Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  On December 2, Kearny wrote to Stockton from “Headquarters, Army of the West, camp at Warner’s”:

  Sir: I this afternoon reached here, escorted by a party of 1st regiment dragoons. I came by order of the pres. of the U.S. We left Santa Fe on the 25th Sept., having taken possession of N. Mex., annexed it to the U.S., established a civil govt in that territory, and secured order, peace and quietness there. If you can send a party to open communication with us on the route to this place, and to inform me of the state of affairs in Cal., I wish you would do so, and as quickly as possible. The fear of this letter falling into Mexican hands prevents me from writing more. Your express by Mr Carson was met on the Del Norte; and your mail must have reached Washington at least 10 days since.… Very respectfully …

  Kearny’s letter, in announcing that his arrival was upon direct orders of the President of the United States, contained the hint that he now commanded the American forces in California. He made no mention of the strength of his “party,” of the fact that he had given Stockton’s dispatches to Tom Fitzpatrick “on the Del Norte,” or that he had ordered Carson to turn back and guide the Army of the West to California.

  Stockton’s reply, dated on the evening of the third and reaching Kearny on December 5, said that Captain Gillespie, a detachment of mounted riflemen, and a fieldpiece were proceeding “without delay” to intercept the general and his force and that “Capt. G. is well informed in relation to the present state of things in Cal., and will give you all needful information.” The note contained its own hint of who was in charge: it was signed “Robt. Stockton, commander-in-chief and governor of the territory of California, etc.”

  * * *

  Kearny and his dragoons made their way south from Warner’s ranch in a flogging rain on December 4, taking the entire day to snail along the swampy roadway the fifteen miles to Stokes’ Santa Ysabel property, where a hot dinner was prepared for them by the Englishman’s majordomo and Indian workers.

  The thunderstorm had not abated the next morning when the march resumed toward some rugged hills in the west and the Indian village of San Pascual, but after a few hours on the trail, Stockton’s promise was fulfilled: the dragoons, making their way through an oak grove, met outriders from Archibald Gillespie’s detachment of thirty-five sailors, marines, and volunteers from the Congress and the California Battalion. The two American columns merged and camped—a short distance apart, as if Stockton, or Gillespie, wanted Kearny to be mindful of separate commands.1

  As Kit Carson and Alexis Godey celebrated their reunion, Captain Gillespie and his two officers, Navy Lieutenant Edward F. Beale and Midshipman James M. Duncan, met with Kearny and his staff and Gillespie announced the most critical news: a force of lancers, perhaps a hundred men under Captain Andrés Pico, was posted at San Pascual village, about ten miles ahead on the direct route to San Diego. Stockton, who had learned of the insurgents’ position from two captured deserters, suggested, via messages carried by Gillespie, that Kearny attack Pico and “beat up the camp if the general thought it advisable” in order to continue the march without harassment. One of the deserters, an Indian named Rafael Machado, had been sent along with Gillespie’s party.

  At a war council that night, Captain Benjamin Moore, one of Kearny’s ablest officers, asked to lead a raid on Pico’s camp and the general appears to have given this idea serious consideration. But he decided instead to send a patrol out under Lieutenant Thomas Hammond to reconnoiter the enemy position and return with as much detailed information as could be gathered in the dark of night. Moore opposed this decision, saying that a horseback reconnaissance might be discovered and thereby ruin the element of surprise. He preferred a full-blown night attack that would find Pico’s men unmounted and unprepared—“To dismount them is to whip them,” he said.

  The captain was overruled, and on the night of December 5 Hammond, the deserter Machado, and six dragoons rode out in a sleety rain to find Pico and his insurgents.

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  Thomas Clark Hammond of Fort McHenry, Maryland, West Point class of ’42, was age twenty-seven when he led the patrol that night. The second lieutenant had been married two years; his wife was the daughter of a prominent Platte County, Missouri, judge, and he was the father of a one-year-old son. He was a dedicated career officer, tough, uncomplaining, ambitious, eager for a fight. Kearny would not have entrusted the mission to a lesser man.

  The patrol located San Pascual village with no difficulty, and as the dragoons huddled against the biting cold and needling rain in the brush at the foot of a hill, Hammond sent Machado into the scattering of huts to “bring an Indian out” who could tell of the strength of Pico’s force. Gillespie, in recounting the events later, said, “Rafael went into the midst of the Enemy where they were sleeping, pulled out an Indian and ascertained that Andrés Pico was there with one hundred men.” Lieutenant Edward Beale explained the ease by which Machado gained the critical information: “The Indians are very inimical to the Californians and always ready to betray them.”

  After waiting some anxious minutes for Machado’s return, Hammond, fretting lest the Indian had run into trouble, led his dragoons to the outskirts of the village. According to Gillespie, the clank of the dragoons’ sabers alerted Pico’s sentries and instantly dogs began barking and the Californians, thrown awake, began shouting “Viva California!” “Abajo los Americanos!” and “a great variety of abuse.”

  Pico, it appears, could not at first credit that the intruders were Americans. The insurgents’ spy network in San Diego, rudimentary but effective, had notified him of the hated Gillespie’s departure from the town on December 3 with a small party of horsemen, riding east. Apparently no mention had been made of the brass cannon being pulled along at the rear of the American party, for Pico believed that the marine officer was merely leading a foraging expedition to find horses and stray cattle. He had taken his lancers—probably about a hundred men2—to San Pascual to keep an eye on Gillespie and did not know of Kearny’s arrival nearby. He could not believe that a small foraging patrol would be so audacious as to challenge him and seemed to resist the idea that Gillespie was not alone in the area, even when a sentry showed him a dragoon jacket and a blanket stamped with the letters “U.S.” that had been dropped on the trail. When Pico ordered his lancers to gather their horses, he did not know what to expect—a skirmish with the marine and his foraging party still seemed unlikely.

  Not until dawn, when he saw Kearny’s army for the first time, did he realize that he faced a full-fledged battle.

  * * *

  Hammond and his horsemen returned to Kearny’s camp at two on the morning of December 6 and the lieutenant reported Machado’s information and the unfortunate fact that Pico and his men had been alerted to the American presence. The general’s reaction to the latter news is not recorded but his fury, and that of Captain Moore, who had warned of this danger in the reconnaissance, cannot be doubted. Gillespie, who was not present to witness it, placed the blame for the fiasco directly on the patrol commander: “Thus the Californians were warned of the proximity of the Americans. The blunder by Hammond lost for Kearny the powerful advantage of surprise.”

  Kearny had no time to lecture; he ordered the camp be awakened and the men mounted; he sent Alexis Godey and Lieutenant Beale to Gillespie with orders for the marine to gather his men and join the dragoons on the trail to San Pascual village.

  The advance began before dawn on December 6. The rain had stopped, but in the bitter cold the men had to wrestle themselves from their frozen blankets and saddle up in the moonlight with no time for breakfast rations. They were exhausted and hungry, as were their animals, as they plodded along a cart trail in a thick fog toward San Pascual.

  Combined with Gillespie’s small force, Kearny’s Army of the West now numbered about 150 men. Twelve dragoons under Abraham Johnston led the army, with Kit Carson riding with them, followed by Kearny, Lieutenant Emory, and the engineers. Next in the column rode Captain Moore, Lieuten
ant Hammond, and fifty dragoons, most of them mounted on mules, followed by Gillespie with twenty men of the California Battalion, and Lieutenant John Davidson with two mountain howitzers and the crew to serve them. In the rear, the balance of the force, fifty or sixty men under the quartermaster, Major Thomas Swords, rode with the baggage train and Gillespie’s brass four-pounder. The army was strung out, two columns wide, for nearly a mile along the brushy trail.

  As the Indian huts of San Pascual came into view, lying at the east end of a flat valley, Kearny stopped his column in a narrow ravine that followed the valley floor into the village and there he gave some final orders to his officers. Precisely what these orders were is unknown, but he appears to have given a version of Lord Nelson’s oft-used admonition that “every man is expected to do his duty” and urged his officers not to depend upon musketry (much of the army’s powder had been dampened in the rain), but in true dragoon custom to rely upon the point of the saber. He had no real idea of the enemy numbers or of their deployment, or of the terrain, shrouded by the ground fog, and therefore he had no tactic. He said something about surrounding the village and taking as many prisoners as possible.

  Ahead, gathered around the Indian huts, Andrés Pico and his horsemen waited, wrapped in bright serapes and leather cuirasses, their seven-foot-long, needle-pointed, fire-hardened, ashwood lances couched. Pico, with poorer firearms and powder than the Americans, had but a single order for his men: “One shot and the lance!”

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  The battle began by mistake, its opening move like a miniature version of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Kearny’s order to “Trot!” was apparently misheard by Abraham Johnston, who suddenly yelled something, unsheathed his saber, and spurred his horse down the valley, followed by Kit Carson and the twelve dragoons who led the American column. Captain Johnston’s charge toward the village, three-quarters of a mile away, was so startling that gaps began opening in the line of march as Kearny, Benjamin Moore, and others yelled orders to follow. Those in the front of the column were able to spur their horses and mules, most of them weak and blown already, but minutes passed before those in the rear even realized that the army was on the move.

  In the gray dawning, Johnston and the vanguard reached San Pascual fatal minutes ahead of Moore and the fifty dragoons who had followed closest behind, and Pico’s horsemen were awaiting them in a gully on the eastern edge of the village. The Californians fired what few carbines they had, then wheeled to uncouch their lances. Johnston was killed by one of the first shots fired—struck in the forehead—and rolled off his horse; another bullet hit Carson’s horse and the guide went down, his carbine flung from his grasp, and rolled off the path as the others thundered past. He retrieved his rifle but found it smashed, took a carbine and cartridge box from a wounded dragoon, and scrambled ahead on foot until finding a sniper’s roost in the rocks bordering the gully.

  Pico had by now realized the number of Americans opposing him, and after meeting the initial charge with a volley, the lancers fell back momentarily to a level stretch of ground a half-mile away on the west of the village. This maneuver was interpreted by Moore—commanding the main body of dragoons—as a retreat, and he led a charge against Pico’s force with all the men who by now had reached the battle zone. The horses and mules picked their way forward through the brush and rocks until they came upon Pico and his men, who had in the meantime re-formed and now turned, leveling carbines and lances, and countercharged. Moore, some yards ahead of his men, rode directly at Pico. He fired his pistol, then slashed at the Mexican captain with his saber. The blow was parried as two of Pico’s men rushed up, lances leveled, and speared Moore from his horse. The American was shot as he lay wounded on the ground, then killed by lance thrusts. Later, when his body was recovered, Moore was found still grasping his broken sword, his body torn by sixteen lance wounds.

  As Moore fell from his horse, his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Thomas Hammond, rode up yelling to those behind him, “For God’s sake, men, come up!” and was also lanced and unhorsed. He died in agony several hours later.

  Within seconds, the fight devolved into a furious hand-to-hand combat, gun butts and sabers against gun butts and lances, engaging Pico’s men both on the flat and in and around San Pascual village, where Kearny and the others were fighting. The Californians were not only skilled horsemen (“the very best riders in the world,” Kearny later said), but adept with the reata, managing to drop their loops over several of the mule-mounted Americans and jerk them from their saddles.

  Gillespie arrived in the midst of the fight, the artillery pieces in tow, but was thrown from his horse and gashed so deeply in the chest by a lance thrust that his lung was exposed. Afoot and yelling “Rally! Rally! Face them!” he fended off six other attackers, then was literally nailed to the ground by a lance. Incredibly, he managed to pull the spear free and struggle over to one of the howitzers. He fumbled with flint and steel and was able to light the machero (a wick in a box used to light the gun’s fuse) before being knocked to the ground again, this time by a jabbing lance that split his lip and broke off a front tooth.

  Kearny, too, was in the midst of the fight, slashing with his saber and trying to stay on his mount. At one point, he was surrounded by lancers, and before Lieutenant Emory and Captain Henry Turner could come to his aid, took two lance wounds, one in the upper arm, the other in the buttock. Emory, who dug in his spurs and forced his way forward, probably saving Kearny’s life by slashing at the attackers with his saber, later said, “The old general [he was but fifty-two] defended himself valiantly and was as calm as a clock.”

  Gillespie, weak from loss of blood, now found the second of Kearny’s howitzers and managed to light the machero with his flint and steel. After he handed it to one of the gunners and heard the flat bang of the gun, he fainted. Navy Lieutenant Edward Beale, Gillespie’s second, then took over the gun and also managed to find the Sutter four-pounder and bring it into position. The gunners loaded both guns with grapeshot and fired each once toward the Californians. Pico was unwilling to put his lancers against the guns and wisely withdrew, leaving the field and dragging with reatas one of Kearny’s howitzers—the one Gillespie had failed to fire—whose mule team had bolted into the enemy lines.

  Beale’s cannon shots ended the battle. It had lasted no more than thirty minutes, ten of them in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting that followed Johnston’s first engagement with Pico’s lancers and Moore’s charge that followed.

  San Pascual village was deserted, and as the Americans fell into it, exhausted, famished, and thirsty, their animals done in, the dragoon surgeon John Griffin used it as a dressing station. He had much bloody work to do. In all, three officers—captains Johnston and Moore, and Lieutenant Hammond—and nineteen men of the Army of the West had been killed in the battle and another eighteen wounded, among them Kearny, Gillespie, Lieutenant Warner of the Engineers, who suffered three wounds, and Robidoux, the guide. Only two men—Johnston and one dragoon—had been killed by musketry, the others by lance.

  The casualties among the Californians was never dependably recorded. Pico claimed to have lost only eleven wounded. He also reported that he had defeated a force of two hundred Americans, killing over thirty, including the “despicable Gillespie.” He made no mention of the one Californian taken prisoner by the Americans. Ironically, he said he suffered most of his casualties after retiring from the San Pascual field when he lost eleven men in an attack by a band of Luiseño Indians.

  Kearny’s report, written a week after the battle, was at least as exaggerated as Pico’s. He wrote that he had defeated 160 Californians, that six dead were left on the field, the rest of the dead and wounded carried away by Pico’s men.

  During the battle, the general had brushed off Griffin’s ministrations and ordered the doctor to attend to the more seriously wounded. Then, like Gillespie, he fainted from blood loss. The gashes in his forearm and buttock were deep and since he was not sure he could mount
a horse, he turned over temporary command of the army to his adjutant, Captain Henry Turner, a Virginian and West Pointer who had served with Kearny since 1835.

  With Kit Carson supervising the detail, the dead were buried on the night of the battle under a willow tree east of the San Pascual camp as wolves howled in the moonglow. Of the graves dug in the frost-covered ground, Emory wrote: “They were put to rest together forever, a band of brave and heroic men.”

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  Mule Hill

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  For the moment, pursuit of Pico’s horsemen was impossible and the Americans—“the most tattered and ill-fed detachment of men that ever the United States mustered under her colors,” William Emory called them—spent the rest of the day of San Pascual in their sodden camp while Surgeon Griffin tended the casualties. There were no wagons for the wounded and some of the men fashioned travois by lashing buffalo robes between willow poles to be dragged behind mules. For the present, the men and animals were too fatigued to move on. The Indian village produced little food and the rations the dragoons had carried were but a memory.