Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (22 page)

Four days later Stockton declared California to be United States soil and named himself both commander in chief and governor. It seemed that the conquest was complete, although, unbeknownst to him, a resistance movement was already quietly building. The commodore sat down and wrote a self-congratulatory letter to President Polk in which he trumpeted that he had “chased the Mexican army more than three hundred miles along the coast, pursued them thirty miles in the interior of their own country, routed and dispersed them and secured the Territory to the United States, ended the war, restored peace and harmony among the people, and put a civil government into successful operation.”

Stockton planned to leave California as soon as possible to pursue his planned invasion of the west coast of Mexico proper. Upon his departure, he would name Fremont the new governor of California.

Both Stockton and Fremont were anxious to get the glorious news of the conquest to Washington—and to place their version of events in the hands of President Polk himself. Fremont suggested that they write dispatches and send them overland, placing them in the able hands of none other than Kit Carson.

Carson would “insure the safety and speedy delivery of these important papers,” Fremont reasoned, and the plum assignment would be “a reward for his brave and valuable service on many occasions.” The journey would route him through New Mexico, allowing him to see his wife Josefa. “It would be a service of high trust and honor and of great danger also,” Fremont said, but Carson would enjoy “going off at the head of his own party with carte blanche for expenses and the prospect of novel pleasure and honor at the end.”

Carson accepted the assignment, of course, and pledged to make the journey in sixty days. As usual, the feat would be accomplished on the backs of mules. Cussed though they assuredly were, mules, not horses, were “winning” the West. The sterile cross between a horse mare and a jackass, mules were stronger, sturdier, surer-footed, and less liable to spook. They could carry greater loads longer on less feed—and on feed of a poorer quality. Although they were usually slower and seemed to be designed by committee, they could better withstand temperature extremes and other vagaries of weather.

People like Carson, who had been among them all his life, were superstitious about their mules. Some people insisted mules could detect water five miles away. They could tell if a hailstorm was approaching. They could smell blood. They were even clairvoyant: The literature of the mountain men is rife with stories of mules who saved their owners by sensing the coming attack of hostile Indians—and by clearly communicating their apprehension through one anxious tic or another. Later accounts celebrating Kit Carson’s great rides almost invariably place him on a fleet and noble “steed,” but that was a bit of equestrian chauvinism; every time Carson aimed for the other side of the continent, he was on a mule.

On the morning of September 5, Stockton and Fremont stuffed his saddlebags with all manner of correspondence. Then Carson, the scout-turned-transcontinental-courier, mounted his mule and headed east toward the sunrise with fifteen men, including six Delaware Indians.

With Kearny only a day away from the capital, Armijo flew into a dither of inspired play-acting at Apache Canyon. As the vital hours slipped by, the governor grew more unpredictable, and at the same time more grandiose. He gathered together the members of the legislative assembly on the steep hills and sat them in the cool shade of the juniper trees. Instead of exhorting them, however, he presented a series of questions.

“
You
tell me what I should do,” he said, Pontius-like.

They looked at him with puzzled expressions.

He cast about for the most delicate way to phrase the question. “Should I fight or treat with the enemy?”

One of the legislators stood up and spoke for the others. “The question you have posed is improper,” the man resolutely said. “We came here as soldiers, not as legislators. Our duty is to act as such, and obey orders.”

This was not the answer Armijo was looking for. He stiffened up and nodded vigorously, grumbling something along the lines of, “Of
course
we are soldiers.” With that, he took his leave.

Then he turned to the officers of the militia and floated the same question. Again, the answer failed to satisfy him. “We have assembled to fight,” one of his interlocutors stated, “and that is what we should do. That is our only wish.”

Armijo again nodded, commending the man for his patriotism. He paced and stewed and sulked, and then suddenly spun around, having worked his actor’s face up into a fit of feigned indignation. “With the regular army I would of course meet any enemy,” he assured them. “But not with these
volunteers
.” He gestured deprecatingly at the peasants and peons working down in the canyon, still slaving away on the fortifications, felling trees to construct a crude abatis. “Look at them—they are all
cowards!
I shall not compromise myself by going into battle with people who have no military discipline!”

Then to everyone’s mute astonishment, the governor formally disbanded the defenders of Apache Canyon, the whole lot of them. As he did so, he affected a look of intense exasperation, as if they were the ones who had let
him
down. He was, he said, a victim of circumstance; he had done all that could be done, but it was entirely out of his hands now. A militia captain vowed to kill him for deserting the homeland, but the threat came to nothing. For the next several hours the canyon was a scene of dusty disarray, with people stampeding this way and that. The three thousand men—bewildered and most of them, in truth, greatly relieved—hopped on whatever mules or burros immediately presented themselves and scurried toward home to see to the safety of their families.

Then Armijo sat down and dictated a final letter to Kearny. A syrup of emotion flowed from his lips to the pen of his mystified amanuensis. “My heart is grieved with pain on seeing that from my hands the country in which I first saw light will pass to another nation,” he dictated. The governor went on to suggest that Kearny hadn’t seen the last of him, that Armijo would return in due time to avenge the American conquest. “I do not
deliver
to Your Excellency the province of New Mexico,” he explained. “I only make a temporary military retreat, until I shall receive further orders from my government.”

Finishing the letter, and leaving it in the hands of a messenger, Armijo assembled his bodyguard of one hundred soldiers and galloped for Santa Fe. From the Palace of the Governors he took all the money and gold plate he could cram into his trunks and then mounted his horse. According to one account, an angry throng materialized and tried to prevent him from leaving. Digging into his overstuffed pockets, the governor tossed out several handfuls of gold and silver coins, strewing them at the crowd’s feet. While the people jostled for the money, he spurred his horse and sped away toward Chihuahua, never to be seen in Santa Fe again.

At that very moment a large force under Colonel Ugarte was hastening up the Rio Bravo to reinforce Armijo’s defenses.

Armijo’s second-in-command, Diego Archuleta, did not rise in Armijo’s absence to take the reins of the army. James Magoffin, President Polk’s secret agent, had met with Archuleta, too, and apparently offered him a separate deal. Magoffin quite disingenuously told Archuleta that Kearny was interested in annexing only
the eastern half
of New Mexico, to the banks of the Rio Grande. The details of their meeting are frustratingly vague, but it appears that Magoffin promised Archuleta that if he acquiesced in the American invasion and did not put up any resistance, he could have all of western New Mexico—an attenuated domain that nonetheless encompassed Arizona and parts of present-day Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. It is not known whether Archuleta accepted this offer, but, like Armijo, the proud soldier declined to defend his country, a tack quite uncharacteristic of him. He retreated to his ranch on the lower Rio Grande, near Albuquerque, to ride out the invasion.

In Santa Fe, the people were left in shock at the realization that their leaders had truly deserted them. The American infidels were coming, and not a thing could be done about it. Women wept in the streets. Valuables were hidden, children sent away. The people battened down their houses as though preparing for a storm. One citizen, mortified by his pusillanimous governor, wrote in disgust, “Mr. Armijo did absolutely nothing. All is lost, including honor.”

While camped along the Pecos River near the great ruins, Kearny’s men suddenly heard approaching hoofbeats. They turned from their fires to behold a rider galloping at them, gesticulating wildly, aiming straight for General Kearny. “A large fellow, mounted on a mule, came towards us at full speed, and extending his hand to the general, congratulated him on the arrival of his army,” wrote Lt. William Emory. It was the
alcalde
of the nearby Hispanic village of Pecos, and he came bearing important news. “He said, with a roar of laughter, ‘Armijo and his troops have gone to hell! The canyon is all clear!’”

Kearny did not necessarily believe the man. He treated the
alcalde
’s news as a rumor, like all the others. The Army of the West rose before dawn on the morning of August 18 and pushed toward Apache Canyon. The news that filtered back from his runners and scouts was encouraging—the
alcalde
apparently spoke the truth. But Kearny cautiously refused to accept his good fortune until he could see it with his own eyes.

When the American forces approached the canyon around noon that day, they were heartened to find that the place was indeed completely deserted. Mexican campfires were still smoldering, the earthworks were half-completed, and trees had been felled this way and that in a manner that suggested both confusion and incompetence. The defenders had quit the canyon in such a hurry that they left their cannons in place, only to be reclaimed by the Americans. Kearny did not waste time studying the nuances of this formidable defile, but it was obvious to him that the New Mexicans could have made the passage murderously difficult for his army. Lieutenant Emory thought that although Armijo’s arrangements for defense were “very stupid,” Apache Canyon was “a gateway which, in the hands of a skillful engineer and one hundred resolute men, would have been perfectly impregnable.” Had Armijo “possessed the slightest qualifications for a general,” Emory went on, “he might have given us infinite trouble.” Similarly, volunteer George Gibson, a Missouri lawyer who kept a thorough journal, deemed Apache Canyon a place of such “great natural strength [that] a few men could have held off a whole army, for cannon at the mouth could sweep the whole road as it is almost impossible even for infantry to ascend the precipitous sides.” A historian would later go further, suggesting, somewhat melodramatically, that had it been defended by an able general, the battle of Apache Canyon “would have proved a second Thermopylae.”

Nothing now stood in the way of General Kearny’s path to Santa Fe, and he made double time, hoping to have the capital before sundown. It was thirty miles from their morning’s campsite to Santa Fe, but the Missourians were excited to get a glimpse of the mythic city. “We marched rapidly on,” volunteer George Gibson wrote, “for we were all anxious to see the place about which we had heard so much.” The trail made a final bend to the right, skirting the green ridges, climbing over hills covered in chamisa sagebrush and cholla cactus and sprinkled with purple aster. It was monsoon season and the rutted road had recently been doused by a summer shower. Though it left a few wallows, the rain was a welcome thing. It cooled and sharpened the air and dampened the dust. Even now, thunderheads were piled overhead, dropping gray nails of rain that evaporated into vapor as the storms grumbled eastward.