Tycoon's War

Rivas had a single central plaza. Two streets led through the suburbs to the plaza from the north and the south. Similarly, two parallel streets tracked from east and west to the plaza. All the streets, which, like the plaza, were paved with mud brick, were narrow and lined unevenly with single-story adobe brick buildings that fronted directly onto the raised side-walks. According to an enemy agent caught spying on Walker’s encamped army the previous evening and left hanging, dead, from a bough of a tree by the river, President Mora had made his headquarters in a large, private house in one of the streets on the western side of the plaza, opposite the city’s powder magazine.

Walker’s objective was to capture Mora and force him to take Costa Rica out of the war. The filibuster general was sending his troops into Rivas from the north, south, and east, so that they could clean out resistance on their way to converging on Mora’s headquarters in the west of the city. The energetic Lieutenant Colonel Edward Sanders led four rifle companies, entering Rivas from the east along Calle San Francisco and Calle San Pedro. Sanders encountered several Costa Rican sentries on the outer edge of the suburbs; they ran off without putting up a fight. At the trot, Sanders and his two hundred men then pounded along the two deserted streets, reaching the plaza without encountering resistance.

The Rivas plaza was a cobbled square one hundred yards across. Occupying the entire eastern side of the plaza, the tall, roofless stone walls of the Cathedral of San Pedro and its adjoining convent stood stark and derelict. Seriously damaged by an earthquake twelve years earlier, the church buildings were no longer used. Commercial buildings with shading verandas extended along the northern and southern perimeters of the plaza, while an inn and a warehouse occupied the western side.

Sanders and his men quickly swung right and entered the Calle de Polvon, the northernmost of the two streets running west. This street led to the gunpowder magazine and, directly opposite it, the house where, according to the executed spy, President Mora was in residence. With their final objective eighty yards from the plaza, Sander and his men bunched together in the slim avenue and hurried on. Forty yards down the street, they came on two small brass cannon standing facing east; ammunition carts sat a little farther on. Whooping like men who had won a lottery, Sanders’s troops stopped to secure the cannon, then dragged them back to the square.²

By the time Sanders was able to convince his men to leave their trophies and recommence the advance toward the magazine, puffs of smoke began to appear all along the western street. Bullets whined around the Americans, and Sanders’s men begin to fall all around him as he pushed forward. Mora had billeted his troops in houses throughout Rivas’s western quarter, the most built-up part of the city, and on his orders, loopholes had been punched through adobe house walls that faced the streets. As Sanders discovered, the entire street ahead of him was lined with holed walls, from which hundreds of now alerted Costa Ricans began to open fire with musket and rifle. Caught in the open and facing a now withering fire that cut down his exposed men, Sanders had no option but to order a retreat to the plaza. His men gladly retreated, carrying their wounded with them as bullets kicked up dust all around.

Meanwhile, Major A. S. Brewster had brought three rifle companies up the streets from the east, and they cleared the southern side of the plaza without incident. Seeing Sanders’s men in trouble on the street leading to the magazine, Brewster brought his men across the plaza to the second west-running street, hoping to move along it and swing around and attack the enemy headquarters from the west. But as soon as Brewster and his command entered this second western street, they came under intense rifle fire from French and German marksmen in Costa Rican pay who occupied a tower of the San Francisco Church, four blocks along this street. Fine shots and equipped with Minié rifles, they soon took a heavy toll on Brewster’s men. The street was a death trap, and like Sanders, Brewster was forced to pull his men back to the plaza in search of cover.

Colonel Bruno Natzmer, an Austrian who had previously served as chief of staff to Chelon Valle, Walker’s loyal Nicaraguan colonel, now arrived at the plaza from the south with two hundred men of the Second Rifles. With progress down both western streets blocked, Natzmer’s men occupied the buildings on the southern side of the plaza, from where they tried to bring fire to bear on loopholes along the western streets.

The hundred native Nicaraguan troops under Colonel Machado had been advancing cautiously toward the plaza down the road from the north, passing the burned-out ruin of the Espinosa hacienda on the Santa Ursula Hill, scene of the first Battle of Rivas. The heavy fire ahead had awoken Costas occupying houses along the western side of the road, and they began firing at the Nicaraguans through loopholes. Colonel Machado was riding a horse, waving his sword, and urging his troops forward in fiery Spanish when he stopped in midsentence and toppled from his horse, struck down by several musket balls. As Muchado’s terrified horse bolted back down the road, his troops looked at the colonel lying dead in the dust at their feet, then followed the horse’s example. Beating a hasty retreat, they headed for woodland north of the city. They would play no further part in the battle.

General Walker now came riding up one of the eastern streets, with Colonel Birkett D. Fry and the reserve troops of the First Light Infantry Battalion right behind him. On reaching the plaza, Walker found that his attack had bogged down, with the men of the advance elements now occupying the buildings on all sides of the plaza. There was sporadic American rifle fire from those plaza buildings that had a line of sight to the western streets, and from the one tower of the San Pedro Cathedral still standing, a steady popping of American rifles could be heard—Major John Waters and his dismounted Rangers had taken possession of the tower and were using it as a sniping position. In streets leading up to the plaza, men sat with backs to the walls, with no intention of going any further while three thousand Costa Rican muskets lay in wait for them in the streets west of the plaza.

Walker, still on horseback, ordered Colonel Fry to lead the First Light Infantry in a frontal attack across the plaza and down the western street leading to the magazine, to fulfill Sanders’s original mission. But Fry could see that this was suicidal.

Lieutenant Jamison, farther up this street with his reserve company, watched Walker in amazement. “Bullets were flying thick all around him, and his clothing and his horse were covered with the debris from the walls of the buildings. He sat on his horse seemingly the least excited of all the belligerents.”⁴ Edward Kewen, who had been serving as a civil administrator with the government, had come along on this mission as a volunteer. He and several other men now dashed out into the open, grabbed Walker’s mount, and dragged horse and rider back into cover.

Walker’s intelligence had been correct—the Costa Rican president was indeed in a house across the street from the powder magazine. President Mora had made his quarters in the house of Dona Francesca Carrasco, a well-to-do widow whose husband, Pancho, had been a victim of the civil war. Dona Francesca was also an ardent Legitimista. Highly intelligent and well educated, she not only played hostess to Don Juanito but had also acted as his secretary while he was in the city, penning his letters as he dictated them. Since the filibuster attack began, Mora had been astonished to see Dona Francesca produce a musket and join his officers and men shooting at the Yankees from her house’s windows and loopholes.

Now that there was a lull in the battle, with just the occasional potshot from both sides, Mora called for volunteers from those with him in the Carrasco house to go out and spike the two cannon captured by the filibusters, before Walker could turn the guns against the Costa Ricans. Half a dozen men put up their hands. Two of Mora’s staff officers, José Maria Rojas and Francisco Rodriguez, soon equipped themselves with iron spikes and hammers. The other volunteers stood ready with loaded rifles. At the word from Mora, the door was flung open, and Rojas and Rodriguez hurled themselves out into the street, with the riflemen close behind. Then, to the astonishment of everyone, Senora Carrasco dashed after them, musket in hand.

The Costa Rican sabotage party, including its female member, ran down the Street of the Magazine toward the plaza and the two brass cannon standing at the plaza entrance, where Sanders’s men had left them. Hundreds of Costa Ricans at loopholes all the way along the street commenced covering fire, forcing filibusters around the plaza to keep their heads down, and permitting the party to reach the guns. As Dona Francesca and others stood guard, firing at any filibuster they saw trying to take aim at them, the two officers hammered their spikes into the cannon’s touchholes. In seconds, the spikes were driven home.⁵ And then the members of the party scurried back the way they came, with every one of them, including Dona Francesca, making it back to the Carrasco house alive, their mission a complete success. “The enemy had made the cannon useless,” James Jamison would later lament.⁶

The gall of the Costas in making this successful sally against the cannon infuriated quick-tempered Major John Markham. One of Walker’s “Originals” and a survivor of the last Battle of Rivas, Markham called for volunteers to accompany him on a charge across the plaza and down the street to take the enemy headquarters. In response, Captain Linton, Lieutenant Jamison, and twenty-eight enlisted men, twelve of them from Jamison’s Company D, answered the call.

With the major in the lead, brandishing his sword and yelling like a man possessed, the thirty-one volunteers sprinted across the plaza and plunged down the street that led to the magazine. Once they entered the narrow street, the Americans came under sustained fire. The “mad excitement” of the charge carried the volunteers as far as the two ammunition carts, fifty yards along the street from the plaza, and just ninety feet from their objective, the Carrasco house.⁷ But by that point, as many as a thousand enemy muskets and rifles were being brought to bear on them.

“The bullets ripped and stung,” Jamison would say, “and reddened the pavements with blood.”⁸ Captain Linton spun a pirouette on the sidewalk and fell dead with a bullet to the heart. In the lead, Major Markham went down with one knee almost blown away. James Jamison’s right leg was taken from under him. Falling flat on his face, he lay in the middle of the street; he could see that he’d been hit in the lower part of the right leg. Through searing pain, Jamison saw two men from his company fall dead close by. Half of the thirty-one men who entered the street had by this time been killed or wounded.

Hauling the ammunition carts with them as portable cover, and with enemy bullets continually splintering the wood, the assault party made a painful retreat, leaving their dead where they lay. Jamison, unable to walk, was half dragged to the plaza by his men. Troops of the First Rifles who’d taken part in Colonel Sanders’s initial charge down this deadly street were sheltering on the elevated veranda of a building on the northern side of the plaza. As bullets zipped and chipped all around them, Jamison and other wounded were roughly pushed up onto the veranda to join them before the remaining members of the assault party hurriedly dispersed to cover.

On the veranda, Jamison found himself in the company of a number of Sanders’s wounded. The building fronted by this veranda was a dry goods store, and some enterprising members of the First Rifles had dragged huge blocks of cheese out from the store and used them to create a protective breastwork along the edge of the veranda. The cheese was near rock hard and, as Jamison witnessed, could stop a bullet. Colonel Sanders placed his best shots along this breastwork. To Jamison’s amusement, when not taking aim at Costa Rican heads, these riflemen burrowed into the barricade with their jackknives and snacked on chunks of cheese.

One of these marksman in particular took Jamison’s eye. Known merely as “Arkansas,” he was a tall, angular backwoodsman, and he had found a spot at the western end of the veranda where there was a recess in the wall beside one of the thick wooden veranda posts. From this protected position, Arkansas was able to fire at several houses along the street leading to the magazine. Arkansas and a buddy had come to Nicaragua with their long Missouri rifles, and he soon proved that he could use the weapon. Looking for a target at a loophole down the street, he took aim and fired. With a spray of white paint and orange dust, his bullet bit the adobe brick wall beside the loophole. It took Arkansas several more rounds to find his range, but once he did, he became lethal.

Replying rounds thudded into the wooden pillar beside Arkansas, but none reached him. After each shot, he slid his Missouri rifle to his friend, who, lying nearby, reloaded it while Arkansas used the friend’s weapon. In this way, the sniper team from Arkansas maintained a rapid rate of fire. Jamison would later hear that Arkansas kept up his sniping for hours, wounding or killing as many as fifty Costa Ricans and forcing the Costas to abandon the nearest house. This was, Jamison would say, “the most spectacular sharpshooting I saw in Nicaragua.”¹¹

From up in the cathedral tower, Major John Waters and his Mounted Rangers were shooting at anything that moved in the western quarter of the city. One of Waters’s deputies, the “impetuous” Lieutenant Gillis, had recklessly exposed himself to enemy fire early on and paid with his life.¹² Now Waters’s men kept their heads down and made every shot count.

From his vantage point, Waters could see that Colonel Sanders had managed to get men up onto the red tile rooftops of the inn and warehouse on the western side of the plaza. Sheltering behind the hip of the roofs, these men popped up from time to time to fire down into the western quarter, before dropping down into cover again to reload.

There was movement on the steps behind Waters. He glanced around, to see General Walker’s brother, Norvell Walker, clambering up into the tower with a bottle in his hand. Even though Walker had dismissed him, Norvell had trailed the army down to Rivas. Now, he found a cozy corner in the tower with a view of the action below, and there he sat, to the annoyance of Waters and his men, drinking and talking, talking and drinking.

James Jamison and more than twenty other wounded were carried off the veranda and into the dry goods store, where bales of cotton were used as temporary hospital beds. Around noon, Jamison was lying on a bale, waiting for medical attention, when General Walker arrived on the scene. Looking calm and collected, Walker moved around the room, talking with each wounded man, treating officers and enlisted men alike. Reaching Jamison, he sat on the bale beside him and uttered a few “kind and hopeful” words before moving on to the next man.¹³ His brief visit was enough to lift Jamison’s sagging spirits.

A little after midday, there were shouts of alarm from several quarters. Costa Rican reinforcements had been seen arriving in the western sector during the late morning—these were the garrisons from La Virgen and San Juan del Sur, summoned by President Mora. Now, from the second street leading into the city’s western quarter, a hundred Costas came charging into the plaza.

Assaulting a large building on the northwestern side of the plaza, the Costas crashed in through the doors and windows, driving out men from Bruno Natzmer’s command who had been occupying it, and taking control of the building. From here, the Costa Ricans could pour a deadly fire across the plaza at Walker’s men. Realizing that he must recapture this building, and quickly, Walker called for volunteers. Lieutenant Robert Gay, an “Original” who’d gained renown on the Virgin Bay beach during the Battle of La Virgen, was the first to come forward. He was joined by Major William Kissane Rogers of the Commissary Department and eleven others, including Walker aide Captain Huston and James Jamison’s latest company commander, Captain N. C. Breckenridge. Agreeing that this would involve close-quarter fighting indoors, all thirteen men armed themselves with pistols. Keeping low, Gay and his comrades scuttled to the building next door to that occupied by the Costas. Then, on Gay’s word, they charged along the veranda to the attack.

Gay and Huston were both gunned down at the doors to the building. Moments later, Breckenridge reeled away clutching his head. But those behind the officers crashed in through doors and window shutters, just as the Costas had done not long before. Inside, in desperate face-to-face combat, another four Americans died, but more than thirty Costa Ricans were killed; the remainder fled out the back. Walker would reconcile the death of Gay and half the men who accompanied him with the fact that the building was retaken. “The gallantry of those who went with Gay was, in its spirit,” Walker the romantic would later say, “more like that of the knights of feudal times.”¹⁴

A bid to keep up the momentum and capture the house next door proved less successful. New Yorker Captain McArdle, who had been fighting a duel with one of Walker’s aides not many days ago, led this attack. It was kept up, on and off, for several hours, but only resulted in more American dead. At one point, McArdle was at a door, which the Costa Ricans had left partly open so they could fire out through the opening. McArdle thrust his pistol in through the gap and fired several shots to the left and right, bringing cries of pain from within. Then, from inside, a bayonet was plunged into McArdle’s wrist, pinning his arm. Seconds later, another Costa put a musket to McArdle’s gun hand and fired, blowing off his hand. With a yelp, McArdle withdrew his arm, then looked in disbelief at the bloody stump where his hand had been. “The damned rascal got my pistol!” he exclaimed. ¹⁵

McArdle would live, unlike his dueling partner of several days before, Captain Dewitt Clinton, who lay dead not many yards away. As McArdle was helped away and the attack continued, a Costa Rican soldier, shot dead, tumbled out a doorway. A Private Soule scurried to the body, knelt beside it, and, ignoring enemy bullets kicking up dust all around him, calmly ransacked the dead man’s pockets for souvenirs, then scampered back into cover, unharmed.

General Canas, President Mora’s brother-in-law and third-ranking among the Costa Rican commanders, was inside a house on the Street of the Magazine, not far from the Carrasco house. As the afternoon wore on, and with sunset not long off, Canas decided that something drastic had to be done to force the filibusters from the buildings on the plaza. Remembering the story of the Nicaraguan pair, Mongola and Fajardo, who had set fire to the Espinosa hacienda in Rivas the previous year, Canas sent for Sergeant Luis Pacheco.

Twenty-three-year-old Pacheco, a slight man with a long face and a thin mustache, was a mixed-race native of the Costa Rican town of Cartago. Just before this war had broken out, Pacheco had been convicted of rape, but President Mora had pardoned him—in the expectation that in his gratitude Pacheco would make a good soldier. Now it was time for Pacheco to repay the favor and to prove himself. Canas pointed out to Pacheco that at the top of the street, at the western end of the plaza, was an inn owned by Roberto Guerra. Canas ordered Pacheco to set fire to it, hoping the fire would spread to other buildings around the plaza and drive the Yankees out.

A torch was prepared, lit, and handed to Pacheco. The door was then flung open, and Sergeant Pacheco was pushed out into the street. Praying that he would somehow be spared, Pacheco dashed up the street toward the plaza. American marksmen opened up on him, and like angry bees, bullets hummed by his ear. To his own amazement, Pacheco reached the wall of Guerra’s Inn unscathed. With a grunt, he heaved his burning torch up under the eaves of the roof.

Without waiting to see if the fire would take, Pacheco, still under fire from the filibusters, turned and sprinted back the way he’d come. As he ran, he felt the impact of slugs hitting him, but his legs continued to drive him back to where he’d started from. Again he was hit. Pacheco staggered, then stumbled and sprawled facedown on the sidewalk outside the thick wooden door that offered salvation. The door swung open. Private Ramon Montoya reached out and dragged the sergeant in from the pavement. As Yankee bullets thudded into the wall around the doorway, the door was slammed shut. Pacheco had survived. Sitting propped against a wall, he studied with some fascination the sources of the blood discoloring his white clothes; he had, he discovered, received five separate bullet wounds. Two other soldiers in the room, Privates Venancio Lascarez and Remigio Garro, gave Pacheco little chance of seeing another day and would be amazed to find him still alive the next day in a field hospital. ¹⁶

For long minutes, General Canas waited to see smoke rising from Guerra’s Inn. But the general was disappointed; Pacheco’s torch didn’t ignite a fire. So Canas called for volunteers for a second attempt. Two youths came forward. One was a Nicaraguan private, a local Legitimista. The other was Juan Santamaria, a Costa Rican drummer boy from Alajuela whose nickname was el Erizo—the hedgehog. The wounded Sergeant Pacheco, sitting against a wall, ripped the bottom from his own grimy, bloodied shirt, dipped it in paraffin, and tied it around the top of a chair-leg size piece of timber produced by another soldier. Pacheco handed this to young Santamaria and prayed that God would go with him. The Nicaraguan boy was also provided with a torch, and both torches were lit. General Canas wished the pair good luck and then ordered the door opened.

The Nicaraguan youth was the first to emerge into the street. Santamaria the drummer boy was right behind him. Sprinting down the pavement with their burning torches, they kept close to the buildings as Costa Ricans all along the street strove to provide covering fire from windows and loopholes. The Americans, anticipating this second sally, sent a fusillade of bullets hurtling toward the pair. The Nicaraguan, peppered with bullets, spun and fell. His torch tumbled uselessly into the dust. Santamaria continued on.

Reaching the inn’s nearest corner, Santamaria thrust his torch up under the eaves as bullets kicked up dust all around him. As, Costa Ricans at loopholes watched with bated breath, the drummer boy turned to make his return run. They saw the boy hit by several rounds at once, then crumple to the ground at the entrance to the plaza. There he lay, on his back, eyes wide, as if studying the blue Nicaraguan sky. His comrades prayed he would get to his feet again, but Juan Santamaria was dead. Yet his mission had not been in vain—smoke was oozing out from beneath the eaves of Guerra’s Inn.

Lieutenant James Jamison dragged himself out onto the veranda of the dry goods store. The men there told him that the Costas had set fire to the city. Peeking over the wall of cheese, Jamison could see smoke rising from the roof of the inn on the western side of the plaza.

Beside Jamison, Captain Jack Dunnigan sat taking a swig from a bottle of patent bitters. As Dunnigan drank, a bullet from nowhere suddenly hit him in the throat, damaging the thyroid. Dunnigan clapped a hand over his bleeding throat and, in a hoarse whisper, remarked, “Never before has my drinking been cut short in so discourteous a manner.”¹⁷

As Dunnigan crawled away to have his wound attended to, Jamison again took a peak over the wall of cheese. Not only was the inn burning, but smoke was also rising on the northwestern side of the plaza from fires set by the Costas in the west of the city.

The ARN officers in the northern buildings decided that once night fell, they would evacuate their wounded around the plaza to the San Pedro Convent, and Lieutenant George Winters was ordered to make his way to the convent to have preparations made to receive the wounded.¹⁸ Winters was a young man who believed his life was charmed, and instead of threading his way through the buildings skirting the plaza, he decided to take a short cut—across the middle of the plaza. With a valuable pearl-handled revolver in his hand, Winters leaped from a northern veranda and, in a crouching run, headed across the plaza toward the cathedral and convent.

By this time, Costa Rican marksmen had occupied rooftops in the western sector. They saw Winters’s running figure; so too did the snipers in the San Francisco Church tower. Winters had crossed thirty yards of plaza when a .758 Minié round smacked into his right thigh, shattered it, then continued on to shatter his left thigh. Winters dropped to his knees as if forced down by some invisible power. Unable to believe he’d been wounded, Winters tried to rise again but couldn’t. With bullets hitting the pavement all around him, he could only kneel there, waiting for the bullet that would end it all.

From a spot near Jamison on the veranda of the dry goods store, Captain Myron Veeder suddenly hurdled the wall of cheese, dropped down into the plaza, then dashed toward the downed man. “Bullets came like hail in an Atlantic storm,” the watching Jamison would recall. ¹⁹ As Veeder reached Winters, so many rounds ripped into the brick paving around the pair that the men were momentarily obscured from view by a cloud of red dust raised by the fusillade. Out of the dust came Veeder, with Winters over his shoulder. Winters was still holding his pearl-handled revolver. Miraculously, the pair reached cover. Somehow, Veeder emerged from the rescue unscathed, although his jacket was riddled with bullet holes.

By 11:30 P.M. Guerra’s Inn was a gutted, smoldering ruin, and buildings in the northwest were burning strongly. Occasional shots punctuated the night, but otherwise, there was not a sound. Remarkably, as this seventeen-hour battle was fought out, a population of eighteen thousand people had been sheltering in back rooms throughout the city, praying for the killing to end and the soldiers to leave.

Once the sun went down, Walker had his units quietly evacuate the buildings on the western, northern, and southern sides of the plaza, one by one. A few rooftop marksmen on the northern and southern sides kept up a steady rate of fire to make the Costas think Walker’s men were still hunkered down around the plaza, and Major Waters and his Rangers remained in the cathedral bell tower, from where they shot at anything moving in the western sector.

Sixty American wounded lay in the ruined, roofless convent; Jamison was one of fourteen officers among them. In the moonlight, Jamison recognized several: his own company commander, Captain Breckenridge, a bloodied bandage around his head; Lieutenant Theodore E. Potter, a tall, slim man from Minnesota with neat beard and mustache whose wound was not life-threatening; and Willie Gould, a young private from Jamison’s company. Slight, fair-haired, blue-eyed, his boyish face drained of blood, Gould lay unconscious; the doctors, Moses, Cole, and Jones, held little hope for him. Jamison spotted General Walker moving among the wounded, talking with them, checking their bandages. Walker’s face gave nothing away; despite the desperate situation, he was “as inscrutable as a sphinx.”²⁰

A survey of his troops told Walker he had four hundred men fit to fight, with, on average, just three rounds per man remaining. With so little ammunition, it was pointless continuing the assault. Walker ordered his army to prepare to withdraw. The operation had to be carried out silently, discreetly, so that the enemy didn’t come charging down on top of them. Major Brewster would command a small rear guard. The horses of officers and Mounted Rangers were brought to the convent, and all wounded who could ride were put in the saddle. Walking wounded would go with them, in the middle of the column, as it retreated. The critically injured were a different matter.

Walker went to where George Winters lay and spoke quietly with him. The ashen-faced Winters nodded slowly. After speaking with the other seriously wounded men who remained conscious, the little general addressed the wounded as a group. He told them that the army must withdraw, but critically injured men would only jeopardize the chances of the others and would have a better chance if they stayed behind, with the hope that the Costa Rican surgeons would take over their care.

These men knew it was highly unlikely the enemy would spare them, but not one objected. On the contrary. “Save the army, general,” one man called, “and take no thought of us.”²¹ The critically wounded were carried to the raised altar platform in the ruined cathedral—perhaps on that once-sanctified spot, they would attract the sympathy of the Catholic Costa Ricans.

Jamison, watching this take place, was red hot with a fever brought on by his wound; his right leg had blown up to twice its size. Desperate to catch the cooling night breeze coming off the lake, he crawled across the convent floor and into the adjoining cathedral. In a corner where the breeze found its way in through the broken walls, Jamison sagged against a mound of rubble and gratefully closed his eyes.

Jamison awoke with a start. In the moonlight, he checked his pocket-watch—4:00 A.M. Above his head, a Costa Rican bullet hit a bell in the cathedral bell tower with a resonating clang. The Costas were shooting at the Rangers’ sniping position. But when there was no return fire, it dawned on Jamison that the Rangers had gone. The army must have withdrawn, and Jamison had been overlooked! His comrades had probably seen him sleeping, and thought him dead. “For a moment [I] was appalled at my predicament,” he would later say. “I knew that capture meant death.”²²

Overcoming his panic, Jamison crawled toward the cathedral’s rear door, armed with sword and pistol and dragging his swollen leg behind him. Pulling himself up over the pile of rubble blocking the door, he slipped down the other side, came to his feet, and looked around. With no idea what direction to follow and using his sword as a crutch, he hobbled through the Rivas suburbs. Behind him, the Costas continued to fire into the deserted American positions. At the city outskirts, hearing horses approach, Jamison dived over a wall of cactus plants. A troop of Costa Rican lancers cantered by in the darkness.

Jamison continued his awkward flight, following a main road, until he realized he was going south, toward Costa Rica. Glumly, he turned around and limped back the other way, toward Rivas and Granada beyond it, certain he would be caught and put before a firing squad. But fortune favored him; Jamison stumbled onto a pony standing abandoned in the road. Catching and mounting it, he circled around Rivas and then rode north to link up with Walker and his bloodied army as it withdrew toward Granada.

As dawn broke over Rivas on the morning of April 11, Norvell Walker awoke from a drunken sleep in the cathedral’s bell tower. When he’d dropped off to sleep the night before, he had been accompanied by Rangers. Now he was alone. To his horror, Norvell realized that the army had gone and he had been left behind. Slithering down the steps to the ground below, he fled the ruined cathedral and scampered after his brother’s long-gone army.

After several hours of daylight, it dawned on President Mora that the filibusters had pulled out. With bayonets fixed, his troops moved through the city, looking for remnants of William Walker’s army. At the San Pedro Cathedral, Costas crashed through the thick doors that faced onto the plaza. At the altar platform, the crippled Lieutenant George Winters and his wounded comrades sat or lay. Winters, with back to the altar, raised his pearl-handled revolver and fired, cutting down the first Costa Rican to take a step toward him. He fired again, as with angry yells, the soldiers in white charged the altar. Winters and the other American wounded were bayoneted to death. The story would later be told by Americans who fought at Rivas—more legend than fact, in all probability—that George Winters emptied all six barrels of his revolver before the Costas got him.²³

Elsewhere in the city, Don Francisco Ugarte, the man who had billeted Lieutenant Jamison, emerged from his home and sought out President Mora. Ugarte proceeded to point out houses where five wounded Americans had taken refuge with friendly locals. Costa Rican troops dragged the five filibusters out into the street, then shot them dead on the spot.

President Mora sent out lancers to round up filibuster stragglers, but his army was in no shape to give chase to Walker’s main body. Walker himself estimated that the Costa Ricans suffered six hundred killed or wounded in the battle, a figure repeated in the American press. Actual Costa Rican casualties, revealed much later by Costa Rican sources, numbered over eight hundred.²⁴ As the exhausted survivors took stock of their situation, their president issued a proclamation, telling the people of Costa Rica that on April 11, the nation’s army had won a great victory against the Yankee army of the filibuster Walker at Rivas.