Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/317

288 bled at that point. Of Kearny's dragoons there were some 300. The First Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers — which chose Alexander W. Doniphan as colonel — numbered about 860. The artillery, including nearly 250 men, consisted of "Battery A" of St. Louis under Captain Weightman and a company under Captain Fischer, a graduate of the Prussian artillery service, and formed a battalion commanded by Major M. L. Clark, a West Pointer. There were also two small companies of volunteer infantry, a St. Louis mounted body of about one hundred called the Laclede Rangers, which Kearny attached to his regulars, about fifty Delaware and Shawnee Indians, and finally, though by no means last in importance, a Roman Catholic priest familiar with the Spanish language.

Without lingering to complete the outfit, Kearny sent the command off by sections. June 5a detachment of the dragoons advanced. By the twenty-eighth all of Doniphan's regiment were on the march for Santa Fe and — none of them cared how much farther; and two days later Weightman's fine brass cannon, gleaming radiantly in the bright sunshine, wheeled into the trail. Tor several days the troops had to break their way through a rough country, but about fifteen miles south of the Kansas River they struck the Santa Fe road, a broad, well marked, natural highway running toward the southwest.

Council Grove, the famous rendezvous of Indians and frontiersmen, was the last place from which a single person could safely return; and now for nearly four weeks not one "stick of timber"? was to cheer the eye. After pressing on in the same direction to the Arkansas, the troops left the main trail, marched wearily along the northern bank of the river — ascending about seven feet in each mile — till they were beyond the great bend, and finally, crossing the shallow stream, turned their faces toward Bent's Fort, a protected trading post, which stood near the present site of Las Animas, Colorado, about 650 miles from Fort Leavenworth. Belts had been tightened over and over again by this time. Drinking water that no horse would touch had sickened many a tough rider. Mosquitos and buffalo gnats had tormented the flesh day and night. Faces had been scorched by siroccos, and tongues had swollen with thirst. Many had become so tired that a rattlesnake in the blanket seemed hardly worth minding, and so