Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  But its issue did not prevent Samuel Colt from bankruptcy in 1842. Texas was too poor to support mass production; not enough of the guns could be ordered or procured. These were the dark years in Sam Colt's life. He was a great man to certain quiet, cold-eyed, weatherbeaten men who occasionally came up from Texas, but he was a prophet with a prophet's usual honor on his native soil. For five years, no Colt's handguns were made. Sam Colt even gave away all the ones he owned.

  Then, suddenly, there was war between the United States and Mexico, in early 1846. Texas was a state, and General Zachary Taylor, on the Rio Grande, had asked Texas for two regiments of horse. Jock Hays, barely thirty, raised one; his officers were Ben McCulloch, Sam Walker, Mike Chevaille, Big Foot Wallace, and John S. Ford. Hays and these men were clamoring for a thousand of something called a Colt.

  Zachary Taylor gave in to their requests; he wanted none of the newfangled arms for his own U.S. infantry and dragoons, but politics had forced on him the use of Texas Ranger scouts. Taylor requisitioned Washington for 1,000 revolving pistols.

  There were none. The government contacted Colt, who at that moment did not even possess a single model of his own. But Sam Colt behaved with the coolness and judgment that was to make him a millionaire. He advertised in New York newspapers for a Colt's pistol, in the meantime designing a few improvements, and signed a contract with the government to make 1,000 weapons at $28.00 each. Then he farmed the contract out to Eli Whitney, of cotton gin fame. But Whitney was not allowed to reveal this fact; each pistol bore the hallmark, Address Samuel Colt, New York. Colt lost $3,000 dollars on this deal. But after Jack Hays had his thousand pistols, Sam Colt's fame was to become worldwide, and his name a household word throughout the United States.

  United States military historians, in remarking about the inability of high commanders on both sides to use cavalry in the American Civil War, have often commented that these incipient leaders found that in the Mexican War they were able to win without a mounted arm. This does not entirely state the case.

  The United States Army had no cavalry arm in 1846, but had mounted infantry, called dragoons. These troops were heavy and cumbrous; they rode horses to battle, but much preferred to fight on foot. The reason the United States possessed no horse arm in 1846 was not military blindness but the fact that the entire population, save for a few Texans, were still living in a country dominated by woodlands. East of the Plains, cavalry could never be anything but an auxiliary arm.

  The idea that the United States won the Mexican War without cavalry is not quite true. Hays's regiment, composed of West Texans, was cavalry. It performed all the normal tasks of cavalry—scouting, flanking, harassing, trail-blazing, and keeping Mexican cavalry from doing the same. Ironically, Hays's Texans achieved worldwide, popular acclaim but very little credit in U.S. Army annals. Here the reason was probably twofold. Hays's regiment of Rangers were irregulars, hardly proper soldiers, who fought like devils, but behaved like wildmen; and this, along with the fact that the generals knew nothing about cavalry, undoubtedly influenced their memoirs and minds.

  An incident at the very beginning of the Mexican War is highly significant. Taylor, on the Rio Grande, found he did not know the country or the Mexican mind. Nor could his heavy, blue-uniformed, sweating dragoons perform the tasks they were assigned. Taylor asked for Walker's Scouts to keep his communications open, particularly after Arista's cavalry snapped up sixty of his own dragoons without a fight. Walker, with a few men, carried the vital messages between Taylor at Point Isabel and Major Brown on the river that set up the victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma.

  After these battles, company by company—they were raised by company on the Indian frontier—Hays's regiment filtered down into Mexico. Gillespie's company came by way of Laredo, Ben McCulloch's from the middle Guadalupe. The riders were all frontiersmen of the first tier, not farm boys following the colors. It was generally thought that McCulloch's company was the finest group that had ever assembled in the ranging service.

  Ben McCulloch was blue-eyed and taciturn, with a strong face he kept under perfect control. No one ever knew what was in his mind until his words made it clear. He was cool—the word runs through all Ranger descriptions—and above all cool to the point of incredibility in combat. And, like all true partisans, McCulloch seemed to think best under fire. He gave few orders; those he gave were obeyed.

  McCulloch's Rangers moved into camp near Fort Brown on May 22, 1846. General Taylor gave them a vitally important duty: to scout the ground between Matamoros and Monterrey, and to select the route for the American invasion. At this time Zachary Taylor was entirely without officers who knew the country or cavalry that could perform such a task. But the Texas Rangers had both.

  Ben McCulloch rode into Mexico with forty picked men on June 12.

  The third day of the scout the Rangers defeated a party of armed Mexicans under Blás Falcón, a leading ranchero of the district. The Mexican army had already withdrawn south. The Mexican escopetas were no match for Colts, and the rancheros fled, leaving guns, horses, everything.

  McCulloch's way was characteristic of the pattern Hays had set; McCulloch now polished and perfected it. He rode carefully, not seeking trouble, but he attacked it boldly when it arose. The Quién vive? of the Mexican challenge was answered by the lightning charge. McCulloch rode on forced marches by night, to come up behind Mexican villages or ranches from the southern, supposedly safe, roads. He doubled and twisted, throwing off any possible pursuit. Above all else, he went boldly, seizing towns and ranchos he could not gracefully avoid, not by numbers but by an awesome display of utter confidence. McCulloch seized and held moral superiority; the Mexicans were afraid of him.

  Sending his lieutenant, John McMullen, on a side scouting expedition, McCulloch quickly determined that General Arista had retreated all the way to Monterrey and that the Linares route to that city was unfeasible due to lack of watering places. He had found out what Taylor wanted to know.

  Turning about, McCulloch rode northwest, rather than on the direct route to Matamoros. The Rangers were eager to find and fight. General Antonio Canales, who had long waged a bloody warfare against the Texans above the Rio Grande. Canales, like Falcón, was one of those landowners whose family held title to vast grants north of the Bravo, and these families provided a continuing leadership for Mexican raids and Mexican resistance to Anglo expansion south. Canales personally had secured the execution of Ewen Cameron after he drew a white bean. The Rangers wanted Canales's blood.

  But the summer solstice brought roaring rains, and McCulloch found Canales gone. Having been deep in enemy country for ten days, and ridden 250 miles in that time, McCulloch rode into Reynosa, upriver from Matamoros, which Taylor had just seized. The Rangers had not taken off their boots, coats, or spurs during the entire ride. Their information gave Taylor what he needed to plan his campaign.

  The rangers made camp at Reynosa. But now, there was an ominous hint of things to come. The Mier Expedition survivors had been treated barbarously by the inhabitants of this town, starved, beaten, spat upon. Some of the same men were with McCulloch; all of his Rangers had had kinfolk or comrades killed by Mexicans since 1836. One of them, Sam Reid, later wrote: "Our orders were most strict not to molest any unarmed Mexican, and if some of the most notorious of these villains were found shot, or hung up in the chaparral . . . the government was charitably bound to suppose, that during a fit of remorse and desperation, tortured by conscience for the many evil deeds they had committed, they had recklessly laid violent hands upon their own lives! Quién sabe?"

  Zachary Taylor sabe-ed well enough that the Texans were settling old scores, but he was helpless: "I have not the power to remedy it . . . I fear they are a lawless set." He said that if they would only obey orders, the Texans unquestionably would be the best soldiers among all the U.S. volunteers. Meanwhile, the Rangers colorfully celebrated every American and Mexican holiday with races and riding contests, including some very rough g
ames on horseback. The American troops were awed and fascinated by these, not realizing they were seeing the birth of something new, which would one day be called the rodeo.

  The tricks, stunts, and very notion had been absorbed by the Rangers from the Mexicans and horse Indians.

  The Rangers also attended a few Mexican bailes or dances; fandangos as the Texans persisted in calling them. The appearance of these huge, bearded, cold-eyed men caused women to scream and men to bolt, and usually dampened all Mexican enthusiasm for fiesta.

  Then, on July 9, Taylor marched to Camargo, preparatory to driving on Monterrey. The Rangers were in the saddle again, scouting the U.S. invasion route. They made a few side trips, seeking Colonel Juan Seguín. Seguín, a Texas Spaniard, had sided with the Revolution in 1835. Then, during the great turmoil of 1842 and retirement of Mexicans from south Texas ordered by Woll, he had returned to his own people. The Rangers wanted him, too. But again, McCulloch checked and discarded unsuitable roads. As the Texas historian Wooten quoted an American general: "He and his officers and men were not only the eyes and ears of General Taylor's army, but its right and left arms as well."

  The American army in Mexico definitely possessed a cavalry arm.

  Captain Duncan, during McCulloch's illness, led the vanguard. He actually accepted the surrender of Cerralvo. Now, a pattern was clear. The frontier Rangers were the vanguard, and the army's eyes and ears, while the Rangers under Wood—all east Texans—did escort duty.

  Meanwhile, Jack Hays had left Matamoros with the main body of the Ranger regiment. Taylor's quartermaster was trying to buy mules at $20 each, but he was not finding any. He wrote, "This call might have been ineffectual, had not a Texan mounted regiment been moving into the quarter whence we expected these mules." By methods never recorded, Hays got the army all the mules it needed.

  Taylor moved on Monterrey in September 1846, with McCulloch and Gillespie's companies going ahead of one column, Hays going before the other. At Ramos, McCulloch struck two hundred Mexican cavalry and knocked them out of the way. Now, the mountains over the old Spanish city of Monterrey were in sight of all of Taylor's 6,000 men. The General ordered the "Texas mounted troops" to "form the advance of the army tomorrow, and to move at sunrise."

  Taylor kept a group of Rangers with his staff, and General Worth, commanding the 2d Division, took Rangers with him on every personal reconnaissance. Once, before Monterrey, they saved his life. But these were minor services, which generally went unrecorded.

  Worth's column, with the Rangers in front, moved out at 6 a.m. McCulloch immediately found himself riding into a large squadron of Mexican lancers, supported by infantry. This was Najera's squadron, beautifully mounted, uniformed, carrying lanceheads that glittered in the sun. Najera rode in front and gave the command to set lances.

  Dirty, smelly, unshaven, the Rangers watched McCulloch. McCulloch never got Worth's order to dismount and smell the situation out. He did not give Najera time to get set; he charged. There was a violent melee, as lancers and Rangers fought at close range with lances, swords, knives, and pistols. McCulloch rode down everything in his path. At the end, a hundred Mexican bodies in brilliant uniforms lay in the road; Colonel Najera was dead, and the body of his troops were in flight toward Saltillo.

  The reducing of the hills above the city and the entry into the fortified capital were bloody work for the American infantry and artillery. But Rangers went with every party, and their marksmanship, with rifles, assisted materially in clearing the houses and squares. The American regulars broke the main resistance in front of the palace, driving off the Mexican battalions of infantry, light horse lancers, and the heavy cavalry, which tried to charge with broadswords. All met a disastrous fire and a wall of bayonets. But while Worth was carrying everything before him, Taylor himself, to Worth's east, was rather badly mauled. Monterrey could still have turned into a Mexican catastrophe, but Taylor accepted Ampudia's offer to parley.

  At the end of negotiations, the Mexican army was permitted to evacuate with the honors of war and an eight-week truce. Monterrey was not to be a decisive battle. Protests to this were extremely violent among Hays's men. But they had no say in the matter.

  During this truce, Hays's regiment went home. It had been enlisted for six months; the time had expired, and the Texans were now disgusted with the war. Zachary Taylor, for his part, obviously wanted to be rid of them. The thought of a thousand Texans camping in Monterrey worried Taylor badly; he issued the Rangers a general discharge on October 1.

  Giddings, an officer with the Ohio volunteers, wrote frankly that the Army would have been much more regretful to see the Rangers go, except for the "lawless and vindictive spirit some of them had displayed" after the capitulation of Monterrey. Atrocities there were many, because the Texas troops detested Mexicans with a cold, consuming hate.

  This was an entirely different attitude than the one toward Comanches. Texas looked on Indians very much as Western Europeans had once looked on wolves. They were hated as dangerous animals; they were marked down for extermination. The detestation of Mexico was different. Mexico had a culture and a civilization, but it was one Anglo-Celts, on close contact, instinctively despised. The Mexican and the Texan, as so often happened in such contacts, felt the ways of each impugned the manhood of the other. The Texan reaction toward Mexico was not one of destruction so much as a determination to dominate. Unhappily, the Mexican-Hispanic urge to press an insult could not be suppressed, while the Texan refusal to accept any kind of slur or comment led to bloodshed.

  This puzzled some of the other Americans, because while the Texas regiment was tattered, unwashed, and bearded—from living in the saddle—Hays's people were by no means crude or ignorant as a group. McCulloch commanded lawyers, doctors, poets, surveyors, and men whose education was equal to any American's. Giddings referred to the frequent quotation of Latin or Greek around Ranger campfires. But the Ranger force lived in a world where the consciousness of war and killing was ever-present; the other volunteers did not. The Rangers represented most of the splendid qualities of their English-speaking race, but they had adapted at least part of their ethos entirely to the brutal frontier. Thus, Hays himself, with perfect truth, could be called a "perfect gentleman" by the citizenry of San Antonio, and a feared and fearful killer by Mexicans and Indians.

  Without some such adaptation, very likely American casualties on the far frontier would have been much higher, if not disastrous. But the adaptation left its mark.

  A strong, if not the strongest, factor in the Texans' leaving Mexico was concern for the Indian frontier, which the withdrawal of the companies had left exposed. Texas always had to balance its concern, and forces, between the Mexican and Indian wars.

  Afterward, events in northern Mexico continued as a tragicomedy of errors. Taylor's truce was disapproved by the government, and he so notified Santa Anna on November 13, 1846. But Polk's Administration did not want Taylor himself to fight. It had wanted the war, but not for a known Whig general to win it for the United States. Winfield Scott was sent to the Rio Grande to extract 9,000 of Taylor's best troops for the planned Vera Cruz expedition, and to order Taylor to withdraw all his forces to Monterrey and remain on the defensive.

  On January 3, 1847, Scott sent Taylor dispatches with these orders. Now, the absence of the mounted Texans changed history. From the day they rode north, United States communications had collapsed; couriers were killed; the army had lost its eyes and ears. Lieutenant John Richey, carrying Scott's written orders, was roped from his horse by Mexican vaqueros near Linares. They killed Richey with considerable cruelty; more important historically, they delivered his dispatch case to General Santa Anna.

  Santa Anna, seeing Taylor was to be abandoned at Monterrey with a skeleton force, smelled the victory the Mexican nation so badly needed at this time. He marched toward Monterrey from San Lusís Potosí with a little more than 15,000 men. This was the best army Mexico had in the field.

  Now, in January 1847, B
en McCulloch arrived at Taylor's headquarters with 27 Rangers. He had heard the war was recommenced. This was true enough. Zachary Taylor decided not to obey his orders to fall back on Monterrey, because they made no military sense in his situation. He had already taken Victoria and Saltillo, and to obey such orders would have dispirited his whole force. McCulloch offered to serve again, but at his own pleasure—not for duration, nor even for a year. Taylor was so desperate for riders that he violated army regulations and enlisted the Rangers into the U.S. service on their own terms.

  The first duty of these paladins was to find Santa Anna's army. General Taylor had already lost two fine officers and part of the regulars trying to do this; American infantry was helpless on the northern Mexican deserts. McCulloch took sixteen men, crossed a thirty-five-mile desert, and found Santa Anna at Encarnación. He rode through the advance guard of the Mexican cavalry to do it.

  On February 20, Taylor sent McCulloch back to Encarnación to determine the size of Santa Anna's army. With seven men, the Ranger captain went into the Mexican lines at midnight, scouting Santa Anna's bivouac like a Comanche camp. McCulloch counted fires, and arrived at almost the exact number in the force. He sent this word back to Taylor, while he and one man stayed inside the Mexican picket line until daylight, just to make sure. Then, when the Mexican soldiers lit green-wood breakfast fires, the two Rangers mounted and rode deliberately through the smoke, confirming that Santa Anna had between 15,000 and 20,000 men.

  This information caused Taylor to retreat back to the pass at Angostura, near a hacienda called Buena Vista. Here he had a position that could not be flanked or turned. He took McCulloch's personal report, and said only, "Very well, Major, that's all I wanted to know. I am glad they did not catch you."