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[viii] 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[ix] 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[x] 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.

[2]

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,[4] “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[5] 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[6] 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[7] 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[8] 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

Hence, though American territory and Spanish marched side by side for twenty-five hundred miles, it was found impossible to agree on a[9] 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[10] 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.[11] 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[12] 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[13] 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[14] 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[15] 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[16] 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[17] 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[18] 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.

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!)[20] 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[21] 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[22] 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[23] 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[24] 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,[25] 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]

[26]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[27] 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,[28] 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.[29] 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[30] 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[31] 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[32] 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[33] 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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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[37] 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[38] 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,[39] 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[40] 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[41] 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.

[42]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[43] 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[44] 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,[45] 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[46] 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[47] 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[48] 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[49] 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[50] 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,[51] 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[52] 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[53] 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[54] ghostly spars of his rakish craft and to hear, borne by the night breeze, the rumble of his distant cannonading.

[56]

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,[58] 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[59] 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[60] 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[61] 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[62] 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[63] 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[64] 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[65] 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[66] 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,[67] 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[68] 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[69] 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[70] 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[71] 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[72] 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[73] 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[74] 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[75] 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[76] 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[77] 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[78] 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[79] 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,[80] 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[81] 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[82] 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[83] 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,[84] mortally wounded, and his men, such of them as were not dead, turned and fled for their lives.

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[85] 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,[86] 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.

[88]

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[90] 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[91] 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.

[92]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,[93] 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[94] 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[95] 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[96] 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.

[97]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[98] 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[99] 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[100] 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[101] 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[102] 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[103] 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[104] 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[105] 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,[106] 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[107] 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[108] 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[109] 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[110] 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.

[111]“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[112] 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[113] 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[114] 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[115] 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[116] 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[117] 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[118] 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[119] 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,[120] 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[121] 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[122] 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[123] 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[124] 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[125] 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[126] 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[127] 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[128] 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[129] 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.

[130]

[132]

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.

[134]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[135] 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[136] 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[137] 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[138] 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[139] 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[140] 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[141] 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[142] 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[143] 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[144] 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[145] 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.[146] 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[147] 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[148] 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[149] 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[150] 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[151] 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,[152] 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[153] 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[154] 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[155] 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,[156] 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[157] 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[158] 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;[159] 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.

[160]

[162]

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,[164] 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[165] 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[166] 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[167] 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[168] 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.[169] 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[170] 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.[171] 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[172] 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[173] 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[174] 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[175] 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.[176] 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[177] 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,[178] 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.

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 [179]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,[180] 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,[181] 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[182] 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[183] 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[184] 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[185] 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[186] 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[187] 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[188] 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.”

[189]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[190] 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[191] 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.”

[192]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[193] 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[194] 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.

[196]

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[198] 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[199] 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[200] 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[201] 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[202] 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[203] 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,[204] 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[205] 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,[206] 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.[207] 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[208] 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;[209] 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?

[210]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,[211] 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[212] 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[213] 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[214] 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]

[215]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[216] 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[217] 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[218] 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[219] 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[220] 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[221] 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[222] 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,[223] 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[224] 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[225] 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[226] 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.”

[227]“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[228] 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[229] 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[230] 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[231] 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[232] 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[233] 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.

[234]

[236]

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[238] 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,[239] 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[240] 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[241] 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[242] 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[243] 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[244] 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[245] 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[246] 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[247] 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,[248] 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,[249] 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[250] 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[251] 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[252] 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[253] 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[254] 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[255] 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[256] 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[257] 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,[258] 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[259] 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[260] 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.

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.[261] 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[262] 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[263] 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.[264] 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[265] 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[266] 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[267] 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,[268] 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[269] 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[270] 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[271] 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[272] 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[273] 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[274] 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[275] 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.

[276]

[278]

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[280] 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[281] 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.[282] 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[283] 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.

[284]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[285] 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[286] 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[287] 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[288] 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[289] 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[290] 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[291] 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[292] 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[293] 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[294] 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[295] 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[296] 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[297] 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[298] 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[299] 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[300] 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[301] 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[302] 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[303] 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[304] 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[305] 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;[306] 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[307] 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;[308] 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[309] 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[310] 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[311] 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[312] 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,[313] 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[314] 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[315] 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.

[316]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,[317] 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[318] 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[319] 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,[320] 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.[321] 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,[322] 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[323] 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.