Tycoon's War

And now, with that court case only midway through, the forty-six-year-old Garrison was standing across the long, wide table that served as Vanderbilt’s desk. And he was offering Vanderbilt a partnership with Morgan and himself, if the Commodore walked away from the Transit Company, whose shares were now worth just three dollars, down from twenty-three on March 12.² This way, by making Vanderbilt their partner in the Nicaraguan operations, and by default also making him a partner with President William Walker of Nicaragua, Morgan and Garrison would make an enemy an ally and would no longer have to watch their backs in dread of Vanderbilt’s next assault.

Vanderbilt, sitting the other side of the table, didn’t even have to think it over. He shook his head. He’d been fighting Garrison and his crony Morgan tooth and nail for years. Garrison may have outwitted him to snare the Sierra Nevada in the spring, but as recently as June, Vanderbilt had extracted his revenge. The mortgages on the Transit Company steamships Northern Light and Star of the West, both of which were tied up in New York on Vanderbilt’s orders, had fallen due on May 31. A total of $124,000 had been owing on the pair of steamers, which had cost $380,000 each to build five years back. Vanderbilt had chaired a meeting of Transit Company directors, at which the steamers, “two of the best boats of the old line” in the opinion of the New York Times, had been voted to the Commodore personally, for the sum of the mortgage.⁴ This had given the ships to Vanderbilt at a bargain price; they were worth three times as much, in the estimation of the Times.

But the mortgagees had other ideas—one lender was financier George A. Hoyt, while the other was none other than Charles Morgan. They foreclosed on the two mortgages, seized the steamers, and put them up for auction. Vanderbilt had been certain that Morgan and Garrison wanted the two ships for their Nicaragua run, so, determined to keep the steamers out of their hands, he had been sure to make the winning bids. He had paid over the odds, but at least he had made sure Morgan and Garrison could not add the Northern Light and the Star of the West to their fleet, forcing Morgan to take the Tennessee, the Calhoun, and the Texas away from the profitable Gulf routes to serve Nicaragua.

In the past, Vanderbilt had gone into partnership with steamship rivals. But that had been different—he had made a fortune then. Garrison was not offering him more than the mere promise of a profit. “I am working for the stockholders of the Transit Company,” Vanderbilt now informed Garrison, adding a few expletives, “and I will not betray them.”⁵ He called to long-serving clerk Lambert Wardell, who worked beyond double doors in the adjoining office, and instructed him to see Mr. Garrison from the premises.

Once the disappointed Garrison departed, Vanderbilt called in Wardell again and dictated a statement in which he detailed the offer just made to him by Garrison. The magnate then sent the statement to attorney Charles Rapallo, so that the attorney might use it in the court case against Garrison.

Even though the price of Transit Company shares had reached an all-time low, the remaining shareholders had recently given the Commodore a vote of support, expressing their “utmost confidence in the ability and energy of Cornelius Vanderbilt, esq., our President.”⁶ They had little choice—without the Commodore, whose record suggested he might well restore the company’s fortunes, their shares were worthless. So the shareholders had supported his policy of keeping Transit Company steamers tied up, even though the vessels could be making money on other routes—to Panama, for instance. The press hadn’t been so obliging. The Times had been scathing in its criticism of Vanderbilt’s bloody-minded strategy: “Commodore Vanderbilt should consent to alight from his high horse,” it had railed, “and resume the practical business temper and good sense which characterize his management of steamboat jobs.”⁷

But “Mr. Vanderbilt would have his own way,” the Times had conceded, and the Transit Company’s steamers had continued to lay idle for months. Yet, in his own inimitable fashion, Vanderbilt himself had been secretly making a vast profit from his idle steamships—because they had been tied up. Back in March, as soon as he had returned from Washington and ordered the eight ships off the Nicaragua run, the Commodore had paid a visit to competitor William Aspinwall, head of the Pacific Mail Line, and made a deal with him. For two months, Aspinwall had paid him forty thousand dollars a month on the condition that he would not put his steamers on the Panama run in competition with Aspinwall’s own vessels. The money had gone to Vanderbilt personally, not to the Transit Company. Other shareholders knew nothing of the deal.⁸

In June, Aspinwall had balked at the payments, so in July, Vanderbilt had negotiated a new secret deal, giving Aspinwall more for his money. This time, in return for forty thousand dollars a month—the amount would later increase to fifty-six thousand a month—with most of the bribe money coming from the Pacific Mail Line and some now also from the U.S. Mail Line, Vanderbilt pledged not to compete on the Panama line, swore to destroy the Morgan-Garrison Nicaragua Line, and undertook to run his steamers to the Gulf of Mexico in competition with Morgan to put even more pressure on his adversary. Vanderbilt in fact established the Vanderbilt Gulf Line, operating out of Galveston and New Orleans, commissioning the construction of two purpose-built steamers for the gulf trade: the SS Opelousa and the SS Magnolia.⁹ When Garrison came to see Vanderbilt, he had been blissfully unaware of this covert deal. Only years later would the deal be uncovered, becoming the subject of court action against the Commodore by Transit Company shareholders, when it would be labeled “immoral and in restraint of trade and commerce.”¹⁰

Over the next two years, this deal would net Vanderbilt personally close to a million dollars. He would not pass on a cent to the Transit Company.¹¹ Vanderbilt kept his end of the bargain, but his deal with the Pacific Mail and U.S. Mail Lines was not why he was still determined to destroy William Walker, “that tin-sojer in Nicaraguey,” as he called the new president of Nicaragua. ¹² Walker had taken his property—Transit charter and Transit Company assets in Nicaragua—and then went and climbed into bed with Vanderbilt’s competitors. This was why Vanderbilt had marked Walker for destruction.

The New York Herald had recently declared that most Americans were in sympathy with the Walker government in Nicaragua. But despite this, and, believing that the Commodore would at any moment launch his steamers on the Panama route, the Herald sagely warned that the new American-led government of Nicaragua was playing with fire, and “its gallant head has periled its hitherto bright prospects. It will be seen that it is in Mr. Vanderbilt’s power to kill off the new government by opening another route and thus cutting off Walker’s communications with San Francisco and New York.”¹³

Vanderbilt’s tactics were not as the Herald predicted, but they were still aimed at killing off the new Nicaraguan government. Quietly and covertly, the Commodore had “poured money into the capitals of the small countries adjoining Nicaragua.”¹⁴ It was Vanderbilt who had armed the conscript soldiers of the Allied armies that had blossomed from nothing in the north and now sat at León. He had sent the Allied governments money; he had purchased weapons and ammunition and shipped it all to Central America. The invasion of Nicaragua by the Allied armies had been motivated, financed, and equipped by Vanderbilt. Yet, for all his expenditure in support of the war-making efforts of the Allied governments, no doubt financed, in part, by the Aspinwall bribe payments, Vanderbilt had poured money down the drain if the Allied armies continued to sit on their rumps, like matrons at a church picnic, and failed to engage Walker’s filibusters. As far as the Commodore was concerned, there had to be another way to beat William Walker, and by hook or by crook, he would find it.

Colonel José Dolores Estrada watched with paternal pride as the men of his little army filed past his horse toward the San Jacinto ranch house. Sixty-four-year-old Estrada sat tall and straight in the saddle. With thick, gray hair and a noble bearing, he looked every inch the aristocrat. Yet he’d started out in Nicaragua’s army back in 1827 as a humble private and worked his way up through the ranks to become a colonel in the Legitimista army during the civil war. After the peace, he had gone north to Honduras rather than accept filibuster-sponsored rule in his country. In July, Estrada had returned to Nicaragua with the Legitimistas’ former president, José Maria Estrada (no relation).

But in August, the former president had been assassinated at Somotillo. Yet, instead of dividing the Legitimistas and Democraticos even further, the assassination had thrown them together. General Tomás Martinez, General Fernando Chamorro, and other senior Nicaraguan Legitimista officers vowed loyalty to Patricio Rivas. Soon, General Martinez would march south toward Walker-held territory from Matagalpa with the bulk of what he called the Army of the Septentrion. As Martinez prepared, he had given Colonel Estrada an advance guard of three companies and ordered him to pass down east of Lake Managua toward Granada, gathering recruits as he went.

Colonel Estrada’s advance guard numbered just 17 officers and 140 enlisted men. Of the enlisted men, 120 were Matagalpa Indians, tough, brave, and fiercely independent Nicaraguan natives.¹⁵ They marched barefoot, dressed in tattered white shirts and straw hats, and with ancient flintlock muskets on their shoulders. As they moved south into the Chontales district in late August, Estrada’s forward scouts had surprised a filibuster detachment herding cattle to feed Walker’s troops, on the Los Llanos cattle ranch near Tipitapa. Estrada’s scouts had shot the detachment’s commander, Captain Ubaldo Herrera, from the saddle.

Now, in the first days of September, Colonel Estrada’s column arrived at the San Jacinto ranch of Miguel Bolanos, almost twenty miles to the northeast of Tipitapa—where, Estrada knew, there was a Walker garrison. Here at the San Jacinto ranch, Estrada would wait for General Martinez to join him with the rest of the Army of the Septentrion. Estrada’s men were tired and hungry, but before he let them rest, the colonel made them fortify the ranch house, for he expected the filibusters to send out patrols looking for those responsible for the death of Captain Herrera, and he wanted to be prepared. The San Jacinto hacienda was a single-story adobe structure with two wings fronted by porticos, all set on a low rise, with cattle corrals on either side. Estrada’s men built adobe barricades at the corrals, and a trench all the way around the house linked to the corrals. Only once these defenses were created did the colonel allow his men to rest.

The rain pelted down. It was the night of September 4, and in the inky darkness, Lieutenant Colonel McDonald and forty men of Walker’s Second Rifles Battalion, led by a Captain Jarvis, found what cover they could beneath the trees and pulled their capes up around their necks. The hacienda of the San Jacinto estate was less than a mile away.

Walker—who continued to use the title of General rather than that of President—had been distressed by the death of Captain Herrera. The young captain had joined Walker for the second campaign in the south the previous summer, bravely leading his Democratico company at the Battle of La Virgen and acting as a guide for the taking of Granada. And it had been Herrera who commanded the firing squad that executed Mateo Mayorga. Immediately after Walker had heard that the loyal Nicaraguan captain had been shot from his horse while herding cattle, he sent orders to McDonald, his post commander at Tipitapa, to cross the Tipitapa River and make a reconnaissance in force north toward Los Llanos in search of Herrera’s killers.

On the march, McDonald had learned that a hostile force of unknown size had occupied the hacienda of the San Jacinto ranch. He assumed it to be the small force that killed Captain Herrera. Now, as his men hunched their shoulders in the rain, McDonald decided to wait until daybreak before approaching the hacienda.

As dawn broke on September 5, McDonald and his black-clad riflemen approached the hacienda at the double-quick march. The rain had abated, but the ground was soggy underfoot. By the time he was a hundred yards from the hacienda, McDonald could see, in the new day’s golden light, the adobe barricades at the corrals and straw-hatted heads lining a trench to the front. On the command of an elderly officer on the hacienda veranda, a ragged line of smoke appeared, stretching the length of the hacienda. Colonel Estrada’s untrained Indians were not good shots; not a single bullet claimed its target. But the sight and sound of the volley by 140 muskets staggered the Americans, who had been expecting to face perhaps a dozen natives.

The filibuster attack faltered, then stopped. Running out in front of his men, Captain Jarvis loudly urged them to keep going. Ahead, several of Colonel Estrada’s men came out from cover for a clear shot. One of them, Private Exacto Rocha, drew a bead on Jarvis, who raised his pistol and took rapid aim at Rocha. Both fired at the same moment, and both fell. Rocha was killed instantly. Jarvis, mortally wounded, was dragged away by his men, but before an hour had passed, he, too, would die from his wound.

Estrada’s men fired another volley. There were no more American fatalities, but the ARN attack was a shambles. Surprised and demoralized, McDonald and his men beat a hasty and disorderly withdrawal and hurried back toward Tipitapa. In their wake, Estrada’s dusky recruits let out a victorious cheer.

First Sergeant Andres Castro was, like his comrades, eating a light predawn breakfast. It was five o’clock on the morning of Sunday, September 14, nine days since McDonald’s filibusters fled San Jacinto. Twenty-four-year-old Castro was short, slim, and olive-skinned. A native of Managua, he’d served in Tomás Martinez’s Legitimista army during the civil war and had considerable combat experience. At the sound of a galloping horse, Castro looked up. Corporal Faustino Salmeron, a scout, came hurtling up to the San Jacinto hacienda in the predawn darkness.

Colonel Estrada emerged from the house and calmly asked Salmeron how many enemy were coming, and from where. The scout estimated that three hundred Yankees were approaching the hacienda from the direction of Tipitapa. Seeming unconcerned by the number, Estrada summoned his officers and instructed them to take up their prearranged defensive positions with their men. As the officers ran to obey, Sergeant Castro grabbed his musket and hurried to join Lieutenant Miguel Velez’s platoon at the front of the house.

As the sun began to rise, Lieutenant Colonel Byron Cole halted his mounted contingent with a raised hand. This was the same Byron Cole who’d employed William Walker at his Sacramento newspaper and later arranged the first contract with Provisional Director Castellon that brought Walker and his “Originals” to Nicaragua. Only recently given a senior ARN commission by Walker, Cole had just led an expedition to the mountainous northeast, extending Walker’s rule, rounding up deserters, making a study of the territory with a view to future North American colonization, and dispensing Walker government cattle supply quotas to local ranchers. At Tipitapa, on his way back to Granada, Cole had bumped into an ARN column heading for San Jacinto to eject Colonel Estrada and his men. Cole had eagerly taken over its command.

Cole’s party was not three hundred strong as Estrada’s scout had estimated. It numbered just seventy men, all mounted. Most were volunteers, ARN officers, and former officers serving with Walker’s civil administration, who’d been disgusted by the poor performance of McDonald and his men. “Seeing the enthusiasm of some officers and citizens,” Walker later wrote, “and desirous of ascertaining more exactly the strength of the enemy beyond Tipitapa,” the president had consented to the volunteers’ reconnoitering San Jacinto and assigned a company of Mounted Rangers to accompany them.¹⁷

One of the volunteers, Charles Callahan, only in his twenties, had recently been appointed Walker’s collector of customs at Granada. He was also the Nicaragua correspondent for the New Orleans Daily Picayune newspaper. Walker permitted Callahan to join the others because the young man had, in Walker’s words, “a thirst for action.”¹⁸ Such was the enthusiasm of the party; they had ridden through the night to get here. Despite the hard ride, they’d brought along the ARN’s mascot, “Warrior,” a shaggy dog who lined up with the troops on parade and trotted at the front of marching columns.

Colonel Cole’s party dismounted. As horses and mascot were taken to the rear, Cole divided his small command into three sections, appointing Major Cal O’Neal, Major Watkins, and Robert Milligan, a former lieutenant, to lead them. Cole told his officers that, as they were likely to be outnumbered, they must get their men in among the enemy quickly and dispose of them hand to hand. The Americans fanned out, formed three lines, and then, with Cole at the forefront, advanced at the walk for a frontal attack on the hacienda.

In the early morning light, Colonel Estrada, sitting on a battered leather stool on the hacienda’s veranda, could see filibusters in their black coats and hats, at a distance of two thousand yards, approaching in three parallel lines and at a steady march. With a yell, the filibusters broke into a trot. One of their lines continued toward the house. The other two swung left and right to tackle the fortified corrals on the flanks.

Estrada ordered his men to hold their fire. He waited and waited, as the charge brought the filibusters closer at a nerve-wracking pace. At a range of a hundred yards, Estrada gave the order. His troops let off a devastating volley. Unlike the skirmish on the fifth, this time Estrada’s men displayed much improved accuracy; a victory under the belt had steadied nerves and aim. From one side of the battlefield to the other, Americans were felled. The filibuster charge faltered. Then, as the Nicaraguans reloaded, the Yankees renewed the charge. The Americans reached the trench line, only to be driven back. Again, after a pause to lick their wounds and to count their diminishing numbers, they charged into the jaws of death. Again they were repulsed.

For a third time, the Americans charged. All over the battlefield, there were displays of desperate courage. On the Nicaraguan right, an unidentified filibuster in a U.S. Army uniform made a flying leap and hurdled the trench, only to be shot dead on the other side by Lieutenant Adam Soli. In the center, another Yankee officer crossed the trench. Finding he’d emptied his smoking pistol, the American threw it away and, using his sword, cut down several Nicaraguans who came at him with fixed bayonets.

Sergeant Andres Castro reached to the leather ammunition box on his belt, only to find it empty. Casting aside his musket, he grabbed a large stone from the hacienda’s foundations and ran at the American swordsman, crashing the stone into the Yankee’s head, killing him. Moments later, an American bullet from the other side of the trench slammed into Castro’s leg, and he went down grasping his shattered limb.

Once again, the filibusters were driven back and had to regroup. After this repulse, Cole called a council of war. Since they had criticized McDonald’s men for giving up the fight three weeks earlier, the proud Americans weren’t willing to acknowledge defeat. It was now agreed to launch a concentrated attack on the corral to the right. A little before 10:00 A.M., with their revolvers reloaded, the Americans went forward at the run, yelling, “Hurrah, Walker!”¹⁹

The young Nicaraguan officer at the corral, Ignacio Jarquin, had joined General Martinez’s army so recently he had yet to receive his lieutenant’s commission. Colonel Estrada had told him to sacrifice his life rather then let the filibusters take his position, and Jarquin was faithful to his orders, dying while fighting the Yankees chest to chest. Around him, several of his men also fought to the last. The Americans took the corral, but at high cost. Former ARN officer Robert Milligan was among those killed. Byron Cole took a bullet in the torso, although he tried to shrug off the wound. Cal O’Neal was wounded in the arm but was still full of fight. Major Watkins had a bullet in the hip and was sitting with his back against a barricade, hardly able to move. As the surviving Americans took up defensive positions at the corral, finding cover for the first time during the battle, the Nicaraguans at the other corral and in the trench line poured fire into their position.

Gun smoke clouded the air, and the noise of battle was so great that Colonel Estrada had to shout to be heard. From his veranda stool, he called newly promoted Captain Liberato Cisne to him. Yelling and pointing, Estrada told Cisne to take the platoons of Lieutenants José Ciero and Juan Fonseca, circle around behind the hacienda, and bayonet-charge the Yankees from the rear. Cisne saluted and hurried away. Gathering the seventeen surviving men of the Ciero and Fonseca platoons, Cisne led them to the rear of the house, where they jumped the trench. Then, in a crouch, they moved undetected around behind the corral. On the young captain’s command, they all fired at once, then, with fixed bayonets, rose up. With Cisne, Ciero, and Fonseca wielding their swords, they charged into the rear of the filibusters, yelling: “Viva Martinez! Viva Nicaragua!”²⁰

The heads of Cole and his men jerked around. The Nicaraguan charge took the Americans completely by surprise. Totally unnerved and thinking many more Nicaraguans were charging them than was the case, the filibusters broke and scattered in all directions. This time, there was no thought of regrouping. Carrying wounded with them, the Americans fled to their horses, mounted up, and galloped away, after a battle that had lasted much of the morning.²¹

Captain Bartholomew Sandoval received Colonel Estrada’s permission to give chase. Estrada himself mounted Corporal Salmeron’s horse, but, after going a short distance, left the pursuit to the younger men and returned to the hacienda. The filibusters had abandoned twenty horses, which the Nicaraguans used for the chase. On the road to Tipitapa, they overtook nine Yankees, killing them all. They tracked another eighteen to the nearby San Ildefonso ranch. Searching the ranch buildings, Corporal Salmeron discovered Byron Cole, sitting, badly wounded and armed with two pistols and a rifle. Cole was too weak to resist; his weapons were knocked aside. The pale lieutenant colonel was dragged outside. The other seventeen hiding filibusters, several of them badly wounded, were also captured. One identified himself as a doctor.

The filibuster prisoners were brought back to the San Jacinto hacienda. Colonel Estrada had found the bodies of eighteen Americans in the grounds; with the nine killed on the road to Tipitapa, the Yankees had lost twenty-seven men. Estrada’s losses were twenty-eight men, plus a number wounded. Around the battle site, his soldiers collected thirty-two enemy rifles, some of them the prized new breech-loading Sharps variety, plus twenty-five revolvers, as well as numerous discarded hats, caps, and capes. A number of letters were also found on American bodies, and these were brought to Estrada in case they contained valuable intelligence.²²

As the American prisoners were locked away in an outbuilding, Estrada scribbled a note to General Martinez, telling of the victory at San Jacinto and asking what he should to with his prisoners. Bearing the note and captured letters, a mounted courier galloped north to Martinez at Matagalpa.

That afternoon, American survivors began to stream into Tipitapa. Bloodied and exhausted, they brought tales of woe from San Jacinto. One of them, Wiley Marshall, died shortly after reaching the town. Garrison commander McDonald promptly hacked down the wooden bridge over the Tipitapa River to slow an enemy advance. New Orleans Picayune correspondent Charles Callahan escaped the San Jacinto battlefield only to be captured by local Indians near Segovia. They stripped the young American, administered five hundred lashes, then killed him slowly, agonizingly, by cutting him in pieces.²³

When twenty-five San Jacinto survivors rode back into the capital, they were accompanied by Warrior the dog, “with his head lowered and his tail between his legs.”²⁴ Once Walker learned the details of the disaster at San Jacinto, he abandoned Tipitapa, withdrawing McDonald’s garrison to Managua.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 16, Byron Cole and his seventeen fellow prisoners were released from the hut where they’d been kept for two days. Colonel Estrada’s troops herded them into a courtyard behind the San Jacinto hacienda. Here, a magnificent old ceiba tree spread.

That morning, Colonel Estrada had received instructions from General Martinez—the prisoners were to be executed, at once. And Estrada was told to save bullets; no firing squad for them. The Yankees were to be hanged. No trial. No time to reflect. No ceremony. No exceptions. Eighteen rope nooses were swiftly prepared.

General Ramon Belloso paced the floor. Since 1854, he had been El Salvador’s most senior general. Now, surrounded by generals and colonels from four countries, the forty-six-year-old was in a quandary. Should they attack William Walker, or should they continue to wait for Walker to attack them in their strongly fortified position at León?

In 1833, Belloso, then a newly commissioned captain, had ruthlessly put down an insurrection of native Indians in El Salvador. He’d gone on to command Salvador’s 150-man Presidential Honor Guard. Now, resplendent in a uniform emblazoned with a fruit salad of gold braid, he looked like a caricature of a Napoleonic general. In June, Patricio Rivas had named Belloso commander of all Allied forces in Nicaragua, much to the displeasure of the generals from Guatemala and Honduras and Rivas’s own chief general, Maximo Jerez. Somehow, despite personal rivalries and old cross-border feuds, the Allied armies had operated as one.

But Belloso’s reputation had been made many years before, and the younger officers at León suspected that he had lost his courage. They wanted to come to grips with the “buccaneer of the north,” as they called Walker, and his pirate crew. And, after sitting at León for two idle months, the electrifying news of Colonel Estrada’s comprehensive defeat of Walker’s filibusters at San Jacinto signaled to them that it was time the main army went on the offensive. Previously, General Paredes, the Guatemalan commander, had agreed with Belloso when he counseled caution. But Paredes was seriously ill and unable to leave his bed. In his stead, Paredes’s zealous young chief of staff, Colonel José Zavala, pushed for action, and other officers agreed with him.

Zavala reminded Belloso word had come that General Martinez was on the march from Matagalpa with four hundred Nicaraguan troops. Planning to link up with Colonel Estrada’s advance guard at San Jacinto, Martinez expected to be in a position to threaten Granada before the week was out. The Allies had come to fight Walker, said Zavala and his colleagues. Were they merely to lounge around camp while Martinez did all the fighting and reaped all the glory? Belloso, realizing that the Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans were likely to march on Granada without him, gave in. He ordered the entire Allied army to prepare to march south.