Part 5 (1/2)

THE KING OF THE FILIBUSTERS

In one of the public squares of San Jose, which is the capital of Costa Rica, there is a marble statue of a stern-faced young woman, with her foot planted firmly on a gentleman's neck. The young woman is symbolic of the Republic of Costa Rica, and the gentleman ground beneath her heel is supposed to represent the American filibuster and soldier of fortune, William Walker. Now, before going any farther, justice requires me to explain that Walker's downfall was not due to Costa Rica, as the citizens of that little republic would like the world to believe, and as the bombastic statue in the plaza of its capital would lead one to suppose, but to a far greater and richer power, whose victories were won with dollars instead of bayonets, whose capital was New York City, and whose name was Cornelius Vanderbilt.

To the younger generation the name of William Walker carries no significance, but to the gray-heads whose recollections antedate the Civil War the mention of it brings back a flood of thrilling memories, while throughout the length and breadth of that wild region lying between the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Isthmus of Panama it is still a synonym for unfaltering courage. His weakness was ambition; his fault was failure. Had he succeeded in realizing his ambitions--and he failed only by the narrowest of margins--he would have been lauded as another Cortez, and would have received stars and crosses instead of bullets.

Had his life not been cut short by a Honduran firing-party, it is possible, indeed probable, that, instead of there being six states in Central America there would be but one, and in that one the inst.i.tution of slavery might still exist. Though I have scant sympathy with the motives which animated Walker, and though I believe that his death was for the best good of the Central American peoples, he was the very ant.i.thesis of the cutthroat and blackguard and outlaw which he has been painted, being, on the contrary, a very brave and honest gentleman, of whom his countrymen have no reason to feel ashamed, and that is why I am going to tell his story.

The eldest son of a Scotch banker, Walker was born in 1824 in Nashville, Tennessee. His father, a stiff-necked Presbyterian who held morning and evening prayers, asked an interminable grace before every meal, and took his family to church three times on Sunday, had set his heart on his son entering the ministry, and it was with a pulpit and parish in view that young Walker was educated. By the time that he was ready to enter the theological school, however, he decided that he preferred M.D.

instead of D.D. after his name, whereupon, much to his father's disappointment, he insisted on taking the medical course at the University of Tennessee, following it up by two years at the University of Edinburgh. Thoroughly equipped to practise his chosen profession, he opened an office in Philadelphia, but in a few months the routine of a doctor's life palled upon him, so, taking down his bra.s.s door-plate, he went to New Orleans, where, after two years of study, he was admitted to the bar. But he soon found that briefs and summonses were scarcely more to his liking than prescriptions and pills, so, with the prompt decision which was one of his most marked characteristics, he closed his law-office and obtained a position as editorial writer on a New Orleans newspaper. Within a year the restlessness which had led him to abandon the church, medicine, and the bar caused him to give up journalism in its turn. At this time, 1852, the Californian gold fever was at its mad height, and to the Pacific coast were pouring streams of fortune-seekers and adventure-lovers from every quarter of the globe.

One of the latter was Walker, and it was while editor of the San Francisco _Herald_, when only twenty-eight years old, that his amazing career really began.

Walker was not of the sort who could content himself for any length of time within the stuffy walls of an editorial sanctum. His fingers were made to grasp something more virile than the pen. Nor did he make any attempt to win a fortune with pick and shovel in the gold fields. His ambitions were neither intellectual nor mercenary, but political, for from his boyhood days in Nashville he had dreamed, as all boys worth their salt do dream, of some day founding a state, with himself as its ruler, in that wild and savage region below the Rio Grande. Enlisting half a hundred kindred souls from the hordes of the reckless, the adventurous, and the needy which were pouring into California by boat and wagon-train, Walker chartered a small vessel and set sail from San Francisco for the coast of Mexico. His avowed object was a purely humanitarian one: to protect the women and children living along the Mexican frontier from ma.s.sacre by the Indians, the state of Sonora being at that time more under the dominion of the Apaches than it was under that of Mexico. But it was not the protection of the women and children--though they needed protection badly enough, goodness knows--which led Walker to embark on this hare-brained expedition. He was lured southward by a dream of empire, an empire of which he should be the ruler, and which should be founded on slavery. By this time, remember, the slavery question in the United States had become exceedingly acute, the future of the inst.i.tution on this continent largely depending upon whether the next States admitted to the Union should be slave or free. Walker was a sincere, even fanatical, believer in slavery. Born and reared in an atmosphere of slavery, to Walker it was as sacred, as G.o.d-given an inst.i.tution as the Fast of Ramadan is to the Moslem or the Feast of the Pa.s.sover to the Jew. Convinced that friction over this question would sooner or later force the slave-holding States to secede from the Union, he determined to extend the area of slavery by conquering that portion of northern Mexico immediately adjacent to the United States, to establish an independent government there, and eventually to annex his country to the South, thus counteracting the growing movement for abolition, which, with the admission of new Northern territories, already hinted at the overthrow of slavery.

Financed by Southern friends whose motives were probably considerably less altruistic than his own, Walker landed at Cape San Lucas, the extreme southern point of the Mexican territory of Southern California, in October, 1852, with an ”army of invasion” of forty-five men. Instead of hastening to protect the women and children of whom he had talked so feelingly, he sailed up the coast to the territorial capital of La Paz, which he seized, where he issued a proclamation announcing the annexation of the neighboring state of Sonora, in which he had not yet set foot, giving to the two states the name of the ”Republic of Sonora,”

and proclaiming himself its first president. As soon as the news of this initial success reached San Francisco, Walker's sympathizers there busied themselves in recruiting reinforcements, three hundred desperadoes who boasted that they were afraid of nothing ”on two feet or four” being s.h.i.+pped to him at La Paz a few weeks later. These men were looked upon as hard cases even in the San Francisco of the early fifties, and, if they had not consented to leave the country to a.s.sist Walker, many of them would probably have left it sooner or later at the end of a rope in the hands of the local vigilance committee. When this force of scoundrels arrived at La Paz and found themselves under the command of a quiet, mild-mannered, beardless youth of twenty-eight, instead of the brawny, foul-mouthed, swashbuckling leader whom they had expected, they promptly hatched a scheme to blow up the magazine, seize the s.h.i.+p and the stores of the expedition in the ensuing confusion, and make their way back to the United States, leaving Walker to s.h.i.+ft for himself. Warning of the conspiracy reaching him, however, Walker displayed for the first time those traits which were later to make his name a word of terror in the ears of men who bragged that they feared neither G.o.d nor man. Arresting the ringleaders, he had two of them tried by court-martial and shot within an hour; two of the others he ordered flogged and drummed out of camp, to take their chances among the hostile Mexicans and Indians. But, though this act gained Walker the fear and respect of his followers, the newcomers among them had no stomach for a leader who could punish, so when he called for volunteers to accompany him in the conquest of Sonora less than a hundred men offered to follow him.

From the very first the shadow of failure hung over the enterprise. To begin with, there is no more savage and desolate region on the American continent than the peninsula of Lower California, it being so barren and dest.i.tute that even the lizards have to scramble for an existence.

Mexicans and Indians hung upon the flanks of the little column night and day, as buzzards follow a dying steer. There was neither medicine nor medical instruments with the expedition, and the wounded died from lack of the most elementary care. Their shoes gave out and the men marched bare-foot over sun-scorched rocks and needle cactus, leaving a trail of crimson behind them in the sand. Their provisions were soon exhausted, and their only food was beef which they killed on the march. For years afterward the route of that ill-fated expedition could be traced from La Paz to the Colorado River by the bleaching skeletons of the men who fell by the way. By the time the head of the Gulf of California was reached the expedition had dwindled to barely twoscore men. It was no longer a question of conquering Sonora; it was a question of getting back to the States alive.

With sinking heart, but imperturbable face, Walker led his little band of starving, fever-racked, exhausted men toward the Californian line.

Three miles of road led through a mountain pa.s.s into the United States and safety. But the pa.s.s was held by a force of Mexican soldiery under Colonel Melendrez, and his Indian allies were scattered over the plain below. And, as though to give a final touch of irony to the situation in which Walker and his men found themselves, from their position on the Mexican hillside they could look across into American territory, could see the American flag, their flag, fluttering over the military post south of San Diego, could even see the sun glinting upon the bits and sabres of the troop of American cavalry drawn up along the border. Four Indians bearing a flag of truce approached. They bore a message from the Mexican commander to the filibusters. If they would surrender their leader and give up their arms, Melendrez sent word, they would be permitted to leave the country unmolested. But after you have fought and bled and marched and starved with a man for a year, you are not likely to abandon him, particularly when the end is in sight, so they sent back word to Melendrez that if he wanted their arms he would have to come and take them. Meanwhile the American commander, Major McKinstry, had drawn up his troopers along the boundary-line and awaited the result of the unequal struggle like an umpire at a foot-ball game. Walker, who knew perfectly well that he deserved no aid from the United States, and that he would get none, appreciated that if he was to get out of this predicament alive it must be by his own wits. Concealing a dozen of his men among the rocks and sage-brush which lined the road on either side, with the remainder of his force he pretended to beat a panic-stricken retreat. Melendrez, confident that it was now all over but the shouting, swept down the road in pursuit. But as the Mexicans rode into the ambush which Walker had prepared for them the hidden filibusters emptied a dozen saddles at a single volley, and the soldiers, terrified and demoralized, wheeled and fled for their lives. Thirty minutes later the President, the Cabinet, and all that remained of the standing army of the late Republic of Sonora stumbled across the American boundary and surrendered to Major McKinstry. It was May 8, 1854, and in such fas.h.i.+on Walker celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

Sent to San Francisco as a political prisoner, Walker was tried for violating the neutrality laws of the United States, was acquitted--for the members of a Californian jury could not but sympathize with such a man--and once again found himself writing editorials for the San Francisco _Herald_. His narrow escape from death in Mexico had only served to whet his appet.i.te for adventure, however, so when he was not doing his newspaper work he was poring over an atlas in search of some other land where a determined man might carve out a career for himself with his sword. Staring at the map of Middle America, his finger again and again paused, as though by instinct, on Nicaragua. Here was indeed a fertile field for the filibuster. Not only was the country enormously rich in every form of natural resources, but it had a kindly and moderately healthy climate, and, what was the most important of all, owing to its peculiar geographical position, it commanded what was at that time one of the great trade-routes of the world. At this time there were three routes to the Californian gold-fields: one, the long and weary voyage around the Horn; another, by the dangerous and costly Overland Trail; and the third, which was the shortest, cheapest, and most popular, across Nicaragua. If you will glance at the map, you will see that, barring the Isthmus of Panama, which is several hundred miles farther south, Nicaragua is the narrowest neck of land between the two great oceans, and that in the middle of this neck is the great Lake Nicaragua, which is upward of fifty miles in width. An American corporation known as the Accessory Transit Company, of which the first Cornelius Vanderbilt was president, had obtained a concession from the Nicaraguan Government to transport pa.s.sengers across Central America by this route. Pa.s.sengers _en route_ from New York or New Orleans to the gold-fields were landed by the company's steamers at Greytown, on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, and transported thence by light-draught steamers up the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua. Here they were transferred to larger steamers and taken across the lake to Virgin Bay, the twelve-mile journey from there to the port of San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, being performed in carriages or on the backs of mules. During a single year twenty-five thousand pa.s.sengers crossed Nicaragua by this route. It did not take Walker long to appreciate, therefore, that the man who succeeded in making himself master of this, the shortest route to California, would be in a position of considerable strength. Not only this, but Nicaragua was torn by internal dissensions; the army was divided into a dozen factions; the peasantry were down-trodden and poverty-stricken; the government was inconceivably corrupt; and the usual revolution was, of course, in progress, in which the sister republics of Honduras and Costa Rica were preparing to take a hand. Everything considered, Nicaragua's only hope of salvation from anarchy lay in finding for a ruler a man with an inflexible sense of justice and an iron hand. Walker determined to be that man.

In view of what I have already told of his exploits, you have doubtless pictured Walker as a tall, broad-shouldered man of commanding presence.

As a matter of fact, he was nothing of the sort. In height he was but five feet five inches, and correspondingly slender. A remarkably square jaw and a long chin lent strength and determination to features which were plain almost to the point of coa.r.s.eness. His eyes, which were of a singularly light gray, are universally spoken of as having been his most noticeable feature, for they were so large and fixed that the eyelids scarcely showed, and so penetrating that they seemed to bore holes into the person at whom they were looking. He was extremely taciturn, and when he did speak it was briefly and to the point. He had an unusual command of English, however, and his words were always carefully chosen.

A stranger to fear, men who followed him on his campaigns a.s.sert that even under the most trying and perilous circ.u.mstances they had never seen him change countenance or betray emotion by so much as the contraction of a muscle. He was wholly lacking in personal vanity, and when in the field wore his trousers tucked into his boots, a flannel s.h.i.+rt open at the neck, and a faded black campaign hat. In a land where all three habits were universal, he neither drank, smoked, nor swore; he never looked at women; his word, once given, was never broken; the justice he meted out to disobedient followers, though stern to the point of brutality, was absolutely impartial. Highly ambitious, it is paying but the barest justice to his memory to say that his aspirations, however little we may sympathize with them, were wholly political and never mercenary, his whole career showing him to be utterly careless of wealth. Taking everything into consideration, we have good reason to be proud that William Walker was an American.

In 1854, as I have already remarked, Nicaragua was split asunder by civil war. The opposing parties were the Legitimists and the Democrats.

What they were fighting about is of no consequence; perhaps they did not know themselves. In any event, in August of that year an American named Byron Cole, acting as an agent for Walker, arrived at the headquarters of the Democratic forces with a novel offer. Briefly, he agreed to contract to supply the Democratic party with three hundred American ”colonists liable to military duty,” these settlers to receive a grant of fifty-two thousand acres of land, and to have the privilege of becoming citizens of Nicaragua. This contract was approved and signed by General Castillon, the Democratic leader, and with it in his pocket Cole hastened to San Francisco and Walker. After taking the precaution of submitting the contract to the civil and military authorities in San Francisco, and receiving their a.s.surances that it did not violate the neutrality laws of the United States, Walker immediately set about recruiting his ”colonists,” and in May, 1855, just a year after his escape from Mexico, he was ready to sail. Although, as I have said, the Federal authorities had pa.s.sed upon the legality of the contract, it was a noticeable fact that the peaceable settlers took with them Winchester rifles instead of spades, and Colt's revolvers instead of hoes, and that the hold of the brig _Vesta_, on which they sailed from San Francisco, was filled with ammunition and machine guns instead of agricultural implements and machinery.

After a long and stormy voyage down the Pacific coast Walker and his men landed, on June 16, at the port of Realejo, in Nicaragua, where he was met by Castillon. Walker was at once commissioned a colonel; Achilles Kewen, who had just come from Cuba, where he had been fighting under the patriot Lopez, a lieutenant-colonel; and Timothy Crocker, a fighting Irishman, who was a veteran of Walker's Sonora expedition, a major; the corps being organized as an independent command under the name of _La Falange Americana_--the American Phalanx. At this time the Transit route from the Atlantic to the Pacific was held by the Legitimist forces, and these Walker was ordered to dislodge, it being essential to the success of the Democrats that they gain possession of this interoceanic highway. Accordingly, a week after setting foot in Nicaragua, Walker, at the head of fifty-seven of his Americans and one hundred and fifty native soldiers, set out for Rivas, a town on the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Nicaragua held by twelve hundred of the enemy. The first battle of his Nicaraguan campaign ended in the most complete disaster. At the first volley his native allies bolted, leaving the Americans surrounded by ten times their number of Legitimists. The enemy instantly perceived this defection, and pressed the Phalanx so hard that its members were driven to take shelter behind a row of adobe huts.

No one knew better than Walker that if the enemy charged he and his men were done for, so he decided to do the charging himself. Out from behind the huts dashed the red-s.h.i.+rted filibusters, firing as they came, and so ferocious was their onslaught that they succeeded in cutting their way through the encircling army and escaping into the jungle. Though six of the Americans were killed, including Walker's two lieutenants, Kewen and Crocker, and twice as many wounded, the battle of Rivas established the reputation of Americans in Central America for years to come, for a hundred and fifty of the enemy fell before their deadly fire.

[Ill.u.s.tration: General William Walker and his men, after a long and stormy voyage, landing at Virgin Bay, en route to Costa Rica.

From a print in the New York Public Library.]

Bleeding and exhausted from battle and travel, Walker and his men, after an all-night march through the jungle, limped into the port of San Juan del Sur, and, finding a Costa Rican vessel in the harbor, they seized it for their own use. Still bearing in mind the necessity of getting control of the Transit route, Walker gave his men only a few days in which to recover from their wounds and weariness, and then was off again, this time for Virgin Bay, the halting-place for pa.s.sengers going east or west. Though in the fight which ensued Walker was outnumbered five to one, his losses were only three natives killed and a few Americans wounded, while one hundred and fifty of the enemy fell before the rifles of the filibusters. This disparity of losses emphasizes, as does nothing else, the deadliness of the American fire.

After the fight at Virgin Bay Walker received from California fifty recruits, thus bringing the force under his command up to some four hundred men, about a third of whom were Americans. The Legitimists, learning that he was planning to again attack Rivas, hastened to reinforce the garrison of that town by hurrying troops there from their headquarters at Granada, which was farther up the lake, planning to give Walker a warm and unexpected reception. But it was Walker who did the surprising, for, having his own channels of secret information, he no sooner learned of the weakened condition of Granada than he determined to direct his efforts against that place, instead of Rivas, and by capturing it to give the Legitimist cause a solar-plexus blow. Embarking his men on a small steamer with the announced intention of attacking Rivas, as soon as night fell he turned in the opposite direction and, with lights out and fires banked, steamed silently up the lake. Dawn found him off Granada, the garrison and inhabitants of which were sleeping off a drunken debauch with which they had celebrated a recent victory. Even the sentries drowsed at their posts. Un.o.bserved, the Americans landed in the semi-darkness of the early dawn, and it was not until they had reached the very outskirts of the town that a sentry suddenly awakened to their presence and gave the alarm by letting off his rifle, the shot being instantly answered by a crackle of musketry as the Americans opened fire. ”Charge!” shouted Walker, ”Get at 'em! Get at 'em!” and dashed forward at a run, a revolver in each hand, with his followers, cheering like madmen, close at his heels. ”Los Filibusteros!

Los Filibusteros!” screamed the terror-stricken inhabitants, catching sight of the red s.h.i.+rts and scarlet hat-bands of the Americans. ”Run for your lives!” The demoralized garrison made a brief and ineffective stand in the Plaza, and then threw down their arms. Walker was master of Granada. He at once inst.i.tuted a military government, released over a hundred political prisoners confined in the local jail, policed the town as effectually as though it were a New England village, and when he caught one of his native soldiers in the act of looting, ran him through with his sword.

Walker was now in a position to dictate his own terms of peace, and, four months after he and his fifty-seven followers landed in Nicaragua, an armistice was arranged and the side to which the Americans had lent their aid was in power. A native named Rivas was made provisional president, and Walker was appointed commander-in-chief of the army, which at that time numbered about twelve hundred men. Though insignificant in numbers when judged by European standards, this was really a remarkable force, and perhaps the most effective for its size known to military history. The officers had all seen service under many flags and in many lands--in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Algeria, Italy, Egypt, Russia, India, China--and the men, nearly all of whom had been recruited in San Francisco, boasted that ”California was the pick of the world, and they were the pick of California.” There was scarcely a man among them who could not flick the ashes from a cigar with his revolver at a hundred feet, or with his rifle hit a dollar held between a man's thumb and forefinger at a hundred yards. All the strange, wild natures for whom even the mining-camps of California had grown too tame were drawn to Walker's flag as iron filings are drawn to a magnet.

Frederick Townsend Ward, the New England youth who raised, trained, and led the Ever-Victorious Army, who rose to be an admiral-general of China, and who performed the astounding exploits for which General Charles Gordon received the credit, gained much of his military training under Walker; Joaquin Miller, ”the poet of the Sierras,” was another of his devoted followers, while scores of the other men who fought under the blue-and-white banner with the scarlet star in later years achieved name and fame in many different lands.