Chapter 7: The March of the One Thousand

TWENTY-TWO centuries or thereabouts ago a Greek soldier of fortune named Xenophon found himself in a most trying and perilous situation. Lured by avarice, adventure, and ambition, he had accepted a commission in a legion of Hellenic mercenaries, ten thousand strong, who had been engaged by Cyrus to assist him in ousting his brother from the throne of Persia. But at Cunaxa Cyrus had met his death and his forces complete disaster, the Greek legionaries being left to make their way back to Europe as best they might. Under Xenophon’s daring and resourceful leadership they set out on that historic retreat across the plains of Asia Minor which their leader was to make immortal with his pen, eventually reaching Constantinople, after an absence of fifteen months and a total journey of about three thousand five hundred miles, with little save their weapons and their lives. Xenophon’s story of the March of the Ten Thousand as told in his “Anabasis,” is the most famous military narrative ever written; it is used as a text-book in colleges and schools, and is familiar wherever the history of Greece is read.

Yet how many of those who know the “Anabasis” by heart are aware that Xenophon’s exploit has been surpassed on our own continent, in our own times, and by our own countrymen? Where is the text-book which contains so much as a reference to the march of the One Thousand? How many of the students who can glibly rattle off the details of Xenophon’s march across the Mesopotamian plains have ever even heard of Doniphan’s march across the plains of Mexico? During that march, which occupied twelve months, a force of American volunteers, barely a thousand strong, traversed upward of six thousand miles of territory, most of which was unknown and bitterly hostile, and returned to the United States bringing with them seventeen pieces of artillery and a hundred battle-flags taken on fields whose names their countrymen had never so much as heard before. Because it is the most remarkable campaign in all our history, and because it is too glorious an episode to be lost in the mists of oblivion, I will, with your permission, tell its story.

Early in May, 1846, Mexico, angered by the annexation of Texas, declared war against the United States. Hostilities began a few days later, when the Army of Occupation under General Zachary Taylor, whom this campaign was to make President, crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros and defeated the Mexicans in quick succession at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. The original plan of campaign was for the Army of Occupation to penetrate directly into the heart of Mexico via Monterey; the Army of the Centre, under General Wool, to operate against Chihuahua, the metropolis of the north, two hundred and twenty-five miles below the Rio Grande; while an expeditionary force under Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, known as the Army of the West, was ordered to march on Santa Fé for the conquest of New Mexico. Subsequently this plan was changed: General Scott captured Vera Cruz and used it as a base for his advance on the capital; General Wool, instead of descending on Chihuahua, effected a juncture with General Taylor at Saltillo; and Colonel Kearny, after the taking of New Mexico, divided his force into three separate commands. The first he led in person across the continent to the conquest of California; the second, under Colonel Sterling Price, was left to garrison Santa Fé and hold New Mexico; the third, consisting of a thousand Missouri volunteers under Colonel Alexander Doniphan, was ordered to make a descent upon the state of Chihuahua and join General Wool’s division at Chihuahua City. The march of this regiment of raw recruits from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fé, El Paso, Chihuahua, Saltillo, and Matamoros is known as Doniphan’s Expedition.

When, echoing Mexico’s declaration of war, came President Polk’s call for fifty thousand volunteers, Governor Edwards, of Missouri, turned to Colonel Doniphan for assistance in raising the quota of that State. He could not have chosen better, for Alexander Doniphan combined practical military experience and remarkable executive ability with the most extraordinary personal magnetism. Though a citizen of Missouri, Doniphan was a native of Kentucky, his father, who was a comrade of Daniel Boone, having pushed westward with that great adventurer to “the dark and bloody ground,” where, in 1808, Alexander was born. Left fatherless at the age of six, he was sent to live with his elder brother at Augusta, Ky., where he received the best education that the frontier afforded. Graduating from the Methodist college in Augusta when nineteen, he took up the study of law and in 1833 moved to Liberty, Mo., where his pronounced abilities quickly brought him reputation and a large and profitable clientèle. A born organizer, he took a prominent part in building up the State militia, commanding a brigade of the expeditionary force which was despatched in 1838 to quell the insurrectionary movement among the Mormons at Far West. A polished and convincing orator, he met with instant success when he set out through upper Missouri to raise recruits for service in Mexico. The force thus raised was designated as the 1st Missouri Mounted Volunteers, and no finer regiment of horse ever clattered behind the guidons. Missouri, then on our westernmost frontier, was peopled by hardy pioneers, and the youths who filled the ranks of the regiment were the sons of those pioneers and possessed all the courage and endurance of their fathers. Though Doniphan was a brigadier-general of militia and had seen active service, he enlisted as a private in the regiment which he had raised, but when the election for officers came to be held he was chosen colonel by acclamation. If ever a man looked the beau sabreur it was Doniphan. He was then in his eight-and-thirtieth year and so imposing in appearance that the mere sight of him in any assemblage would have caused the question: “Who is that man?” to go round. Six feet four in his stockings; crisp, curling hair, which, though not red, was suspiciously near it; features which would have been purest Grecian had not an aquiline nose lent them strength and distinction; a complexion as fair and delicate as a woman’s; a temperament that was poetic, even romantic, without being effeminate; a sense of humor so highly developed that he never failed to recognize a joke when he heard one; a personal modesty which was as delightful as it was unaffected; manners so courtly and polished as to suggest an upbringing in a palace rather than on the frontier; conversation that was witty, brilliant, and wonderfully fascinating—there you have Alexander Doniphan en silhouette, as it were. Small wonder that President Lincoln, when Colonel Doniphan was presented to him in after years, remarked: “Colonel, you are the only man I ever met whose appearance came up to my previous expectations.”

The Army of the West, of which Colonel Doniphan’s Missourians formed a part, was ordered to mobilize at Fort Leavenworth, where several weeks were spent in completing the equipment, collecting supplies, and teaching the recruits the rudiments of drill. Everything being complete down to the last horseshoe, on the morning of June 26, 1846, the expedition, comprising barely two thousand men in all, headed by Colonel Kearny with two squadrons of United States dragoons, smart and soldierly in their flat-topped, visored caps and their shell jackets of blue piped with yellow, and followed by a mile-long train of white-topped wagons, set out across the grassy prairies on a march which was to end in the conquest and annexation of a territory larger than all the United States at that time. It would be difficult to express the hopes and apprehensions of the volunteers and of those who watched and waved to them, when, with the bands playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” they moved out of Fort Leavenworth on that sunny summer’s morning and turned their horses’ heads toward the south—and Mexico. At that time the American people’s knowledge of Mexico was very meagre, for the geographies of the day, though indicating very clearly the Great American Desert, as it was called, stretching long and wide and yellow between Missouri and Mexico, showed little beyond the barest outlines of the vast unexplored regions to the west and south. The people of Missouri, however, knew more than any others, for their traders, for more than twenty years, had laboriously traversed the dangerous trail which led from Independence to the northernmost of the Mexican trading-posts at Santa Fé and thence on to Chihuahua. Thus they knew that the regions between the Missouri and the Great Desert were Indian country and dangerous, and that those beyond were Indian and Mexican and more dangerous still. No wonder that the volunteers felt that every mile of their advance into this terra incognita would reveal perils, marvels, and surprises; no wonder that those who were left behind prayed fervently for the safety of the husbands and sons and lovers who had gone into the wild as fighters go.

There was no road, not even a path, leading from Fort Leavenworth into the Santa Fé trail, and, as the intervening country was slashed across by innumerable streams and canyons, bridges and roads had to be built for the wagons. The progress of the column was frequently interrupted by precipitous bluffs whose sides, often two hundred feet or more in height, were so steep and slippery that it was impossible for the mules to get a foothold, and the heavily laden wagons, with a hundred sweating, panting, cursing men straining at the drag-ropes, had to be hauled up by hand. As the column pressed southward the heat became unbearable. The tall, rank grass harbored swarms of flies and mosquitoes which attacked the soldiers until their eyes were sometimes swollen shut and clung to the flanks of the mules and horses until the tormented animals streamed with blood. In places the ground became so soft and marshy that the wagons sank to the hubs and the march was halted while a dozen teams hauled them out again. Numbers of the wagons broke down daily under the terrific strain to which they were subjected, and, as though this was not enough, the troubles of the teamsters were increased by the mules, which, maddened by the attacks of insects and made refractory by the unaccustomed conditions, stubbornly refused to work.

Preceding the column was a hunter train, commanded by Thomas Forsyth, a celebrated frontiersman. Leaving camp about eleven in the evening and riding through the night, the hunters and butchers would reach the site selected for the next camp at daybreak and would promptly get to work killing and dressing the game which swarmed upon the prairies, so that a supply of fresh meat—buffalo, elk, antelope, and deer—was always awaiting the troops upon their arrival at sundown, while along the banks of the Arkansas the men brought in quantities of wild grapes, plums, and rice. Arriving at the towering butte, standing solitary in the prairie, known as Pawnee Rock, Forsyth asked his hunters to ascend it with him. Even these old plainsmen, accustomed as they were to seeing prodigious herds of game, whistled in amazement at the spectacle upon which they looked down, for from the base of the rock straightaway to the horizon the prairie was literally carpeted with buffalo. Forsyth, who was always conservative in his expressions, estimated that five hundred thousand buffalo were in sight, but his hunters asserted that eight hundred thousand would be much nearer the number of animals seen from the summit of Pawnee Rock that morning.

Crossing the Arkansas, the expedition entered upon the Great American Desert—as sterile, parched, and sandy a waste as the Sahara. Dreary, desolate, boundless solitude reigned everywhere. The heat was like a blast from an opened furnace door. The earth was literally parched to a crust, and this crust had broken open in great cracks and fissures. Such patches of vegetation as there were had been parched and shrivelled by the pitiless sun until they were as yellow as the sand itself. Soon even this pretense of vegetation disappeared; the parched wire grass was stiffened by incrustations of salt; streaks of alkali spread across the face of the desert like livid scars; the pulverized earth looked and felt like smouldering embers. The mules grew weak from thirst and some of the wagons had to be abandoned. Horses fell dead from heat and exhaustion, but the men thus forced to march on foot managed to keep pace with the mounted men. Their boots gave out, however, and for miles the line of their march could be traced by bloody footprints. Wind-storms drove the loose sand of the desert against them like a sand-blast, cutting their lips, filling their eyes and ears and sometimes almost suffocating them. Though constantly tantalized by mirages of cool lakes with restful groves reflected in them, they would frequently fail to find a pool of water or a patch of grass in a long day’s march and would plod forward with their swollen tongues hanging from their mouths. Those who saw the smart body of soldiery which rode out of Fort Leavenworth would scarcely have recognized them in the straggling column of ragged, sun-scorched skeletons of men, sitting their gaunt and jaded horses, which crossed the well-named Purgatoire eight weeks later, and saw before them the snow peaks of the Cimarrons.