Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  The following morning, December 7, dawned clear. Reassuming command, Kearny painfully mounted a mule and warily led his men in the direction of San Diego, transporting the wounded by means of improvised travois, blankets or hides stretched between willow poles lashed to the flanks of the mules. Thus encumbered, their pace was excruciatingly slow. The Angelenos kept their distance for much of the day. But late in the afternoon Pico ordered an assault on the American column, his men charging down from the cover of a ravine. The dragoons mustered a spirited defense, their powder now dry and their carbines firing effectively, and wounded two or three lanceros. The Americans seized possession of a small hill, where they unlimbered their artillery, which kept the Angelenos at bay. But they had traveled no more than six or seven miles that day, and Kearny knew that without relief from Stockton they would be hard pressed to continue the remaining thirty miles to San Diego. Their food supply was exhausted, and he issued orders for the men to begin slaughtering and eating their mules. It looked bad. Yet Kearny’s success in establishing a camp on what became known as Mule Hill was the cause of considerable demoralization among the Angelenos, who feared they had lost their opportunity to crush the Americans.

  Later that evening a rider from Los Angeles brought a dispatch that depressed the spirits of Pico’s men even further. There would be no reinforcements. Four days earlier, on the night of December 3, an armed group led by José Antonio Carrillo and Sérbulo Varela had staged a mutiny against Commandante Flores. The ostensible issue was the continuing conflict over Flores’s plan to send the American prisoners to Mexico, which Carrillo and most of the Angelenos opposed. But the deeper conflict was the continuing antagonism between Californios and Mexicans. From the adobe near Government House where the Americans prisoners were housed, Benjamin Davis Wilson and the others could hear “the firing with cannon and small arms in the street, which was kept up for many hours.” Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the shooting stopped, and ranchero William Workman, who had remained loyal to the Californio cause, rushed in to inform the Americans that Flores had been arrested.

  He remained under guard for two days until December 5, when Antonio Coronel arrived with the news of Kearny’s presence in California. In light of that intelligence, Flores abandoned his plan of transporting the prisoners and was restored to his command. He sent orders to Pico to return to Los Angeles to assist in the preparation of a defense. It must have been a moment of great frustration for Don Andrés. He had been a reluctant warrior, but the confrontation had gone his way. Kearny and his dragoons were within his grasp. Defeating them and taking prisoners might change the outcome of the struggle considerably. The insurgents might then negotiate from strength. But divisions among them now prevented Pico from delivering the fatal blow. The hopes of his fighters faded. That night, by ones and twos, they began deserting camp.

  Early the following morning Californio sentries captured Alex Godey and his two companions, returning from their mission to San Diego. Pico, thinking that some of his missing men might be in American hands, sent an emissary to Mule Hill under a flag of truce to propose a prisoner exchange. In fact, Kearny was holding just one Californio prisoner, whom he swapped for one of the captured messengers. The redeemed men brought bad news to both camps. Francisco Higuera had bragged about killing Gillespie, which had been the occasion for considerable celebration among the Angelenos in Pico’s squadron. Now they learned from their returned compatriot that Gillespie was alive, if seriously wounded.

  Thomas Burgess, the prisoner released by Pico, also delivered an upsetting report. The three men had gotten through to Commodore Stockton and delivered Captain Turner’s message, he said. But “Stockton refused to send us a reinforcement.” The commodore had given them a letter addressed to Captain Turner, but Pico had confiscated it. Navy Lieutenant Beale refused to believe the story, which cast his superior officer in a very bad light. Beale declared he would go to San Diego himself and summon relief. Kit Carson volunteered to accompany him. Neither of them was familiar with the countryside, but the headman of San Pasqual ranchería—whose Christian name was José Panto—was at that moment in the American camp offering assistance, and he agreed to act as their guide.

  The men departed late that night. Carson and Beale removed their shoes and fastened them to their belts, and the three of them belly-crawled through the Angeleno lines. “We could see three rows of sentinels, all a-horseback,” Carson recalled. Somehow they lost their shoes and “had to travel over a country covered with prickly pear and rocks, barefoot.” The men agreed to split up, in the hope that one of them might get through. As soon as the three had departed, Kearny ordered his men to burn all nonessential property. If they were overpowered, he wanted no booty for the Californios to plunder. A feeling of “last stand” permeated the American camp. They were unaware that Pico had already received orders to withdraw.

  Headman Panto was first to arrive in San Diego, early on the afternoon of December 9. Beale came in that evening, Carson an hour or two later. Shortly after midnight on the morning of December 10, a relief force of 215 sailors and marines, commanded by Lieutenant Andrew Gray of the U.S. Navy, departed for San Pasqual. They arrived at Mule Hill some twenty-four hours later to the cheers of the stranded Americans. Lieutenant Gray had been prepared to fight his way through the Angeleno lines, but found himself unopposed. The reason why became clear at daybreak. The Angelenos were gone. Pico and the core of his squadron had returned to Los Angeles, while many other men had simply drifted away. The Americans began their journey to San Diego that morning and arrived the following afternoon, the First Regiment of U.S. Dragoons finally completing their 2,000-mile trek across the continent.

  STOCKTON WAS LATER REQUIRED “to vindicate his official conduct” in not sending relief sooner to Kearny and the dragoons. According to his sworn testimony, he first learned of their dire situation on the evening of December 6, the day of the battle, from ranchero Edward Stokes, who had watched the fighting—at least what he could see through the fog—from the hills overlooking San Pasqual. “General Kearny had lost a great many killed and wounded, and one of his guns,” Stokes reported to Stockton. Yet the commodore did nothing. The following day he received the letter from Captain Turner, reporting eighteen Americans dead, many wounded, and provisions exhausted. The letter persuaded him to send relief, Stockton testified, but unsure of the size of Pico’s squadron he decided he had to send a very large company, which required a correspondingly large number of animals. Assembling such a force took time, and it was still not ready to depart by the time José Panto arrived two days later. Panto, however, provided Stockton with an accurate count of the enemy force, persuading him to risk sending a smaller company on foot. They were quickly mustered and dispatched.

  What, then, of Thomas Burgess’s claim that Stockton had refused outright to send assistance, and had said so in a letter? Pico had taken possession of that document and sent it to Los Angeles for translation. Many years later, when it resurfaced among the papers of Antonio Coronel, the letter revealed that Stockton had lied under oath. “I have thought it most wise to postpone the march of my men till I can hear from you again,” he had written to Captain Turner, “as they will only consume provisions without being of any use.” His delay in sending relief had placed American lives in jeopardy, something Stockton was loath to admit. So he concocted testimony that was less discomfiting. Just as Kearny’s reckless decision to attack Pico may be explained by his desire to claim the martial glory for himself—the Army pulling the Navy’s chestnuts from the fire—so Stockton’s delay in providing assistance may have been rooted in his expectation that Kearny would be his competitor for the heroic role as conqueror of California.

  WHEN KEARNY AND HIS MEN arrived in San Diego, they were greeted by Stockton, who offered the wounded general the use of his own quarters and ordered his naval surgeons to attend the wounded dragoons, many of whom were suffering from what a later generation would label posttraumatic stress. “They al
l had the utmost horror of Californians,” wrote American merchant William Heath Davis, who visited the injured men in the infirmary. “The attack upon them had been sudden and vigorous, and they had been pursued by the Californians relentlessly.” While Davis was speaking with a young dragoon “with an intelligent face,” the wounded man suddenly turned delirious and cried out in terror, convinced the lanceros were upon him once again. Other men salved their wounded psyches with fantasies of violent retribution. The dragoons he spoke with, said Ordinary Seaman Joseph Downey, “burned to get a chance to revenge the death of their comrades,” eager for the opportunity to win back their lost honor.

  Kearny was equally anxious for the vindication of battle. He presented Stockton with his commission and instructions from President Polk, which authorized him to assume command of the ground campaign in California and begin the organization of a military government. This was precisely what Stockton had feared, and he responded aggressively. The Navy had already completed the conquest, he assured Kearny, and was in the process of putting down an insurrection against American authority. He had already begun the establishment of a government, he continued, and planned to appoint John C. Frémont as governor. Kearny bristled at this news but chose not to argue. Stockton commanded hundreds of sailors and marines, Kearny merely a small company of battle-damaged dragoons. “Our General has no force at his command,” Griffin noted in his diary, “and he seems low spirited.”

  But additional U.S. Army forces would soon arrive in California. The Mormon Battalion, some five hundred men commanded by Captain Philip St. George Cooke, was trailing Kearny overland across the southwestern desert and was expected any day. In addition, Washington had promised a regiment of New York volunteers, eight hundred officers and men, who were being sent around Cape Horn. Kearny felt sure he would prevail once these additional forces were under his command. In the short term, however, defeating the Californios meant relying on Stockton’s webfoot infantry. So Kearny suffered in silence and bided his time.

  JOHN C. FRÉMONT had been at Monterey since late October. He spent several weeks rounding up horses and signing up recruits for the California Battalion from the large number of overland immigrants arriving at Sutter’s Fort. The insurgent Californios enjoyed a great deal of support around Monterey, but the only armed engagement of any consequence in the north took place in mid-November at Rancho Natividad, near present-day Salinas, when a group of norteños attacked a detachment of 50 American volunteers, killing 3 and wounding 7. A few days later, on November 29, Frémont began his march south with an estimated 350 fighting men. “To arms, Colonel Fremont!” sang the editor of the Monterey Californian, “now arm thy battalion, and humble the foe.”

  But Frémont decided to cast himself in a different kind of role. Stockton had promised him the governorship of California, so Frémont shifted course midstream, seeking to win friends and influence among the Californios he expected to govern. On the eve of his departure for the south, he issued orders that all American officers were “to abstain from any further offensive proceedings against the Californians residing and being in the Northern Department.” The time had come, he proclaimed, for “conciliatory measures.”

  His first opportunity to apply this policy arose in mid-December, when his force occupied the town of San Luis Obispo, 150 miles south of Monterey. Some thirty Californio fighters were rounded up and jailed, including their leader, Alcalde José de Jesús Pico, a cousin of the Pico brothers of Los Angeles. Alcalde Pico had been paroled the previous August, but following the uprising in September he joined the insurgents, violating his oath. Frémont ordered him tried before an American military tribunal. “I denied nothing,” Pico later recalled, even acknowledging his participation in the attack on Americans at Natividad the month before. Found guilty of breaking his parole, he was sentenced to death, with the execution to take place the following day. That morning Frémont was in his quarters speaking with an aide when the two of them heard a commotion in the adjoining room, and suddenly, in the aide’s words, “a lady with a group of children, followed by many other ladies, burst into the room, throwing themselves upon their knees, and crying for mercy for the father and husband. It was the wife and children and friends of Pico.” Frémont listened to their pleas, then dismissed them and ordered Don Jesús brought from his cell.

  “I thought they were taking me to the gallows,” Pico recalled, but instead he was escorted to Frémont. He entered the room, in Frémont’s words, “with the gray face of a man expecting death, but calm and brave.” Frémont pointed out the window at the troops parading in the square, preparing for the execution. “You were about to die,” he said, “but your wife has saved you.” Pico’s repressed emotions suddenly erupted and he dropped to his knees, but Frémont told him to stand. There was a condition, he said. Don Jesús must agree to accompany him on the march to Los Angeles. Pico feared that once they were a safe distance from his wife and family he would be shot. But Frémont wanted Pico as an intermediary, utilizing the man’s personal and political connections to assist in opening negotiations with the Californios. “The impression at the time was that the colonel was acting with too much clemency,” a riflero in the California Battalion testified. But “the result proved that he acted wisely.” Frémont was once again demonstrating his skill as a master opportunist.

  Warned of a potential ambush by Californios along the road to Santa Barbara, Frémont directed his men over mountain trails in the midst of an extended winter storm, taking eleven days to travel a distance of one hundred miles. Reaching the town on December 28, the Americans found it deserted and undefended. Frémont dispatched a short letter to Stockton. “Bad weather and poor horses have harassed and impeded our movements, making our advance extremely slow.” But now he planned to move in for the kill. “I shall march directly to the pueblo de los Angeles, and if not met by the enemy on the road will attack him at the town.”

  •

  CHAPTER 10 •

  POOR CALIFORNIOS

  AMONG CALIFORNIOS, popular enthusiasm for the war was waning rapidly. In the weeks after the Battle of San Pasqual, a steady trickle of men came in to surrender to the Americans at San Diego. “We have had many flags of truce and Mexicans coming in and delivering themselves up,” wrote army surgeon John Griffin, including “some the very rascals who were in the fight at San Pasqual.” Stockton authorized the creation of a squadron of Californios in support of American forces. This showed “too much leniency,” Griffin worried. “These fellows suppose that they can make war as long as it is convenient—and when they get tired of it, come in and be paid high wages for little or no services.” Griffin had served during the Seminole War in Florida, an experience that hardened him. The fight must be pursued, he believed, until the enemy had been ground into the dust and was begging for mercy.

  Most Californios did their best to keep as far away from the action as possible. Veterans of the fight at San Pasqual—as traumatic for the Californios as for the Americans—hoped to sit out what they expected to be the war’s violent conclusion. One group of eleven men left the lines around Mule Hill and headed for an isolated rancho in the foothills of the Pauma Valley, about eighteen miles from the coast on Río de San Luis Rey. They made their way across the country in the traditional manner of soldados, expropriating whatever they needed from the Indian rancherías along the way. But with the Americans on the scene, that was something the Indians were no longer willing to tolerate. In early December an armed band of Luiseños attacked the adobe in which those Californios were holed up, seizing and killing them all. When news of the massacre reached Los Angeles, Commandante Flores ordered ranchero José del Cármen Lugo of far-flung Rancho San Bernardino to punish the perpetrators. With a company of fifteen Californios and fifty Cahuilla Indian allies, Lugo lured the Luiseño fighters into an ambush near Rancho Temecula in the waning days of December 1846. “We made a great slaughter,” he reported, “and falling on them from the rear killed many.” The precise toll is u
nknown, but Lugo claimed to have killed more than a hundred men, which would make the fight at Temecula the deadliest fight of the entire war in California. The violent struggle between Indians and the Spanish, which had begun with the conquest seventy-five years before, continued unabated through the closing days of Mexican rule.

  While the violence played out among local actors, Flores received a letter from José Castro, the former commandant of California who had fled to Mexico. “Do not wait for any aid from the state of Sonora,” Castro wrote. “This country is in ruins and funds are not sufficient to cover even the most necessary expenses.” Thus was the last hope of the Californios dashed. Despite a series of brilliant tactical victories against a vastly superior enemy, they plainly saw they were about to be overwhelmed by converging American forces. “Destiny’s cold hand directed the path they had to follow,” wrote historian Manuel Clemente Rojo. “It was decreed that they had to submit, and that submission was not long in coming. Poor Californios! So generous, so courageous, and so unfortunate.” Flores concluded that he had no option but to make peace with the Americans.

  ON DECEMBER 29 the Americans moved out of San Diego, headed north for Los Angeles. Lieutenant William Emory noted the size and composition of the force: 521 fighting men, mostly sailors and marines acting as infantry, but including 60 mounted rifleros, 25 mounted Californios, and 57 dragoons afoot; six artillery pieces and ten carretas carrying provisions; as well as a herd of several hundred cattle to supply the daily ration of beef. The 140-mile march began in a fierce rainstorm, and the weather continued wet and cold for most of the journey. “Our men were badly clothed, and their shoes generally made by themselves out of canvas,” Stockton reported. In fact, many of the sailors were barefoot. “It was very cold and the roads heavy. Our animals were all poor and weak, some of them giving out daily, which gave much hard work to the men in dragging the heavy carts.” Yet the Americans were in high spirits. “We were actuated and led on by a craving desire to win back our lost honor,” wrote Seaman Joseph Downey, determined “to plant the Stripes and Stars once more in the square of Los Angeles.” Downey’s journal provides the best account of the final campaign of the conquest.