Winston Groom - Kearnys March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846-1847

Also by Winston Groom

Better Times than These
As Summers Die
Only
Conversations with the Enemy

(with Duncan Spencer)
Forrest Gump
Shrouds of Glory
Gone the Sun
Gumpisms
Gump & Co.
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl
The Crimson Tide
A Storm in Flanders
1942
Patriotic Fire
Vicksburg, 1863

This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright 2011 by Winston Groom

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Groom, Winston, [date]
Kearnys march : the epic creation of the American west, 18461847 / by Winston Groom. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-70141-1
1. Kearnys Expedition, 1846. 2. Kearny, Stephen Watts, 17941848.
I. Title.
E405.2.G76 2011
979.02dc22 2011013889

Maps by Robert Bull

Jacket image: The Capture of Monterrey, September 25, 1846, by Adolphe Jean-Baptiste Bayot after Carl Nebel, hand-colored lithograph, 1851. Universal History Archive/Getty Images Jacket design by Jason Booher

v3.1

To Carolina Montgomery Groomage twelve

When you were seven and came into my office to ask what I was doing, I was writing your bookPatriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans, a tale of pirates, Indians, heroes, and scoundrels.

Heres another story for you with explorers, Indians, generals, and mountain menand always the heroes and scoundrelswho provide the grace and the disrepute that make our human race at once interesting and unique.

Your loving papa

If you have no family or friends to aid you, and no prospect opened for you, turn your face to the great West, and there build up a home and fortune. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Horace Greeley, 18111872

Whats in a Name?

In each of the five military histories Ive written previous to this one, there has been some family connection, some near relative of mine involved in the conflict. It wasnt intentional but just sort of happened. In Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War it was my great-grandfather Fremont Sterling Thrower, who fought with the rebel general Joseph Wheelers cavalry against William T. Sherman in the Battle of Atlanta. In A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 19141918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front it was my grandfather, who served in France with the Thirty-first Infantry (Dixie) Division. In 1942: The Year That Tried Mens Souls it was my father, a captain in the army during World War II. In Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans, it turned out that my great-great-great-grandfather Elijah Montgomery had been a captain with the U.S. Seventh Infantry Regiment during the War of 1812, and during the Battle of New Orleans he had received both a commendation and field promotion to major from Andrew Jackson himself.

When I undertook to write about the Battle of Vicksburg several years ago it was with a slight trepidation because I knew of no link between that terrific event and anyone in my ancestry. Its not that Im superstitious, but I felt I was somehow breaking a chain, that luck might not be with me. I pacified myself with the fact that on a golf course right behind my home in Point Clear, Alabama, lay a quiet little Civil War cemetery where several hundred Confederate soldiers are buried, most of whom had been wounded during the Battle of Vicksburg. It was the most slender of connections but it would have to doand did, until one day a distant cousin whom I had never met appeared out of the blue with all manner of genealogical history about the Groom family.

The other sides of the family were pack rats and documented ancestries back to Charlemagneeven to the time of the apes, for that matterbut of the Groom family, beyond my great-grandfather Groom, little was known, and I had always assumed that they must have been criminals, or worse.

Lo and behold, documentation by this genealogist cousin revealed that my great-great-grandfather James Wright Groom had served honorably in the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War and wound up his life, in 1906, as an engineer and well-respected citizen of Mobile, Alabama, which is where Im from. Armed with this news, I felt almost uncannily blessed and plunged into my research on the story with renewed vigor and confidence.

Yet here, again, when I planned and proposed Kearnys March, there was not a soul in my familial background who had taken the slightest part in that most interesting and acquisitive period in American history. A check of family records turned up no soldiers from the Mexican-American War, and again I began to suffer that sinking sensation you get when something doesnt seem quite rightlike starting off a long journey without your lucky penny, rabbits foot, or what have you.

It hovered over me like a murky pall all through the researching and into the beginnings of the writing, until I had a sudden revelation: there might be a connection after all, however tenuous, between John C. Frmont, the famous Pathfinder of this story, and my great-grandfather Fremont Thrower, who fought in the Civil War.

Because of the widespread publication of his western explorations, Frmont for a time in the mid-1840s was arguably the most celebrated person in America. He had attained such star status that counties, cities, streets, mountains, rivers, parks, libraries, schools, and above all babies were being named after him. I believe it is highly likely that my great-grandfather was among the latter. Fremont Thrower was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1845, the year that John Frmonts famous explorers report was published in newspapers throughout the country, and there is no evidence in the family tree of anyone else called Fremont, which is a name of French extraction.

If it is so, an interesting sidelight would be that, eighteen years later, Fremont Thrower found himself serving as a private in the Confederate cavalry, while his namesake, John Frmont, was a general in the Union army.

These small links have become meaningful to me over the course of writing these historical books and lend a sort of immediacy to the work. Its certainly not blood kin, if indeed its anything at all, but Ill take it, the same way I did the little cemetery behind my housea feeling that theres something somehow special between yourself and the matter at hand.

Point Clear

December 11, 2010