The Year of Decision 1846 by Bernard DeVoto

Author:Bernard DeVoto [DeVoto, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466874466
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-06-24T06:00:00+00:00

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Sonorous Metal

ON July 16, Her Majesty’s Ship Collingwood, Rear Admiral Sir George Seymour, made Monterey. Her officers began paying calls of ceremony on the American flotilla, and one of the anxieties of Commodore Sloat abated. He had forestalled by nine days the possible hoisting of the Union Jack over the customhouse, where the American flag now flew with the entire acquiescence of the natives. In fact there had been no possibility that the British would make trouble before or after the occupation. Their mood was a cool professional interest in the technics of empire.

The Royal Navy knows how to enjoy shore leave and made the most of the pleasant town. Its spectacle was tepid till late afternoon of the nineteenth, when Lieutenant Walpole of the Collingwood, who had read Cooper, found the familiar confronting him. A cloud of dust showed north of town and there came marching out of it a body of horsemen in column of twos. Almost two hundred of them, with a remuda of three hundred besides. The advance guard consisted of sailors who sat their saddles none too well, but the rest was first-rate pageantry. Riding alone came the commander, who had, Lieutenant Walpole says, “such an eye!” — the eye of a Conqueror. Then five Delawares, whom Walpole took to be a personal bodyguard, savage and painted, unmistakably the image of Uncas. Then a wilder, more savage troop, “many of them blacker than the Indians,” to the number of 160 in all, thirty-nine of them the Conqueror’s own, the rest “loafers picked up lately.” The thirty-nine took the believing British eye, for they were authentic trappers. Cooper had told him about them and he was so awed that he even dressed them in buckskins, as an alert costumer ought to have done for him.

To any eye, the army of the deceased California Republic, now a force without any standing whatever, looked tough. The vernacular had not yet coined the phrase which later remarked of Ben Butler that he could strut sitting down. But the Conqueror, riding alone between his sailors and his Delawares, could swagger in the saddle, and his filibusters swaggered through Monterey, to make camp in a wood beyond the town. Walpole saw “the rifle held by one hand across the pommel of the saddle,” and gaped in the knowledge that one of the invaders was Kit Carson who, he said, was as famous in these wilds as the Iron Duke was in Europe. Colton, the American chaplain, noted their black beards and gleaming teeth and felt the town shake as they passed. He then composed a tableau while dusk came up and the campfires shone against the woods.

A recognition stirs, different from Walpole’s instruction in Cooper. This column of bearded horsemen with white teeth parading the street of Monterey, this carefully spaced display of the Conqueror riding alone on a cheap errand while the audience cheers, this arrangement, this camera angle — it is labeled. The dramaturgy of Captain Frémont had changed its medium.

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