* * *
During the sixteen-day lull between the advent of the Army of the West in San Diego and the beginning of the 150-mile march to Los Angeles on December 28, both officers seemed certain in their knowledge of whose authority was paramount. Even so, as they prepared to march, each man made certain gentlemanly gestures. Stockton suggested that the general take command of the combined army and offered himself as aide-de-camp; Kearny declined, said the commodore should lead the force with himself, Kearny, as aide-de-camp. Stockton repeated his offer before the march began, and again Kearny declined.
H. H. Bancroft’s explanation for Kearny’s strange reluctance to take the command he assumed belonged to him by his seniority of rank and War Department order is that he felt he owed Stockton a favor. After the disaster of San Pascual, which Bancroft said “reflected no credit on his ability as an officer,” he had entered San Diego under “peculiar circumstances, wounded, like so many of his men, deprived of his best officers who had been killed, his whole command perhaps saved from destruction by the commodore’s aid.” The delicacy of Kearny’s position and the fact that Stockton was actively engaged in organizing an expedition against the enemy, the historian wrote, “prompted the general not only to abstain from demanding the chief command, but to decline it when proffered by Stockton.”
The breech in the amenities opened on December 22 after Stockton described his plans to Kearny: he would advance to the coastal town of San Luís Rey, forty miles north of San Diego, and there determine the whereabouts of Colonel Frémont and the deployment of the enemy. Failing to join with Frémont, he said, might dictate a course of falling back to San Diego.
Kearny’s soldierly brain could see no benefit in such a tentative movement, especially one that might leave Frémont and his California Battalion, the strength and location of which were unknown, in limbo. He said as much to Stockton in a letter counseling a quick march to Los Angeles via San Luís Rey and stating, “I shall be happy to … give you any aid either of head or hand of which I may be capable.”
Stockton’s reaction to this sensible suggestion was inexplicably harsh and filled with demonstrably false suggestions. The commodore asserted that the Californians might be fielding a more numerous army than his and Kearny’s combined force of six hundred men, and that this phantom army “might get in my rear and cut off my communication with San Diego,” and even put his ships off the California shore at hazard.
This exchange of ideas on the conduct of the Los Angeles campaign seems to have tipped the scale for Kearny. A few days before the march, he met with Stockton and said that in the national interest in completing the annexation of California, he needed to command the army.
In a later report to the War Department, he said that the command “was reluctantly granted to me by Commodore Stockton on my urgent advice that he should not leave Colonel Frémont unsupported to fight a battle on which the fate of California might for a long time depend.”
Stockton’s view differed. In his subsequent testimony in Washington, he said that Kearny “gave me to understand he would like to command and after a conversation I agreed to appoint him … but I retained my own position as commander in chief.”
Kearny seemed to admit that while he had the immediate command, Stockton’s authority was preeminent when he wrote that “during our march, his authority and command, though it did not extend over me, or over troops which he had himself given me, extended far beyond where we were moving. It extended to the volunteers stationed at Nueva Helvetia, Sonoma, Monterey and I think some few in San Francisco and over the California Battalion of mounted riflemen under Colonel Frémont’s command which I had not then claimed.”
The Stockton-Kearny army thus set out for Los Angeles on December 29, 1846, with the band from the Congress leading the force of forty-four officers, fifty-seven First Dragoons under Captain Henry Turner, and five hundred sailors, marines, and volunteer riflemen, the latter, the only men on horseback, commanded by Captain Archibald Gillespie. The column was armed with muskets, carbines, boarding axes, and six artillery pieces, followed by ten oxcarts of supplies, the bullocks so feeble that the men had to help drag the fieldpieces and stores wagons. They moved slowly, covering only thirty miles in the first three days on the route Kearny had taken into San Diego, and on New Year’s Eve, they camped at the San Bernardo rancho.
“Our men were badly clothed, and their shoes generally made by themselves out of canvas,” Stockton wrote; yet, as he perhaps thought befitted a commander in chief, he slept in a lavish tent suite complete with night tables and a bed with a mattress, while Kearny slept on the ground wrapped in a bearskin.
2
At about the time Kearny and his battered veterans of San Pascual first reached San Diego, Lieutenant Colonel Frémont had brought his California Battalion down the boggy trails from Monterey to San Luís Obispo. His call for volunteers had been answered and his battalion had grown to a demi-regiment made up of his old exploring company, immigrants newly arrived at New Helvetia, a company of Walla Wallas and a miscellany of California Indians, some sailors and marines detached from warship duty in San Francisco Bay, and the Bear Flaggers of the Sonoma garrison under Captain John Grigsby. He had 428 men in buckskins and moccasins and all manner of cobbled-together outfits, three fieldpieces, ammunition and stores wagons, and an enormous herd of nearly two thousand horses and mules, plus a small collection of cattle. All, men and animals, had been gathered and on the march in the space of two months.
It had taken nearly a month for his cumbersome party, moving in rain squalls along eroded mud paths, to reach San Luís Obispo, and when Frémont set up his camp in the mountain foothills above the mission village on the night of December 14, he had no idea what resistance the Californians might throw against him. He was operating in a vacuum three hundred miles from San Diego: he did not know of Kearny’s fight at San Pascual, nor of the whereabouts of Stockton and his men, who were presumably coming north toward Los Angeles.
The San Luís Obispo Mission was surrounded and occupied quickly with no resistance. Frémont’s men captured several local influentials, including José de Jesús Pico, a cousin of Andrés and Pío Pico, and thirty-five of his rebels who had fought Frémont’s men at La Natividad in October. José Pico had surrendered to the Americans months before and had been granted “parole”—freedom under the promise that he would not bear arms or engage in any insurgent activities. However, a search of his quarters turned up letters and documents showing that he was in regular contact with General Flores, commander of the Californians. Amazingly, Frémont, supposed to be on the march toward the critical recapture of Los Angeles, decided to hold a court-martial to punish the captured officer for violating his parole. This was done on December 16 and Pico was sentenced to death by firing squad the next morning.
He was rescued minutes before he was to stand blindfolded before his executioners. After paying a visit to the condemned man, Frémont granted an audience to Pico’s wife, a woman described by those who knew her as “striking.” She was dressed in black and brought her children and knelt before the colonel to beg for her husband’s life. Frémont raised her to her feet and promised he would consider her entreaties. He had the prisoner brought to him, later describing him as “calm and brave … a handsome man, within a few years of forty, with black eyes and black hair,” and told him his life had been spared and for this, he should thank Señora Pico.
In his memoirs, Frémont said that Pico made the sign of the cross and said, “I was to die—I had lost the life God gave me—you have given me another life. I devote the new life to you.”
In truth, Frémont may have intended sparing Pico’s life all along; several of the California Battalion officers had come forward with the suggestion. It turned out to be a wise decision, as was the freeing of the other captives taken in the mission town. Pico volunteered to accompany the expedition to Los Angeles, and those freed from captivity—reluctant and unpaid volunteers to begin with—passed the
word that the Americans had overwhelming numbers and it was futile to resist them.
The march was resumed on December 17 with Santa Barbara, a hundred miles south of San Luís Obispo, the next significant town en route to Los Angeles. Frémont led his battalion inland toward the western slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains, traveling over country until recently stricken by drought. The new rains had produced only sparse grass, and the horses and pack train grew jaded and weak as the days wore on, each day ending with little more than fifteen miles of progress for the weary force.
On Christmas Eve, the Americans crossed San Marcos Pass, a few miles northwest of Santa Barbara, in a freezing mountain rainstorm. The trail, which virtually disappeared in the flash floods, caused a hundred pack animals to loose their footing and dump their packsaddles and baggage “like the trail of a defeated army,” as Frémont put it. The battalion camped in the mud, ate cold rations since cook fires were impossible, crossed ravines choked with uprooted trees and dense brush, watched helplessly as mules and horses buried themselves in mud, and were hurtled into the rocks by winds so strong they could snatch a man off his feet. They struggled into the town in the afternoon of December 27 so trail-worn, hungry, and fatigued that it took a week for the men and animals to recover sufficiently to resume the march.
Fortunately for Frémont and his prostrate army, Santa Barbara, its shops closed and streets deserted, offered no resistance and no prisoners to worry about, and the flag was raised in the central plaza with no onlookers. The Americans themselves were too tired to cheer.
* * *
The six-hundred-man Stockton-Kearny force approached the vineyards of San Luís Rey Mission on January 4, 1847, and there the commodore exercised his authority as commander in chief. A party of three men arrived in the American camp under a truce flag, bringing a message dated January 1 from now-Governor José Flores, who proposed a suspension of hostilities. Rumors were abroad that Mexico and the United States were negotiating a peace settlement, Flores wrote, and further bloodshed should be avoided until these reports were verified.
Stockton, without consulting Kearny, angrily rejected the proposal, ridiculing Flores’ claim to be governor of California and declaring to the couriers that the Mexican officer had broken parole and would be executed if captured.
As the combined army moved on from San Luís Rey to San Juan Capistrano, Stockton received a report that Frémont and his men had reached Santa Barbara. Upon reading this, the commodore sent Captain George Hamley, master of the whaler Stonington, to deliver a message to the colonel warning him of the near presence of the Californians, and of their belligerence after defeating Gillespie and Mervine—and Kearny at San Pascual. Hamley rode back to San Diego, then took passage upcoast on a trader to intercept Frémont.
By the time he reached the explorer, the last battle in the conquest of California had ended.
3
From his headquarters at San Fernando, north of Los Angeles, Governor-General José Flores had reached his wit’s end. He had hoped to harass the Americans with hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, buying time until Mexico either sent him reinforcements—which he knew was little more than a dream—or signed a peace with the United States. He had close to five hundred men but they were unpaid, ill-equipped, and disgruntled. The American Frémont and his buckskinned battalion were heading south out of Santa Barbara, and the American Stockton, who had rejected the New Year’s Day cease-fire proposal, was on the march north out of San Diego. The surrender of Gillespie and his garrison in Los Angeles three months past and the subsequent defeat of the Americans at San Pascual had inspired the Californians with renewed patriotic zeal. But the euphoria had been short-lived: the Americans were on the march from the north and south, with larger numbers than ever before, and they would converge on Los Angeles.
During the first days of the new year, Flores expected it would be Frémont he would first meet in battle. This expectation changed after his scouts brought news of Stockton’s rapid advance, and on January 7, the Californian moved his force into camp on a steep bluff overlooking a ford of the San Gabriel River, twelve miles northeast of Los Angeles. It was an advantageous place amid willows and mustard brush on the American line of march, perhaps a perfect place for an ambush.
Stockton’s scouts located Flores’ potential ambuscade during the night and reported the enemy position. The commodore ordered a crossing of the river on a lower ford than originally planned and halted his force about a quarter-mile from the river at around two in the afternoon of the eighth, the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s 1815 victory at New Orleans.
The Californians watched the American advance and Flores stationed sharpshooters, Andrés Pico’s lancers and two other squadrons of horsemen, all strung out along the fifty-foot-high-bluff four hundred yards west of the stream. He placed a large force of horsemen and his two nine-pounder cannons at the crossing ford.
Upon reaching the San Gabriel bank, Stockton’s skirmishers exchanged rifle fire with the Californians, and by the time the crossing began in earnest, Flores’ cannons were pelting the water with grape and round shot. The river, about a hundred yards wide and knee-deep, had a quicksand bed that slowed the crossing and gave the Californians fish-in-a-barrel targets from their positions on the bluff. But Flores’ powder was of poor quality and there were few casualties.
As the main force of Americans reached the riverbank, Kearny ordered two nine-pounders brought forward to counter the Californian artillery, but Stockton, who had no experience in land fighting, countermanded the order and insisted that the guns not be unlimbered until after they had crossed the river. The cannons were pulled by flailing mule teams and manhandled with guy ropes across the spongy streambed under a hail of rifle and cannon fire. At one point, seeing one of the nine-pounders stalled and sinking, Stockton rode to it, grabbed a rope, and shouted at the desperate gunners, “Quicksand be damned, come on, boys!”
Incredibly, they managed to get the guns over and unlimbered as Stockton, who did have experience in laying guns at sea, took command of the pieces, yelling, “Steady, boys, don’t waste a shot!” Meantime, his main force splashed across the San Gabriel, finding shelter under what Lieutenant William Emory called “a natural banquette, breast-high” while being deployed. Kearny directed the deployment, sending his dragoons, Gillespie’s volunteers, and the tars from Stockton’s ships up and downstream as the balance of the force continued the crossing under the galling musket fire from the bluff. The carts of the baggage train foundered in the sand and the terrified mules and horses were belabored to shore by the ropes and whips of the teamsters and the flat blades of dragoon sabers.
Stockton was too busy to notice the chaos in the stream. He took command of one of the nine-pounders, laid it so accurately toward Flores’ guns on the bluff that the first shot smashed the carriage of one of the enemy cannons to splinters, rendering the piece useless.
Kearny now had most of his men deployed to his satisfaction and stood, big dragoon pistol in each hand, shouting to Stockton, “I am now ready for the charge!” The commodore nodded and yelled to the sailors and marines in front of him, “Forward, my Jacks! Charge!” They scrambled up the hill, bayonets fixed and shouting “New Orleans!” as Stockton’s gun crews flogged their mule teams up at the same time.
Near the top of the bluff, Kearny’s party swerved to the right, and the left wing of the Californians fell back after firing their weapons, abandoning their disabled cannon. But some of Flores’ mounted troops circled the Kearny column as if to attack its flank and rear guard, and the general quickly ordered his men into a square formation. Faced with the hedgerow of bayonets, the Californians retreated out of range.
On Kearny’s left, Stockton met a feeble charge by Flores’ horsemen, but as the commodore later wrote, “finding so warm a reception … they changed their purpose and retired, when a discharge of artillery told upon their ranks.”
By the time the Americans reached the top of the bluff, the enemy had disappe
ared, only the dust raised by their rear-guard horsemen marking their retreat.
The battle at the San Gabriel, from the first skirmisher’s shots through the contested river crossing and the climbing of the heights, had lasted less than two hours. Two American sailors had been killed, eight men were wounded. The Californian casualties were never authenticated. H. H. Bancroft asserts that they were “probably the same in killed.… Each party as usual greatly overrated the enemy’s loss.”
With the animals too spent in the day’s work to give chase, Stockton and Kearny made camp on the bluff. On the night of January 8, Flores’ campfires could be seen flickering in the distant hills athwart the road to Los Angeles and a few desultory shots were exchanged in the darkness. In the morning, as Stockton ordered the march to continue, the Californians had again vanished.
Before leaving the bluffs on the morning of January 9, a courier rode into the American camp under a white truce flag, bringing news that Frémont and his men were now in San Fernando, about twenty-five miles north of Los Angeles. Stockton sent a message back urging the colonel to bring the force into the pueblo quickly and join his command. Presumably he told Frémont of the fight on the San Gabriel and that he and Kearny would enter Los Angeles later in the day.
The Americans detoured off the main road at noon after reports reached Stockton that Flores had regrouped what remained of his force—many of his men had deserted—and was drawn up in a horseshoe-shaped formation on an open plain on a mesa about six miles from the San Gabriel. Kearny again placed his men in a hollow square, the pack animals and provision and baggage carts in the center, and ordered that there would be no stragglers or breaking of ranks, that every man needed to keep his post and pace to thwart any cavalry charge by the enemy.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 69