When the dust of Mexico had settled and the treaty papers were signed, America did not return to the so-called Era of Good Feelings. Politicians, preachers, editors, and leaders on almost all sides became averse to listening; instead they barked louder and more profanely above the rising din. And so the nation shuddered into a kind of “era of agitation,” ending only with the curse of civil war.
That might have been the end of it, and of the United States as one people, but it wasn’t.
The whole remains today as immutable testimony to the perseverance of such men as Polk and Kearny, Frémont and Doniphan, Scott and Taylor, and the hundred thousand more who served under them in war, and their descendants, down to the present day. It remains because another hundred thousand pioneers on horse or muleback, or in their Conestoga wagons—including the Donners and the Mormons with their hand carts—struck out across those thousand or two thousand miles and braved the parching deserts, treacherous mountains, lethal snowstorms, open plains, gloomy forests, and a hundred other places where death came within a wink. They were the ones who first made the American West; then came the railroads and the multitudes, who may have been settlers but they weren’t the pioneers.
All those in the story played their roles and Kearny’s march, of course, is just a part, but it looms large when the history of the West is told. From the day Stephen Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth on that bright June morning in 1846, wherever he went became the United States of America.
* Kearny appears to have been of the old school on this subject. As the editors of the Frémont correspondence correctly point out, Kearny’s apparent postponement of the duel “was a strange proceeding, since his duty by military regulations was to arrest both parties.”
† Bryant’s book, What I Saw in California, published in 1848, has become a classic of the genre.
‡ Not quite. Frémont’s party of disgrace, traveling a day or two behind, finished the job, “burning the broken wagons, ox-yokes, and other sad relics,” to “destroy all traces which might operate to the discouragement of emigrants.”
§ As a token of gratitude for his service, before Carson left, Polk conferred upon him a lieutenant’s commission in the army’s Mounted Rifles, a regular army regiment. This would pay him roughly $100 a month, or about $32,000 a year in today’s money.
‖ Captured in the city fighting were seventy-two of the Irish deserters alluded to in an earlier footnote, who had formed the St. Patrick’s Battalion in the Mexican army. Lured by pleas from their fellow Catholics and the promise of high pay and Mexican land, most had deserted from Taylor’s army. Scott ordered them court-martialed and had forty-eight publicly hanged.
a The gold was first discovered at a mill Sutter was building, and the “rush” lasted less than a decade, but it saw more than 300,000 people—mostly Americans—pour into California during that time and extract precious metals worth billions in today’s dollars.
b Stoneman’s name was immortalized for his prowess at tearing up Rebel railroad track in the 1969 song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
NOTES ON SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first acknowledgment is to the dogged historians who have gone before, providing information, illumination, context, and insight into the diverse themes and threads of this story. My thanks to them is profound and heartfelt.
In a note regarding the sources of my previous book about the Civil War battle of Vicksburg, I remarked on the explosion of bureaucratic documentation that had taken place between the setting of my book Patriotic Fire, about the War of 1812, when only the barest of government records were kept, and the 1860s. Moving on to the 1840s, when the present story is told, I found a sparseness of documentation more akin to 1812 than to the Civil War, just fifteen years hence. Commanders such as Kearny, Doniphan, Price, and Taylor submitted straightforward, almost cursory accounts of their campaigns to the War Department and these, more or less, comprise the official record. However, those documents are supplemented by an abundance of personal diaries, journals, memoirs, and letters alluded to in the text, allowing us to flesh out the portrait of this extraordinary time in American history.
Not the least of these is the diary of President James K. Polk, as edited and annotated by Allan Nevins, which provides remarkably candid insights into the problems Polk faced and the solutions he endorsed. My friend John Sigenthaler’s fine, concise biography of Polk and Walter Borneman’s more elaborate Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America are solid guides to “Young Hickory” Polk. Otherwise, the politics of the times is amplified by such works as Thomas Hart Benton’s Thirty Years’ View, Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History, George Bancroft’s History of the United States, Allan Nevins’s Ordeal of the Union, and Bernard De Voto’s The Year of Decision: 1846. Of the modern accounts, Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder, Robert Leckie’s From Sea to Shining Sea, and Robert Merry’s A Country of Vast Designs provide a good overview of the age.
John C. Frémont was his own best advertiser in Memoirs of My Life, but Tom Chaffin’s Pathfinder and Allan Nevins’s Frémont: Pathmarker of the West bring clarity to Frémont’s bold and complex personality. One has to wend one’s way through the various arguments and counterarguments about what, or what not, Frémont was charged with doing, vis-à-vis California; I just followed my instincts, which is about as much as anyone can do until yet further information is brought forth.
Of the mountain men, there are more than a dozen books on Kit Carson alone; among the best are Harvey Lewis Carter’s Dear Old Kit and Kit Carson: A Portrait in Courage by M. Morgan Estergreen.
There are many, many fine works on Native Americans, or Indians, among them Robert Utley’s The Indian Frontier of the American West: 1846–1890 and, of course, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the latter covering a later period in Indian history.
David Dary’s The Santa Fe Trail, Henry Inman’s The Old Trail to Santa Fe, and Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail are excellent reading for what life was like out on the plains. William Keleher’s Turmoil in New Mexico, 1846–1848 is a fine primer for the situation at the Santa Fe end of the trail as General Kearny found it. And General John S. D. Eisenhower’s masterful So Far from God is by far the best piece of writing on the Mexican-American War itself. Niles’ National Register, a journal of the times, proved to be a fount of information, since it collected and published numerous contemporary reports of every important issue of the day.
The best of the numerous books on the Donner Party is still George R. Stewart’s 1948 Ordeal by Hunger. Edwin Bryant’s What I Saw in California and James Clyman’s memoir Frontiersman are two of the best contemporary accounts of crossing the mountains and descending into the turmoil that was California in 1846–47, in addition to the Englishman George F. A. Ruxton’s 1847 Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, which is simply a pleasure to read.
My profound thanks also goes to my editor, Andrew Miller, for his careful attention to the manuscript, and to his assistant, Andrew Michael Carlson, whose fine line editing improved the story immensely—as did that of my long-time copy editor, Don Kinneson, whose eagle eye and keen mind saved me from myself more times than I can count.
My wife, Anne-Clinton, and Wren Murphy are professionals when it comes to locating and acquiring photographs and other images, research materials, and permission to use or quote from them. In the course of those pursuits, I would like to extend my grateful thanks not only to them, but also to Valerie Moore at the Library of Congress; Daniel Kosharek, Photo Archives, Palace of the Governors, the New Mexico History Museum; Jaime Bourassa, Missouri History Museum; Tom Price, curator, James K. Polk Memorial Association; Doug Misner, Utah History Research Center; Erika Castano, University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections; Bonnie Coleman and Dennis Trujillo, State Historian’s Office, New Mexico; and Ray John de Aragon of Albuquerque, who graciously allowed me to use the portrait of General Armijo from his pr
ivate collection. Each of them was kind enough to go beyond the normal courtesy, and made a special effort to locate difficult-to-find images.
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