores of a cove where a mountain
torrent debouched into the sea, seemed to flicker like a scene on a
moving-picture screen in the shifting waves of heat. Immediately at
the back of the town rose the green wall of the Sumatran jungle, which
bordered the yellow beach in both directions as far as the eye could
reach. Behind this impenetrable screen of vegetation, over which the
miasma hung in wreathlike clouds, rose the purple peaks of the Bukit
Barisan Range, of which Mount Berapi, twelve thousand feet high, is
the grim and forbidding overlord. Upon this shore a mighty surf pounds
unceasingly. Farming far to seaward, the tremendous rollers come
booming in with the speed of an express train, gradually gathering
volume as they near the shore until they tower to a height of twenty
feet or more, when, striking the beach, they break upon the sands with
a roar which on still nights can be heard up-country for many miles. So
dangerous is the surf along this coast that when trading vessels drop
anchor off its towns to pick up cargoes of pepper, copra, or coffee,
they invariably send their boats ashore in charge of natives, who are
as familiar with this threatening, thunderous barrier of foam as is
a housewife with the cupboards in her kitchen. But even the Malays,
marvellously skilful boatmen as they are, can effect a landing only at
those places where the mountain streams, of which there are a great
number along the western coast of Sumatra, have melted comparatively
smooth channels through the angry surf to the open sea. The pepper,
which is one of the island’s chief articles of export, is grown on the
high table-lands in the interior and is brought down to the trading
stations on the coast by means of bamboo rafts, their navigation
through the cataracts and rapids which obstruct these mountain streams
being a perilous and hair-raising performance.
Thus it came about that while the New England merchantman rocked lazily
in the Indian Ocean swells on this scorching afternoon in February,
1831, her master, Mr. Endicott, her second mate, John Barry, and four
of her crew, were at the trading station, a short distance up the
river from Qualla Battoo, superintending the weighing of the pepper
and making sure that it was properly stowed away in the boats where
the water could not reach it, for, as Captain Endicott had learned
from many and painful experiences, the Malays are not to be trusted in
such things. Now, Captain Endicott had not traded along the coasts of
Malaysia for a dozen years without learning certain lessons by heart,
and one of them was that the lithe and sinewy brown men with whom he
was doing business were no less cruel and treacherous than the surf
that edged their shores. Hence his suspicions instantly became aroused
when he noticed that the first boat, after being loaded at the trading
station and starting for the river mouth instead of making straight for
the _Friendship_, as it should have done, stopped on its way through
the town and took aboard more men. Concluding, however, that the Malay
crew required additional oarsmen in order to negotiate the unusually
heavy surf, his suspicions were allayed and he turned again to the
business of weighing out pepper for the second boat-load, though he
took the precaution, nevertheless, of detailing two of his men to keep
their eyes on the boat and to instantly report anything which seemed
out of the ordinary.
Instead of taking on more oarsmen, as Captain Endicott had supposed,
the boat’s crew had exchanged places with double their number of
armed warriors, who, concealing their weapons, sent the boat smashing
through the wall of surf and then pulled leisurely out toward the
unsuspecting merchantman. Though the first mate, who was in charge
of the loading, remarked that the boat had an unusually large crew,
he drew the same conclusions as the captain and permitted it to come
alongside. No sooner was it made fast to the _Friendship’s_ side,
however, than the Malays, concealing their _krises_ in their scanty
clothing, began to scramble over the bulwarks, until a score or more
of them were gathered on the vessel’s decks. The mate, ever fearful
of treachery, ordered them back into their boat, but the Malays,
pretending not to understand him, scattered over the ship, staring at
the rigging and equipment with the open-mouthed curiosity of children.
So well did they play their parts, indeed, that the mate decided that
his suspicions were unfounded and turned again to the work of checking
up the bags of pepper as they came over the side. When the Malays had
satisfied themselves as to the strength and whereabouts of the crew,
whom they outnumbered three to one, they unostentatiously took the
positions their leader assigned to them. Then, choosing a moment when
the mate was leaning over the side giving orders to the men in the
boat, one of their number, moving across the deck on naked feet with
the stealth and silence of a cat, drew back his arm and with a vicious
downward sweep buried his razor-edged _kris_ between the American’s
brawny shoulders. Though mortally wounded, the mate uttered a scream
of warning, whereupon five of the sailors who had been lounging under
the forward awning, snatching up belaying-pins and capstan-bars, ran
to his assistance. But the Malays were too many for them and too well
armed, and after a brief but desperate struggle two other Americans
lay dead upon the blood-stained deck, while the other three, less
fortunate, were prisoners with a fate too horrible for words in store
for them. The four remaining seamen, who had been below, aroused by the
noise of the struggle, had rushed on deck in time to witness the fate
of their comrades. Realizing the utter helplessness of their position
and appreciating that only butchery or torture awaited them if they
remained, they burst through the ring of natives who surrounded them
and dived into the sea. They quickly discovered, however, that the
shore held no greater safety than the ship, for whenever they were
lifted on the crest of a wave they could see that the beach was lined
with armed warriors, whooping and brandishing their spears. Seeing that
to land was but to invite death in one of its most unpleasant forms,
the four swimmers held a brief consultation and then, abruptly changing
their course, struck out for a rocky promontory several miles away,
which offered them at least temporary safety, as the Malays could not
readily reach them.
In the meantime, the two seamen who had been detailed by Captain
Endicott to keep watch of the boat, observing the confusion on the
_Friendship’s_ decks and seeing the sailors jumping overboard, summoned
their commander, who quickly surmised what had happened. Endicott
realized that there was not an instant to lose. Ordering his second
mate and the four seamen into the boat which was then being loaded,
they pulled madly for the mouth of the river. Nor were they a second
too soon, for, as they swung into that reach of the river which is
bordered on either bank by the huts of the town, the Qualla Battooans
ran out and attempted to intercept them. But the Americans, spurred on
by the knowledge that death awaited them if they were captured, bent
to their oars, and, amid a rain of bullets, spears, and arrows, the
boat swept through the town as a racing shell sweeps down the Hudson at
Poughkeepsie. Though they succeeded by something akin to a miracle in
reaching the mouth of the river unharmed, it now looked as though they
would perish in the mountain-high surf, for they were ignorant of the
channel and had none of the Malay skill for handling a boat in heavy
breakers. But at this crucial moment they saw a man’s head bobbing in
the water alongside, a familiar voice hailed them in English, and a
moment later a friendly Malay named Po Adam, the rajah of a neighboring
tribe which was on none too friendly terms with the Qualla Battooans,
drew himself into the boat.
“What on earth are you doing here, Adam?” exclaimed Endicott, when he
recognized his caller from the sea. “Are you coming with us?”
“Yes, cap’n,” said the Malay; “if they kill you they must kill me
first.” Po Adam, it seemed, had come to Qualla Battoo in his armed
coasting schooner, had witnessed the capture of the American vessel,
and, fearing that the attack might be extended to him because of his
known friendship for foreigners, he had swum to the American boat. With
him for a pilot they managed, with extreme difficulty, to negotiate the
breakers, though no sooner was this danger behind them than another one
appeared in front, for the Malays, foiled in their attempt to intercept
the Americans as they passed down the river, had put off in several war
canoes, which could easily overtake them on the sea. The Americans were
defenseless, for in their haste to embark they had left their weapons
behind them. Po Adam, however, had managed to cling to his scimitar
during his swim, and this he brandished so ferociously and uttered
such appalling threats of what his tribesmen would do to the Qualla
Battooans if he were molested that they sheered off without attacking.
Realizing that it was foolhardiness to attempt to retake the
_Friendship_ with half a dozen men, Captain Endicott, after touching at
the promontory to pick up the four sailors who had jumped overboard,
regretfully laid his course for Muckie, Po Adam’s capital, twenty miles
down the coast. As he departed there rang in his ears the exultant
shouts of the Malays who were looting his beloved vessel. Turning,
he shook his fist in the direction of Qualla Battoo. “I’ll come back
again, my fine fellows,” he muttered, “and when I do you’ll wish to
Heaven that you’d never touched Americans.”
Reaching Muckie late that night, the refugees were overjoyed to find
in the harbor three American merchantmen. No sooner had Endicott
told his story to their commanders than they resolved to attempt the
recapture of the _Friendship_, for they recognized the fact that, once
the natives found that they could attack with impunity a vessel flying
the stars and stripes, no American would be safe upon those coasts.
This, remember, was in the days when we had no Asiatic squadron and
when Americans doing business in that remote quarter of the globe had,
in large measure, to settle such scores for themselves. There have,
indeed, been hundreds of occasions on these far-distant seaboards,
which the historians have either forgotten, or of which they have
never known, when American merchant sailors engaged in as desperate
actions and fought with as reckless courage against overwhelming odds
as did ever the men who wore the navy blue. This was one of those
occasions. In those days, when the fewness of prowling gunboats offered
the pirates of Malaysia many opportunities to ply their trade, all
merchantmen venturing into those waters went armed, and their crews
were as carefully trained in cutlass drill and the handling of guns
as they were in boat drill and in handling the sails. Therefore,
notwithstanding the fact that their combined crews numbered barely half
a hundred men, the three American ships which the next morning bore
down on Qualla Battoo were not to be despised.
To the message sent by the American captains to the rajah of Qualla
Battoo demanding the immediate surrender of the _Friendship_, he
returned the insolent reply: “Why don’t you come and take her--if you
can?” As soon as this message was received, the American vessels ran in
to the shore as close as they dared and, bringing every gun to bear,
opened fire upon the town, the forts at Qualla Battoo, which mounted
several heavy guns, replying without effect. Though the bombardment
destroyed a number of native huts, the American commanders quickly
recognized that it was doing no serious harm and decided to get the
business over with by making a boat attack on the _Friendship_ and
retaking her at the point of the cutlass. Three boats were accordingly
lowered and, loaded with sailors armed to the teeth and eager to avenge
their countrymen, steered toward the _Friendship_, whose bulwarks were
black with Malays. As the boats drew within range the Malays, who were
armed with muskets of an antiquated pattern, greeted them with a heavy
fire; several of the crews dropped forward, wounded, and for a moment
the progress of the boats was checked. “Give way, men! Give way all!”
bellowed the officers, and, thus steadied, the sailors bent again to
their oars. As they swung alongside the _Friendship_ the sailors at
the bow and stern of each boat held it in place with boat-hooks, while
the crews, pistols in their belts and cutlasses between their teeth,
swarmed up the side in obedience to the order: “Boarders up and away!”
They may have been amateurs at the business, these merchant seamen,
but they did the job as though they were seasoned man-of-war’s men
with “U. S.” stamped in gilt upon their hatbands. There have been few
more gallant or daring actions in the history of the sea, for the
boarders numbered less than twoscore men all told, and awaiting them on
the decks above were three hundred desperate and well-armed natives.
Though bullets and arrows and javelins were rained down upon them,
the Americans went up the side with the agility of monkeys; though
the Malays slashed at them with scimitars and _krises_ and lunged at
them with spears, the seamen, their New England fighting blood now
thoroughly aroused, would not be denied. Scrambling over the bulwarks,
they fairly hewed their way into the mass of brown men, hacking,
stabbing, shooting, cursing, cheering--a line of grim-faced fighters
sweeping forward as remorselessly as death. Before the ferocity
of their attack the Malays, courageous though they were, became
panic-stricken, broke, and ran, until, within five minutes after the
Americans had set foot upon the _Friendship’s_ decks, such of the enemy
as were not dead or wounded had leaped overboard and were swimming
for the shore. Upon examining the vessel, Captain Endicott found that
she had been rifled of everything that was portable, including twelve
thousand dollars in coin. Even the copper bolts had been taken from her
timbers and everything that could not be taken away had been wantonly
destroyed. So great was the havoc that had been wrought that it was
impossible to continue the voyage; so, after effecting temporary
repairs at Muckie, Captain Endicott and the survivors of his crew
sailed for home and, with the exception of one of them, out of this
story.
If the rajah of Qualla Battoo had been acquainted with the manner of
man who at this time occupied the White House, he would probably have
thought twice before he molested an American vessel. With far less
provocation than that given by the Malays, Andrew Jackson had virtually
exterminated the powerful nation of the Creeks; defying the power of
Spain, he had invaded the Floridas, captured Spanish forts, seized
Spanish towns, and executed Spanish subjects. In fact, he was the very
last man who could be affronted with impunity by any sovereign--much
less by the ruler of an insignificant state in Malaysia. When the
news of the attack on the _Friendship_ and the murder of her American
sailors reached Washington, the 44-gun frigate _Potomac_, Captain John
Downes, lay in New York harbor waiting to convey Martin Van Buren, the
newly appointed minister to the court of St. James, to England. But
Jackson, who always wanted quick action, ordered Captain Downes to
sail immediately for Sumatran waters and teach the Malays that, merely
because they happened to dwell at the antipodes, they could not escape
American retribution.
On the 6th of February, 1832--a year to a day after the treacherous
attack on the _Friendship_--the _Potomac_ appeared off Qualla Battoo.
As Captain Downes had planned to give the Qualla Battooans as much of
a surprise as they had given Captain Endicott, he ordered the guns
run in, the ports closed, the topmasts housed, and the Danish colors
displayed, so that to the untrained native eye the big frigate would
have the appearance of an unsuspecting merchantman. Even the officers
and men who were sent in a whale-boat to take soundings and to choose
a place for a landing were dressed in the nondescript garments of
merchant sailors, so that the hundreds of Malays who lined the shore
did not hesitate to threaten them with their weapons. John Barry,
the second mate of the _Friendship_, had come with the expedition as
a guide and from the whale-boat he had indicated to the officers the
mouth of the river, where a landing could be effected with comparative
ease. Everything being in readiness, Captain Downes issued orders that
the landing would take place at midnight. The fact was impressed upon
every one that if the Qualla Battooans were to be taken by surprise,
the strictest silence must be observed. At the hour appointed, the
men assembled at the head of the gangway on the side away from the
town and, at the whispered order, noiselessly took their places
in the waiting boats. Through a fragrance-laden darkness, under a
purple-velvet sky, the line of boats pulled silently for the shore, the
occasional creak of an oar-lock or the clank of a cutlass being drowned
by the thunder of the surf. As the keels grated on the beach, the
men jumped out and formed into divisions in the darkness, the boats,
with enough men to handle them, being directed to remain outside the
line of breakers until they were needed. No time was lost in forming
the column, which was composed of a company of marines, a division of
seamen, a division of musketeers and pikemen, and another division of
seamen, the rear being brought up by a gun crew dragging a six-pounder
which the sailors had dubbed the “Betsy Baker.”
The Qualla Battooans, who were far from being on good terms with the
neighboring tribes, had encircled their town with a chain of forts
consisting of high stockades of sharpened teakwood logs loopholed for
musketry. In the centre of each of these stockaded enclosures stood
a platform raised on stilts to a height of fifteen or twenty feet,
from which swivel-guns could sweep an attacking force and to which the
defenders could retreat for a last desperate stand in case an enemy
should succeed in taking the stockade. Barry, who was well acquainted
with the defenses of the town, had drawn a map indicating the position
of the various forts, so, as soon as the debarkation was completed,
the divisions marched off to take up their positions in front of the
forts which they had been designated to capture. To Lieutenant Huff,
commanding the division of musketeers and pikemen, had been assigned
the taking of the fort on the northern edge of the town, which was
garrisoned by a strong force of Malays under Rajah Maley Mohammed,
one of the most powerful chieftains on the west coast of Sumatra.
As the Americans stealthily approached in the hope of taking the
garrison by surprise, their presence was discovered by a sentry and
an instant later flame spurted from every loophole in the stockade as
the defenders opened fire. The Yankee sailors paused only long enough
to pour in a single volley and then, their bugles screaming the charge,
raced for the stockade gate. It was built of solid teak and defied the
efforts of the sailors to batter it down with their axes; whereupon
a marine dashed forward with a bag of powder, a fuse was hastily
attached and lighted, and when the smoke of the ensuing explosion
cleared away the gates had disappeared. Through the breach thus made,
the Americans poured and an instant later were at hand-grips with the
enemy. For twenty minutes the struggle within the stockade was a bloody
one, for the Malays fought with the courage of desperation, asking no
quarter and giving none. But their numbers were unavailing against the
discipline and determination of the Americans, who, by a series of
rushes, drove the enemy before them until they finally retreated to the
shelter of their high platform, drawing the ladders up after them. Now
the struggle entered upon its most desperate phase, for the defenders,
anticipating no mercy, prepared to sell their lives at the highest
possible price. From the bamboo poles of which the huts were built the
dexterous sailors quickly improvised ladders and, rushing forward
under cover of a heavy rifle fire, planted them against the platform on
all four sides. Then, while the riflemen picked off every defender who
ventured to expose himself, the sailors swarmed up the ladders, firing
their pistols pointblank into the savage faces which glared down upon
them from the platform’s edge. It was a perilous feat, this assault by
ladders on a platform held by a desperate and dangerous foe, but its
very daring made it successful, and almost before the Malays realized
what had happened the Americans had gained the platform and were at
their throats. It was all over save the shouting. Those of the warriors
who were not despatched by the sailors leaped from the platform only
to be shot by the Americans below. It was a bloody business. The rajah
fought with the ferocity of a Sumatran tiger, even after he was dying
from a dozen wounds, slashing with his scimitar at every American who
came within reach, until a bayonet thrust from a marine sent him to the
Moslem paradise. As he fell, a young and beautiful woman, who, from her
dress, was evidently one of his wives, sprang forward and, snatching up
the scimitar which had dropped from his nerveless fingers, attacked the
Americans like a wildcat, laying open one man’s head and slicing off
the thumb of another. The sailors, loath to fight a woman--particularly
one so young and lovely--fell back in momentary confusion, but as they
attempted to surround her, she weakened from loss of blood caused by
a stray bullet, the scimitar fell from her hand, and she fell forward
dead across the body of her husband.
While this struggle was in progress, Lieutenants Edson and Tenett, in
command of the marines, had surprised the fort in the middle of the
town, battered in the gates, and, after a brisk engagement, had routed
the garrison. The first division of seamen, under Lieutenant Pinkham,
had been ordered to take the fort in the rear of the town, but it was
so cleverly concealed in the jungle that Mr. Barry was unable to locate
it in the darkness, whereupon Pinkham joined Lieutenant Shubrick’s
command in an assault upon the most formidable fort of all, which
occupied an exceptionally strong position on the bank of the river.
Here the reigning rajah of Qualla Battoo had collected several hundred
of his best fighting men, who announced that they would die rather than
surrender. And they kept their word. By this time daybreak was at hand,
and as soon as the Americans came within range the Malays opened on
them with their swivel-guns, which were mounted on the high platform
in the centre of the stockade. Taking such shelter as they could find,
the Americans opened a brisk rifle fire, but the walls were of teak,
which turned a bullet as effectually as armor-plate, and it soon became
evident that if the place was to be taken, some other means of attack
must be adopted. Leaving sufficient men in front of the fort to keep
the Malays fully engaged, Lieutenant Shubrick with the fusileers and
the “Betsy Baker” made a détour, and, unobserved by the defenders,
succeeded in reaching the river bank at the rear of the fort. But here
the Americans met with a surprise, for, lying in the river, a few rods
off the fort, were three large and heavily armed _proas_ filled with
warriors awaiting a favorable opportunity to take a hand in the battle.
But this was just such an opportunity as the gun crew had been hoping
and praying for. Swinging their little field-piece into position, they
trained it on the crowded deck of the nearest of the pirate craft,
and the first intimation the Malays had that the Americans were in
their vicinity was when they were swept by a storm of grape which
turned their decks into a shambles. So deadly was the fire of the
American gunners that, though the Malays succeeded in getting up sail
on one of the _proas_ and running her out of the river, the crews of
the other two boats were compelled to jump overboard and swim to the
opposite bank. Before they could escape into the bush, however, they
were intercepted by a force of warriors under our old friend, Po Adam,
who, having seen the approach of the _Potomac_ and shrewdly suspecting
that she was a war-ship, had hastily collected his fighting men and,
slipping up the coast, had hovered in the jungle at the outskirts
of the town, awaiting an opportunity to assist the Americans and,
incidentally, to even up a few scores of his own.
The _proas_ thus disposed of, Lieutenant Shubrick ordered his bugler
to sound the “charge,” which was the signal agreed upon with the other
portion of his force, whereupon they were to storm the citadel from
the front while he attacked it from the rear. As the bugle sang its
piercing signal, the gunners sent a solid shot from the “Betsy Baker”
crashing into the gates of the fort, and at the same instant the whole
line raced forward at the double. Though the gates were splintered,
they were not down, but half a dozen brawny bluejackets sprang at
them with their axes, and before their thunderous blows they went
crashing in. But as the head of the storming column burst through
the passageway thus opened they were met with a blast of lead which
halted them as abruptly as though they had run against a granite wall.
A sailor spun about on his heels and collapsed, an inert heap, with a
bullet through his brain; another clapped his hand to his breast and
gazed stupidly at the ever-widening splotch of crimson on his tunic;
all down the column could be heard the never-to-be-forgotten sound of
bullets against flesh and the groans or imprecations of wounded men.
“Come on, men! Come on!” screamed the officers. “Get at the beggars!
Give ’em the bayonet! Get it over with! All together, now--here we go!”
and, themselves setting the example, they plunged through the opening,
cutlass in hand. For a few moments the battle was as desperate as any
ever waged by American arms. The cutlasses of the sailors fell like
flails, and when they rose again their burnished blades were crimson.
The marines swung their bayonets like field-hands loading hay, and at
every thrust a Malay shrieked and crumpled. Meanwhile the little squad
of artillerymen had dragged their gun to an eminence which commanded
the interior of the stockade and from this place of vantage were
sweeping bloody lanes through the crowded mass of brown men. But the
Malays were no cowards. They knew how to fight and how to die. As fast
as one man went down another sprang to take his place. The noise was
deafening: the _bang--bang--bang_ of muskets, the crack of pistols,
the rasp of steel on steel, the deep-throated hurrahs of the sailors,
the savage yells of the Malays, the groans and curses of the wounded,
the gasps of the dying, the labored breathing of struggling men, the
whole terrifying pandemonium punctuated at thirty-second intervals by
the hoarse bark of the brass field-gun. Magnificently as the Malays
fought, they could not stand against the cohesion and impetus of the
American assault, which pushed them back and carried them off their
feet as a ’varsity football team does a team of scrubs. After a quarter
of an hour of fighting the survivors of the garrison retreated to their
platform in the air, leaving the space within the stockade carpeted
with their dead and wounded. Even then the Malays never dreamed of
surrendering, but constantly called down to the Americans in broken
English to “Come and take us.” To add to the confusion, if such a thing
were possible, the portion of the stockade captured by Lieutenants Huff
and Edson had, in pursuance of orders, been set on fire. So rapidly did
the flames spread among the sun-dried, straw-thatched huts, however,
that for a few minutes it looked as though Lieutenant Shubrick’s party
would be cut off. The men handling the “Betsy Baker” having run out of
ammunition, a messenger was hastily despatched to the boats for more
and returned on a run with several bags of bullets. One of these was
stuffed into the muzzle and the little gun was trained on the Malays
who occupied every foot of the aerial retreat. When the smoke cleared
away it was seen that the bag of bullets, fired at such close range,
had created awful havoc among the defenders, for dead and dying men
were scattered everywhere. Instantly Shubrick appreciated that now was
his time to act, before the Malays had an opportunity to recover from
their confusion. “Now’s our chance, boys!” he shouted. “Let’s get up
on top there and clean out the nest of niggers.” At the words, his
bluejackets rushed forward with a cheer. Nothing could stop them. Some
ascended hastily constructed ladders; others swarmed up the poles which
supported the platform as they were accustomed to swarm up the masts at
sea, wriggling over the edge of the platform, emptying their pistols
into the snarling countenances above them, and, once on their feet,
going at the Malays with cold steel. The battle in the air was short
and savage. In five minutes not an unwounded Malay remained within the
citadel, and, amid a hurricane of cheers, the star-spangled banner was
broken out from the staff where so lately had flaunted the standard
of the rajah--the first time that our flag was ever raised over a
fortification on Asiatic soil.
By this time, the Qualla Battooans were so thoroughly demoralized that
the capture of the two remaining forts was effected with comparatively
little difficulty. The companies composing the expedition now fell in
upon the beach, and the roll was called to ascertain the casualties
and to learn if any men had been left in the jungle. It was found that
the Americans had had only two killed and eleven wounded--an amazingly
small loss in view of the desperate character of the fighting. The
Malays, on the other hand, though fighting from behind fortifications,
lost upward of four hundred men.
The next day, learning that the Malays were still defiant and that a
large force of warriors was gathering at the back of the town, Captain
Downes weighed anchor and, standing as close inshore as the water
permitted, opened fire with his heavy guns, completing the destruction
of the forts, setting fire to the town, and killing a considerable
number of warriors. For more than an hour the bombardment continued,
the American gunners choosing their marks, laying their guns, and
placing their shots with the same coolness and accuracy which, years
later, was to distinguish their successors at Santiago and Vera Cruz.
The Qualla Battooans were even more terrified by the thunder of the
_Potomac’s_ broadsides than by the havoc that they wrought, for they
had never heard big guns or seen a war-ship in action before. Soon
white flags began to appear at various spots along the beach, and when,
in acknowledgment of the signal, the bombardment ceased, a _proa_ set
out through the surf toward the frigate. As it came alongside it was
found to contain emissaries from the surviving rajahs who had come to
beg for peace. The awed and humbled chieftains passed between double
ranks of bluejackets and marines to the quarter-deck, where they were
received by Captain Downes, who was in full uniform and surrounded by
a glittering staff. Nothing was left undone to impress the Malays with
the might and majesty of the nation they had offended or their own
insignificance, they being compelled to approach the American commander
on their knees, bowing their heads to the deck at every yard. But they
had had their lesson; their insolence and haughtiness had disappeared;
all they wanted was peace--peace at any price.
The next morning the crew of the _Potomac_ were gladdened by the cheery
notes of the bo’sn’s whistle piping: “All hands up anchor for home.”
Her mission had been accomplished. As the splendid black-hulled vessel
stood out to sea under a cloud of snowy canvas, the grim muzzles of
her four and forty guns peering menacingly from her open ports, the
chastened and humbled survivors of Qualla Battoo stood on the beach
before their ruined town and watched her go. At the mouths of her
belching guns they had learned the lesson that the arm of the great
republic is very long, and that if need be it will reach half the world
around to punish and avenge.
UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR
UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR
Had you stood on the banks of the Brazos in December of the year in
which the nineteenth century became old enough to vote and looked
northeastward across the plains of central Texas, your attention
would doubtless have been attracted by a rolling cloud of dust. From
out its yellow haze would have crept in time a straggling line of
canvas-covered wagons. Iron-hard, bearded men, their faces tanned
to the color of a much-used saddle, strode beside the wheels, their
long-lashed blacksnakes cracking spasmodically, like pistol-shots,
between the horns of the plodding oxen. Weary-faced women in sunbonnets
and calico, with broods of barelegged, frowzy-headed youngsters huddled
about them, peered curiously from beneath the arching wagon-tops. A
thin fringe of scouts astride of wiry ponies, long-barrelled rifles
resting on the pommels of their saddles, rode on either flank of the
slowly moving column. Other groups of alert and keen-eyed horsemen led
the way and brought up the rear. Though these dusty migrants numbered
less than half a thousand in all, though their garments were uniform
only in their stern practicality and their shabby picturesqueness,
though their only weapons were hunting rifles and the only music
to which they marched was the rattle of harness and the creak of
axle-trees, they formed, nevertheless, an army of invasion, bent on the
conquest not of a people, however, but of a wilderness.
Who that saw that dusty column trailing across the Texan plains would
have dreamed that these gaunt and shabby men and women were destined to
conquer and civilize and add to our national domain a territory larger
than the German Empire, with Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium thrown
in? Yet that trek of the pioneers, “southwesterly by the lone star,”
was the curtain-raiser for that most thrilling of historic dramas, or
rather, melodramas: the taking of Texas.
To understand the significance of that chain of startling and
picturesque events which began with the stand of the settlers on the
Guadalupe and culminated in the victory on the San Jacinto without at
least a rudimentary knowledge of the conditions which led up to it is
as impossible as it would be to master trigonometry without a knowledge
of arithmetic. But do not worry for fear that you will be bored by the
recital; the story is punctuated much too frequently with rifle-shots
and pistol-shots for you to yawn or become sleepy-eyed.
The American colonization of Texas--then known as the province of New
Estremadura--began while Spain still numbered Mexico among her colonial
possessions. When Iturbide ended Spanish rule in Mexico, in 1821, and
thereby made himself Emperor of the third largest nation in the world
(China and Russia alone being of greater area), he promptly confirmed
the land grants which had been made by the Spanish authorities to the
American settlers in Texas, both he and his immediate successors being
only too glad to further the development of the wild and almost unknown
region above the Rio Grande by these hardy, thrifty, industrious folk
from the north. Under this official encouragement an ever-growing,
ever-widening stream of American emigration went rolling Texasward. The
forests echoed to the axe strokes of woodsmen from Kentucky; the desert
was furrowed by the ploughshares of Ohio farmers; villages sprang up
along the rivers; the rolling prairies were dotted with patches of
ripening grain. Texas quickly became the magnet which drew thousands of
the needy, the desperate, and the adventurous. Men of broken fortunes,
men of roving habits, adventurers, land speculators, disappointed
politicians, unsuccessful lawyers, men who had left their country
for their country’s good, as well as multitudes of sturdy, thrifty,
hard-working folk desirous of finding homes for their increasing
families poured into the land of promise afoot and on horseback, by
boat and wagon-train, until, by 1823, there were probably not far from
twenty thousand of these American outlanders established between the
Sabine and the Pecos.
Meanwhile the government of Mexico was beginning the quick-change act
with which it has alternately amused and exasperated and angered the
world to this day. The short-lived empire of Iturbide lasted but a
year, the Emperor meeting his end with his back to a stone wall and
his face to a firing-party. Victoria proclaimed Mexico a republic and
himself its President. Pedraza succeeded him in 1828. Then Guerrero
overthrew Pedraza, and Bustamente overthrew Guerrero, and Santa Anna
overthrew Bustamente and made himself dictator, ruling the war-racked
country with an iron hand. Now, a dictator, if he is to hold his
job, much less enjoy any peace of mind, must rule a people who,
either through fear or ignorance, are willing to forget about their
constitutional rights and obligingly refrain from asking questions.
But the American settlers in Texas, as each of the Mexican usurpers
discovered in his turn and to his very great annoyance, were not built
according to these specifications. They were not ignorant, and they
were not in the least afraid, and when the privileges they had enjoyed
were revoked or curtailed they resented it emphatically.
Alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of American settlers,
disturbed by their independence and self-reliance, and realizing that
they were daily becoming a greater menace to the dictatorial and
dishonest methods of government which prevailed, the Mexican dictators
determined to crush them before it was too late. In pursuance of this
policy they inaugurated a systematic campaign of persecution. Sixty-odd
years later the Boers adopted the same attitude toward the British
settlers in the Transvaal that the Mexicans did toward the American
settlers in Texas, and the same thing happened in both cases.
For three years after Mexico achieved its independence Texas was a
separate State of the republic, with a government of its own. But in
1824, in pursuance of this anti-American policy, it was deprived of
the privilege of self-government and added to the State of Coahuila.
Shortly after this a law was passed forbidding the further settlement
of Americans in Texas and prohibiting Americans from even trading in
that region. And, to still further harass and humiliate the Texans, a
number of penal settlements, composed of the most desperate criminals
in the Mexican prisons, were established in Texas. Heretofore the
Texans, in recognition of their services in transforming Texas from a
savage wilderness into a civilized and prosperous province, had enjoyed
immunity from taxes, but now custom-houses were established and the
settlers were charged prohibitive duties even on the necessities of
life. When they protested against so flagrant an injustice the Mexican
Government answered them by blockading their ports. Heavy garrisons
were now quartered in the principal towns, the civil authorities were
defied, and the settlers were subjected to the tyranny of unrestrained
military rule. Still the Texans did not offer armed resistance. Their
tight-drawn patience snapped, however, when, in 1834, Santa Anna,
determined to crush for good and all the sturdy independence which
animated them, ordered his brother-in-law, General Cos, to enter Texas
with a force of fifteen hundred men and disarm the Americans, leaving
only one rifle to every five hundred inhabitants. That order was all
that was needed to fan the smouldering embers of Texan resentment into
the fierce flame of armed revolt. Were they to be deprived of those
trusty rifles which they had brought with them on their long pilgrimage
from the north, which were their only resource for game, their only
defense against Indians, their only means of resistance to oppression?
Those were the questions that the settlers asked themselves, and they
answered them at Gonzales, on the banks of the Guadalupe.
At Gonzales was a small brass field-piece which had been given to the
settlers as a protection from the Indians. A detachment of Mexican
cavalry, some eightscore strong, was ordered to go to the town, capture
the cannon, and disarm the inhabitants. News of their coming preceded
them, however, and when the troopers reached the banks of the river
opposite the town they found that all the boats had been taken to
the other side, while the cannon which they had come to capture was
drawn up in full view with a placard hanging from it. The placard bore
the ominous invitation: “Come and take it.” The Mexican commander,
spurring his horse to the edge of the river, insolently called upon
the inhabitants to give up their arms. It was the same demand, made
for the same purpose, which an officer in a scarlet coat had made of
another group of Americans, threescore years before, on the village
green at Lexington. It was the same demand! And the same answer was
given: “Come and take our weapons--if you can!” Though the Mexican
officer had a force which outnumbered the settlers almost ten to one,
he prudently decided to wait, for even in those days the fame of the
Texan riflemen had spread across the land.
Meanwhile horsemen had carried the news of the raid on Gonzales to
the outlying ranches and soon the settlers came pouring in until by
nightfall they very nearly equalled the soldiery in number. Knowing
the moral effect of getting in the first blow, they slipped across the
river in the dark and charged the Mexican camp with an impetuosity and
fierceness which drove the troopers back in panic-stricken retreat.
As the Texans were going into action a parson who accompanied them
shouted: “Remember, men, that we’re fighting for our liberty! Our
wives, our children, our homes, our country are at stake! The strong
arm of Jehovah will lead us on to victory and to glory! Come on, men!
Come on!”
The news of this victory, though insignificant in itself, was as
kindling thrown on the fires of insurrection. The settlers in Texas
rose as one. In October, 1835, in a pitched battle near the Mission
of the Immaculate Conception, outside of San Antonio, ninety-four
Texan farmers, fresh from the plough, whipped four times that number
of Mexicans. In December, after a five days’ siege, the Alamo, in San
Antonio, was carried by storm, General Cos and fourteen hundred Mexican
regulars, with twenty-one pieces of artillery, surrendering to less
than four hundred Texans. By Christmas of 1835 Texas was left without
an armed enemy within her borders.
When word was brought to Santa Anna that the garrison of the Alamo
had surrendered, he behaved like a madman. With clinched fists and
uplifted arms he swore by all the saints in the calendar and all the
devils in hell that he would never unbuckle his sword-belt until Texas
was once again a wilderness and every _gringo_ settler was a fugitive,
a prisoner, or a corpse. As it was at San Antonio that the Mexicans
had suffered their most humiliating defeat, so it was San Antonio that
the dictator chose as the place where he would wash out that defeat in
blood, and on the 22d of February, 1836, he appeared before the city at
the head of six thousand troops--the flower of the Mexican army. After
their capture of San Antonio the Texans, most of whom were farmers,
had returned to their homes and their crops, Colonel W. Barrett Travis
being left to hold the town with only one hundred and forty-five men.
With him were Davy Crockett, the stories of whose exploits on the
frontier were already familiar in every American household, Bonham,
the celebrated scout and Indian fighter, and James Bowie, who, in a
duel on the Natchez River bar, had made famous the terrible long-bladed
knife which his brother Rezin had made from a blacksmith’s file. A few
days later thirty-seven brave hearts from Goliad succeeded in breaking
through the lines of the besiegers, bringing the total strength of the
garrison up to one hundred and eighty-three. Surrounding them was an
army of six thousand!
The story of the last stand in the Alamo has been told so often that
I hesitate to repeat it here. Yet it is a tale of which Americans can
never tire any more than they can tire of the story of Jones and the
_Bonhomme Richard_, or of Perry at Lake Erie. The Texans, too few in
numbers to dream of defending the town, withdrew into the Alamo, an
enormously thick-walled building, half fortress and half church, which
derived its name from being built in a clump of _álamos_ or cottonwood
trees. For eleven days the Mexicans pounded the building with artillery
and raked it with rifle fire; for eleven days the Texans held them
back in that historic resistance whose details are so generally and
so uncertainly known. Day after day the defenders strained their eyes
across the prairie in search of the help that never came. Day after
day the blood-red flag that signified “No quarter” floated above the
Mexican lines, while from the walls of the Alamo flaunted defiantly the
flag with a single star.
At sunset on the 4th of March the Mexican bombardment abruptly ceased,
but no one knew better than Travis that it was but the lull which
preceded the breaking of the storm. Drawing up his men in the great
chapel, Travis drew a line across the earthen floor with his sword.
“Men,” he said, “it’s all up with us. A few more hours and we shall
probably all be dead. There’s no use hoping for help, for no force that
our friends could send us could cut its way through the Mexican lines.
So there’s nothing left for it but to stay here and go down fighting.
When the greasers storm the walls kill them as they come and keep on
killing them until none of us are left. But I leave it to every man to
decide for himself. Those who wish to go out and surrender may do so
and I shall not reproach them. As for me, I shall stay here and die for
Texas. Those who wish to stay with me will step across this line.”
There was not so much as a flicker of hesitation. The defenders
moved across the line as one. Even the wounded staggered over with
the others, and those who were too badly wounded to walk dragged
themselves across on hands and knees. Bowie, who was ill with fever,
lay on his cot, too weak to move. “Boys,” he called feebly, “boys, I
don’t believe I can get over alone ... won’t some of you help me?” So
they carried him across the line, bed and all. It was a picture to
stir the imagination, to send the thrills of patriotism chasing up and
down one’s spine: the gloomy chapel with its adobe walls and raftered
ceiling; the line of stern-faced, powder-grimed men in their tattered
frontier dress, crimsoned bandages knotted about the heads of many of
them; the fever-racked but indomitable Bowie stretched upon his cot;
the young commander--for Travis was but twenty-seven--striding up and
down, in his hand a naked sword, in his eyes the fire of patriotism.
On the morning of the 6th of March, before the sun had risen, Santa
Anna launched his grand assault. Their bugles sounding the ominous
notes of the _degüello_, which signified that no quarter would be
given, the Mexican infantry, provided with scaling-ladders, swept
forward at the double. Behind them rode the cavalry, with orders to
sabre any man who flinched. As the Mexican columns came within range
the Texans met them with a blast of lead which shrivelled and scattered
them as the breath of winter shrivels and scatters the autumn leaves.
The men behind the walls of the Alamo were master marksmen who had
taken their degree in shooting from the stern college of the frontier,
and they proved their marvellous proficiency that day. Crockett and
Bonham aimed and fired as fast as rifles could be loaded and passed up
to them, and at every spurt of flame a little, brown-faced man would
drop with a crimson patch on the breast of his tunic or a round blue
hole in his forehead. Any troops on earth would have recoiled in the
face of that deadly fire, and Santa Anna’s were no exception. But
the cavalry rode into them and at the point of their sabres forced
them again to the attack. Again the shattered regiments advanced and
attempted to place their ladders against the walls, but once more the
sheer ferocity of the Texan defense sent them reeling back, bleeding
and gasping. But there was a limit even to the powers of resistance
of the Texans. The powder in their horns ran low; their arms grew
weak from slaying. So, when the wave of brown-skinned soldiery rolled
forward once again over its carpet of corpses, it topped and overflowed
the desperately defended walls. The Texans, whose ammunition was
virtually exhausted, were beaten back by sheer weight of numbers, but
they rallied in the patio and, under the sky of Texas, made their
final stand. What happened afterward is, and always must be, a matter
of speculation. No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of
victims is a matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred
and eighty-three defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some
assert that one woman escaped; some say two; others say none. Some
declared that a negro servant got away; others declare with equal
positiveness that he did not. Some state that half a dozen Americans
stood at bay with their backs to the wall, Crockett among them. That
the Mexican general, Castrillon, offered them their lives if they would
surrender, and that, when they took him at his word, he ordered them
shot down like dogs. (Since then a Mexican’s word has never been good
for anything in Texas.) All we do know with any certainty of what
went on within those blood-bespattered walls is that every American
died fighting. Travis, revolver in one hand and sword in the other,
went down amid a ring of men that he had slain. Bowie, propped on his
pillows, shot two soldiers who attempted to bayonet him as he lay
all but helpless and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of
another before they could finish him. Crockett, so the Mexicans related
afterward, fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was killed
against the wall, but to get at him the Mexicans had to scramble over
a heap of their own dead. No one will ever know how many of the enemy
each of these raging, fighting, cornered men sent down the long and
gloomy road before he followed them. The pavement of the patio was
scarlet. The dead lay piled in heaps. Not an American remained alive.
Death and Santa Anna held the place. As the inscription on the monument
which was raised in later years to the defenders reads: “Thermopylæ had
her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none.” But before they died,
the ninescore men who laid down their lives for Texas sent _sixteen
hundred_ Mexicans to their last accounting.
By order of Santa Anna, the bodies of the Texans were collected in a
huge pile and burned, while the Mexican dead--sixteen hundred of them,
please remember--were buried in the local cemetery. As Bowie’s body
was brought out, General Cos remarked: “He was too brave a man to be
burned like a dog--but never mind, throw him in.” As the Sabbath sun
sank slowly into the west the smoke of the funeral pyre rose against
the blood-red sky like a column draped in mourning. It marked something
more than the end of a band of heroes; it marked the end of Mexican
dominion above the Rio Grande.
[Illustration: Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and
plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another.]
While Santa Anna was besieging the Alamo, General Urrea invaded eastern
Texas for the purpose of capturing San Patricio, Refugio, and Goliad
and thus stamping out the last embers of insurrection. It was not a
campaign; it was a butchery. The little garrison of San Patricio was
taken by surprise and every man put to death. At Refugio, however, a
force of little more than a hundred men under Colonel Ward repulsed
the Mexicans, whose loss in killed and wounded was double the entire
number of the defenders. A few days later, however, Ward and his
men, while falling back, were surrounded and taken prisoners. When
Urrea’s column appeared before Goliad, Colonel Fannin, whose force
was outnumbered six to one, ordered a retreat, feeling confident
that the Mexicans, for whose fighting abilities the Texans had the
utmost contempt, would not dare to follow them. But the Texans made
the fatal mistake of underrating their adversaries, for, before they
had fallen back a dozen miles, they found themselves hemmed in by two
thousand Mexicans. Escape was out of the question, so Fannin formed
his three hundred men in hollow square and prepared to put up one of
those fight-till-the-last-man-falls resistances for which the Texans
had become famous. Being cut off from water, however, and with a
third of his men wounded, he realized that his chances of success
were represented by a minus sign; so, when the Mexican commander, who
had been heavily reinforced, offered to parole both officers and men
and return them to the United States if they would surrender, Fannin
accepted the offer and ordered his men to stack their arms. The terms
of the surrender were written in both English and Spanish, and were
signed by the ranking officers of both forces with every formality.
The Texan prisoners were marched back under guard to Goliad, the town
they had so recently evacuated, and were confined in the old fort,
where they were joined a few days later by Colonel Ward’s command, who,
as you will remember, had also been captured. On the night of the 26th
of March a despatch rider rode into Urrea’s camp bearing a message from
Santa Anna. It contained an order for the murder of all the prisoners.
The next day was Palm Sunday. At dawn the Texans were awakened and
ordered to form ranks in the courtyard. They were then divided into
four parties and marched off in different directions under heavy guard.
They had not proceeded a mile across the prairies before they were
halted and their captors deliberately poured volley after volley into
them until not a Texan was left standing. Then the cavalry rode over
the corpse-strewn ground, hacking with their sabres at the dead. Upward
of four hundred Texans were slaughtered at Goliad. The defenders of the
Alamo died fighting with weapons in their hands, but these men were
unarmed and defenseless prisoners, butchered in cold blood in one of
the most atrocious massacres of history.
With the extermination of the Texan garrisons, Santa Anna complacently
assured himself that his work in the north was finished and prepared
to return to the capital, where he was badly needed. It is never safe,
you see, for a dictator to leave the chair of state for long, else he
is likely to return and find a rival sitting in it. Now, however,
Santa Anna felt that the Texan uprising was, to make use of a slangy
but expressive phrase, all over but the shouting. But the Texans, as
stout old John Paul Jones would have put it, had only just begun to
fight. Learning that a force of Texan volunteers was mobilizing upon
the San Jacinto, the “Napoleon of the West,” as Santa Anna modestly
described himself, decided to delay his departure long enough to invade
the country north of Galveston and put the finishing touches to the
subjugation of Texas by means of a final carnival of blood and fire.
Theoretically, everything favored the dictator. He had money; he had
ample supplies of arms and ammunition; he had a force of trained and
seasoned veterans far outnumbering any with which the Texans could
oppose him. It was to be a veritable picnic of a campaign, a sort of
butchers’ holiday. In making his plans, however, Santa Anna failed to
take a certain gentleman into consideration. The name of that gentleman
was Sam Houston.
The chronicles of our frontier record the name of no more picturesque
and striking figure than Houston. The fertile brain of George A.
Henty could not have made to order a more satisfactory or wholly
improbable hero. Though his exploits are a part of history, they read
like the wildest fiction. That is why, perhaps, the dry-as-dust
historians make so little mention of him. The incidents in his life
would provide a moving-picture company with material for a year. Born
in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his father, who had been an
officer in the Revolution, answered to the last roll-call when young
Sam had barely entered his teens. The support of a large and growing
family thus falling upon the energetic shoulders of Mrs. Houston,
she packed her household goods in a prairie-schooner and moved with
her children to Tennessee, then upon the very edge of civilization.
Here Sam, who had learned his “three R’s” in such poor schools as the
Virginia of those early days afforded, attended a local academy for a
time. Translations of the classics having fallen into his hands, his
imagination was captured by the exploits of the heroes of antiquity,
and he asked permission of the principal to study Latin, which, for
some unexplainable reason, was curtly refused him. Whereupon he walked
out of the academy, declaring that he would never repeat another lesson.
His family, who had scant sympathy with his romantic fancies, procured
him a job as clerk in a crossroads store. Within a fortnight he was
missing. After some months of anxiety his relatives learned that he
was living among the Cherokee Indians across the Tennessee. When one of
his brothers attempted to induce him to return home, young Sam answered
that he preferred measuring deer tracks to measuring tape, and that, if
he was not permitted to study Latin in the academy, he could at least
dig it out for himself in the freedom of the woods. Houston dwelt for
several years with his Cherokee friends, eventually being adopted as
a son by the chieftain Oolooteka. Upon the outbreak of our second war
with Great Britain he enlisted in the American army. Though his friends
remonstrated with him for entering the army as a private soldier, his
mother was made of different stuff. As he was leaving for the front she
took down his father’s rifle and, with tear-dimmed eyes, handed it to
her son. “Here, my boy,” she said bravely, though her voice quavered,
“take this rifle and never disgrace it. Remember that I would rather
that all my sons should lie in honorable graves than that one of them
should turn his back to save his life. Go, and God be with you, but
never forget that, while my door is always open to brave men, it is
always shut to cowards.”
Houston quickly climbed the ladder of promotion, obtaining a commission
within a year after he had enlisted as a private. He first showed the
stern stuff of which he was made when taking part in General Jackson’s
campaign against the Creek Indians. His thigh pierced by an arrow
during the storming of the Indian breastworks at Tohopeka, Houston
asked a fellow officer to draw it out. But it was sunk so deeply in the
flesh that the attempt to extract it brought on an alarming flow of
blood, whereupon the officer refused to proceed, fearing that Houston
would bleed to death. Thereupon the fiery youngster drew his sword.
“Draw it out or I’ll run you through!” he said. Out the arrow came.
General Jackson, who had witnessed the incident and had noted the
seriousness of the young officer’s wound, ordered him to the rear, but
Houston, mindful of his mother’s parting injunction, disregarded the
order and plunged again into the thick of the battle. It was a breach
of discipline, however, to which Andrew Jackson shut his eyes.
Opportunity once more knocked loudly at young Houston’s door when the
Creeks made their final stand at Horseshoe Bend. After the main body
of the Indians had been destroyed, a party of warriors barricaded
themselves in a log cabin built over a ravine in such a situation that
the guns could not be brought to bear. The place must be taken by
storm, and Jackson called for volunteers. Houston was the only man who
responded. Snatching a rifle from a soldier, he shouted, “Come on, men!
Follow me!” and dashed toward the cabin. But no one had the courage to
follow him into the ravine of death. Running in zigzags, to disconcert
the Indian marksmen, he actually reached the cabin before he fell with
a shattered arm and two rifle-bullets through his shoulder. It was just
the sort of deed to win the heart of the grim old hero of New Orleans,
who until his death remained one of Houston’s staunchest friends and
admirers.
Seeing but scant prospects of promotion in the piping times of peace
which now ensued, Houston resigned from the army, took up the study of
law, and was admitted to the bar within a year from the time he opened
his first law book. He practised for a few years with marked success,
gave up the law for the more exciting field of politics, was elected
to Congress when only thirty, and four years later became Governor of
Tennessee. As the result of an unhappy marriage, and deeply wounded
by the outrageous and baseless accusations made by his political
opponents, he resigned the governorship and went into voluntary exile.
In his trouble he turned his face toward the wigwam of his adopted
father, Oolooteka, who had become the head chief of his tribe and had
moved from the banks of the Tennessee to the falls of the Arkansas.
Though eleven eventful years had passed, the old chiefs affection for
his white son had not diminished, and the exile found a warm welcome
awaiting him in the wigwams and beside the council-fires of his
adopted people. Learning of the frauds by which the Indian agents were
enriching themselves at the expense of the nation’s wards, Houston,
who had adopted Indian dress, went to Washington and laid the facts
before Secretary Calhoun, who, instead of thanking him, rebuked him for
presuming to appear before him in the dress of an Indian. Thereupon
Houston turned his back on the secretary, and went straight to his
old-time friend, President Jackson, who promptly saw to it that the
guilty officials were punished. When the story of Calhoun’s criticism
of Houston’s costume was repeated to the President, that rough old
soldier remarked dryly: “I’m glad there is one man of my acquaintance
who was made by the Almighty and not by the tailor.”
After three years of forest life among the Indians Houston decided
to emigrate to Texas and become a ranchman, setting out with a few
companions in December, 1832, for San Antonio. The romantic story of
Houston’s self-imposed exile had resulted in making him a national
figure, and the news that he had come to Texas spread among the
settlers like fire in dry grass. Before reaching Nacogdoches he learned
that he had been unanimously elected a member of the convention which
had been called to meet at Austin in the spring of 1833 to draft a
constitution for Texas. From that time onward his story is that of
his adopted country. When the rupture with Mexico came, in 1835, as a
result of the attempt to disarm the settlers at Gonzales, Houston was
chosen commander of the volunteer forces to be raised in eastern Texas,
and after the battle at the Mission of the Immaculate Conception he was
appointed commander-in-chief of the Texan army.
When Santa Anna, flushed by his bloody successes at the Alamo and
Goliad, started to invade central Texas, in the spring of 1836,
Houston, who had been able to raise a force of barely five hundred
untrained and ill-armed men, sullenly retreated before the advance of
the dictator. On the 18th of April, however, his plan of campaign was
suddenly reversed by the capture of two Mexicans, from whom he learned
what he had not positively known before: that Santa Anna himself was
with the advance column and that he was temporarily cut off from the
other divisions of his army. The chance for which Houston was waiting
had come, and he seized it before it could get away. If Texas was to
be free, if the Lone Star flag and not the flag with the emblem of
the serpent and the buzzard was to wave over the region above the Rio
Grande, it was now or never. There were no half-way measures with Sam
Houston; he determined to stake everything upon a single throw. If he
won, Texas would be free; if he lost he and his men could only go down
fighting, as their fellows had gone before them. Pushing on to a point
near the mouth of the San Jacinto, where it empties into the Bay of
Galveston, he carefully selected the spot for his last stand, mounted
the two brass cannon known as “the Twin Sisters,” which had been
presented to the Texans by Northern sympathizers, and sat down to wait
for the coming of “the Napoleon of the West.” On the morning of the
20th of April his pickets fell back before the Mexican advance, and the
two great antagonists, Houston and Santa Anna, at last found themselves
face to face. The dictator had with him fifteen hundred men; Houston
had less than half that number--but the Texans boasted that “two to one
was always fair.”
At daybreak on the 21st Houston sent for his chief of scouts, the
famous Deaf Smith,[D] and ordered him to choose a companion, take axes,
and secretly destroy the bridge across the San Jacinto. As the bridge
was the only means of retreat for miles around, this drastic step meant
utter destruction to the conquered. Talk about Cortes burning his
boats behind him! He showed not a whit more courage than did Houston
when he destroyed the bridge across the San Jacinto. At 3 o’clock in
the afternoon he quietly paraded his little army behind the low range
of hills which screened them from the enemy, who were still drowsing
in their customary siesta. At this psychological moment Deaf Smith,
following to the letter the instructions Houston had given him, tore
up on a reeking horse, waving his axe above his head, and shouted:
“Vince’s Bridge is down! We’ve got to fight or drown!” That was the
word for which Houston had been waiting. Instantly he ordered his whole
line to advance. The only music of the Texans was a fife and a drum,
the musicians playing them into action to the rollicking tune of “Come
to the Bower.” And it was no bower of roses, either. As they swept
into view, rifles at the trail and moving at the double, the Mexicans,
though startled at the unexpectedness of the attack, met them with a
raking fire of musketry. But the sight of the brown-faced men, and of
the red-white-and-green banner which flaunted above them, infuriated
the Texans to the point of frenzy. Losing all semblance of formation,
they raced forward as fast as they could put foot to ground.
In front of them rode the herculean Houston, a striking figure on his
white horse. “Come on, boys!” he thundered. “Get at ’em! Get at ’em!
Texans, Texans, follow me!” And follow him they did, surging forward
with the irresistibility of a tidal wave. “Remember the Alamo!” they
roared. “Remember Goliad! Remember Travis! Remember Jim Bowie! Remember
Davy Crockett! Kill the damned greasers! Cut their hearts out! Kill
’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”
In the face of the maddened onslaught the Mexican line crumbled like
a hillside before the stream from a hydraulic nozzle. Before the
demoralized Mexicans had time to realize what had happened the Texans
were in their midst. Many of them were “two-gun men,” who fought with
a revolver in each hand--and at every shot a Mexican fell. Others
avenged the murdered Bowie with the wicked knife which bore his name,
slashing and ripping and stabbing with the long, savage blades until
they looked like poleaxe men in an abattoir. In vain the terrified
Mexicans threw down their arms and fell upon their knees, pattering
out prayers in Spanish and calling in their broken English: “Me no
Alamo! Me no Goliad!” Within five minutes after the Texans had come
to hand-grips with their foe the battle had turned into a slaughter.
Houston was shot through the ankle and his horse was dying, but man and
horse struggled on. Deaf Smith drove his horse into the thick of the
fight and, as it fell dead beneath him, he turned his long-barrelled
rifle into a war-club and literally smashed his way through the Mexican
line, leaving a trail of men with broken skulls behind him. An old
frontiersman named Curtis went into action carrying two guns. “The
greasers killed my son and my son-in-law at the Alamo,” he shouted,
“and I’m going to get two of ’em before I die, and if I get old Santa
Anna I’ll cut a razor-strop from his back.”
The commander of one of the Mexican regiments attempted to stem the
tide of defeat by charging the Texan line at its weakest point with
five hundred men. Houston, instantly appreciating the peril, dashed
in front of his men. “Come on, my brave fellows!” he shouted, “your
general leads you!” They met the charging Mexicans half-way, stopped
them with a withering volley, and then finished the business with the
knife. Only thirty-two of the five hundred Mexicans were left alive to
surrender. Everywhere sounded the grunt of blows sent home, the scream
of wounded men, the choking sobs of the dying, the _crack-crack-crack_
of rifle and revolver, the grating rasp of steel on steel, the harsh,
shrill orders of the officers, the trample of many feet, and, above
all, the deep-throated, menacing cry of the avenging Texans: “Remember
the Alamo! Remember Goliad! Kill the greasers! Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill
’em!”
In fifteen minutes the battle of the San Jacinto was over, and all
that was left of Santa Anna’s army of invasion was a panic-stricken
mob of fugitives flying blindly across the prairie. Hard on their
heels galloped the Texan cavalry, cutting down the stragglers with
their sabres and herding the bulk of the flying army toward the river
as cow-punchers herd cattle into a corral. And the bridge was gone!
Before the Mexicans rolled the deep and turbid San Jacinto; coming up
behind them were the blood-crazed Texans. It was death on either hand.
Some of them spurred their horses into the river, only to be picked
off with rifle-bullets as they tried to swim across. Others threw down
their weapons and waited stolidly for the fatal stroke or shot. It was
a bloody business. Modern history records few, if any, more sweeping
victories. Of Santa Anna’s army of something over fifteen hundred men
six hundred and thirty were killed, two hundred and eight wounded, and
seven hundred and thirty taken prisoners.
The finishing touch was put to Houston’s triumph on the following
morning when a scouting party, scouring the prairie in search of
fugitives, discovered a man in the uniform of a common soldier
attempting to escape on hands and knees through the high grass. He
was captured and marched nine miles to the Texan camp, plodding on
foot in the dust in front of his mounted captors. When he lagged one
of them would prick him with his lance point until he broke into a
run. As the Texans rode into camp with their panting and exhausted
captive, the Mexican prisoners excitedly exclaimed: “_El Presidente!
El Presidente!_” It was Santa Anna, dictator of Mexico--a prisoner in
the hands of the men whom he had boasted that he would make fugitives,
prisoners, or corpses. Lying under the tree where he had spent the
night, the wounded Houston received the surrender of “the Napoleon of
the West.” The war of independence was over. Texas was a republic in
fact as well as in name, and the hero of the San Jacinto became its
president. The defenders of the Alamo and Goliad were avenged. From the
Sabine to the Rio Grande the lone-star flag flew free.
THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE
THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE
This is the forgotten story of the greatest ride. The history of the
nation has been punctuated with other great rides, it is true. Paul
Revere rode thirty miles to rouse the Middlesex minutemen and save from
capture the guns and powder stored at Concord; Sheridan rode the twenty
miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek and by his thunderous “Turn, boys,
turn--we’re going back!” saved the battle--and the names of them both
are immortalized in verse that is more enduring than iron. Whitman, the
missionary, rode four thousand miles and saved us an empire, and his
name is not known at all.
Though there were other actors in the great drama which culminated in
the grim old preacher’s memorable ride--suave, frock-coated diplomats
and furtive secret agents and sun-bronzed, leather-shirted frontiersmen
and bearded factors of the fur trade--the story rightfully begins and
ends with Indians. There were four of them, all chieftains, and the
beaded patterns on their garments of fringed buckskin and the fashion
in which they wore the feathers in their hair told the plainsmen as
plainly as though they had been labelled that they were listened to
with respect in the councils of the Flathead tribe, whose tepees were
pitched in the far nor’west. They rode their lean and wiry ponies
up the dusty, unpaved thoroughfare in St. Louis known as Broadway
one afternoon in the late autumn of 1832. Though the St. Louis of
three quarters of a century ago was but an outpost on civilization’s
firing-line and its six thousand inhabitants were accustomed to seeing
the strange, wild figures of the plains, the sudden appearance of these
Indian braves, who came riding out of nowhere, clad in all the barbaric
panoply of their rank, caused a distinct flutter of curiosity.
The news of their arrival being reported to General Clarke, the
military commandant, he promptly assumed the ciceronage of the
bewildered but impassive red men. Having, as it chanced, been an Indian
commissioner in his earlier years, he knew the tribe well and could
speak with them in their own guttural tongue. Beyond vouchsafing the
information that they came from the upper reaches of the Columbia,
from the country known as Oregon, and that they had spent the entire
summer and fall upon their journey, the Indians, with characteristic
reticence, gave no explanation of the purpose of their visit. After
some days had passed, however, they confided to General Clarke that
rumors had filtered through to their tribe of the white man’s “Book
of Life,” and that they had been sent to seek it. To a seasoned old
frontiersman like the general, this was a novel proposition to come
from a tribe of remote and untamed Indians. He treated the tribal
commissioners, nevertheless, with the utmost hospitality, taking them
to dances and such other entertainments as the limited resources of
the St. Louis of those days permitted, and, being himself a devout
Catholic, to his own church. Thus passed the winter, during which
two of the chiefs died, as a result, no doubt, of the indoor life
and the unaccustomed richness of the food. When the tawny prairies
became polka-dotted with bunch-grass in the spring, the two survivors
made preparations for their departure, but, before they left,
General Clarke, who had taken a great liking to these dignified and
intelligent red men, insisted on giving them a farewell banquet. After
the dinner the elder of the chiefs was called upon for a speech. You
must picture him as standing with folded arms, tall, straight and of
commanding presence, at the head of the long table, a most dramatic and
impressive figure in his garments of quill-embroidered buckskin, with
an eagle feather slanting in his hair. He spoke with the guttural but
sonorous eloquence of his people, and after each period General Clarke
translated what he had said to the attentive audience of army officers,
government officials, priests, merchants, and traders who lined the
table.
“I have come to you, my brothers,” he began, “over the trail of many
moons from out of the setting sun. You were the friends of my fathers,
who have all gone the long way. I have come with an eye partly open
for my people, who sit in darkness. I go back with both eyes closed.
How can I go back blind, to my blind people? I made my way to you with
strong arms through many enemies and strange lands that I might carry
much back to them. I go back with both arms broken and empty. Two
fathers came with us; they were the braves of many winters and wars. We
leave them asleep here by your great water and wigwams. They were tired
in many moons, and their moccasins wore out.
“My people sent me to get the white man’s Book of Life. You took me to
where you allow your women to dance as we do not ours, and the Book
was not there. You took me to where they worship the Great Spirit with
candles, and the Book was not there. You showed me images of the good
spirits and pictures of the good land beyond, but the Book was not
among them to tell us the way. I am going back the long and sad trail
to my people in the dark land. You make my feet heavy with gifts, and
my moccasins will grow old in carrying them; yet the Book is not among
them. When I tell my poor, blind people, after one more snow, in the
big council that I did not bring the Book, no word will be spoken by
our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go
out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go on a
long path to other hunting-grounds. No white man will go with them and
no white man’s Book to make the way plain. I have no more words.”
Just as the rude eloquence of the appeal touched the hearts of the
frontier dwellers who sat about the table in St. Louis, so, when it was
translated and published in the Eastern papers, it touched the hearts
and fired the imaginations of the nation. In a ringing editorial _The
Christian Advocate_ asked: “Who will respond to go beyond the Rocky
Mountains and carry the Book of Heaven?” And this was the cue for the
missionary whose name was Marcus Whitman to set foot upon the boards of
history.
His preparation for a frontiersman’s life began early for young
Whitman. Born in Connecticut when the eighteenth century had all
but run its course, he was still in his swaddling-clothes when his
parents, falling victims to the prevalent fever for “going west,”
piled their lares and penates into an ox-cart and trekked overland to
the fertile lake region of central New York, Mrs. Whitman making the
four-hundred-mile journey on foot, with her year-old babe in her arms.
Building a cabin with the tree trunks cleared from the site, they
began the usual pioneer’s struggle for existence. His father dying
before he had reached his teens, young Marcus was sent to live with
his grandfather in Plainfield, Mass., where he remained ten years,
learning his “three R’s” in such schools as the place afforded, his
education later being taken in hand by the local parson. His youth was
passed in the usual life of the country boy; to drive home the cows
and milk them, to chop the wood and carry the water and do the other
household chores, and, later on, to plough and plant the fields--a
training which was to prove invaluable to him in after years, on
the shores of another ocean. I expect that the strong, sturdy boy of
ceaseless activity and indomitable will--the Plainfield folk called
him mischievous and stubborn--who was fonder of hunting and fishing
than of algebra and Greek, must have caused his old grandfather a
good deal of worry; though, from all I can learn, he seems to have
been a straightforward and likable youngster. Very early he set his
heart on entering the ministry; but, owing to the dissuasions of his
relatives and friends, who knew how pitifully meagre was a clergyman’s
living in those days, he reluctantly abandoned the idea and took up
instead the study of medicine. After practising in Canada for several
years, he returned to central New York, where, with but little help,
he chopped a farm out of the wilderness, cleared it, and cultivated
it, built a grist-mill and a sawmill, and at the same time acted as
physician for a district fifty miles in radius. He was in the heyday
of life, prosperous, and engaged to the prettiest girl in all the
countryside, when, reading in the local paper the appeal made by the
Indian chieftains in far-away St. Louis, the old crusading fervor that
had first turned his thoughts toward the ministry, flamed up clear and
strong within him, and, putting comfort, prosperity, everything behind
him, he applied to the American Board for appointment as a missionary
to Oregon. Such a request from a man so peculiarly qualified for a
wilderness career as Whitman could not well be disregarded, and in due
time he received an appointment to go to the banks of the Columbia,
investigate, return, and report. The wish of his life had been granted:
he had become a skirmisher in the army of the church.
Accompanied by a fellow missionary, Whitman penetrated into the Western
wilderness as far as the Wind River Mountains, near the present
Yellowstone Park. After familiarizing themselves through talks with
traders, trappers, and Indians with the conditions which prevailed
in the valley of the Columbia, Whitman and his companion returned
to Boston, and upon the strength of their report the American Board
decided to lose no time in occupying the field. Ordered to establish a
station on the Columbia, in the vicinity of Fort Walla Walla, then a
post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Whitman turned the long and arduous
trip across the continent into a wedding journey. The conveyances
used and the roundabout route taken by the bridal couple strikingly
emphasize the primitive internal communications of the period. They
drove in a sleigh from Elmira, N. Y., to Hollidaysburg, a hamlet on the
Pennsylvania Canal, at the foot of the Alleghanies, the canal-boats,
which were built in sections, being taken over the mountains on a
railway. Travelling by the canal and its communicating waterways to
the Ohio, they journeyed by steamboat down the Ohio to its junction
with the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence up
the Missouri to Council Bluffs, where they bought a wagon (bear that
wagon in mind, if you please, for you shall hear of it later on), and
outfitted for the journey across the plains. Accompanied by another
missionary couple, Doctor and Mrs. Spalding, they turned the noses of
their mules northwestward and a week or so later caught up with an
expedition sent out by the American Fur Company to its settlement of
Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia. Following the North Fork of
the Platte, they crossed the Wind River Mountains within sight of the
landmark which came in time to be known as Frémont’s Peak, though these
two young women crossed the Great Divide six years before Frémont,
“the pathfinder,” ever set eyes upon it. Few women of our race have
ever made so perilous or difficult a journey. Before it was half
completed, the party, owing to a miscalculation, ran out of flour and
for weeks on end were forced to live on jerked buffalo meat and tea.
Crossing the Snake River at a point where it was upward of a mile in
width, the wagon was capsized by the velocity of the current, and, the
mules, on which the women had been put for safety, becoming entangled
in the harness, their riders escaped drowning by what the missionaries
devoutly ascribed to a miracle and the rough-spoken frontiersmen to
“damned good luck.” Another river they crossed by means of a dried
elkskin with two ropes attached, on which they lay flat and perfectly
motionless while two Indian women, holding the ropes in their teeth,
swam the stream, drawing this unstable ferry behind them.
At Fort Hall, near the present site of Pocatello, Ida., they came
upon the southernmost of that chain of trading-posts with which the
Hudson’s Bay Company sought to guard the enormous territory which,
without so much as a “by-your-leave,” it had taken for its own. Here
Captain Grant, the company’s factor, made a determined effort to induce
Whitman to abandon the wagon that he had brought with him across
the continent in the face of almost insuperable obstacles. But the
obstinacy that had caused the folks in Plainfield to shake their heads
when the name of young Marcus Whitman was mentioned stood him in good
stead, for the more persistent the Englishman became in his objections
the more adamantine grew the American in his determination to cling at
all costs to his wagon, for no one knew better than Whitman that this
had proved the most successful of the methods pursued by the great
British fur monopoly to discourage the colonization of the territory
wherein it conducted its operations. The officials of the Hudson’s Bay
Company well knew that the colonization of the valley of the Columbia
by Americans meant not only the end of their enormously profitable
monopoly but the end of British domination in that region. Though they
did not have it in their power to forcibly prevent Americans from
entering the country, they argued that there could be no colonization
on a large scale unless the settlers had wagons in which to transport
their seeds and farming implements. Hence the company adopted the
policy of stationing its agents along the main routes of travel with
instructions to stop at nothing short of force to detain the wagons.
And until Marcus Whitman came this policy had accomplished the desired
result, the specious arguments of Captain Grant having proved so
successful, indeed, that the stockade at Fort Hall was filled with
abandoned wagons and farming implements which would have been of
inestimable value to the settlers who had been persuaded or bullied
into leaving them behind. But Whitman was made of different stuff, and
the English official might as well have tried to argue the Snake River
out of its course as to argue this hard-headed Yankee into giving up
his wagon. Though it twice capsized and was all but lost in the swollen
streams, though once it fell over a precipice and more than once went
rolling down a mountainside, though for miles on end it was held on
the narrow, winding mountain trails by means of drag-ropes, and though
it became so dilapidated in time that it finished its journey on two
wheels instead of four, the ramshackle old vehicle, thanks to Whitman’s
bulldog grit and determination, was hauled over the mountains and was
the first vehicle to enter the forbidden land. I have laid stress upon
this incident of the wagon, because, as things turned out, it proved
a vital factor in the winning of Oregon. “For want of a nail the shoe
was lost,” runs the ancient doggerel; “for want of a shoe the horse was
lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider the
kingdom was lost.” And, had it not been for this decrepit old wagon of
Whitman’s, a quarter of a million square miles of the most fertile land
between the oceans would have been lost to the Union.
Seven months after helping his bride into the sleigh at Elmira, Whitman
drove his gaunt mule-team into the gate of the stockade at Fort Walla
Walla. To-day one can make that same journey in a little more than four
days and sit in a green plush chair all the way. The news of Whitman’s
coming had preceded him, and an enormous concourse of Indians,
arrayed in all their barbaric finery, was assembled to greet the man
who had journeyed so many moons to bring them the white man’s Book
of Heaven. Picture that quartet of missionaries--skirmishers of the
church, pickets of progress, advance-guards of civilization--as they
stood on the banks of the Columbia one September morning in 1836 and
consulted as to how to begin the work they had been sent to do. It was
all new. There were no precedents to guide them. How would you begin,
my friends, were you suddenly set down in the middle of a wilderness
four thousand miles from home, with instructions to Christianize and
civilize the savages who inhabited it?
Whitman, in whom diplomacy lost an adept when he became a missionary,
appreciated that the first thing for him to do, if he was to be
successful in his mission, was to win the confidence of the ruling
powers of Oregon--the Hudson’s Bay Company officials at Fort Vancouver.
This necessitated another journey of three hundred miles, but it could
be made in canoes with Indian paddlers. Doctor McLoughlin, the stern
old Scotchman who was chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and
whose word was law throughout a region larger than all the States east
of the Mississippi put together, had to be able, from the very nature
of his business, to read the characters of men as students read a
book; and he was evidently pleased with what he read in the face of
the American missionary, for he gave both permission and assistance in
establishing a mission station at Waiilatpui, twenty-five miles from
Walla Walla.
Whitman’s first move in his campaign for the civilization of the
Indians was to induce them to build permanent homes and to plough and
sow. This the Hudson’s Bay officials had always discouraged. They
did not want their savage allies to be transformed into tillers of
the soil; they wanted them to remain nomads and hunters, ready to
move hundreds of miles in quest of furs. The only parallel in modern
times to the greed, selfishness, and cruelty which characterized
the administration of the Hudson’s Bay Company was the rule of the
Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola and of King Leopold in the Congo.
At this time Oregon was a sort of no man’s land, to which neither
England nor the United States had laid definite claim, though the
former, realizing the immensity of its natural resources and the
enormous strategic value that would accrue from its possession, had
long cast covetous eyes upon it. The Americans of that period, on
the contrary, knew little about Oregon and cared less, regarding the
proposals for its acquisition with the same distrust with which the
Americans of to-day regard any suggestion for extending our boundaries
below the Rio Grande. Daniel Webster had said on the floor of the
United States Senate: “What do we want with this vast, worthless
area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and
whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie-dogs? To what use could we
ever hope to put these great deserts or these endless mountain ranges,
impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal snow? What can
we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand
miles, rock-bound, cheerless, and uninviting, and not a harbor on it?
Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to
place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston.”
The name Oregon, it must be borne in mind, had a very much broader
significance then than now, for the territory generally considered to
be referred to by the term comprised the whole of the present States of
Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and a portion of Montana.
Notwithstanding the systematic efforts of the Hudson’s Bay Company to
keep them out, a considerable number of Americans--perhaps two or three
hundred in all--had settled in the country watered by the Columbia, but
they were greatly outnumbered by the Canadians and British, who held
the balance of power. The American settlers believed that, under the
terms of the treaty of 1819, whichever nation settled and organized
the territory that nation would hold it. Though this was not directly
affirmed in the terms of that treaty, it was the common sentiment of
the statesmen of the period, Webster, then Secretary of State, having
said, in the course of a letter to the British minister at Washington:
“The ownership of the whole country (Oregon) will likely follow the
greater settlement and larger amount of population.” The missionaries,
recognizing the incalculable value of the country which the American
Government was deliberately throwing away, did everything in their
power to encourage immigration. Their glowing accounts of the fertility
of the soil, the balmy climate, the wealth of timber, the incalculable
water-power, the wealth in minerals had each year induced a limited
number of daring souls to make the perilous and costly journey across
the plains. In the autumn of 1842 a much larger party than any
that had hitherto attempted the journey--one hundred and twenty in
all--reached Waiilatpui. Among them was a highly educated and unusually
well-informed man--General Amos Lovejoy. He was thoroughly posted in
national affairs, and it was in the course of a conversation with him
that Doctor Whitman first learned that the Webster-Ashburton treaty
would probably be ratified before the adjournment of Congress in the
following March. It was generally believed that this treaty related
to the entire boundary between the United States and England’s North
American possessions, the popular supposition being that it provided
for the cession of the Oregon region to Great Britain in return for
fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland.
Doctor Whitman instantly saw that, as a result of the incredible
ignorance and short-sightedness of the statesmen--or rather, the
politicians who paraded as statesmen--at Washington, four great States
were quietly slipping away from us without a protest. There was but
one thing to do in such a crisis. He must set out for Washington.
Though four thousand miles of Indian-haunted wilderness lay between
him and the white city on the Potomac, he did not hesitate. Though
winter was at hand, and the passes would be deep in snow and the plains
destitute of pasturage, he did not falter. Though there was a rule of
the American Board that no missionary could leave his post without
obtaining permission from headquarters in Boston, Whitman shouldered
all the responsibility. “I did not expatriate myself when I became
a missionary,” was his reply to some objection. “Even if the Board
dismisses me, I will do what I can to save Oregon to the nation. My
life is of but little worth if I can keep this country for the American
people.”[E]
Whitman’s friends in Oregon felt that he was starting on a ride into
the valley of the shadow of death. They knew from their own experiences
the terrible hardships of such a journey even in summer, when there was
grass to feed the horses and men could live with comfort in the open
air. It was resolved that he must not make the journey alone, and a
call was made for a volunteer to accompany him. General Amos Lovejoy
stepped forward and said quietly: “I will go with Doctor Whitman.”
The doctor planned to start in five days, but, while dining with the
Hudson’s Bay officials at Fort Walla Walla, an express messenger of
the company arrived from Fort Colville, three hundred and fifty miles
up the Columbia, and electrified his audience by announcing that a
party of one hundred and forty British and Canadian colonists were
on the road to Oregon. A young English clergyman, carried away with
enthusiasm, sprang to his feet, waved his napkin above his head and
shouted: “We’ve got the country--the Yankees are too late! Hurrah
for Oregon!” Whitman, appreciating that things had now reached a pass
where even hours were precious, quietly excused himself, hurried back
to the mission at Waiilatpui, and made preparations for an immediate
departure. The strictest secrecy was enjoined upon all the Americans
whom Whitman had taken into his confidence, for had a rumor of his
intentions reached British ears at this juncture it might have ruined
everything. So it was given out that he was returning to Boston to
advise the American Board against the contemplated removal of its
missions in Oregon--an explanation which was true as far as it went.
On the morning of October 3, 1842, Whitman, saying good-by to his wife
and home, climbed into his saddle and with General Lovejoy, their
half-breed guide, and three pack-mules set out on the ride that was
to win us an empire. The little group of American missionaries and
settlers whom he left behind gave him a rousing cheer as he rode off
and then stood in silence with choking throats and misted eyes until
the heroic doctor and his companions were swallowed by the forest.
With horses fresh, they reached Fort Hall in eleven days, where
the English factor, Captain Grant--the same man who, six years
before, had attempted to prevent Whitman from taking his wagon into
Oregon--doubtless guessing at their mission, did his best to detain
them. Learning at Fort Hall that the northern tribes were on the
war-path, Whitman and his companions struck southward in the direction
of Great Salt Lake, planning to work from there eastward, via Fort
Uintah and Fort Uncompahgre, to Santa Fé, and thence by the Santa Fé
trail to St. Louis, which was on the borders of civilization. The
journey from Fort Hall to Fort Uintah was one long nightmare, the
temperature falling at times to forty degrees below zero and the
snow being so deep in places that the horses could scarcely struggle
through. While crossing the mountains on their way to Taos they were
caught in a blinding snow-storm, in which, with badly frozen limbs,
they wandered aimlessly for hours. Finally, upon the guide admitting
that he was lost and could go no farther, they sought refuge in a
deep ravine. Whitman dismounted and, kneeling in the snow, prayed
for guidance. Can’t you picture the scene: the lonely, rock-walled
gorge; the shivering animals standing dejectedly, heads to the ground
and reins trailing; the general, muffled to the eyes in furs; the
impassive, blanketed half-breed; in the centre, upon his knees,
the indomitable missionary, praying to the God of storms; and the
snowflakes falling swiftly, silently, upon everything? As though in
answer to the doctor’s prayers--and who shall say that it was not--the
lead-mule, which had been left to himself, suddenly started plunging
through the snowdrifts as though on an urgent errand. Whereupon the
guide called out: “This old mule’ll find the way back to camp if he kin
live long ’nough to git there.” And he did.
The next morning the guide said flatly that he would go no farther.
“I know this country,” he declared, “an’ I know when things is possible
an’ when they ain’t. It ain’t possible to git through, an’ it’s plumb
throwin’ your lives away to try it. I’m finished.”
This was a solar-plexus blow for Whitman, for he was already ten
days behind his schedule. But, though staggered, he was far from
being beaten. Telling Lovejoy to remain in camp and recuperate the
animals--which he did by feeding them on brush and the inner bark of
willows, for there was no other fodder--Whitman turned back to Fort
Uncompahgre, where he succeeded in obtaining a stouter-hearted guide.
In a week he had rejoined Lovejoy. The storm had ceased, and with
rested animals they made good progress over the mountains to the
pyramid pueblo of Taos, the home of Kit Carson. Tarrying there but a
few hours, worn and weary though they were, they pressed on to the
banks of the Red River, a stream which is dangerous even in summer,
only to find a fringe of solid ice upon each shore, with a rushing
torrent, two hundred feet wide, between. For some minutes the guide
studied it in silence. “It is too dangerous to cross,” he said at last
decisively.
“Dangerous or not, we _must_ cross it, and at once,” answered Whitman.
Cutting a stout willow pole, eight feet or so in length, he put it on
his shoulder and remounted.
“Now, boys,” he ordered, “shove me off.” Following the doctor’s
directions, Lovejoy and the guide urged the trembling beast onto
the slippery ice and then gave him a sudden shove which sent him,
much against his will, into the freezing water. Both horse and rider
remained for a moment out of sight, then rose to the surface well
toward the middle of the stream, the horse swimming desperately. As
they reached the opposite bank the doctor’s ingenuity in providing
himself with the pole quickly became apparent, for with it he broke the
fringe of ice and thus enabled his exhausted horse to gain a footing
and scramble ashore. Wood was plentiful, and he soon had a roaring
fire. In a wild country, when the lead-animal has gone ahead the
others will always follow, so the general and the guide had no great
difficulty in inducing their horses and pack-mules to make the passage
of the river, rejoining Whitman upon the opposite bank.
Despite the fact that they found plenty of wood along the route that
they had taken, which was fully a thousand miles longer than the
northern course would have been, all the party were severely frozen,
Whitman suffering excruciating pain from his frozen ears, hands,
and feet. The many delays had not only caused the loss of precious
time, but they had completely exhausted their provisions. A dog had
accompanied the party, and they ate him. A mule came next, and that
kept them until they reached Santa Fé, where there was plenty. Santa
Fé--that oldest city of European occupation on the continent--welcomed
and fed them. From there over the famous Santa Fé trail to Bent’s
Fort, a fortified settlement on the Arkansas, was a long journey
but, compared with what they had already gone through, an easy one.
A long day’s ride northeastward from this lonely outpost of American
civilization, and they found across their path a tributary of the
Arkansas. On the opposite shore was wood in plenty. On their side
there was none, and the river was frozen over with smooth, clear ice,
scarce strong enough to hold a man. They must have wood or they would
perish from the cold; so Whitman, taking the axe, lay flat upon the
ice and snaked himself across, cut a sufficient supply of fuel and
returned the way he went, pushing it before him. While he was cutting
it, however, an unfortunate incident occurred: the axe-helve was
splintered. This made no particular difference at the moment, for the
doctor wound the break in the handle with a thong of buckskin. But as
they were in camp that night a famished wolf, attracted by the smell
of the fresh buckskin, carried off axe and all, and they could find no
trace of it. Had it happened a few hundred miles back it would have
meant the failure of the expedition, if not the death of Whitman and
his companions. On such apparently insignificant trifles do the fate of
nations sometimes hang.
Crossing the plains of what are now the States of Oklahoma and Kansas,
great packs of gaunt, gray timber-wolves surrounded their tent each
night and were kept at bay only at the price of unceasing vigilance,
one member of the party always remaining on guard with a loaded rifle.
The moment a wolf was shot its famished companions would pounce upon
it and tear it to pieces. From Bent’s Fort to St. Louis was, strangely
enough, one of the most dangerous portions of the journey, for, while
heretofore the chief dangers had come from cold, starvation, and
savage beasts, here they were in hourly danger from still more savage
men, for in those days the Santa Fé trail was frequented by bandits,
horse-thieves, renegade Indians, fugitives from justice, and the other
desperate characters who haunted the outskirts of civilization and
preyed upon the unprotected traveller. Notwithstanding these dangers,
of which he had been repeatedly warned at Santa Fé and Bent’s Fort,
the doctor, leaving Lovejoy and the guide to follow him with the
pack-animals, pushed on through this perilous region alone, but lost
his way and spent two precious days in finding it again--a punishment,
he said for having travelled on the Sabbath.
The only occasion throughout all his astounding journey when this man
of iron threatened to collapse was when, upon reaching St. Louis, in
February, 1843, he learned, in answer to his eager inquiries, that
the Ashburton treaty had been signed on August 9, long before he left
Oregon, and that it had been ratified by the Senate on November 10,
while he was floundering in the mountain snows near Fort Uncompahgre.
For a moment the missionary’s mahogany-tanned face went white and his
legs threatened to give way beneath him. Could it be that this was the
end of his dream of national expansion? Was it possible that his heroic
ride had been made for naught? But summoning up his courage he managed
to ask: “Is the question of the Oregon boundary still open?” When he
learned that the treaty had only settled the question of a few square
miles in Maine, and that the matter of the northwest boundary was still
pending, the revulsion was so great that he reeled and nearly fell.
God be praised! There was still time for him to get to Washington! The
river was frozen and he had to depend upon the stage, and an overland
journey from St. Louis to Washington in midwinter was no light matter.
But to Whitman with muscles like steel springs, a thousand miles
by stage-coach over atrocious roads was not an obstacle worthy of
discussion.
He arrived at Washington on the 3d of March--just five months from
the Columbia to the Potomac--in the same rough garments he had worn
upon his ride, for he had neither time nor opportunity to get others.
Soiled and greasy buckskin breeches, sheepskin _chaparejos_, fleece
side out, boot-moccasins of elkskin, a cap of raccoon fur with the
tail hanging down behind, frontier fashion, and a buffalo greatcoat
with a hood for stormy weather, composed a costume that did not show
one inch of woven fabric. His face, storm-tanned to the color of a
much-smoked meerschaum, carried all the iron-gray whiskers that five
months’ absence from a razor could put upon it. I doubt, indeed, if
the shop-windows of the national capital have ever reflected a more
picturesque or striking figure. But he had no time to take note of the
sensation created in the streets of Washington by his appearance. Would
he be granted an audience with the President? Would he be believed?
Would his mission prove successful? Those were the questions that
tormented him.
Those were days when the chief executive of the nation was hedged by
less formality than he is in these busier times, and President Tyler
promptly received him. Some day, perhaps, the people of one of those
great States which he saved to the Union will commission a famous
artist to paint a picture of that historic meeting: the President, his
keen, attentive face framed by the flaring collar and high black stock
of the period, sitting low in his great armchair; the great Secretary
of State, his mane brushed back from his tremendous forehead, seated
beside him; and, standing before them, the preacher-pioneer, bearded
to the eyes, with frozen limbs, in his worn and torn garments of fur
and leather, pleading for Oregon. The burden of his argument was that
the treaty of 1819 must be immediately abrogated and that the authority
of the United States be extended over the valley of the Columbia. He
painted in glowing words the limitless resources, the enormous wealth
in minerals and timber and water-power of this land beyond the Rockies;
he told his hearers, spellbound now by the interest and vividness of
the narrative, of the incredible fertility of the virgin soil, in which
anything would grow; of the vastness of the forests; of the countless
leagues of navigable rivers; of the healthful and delightful climate;
of the splendid harbors along the coast; and last, but by no means
least, of those hardy pioneers who had gone forth to settle this rich
new region at peril of their lives and who, through him, were pleading
to be placed under the shadow of their own flag.
But Daniel Webster still clung obstinately to his belief that Oregon
was a wilderness not worth the having.
“It is impossible to build a wagon road over the mountains,” he
asserted positively. “My friend Sir George Simpson, the British
minister, has told me so.”
“There _is_ a wagon road over the mountains, Mr. Secretary,” retorted
Whitman, “for I have made it.”
It was the rattletrap old prairie-schooner that the missionary had
dragged into Oregon on two wheels in the face of British opposition
that clinched and copper-riveted the business. It knocked all the
argument out of the famous Secretary, who, for almost the first time in
his life, found himself at a loss for an answer. Here was a man of a
type quite different from any that Webster had encountered in all his
political experience. He had no axe to grind; he asked for nothing; he
wanted no money, or office, or lands, or anything except that which
would add to the glory of the flag, the prosperity of the people,
the wealth of the nation. It was a powerful appeal to the heart of
President Tyler.
“What you have told us has interested me deeply, Doctor Whitman,” said
the President at length. “Now tell me exactly what it is that you wish
me to do.”
“If it is true, Mr. President,” replied Whitman, “that, as Secretary
Webster himself has said, ‘the ownership of Oregon is very likely to
follow the greater settlement and the larger amount of population,’
then all I ask is that you won’t barter away Oregon or permit of
British interference until I can organize a company of settlers and
lead them across the plains to colonize the country. And this I will
try to do at once.”
“Your credentials as a missionary vouch for your character, Doctor
Whitman,” replied the President. “Your extraordinary ride and your
frostbitten limbs vouch for your patriotism. The request you make is a
reasonable one. I am glad to grant it.”
“That is all I ask,” said Whitman, rising.
The object that had started him on his four-thousand-mile journey
having been attained, Whitman wasted no time in resting. His work was
still unfinished. It was up to him to get his settlers into Oregon,
for the increasing arrogance of the Hudson’s Bay Company confirmed him
in his belief that the sole hope of saving the valley of the Columbia
lay in a prompt and overwhelming American immigration. He had, indeed,
arrived at Washington in the very nick of time, for, if prior to his
arrival the British Government had renewed its offer of compromising
by taking as the international boundary the forty-ninth parallel to
the Columbia and thence down that river to the Pacific--thus giving
the greater part of the present State of Washington to England--there
is but little doubt that the offer would have been accepted. But the
promise made by President Tyler to Whitman committed him against taking
any action.
Though Whitman was treated with respect and admiration by the President
of the United States, the greeting he received when he reported himself
at the headquarters of the American Board in Boston was far from being
a cordial one.
“What are you doing here, away from your post without permission?”
curtly inquired the secretary of the Board, eying his shaggy visitor
with evident disapproval.
“I came on business to Washington,” answered Whitman, looking the
secretary squarely in the eye. “There was imminent danger of Oregon
passing into the possession of England, and I felt it my duty to do
what I could to prevent it.”
“Obtaining new territories for the nation is no part of our business,”
was the ungracious answer. “You would have done better not to have
meddled in political affairs. Here, take some money and get some
decent clothes, and then we’ll discuss this scheme of yours of piloting
emigrants over the mountains.”
Meanwhile General Lovejoy had been busy upon the frontier spreading
the news that early in the spring Doctor Whitman and himself would
guide a body of settlers across the Rockies to Oregon. The news spread
up and down the border like fire in dry grass. The start was to be
made from Weston, not far from where Kansas City now stands, and soon
the emigrants came pouring in--men who had fought the Indians and the
wilderness all the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf; men who had
followed Boone and Bowie and Carson and Davy Crockett; a hardy, sturdy,
tenacious breed who were quite ready to fight, if need be, to hold this
northwestern land where they had determined to build their homes. The
grass was late, that spring of 1843, and the expedition did not get
under way until the last week in June. At Fort Hall they met with the
customary discouragements and threats from Captain Grant, but Whitman,
like a modern Moses, urged them forward. On pushed the winding train
of white-topped wagons, crossing the sun-baked prairies, climbing the
Rockies, fording the intervening rivers, creeping along the edge of
perilous precipices, until at last they stood upon the summit of the
westernmost range, with the promised land lying spread below them.
Whitman, the man to whom it was all due, reined in his horse and
watched the procession of wagons, bearing upward of a thousand men,
women, and children, make its slow progress down the mountains. He must
have been very happy, for he had added the great, rich empire which the
term Oregon implied to the Union.[F]
For four years more Doctor Whitman continued his work of caring for the
souls and the bodies of red men and white alike at the mission station
of Waiilatpui. On August 6, 1846, as a direct result of his great ride,
was signed the treaty whereby England surrendered her claims to Oregon.
In those days news travelled slowly along the frontier, and it was
the following spring before the British outposts along the Columbia
learned that the British minister at Washington had been beaten by the
diplomacy of a Yankee missionary and that the great, despotic company
which for well-nigh two centuries had been in undisputed control of
this region, and which had come to regard it as inalienably its own,
would have to move on. From that moment Marcus Whitman was a doomed
man, for it was a long-standing boast of the company that no man defied
it--and lived.
The end came with dramatic suddenness. Early in the afternoon of
November 20, 1847, Doctor Whitman was sitting in the mission station
prescribing medicine, as was his custom, for those of his Indians who
were ailing, when a blanketed warrior stole up behind him on silent
moccasins and buried a hatchet in his brain. Then hell broke loose.
Whooping fiends in paint and feathers appeared as from the pit. Mrs.
Whitman was butchered as she knelt by her dying husband, their scalps
being torn from their heads before they had ceased to breathe. Fourteen
other missionaries were murdered by the red-skinned monsters and forty
women and children were carried into a captivity that was worse than
death. And this by the Indians who, just fifteen years before, had
pleaded to have sent them the white man’s Book of Heaven! Though no
conclusive proof has ever been produced that they were whooped on to
their atrocious deed by emissaries of the great monopoly which had
been forced out of Oregon as a result of Whitman’s ride, there is but
little doubt. Whitman had snatched an empire from its greedy fingers,
and he had to pay the price.
Within sight of the mission station, where for more than a decade they
had worked together, and from which he had started on his historic
ride, the martyr and his courageous wife lie buried. You can see the
grave for yourself should your travels take you Walla Walla way. You
will need to have it pointed out to you, however, for you would never
notice it otherwise: a modest headstone surrounded by a picket fence.
Though Marcus Whitman added to the national domain a territory larger
and possessing greater natural resources than the German Empire, though
but for him Portland and Tacoma and Seattle and Spokane would be
British instead of American, no memorial of him can be found in their
parks or public buildings. Instead of honoring the man who discovered
the streams and forests from which they are growing rich, who won for
them the very lands on which they dwell, unworthy discussions and
acrimonious debates as to the motives which animated him are the only
tributes which have been paid him by the people for whom he did so
much. But he sleeps peacefully on beside the mighty river, oblivious
to the pettiness and ingratitude of it all. When history grants Marcus
Whitman the tardy justice of perspective, over that lonely grave a
monument worthy of a nation builder shall rise.
THE MARCH OF THE ONE THOUSAND
THE MARCH OF THE ONE THOUSAND
Twenty-two centuries or thereabouts ago a Greek soldier of fortune
named Xenophon found himself in a most trying and perilous situation.
Lured by avarice, adventure, and ambition, he had accepted a commission
in a legion of Hellenic mercenaries, ten thousand strong, who had
been engaged by Cyrus to assist him in ousting his brother from the
throne of Persia. But at Cunaxa Cyrus had met his death and his forces
complete disaster, the Greek legionaries being left to make their
way back to Europe as best they might. Under Xenophon’s daring and
resourceful leadership they set out on that historic retreat across the
plains of Asia Minor which their leader was to make immortal with his
pen, eventually reaching Constantinople, after an absence of fifteen
months and a total journey of about three thousand five hundred miles,
with little save their weapons and their lives. Xenophon’s story of the
March of the Ten Thousand as told in his “Anabasis,” is the most famous
military narrative ever written; it is used as a text-book in colleges
and schools, and is familiar wherever the history of Greece is read.
Yet how many of those who know the “Anabasis” by heart are aware that
Xenophon’s exploit has been surpassed on our own continent, in our own
times, and by our own countrymen? Where is the text-book which contains
so much as a reference to the march of the _One Thousand_? How many
of the students who can glibly rattle off the details of Xenophon’s
march across the Mesopotamian plains have ever even heard of Doniphan’s
march across the plains of Mexico? During that march, which occupied
twelve months, a force of American volunteers, barely a thousand
strong, traversed upward of six thousand miles of territory, most of
which was unknown and bitterly hostile, and returned to the United
States bringing with them seventeen pieces of artillery and a hundred
battle-flags taken on fields whose names their countrymen had never so
much as heard before. Because it is the most remarkable campaign in all
our history, and because it is too glorious an episode to be lost in
the mists of oblivion, I will, with your permission, tell its story.
Early in May, 1846, Mexico, angered by the annexation of Texas,
declared war against the United States. Hostilities began a few days
later, when the Army of Occupation under General Zachary Taylor,
whom this campaign was to make President, crossed the Rio Grande at
Matamoros and defeated the Mexicans in quick succession at Palo Alto
and Resaca de la Palma. The original plan of campaign was for the
Army of Occupation to penetrate directly into the heart of Mexico
via Monterey; the Army of the Centre, under General Wool, to operate
against Chihuahua, the metropolis of the north, two hundred and
twenty-five miles below the Rio Grande; while an expeditionary force
under Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, known as the Army of the West,
was ordered to march on Santa Fé for the conquest of New Mexico.
Subsequently this plan was changed: General Scott captured Vera Cruz
and used it as a base for his advance on the capital; General Wool,
instead of descending on Chihuahua, effected a juncture with General
Taylor at Saltillo; and Colonel Kearny, after the taking of New Mexico,
divided his force into three separate commands. The first he led in
person across the continent to the conquest of California; the second,
under Colonel Sterling Price, was left to garrison Santa Fé and hold
New Mexico; the third, consisting of a thousand Missouri volunteers
under Colonel Alexander Doniphan, was ordered to make a descent upon
the state of Chihuahua and join General Wool’s division at Chihuahua
City. The march of this regiment of raw recruits from Fort Leavenworth
to Santa Fé, El Paso, Chihuahua, Saltillo, and Matamoros is known as
Doniphan’s Expedition.
When, echoing Mexico’s declaration of war, came President Polk’s call
for fifty thousand volunteers, Governor Edwards, of Missouri, turned
to Colonel Doniphan for assistance in raising the quota of that State.
He could not have chosen better, for Alexander Doniphan combined
practical military experience and remarkable executive ability with the
most extraordinary personal magnetism. Though a citizen of Missouri,
Doniphan was a native of Kentucky, his father, who was a comrade of
Daniel Boone, having pushed westward with that great adventurer to
“the dark and bloody ground,” where, in 1808, Alexander was born.
Left fatherless at the age of six, he was sent to live with his
elder brother at Augusta, Ky., where he received the best education
that the frontier afforded. Graduating from the Methodist college in
Augusta when nineteen, he took up the study of law and in 1833 moved
to Liberty, Mo., where his pronounced abilities quickly brought him
reputation and a large and profitable clientèle. A born organizer,
he took a prominent part in building up the State militia, commanding
a brigade of the expeditionary force which was despatched in 1838 to
quell the insurrectionary movement among the Mormons at Far West. A
polished and convincing orator, he met with instant success when he set
out through upper Missouri to raise recruits for service in Mexico.
The force thus raised was designated as the 1st Missouri Mounted
Volunteers, and no finer regiment of horse ever clattered behind the
guidons. Missouri, then on our westernmost frontier, was peopled by
hardy pioneers, and the youths who filled the ranks of the regiment
were the sons of those pioneers and possessed all the courage and
endurance of their fathers. Though Doniphan was a brigadier-general
of militia and had seen active service, he enlisted as a private in
the regiment which he had raised, but when the election for officers
came to be held he was chosen colonel by acclamation. If ever a
man looked the _beau sabreur_ it was Doniphan. He was then in his
eight-and-thirtieth year and so imposing in appearance that the mere
sight of him in any assemblage would have caused the question: “Who
is that man?” to go round. Six feet four in his stockings; crisp,
curling hair, which, though not red, was suspiciously near it;
features which would have been purest Grecian had not an aquiline nose
lent them strength and distinction; a complexion as fair and delicate
as a woman’s; a temperament that was poetic, even romantic, without
being effeminate; a sense of humor so highly developed that he never
failed to recognize a joke when he heard one; a personal modesty
which was as delightful as it was unaffected; manners so courtly and
polished as to suggest an upbringing in a palace rather than on the
frontier; conversation that was witty, brilliant, and wonderfully
fascinating--there you have Alexander Doniphan _en silhouette_, as it
were. Small wonder that President Lincoln, when Colonel Doniphan was
presented to him in after years, remarked: “Colonel, you are the only
man I ever met whose appearance came up to my previous expectations.”
The Army of the West, of which Colonel Doniphan’s Missourians formed
a part, was ordered to mobilize at Fort Leavenworth, where several
weeks were spent in completing the equipment, collecting supplies,
and teaching the recruits the rudiments of drill. Everything being
complete down to the last horseshoe, on the morning of June 26, 1846,
the expedition, comprising barely two thousand men in all, headed by
Colonel Kearny with two squadrons of United States dragoons, smart
and soldierly in their flat-topped, visored caps and their shell
jackets of blue piped with yellow, and followed by a mile-long train
of white-topped wagons, set out across the grassy prairies on a march
which was to end in the conquest and annexation of a territory larger
than all the United States at that time. It would be difficult to
express the hopes and apprehensions of the volunteers and of those
who watched and waved to them, when, with the bands playing “The Girl
I Left Behind Me,” they moved out of Fort Leavenworth on that sunny
summer’s morning and turned their horses’ heads toward the south--and
Mexico. At that time the American people’s knowledge of Mexico was
very meagre, for the geographies of the day, though indicating very
clearly the Great American Desert, as it was called, stretching long
and wide and yellow between Missouri and Mexico, showed little beyond
the barest outlines of the vast unexplored regions to the west and
south. The people of Missouri, however, knew more than any others, for
their traders, for more than twenty years, had laboriously traversed
the dangerous trail which led from Independence to the northernmost of
the Mexican trading-posts at Santa Fé and thence on to Chihuahua. Thus
they knew that the regions between the Missouri and the Great Desert
were Indian country and dangerous, and that those beyond were Indian
and Mexican and more dangerous still. No wonder that the volunteers
felt that every mile of their advance into this _terra incognita_ would
reveal perils, marvels, and surprises; no wonder that those who were
left behind prayed fervently for the safety of the husbands and sons
and lovers who had gone into the wild as fighters go.
There was no road, not even a path, leading from Fort Leavenworth
into the Santa Fé trail, and, as the intervening country was slashed
across by innumerable streams and canyons, bridges and roads had to
be built for the wagons. The progress of the column was frequently
interrupted by precipitous bluffs whose sides, often two hundred feet
or more in height, were so steep and slippery that it was impossible
for the mules to get a foothold, and the heavily laden wagons, with a
hundred sweating, panting, cursing men straining at the drag-ropes,
had to be hauled up by hand. As the column pressed southward the heat
became unbearable. The tall, rank grass harbored swarms of flies and
mosquitoes which attacked the soldiers until their eyes were sometimes
swollen shut and clung to the flanks of the mules and horses until
the tormented animals streamed with blood. In places the ground became
so soft and marshy that the wagons sank to the hubs and the march
was halted while a dozen teams hauled them out again. Numbers of
the wagons broke down daily under the terrific strain to which they
were subjected, and, as though this was not enough, the troubles of
the teamsters were increased by the mules, which, maddened by the
attacks of insects and made refractory by the unaccustomed conditions,
stubbornly refused to work.
Preceding the column was a hunter train, commanded by Thomas Forsyth,
a celebrated frontiersman. Leaving camp about eleven in the evening
and riding through the night, the hunters and butchers would reach the
site selected for the next camp at daybreak and would promptly get to
work killing and dressing the game which swarmed upon the prairies,
so that a supply of fresh meat--buffalo, elk, antelope, and deer--was
always awaiting the troops upon their arrival at sundown, while along
the banks of the Arkansas the men brought in quantities of wild grapes,
plums, and rice. Arriving at the towering butte, standing solitary in
the prairie, known as Pawnee Rock, Forsyth asked his hunters to ascend
it with him. Even these old plainsmen, accustomed as they were to
seeing prodigious herds of game, whistled in amazement at the spectacle
upon which they looked down, for from the base of the rock straightaway
to the horizon the prairie was literally carpeted with buffalo.
Forsyth, who was always conservative in his expressions, estimated that
five hundred thousand buffalo were in sight, but his hunters asserted
that eight hundred thousand would be much nearer the number of animals
seen from the summit of Pawnee Rock that morning.
Crossing the Arkansas, the expedition entered upon the Great American
Desert--as sterile, parched, and sandy a waste as the Sahara. Dreary,
desolate, boundless solitude reigned everywhere. The heat was like a
blast from an opened furnace door. The earth was literally parched
to a crust, and this crust had broken open in great cracks and
fissures. Such patches of vegetation as there were had been parched and
shrivelled by the pitiless sun until they were as yellow as the sand
itself. Soon even this pretense of vegetation disappeared; the parched
wire grass was stiffened by incrustations of salt; streaks of alkali
spread across the face of the desert like livid scars; the pulverized
earth looked and felt like smouldering embers. The mules grew weak
from thirst and some of the wagons had to be abandoned. Horses fell
dead from heat and exhaustion, but the men thus forced to march on
foot managed to keep pace with the mounted men. Their boots gave
out, however, and for miles the line of their march could be traced
by bloody footprints. Wind-storms drove the loose sand of the desert
against them like a sand-blast, cutting their lips, filling their eyes
and ears and sometimes almost suffocating them. Though constantly
tantalized by mirages of cool lakes with restful groves reflected in
them, they would frequently fail to find a pool of water or a patch
of grass in a long day’s march and would plod forward with their
swollen tongues hanging from their mouths. Those who saw the smart
body of soldiery which rode out of Fort Leavenworth would scarcely
have recognized them in the straggling column of ragged, sun-scorched
skeletons of men, sitting their gaunt and jaded horses, which crossed
the well-named Purgatoire eight weeks later, and saw before them the
snow peaks of the Cimarrons.
Although four thousand Mexican troops under General Armijo had been
gathered at the pass of the Galisteo, fifteen miles north of Santa
Fé, where, as a result of the rugged character of the country,
they could have offered a long and desperate resistance and could
only have been dislodged at a great sacrifice of life, upon the
approach of the American column they retired without firing a shot
and retreated to Chihuahua. On the 18th of August, 1846, the American
forces entered Santa Fé, and four days later Colonel Kearny issued a
proclamation annexing the whole of New Mexico to the Union. As the
red-white-and-green tricolor floating over the palace, which had
sheltered a long line of Spanish, Indian, and Mexican governors,
dropped slowly down the staff and in its stead was broken out a flag
of stripes and stars, from the troops drawn up in the plaza came a
hurricane of cheers, while the field-guns belched forth a national
salute. As United States Senator Benton described this remarkable
accomplishment in his speech of welcome to the returning troops: “A
colonel’s command, called an army, marches eight hundred miles beyond
its base, its communications liable to be cut by the slightest effort
of the enemy--mostly through a desert--the whole distance almost
totally destitute of resources, to conquer a territory of two hundred
and fifty thousand square miles, without a military chest; the people
of this territory are declared citizens of the United States, and the
invaders are thus debarred the rights of war to seize needful supplies;
they arrive without food before the capital--a city two hundred and
forty years old, garrisoned by regular troops.”
To understand the reason for General Armijo’s evacuation of New
Mexico without firing a shot in its defense, it is necessary to here
interject a chapter of secret history. The bloodless annexation of New
Mexico was due, not to Colonel Kearny, but to an American trader and
frontiersman named James Macgoffin. Macgoffin, who had lived and done
business for years in Chihuahua, was intimately acquainted with Mexico
and the Mexicans. He was not only familiar with the physiography of
the country, but he understood the psychology of its people and how
to take advantage of it. When war was declared he happened to be in
Washington. Going to Senator Benton, he explained that he wished to
offer his services to the nation and outlined to the deeply interested
senator a plan he had in mind. Senator Benton immediately took
Macgoffin to the White House and obtained him an interview with the
President and the Secretary of War, who, after listening to his scheme,
gladly availed themselves of his services. Macgoffin thereupon hastened
to Independence, Mo., where he hastily outfitted a wagon-train and
some weeks later, in his customary rôle of trader, arrived at Santa
Fé, reaching there several weeks in advance of Kearny’s column. The
details of his dealings with General Armijo, of how he worked upon
his cupidity, and of the precise inducements which he offered him to
withdraw his forces from the pass of the Galisteo, to evacuate Santa Fé
and leave all New Mexico to be occupied by the Americans, are buried
in the archives of the Department of State, and will probably never be
known. But though Armijo fled and Kearny effected a bloodless conquest,
Macgoffin’s work was not yet done. There remained the most dangerous
part of his mission, which was to do for General Wool in Chihuahua what
he had done for Colonel Kearny in Santa Fé. That he carried his life in
his hands no one knew better than himself, for had the Mexicans learned
of his mission he would have died before a firing-party. As a matter
of fact, he did arouse the suspicions of the authorities in Chihuahua,
but, owing to their inability to confirm them and to his personal
friendship with certain high officials, instead of being executed he
was sent as a prisoner to Durango, where he was held until the close
of the war. Upon his return to Washington after hostilities had ended,
Congress, in secret session, voted him fifty thousand dollars as
remuneration for his services, but, though President Taylor urged the
prompt payment of the same, the War Department arbitrarily reduced the
sum to thirty thousand dollars, which was insufficient to cover the
disbursements he had made. Ingratitude, it will thus be seen, is not
confined to princes.
Having organized a territorial government, brought order out of chaos,
and put New Mexico’s house in thorough order, Kearny, now become a
general, set out on September 25 with only three hundred dragoons for
the conquest of California. This march of Kearny’s, with a mere handful
of troopers, across fifteen hundred miles of unknown country and his
invasion, subjugation, and occupation of a bitterly hostile territory
are almost without parallel in history. Colonel Doniphan, who was left
in command of all the forces in New Mexico, rapidly pushed forward his
preparations for his contemplated descent upon Chihuahua, delaying his
start only until the arrival of Colonel Price’s column to occupy the
newly conquered territory. But on October 11, just as everything was in
readiness for the expedition’s departure, a despatch rider brought him
orders from Kearny to delay his movement upon Chihuahua and proceed
into the country of the Navajos to punish them for the depredations
they had recently committed along the western borders of New Mexico.
The disappointment of the Missourians, when these orders were
communicated to them, can be imagined, for they had volunteered for a
war against Mexicans, not Indians. But that did not prevent them from
doing the business they were ordered to do and doing it well. Crossing
the Cordilleras in the depths of winter without tents and without
winter clothing, Doniphan rounded up the hostile chiefs and forced them
to sign a treaty of peace by which they agreed to abstain from further
molestation of their neighbors, whether Indian, Mexican, or American.
A novel treaty, that, signed on the western confines of New Mexico
between parties who had scarcely so much as heard each other’s names
before, and giving peace and protection to Mexicans who were hostile to
both. No wonder that the Navajos and the New Mexicans, who had been at
war with each other for centuries, looked with amazement and respect
on an enemy who, disregarding all racial and religious differences,
stepped in and drew up a treaty which brought peace to all three.
Owing to the delay caused by the expedition against the Navajos, it
was the middle of December and bitterly cold before the column was at
last ready to start upon the conquest of Chihuahua. The line of march
was due south from Santa Fé, along the east bank of the Rio Grande,
to El Paso del Norte. Ninety miles of it lay through the _Jornada del
Muerto_--the “Journey of Death.” In traversing this desert the men
suffered terribly, for the weather had now become extremely cold, and
there was neither wood for fires nor water to drink. The soldiers,
though footsore with marching, benumbed by the piercing winds, and
weakened from lack of food, pushed grimly forward through the night,
for there were few halts for rest, setting fire to the dry bunches
of prairie grass and the tinder-like stalks of the soap-plant, which
would blaze up like a flash of powder and as quickly die out, leaving
the men shivering in the cold. The course of the straggling column
could be described for miles by these sudden glares of light which
intermittently stabbed the darkness. Toward midnight the head of
the column would halt for a little rest, but throughout the night
the weary, limping companies would continue to straggle in, the men
throwing themselves supperless upon the gravel and instantly falling
asleep from sheer exhaustion. At daylight they were awakened by
the bugles and the march would be resumed, with no breakfast save
hardtack, for there was no fuel upon the desert with which to cook.
Such was the three days’ march of Doniphan’s men across the Journey
of Death. On the 22d of December the expedition reached the Mexican
hamlet of Donanna, where the soldiers found an abundance of cornmeal,
dried fruit, sheep, and cattle, as well as grain and fodder for their
starving horses, and, most welcome of all, streams of running water.
The army was now within the boundaries of the state of Chihuahua.
On Christmas Day, after a shorter march than usual, the column encamped
at the hamlet of Brazito, twenty-five miles from El Paso, on the Rio
Grande. While the men were scattered among the mesquite in quest of
wood and water a splutter of musketry broke out along their front,
and the pickets came racing in with the news that a strong force of
Mexicans was advancing. The officers, as cool as though back at Fort
Leavenworth, threw their men into line for their first battle. Colonel
Doniphan and his staff had been playing loo to determine who should
have a fine Mexican horse that had been captured by the advance-guard
that morning.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to stop the game long enough to whip the
greasers,” Doniphan remarked, carefully laying his cards face down upon
the ground, “but just bear in mind that I’m ahead in the score. We’ll
play it out after the scrap is over.” The game was never finished,
however, for during the battle the horse which formed the stakes
mysteriously disappeared.
The Mexican force, which was under the command of General Ponce de
Leon, was composed of some thirteen hundred men. Five hundred of these
consisted of the Vera Cruz lancers, one of the crack regiments of the
Mexican army; the remainder were volunteer cavalry and infantry from
El Paso and Chihuahua. When a few hundred yards separated the opposing
forces, a lieutenant of lancers, magnificently mounted and carrying a
black flag--a signal that no quarter would be given--spurred forward at
full gallop until within a few paces of the American line, when, with
characteristic Mexican bravado, he suddenly jerked his horse back upon
its haunches. Doniphan’s interpreter, a lean frontiersman clad in the
broad-brimmed hat and fringed buckskin of the plains, rode out to meet
him.
“General Ponce de Leon, in command of the Mexican forces,” began the
young officer arrogantly, “presents his compliments to your commander
and demands that he appear instantly before him.”
“If your general is so all-fired anxious to see Colonel Doniphan,” was
the dry answer, “let him come over here. We won’t run away from him.”
“We’ll come and take him, then!” shouted the hot-headed youngster
angrily; “and remember that we shall give no quarter!”
“Come right ahead, young feller,” drawled the plainsman, as the
messenger spurred back to the Mexican lines, his sinister flag
streaming behind him. “You’ll find us right here waitin’ fer you.”
No sooner had the messenger delivered the American’s defiance than the
trumpets of the Mexican cavalry sounded and the lancers, deploying into
line, moved forward at a trot. They presented a beautiful picture on
their sleek and shining horses, their green tunics faced with scarlet,
their blue skin-tight pantaloons, their brass-plated, horse-tailed
_schapkas_, and the cloud of scarlet pennons which fluttered from their
lances. The bugles snarled again, the five hundred lances dropped as
one from vertical to horizontal, five hundred horses broke from a trot
into a gallop, and from five hundred throats burst a high-pitched
scream: “_Viva Mexico! Viva Mexico!_”
Waiting until the line of cheering, charging horsemen was within a
hundred and fifty yards, the officer in command of the American left
called, in the same tone he would have used on parade: “Now, boys,
let ’em have it!” Before the torrent of lead that was poured into it
the Mexican line halted as abruptly as though it had run into a stone
wall, shivered, hesitated. Dead men toppled to the ground, wounded men
swayed drunkenly in their saddles while great splotches of crimson
spread upon their gaudy uniforms, riderless horses galloped madly
away, and cursing officers tore up and down, frantically trying to
reform the shattered squadrons. At this critical juncture, when the
Mexicans were debating whether to advance or to retreat, Captain
Reed, recognizing the psychological value of the moment, hurled his
company of dismounted Missourians straight at the Mexican line. So
furious was the onset of the little band of troopers that the crack
cavalry of Mexico, already on the verge of demoralization, turned and
fled. Meanwhile the Chihuahua infantry, taking advantage of the cover
afforded by the dense chaparral, had moved forward against the American
right. As the Mexicans advanced Doniphan ordered his men down on their
faces, cautioning them to hold their fire until he gave the word. The
advancing Mexicans, seeing men drop all along the line and supposing
that their scattering fire had wrought terrible execution, with a storm
of _vivas_ dashed forward at the double. But as they emerged into the
open, barely a stone’s throw from the American line, the whole right
wing rose as one man and poured in a paralyzing volley. “Now, boys, go
in and finish ’em!” roared Doniphan, a gigantic and commanding figure
on a great chestnut horse. With the high-keyed, piercing cheer which in
later years was to be known as “the rebel yell,” the Missourians leaped
forward to do his bidding. In advance of the line raced Forsyth, the
chief of scouts, and another plainsman, firing as they ran. And every
time their rifles cracked a Mexican would stagger and fall headlong.
Meanwhile the American centre had repulsed the enemy with equal
success, though a field-piece which the Mexicans had brought into
action at incautiously close range continued to annoy them with its
fire.
“What the hell do you reckon that is?” inquired one Missourian of
another, as a solid shot whined hungrily overhead.
“A cannon, I reckon,” answered some one.
“Come on! Let’s go and get it!” shouted some one else, and at the
suggestion a dozen men dashed like sprinters across the bullet-swept
zone which lay between them and the field-piece. So quickly was it
done that the Mexican gunners were bayonetted where they stood and in
another moment the gun, turned in the opposite direction, was pouring
death into the ranks of its late owners. In thirty minutes the battle
of the Brazito was history, and the Mexicans--such of them as were
left--were pouring southward in a demoralized retreat, which did not
halt until they reached Chihuahua. Five hundred Americans--for the
balance of Doniphan’s column did not reach the scene until the battle
was virtually over--in a stand-up fight on unfamiliar ground, with all
the odds against them, whaled the life out of thirteen hundred as good
soldiers as Mexico could put into the field. In killed, wounded, and
prisoners the Mexicans lost upward of two hundred men; the American
casualties consisted of eight wounded. In such fashion did Doniphan and
his Missourians celebrate the Christmas of 1846.
The expedition remained six weeks at El Paso, awaiting the arrival of
a battery of artillery which Doniphan had asked Colonel Price to send
him from Santa Fé; so February was well advanced before the troops
started on the final stage of their advance upon Chihuahua. A few days
after his departure from El Paso Colonel Doniphan received astounding
news. An American named Rodgers, who had escaped from Chihuahua at
peril of his life, brought word that General Wool, to whom Doniphan
had been ordered to report at Chihuahua, had abandoned his march upon
that city and that the Mexicans were mobilizing a formidable force to
defend the place. Though Wool’s change of plan was known in the United
States, Doniphan had penetrated so far into the enemy’s country that
there was no way to warn him of his danger, and the nation waited with
bated breath for news of the annihilation of his little column. Even
at this stage of the march Doniphan could have retraced his steps and
would have been more than justified in doing so, for it seemed little
short of madness for a force of barely a thousand men, wholly without
support, to invade a state which was aware of their coming and was
fully prepared to receive them. It shows the stuff of which Doniphan
and his Missourians were made that they never once considered turning
back.
[Illustration: In another moment the gun was pouring death into the
ranks of its late owners.]
On February 12 the expedition reached the edge of the arid, sun-baked
desert, threescore miles in width, whose pitiless expanse lies
squarely athwart the route from El Paso to Chihuahua. Two days
later, after giving the animals an opportunity to feed and rest, the
never-to-be-forgotten desert march began. Aware that not a drop of
water was to be had until the desert was crossed, the troopers not
only filled their water-bottles, but tied their swords about their
necks and filled the empty scabbards with water. The first day the
column covered twenty miles and encamped for the night in the heart of
the desert. The following day the loose sand became so deep that the
wagons were buried to the hubs and the teams had to be doubled up to
pull them through. The mules were so weak from thirst, however, that
the soldiers had to put their shoulders to the wheels before the wagons
could be extricated from the engulfing sands. Notwithstanding this
delay, twenty-four more miles were covered before the soldiers, their
lips cracked open, their tongues swollen, and their throats parched
and burning, threw themselves upon the sands to snatch a few hours’
rest. The next day was a veritable purgatory, for the canteens were
empty, the horses and mules were neighing piteously for water, and many
of the men were delirious and muttered incoherently as they staggered
across the _llanos_, swooning beneath waves of shifting heat. As the
day wore on their sufferings grew more terrible; many of the supplies
had to be abandoned, and finally, when only ten miles from water, the
oxen were turned loose. Though only a few miles now separated them from
the Guyagas Springs, where there was water and grass a-plenty, men and
horses were too weak to continue the march and fell upon the desert,
little caring whether they lived or died. Indeed, had it not been for
a providential rain-storm which burst upon them a few hours later,
quenching their thirst and cooling their burning bodies, a trail of
bleaching skeletons would probably have marked the end of Doniphan’s
expedition.
Upon reaching the lush meadows which bordered the little lake[G] near
Guyagas Springs a long sigh of relief went up from the perspiring
column, for here they could spend a few days in rest and recuperation.
But, though they had, as by a miracle, escaped a death by thirst,
they were suddenly confronted by another and even greater danger. A
trooper carelessly knocked the ashes from his pipe upon the ground;
the sun-dried grass instantly took fire; and before the soldiers
realized their peril, a waist-high wall of flame, fanned by a brisk
wind, was bearing down upon them. All attempts to check the progress
of the fire proving useless, the animals were hastily harnessed and a
desperate attempt was made by the teamsters to get their wagons ahead
of the flames, but a gale was blowing in the direction the column was
advancing and the barrier of fire, now spread out for many miles,
was approaching faster than a man could walk; so the wagons and guns
were run into the lake. That the expedition was saved was due to the
ingenuity of a trooper in the Missouri Horse Guards, who had had
experience with prairie fires before. Acting upon his suggestion,
the soldiers were dismounted and ordered to cut the grass with their
sabres over a zone thirty feet in width and then set fire to the
grass standing next to the wind, which burned slowly until it met the
advancing conflagration. That night the men slept on the bare and
blackened earth, without forage for their horses but with thankfulness
in their hearts.
A few days after this episode the scouts in advance of the column saw
a group of horsemen riding toward them across the plain. As the party
came nearer it was seen to consist of thirty or forty Indians led
by a single white man. The latter proved to be one of the strangest
characters ever produced by the wild life of the frontier. His name
was Captain James Kirker, or, as he was called by the Mexicans,
Santiago Querque, and he was an Indian fighter by profession. By this
I do not mean that he took part in the periodical wars between the
Indians and the whites, but that he contracted to kill Indians at so
much per head, just as hunters in certain portions of the country make
a business of tracking and killing vermin for the bounty. For many
years past Kirker, whose fame was as wide as the plains, had been
employed by the state of Chihuahua to exterminate the Apaches who
terrorized its borders, and, thinking to fight the devil with fire, he
had imported twoscore Delaware braves, noted even among the Indians for
their abilities as trackers, to help him in hunting down the Apaches.
Shortly before the outbreak of the war the government of Chihuahua owed
Kirker thirty thousand dollars for the scalps of Apaches he had slain,
but when hostilities began it refused to pay him and threatened him
and his braves with imprisonment if they persisted in their claims.
Thus it came about that Doniphan received a considerable addition to
the strength of his force, for no sooner had Kirker received word of
the approach of the column than he and his Delawares slipped out of
Chihuahua between two days and rode off to offer their services to
their countrymen. Because of his remarkable knowledge of the country
and his acquaintance with the language and customs of the people,
Kirker proved of essential service to Doniphan as an interpreter
and forage-master, while his Delawares were invaluable as scouts.
In appearance Kirker was a dime-novel hero come to life, for his
long hair fell upon his shoulders; his mustaches were of a size and
fierceness that would have abashed a pirate; from neck to knees he was
dressed in gorgeously embroidered, soft-tanned buckskin; his breeches
disappeared in high-heeled boots ornamented with enormous spurs, which
jangled noisily when he walked; his high-crowned sombrero was heavy
with gold braid and bullion; thrust carelessly into his scarlet sash
was a veritable armory of knives and pistols, and the thoroughbred he
bestrode could show its heels to any horse in northern Mexico.
On the 28th of February, when within less than ten miles of Chihuahua,
the Americans caught their first glimpse of the army which had
been assembled to receive them. The enemy occupied the brow of a
rocky eminence, known as Sacramento Hill, which rises sharply from
a plateau guarded on one side by the Sacramento River and on the
other by a dried-up watercourse, known as an _arroyo seco_. The great
natural strength of the position had been enormously increased by an
elaborate system of fieldworks consisting of twenty-eight redoubts and
intrenchments. Here, in this apparently impregnable position, which was
the key to the capital of the state, and hence to all northern Mexico,
the Mexican army, which, according to the muster-rolls which fell into
Doniphan’s possession after the battle, consisted of four thousand two
hundred and twenty men, was prepared to offer a desperate resistance to
the invader. To oppose this strongly intrenched force, which comprised
the very flower of the Mexican army, Colonel Doniphan had one thousand
and sixty-four men, of whom one hundred and fifty were teamsters. No
wonder that the Mexicans were so confident of victory that they had
prepared great quantities of shackles and handcuffs to be used in
marching the captured _gringos_ to the capital in triumph.
Now, if Colonel Doniphan had acted according to the cut-and-dried rules
of the game as taught in military schools and books on tactics and had
done what the Mexican commander expected him to do, there is little
doubt that he and his men--such of them as were not killed in battle or
shot in cold blood afterward--would have gone to the City of Mexico in
the chains so thoughtfully provided for them. But being a shirt-sleeve
fighter, as it were, and not in the least hampered by a knowledge of
scientific warfare, he did the very thing that he was not expected to
do. Instead of attempting to fight his way down the high-road which led
to Chihuahua, which was commanded by the enemy’s guns, and where they
could have wiped him out without leaving their intrenchments, he formed
his column into a sort of hollow square, cavalry in front, infantry on
the flanks, and guns and wagons in the centre, suddenly deflected it
to the right, and before the Mexicans grasped the significance of the
manœuvre he had thrown his force across the _arroyo seco_, had gained
the summit of the plateau, and had deployed his men upon the highland
in such a position that the Mexican commander was compelled to hastily
reconstruct his whole plan of battle. By this single brilliant manœuvre
Doniphan at once nullified the advantage the Mexicans derived from
their commanding position.
The Americans scarcely had time to get their guns into position and
form their line of battle before a cavalry brigade, twelve hundred
strong, led by General Garcia Condé, ex-minister of war, swept
down from the fortified heights with a thunder and roar to open the
engagement. This time there was no waiting, as at the Brazitos, for
the Mexicans to get within close range; the advancing force was too
formidable for that. In the centre of the American position was posted
the artillery--four howitzers and six field-guns--under Captain
Weightman. Above the ever loudening thunder of the approaching cavalry
could be heard that young officer’s cool, clear voice: “Form battery!
Action front! Load with grape! Fire at will!” As the wave of galloping
horses and madly cheering men surged nearer, Weightman’s gunners,
getting the range with deadly accuracy, poured in their thirty shots a
minute as methodically as though they were on a target-range. In the
face of that blast of death the Mexican cavalry scattered like autumn
leaves. Within five minutes after their bugles had screamed the charge,
the finest brigade of cavalry that ever followed Mexican kettle-drums,
shattered, torn, and bleeding, had turned tail and was spurring full
tilt for the shelter of the fortifications, leaving the ground over
which they had just passed strewn with their dead and dying. For the
next fifty minutes the battle consisted of an artillery duel at long
range, throughout which Colonel Doniphan sat on his war-horse at the
rear of the American battery, his foot thrown carelessly across the
pommel of his saddle, whittling a piece of wood--an object-lesson in
coolness for his men and, incidentally, a splendid mark for the Mexican
gunners.
While the guns of the opposing forces were exchanging compliments at
long range the American officers busied themselves in forming their
men preparatory to taking the offensive. That was Doniphan’s plan
of battle always--to get in the first blow. When everything was in
readiness, Colonel Doniphan tossed away his stick, pocketed his knife,
drew his sabre, and signalled to his bugler to sound the advance. As
the bugles shrieked their signal the whole line, horse, foot, and guns,
dashed forward at a run. It was a daring and hazardous proceeding,
a thousand men charging across open ground and up a hill to carry
fortifications held by a force four times the strength of their own,
but its very audacity brought success. So splendid was the discipline
which Doniphan had hammered into his force that the infantry officers
ran sideways and backward in front of their men as they advanced,
just as they would have done on the drill field, keeping them in such
perfect step and order that, as an English eye-witness afterward
remarked, a cannon-ball could have been fired between their legs down
the line without injuring a man. Not a shot was fired by the Americans
until they reached the first line of redoubts, behind which the Mexican
officers were frantically endeavoring to steady their wavering men.
As the Americans surged over the intrenchments they paused just long
enough to pour in a volley and then went in with the bayonet. At
almost the same moment Captain Weightman brought his guns into action
with a rattle and crash and began pouring a torrent of grape into the
now thoroughly demoralized Mexicans. As the right wing stormed the
breastworks an American sergeant who was well in advance of the line,
having emptied his rifle and pistols and being too hard-pressed to
reload them, threw away his weapons and defended himself by hurling
rocks. When the order to charge was given, Kirker, the Indian fighter,
called to another scout named Collins: “Say, Jim, let’s see which of
us can get into that battery first.” The battery referred to was in
the second redoubt, whence it was directing a galling fire upon the
Americans over the heads of the Mexicans defending the first line of
fortifications. Collins’s only reply was to pull down his hat, draw
his sword, bury his spurs in his horse’s flanks, and ride at the
battery as a steeplechaser rides at a water-jump, Kirker, his long
hair streaming in the wind, tearing along beside him. Is it any wonder
that the Mexicans exclaimed to each other: “These are not men we are
fighting--they are devils!”
All the companies were now pressing forward and pouring over the
intrenchments, the Mexicans sullenly giving way before them. Meanwhile
the left wing, under Major Gilpin, had scaled the heights, swarmed
over the breastworks, and driven out the enemy, while a company under
Captain Hughes had burst into a battery defended by trenches filled
with Mexican infantry, which they had literally cut to pieces, and
had killed or captured the artillerymen as they were endeavoring to
set off the guns. Though the Mexican commander, General Heredia, made
a desperate attempt to rally his panic-stricken troops under cover
of repeated gallant charges by the cavalry under Condé, the men were
too far gone with terror to pay any heed to the frantic appeals of
their officers. With the American cavalry clinging to its flanks and
dealing it blow upon savage blow, the retreat of the Mexican army
quickly turned into a rout, the splendid force that had marched out
of Chihuahua a few days before returning to it a beaten, cowed, and
bleeding rabble. The battle of the Sacramento lasted three hours
and a half, and in that time an American force of nine hundred and
twenty-four effective men--the rest were teamsters--utterly routed a
Mexican army of four thousand two hundred and twenty men fighting from
behind supposedly impregnable intrenchments. In killed, wounded, and
prisoners the Mexicans lost upward of nine hundred men; the Americans
had four killed and seven wounded. The battle of the Sacramento was
in many respects the most wonderful ever fought by American arms. For
sheer audacity, disproportionate numbers, and sweeping success the
battle of Manila Bay may be set down as its only rival. The only land
battle at all approaching it was that of New Orleans, but there the
Americans fought at home, on their own soil, behind fortifications.
At Sacramento Doniphan’s men attacked a fortified position held by
troops outnumbering them more than four to one. They were in a strange
land, thousands of miles from home. They were in rags, suffering from
lack of food. They believed that they had been abandoned by their own
government and left to their fate. In case of defeat there was no hope
of succor, no help--nothing but inevitable destruction. That is why I
say that the exploit of these Missourians has never been surpassed, if,
indeed, it has ever been equalled in the annals of the world’s warfare.
There is little more to tell. The following day, with the regimental
bands playing “Hail Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle,” Colonel Doniphan and
his men entered the city of Chihuahua in triumph. For two months they
held undisputed possession of the metropolis of northern Mexico; the
city was cleaned and policed; law and order were rigidly enforced and
the rights of the citizens strictly respected. On the 28th of April,
1847, in pursuance of orders received from General Wool, the expedition
evacuated Chihuahua and set out across an arid and desolate country
for Saltillo, covering the six hundred and seventy-five miles in
twenty-five days. After being reviewed and publicly thanked by General
Taylor, the Missourians started on the last stage of their wonderful
march. Reaching Matamoros, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, they took
ship for New Orleans, whose citizens went mad with enthusiasm. Their
journey by steamboat up the Mississippi was one continuous ovation;
at every town they passed the whistles shrieked, the bells rang, and
the townspeople cheered themselves hoarse at sight of the sun-browned
veterans in their faded and tattered uniforms. On July 1, after an
absence of a little more than a year, to the strains of “Auld Lang
Syne” and “Home, Sweet Home,” Doniphan and his One Thousand once again
set foot on the soil of old Missouri. Going out from the western
border of their State, they re-entered it from the east, having made a
circuit equal to a fourth of the circumference of the globe, providing
for themselves as they went, driving before them forces many times
the strength of their own, leaving law and order and justice in their
wake, and returning with trophies taken on battle-fields whose names
few Americans had ever heard before. It is a sad commentary on the
gratitude of republics that the government never acknowledged, either
by promotion, decoration, or the thanks of Congress, the invaluable
services of Alexander Doniphan; there is no statue to him in any town
or city of his State; not even a mention of his immortal expedition
can be found in the school histories of the nation he served so well.
He lived for forty years after his great march and lies buried under
a granite shaft in the cemetery at Liberty, Mo. Though forgotten by
his countrymen, the brown-faced folk below the Rio Grande still tell
of the days when the great captain came riding down from the north to
invade a nation at the head of a thousand men.
WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE
WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE
“... I met ’im all over the world, a-doin’ all kinds of things,
Like landin’ ’isself with a Gatlin’ gun to talk to them ’eathen kings.
* * * * *
For there isn’t a job on the top o’ the earth the beggar don’t know, nor do--
You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead to paddle ’is own canoe.”
There you have a four-line epitome of the career and character of the
burly, tousle-headed, gruff-voiced old sea-dog who is the hero of
this narrative. His name? Matthew Calbraith Perry, one time commodore
in the navy of the United States and younger brother of that other
Yankee sea-fighter, Oliver Hazard Perry, without whose picture, wrapped
in the Chesapeake’s flag and standing in a dramatic attitude in the
stern-sheets of a small boat, no school history of the United States
would be complete. Though Matthew did not have to depend upon the
reflected glory of his famous brother, for he won glory enough of his
own, his extraordinary exploits have never received the attention of
which they are deserving, partly, no doubt, because they were obscured
by the smoke of his brother’s guns on Lake Erie and partly because they
were performed at a period in our national history when the public mind
was occupied with happenings nearer home.
His father, a Yankee privateersman of the up-boys-and-at-’em school,
was captured by a British cruiser during the Revolution and sent as a
prisoner of war to Ireland, where his captivity was made considerably
more than endurable by a peaches-and-cream beauty from the County
Down. After the war was over he returned to Ireland and gave a typical
story-book ending to the romance by hunting up the girl who had cheered
his prison hours and making her his wife. The dashing young skipper and
his sixteen-year-old bride built themselves a house within sight of
the shipping along the Newport wharfs, and there, when the eighteenth
century lacked but half a dozen years of having run its course and when
our flag bore but fifteen stars, Matthew was born. How many of the
neighbors who came flocking in to admire the lusty youngster dreamed
that he would live to command the largest fleet which, in his lifetime,
ever gathered under the folds of that flag and that his exploits on
the remotest seaboards of the world would make the wildest fiction seem
probable and tame?
Young Perry was helping to make history at an age when most boys are
still in school, for, as a midshipman of seventeen, he stood beside
Commodore Rodgers when he lighted the fuse of the “Long Tom” in the
forecastle battery of the frigate _President_ and sent a ball crashing
into the British war-ship _Belvidera_--the first shot fired in the War
of 1812. In the same ship and under the same commander he scoured the
seas of northern Europe in a commerce-destroying raid which extended
from the English Channel to the Arctic, during which the daring
American was hunted by twenty British men-of-war, sailing, for safety’s
sake, in pairs. As a young lieutenant in command of the _Cyane_ he
convoyed the first party of American negroes sent to West Africa to
establish, under the name of Liberia, a country of their own. It was
on this voyage that the character of the man who, in later years, was
to revolutionize the commerce of the world first evidenced itself.
Putting into Teneriffe, in the Canaries, for water and provisions,
Perry, resplendent in “whites” and gold lace, went ashore to pay the
Portuguese governor the customary call of ceremony. As he was taking
leave of the governor he casually remarked that the _Cyane_, on leaving
the harbor, would, of course, fire the usual salute. Whereupon the
Portuguese official, a pompous royalist who had a deep-seated aversion
to republican institutions and went out of his way to show his contempt
for them, told the young commander that the shore batteries would
return the salute _less one gun_, for, as he impudently remarked,
Portugal considered herself superior to republics and could not treat
them as equals. Perry, white with anger, told the governor that the
nation which he had the honor to serve was the equal of any monarchy on
earth, and that unless he received an assurance that his salute would
be returned gun for gun, he would fire no salute at all. That afternoon
the _Cyane_ sailed past the batteries, over which flew the Portuguese
flag, in a silence which unmistakably spelled contempt. Though
personally Perry was the most peaceable of men, as the representative
of the United States in distant oceans he perpetually carried a chip on
his shoulder and defied any one to knock it off. A cannibal king tried
it once, and--but of that you shall hear a little later.
A year or so after he had landed his party of negro colonists he
visited the coast of cannibals and fevers again and at the mouth
of the Mesurado River chose the site of the future capital of
Liberia, which was named Monrovia in honor of President Monroe, thus
establishing the first and only colony ever founded by the United
States. His next commission was to wipe out the pirates who, shielding
themselves under the flags of the new South American republics and
assuming the thin disguise of privateersmen, were terrorizing commerce
upon the Spanish main. Under Commodore David Porter he spent eight
months under sail upon the Gulf, and when he at last turned his
bowsprit toward the north, he had put an end to the depredations of
the “dago robbers,” as his seamen called them. It was here, in fact,
that the term “dago” as applied by Americans to foreigners of the Latin
race began. The name of James, the Spaniards’ patron saint, has been
indiscriminately bestowed, in its Spanish form, Iago, upon provinces,
islands, towns, and rivers from one end of Spanish America to the
other, Santiago, San Diego, Iago, and Diego being such constantly
recurring names that the American sailors early fell into the custom of
calling the natives of these parts “Diegos” or “dago men,” whence the
slang term so universally used to-day.
About the time that the United States was celebrating its fiftieth
birthday the government at Washington, thinking it high time to give
the Europeans an object-lesson in the naval power of the oversea
republic, ordered a squadron of war-ships to the Mediterranean, in
many of whose ports the American flag was as unfamiliar as China’s
dragon banner. The command of the expedition was given to Commodore
Rodgers, who hoisted his pennant on the _North Carolina_, the finest
and most formidable craft that had yet been launched from an American
shipyard, and Perry went along as executive officer to his old chief.
When the great ship, with the grim muzzles of her one hundred and two
guns peering from her three tiers of port-holes, majestically entered
the European harbors under her cloud of snowy canvas, the natives were
goggle-eyed with admiration and amazement, for in those days most
Europeans thought of America--when they gave it any thought at all--as
a land of Indians, grizzly bears, and buckskin-clad frontiersmen. As
executive officer, Perry’s duties comprised pretty much everything
which needed to be done on deck. Whether in cocked hat and gold
epaulets by day or in oilskins and sou’wester at night, he was regent
of the ship and crew. The duties of the squadron were not confined
to visits of ceremony, either, for one of the objects for which it
had been sent was to teach the pirates who infested Levantine waters
that it was as dangerous to molest vessels flying the American flag
as to tamper with a stick of dynamite. During the Greek struggle for
independence, which was then in progress, the Greek privateers had
on more than one occasion been a trifle careless in differentiating
between the vessels of neutral nations and those of their Turkish
oppressors, and in May, 1825, they committed a particularly bad error
of judgment by seizing a merchant ship from Boston. In those days the
administration at Washington was as quick to resent such affronts
as it is tardy nowadays, and no sooner had the American squadron
arrived in Levantine waters than it sought an opportunity to teach the
Greeks a lesson. An opportunity soon presented itself. Learning that
a British merchantman, the _Comet_, had been seized by the Greeks,
Rodgers ordered her to be recaptured and sent a boarding party of
bluejackets and marines to do the business. Swarming up the bow-chains,
the Americans gained the deck before the pirates realized just what
was happening, though the ship was not taken without a desperate
hand-to-hand struggle, in which Lieutenant Carr, singling out the
pirate chief, killed him with his own hand. Thenceforward the Greeks,
whenever they saw a vessel flying the stars and stripes, touched their
hats, figuratively speaking. The _North Carolina’s_ mission thus having
been accomplished, in the spring of 1827 Perry ordered the boatswain to
sound the welcome call: “All hands up anchor for home.”
So well had Perry performed his exacting duties that when the
_Concord_, of eighteen guns, was completed, two years later, he was
given command of her and instructed to carry our envoy, John Randolph,
of Roanoke, to Russia. While lying in the harbor of Cronstadt the
_Concord_ was visited by Czar Nicholas I--the first Russian sovereign
to set foot on the deck-planks of an American war-ship. He was so
pleased with what he saw that he invited Perry to a private audience,
during which the young American naval officer and the Great White Czar
chatted and smoked with all the informality of old friends. Before
the interview was over the ruler of all the Russias offered Perry an
admiral’s commission in the Russian service, but the latter, recalling,
no doubt, the unfortunate experience of his great countryman, John
Paul Jones, while admiral in the navy of Czar Nicholas’s grandmother,
the Empress Catherine, declined the flattering offer. The Yankee
sailorman’s next experience with the Lord’s anointed was on the other
side of Europe. Acting under instructions to leave the visiting cards
of the United States at every port of importance in the Old World--for
nations are just as punctilious about paying and returning calls
as society women--Perry dropped anchor one fine spring morning in
the harbor of Alexandria. Invited to dine at Ras-el-Tin Palace with
Mohammed Ali, the founder of the Khedival dynasty, the brilliancy
and efficiency of the young American impressed the conqueror of the
Sudan as much as they had the conqueror of Poland, and when Perry and
his officers left they took with them, as presents from the Khedive,
thirteen gold-mounted, jewel-incrusted swords, from which, by the way,
was adopted the “Mameluke grip” now used in our navy.
When Andrew Jackson sat himself down in the White House, in 1829, he
promptly inaugurated the same straight-from-the-shoulder-smash-bang
foreign policy which had characterized him as a soldier and used the
navy to back up his policy. During the period from 1809 to 1812 the
Neapolitan Government, first under Joseph Bonaparte and then under
Joachim Murat, had, under the terms of Napoleon’s universal embargo,
confiscated numerous American ships and cargoes, the claims filed with
the State Department in Washington aggregating upward of one million
seven hundred thousand dollars. No sooner had Jackson taken his oath
of office, therefore, than he appointed John Nelson minister to the
kingdom of Naples and ordered him to collect these claims. And in order
that the Neapolitans, who were an evasive lot and kissed every coin
good-by before parting with it, might be convinced that the United
States meant business, Commodore John Patterson--the same who had aided
Jackson in the defense of New Orleans--was given a squadron of half a
dozen war-ships and instructed to back up the minister’s demands by
the menace of his guns. The force at Patterson’s disposal consisted
of three fifty-gun frigates and three twenty-gun corvettes, which
sufficed, according to the plan evolved by the commodore, for a naval
drama in six acts. Almost at the moment of sailing the commander of
the _Brandywine_ was taken ill, and our friend Perry was ordered to
replace him. (Did you ever hear of such a persistent run of luck?) Now,
of all the Americans who visit Naples each year, I very much doubt
if there is one in a hundred thousand who is aware that an American
war fleet once lay in that lovely harbor and threatened--in diplomatic
language, of course--to blow that charming city off the map if a little
account which it had come to collect was not paid then and there. When
Minister Nelson went ashore in the _Brandywine’s_ gig, called upon the
Neapolitan minister of state, Count Cassaro, and intimated that the
United States would appreciate an immediate settlement of its account,
which was long overdue, the wily Neapolitan almost laughed in his face.
Why should the government of Ferdinand II, notorious for its corruption
at home, pay any attention to the demands of an almost unknown republic
five thousand miles away? The very idea was laughable, preposterous,
absurd. No! the Yankee envoy, with but a solitary war-ship to back him
up, would not get a single _soldo_. Very well, said Minister Nelson,
the climate was pleasant and the Neapolitan Government might shortly
change its mind--in fact he thought that it undoubtedly would--and
he would hang around. So Perry dropped the _Brandywine’s_ anchor
under the shadow of Capadimonte, and he and Minister Nelson smoked
and chatted contentedly enough in the pleasant shade of the awnings.
Three days later another floating fortress, black guns peering from
her ports and a flag of stripes and stars trailing from her stern,
sailed majestically up the bay. It was the frigate _United States_.
Again Minister Nelson called on Count Cassaro, and again his request
was refused, but this time a shade less curtly. Nor did King Bomba, in
his palace on the hill, laugh quite so loudly. Four days slipped away
and _splash_ went the anchor of the _Concord_ alongside her sisters.
King Bomba began to look anxious, and his minister was plainly worried,
but still the money remained unpaid. Two days later the _John Adams_
came sweeping into the harbor under a cloud of snowy canvas and hove
to so as to bring her broadside to bear upon the city--whereupon Count
Cassaro sent hurriedly for some local bankers. When the fifth ship
sailed in, the city was agog with excitement, and the Neapolitans had
almost reached the point of being honest--but not quite. But the report
that a sixth ship was entering the harbor brought the desired result,
for Count Cassaro called for his carriage, hastened to the American
envoy, and asked him whether he would prefer the money in drafts or
cash.
Though the next ten years of Perry’s life were spent on shore duty,
as the result of the extraordinary work he performed during that
comparatively brief time, he came to be known as “the educator of
the navy.” In those ten years he founded the Brooklyn Naval Lyceum;
commanded the _Fulton_, the first American war vessel independent of
wind and tide; discovered the value of the ram as a weapon of offense
and thereby changed the tactics of sea-fights from “broadside to
broadside” to “prow on”; revolutionized the naval architecture of the
world; modernized the lighthouse system along our coasts; substituted
the use of shells for solid shot in our navy; and established the
School of Gun Practice at Sandy Hook. Any one of these was an
achievement of which a man would have good reason to be proud. Any one
of them was a service which merited the appreciation of the nation. In
1840 he was rewarded with the rank of commodore, and thenceforward the
vessel that carried him flew the “broad pennant.” Yet all of his later
illustrious services under the red, the white, and the blue pennants
added nothing to his pay, permanent rank, or government reward, for
until the year 1862 there was no office in the American navy carrying
higher pay than that of captain.
As a result of the Webster-Ashburton treaty, whereby England and the
United States bound themselves to suppress the slave-trade, Perry was
given command of an eighty-gun squadron, and in 1842 was ordered to
the west coast of Africa for the purpose of stamping out the traffic
in “black ivory” and, incidentally, to protect the negro colony he
had established in Liberia a quarter of a century before from the
aggressions of the native rulers. Though the framers of the treaty
were unquestionably sincere in their desire to stamp out the traffic
in human beings, and though both the British and American navies made
every effort to enforce it, these efforts were nullified by the fact
that for a number of years the courts of England and the United States
refused to convict a slaver unless captured with the slaves actually
on board. The absurdity--and tragedy--of this ruling was emphasized
by the case of the slaver _Brilliante_. On one of her dashes from the
west coast of Africa to the Gulf coast of the United States her captain
found himself becalmed and surrounded by four war-ships. Aware that he
would certainly be boarded unless the wind quickly rose, he stretched
his entire cable chain on deck, suspended it clear of everything, and
shackled to it his anchor, which hung on the bow ready to drop. To this
chain he lashed the six hundred slaves he had aboard. He waited until
he could hear the oars of the boarding parties close at hand--then he
cut the anchor. As it fell it dragged overboard the cable with its
human freight, and though the men-of-war’s men heard the shrieks of the
victims and found their fetters lying on the deck, the fact remained
that there were no slaves aboard; so, in conformity with the rulings of
the learned judges in Washington and London, there was nothing left for
the boarders but to depart amid the jeers of the slaver’s captain and
crew.
Upon reaching the west coast, known then, as now, as “the white man’s
graveyard,” the first thing to which Perry turned his attention was
the settlement of an outstanding score with the tribesmen of Berribee,
who inhabited that region which now comprises the French Ivory Coast.
A few months prior to his visit the untutored savages of this coast
of death had enticed ashore the captain and crew of the American
schooner _Mary Carver_ and, after unspeakable tortures, had murdered
them. For three hours Captain Carver was subjected to torments almost
incredible in the fiendish ingenuity they displayed, finally, when all
but dead, being bound and turned over to the women and children of the
tribe, who amused themselves by sticking thorns into his flesh until
he was a human pincushion. Then they cooked and ate him. It was with
uneasy consciences, therefore, that the natives saw four great black
ships, flying the same strange flag that they had taken from the _Mary
Carver_, drop anchor off Berribee one red-hot November morning.
Commodore Perry sent a message to the King, who bore the pleasing
name of Crack-O, that it would be better for his health as well as
for that of the white men trading along the coast if he moved his
capital a considerable distance inland. The ebony monarch sent back
the suggestion that the matter be thrashed out at a palaver to be
held in the royal kraal two days later. On the morning appointed
Commodore Perry, with twelve boatloads of sailors and marines, landed
with considerable difficulty through the booming surf and, escorted
by fifty natives armed with rusty muskets of an obsolete pattern,
marched through the jungle to the palaver house. As he entered the
town it did not escape the keen eye of the American commander that
there was a noticeable absence of natives to greet him; he guessed,
and rightly, that the warriors were in ambush and that the women
and children had taken to the bush. So, before entering the palaver
house, he took the precaution of posting sentries at the gates of
the stockade and of drawing up his men close by with orders to break
into the kraal if they heard a disturbance. Then he strode into the
presence of King Crack-O, and two strong men stood face to face. The
African ruler was a gigantic negro with a face as ugly as sin and the
frame of a prize-fighter, his tremendous muscles playing like snakes
under a skin made shiny with cocoanut oil. Flung over his massive
shoulders was the royal robe of red and yellow, and tilted rakishly
on his fuzzy skull was a dilapidated top-hat--the emblem of royalty
throughout native Africa. Behind him, leaning against the wall and
within easy reach, was his trowel-bladed spear, a vicious weapon with
a six-foot shaft which, in the hands of a man who knew how to use it,
could be driven through a three-inch plank. Twelve notches on its haft
told their own grim story. Taking him by and large, he was a mighty
formidable figure, was his Majesty King Crack-O of Berribee, though
the American commodore, who stood six feet two in his stockings and
was built in proportion, was not exactly puny himself. As the Berribee
tongue was not included in the remarkable list of languages of which
Perry had made himself master, and as King Crack-O’s knowledge of
English was confined to such odds and ends of profanity as he had
picked up from seamen and traders, a voluble African named Yellow
Will, who proved himself a most impudent and barefaced liar, did the
interpreting. It was the interpreter, in fact, who precipitated the
shindy, for his attitude quickly became so insolent that Perry, who
was a short-tempered man under the best of circumstances, shook his
fist under his nose and thundered that he would either speak the
truth or get a flogging. Terrified by the violence of the explosion,
the interpreter bolted for the gate, and the sentry, who believed in
acting first and inquiring afterward, levelled his rifle and shot him
dead. Instantly the royal enclosure was in an uproar. King Crack-O
snatched at his spear, but, quick as the big black was, the American
commodore was quicker. Perry, who, despite his size, was as quick on
his feet as a professional boxer, hurled himself upon Crack-O before he
could get to his weapon and caught him by the throat, while a sergeant
of marines, who had burst in at sound of the scuffle, shot the King
through the body. Though mortally wounded, the negro ruler fought
with the ferocity of a gorilla, again and again hurling off the half
dozen sailors who attempted to make him prisoner, being subdued only
when a marine brought a rifle barrel down on his head and stretched
him senseless. The forest encircling the royal kraal was by this
time vomiting armed and yelling warriors, who opened fire with their
antiquated muskets, a compliment which the bluejackets and marines
returned with deadly effect. Bound hand and foot, the wounded King was
taken out to the flag-ship, where he died the next morning. Before
departing, the sailors touched a match to his mud-and-wattle capital,
though not before they had recovered the flag taken from the ill-fated
_Mary Carver_, and in twenty minutes the town was a heap of smoking
ashes. Moving slowly down the coast, Perry landed punitive expeditions
at every village of importance, drove back the tribesmen, destroyed
their crops, confiscated their cattle, and burned their towns. News
travels in Africa by the “underground railway” as though by wireless,
and the effect of this powder-and-ball policy was quickly felt along
a thousand miles of coast, the tribal chieftains hastening in, under
flags of truce, “to talk one big palaver, to pay plenty bullock, to no
more fight white man.” Thus was concluded one of those “little wars”
which have done so much to make the red-white-and-blue flag respected
at the uttermost ends of the earth, but of which our people seldom hear.
In 1846 came the war with Mexico and with it still another opportunity
for Perry to add to his reputation. Opportunity seemed, indeed,
to be forever hammering at his door--and he never let the elusive
jade escape him. When Scott found that his artillery was unable to
effect a breach in the walls of Vera Cruz, he asked Perry, who was
in charge of the naval operations in the Gulf, for the loan of some
heavy ordnance from the fleet, saying that his soldiers would do the
handling. “Where the guns go the men go, too,” responded Perry--and
they did. Landing the great guns from his war-ships, he manned them
with his own crews, pushed them up to within eight hundred yards of the
Mexican fortifications, and hammered them to pieces with an efficiency
and despatch which amazed the army officers, who had never taken the
sailor into consideration as a fighting factor on land. It was Perry’s
guns, served by the bluejackets he had trained and aimed by officers
who had learned their business at the School of Gun Practice he had
founded, which opened a gate through the walls of Vera Cruz for Scott’s
triumphant advance on the Mexican capital.
Perry had long advocated the value of sailors trained as infantry,
and this campaign gave him an opportunity to show his critics that
he knew what he was talking about. Forming the first American naval
brigade ever organized, he moved slowly down the Gulf coast, landing
and capturing every town he came to, until the whole littoral from
the Rio Grande to Yucatan was in his possession. At the taking of
Tabasco--now known as San Juan Bautista--the novel sight was presented
of the commander-in-chief of the American naval forces leading the
landing parties in person. The capital of the state of Tabasco lies
in the heart of the rubber country, some seventy miles up the Tabasco
River, and only eighteen degrees above the equator. The expedition
against it consisted of forty boats, conveying eleven hundred men.
This was new work for American sailors, for up to that time our naval
traditions consisted of squadron fights in line, ship-to-ship duels
and boarding parties. In this case, however, a flotilla was to ascend
a narrow and tortuous river for seventy miles through a densely wooded
region, which afforded continuous cover for riflemen, and then to
disembark and attack heavy shore batteries defended by a force many
times the strength of their own. As the long line of boats reached
the hairpin turn in the river known as the Devil’s Bend, the dense
jungle which lined both sides of the stream suddenly blazed with
musketry and the boats were swept with a rain of lead. Perry, who
was standing in an exposed position under the awnings of the leading
boat, his field-glasses glued to his eyes, escaped death by the breadth
of a hair. As the spurts of flame and smoke leaped from the wall of
shrubbery he roared the order, “Fire at will!” and the fusillade of
small arms that ensued riddled the jungle and effectually put to flight
the Mexicans.
When within a few miles of the town it was found that the Mexicans had
placed obstructions in the channel in such a manner that they would
have to be blown up before the boats could pass. And for this Perry
would not wait. Directing the gunners to sweep the beach with grape,
he gave the order: “Prepare to land!” He himself took the tiller of
the leading boat. Reaching the line of obstructions in the river,
he suddenly steered straight for the shore and, rising in his boat,
called in a voice which echoed over river and jungle: “Three cheers, my
lads, and give way all!” Responding with three thunderous hurrahs, the
sailors bent to their oars and raced toward the shore as the college
eights race down the river at Poughkeepsie. Perry was the first to
land. Followed by his flag-captain and his aides, he dashed up the
almost perpendicular bank in the face of a scattering rifle fire
and unfurled his broad pennant in sight of the whole line of boats.
Quickly the marines and sailors landed and cleared the underbrush of
snipers. Then, with a cloud of skirmishers thrown out on either flank,
a company of pioneers in advance to clear the road, and squads of
bluejackets marching fan-fashion, dragging their field-pieces behind
them, the column moved on Tabasco with the burly commodore tramping at
its head. The thermometer--for it was in June--stood at 130 degrees
in the shade--and there was no shade. Man after man fainted from heat
and exhaustion. Miasma rose in clouds from the jungle. The pitiless
sun beat down from a sky of brass. The country was so swampy that the
pioneers had to fell trees and build bridges before the column could
advance. Every few minutes a gun would sink to the hubs in quicksand
and a whole company would have to man the drag-ropes and haul it out.
This overland march, through a roadless and pestilential jungle, was
one of the most remarkable exploits and certainly one of the least
known of the entire war.
The flotilla left in the river had, meanwhile, succeeded in blowing
up the obstructions and, moving up the stream, shelled the Mexican
fortifications from the rear while Perry and his sweating men prepared
to carry them by storm. Waiting until the straggling column closed
up and the men had a few moments in which to rest, Perry formed his
command into “company front,” and signalled to his bugler. As the
brazen strains of the “charge” pealed out the line of sweating,
panting, cheering men, led by the grizzled commodore himself, pistol
in one hand and cutlass in the other, swept at a run up the steep main
street of the city with the ships’ bands playing them into action with
“Yankee Doodle.” In five minutes it was all over but the shouting. The
Mexican garrison had fled, and our flag waved in triumph over the city
which gave the sauce its name. The capture of Tabasco, whose commercial
importance was second only to that of Vera Cruz, was the last important
naval operation of the war. Since the fall of Vera Cruz, Perry and
his jack-tars had captured six fortress-defended cities, had taken
ninety-three pieces of artillery, had forced neutrality on the great,
rich province of Yucatan, had established an American customs service
at each of the captured ports, and had found time in between to build
a naval hospital on the island of Salmadina, which saved hundreds of
lives. And yet but few of our people are aware that Matthew Perry even
took part in the war with Mexico.
Perry’s service in Russia, Egypt, Italy, Africa, the West Indies,
and Mexico was, however, but a preparatory course for the great
adventure on which he was destined to embark, for, as a result of the
extraordinary fund of experience and information he had gained on
foreign seaboards, he was selected to command the expedition which the
American Government had determined to send to Japan in an attempt to
open up that empire to commerce and civilization. Now, you must not
lose sight of the fact that the Japan of sixty years ago was quite a
different country from the Japan of to-day. The Japanese of 1853 were
as ultra-exclusive and as pleased with themselves as are the members of
the Newport set. They wanted no outsiders in their country, and they
did not have the slightest desire to play in any one else’s back yard.
All they asked was to be let alone. But no nation can successfully
oppose the march of civilization. It must either welcome progress or go
under. For three centuries every maritime power in Europe had attempted
to open up Japan, and always they had met with failure. But about the
middle of the nineteenth century the United States decided to take a
hand in the game. With the conquest and settlement of California;
the increase of American commerce with China; the growth of American
whale-fisheries in Eastern seas, in which ten thousand Americans
were employed; the development of steam traffic and the consequent
necessity for coaling stations, it became increasingly evident to the
frock-coated gentlemen in Washington that the opening of the empire of
the Mikado was a necessity which could not much longer be delayed.
Thus it came about that the morning of July 8, 1853, saw a squadron of
black-hulled war-ships--the _Mississippi_, _Susquehanna_, _Plymouth_,
and _Saratoga_--sailing into the Straits of Uraga and into Japanese
history. And on the bridge of the flag-ship, his telescope glued to
his eye, was our old friend, Matthew Calbraith Perry. The Straits of
Uraga, I should explain, form the entrance to the Bay of Tokio, whose
sacred waters had, up to that time, never been desecrated by the
hulls of foreign war-ships. But Perry was never worried about lack
of precedent. At five in the afternoon his ships steamed in within
musket-shot of Uraga, and, at the shrill signal of the boatswains’
pipes, their anchors went rumbling down. A moment later a string of
signal-flags fluttered from the flag-ship in a message which read:
“Have no communication with the shore, have none from the shore.”
Perry, you see, had spent the three preceding years in preparing for
this expedition by learning all that he could of the Japanese character
and customs, and he had not spent them for naught. He had determined
that, when it came to being really snobbish and exclusive, he would
make the Japanese, who had theretofore held the record for that sort
of thing, look like amateurs. And he did. For when the captain of the
port, in his ceremonial dress of hempen cloth and lacquered hat, put
off in a twelve-oared barge to inquire the business of the strangers, a
marine sentry at the top of the flag-ship’s ladder brusquely motioned
him away as though he were of no more importance than a tramp. Then
came the vice-governor, flying the trefoil flag and with an escort
of armored spearmen, but he met with no more consideration than the
port-captain. The American ships were about as hospitable as so
many icebergs. Indeed, it was not until he had explained that the
governor was prohibited by law from boarding a foreign vessel that
the vice-governor was permitted to set foot on the sacred deck-planks
of the flag-ship. Even then he was not permitted to see the mighty
and illustrious excellency who was in command of the squadron; no,
indeed. As befitted his inferior rank, he was received by a very stiff,
very haughty, very condescending young lieutenant who interrupted
the flowery address of the dazed official by telling him that the
Americans considered themselves affronted by the filthy shore boats
which hovered about them, and that if they did not depart instantly
they would be fired on. After the vice-governor had gone to the rail
and motioned the inquisitive boats away, the lieutenant informed him
that the illustrious commander of the mighty squadron bore an autograph
letter from his Excellency the President of the United States to the
Mikado, and that he proposed to steam up to Tokio and deliver it in
person. When the vice-governor heard this he nearly fainted. For a
fleet of barbarian war-ships to anchor off the sacred city, the capital
of the empire, the residence of the son of heaven, was impossible,
unthinkable, sacrilegious. The very thought of it paralyzed him with
fear. When he carried the news of what the Americans proposed doing to
the governor, that official changed his mind about the illegality of
his setting foot on a foreign ship, and the following morning, with
a retinue which looked like the chorus of a comic opera, he went in
state to the flag-ship to expostulate. But the commodore refused to
see the governor, just as he had refused to see his subordinate, and
that crestfallen official, his feelings sadly ruffled, was forced to
content himself with a brief conversation with Commander Buchanan, who
told him that, unless arrangements were made at once for delivering the
President’s letter to a direct representative of the Mikado, Commodore
Perry was unalterably determined on steaming up to Tokio and delivering
the letter to the Emperor himself. From beginning to end of the
interview, the American officer, who, I expect, enjoyed the performance
hugely, resented the slightest lack of ceremony on the governor’s part
and did not hesitate to give evidence of his displeasure when that
bedeviled official omitted anything which the American thought he ought
to do. At length the now deeply impressed Japanese agreed to despatch a
messenger to Tokio for further instructions, and to this the Americans,
with feigned reluctance, agreed, adding, however, that if an answer was
not received within three days they would move up to the capital and
learn the reason why.
The appearance of American war-ships in the Bay of Tokio was a mighty
shock to the Japanese. What right had a foreign nation to impose on
them a commerce which they did not want; a friendship which they did
not seek? The alarm-bells clanged throughout the empire. Messengers
on reeking horses tore through every town spreading the astounding
news. Spears were sharpened, and ancient armor was dragged from dusty
chests. Night and day could be heard the clangor of the smiths forging
weapons of war. Away with the barbarians! To arms! _Jhoi! Jhoi!_
Buddhists wore away their rosaries invoking Kartikiya, the god of
war, and Shinto priests fasted while they called on the sea and the
storm to destroy the impious invaders of the Nipponese motherland. The
hidebound formality of untold centuries was swept away in this hour
of common danger, and for the first time in Japanese history high and
low alike were invited to offer suggestions as to what steps should
be taken for the protection of the nation and the preservation of the
national honor. It didn’t take the wiseheads long, however, to decide
that compliance was better than defiance; so, on the last of the three
days of grace granted by the Americans, the governor in his gorgeous
robes of office once more boarded the _Susquehanna_ and, with many
genuflections, informed the officer designated to meet him that the
letter from the President would be received a few days later, with
all the pomp and ceremony which the Imperial Government knew how to
command, in a pavilion which would be erected on the beach near Uraga
for the purpose, by two peers of the empire who had been designated by
the Mikado as his personal representatives.
On the morning of July 14 the squadron weighed anchor and moved up so
as to command the place where the ceremony was to be held. Carpenters,
mat makers, tapestry hangers, and decorators sent from the capital
had been working night and day, and under their skilful hands a great
pavilion, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, had sprung up
on the beach. When all was in readiness the governor and his suite,
their silken costumes ablaze with gold embroidery, pulled out to
the flag-ship to escort the commodore to the shore. As the Japanese
stepped aboard, a signal called fifteen launches and cutters from
the other ships of the squadron to the side of the _Susquehanna_.
Officers, bluejackets, and marines in all the glory of full dress
piled into them, and, led by Commander Buchanan’s gig, they headed
for the shore, the oars of the American sailors rising and falling
in beautiful unison. As the procession of boats drew out to its full
length, the bright flags, the gorgeous banners, the barbaric costumes
of the Japanese, the leather shakoes of the marines, and the scarlet
tunics of the bandsmen, with the turquoise sea for a foreground and
the great white cone of Fujiyama rising up behind, combined to form
a never-to-be-forgotten picture. When the boats were half-way to the
landing stage, a flourish of bugles sounded from the flag-ship, the
marine guard presented arms, and Commodore Perry, resplendent in cocked
hat and gold-laced uniform, attended by side boys and followed by a
glittering staff, descended the gangway and entered his barge, while
the _Susquehanna’s_ guns roared out a salute. On the shore a guard of
honor composed of American sailors and marines was drawn up to receive
him. As he set foot on the soil of Japan the troops presented arms,
the officers saluted, the drums gave the three ruffles, the band burst
into the American anthem, and the colors swept the ground. Nothing had
been left undone which would be likely to impress the ceremony-loving
Japanese, and the effect produced was spectacular enough to have
satisfied P. T. Barnum. The land procession was formed with the same
attention to ceremonial and display. First came a hundred marines
in the picturesque uniform of the period, marching with mechanical
precision; after them came a hundred bluejackets with the roll of the
sea in their gait, while at the head of the column was a marine band,
ablaze with gold and scarlet. Behind the bluejackets walked Commodore
Perry, guarded by two gigantic negroes--veritable Jack Johnsons in
physique and stature--preceded by two ship’s boys bearing the mahogany
caskets containing Perry’s credentials and the President’s letter, the
delivery of which was the reason for all this extraordinary display.
As the glittering procession entered the pavilion the two counsellors
of the empire who had been designated by the Mikado to receive
the letter rose and stood in silence. When the governor of Uraga,
acting as master of ceremonies, intimated that all was ready, the
two boys advanced and handed their caskets to the negroes. These,
opening in succession the rosewood caskets and the envelopes of
scarlet cloth, displayed the presidential letter and its accompanying
credentials--impressive documents written on vellum, bound in blue
velvet, and fringed with seals of gold. Upon the master of ceremonies
announcing that the imperial high commissioners were ready to receive
the letter, the negroes returned the imposing documents to the boys,
who slowly advanced the length of the hall and deposited them in a box
of scarlet lacquer which had been brought from Tokio for the purpose.
Again a frozen silence pervaded the assemblage. Then Perry, speaking
through an interpreter, paid his respects to the immobile functionaries
and announced that he would return for an answer to the letter in the
following spring. When some of the officials anxiously inquired if he
would come with all four ships, he sententiously replied: “With many
more.”
Although he had announced that he would not revisit Japan until
the spring, when Perry learned that the French and Russians were
hastily preparing expeditions to be sent to Tokio for the purpose of
counteracting American influence, he decided to advance the date of
his return, entering the Bay of Tokio for the second time on February
12, 1854, thus getting ahead of his European rivals. This time he had
with him a really imposing armada: the _Susquehanna_, _Mississippi_,
_Powhatan_, _Macedonian_, _Southampton_, _Lexington_, _Vandalia_,
_Plymouth_, and _Saratoga_. On this occasion he refused to stop at
Uraga and, much to the consternation of the Japanese, steamed steadily
up the bay and anchored off Yokohama, within sight of the capital
itself. The negotiations which ensued occupied several days, during
which Perry insisted on the same pomp and ceremony, and took the same
high-handed course that characterized his former visit. Noticing that
the grounds surrounding the treaty house had been screened in by large
mats, he inquired the reason, and upon being informed that it was
done so that the Americans might not see the country, he said that he
considered that the nation he represented was insulted and ordered that
the screens instantly be removed. That was the sort of attitude that
the Japanese understood, and thereafter they treated Perry with even
more profound respect. The negotiations were brought to a conclusion
on the 31st of March, 1854, when the terms of the treaty whereby the
empire of Japan was opened to American commerce were finally agreed
upon. Thus was recorded one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs in
our history. As Washington Irving wrote to Commodore Perry: “You have
gained for yourself a lasting name and have done it without shedding a
drop of blood or inflicting misery on a human being.”
But Perry’s accomplishment had a sequel, and a bloody one. The
treaty which admitted the foreigner precipitated civil war in Japan.
Although for two hundred and fifty years the Japanese had been at
peace and their sword-blades were rusty from lack of use, the embers
of rebellion had long been smouldering, and the act that admitted the
alien served to fan them into the flame of open revolt. The trouble
was that the tycoon--the viceroy, the mouthpiece of the Mikado, the
power behind the throne--had become all-powerful, while the Mikado
himself, as the result of a policy of seclusion that had been forced
upon him, had become but a puppet, a figurehead. As the treaty with
the United States had been signed under the authority of the tycoon,
the rebels took up arms in a double-barrelled cause: to restore the
Mikado to his old-time authority and to expel the “hairy barbarians,”
as the foreigners were pleasantly called. The insurrectionists, who
represented the powerful Choshiu and Satsuma clans, induced the
Mikado to issue an edict setting June 25, 1863, as a date by which
all foreigners should be expelled from the empire. The tycoon, though
bound to the United States and the European powers by the most solemn
treaties, found himself helpless. He promptly sent in his resignation,
but the Mikado, coerced by the rebellious clansmen, refused to accept
it and left the unhappy viceroy to wriggle out of the predicament as
best he could.
Meanwhile the leaders of the Choshiu clan seized and proceeded to
fortify and mine the Straits of Shimonoseki, the great highway of
foreign commerce forming the entrance to the inland sea, which at that
point narrows down to a channel three miles in length and less than a
mile in width, through which the tides run like a mill-race. On June
25, the eventful day fixed for the expulsion of the barbarians from
the sacred dominions of the Mikado, the American merchant steamer
_Pembroke_, with a pilot furnished by the Tokio government and with
the American flag at her peak, was on her way northward through
the channel when she was fired on by the clansmen though, as luck
would have it, was not hit. But peace which had existed in Japan
for nearly two centuries and a half was broken. A few days later a
French despatch-boat was hit in seven places, her boat’s crew nearly
all killed by a shell, and the vessel saved from sinking only by a
lively use of the pumps. On July 11 a Dutch frigate was hit thirty-one
times, and nine of its crew were killed or wounded, and a little later
a French gunboat was badly hulled as she dashed past the batteries
at full speed. It was evident that the Japanese had acquired modern
guns in the ten years that had passed since Perry had taught them the
blessings of civilization, and it was equally evident that they knew
how to use them.
News is magnified as it travels in the East, and by the time word of
the _Pembroke_ incident reached Commander David McDougal, who was
cruising in Chinese waters in the sloop of war _Wyoming_ in pursuit
of the Confederate privateer _Alabama_, it had been exaggerated until
he was led to believe that the American vessel had been sunk with all
hands. Though possessing neither a chart of the straits nor a map of
the batteries, McDougal ordered his ship to be coaled and provisioned
at full speed (and how the jackies worked when they got the order!),
and on July 16, under a cloudless sky, without a breath of wind,
and the sea as smooth as a tank of oil, the _Wyoming_, her ports
covered with tarpaulins so as to make her look like an unsuspecting
merchantman, but with her crew at quarters and her decks cleared for
action, came booming into Shimonoseki Straits. No sooner did she get
within range of the batteries than the five eight-inch Dahlgren guns
presented to Japan by the United States as a token of friendship,
opened on her with a roar. It was not exactly a convincing proof of
friendship. The Japanese batteries, splendidly handled, concentrated
their fire on the narrowest part of the straits, which they swept
with a hail of projectiles, while beyond, in more open water, three
heavily armed converted merchantmen--the steamer _Lancefield_, the bark
_Daniel Webster_, and the brig _Lanrick_, all, oddly enough, American
vessels which had been purchased by the clansmen for use against their
former owners--lay directly athwart the channel, prepared to dispute
the _Wyoming’s_ passage, should she, by a miracle, succeed in getting
past the batteries. As the first Japanese shell screamed angrily
overhead, the tarpaulins concealing the _Wyoming’s_ guns disappeared
in a twinkling, the stars and stripes broke out at her masthead, and
her artillery cut loose. It was a surprise party, right enough, but the
surprise was on the Japanese.
As McDougal approached the narrows, sweeping them with his
field-glasses, his attention was caught by a line of stakes which, as
he rightly suspected, had been placed there by the Japanese to gauge
their fire. Accordingly, instead of taking the middle of the channel,
as denoted by the line of stakes, he ordered the Japanese pilot, who
was paralyzed with terror, to run close under the batteries. It was
well that he did so, for no sooner was the _Wyoming_ within range than
the Japanese gunners opened a cannonade which would have blown her
out of the water had she been in mid-channel, where they confidently
expected her to be, but which, as it was, tore through her rigging
without doing serious harm. There were six finished batteries, mounting
in all thirty guns, and the three converted merchantmen carried
eighteen pieces, making forty-eight cannon opposed to the _Wyoming’s_
six.
Clearing the narrows, McDougal, despite the protestations of his
pilot, who said that he would certainly go aground, gave orders to
go in between the sailing vessels and take the steamer. Just then a
masked battery opened on the _Wyoming_, but even in those days the fame
of the American gunners was as wide as the seas, and they justified
their reputation by placing a single shell so accurately that its
explosion tore the whole battery to pieces. Then McDougal, signalling
for “full steam ahead,” dashed straight at the _Daniel Webster_,
pouring in a broadside as he swept by which left her crowded decks a
shambles. Then, opening on the _Lanrick_ with his starboard guns, he
fought the two ships at the same time, the action being at such close
quarters that the guns of the opponents almost touched. In this, the
first battle with modern weapons in which they had ever engaged, the
Japanese showed the same indifference to death and the same remarkable
ability as fighters and seamen which was to bring about the defeat
of the Russians half a century later. So rapidly did the crew of the
_Lanrick_ serve their guns that they managed to pour three broadsides
into the _Wyoming_ before the latter sent her to the bottom. The
_Lanrick_ thus rubbed off the slate, McDougal swept down upon the
_Lancefield_, and oblivious of the terrific fire directed upon him by
the _Daniel Webster_ and the shore batteries, coolly manœuvred for a
fighting position. But during this manœuvre the _Wyoming_ went ashore
while at the same moment the heavily manned Japanese steamer bore down
with the evident intention of ramming and boarding her while she was
helpless in the mud. For a moment it looked as though the jig was up,
and it flashed through the mind of every American that, before going
into action, McDougal had given orders that the _Wyoming_ was to be
blown up with every man on board rather than fall into the hands of
the enemy--for those were the days when the Japanese subjected their
prisoners to the horrors of the thumb-screws, the dripping water, and
the torture cage. But after a few hair-raising moments, during which
every American must have held his breath and murmured a little prayer,
the powerful engines of the _Wyoming_ succeeded in pulling her off the
sand-bar, whereupon, ignoring the bark of the batteries, McDougal
manœuvred in the terribly swift current until the American gunners
could see the _Lancefield_ along the barrels of their eleven-inch
pivot-guns. Then both Dahlgrens spoke together. The accuracy of the
American fire was appalling. The first two shells tore apertures as big
as barn-doors in the Japanese vessel’s hull, a third ripped through her
at the water-line, passed through the boiler, tore out her sides, and
burst far away in the town beyond. The frightful explosion which ensued
was followed by a rain of ashes, timbers, ironwork, and fragments
of human beings, and before the smoke had cleared the _Lancefield_
had sunk from sight. It was now the _Daniel Webster’s_ turn, and in
a few minutes the namesake of the great statesman was shattered and
sinking. The three vessels thus disposed of, the _Wyoming_ was now
free to turn her undivided attention to the shore batteries, her
gunners placing shell after shell with as unerring accuracy as Christy
Mathewson puts his balls across the plate. Gun after gun was put out
of action, battery after battery was silenced, until the whole line
of fortifications was a heap of ruins with dismounted cannon lying
behind their wrecked embrasures and dead and wounded Japanese strewn
everywhere. At twenty minutes past noon firing ceased. Then, his work
accomplished, McDougal turned his ship and steamed triumphantly the
length of the straits while the hills of Japan echoed and re-echoed the
hurrahs of the American sailors.
In this extraordinary action, which lasted an hour and ten minutes, the
_Wyoming_ was hulled ten times, her funnel had six holes in it, two
masts were injured and her top-hamper badly damaged. Of her crew, five
were killed and seven wounded. On the other hand, the lone American,
with her six guns, had destroyed six shore batteries mounting thirty
improved European cannon and had sent three ships, with eighteen pieces
of ordnance, to the bottom, killing upward of a hundred Japanese and
wounding probably that many more. It is no exaggeration, I believe, to
assert that the history of the American navy contains no achievement
of a single commander in a single ship which surpasses that of David
McDougal in the _Wyoming_ at Shimonoseki. Dewey’s victory at Manila was
but a repetition of the Shimonoseki action on a larger scale.
Four days later two French war-ships went in and hammered to pieces
such fragments of the fortifications as the _Wyoming’s_ gunners had
left, but the clansmen, reinforced by _ronins_, or freelances, from
all parts of the empire, repaired their losses, built new batteries,
mounted heavier guns, and succeeded for fifteen months in keeping
the straits closed to foreign commerce. Then an allied fleet of
seventeen ships, with upward of seven thousand men, repeated the work
which the _Wyoming_ had done single-handed, forcing the passage,
destroying the forts, putting an end to the uprising, and restoring
safety to the foreigner in Japan. The American representation in
this great international armada consisted of one small vessel, the
_Ta Kiang_, manned by thirty sailors and marines under Lieutenant
Frederick Pearson, and mounting but a single gun. So gallant a part
was played by Pearson in his cockle-shell that Queen Victoria took
the extraordinary step of decorating him with the Order of the Bath,
which Congress permitted him to wear--the only American, so far as
I am aware, that has ever been thus honored. But no other operation
of the war so impressed the Japanese and so gained their admiration
and respect as when the _Wyoming_ came storming into the straits and
defied and defeated all their ships and guns. Years afterward a noted
Japanese editor wrote: “That action did more than all else to open
the eyes of Japan.” Though the European commanders were loaded with
honors and decorations for what was, after all, but supplementary
work, the heroism displayed by McDougal and his bluejackets received
neither reward nor recognition from their own countrymen, for 1863 was
the critical year of the Civil War, and the thunder of the _Wyoming’s_
guns in far-away Japan was lost in the roar of the guns at Gettysburg.
As Colonel Roosevelt once remarked: “Had that action taken place at
any other time than during the Civil War, its fame would have echoed
all over the world.” But, though few Americans are aware that we once
fought and whipped the Japanese, I fancy that it has not been forgotten
by the Japanese themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] In 1814 Bean was sent by General Morelos, then president of the
revolutionary party in Mexico, on a mission to the United States to
procure aid for the patriot cause. At the port of Nautla he found a
vessel belonging to Lafitte, which conveyed him to the headquarters of
the pirate chief, at Barataria. Upon informing Lafitte of his mission,
the buccaneer had him conveyed to New Orleans, where Bean found an old
acquaintance in General Andrew Jackson, upon whose invitation he took
command of one of the batteries on the 8th of January and fought by the
side of Lafitte in that battle. Colonel Bean eventually rose to high
rank under the Mexican republic, married a Mexican heiress, and died on
her hacienda near Jalapa in 1846.
[B] A full account of the life and exploits of Jean Lafitte will be
found under “The Pirate Who Turned Patriot,” in Mr. Powell’s “Gentlemen
Rovers.”
[C] A detailed account of the amazing exploits of Colonel Boyd will be
found in “For Rent: An Army on Elephants,” in Mr. Powell’s “Gentlemen
Rovers.”
[D] Erastus Smith, known as Deaf Smith because he was hard of hearing,
first came to Texas in 1817 with one of the filibustering forces that
were constantly arriving in that province. He was a man of remarkable
gravity and few words, seldom answering except in monosyllables. His
coolness in danger made his services as a spy invaluable to the Texans.
[E] It is a regrettable fact that this, one of the finest episodes in
our national history, from being a subject of honest controversy has
degenerated into an embittered and rancorous quarrel, some of Doctor
Whitman’s detractors, not content with questioning the motives which
animated him in his historic ride, having gone so far as to cast doubts
on the fact of the ride itself and even to assail the character of
the great missionary. Full substantiation of the episode as I have
told it may be found, however, in Barrows’s “Oregon, the Struggle for
Possession,” Johnson’s “History of Oregon,” Dye’s “McLoughlin and Old
Oregon,” and Nixon’s “How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon,” an array of
authorities which seem to me sufficient.
[F] Years afterward, Daniel Webster remarked to a friend: “It is safe
to assert that our country owes it to Doctor Whitman and his associate
missionaries that all the territory west of the Rocky Mountains and
north of the Columbia is not now owned by England and held by the
Hudson’s Bay Company.”--Dye’s “McLoughlin and Old Oregon.”
[G] The efflorescent soda incrusted on the margin of the water was used
by the soldiers as a substitute for saleratus.
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