Part 1

BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

THE LAST FRONTIER: THE WHITE MAN’S WAR FOR CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50

GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50

THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $3.00

FIGHTING IN FLANDERS. Illustrated. 12mo _net_ $1.00

THE ROAD TO GLORY. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50

THE ROAD TO GLORY

[Illustration: On the decks above were three hundred desperate and well-armed natives. (_Page 144_)]

THE ROAD TO GLORY

BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL

ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK:::::::::::1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published September, 1915

[Illustration]

TO MY SON EDWARD ALEXANDER POWELL, III

FOREWORD

The great painting--it is called “Vers la Gloire,” if I remember rightly--reaches from floor to ceiling of the Pantheon in Paris. Across the huge canvas, in a whirlwind of dust and color, sweeps an avalanche of horsemen--cuirassiers, dragoons, lancers, guides, hussars, chasseurs--with lances levelled, blades swung high, banners streaming--France’s unsung heroes in mad pursuit of Glory.

That picture brings home to the youth of France the fact that the nation owes as great a debt of gratitude to men whose very names have been forgotten as to those whom it has rewarded with titles and decorations; it teaches that a man can be a hero without having his name cut deep in brass or stone; that time and time again history has been made by men whom the historians have overlooked or disregarded.

This is even more true of our own country, for three-fourths of the territory of the United States was won for us by men whose names are without significance to most Americans. Nolan, Bean, Gutierrez, Magee, Kemper, Perry, Toledo, Humbert, Lallemand, De Aury, Mina, Long--these names doubtless convey nothing to you, yet it was the persistent and daring assaults made by these men upon the Spanish boundaries which undermined the power of Spain upon this continent and paved the way for Austin, Milam, Travis, Bowie, Crockett, Ward, and Houston to effect the liberation of Texas. On the other side of the Gulf of Mexico the Kempers, McGregor, Hubbard, and Mathews harassed the Spaniards in the Floridas until Andrew Jackson, in an unofficial and almost unrecorded war, forced Spain to cede those rich provinces to the United States. In a desperate battle with savages on the banks of an obscure creek in Indiana, William Henry Harrison broke the power of Tecumseh’s Indian confederation, set forward the hands of progress in the West a quarter of a century, and, incidentally, changed the map of Europe. A Missouri militia officer, Alexander Doniphan, without a war-chest, without supports, and without communications, invaded a hostile nation at the head of a thousand volunteers, repeatedly routed forces many times the strength of his own, conquered, subdued, and pacified a territory larger than France and Italy put together; and, after a march equivalent to a fourth of the circumference of the globe, returned to the United States, bringing with him battle-flags and cannon captured on fields whose names his country people had never so much as heard before. A missionary named Marcus Whitman, by the most daring and dramatic ride in history, during which he crossed the continent on horseback in the depths of winter, facing death almost every mile from cold, starvation, or Indians, prevented the Pacific Northwest from passing under the rule of England. Matthew Perry, without firing a shot or shedding a drop of blood, opened Japan to commerce, Christianity, and civilization, and made American influence predominant in the Pacific, though, a decade later, David McDougal was compelled to teach the yellow men respect for our citizens and our flag at the mouths of his belching guns.

Certain of these men have been accused of being adventurers, as they unquestionably were--but what, pray, were Hawkins and Raleigh and Drake? Others have been condemned as being filibusters, an accusation which in some cases was doubtless deserved--but were Jason and his Argonauts anything but filibusters who raided Colchis to loot it of the golden fleece? Adventurers and filibusters though some of them may have been, they were brave men (there can be no disputing that) and makers of history. But it was their fortune--or misfortune--to have been romantic and picturesque and to have gone ahead without the formality of obtaining the government’s commission or permission, which, in the eyes of the sedate and prosaic historians, has completely damned them. But, as we have not hesitated to benefit from the lands they won for us, it is but doing them the barest justice to listen to their stories. And I think you will agree with me that in their stories there is remarkably little of which we need to feel ashamed and much of which we have reason to be proud.

Devious and dangerous were the roads which these men followed--amid the swamps of Florida, across the sun-baked Texan prairies, down the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-bound ridges of the Rockies, into the miasmic jungles of Tabasco, along the pirate-haunted coasts of Malaysia, across the Indian country, through the mined and shot-swept straits of Shimonoseki; but, no matter what perils bordered them, or into what far corner of the earth they led, at the end Glory beckoned and called.

E. ALEXANDER POWELL. SANTA BARBARA, California.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOREWORD vii

I. ADVENTURERS ALL 1

II. WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER 55

III. THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR 87

IV. THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO 131

V. UNDER THE FLAG OF THE LONE STAR 161

VI. THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE 195

VII. THE MARCH OF THE ONE THOUSAND 235

VIII. WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE 277

ILLUSTRATIONS

On the decks above were three hundred desperate and well-armed natives _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers, broke and ran 84

Bowie, propped on his pillows, shot two soldiers and plunged his terrible knife into the throat of another 178

In another moment the gun was pouring death into the ranks of its late owners 260

ADVENTURERS ALL

ADVENTURERS ALL

This story properly begins in an emperor’s bathtub. The bathtub was in the Palace of the Tuileries, and, immersed to the chin in its cologne-scented water, was Napoleon. The nineteenth century was but a three-year-old; the month was April, and the trees in the Tuileries Garden were just bursting into bud; and the First Consul--he made himself Emperor a few weeks later--was taking his Sunday-morning bath. There was a scratch at the door--scratching having been substituted for knocking in the palace after the Egyptian campaign--and the Mameluke body-guard ushered into the bathroom Napoleon’s brothers Joseph and Lucien. How the conversation began between this remarkable trio of Corsicans is of small consequence. It is enough to know that Napoleon dumfounded his brothers by the blunt announcement that he had determined to sell the great colony of Louisiana--all that remained to France of her North American empire--to the United States. He made this astounding announcement, as Joseph wrote afterward, “with as little ceremony as our dear father would have shown in selling a vineyard.” Incensed at Napoleon’s cool assumption that the great overseas possession was his to dispose of as he saw fit, Joseph, his hot Corsican blood getting the better of his discretion, leaned over the tub and shook his clinched fist in the face of his august brother.

“What you propose is unconstitutional!” he cried. “If you attempt to carry it out I swear that I will be the first to oppose you!”

White with passion at this unaccustomed opposition, Napoleon raised himself until half his body was out of the opaque and frothy water.

“You will have no chance to oppose me!” he screamed, beside himself with anger. “I conceived this scheme, I negotiated it, and I shall execute it. I will accept the responsibility for what I do. Bah! I scorn your opposition!” And he dropped back into the bath so suddenly that the resultant splash drenched the future King of Spain from head to foot. This extraordinary scene, which, ludicrous though it was, was to vitally affect the future of the United States, was brought to a sudden termination by the valet, who had been waiting with the bath towels, shocked at the spectacle of a future Emperor and a future King quarrelling in a bathroom over the disposition of an empire, falling on the floor in a faint.

Though this narrative concerns itself, from beginning to end, with adventurers--if Bonaparte himself was not the very prince of adventurers, then I do not know the meaning of the word--it is necessary, for its proper understanding, to here interject a paragraph or two of contemporaneous history. In 1800 Napoleon, whose fertile brain was planning the re-establishment in America of that French colonial empire which a generation before had been destroyed by England, persuaded the King of Spain, by the bribe of a petty Italian principality, to cede Louisiana to the French. But in the next three years things turned out so contrary to his expectations that he was reluctantly compelled to abandon his scheme for colonial expansion and prepare for eventualities nearer home. The army he had sent to Haiti, and which he had intended to throw into Louisiana, had wasted away from disease and in battle with the blacks under the skilful leadership of L’Ouverture until but a pitiful skeleton remained. Meanwhile the attitude of England and Austria was steadily growing more hostile, and it did not need a telescope to see the war-clouds which heralded another great European struggle piling up on France’s political horizon. Realizing that in the life-and-death struggle which was approaching he could not be hampered with the defense of a distant colony, Napoleon decided that, if he was unable to hold Louisiana, he would at least put it out of the reach of his arch-enemy, England, by selling it to the United States. It was a master-stroke of diplomacy. Moreover, he needed money--needed it badly, too--for France, impoverished by the years of warfare from which she had just emerged, was ill prepared to embark on another struggle.

There were in Paris at this time two Americans, Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, who had been commissioned by President Jefferson to negotiate with the French Government for the purchase of the city of New Orleans and a small strip of territory adjacent to it, so that the settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee might have a free port on the gulf. After months spent in diplomatic intercourse, during which Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, could be induced neither to accept nor reject their proposals, the commissioners were about ready to abandon the business in despair. I doubt, therefore, if there were two more astonished men in all Europe than the two Americans when Talleyrand abruptly asked them whether the United States would buy the whole of Louisiana and what price it would be willing to pay. It was as though a man had gone to buy a cow and the owner had suddenly offered him his whole farm. Though astounded and embarrassed, for they had been authorized to spend but two million dollars in the contemplated purchase, the Americans had the courage to shoulder the responsibility of making so tremendous a transaction, for there was no time to communicate with Washington and no one realized better than they did that Louisiana must be purchased at once if it was to be had at all. England and France were, as they knew, on the very brink of war, and they also knew that the first thing England would do when war was declared would be to seize Louisiana, in which case it would be lost to the United States forever. This necessity for prompt action permitted of but little haggling over terms, and on May 22, 1803, Napoleon signed the treaty which transferred the million square miles comprised in the colony of Louisiana to the United States for fifteen million dollars. Nor was the sale effected an instant too soon, for on that very day England declared war.

Now, in purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson, though he got the greatest bargain in history, found that the French had thrown in a boundary dispute to give good measure. The treaty did not specify the limits of the colony.

“What are the boundaries of Louisiana?” Livingston asked Talleyrand when the treaty was being prepared.

“I don’t know,” was the answer. “You must take it as we received it from Spain.”

“But what did you receive?” persisted the American.

“I don’t know,” repeated the minister. “You are getting a noble bargain, monsieur, and you will doubtless make the best of it.”

As a matter of fact, Talleyrand was telling the literal truth (which must have been a novel experience for him): he did not know. The boundaries of Louisiana had never been definitely established. It seems, indeed, to have come under the application of

“The good old rule ... the simple plan, That they shall take who have the power, And they shall keep who can.”

Hence, though American territory and Spanish marched side by side for twenty-five hundred miles, it was found impossible to agree on a definite line of demarcation, the United States claiming that its new purchase extended as far westward as the Sabine River, while Spain emphatically asserted that the Mississippi formed the dividing line. Along about 1806, however, a working arrangement was agreed upon, whereby American troops were not to move west of the Red River, while Spanish soldiers were not to go east of the Sabine. For the next fifteen years this arrangement remained in force, the strip of territory between these two rivers, which was known as the neutral ground, quickly becoming a recognized place of refuge for fugitives from justice, bandits, desperadoes, adventurers, and bad men. To it, as though drawn by a magnet, flocked the adventure-hungry from every corner of the three Americas.

The vast territory beyond the Sabine, then known as New Spain and a few years later, when it had achieved its independence, as Mexico, was ruled from the distant City of Mexico in true Spanish style. Military rule held full sway; civil law was unknown. Foreigners without passports were imprisoned; trading across the Sabine was prohibited; the Spanish officials were suspicious of every one. Because this trade was forbidden was the very thing that made it so attractive to the merchants of the frontier, while the grassy plains and fertile lowlands beyond the Sabine beckoned alluringly to the stock-raiser and the settler. And though there was just enough danger to attract them there was not enough strength to awe them. Jeering at governmental restrictions, Spanish and American alike, the frontiersmen began to pour across the Sabine into Texas in an ever-increasing stream. “Gone to Texas” was scrawled on the door of many a deserted cabin in Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. “Go to Texas” became a slang phrase heard everywhere. On the western river steamboats the officers’ quarters on the hurricane-deck were called “the texas” because of their remoteness. When a boy wanted to coerce his family he threatened to run away to Texas. It was felt to be beyond the natural limits of the world, and the glamour which hovered over this mysterious and forbidden land lured to its conquest the most picturesque and hardy breed of men that ever foreran the columns of civilization. A contempt for the Spanish, a passion for adventure were the attitude of the people of our frontier as they strained impatiently against the Spanish boundaries. The American Government had nothing to do with winning Texas for the American people. The American frontiersmen won Texas for themselves, unaided either by statesmen or by soldiers.

Though these men wrote with their swords some of the most thrilling chapters in our history, their very existence has been ignored by most of our historians. Though they performed deeds of valor of which any people would have reason to be proud, it was in an unofficial, shirt-sleeve sort of warfare, which the National Government neither authorized nor approved. Though they laid the foundations for adding an enormous territory to our national domain, no monuments or memorials have been erected to them; even their names hold no significance for their countrymen of the present generation. In short, they were filibusters, and that, in the eyes of those smug folk who believe that nothing can be meritorious that is done without the sanction of congresses and parliaments, completely damned them. They were American dreamers. Had they lived in the days of Cortes and Pizarro and Balboa, of Hawkins and Raleigh and Drake, history would have dealt more kindly with them.

The free-lance leaders, who, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century made the neutral ground a synonym for hair-raising adventure and desperate daring, were truly remarkable men. Five of them had held commissions in the army of the United States; one of them had commanded the French army sent to Ireland; another was a peer of France and had led a division at Waterloo; others had won rank and distinction under Napoleon, Bolivar, and Jackson. But because they wore strange uniforms and fought under unfamiliar flags, and because, in some cases at least, they were actuated by motives more personal than patriotic, the historians have assumed that we do not want to know about them, or that it will be better for us not to know about them. They take it for granted that it is better for Americans to think that our territorial expansion was accomplished by men with government credentials in their pockets, and when these unofficial conquerors are mentioned they turn away their heads as though ashamed. But I believe that our people would prefer to know the truth about these men, and I believe that when they have heard it they will agree with me that in their amazing exploits there is much of which we have cause to be proud and surprisingly little of which we have need to feel ashamed.