Tycoon's War

Congratulating Walker on his victory at Virgin Bay, Provisional Director Escoto advised the American colonel that while he would like to send him reinforcements, and volunteers as requested, the cholera epidemic was making it difficult to recruit even common laborers for government service, let alone soldiers. He would undertake to send Walker supplies by sea and do his best to find volunteers to join the Falange in the south but couldn’t promise anything.

Walker’s force, meanwhile, was growing by other means. Daily now, deserters from the Legitimista army at Rivas arrived at San Juan del Sur to volunteer to join Colonel Valle’s Democratico unit, telling tales of brutal treatment at the hands of Legitimista officers. These deserters also passed on information about the military situation at Rivas. At the same time, from the village of San Jorge, Democratico sympathizers come flooding west with red ribbons on their hats and broad smiles on their faces to join Valle’s unit.

Despite these additions, Walker would not move from San Juan del Sur until he had the promised reinforcements from Provisional Director Escoto. Other reinforcements came from south of the border; as news of the Legit imista defeat at La Virgen spread, Democratico sympathizers who had fled into northern Costa Rica at the beginning of the war arrived in San Juan del Sur to offer their services to Colonel Walker. Among them was American physician Dr. J. L. Cole, who had married the daughter of a leading Rivas family, the Aguartes.

Then, one day, Walker’s first guide in the Meridional Department, old Don Maximo Espinosa, appeared out of the blue. Walker had last seen of Don Maximo back in Tola on June 28, when the Falange had left Espinosa and his nephew watching over the captured Legitimista lancers. Espinosa told Walker that once news reached Tola of the Falange’s retreat from Rivas, he had gone into hiding in the countryside near his Santa Ursula plantation, relying on former employees for food and information and hoping to soon hear that Walker had returned. Walker, relieved to see Espinosa alive and well, invited him to take up the appointment Director Castellon had given him back in June, that of Democratico commissioner of taxes for the Meridional Department, based in San Juan del Sur.

Espinosa enthusiastically set about raising money for the Democraticos via port duties and by imposing a tax on all local businesses. Of the two leading bars in San Juan del Sur, one was run by the French consul, the other, the Dime Saloon, by American John Priest, who was also the U.S. consul for the area. When Prefect Espinosa assessed Priest for tax, Priest was furious. He hadn’t paid tax to the Legitimistas, and he certainly had no intentions of paying tax to the Democraticos. Not only did he refuse to pay, but Priest also threatened to summon a U.S. warship to protect his right to sell liquor to sailors and soldiers without paying tax, by virtue of the fact that he was the official U.S. representative in the port.

When this was reported to Walker, he didn’t bat an eyelid. He simply issued orders for a twenty-four-hour guard to be mounted outside the Dime Saloon by Valle’s soldiers, to prevent customers from entering the saloon until the tax had been paid. Not surprisingly, several hours later, Priest turned up at Prefect Espinosa’s office and paid his tax in full.

On September 20, the 1,257-ton Nicaragua Line steamer Sierra Nevada arrived at San Juan del Sur from San Francisco. Built in New York four years previously, she was considered one of the soundest ships on the Central American run. Passengers streaming ashore were met by Walker’s recruiting officers. No longer was William Walker perceived as either a failure or a joke—news of the victory at La Virgen meant that he was able to recruit a handful of Americans from among the steamer’s passengers. Young and keen for adventure, they were armed with captured weapons, and, like the rest of Walker’s men, would serve in the clothes they wore at the time they joined the Falange. For a uniform, they were given black dye for their shirts and a red Democratico ribbon to wear around their hats. These new men, along with several Americans enlisted locally, including Dr. Cole, brought Walker’s little force up to sixty men fit for duty. Colonel Valle’s Nicaraguan unit, meanwhile, had grown to be more than two hundred strong.

Word now reached Walker that the Legitimistas’ commanding general, Major General Ponciano Corral, had come down from Granada and dismissed General Guardiola from his post, taking personal charge at Rivas and reorganizing the city’s defenses. “Butcher” Guardiola had slunk off back to Honduras. While Walker felt that Corral would probably be no better at soldiering than Guardiola, he was told by Valle and others that the affable Corral, popular with all classes when mayor of Granada and a cabinet minister, would be more likely to lift the morale of the Legitimistas at Rivas.

Before long, fresh intelligence arrived—General Corral was marching from Rivas with his main force to do battle with Walker at San Juan del Sur. Walker immediately assembled his men and marched west, planning to ambush Corral on the Transit Road. But Corral unaccountably turned around and returned to Rivas, so Walker abandoned his ambush location and continued on to La Virgen. Shortly after the column arrived there, Walker’s scouts intercepted a mounted Legitimista courier from Granada who had expected to find General Corral’s army at La Virgen. Among the dispatches carried by the courier was one to Corral from the adjutant general of the Legitimista army, Major General Fernando Chamorro, telling Corral that Chamorro couldn’t send reinforcements that Corral had requested. Chamorro revealed that through illness and desertions, the Granada garrison was badly depleted, leaving the city lightly defended, while the morale of troops and civilians alike was drooping. Chamorro also warned that Legitimista party leaders were losing heart and despairing of the ability to keep fighting if the Democraticos actively pressed the war.

Having read these very informative dispatches, Walker returned them to the courier, along with a note from Walker to General Corral, advising him that Walker had taken the liberty of reading them. The astonished courier was given back his horse, told he could find General Corral at Rivas, and sent on his way. Walker had added a comment in his note—with both sides having exhausted themselves in this war, he said, what the country needed was peace.

Later that same day, a response arrived from General Corral, politely acknowledging receipt of the intercepted dispatches. But there was also a slip of paper on which were written what Walker took to be “cabalistic signs.”² Suspecting they may have been Freemason’s signs, Walker showed the piece of paper to Charles Hornsby and Julius De Brissot, both of whom, he knew, were Freemasons. De Brissot, who held high rank in the Masonic Order, said that this was indeed a message using Freemasons’ code and that Corral inquired whether he could communicate confidentially with Walker. Walker was well pleased. Not only did he now know the state of enemy defenses and morale at their capital, but he also knew that their field commander was open to a peace parley.

But rather than move toward Rivas, Walker marched back to San Juan del Sur, later explaining that he didn’t feel he yet had a large enough force to take on Corral’s army of at least twelve hundred men at Rivas if Corral chose to fight. Besides, he would say, intelligence brought to him out of Granada by an escaped prisoner confirmed the state of affairs described in the captured Legitimista dispatches, and his thoughts turned to the plan that had been in his mind for some time—the secret plan that he had revealed to Colonel Valle. But to make that plan work, Walker felt he still needed more men.

On October 3, a few days after Walker’s return to San Juan del Sur, the 1,117-ton Pacific Mail Line steamer Cortes dropped anchor in the cove. Built in New York in 1852 as the Saratoga, 220 feet long, with three decks and two masts, the Cortes had been purchased by Cornelius Vanderbilt for his Independent Line in 1853 before going to the Pacific Mail Line the following year in the buyout of Vanderbilt’s competitive operation. Now, after the Nicaragua Line lost two of its vessels in shipwrecks on the coast of Mexico, the Cortes was under charter to Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison of the Accessory Transit Company to help fill the gap left by their loss.

As the hundreds of San Francisco passengers came ashore from the Cortes, Walker and his officers stood on the edge of the beach, watching them. Through the surf, Nicaraguan natives carried men, women, and children on their backs and shoulders from small boats to the sandy shore. Now, with a smile, Walker recognized a passenger limping onto the beach and leading a party of thirty-five men armed with rifles and pistols. He was Charles Gilman, one of Walker’s followers during the Sonoran expedition, the man whose leg Walker had amputated during that ill-starred episode. In California, Gilman had spent many months recovering before being fitted with a wooden leg. In Walker’s opinion, “Gilman was a man of strong mind, with all the sentiments of a soldier,” a man possessed of “a good store of military knowledge.”³

More importantly, in Mexico, Gilman had demonstrated his total loyalty to Walker, and he had done so again by helping recruit the thirty-five men who had accompanied him from San Francisco. Best of all, as far as Walker was concerned, Gilman followed his orders without question. Walker immediately gave him the rank of lieutenant colonel, appointing him deputy to Charles Hornsby, whom he now promoted to full colonel.

Among Gilman’s men were George R. Davidson, who had served in the U.S. Army’s Kentucky Regiment during the Mexican War, as well as John P. Waters, John M. Baldwin, and A. S. Brewster, all of whom had U.S. Army experience. Walker immediately put Gilman’s party to work guarding the latest Treasure Train on its trek across the isthmus to La Virgen and its connection with a lake steamer. On the return of this party to San Juan del Sur, Walker, now with almost a hundred North American soldiers, reorganized the Falange into a battalion of three companies. Hornsby commanded the battalion, with Gilman as his deputy, while John Markham, who had performed so well at Rivas and Virgin Bay, was promoted to captain and given command of a company. Two of the new arrivals, Brewster and Davidson, received captain’s commissions and command of the other two companies.

At the same time, Walker divested himself of the services of Mariano Mendez, sending the colorful but wayward Mexican back to León. Walker’s excuse was that Valle’s men complained that Mendez treated them roughly and had reportedly been rustling the cattle of local landowners. Before the unhappy Mexican departed, he leaned down from the saddle of his horse and cautioned Walker in a low voice: “The Nicaraguans are to be governed only with silver in one hand and the whip in the other.”⁴

At this point, too, Walker and Charles Doubleday fell out. Years later, Doubleday would claim that he submitted his resignation after Walker and he had walked alone along the beach at San Juan del Sur and Walker told him in confidence that he planned to become virtual emperor of all of Central America—this, said Doubleday was a “conspiracy against the popular liberty,” and he could not support it.⁵ In reality, it seems that Doubleday, who had come to think of himself as Walker’s chief aide, expressed the opinion that the operation Walker would soon embark on was ill conceived—Walker’s latest general order, now that he had added thirty-six more Americans to the Falange, was for preparations to be made for the entire force to march to Lake Nicaragua for an offensive operation.

Walker himself would write that Doubleday “left at this time because having, without invitation, stated to (me) his opinion about certain movements being made.” Doubleday made these remarks in front of Walker’s other officers, generating a terse response from Walker: “When my commissary’s opinion is required it will be asked for!”⁶

Walker would brook no insubordination from his officers, then or later. One of his admirers, the poet Joaquin Miller, a California miner who knew a number of men who fought under Walker, said that Walker “never took advice, but always gave commands, and they must be obeyed.”⁷ As for Doubleday’s unsolicited advice, Walker later wrote, “At the time the remark was made, it was of the first necessity for the force to feel that it had but one head.”⁸ Doubleday himself admitted, “I was young, which is my excuse for venturing to remonstrate against the course that he (Walker) had determined upon.”⁹

Doubleday, whose pride was hurt, immediately resigned. But he asked for and received a character reference from Walker. After Doubleday showed that reference to the representative of the U.S. Mail Line at Panama, he was given a free steamer ticket to New York. Walker lamented the loss of Doubleday, whom he considered “industrious and exact in the performance of his duties.”¹⁰ But in Walker’s view, no man was irreplaceable, and he would permit no one to contest his decisions.

Charles Doubleday would one day swallow his pride and again serve William Walker, praising Walker “for the example he gave to the world of courage and high purpose.”¹¹ But that was some way off; on October 3, Doubleday immediately departed San Juan del Sur in an open boat and sailed to Costa Rica. From there he took a Peruvian brig to Panama. Within weeks, Doubleday would be back home in Ohio, a long way from tropical Nicaragua, experiencing snow for the first time in years, regaling friends and family with tales of his adventures, and, with feelings of envy and regret, reading the regular U.S. newspaper reports of unfolding events in Nicaragua.

The same day that the Cortes arrived and Doubleday left, a boat arrived from Realejo carrying Captain Ubaldo Herrera, originally a native of Legitimista stronghold Granada but now a firm Democratico, bringing with him thirty-five Nicaraguans from the north. These men were the promised reinforcements from Director Escoto. Although few in number, they were all volunteers, as Walker had stipulated. Herrera’s little company brought Colonel Valle’s battalion strength up to more than 250 men.

Walker was almost ready to implement his secret plan. But there were logistical reasons to delay a little longer. To begin with, Captain Herrera had also proudly brought Walker a small, brass two-pound cannon from León. To augment this, that same day Walker purchased a new six-pound iron naval gun from Captain Reed, skipper of the Queen of the Pacific, a square-rigged coal ship chartered by the Nicaragua Line and currently in port to refill the Cortes’s bunkers. Walker ordered gun carriages built for the two guns. With horses and mules at a premium, once the carriages were readied, the guns would have to be dragged by a detachment from Valle’s battalion.

That night, as Walker and Charles Gilman dined together, they discussed the Accessory Transit Company. Gilman, fresh from San Francisco, told Walker “that there was a struggle in the company itself, between rival parties aiming to get control of it. The impression made on [me] was that the agents in New York and San Francisco [Morgan and Garrison] were acting together to depress the market price of the stock.”¹²

Walker filed this information away in the back of his mind for future reference. Matters involving Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Garrison were not at the top of his list of priorities. For now, Walker was focusing on his next military operation. With a force of 350 men including almost 100 Americans, plus two field pieces, Walker now had enough confidence to attempt an operation so audacious that Julius Caesar would have been proud.

It took a week to build the gun carriages. On October 11, to the tap of kettle drums played by a Nicaraguan drummer boy in Valle’s battalion and by Walker’s youngest recruit, Norris, an American youth of perhaps fourteen who had come down on the Cortes with Gilman’s party, Walker’s entire force marched briskly out of San Juan del Sur. They marched over the Transit Road to La Virgen, taking the two cannon with them.

The troops were quartered at La Virgen, with orders to keep out of sight. Shortly after, the green-hulled, double-decked lake steamer La Virgen hove into view. Brought to Nicaragua by Cornelius Vanderbilt to operate with the Central America, the Director, and the Morgan on the lake, the side-wheel steamboat was making a scheduled run to Virgin Bay from the San Juan River.

When the La Virgen arrived, Colonel Charles Hornsby and a detachment of Falange troops waited for her passengers to disembark and then went aboard. Hornsby was known to the skipper, Joseph N. Scott, an American and a veteran of the Transit Company’s lake and river operations. Scott’s welcoming smile dissolved when Hornsby presented him with written notification from Colonel Walker that his steamboat was being commandeered until further notice. Scott protested vehemently, as did Transit manager Cortlandt Cushing when he found out. Scott and Cushing argued that, as the lake and river steamers were owned by a U.S. company, the U.S. government considered them to be sailing under the U.S. flag.

Walker, a trained attorney among other things, was the last person with whom the pair should have argued points of law. He dismissed their argument by pointing out that the Transit Company’s contract with the Nicaraguan government, with which Walker had made himself totally familiar, specifically stated that these vessels were to operate under the Nicaraguan flag, which meant Nicaraguan authorities could requisition them if need be. Walker would later admit that previously, he’d deliberately lied “to disarm Mr. Cushing.” He had assured the Transit Company man that he knew of no way in which the steamers could be of use to him, although he did show Cushing the document signed by Provisional Director Castellon authorizing him to act in respect to the Transit Company and its debts to the Nicaraguan government. ¹³ His lie ensured that the Transit Company took no steps to keep its vessels out of Walker’s hands.

Through that night, sentries stood guard over the steamer and around the settlement to prevent word leaking out that Walker had taken control of La Virgen. Next day, Thursday, when the steamer was scheduled to sail on, Walker’s entire force was crammed aboard, along with the two field guns. Walker even took along a pair of horses, one for Colonel Valle and another for Lieutenant Colonel Gilman.

A little after 4:30 P.M., the overloaded side-wheeler slowly pulled away from the jetty and turned her bow toward San Carlos, on the eastern side of the lake. No one on board except William Walker and Chelon Valle knew where La Virgen was heading. On her scheduled run, the steamer would head across the lake to San Carlos and the San Juan River. But once she was on the lake, up in the pilothouse Walker gave Captain Scott a new heading, and the skipper resignedly spun the wheel. The prow gradually came around to port, until it pointed north.

On La Virgen’s two crowded decks, Valle’s Nicaraguan soldiers looked at each other with surprise. This quickly turned to excitement. Soon, Democraticos were clapping each other on the back, shouting like madmen, and dancing around, cheering with joy. The Falange’s Americans looked at them as if they were lunatics, until someone explained that it had dawned on the Nicaraguans just where they were heading—Colonel Walker was bypassing Rivas and taking them to attack Granada. Granada, where the Legitimista leadership sat, protected by a depleted, demoralized garrison. This was Walker’s secret plan. Rather than continuing to strike at the body of the enemy in the hope of causing a mortal wound, he was going straight for the head, to remove it with one bold thrust. If he succeeded, the war would be as good as over.

In the late afternoon, with the sun descending in the western sky to its left, the green-hulled lake steamer, its heavy load making her sit low in the water, headed up the lake, taking Walker’s little army toward its appointment with destiny.