Real Soldiers of Fortune Part 10

His followers called him, and later, when he was thirty-two years old, he was known all over the United States as the "Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny."

From the first Walker recognized that in order to establish himself in Nicaragua he must keep in touch with all possible recruits arriving from San Francisco and New York, and that to do this he must hold the line of transit from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific. At this time the sea routes to the gold-fields were three: by sailing vessel around the Cape, one over the Isthmus of Panama, and one, which was the shortest, across Nicaragua. By a charter from the Government of Nicaragua, the right to transport pa.s.sengers across this isthmus was controlled by the Accessory Transit Company, of which the first Cornelius Vanderbilt was president.

His company owned a line of ocean steamers both on the Pacific side and on the Atlantic side. Pa.s.sengers _en route_ from New York to the gold-fields were landed by these latter steamers at Greytown on the west coast of Nicaragua, and sent by boats of light draught up the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua. There they were met by larger lake steamers and conveyed across the lake to Virgin Bay. From that point, in carriages and on mule back, they were carried twelve miles overland to the port of San Juan del Sud on the Pacific Coast, where they boarded the company's steamers to San Francisco.

During the year of Walker's occupation the number of pa.s.sengers crossing Nicaragua was an average of about two thousand a month.

It was to control this route that immediately after his first defeat Walker returned to San Juan del Sud, and in a smart skirmish defeated the enemy and secured possession of Virgin Bay, the halting place for the pa.s.sengers going east or west. In this fight Walker was outnumbered five to one, but his losses were only three natives killed and a few Americans wounded. The Legitimists lost sixty killed and a hundred wounded. This proportion of losses shows how fatally effective was the rifle and revolver fire of the Californians. Indeed, so wonderful was it that when some years ago I visited the towns and cities captured by the filibusters, I found that the marksmanship of Walker's Phalanx was still a tradition. Indeed, thanks to the filibusters, to-day in any part of Central America a man from the States, if in trouble, has only to show his gun. No native will wait for him to fire it.

After the fight at Virgin Bay, Walker received from California fifty recruits--a very welcome addition to his force, and as he now commanded about one hundred and twenty Americans, three hundred Nicaraguans, under a friendly native, General Valle, and two bra.s.s cannon, he decided to again attack Rivas. Rivas is on the lake just above Virgin Bay; still further up is Granada, which was the head-quarters of the Legitimists.

Fearing Walker's attack upon Rivas, the Legitimist troops were hurried south from Granada to that city, leaving Granada but slightly protected.

Through intercepted letters Walker learned of this and determined to strike at Granada. By night, in one of the lake steamers, he skirted the sh.o.r.e, and just before daybreak, with fires banked and all lights out, drew up to a point near the city. The day previous the Legitimists had gained a victory, and, as good luck or Walker's "destiny" would have it, the night before Granada had been celebrating the event. Much joyous dancing and much drinking of aguardiente had buried the inhabitants in a drugged slumber. The garrison slept, the sentries slept, the city slept.

But when the convent bells called for early ma.s.s, the air was shaken with sharp reports that to the ears of the Legitimists were unfamiliar and disquieting. They were not the loud explosions of their own muskets nor of the smooth bores of the Democrats. The sounds were sharp and cruel like the crack of a whip. The sentries flying from their posts disclosed the terrifying truth. "The Filibusteros!" they cried.

Following them at a gallop came Walker and Valle and behind them the men of the awful Phalanx, whom already the natives had learned to fear: the bearded giants in red flannel shirts who at Rivas on foot had charged the artillery with revolvers, who at Virgin Bay when wounded had drawn from their boots glittering bowie knives and hurled them like arrows, who at all times shot with the accuracy of the hawk falling upon a squawking hen.

There was a brief terrified stand in the Plaza, and then a complete rout. As was their custom, the native Democrats began at once to loot the city. But Walker put his sword into the first one of these he met, and ordered the Americans to arrest all others found stealing, and to return the goods already stolen. Over a hundred political prisoners in the cartel were released by Walker, and the ball and chain to which each was fastened stricken off. More than two-thirds of them at once enlisted under Walker's banner.

He now was in a position to dictate to the enemy his own terms of peace, but a fatal blunder on the part of Parker H. French, a lieutenant of Walker's, postponed peace for several weeks, and led to unfortunate reprisals. French had made an unauthorized and unsuccessful a.s.sault on San Carlos at the eastern end of the lake, and the Legitimists retaliated at Virgin Bay by killing half a dozen peaceful pa.s.sengers, and at San Carlos by firing at a transit steamer. For this the excuse of the Legitimists was, that now that Walker was using the lake steamers as transports it was impossible for them to know whether the boats were occupied by his men or neutral pa.s.sengers. As he could not reach the guilty ones, Walker held responsible for their acts their secretary of state, who at the taking of Granada was among the prisoners. He was tried by court-martial and shot, "a victim of the new interpretation of the principles of const.i.tutional government." While this act of Walker's was certainly stretching the theory of responsibility to the breaking point, its immediate effect was to bring about a hasty surrender and a meeting between the generals of the two political parties. Thus, four months after Walker and his fifty-seven followers landed in Nicaragua, a suspension of hostilities was arranged, and the side for which the Americans had fought was in power. Walker was made commander-in-chief of an army of twelve hundred men with salary of six thousand dollars a year. A man named Rivas was appointed temporary president.

To Walker this pause in the fight was most welcome. It gave him an opportunity to enlist recruits and to organize his men for the better accomplishment of what was the real object of his going to Nicaragua. He now had under him a remarkable force, one of the most effective known to military history. For although six months had not yet pa.s.sed, the organization he now commanded was as unlike the Phalanx of the fifty-eight adventurers who were driven back at Rivas, as were Falstaff's followers from the regiment of picked men commanded by Colonel Roosevelt. Instead of the undisciplined and lawless now being in the majority, the ranks were filled with the pick of the California mining camps, with veterans of the Mexican War, with young Southerners of birth and spirit, and with soldiers of fortune from all of the great armies of Europe.

In the Civil War, which so soon followed, and later in the service of the Khedive of Egypt, were several of Walker's officers, and for years after his death there was no war in which one of the men trained by him in the jungles of Nicaragua did not distinguish himself. In his memoirs, the Englishman, General Charles Frederic Henningsen, writes that though he had taken part in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War he would pit a thousand men of Walker's command against any five thousand Confederate or Union soldiers. And General Henningsen was one who spoke with authority. Before he joined Walker he had served in Spain under Don Carlos, in Hungary under Kossuth, and in Bulgaria.

Of Walker's men, a regiment of which he commanded, he writes: "I often have seen them march with a broken or compound fractured arm in splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or revolver. Those with a fractured thigh or wounds which rendered them incapable of removal, shot themselves. Such men do not turn up in the average of everyday life, nor do I ever expect to see their like again. All military science failed on a suddenly given field before such a.s.sailants, who came at a run to close with their revolvers and who thought little of charging a gun battery, pistol in hand."

Another graduate of Walker's army was Captain Fred Townsend Ward, a native of Salem, Ma.s.s., who after the death of Walker organized and led the ever victorious army that put down the Tai-Ping rebellion, and performed the many feats of martial glory for which Chinese Gordon received the credit. In Shanghai, to the memory of the filibuster, there are to-day two temples in his honor.

Joaquin Miller, the poet, miner, and soldier, who but recently was a picturesque figure on the hotel porch at Saratoga Springs, was one of the young Californians who was "out with Walker," and who later in his career by his verse helped to preserve the name of his beloved commander. I. C. Jamison, living to-day in Guthrie, Oklahoma, was a captain under Walker. When war again came, as it did within four months, these were the men who made Walker President of Nicaragua.

During the four months in all but t.i.tle he had been president, and as such he was recognized and feared. It was against him, not Rivas, that in February, 1856, the neighboring republic of Costa Rica declared war.

For three months this war continued with varying fortunes until the Costa Ricans were driven across the border.

In June of the same year Rivas called a general election for president, announcing himself as the candidate of the Democrats. Two other Democrats also presented themselves, Salazar and Ferrer. The Legitimists, recognizing in their former enemy the real ruler of the country, nominated Walker. By an overwhelming majority he was elected, receiving 15,835 votes to 867 cast for Rivas. Salazar received 2,087; Ferrer, 4,447.

Walker now was the legal as well as the actual ruler of the country, and at no time in its history, as during Walker's administration, was Nicaragua governed so justly, so wisely, and so well. But in his success the neighboring republics saw a menace to their own independence. To the four other republics of Central America the five-pointed blood-red star on the flag of the filibusters bore a sinister motto: "Five or None."

The meaning was only too unpleasantly obvious. At once, Costa Rica on the south, and Guatemala, Salvador, and Honduras from the north, with the malcontents of Nicaragua, declared war against the foreign invader.

Again Walker was in the field with opposed to him 21,000 of the allies.

The strength of his own force varied. On his election as president the backbone of his army was a magnificently trained body of veterans to the number of 2,000. This was later increased to 3,500, but it is doubtful if at any one time it ever exceeded that number. His muster and hospital rolls show that during his entire occupation of Nicaragua there were enlisted, at one time or another, under his banner 10,000 men. While in his service, of this number, by hostile shots or fever, 5,000 died.

To describe the battles with the allies would be interminable and wearying. In every particular they are much alike: the long silent night march, the rush at daybreak, the fight to gain strategic positions either of the barracks, or of the Cathedral in the Plaza, the hand-to-hand fighting from behind barricades and adobe walls. The out-come of these fights sometimes varied, but the final result was never in doubt, and had no outside influences intervened, in time each republic in Central America would have come under the five-pointed star.

In Costa Rica there is a marble statue showing that republic represented as a young woman with her foot upon the neck of Walker. Some night a truth-loving American will place a can of dynamite at the foot of that statue, and walk hurriedly away. Unaided, neither Costa Rica nor any other Central American republic could have driven Walker from her soil.

His downfall came through his own people, and through an act of his which provoked them.

When Walker was elected president he found that the Accessory Transit Company had not lived up to the terms of its concession with the Nicaraguan Government. His efforts to hold it to the terms of its concession led to his overthrow. By its charter the Transit Company agreed to pay to Nicaragua ten thousand dollars annually and ten per cent. of the net profits; but the company, whose history the United States Minister, Squire, characterized as "an infamous career of deception and fraud," manipulated its books in such a fashion as to show that there never were any profits. Doubting this, Walker sent a commission to New York to investigate. The commission discovered the fraud and demanded in back payments two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. When the company refused to pay this, as security for the debt Walker seized its steamers, wharves, and storehouses, revoked its charter, and gave a new charter to two of its directors, Morgan and Garrison, who, in San Francisco, were working against Vanderbilt. In doing this, while he was legally in the right, he committed a fatal error. He had made a powerful enemy of Vanderbilt, and he had shut off his only lines of communication with the United States. For, enraged at the presumption of the filibuster president, Vanderbilt withdrew his ocean steamers, thus leaving Walker without men or ammunition, and as isolated as though upon a deserted island. He possessed Vanderbilt's boats upon the San Juan River and Nicaragua Lake, but they were of use to him only locally.

His position was that of a man holding the centre span of a bridge of which every span on either side of him has been destroyed.

Vanderbilt did not rest at withdrawing his steamers, but by supporting the Costa Ricans with money and men, carried the war into Central America. From Washington he fought Walker through Secretary of State Marcy, who proved a willing tool.

Spencer and Webster, and the other soldiers of fortune employed by Vanderbilt, closed the route on the Caribbean side, and the man-of-war _St. Marys_, commanded by Captain Davis, was ordered to San Juan on the Pacific side. The instructions given to Captain Davis were to aid the allies in forcing Walker out of Nicaragua. Walker claims that these orders were given to Marcy by Vanderbilt and by Marcy to Commodore Mervin, who was Marcy's personal friend and who issued them to Davis.

Davis claims that he acted only in the interest of humanity to save Walker in spite of himself. In any event, the result was the same.

Walker, his force cut down by hostile shot and fever and desertion, took refuge in Rivas, where he was besieged by the allied armies. There was no bread in the city. The men were living on horse and mule meat. There was no salt. The hospital was filled with wounded and those stricken with fever.

Captain Davis, in the name of humanity, demanded Walker's surrender to the United States. Walker told him he would not surrender, but that if the time came when he found he must fly, he would do so in his own little schooner of war, the _Granada_, which const.i.tuted his entire navy, and in her, as a free man, take his forces where he pleased. Then Davis informed Walker that the force Walker had sent to recapture the Greytown route had been defeated by the janizaries of Vanderbilt; that the steamers from San Francisco, on which Walker now counted to bring him re-enforcements, had also been taken off the line, and finally that it was his "unalterable and deliberate intention" to seize the _Granada_. On this point his orders left him no choice. The _Granada_ was the last means of transportation still left to Walker. He had hoped to make a sortie and on board her to escape from the country. But with his ship taken from him and no longer able to sustain the siege of the allies, he surrendered to the forces of the United States. In the agreement drawn up by him and Davis, Walker provided for the care, by Davis, of the sick and wounded, for the protection after his departure of the natives who had fought with him, and for the transportation of himself and officers to the United States.

On his arrival in New York he received a welcome such as later was extended to Kossuth, and, in our own day, to Admiral Dewey. The city was decorated with flags and arches; and banquets, fetes, and public meetings were everywhere held in his honor. Walker received these demonstrations modestly, and on every public occasion announced his determination to return to the country of which he was the president, and from which by force he had been driven. At Washington, where he went to present his claims, he received scant encouragement. His protest against Captain Davis was referred to Congress, where it was allowed to die.

Within a month Walker organized an expedition with which to regain his rights in Nicaragua, and as, in his new const.i.tution for that country, he had annulled the old law abolishing slavery, among the slave-holders of the South he found enough money and recruits to enable him to at once leave the United States. With one hundred and fifty men he sailed from New Orleans and landed at San del Norte on the Caribbean side. While he formed a camp on the harbor of San Juan, one of his officers, with fifty men, proceeded up the river and, capturing the town of Castillo Viejo and four of the Transit steamers, was in a fair way to obtain possession of the entire route. At this moment upon the scene arrived the United States frigate _Wabash_ and Hiram Paulding, who landed a force of three hundred and fifty blue-jackets with howitzers, and turned the guns of his frigate upon the camp of the President of Nicaragua. Captain Engel, who presented the terms of surrender to Walker, said to him: "General, I am sorry to see you here. A man like you is worthy to command better men." To which Walker replied grimly: "If I had a third the number you have brought against me, I would show you which of us two commands the better men."

For the third time in his history Walker surrendered to the armed forces of his own country.

On his arrival in the United States, in fulfilment of his parole to Paulding, Walker at once presented himself at Washington a prisoner of war. But President Buchanan, although Paulding had acted exactly as Davis had done, refused to support him, and in a message to Congress declared that that officer had committed a grave error and established an unsafe precedent.

On the strength of this Walker demanded of the United States Government indemnity for his losses, and that it should furnish him and his followers transportation even to the very camp from which its representatives had torn him. This demand, as Walker foresaw, was not considered seriously, and with a force of about one hundred men, among whom were many of his veterans, he again set sail from New Orleans.

Owing to the fact that, to prevent his return, there now were on each side of the Isthmus both American and British men-of-war, Walker, with the idea of reaching Nicaragua by land, stopped off at Honduras. In his war with the allies the Honduranians had been as savage in their attacks upon his men as even the Costa Ricans, and finding his old enemies now engaged in a local revolution, on landing, Walker declared for the weaker side and captured the important seaport of Trujillo. He no sooner had taken it than the British warship _Icarus_ anch.o.r.ed in the harbor, and her commanding officer, Captain Salmon, notified Walker that the British Government held a mortgage on the revenues of the port, and that to protect the interests of his Government he intended to take the town.

Walker answered that he had made Trujillo a free port, and that Great Britain's claims no longer existed.

The British officer replied that if Walker surrendered himself and his men he would carry them as prisoners to the United States, and that if he did not, he would bombard the town. At this moment General Alvarez, with seven hundred Honduranians, from the land side surrounded Trujillo, and prepared to attack. Against such odds by sea and land Walker was helpless, and he determined to fly. That night, with seventy men, he left the town and proceeded down the coast toward Nicaragua. The _Icarus_, having taken on board Alvarez, started in pursuit. The President of Nicaragua was found in a little Indian fishing village, and Salmon sent in his sh.o.r.e-boats and demanded his surrender. On leaving Trujillo, Walker had been forced to abandon all his ammunition save thirty rounds a man, and all of his food supplies excepting two barrels of bread. On the coast of this continent there is no spot more unhealthy than Honduras, and when the Englishmen entered the fishing village they found Walker's seventy men lying in the palm huts helpless with fever, and with no stomach to fight British blue-jackets with whom they had no quarrel. Walker inquired of Salmon if he were asking him to surrender to the British or to the Honduranian forces, and twice Salmon a.s.sured him, "distinctly and specifically," that he was surrendering to the forces of her Majesty. With this understanding Walker and his men laid down their arms and were conveyed to the _Icarus_. But on arriving at Trujillo, in spite of their protests and demands for trial by a British tribunal, Salmon turned over his prisoners to the Honduranian general. What excuse for this is now given by his descendants in the Salmon family I do not know.

Probably it is a subject they avoid, and, in history, Salmon's version has never been given, which for him, perhaps, is an injustice. But the fact remains that he turned over his white brothers to the mercies of half-Indian, half-negro, savages, who were not allies of Great Britain, and in whose quarrels she had no interest. And Salmon did this, knowing there could be but one end. If he did not know it, his stupidity equalled what now appears to be heartless indifference. So far as to secure pardon for all except the leader and one faithful follower, Colonel Rudler of the famous Phalanx, Salmon did use his authority, and he offered, if Walker would ask as an American citizen, to intercede for him. But Walker, with a distinct sense of loyalty to the country he had conquered, and whose people had honored him with their votes, refused to accept life from the country of his birth, the country that had injured and repudiated him.

Even in his extremity, abandoned and alone on a strip of glaring coral and noisome swamp land, surrounded only by his enemies, he remained true to his ideal.

At thirty-seven life is very sweet, many things still seem possible, and before him, could his life be spared, Walker beheld greater conquests, more power, a new South controlling a Nicaragua ca.n.a.l, a network of busy railroads, great squadrons of merchant vessels, himself emperor of Central America. On the gunboat the gold-braided youth had but to raise his hand, and Walker again would be a free man. But the gold-braided one would render this service only on the condition that Walker would appeal to him as an American; it was not enough that Walker was a human being.

The condition Walker could not grant.

"The President of Nicaragua," he said, "is a citizen of Nicaragua."

They led him out at sunrise to a level piece of sand along the beach, and as the priest held the crucifix in front of him he spoke to his executioners in Spanish, simply and gravely: "I die a Roman Catholic.

In making war upon you at the invitation of the people of Ruatan I was wrong. Of your people I ask pardon. I accept my punishment with resignation. I would like to think my death will be for the good of society."

From a distance of twenty feet three soldiers fired at him, but, although each shot took effect, Walker was not dead. So, a sergeant stooped, and with a pistol killed the man who would have made him one of an empire of slaves.

Had Walker lived four years longer to exhibit upon the great board of the Civil War his ability as a general, he would, I believe, to-day be ranked as one of America's greatest fighting men.

And because the people of his own day destroyed him is no reason that we should withhold from this American, the greatest of all filibusters, the recognition of his genius.

MAJOR BURNHAM, CHIEF OF SCOUTS

AMONG the Soldiers of Fortune whose stories have been told in this book were men who are no longer living, men who, to the United States, are strangers, and men who were of interest chiefly because in what they attempted they failed.

The subject of this article is none of these. His adventures are as remarkable as any that ever led a small boy to dig behind the barn for buried treasure, or stalk Indians in the orchard. But entirely apart from his adventures he obtains our interest because in what he has attempted he has not failed, because he is one of our own people, one of the earliest and best types of American, and because, so far from being dead and buried, he is at this moment very much alive, and engaged in Mexico in searching for a buried city. For exercise, he is alternately chasing, or being chased by, Yaqui Indians.