Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (30 page)

Carson and Kearny rode together much of the way—the scout in his greasy buckskins, the general in his proud dragoon blues. Fellow Missourians, they shared many friends back home. With laconic good humor, Carson tried to make conversation as they went along, but much of the time he quietly sulked. It wasn’t the hard monotony of having to cover, in reverse, the same sun-scoured terrain he had so recently crossed. Nor was it simply that he missed Josefa, nor the nagging distaste he still felt for surrendering to Fitzpatrick the messages that Fremont had formally entrusted to him. He had let go of all those concerns back on the Rio Grande.

Mainly, Carson’s stewing had to do with the transcontinental adventure he’d been denied. In all his wide travels, he had never been to the East Coast. Carson had been looking forward to seeing his nation’s capital. He was under no illusions that he belonged to that closed world of books and stylish clothes and drawing room manners. Yet he wanted to meet the well-placed men and women who had effectively served as his sponsors, sending him on the errands that had made him nationally famous, writing about him, broadcasting his exploits: Not only President Polk, but also Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, and the senator’s daughter Jessie Benton Fremont as well as Secretary of State Buchanan, Secretary of War Marcy, and various people connected with the Topographical Engineers.

Carson, who had in effect been a field agent of Manifest Destiny, wanted to meet its prime movers.

The competitor in Carson had also been intrigued by the notion of making a sixty-day trip. To cross the continent in two months’ time loomed as a kind of athletic grail. Sixty days was what he had promised Fremont he could do—
coast to coast in sixty days!
The feat he had proposed hung in the air as a mythic goal of doubtful attainability. In 1846 the quickest way to get information or goods from one coast to the other was by ship, via the antipodal tip of Tierra del Fuego—or alternately, to Panama, then overland to another ship waiting on the far shore of the isthmus.

Carson was interested in blazing the continental overland route, thereby proving its merits. He had been right on schedule, by his estimation. Carson’s party had spent twenty-six days getting to New Mexico from Los Angeles, but from then on the going would have been easier, riding the well-trod Santa Fe Trail northeast to the Missouri River, then churning by steamboat to St. Louis, then arrowing the final stretches to Washington by rail and stagecoach on good wagon roads.

Now here he was, ingloriously loping along a slow trail with a middle-aged general who’d pointed him toward a land that had already been conquered. Carson did not like it a bit.

In fact, Carson’s now-dated information was all wrong; California was
not
conquered. Since he had left Los Angeles with Fremont’s triumphant dispatches, the territory had been convulsed by an insurrection. The Americans had been kicked out of Los Angeles, out of Santa Barbara, out of every other coastal settlement south of Monterey. The Mexicans, outraged by the harsh terms clamped on them by Commodore Robert Stockton—including curfews and arbitrary arrests without a hearing—had risen up and attacked American positions. In the words of one historian, the revolt had “blossomed like a crown fire leaping through mountain timber.” A manifesto had been circulated among the citizens: “We, all the inhabitants of the department of California, as members of the great Mexican nation, declare that it is and has been our wish to belong to her alone. Therefore, the intrusive authorities appointed by the invading forces of the United States are held as null and void. All North Americans being foes of Mexico, we swear not to lay down our arms until we see them ejected from Mexican soil.”

Now the reversal was nearly complete. The proud Californians again had the upper hand. The only place the Americans still held was San Diego, where Commodore Stockton had a few warships anchored in the bay. But the Mexicans there had him so thoroughly pinned down that he could scarcely come ashore.

General Kearny, with his confident guide and his miserably small and haggard force, was limping toward a trap.

In early November, Kearny’s dragoons reached a world “cracked and drawn into blisters” and uninhabited by man, a world whose only denizens appeared to be tarantulas, scorpions, and skittering lizards. The ground was spongy with saline moisture, and wherever the soldiers’ feet pressed the ground, “the salts of the earth effloresced, and gave it the appearance of being covered with frost,” Emory wrote. “In this way the numberless tracks of horses were indelible, and could be traced for great distances in long white seams.” The men trudged past mesquite and creosote, through ocotillo and paloverde, across dunes of rippled sand. They beheld the splendid weirdness of the century plant and the joshua tree and encountered saguaro cactus for the first time, the giant of the Sonoran desert, with its mighty fluted trunks and sagging humanlike arms. Lieutenant Emory described the land as “beautiful in the extreme,” marked by “irregular, fantastic mountains” and “mysterious-looking places.”

Capt. Henry Turner said marching over this desert landscape “was a strange existence…I constantly feel as though I were in a dream, to be thus surrounded day after day with the wilderness, not one familiar object in nature except the sun, the moon, and the stars. Twere better for it to be blotted out from the face of the earth. It is the veriest wilderness in the world, and then the sad thought comes over me, that I am far away from my little family, and that each day widens the distance.”

General Kearny was perhaps less charitable. “It surprised me,” he wrote, “to see so much land that can never be of any use to man or beast.”

And yet by Kearny’s tendriling movement across it, this useless land was now effectively part of the United States. The one hundred men now grunting across the desert did not look like much of an invading force, but that’s what they were—a long, slender offshoot of Washington. Kearny’s orders from President Polk gave him “a wide discretionary power” to take possession of all of what was then called “Upper California,” an unbelievably vast area that included not only the present state of California but also parts of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Seldom in history had so much real estate been seized by the simple act of a few men walking over it.

Even as Kearny claimed this sere land, he clearly doubted whether it was worth taking. Although the Spanish had long ago settled large swaths of the lush California coast, they had never been able to make anything of this infernal country on the interior. Spanish explorers crisscrossed it many times, and several crude trails had been stamped out to carry on a feeble intercourse between California and New Mexico’s settlements on the Rio Grande. But most of it remained a vague, suppositional country. No Spanish villages, no active missions or presidios dotted these desolate precincts of present-day western Arizona and eastern California—and even the nomadic Indians passed through sparingly.

Blazing by day and freezing at night, the desert march was brutal on Kearny’s one hundred dragoons and lethal to their horses and mules. Animals were collapsing almost hourly—in a single day a dozen dropped in their tracks—and the stronger ones were becoming patchy with scabs and saddle sores. Much of the time the animals had only the pods and branches of mesquite shrubs to eat. For hundreds of miles the men walked on foot to spare the mules. Man and beast alike were slashed by serrated yucca leaves and punctured by the needles of prickly pear and barrel cactus.

Increasingly, Kearny spotted the now thoroughly decomposed carcasses of mules that Carson had abandoned on his way east. Eventually Kearny’s own magnificent bay, the beloved horse that had been with him ever since Fort Leavenworth, expired. And so even the general, prim equestrian though he was, had to suffer the indignity of mounting a mule.

This terrain was just as Carson had warned Kearny it would be. Back on the Rio Grande, Carson had said that every party that had ever ventured into the Gila had emerged from its stark canyons in an advanced state of starvation. He had advised Kearny that the going would be so rough, there was no point in bringing wagons along; the trail was not passable for them—their axles would quickly snap. Reaching California with supply wagons, Carson estimated, would easily take four months, maybe longer.

The general had taken his scout’s advice. He’d sent the wagons back to Santa Fe while summoning more mules. Now, as Kearny led his gaunt men through the rocky goosenecks of the Gila, he was grateful not to be pulling anything other than the two rolling howitzers. There was one particularly grueling stretch that Kearny’s men came to call “the Devil’s Turnpike,” a succession of steep ascents and basalt precipices that alone claimed fifteen mules. Lieutenant Emory described the stygian pass with grim eloquence: “The metallic clinks of spurs, the rattling of the mule shoes, the high black peaks, the deep dark ravines, and the unearthly looking cacti which stuck out from the rocks like the ears of Mephistopheles—all favored the idea that we were now treading on the verge of the regions below. Occasionally a mule gave up the ghost and was left as a propitiatory tribute to the place.”

The dragoons began to grumble at their hardships. Captain Turner complained in his journal: “How little do those who sit in their easy chairs in Washington know of the privations we are daily subjected to. Even our anxious friends at home can form no idea of the trials we undergo—wading streams, clambering over rocks, laboring through the valleys [where] the sand causes our animals to sink up to their knees. Then our frugal meals, hard bed, and perhaps wet blankets…I have no taste for this mode of life—it contains not a single charm for me. It is
labor, labor
from morning till night. I’m tired of this business. I wish it was over…This is a soldier’s fare, but I am sick of it.”

One of the delicate national issues quietly hovering in the background while the dragoons trudged westward was whether this country would one day be slaveholding should Washington ever fully annex it and grant it statehood. Surveying the desiccated landscapes of present-day Arizona, Lieutenant Emory put an end to such speculation: “No one who has ever visited this country would ever think of bringing his own slaves here with any view to profit. Their labor would never repay the cost of transportation.” The only people who might live in this country, thought Henry Turner, were consumptives and other sickly souls attracted to its dry air and pure atmosphere. “Invalids may live here when they might die in any other part of the world,” Turner wrote, “but really the country is so forbidding that no one would scarcely be willing to secure a long life at the cost of living in it.”

Another issue that Emory’s Topographical Corps was supposed to investigate was whether the Gila Trail could be a suitable route for a good wagon road—and ultimately, a transcontinental railway. But Emory blasted that notion as readily as he did the question of slavery: It was impossible, he said, to imagine putting a decent thoroughfare through this ragged rock wasteland. Clearly the cross-country road, if it was ever to be built, would have to be routed somewhere farther to the south, possibly passing through the Mexican stronghold of Tucson.

Then, out of the black jaws of the Gila, Kearny’s column emerged to behold a splendid oasis. They had entered the well-watered land of the peaceful Pimas, and a related tribe called the Maricopas. The Pimas were advanced farmers who had long ago mastered a complex system of dikes and irrigation canals that allowed them to grow abundant corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and cotton, among other crops. Lieutenant Emory’s engineering mind was impressed by the “beauty, order, and disposition” of the canals, and was, like most of Kearny’s men, thoroughly taken with the whole tribe. They were “frank, confident, peaceful, and industrious,” Emory thought, and “in possession of a beautiful and fertile basin.” Kearny’s men, famished as they were, approached the Pimas and offered money and barter for food, but the Indians refused any sort of payment. “Bread is to eat, not to sell, take what you want,” they insisted in Spanish—and promptly invited Kearny’s men to a feast.