Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (21 page)

It was an outrageous crime, and the worst bloodshed in what had thus far been a placid and uneventful revolt. But now the Bear Flaggers cried out for retribution, as did Fremont and Carson.

On Sunday, June 28, Fremont spotted a small boat crossing the bay and ordered Carson to intercept it. The boat landed near San Quentin and three men stepped ashore. They were two twenty-year-old twins, Ramon and Francisco de Haro, and their elderly uncle, Jose de los Berreyesa. They were prominent citizens—the two young men were the sons of the mayor of Sonoma.

What happened next is subject to some debate, and different accounts stress different points. But Carson apparently arrested the three men and demanded that they hand over any dispatches they might be carrying. They appeared nervous and uncooperative, but insisted they harbored no messages. Though it was obvious these three men were not soldiers, Carson was suspicious. He called to Fremont and asked him what he wanted to do with them. “Captain, should I take these men prisoner?” he yelled from a distance.

Fremont waved his hand dismissively. “No,” he replied, “I have no use for prisoners.” Then he added, cryptically, “Do your duty.”

Carson was not sure what his commander meant by that. He lingered for a moment, then had a “brief consultation” with some of the other men who had accompanied him to the boat landing. They gradually realized that Fremont intended for these three captives to pay for the deaths of Fowler and Cowie. Fremont would not carry out the deed himself—and later disavowed having any part in it—but he insisted that his loyal scout follow through. He yelled, “Mr. Carson,
your duty
.”

That was good enough for Carson. Without another apparent thought, he turned and gunned down the de Haro twins and their uncle in cold blood. (Some accounts say that several men fired along with Carson.)

Fremont seemed satisfied by the execution and the retribution it afforded. “It is well,” he proclaimed after he heard the rifle reports. According to one eyewitness, Carson then searched the bodies and, as he’d suspected, found dispatches on one of them.

Neither Carson nor Fremont mentioned anything about this little atrocity in his memoirs. It remains one of the more unfathomable episodes of Carson’s life. One cannot easily attribute his actions to the sort of ignorant racism that animated so many jingoistic soldiers who would fight in the Mexican War: Carson was married to a Hispanic, was a Catholic, spoke Spanish, and had for two decades enjoyed wide circles of Mexican friends. People who otherwise loved Carson had trouble accepting his role in this incident. Years later one of his close friends, W. M. Boggs, would condemn it as “a cold hearted crime.”

But in this murder, as in the attack on the Klamath village, a certain troubling pattern had shown itself, one that would recur in Carson’s later campaigns. It was a kind of dark symbiosis between authority and action: Fremont needed Carson to carry out his dirty work, and Carson needed Fremont, apparently, to tell him what to do. Modern psychiatry might call these two men codependents. Together they were far more lethal than when apart. Unwilling to disappoint a superior, Carson seemed incapable of resisting an order he personally disagreed with. When given a command, he was the good soldier; in such situations, his trigger-finger did not communicate with his conscience.

Two weeks later Fremont’s California Battalion made its way to the provincial capital of Monterey. Warships of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron had already sailed into the magnificent harbor and, in a bloodless takeover, claimed the town for the United States. Now weighing anchor in the bay were two American transport ships, three frigates, and three sloops—each of which was fixed with forty-four guns. The Stars and Stripes flew uncontested over Monterey’s scallop of shoreline.

The new commodore of the Pacific Squadron was Robert Field Stockton, the pompous seaman aboard whose ship Sen. Tom Benton was almost killed by errant cannon fire. A wealthy businessman from New Jersey who had enrolled in Princeton at the precocious age of thirteen, Stockton was a good-looking officer of fifty-one years, with cool, calculating eyes, a determined face, a nest of curly hair, and frizzled scimitars for sideburns. He had sailed much of the world, from the Mediterranean to the horn of South America, and while stationed in West Africa had helped negotiate a treaty that led to the creation of the state of Liberia. When home, he nursed eclectic ventures—canals, real estate, naval architecture, politics (he would later become a U.S. senator from New Jersey, his tendency for long-winded speechmaking earning him the nickname “Gassey Bob”). Ever since he arrived in Monterey and assumed command of the Pacific Squadron, Commodore Stockton held an exaggeratedly high opinion of his status in California. “My word is at present the law of the land,” he wrote President Polk. “My person is more than regal.”

If it is possible, the commodore nursed even greater ambitions for personal glory than did Fremont: Upon learning from a Mexican newspaper account that the U.S.-Mexican War was officially on, Stockton became impatient to mop up operations in California as soon as feasible so he could stage an amphibious invasion of Acapulco and then march all the way to Mexico City—a project he apparently concocted on his own without authorization from Washington. Restless, ready to bend rules, and forever solicitous of his own immortality, Stockton was a man cut from Fremontian cloth. It was little surprise, then, that the two men should instantly like each other and would become allies.

Stockton proposed to join forces with Fremont’s men and quickly conquer Los Angeles and the rest of California. The commodore dashed off an obnoxious declaration of war against Gen. Jose Castro, a document as inflamed as it was untruthful. Stockton claimed that he was receiving “daily reports from the interior of scenes of rapine, blood, and murder.” (A lie, of course—Cowie and Fowler were the only known deaths, and, thanks to Carson, they had been more than avenged.) General Castro, Stockton went on, “has violated every principle of international law and national hospitality, by pursuing…with wicked intent Capt. Fremont who came here to refresh his men after a perilous journey across the mountains, on a scientific survey.” For these “repeated hostilities and outrages,” Stockton concluded, “military possession was ordered to be taken of Monterey and San Francisco until redress could be obtained from the government of Mexico.”

Stockton soon reorganized Fremont’s army as the “Naval Battalion of Mounted Riflemen.” Improvising as he went, the commodore designated Fremont a major, Gillespie a captain, and Carson a lieutenant. Although at first most of the expeditioners seemed happy to become regularized, they began to chafe at the restrictions and protocols laid down by Stockton. Fremont writes in his
Memoirs,
“Living an uncontrolled life, ranging prairies and mountains subject to no will but their own, it was a great sacrifice for these border chiefs to lay aside their habits of independence.”

By late July the commodore told Fremont to prepare for his first assignment—to sail for San Diego, from which he was then to fan out and conquer Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California. There was some urgency to the assignment, Stockton felt, for the commodore was acutely worried about British meddling. The evidence was not far at hand: Anchored alongside the American ships in Monterey Bay was a single British man-of-war, the
Collingwood,
a formidable vessel armed with eighty guns.

For Stockton and Fremont, the presence of this British flagship was proof enough that the English had planned to take over California and that American Anglophobia had been justified all along. Fremont said he and his men “looked upon the
Collingwood
with the feeling of a racer” who had crossed the finish line a hair ahead of his opponent. In truth, though the British were keenly interested in California, the
Collingwood
had sailed into Monterey primarily to gather intelligence and to ensure that English mercantile interests were not being encroached upon. The
Collingwood
’s commander, Adm. Sir George Seymour, exchanged pleasantries with officers of the U.S. Pacific Squadron and gave no signs of aggression.

The British sailors were intrigued by Fremont’s motley army of mountain men. The English seemed to marvel at the trappers as though they were some fabled elite—like French Legionnaires, perhaps, or samurai warriors. One officer aboard the
Collingwood
thought Carson and his comrades were “a curious set…who had passed years in the wilds, living upon their own resources.” Dressed in “long, loose coats of deerskin,” many of them were “blacker than the Indians.” The Englishman continued, “One or two enjoy a high reputation in the prairies. Kit Carson is as well known there as the Duke of Wellington is in Europe.”

The two groups swapped stories and played games. Carson set up coins at a distance of 150 paces and tested his marksmanship against some of the English sailors—for bets. Early Carson biographer Edwin Sabin notes that his “long, true barrel and remarkable eyesight kept the Britishers poor in pocket.”

On July 25, Fremont’s battalion boarded the
Cyane,
a navy sloop, and set sail for San Diego. It was an amusing notion to think of Fremont’s men as “sailors.” Many of them had never seen an ocean before, let alone sailed on one.

Carson, certainly, was a confirmed landlubber. He had been looking forward to the voyage, but soon found that maritime life did not agree with him. As the
Cyane
heaved in the Pacific swells, with the headlands of Big Sur shimmering off to port, he grew seasick. For him, the four-day sail to San Diego was pure hell. He told a friend he would never again board an oceangoing vessel, “not as long as mules have backs.” Carson said, “I swore it would be the last time I would leave sight of land,” adding: “I’d rather ride on a grizzly than on this boat.”

But he wasn’t the only one—the decks of the
Cyane
positively writhed with vomiting, sallow-faced mountain men. A navy chaplain, the Reverend Walter Colton, found it hilarious that these “wild savages” under whose “heavy tramp the ground seemed to tremble” should be so helpless at sea. Wrote Colton: “They are laying about the deck in a spirit of resignation that would satisfy the non-resistant principles of a Quaker. Two or three resolute old women might tumble the whole lot of them into the sea.”

Fremont’s men arrived in San Diego harbor on July 29 and were met with no resistance whatsoever. A brace of Marines marched ashore and raised the American flag over the town. For a week Fremont was entertained by the leading citizens of San Diego while Carson went out to scour the surrounding countryside for horses that would be needed for the attack on the pueblo of Los Angeles. As they waited for Commodore Stockton to sail south from Monterey, Fremont luxuriated in the Southern California summer. “The days were bright and hot,” “the sky pure and entirely cloudless, and the nights cool and beautifully serene.”

Commodore Stockton tacked out of Monterey Bay on August 1 with 360 sailors aboard the
Congress
. (That same week, Kearny’s army was arriving at Bent’s Fort.) Stockton dropped anchor off Santa Barbara only long enough to claim the town and raise the Stars and Stripes. By the time he arrived in the waters off Los Angeles, General Castro had already composed a formal letter to Gov. Pio Pico stating that he did not think it was possible to defend the pueblo. General Castro wrote, “After having made on my part every sacrifice that has been in my power to prepare for the defense of the Department and to oppose the invasion that by land and sea has been made by the United States forces, today I find myself in the painful necessity of informing Your Excellency that it is impossible for me to do one or the other.”

On August 13, Fremont and Stockton consolidated their forces and marched into Los Angeles without contest. “Our entry,” boasted Fremont, “had more the effect of a parade of home guards than of any enemy taking possession of a conquered town.” The Americans learned to their delight that Castro had disbanded his army and escaped to the San Bernardino Mountains and then south to Sonora. Governor Pico, meanwhile, had left for Baja California. The Americans were somewhat disappointed that they had no one to fight, and that all the Mexican soldiers had, as Carson put it, “departed to any part of the country where they thought they would not meet with Americans.”