Before the dramatic news from the Mexican border reached Washington—or even Charleston—Sherman received orders to report to the army’s Eastern Command at Governors Island, New York. On arrival he was assigned to recruiting duty, an important activity, and was to be stationed at Pittsburgh. Accordingly, he and a small contingent took a stagecoach and set up headquarters within a couple of weeks. He was pleased to learn that his area of responsibility included a substation at Zanesville, Ohio, not very far from Lancaster. Any inspection trip to Zanesville could easily afford him a chance to visit home.

In late May events began to move rapidly. On a trip back to Pittsburgh from Zanesville, Sherman learned that war had been formally declared between the United States and Mexico. After the skirmish on the Rio Grande that precipitated the conflict, the Mexican commander at Matamoros, General Pedro de Ampudia, had brought his army across the Rio Grande, where Zachary Taylor’s men, though vastly outnumbered, had fought him to a standstill at Palo Alto. On May 9, the next day, the Mexican army at Resaca de la Palma had been shattered, inflicting heavy loss and forcing Ampudia to flee back across the river. The details were probably not in the dispatches that Sherman received, but the fact that actual fighting had broken out put him in a state of excitement. He decided on the spot that he could no longer tolerate recruiting duty; he had to get into the action.

On arrival back at Pittsburgh, Sherman found a letter waiting for him from Governors Island. His West Point roommate Edward O. C. Ord, like Sherman a member of the 3d Artillery, had received orders to proceed to California, and he was inviting Sherman to join him. Sherman grasped at the opportunity. He was not part of Taylor’s army, but he saw California as the coming theater. He wrote the adjutant general,¹ who placed him on orders to join a group traveling by ship to California. Among the others, besides Ord, was a friend from West Point days, Lieutenant Henry Wager Halleck.

On July 14, 1846, Sherman’s packet departed New York City aboard the USS Lexington, an aged warship that had been converted into a “store ship” (freighter) carrying artillery pieces and a great amount of gunpowder. She was bound for California by way of Rio de Janeiro, the Strait of Magellan, and Valparaiso. As Sherman calculated it, the voyage would be twenty-two thousand miles in length and would require several months to complete. (He noted that the trip overland would be something like two thousand miles.)

The Lexington’s long route had her sailing eastward across the Atlantic to a point near Africa in order to make use of the prevailing winds from the west. After crossing the equator she would travel from east to west. Sherman at first hoped that this route would allow a stopover at Madeira, but the captain’s orders specified that the only refueling stations to be visited would be Rio de Janeiro and Valparaiso. So he missed a bit of sightseeing.

—

The Lexington was a congenial ship. As the men expected action at the end of the voyage, they were buoyed by a spirit of adventure. The captain was an experienced old sailor who had crossed through the critical and dangerous Strait of Magellan several times. Though his position gave him the power to administer severe discipline, Sherman noted that such action was seldom necessary. There was, in fact, room for a bit of levity on occasion. A great deal, for example, was made of the fact of crossing the equator. In a letter home, Sherman described to Ellen how it was observed:

The ship was pronounced on the equator at eight this forenoon when I was summoned to the Captain’s cabin where a holystone [piece of hard stone used for cleaning decks] was presented for me to rest my hand upon when the following oath was administered by the Captain in person: “You do swear that you will not chew pig-tail when you can get good Cavendish, that you will not eat hard tack when you can get soft bread, unless you like the hard best, that you will not kiss the maid instead of the mistress, unless you like the maid best, and in all other things comport yourself like a true son of Neptune. So help you salt water”—a dash of which was sprinkled in my face. I was then duly initiated, and in my turn administered the same oath to all of our officers on the quarter deck, taking care to baptize them well in salt water.²

The Lexington was carrying ten officers, six from the army and four from the navy. Sherman, as a senior first lieutenant, was the highest-ranking army officer, and according to custom was the channel through whom the captain issued all his orders to the soldiers.

Life for the officers centered around a wardroom, which was surrounded by several officers’ cabins. Sherman shared a stateroom with Ord, and the other four army officers, including Halleck, roomed together. The space in the staterooms was limited, however, and they were used only for sleeping.

The main problem, which each man solved in his own way, was boredom. Fortunately, the running of the ship itself required the full-time efforts of about half the sailors, assisted by a quarter of the soldiers. Since an army officer had to be present to command the soldiers, Sherman found himself on deck duty about one day in four. Otherwise, he passed the time reading and writing letters. As he had great volumes of writing paper on hand—and an amazing eye for detail—his letters to his fiancée were voluminous and informative.³

Arranging for his letters to be delivered was a major problem. In the two ports of call where the Lexington stopped, he found ships heading for the United States to take his letters with them. Selection of couriers was a matter requiring great care. Since the route being followed by the Lexington was well traveled, it was possible at times to join up with a ship at sea bound for home. Not every ship encountered on the ocean would stop, however, and when one did heave to, Sherman would not always find her heading for home. A ship going to New York by way of Le Havre, France, would suffice. As the Lexington went farther along on her voyage, Sherman became less choosy in selecting his couriers.

The Lexington covered the first leg of the trip, to Rio de Janeiro, in two months almost to the day. She stayed in port for nine days, during which Sherman divided his time between sightseeing, which was ample and rewarding, and writing to Ellen. On September 21 the Lexington raised anchor and left Rio, setting out on the most dangerous part of the voyage, the passage around Cape Horn.

At first the Lexington enjoyed generally smooth sailing, with only a couple of storms along the coast of Patagonia, in South America. Even though the time of year corresponded to springtime in the northern hemisphere, the conditions were grim. The land areas were covered with snow, the winds from the west were fearsome, and the ocean currents flowed from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

As had become common practice for all vessels crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the captain of the Lexington avoided using the Strait of Magellan itself, which is a narrow, extremely dangerous channel. Ferdinand Magellan had discovered it in 1520, after thirty-eight days waiting at the east entrance while scouting parties determined whether the strait actually led to open ocean on the west. The next significant traversing was that of Sir Francis Drake, 150 years later. Drake actually used Magellan’s strait, but he made a note that he believed a wider, safer passage existed south of Tierra del Fuego, the island south of Magellan’s passage. Thus, when this much wider passage was confirmed in the 1600s, it was named after Drake. That route was the one selected by the captain of the Lexington.

Though the Drake Passage is preferable to the Strait of Magellan, both have been generally considered the most dangerous waterways on the globe. Temperatures are extremely low and the winds strong, creating monster waves, some of them reaching crests of a hundred feet. The captain of the Lexington was forced to wait at the eastern entrance for thirty days before beginning passage. The passage itself took only twelve days.

Such a long wait was nothing unusual; nor was it uncommon for a ship to be tossed around. Sherman noted, with a touch of amusement, that tradition of the sea forbade complaint. An individual might be hurled from his seat at the dinner table, or his plate dumped into his lap, but anyone undergoing such an experience—it happened to everyone at least once—was required to laugh; any other reaction was verboten among his fellows.

On October 28, Sherman wrote Ellen, “The Horn is passed, and all now look upon our arrival at Valparaiso as a matter of course.”⁴ That optimism, however, was premature. An unexpected gale of wind blew the ship from the Pacific Ocean back into the Drake Passage. Once more out of the passage, however, sailing was smooth. The Lexington arrived at Valparaiso on November 24, 1846.

Unlike the enthusiasm Sherman had held for everything in Rio, he did not care much for Valparaiso. For some reason, when his cohorts Ord and Halleck made the sixty-mile trip inland to Santiago, Sherman did not accompany them. He was, he claimed, too busy with business and pleasure in the town. The business probably involved sending and receiving mail, but Sherman also witnessed a steeplechase, attended church, and took in an opera. He visited the British minister and conferred with the officers of some of His Majesty’s ships in the harbor. He noted an interesting matter of social structure. Whereas in Rio de Janeiro all manual labor and toting of bales was done by black slaves from Africa, in Chile no such slaves existed. Physical labor was performed by free men. Sherman was slightly amused to observe the efforts that menial laborers exerted to assure visitors that they were, despite the nature of their work, caballeros—gentlemen.

During the Lexington’s stay in Valparaiso, a couple of ships from California arrived, bound for Cape Horn. They brought jarring news. The Americans, they reported, had already taken possession of California, overcoming the weak resistance of the Californios. Having done so, the conquerors had begun squabbling among themselves as to who among them was actually in charge. The important thing to Sherman, however, was that the Lexington, with all its guns and ammunition, was arriving in a region where the fighting had ceased. He was therefore going not to a combat zone, but to an occupied territory where his duties would be administrative. It was quite a blow to an officer with career ambitions.

Sherman pondered issues wider than his own career. The United States had now become a power that owned foreign territory. In his conversations with a newly arrived British admiral at Valparaiso, he gathered that the British were not happy with America’s entrance onto the international stage. Yet he finally concluded that President Polk had been justified in annexing the area. He conjectured that in the absence of such action, another country, possibly Britain, would have taken California instead.

—

On December 5, 1846, the Lexington set sail from Santiago, bound for California. Sherman had little to report on that leg of the voyage other than a couple of severe storms, which were to be expected. The final destination of the Lexington was uncertain. The captain divulged only that they were bound for some somewhere in northern California—probably either Monterey or San Francisco. Sherman hoped that they were headed for San Francisco, eighty miles beyond Monterey,⁵ because that region was relatively pristine. The Monterey area had been occupied by the Mexican Californios since 1821. He had been told that the barracks in Monterey were “flea-bitten.” Rumor had given him much by way of previous knowledge.

The mere fact that this leg of the journey was relatively uneventful did not mean it was short. On January 26, some fifty days after leaving Valparaiso, the Lexington pulled into the Bay of Monterey. Whether Sherman’s artillery would remain there or go on to San Francisco was not certain.

Sherman, it turned out, was to be assigned to headquarters at Monterey. Once there, he learned the details of the American takeover of California, of the aggressive and probably illegal actions of Commodore Robert F. Stockton in Los Angeles, of the role of the exploration party of John C. Frémont, and of Commodore John D. Sloat’s taking Monterey. He was also aware that Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny had arrived at San Diego, after a grueling trip overland, on December 12, 1846, and that Frémont had defied him by declaring himself governor, despite the fact that Kearny carried orders from President Polk to take over as governor.

The matter had been finally settled with the arrival of Commodore William Shubrick in early February, with a regiment of troops. As a regular soldier, Sherman personally favored Sloat and Kearny in that unfortunate internecine quarrel. Frémont and Stockton, it is widely held, had done more harm than good. One Californio advised Sherman that had it not been for their antics, the native population would have submitted to American rule without firing a shot.⁶

Kearny was a hero to Sherman. It was a big day, therefore, when the general came from the Cyane and visited the Independence while he was there:

I was dining with the ward room officers of the Independence . . . General Kearny came on board and received a hearty welcome to the Bay of Monterey. I had met him before. He looked haggard, worn, and rough, for he had endured a hard march from Santa Fe, had got into a tight place, lost two of his captains, one lieutenant, and twenty men out of forty-five. He too had received two lance wounds in the fight, but nevertheless, his face wore that smile so characteristic of him. He has always been a favorite model of mine and I was peculiarly glad to see him.⁷

Apparently Sherman’s admiration for Kearny was reciprocated, because the general took him as an aide on various explorations around California.

—

The situation in California may have been stabilized, but Sherman, like most other professional soldiers, was hoping that the war would not completely end before he had a chance to participate. Since news required six months to travel from Washington to California, he had very little idea how much action had taken place. He knew that Zachary Taylor had taken the Mexican city of Monterrey, but he did not know that on February 22 and 23, a month before his letter about the Kearny affair, Taylor had won a battle—“survived” is a better word—at Buena Vista, just south of Saltillo.⁸ In March, Winfield Scott had landed ten thousand men at Veracruz and was preparing to move inland toward Mexico City. Sherman’s chances for active fighting in this war were gone.

—

In California, however, Sherman had experiences that would have been considered quite memorable had they not been compared to the dramatic events taking place in Mexico. He was assigned as an aide to Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, who had succeeded Kearny as governor of California in early May of 1847. His duties were not crushing, but they included maintaining order and discipline. One day his duties required him to take a small detachment and track down a sailor who had deserted. The man knew that his punishment would be death, and Sherman knew it as well. But Sherman’s duty was plain. He delivered the victim into the hands of the proper authorities, never checking up to learn of the man’s fate.

Sherman was curious about John C. Frémont, the colonel who had once called himself governor of California. He went to visit this renegade, who received him cordially. They visited about an hour, including sharing a cup of tea. Like so many others, Sherman was puzzled how such a plain, ordinary-looking man could exert such a dynamic influence over his band of explorers. Some fire must have lit up in Frémont when in action that escaped the observer when he was in repose. This visit occurred before Frémont, still under arrest, left for the east with Kearny.

Sherman had a similar experience with the famed explorer Kit Carson, who had sided with Frémont in the previous controversy. Carson was carrying the rank of a mere lieutenant despite his national acclaim, and his modest status seemed to give him no problems. Carson seemed unimpressed by all the public attention he had received; his sole thought was to head east and join his wife in Taos, New Mexico. With all his bravery on land, Carson regarded travel by water with sheer terror. He had once ridden on horseback for five hundred miles between Monterey and Los Angeles to avoid making the trip by steamship. Since Sherman had been shipboard for 198 days on the way around the Horn, he found this puzzling. Carson also refused the offer of a detachment of troops to accompany him as he headed eastward. He took a couple of men and rode off from San Diego alone.

—

One day in early May 1848, two men walked into Colonel Mason’s headquarters in Monterey with a request: to file a claim for a piece of land near a place called Sutter’s Mill, California, about forty miles northeast of Sacramento. With them they carried a small packet of dust in which were small nuggets they claimed were gold. If such turned out to be the case, they wanted exclusive legal rights to that piece of land, a development they believed would make them rich.

Mason was doubtful about a proposition of such potential importance. First he had to determine whether the nuggets were actually gold. Here Sherman was able to help. Mineralogy had been an important academic subject at West Point, and, more important, Sherman had, as a young officer in Georgia, become familiar with the characteristics of the substance that was to cause the Cherokees to be evicted from their lands. He bit the substance and then took a hammer and pounded it. Its malleability convinced him—and therefore Mason—that the shiny particles were what the two men claimed they were.

Another, more serious problem remained, however. At the time of the incident, both Mason and Sherman regarded California as Mexican territory, with themselves only military occupiers. That being the case, Mexican law, not American, would apply. In view of these doubts, Mason wrote an innocuous letter that did not grant the rights. The two visitors, probably disappointed, went on their way.

Mason and Sherman were disturbed by the encounter, and they still held hopes that the discovery of gold would escape general notice. They knew that small quantities of gold had been discovered weeks before, and nothing had come of it. Mining interests up to that time had been centered on mercury, not gold. A man who shared their concern was John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who had adopted Mexican citizenship and had built the trading post called Sutter’s Fort on the road leading from the Sierra Madre westward to San Francisco. His business of supplying exhausted and depleted travelers coming from the East had been lucrative, and he could foresee that a gold rush on his property would ruin him. So when one of his workers, James W. Marshall, had discovered gold the previous January, Sutter had demanded silence. He had thus far been able to maintain secrecy about the discovery.

Such a thing as gold in the streams, promising instant wealth, could not be kept a secret long. When word got out and was spread in banner headlines in the newspapers, the famed gold rush began.

Finally, Colonel Mason decided it was time for him to take a personal look. So in late June 1848, he took a small detachment, including Sherman, on an expedition to Sutter’s Fort. It was not an easy trip. Bodies of water had to be crossed, and it took the party three days to make the journey. To make things even more difficult, their horses got away just as they reached the fort. Fortunately, Sutter was able to send out a group of Indian employees and recaptured them.⁹ Time was not urgent, so the party spent several days of relaxation and celebration. It was only then that Mason and Sherman received the details of Marshall’s discovery of gold months before. Then, on July 4, the party left Sutter’s Fort, accompanied by Sutter, for Coloma, forty miles away.

The party spent several days on the American River, where Coloma was located. They encountered Marshall himself, who was originally a lumberer but was now digging for gold. A couple of systems for gold removal were in use, the principal one being a mere sifting of the sands of a creek in a pan of water. But whatever system, in a letter to his brother John, Sherman estimated that as many as four thousand men were mining in the area, taking out of the ground about $30,000 to $50,000 a day.¹⁰ It was an awesome sight.

—

Back at Monterey, Sherman saw the gold rush only in negative terms. He had a right to do so. His first concern was for the economy of the region. Prices for goods, being paid for in gold, became astronomical. The most ordinary of commodities carried prices so high that people of fixed income, such as officers like himself, could not make ends meet. Of equal concern to a conscientious officer was the effect of the panic on members of the army and navy; desertion was rampant. (Even Sherman’s own clerk deserted.) The terms of service of the volunteers who had fought in the war with Mexico had expired, and many of them simply headed for the Sierra Madre and the American River. Ironically, though Sherman’s duties called for him to quell desertions and maintain order, he was unable to share in the bonanza himself.

Sherman, however, was a practical man, a survivor. To cope with his own personal financial problems, he secured two months’ leave and, with a couple of other officers, set up a store in the gold mining area. Sherman hired himself out as a surveyor—land claims were highly important—and invested in some landholdings. By dint of these actions he was able to get by. He did not forget his brother John. Sherman advised a way in which his brother could profit:

. . . if you can, even when you receive this, despatch a cargo of assorted articles ready for immediate consumption or use, you can realize more than a hundred per cent. Indian goods of all kinds command any price that is asked.¹¹

Sherman’s advice was a big order, and it is doubtful that John was adventuresome enough to take it.

Though Sherman coped satisfactorily with the effects of the gold rush, he could never shed his concern that by his own mistake he had missed participating in the exploits of the men under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. At one point he contemplated resigning from the army while he was still in California. General Persifor Smith, who had succeeded Colonel Mason as governor of California, successfully dissuaded him by promoting him to the position of adjutant, a jump above that of aide.

In December 1849, General Smith ordered Sherman to deliver some dispatches to General Winfield Scott in New York City. Sherman therefore left Monterey on January 2, 1850, on the steamer Oregon. By this time it was no longer necessary to go around Cape Horn. One ship took him to Panama, and another from there to New York. He arrived at New York about the close of January.¹²