BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
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MAN’S WAR FOR CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA.
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THE ROAD TO GLORY
[Illustration: On the decks above were three hundred desperate and
well-armed natives. (_Page 144_)]
THE ROAD TO
GLORY
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK:::::::::::1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1915
[Illustration]
TO MY SON
EDWARD ALEXANDER POWELL, III
FOREWORD
The great painting--it is called “Vers la Gloire,” if I remember
rightly--reaches from floor to ceiling of the Pantheon in Paris.
Across the huge canvas, in a whirlwind of dust and color, sweeps
an avalanche of horsemen--cuirassiers, dragoons, lancers, guides,
hussars, chasseurs--with lances levelled, blades swung high, banners
streaming--France’s unsung heroes in mad pursuit of Glory.
That picture brings home to the youth of France the fact that the
nation owes as great a debt of gratitude to men whose very names
have been forgotten as to those whom it has rewarded with titles and
decorations; it teaches that a man can be a hero without having his
name cut deep in brass or stone; that time and time again history has
been made by men whom the historians have overlooked or disregarded.
This is even more true of our own country, for three-fourths of the
territory of the United States was won for us by men whose names are
without significance to most Americans. Nolan, Bean, Gutierrez, Magee,
Kemper, Perry, Toledo, Humbert, Lallemand, De Aury, Mina, Long--these
names doubtless convey nothing to you, yet it was the persistent and
daring assaults made by these men upon the Spanish boundaries which
undermined the power of Spain upon this continent and paved the way for
Austin, Milam, Travis, Bowie, Crockett, Ward, and Houston to effect
the liberation of Texas. On the other side of the Gulf of Mexico the
Kempers, McGregor, Hubbard, and Mathews harassed the Spaniards in the
Floridas until Andrew Jackson, in an unofficial and almost unrecorded
war, forced Spain to cede those rich provinces to the United States.
In a desperate battle with savages on the banks of an obscure creek
in Indiana, William Henry Harrison broke the power of Tecumseh’s
Indian confederation, set forward the hands of progress in the West a
quarter of a century, and, incidentally, changed the map of Europe.
A Missouri militia officer, Alexander Doniphan, without a war-chest,
without supports, and without communications, invaded a hostile nation
at the head of a thousand volunteers, repeatedly routed forces many
times the strength of his own, conquered, subdued, and pacified a
territory larger than France and Italy put together; and, after a march
equivalent to a fourth of the circumference of the globe, returned to
the United States, bringing with him battle-flags and cannon captured
on fields whose names his country people had never so much as heard
before. A missionary named Marcus Whitman, by the most daring and
dramatic ride in history, during which he crossed the continent on
horseback in the depths of winter, facing death almost every mile from
cold, starvation, or Indians, prevented the Pacific Northwest from
passing under the rule of England. Matthew Perry, without firing a shot
or shedding a drop of blood, opened Japan to commerce, Christianity,
and civilization, and made American influence predominant in the
Pacific, though, a decade later, David McDougal was compelled to teach
the yellow men respect for our citizens and our flag at the mouths of
his belching guns.
Certain of these men have been accused of being adventurers, as they
unquestionably were--but what, pray, were Hawkins and Raleigh and
Drake? Others have been condemned as being filibusters, an accusation
which in some cases was doubtless deserved--but were Jason and his
Argonauts anything but filibusters who raided Colchis to loot it of the
golden fleece? Adventurers and filibusters though some of them may have
been, they were brave men (there can be no disputing that) and makers
of history. But it was their fortune--or misfortune--to have been
romantic and picturesque and to have gone ahead without the formality
of obtaining the government’s commission or permission, which, in the
eyes of the sedate and prosaic historians, has completely damned them.
But, as we have not hesitated to benefit from the lands they won for
us, it is but doing them the barest justice to listen to their stories.
And I think you will agree with me that in their stories there is
remarkably little of which we need to feel ashamed and much of which we
have reason to be proud.
Devious and dangerous were the roads which these men followed--amid
the swamps of Florida, across the sun-baked Texan prairies, down
the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-bound ridges of the
Rockies, into the miasmic jungles of Tabasco, along the pirate-haunted
coasts of Malaysia, across the Indian country, through the mined and
shot-swept straits of Shimonoseki; but, no matter what perils bordered
them, or into what far corner of the earth they led, at the end Glory
beckoned and called.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
SANTA BARBARA,
California.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD vii
I. ADVENTURERS ALL 1
II. WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER 55
III. THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR 87
IV. THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO 131
V. UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR 161
VI. THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE 195
VII. THE MARCH OF THE ONE THOUSAND 235
VIII. WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE 277
ILLUSTRATIONS
On the decks above were three hundred desperate and
well-armed natives _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming
troopers, broke and ran 84
Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and
plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another 178
In another moment the gun was pouring death into the
ranks of its late owners 260
ADVENTURERS ALL
ADVENTURERS ALL
This story properly begins in an emperor’s bathtub. The bathtub was
in the Palace of the Tuileries, and, immersed to the chin in its
cologne-scented water, was Napoleon. The nineteenth century was but a
three-year-old; the month was April, and the trees in the Tuileries
Garden were just bursting into bud; and the First Consul--he made
himself Emperor a few weeks later--was taking his Sunday-morning bath.
There was a scratch at the door--scratching having been substituted
for knocking in the palace after the Egyptian campaign--and the
Mameluke body-guard ushered into the bathroom Napoleon’s brothers
Joseph and Lucien. How the conversation began between this remarkable
trio of Corsicans is of small consequence. It is enough to know that
Napoleon dumfounded his brothers by the blunt announcement that he had
determined to sell the great colony of Louisiana--all that remained
to France of her North American empire--to the United States. He
made this astounding announcement, as Joseph wrote afterward, “with
as little ceremony as our dear father would have shown in selling
a vineyard.” Incensed at Napoleon’s cool assumption that the great
overseas possession was his to dispose of as he saw fit, Joseph, his
hot Corsican blood getting the better of his discretion, leaned over
the tub and shook his clinched fist in the face of his august brother.
“What you propose is unconstitutional!” he cried. “If you attempt to
carry it out I swear that I will be the first to oppose you!”
White with passion at this unaccustomed opposition, Napoleon raised
himself until half his body was out of the opaque and frothy water.
“You will have no chance to oppose me!” he screamed, beside himself
with anger. “I conceived this scheme, I negotiated it, and I shall
execute it. I will accept the responsibility for what I do. Bah! I
scorn your opposition!” And he dropped back into the bath so suddenly
that the resultant splash drenched the future King of Spain from head
to foot. This extraordinary scene, which, ludicrous though it was, was
to vitally affect the future of the United States, was brought to a
sudden termination by the valet, who had been waiting with the bath
towels, shocked at the spectacle of a future Emperor and a future King
quarrelling in a bathroom over the disposition of an empire, falling on
the floor in a faint.
Though this narrative concerns itself, from beginning to end,
with adventurers--if Bonaparte himself was not the very prince of
adventurers, then I do not know the meaning of the word--it is
necessary, for its proper understanding, to here interject a paragraph
or two of contemporaneous history. In 1800 Napoleon, whose fertile
brain was planning the re-establishment in America of that French
colonial empire which a generation before had been destroyed by
England, persuaded the King of Spain, by the bribe of a petty Italian
principality, to cede Louisiana to the French. But in the next three
years things turned out so contrary to his expectations that he was
reluctantly compelled to abandon his scheme for colonial expansion
and prepare for eventualities nearer home. The army he had sent to
Haiti, and which he had intended to throw into Louisiana, had wasted
away from disease and in battle with the blacks under the skilful
leadership of L’Ouverture until but a pitiful skeleton remained.
Meanwhile the attitude of England and Austria was steadily growing
more hostile, and it did not need a telescope to see the war-clouds
which heralded another great European struggle piling up on France’s
political horizon. Realizing that in the life-and-death struggle
which was approaching he could not be hampered with the defense of
a distant colony, Napoleon decided that, if he was unable to hold
Louisiana, he would at least put it out of the reach of his arch-enemy,
England, by selling it to the United States. It was a master-stroke of
diplomacy. Moreover, he needed money--needed it badly, too--for France,
impoverished by the years of warfare from which she had just emerged,
was ill prepared to embark on another struggle.
There were in Paris at this time two Americans, Robert R. Livingston
and James Monroe, who had been commissioned by President Jefferson to
negotiate with the French Government for the purchase of the city of
New Orleans and a small strip of territory adjacent to it, so that the
settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee might have a free port on the gulf.
After months spent in diplomatic intercourse, during which Talleyrand,
the French foreign minister, could be induced neither to accept nor
reject their proposals, the commissioners were about ready to abandon
the business in despair. I doubt, therefore, if there were two more
astonished men in all Europe than the two Americans when Talleyrand
abruptly asked them whether the United States would buy the whole
of Louisiana and what price it would be willing to pay. It was as
though a man had gone to buy a cow and the owner had suddenly offered
him his whole farm. Though astounded and embarrassed, for they had
been authorized to spend but two million dollars in the contemplated
purchase, the Americans had the courage to shoulder the responsibility
of making so tremendous a transaction, for there was no time to
communicate with Washington and no one realized better than they did
that Louisiana must be purchased at once if it was to be had at all.
England and France were, as they knew, on the very brink of war, and
they also knew that the first thing England would do when war was
declared would be to seize Louisiana, in which case it would be lost to
the United States forever. This necessity for prompt action permitted
of but little haggling over terms, and on May 22, 1803, Napoleon signed
the treaty which transferred the million square miles comprised in the
colony of Louisiana to the United States for fifteen million dollars.
Nor was the sale effected an instant too soon, for on that very day
England declared war.
Now, in purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson, though he got the greatest
bargain in history, found that the French had thrown in a boundary
dispute to give good measure. The treaty did not specify the limits of
the colony.
“What are the boundaries of Louisiana?” Livingston asked Talleyrand
when the treaty was being prepared.
“I don’t know,” was the answer. “You must take it as we received it
from Spain.”
“But what did you receive?” persisted the American.
“I don’t know,” repeated the minister. “You are getting a noble
bargain, monsieur, and you will doubtless make the best of it.”
As a matter of fact, Talleyrand was telling the literal truth (which
must have been a novel experience for him): he did not know. The
boundaries of Louisiana had never been definitely established. It
seems, indeed, to have come under the application of
“The good old rule ... the simple plan,
That they shall take who have the power,
And they shall keep who can.”
Hence, though American territory and Spanish marched side by side
for twenty-five hundred miles, it was found impossible to agree on
a definite line of demarcation, the United States claiming that its
new purchase extended as far westward as the Sabine River, while
Spain emphatically asserted that the Mississippi formed the dividing
line. Along about 1806, however, a working arrangement was agreed
upon, whereby American troops were not to move west of the Red River,
while Spanish soldiers were not to go east of the Sabine. For the
next fifteen years this arrangement remained in force, the strip of
territory between these two rivers, which was known as the neutral
ground, quickly becoming a recognized place of refuge for fugitives
from justice, bandits, desperadoes, adventurers, and bad men. To it,
as though drawn by a magnet, flocked the adventure-hungry from every
corner of the three Americas.
The vast territory beyond the Sabine, then known as New Spain and a
few years later, when it had achieved its independence, as Mexico,
was ruled from the distant City of Mexico in true Spanish style.
Military rule held full sway; civil law was unknown. Foreigners without
passports were imprisoned; trading across the Sabine was prohibited;
the Spanish officials were suspicious of every one. Because this
trade was forbidden was the very thing that made it so attractive to
the merchants of the frontier, while the grassy plains and fertile
lowlands beyond the Sabine beckoned alluringly to the stock-raiser and
the settler. And though there was just enough danger to attract them
there was not enough strength to awe them. Jeering at governmental
restrictions, Spanish and American alike, the frontiersmen began to
pour across the Sabine into Texas in an ever-increasing stream. “Gone
to Texas” was scrawled on the door of many a deserted cabin in Alabama,
Tennessee, and Kentucky. “Go to Texas” became a slang phrase heard
everywhere. On the western river steamboats the officers’ quarters on
the hurricane-deck were called “the texas” because of their remoteness.
When a boy wanted to coerce his family he threatened to run away to
Texas. It was felt to be beyond the natural limits of the world, and
the glamour which hovered over this mysterious and forbidden land
lured to its conquest the most picturesque and hardy breed of men
that ever foreran the columns of civilization. A contempt for the
Spanish, a passion for adventure were the attitude of the people of our
frontier as they strained impatiently against the Spanish boundaries.
The American Government had nothing to do with winning Texas for the
American people. The American frontiersmen won Texas for themselves,
unaided either by statesmen or by soldiers.
Though these men wrote with their swords some of the most thrilling
chapters in our history, their very existence has been ignored by
most of our historians. Though they performed deeds of valor of which
any people would have reason to be proud, it was in an unofficial,
shirt-sleeve sort of warfare, which the National Government neither
authorized nor approved. Though they laid the foundations for adding an
enormous territory to our national domain, no monuments or memorials
have been erected to them; even their names hold no significance
for their countrymen of the present generation. In short, they were
filibusters, and that, in the eyes of those smug folk who believe
that nothing can be meritorious that is done without the sanction of
congresses and parliaments, completely damned them. They were American
dreamers. Had they lived in the days of Cortes and Pizarro and Balboa,
of Hawkins and Raleigh and Drake, history would have dealt more kindly
with them.
The free-lance leaders, who, during the first quarter of the nineteenth
century made the neutral ground a synonym for hair-raising adventure
and desperate daring, were truly remarkable men. Five of them had
held commissions in the army of the United States; one of them had
commanded the French army sent to Ireland; another was a peer of France
and had led a division at Waterloo; others had won rank and distinction
under Napoleon, Bolivar, and Jackson. But because they wore strange
uniforms and fought under unfamiliar flags, and because, in some cases
at least, they were actuated by motives more personal than patriotic,
the historians have assumed that we do not want to know about them, or
that it will be better for us not to know about them. They take it for
granted that it is better for Americans to think that our territorial
expansion was accomplished by men with government credentials in their
pockets, and when these unofficial conquerors are mentioned they turn
away their heads as though ashamed. But I believe that our people would
prefer to know the truth about these men, and I believe that when they
have heard it they will agree with me that in their amazing exploits
there is much of which we have cause to be proud and surprisingly
little of which we have need to feel ashamed.
The first of these adventurous spirits who for more than twenty years
kept the Spanish and Mexican authorities in a fume of apprehension,
was a young Kentuckian named Philip Nolan. He was the first American
explorer of Texas and the first man to publish a description of that
region in the English language. He spent his boyhood in Frankfort,
Kentucky, and as a young man turned up in New Orleans, then under
Spanish rule, having been, apparently, a person of considerable
importance in the little city. Having heard rumors that immense droves
of mustangs roamed the plains of Texas and seeing for himself that the
Spanish troopers in Louisiana were badly in need of horses, he told
the Spanish governor that if he would agree to purchase the animals
from him at a fixed price per head and would give him a permit for the
purpose, he would organize an expedition to capture wild horses in
Texas and bring them back to New Orleans. The governor, who liked the
young Kentuckian, promptly signed the contract, gave the permit, and
Nolan, with a handful of companions, crossed the Sabine into Texas,
corralled his horses, brought them to New Orleans, and was paid for
them. It was a profitable transaction for every one concerned. It was
so successful that another year Nolan did it again. On the proceeds he
went to Natchez, married the beauty of the town, and built a home. But
along toward the close of 1800 the governor wanted remounts again, for
the Spanish cavalrymen seemed incapable of taking even ordinary care
of their horses. So Nolan, who was, I fancy, already growing a trifle
weary of the tameness of domestic life, enlisted the services of a
score of frontiersmen as adventure-loving as himself, kissed his bride
of a year good-by, and, after showing his passports to the American
border patrol and satisfying them that his venture had the approval of
the Spanish authorities, once more crossed the Sabine into Texas. For a
proper understanding of what occurred it is necessary to explain that,
though Louisiana was under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Foreign
Office (for this was before the province had been ceded to France),
Texas was under the control of the Spanish Colonial Office. Between
these two branches of the government the bitterest jealousy existed,
and a passport issued by one was as likely as not to be disregarded
by the other. In fact, the colonial officials were only too glad of
an opportunity to humiliate and embarrass those connected with the
Foreign Office. But Nolan and his men, ignorant of this departmental
jealousy and conscious that they were engaged in a perfectly innocent
enterprise, went ahead with their business of capturing and breaking
horses. Crossing the Trinity, they found themselves on the edge of
an immense rolling prairie which, as they advanced, became more and
more arid and forbidding. There were no trees, not even underbrush,
and the only fuel they could find was the dried dung of the buffalo.
These animals, though once numerous, had disappeared, and for nine
days the little company had to subsist on the flesh of mustangs. They
eventually reached the banks of the Brazos, however, where they found
plenty of elk and deer, some buffalo, and “wild horses by thousands.”
Establishing a camp upon the present site of Waco, they built a
stockade and captured and corralled three hundred head of horses.
While lounging about the camp-fire one night, telling the stories and
singing the songs of the frontier and thinking, no doubt, of the folks
at home, a force of one hundred and fifty Spaniards, commanded by Don
Nimesio Salcedo, commandant-general of the northeastern provinces,
creeping up under cover of the darkness, succeeded in surrounding the
unsuspecting Americans, who, warned of the proximity of strangers by
the restlessness of their horses, retreated into a square enclosure of
logs which they had built as a protection against an attack by Indians.
At daybreak the Spaniards opened fire, and Nolan fell with a bullet
through his brain. The command of the expedition then devolved upon
Ellis P. Bean, a boy of seventeen, who, from the scanty shelter of the
log pen, continued a resistance that was hopeless from the first. Every
one of the Americans was a dead shot and at fifty paces could hit a
dollar held between a man’s fingers, but they were vastly outnumbered,
they were unprovisioned for a siege, and, as a final discouragement,
the Spaniards now brought up a swivel-gun and opened on them with
grape. Bean urged his men to follow him in an attempt to capture this
field-piece. “It’s nothing more than death, boys,” he told them, “and
if we stay here we shall be killed anyway.” But his men were falling
dead about him as he spoke, and the eleven left alive decided that
their only chance, and that was slim enough, Heaven knows, lay in an
immediate retreat. Filling their powder-horns and bullet pouches and
loading the balance of their ammunition on the back of a negro slave
named Cæsar, they started off across the prairie on their hopeless
march, the Spaniards hanging to the flanks of the little party as
wolves hang to the flank of a dying steer. All that day they plodded
eastward under the broiling sun, bringing down with their unerring
rifles those Spaniards who were incautious enough to venture within
range. But at last they were forced, by lack of food and water, to
accept the offer of the Spanish commander to permit them to return to
the United States unharmed if they would surrender and promise not to
enter Texas again. No sooner had they given up their arms, however,
than the Spaniards, afraid no longer, put their prisoners in irons
and marched them off to San Antonio, where they were kept in prison
for three months; then to San Luis Potosi, where they were confined
for sixteen months more, eventually being forwarded, still in arms,
to Chihuahua, where, in January, 1804, they were tried by a Spanish
court, were defended by a Spanish lawyer, were acquitted, and the judge
ordered their release. But Salcedo, who had become the governor of the
province, determined that the hated _gringos_ should not thus easily
escape, countermanded the findings of the court, and forwarded the
papers in the case to the King of Spain. The King, by a decree issued
in February, 1807, after these innocent Americans had already been
captives for nearly seven years, ordered that one out of every five
of them should be hung, and the rest put at hard labor for ten years.
But when the decree reached Chihuahua there were only nine prisoners
left, two of them having died from the hardships to which they had been
subjected. Under the circumstances the judge, who was evidently a man
of some compassion, construed the decree as meaning that only one of
the remaining nine should be put to death.
On the morning of the 9th of November, 1807, a party of Spanish
officials proceeded to the barracks where the Americans were confined
and an officer read the King’s barbarous decree. A drum was brought, a
tumbler and dice were set upon it, and around it, blindfolded, knelt
the nine participants in this lottery of death. Some day, no doubt,
when time has accorded these men the justice of perspective, Texas
will commission a famous artist to paint the scene: the turquoise sky,
the yellow sand, the sun glare on the whitewashed adobe of the barrack
walls, the little, brown-skinned soldiers in their slovenly uniforms of
soiled white linen, the Spanish officers, gorgeous in scarlet and gold
lace, awed in spite of themselves by the solemnity of the occasion,
and, kneeling in a circle about the drum, in their frayed and tattered
buckskin, the prison pallor on their faces, the nine Americans--cool,
composed, and unafraid.
Ephraim Blackburn, a Virginian and the
oldest of the prisoners, took the fatal
glass and with a hand which did not
tremble--though I imagine that he
whispered a little prayer--threw 3 and 1 4
Lucian Garcia threw 3 and 4 7
Joseph Reed threw 6 and 5 11
David Fero threw 5 and 3 8
Solomon Cooley threw 6 and 5 11
Jonah Walters threw 6 and 1 7
Charles Ring threw 4 and 3 7
William Dawlin threw 4 and 2 6
Ellis Bean threw 4 and 1 5
Whereupon they took poor Ephraim Blackburn out and hanged him.
After Blackburn’s execution three of the remaining prisoners were set
at liberty, but Bean, with four of his companions, all heavily ironed,
were started off under guard for Mexico City. Any one who questions the
assertion that fact is stranger than fiction will change his mind after
hearing of Bean’s subsequent adventures. They read like the wildest and
most improbable of dime novels. When the prisoners reached Salamanca
a young and strikingly beautiful woman, evidently attracted by Bean’s
youth and magnificent physique, managed to approach him unobserved and
asked him in a whisper if he did not wish to escape. (As if, after his
years of captivity and hardship, he could have wished otherwise!)
Then she disappeared as silently and mysteriously as she had come. The
next day the señora, who, as it proved, was the girl wife of a rich
old husband, by bribing the guard, contrived to see Bean again. She
told him quite frankly that her husband, whom she had been forced to
marry against her will, was absent at his silver mines, and suggested
that, if Bean would promise not to desert her, she would find means to
effect his escape and that they could then fly together to the United
States. It shows the manner of man this American adventurer was that,
on the plea that he could not desert his companions in misfortune, he
declined her offer. The next day, as the prisoners once again took up
their weary march to the southward, the señora slipped into Bean’s hand
a small package. When an opportunity came for him to open it he found
that it contained a letter from his fair admirer, a gold ring, and a
considerable sum of money.
Instead of being released upon their arrival at the city of Mexico, as
they had been led to expect, the Americans were marched to Acapulco, on
the Pacific, then a port of great importance because of its trade with
the Philippines. Here Bean was placed in solitary confinement, the only
human beings he saw for many months being the jailer who brought him
his scanty daily allowance of food and the sentry who paced up and down
outside his cell. Had it not been for a white lizard which he found
in his dungeon and which, with incredible patience, he succeeded in
taming, he would have gone mad from the intolerable solitude. Learning
from the sentinel that one of his companions had been taken ill and had
been transferred to the hospital, Bean, who was a resourceful fellow,
prepared his pulse by striking his elbows on the floor and then sent
for the prison doctor. Though he was sent to the hospital, as he had
anticipated, not only were his irons not removed but his legs were
placed in stocks, and, on the theory that eating is not good for a sick
man, his allowance of food was greatly reduced, his meat for a day
consisting of the head of a chicken. When Bean remonstrated with the
priest over the insufficient nourishment he was receiving, the padre
told him that if he wasn’t satisfied with what he was getting he could
go to the devil. Whereupon, his anger overpowering his judgment, Bean
hurled his plate at the friar’s shaven head and laid it open. For this
he was punished by having his head put in the stocks, in an immovable
position, for fifteen days. When he recovered from the real fever which
this barbarous punishment brought on, he was only too glad to go back
to the solitude of his cell and his friend the lizard.
While being taken back to prison, Bean, who had succeeded in concealing
on his person the money which the señora in Salamanca had given him,
suggested to his guards that they stop at a tavern and have something
to drink. A Spaniard never refuses a drink, and they accepted. So
skilfully did he ply them with liquor that one of them fell into a
drunken stupor while the other became so befuddled that Bean found no
difficulty in enticing him into the garden at the back of the tavern
on the plea that he wished to show him a certain flower. As the man
was bending over to examine the plant to which Bean had called his
attention, the American leaped upon his back and choked him into
unconsciousness. Heavily manacled though he was, Bean succeeded
in clambering over the high wall and escaped to the woods outside
the city, where he filed off his irons with the steel he used for
striking fire. Concealing himself until nightfall, he slipped into
the town again, where he found an English sailor who, upon hearing
his pitiful story, smuggled him aboard his vessel and concealed him
in a water-cask. But, just as the anchor was being hoisted and he
believed himself free at last, a party of Spanish soldiers boarded the
vessel and hauled him out of his hiding-place--he had been betrayed by
the Portuguese cook. For this attempt at escape he was sentenced to
eighteen months more of solitary confinement.
One day, happening to overhear an officer speaking of having some
rock blasted, Bean sent word to him that he was an expert at that
business, whereupon he was taken out and put to work. Before he had
been in the quarry a week he succeeded in once more making his escape.
Travelling by night and hiding by day, he beat his way up the coast,
only to be retaken some weeks later. When he was brought before the
governor of Acapulco that official went into a paroxysm of rage at
sight of the American whose iron will he had been unable to break
either by imprisonment or torture. Bean, who had reached such a stage
of desperation that he didn’t care what happened to him, looking the
governor squarely in the eye, told him, in terms which seared and
burned, exactly what he thought of him and defied him to do his worst.
That official, at his wits’ end to know how to subdue the unruly
American, gave orders that he was to be chained to a gigantic mulatto,
the most dangerous criminal in the prison, the latter being promised a
year’s reduction in his sentence if he would take care of his yokemate,
whom he was authorized to punish as frequently as he saw fit. But the
punishing was the other way around, for Bean pommelled the big negro
so terribly that the latter sent word to the governor that he would
rather have his sentence increased than to be longer chained to the
mad Americano. By this time Bean had every one in the castle, from
the governor to the lowest warder, completely terrorized, for they
recognized that he was desperate and would stop at nothing. He was,
in fact, such a hard case that the governor of Acapulco wrote to the
viceroy that he could do nothing with him and begged to be relieved of
his dangerous prisoner. The latter, in reply, sent an order for his
removal to the Spanish penal settlement in the Philippines. But while
awaiting a vessel the revolt led by Morelos, the Mexican patriot, broke
out, and a rebel army advanced on Acapulco. The prisons of New Spain
had been emptied to obtain recruits to fill the Spanish ranks, and Bean
was the only prisoner left in the citadel. The Spanish authorities,
desperately in need of men, offered him his liberty if he would help
to defend the town. Bean agreed, his irons were knocked off, he was
given a gun, and became a soldier. But he felt that he owed no loyalty
to his Spanish captors; so, when an opportunity presented itself a
few weeks later, he went over to Morelos, taking with him a number of
the garrison. A born soldier, hard as nails, amazingly resourceful
and brave to the point of rashness, he quickly won the confidence and
friendship of the patriot leader, who commissioned him a colonel in the
Republican army. When Morelos left Acapulco to continue his campaign
in the south, he turned the command of the besieging forces over to
the ex-convict, who, a few weeks later, carried the city by storm. It
must have been a proud moment for the American adventurer, not yet
thirty years of age, when he stood in the plaza of the captured city
and received the sword of the governor who had treated him with such
fiendish cruelty.[A]
When the story of the treatment of Nolan and his companions trickled
back to the settlements and was repeated from village to village and
from house to house, every repetition served to fan the flame of hatred
of everything Spanish, which grew fiercer and fiercer in the Southwest
as the years rolled by. From the horror and indignation aroused along
the frontier by the treatment of these men, whom the undiscerning
historians have unjustly described as filibusters, sprang that movement
which ended, a quarter of a century later, in freeing Texas forever
from the cruelties of Latin rule. Thus it came about that Nolan and his
companions did not suffer in vain.
Though during the years immediately following Nolan’s ill-fated
expedition all Mexico was aflame with the revolt lighted by the patriot
priest Hidalgo, things were fairly quiet along the border. But this was
not to last. After the capture and execution of the militant priest
one of his followers, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, after a thrilling
flight across Texas, found refuge in Natchez, where he made the
acquaintance of Lieutenant Augustus Magee, a brilliant young officer
of the American garrison. Gutierrez painted pictures with words as an
artist does with the brush, and so inspiring were the scenes his ready
tongue depicted that they fired the young lieutenant with an ambition
to aid in freeing Mexico from Spanish rule. Magee was of a daring and
romantic disposition and accepted without question the stories told
him by Gutierrez. His plan seems to have been to conquer Texas to the
Rio Grande and, after building up a republican state, to apply for
admission to the Union. Resigning his commission, he threw himself
heart and soul into the business of recruiting an expedition from the
adventurers who made New Orleans--now become an American city--their
headquarters and from the freebooters of the neutral ground. A call
to these men to join the “Republican Army of the North” and receive
forty dollars a month and a square league of land in Texas was eagerly
responded to, and by June, 1812, Gutierrez and Magee had recruited half
a thousand daredevils who, for the sake of adventure, were willing to
follow their leaders anywhere. Most of them were “two-gun men,” which
means that they went into action with a pistol in each hand and a knife
between the teeth, and they didn’t know the name of fear. In order to
secure the co-operation of the Mexican population of Texas, Gutierrez
was named commander-in-chief of the expedition, though the real leader
was Magee, who held the position of chief of staff, an American
frontiersman named Reuben Kemper being commissioned major.
In the beginning everything was as easy as falling down-stairs.
The time chosen for the venture was peculiarly propitious, for the
Spaniards had their hands full with the civil war in Mexico, which they
supposed they had ended with the capture and execution of Hidalgo, but
which had broken out again under the leadership of another priest,
named Morelos. As a result of the demoralization which existed, the
Americans were almost unopposed in their advance. Nacogdoches fell
before them, and so did the fort at Spanish Bluff, and by November,
1812, they had raised the republican standard over La Bahia, or, as
it is known to-day, Goliad. Three days later Governor Salcedo--the
same who had attacked Nolan’s party a dozen years before--marched
against the town with fourteen hundred men. Though the Americans were
outnumbered more than two to one, they did not wait for the Spaniards
to attack but sallied out and drove them back in confusion. Whereupon
the Spaniards sat down without the town and prepared to conduct a
siege, and the Americans sat down within and prepared to resist it. It
ended in a peculiar fashion. During a three days’ armistice Salcedo
invited Magee to dine with him in the Spanish camp, and the American
commander accepted. What arguments or inducements the astute Spaniard
brought to bear on the young American can only be conjectured, but, at
any rate, Magee agreed to surrender the town on condition that all of
his men should be sent back to the United States in safety. To this
condition Salcedo assented. Returning to the town, Magee had his men
paraded, told them what he had done, and asked all who approved of his
action to shoulder arms. For some moments after he had finished they
stared at him in mingled amazement, incredulity, and suspicion. It was
unbelievable, unthinkable, preposterous, that he, the idol of the army,
the hero of a dozen engagements, a product of the great officer factory
at West Point, should even contemplate, much less advocate, surrender.
Not only did they not shoulder arms, but most of them, to emphasize
their disapproval, brought their rifle butts crashing to the ground.
For a few moments Magee stood with sunken head and downcast eyes; then
he slowly turned and entered his tent. An hour or so later a messenger
under a flag of truce brought a curt note from Salcedo reminding Magee
of their agreement and demanding to know why he had not surrendered
the town as he had promised. The message was opened by Gutierrez, who
ordered that no answer should be sent, whereupon Salcedo threw his
entire force against the town in an attempt to carry it by storm.
But the Americans, though sick at heart at the action of their young
commander, were far from being demoralized, as the oncoming Spaniards
quickly found, for as they reached the outer line of intrenchments the
Americans met them with a blast of lead which wiped out their leading
companies and sent the balance scampering San Antonio-ward. Throughout
the action Magee remained hidden in his tent. When an orderly went to
summon him the next morning he found the young West Pointer stretched
upon the floor, with a pistol in his hand and the back blown out of his
head.
Though Gutierrez still retained the nominal rank of general, the
actual command of “the Army of the North” now devolved upon Major
Reuben Kemper, a gigantic Virginian who, despite the fact that he was
the son of a Baptist preacher, was celebrated from one end of the
frontier to the other for his “eloquent profanity.” Kemper was a man
well fitted to wield authority on such an expedition. He had a neck
like a bull, a chest like a barrel, a voice like a bass drum, and it
was said that even the mates on the Mississippi River boats listened
with admiration and envy to his swearing. Nor was he a novice at the
business of fighting Spaniards, for a dozen years before he and his
two brothers had been concerned in a desperate attempt to free Florida
from Spanish rule; in 1808 he had been one of a party of Americans
who had attempted to capture Baton Rouge, had been taken prisoner,
sentenced to death, and saved by the intervention of an American
officer on the very morning set for his execution; and the following
year, undeterred by the narrowness of his escape, he had made a similar
attempt, with similar unsuccess, to capture Mobile. The cruelties he
had seen perpetrated by the Spaniards had so worked on his mind that he
had vowed to devote the rest of his life to ridding North America of
Spanish rule.
Such, then, was the picturesque figure who assumed command of “the Army
of the North,” now consisting of eight hundred Americans, one hundred
and eighty Mexicans, and three hundred and twenty-five Indians, and led
it against the Spaniards, twenty-five hundred strong and with several
pieces of artillery, who were encamped at Rosales, near San Antonio.
As soon as his scouts reported the proximity of the Spaniards, who were
ambushed in the dense chaparral which lined the road along which the
Americans were advancing, Kemper threw his force into battle formation,
ordering his men to advance to within thirty paces of the Spanish line,
fire three rounds, load the fourth time, and charge. The movement was
performed in as perfect order as though the Americans had been on a
parade-ground and no enemy within a hundred miles. Demoralized by the
machine-like precision of the Americans’ advance and the deadliness of
the volleys poured into them, the Spaniards broke and ran, Kemper’s
Indian allies remorselessly pursuing the panic-stricken fugitives until
nightfall put an end to the slaughter. In this great Texan battle, for
any mention of which you will search most of the histories in vain,
nearly a thousand Spaniards were killed and wounded. The Indians saw to
it that there were few prisoners.
The next day the victorious Americans reached San Antonio and sent in a
messenger, under a flag of truce, demanding the unconditional surrender
of the town and garrison. Governor Salcedo sent back word that he would
give his decision in the morning. “Present yourself and your staff in
our camp at once,” Kemper replied, “or I shall storm the town.” (And
when a town was carried by storm it was understood that no prisoners
would be taken.) When Salcedo entered the American lines he was met by
Captain Taylor, to whom he offered his sword, but that officer declined
to accept it and sent him to Colonel Kemper. On offering it to the
big frontiersman, it was again refused, and he was told to take it to
General Gutierrez, who was the ranking officer of the expedition. By
this time the patience of the haughty Spaniard was exhausted, and,
plunging the weapon into the ground, he turned his back on Gutierrez. A
few hours later the Americans entered San Antonio in triumph, released
the prisoners in the local jails, and, from all I can gather, took
pretty much everything of value on which they could lay their hands.
When Kemper asked his Indian allies what share of the loot they wanted,
they replied that they would be quite satisfied with two dollars’ worth
of vermilion.
After the capture of San Antonio, General Gutierrez, who, though he
had been content to let the Americans do the fighting, now that he was
among his own people swelled up like a turkey gobbler, announced that
he had decided to send the Spanish officers who had been captured
to New Orleans, where they would be held as hostages until the war
was over. To this suggestion the Americans readily agreed, and that
evening the governor and his staff, with the other officers who had
surrendered, started for the coast under the guard of a company of
Mexicans. When a mile and a half below the town, on the east bank
of the San Antonio River, the captives were halted, stripped, and
tied, and their throats cut from ear to ear, some of the Mexicans
even whetting their knives upon the soles of their shoes in the
presence of their victims. When Kemper learned of this butchery of
defenseless prisoners he strode up to Gutierrez and, catching him by
the throat, held him at arm’s length and shook him as a terrier does
a rat, meanwhile ripping out a stream of invectives that would have
seared a thinner-skinned man as effectually as a branding-iron. Then,
refusing to longer serve under so barbarous a leader, Kemper resigned
his commission and, followed by most of the other American officers of
standing, set out for New Orleans.
Of the American officers who remained Captain Perry was the highest
in rank and the most able, and to him was given the direction of
the expedition, Gutierrez, for reasons of policy, still retaining
nominal command. With the departure of Kemper came a relaxation in
the iron discipline which he had maintained and the troops, drunk
with victory and believing that the campaign was all over but the
shouting, broke loose in every form of dissipation. While in this
state of unpreparedness, they were surprised by a force of three
thousand Spaniards under General Elisondo. Instead of marching directly
upon San Antonio and capturing it, as he could have done in view of
the demoralization which prevailed, Elisondo made the mistake of
intrenching himself in the graveyard half a mile without the town.
But in the face of the enemy the discipline for which the Americans
were celebrated returned, for first, last, and all the time they were
fighters. At ten o’clock on the evening of June 4 the Americans,
marching in file, moved silently out of the town. In the most profound
silence they approached the Spanish lines until they could hear the
voices of the pickets; then they lay down, their arms beside them,
and waited for the coming of the dawn. Colonel Perry chose the moment
when the Spaniards were assembled at daybreak for matins to launch his
attack. Even then no orders were spoken, the signals being passed down
the line by each man nudging his neighbor. So admirably executed were
Perry’s orders that the Americans, moving forward with the stealth
and silence of panthers, had reached the outer line of the enemy’s
intrenchments, had bayonetted the Spanish sentries, and had actually
hauled down the Spanish flag and replaced it with the Republican
tricolor before their presence was discovered. Though taken completely
by surprise, the Spaniards rallied and drove the Americans from the
works, but the latter reformed and hurled themselves forward in a
smashing charge which drove the Spaniards from the field, leaving
upward of a thousand dead, wounded, and prisoners behind them. The
American loss in killed and wounded was something under a hundred.