XVA. D. 1853THE GREAT FILIBUSTER
William Walker, son of a Scotch banker, was born in Tennessee, cantankerous from the time he was whelped. He never swore or drank, or loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure, believed in negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette and formality, liked squabbling, had a nasty sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The little dry man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and when he wanted to do anything very outrageous, always began by taking counsel’s opinion. He wore a black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even when in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer Mexico. His followers were California gold miners dressed in blue shirts, duck trousers, long boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he had taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an election and proclaimed himself president of Sonora, he was joined by two or three hundred more of the same breed from San Francisco. These did not think very much of a leader twenty-eight years old, standing five feet six, and weighing only nine stone four, so they merrily conspired to blow him up with gunpowder,and disperse with what plunder they could grab. Mr. Walker shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the rest without showing any sign of emotion. He could awe the most truculent desperado into abject obedience with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed his men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our government,” he wrote, “has been formed upon a firm and sure basis.”
The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for while the new president of Sonora marched northward, they gathered in hosts and hung like wolves in the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who were slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an actual attack, but Walker’s grim strategies, and the awful rifles of despairing men, cut them to pieces. So the march went on through hundreds of miles of blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with thirst, and blew their own brains out rather than be captured. Only thirty-four men were left when they reached the United States boundary, the president of Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his army and navy bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt, starving, but too terrible for the Mexican forces to molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United States garrison as prisoners of war.
Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and forty-eight other Californians, Walker landed on the coast of Nicaragua. This happy republic was blessed at the time with two rival presidents, and the one who got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the country. As hero of several brilliant engagements, Walker was made commander-in-chief, and at the next election chosen by the people themselves as president.He had now a thousand Americans in his following, and when the native statesmen and generals proved treacherous, they were promptly shot. Walker’s camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school, his government the cleanest ever known in Central America, and his dignity all prickles, hard to approach. He depended for existence on the services of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile republics, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and insulted them all. He suspended diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British navy, and had no sense of humor whatsoever. Thousands of brave men died for this prim little lawyer, and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle in his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his purity, and his valor, poor Walker was a prig. So the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the republics from Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the United States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless government.
The armies of four republics were closing in on Walker’s capital, the city of Granada. He marched out to storm the allies perched on an impregnable volcano, and was carrying his last charge to a victorious issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight hundred men had jumped on Granada. He forsook his victory and rushed for the capital city.
There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and sick in the Granada garrison to man the church, armory and hospital against Zavala, but the women loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-twohours of ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out of the city. They fell back to lie in Walker’s path as he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap, carried it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke him between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept his flight. In this double battle, fighting eight times his own force, Walker killed half the allied army.
But the pressure of several invasions at once was making it impossible for Walker to keep his communication open with the sea while he held his capital. Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the place, it must be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his sick men to an island in the big Lake Nicaragua; while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command, burned and abandoned the capital.
But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with thisinscription:—
“Here was Granada!”
In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousandout of six thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence. It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries.
Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from the ramparts.
It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.
“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan schooner-of-warGranada.”
“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishmanafterward, “I believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”
Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.
During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans—and the proportion of wounds was one hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand Indians—and lost fifteen thousand killed.
Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer Central America, in defiance of the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.