American Men of Action Part 13

The settlers in Texas, coming as they did largely from the southern states, were naturally slave-holders, but in 1829, Mexico abolished slavery, an action which greatly enraged them. It is startling to reflect that a country which we consider so inferior to ourselves should have preceded us by over thirty years in this great step forward in civilization. In other ways, the Mexican yoke was not a pleasant one to the Texans, and within a few years, the whole country was in a state of seething insurrection. President Jackson was eager to annex Texas, whose value to the Union he fully recognized, and offered Mexico five million dollars for the province, but the offer was refused. Such was the condition of affairs when, in 1833, Sam Houston appeared upon the scene.

The story of the life of this extraordinary man reads like a fable. Born in Virginia in 1793, he was taken to Tennessee at the age of thirteen, and promptly began his career by running away from home and joining the Cherokee Indians. When his family found him, he refused to return home, and the next seven years were spent largely in the wilderness with his savage friends. The wild life was congenial to him, and he grew up rough and head-strong and healthy. Then the Creek war broke out, and Houston enlisted with Andrew Jackson. One incident of that war gives a better insight into Houston's character than volumes of description. At the battle of the Horseshoe, where the Creeks made a desperate stand, a barbed arrow struck Houston in the thigh and sank deep into the flesh.

He tried to pull it out and failed.

"Here," he called to a comrade, "pull out this arrow."

The other took hold of the shaft of the arrow and pulled with all his might, but could not dislodge it.

"I can't get it out," he said, at last.

"Oh, yes, you can!" cried Houston, and raised his sword. "Pull it out, or it'll be worse for you!"

The soldier saw he was in earnest, and, taking hold of the arrow again, gave it a mighty wrench. It came out, but the barbs of the arrow tore the flesh badly. Houston, however, paused only to tie up the wound roughly, and hurried back into the fight, though Jackson ordered him to the rear. Before long, two bullets struck him down, and he lay between life and death for many days.

Such desperate valor was exactly after "Old Hickory's" heart, and from that time forward, Jackson was Houston's friend and patron. In 1818, he managed to gain admittance to the bar, and his rise was so rapid that within five years he had been elected to Congress, and four years later governor of Tennessee. Then came the strange catastrophe which nearly wrecked his life.

Houston was, after Andrew Jackson, the most popular man in the state. He resembled the hero of New Orleans in many ways, being rough, rude, hot-headed and honest--just the sort of man to appeal to the people among whom his lot was cast. When, therefore, in January, 1829, while governor of the state, he married Miss Eliza Allen, a member of one of the most prominent families in it, everybody wished him well, and the wedding was a great affair. But scarcely was the honeymoon over, when he sent his bride back to her parents, resigned the governors.h.i.+p, and, refusing to give any explanation of his conduct, plunged into the wilderness to the west.

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of frontier society is its chivalry toward women, and Houston's conduct brought about his head a perfect storm of indignation. No doubt he had many enemies who welcomed the opportunity to wreck his fame, and who gladly added their voices to the uproar. From the most popular man, he became the most hated, and it would have been dangerous for him to venture back within the state's borders. Not until after his death, did his wife give any explanation of his conduct. She stated that he had discovered that she loved another, and that he had deserted her so that she could secure a divorce on the ground of abandonment. That explanation, lame as it is, is the only one ever offered by either of the princ.i.p.als.

Meanwhile, Houston had joined his old friends, the Cherokees, now living in Arkansas Territory, and asked to be admitted to the tribe. The Indians expressed the opinion that he should have beaten his wife instead of abandoning her, but nevertheless adopted him, and for three years he lived their life, dressing, fighting, hunting and drinking precisely like any Indian. The papers, meanwhile, were filled with surmises concerning him. No one understood why he should have exiled himself, and it was reported that he intended to lead the Cherokees into Texas, conquer the country and set up a government of his own. President Jackson wrote to him, protesting against "any such chimerical, visionary scheme," which, needless to say, Houston had never entertained. These rumors grew so annoying, that he issued a proclamation offering a prize "To the Author of the Most Elegant, Refined, and Ingenious Lie or Calumny" about him.

The trouble culminated when Houston, having gone to Was.h.i.+ngton to plead for his friends, the Indians, caned a member of Congress who had slandered him on the floor of the House. He was arrested, and arraigned before the bar of the House for "breach of privilege," and was reprimanded by the Speaker and fined five hundred dollars--a fine which President Jackson promptly remitted, remarking that a few more examples of the same kind would teach Congressmen to keep civil tongues in their heads. Houston's comment on the affair was, "I was dying out once, and, had they taken me before a justice of the peace and fined me ten dollars for a.s.sault and battery, it would have killed me; but they gave me a national tribunal for a theatre and it set me up again."

It did "set him up" in earnest. The President, who always had a warm place in his heart for him, helped by sending him--not, perhaps, without some insight into the future--to Texas, to examine into the value of that country, in case the United States should decide to buy it. What Jackson's private instructions were can only be surmised, but, certainly, Houston showed no hesitation or uncertainty after he reached the scene.

On December 10, 1832, he crossed into Mexican territory, and was soon at the head of the Texas insurrectionists, who had determined to establish a government of their own, and who found in Houston a leader after their own hearts. Armed collisions between Texans and Mexican troops became of common occurrence, and the spirit of revolt spread so rapidly that Santa Anna, dictator of Mexico, sent an army under General Cos to pacify the country and drive the Americans out.

It was the spark in the magazine. All Texas sprang to arms under such leaders as Houston, Austin, Travis, Bonham, Fannin, "Deaf" Smith, and "Ben" Milam; took Goliad, where Milam lost his life heading a desperate a.s.sault; captured Concepcion and San Antonio, until, by the middle of December, 1836, not a Mexican soldier was left north of the Rio Grande.

But Houston, who had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Texan forces, knew they would return, and bent every effort to organize a disciplined army. It was a difficult thing to do with the high-tempered and lawless elements at hand; everything was disorder and confusion, and meanwhile came word that Santa Anna himself, at the head of an army of six thousand men, was entering Texas.

No effective opposition could be offered such an army; the San Antonio garrison was entrapped in the old mission called The Alamo and killed to the last man; Fannin and his force, three hundred and fifty strong, were cornered at Goliad and brutally shot down in detachments after they had surrendered; and Santa Anna, certain that Texas had been conquered, divided his army into columns to occupy the country. Houston only was left, and the fate of Texas hung on his little force; he knew he could strike but once; if he were defeated, the war for independence would end then and there; so he watched and waited, gathering together the stragglers, keeping them in heart, laboring like a very Hercules.

Hundreds of miles away, in Was.h.i.+ngton, old Andrew Jackson, a map of Texas before him, followed with his finger the retreat as far as he knew it, and paused with in on San Jacinto.

"Here's the place," he said. "If Sam Houston's worth one bawbee, he'll stand here and give 'em a fight."

And so it was. It makes the pulses thrill, even yet, the story of that twenty-first of April, 1836; how Houston destroyed the bridge behind them, so that there could be no retreat, and then, on his great gray horse, tried to address his men, but could only cry: "Remember The Alamo"; how old Rusk could say not even that, but choked with a sob at the first word, and waved his hand toward the enemy; how the solitary fife struck up, "Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you?"

while those seven hundred gaunt, starved, ragged phantoms, burning with rage at the thought of their comrades foully slain, deployed on the open prairie and charged the unsuspecting Mexican army. It was over in half an hour--the enemy annihilated, 630 killed, 200 wounded, 700 prisoners--among the prisoners Santa Anna himself, begging for mercy.

And Aaron Burr, dying in New York with the vision of his Texan empire still before him, reading, weeks later, the news of the victory, cried out, "I was thirty years too soon!"

There was never any question, after that, of Texan independence; Santa Anna, to save a life forfeited a hundred times over, was ready to agree to any terms. Houston was a popular hero; Texas was his child, and he was unanimously chosen President of the new Republic. From the first, Houston, recalling the wishes of his old leader, Andrew Jackson, sought annexation to the United States, and the debates over the question in Congress nearly disrupted the Union. For the North feared the effects of such a tremendous addition to slave territory, from which three or four states might be carved, and so destroy the balance of power between North and South. Again, Mexico, which still dreamed of reconquering Texas, notified the United States that annexation would be considered a declaration of war; but Houston pressed the question with great adroitness, it was evident that Texas really belonged in the Union, and on March 1, 1845, Congress pa.s.sed the resolution of annexation, and Houston and Husk, the heroes of San Jacinto, were at once elected senators.

In the brief but brilliant war with Mexico which followed, which is considered more in detail in connection with the life of Winfield Scott, and which resulted in the securing of the great Southwest for the United States, Houston played no part, except as a member of the Senate, where he remained until 1859, being defeated finally by a secessionist. For, true to the precepts of Jackson, he was from the first bitterly opposed to nullification and secession. The same year, he was elected governor of Texas, turning a Union minority into a triumphant majority by the wizardry of his personality. He could not prevent secession, however, but he refused to take the oath to the Confederate government required by the legislature and was deposed. Martial law being established, an officer one day demanded Houston's pa.s.s.

"San Jacinto," he answered, and went on his way, nor did any dare molest him. But he was worn out and aging fast, and the end came toward the close of July, 1863.

Reference has been made to the capture of the old mission at San Antonio known as "The Alamo," and a brief account must be given of the remarkable group of men who lost their lives there--David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barrett Travis. Crockett was perhaps the most famous of the three, and his name is still more or less of a household word throughout the middle West, while some of his stories have pa.s.sed into proverbs. He was the most famous rifle shot in the whole country and the most successful hunter. Born in Tennessee soon after the Revolutionary war, of an Irish father, he ran away from home after a few days' schooling, knocked about the country, served through the Creek war under Andrew Jackson, and gained so much popularity by his hunting stories, with which he held great audiences spellbound, that he was elected to the State legislature and then to Congress, though he had never read a newspaper. In Congress, he managed to antagonize Andrew Jackson, not a difficult task by any means, with the result that Jackson, who carried Tennessee in his vest pocket, effectively ended Crockett's political career. Crockett left the state in disgust, seeking new worlds to conquer, and hearing of the struggle in Texas, decided to join the revolutionists.

By boat and on horseback, he made his way toward the distant plains where the Texans were waging their life and death struggle against the Mexicans. More than one hairbreadth escape did the old hunter have from Indians, desperadoes and wild beasts, but he finally got to the neighborhood of San Antonio, and fell in with another adventurer, a bee-hunter, also on his way to join the Texans. They soon learned that a great Mexican army was marching on San Antonio, and that the defenders of the place had gathered in the old mission called "The Alamo." There were only a hundred and fifty of them, while the Mexican army numbered four thousand; but they had made up their minds to hold the place, a mere sh.e.l.l, utterly unable to withstand artillery, or even a regular and well-directed a.s.sault. It was plain enough that to attempt to defend the place against such an overwhelming force was desperate in the extreme, but Crockett and his companion kept straight on, and were soon inside The Alamo. A few days later, Santa Anna's great army camped around it.

In command of The Alamo garrison was Colonel Travis, a young man of twenty-five; an Alabaman, admitted to the bar there, but driven out of his native state by financial troubles, and casting in his lot with the Texas revolutionists, among whom he soon acquired considerable influence. The third of the trio, Colonel Bowie, was a native of Georgia, but had settled in Louisiana, where, nine years before, he had been a partic.i.p.ant in a celebrated affray. Two gentlemen, becoming involved in a quarrel, decided to settle it in approved fas.h.i.+on by a duel, and, accompanied by their friends, among whom was Bowie, adjourned to a convenient place and took a shot at each other without doing any damage. They were about to declare honor satisfied and to shake hands, when a dispute arose among their friends, and before it was over, fifteen were killed and six were badly injured. Bowie distinguished himself by stabbing a man to death with a knife made from a large file.

The weapon was afterwards sent to Philadelphia and there fas.h.i.+oned into the deadly knife which has ever since been known by his name. The prospect of trouble in Texas naturally attracted him, he was made colonel of militia there, and dispatched to The Alamo with a small force by General Houston early in 1836.

Here, then, in this old and crumbling Spanish mission, toward the end of February, were gathered a hundred and fifty Texans, a wild and undisciplined band, impatient of restraint or control, but men of iron courage and the best shots on the border, with Travis in command; while without was the army of Santa Anna. On February 24th, Travis, in a letter asking for reinforcements, announced the siege and added that he would never surrender or retreat. Early in March, thirty-two men from Gonzales, knowing they were going to well-nigh certain death, made their way into the fort, raising its garrison to 180.

Santa Anna demanded unconditional surrender, and Travis answered with a cannon-shot; whereat, on the morning of the sixth of March, the Mexican army stormed the fort from all sides, swarmed in through breaches and over the walls, which the Texans were too few to man, and a desperate hand-to-hand conflict followed. To and fro between the shattered walls the fight reeled, each tall Texan the centre of a group of foes, fighting with a wild and desperate courage; but the odds were too great, and one by one they fell, thrust through with bayonets or riddled by bullets. Colonel Travis fell, and so did Bowie, sick and weak from a wasting disease, but rising from his bed, and dying fighting with his great knife red with the blood of his foes. At last a single man stood at bay. It was Davy Crockett.

Wounded in a dozen places, ringed about by the bodies of the men he had slain, he stood facing his foes, his back against a wall, knife in hand, daring them to come on. No one dared to run in upon that old lion. So they held him there with their lances, while, the musketeers loaded their carbines and shot him down. Not a man of the garrison was left alive, but each of them had avenged himself four times over, for the Mexican loss was over five hundred. So ended one of the most heroic events in American history. "Thermopylae had its messengers of death; The Alamo had none."

One more era remains to be recorded, that in which the United States confirmed its hold upon the Pacific coast, and here again the story is that of the lives of three men--Marcus Whitman, John Augustus Sutter, and John Charles Fremont. It was Whitman who brought home to the Nation the value of Oregon by a spectacular ride from ocean to ocean; it was Sutter who led the way for an American invasion of California, and who gave impetus to that invasion by the discovery of gold; and it was Fremont who led the revolution there against the Mexicans, and who secured the country's independence.

The explorations of Lewis and Clark, early in the century, had made the country along the Columbia river known to the East in a dim way, but it was so distant and so inaccessible that it excited little interest. Just before the second war with England, John Jacob Astor had attempted to carry out a far-reaching plan for the development of the country and the securing of its great fur trade, but the outbreak of the war had stopped all efforts in that direction, and Astor never took them up again.

Meanwhile through Canada, the Hudson Bay Company, a great English concern engaged in the fur trade, had extended its stations to the Pacific coast, and was quietly taking possession of the country.

In 1834, the American board of missions, learning of the need for a missionary among the Oregon Indians, appointed Marcus Whitman to the work. Whitman was at that time thirty-two years of age and was just about to be married. His betrothed agreed to accompany him on his perilous mission, and, after great difficulty, he secured an a.s.sociate in the person of Rev. H.H. Spalding, also just married. What a bridal trip that was! At Pittsburg, George Catlin, who knew the western Indians better than any living man, having spent years among them, warned them of the folly of attempting to take women across the plains; at Cincinnati, they were greeted by William Moody, only forty-five years of age and yet the first white man born there; at the frontier town of St.

Louis, they joined a hunting expedition up the Missouri, and by June 6, 1836, were at Laramie.

A month later, they crossed the Great Divide by the South Pa.s.s, "discovered," six years later, by Fremont; and toward the end of July, they came to the great mountain rendezvous of traders and trappers high in the mountains near Fort Hall. Some of those men had not seen a white woman for a quarter of a century. You can imagine, then, what a sensation the arrival of Mrs. Whitman and Mrs. Spalding occasioned, and with what warmth they were welcomed. Ten days they tarried there, then pressed on westward, and on September 2, 1836, after a journey of thirty-five hundred miles, the gates of Fort Walla-Walla, on the lower Columbia, opened to receive them, and the conquest of Oregon began.

Fort Walla-Walla belonged to the Hudson Bay Company, which had undisputed control of the rich Oregon fur trade, and which was determined to retain it at any cost. So the difficulties of the Oregon trail were invariably exaggerated, and immigration from the states systematically discouraged. Nevertheless, in the years following Whitman's arrival, other parties of missionaries and settlers worked their way into the country, until, in 1842, their number reached about a hundred and fifty. The Hudson Bay Company realized that neither England nor America had a clear t.i.tle to the region, and that its population must, in the end, determine its nationality. Consequently it bent every effort to hurry English settlers into the country. In October, 1842, Whitman was dining with a company of Englishmen at Walla-Walla, when a messenger arrived with news of the approach of a large body of settlers from Canada. A shout arose: "Hurrah for Oregon! America is too late!

We've got the country!" And Whitman, at a glance, saw through the plan.

Twenty-four hours later, he had started to ride across the continent to carry the news to Was.h.i.+ngton. He had caught the import of the news, had grasped its consequences, and he was determined that Oregon, with its great forests and broad prairies, its mighty rivers, and its unparalleled richness, should be saved for the Union. If the Nation only knew the value of the prize, England would never be permitted to carry it off. His wife and friends protested against the desperate venture--four thousand miles on horseback--for it would soon be the dead of winter, with snow hiding the trail and filling the pa.s.ses, with streams ice-blocked and winter-swollen, and last but not least, with the Blackfoot Indians on the warpath. But he would listen to none of this: his duty, as he conceived it, lay clear before him; he was determined to set out at once. Amos Lovejoy volunteered to accompany him, a busy night was spent in preparation, and the next day they were off.

No diary of that remarkable journey was kept by Dr. Whitman, but most of its incidents are known. Terribly severe weather was encountered almost at the start, for ten days they were snowed up in the mountains, and long before the journey ended, were reduced to rations of dog and mule meat. But they struggled on, more than once losing the way and giving themselves up for lost, and on March 3, 1843, just five months from Walla-Walla, Whitman entered Was.h.i.+ngton.

His spectacular ride rivetted public attention upon the far western country, and the information which he gave concerning it opened the Nation's eyes to its value. When he returned, later in the year, to the banks of the Columbia, he took back with him a train of two hundred wagons and a thousand settlers--a veritable army of occupation which the British could not match. Three years later, so steadily did the tide continue which Whitman had started, the American population had risen to over ten thousand, there was never any further real uncertainty as to whom Oregon belonged, and the treaty of 1846 settled the question for all time.

The new territory was soon to be the scene of a terrible tragedy. The white man had brought new diseases into it, measles, fevers, and even, smallpox; they spread rapidly among the Indians, aggravated by their imprudence and ignorance of proper treatment, and many died. The Indians became convinced that the missionaries were to blame, and it is claimed, too, that the emissaries of the Hudson Bay Company urged them on.

However that may have been, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1847, the Indians fell upon the missionaries and killed fifteen, of them, among the dead being Marcus Whitman and his wife. So ended the life of the man who saved Oregon, and of the woman who was the first of her s.e.x to cross the continent.

Meanwhile, far to the south, a drama scarcely less thrilling was enacting, its chief personage being John Augustus Sutter. Sutter was a Swiss and had received a military education and served in the Swiss Guard before coming to America in 1834. He settled first at St. Louis and then at Santa Fe, where he gained considerable experience as a trader. Finally, in 1838, he decided to cross the Rockies, and after trading for a time in a little schooner up and down the coast, was wrecked in San Francis...o...b..y. He made his way inland, and founded the first white settlement in the country on the site of what is now Sacramento. Here, in 1841, he built a fort, having secured a large grant of land from the Mexican Government, and set up what was really a little empire in the wilderness, over which he reigned supreme. And here, three years later, down from the snow-filled and tempest-swept pa.s.ses of the Rockies, came a party of starving and frost-bitten scarecrows, the exploring expedition headed by John Charles Fremont, of whom we shall speak presently.

The rest of Sutter's history is soon told. In 1848, when Mexico ceded California to the United States, he was the owner of a vast domain, over which thousands of head of cattle wandered. A few years later, he was practically a ruined man--ruined by gold. On the eighteenth day of January, 1848, one of his men named Marshall, brought to Sutter a lump of yellow metal which he had uncovered while digging a mill-race. There could be no doubt of it--it was gold! News of the great discovery soon got about; there was a great rush for this new Eldorado; Sutter's land was overrun with gold-seekers, who cared nothing for his rights, and when he attempted to defend his t.i.tles in the courts, they were declared invalid, and his land was taken from him. To crown his disasters, his homestead was destroyed by fire; finding himself ruined, without land and without money, he gave up the struggle in despair and returned east, pa.s.sing his last years in poverty in a little town in Pennsylvania.

Fremont, meantime, had done a great work for California. The son of a Frenchman, showing an early apt.i.tude for mathematics, he had secured an appointment to the United States engineering corps, and, after various minor expeditions in which he had acquitted himself well, was put in charge of an expedition for the exploration of the Rocky Mountains. He was fortunate at the start in securing the services as guide and interpreter of that famous hunter and plainsman, Kit Carson, whose life had been pa.s.sed on the prairies, who knew more Indians and Indian dialects than any other white man, and who was, to his generation, what Davy Crockett was to an earlier one. To Carson a great share of the expedition's success was no doubt due, and it was so successful that in the following year, Fremont was leading another over the country between the Rockies and the Pacific. This one was almost lost in the mountains, and came near peris.h.i.+ng of cold and hunger, but, finally, in March, 1844, managed to struggle through to Sutter's Fort.

Fremont found California in a state of unrest amounting almost to insurrection against Mexican rule, and as the number of white settlers increased, this feeling grew, until Mexico, becoming alarmed, sent an armed force to occupy the country. The show of force was the one thing needed to fire the magazine; the settlers sprang to arms as one man, and, under Fremont's leaders.h.i.+p, defeated the Mexicans and drove them southward across the border. Soon afterwards, General Kearny marched in from the east, from his remarkable and bloodless conquest of New Mexico, with a force sufficient to render it certain that California would never again be taken by the Mexicans.

On the fourth of July, 1849, Fremont was chosen governor of the new territory, and in the following year, arranged the treaty by which California pa.s.sed permanently to the United States. The new state was quick to reward him and sent him to the Senate, where he gained sufficient prominence to receive the nomination of the anti-slavery party for the presidency in 1856. He never had any chance of election, for the reform party had not yet sufficient strength, and was defeated by Buchanan. He served with some distinction in the Civil War, gaining considerable notoriety, while in charge of the Western Department in 1861, by issuing a proclamation freeing the slaves of secessionists in Missouri. The proclamation drew forth some laudatory verses from John G.

Whittier, but was promptly countermanded by President Lincoln. Soon afterwards, Fremont became involved in personal disputes with his superior officers, was relieved from active service, and the remainder of his life was spent in private enterprises.

Fremont's "pathfinding" virtually completed the exploration of the country. A few secluded nooks and corners became known only as the tide of immigration crept into them; but in its general features, the great continent, on whose eastern sh.o.r.e the white man was fighting for a foothold two centuries before, was known from ocean to ocean. It had been conquered and occupied by a dominant race, and won for civilization.