Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (16 page)

And then something did. Out of the forest stepped a stranger named Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, bearing cryptic messages from Washington. He was a gimlet-eyed Marine from New Jersey, sickly but irascible and quite arrogant.

The trek Gillespie had taken to reach this lakeside wilderness has to rank as one of the great solo courier missions in history. He had left Washington in October of the previous year after having met with President Polk and other government officials, including the secretary of the navy, George Bancroft. He took a steamship from New York City down to Veracruz, Mexico. While on board he committed to memory the texts of his most sensitive dispatches and then destroyed the original documents. From Veracruz, he traveled inland to Mexico City, assuming various disguises and taking copious notes on the turbulent political climate and the nation’s disposition toward war.

By December, Gillespie reached Mazatlán, on the west coast of Mexico, and boarded an American whaling ship bound for Hawaii—the Sandwich Islands, as they were then known. From Honolulu he made an about-face, sailing east toward California in an American man-of-war. His ship hove into Monterey in April, and he slipped ashore posing as a merchant. After meeting with the American consul there, Thomas Oliver Larkin, he quietly pushed inland to the Sacramento River, wending his way north along the river until he caught Fremont’s scent.

Gillespie, it seemed, was Polk’s far-flung secret agent, not just a messenger but someone who had been given considerable discretion to improvise decisions on the ground. History does not know precisely what his dispatches said, or precisely what oral information might have been lodged in his head. Neither Gillespie nor Fremont ever came clean on this question. It remains one of the imponderables of American history just what Fremont knew, when he knew it—and what he chose to ignore.

This much is clear: Polk and others in Washington were worried about California, and they wanted Fremont to return there posthaste to help ensure that the coveted province fell into American hands while simultaneously making certain the British did not try to seize it for themselves.

This fear was not entirely unfounded. England’s interest in California dated all the way back to 1579, the year Sir Francis Drake came ashore somewhere north of present-day San Francisco and claimed “Nova Albion,” as he called it, for the British crown. In 1846 the British were well-ensconced in Oregon. Their ships prowled the Pacific coast of California, and officials in Mexico City were offering to sell California to England in exchange for a war loan. In addition, an Irish priest named Eugene McNamara had secured Mexican permission for a curious scheme (never to reach fruition) that would have brought over boatloads of Catholic immigrants from English-held Ireland to start a new utopian colony in Southern California. Through official and unofficial channels, then, Britain was certainly intrigued by California—the question was how far it was willing to go to antagonize the Americans.

Fremont stayed up talking with Gillespie and reading his dispatches in the flickering firelight. War with Mexico had already broken out, and plans for the grand march of the Army of the West were under way, but Gillespie did not—could not—know that yet; such was the snail’s pace of communication then that it would be another month before anyone in California heard the news.

It was perhaps a measure of the national arrogance that in the flushed excitement over the possible intrigues of England and Mexico and the course of empire, the Americans forgot about the
other
inhabitants of the region—the Indians all around them. Fremont was so preoccupied that he neglected to post a watchman that night.

But by the time he drifted off to sleep, Fremont had already made up his mind which path he would take. He later wrote, “The information through Gillespie had absolved me from my duty as an explorer, and I was left to my duty as an officer of the American Army with the future authoritative knowledge that…to obtain possession of California was the chief object of the President.” Fremont said he now fully appreciated that “the men who understood the future of our country, and who ruled its destinies, regarded the California coast as the boundary fixed by nature to round off our national domain.”

On August 14, 1846, two days after the Navajo raid on Las Vegas, General Kearny marched with his Army of the West into the town’s central plaza, dismounted from his bay charger, and demanded that the mayor, or
alcalde
, join him in addressing a milling crowd of several hundred shocked villagers.

This was the first village of any size that Kearny’s army had encountered, and he wanted to set a certain tone. The people of Las Vegas were fascinated by the Americans, but also afraid. The women cowered in the shadowy edges of the square, drawn up in their shawls and rebozos, some of them nervously smoking cornhusk cigarettes, while the men in their brightly colored serapes and glazed sombreros pushed forward into the open light of the plaza. (Susan Magoffin, who passed through town a few days later, described the Las Vegans as “wild looking strangers” who “constantly stared” and “swarmed around me like bees…some of the little ones in a perfect state of nudity.”) The village dogs barked incessantly, and pigs could be heard snuffling in their sties, but otherwise the town was silent, the people waiting to hear what the American general had to say.

Kearny and the
alcalde
climbed a rickety ladder to the flat mud roof of one of the adobe buildings facing the plaza. From there, Kearny, wearing a blue flannel frock coat with gold buttons and epaulets and a saber swinging at his side, peered down at the villagers. With the
alcalde
standing awkwardly at his side, Kearny began to speak the will of the United States of America. He did not mince words.

“I have come amongst you by the orders of my government to take possession of your country,” Kearny said through an interpreter, his voice even and calm. He pointed to the many hundreds of American troops who were steadily filing past the town on the way to occupy the capital of Santa Fe. “There goes my army. You see but a small portion of it.” And yet, the general said, “we come amongst you as friends, not as enemies; as protectors, not as conquerors. Henceforth, I absolve you of all allegiance to the Mexican government.”

At this the crowd erupted in a “great sensation,” as an American lieutenant put it, a confusion of shouting, cheers, and gasps. Kearny waited for the hubbub to die down, and then continued. “From the Mexican government,” he said, “you have
never
received protection. The Navajos come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep, and even your women, whenever they please.”

The people of Las Vegas eyed each other with quickened interest and vigorously nodded. “
Si, si
—it is true,” they said.

Kearny sensed that he’d struck a nerve. He had heard about the recent Navajo raid. He realized that he was conquering a people who were already cowed and exhausted by a savage war of the frontier—a war that the United States was now, for better or worse, inheriting. “My government,” he said with perfect confidence, “will
correct
all this. It will protect you in your persons and property. Your enemies will become our enemies. We will keep off the Indians.”

The villagers were skeptical of this tall promise. The Mexican army, it is true, had never protected them from the Navajo menace, nor had it given the people weapons with which they might defend themselves. All the villagers had to beat back the Indians were lances, bows and arrows, and a few antique muskets dating back to the 1700s. The Spanish had been equally impotent to stop the raids. Navajo predation, it seemed, was part of the order of things in this harsh extremity of the faded Spanish empire, where the echoed idioms of Cervantes were still spoken.

But now the villagers of Las Vegas must have wondered what stout strain of ambition had marched into their midst, this conqueror who called himself a friend. What kind of army was this that presumed to vanquish in an effortless sprint not only their nation but also their nation’s sworn enemy? Even if he wanted to, what made this man in the fancy blue uniform think he could “correct all this,” reversing the hard pattern of centuries?

Kearny went further. “Not a pepper, not an onion, shall be taken by my troops without pay,” he promised. “I will protect you in your persons and property and in your religion. Some of your priests have told you that we would ill-treat your women and brand them on the cheek, as you do your mules on the hip. It is all false.”

General Kearny then insisted that the
alcalde
pledge an oath of allegiance to the United States, on the rooftop for all to see. “Look at me in the face,” Kearny demanded as the townsfolk watched. The
alcalde
had a hollow expression, but, reluctantly at first, he did as he was told. The short oath ended with a solemnity that was not trivial for a Catholic man swearing before a crowd of staunch Catholics and the glaring village priest. After proclaiming his fealty to the United States of America, he was made to say—
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
.

Then Kearny and his men bounded off for Santa Fe, which lay beyond the mountains, some seventy miles to the west. Thus far the conquest of New Mexico had been uneventful. But Kearny’s runners learned that the governor of New Mexico was planning to put up a major fight in a canyon fifteen miles outside the city. If Kearny’s intelligence was accurate, Armijo had three thousand men already dug into the canyon, waiting to repulse the American invaders.

Narbona returned from the Hopi country after the great drought of the 1820s only to hear accounts of the massacre of the chiefs at Jemez, and he understood that little had changed: The old war was very much alive. But Narbona, now sixty-three years old, seemed to understand that ultimately the Navajos would never gain anything from this grinding conflict. The grand old warrior took a different tack—he began to preach peace. In 1829 he was invited to come to Santa Fe for talks, but fearing a trap like the one that had been laid at Jemez, Narbona insisted that the Mexican governor furnish him with a full military escort.

Although suspicious of the Mexicans, he decided that the journey was worth the risk. The ensuing conference in Santa Fe did not achieve any lasting results for the Navajo people, but by establishing himself as a peace leader, he was at least successful in protecting his own outfit—inoculating it, in effect—from further Mexican attacks. He made two other trips to Santa Fe, in 1832 and 1833, and for a time the hostilities seemed to quiet down.

But then in early February 1835, Narbona learned that the Mexicans were mounting a massive campaign against the eastern Navajos. Narbona and his people had kept the peace and refrained from raiding for many years, but certainly an invasion of their homeland called for war. Word reached him that a force of more than one thousand Mexican soldiers and armed civilians had left Santa Fe on February 8 and was aimed toward Navajo country. Among the invaders were a large number of Pueblo Indian warriors.

Narbona hastily gathered together 250 of the best Navajo warriors and raced to a little notch in the Chuska Mountains known as Beesh Lichii’I Bigiizh, or Copper Pass. He knew that the Mexicans would have to pass through this eight-thousand-foot-high rock defile if they were to penetrate Navajo country. When they did, Narbona and his warriors would be waiting for them, hiding in the tall pines on the ridgeline above.

The next morning a dust cloud appeared on the dun floor of the broad flat valley to the east. Soon the Mexican soldiers came into view, a long tattered scarf of men on horseback in the distance, riding along the frozen Rio Chaco. Their silver buttons shone in the morning sun, giving Narbona plenty of time to prepare. On this cold, gusty day in February, the invading army was marching headlong into an ambush. Precisely as Narbona had guessed, it was aiming for Copper Pass.