Tycoon's War

Hornsby had sailed down from New Orleans with two colleagues, Thomas E. Fisher and Julius De Brissot, and had been in Nicaragua when Walker was in Sonora. The three of them had tinkered with the idea of becoming involved in the civil war, offering to raise a force of Americans back in the States to join the Democratico side. But the disorganized nature of the Democratico army had persuaded Hornsby and De Brissot otherwise. They had traveled on to San Francisco, where both had subsequently joined Walker’s expedition on condition that they be given the rank of captain. De Brissot was something of a romantic; he had been on his way to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands the previous year when he had joined up with Hornsby and Fisher on a steamer heading to Nicaragua from New Orleans. In Walker’s estimation, De Brissot sometimes tried too hard to impress but could be trusted to do his best.²

Thomas Fisher, a native of New Orleans, was one of several men Walker commissioned as lieutenants. Another was Francis “Frank” P. Anderson, from New York State. Brash and brave, Anderson, who had served in the New York Regiment during the Mexican War, was passionate about good horses and good brandy and was popular with the other men. For his other lieutenants, Walker selected the quick-tempered but tough-as-nails John R. Markham and the no-nonsense youngster Robert Gay, both of whom also had U.S. Army experience. Like Hornsby, Markham and Gay were wearing their old U.S. Army uniforms on this mission. All the officers were armed with swords and pistols—Colt navy revolvers in most instances, although Tim Crocker favored a six-barreled pepperbox pistol. And, like all the members of the force, Walker’s officers wore red Democratico army ribbons tied around their hatbands.

Most of the rank-and-file members of the American Falange were, in Walker’s words, “men of strong character, tired of the humdrum of common life, and ready for a career which might bring them the sweets of adventure and the rewards of fame.”³ Among them was the resilient Kanaka John, a powerfully built native of the Hawaiian Islands—no one knew his last name. Then there were the eager teenagers, including J. Calvin O’Neal, who was barely eighteen, and Benjamin Williamson. Walker had also recruited a doctor. While he himself was a qualified physician, Walker had seen during the Sonoran venture that the commander could not always spare the time to tend to the wounded. Prior to signing on with Walker, Dr. Alex P. Jones had been searching for buried treasure in the Cocos Islands. While he had the medical credentials for the job, Jones also had no qualms about using a rifle if he had to.

Each Falange member marched with an ammunition pouch packed with large-caliber .758 rifle rounds, and his canteen was full—in most cases, full of brandy, whiskey, or wine. Every Nicaraguan soldier had a jicara swinging from a buttonhole. These elaborately carved clay bottles contained tiste, a mixture of chocolate, sugar, and cornmeal diluted in water. In his haversack, every man carried enough rations for just two days—Walker intended taking Rivas within forty-eight hours. But already that timetable seemed optimistic.

The landing had not gone well. Julius De Brissot had steered their largest boat onto the rocks, wrecking it. Doubleday, who was already unwell, had been tipped into the water and had only just been saved from drowning. It had taken hours to ferry men and stores ashore. Then, after midnight, when the column was at last on the march, with the Falange leading and most of Ramirez’s Nicaraguans in the rear and some in the center carrying their heavy ammunition boxes, down came the rain. And then they had lost their way. Doubleday had felt so feeble he had to lie down. “It would be hard to imagine a more miserable object than I felt myself to be as I lay on the bare, sodden ground,” he later reflected.⁴

Before long, the rain ceased, just as instantly as it had begun. Then the scouts returned, reporting that they had relocated the trail. The march resumed, now with a soldier at each of Doubleday’s arms, holding him up. But on the muddy ground, “the walking was fearfully bad.”⁵ The column’s progress, as men slipped and slid in the darkness, was at a snail’s pace. But when the sun rose on the morning of June 28, its heat was immediately felt and the men of the slow-moving column quickly dried out. Spirits lifted, as did the rate of march. Keeping to the woodland and avoiding farmhouses, they pushed on toward the village of Tola. Walker had it in mind to spend the next night there, before continuing on to Rivas the following day in time to surprise the Legitimista garrison on the night of the twenty-ninth.

By 9:00 A.M. the column found a deserted adobe house, and there, with sentries posted, the troops breakfasted. Sitting on the ground, the North Americans brought out crackers and cold meat. The Nicaraguans had cheese and tortillas. The North Americans washed down their meal with water or liquor from their canteens, the Nicaraguans with a little sweet tiste. Strolling around the gypsylike encampment, Walker eyed his command with paternal pride. “The felt hats of the Falange showed, in their drooping brims, the effects of the night’s rain; and the thick, heavy beards gave to most of the body a wild and dangerous air,” he would note.⁶ After the meal, Walker allowed the column to catch a few hours’ sleep. The energetic colonel himself didn’t need much sleep.

As the men rested, Walker eyed Colonel Ramirez. Doubleday had alerted Walker to Nicaraguan friends’ warnings that Ramirez “was not only a man of inferior capacity and courage,” which Doubleday knew from experience to be true, having seen him in action at Granada, “but was also a tool of Munoz.”⁷ Walker had heard that General Munoz was totally against the Falange’s Rivas operation, probably because he feared that if Walker succeeded, the American could usurp him as Democratico commander in chief. While Colonel Ramirez had obeyed Director Castellon’s order to raise recruits for the Rivas operation, he had done so without enthusiasm, quite blatantly telling Walker that he considered the mission “hazardous and ill-advised.”⁸ Walker had decided not to place too much reliance on Ramirez or his men.

By early afternoon, the march to Rivas was under way again. The air was balmy and mild. “You felt,” Walker said later, “as if a thin and vapory exhalation of opium, soothing and exhilarating by turns, was being mixed at intervals with the common elements of the atmosphere.”⁹ Shortly after sunset, the rain returned, again bucketing down. The rain-soaked Americans were dragging their feet when Don Maximo Espinosa led the weary column to a property outside Tola owned by Democratico sympathizers. From the farmers, Walker learned that a detachment of twenty Legitimista lancers had that same day arrived in Tola and occupied the town’s previously deserted quartel , or military barracks.

This news was disconcerting enough, but Walker also received a warning from the Democratico family that they’d heard that the Legitimista commander in chief at Granada, General Ponciano Corral, was expecting Walker’s American Falange to turn up in the south. Corral had sent a force under Colonel Manuel Bosque to strengthen the Rivas garrison, and another to San Juan del Sur. Colonel Bosque had in turn sent the lancers to Tola with orders to be on the lookout for Democraticos landed from the sea.

Clearly, someone on the Democratico side, either a spy or a traitor, had sent the Legitimistas a warning about Walker’s Rivas operation. At this point, knowing that his mission had been compromised and that he had lost the element of surprise, another commander might have aborted the mission. But not William Walker.

In the darkness, the rain resumed—“Harder than I ever saw it,” Doubleday was to recall.¹⁰ Cursing the weather, the sodden members of the column splashed on along a road running with water like a small river. Half a mile out from Tola, with thunder rumbling in the heavens and lightning flashing in the distance, Walker dispatched twenty of his own men to locate the Legitimista lancers and deal with them. The chosen men handed their knapsacks and bedrolls to colleagues, then moved out on the double through the rain with rifles under their coats to keep the ammunition dry. Behind them, Walker led the column forward at a brisk walking pace.

Built on the ruins of the once great capital of the Toltec Indian empire, Tola was a humble adobe village set around the usual Central American plaza. Along the deserted cobbled main street, the twenty men of the advance party trotted, their muscles tensed for action. The quartel was easy to locate; it was the only building in Tola with a sentry posted outside. The other lancers advertised their presence indoors by noisily playing cards in the light of burning tallow dips. As laughter floated out from inside and the rain beat down on the roof tiles and cobblestones, the twenty Americans flattened themselves against the adobe wall next door to the quartel, pausing with pounding hearts to listen for sounds of discovery. But the lone Legitimista sentry was skulking back out of the drumming rain and hadn’t seen or heard them. As one, the Americans rushed the quartel’s double doors.

“Quien vive?” came the startled sentry’s challenge, as he leveled his musket at the shapes appearing from the darkness.¹¹ He didn’t wait for an answer, loosing off a shot. There was a clap of thunder from nearby at the same moment that the lancer’s smooth-bore musket boomed. The shot was instantly met by the characteristic whiplike crack of an American’s Minié rifle. Though fired on the run, the reply was accurate—the sentry went down. His own shot missed the mark; the ball flew harmlessly out into the night.

Stepping over the wounded sentry, the Americans kicked in the quartel doors, and in through the opening they barged, rifles at the ready. A black-coated Legitimista lieutenant of lancers ran down the corridor toward them, drawing a sword as he came. A handful of his white-clad enlisted men were behind him. Several Americans fired at once, dropping the officer and two of his men. There was another clap of thunder. Yelling in terror, the surviving lancers turned and fled out the back way. Some Americans gave chase; others burst into the front room, where more than a dozen terrified card players threw up their hands.

“Shoot them, Colonel!” urged Captain Tejada, one of Ramirez’s officers. Short, dumpy, pompous Tejada had been given the nickname “Napoleon” by the Americans, for his outlandish uniform and ridiculous bicorn hat. “Shoot them!”¹²

As the Americans soon learned, there was an unwritten rule in Central America—in war, all prisoners were shot. Ramirez’s deputy, Colonel Mariano Mendez, a bloodthirsty Mexican in his sixties, was nodding; he knew enough English to loudly concur with Tejada. “Keel them!”¹³

Walker ignored the pair, ordering Dr. Jones to tend to the wounded Legitimistas as if they were his own men. During the night, Walker quietly talked with the captured Legitimista officer and several of his men, in Spanish. Grateful to have been spared, they spoke freely, revealing that a German merchant from León had turned up at Granada and told General Corral of a planned Falange operation against Rivas. The German had been able to leave León and pass through Democratico lines because he carried a passport—newly issued by none other than General Munoz. To Walker, the conclusion was inescapable: Munoz had deliberately sent the German to Granada to warn the Legitimistas of Walker’s mission.

Under a dry sky, they began the march at 8:00 A.M. With Don Maximo and his young nephew remaining at Tola to guard the prisoners, the columns’ new guides were a courtly Rivas resident, Don Cleto Mayorga, once a captain in the Democratico army, and his son, a boy of twelve. Walker had divided the lancers’ twenty captured horses among his American officers and an advance guard. Mariano Mendez, the Mexican colonel, managed to also find a horse for himself in the village; eager for action and equipped with a captured seven-foot lance, he rode with the advance guard.

Just as northern Nicaragua was dominated by one political faction and the south by another, even the agriculture of Nicaragua was different in north and south. Unlike the cane fields of the north, the countryside that Walker and his men now passed through was dominated by cacao plantations; the cocoa bean from the cacao tree fueled the flourishing local chocolate-making industry.

An hour out of Rivas, the column met a stream of Nicaraguan women walking along the road from the city. Mostly young, they had empty, hand-woven fruit baskets on their heads. The ethnic mix in Nicaragua took in the original Indian inhabitants, the descendants of African slaves brought in to work the plantations by the Spanish overlords of Nicaragua, a very small percentage of landed gentry of pure Spanish ancestry, and subgroups created by intermarriage between the other groups. Most Nicaraguans, like these women fresh from the morning market where they had sold and bartered their farm produce, were poor subsistence farmers or the employees of the few major landowners.

As they passed either side of the column, the women, chattering and giggling, quickly overcame their initial surprise and gave the Yanquis warm smiles and cheerful greetings, sometimes also calling out to men they recognized in the Democratico ranks at the rear of the column. Walker’s Americans, charmed by the attractive senoritas, tried out their limited Spanish, telling the women how beautiful they looked. “The girls,” Walker was to record, “seemed pleased with the compliments of the men from the land of gold.”¹⁴ Walker himself could appreciate the beauty of the local women, but only one woman had ever turned his head—his late fiancée, Ellen Martin, to his mind the most beautiful woman in all of New Orleans, if not the world. Around his neck, he continued to wear the simple gold crucifix that Ellen had given him when they had become engaged.

Amid the banter and “interchange of civilities” between members of the column and the passing women, Spanish-speaker Doubleday overheard Colonel Ramirez questioning the females about the number and disposition of Legitimista troops at Rivas. But Ramirez didn’t pass on to Walker what he learned. “The full significance of this was revealed by subsequent events,” Doubleday later wrote. ¹⁵

The women were soon left behind. The Americans’ smiles faded, their heart rates increased, as they drew closer to Rivas and the fight they expected must soon erupt. As the advance guard topped a rise four miles from Rivas, there was a gasp from the men riding with Walker. Lake Nicaragua spread before them and, in it, quite near, an island from which sprouted a pair of volcanoes—Concepcion, the taller of the two, and Madera. Shooting up three thousand feet from the island, the conical mountains were symmetrical and almost identical. “Dark forests of the tropics clothed the sides,” Walker noted of the volcanoes. To Walker, who, like most of his men, was seeing it for the first time, this was “a vision of enchantment.” Such was its beauty, he said, “The first glimpse of the scene almost made the pulse stand still.”¹⁶

The road now curved around to the north, following the lake, and the Americans could hardly take their eyes from the scenery as they continued the march. The guide told Walker that a mile from Rivas, the road joined the main highway to Granada. Walker took this route so that he could enter Rivas from the north, avoiding pickets likely to be on the lookout for him to the south and west, and putting himself between the city and any reinforcements coming from the Legitimista capital.

Colonel Bosque, the Legitimista commander at Rivas, had set up barricades on all the roads leading into the city. At a farmhouse beside the road less than half a mile out from Rivas, Walker called a halt. Ahead, a typical breast-high barricade of dried mud and tree branches could be seen stretching across the road, from one house to another, blocking the Granada road. The heads of Legitimista troops could be seen above the top of the barricade, while the barrel of a large cannon, a twenty-four-pounder, jutted through a gap in the mud wall. Ordering the mounted members of the Falange to dismount, Walker summoned his senior American and Nicaraguan officers to a conference.

In discussions with the Espinosas on the voyage down from Realejo, Walker had formed a clear picture of the layout of Rivas, and this picture had been confirmed by Mayorga. In good times, the city of Rivas held a population of twenty-five thousand. Civil war casualties, conscription, and the flight of Democratico supporters had reduced that to eleven thousand, leaving many empty buildings in the suburbs. On the northern outskirts of the city, there were cacao plantations on either side of the road—the Maleano estate and the Santa Ursula estate. Santa Ursula was Don Maximo Espinosa’s property, now in the hands of the Legitimista government. The adjoining Maleano estate was the property of Don Juan Ruiz, a member of the Legitimista government. There had been a long-standing feud between Espinosa and Ruiz, and this had been the motivation for Espinosa’s taking the Democratico side in the civil war.

Characterized by rising ground and numerous adobe buildings, the two cacao plantations offered good defensive positions, and Walker decided that if the need arose, he could fall back to one of those. His plan was to quickly drive over the barricades and through the suburbs to the central plaza of Rivas before the Legitimista garrison had time to organize. Explaining his plan of attack to his officers, Walker assigned half the men of the Falange to Lieutenant Colonel Achilles Kewen and half to Major Crocker. Their orders were to push Legitimista troops from the streets and rapidly advance to the plaza. Colonel Ramirez was instructed to follow close on the heels of the Falange and protect its flanks and rear by covering the Granada and San Juan del Sur roads.

Walker still had not let on that he could speak Spanish and passed on his instructions to the Nicaraguan commander via Captain “Napoleon” Tejada, who spoke relatively good English. But Tejada balked, asking Walker to repeat the orders. Tejada seemed to think it unwise to allow Ramirez to stay in the rear and stubbornly declined to translate the orders, shrugging and pretending not to understand. Exasperated, Walker sent Tejada to the rear and had Doubleday pass on the orders to Ramirez. Doubleday noted that “the eyes of Ramirez sparkled” when he heard his instructions.¹⁷

Although Doubleday had immediately passed on Walker’s orders, Doubleday, like Tejada, had his suspicions about Ramirez’s reliability, and he, too, voiced his concern to Walker, suggesting it would be a mistake to let the Americans take the brunt of the assault on their own. He added, “It would be better not to send our native troops too far out of reach, Colonel.”¹⁸

A myth would later grow that William Walker never smiled, but Doubleday made a lie of that in his memoirs. Of Walker’s response to his suggestion about Ramirez’s troops, he wrote: “With a smile which we afterwards learned to understand the meaning of so well, he replied that I had not yet seen what fifty-six such men as he had, and so armed, could do.”¹⁹ Bowing to his superior, Doubleday offered no more advice.

“Do you fully understand your orders?” Walker now asked his officers. When all acknowledged that they did, Walker sent them to their troops.²⁰ As the Mayorgas led away all but Walker’s horse, Walker took out his fob watch and checked the time—it was just going on noon. He pulled himself up into the saddle. “Advance!” he called.