by Tim Curran
Along with them, were elements of the Kentucky and Arkansas cavalry. Each man waited amongst the rocks, eyes wide, flintlock muskets and carbines primed and at the ready, knives sharpened and hatchets in hand. There was a stink in the air-sour, high, heady.
The smell of fear.
For down below, the enemy were massing and everyone spread out on that ridge could see them, really see them for the first time. The sheer numbers. For once, intelligence had neither over-inflated or under-inflated enemy strength. The Mexicans moved and marched, formed-up into ranks and scattered out in skirmish lines. From where Cobb sat…they were mulling, busy things in perpetual motion.
“ Don’t look out there and see yer death, boys,” Cobb told his volunteers. “Look down there and know, know that if they take ye, yer gonna take ten of them motherfuckers with ye.”
Cannonade exploded along the face of the mountain as the Mexican guns-eight-pounders and sixteen-pounders-sought them out. By nightfall, they picked up the pace, raining hell down upon two Indiana rifle companies. Bugles sounded and men died and gouts of smoke filled the air…but the real fighting had yet to begin.
The volunteers and regular army forces waited and waited. Hungry, cold, but not daring to close their eyes as discharges of grapeshot tore up the landscape around them.
At dawn the next day, the Mexican cannons started singing again and things really started moving. Heavy fire erupted in and around the volunteers and was answered by American batteries. The entire mountainside was crawling with the enemy like hordes of Hun filled with blood-rage and steel, preparing to sack a town.
Cobb moved his troops out and charged a hidden Mexican emplacement that had been harassing the Indiana rifles, killing the soldiers and hacking on them until they lay scattered in pieces amongst their damaged guns.
But for every ten killed, twenty more came shouting up the hill at them. And behind them, Jesus, half the Mexican army. Infantry in their green tunics, cavalry in scarlet coats. They carried British East India rifles and long lances, wore brass helmets with large black plumes like raven’s feathers.
All hell broke loose.
Cannon balls whistled over the heads of the volunteers, exploding with gouts of shattered rock and flying dirt. Grapeshot ripped into men, spraying their anatomies in every which direction. Smoke hung like a ground fog over everything and the cavalry looked like ghost riders pounding through it. Men were screaming and shrieking, blood covered the ground in viscous, steaming pools. Soldiers-both American and Mexican-dropped and died, piling up like corded lumber. Some rose only to fall again and be crushed under the thundering hooves of horses. Bugles sounded out. Men crawled through the carnage, missing limbs and/or pressing their viscera back into ruptured abdomens. Some wanted to escape…but others, piecemeal, wanted to fight on.
Cobb bayoneted a soldier and slashed the face off another. He saw volunteers fall…but each time he advanced to their aid, bodies fell at his feet, blood and brains spattered into his face, enemy soldiers rushing out at him.
So he busied himself shooting and knifing, taking them as they came.
And around him, the volunteers scrambled over heaped bodies as mounted troopers of the Mississippi Rifles charged into the fray. They wore bright red shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. The Mexican cavalry met them on deadly ground and muskets sounded and sabers slashed, horses were ripped apart by cannon balls and men fell by the hundreds, the landscape becoming a bleeding, blasted sea of bodies and limbs and glistening internals.
Behind the Mexican cavalry, a body of lancers came shouting and running, infantry with fixed bayonets backing them up.
The Missouri volunteers, many of them burnt black with powder, fought on, ready to take anything that came. Cobb emptied his pistols until they were smoking and hot. He fired his musket, loaded, rammed, fired again with swift expertise. But the Mexicans poured forward in a surging, shrieking tide, severing the American lines, and Cobb found himself crushing skulls with the butt of his rifle, opening bellies and throats with his knives, and taking weapons off dead men, fighting and fighting.
The Mexicans charged not only from the front, but from both sides and behind now. It was sheer pandemonium. Men were falling and writhing. Horses stampeding and throwing their riders, mad now with gaping wounds and terror from the pounding and shooting and screaming. Shells were bursting and rifle balls whizzing like mad hornets, smoke billowing and dust rising up in blinding whirlwinds. Musketry was crashing and big guns thundering. Wagons and their loads were shattered to kindling and everywhere the dead and the dying, blood and smoke and wreckage.
And still more fresh Mexican troops charged in.
Cobb, filled now with a tearing, raging hunger, dashed in amongst their numbers, cutting men down with musket-fire and blazing pistols. He split open the head of a lancer with his hatchet, slit the throat of another, took up his lance and speared a Mexican officer from his horse. He sank the shaft through the man’s chest and impaled him into the ground. Killing two or three others, he mounted the Mex’s horse-a fine white stallion-and charged in, hacking and cutting, shooting and stabbing.
The horse was blown out from under him, a volley of grapeshot blowing the animal’s legs into shrapnel.
From above, the landscape was ragged and gutted, a chasm filled with smoke and fire, swarming with men and riderless horses. It was a slaughter of the first degree and in the confusion, it was hard to tell who was winning and who was losing.
But Cobb didn’t know and didn’t care.
He fought on, killing more men, stealing horses, slicing through the Mexican lines like a red-hot blade. The fighting continued for some time, but eventually, the dead heaped across the ground in great flesh-and-blood ramparts, the Mexicans broke off their advance. Pounded continually by artillery, their cavalry shattered, they pulled back and even this cost them hundreds and hundreds of men.
When the fighting had ended, the battlefield was a graveyard.
A slaughterhouse.
As far as the eye could see, bodies and parts thereof, men blown up into trees, horses disemboweled by cannonball, soldiers cut in half from musketry. It looked like an image from Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death -smoke and fire, cadavers and shattered wagons. Pitted earth. Pools of blood. Thousands of flies lighting off the dead and those near to it. Men begged for medical aid, for water, for their mothers and sweethearts, for an ounce of life so they could do just a little more killing.
As Cobb walked through the carnage, his buckskins wet with blood and burned from blazing shrapnel, he saw living men drag themselves out from under corpses. Wild-eyed, blood-drenched things, they brandished empty pistols and gored knives. They bayoneted the already dead and those begging for death. Battle-shocked officers in blackened uniforms stumbled out, cursing and crying and shouting out orders to dead men. They called for corpses to rise and give chase to the enemy, while amongst them soldiers shambled to and fro, looking for fallen comrades, dropped weapons, and lost limbs.
Cobb and his blood-stained, fire-baptized volunteers, moved through the burning fields of corpses, parting seething mists of smoke, and began mutilating the Mexicans. Scalping and dismembering, chopping off fingers and ears and plucking free death-masks and hands. They laughed with a deranged cackling as they arranged Mexican corpses in obscene displays.
And Cobb urged them on to new and more twisted atrocities as the birthmark on his back blazed and steamed and pulsed.
Something in him was very pleased, very satisfied with what it saw.
War is hell.
And for whatever was in Cobb, this was like coming home.
***
Fire and heat and smoke and screaming.
The schoolhouse was burning.
Voices inside cried out in Spanish, bastardized English, Indian tongues…begging, pleading to be released, released for the love of God. And Cobb had every intention of releasing them-right into the hands of their maker.
Cobb watched the fire, fed on it, felt it bu
rning inside him, too. His blood was acid that bubbled and seethed. His heart a red-hot piston hammering and hammering, throwing sparks and oily steam. The birthmark at his back was like an iron brand scorched into his flesh.
The volunteers ringed the schoolhouse, muskets at the ready.
“ Any of them chilis get out,” Cobb told them. “Drop them bastards.”
The volunteers had tracked the Mexican guerrillas here to a little town called Del Barra. This is where they lived, operated out of. Just a shabby collection of shacks and adobes leeched by the sun and blasted by desert wind, all lorded over by an old Spanish church and schoolhouse. In the basement of the church, the volunteers found rifles and ammunition, uniforms and weapons stripped from American dead. Many of these still had bloodstains on them.
The priest had refused to let them see the cellar.
Cobb slit his throat.
So the schoolhouse blazed in that hot, arid country and the wind was that of pyres and crematories, the sun melting like a coin of yellow wax in the cloudless sky above.
Sweat ran down Cobb’s face like tears, cutting clean trails through the ground-in dirt. His eyes were wide and unblinking, red-rimmed like the boundaries of hell. A pink worm of a tongue licked salt from his lips. He could hear the sounds of the shouting and shrieking within. Flames had engulfed one side of the schoolhouse now and were greedily licking up another. Inside…old men, women, children. Pounding and screeching to be let out.
There was a sudden wild, roaring sound and the entire schoolhouse was engulfed. It didn’t take much. The wood was dry as tinder, caught flame like matchsticks. Smoke twisted in the air, black belching funnels of it. It stank of charred wood, cremated flesh and singed hair.
The screaming and pounding was dying out now.
“ Just about all fried up, I reckon,” Jones said, scratching at his crotch.
A few flaming forms burst from the inferno now, stick figures swallowed in yellow and orange flame. They stumbled about, arms waving about crazily. If it hadn’t been so profane, it might have been comical. Volunteers opened up on them dropping them as danced through the doorway. More followed. Anything, anything to escape the flames. The volunteers fired, primed and loaded, fired again.
A final form came running with a weird, jerking gait, flames licking from it in flickering plumes. It carried something. Cobb figured it was a mother carrying her child.
He held his hand up.
The volunteers did not fire.
She made it maybe ten, fifteen feet, collapsed in a smoldering heap. Cobb watched her until the fire died out and she was just a folded-up, blackened window dummy, her flesh falling away in cinders. She and the child had been melted together in a roasted mass. Their faces were incinerated skulls. The smoke that came from them was hot and stinking.
Within an hour, as the volunteers sat around drinking mescal and chewing on tortillas looted from the adobes, the schoolhouse had fallen into itself in a jackstraw tumble of soot and blackened beams.
There was nothing left.
After a time, the volunteers burned the church and dynamited the adobes until there was nothing left to mark the village of Del Barra but embers and smoke and the stink of death.
And that’s how they left it.
***
But, of course, the war had to come to an end.
After Monterrey and Camargo, Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Palo Alto, the Mexicans, beaten and weary and just simply tired of the carnage, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the war ended.
The Americans filtered back into Texas and New Mexico.
Some were grateful that it had come to an end.
Others just went looking for another fight.
James Lee Cobb went looking for something, too…he just wasn’t sure what.
5
Long before the Mexican-American War, the Mexican authorities paid private armies to hunt down and kill marauding tribes of Indians-particularly Apaches and Comanche’s-that were harassing Mexican towns and villages. The Indians would swarm down from the U. S side of the border, killing men, kidnapping women, stealing livestock and horses…in fact, anything they could lay their hands on.
The Mexican army simply couldn’t contend with these raiders, so scalp bounty laws were enacted. The scalps acted as “receipts”: each worth roughly a hundred pesos. And for industrious, prolific bounty hunters the rewards could be quite lucrative indeed. One might think the repellent nature of the business would limit the amount of hunters, but this wasn’t so. After the Panic of 1837, there were plenty looking for quick cash. And they weren’t real particular as to what they had to do to get it.
During the Mexican-American War, Indian depredations diminished somewhat. Mainly because U.S. soldiers spent their free time hunting down renegade bands. When the war ended…the Indian raids picked-up considerably. Comanche’s and Apaches killed hundreds of Mexicans, stole thousands of heads of livestock, and kidnapped an untold number of women and children.
The scalp bounties were revived in most Mexican states, but particularly in Chihuahua and Sonora…and with a vengeance.
The price was now $200 American for a single “receipt”.
James Lee Cobb, like many other soldiers, found himself suddenly working for the very government he’d done his damnedest to sack during the war. The whole thing became something of a cottage industry complete with regulatory committees and inspectors. Standards were set by the Mexican authorities to prevent fraud-a scalp had to include either the crown or both ears and preferably both. This prevented fresh scalps from being stretched and sliced-up, sold off as a dozen or more.
Cobb worked with a team consisting of himself, two ex-Texas Rangers, and three Shawnee Indians who were expert at removing scalps. They hunted down Apaches, Comanche’s, even Seri Indians. They scalped men, women, children…sparing no one.
Since it was easier to work on a freshly-killed body-the living ones protested the practice vehemently-Cobb and his boys usually put their rounds into the chests of their victims. A clear heart-shot simplified the hell out of things. Their prey went down dead and you could get to work on them right away, instead of waiting for them to expire from their wounds. Because scalp-hunting was a business like any other and time was money. Of course, to save time you could slit their throats or stab them in the heart to speed things along. Women and children you could lay in wait for, lasso ‘em like stock and gun them down.
Drop ‘em and peel ‘em, as Cobb liked to put it.
The braves took a little more stealth. Sometimes Cobb and his boys sprang carefully-arranged ambushes to bring down hunting parties and sniping from a distance had its merits. The Shawnees were real good with the wet work. They’d slit around the crown of the head and then, sitting with their feet on the victim’s shoulders, yank the scalp free. They could go through a dozen Indians in record time.
Of course, Cobb and the Texans were no slouches either.
After the scalps were yanked, they were salted and tied to poles to preserve them until they could be cashed-in.
One time, in Durango, Cobb’s hunters killed a party of thirty braves by sniping them in a dry wash with long rifles. After they’d dropped and peeled ‘em, they backtracked to the Indian’s camp and slaughtered no less than sixty women and children. Though, truth be told, they spent most of the day beating the brush for those that had run off.
Eventually, the scalp business fanned hateful animosity from the targeted tribes. They began a program of bloody reprisals. This more than anything made Cobb and the boys start hunting peaceful tribes like the Pimas and Yumas in Arizona Territory. In a single raid, they took nearly four-hundred scalps. But the real boom for them came about the time the Indians started actively hunting the hunters.
See, Cobb had come up with a better idea.
Scalps of Mexicans looked the same as scalps of Indians. There was no true way to tell the difference…so why not? Let the Mexicans pay for the murder of their own people. It was
a novel idea.
One of the Texans, a fellow named Grendon, wasn’t entirely taken with the idea. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, shit, killing injuns is one thing…but Mesicans, they’s almost like real people.”
“ Ye killed ‘em during the war, didn’t ye?” Cobb put to him. “What’s the difference now? They ain’t real folk anyhow, they’s just injuns what like to act like white men. All the more reason to drop and peel ‘em, ye ask me. Fuck, son, we got us a crop ready for the harvesting, one that’ll turn into lots of green and folding…if ye follow me on that.”
The others agreed most heartily, particularly Coolan, the big ex-ranger who it was said decapitated no less than two dozen Mexican officers during the war…using nothing but a short-bladed hunting knife. But Grendon just couldn’t get by his morals and ethics, so they shot him and Coolan scalped him as a joke.
They hit a Mexican village and caught the entire population in church. They charged in on horseback, pulling triggers and throwing knives and hatchets until their arms were sore and pistols smoking and the dead were heaped-up like sheaves of wheat. It took them the better part of four hours to scalp all two-hundred of ‘em, but they went at it with the diligence and zeal that marked the professional. They made a broad sweep through central Mexico and harvested so many scalps, they began wiring them together in bails.
In 1850, just before the boom died out, they rolled into Sonora with nearly 8,000 scalps piled high in the bed of a wagon.
Shortly afterwards, the scalping business went belly-up and Cobb rode hell-for-leather out of Mexico with a price on his head for murdering Mexicans.
But as Cobb said later, it was fun while it lasted.
***
The next twenty-odd years of his life passed in the blink of an eye.
Cobb rustled cattle and horses. Worked as range detective for various cattle combines, a hired gun for just about anyone who would pay him. He robbed banks and stages, made something of a name for himself as a road agent. Was arrested no less than three times and escaped the noose each time by breaking out of jail. He served as scout during the Indian Wars, sold guns to renegade Apaches, and managed a brothel in San Francisco. But that came to a crashing halt when it was discovered that he and the ladies under his employ were not only robbing their patrons, but murdering them and burying their remains in the cellar. After that, he ran roughshod through Indian Territory, stealing and killing and forcing Indians and whites alike to pay his gang protection money. He became something of a terror along the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers.