3

ENTER THE COLONEL

ALL WAS SILENT BUT FOR THE SWISH OF THE PADDLES DRAGGING through the water and the raucous call of a macaw from the jungle on shore. It was midafternoon on June 16, 1855, and a small fleet of long, slim bungoes, native dugouts, had pulled away from the 155-ton Californian brig Vesta as she lay off Point Ycaco on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.

In single file, the slender craft made their way up a narrow inlet, heading north. In the dugouts, seated between the bronze-skinned Indian paddlers, sat a uniformed Nicaraguan officer and fifty-eight Americans. Most of the Americans were armed with holstered pistols and sheathed bowie knives. Some also had swords. All possessed long-barreled rifles, with the barrels pointing skyward. From a distance, the rifles looked like a forest of dead trees floating across the water.

Several of the riflemen wore the Mexican War vintage uniform of U.S. Army officers—dark blue, with stiff, high collars, red piping, and gold epaulettes—and peaked caps of the kind associated with naval officers. Others wore dark frock coats, waistcoats, and broad-brimmed black felt hats. In the first bungo, the thirty-one-year-old, frock-coated leader of the band sat bareheaded and poker-faced, his gray eyes studying the shore, his nostrils taking in the sweet-scented tropical air. His hair was neatly cropped and combed, and unlike most of his men, some of whom had mustaches, the rest, beards, he was perfectly clean-shaven. There was something of the look of a clergyman about William Walker.

The Nicaraguan Indians paddling the lead canoe chattered away in Spanish among themselves. Walker understood every word, but kept his lips buttoned. He was pretending to Colonel Ramirez, the Nicaraguan officer in one of the following canoes, that he could speak no Spanish. It was a pretense he would keep up for some time, knowing that the locals might talk un-guardedly in his presence if they thought that, like most North Americans, he couldn’t speak their language.

A little before 4:00 P.M., four miles from the Vesta’s anchorage, the bungoes slid into a wooden jetty. Some occupants climbed onto the jetty. Those still in the boats handed up weapons and belongings, then joined the others. The Americans assembled in ranks on the jetty with bedrolls and haversacks on their backs, rifles on their shoulders, and bags in their hands. Felix “Madregil” Ramirez, the Nicaraguan officer, a swarthy Democratico army colonel who only spoke when he had to, led the way down the jetty to solid ground followed by the American commander and his solid, middle-aged deputy, Achilles Kewen. Behind them, Timothy Crocker, a slight but handsome young man barely into his twenties, snapped an order and led the men in ranks of two at the march behind the senior officers.

The San Francisco newspaper the Daily Alta California had recorded the Americans’ departure with a brief comment datelined May 3, 1855, five weeks before, reporting that Walker and his party had sailed for Nicaragua “to assist the government there in establishing peace.” There were elements of truth in the report, if it is accepted that to make peace, Walker and his fellow soldiers of fortune had come fully prepared to first make war. Nicaragua, being in the middle of a civil war at this moment, had two opposing governments, and Walker and his companions planned to help one and overthrow the other.

As the American contingent marched by a guardhouse at the roadside, the neat, slim, young Democratico officer of the guard, resplendent in high boots, white trousers, and jacket, and with a sword at his side and a short, red cloak slung over one shoulder, called out the guard. A drummer boy tapped a tattoo on an aged kettle drum, and a dozen men turned out and formed a line. These soldiers were local peasants, conscripts. Like most adult males in Nicaragua, they had mustaches, and some, goatees. Their hair was untidily long. All wore grimy, loose-fitting white jackets and white trousers that were rolled up past their knees. Every man wore a wide-brimmed straw hat bearing a wide red hatband—red being the color of the Democratico faction—on which was printed the words Ejercito Democratico, “Democratic Army.” These draftees were all barefoot, but on their officer’s command, they came to attention like regular soldiers and presented their ancient flintlock muskets to the passing officers.

Colonel Ramirez led the Americans along a dirt street, past houses where attractive, dark-haired, dark-eyed Nicaraguan women in colorful dresses lounged barefoot in doorways and at open windows, smiling an enticing welcome at los Yanquis as they passed. There were far more women and children to be seen than men—many of the town’s men were either serving in the army or had died in the thirteen-month-old civil war. Ramirez guided the Americans to quarters in the heart of the town, then bade them a good night.

Walker allowed his men to purchase aguardiente, or guaro, as it was nicknamed, the cheap but highly potent local liquor, not unlike rum, made from the sugar cane. Guaro was sold by the town’s pulperias, or grocery stores, and the storekeepers gladly remained open half the night to do a brisk trade with the Yankees. At their quarters, the Americans swigged their guaro and chattered and joked well into the warm tropical night.

 

 

Soon after sunrise the next morning, Colonel Ramirez reappeared, bringing two Americans with him to escort Walker to a meeting with the Democratico leadership in León, the Democratico capital, farther to the south. One of the Americans, Dr. Joseph W. Livingston, was a resident of the city of León and onetime U.S. consul there, having lived in Nicaragua for nine years.¹ The other man was twenty-six-year-old Charles W. Doubleday. English-born, Doubleday had migrated to the United States at age three with his parents and had been raised on a farm in Ohio. Like thousands of other adventure seekers, Doubleday had been drawn to California by the gold rush, but by mid-1854, he had been returning home, via Nicaragua, when the civil war broke out. After losing the trunk containing the gold he was taking home, Doubleday, game for anything, had thrown in his lot with the Democraticos and, because he spoke good Spanish, had been commissioned a captain in their army. He had first commanded a gringo unit comprised of twenty Americans, Britons, and Irishmen, but after most had been killed or wounded, he had led a company of Nicaraguan troops.

Not having mixed with Americans for a year, Doubleday was delighted to see the Walker party. But when introduced to their leader, he was a little surprised, even disappointed. Doubleday had never previously met Walker but had known of him in San Francisco. “Colonel” Walker’s reputation had made him sound, to Doubleday, a big man, in more ways than one. But in the flesh, Walker “did not, at the time, impress me as the man of indomitable will and energy which I afterwards found him to be. He was quiet and unassuming.”²

For the thirty-mile ride to León, Walker chose to take along young Tim Crocker, one of seven men in his band who had survived the Sonoran expedition with Walker and unhesitatingly signed up to follow him again. Crocker didn’t say much and seemed mild enough to the casual acquaintance, but, said Walker, “he was a man to lead others when danger was to be met.”³ Before he left Realejo, Walker took aside his deputy, Achilles Kewen, a large, chivalrous, and fearless character, and told him to march the Americans ten miles to the regional capital of Chinandega, there to wait for Walker to either return or send for them.

Walker, Crocker, Doubleday, Livingston, and Ramirez then set off, riding east. It was the rainy season, which lasts from May to October in Nicaragua, and it had rained overnight so the dirt road was muddy and heavy going, but otherwise, this leg was uneventful. The church bells of staunchly Democratico Chinandega welcomed the horsemen as Walker took in the dramatic scenery, noting, in the distance, the picturesque cone of the extinct volcano El Viejo rising up to dominate the landscape. Beyond Chinandega, villagers came out of moss-encrusted stone cottages fronted by cacti fences to smile and wave to the passing horsemen—word had gone before them that Yankee soldiers had arrived at Realejo to help the Democraticos win the war.

The narrow road cut through thick vegetation that occasionally yielded to fields of corn and plantations of plantain—the potato of Latin America. Several times, the riders passed groups of idle, white-clad Democratico soldiers shading themselves at the roadside beneath the branches of ceibas, the sprawling silk-cotton tree of the tropics. Many of the local soldiers were smoking cigarillos. And, Walker noted, the sergeants and corporals in charge seemed always on their guard in case any of their men tried to run off. As Walker quickly learned, few of the common people in this country took part in the civil war by choice. In fact, the peasants dreaded military service. Desertion from the ranks was rife on both sides.

As the party of riders neared León, a vast plain opened before them; a plain, Walker would write, that “seems almost boundless in extent as you look toward the south, while gazing northward you perceive the lofty line of volcanoes—Viejo on one flank and Momotombo on the other—stretching from the Gulf of Fonseca to the Lake of Managua.”⁴ The city of León, with a population of fifty thousand, was the second-largest in Central America. It had been established in the sixteenth century by Spanish conquistadors from Panama City, who had surrounded it with thick stone walls—not to keep out the locals as much as protection against Cortes’s Mexico-based conquistadors who had come south looking for Nicaragua’s famed but often elusive gold and silver deposits. The conquistadors not infrequently fought their own countrymen for the spoils of Nicaragua. The León that Walker found was a city of graceful Moorish architecture. From the tower of the city’s massive cathedral of San Pedro, Charles Doubleday told him as they rode, it was possible to see thirteen volcanoes and, to the west, the gleaming Pacific.

Outside a large house fronting the city’s central plaza, the riders dismounted. There was a Democratico detachment standing guard over the house, while above it flew the drab Democratico flag: three horizontal bars of yellow, white, and beige. Colonel Ramirez led the Americans into the house. Middle-aged provisional director, Don Francisco Castellon, came to greet them. A short man, clean-shaven, with thick gray hair, and of Spanish descent, he looked more like a musician than a politician. “It did not require many minutes,” Walker would note, “to see that he was not the man to control a revolutionary movement.”⁵

Walker kept up the pretense of having no Spanish. Even Doubleday believed that Walker “did not yet speak Spanish” and so acted as interpreter.⁶ Castellon did not hide his delight at seeing the Americans. Back on December 29 of the previous year, he had signed a contract with Byron Cole, Walker’s former employer. That contract had called for two hundred North American mercenaries and a mortar to be dispatched at once to join the Democratico army’s siege of the Legitimista capital, Granada. The fact that neither Yankees nor mortar had turned up had influenced Castellon’s decision to abandon the protracted and fruitless siege. Since then, the war had gone badly for the Democraticos. The Legitimistas had gone on the offensive, winning a battle in the field and driving the Democratico forces back. Legitimista armies now hemmed the Democraticos in from the northeast and the south.

Still, even though the Americans were six months late, Castellon could certainly use them. Walker had in fact been responsible for their delayed arrival. In the fall of 1854, Byron Cole had sold the Commercial-Advisor and headed for Central America. In December, Walker had moved to Sacramento to become editor of the State Democratic Journal. Two months later, out of the blue, Cole had sent Walker the signed contract from Nicaragua, urging him to use his reputation gained from the Sonora venture to recruit the two hundred men the contract specified and lead them down to Nicaragua at once.

But Walker, the trained lawyer, knew that Cole’s contract infringed the U.S. Neutrality Act. Following the Sonora debacle, a friendly San Francisco jury had acquitted Walker of breaking the Neutrality Act in Mexico, and he was determined not to infringe it again. So Walker had sent a new contract down to Castellon, this time specifying the recruitment of “colonists,” with no mention of arms. Castellon had signed and returned this second contract, but when Walker still did not come, Castellon had felt that the American had only been toying with him, with no Yankee mercenaries likely to come to his aid after all.

Walker, in turn, had been frustrated by difficulties in raising money to pay for weapons and ammunition and in chartering a ship to take the “colonists” to Nicaragua. Just one major investor, San Francisco merchant Joseph Taylor, had been found, contributing $1,000. Walker’s former legal tutor and firm friend Edmund Randolph had put up a little cash, as did another lawyer friend, A. Parker Crittenden. Crittenden also agreed to act as Walker’s San Francisco agent and recruit more men to serve in Nicaragua once Walker had become established there. Walker also added his own meager savings to the fund. But the money-raising had consumed valuable time.

As the León meeting progressed, the provisional director told Walker that he wanted the American volunteers to form a separate corps within the Democratico Army, the Falange Americana, or “American Phalanx,” under Walker’s command. Walker did not agree right away; he wanted to meet the Democraticos’ commanding general before he and his men finally committed themselves to this war. Walker had learned that Castellon had removed General Maximo Jerez from command of the Democratico Army following his wounding by a French sniper during the aborted siege of Granada. Not that Jerez would be any great loss. Walker had also learned that General Jerez, educated in France and a doctor before the civil war, had neither the experience nor the aptitude to successfully lead an army. Most important of all, Jerez had never commanded the respect of his men. It hadn’t helped that he had once fallen off his horse in front of his troops. According to the cynical locals, Jerez couldn’t ride, couldn’t shoot, and couldn’t win a battle.

After dinner, the new commander in chief, General Don José Trinidad Munoz, arrived at the provisional director’s house to meet Walker. Despite Charles Doubleday’s assertion that Munoz was thought by many “to be the ablest soldier in Central America,” critics said that the general was afraid of committing to battle.⁷ Others suggested that Munoz had political ambitions—instead of fighting the Legitimistas, he would prefer to see a compromise deal done between the two warring parties, one that left him in a position of power. Born in El Salvador, Munoz had fought in wars in several Central American countries and had once tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Tall and handsome, “a man of the most striking physical beauty” in Doubleday’s estimation, Munoz arrived wearing the flashy uniform of a major general.⁸ As Castellon introduced him, Munoz gave Walker an extravagant salute.

Walker was unimpressed with General Munoz from the start. Barely acknowledging Walker’s companions, the pompous, conceited Munoz launched into an extraordinary dissertation about the comparative merits of American generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War, “expressing his ignorance in every sentence,” as far as Walker was concerned. ⁹ Doubleday saw immediate antipathy bloom between Walker and Munoz, likening it to the kind of reaction “exhibited in the sudden encounter between a dog and a cat.”¹⁰

To make matters worse, Castellon and Munoz did not much like each other either, and Castellon had not warned Munoz that the Americans had landed in the country. It was in this meeting that Munoz first learned of his provisional director’s plan to employ American mercenaries. When Castellon informed Munoz that he had proposed to Colonel Walker that the Americans form a separate unit within the Democratico Army, the general was not happy. Munoz suggested that Walker’s American riflemen be distributed among his Democratico units, to stiffen the less-than-ardent fighting spirit of his native conscripts, but seeing that neither Castellon nor Walker liked that idea, he excused himself and departed.

After Munoz left, Walker gave the provisional director, through Doubleday, an ultimatum. “If my comrades and myself are to enter the service of the Provisional Government, it must be with the distinct understanding that we are not put under the orders of General Munoz.”¹¹

The next morning, after spending the night at the director’s house, Walker surprised Castellon by proposing that the Americans immediately launch a campaign against the Legitimista city of Rivas, in the Meridional Department, a southwestern province well behind Legitimista lines. Rivas commanded the Transit Road, the route via which Accessory Transit Company passengers crossed from Lake Nicaragua to San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast, and over which, twice a month, gold shipments from California passed.

Walker pointed out that, if successful, such an operation behind enemy lines would have two benefits—tax moneys raised in the Meridional Department could be sent to the cash-strapped Democratico government in León, and more Americans could potentially be recruited into Walker’s unit from among the thousands of travelers who used the Transit Route. All Walker asked for was two hundred Nicaraguan troops to back up the American Falange. Give him those men, said Walker, and he would take Rivas and the Meridional Department for the Democraticos.

This was no spur-of-the-moment idea; Walker had obviously planned this operation against Rivas well in advance, before he left the United States. The plan was undeniably novel, if not brilliant, but the thought of the Americans leaving the north and operating independently well to the south worried Castellon. He much preferred to keep the Yankees close by, to act as his personal bodyguard if worse came to worst. But Walker had no intention of allowing his men to serve as the provisional director’s bodyguard unit—like the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, he would later write.¹² Nor would Walker contemplate dividing his men among the Democratico Army’s untrained, ill-disciplined Nicaraguan peasants, as Munoz wanted. As the provisional director stalled, Walker continued to push for the Rivas operation. This strike behind enemy lines, he said, had the capacity to secure the Transit lifeline and put Democratico forces in a position to strike at the Legitimista capital, Granada, from the rear, leaving Legitimista armies stranded in the north. If successful, it could bring about a swift end to the war.

With Castellon prevaricating, Walker informed him that his Americans would only become involved in this war if the Rivas operation was given the go-ahead. It had to be Walker’s way, or none at all. As the Tennesseean rose to leave, the suddenly worried provisional director hurried to say that he would get back to him as soon as he’d spoken with his war minister. Walker replied that he was rejoining his men. He and Timothy Crocker set off for Chinandega, leaving Castellon with no doubt that if Walker’s daring Rivas operation did not receive approval and support, the Americans would return to the United States.