Kearny's March

by Winston Groom

  Also by Winston Groom

  Better Times than These

  As Summers Die

  Only

  Conversations with the Enemy

  (with Duncan Spencer)

  Forrest Gump

  Shrouds of Glory

  Gone the Sun

  Gumpisms

  Gump & Co.

  Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl

  The Crimson Tide

  A Storm in Flanders

  1942

  Patriotic Fire

  Vicksburg, 1863

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2011 by Winston Groom

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Groom, Winston, [date]

  Kearny’s march : the epic creation of the American west, 1846–1847 / by Winston Groom. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-70141-1

  1. Kearny’s Expedition, 1846. 2. Kearny, Stephen Watts, 1794–1848.

  I. Title.

  E405.2.G76 2011

  979′.02—dc22 2011013889

  Maps by Robert Bull

  Jacket image: The Capture of Monterrey, September 25, 1846, by Adolphe Jean-Baptiste Bayot after Carl Nebel, hand-colored lithograph, 1851. Universal History Archive/Getty Images Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  To Carolina Montgomery Groom—age twelve

  When you were seven and came into my office to ask what I was doing, I was writing your book—Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans, a tale of pirates, Indians, heroes, and scoundrels.

  Here’s another story for you with explorers, Indians, generals, and mountain men—and always the heroes and scoundrels—who provide the grace and the disrepute that make our human race at once interesting and unique.

  —Your loving papa

  If you have no family or friends to aid you, and no prospect opened for you, turn your face to the great West, and there build up a home and fortune.… Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

  Horace Greeley, 1811–1872

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note: What’s in a Name?

  Maps

  1. A People in Motion

  2. Mr. Polk Gets His War

  3. The Pathfinder

  4. True West

  5. Kearny’s March

  6. The Santa Fe Trail

  7. Some Days You Eat the Bear; Some Days the Bear Eats You

  8. “The Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Moves On”

  9. In Old Monterrey

  10. Dancing on Air

  11. Doniphan’s Expedition

  12. The Fight of Their Lives

  13. The Death Trap

  14. The Horror

  15. Political Treachery, Military Insubordination, Discovery of Zion, and the Salvation of Children

  16. Last Roll Call: A Warm Salute

  Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  What’s in a Name?

  In each of the five military histories I’ve written previous to this one, there has been some family connection, some near relative of mine involved in the conflict. It wasn’t intentional but just sort of happened. In Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War it was my great-grandfather Fremont Sterling Thrower, who fought with the rebel general Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry against William T. Sherman in the Battle of Atlanta. In A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914–1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front it was my grandfather, who served in France with the Thirty-first Infantry (Dixie) Division. In 1942: The Year That Tried Men’s Souls it was my father, a captain in the army during World War II. In Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans, it turned out that my great-great-great-grandfather Elijah Montgomery had been a captain with the U.S. Seventh Infantry Regiment during the War of 1812, and during the Battle of New Orleans he had received both a commendation and field promotion to major from Andrew Jackson himself.

  When I undertook to write about the Battle of Vicksburg several years ago it was with a slight trepidation because I knew of no link between that terrific event and anyone in my ancestry. It’s not that I’m superstitious, but I felt I was somehow breaking a chain, that luck might not be with me. I pacified myself with the fact that on a golf course right behind my home in Point Clear, Alabama, lay a quiet little Civil War cemetery where several hundred Confederate soldiers are buried, most of whom had been wounded during the Battle of Vicksburg. It was the most slender of connections but it would have to do—and did, until one day a distant cousin whom I had never met appeared out of the blue with all manner of genealogical history about the Groom family.

  The other sides of the family were pack rats and documented ancestries back to Charlemagne—even to the time of the apes, for that matter—but of the Groom family, beyond my great-grandfather Groom, little was known, and I had always assumed that they must have been criminals, or worse.

  Lo and behold, documentation by this genealogist cousin revealed that my great-great-grandfather James Wright Groom had served honorably in the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War and wound up his life, in 1906, as an engineer and well-respected citizen of Mobile, Alabama, which is where I’m from. Armed with this news, I felt almost uncannily blessed and plunged into my research on the story with renewed vigor and confidence.

  Yet here, again, when I planned and proposed Kearny’s March, there was not a soul in my familial background who had taken the slightest part in that most interesting and acquisitive period in American history. A check of family records turned up no soldiers from the Mexican-American War, and again I began to suffer that sinking sensation you get when something doesn’t seem quite right—like starting off a long journey without your lucky penny, rabbit’s foot, or what have you.

  It hovered over me like a murky pall all through the researching and into the beginnings of the writing, until I had a sudden revelation: there might be a connection after all, however tenuous, between John C. Frémont, the famous Pathfinder of this story, and my great-grandfather Fremont Thrower, who fought in the Civil War.

  Because of the widespread publication of his western explorations, Frémont for a time in the mid-1840s was arguably the most celebrated person in America. He had attained such star status that counties, cities, streets, mountains, rivers, parks, libraries, schools, and above all babies were being named after him. I believe it is highly likely that my great-grandfather was among the latter. Fremont Thrower was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1845, the year that John Frémont’s famous explorer’s report was published in newspapers throughout the country, and there is no evidence in the family tree of anyone else called Fremont, which is a name of French extraction.

  If it is so, an interesting sidelight would be that, eighteen years later, Fremont Thrower found himself serving as a private in the Confederate cavalry, while his namesake, John Frémont, was a general in the Union army.

  These small links have become meaningful to me over the course of writing these historical books and lend a sort of immediacy to the work. I
t’s certainly not blood kin, if indeed it’s anything at all, but I’ll take it, the same way I did the little cemetery behind my house—a feeling that there’s something somehow special between yourself and the matter at hand.

  Point Clear

  December 11, 2010

  CHAPTER ONE

  A People in Motion

  Late on an August afternoon in 1845, the most famous man in America, U.S. captain John Charles Frémont, departed Bent’s Fort, the last outpost of American civilization, which lay in the foothills of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. With him were several score of the toughest, most experienced mountain men of the day—fur trappers and Indian fighters such as Kit Carson, Joseph Walker, and Bill Williams; the French-Canadians Basil Lajeunesse, Antoine Robideaux, Alexis Godey, and Auguste Archambault; a party of nine Delaware Indians; and an eighteen-year-old free black man who was Frémont’s valet. Sixty-one of them in all, they made a formidable armed party, each man carrying a .50-caliber Hawken “buffalo rifle,” two pistols, and any number of knives. They were headed west, into the setting sun, with instructions to chart the unknown.

  Frémont’s fame had reached him surprisingly early, at the age of thirty-two, after his first journey of exploration several years before, in which he disproved the widely held myth that the vast plains west of the Mississippi River were nothing more than a worthless, uninhabitable wasteland—the so-called Great American Desert. It was further enhanced by his second expedition, which “disclosed to multitudes a shining new land of flowers, sunshine, and wealth.” American explorers in those days were accorded the sort of exultation once given to modern-day astronauts. Theirs was a difficult, often dangerous, but fascinating and useful world that let the common man see what lay beyond his antlike horizons.

  Daniel Boone became a legend in his own time by pioneering the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, and early in the century Lewis and Clark unveiled the secrets of the Northwest Territory. The U.S. Navy thrilled the nation with its report of the Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 (the renowned “Ex.Ex.”), which charted the Pacific from Alaska to the South Seas, including a detailed look at the American West Coast. But Frémont’s revelations struck a note that set the country atremble, for by this time it was fairly bursting with European immigrants and others yearning for cheap, fertile land to sow and reap.

  Aided in some measure by his wife’s flair for literary composition, Frémont’s published reports sent whole communities scurrying to acquire “prairie schooners,” the great covered wagons that took Americans on their westward migration. It didn’t hurt, by the way, that the wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, was the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, at the time the most influential man in the U.S. Senate, who saw to it that his son-in-law’s findings were distributed wholesale by the U.S. Government Printing Office.

  Frémont’s present mission was, ostensibly, a strictly scientific one, established to discover and chart the western expanse of the continent. To that end his expedition carried with it the most sophisticated instruments of the day: “a fine refracting telescope, two pocket chronometers, two sextants, a reflecting circle, a siphon barometer and cistern barometer, half a dozen thermometers and an assortment of compasses.” And if the delicate barometers got broken, altitude would be determined by taking the temperature at which water boiled. A brilliant young artist and draftsman named Edward Kern was along to sketch flora, fauna, and topographical features. Also included were sacks of trinkets, clothing, and tools for the Indians they would inevitably encounter, as well as ample ammunition should the Indians prove hostile. The press had already branded Frémont the “Pathfinder,” but in fact he found few paths that had not already been traveled by the Native Americans or indeed by the mountain men. The difference was that Frémont was able to map them and describe them in a way that only a trained engineer and scientist could.

  Frémont was by now well versed in the rigors of such undertakings. The previous year he and his party got up the High Sierras too late, nearly froze and starved, and survived only by eating their pack animals and even the pet dogs that some of the men had acquired. Death could come in a flash in these fierce, uncharted climes—ambush by a war party; the sudden charge of a thousand-pound grizzly or the leap of a cougar; quicksand, desert thirst, prairie fire, flash floods, and heaven help the man who fell ill.

  Now a new menace was in the air, the threat of war—war with Mexico, war with England. The U.S. Congress had just voted to grant the independent Republic of Texas statehood. Mexico immediately severed diplomatic relations and promised war if the Americans went through with it. Britain had begun making bellicose noises over U.S. claims to the immense Oregon Territory that included what are now the states of Oregon, Washington, and parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Likewise, it was feared that the English, who possessed the world’s most powerful navy, would come in on the part of Mexico if she went to war with the United States.

  These problems were likely on Captain Frémont’s mind as his little army plodded out of Bent’s Fort toward the distant, snowcapped Rockies. Sixty men doesn’t sound like much in the long scheme of things, but in the 1840s, in the sparseness of the western half of the continent, sixty well-armed, well-trained men were a force to be reckoned with, considering that in the entire province of California fewer than one thousand Mexicans could be counted on as a military force.

  Frémont believed, or so he later said, that he was under secret instructions from the president himself, James K. Polk, to seize California from the Mexicans if war broke out. Navy Secretary George Bancroft had issued similar orders to Commodore John Drake Sloat, commander of the U.S. Pacific Squadron. At the time, there was a sizable community of American emigrants living there, most residing in towns along the coast or on farms in the Sacramento valley. It was anticipated that these sturdy people would rise up against the Mexican authorities in the event of war, or perhaps instigate a war themselves.

  It was shaping up as an explosive adventure, but Frémont felt up to the task. If successful he knew he would come home covered in glory. Little did he dream that instead he would return under arrest and facing a court-martial for mutiny, a hanging offense.

  The following year, 1846, the war with Mexico arrived. It broke out between a Mexican army on the Rio Grande and the U.S. Army under General Zachary Taylor, which President Polk had sent south to provoke hostilities. At least that’s the way most people saw it. Polk’s story was that the Mexicans had attacked American soldiers first, and on American soil, and he was sticking to it.

  While the principal theater of the war remained along the Rio Grande, Polk also set into motion another event designed to fulfill his dream of an America “from sea to shining sea.” He sent out urgent orders to Colonel (soon to be a general) Stephen Watts Kearny at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—then considered the western “frontier” of the United States—to march his two-thousand-man Army of the West a thousand miles down the old Santa Fe Trail and capture the New Mexico Territory, a huge Mexican province consisting of Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, which was presently being governed from Santa Fe. Kearny’s further instructions were to march the army another thousand miles west to the California Territory, which also included what are presently the states of Utah and Nevada, and take that, too.

  Polk’s line of thinking was that the inhabitants of those far-flung provinces were being so ill served by their government down in Mexico City they would willingly submit to U.S. conquest. He wasn’t far from wrong. In the New Mexico Territory, for example, the government seemed powerless to protect its farmers from the depredations of the wild Indians, at the same time taxing the citizens heavily for that exact purpose.

  Still, Kearny’s task was daunting. The Santa Fe Trail was tough and tricky. There had been trade up and down its course long enough that nobody was going to get lost, but weather, terrain, and hostile Indians were always challenging, and to get a whole army over it was a complicated project and logistical nightmare. Then there was
the question of what lay in wait at the other end. Would the Mexican government send a large army up to defend the place? Would Kearny face insurmountable fortifications? Would the population be rebellious? And then, assuming success in Santa Fe, he would then have to move the California force another thousand miles, this time across some of the most inhospitable desert and mountain terrain on earth, which remained unmapped, unexplored, and all but unknown. It would be a dangerous enterprise, but danger was the business Kearny was in and Polk couldn’t have picked a better man.

  Kearny had entered the army nearly thirty years earlier, after graduating from Columbia College, and for the past decade he had commanded the First Cavalry Regiment. In fact, he had already come to be known in army circles as the Father of Cavalry. A newspaper reporter who had recently met him described him as “a man rising fifty years of age. His height is about five feet ten or eleven inches. His figure is all that is required by symmetry. His features are regular, almost Grecian; his eye is blue, and he has an eagle-like expression, when excited by stern or angry emotion, but in ordinary social intercourse, the whole expression of his countenance is mild and pleasing, and his manners and conversation are unaffected, urbane, and conciliatory, without the slightest exhibition of vanity or egotism. He appears the cool, brave, and energetic soldier.” So it certainly appeared that Stephen Kearny was well equipped to lead the expedition the president had ordered—but there was something else. What Kearny didn’t know, what he couldn’t know, was that from the moment he marched the Army of the West out of Fort Leavenworth, on June 26, 1846, “the first phase, the political phase, of the American Civil War had begun.”

  By the 1840s a tense and immutable friction had begun to thrum across the American landscape, North and South. In the beginning the argument was largely political and, more specifically, economic. A decade earlier North and South had nearly come to blows as a result of a tariff passed over the objections of southern legislators, which put duties on foreign goods in such a way as to make them nearly unaffordable in the South. This legislation, known to southerners as the Tariff of Abominations, had been declared “null and void” by the state of South Carolina, forcing a showdown on the question of whether states must obey laws of Congress that they found obnoxious. The stalemate was broken when Andrew Jackson threatened to send federal forces to Charleston to enforce the law, but this left a bitter feeling among many southerners that only increased with time.