Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (20 page)

On the night of August 17, Kearny camped near the ruins of the ancient pueblo of Pecos, in a grassy valley where the Pecos River came spilling from a cleft in the mountains. Pecos had been occupied for five hundred years, and until recently it was the largest of all the Pueblo Indian villages. At one time as many as three thousand people had lived there. The pueblo had a legend that concerned the “fire of Montezuma.” The Indians believed they were related to the great Aztec leader, and that one day long ago Montezuma instructed them to build a permanent fire in a subterranean chamber. Under no circumstances was the fire to be extinguished until a certain people arrived from the east to liberate them from the tyrannies of Spanish rule.

And so for hundreds of years, as they languished under conquistadors and friars, the Pecos people secretly fed the fire in a special kiva, a round ceremonial room with a smokehole, built underground. Over the patient centuries, tending the fire remained a kind of druidic ritual for them, a symbol of their longing for the prophesied deliverers. The rites were dutifully maintained until the year 1838, when some rash of diseases, doubtless borne on the wagon trains that passed the pueblo on the nearby Santa Fe Trail, decimated the Pecos population. Then a series of Comanche raids nearly finished them off. Facing extinction, the last seventeen Pecos Indians vacated their once-great pueblo and took up residence in the safety of the Jemez Mountains sixty miles to the west, joining a kindred tribe that spoke the same language. The fire was left to die at Pecos, but it was said that a dedicated group of the exiles transported the last embers to their new home in the Jemez and continued the tradition there.

Kearny’s soldiers were amazed by the Pecos ruins and liked the sound of the legend—particularly the part about a certain people coming from the east to liberate the long-suffering Indians. Pecos had been a thriving village when the first conqueror, Coronado, passed through these parts in 1540, claiming this kingdom for the Spanish, who were sure that somewhere nearby there existed seven cities of gold, which could be dismantled, melted into ingots, and shipped home to feed the great empire. The golden cities never materialized, however, and the Spaniards turned their attentions to the considerably more prosaic task of winning the souls of Pueblo Indians—while simultaneously enslaving them.

The Americans had their own ideas about New Mexico’s worth. If metals could not be teased from the alkaline dirt, then at least wagon roads could be sunk into its barren ribs, connecting the Eastern cities to California, which Kearny was scheduled to conquer next. Perhaps the Americans were not as metal-obsessed as Coronado had been, but they were just as determined to find their own kind of gold.

Though exhausted, many of Kearny’s soldiers tramped over the listing walls of the Pecos ruins, blinking at the grandeur of history, and their own place in it. One of the soldiers who kept a journal, Pvt. Frank Edwards from Illinois, was told that the Pecos ruins had been built by a master race of white giants who stood fifteen feet tall. The idea did not seem completely preposterous to Edwards. “The bones which have been dug from the floor of the church are, certainly, of gigantic size,” he wrote. “A thigh bone that I saw could never have belonged to a man less than ten feet.”

As he was examining the giant’s femur, a mule that Edwards had tied up outside broke loose from its picket and clopped into the ruined mission church. “Apparently as anxious to satisfy his curiosity as I was,” the mule climbed up to the place where the altar had once stood. “It gravely turned around,” Edwards wrote, “and gave vent to his pious feelings in a long EEE-haw.”

The windswept grass on the jumbled hills had crisped to a fine summer gold when Kit Carson guided his mule down through the gambrel oak thickets and into the tiny village of Sonoma, California. He rode with Fremont at the head of a ragtag column of 160 volunteers, most of them American settlers from the Sacramento Valley. They were, according to one observer, “very much sunburnt and the most un-uniform and grotesque set of men ever seen.”

Cows mashed their cud in the surrounding pastures while the town dogs yipped at the strangers. Sonoma’s dirt streets thronged with rabbles of American men drunk on liquor—and drunk on a newfound power. They shouted out “Liberty!” in slurred cries that frightened the local townsfolk, who did not know there was a war on and did not want one.

It was June 25, 1846, and Carson tried to make sense of this chaotic scene. A week and a half earlier, on June 14, a well-armed posse of American hotheads, citing outrages mostly imagined, had risen up against the Mexican authorities and seized this adobe village not far from the shallows of northern San Francisco Bay. Calling themselves
Osos
—Bears—these self-styled revolutionaries took Sonoma’s leading citizens as prisoners, cleaned out the modest-sized armory, stole all the horses they could find, and then declared the birth of an independent nation-state: the Bear Flag Republic.

The Osos carried out this spontaneous revolt with a giddy sense of melodrama—as though it were the Boston Tea Party of the West. They called their movement “high and holy,” and one of the revolt leaders, a Dr. Semple, said that “the world has not hitherto manifested so high a degree of civilization.” But in truth the episode was little more than opera buffa, fueled by impulses that could not be called high-minded. The Osos were little more than a mob, without organization or clear aims. One of Fremont’s own men thought that most of the rebels were “moved by nothing but the chance of plunder without the slightest principle of honor.”

Using Sonoma as a base, the Bears planned to sweep southward and take over Monterey, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and the rest of California. But for now they were content to consolidate their initial victory while savoring their new symbol of solidarity: Over the town plaza a new flag flapped in the breeze, a slightly deformed banner fashioned from scraps of ladies’ undergarments, with a grizzly bear (or “something they
called
a bear,” as one early historian of the revolt put it) rising on its haunches, the crude image dribbled in berry juice. (Today’s state flag of California draws its design from this improbable standard.)

John Fremont’s role in this uprising was tangential but nonetheless crucial. His presence in California was the catalyst that made it possible. Ever since he had led his exploring party out of the Oregon wilds and back to the Sacramento River, he had been carefully gauging the unrest among the American expatriots. Constantly entertaining visitors at his camp, Fremont had strongly encouraged the Americans to revolt; at the same time, he stressed that he could not officially intervene in the conflict until the settlers provoked the California authorities into committing a clear act of war. Nor would he permit any of his own men to detach from the expedition.

Still, there was a certain cognitive dissonance to Fremont’s moves and positions: The settlers couldn’t figure him out. He feared the consequences of his own involvement while also fearing the consequences should accelerating events leave him behind. And so for more than a month he vacillated, brooded, schemed in his tent, sending mixed signals as he waited for the right moment to insert himself into the drama.

Now that moment had arrived. Fremont learned that Gen. Jose Castro in Monterey, as a direct (and understandable) response to the Bear Flag Revolt, had issued an ultimatum demanding that all American foreigners “leave the country or be driven out by force.” Not only that, Castro had sent a certain Capt. Joaquin de la Torre north to drive the Bear Flaggers from Sonoma. Here was the provocation Fremont felt he needed: As a U.S. Army officer, he was not authorized to attack the Californians, but he could certainly
defend
American citizens from Californian attack. So Fremont quickly gathered up an army consisting of his exploring expedition plus some one hundred other volunteers and hastened to Sonoma to rebuff de la Torre’s offensive.

Fremont’s “army” was a strange multinational force of buckskin rogues and filibusterers. One noncombatant observer described them as “Americans, French, English, Swiss, Poles, Russians, Chileans, Germans, Greeks, Austrians, Pawnees. If the Mexicans can whip this crowd they can beat all the world, for Castro will whip all nations, languages and tongues!”

By the time Fremont and Carson rode into Sonoma that fine June day, the Osos had already successfully repulsed Captain de la Torre, and the situation seemed calm. But Fremont was now at last committed to the Bear Flag cause—and impatient to marry it with the larger American cause. Without his help, the army of settlers would face “inevitable disaster,” he feared, in the teeth of the more numerous forces the Mexican Californians would soon muster. His own expedition party represented “the Army and the Flag of the United States,” a fact that Fremont thought “gave to my movements the national character which must of necessity be respected by Mexico.”

Quickly Fremont seemed to undergo a personality transformation. He chucked all pretense of being an explorer and now took to signing his dispatches “Commander of United States Forces in California.” He wore a felt hat and more flamboyant garb, surrounded himself with Delaware Indians as bodyguards, and tied natty green ribbons around his horse’s tail and neck. He reorganized the various combatants into a unit he called the California Battalion. Employing a bit of chronological legerdemain, he had the Bear Flaggers effectively forward-date the official “start” of the revolt to coincide with the moment he joined it, thus arranging for his leadership to “begin at the beginning,” as he later put it. Declaring himself “Oso 1,” Fremont began to issue imperious, even ruthless, demands. He told one of his subordinates to “iron and confine any person who shall disobey your orders—shoot any person who shall endanger the safety.” When a former ally, a Swiss-born trader and ranch-owner named Johann Sutter, questioned his new authority, Fremont snapped back: “If you don’t like what I’m doing, then you can go and join the Mexicans!”

Joaquin de la Torre and his small army of one hundred men had retreated only a few miles from Sonoma. When Fremont learned this, he and his California Battalion gave chase, pursuing the captain to the mission of San Rafael near the shores of San Francisco Bay. But the Californian managed to escape by a clever ruse. He wrote a false note disclosing a plan to outflank Fremont and reattack Sonoma. He sent the dispatch by a courier he deliberately arranged for the Americans to intercept—thus buying him time so that he could sneak with his army across San Francisco Bay in a schooner, vanishing in the fog.

Then Fremont learned of a tragedy that had befallen a pair of Bear Flag insurrectionists. A few days earlier an American named Fowler and another named Cowie secretly ventured north from Sonoma to secure gunpowder at a small coastal outpost called Bodega. But a band of Mexican guerrillas captured and brutally lynched the two Americans. The two men were tied to trees and slashed with knives, their limbs pulled apart with lariats.