Kearny's March

In 1846, both military forces and civilian wagon trains crossed the Missouri River and set out for the West.  Winston Groom, author of Forest Gump, details the various movements and shows how they formed the American West.

Stephen Watts Kearny was the commander on the western frontier, based in Fort Levenworth.  Father of the American Cavalry, he was ordered by President Polk to march his 300 dragoons, a regiment of mounted Missouri Volunteers, and a battalion of Mormons west and capture Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Once secured, he was to continue on to California and claim it for the United States.  Having captured New Mexico without firing a shot, most likely thanks to bribing the territorial governor, Kearny spent a month in the area to make sure all was well before moving on to California.  At this point, he dispatched the mounted Missouri Volunteers - commanded by Colonel Alexander Doniphan - to make his way south for the planned rendezvous with General Wool and his army at Chihuahua.  Kearny would take his dragoons directly to California while Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke would build a road to California with the Mormon Battalion.  Kearny had hardly begun when he met Kit Carson, who was returning from California.  The state was already conquered!

Kit Carson had set out for California in 1845 with John C. Fremont the Pathfinder.  Fremont had a force of 60 heavily armed men who had been traipsing through California.  Even though he could not have known the war had begun, he aided local American settlers in the Bear Flag Revolt.  With the help of the US Navy, the state was captured in short order.  Fremont had enlisted the California Brigade of 300 men and worked hand in glove with Commodore Stockton.  Fremont had sent Kit Carson with the news.  When Kearny arrived, Fremont - who was part of the army - chose to follow Stockton's orders rather than those of an army general.  This did not end well for him and led to his court martial.

Meanwhile, Doniphan and his Missourians headed down the Rio Grande and, north of El Paso, had a battle with a Mexican Army.  Despite their unkempt appearance and lax discipline, they soundly trounced their opponents.  Doniphan waited in El Paso for news from General Wool, eventually learning that he had been redirected to Saltillo to fortify General Taylor's position.  Though it was never intended that the volunteer regiment would act alone against Chihuahua, Doniphan boldly struck into the desert to capture the city.  At the end of February 1847, Doniphan attacked a much larger Mexican Army, where his ragamuffin army once again trounced the Mexicans.

The Mormons had had a difficult time in the American Midwest.  Bounced from state to state on account of growing discrimination, the Mormons finally fled west with plans of leaving the United States altogether.  They were camped on the banks of the Missouri River.  As chance would have it, President Polk requested that the Mormons raise a battalion from their ranks and join the war.  Brigham Young saw this as an income stream and a way to get many of the Saints beyond the intolerance of the Midwest.  Soon, 500 Mormons were enlisted at Fort Levenworth and marched to New Mexico.  Too slow to keep pace with Kearny, they also had to take an alternative route to accommodate their wagons.  On the way, the Mormon Battalion fought wild bulls and captured Tucson.

Leaving from Independence, MO, the Donner-Reed Party joined a large wagon train on the Oregon Trail.  However, they had California in mind and left the larger train to take the untried Hastings Cutoff which was said to save 300 miles.  Of course, the route was impractical for wagons.  They tried to race through the pass before the snows arrived but instead got trapped when snows arrived before they were through.  With nowhere near enough food to survive winter in the mountains, starvation and cannibalism followed.  In the spring, after the survivors were rescued, General Kearny went through the pass and saw the carnage.

Where most of the books that cover the Mexican-American War focus on the campaigns of Taylor and Scott, this one is almost exclusively concerned with the western theater of the war, though there is a chapter detailing the Battle of Monterrey, which was part of Taylor's Campaign in Northern Mexico.  Here is an outstanding account of the various westward movements that took place in 1846 and 1847, opening the American West to a flood of immigrants.

Highly recommended.