How Few Remain (8 page)

“England, she has no right to make such a warning,” said one of the men in front of Roosevelt. He had a guttural accent;
warning
came out
varning
. Roosevelt’s big head nodded vehemently—even a German immigrant could see the nose in front of his face.

He wondered if Blaine would see it or back down, spineless as the Democrats who’d run the country since Lincoln was so unceremoniously shown the door after the war against secession turned out to be the War of Secession. By that second headline, the president seemed to be doing what the people had elected him to do, for which Roosevelt thanked God.

Behind Roosevelt, the crowd parted as if it were the Red Sea and Moses had come. But it wasn’t Moses, it was a fierce-looking fellow with a bushy white mustache and chin beard who wore a banker’s somber black suit.

“Mornin’, Mr. Cruse,” a grocer said respectfully. “Good day, sir,” one of the men who worked at the livery stable added, tipping his straw hat. “How’s the boy, Tommy?” said a miner who matched Cruse in years but not in affluence.

“Mornin’ to you all,” Cruse said, affable enough and to spare. A few years earlier, he’d been poorer than the miner who’d greeted him. Roosevelt doubted whether any bank in Montana Territory would have lent him more than fifty dollars. But he’d made his strike, which was rare, and he’d sold it for every penny it was worth, which was rarer. These days, he didn’t need to borrow money from a bank, for he owned one. He was one of the handful of men throughout the West who’d gone at a single bound from prospector to capitalist.

He’d dealt squarely with people when he was poor, and he kept on dealing squarely with them now that he was rich. Had he wanted to be territorial governor, he could have been. He’d never given any sign of being interested in the job.

Like everyone else, Roosevelt gave way for him. It was a gesture of respect for the man’s achievement, not one of servility. Roosevelt had money of his own, New York money, infinitely
older and infinitely more stable than that grubbed from the ground here in the wild territories.

“Good morning, Mr. Roosevelt,” Cruse said, nodding to him. The self-made millionaire respected those who gave him his due and no more.

“Good morning to you, Mr. Cruse,” Roosevelt answered, hoping he would be as vigorous as the ex-miner when he got old. He pointed toward the front page of the
Helena Gazette
. “What do you think we ought to do, sir, about the Confederates’ land grab?”

“Let me see the latest before I answer.” Unlike so many of his comrades, Thomas Cruse would not leap blind. He stood well back from the newspaper under glass, studying the headlines. The crowd of men who had also been reading them waited, silent, for his considered opinion. Once he was done, he spoke with due deliberation: “I think we ought to continue on the course we’ve taken up till now. I see no other we can choose.”

“My exact thought, Mr. Cruse,” Roosevelt agreed enthusiastically. “But if the Confederates and the British—and the French who prop up Maximilian—also continue on their course …”

“Then we lick ’em,” Tom Cruse said in a loud, harsh voice. The crowd in front of the newspaper office erupted in cheers. Theodore Roosevelt joined them. Cruse could speak for all of Montana Territory. The miner turned banker had certainly spoken for him.

    General James Ewell Brown Stuart’s way had always been to lead from the front. As commander of the Confederate States Department of the Trans-Mississippi, he might have made his headquarters in Houston or Austin, as several of his predecessors had done. Instead, ever since being promoted to the position two years earlier, he’d based himself in the miserable village of El Paso, as far west as he could go while staying in the CSA.

Peering north and west along the Rio Grande—swollen, at the moment, with spring runoff and very different from the sleepy stream it would be soon—Jeb Stuart looked into the USA. That proximity to the rival nation made El Paso important as a Confederate outpost, and was the reason he’d brought his headquarters hither.

But El Paso had been a place of significance before an international border sprang up between Texas and New Mexico
Territory, between CSA and USA. It and its sister town on the other side of the Rio Grande, Paso del Norte, had stood on opposite sides of the border first between Mexico and the USA and then between Mexico and the CSA. The pass the names of the two towns commemorated was one of the lowest and broadest through the Rockies, a gateway between east and west travelers had been using for centuries.

Stuart looked across the Rio Grande to Paso del Norte. Not quite twenty years earlier, the national border between Texas and New Mexico had gone up. (It would have gone up farther west and north, but the Confederate invasion of New Mexico, mounted without adequate manpower or supplies, had failed.) Now, as soon as Stuart got the telegram for which he was waiting, the border on the Rio Grande would cease to be.

His aide-de-camp, a burly major named Horatio Sellers, came walking up to the edge of the river to stand alongside him. Sweat streaked Sellers’ ruddy face. Dust didn’t scuff up under his boots, as it would in a few weeks, but the heat was already irksome, and gave every promise of becoming appalling.

Sellers peered across into what remained for the moment the territory of the Empire of Mexico. Paso del Norte was larger than its Confederate counterpart, but no more prepossessing. A couple of cathedrals reared above the mud-brick buildings that made up most of the town. The flat roofs of those buildings made the place look as if the sun had pounded it down from greater prominence.

Sellers said, “We’re giving Maximilian three million in gold and silver for those two provinces? Three
million? Sir
, you ask me, we ought to get change back from fifty cents.”

“Nobody asked you, Major,” Stuart answered. “Nobody asked me, either. That doesn’t matter. If we’re ordered—when we’re ordered—to take possession of the provinces for the Confederacy, that’s what we’ll do. That’s all we can do.”

“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp answered resignedly.

“Look on the bright side,” Stuart said. “We’ve got the Yankees hopping around like fleas on a hot griddle. That’s worthwhile all by itself, if you ask me.” He grinned. “Of course, Longstreet didn’t ask me, any more than he asked you.”

Sellers remained gloomy, which was in good accord with his nature. “Two provinces full of desert and Indians and Mexicans, and we’re supposed to turn them into Confederate states, sir? It’ll
be a lot of work, I can tell you that. Christ, Negro servitude is illegal south of the border.”

“Well, if the border moves south, our laws move with it,” Stuart answered. “I expect we’ll manage well enough there.” He chuckled. “I’ll bet Stonewall wishes he were here instead of me. He liked Mexico when he fought there for the USA—he even learned to speak Spanish. But he’s stuck in Richmond, and that’s about as far from El Paso as you can be and still stay in the Confederate States.”

“Sir,” Sellers persisted, exactly as if Jeb Stuart could do something about the situation, “supposing we do annex Sonora and Chihuahua. How the devil are we supposed to defend them from the USA? New Mexico Territory and California have a lot longer stretch of border with ’em than Texas does, and the Yankees have a railroad down there, so they can ship in troops faster than we can hope to manage it. What are we going to do?”

“Whatever it takes, and whatever we have to do,” Stuart said, though he recognized the answer as imperfectly satisfactory. “I’ll tell you this much, Major, and you can mark my words: once those provinces are in our hands, we
will
have a railroad through to the Pacific inside of five years. We aren’t like Maximilian’s pack of do-nothings down in Mexico City. When the Anglo-Saxon race sets its mind to do something, that thing gets done.”

“Of course, sir.” Major Sellers was as smugly confident of the superiority of his own people as was Stuart. After a moment, he added, “We’ll need a railroad more than the greasers would have, too. We’ll use it for trade, the same as they would have done, but we’ll use it against the United States, too, and they never would have bothered with that.”

Stuart nodded. “Can’t say you’re wrong there. If Mexico ever got into a brawl with the USA, first thing she’d do would be to pull out of that part of the country and see whether a Yankee army was still worth anything once it got done slogging its way through the desert.”

“No, sir.” Sellers shook his head. “The first thing Maximilian would do would be to scream for us to help. The second thing he’d do would be to pull out of Sonora and Chihuahua.”

“You’re likely to be right about that, too,” Stewart said. The sound of boots clumping on the dirt made him turn his head. An orderly was coming up, a telegram clenched in his right fist.
“Well, well.” One of Stuart’s thick eyebrows rose. “What have we here?”

“Wire for you, sir,” said the orderly, a youngster named Withers. “From Richmond.”

“I hadn’t really expected them to wire me from Washington, D.C.,” Stuart answered. Major Sellers snorted. Withers looked blank; he didn’t get the joke. With a small mental sigh, Stuart read the telegram. That eyebrow climbed higher and higher as he did. “Well, well,” he said again.

“Sir?” Sellers said.

Stuart realized
well, well
was something less than informative. “We are ordered by General Jackson to assemble two regiments of cavalry and two batteries of artillery at Presidio, and also to assemble five regiments of cavalry, half a dozen batteries, and three regiments of infantry here at El Paso, the said concentrations to be completed no later than May 16.” The date amused him. Most officers would surely have chosen the fifteenth. But that was a Sunday, and Jackson had always been averse to doing anything not vitally necessary on the Sabbath.

Sellers whistled softly. “It’s going to happen, then.”

“I would say that appears very likely, Major,” Stuart agreed. “Presidio is on the road to the town of Chihuahua, the capital of Chihuahua province, which we would naturally have to occupy upon annexation. And of the larger force to be assembled here, I presume some will go to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora province—which I suppose will become Sonora Territory—and some will defend El Paso against whatever moves the United States may make in response to our actions.”

“We’ll have to post guards all along the railroad.” Now Major Sellers looked north. The Texas-New Mexico frontier and the Rio Grande pinched El Paso off at the end of a long, narrow neck of Confederate territory, through which the Texas Western Railroad necessarily ran. Small parties of raiders could do a lot of damage along that line.

“Once the annexation goes through, we won’t have any trouble moving south of the Rio Grande. We’ll have more depth in which to operate,” Stuart said. That was true, but it wasn’t so useful as it might have been, and he knew as much. No railroad to El Paso ran through Chihuahua province; movement would have to be by horseback and wagon. He sighed, folded the telegram, and put it in the breast pocket of his butternut tunic: he was not a man to
wear an old-style uniform once the new one had been authorized. “Have to go back to my office and see what I can move, and from which places.”

The longer he studied the map, the less happy he got. To carry out General Jackson’s orders, he would have to pull troops from as far away as Arkansas, and that would result in weakening a different frontier with the USA. He would also have to call down the Fifth Cavalry and to denude the rest of the garrisons protecting west Texas from the Comanche raiders who took refuge in New Mexico Territory. If the Yankees turned the Comanches loose, there was liable to be hell to pay among the ranchers and farmers in that part of the country.

But there would certainly be hell to pay if he did not obey Jackson’s order in every particular. Old Stonewall had sacked one of his officers during the war for failing to deliver an ordered attack even though the fellow had learned he was outnumbered much worse than Jackson thought he was. Jackson did not, would not, take no for an answer.

By the time Stuart was done drafting telegrams, he had shifted troops all over the landscape. He took the text of the wires over to the telegraph office, listened to the first couple of them clicking their way east, and then went off to watch the cavalry regiment regularly stationed at El Paso go through its morning exercises.

Troops began arriving a couple of days later. So did cars filled with hardtack, cornmeal, beans, and salt pork for the men, and with oats and hay for the horses and other animals. Every time he looked across the river into Chihuahua province, he wondered how he could keep his soldiers supplied there. He also sent out orders accumulating wagons at El Paso. If he didn’t bring food and munitions with him, he suspected he’d have none.

No troop movements on this scale had been seen in the Trans-Mississippi since the end of the war, not even during the great Comanche outbreak of 1874. Some officers had been rusticating in their fortresses since Lincoln abandoned the struggle to keep the Confederacy from gaining its independence. All things considered, they did a good job of shaking off the cobwebs and going from garrison soldiering to something approaching field service.

By the tenth of May, Stuart was convinced he would have all his troops in place before the deadline General Jackson had sent him. On that day, a messenger came galloping into El Paso. “Sir,” he said when he came before Stuart, “Sir, Lieutenant Colonel
Foulke has crossed the border from Las Cruces under flag of truce and wants to speak with you.”

“Has he?” Stuart thought fast. There were any number of places where the Yankees could have sneaked an observer over the border to keep an eye on the one railroad into El Paso; spotting troop trains would have given them a good notion of the force he had at his disposal. But what the United States knew and what they officially knew were different things. “I want his party stopped four or five miles outside of town. I’ll ride out and confer with him there. Hop to it, Sergeant. I don’t want him in El Paso.”

“Yes, sir.” The noncommissioned officer who’d brought him the news hurried away to head off the U.S. officer.