Tycoon's War

This column had left San José on March 4, just three days after the declaration of war, to the sound of tapping drums, tooting bugles, and the cheers of the population. A second force, of 250 men, had departed San José the same day. Led by General Florentino Alfaro, it headed northeast, via Alajuela, toward the Sarapiqui River. While General Mora was under orders to advance as far as Liberia and then wait for the main expeditionary army of 3,000 men to join him, General Alfaro’s orders were to reach the San Juan River via the jungle, following the Sarapiqui River, which flowed into the San Juan below El Castillo. Alfaro was then to make his way up the San Juan to launch surprise attacks on the filibuster garrisons at El Castillo and San Carlos, seize them, and close off the river to steamer traffic. This would prevent supplies from reaching Walker from America’s Atlantic states. President Mora himself would meanwhile lead the main push into southwestern Nicaragua, to seize the steamer port of San Juan del Sur, cutting Walker’s supply route from California.

President Mora was a shrewd tactician. Like Walker, he appreciated the strategic significance of the Transit Route and the tactical advantage of denying Walker his supply routes before the Costa Ricans actually did battle with Walker’s main force. The Costa Rican army’s western drive up through Guanacaste province to San Juan del Sur was the least complex of the two offensive operations. Traversing easy terrain, it would involve a force that would outnumber the filibusters by three to one. But Mora knew that his would also be the most obvious attack and likely to draw a spirited response from Walker’s troops. General Alfaro’s force had the more difficult task, for his men had to literally hack their way to the San Juan River through thick, mosquito-ridden jungle and around alligator-infested swamp-land along the Sarapiqui. But Alfaro had surprise on his side.

As the advance guard dispersed to quarters in Liberia to await the arrival of President Mora and the remainder of the army, force commander General Mora sent scouts north toward the Nicaraguan frontier. That same day, seventy miles to the south, President Mora arrived at Puntarenas from San José, having left Vice President Francisco Oreamuno in charge at the national capital. Mora rode into the seaport trailed by a wave of lancers of the Presidential Honor Guard, who clattered over the cobblestones on pampered steeds. The president was accompanied, too, by a flock of newly commissioned officers, men who would lead the recruits then assembling in Puntarenas. Among them was Ramón Rivas, the son of the president of Nicaragua. Greeting the president in Puntarenas was his brother-in-law, forty-six-year-old José Maria Canas. A Salvadoran, the tough-minded Canas had battle experience in various conflicts in his homeland, and Mora had made him one of his generals for this campaign.

As President Mora made his preparations in Puntarenas and his brother enjoyed the hospitality of the people of Liberia, neither was aware that William Walker’s filibusters were at that moment advancing into Costa Rica from the north.

Late in the evening of Wednesday, March 19, Louis Schlessinger and 240 weary men of the ARN Corps of Observation arrived at a Costa Rican cattle ranch called the Santa Rosa. They had been marching for six days. After Walker learned of the Costa Rican declaration of war on March 11, he had immediately drawn up a decree, which was unhesitatingly signed by President Rivas, proclaiming war against Costa Rica. In Walker’s words, “to guard against any surprise on the line of American travel across the Isthmus,” the Corps of Observation had promptly been formed and sent south into Costa Rica.²

Because Schlessinger had recently been in the area, and despite Walker’s belief that Schlessinger had a “timid nature,” he’d been commissioned a colonel and put in charge of the newly formed Corps of Observation. Days before, Domingo de Goicuria’s promised 250 new recruits had arrived from New Orleans, and the men of four of the new corps’ five companies were Goicuria recruits.³ One company was made up entirely of Germans, another of French-man, with few in either company able to speak English. The corps’ fifth unit was the recently promoted Captain Anthony Rudler’s Company F of the First Rifles, which had been taken from garrison duty at San Juan del Sur.

As Schlessinger’s command marched south, Walker had also sent two companies across Lake Nicaragua by lake steamer to the San Juan River. One company garrisoned the old Spanish fortress at El Castillo; the other had orders to continue farther east down the river to a place the Americans called Hipp’s Point—where the Sarapiqui River joined the San Juan. There, the company was to establish an outpost and prevent any Costa Rican attempt to come down the Sarapiqui and seize the San Juan. It was as if Walker had second sight, for, with this maneuver and Schlessinger’s advance, he had correctly anticipated and moved to counter both of President Mora’s lines of attack.

Now, in darkness and with their rifles on their shoulders, the men of the Corps of Observation, most dressed in black-dyed shirts and with the blue ribbon of the ARN around their black hats, arrived at the Santa Rosa ranch. Fifty miles inside Costa Rica, the Santa Rosa was owned by a Nicaraguan Democratico, Dr. Manuel Barrios. To get here, Schlessinger had force-marched his men well into the night. Once they arrived, exhausted filibusters gratefully found quarters in the sprawling, deserted Santa Rosa hacienda. Built by a Spanish grandee in 1661, the stone house featured a two-story central building that was built on a stone platform ten feet high and contained three large first-floor reception rooms. Accommodation and service wings extended either side of the main building at ground level. All the buildings were surrounded by shading verandas. As Schlessinger and his sixteen officers occupied the main hacienda building, the enlisted men made themselves at home in the wings.

Schlessinger’s path south had been a troubled one. At Rivas, he had argued with Walker’s commandant there, Major A. S. Brewster, over “numerous irregularities” on Schlessinger’s part, the nature of which was unclear.⁴ Then, near the town of Salina in Costa Rica, the only surgeon attached to the Corps of Observation, an unnamed new arrival in Central America, became so irritated by Schlessinger’s irregularities—which included the failure to post pickets at night or to send patrols ahead during the day—that he pulled out of the column, volunteering to take letters from Schlessinger back to Walker in Granada. And Schlessinger had let him go.

Posting sentries and leaving orders that the men could do as they pleased the next morning as long as they presented themselves for arms inspection at 2:00 P.M., Schlessinger went to bed. As his troops also bedded down, they were blissfully unaware that the advance guard of the Costa Rican army was just thirty miles away at Liberia.

The morning passed quietly at the Santa Rosa ranch. Schlessinger sent several horsemen out to try to find a guide before he ventured further south. The ordered arms inspection was postponed from two to three o’clock. Men, in shirtsleeves and with their rifles stacked here and there, lounged about the hacienda grounds. Some butchered several head of Santa Rosa beef, and everyone was looking forward to steak for supper. Sentries stood on the elevated veranda of the main building, but no defensive positions had been prepared.

Sitting on the hacienda veranda with a notepad on his knee as he sketched the scene before him was a young man from New York, George Forrester Williams. A pioneer of a new breed, the war correspondent, Williams had been sent to Nicaragua by Frank Leslie, publisher of America’s first illustrated magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, whose inaugural edition only hit the nation’s newsstands the previous December. Williams’s accounts of the exploits of General Walker and his army of Americans in Central America had already fueled phenomenal sales for the magazine. Published alongside Williams’s stories were his pen-and-ink illustrations. To support his accounts of the Battle of Rivas and the massacre of Americans at La Virgen, Williams had drawn imagined scenes based on interviews with men who had been present. Williams had been permitted by General Walker to accompany the Corps of Observation on active duty, and he was hoping to see some real fighting close hand. He would soon see more than enough action.

A little before 3:00 P.M., a rifleman sent out scouting came galloping up to the hacienda as if the Devil himself were on his tail. “Here they come!” he bellowed.⁵ Schlessinger’s adjutant, nineteen-year-old Major Cal O’Neal, one of Walker’s “Originals” and a veteran of the Battles of Rivas and La Virgen and of the storming of Granada, looked out from the veranda to see waves of white-clad Costa Rican troops appearing from the trees to the south. They were running toward the hacienda, urged on by officers on horseback. O’Neal turned and dashed inside the hacienda to find Schlessinger. But the unit’s commander had disappeared.

The attack was being mounted by General Mora’s five hundred men of the Costa Rican army’s advance guard. Early that morning, Mora, at Liberia, had received intelligence from his scouts that an estimated three hundred filibusters were encamped at the Santa Rosa hacienda. Another Costa Rican commander might have sent south for orders from President Mora or may have even withdrawn in fright. Not José Mora. He’d ordered his troops to arms, and by 9:00 A.M., the advance guard was on the march to Santa Rosa. The Costa Ricans went into action after marching thirty miles through the heat of the day.

Without a commander, individual filibuster officers were left to make their own decisions. Intent on preventing the enemy from outflanking the hacienda, Captain Rudler led his forty men to the limited cover provided by a corral a little way from the house. There, with some men kneeling, others lying flat, Rudler’s company fired concentrated volleys against the steadily advancing enemy. Several Costa Rican officers were seen to fall from their horses, but the hundreds of Costa Rican foot soldiers kept pushing forward, firing from the shoulder, pausing to reload, then advancing again. Few had ever fired a gun before their brief weapons training in San José, but their lack of accuracy was compensated for by their massed firepower. Several of Anthony Rudler’s men fell around him. With the rapid Costa Rican advance cutting him off from the house, Rudler ordered his unit to fall back toward distant trees before their position was overrun.

To the left of the house, Captain Creighton’s company stood in ranks facing the enemy, with the men on the right hard up against the building. Adjutant Major O’Neal joined Creighton just as his men fired a volley. A dozen Costa Ricans went down, dead or wounded. The enemy advance wavered, then resumed. Frantically, Creighton’s men reloaded. O’Neal, sword in one hand, pistol in the other, looked around to see that the company of Captain Prange had broken; most of its Germans and Prussians were running for their lives. Captain Thorpe’s company was in slow retreat. The French company of Captain Legeay had attempted to occupy the hilly, broken ground to one side of the hacienda, but the Costa Ricans were driving them off the rise, killing a number in their rush.

Creighton’s company loosed off another volley. But fewer Costa Ricans fell this time—with the enemy drawing ever closer, the aim of Creighton’s inexperienced recruits was no longer steady. The Costa Ricans replied—a hundred musket balls scythed toward Creighton’s men; a dozen Americans fell. That was enough for many survivors; they turned and ran. American officers tried to stop them. “But the panic was such that they found few willing to listen or to follow,” Cal O’Neal later reported.⁶

The battle swiftly became a rout. The Costa Ricans would record that the fighting lasted fourteen minutes. To O’Neal and other survivors, it seemed to have been all over in a matter of five minutes .⁷ As the Corps of Observation disintegrated, most of its men fled. With his troops giving chase, General Mora rode up to the hacienda and saw dead and wounded lying everywhere—more wearing black than white. A number of wounded filibusters were taken captive. Before long, more prisoners, captured while trying to escape, were brought to the house. In all, eighteen filibusters were made prisoners. Fifty-nine dead filibusters littered the Santa Rosa grounds. The Costa Ricans lost nineteen men killed in action; another man would die in hospital at Liberia. Mora’s dead included his best young officers—Quiros, Gutierrez, Roja, and Castro, the flower of the Costa Rican elite, who, only days before, had reveled in the welcome at Liberia.

In the late afternoon, as the dead of both sides were buried in Santa Rosa grounds, with the corpses of the filibusters tossed unceremoniously into a single, unmarked grave, the eighteen dejected filibuster prisoners were bundled none too gently into an outbuilding with their hands bound behind their backs. Not a single prisoner was an officer. One of them protested that he was a newspaper correspondent and a noncombatant, but the Costa Rican soldiers contemptuously ignored reporter Williams as they thudded the door shut.

The word would soon flow across the country, then across Central America and to the United States and rest of the world: Suffering three times more fatalities than the Costa Ricans, William Walker’s vaunted Yankee filibusters had been defeated at Santa Rosa by an army of peasants.