December 6, 1846
With the vanguard of Gen. Kearny's dragoons, frontier scout
Kit Carson, genial cutthroat, collector of scalps,
bearing down at a gallop on San Pascual
by an opportune tumble saved himself
“his horse shot under him”
and lived to tell how they erupted from the chapparal
and charged the California lancer cavalry
—who fled pellmell, and drew them, doubled back
and cut their squads apart piecemeal like cattle
at the matanza, the razor
reach of Spanish lances from another century
too long for sabers and clubbed bayonets,
desert-bedraggled Army horsemanship
no match for practical vaquero mastery
of slaughter from horseback.
Unscathed almost, the Californios retired. Kearny
lost twenty men and could not sit a horse
himself for months. Of those in the first onslaught
only a few stragglers survived the brunt,
the savvy scout among them.
Gen. Pico's victory altered nothing. Kearny was
delayed a week in reaching San Diego.
Old Alta California was still lost,
or won, depending on the point of view.
It was a backward country.
The pennons prancing at the antique lanceheads, the horsemanship
that rivaled Tartary's—style in defeat:
in a half generation two years’ drought
and want of capital destroyed the herds
and bankrupted the rancheros.