Tycoon's War

Walker called for a charge, and the Americans leaped forward with a bloodthirsty yell. Their approach had been observed, and, belching smoke and flame, the big gun at the barricade boomed a welcome. Its aim was too high—grape and canister designed to cut infantry to pieces went whistling over the ducking heads of the Falange members. Before the gunners had time to reload, the Americans scaled the barricade, only to see a second barricade ahead. Walker’s men didn’t waste ammunition on fleeing Legitimistas, instead sprinting to the next barricade. This was quickly abandoned by the enemy.

Clearing the first barricade on his horse, Walker came galloping up behind his troops as they mounted the second barricade. On the far side, Walker could see the summit of Santa Ursula Hill in the near distance. The road ahead, up which Legitimista troops were fleeing, was dotted with adobe houses. Excitedly the Americans pushed forward, up the hill, toward the city center. But as they reached a cross street, they ran into a hail of musket fire from loopholes strategically cut into the walls of buildings at the intersection. Rather than pause and be bogged down, the Americans ran by

as the Legitimistas at the loopholes were reloading, leaving these troops for Ramirez to deal with when his men came up.

The Falange breasted the crown of the Santa Ursula Hill, only to be met by lethal, concentrated fire from virtually invisible opponents in buildings to their front and flanks. Doubleday recorded, “We kept close to the houses either side” of the street, hugging the adobe walls for cover in what had become a deadly shooting gallery. But, he said, “Already we were counting our dead and wounded.”²

On the summit of Santa Ursula Hill, Achilles Kewen, seeing the futility of trying to push farther forward in the face of murderously accurate Legitimista fire coming from close range, ordered his men to break into the large house surrounded by a veranda beside them. After using rifle butts to smash open wooden gates and crash down front doors, his men dragged and carried their wounded into cover, taking possession of the empty hacienda. On the other side of the road, Major Crocker’s men followed suit, crashing their way into several smaller houses.

Walker rode up just as the houses were being occupied. Continuing on past, he saw Tim Crocker ahead in the street, alone. Young Crocker was panting. His eyes were wide with excitement. His right arm hung uselessly at his side, for his shoulder had been shot through, and his sword lay where he’d dropped it. Blood ran from a wound on his chin. Three of the six barrels of the smoking pepperbox pistol in his left hand had been discharged.

Walker, hoping to restart the drive toward the plaza by now introducing Colonel Ramirez’s men into the fray, looked around to see how close the Democratico troops were. But of Ramirez and most of his command, there was no sign. A handful of Nicaraguans were coming up with ammunition boxes offloaded from their mules, and off to the right Walker could see mad Mariano Mendez and a handful of Democratico troops pushing forward down a side street. But that was all.

Looking to the front again, Walker spotted a mass of Legitimista infantry moving forward to outflank the Americans through the undergrowth on their left. These were eighty men of a Legitimista company commanded by Colonel Manuel Arguello, who had just arrived in Rivas after being urgently summoned from San Juan del Sur. Arguello’s men fired as they advanced, and musket balls whizzed all around Walker. He calmly dismounted and joined Kewen’s men.

Kewen had occupied the Hacienda Santa Ursula, home of Don Maximo Espinosa, who waited back at Tola for news of Walker’s victory. It was a spacious, airy house with large rooms and high ceilings. Two hundred years old, it had been built in classic Mediterranean Spanish style, with shading, pillared verandas on all sides. And unlike the homes of the common people, which generally had dirt for floors, the hacienda’s floor was tiled. Don Maximo’s more valuable and portable contents had long ago been looted by the Legitimistas, but the larger furniture remained, and Walker, Kewen, and Doubleday dragged heavy, baronial-style tables and sideboards to the wide-open doorway to barricade it, for the Americans had destroyed the doors when they’d broken in.

As the three of them toiled to create a barricade, there were shouts from Americans in the houses across the street—Major Crocker had been killed, and the Legitimistas could be seen massing for an assault on the houses. The trio closed off the hacienda’s doorway just in time—a wave of bellowing Legitimistas came charging up onto the veranda with bayonets fixed, and Walker, Kewen, and Doubleday stood shoulder to shoulder at the doorway behind their temporary barricade, desperately batting away thrusting bayonets with their swords. In the nick of time, Captain Charles Hornsby and several others came running to join Walker and the others and, poking rifles over the shoulders of the three Americans in the doorway, fired point-blank into the mass of attackers.

As soon as Hornsby and his companions fired, they stood aside to reload their single-shot rifles, allowing more Americans to take their places and loose off another deadly volley. Then Hornsby and his men stepped up with reloaded weapons and fired again. The combined result was carnage—a pile of white-clad Legitimistas, some lifeless, others savagely wounded, and all covered in blood, lay in front of the doorway. The remaining attackers withdrew, turning and firing the occasional shot as they went.

As the assault petered out, big, bushy-bearded Kewen, standing right beside Doubleday, clutched at the air with both hands, staggered, and fell; he had been hit by a parting shot. “I caught him and laid him gently on his back,” Doubleday wrote. Blood was running from the corner of Kewen’s mouth, and there was a red spot on his breast, from which blood also flowed freely. “He had been shot through the lung,” Doubleday would record, “and smilingly sank into death.”⁴

By the time that Kewen breathed his last, Colonel Arguello had put his Legitimista company between Colonel Ramirez’s Democratico troops and the Falange and had also regained the cannon abandoned at the first barricade. When Ramirez saw this, he briskly marched his troops away from the battle. Skirting Rivas, he headed south to take his men across the frontier into neighboring Costa Rica. Ramirez left Walker and his small American band of little more than fifty men surrounded by twelve hundred Legitimista troops.

As exhausting hours passed and rain came and went, the Legitimistas launched attack after attack on the houses being held by the Americans, only to be driven back each time. Inside the Santa Ursula hacienda, Doubleday noticed that many fellow Americans were sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall by window or door. Their rifles were loaded, ready in case the enemy broke into the house, but no one was making a target of himself.

After surviving a year of fighting as a member of the Democratico army prior to Walker’s coming to Nicaragua, Doubleday had come to think of himself as leading a charmed life. Convinced that he was indestructible, he now crawled around the men, taking their loaded rifles, poking them out an opening, and firing as soon as he saw the head of an enemy. Doubleday had done this several times and was just drawing a bead on a fresh target when “a ball struck me in the right temple, and I dropped to the floor.”⁵ Later, he would recollect a flickering sensation as he lay there on the tiles. Then he heard the voices of two men who had come to kneel beside him.

Doubleday opened his eyes and looked up at the pair. “I’m not gone yet!” he declared, pulling himself to his feet, where he stood, swaying, noticing that his clothes were damp with his own spilled blood.⁶ Dr. Jones wound a bandage tightly around Doubleday’s skull, telling him that he was lucky to be alive—the temporal artery had been severed, and the Legitimista musket ball had lodged in his skull, behind the ear. Later, when the surgeon had the opportunity, said Dr. Jones, he would dig the ball out.

Walker was relieved that Doubleday had survived. He had already lost his most senior officers, Kewen and Crocker, “the two men upon whom [I] chiefly depended.” Walker had formed a close relationship with young Tim Crocker; they’d become like brothers. “The fellowship of difficulty and danger had established a sort of freemasonry between (us),” Walker would later remark. Their joint experience in Mexico had convinced Walker that cool, calm Crocker had a peculiar ability to get himself, and the men he led, out of even the tightest scrape.⁷ Yet now, Crocker was dead.

Five of Walker’s men had been killed, but it was the loss of the two senior officers that hurt most. He would later say that the spirits of his men began to droop once it was known that Crocker and Kewen were dead.⁸ Walker’s own spirits seem to have also taken a tumble—Doubleday wrote that for a time, his commander appeared in a daze and incapable of deciding what to do. Walker told Doubleday that the Falange should wait for nightfall and might then try to launch an assault on the city plaza.⁹ Doubleday thought this insane. To him, the Falange was in no shape to try anything other than escape—if they lived long enough. Dizzy from loss of blood, sitting with his back to a wall and looking around the room, Doubleday took in the sight of wounded Americans all around him. Among them were rash Captain Julius De Brissot and tight-lipped Lieutenant Frank Anderson, both with leg wounds and in considerable pain, and Hughes, a rifleman who had fought under Doubleday at the siege of Granada. The glassy-eyed Hughes looked in a bad way.¹⁰

Someone called a warning: Legitimista soldiers could be heard, and soon seen, punching a hole in an adobe wall opposite the Espinosa hacienda, using picks and crowbars. And through the growing gap in the wall, the ominous shape of a four-pound field gun was spotted. Its cannonballs could soon demolish the walls of the Espinosa house, if the gun was allowed to open fire. This threat jerked Walker from his malaise. He called for volunteers to join him in a charge to put the cannon out of commission.

Minutes later, as the Legitimista gun crew was trying to bring the gun to bear, half a dozen Americans come hurdling over the barricade at the hacienda door, yelling ferociously, charging the gun position. Bareheaded Colonel Walker was in the lead, sword in one hand, pistol in the other. The others carried rifles. The men of the gun crew, caught with ram, gunpowder cask, and cannonballs in hand, dropped everything and turned to flee. Some, too slow, were cut down. Wielding rifle butts like sledge hammers, Walker’s men smashed the spoked wheels of the cannon’s carriage; the barrel crunched to the ground. Walker and his companions then dashed back the way they had come, reaching the Espinosa hacienda unscathed.

Legitimista commander Colonel Manuel Bosque surveyed the scene with sour dissatisfaction. From a loophole in the house where he had set up his headquarters, he could see at least thirty bodies lying in the open, between his position and the buildings occupied by the Yankee filibusteros. One or two of the dead were Americans, but most were Bosque’s own men. Littering the ground around the bodies were rifles, muskets, pistols, hats—the detritus of war. Bosque had been born in Spain. Normally, in Nicaragua, a Spaniard was hated, just as all Spanish had been hated ever since their countrymen were thrown out of Central America by the local people in the 1820s. Spanish overlords had been cruel and arrogant during their three centuries of occupation. But Bosque was a capable, determined, no-nonsense soldier, and that made him valuable to the Legitimistas.

Nothing Colonel Bosque tried in his effort to dislodge the Americans had worked. Repeated frontal assaults had failed. And his attempt to employ a field gun to blast the filibusteros out had been foiled. Bosque had by this time suffered more than one hundred casualties. Determined still, he tried something new, sending runners around his positions with a message—he would pay fifty pesos to the man who set fire to the Espinosa house. Not only would this tactic serve a strategic end, but it would also have the symbolic purpose of destroying the hacienda of the Democratico “traitor” Don Maximo Espinosa.

Two men answered the call. Emanuel Mongolo had been a Rivas schoolteacher before joining the Legitimista army. In his twenties, he was fit and an excellent runner. The other volunteer was Nery Fajardo, a Rivas laborer. When Colonel Bosque pulled out his purse and repeated his offer of fifty pesos if they set fire to the Espinosa hacienda, both men declined the money—they would do this for patriotism, not for pesos, they said.

So, Bosque had a makeshift torch prepared: A bayonet was tied to the end of a long, wooden pole, straw was wrapped around the bayonet, and this was covered with tar. A little before 3:00 P.M., Mongolo and Fajardo burst into the open, with Mongolo holding the burning torch, as Legitimista troops let fly with covering fire aimed at the doors and windows of the buildings sheltering the filibusteros. Mongolo reached the rear of the Espinosa house unscathed. Inside, the Americans were hunkered down to avoid the concentrated musket fire coming from Legitimista lines. Fajardo came panting close behind and, grabbing Mongolo’s legs, hoisted his companion up. Frantically, Mongolo used one hand to rip away roof tiles. Even today, in rural Nicaragua, the roofs of Nicaraguan homes are constructed in the same manner as that of the Espinosa house in 1855. Rough-hewn wooden rafters were laid from wall to wall. Sugar cane was laid over the rafters to create the ceiling, and over the cane lining went the outer covering of baked, red clay roof tiles.

Once Mongolo had removed several tiles, he was able to thrust the torch into the cane lining. The torch lay there burning; the ceiling smoldered until it caught fire. Mongolo and Fajardo scampered back to Legitimista lines, to receive the congratulations of Colonel Bosque and their Legitimista comrades. In its July 10 issue, the Granada-based Legitimista newspaper Defender of Order would laude their courageous deed, quoting Minister for Foreign Relations and the Interior Mateo Mayorga, who would say that the pair was all the more worthy of public admiration because they turned down the fifty-peso reward.¹¹ For their act, Mongolo and Fajardo were elevated to the sparse ranks of Nicaragua’s national heroes, where they remain to this day.

Don Maximo’s hacienda was burning. The fire at the back of the house had slowly spread through the ceiling. Because there was no water within the house, the Americans inside had no means of fighting the fire. As the flames licked and spread, choking smoke began to fill the air. With the hacienda soon untenable, Walker issued orders for everyone in it to transfer to the nearest house across the street occupied by Crocker’s men. Confirmation of the plan was yelled across to the Americans holding that building, warning them to expect visitors.

All the wounded were lifted up and carried on shoulders or assisted to run, as in a single mad dash, Walker and his surviving men fled the burning Espinosa house, crossed the body-strewn street, and crushed through the doorway of the house opposite. In this crowded, smaller house, with the hacienda across the street gripped by fire, Walker took stock of his situation. It was obvious even to the stubborn Tennesseean that any notion of taking Rivas with the men he had left was unachievable. In addition to losing five men, twelve of his followers were wounded, some seriously. Just thirty-seven men remained fit to fight. Better to break out now and live to return and fight another day.

Walker called the men in the building next door to join him, and in ones and twos, they scuttled to him. Once all his men were concentrated in the one house, he told them they would bayonet-charge a narrow front, attacking the Legitimista encirclement to the west, where there was “a kind of moat or ravine bordered by trees.” “Although the intervening space was crowded by the enemy,” Walker told his men, the element of surprise should allow them to drive through the Legitimistas and break out of the encirclement. Walker’s men would then keep going through the cacao plantations to the Transit Road, before following that to San Juan del Sur, where they would find a boat. The plan was “received with a shout” of approval by Walker’s followers. ¹²

But, Walker warned them, for the breakout to succeed, every participant must be able to defend himself, must be able to fight his way out, and had to run unassisted. No one could be spared to carry the wounded. With the detached coolness of a physician, he said that any man unable to run would have to be left behind—with the hope the Legitimistas would provide them with medical treatment. The Americans knew what the Legitimistas did with prisoners, but no one argued with their colonel. As the able-bodied men loaded weapons and slid bayonets from scabbards and fastened them in place on the end of their rifles, Walker and Dr. Jones moved around the wounded. The most severely injured men were unconscious—their fate was sealed.

The thigh muscles of both Frank Anderson and Julius de Brissot had been shot through. In addition, one of Anderson’s feet was bandaged and he had another bandage over a bayonet slash on the scalp. But both Anderson and De Brissot were adamant that they could run and fight, and they were determined to take their place in the breakout. Admiring their courage and knowing how popular Anderson was with the others, Walker decided to give the pair a fighting chance and agreed to their participation.

Private Hughes, sitting propped up in a corner, called Doubleday to his side. Colonel Walker and Dr. Jones had told him he would have to remain behind. Hughes couldn’t stand, let alone walk or run, but still he begged Doubleday not to leave him here. “Any hesitation at this moment would have been fatal to all, besides being useless to him,” Doubleday would later guiltily remark. ¹³ He didn’t bother to lie to the man—Hughes had been engaged in this civil war longer than most of the men in the room, and he of all people knew from personal experience what Nicaraguans did with prisoners. But when Doubleday firmly said that Hughes must stay behind—for the good of them all—Hughes didn’t make a fuss and accepted his sacrifice. Hughes, one of five wounded Americans left to the mercy of the Legitimistas, watched with empty eyes as the other men made their silent preparations to depart, avoiding his gaze.

Walker checked his watch. It was a little before 4:00 P.M. They had been fighting for their lives here in Rivas for close to four hours. The little colonel now quietly told his men it was time to go. As the Espinosa house across the street burned fiercely and attracted the eyes of the Legitimista troops in the encirclement, in the way that a house fire always becomes a beacon to spectators, the forty-five Americans taking part in the desperate escape bid came to their feet. Walker glanced at the men crowded behind him. Dr. Jones had dumped his medical bag and was equipped with rifle and bayonet. Hornsby and Markham looked cool and determined. Most of the others were tense; wide eyes flashed from one to another. They knew that if this breakout attempt failed, they would all be dead by the time the sun went down.

Walker nodded to the man on the other side of the doorway, who drew back the door. Out into the open dashed Walker. On his heels came the unwounded men. Doubleday, De Brissot, Anderson, and four other wounded brought up the rear. All yelled as if possessed by demons. It was every man for himself. As they ran, they fired rifles and pistols at Legitimista soldiers in their path and were prepared to bayonet any man who stood in their way. Surprise was with the Falange. “We were firing our revolvers into our opponents’ faces and thrusting our way through their ranks before they had any notion of what we were about,” Doubleday later recalled. ¹⁴ A few Legitimistas got off a shot. A young American private fell, mortally wounded. But the power of the charge swept the others into the Legitimista line, and through it. “Before the enemy could disengage themselves from us we had passed through their midst.”¹⁵

On reaching the lip of the ravine, the Americans swung around to counter any attempted pursuit. But the Legitimistas were fleeing in all directions in panic. Walker quickly led the party along the top of the ravine to open country and the beckoning trees of a distant cacao plantation. With Hornsby and several of his best men as rear guard, the party moved into the plantation. Not a single Legitimista followed. It seemed to Walker’s Americans that the Nicaraguans were glad to see the back of them.

The news that reached Colonel Bosque at his command post was confused. He was told that some of the Yankees had managed to escape by charging through the western side of the encirclement. When he asked who was giving chase to the fleeing filibusters, he was sheepishly informed that no one was. But, he was assured, most of the Yankees were still holed up in two houses at the top of Santa Ursula Hill. Their false belief had been created by the enormous firepower that the Americans demonstrated throughout the afternoon. The Legitimistas were convinced that, to deliver such devastating rifle fire, many more Americans must have been involved in the attack on Rivas than had actually been the case. ¹⁶

For a time, the Legitimistas tensely waited for the other Americans they imagined to still be in the two houses to attempt another breakout. But when nothing stirred and there was no answering fire, Colonel Bosque ordered an all-out assault on the buildings. Hearts in mouths, hundreds of white-clad Legitimista troops charged the houses the Yankees had occupied half an hour before. Meeting no resistance, they burst inside.

When Bosque arrived at one house, he found his men glaring at five seriously wounded Yankee prisoners on the floor. These filibusters had killed their friends and relatives in the battle—the final Legitimista casualty count would be seventy killed and a similar number wounded. Bosque ordered a pile of wood to be raised in the Rivas Plaza. The bodies of the dead Americans—Crocker, Kewen, and four others, including the young private killed during the breakout—were taken on a cart to the plaza and irreverently tossed onto the pile. The Spanish colonel then ordered that Hughes and the four other wounded Americans also be placed on the woodpile and chained in place. On Bosque’s order, the log pile was set alight. With leering Legitimista troops and thousands of Rivas residents silently filling the plaza to watch, the Yankee wounded were burned to death on the pyre.

In the cacao plantation, the Falange linked up with Mayorga their guide, who led them west along a little-used track. It was soggy from the rains, and before long, the Americans were struggling in mud halfway up to their knees. Cursing, using their rifles as walking sticks, giving each other a hand, with some of them, including Doubleday, losing boots to the clawing mud and having to go on in bare feet, they struggled through the darkness. Close to midnight, they reached a hilltop hut on a small cattle ranch cleared from the forest. The Transit Road to the Pacific Coast, said Mayorga, was about two miles farther on. The terrified ranchero and his wife, who occupied the hut, were placed under guard, and here the weary Americans grabbed a few hours sleep.

With the dawn of June 30, Walker’s survivors ate and drank the last of their rations. This was the first meal they’d had since breakfast the previous day in Tola, seemingly a lifetime before. Using a jackknife that he sharpened on a pebble, surgeon Jones took the opportunity to remove the musket ball lodged in Doubleday’s skull, without anesthetic. With a triumphant smile, Dr. Jones held a bloodied one-ounce ball of lead under Doubleday’s nose. “He managed the operation skillfully” Doubleday later remarked of the painful procedure.¹⁷

Resuming the march, the column reached the Transit Road by 9:00 A.M.—the same road personally mapped out by Cornelius Vanderbilt. After he had jumped the rapids in the steamboat Director on his history-making trip up the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua, Vanderbilt had crossed the lake to Virgin Bay, which was selected as the lake terminus for the road to San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast. Vanderbilt’s original road, hacked through the forest, had been the source of much complaint from early Transit Route travelers. “Pleasant enough in dry weather but horrible when wet,” noted Dr. William Rabe, a New York passenger who traveled the road in August 1851.¹⁸ “It was one giant mudhole,” reported Lieutenant George Crook after his passage along the road in 1852. “Places where mule and rider would almost sink out of sight.” As for his friend Lieutenant Dutch Kautz, “the last he saw of his mule was its ears sticking out of the mud.”¹⁹

Commodore Vanderbilt had promised to improve the road, and he had. First he covered it with planks, and then he covered the planks with white gravel. He turned it into reputedly the best road in Central America. By 1855, Transit passengers were traveling the road in the comfort of stagecoaches brought in by Vanderbilt. Of American construction and painted blue and white, the national colors of Nicaragua’s Legitimista government, the coaches were light and fast. Midway along the road stood the American hotel—universally known as the Half Way House—where the coaches paused to change horses.

Walker led his grateful men onto the Transit Road and began to follow it west, but only a few minutes after they set off toward San Juan del Sur, the sound of a tinkling mule bell met their ears, coming from around a bend.

“It is the Treasure Train, Colonel,” said guide Mayorga. “Steamer passengers from California crossed from San Juan del Sur to Virgin Bay yesterday. This will be the mule train carrying the treasure shipment from the steamer.”²⁰

Having heard that the Treasure Train was usually accompanied by an armed escort, Walker quickly ordered his men off the road, and they dove for cover in the undergrowth. The Treasure Train soon passed by at a leisurely pace, but apart from unarmed muleteers, the train, carrying millions of dollars in California gold, had no escort. Once the mule train was out of sight and out of earshot, the Falange reformed on the road and continued west. They were approaching the Half Way House when a rider came galloping up to them from the direction of San Juan del Sur.

Doubleday recognized the horseman, a native of Kentucky named Dewey who had served under him at Granada. Dewey had gone into business at San Juan del Sur, primarily as a saloon cardsharp fleecing passengers just off the San Francisco steamers. As Dewey reigned in his horse, Walker noted that the man wore a pair of holstered .36 Colt Navy revolvers. After Dewey and Walker introduced themselves, Dewey said, “I’m just from San Juan del Sur, Colonel.”²¹ As he spoke, he cast an eye over the battered and bleeding Falange. Recognizing Doubleday, his former commander, he gave him a friendly nod. Dewey went on to tell Walker that, after Colonel Arguello’s hurried departure for Rivas early the previous morning, there wasn’t a single Legitimista soldier in San Juan del Sur. “Some of your native Democrats, including Mariano Mendez, passed through the town last night,” Dewey added. “On their way to Costa Rica, I do believe.”²²

A little after sunset, the column reached San Juan del Sur. The town had been renamed Pineda City in 1852, but the name never stuck; San Juan del Sur it had remained. In 1855, it had a population of several thousand. Its wooden buildings and small farming lots spread along a strip of flat ground between a beach of volcanic gray sand fronting the cove and the hills behind. Those hills rose sharply for a hundred feet and were covered with thick, lush vegetation. Most of the land here was owned by the Legitimista government, to which the landholders paid rent. The majority of the businesses in the town, including its saloons, were owned by foreigners—Americans, French, British, and Germans, in the main. The town had no port facilities, not even a jetty. Passengers and freight were all brought to the beach from Transit Company steamers in small boats. There had been a few government officials, including a Collector of Customs, based at San Juan del Sur, but they had all cleared out of town and fled to Rivas when Walker’s Americans appeared in the Meridional Department.

Beside the beach, Walker and his men took over the military barrack vacated by Colonel Arguello’s company only the previous day. Seeing a handsome schooner, the seventy-five-ton San José, a former San Francisco pilot boat now flying the Costa Rican flag, dropping anchor in the cove, Walker sent a detail under Captain Hornsby out in a rowboat to take possession of her.

In case he had to make a hurried retreat from southern Nicaragua, Walker had arranged with the skipper of the Vesta, Gilbert Morton, to sail the brig up and down the coast for several nights. If Morton spotted a prearranged light signal from Walker, he was to put in to rescue the Falange. But now, once he had control of the San José, Walker knew that if he failed to make contact with the Vesta in the night, he could use the schooner to take his battered little force back to Realejo.

But even while he was thinking about escaping from San Juan del Sur, Walker was planning his return, with more troops, and with reliable Democratico officers. A new plan of attack was forming in his mind. And it was quite brilliant.

Walker and the savaged Falange arrived back at Realejo on July 1. After failing to attract the attention of the Vesta with their light signals, they had used the San José to depart San Juan del Sur, only to encounter the Vesta off the coast and transfer to her at sea. And they had come back with their depleted numbers slightly increased by the addition of two Americans who had been in San Juan del Sur and had opted to join Walker’s little band despite the failure at Rivas.

Within days of returning to the north, Walker had put a new plan to Provisional Director Castellon and a new demand for two hundred Democratico troops to join his next attempt to take Rivas and the Transit Route. This time, he wanted Democratico officers he could trust. He very quickly accused General Munoz of betraying his previous plan to the Legitimistas and demanded that Castellon remove the general. But the provisional director stalled over both Walker’s demands. The Legitimista commander in chief, General Ponciano Corral, had marched his army to Managua, within striking distance of León. He was expected to attack the Democratico capital soon, and Castellon wanted the Americans to help defend León. As for General Munoz, he had too much support among leading Democraticos, and Castellon would not, or could not, remove him.

For weeks while he was based at Realejo and then Chinandega, Walker negotiated at a distance with Castellon in León, threatening to pull out of Nicaragua if the provisional director failed to support his latest plan. General Munoz, meanwhile, sang a familiar song, agitating to have the Falange disbanded and the Americans spread through his units. But Walker did achieve one success, convincing the provisional director to sign a contract authorizing Walker to recruit for service in the Falange Americana an additional three hundred Americans, men who would each be paid a hundred dollars a month and granted five hundred acres of land in Nicaragua on the cessation of hostilities. Tellingly, the contract also empowered Walker to settle all differences and outstanding accounts between the government of Nicaragua and the Accessory Transit Company. Castellon, not realizing the significance of Walker’s Transit Company clause, did not question any aspect of the contract.

As the weeks passed, two of Walker’s men, Turnbull and McNab, became restless and quit. Walker didn’t stand in their way, but the pair’s departure had a negative effect on the morale of the remaining Americans, many of whom saw this as the beginning of the disintegration of the Falange. So, Walker called his men together and delivered a speech. Accounts of Walker’s speeches tell of him talking in a firm but modulated voice, without excessive emotion or grand gestures. Yet, he was uncommonly persuasive; there was something about both what he said and the way he said it that could rekindle sagging spirits and fire dampened enthusiasm in even the most dire of circumstances.

And so it was on this occasion. Walker told his men that they were there to “regenerate” the civilization of Latin America—not just Nicaragua, not just Central America, but all of South America. They were there to introduce American values and democracy, to replace a worn-out Old World social and political order. These fortunate few, these original men of the Falange, were the first of many, he said, “the precursors of a movement destined to affect materially the civilization of the whole continent of South America.”²⁴

This term, “regeneration,” would quickly gain currency, and soon, in the United States, men who signed up to follow Walker would be referred to by their admirers not as filibusters but as regenerators. As for these Originals, as the men of the first enlistment of the Falange became known, they were inspired by Walker’s address, which, in their eyes, elevated them above the caliber of mere mercenaries and gave them a broader vision and a new purpose. There was no more talk of disintegration, only of regeneration.

An outbreak of cholera in Managua forced General Corral to withdraw his Legitimista army to Granada, but in early August, when General José Santos Guardiola left Granada and marched north toward Condega with a small but well-equipped Legitimista force of several hundred men, General Munoz finally took his Democratico army into the field. Munoz’s orders were to prevent Guardiola from linking up with Legitimista irregulars in the province of Tegucigalpa to the northeast, from where he could threaten León and all the Democratico northwest. General Munoz left León, taking with him six hundred men and all the best equipment and supplies.

Walker was, in the meantime, looking for a local officer he could rely on. He found his man at Chinandega—the town’s subprefect, Don José Maria Valle. A colonel in the Democratico army, Valle had been badly wounded during the siege of Granada. The injury had left him with a stiff knee and forced him into the Democraticos’ civil service. Mostly of Indian stock, Colonel Valle could neither read nor write, yet he had a nobility and an eloquence that endeared him to the local people. Valle was also a gifted troubadour. “When he took the guitar in hand he would carry the women away with his songs of love or of patriotism,” Walker said with admiration.²⁵

Walker liked Valle immediately and found in him a man he could trust. The feeling was mutual—Valle, or Chelon as he was known familiarly by the locals, liked and respected Walker. It was not Walker’s habit to tell even his closest friends everything that was in his mind, and he only told his subordinates what they needed to know. But to win Valle over and in strictest confidence, Walker told him of his new plan, a plan that went well beyond anything he had proposed to Castellon. If it could be pulled off, the civil war would be over within weeks. Valle was so taken by this audacious secret plan that he immediately and excitedly committed to commanding the Democratico troops involved in Walker’s return to the south, at the same time giving Walker his solemn promise not to breathe a word to anyone about what Walker really intended. Walker’s trust was not misplaced—from this moment on, Valle was one of Walker’s most loyal Nicaraguan supporters.

Valle was an old friend of Provisional Director Castellon, and inspired by Walker’s plan, the subprefect traveled down to León to convince Castellon to support Walker’s return to the Meridional Department with men and matériel. When Castellon resisted and spoke against the operation, Valle argued all the harder, for, determined to avenge the death of a brother in the siege of Granada, Valle could not wait to come to grips with the Legitimistas again. While Walker was awaiting Valle’s return, the colonel was joined by an unexpected American recruit—his brother Lipscomb Norvell Walker. Two years younger than Walker, Norvell, as he was known, served as a U.S. Army lieutenant during the Mexican War. Walker immediately commissioned his brother into the Falange with the rank of captain. But when William Walker later spoke about Nicaragua, he would never mention Norvell; his brother would become a liability and a source of embarrassment. As one of Walker’s later recruits would say, when Norvell wasn’t talking, he was drinking, and when he wasn’t drinking, he was talking.²⁶

By the middle of August, Castellon caved in to Valle’s arguments and agreed to support Walker’s stated mission. Walker immediately marched the Falange to Realejo to board the Vesta. But when the promised troops and supplies failed to materialize, Walker wrote to Castellon, telling him he planned to sail for Honduras to enter the service of the president of Honduras, Trinidad Cabanas, an elderly Democratico under threat from the Legitimista government of neighboring Guatemala. Spurred by this threat, Castellon gave the necessary orders.

Colonel Valle soon arrived with 170 local recruits. But in the third week of August, as Walker was loading supplies aboard the Vesta and a Costa Rican ketch he had hired for the mission, cholera arrived at Realejo. Valle’s Nicaraguan recruits were quickly infected, but not a single North American came down with the disease. Walker, with all his medical training, was unable to account for the total immunity of the Americans. So deadly was this strain to the Nicaraguans that a man who was healthy one day could be dead three days later. A number of Valle’s men perished, while others deserted to escape the disease.

But Walker would not be put off his mission, not by cholera nor by an urgent dispatch that arrived from Director Castellon. This dispatch advised Walker that there had been a bloody battle near the town of El Sauce in Nicaragua’s central north, between General Munoz’s Democratico army and General Guardiola’s Legitimista army. After several hours’ fighting, the Democraticos had won. But General Munoz was dead—either as the result of a battle wound or, as another account had it, after being shot in the back by one of his own men once victory had been gained.

“Now, Munoz being out of the way, all will be well,” Castellon wrote to Walker, as he urged the American to abandon his mission to the south and come directly to León with his troops.²⁷ Munoz’s army, while victorious, had suffered heavy casualties; without a commander, it limped into the town of Pueblo Nuevo, licking its wounds and reluctant to take any further offensive action. Although the defeated Legitimista commander, General Guardiola, was said to be riding hard for Granada with just a single companion, the provisional director feared that the Legitimistas might send a new army from Granada against León while Munoz’s army was immobilized. But stubborn William Walker ignored Castellon.

On August 23, the Vesta and the chartered Costa Rican ketch upped anchor and set sail, the word having spread around Realejo that, now that the Democraticos had been victorious at El Sauce, Walker and his Americanos were sailing for Honduras to help President Cabanas. Once the vessels were out of sight of land, they turned south, not north as Legitimista spies back at Realejo would report in expectation of los Yanquis sailing for Honduras. This time, the Legitimistas in the south would receive no warning that William Walker was coming.