Tycoon's War

To the sounds of beating drums and bugle calls, the companies then passed their general in review order, the men looking inspired and determined as they marched by. Walker could see that his speech “had the desired effect and created a new spirit among the men.”³ His troops went to quarters chattering among themselves.

Lieutenant Jamison made his way to a private house in the city—all Walker’s officers were billeted with local families; in Jamison’s case, it was with the family of Don Francisco Ugarte, a wealthy merchant of Spanish Castilian stock. Speaking a little English, Don Francisco had told Jamison that he was a Democratico supporter. Ugarte and his family had immediately made Jamison welcome. Don Francisco’s daughter was married to Dr. Cole, the American resident of Rivas who had been serving with Walker since the previous September. This made Jamison feel all the more at home, as did Don Francisco’s two beautiful, unmarried nieces, who lived with the family.

The SS Cortes eased into the cove at San Juan del Sur at the completion of her scheduled run down from San Francisco. Those on shore expecting the usual rush of passengers quickly realized that something was awry. The steamer didn’t drop anchor, and the lighters that left the beach to make their way out to the ship were waved away. A ship’s boat brought a single passenger ashore. William Garrison, son of Cornelius Garrison, stepped onto the beach and then hurried up the sand and into the town. Told that General Walker was at Rivas, Garrison went looking for transport inland.

Out on the bay, the Cortes maneuvered close to the anchored Transit Company coal hulk sitting in the cove. Soon, the Cortes was steaming away, towing the coal ship behind her. Once out to sea, the Cortes turned south, for Panama, where she would deposit her U.S.-bound passengers. It was April 1, but this was no April Fools’ joke. No more Transit Company steamers would be calling at San Juan del Sur; Cornelius Vanderbilt had struck a first blow in his war against William Walker. All Transit Company services to Nicaragua had been terminated.

On arriving at Rivas, William Garrison informed Walker that when the Cortes was approaching San Juan del Sur, she had been passed by a steamer of the Pacific Mail Line that was heading north from Panama, bound for San Francisco. The northbound steamer, said Garrison, had sent the Cortes a signal by flags, conveying a message to her master, Captain Collens, from Cornelius Vanderbilt in New York. That message had instructed Collens to remove the coal ship from San Juan del Sur and to disembark his passengers in Panama.

Unbeknownst to young Garrison, one of Vanderbilt’s sons-in-law and former Transit Company agent in New York, James Cross, was aboard the Pacific Mail ship. After Vanderbilt returned to New York from his diplomatic mission to Washington, D.C., he had dispatched Cross to the Pacific, via Panama, to terminate the Nicaragua Line service to Nicaragua from San Francisco and to tie up all four ships of the line operating out of the bay city. Cross had been behind the message sent to Captain Collens of the Cortes. A sheepish Garrison confessed to Walker that this sudden movement by the Transit Company “had not been provided for.”⁴

Walker, seated on a chair and still recovering from his tussle with yellow fever, scowled up at Garrison in disbelief as he realized that Morgan and Garrison had expected Vanderbilt to keep Transit Company ships on the Nicaragua run until they could put their own ships on the route. Morgan and Garrison, it turned out, did not yet have a single ship to allocate to the Pacific route. Walker, through Morgan and Garrison’s lack of foresight, was now cut off from supply from San Francisco. “How long before another steamer will come from San Francisco?” Walker asked.

Garrison blanched with embarrassment. “It might be several weeks,” he replied. His father had a strategy in mind, he hurried to add, one that would enable Garrison to lay his hands on one of Vanderbilt’s own West Coast steamers. But it would take a few weeks to work out.

Walker, disgusted, dismissed the young man from his presence. “At the very outset,” he would later say, “the new contractors, Morgan and Garrison, by their timidity—to use no harsher word—jeopardized the welfare of those who had acted on the faith of their capacity and willingness to fulfil their agreements.” Garrison’s agent in Granada, C. J. Macdonald, was equally disgusted with the “hesitation and weakness” of Morgan and Garrison; he quit Garrison’s employ. Macdonald later served as a volunteer in Walker’s army.⁶

While Walker was scathing in his criticism of Morgan and Garrison, it was clear that the pair had simply not been ready to take up the Transit charter as quickly as Walker had wanted. Their focus was different from Walker’s—it was on making money. Over the past winter, once they had realized that Vanderbilt had outsmarted them and regained control of the Transit Company, the pair had set out to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of their defeat and to make a stock-market killing. Once the market knew that the Commodore was back in charge of the Transit Company, the price of company stock had begun to rise. At that point, Morgan had dumped his entire Transit Company holding and that of his partner Garrison. The duo, remarked the New York Times, “lately in the administration of the company, is selling the stock much as Vanderbilt had done after the latter lost control.”⁷

In a bid to prevent the share price from dropping as a result of this, Vanderbilt and his friends had bought every dumped share. Then, Morgan had invested heavily in selling Transit Company shares “short.” In this stock market practice, investors actually bet on a stock’s price going down, rather than up. They in effect borrow the shares from brokers at one price, hoping that it will sink much lower, promising to pay the market price at some time in the future. If the share price rises by the time they have to pay up and “cover” their investment, they lose money. But if the price goes down, as they hope, they make the difference between the initial price and the covering price.

Despite Vanderbilt’s best efforts to keep the Transit Company share price up by buying the dumped stock, his determination to keep his fleet of ocean steamers tied up and so deprive Walker of his seaway lifeline only served to panic the market. Many disenchanted shareholders sold their Transit Company shares for whatever they could get, in the belief that the now charter-less company was done for. When Morgan sold his shareholding in February and went short, Transit Company shares were trading at $23. Vanderbilt and his friends had kept buying stock, supporting the price, and on March 12, the shares had only dropped to $22. But when the news hit New York the next day that the Nicaraguan government had annulled the Transit Company’s charter, the bottom fell out of its share price. By the time Morgan covered his “short” investment some months later, Transit Company shares had dropped to $13. Morgan made $10 a share, walking away with a profit of millions of dollars.⁸

Walker knew nothing of this. Nor did he care. All he was interested in was maintaining his lines of supply. With the arrival of the next steamer from California at least six weeks away, he reasoned that “one motive for holding fast to the Transit was, for the moment, taken away.”⁹ Almost petulantly, Walker gave orders for his troops at Rivas to prepare to depart the city and abandon the Transit.

As day broke over La Virgen on Monday, April 7, an American employee of the Morgan and Garrison Transit operation walked out onto the veranda of his barrack house and stretched. Suddenly he saw movement to the south. Armed men in white were swarming into the settlement. The alarmed American ran to the Transit headquarters building, yelling a warning. As he and eight other Americans gathered on the veranda, locking the doors behind them and standing there defiantly with folded arms, the building was surrounded by Costa Rican troops with bayonets fitted to their muskets. The Costa Rican officer in charge ordered his men to open fire. Musket balls filled the air. All nine unarmed Americans were cut down by the hail of lead. Some were killed instantly. The others were finished off with bayonet and sword.

While some Costa Ricans battered down the locked doors, others rifled the pockets of the dead Americans. Inside the building, the Costas forced open stored trunks, looking for more valuables. A detachment trotted to the lake jetty, which they set alight. As these troops took over La Virgen, another, larger Costa Rican detachment was marching west along Cornelius Vanderbilt’s macadamized Transit Road, to San Juan del Sur and the sea. At the same time, in the near distance, the vanguard of the Costa Rican expeditionary army could be seen tramping up the road from the frontier with drums rattling and flags flying. Trundling along in the rear came a long train of supply wagons and field guns. As the smaller force headed west, the main column of more than three thousand men continued by La Virgen, where the jetty burned, and marched up the road toward Rivas, just nine miles north.

Mounted scouts had informed President Mora that the city of Rivas had been all but deserted by Walker, who left behind a garrison of just two companies of native Nicaraguans under the command of a Cuban officer. Locals soon told Mora that two days back, Walker put most of his men aboard the largest lake steamer, the San Carlos, at La Virgen and steamed away, heading east. No one had any idea what Walker was up to or where he was going.

Mora’s informants had been right—Walker did steam away across the lake with his army. First he went to San Carlos, where he had taken on board the ARN company stationed there. Then he’d proceeded down the San Juan River to the first set of rapids, from where a company under Captain Baldwin and Lieutenants Green and Rakestraw was disembarked to continue downriver to relieve the company stationed at El Castillo and Hipp’s Point. Once the relieved company had boarded the San Carlos, Walker turned around and made for Granada.

Lieutenant James Jamison, one of the hundreds of men aboard the overcrowded San Carlos, later attempted to excuse this strange bout of lake and river steaming by claiming that Walker had done it to “observe the movements of the enemy.”¹⁰ Others would say that it was ineptitude that sent Walker on a roundabout excursion that took him and his army from Granada to Rivas to the San Juan River and back to Granada over a period of ten days. Walker himself would later brush over this strange episode, not even bothering to offer his recent fight with yellow fever as the cause.

In New York City on April 8, the SS Orizaba prepared to sail for Nicaragua. Finally, a month after the Northern Light made her last run to Greytown for the Vanderbilt-controlled Accessory Transit Company, Morgan and Garrison had their act together sufficiently to start one ship on the Atlantic route to Nicaragua.

A journalist from the New York Times had come to the North River wharf to watch the Morgan and Garrison steamer make her maiden departure for Greytown. He was not alone. “An immense crowd was on the wharf,” he reported in next day’s paper, “it having been intimated that some arrests would, doubtless, take place, and that fun might be safely looked for.”¹¹

Cornelius Vanderbilt had tied up every one of the eight steamers he previously had running to Nicaragua. On March 17, he had announced in the press: “The Nicaragua Line is withdrawn for the present, in consequence of the difficulties in that country growing out of the extraordinary conduct of General Walker, in seizing or taking by force the property of American citizens. I deem it a duty I owe the public, to the country, and to the Transit Company, to remain quiet, by letting the ships of the company lay at their wharves, until our government has sufficient time to examine and look into the outrage committed upon their property.”¹²

That same day, Vanderbilt had written a letter to Secretary of State Marcy, demanding that the U.S. government step in to restore Transit Company property in Nicaragua to its rightful owner. The New York press failed to accept the Commodore’s argument, and neither did William L. Marcy. For, as various newspapers pointed out, the Transit Company was a Nicaraguan corporation—a fact, they reminded their readers, that Vanderbilt and the Transit Company had trickily used to their advantage in the past. The press suggested, none too sympathetically, that Vanderbilt apply to the Nicaraguan government for financial compensation.

Despite failing to receive support from either the press or the U.S. government, Vanderbilt did not shift from his obstinate resolve—his steamers sat idle at their New York and San Francisco wharves with their crews out of work and out of pocket while Morgan and Garrison scrambled to find vessels to replace them. Experienced Nicaragua hands had been grabbed by Charles Morgan, who made former Northern Light skipper Edward Tinklepaugh master of the two-year-old Orizaba.

Promptly at noon, Captain Tinklepaugh, on the Orizaba’s bridge, called down to the deck crew, giving the order for the gangplank to be hauled in and lines to be cast off fore and aft. At that moment, Assistant District Attorney Joachimssen appeared on the dockside. Sent by District Attorney McKeon, he was accompanied by six deputy U.S. marshals.

One deputy marshal scurried up the gangway behind Joachimssen; the other five held back, remaining on the dock. Bells clanged on the bridge, as Tinklepaugh, ignoring the D.A.’s pronouncement, telegraphed “slow ahead” to the engine room. The mooring lines were dropped with a splash, and the giant iron wheels on the 1,450-ton steamer’s sides began to slowly rotate. As the ship moved away from the dock, the gangplank fell into the water. Joachimssen and the deputy were stranded on board, and the watching crowd was delighted.

The crowd roared with laughter. The Times reporter would note that there were more remarks in a similar vein, “accompanied by occasional oaths and cheers for Captain Tinklepaugh particularly, and General Walker and Nicaragua generally.” But the pleasure of the onlookers dissolved when the Orizaba came to a stop several hundred yards out in the stream. A ship’s boat was lowered, and it rowed back to the dock to collect the five remaining deputy marshals and a mysterious sixth man.

Joachimssen had brought the ship to a halt by showing Captain Tinklepaugh warrants for the arrest of nine of his passengers who “proposed to join General Walker’s army and aid in carrying on the war against a Government with which the United States is at peace.” He also pointed out that an armed U.S. revenue cutter was waiting outside the Narrows, with orders to detain the Orizaba if her master could not produce a pass from the assistant district attorney. Realizing he’d been outwitted, “Captain Tinklepaugh expressed his willingness to have the parties arrested if they were on board.”

The ship was searched by the marshals, who were accompanied by Frank H. Savage, the mystery man. Even with the help of Savage, a paid informant, the marshals could only find four of the men on their list. At the top of that list was C. Carrol Hicks. “Captain Hicks belongs to Alabama,” the Times would report, “and has just returned by the last steamer from Nicaragua, where he holds a commission in General Walker’s army.” Hicks and the other three were landed at Pier 4, away from the supportive crowd. But as the prisoners were marched away up West Street, one managed to escape. Hicks and two companions were immediately brought before a judge, who set bail at twenty-five hundred dollars each. None of the prisoners had the remotest chance of raising that sort of money, and all three were lodged in Eldridge Street Prison pending a Neutrality Act trial.

Joachimssen gave Captain Tinklepaugh his pass, and at 2:30, the Orizaba got under way again, to the “loud huzzas” of the passengers lining her rails. “The Orizaba had some 500 passengers,” the Times would report. “Of these over 300 are questionably bound for General Walker’s army. Mr. Dillingham, Secretary to Colonel French, was among the passengers.” As the steamer moved down the harbor, the Times reporter was deafened by the cheers of the crowd around him.

Later in the afternoon, a man was spotted in the street not far from the U.S. Marshal’s office, selling maps of Nicaragua, “evidently to induce persons to emigrate to that country. He was promptly arrested by Marshal Dayton.” Once night fell, informant Frank Savage, who had apparently pretended to sign up to go to Nicaragua to learn the identities of Hicks and the others, was tracked down by filibuster sympathizers and severely beaten up. A bulletin posted on the notice board of the Charles Street Saloon on Broadway—“the headquarters of the filibusters” in New York, according to the Times—reported the fate of betrayer Savage: “His health is precarious, and dispatches will be received announcing his situation every two hours.”

Meanwhile, the Orizaba was steaming south down the Atlantic coast in the April dark, bound for Greytown. After dinner, the passengers who hadn’t succumbed to seasickness strolled the swaying decks and enjoyed the sea air as the massive paddlewheels churned the ocean. Among those passengers was Colonel Charles Hornsby, one of Walker’s most senior officers. After being on leave in the United States, Hornsby was returning to Nicaragua, apparently having used an assumed name to avoid the district attorney’s attention at New York.

Hornsby perambulated in the company of six boisterous young men from Nashville. The Tennesseeans were all good friends who had signed up together to join the fight in Nicaragua. One of their number was James Walker, youngest brother of William Walker. Like his big brother, twenty-seven-year-old James was a qualified doctor, but he was going to Nicaragua determined to use a sword rather than a scalpel in his brother’s service. According to one of Walker’s hometown papers, the Nashville Gazette, James was “a gallant young man” who possessed qualities “both of head and heart which eminently fitted him for command.”¹⁴

Without knowing it, as they walked the steamer’s decks, Hornsby, James Walker, and their companions passed a man traveling to Nicaragua as Cornelius Vanderbilt’s secret agent, a man charged with the task of wrecking William Walker’s little empire. Receiving no adequate response from the U.S. government, Vanderbilt had decided to thwart Walker in a more covert way. Hosea Birdsall was employed by the Commodore to take control of former Transit Company property at Punta Arenas, across the bay from Greytown, including river steamers based there. Birdsall also had orders to prevent the Orizaba’s passengers from going up the San Juan River once the steamer dropped anchor off Greytown. If Birdsall was successful, the Commodore would choke the Transit at its Greytown neck, putting Garrison, Morgan, and Walker out of business.

On April 9, a day after William Walker and his troops arrived back at Granada on the lake steamer, Walker issued orders for all but two companies of his bemused troops to march again. With Walker at their head, 550 men of the Army of the Republic of Nicaragua tramped down the road toward Rivas. They were returning to the city, which was seventy miles away and now occupied by the bulk of the Costa Rican expeditionary army and which Walker had vacated just five days earlier. But now, Walker, feeling physically and mentally strong again, was planning to fight.

When the troops camped for the night beside the Ochomogo River, they were joined by Cuban officer Colonel Muchado and his one hundred Nicaraguan troops, who had withdrawn from Rivas as Mora’s Costa Rican army drew near. Muchado’s Nicaraguan deputy, Captain José Bermudez, had stayed behind at Rivas, defecting to the Costa Ricans.

At the Hipp’s Point outpost on the San Juan River, Captain John Baldwin received a troubling report from a scouting party—some miles up the Sarapiqui River, they’d heard the sounds of a road being cut through the jungle from the Costa Rican side of the border. So, on April 10, Baldwin, “a vigilant and intelligent officer,” in William Walker’s estimation, sent sixteen Americans led by Lieutenant Tom Green from Texas to investigate. ¹⁵

Green’s party struggled up the soupy green Sarapiqui, paddling against the current in a bungo. These local dugout canoes typically accommodated eighteen to twenty men. By the middle of the day, eighteen miles from the junction of the San Juan and Sarapiqui Rivers, they heard sounds of slashing machetes ahead. Coming ashore, Green and his men slowly, carefully crept toward the road makers. Spotting toiling Costa Rican soldiers through the thick foliage, the Americans took up firing positions, selecting targets among scores of Costa Ricans sweating to cut a path wide enough for horses and mules to pass along.

On Lieutenant Green’s word, the Americans opened fire. This volley from nowhere cut a swath through the Costa Ricans. There was consternation and panic in the road-building ranks. The Americans quickly reloaded. Again Green and his men fired a withering fusillade, knocking more white-uniformed figures from their feet. Only when General Florentino Alfaro and many more Costa Ricans began arriving from the rear, summoned by the firing, did Green and his men realize they had taken on a force of more than two hundred men.¹⁶ The clouds of smoke and muzzle flashes from American rifles gave away their position, and some Costas began to return fire. In his enthusiasm, Green’s deputy, Lieutenant Rakestraw, jumped to his feet, firing his pistol and yelling encouragement to his men. A Costa Rican musket ball found him, and he went down. Keeping low, Tom Green and his other men maintained a steady rate of fire.

A number of the men of General Alfaro’s command had been claimed by illness during their horrific month-long struggle through the jungle. The remainder were exhausted and close to starvation by the time they blundered into Lieutenant Green’s ambush just eighteen miles short of their objective. Convinced, from the enemy firepower, that there were hundreds of Yankees lurking in the trees, General Alfaro’s conscripts wanted no more of this impossible mission and soon withdrew in disorder. “The routed Costa Ricans did not stop in their flight until they had fallen back to San José,” Walker would observe.¹⁷ Abandoned by most of his men, General Alfaro had no choice but to abandon his mission.

When Lieutenant Green and his men cautiously broke cover and inspected the enemy dead, they counted twenty-seven Costa Rican bodies. Lieutenant Rakestraw was the only American fatality, while two of Green’s men had been wounded.¹⁸ Just sixteen Americans had terminated President Mora’s attempt to catch Walker by surprise via the back door. Now it was up to Walker to close the front door on Mora himself, at the Transit.