sheep man more than anything else alive, it is very disconcerting to
know that Carson went into that business. He became a partner of his
lifelong friend, Maxwell, whose rancho in New Mexico was very like a
castle of the Middle Ages. The dinner service was of massive silver,
but the guests bedded down with a cowhide on the floor. New Mexico was
a conquered country owned by the United States, at intervals between
the Mexican revolts, when Kit settled down as a rancher. The words
settled down, mean that he served as a colonel of volunteers against
the Mexicans, and spent the rest of the time fighting Apaches, the most
ferocious of all savages.
Near Santa Fe, lived Mr. White and his son who fell in defense of their
ranch, having killed three Apaches, while the women and children of the
household met with a much worse fate than that of death. The settlers
refused to march in pursuit until Carson arrived, but by mistake he was
not given command, a Frenchman having been chosen as leader.
The retreat of the savages was far away in the mountains, and well
fortified. The only chance of saving the women and children was to
rush this place before there was time to kill them, and Carson dashed
in with a yell, expecting all hands to follow. So he found himself
alone, surrounded by the Apaches, and as they rushed, he rode, throwing
himself on the off side of his horse, almost concealed behind its neck.
Six arrows struck his horse, and one bullet lodged in his coat before
he was out of range. He cursed his Mexicans, he put them to shame,
he persuaded them to fight, then led a gallant charge, killing five
Indians as they fled. The delay had given them time to murder the women
and children.
Once, after his camp had been attacked by Indians, Carson discovered
that the sentry failed to give an alarm because he was asleep. The
Indian punishment followed, and the soldier was made for one day to
wear the dress of a squaw.
[Illustration: KIT CARSON]
We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five desperadoes for
the sake of a better story. The officer, commanding a detachment of
troops on the march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war.
Carson was the first white man to pass, and while the chiefs were
deciding how to attack his caravan, he walked alone into the council
lodge. So many years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him
that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected that he knew their
language, until he made a speech in Cheyenne, introducing himself,
recalling ancient friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their
special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and taking his
scalp, he claimed that he might have something to say on the point.
They parted, Kit to encourage his men, the Indians to waylay the
caravan; but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican boy to ride
three hundred miles for succor. When the Cheyennes charged the camp
at dawn, he ordered them to halt, and walked into the midst of them,
explaining the message he had sent, and what their fate would be if the
troops found they had molested them. When the Indians found the tracks
that proved Kit’s words, they knew they had business elsewhere.
In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military force to chasten the
hearts of the Navajo nation. They had never been conquered, and the
flood of Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their terrific
sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly grandeur where natural
rocks take the shapes of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of
mountainous height blazing scarlet in color. In one part a wave of rock
like a sea breaker one hundred fifty feet high and one hundred miles
in length curls overhanging as though the rushing gray waters had been
suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow Painted Desert,
where the sands refract prismatic light like a colossal rainbow, and
to the west the walls of the Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the
stupendous labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country of a race
of warriors who ride naked, still armed with bow and arrows, their
harness of silver and turquoise....
They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified. They till their
fields beside the desert springs, and their villages are set in native
orchards, while beyond their settlements graze the flocks and herds
tended by women herders.
The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that this was entrusted
to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson. He was obliged to destroy their
homes, to fell their peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away
their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded eleven thousand
prisoners down to the lower deserts, where the chiefs crawled to him on
their bellies for mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after
Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the Boique Redondo. A
fourth part of them died of want, and their spirit was utterly broken
before they were given back their lands. It is well for them that the
Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the white men, and nobody
tries to rob their new prosperity.
In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer commanding and gave a
terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches.
Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his who lived in
Colorado. Early in the morning of May twenty-third, 1868, he was
mounting his horse when an artery broke in his neck, and within a few
moments he was dead.
But before we part with the frontier hero, it is pleasant to think of
him still as a living man whose life is an inspiration and his manhood
an example.
Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch. “I have sat there,”
he writes, “in the long winter evenings when the great room was
lighted only by the crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of
its two fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and half a dozen
chiefs silently interchange ideas in the wonderful sign language, until
the glimmer of Aurora announced the advent of another day. But not a
sound had been uttered during the protracted hours, save an occasional
grunt of satisfaction on the part of the Indians, or when we white men
exchanged a sentence.”
XIV
A. D. 1845
THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD
John Nicholson was a captain in the twenty-seventh native infantry of
India. He was very tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a
pale face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame and green
like those of a tiger when he was angry. He rarely spoke.
Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded by the enemy
when one of his Afghans saw him in peril from a descending sword. The
Pathan sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a later fight
Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken prisoner, and carried
off by the enemy. Charging alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the
officer rescued his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought
his way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose father had died
for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s side, served him at table with a
cocked pistol on one hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the
time Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal following of
two hundred and fifty wild riders who refused either to take any pay or
to leave his service.
So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found fit for the hand of
the greatest swordsman in India. The Sikh leaders sent out word to
their whole nation for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds
were offered and after long and intricate tests three were found
equally perfect, two of the blades being curved, one straight. Captain
Nicholson chose the straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a
nation of warriors.
This man was only a most humble Christian, but the Sikhs, observing
the perfection of his manhood, supposed him to be divine, and offered
that if he would accept their religion they would raise such a temple
in his honor as India had never seen. Many a time while he sat at work
in his tent, busy with official papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would
squat in the doorway silent, watching their god. He took no notice,
but sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction of sin, would
prostrate himself in adoration. For this offense the punishment was
three dozen lashes with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god
knew that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished us.”
There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to English readers. It is
burned deep into our memory that in 1857 our native army, revolting,
seized Delhi, the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the Great
Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the women, the men who were
tortured to death, or butchered horribly, were of our own households.
Your uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped. Remember
Cawnpore!
Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters translated,
then made up his copies into bundles. At a council of officers the
colonels of the native regiments swore to the loyalty of their men,
but Nicholson dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying,
“Perhaps these will interest you.”
The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at finding in their
trusted regiments an abyss of treachery. Their troops were disarmed and
disbanded.
To disarm and disperse the native army throughout Northwestern India a
flying column was formed of British troops, and Nicholson, although he
was only a captain, was sent to take command of the whole force with
the rank of brigadier-general. There were old officers under him, yet
never a murmur rose from them at that strange promotion.
Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a fierce official
letter, demanding, “Where are you? What are you doing? Send instantly a
return of court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list of the
various punishments inflicted.”
Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his present address,
the date, and the words, “The punishment of mutiny is death.” He
wanted another regiment to strengthen his column, and demanded the
eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and children in the hills.
Lawrence said these men could not be spared. Nicholson wrote back,
“When an empire is at stake, women and children cease to be of any
consideration whatever.” What chance had they if he failed to hold this
district?
[Illustration: GENERAL NICHOLSON]
Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded by his own wild guards
riding in couples, so that he, their god, searched the whole country
with five hundred eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he drew up
his infantry and guns, then rode along the line giving his orders:
“In a few minutes you will see two native regiments come round that
little temple. If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a
volley into them without further orders.”
As the native regiments appeared from behind the little temple,
Nicholson rode to meet them. He was seen to speak to them and then they
grounded their arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven hundred,
but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson himself must have perished
between two fires. He cared nothing for his life.
Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the guns, and then it
was to fire the flesh and blood of nine conspirators into the faces of
a doubtful regiment. For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no
mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he would go away to hide
in his tent and weep.
He had given orders that no native should be allowed to ride past
a white man. One morning before dawn the orderly officer, a lad of
nineteen, seeing natives passing him on an elephant, ordered them
sharply to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed--an Afghan
prince and his servant, sent by the king of Cabul as an embassy to
Captain Nicholson. Next day the ambassador spoke of this humiliation.
“No wonder,” he said, “you English conquer India when mere boys obey
orders as this one did.”
Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it with one stroke of
his sword; but could the English subdue this India in revolt? The
mutineers held the impregnable capital old Delhi--and under the red
walls lay four thousand men--England’s forlorn hope--which must storm
that giant fortress. If they failed the whole population would rise.
“If ordained to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag
down with them in flames and blood as many of the queen’s enemies
as possible.” If they had failed not one man of our race would have
escaped to the sea.
Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of Delhi, and now he
was only a captain under the impotent and hopeless General Wilson. “I
have strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to shoot him if
necessary.”
The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore Gate to the Cashmere
Gate were manned by Sikh gunners, loyal to the English, but detained
against their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson
without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate, and through battery
after battery along the walls he went in silence to the Cashmere Gate,
by which he left the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man
they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon their faces. So
Captain Nicholson studied the defenses of a besieged stronghold as
no man on earth had ever dared before. To him was given command of
the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and stormed the Cashmere
breach. More than half his men perished, but an entry was made, and in
six days the British fought their way through the houses, breaching
walls as they went until they stormed the palace, hoisted the flag
above the citadel, and proved with the sword who shall be masters of
India.
But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he was carried to his tent,
and there lay through the hot days watching the blood-red towers and
walls of Delhi, listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying
that he might see the end before his passing.
Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching at the doctors as
they passed to beg for news of him. Once when they were noisy he
clutched a pistol from the bedside table, and fired a shot through the
canvas. “Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s order.”
Then they kept quiet. Only at the end, when his coffin was lowered into
the earth, these men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke
down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing like children.
Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs--a tribe who had made him
their only god--heard of his passing. Two chiefs killed themselves that
they might serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke to the
people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was a man like as we are, and
that he worshiped a God whom he could not see, but who was always near
us. Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the tribe came down
from their hills to the Christian teachers at Peshawur, and there were
baptized.
XV
A. D. 1853
THE GREAT FILIBUSTER
William Walker, son of a Scotch banker, was born in Tennessee,
cantankerous from the time he was whelped. He never swore or drank,
or loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure, believed in
negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette and formality, liked
squabbling, had a nasty sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The
little dry man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and when he
wanted to do anything very outrageous, always began by taking counsel’s
opinion. He wore a black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even
when in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer Mexico.
His followers were California gold miners dressed in blue shirts, duck
trousers, long boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he had
taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an election and proclaimed
himself president of Sonora, he was joined by two or three hundred more
of the same breed from San Francisco. These did not think very much of
a leader twenty-eight years old, standing five feet six, and weighing
only nine stone four, so they merrily conspired to blow him up with
gunpowder, and disperse with what plunder they could grab. Mr. Walker
shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the rest without showing any sign
of emotion. He could awe the most truculent desperado into abject
obedience with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed his
men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our government,” he wrote, “has
been formed upon a firm and sure basis.”
The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for while the new president
of Sonora marched northward, they gathered in hosts and hung like
wolves in the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who were
slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an actual attack, but
Walker’s grim strategies, and the awful rifles of despairing men, cut
them to pieces. So the march went on through hundreds of miles of
blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with thirst, and blew
their own brains out rather than be captured. Only thirty-four men were
left when they reached the United States boundary, the president of
Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his army and navy
bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt, starving, but too terrible for the
Mexican forces to molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United
States garrison as prisoners of war.
Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and forty-eight other
Californians, Walker landed on the coast of Nicaragua. This happy
republic was blessed at the time with two rival presidents, and the one
who got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the country. As hero
of several brilliant engagements, Walker was made commander-in-chief,
and at the next election chosen by the people themselves as president.
He had now a thousand Americans in his following, and when the native
statesmen and generals proved treacherous, they were promptly shot.
Walker’s camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school, his
government the cleanest ever known in Central America, and his dignity
all prickles, hard to approach. He depended for existence on the
services of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse
for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile republics, Costa
Rica, San Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and insulted them all.
He suspended diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded
for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British navy, and had no
sense of humor whatsoever. Thousands of brave men died for this prim
little lawyer, and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle in
his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his purity, and his
valor, poor Walker was a prig. So the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the
republics from Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the United
States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless government.
The armies of four republics were closing in on Walker’s capital, the
city of Granada. He marched out to storm the allies perched on an
impregnable volcano, and was carrying his last charge to a victorious
issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight hundred men had
jumped on Granada. He forsook his victory and rushed for the capital
city.
There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and sick in the Granada
garrison to man the church, armory and hospital against Zavala, but
the women loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two hours of
ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out of the city. They fell back
to lie in Walker’s path as he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap,
carried it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke him
between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept his flight. In
this double battle, fighting eight times his own force, Walker killed
half the allied army.
But the pressure of several invasions at once was making it impossible
for Walker to keep his communication open with the sea while he held
his capital. Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American
cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the place, it must
be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his sick men to an island in the big
Lake Nicaragua; while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command,
burned and abandoned the capital.
But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as
from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor
stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped
down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the
Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took
three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover
his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the
garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in
their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city
they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with this
inscription:--
“Here was Granada!”
In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six
thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate
than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the
filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence.
It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the
average eight of his adversaries.
Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans
slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of
Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts
of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two
thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His
final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No
valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on
Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s
house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men
they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined
in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on
quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after
saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but
left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from
the ramparts.
It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of
truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.
“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to
apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of
the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war _Granada_.”
“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I
believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”
Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer,
and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.
During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three
thousand five hundred Americans--and the proportion of wounds was one
hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The
allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand
Indians--and lost fifteen thousand killed.
Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer
Central America, in defiance of the British and United States
squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics.
He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea
beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.
XVI
A. D. 1857
BUFFALO BILL
The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they
drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any
member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the
more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met
them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but
they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers.
Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled
from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake.
There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a
garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor
excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not
in good taste.
The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers
wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had
to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving
troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was
drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the
banks of the Platte.