The Mexicans responded by hiring James Kirker, that agile, long-haired Mountain Man. The fur trade was dying, and in 1834 Astor sold out. ‘Beaver was getting scarce,’ said Kit Carson. ‘It became necessary to try our hand at something else.’ Carson became an army scout and guide for the thousands of migrants heading west. Hired by Mexico, Kirker became a professional killer, leading (with a Shawnee deputy named Spybuck) a crew of 200 psychopaths – whites, Indians, escaped black slaves. They were joined by John Horse, a legendary Black Seminole, son of an enslaved mother and Seminole father, who had fought the Americans, afterwards escaping both American and Seminole slavery, to reach Mexico where he became a frontier auxiliary and scalp hunter. These chilling predators, sporting necklaces of ears, were paid by ‘scalps with an ear on each end’ (100 pesos for an adult male, 50 for a woman, 25 for a child). Kirker himself killed over 500 Apache.* The Comanche joined in killing their Apache rivals.
Released by the Americans, Santa Anna redeemed himself in blood when the French king Louis Philippe sent an army to Veracruz to avenge Mexican ill treatment of a French
In February 1845, the outgoing President John Tyler, Virginian slave holder, annexed Texas as many Americans embraced the idea that the continent was their providential empire, its conquest their ‘manifest destiny’. Over thirty years, 400,000 poor migrants trekked westwards in wagons along the dangerous Oregon trails. Mexico mobilized as the incoming president James Polk, who had campaigned for expansion, provoked war then ordered a full-scale invasion which blooded many of the generals of the future civil war; the Mountain Men Carson and Kirker served as scouts. In the army of General ‘Old Rough ’n’ Ready’ Zachary Taylor as he won the first US victories served a young officer, Ulysses Grant, the reticent, intense son of a loudmouth Ohio entrepreneur, a West Pointer married to Julia, daughter of a curmudgeonly southern slave owner. Grant disapproved of this ‘most unjust war’, as did an Illinois congressman, Abraham Lincoln, who attacked Polk’s quest for ‘military glory – that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood’.
When Polk became jealous of Rough ’n’ Ready’s laurels, he appointed Winfield ‘Old Fuss ’n’ Feathers’ Scott to land at Veracruz. As Scott advanced on Mexico City, Grant, a cavalry virtuoso, served with his future opponent, Robert E. Lee. Mexico turned to their one-legged hero Santa Anna, whose fortified position halted Scott’s advance until Lee found a way to bypass it. Santa Anna escaped, ‘pursued so closely’, Grant told his wife Julia, ‘that his carriage, a splendid affair, was taken and in it his cork leg and $30,000 in gold’. On 8 September 1847, Scott fought through the streets into Mexico City, and afterwards promoted both Grant and Lee.*
On 2 February 1848, in a treaty signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo, America won California and new territories larger than western Europe; Mexico lost 55 per cent of its land. The victory opened opportunities for American settlers, who rushed westwards to find land and gold, but this expansion now raised the question: would slavery expand with it? ‘The United States will conquer Mexico,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic, which will bring him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.’ Grant saw the coming catastrophe as ‘largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals,’ he wrote, ‘are punished for their transgressions.’ There were now over three million slaves in the cotton-growing southern states, while the industrial north attracted waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany and later Italy who poured into its growing cities.
