In one of the public squares of San Jose, which is the capital of Costa
Rica, there is a marble statue of a stern-faced young woman, with her
foot planted firmly on a gentleman's neck. The young woman is symbolic
of the Republic of Costa Rica, and the gentleman ground beneath her heel
is supposed to represent the American filibuster and soldier of fortune,
William Walker. Now, before going any farther, justice requires me to
explain that Walker's downfall was not due to Costa Rica, as the
citizens of that little republic would like the world to believe, and as
the bombastic statue in the plaza of its capital would lead one to
suppose, but to a far greater and richer power, whose victories were won
with dollars instead of bayonets, whose capital was New York City, and
whose name was Cornelius Vanderbilt.
To the younger generation the name of William Walker carries no
significance, but to the gray-heads whose recollections antedate the
Civil War the mention of it brings back a flood of thrilling memories,
while throughout the length and breadth of that wild region lying
between the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Isthmus of Panama it is still
a synonym for unfaltering courage. His weakness was ambition; his fault
was failure. Had he succeeded in realizing his ambitions--and he failed
only by the narrowest of margins--he would have been lauded as another
Cortez, and would have received stars and crosses instead of bullets.
Had his life not been cut short by a Honduran firing-party, it is
possible, indeed probable, that, instead of there being six states in
Central America there would be but one, and in that one the institution
of slavery might still exist. Though I have scant sympathy with the
motives which animated Walker, and though I believe that his death was
for the best good of the Central American peoples, he was the very
antithesis of the cutthroat and blackguard and outlaw which he has been
painted, being, on the contrary, a very brave and honest gentleman, of
whom his countrymen have no reason to feel ashamed, and that is why I am
going to tell his story.
The eldest son of a Scotch banker, Walker was born in 1824 in Nashville,
Tennessee. His father, a stiff-necked Presbyterian who held morning and
evening prayers, asked an interminable grace before every meal, and
took his family to church three times on Sunday, had set his heart on
his son entering the ministry, and it was with a pulpit and parish in
view that young Walker was educated. By the time that he was ready to
enter the theological school, however, he decided that he preferred M.D.
instead of D.D. after his name, whereupon, much to his father's
disappointment, he insisted on taking the medical course at the
University of Tennessee, following it up by two years at the University
of Edinburgh. Thoroughly equipped to practise his chosen profession, he
opened an office in Philadelphia, but in a few months the routine of a
doctor's life palled upon him, so, taking down his brass door-plate, he
went to New Orleans, where, after two years of study, he was admitted to
the bar. But he soon found that briefs and summonses were scarcely more
to his liking than prescriptions and pills, so, with the prompt decision
which was one of his most marked characteristics, he closed his
law-office and obtained a position as editorial writer on a New Orleans
newspaper. Within a year the restlessness which had led him to abandon
the church, medicine, and the bar caused him to give up journalism in
its turn. At this time, 1852, the Californian gold fever was at its mad
height, and to the Pacific coast were pouring streams of
fortune-seekers and adventure-lovers from every quarter of the globe.
One of the latter was Walker, and it was while editor of the San
Francisco _Herald_, when only twenty-eight years old, that his amazing
career really began.
Walker was not of the sort who could content himself for any length of
time within the stuffy walls of an editorial sanctum. His fingers were
made to grasp something more virile than the pen. Nor did he make any
attempt to win a fortune with pick and shovel in the gold fields. His
ambitions were neither intellectual nor mercenary, but political, for
from his boyhood days in Nashville he had dreamed, as all boys worth
their salt do dream, of some day founding a state, with himself as its
ruler, in that wild and savage region below the Rio Grande. Enlisting
half a hundred kindred souls from the hordes of the reckless, the
adventurous, and the needy which were pouring into California by boat
and wagon-train, Walker chartered a small vessel and set sail from San
Francisco for the coast of Mexico. His avowed object was a purely
humanitarian one: to protect the women and children living along the
Mexican frontier from massacre by the Indians, the state of Sonora being
at that time more under the dominion of the Apaches than it was under
that of Mexico. But it was not the protection of the women and
children--though they needed protection badly enough, goodness
knows--which led Walker to embark on this hare-brained expedition. He
was lured southward by a dream of empire, an empire of which he should
be the ruler, and which should be founded on slavery. By this time,
remember, the slavery question in the United States had become
exceedingly acute, the future of the institution on this continent
largely depending upon whether the next States admitted to the Union
should be slave or free. Walker was a sincere, even fanatical, believer
in slavery. Born and reared in an atmosphere of slavery, to Walker it
was as sacred, as God-given an institution as the Fast of Ramadan is to
the Moslem or the Feast of the Passover to the Jew. Convinced that
friction over this question would sooner or later force the
slave-holding States to secede from the Union, he determined to extend
the area of slavery by conquering that portion of northern Mexico
immediately adjacent to the United States, to establish an independent
government there, and eventually to annex his country to the South, thus
counteracting the growing movement for abolition, which, with the
admission of new Northern territories, already hinted at the overthrow
of slavery.
Financed by Southern friends whose motives were probably considerably
less altruistic than his own, Walker landed at Cape San Lucas, the
extreme southern point of the Mexican territory of Southern California,
in October, 1852, with an "army of invasion" of forty-five men. Instead
of hastening to protect the women and children of whom he had talked so
feelingly, he sailed up the coast to the territorial capital of La Paz,
which he seized, where he issued a proclamation announcing the
annexation of the neighboring state of Sonora, in which he had not yet
set foot, giving to the two states the name of the "Republic of Sonora,"
and proclaiming himself its first president. As soon as the news of this
initial success reached San Francisco, Walker's sympathizers there
busied themselves in recruiting reinforcements, three hundred
desperadoes who boasted that they were afraid of nothing "on two feet or
four" being shipped to him at La Paz a few weeks later. These men were
looked upon as hard cases even in the San Francisco of the early
fifties, and, if they had not consented to leave the country to assist
Walker, many of them would probably have left it sooner or later at the
end of a rope in the hands of the local vigilance committee. When this
force of scoundrels arrived at La Paz and found themselves under the
command of a quiet, mild-mannered, beardless youth of twenty-eight,
instead of the brawny, foul-mouthed, swashbuckling leader whom they had
expected, they promptly hatched a scheme to blow up the magazine, seize
the ship and the stores of the expedition in the ensuing confusion, and
make their way back to the United States, leaving Walker to shift for
himself. Warning of the conspiracy reaching him, however, Walker
displayed for the first time those traits which were later to make his
name a word of terror in the ears of men who bragged that they feared
neither God nor man. Arresting the ringleaders, he had two of them tried
by court-martial and shot within an hour; two of the others he ordered
flogged and drummed out of camp, to take their chances among the hostile
Mexicans and Indians. But, though this act gained Walker the fear and
respect of his followers, the newcomers among them had no stomach for a
leader who could punish, so when he called for volunteers to accompany
him in the conquest of Sonora less than a hundred men offered to follow
him.
From the very first the shadow of failure hung over the enterprise. To
begin with, there is no more savage and desolate region on the American
continent than the peninsula of Lower California, it being so barren and
destitute that even the lizards have to scramble for an existence.
Mexicans and Indians hung upon the flanks of the little column night and
day, as buzzards follow a dying steer. There was neither medicine nor
medical instruments with the expedition, and the wounded died from lack
of the most elementary care. Their shoes gave out and the men marched
bare-foot over sun-scorched rocks and needle cactus, leaving a trail of
crimson behind them in the sand. Their provisions were soon exhausted,
and their only food was beef which they killed on the march. For years
afterward the route of that ill-fated expedition could be traced from La
Paz to the Colorado River by the bleaching skeletons of the men who fell
by the way. By the time the head of the Gulf of California was reached
the expedition had dwindled to barely twoscore men. It was no longer a
question of conquering Sonora; it was a question of getting back to the
States alive.
With sinking heart, but imperturbable face, Walker led his little band
of starving, fever-racked, exhausted men toward the Californian line.
Three miles of road led through a mountain pass into the United States
and safety. But the pass was held by a force of Mexican soldiery under
Colonel Melendrez, and his Indian allies were scattered over the plain
below. And, as though to give a final touch of irony to the situation in
which Walker and his men found themselves, from their position on the
Mexican hillside they could look across into American territory, could
see the American flag, their flag, fluttering over the military post
south of San Diego, could even see the sun glinting upon the bits and
sabres of the troop of American cavalry drawn up along the border. Four
Indians bearing a flag of truce approached. They bore a message from the
Mexican commander to the filibusters. If they would surrender their
leader and give up their arms, Melendrez sent word, they would be
permitted to leave the country unmolested. But after you have fought and
bled and marched and starved with a man for a year, you are not likely
to abandon him, particularly when the end is in sight, so they sent back
word to Melendrez that if he wanted their arms he would have to come and
take them. Meanwhile the American commander, Major McKinstry, had drawn
up his troopers along the boundary-line and awaited the result of the
unequal struggle like an umpire at a foot-ball game. Walker, who knew
perfectly well that he deserved no aid from the United States, and that
he would get none, appreciated that if he was to get out of this
predicament alive it must be by his own wits. Concealing a dozen of his
men among the rocks and sage-brush which lined the road on either side,
with the remainder of his force he pretended to beat a panic-stricken
retreat. Melendrez, confident that it was now all over but the shouting,
swept down the road in pursuit. But as the Mexicans rode into the ambush
which Walker had prepared for them the hidden filibusters emptied a
dozen saddles at a single volley, and the soldiers, terrified and
demoralized, wheeled and fled for their lives. Thirty minutes later the
President, the Cabinet, and all that remained of the standing army of
the late Republic of Sonora stumbled across the American boundary and
surrendered to Major McKinstry. It was May 8, 1854, and in such fashion
Walker celebrated his thirtieth birthday.
Sent to San Francisco as a political prisoner, Walker was tried for
violating the neutrality laws of the United States, was acquitted--for
the members of a Californian jury could not but sympathize with such a
man--and once again found himself writing editorials for the San
Francisco _Herald_. His narrow escape from death in Mexico had only
served to whet his appetite for adventure, however, so when he was not
doing his newspaper work he was poring over an atlas in search of some
other land where a determined man might carve out a career for himself
with his sword. Staring at the map of Middle America, his finger again
and again paused, as though by instinct, on Nicaragua. Here was indeed a
fertile field for the filibuster. Not only was the country enormously
rich in every form of natural resources, but it had a kindly and
moderately healthy climate, and, what was the most important of all,
owing to its peculiar geographical position, it commanded what was at
that time one of the great trade-routes of the world. At this time there
were three routes to the Californian gold-fields: one, the long and
weary voyage around the Horn; another, by the dangerous and costly
Overland Trail; and the third, which was the shortest, cheapest, and
most popular, across Nicaragua. If you will glance at the map, you will
see that, barring the Isthmus of Panama, which is several hundred miles
farther south, Nicaragua is the narrowest neck of land between the two
great oceans, and that in the middle of this neck is the great Lake
Nicaragua, which is upward of fifty miles in width. An American
corporation known as the Accessory Transit Company, of which the first
Cornelius Vanderbilt was president, had obtained a concession from the
Nicaraguan Government to transport passengers across Central America by
this route. Passengers _en route_ from New York or New Orleans to the
gold-fields were landed by the company's steamers at Greytown, on the
Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, and transported thence by light-draught
steamers up the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua. Here they were
transferred to larger steamers and taken across the lake to Virgin Bay,
the twelve-mile journey from there to the port of San Juan del Sur, on
the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, being performed in carriages or on the
backs of mules. During a single year twenty-five thousand passengers
crossed Nicaragua by this route. It did not take Walker long to
appreciate, therefore, that the man who succeeded in making himself
master of this, the shortest route to California, would be in a position
of considerable strength. Not only this, but Nicaragua was torn by
internal dissensions; the army was divided into a dozen factions; the
peasantry were down-trodden and poverty-stricken; the government was
inconceivably corrupt; and the usual revolution was, of course, in
progress, in which the sister republics of Honduras and Costa Rica were
preparing to take a hand. Everything considered, Nicaragua's only hope
of salvation from anarchy lay in finding for a ruler a man with an
inflexible sense of justice and an iron hand. Walker determined to be
that man.
In view of what I have already told of his exploits, you have doubtless
pictured Walker as a tall, broad-shouldered man of commanding presence.
As a matter of fact, he was nothing of the sort. In height he was but
five feet five inches, and correspondingly slender. A remarkably square
jaw and a long chin lent strength and determination to features which
were plain almost to the point of coarseness. His eyes, which were of a
singularly light gray, are universally spoken of as having been his most
noticeable feature, for they were so large and fixed that the eyelids
scarcely showed, and so penetrating that they seemed to bore holes into
the person at whom they were looking. He was extremely taciturn, and
when he did speak it was briefly and to the point. He had an unusual
command of English, however, and his words were always carefully chosen.
A stranger to fear, men who followed him on his campaigns assert that
even under the most trying and perilous circumstances they had never
seen him change countenance or betray emotion by so much as the
contraction of a muscle. He was wholly lacking in personal vanity, and
when in the field wore his trousers tucked into his boots, a flannel
shirt open at the neck, and a faded black campaign hat. In a land where
all three habits were universal, he neither drank, smoked, nor swore; he
never looked at women; his word, once given, was never broken; the
justice he meted out to disobedient followers, though stern to the point
of brutality, was absolutely impartial. Highly ambitious, it is paying
but the barest justice to his memory to say that his aspirations,
however little we may sympathize with them, were wholly political and
never mercenary, his whole career showing him to be utterly careless of
wealth. Taking everything into consideration, we have good reason to be
proud that William Walker was an American.
In 1854, as I have already remarked, Nicaragua was split asunder by
civil war. The opposing parties were the Legitimists and the Democrats.
What they were fighting about is of no consequence; perhaps they did not
know themselves. In any event, in August of that year an American named
Byron Cole, acting as an agent for Walker, arrived at the headquarters
of the Democratic forces with a novel offer. Briefly, he agreed to
contract to supply the Democratic party with three hundred American
"colonists liable to military duty," these settlers to receive a grant
of fifty-two thousand acres of land, and to have the privilege of
becoming citizens of Nicaragua. This contract was approved and signed by
General Castillon, the Democratic leader, and with it in his pocket Cole
hastened to San Francisco and Walker. After taking the precaution of
submitting the contract to the civil and military authorities in San
Francisco, and receiving their assurances that it did not violate the
neutrality laws of the United States, Walker immediately set about
recruiting his "colonists," and in May, 1855, just a year after his
escape from Mexico, he was ready to sail. Although, as I have said, the
Federal authorities had passed upon the legality of the contract, it was
a noticeable fact that the peaceable settlers took with them Winchester
rifles instead of spades, and Colt's revolvers instead of hoes, and that
the hold of the brig _Vesta_, on which they sailed from San Francisco,
was filled with ammunition and machine guns instead of agricultural
implements and machinery.
After a long and stormy voyage down the Pacific coast Walker and his
men landed, on June 16, at the port of Realejo, in Nicaragua, where he
was met by Castillon. Walker was at once commissioned a colonel;
Achilles Kewen, who had just come from Cuba, where he had been fighting
under the patriot Lopez, a lieutenant-colonel; and Timothy Crocker, a
fighting Irishman, who was a veteran of Walker's Sonora expedition, a
major; the corps being organized as an independent command under the
name of _La Falange Americana_--the American Phalanx. At this time the
Transit route from the Atlantic to the Pacific was held by the
Legitimist forces, and these Walker was ordered to dislodge, it being
essential to the success of the Democrats that they gain possession of
this interoceanic highway. Accordingly, a week after setting foot in
Nicaragua, Walker, at the head of fifty-seven of his Americans and one
hundred and fifty native soldiers, set out for Rivas, a town on the
western shore of Lake Nicaragua held by twelve hundred of the enemy. The
first battle of his Nicaraguan campaign ended in the most complete
disaster. At the first volley his native allies bolted, leaving the
Americans surrounded by ten times their number of Legitimists. The enemy
instantly perceived this defection, and pressed the Phalanx so hard
that its members were driven to take shelter behind a row of adobe huts.
No one knew better than Walker that if the enemy charged he and his men
were done for, so he decided to do the charging himself. Out from behind
the huts dashed the red-shirted filibusters, firing as they came, and so
ferocious was their onslaught that they succeeded in cutting their way
through the encircling army and escaping into the jungle. Though six of
the Americans were killed, including Walker's two lieutenants, Kewen and
Crocker, and twice as many wounded, the battle of Rivas established the
reputation of Americans in Central America for years to come, for a
hundred and fifty of the enemy fell before their deadly fire.
[Illustration: General William Walker and his men, after a long and
stormy voyage, landing at Virgin Bay, en route to Costa Rica.