Stephen W. Kearny

Stephen Watts Kearny walked an army from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe and took the town without a battle. He left in June 1846 with what the War Department called the Army of the West — dragoons, Missouri volunteers, and a road that was mostly grass. Governor Armijo did not stand. The Americans entered Santa Fe on August 18. Kearny organized a civil government, left most of the column, and started for California with a small dragoon escort because a report said the province was already quiet.

The report was late. On December 6, near the village of San Pasqual, Andrés Pico's Californio lancers met Kearny's worn horses and wet powder. The Americans kept the field and paid for it. Kearny was wounded. A relief from San Diego opened the road. In January 1847 a combined force of his remaining dragoons, Stockton's sailors and Marines, and local volunteers took the Los Angeles basin at San Gabriel and La Mesa. The fighting in Alta California ended with the Treaty of Cahuenga. The quarrel that followed — Kearny, Stockton, and Frémont over who governed — is a public court-martial record, not a second battle. This page will not retry it.

He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 30, 1794. He left Columbia for the War of 1812 and stayed in the army on the Missouri and the plains. The 1846 march is the command that put his name on a river of later maps. Late in 1847 he was sent to Veracruz as a military governor and took yellow fever. He died near St. Louis on October 31, 1848, a brevet major general on paper and a sick man in fact.

This register will not invent a missing-in-action finding for a general who came home and died in Missouri. It will not turn San Pasqual into a parade victory. It will say a frontier brigadier took New Mexico without a shot, bought California with a lance wound, and did not live to enjoy the argument.