Half of that assignment had been accomplished. He had conquered New Mexico and organized the rudiments of a new civil governance under Charles Bent. Carson’s news did not alter his essential plan to proceed to California to attend to the other half of his orders, to assume governmental responsibilities there. True, since Stockton and Frémont had already pacified the province, certain adjustments would have to be made, and in his command tent in a cottonwood grove on the Rio Grande, Kearny worked out the details.
He now needed only a modest escort to proceed to California. With fewer men, he could travel faster and worry less about finding game, water, and forage en route. Carson warned that the southern route into Los Angeles lay across harsh, arid terrain, pitiless to man and animal alike, and that heavy wagons could not negotiate the primitive trails.
Kearny trusted Carson’s information and cut his force by two-thirds, sending two hundred of his dragoons back to Santa Fé to join Doniphan’s force preparing to march into Chihuahua. He retained two companies, C and K, of the First Dragoons, a hundred men under Captain Benjamin D. Moore and Lieutenant Thomas C. Hammond, and two mule-drawn mountain howitzers. The supply and baggage wagons were sent back to Santa Fé, and the officers returning there carried orders that packsaddles and additional mules were to be brought down to join the line of march.
Kearny also ordered Kit Carson to guide him and his foreshortened dragoon force back to California. This order made perfect sense: Carson knew the lay of the land between the Rio Grande and Los Angeles, was familiar with it from times past, had, in fact, just traveled it. He knew the water, game, and forage sources, knew the hazards, knew the dangers of moving through Apache lands. What better guide than Kit Carson, who only a month ago had departed California, had been intimately involved in its conquest, knew the Californios and their vast province from Klamath Lake on the north to San Diego on the south?
Kearny had no dependable maps; he needed the maps, and the experience, in Carson’s brain.
But the issue was weightier than these practical elements. In ordering Carson to guide him, the general made the first overt assertion that he commanded all the American military forces in the Mexican territories of the West. He had orders and believed they were explicit on this. Those orders did not mention Stockton or Frémont, or any other officer superior to or superseding him.
Nor did he give a moment’s pause in nullifying Stockton’s orders to Carson to carry dispatches to Washington. The answer to that was simple: Tom Fitzpatrick could deliver the papers to the capital.
Carson must have wished he had taken a slightly more northern route out of Los Angeles, thereby bypassing the Army of the West entirely. He had come eight hundred miles through lean and dry country, he and his men at the edge of starvation, subsisting on parched corn, before striking the Rio Grande Valley. He was 250 miles from his home in Taos, from seeing his wife, Josefa, and his children, for the first time in fourteen months since he left her to join Frémont at Bent’s Fort for the California expedition. He had intended to take his men to Taos for rest and recuperation before continuing on east. Now he was ordered to go west again.
He protested to Kearny, but while the general later admitted that Carson was “at first very unwilling to turn back,” he said that the scout, after being told that Fitzpatrick would carry the dispatches, “was perfectly satisfied with that and so told me.” John S. Griffin, the dragoon surgeon, recorded in his journal that Kearny’s force turned west “with merry hearts & light packs on our long march—Carson as guide, every man feeling renewed confidence in consequence of having such a guide.” Captain Abraham Johnston, regimental adjutant, commented in his diary: “It requires a brave man to give up his private feelings thus for the public good; but Carson was one such! Honor to him for it.”
If he was angry, which is likely, Carson left no evidence of it in his own dictated recollections. He was never much of a protester even as a civilian attached to the army, when he might have given notice and simply quit when inconvenienced. In truth, when it came to the military, Kit was a born follower and now, as an officer of the California Battalion and officially mustered into the service, he could scarcely disobey the orders of a general. He said, “On the 6th of October, ’46, I met General Kearny on his march to California. He ordered me to join him as guide. I done so and Fitzpatrick continued on with the dispatches.”
On October 15, after Fitzpatrick and most of Carson’s express party had headed east, the scout rode west with the general, his officers, and dragoons from the cottonwood-grove bivouac below Socorro. With the small force and pack train, the journey, for all the difficulties of the trail, would be swift. Everyone knew that California, like New Mexico, had been conquered and was at peace, but the general had his orders: he had work to do and was anxious to get it done.
15
Los Angeles
1
A month passed before Kearny heard news of it, but as he led his dragoons west from Socorro, a counterrevolt in California had stalled the conquest. At the time Kit Carson and his express party had departed Pueblo de los Ángeles in early September, the reports he carried had assured President Polk and the War Department that the province had been annexed and pacified, and it had been on this intelligence that the general had reduced his Army of the West by two-thirds.
The pacification had lasted five weeks, from August 17, when Commodore Stockton read his proclamation declaring California a territory of the United States, until September 23, the day Kearny marched south out of Santa Fé with three hundred dragoons. On that day, a tiny band of insurgents had besieged the American garrison in Los Angeles.
At the root of the problem lay Stockton’s insensitivity and inattention. California had fallen far too easily to the restless commodore and his lethargic predecessor, John D. Sloat. Calling the annexation a “conquest” was certainly hyperbolic; there had been no war, no battle, no “campaign” to win the land. Sailing up and down the coast, raising flags, firing salutes, and reading proclamations to the dumbfounded citizenry did not comprise an ambitious officer’s idea of military glory. Stockton had quickly tired of California; he had no interest in serving as its military governor and he turned his attention to his splendid scheme of raising a thousand volunteers and marching to Mexico City.
Nor did the commodore attempt to understand the Californios. Unlike Sloat, whose public pronouncements were unthreatening and studiously diplomatic, and who listened to men such as Thomas O. Larkin, who knew the land and its people, Stockton’s approach was that of an impatient patriarch toward unruly children. He sought no counsel, issued belligerent statements and harsh orders, and while paying lip service to the “rights” of the new American citizens, plainly regarded them simply as a conquered people meekly willing to toe whatever line he drew for them. He seemed ignorant of the essential key to their contentment: the Californios had no loyalty to Mexico and its age-old policy of benign neglect, and while Los Angeles was the center of what little anti-American feeling existed in the province, it was at best a lukewarm hotbed. There existed what H. H. Bancroft called a “turbulent, lawless, and hitherto uncontrollable” element among the abajeños but little interest in the internecine rivalry between their jefes políticos and those in the north. In general, the Californios were willing to abide American annexation—indeed, many influentials openly championed it—provided their way of life could proceed unchallenged by unnecessary American rules.
Stockton had assured that this simple requirement would be denied when he assigned Marine Brevet Captain Archibald H. Gillespie to succeed Frémont as military commandant of Los Angeles.
The career marine had qualities that attracted Stockton as they had Frémont, who had been impressed with Gillespie from the moment they had first met at Klamath Lake in May, 1846, and who had subsequently selected him as adjutant of the California Battalion. He had been the perfect courier for President Polk and the Secretary of the Navy. He was courageous and imaginative in carrying dispatches and orders
across hostile Mexico to Mazatlán, Monterey, and to Frémont in northern California. He had fought Indians alongside Frémont’s men, and had been successful in the several missions entrusted to him. He was fluent in Spanish.
Now age forty-three, with fifteen years of service and still only a lieutenant of marines, Gillespie’s weaknesses emerged fully when he was left in command of Los Angeles with a garrison of forty-eight men. The taste of power seemed to infuse him with the Marine Corps spirit, which a century later was described as “gung ho.” He took control with a will, became imperious, quick-tempered, and tactless. He regarded Mexicans in general as a cowardly, inferior people, and his ill-concealed contempt for the Californios fit perfectly the attitudes of Frémont and his men, and of Stockton and his. Gillespie, now commanding men who had served with both Frémont and Stockton, was as drunk on power as the men were drunk on aguardiente.
The instructions he had received were simple: he was to “maintain military rule” in accordance with the commodore’s proclamation and to be lenient with citizens “well-disposed” toward the United States, exempting them from the burdensome rules directed at the more recalcitrant populace. But Gillespie ignored these niceties and from his Government House headquarters, wrote orders like a man accustomed only to taking orders. He issued directives on enforcing curfews, closing shops at sundown, searching homes for weapons, outlawing gatherings in private homes, forbidding even family reunions in homes. He made it illegal for liquor to be sold without his permission, illegal for two people to walk in the streets together, illegal to gallop a horse across the plaza. He ordered the breaking up of fandangos—which he apparently felt were opportunities for the gathering of malcontents. He presided over and decided petty lawbreaking cases instead of leaving them to local magistrates. He freely used the word “rebel” in his adjudications, imposed fines, jailed perceived offenders without hearings.
After five weeks of obnoxious regulations and frivolous arrests, Gillespie’s satrapy succeeded in igniting the damp tinder of revolt in Los Angeles.
2
Rumors of an insurrection in the planning reached the marine and his men weeks before the first overt sign of it. A militia captain named Cérbulo Varela, described by Bancroft as “a wild and unmanageable young fellow, though not a bad man at heart,” gathered around him a number of like-minded “irresponsible fellows” and announced that he and his friends would not submit to the American’s police-like rules. Varela and his street toughs seem to have harassed Gillespie’s enforcers, yet remained out of range of capture while stirring discontent among the Angelinos.
In mid-September, in response to the burgeoning trouble, Gillespie made a fatal mistake. He divided his meager force by sending a detachment of nineteen men under Ezekial Merritt to San Diego, which had been left ungarrisoned. Merritt and his men had been gone a week when, before dawn on September 23, 1846, Varela and twenty of his ruffians made a noisy assault on the barracks building housing the remainder of Gillespie’s men. The insurgents were apparently hoping that by firing a few shots in the air, beating drums, and shouting, they could roust the Americans and force their surrender. The ploy did not work and Varela and his rebels were chased off with a rifle volley. When the smoke cleared, however, the comic attack on the barracks had produced the result Varela hoped for: a swelling of the rebel ranks from among the numerous Californios who had held their tempers in check during the weeks of what they considered a suffocating governance. People began digging up the guns they had buried, and within days of his first sortie Varela had three hundred men in his ragged command, divided into bands, each with a “captain” in charge, several of these veteran officers officially “under parole” and pledged not to serve against the Americans.
The growing rebel force gathered at La Mesa, one of José Castro’s old camps east of the village, and soon other leaders emerged. Captain José María Flores, an intelligent, professional military man, was elected mayor general of the insurgent force; Flores’ second in command was José Antonio Carrillo, former alcalde of Los Angeles and a veteran intriguer against several governors of the province; and a third man, destined to loom larger than the others in the events to follow, was Captain Andrés Pico, now commandante de escuadrón (squadron commander), age thirty-six and the younger brother of the departed Governor Pío Pico.
On September 24, the insurgents issued their own proclamation, addressed to the “Citizenry” of California and signed by Varela and over three hundred others. The rebels said that “we see ourselves subjugated and oppressed by an insignificant force of adventurers from the U.S. of N. America, who, putting us in a condition worse than that of slaves, are dictating to us despotic and arbitrary laws.…” The manifesto, redolent of Pico’s exit oratory and somewhat more portentous than those written by Stockton and Gillespie, called for freedom from “the heavy chains of slavery” and warned that the American oppressors intended “barbarous servitude” for native Californians. “Shall we wait to see our wives violated, our innocent children beaten by the American whip, our property sacked, our temples profaned, to drag out a life full of shame and disgrace? No! A thousand times no!”
A call to arms followed, asking all citizens from age fifteen to sixty to join in repelling the invaders and branding as traitors those who did not take up the fight.
The issuance of this document was accompanied by a demand that the Americans surrender. Gillespie now busied his men with unspiking four old cannons they had captured in August and in gathering what ammunition and powder he could find while awaiting developments from among the rebels.
On September 24, Gillespie dispatched John “Juan Flaco” Brown to Monterey with urgent messages scribbled on cigarette papers that were balled up and placed in the express rider’s hair. Brown stopped at Santa Barbara to warn Lieutenant Theodore Talbot of the trouble brewing in Los Angeles, then proceeded to Yerba Buena with Gillespie’s message to Stockton that Los Angeles was under siege.
The Americans held their position for several days after slipping out of Government House to the nearby gun emplacements at Fort Hill, an unreconnoitered position that was found to be waterless. Meantime, General Flores renewed his surrender demands and generously offered to permit Gillespie and his men to march out of town unmolested, taking their small arms with them, and proceed to San Pedro Bay, where they could board a merchant ship to remove them from California waters.
On about September 29, Gillespie accepted Flores’ offer and surrendered. Five days later, he embarked with his force on the merchant vessel Vandalia.
In Santa Barbara, a small band that had split off the growing insurgent force in Los Angeles demanded the surrender of Theodore Talbot and his nine-man garrison. The lieutenant, one of Frémont’s trusted adjutants and original exploration-party members, escaped with his men and lurked in the mountains within sight of the town for a week, hoping that an American man-of-war might arrive to rescue them. When none appeared, they crossed into the interior valley and pushed on to Monterey, a patrol of Californios snapping at their heels. They arrived there exhausted, starving, their clothes in rags, on November 8 and rejoined Frémont and his men, who had entered the town a few days before on the American trader Sterling.
In the old hide-and-tallow depot of San Diego, Zeke Merritt and his dozen men were joined by Sutter’s majordomo John Bidwell and a handful of other American sympathizers. They fled the town upon the arrival of a party of fifty of General Flores’ insurgents and boarded the commercial whaler Stonington, at anchor in the bay.
3
Stockton’s Acapulco–Mexico City scheme evaporated on October 1. That day, Skinny John Brown, after a ride of five hundred miles in seven days, reached Yerba Buena on the last of a string of blown horses and delivered the news of the impending fall of Los Angeles. The commodore, poring over his charts in the cabin of the Congress, received Brown’s report dubiously but cleared his table and called his officers to a war council. He dispatched Captain William Mervine of the Savannah to rein
force the Los Angeles garrison; he also sent a courier to Frémont’s camp near Sutter’s Fort ordering the explorer to bring his California Battalion down to San Francisco Bay.
The Savannah reached San Pedro Bay on October 6 and found Gillespie and his men still aboard the Vandalia awaiting rescue. The next day, Mervine landed 350 sailors and marines on the beach, was joined there by Gillespie and his men, and began the march north toward Los Angeles. The expedition was poorly planned and ill-equipped, Mervine apparently having been infected with the prevailing belief that the Californios would run for the hills upon the approach of an American force. The sailors were armed with an assortment of muskets, cutlasses, belaying pins, and boarding pikes; no cannons had been taken from the Savannah, although several light, manageable ones were available. Mervine had no horses, no ambulance wagons, no supply train, and knew nothing of the terrain or the numbers and deployment of the rebel force. Gillespie later said that the captain was “without reason,” and indeed, the two officers were at instant odds, Mervine accusing the marine of unprofessional, even criminal, conduct in surrendering his garrison.
After a few hours’ march from the beach, the Americans began spotting mounted men in the distance, watching their advance. A few random shots were exchanged but Mervine and his force reached the Domínguez rancho, an outpost about fifteen miles from Los Angeles, without serious incident.
General José Flores had been able to mount about two hundred men in the week since Gillespie’s surrender and had taken a wise precaution in herding all horses and cattle inland to deprive the Americans of them. While his force, equipped with lances, swords, skinning knives, and old muskets and pistols buried or hidden during the American takeover, was nearly as poorly armed as Mervine’s, it did have a cannon. This ancient brass four-pounder, used for ceremonial salutes, had been buried in the garden of one Inocencia Reyes, exhumed, and mounted on a makeshift, horse-drawn limber. Flores and his second in command, Colonel José Carrillo, rode out with an advance guard to harass the American advance, and on October 8, 1846, just north of Rancho Domínguez, the engagement known as the “Battle of the Old Woman’s Gun” took place.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 65