Fenway Press

After that we tried our best to go on with our lives as though nothing had happened. We succeeded for the most part. Things began to return to normal between us. In fact, he became my best friend, even better than before. We could tell each other anything. We had no secrets from one another. It’s just we steered clear of Mexico.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

3. THE PELLETIER JOURNAL OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE, #28: JOAQUIN MILLER’S “WITH WALKER IN NICARAGUA”

Around 1870 the American Poet of the West, Joaquin Miller is a popular fixture in London concert halls and drawing rooms. Dressed in designer rawhide, chaps, gunbelt and sombrero he declaims his Songs of the Sierras. Most popular is a long poem entitled “With Walker in Nicaragua.”

It’s not clear whether he ever made his way to Nicaragua to serve with Walker’s Immortals. What we do know is that Cincinnatus Heine Miller left

his sheltered Willamette Valley home in the early 1850s to participate in the larger dramas of his age. He wandered south, worked in the gold camps, moved to San Francisco, and was writing sketches for the local papers when news of William Walker’s mercenary swashbuckling (and illegal) expedition to Nicaragua swept the port, igniting the imaginations and ambitions of footloose young men.

The narrator of the poem recalls being an impressionable greenhorn among strange strong bearded men who have chosen to follow Walker into the mystery and danger of the tropics, dark-brow’d and broad-breasted men blown from the four parts of the earth–but none so awesome as their chief, a man half angel and half Lucifer.  Indeed, there is more than a touch of Milton’s haunted hero in this Walker, a sort of Satan/Zorro in Sombréro black, with plume of snow, a red serape, a silk sash that holds his silver sword chased in gold, Spanish spurs. . .and yet the filibuster chief’s face is a blend of pride and pain/  Of mingled pleading and disdain,/ With shades of glory and of grief. . . .

Like his compatriots, the narrator revels in his savage freedom. He and his mates care only about fame.  Guilt? Law? Shame? For them, the only vice is cowardice. . . .

They pass through wild, dark forests.

And snakes, long, lithe and beautiful

As green and graceful-bough’d bamboo,

Did twist and twine them through and through

The boughs that hung red-fruited full. . . .

Birds hung and swung, green-robed and red

Or dropp’d in curved lines dreamily,

Rainbows reversed, from tree to tree. . . .

He makes his first real contact with the Gray-Eye’d Man of Destiny as the army emerges from the forest and the two ride side by side out across the grassy plain.   Walker asks the young man about his home and family. Doesn’t his father own huge tracts of farm land and hundreds of men at his command?  No, says the young man: his parents tend a small farm alone and doubtless pine for their son’s return. At which point Walker turns in his saddle. . . .

He held his bent head very low,

A sudden sadness in the air;

Then turned and touched my yellow hair

And took the long locks in his hand,

Toyed with them, smiled and let them go. . . .

From that moment the Chief becomes for the young man all a father, friend, could be. . . .

They come upon an ancient city half-hidden in the jungle.

There are martial adventures mano a mano with savages, battles in which the American always emerge triumphant. Long rides, more skirmishes.

At last the filibuster troop comes down to the sea, where

A city stood, white wall’d, and brown

With age, in nest of orange trees. . . .

Is this San Juan del Sur? These days we have some orange TREES, but no ORANGE trees. In any case, after their battles the filibusters rest in the red-hot days beneath the aforementioned trees.

O BRIGHT, BRONZED MAIDENS OF THE SUN!

The local girls are shy at first / And then, ere long, not over long, he singles out (and is singled out by) one stunning beauty in particular. She is tawny-red like wine,/  With black hair boundless as the night. . . .

Their love ignites like wildfire. He declares on the one hand that they are chaste, but he also cries Let luscious lips lean hot to kiss,/ and swoon in love. . . .

We loved in the sufficient sun

We lived in elements of fire.

They spend time lying side by side in a canoe, tangled in a love too passionate for speech, under the observant gaze of the red-eyed crocodile. . . .

She gives him a token cut of virgin gold; she says it is held sacred by her tribe; it will guard him against any enmity from her people. He in turn gives her a dagger (a gift from Walker, tribute to the young man’s warlike spilling of blood at Rivas); it will guard her against any wrongs at American hands–indeed, seeing this blade any filibuster will leap to her defense, and make [her] right or wrong his own. . . .

The mood darkens. Walker and his band suffer reverses. They flee by sea. The white city fades on the horizon. The young man loudly laments that he must leave his beloved. Then he sinks into a deep sleep. When he wakes, the ship’s mate–his hand on the wheel–tells a story of how all night a little cuss. . .in petticoats followed the Americans in her canoe and kept trying to stand up, kept trying to lift. . .something. . .it looked like some sort of beautiful dagger. . . .

But then (continues the mate) she lost her balance, the canoe went over, and even as the waves covered her

“She shook her dagger in the air,

As if still to defy and dare,

And sinking seem’d to call your name.”

Berserk with grief, the young poet falls into a fever, ends up on some sort of island.

He never sees Walker or the girl again. But he hears of Walker’s subsequent death, his dignity before the firing squad, shaking each Honduran soldier’s hand before the execution. . .

I know not which I mourn the most.

My brother or my virgin bride,

My chief or my unwedded wife. . . .

He knows that some are glad Walker is dead.

Speak ill who will of him, he died

In all disgrace; say of the dead

His heart was black, his hands were red–

Say this much and be satisfied;

Gloat over it all undenied.

I only say that he to me,

Whatever he to others was,

Was truer far than any one

That I have known beneath the sun. . . .

Half a century later, Joaquin Miller is still earning his living by writing, often for publications owned by “Frank Leslie, ” which is by now the legal name of the magnetic Miriam Follin “Minnie Montes” Peacock Squier Leslie who assumes the reins of the publishing empire on her husband Frank’s death in 1880. Over the years Miriam and Joaquin have been friends, very close friends.

In 1900 Miller turns up in China. The Boxer Rebellion is in full swing. He meets a young U. S. Marine, a teenager, named Smedley Butler, off on his first real campaign to make the world safe for U.S. business interests (this will be Butler’s bitter reappraisal, years later).

Miller now fades from view, but not Smedley Butler. He will go on to serve in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and in the 1920s in Nicaragua, fighting first against Benjamin Zeledon, and later against Sandino and the first generation of Sandinistas.

Sometime in the early 1930’s Smedley Butler will meet Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.–great-grandson of the Commodore–who over brandy and cigars will tell him a story of the casual brutality of Benito Mussolini. It seems the lead car of Il Duce’s motorcade hits a girl at the roadside, but he orders them not to stop.

Butler retells the story during a public speech in Philadelphia. As Mussolini is widely admired in the U.S., there is an immense uproar, and court martial proceedings are instituted against one of the most highly decorated Marines in the history of the Corps. In the end, Butler publicly apologizes.

In 1934, with thousands of unemployed American workers camped out on the Mall in Washington, and the ruling class quaking in its boots, Butler exposes a Wall Street plot to topple President Roosevelt and install him–Butler–as Military Dictator. No one believes him.

That same Roosevelt says of Anastasio Somoza (I): “He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”

Butler becomes an anti-militarist campaigner, publishes a book called War is a Racket.

Anastasio Somoza (II), on a trip to Italy, buys a headless equestrian statue of Mussolini, has a bronze copy of his own head attached to it, and ships it to Managua, where it looms ominously over a central intersection.

When the Sandinista rebels enter Managua on July 19, 1979, they throw a rope around the equestrian statue of Mussolini/Somoza and pull it clattering to the ground. The horse cracks open and the head goes rolling.

Within a year, American (and Nicaraguan) mercenaries (the Contras) are once again shedding Nicaraguan blood.

In 1988, the Veterans Peace Convoy, led by the “Smedley Butler

Brigade” (or “Smed Buts”) of Boston, defies the U.S. Government and drives a hundred old trucks and school buses to Nicaragua.  Their vow: no replay of Vietnam in Nicaragua.

So for over a hundred and fifty years North Americans have managed to find their way by land, by sea, by air, steampower, sailpower, dieselpower, jetfuel, horseback, burroback, buckboard, surfboard, panga, footleather, in person or in imagination, down to Nicaragua. Some have come for adventure only to meet bullet, cholera or gangrene; some have come for easy money only to be surprised by love; some, who spent their youth amid the smoking ruins of peasant villages and the stench of rotting bodies, have found atonement sweating in Nicaraguan trenches to lay the foundations of country schoolhouses; some have come to check out the scene, only to find themselves drawn in, coaxed in, settling in; and a few have come simply to wait for death.

This is all one story.

************************************************************************

4. Col. Kinney’s Pitch:

SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES!

COLONEL H. L. KINNEY, FAMOUS FOR HIS EXPLOITS IN THE

Mexican War as a scout and pioneer for old Zach Taylor, stared out the window onto the traffic streaming up and down Broadway and recalled his first meeting with that particularly interesting and as it turned out slippery fellow named J. W. Fabens one fine day  in 1854 in Greytown (or San Juan del Norte, depending on who you’re talking to) where that particular Boston gentleman had managed to corner a piece of almost everything coming in off the bright blue sea or going up the big river or coming down it from the lake. You name it: rum (or guaro or aguardiente, depending on who you’re talking to) for the passengers inbound from New York and New Orleans all in a fever for California gold, or rum for the outbounders wasted by California failure and Nicaragua cholera and ready to drink themselves blind between Greytown and home, or rum for the layabout riffraff  from all the seven seas who lounged in their hammocks the livelong day shouting at their darkskinned wenches to fetch them this or fetch them that, or rum for the injuns and niggers, not that you could exactly always tell them apart. And of course guns and powder, hardtack, tobacco, boots, ship’s gear, hoes and hatchets, buckets and saltbeef, printer’s ink and pepper. Dear God almighty but the flow of yankees had begun to pick up like all blazes since ‘50, ‘51, ‘52, what  with Commodore Vanderbilt’s steamboats popping up on the horizon one after another thick as fleas and full to the gunwales with wide-eyed dreamers, their pockets (so far) full of  money.  And there at the corner of the world sat Fabens, always in clean shirt and jeweled vest,  all fopped up with perfume and powder,  smiling away like a parlor god, inviting ladies and officers to tea in his chawming Harvard accent, then selling them second rate trash at twice the going rate.  Kinney had sensed a kindred spirit at first sight, without of course actually liking the man, and Fabens and the Colonel had drunk brandy and smoked cheroots late into the night a few days after they’d met at the wharves, Kinney straight from Corpus Christi (which he flat out owned) and Fabens mellow and expansive after a particularly lucrative week fitting  out a British man’o’war heading back to Jamaica.

Fabens: It seems a shame all these worthy countrymen of ours feel only California can slake their thirst for a new life when all of Nicaragua sits here like an apple ripe for the picking.

Kinney: You mean you wish they’d all set up camp right here, or better yet, move in with you?

Fabens: Heavens, no! The climate here is too tropical for our northern friends. They require the salubrious zephyrs of a breezy highland, not some swampy hellhole like San Juan del Norte.

Kinney: Well there you have it. The task would be to lay your hands on a salubrious zephyr or two, throw in half a peck of breezy highlands, and print your advertisement. But you’ll pardon my saying I think you’ve picked the wrong country to hatch such a scheme.

Fabens: Not so, my dear Colonel. This is a big country. Much of it unexplored. Get away from the Caribbean coast, inland, or along the lake, and the climate changes markedly.  Have you been upriver yet, up to San Carlos and the Chontales coast? No, of course not, you just arrived. But I recommend a look-see. And enterprizing man–or group of men–could do much, do much.  I for one would be deeply gratified to see a steady stream of Anglo-Saxon settlers pass by my door en route not to California but to their new plantations and estates in Nicaragua. Deeply gratified.

Kinney: And no doubt deeply enriched, seeing as how when they’d all got settled in and wanted crockery or plowshares or lace or guns or bibles or whatever, they’d come to you to get it. Ain’t I right?

And Fabens had smiled and poured more brandy, and the very next day Kinney had taken the Accessory Transit Company’s riverboat, the Charles Morgan, upstream (in the company of twelve young men just off the New York steamer, Jake Pelham among them,  on their way to fame and fortune in California) and after clearing the Machuca, Balas, Mico and Castillo rapids with a bit of bumping and scraping but otherwise without incident, walked around the Toros rapids, boarded a new boat, and arrived in San Carlos two days later. There he hired out a reconnaissance fleet of three long dugouts called bungos and was preparing to set off up the east coast of the lake when Jake asked if he might tag along, declaring that he rather liked Nicaragua so far and was in no particular hurry  to get anywhere.  Glad to have another white man along, and a southerner at that (Carolina via New Orleans) Kinney assented, and so they set off on the waters of the big lake, stopping first at the Solentiname islands, fertile but too small for settlements,  then up past San Miguelito, Puerto Morrito, past

countless rivers with no names or names that when spoken by the rowers sounded to Kinney’s ears like the damnedest jumble of meaningless sounds te-pe-gua-na-so-pa, o-he-cu-apa, te-pe-squint-lay–and always, as they slid along the coast, the giant twin peaks of Ometepec off to the west,  but the land seemed rich  enough along the lake, and there was some water in the rivers, and the little hunting he and Jake had tried turned up a small deer and an armadillo, and no question: the air was dryer and sweeter and easier to breathe than the miasmas of San Juan del Greytown although when the sun beat down at mid-day you wouldn’t want to be out in it for long, but, yes: the place had possibilities. Jake, who had met a miner–an Englishman, no less–returning from Granada to his holdings up in the hills above Juigalpa that were beginning to produce a bit of glitter, allowed as how he might sashay up there and take a look for himself.  Kinney, however, had different fish to fry and so when he returned two weeks later and sat back down at the same table on Faben’s veranda overlooking the rivermouth his first question was: Who owns it?

Fabens: This is not a problem. Some of it belongs to no one, just indians, so that for a few American dollars whoever is currently “the government of Nicaragua” will sell me, or you, or should we collaborate, our enterprize, the clearest of clear titles. Some belongs to the Church, and has for centuries, but the Bishop of Granada is an old friend of mine and is always in need of ready cash, and so for a pittance those lands can be bought up. There is some land, some of the best land, that lies in private hands–four or five large ranchers like Ferrer and Guzman, but they’re lonely out there in the wilds and would welcome immigrants with some measure of dynamism and capital. I have already bought, myself, eight thousand acres of prime rice-growing land along the coast. Land is not the question. Nicaraguans never have compunctions about selling their country to foreigners. The question is, how would an investor, or group of investors in such lands attract those who would otherwise head straight to California?

Kinney: The answer is simple. Announce the discovery of gold.

Fabens: Well, you know, word has begun to trickle out. Witness your English friend. Oh yes, there’s gold.

Kinney: But not, it appears,  a devil of a lot.

Fabens: Apparently not,  and not near the coast. And yet, if one were to state publicly…. Well!  It would certainly be no lie to say that the country contains untapped reserves of gold. And silver. No lie at all.

And so it came to pass that in March of 1855 Kinney and Fabens met again, first in New York (mostly with friends of the Colonel’s, fellers he’d knocked about with in the Mexican fracas, and a handful of newspaper men, always thirsty and always ready for a good story) and then in Boston (some stuffy but well-heeled Harvard chums of Fabens eager for investment opportunities, and some more reporters) and in early April announced (in the Boston Daily Advertiser and the National Intelligencer and the New York Evening Post and the New York Herald) the formation of the “Nicaragua Land and Mining Company. “  And as he sat in his room in the Astor House, his feet up on the richly-upholstered blood-red chair, the excellent drinking-whisky soothing his throat, Colonel Kinney was (and here he guffawed) deeply gratified to read spread out on the table before him these various versions of the general invitation to find

A HOME  IN NICARAGUA !

by joining

The Kinney Expedition

to depart from New York  this May,  led (according to the Daily Advertiser)  by a man whose name has been so much before the public in the last four or five months, in connection with those contradictory stories that the invention of the telegraph serves so well to propagate, that the public may be pardoned  if it has become somewhat confused and uncertain with regard to his plans…

and yet his plans are precisely what? Well, to offer adventurous Americans a chance to purchase–if without delay they book passage to Nicaragua [$80 for after-saloons, $60 forward saloons, and $40 steerage] on the steamship United States— clear title to at the very least one hundred and sixty acres of land, and as much as six hundred and forty acres…

But what land? Well, Mr. J. W. Fabens, known in this vicinity as a member of Harvard College, of the class of 1842, and known to the country at large as the Commercial Agent of the United States for several years at San Juan [del Norte, that is], which is the Atlantic seaport of the State of Nicaragua in collaboration with other gentlemen of acknowledged honor including Fletcher Webster, Esq. of this city have obtained by grants from the government and by purchases from individuals, SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES of lands lying upon the slopes of the highlands adjoining  Lake Nicaragua….

Of course it goes without saying that this is a business enterprize, not a political adventure inasmuch as Col. Kinney and his associates have no intention of overturning the existing government of Nicaragua nor to make themselves by armed invasion rulers of a State which has a less white population than many New England towns…

Indeed, the colonists who go out under [Kinney’s] auspices will rigidly respect the laws of Nicaragua, and those who settle in the country will become Nicaraguans…

They will not seek to subvert the institutions of the State, but simply to gather in a fruitful field the harvest which the present population is too idle to sow, much less to reap…

they will dispossess nobody;

they will occupy no lands except those acquired by fair purchase or lawful grant;

and will injure in no way  the happiness or the business of the present inhabitants…

For even the most superficial observer cannot avoid pursuing in his mind what may be the effect on the future history of the State of Nicaragua, whose rich endowments of nature unhappily have been so little improved by man, of this influx of a large body of industrious Anglo-Saxon settlers…

And what are these natural endowments and potential harvests? Gold and silver in considerable quantities says the Boston Daily Advertiser. Gold, silver, coal and other minerals says the New York Evening Post.. Gold, silver, copper, lead and iron may be found in considerable quantities says the National Intelligencer…

The inexhaustibly rich soil of Nicaragua will yield to the persevering planter rich harvests of sugar, coffee, cocoa, indigo, cotton, tobacco, maize, wheat, rice, not to mention cheese and hides from the cattle for which land and climate are admirably suited.

The fields and forests will yield, either naturally or with minimal cultivation, plantains, bananas, beans, chile, tomatoes, breadfruit, arrow-root, okro, citrons, oranges, limes, lemons, pine apples (the delicious white Guayaquil as well as the yellow variety), mamays, anonas, guavas, coconuts…sarsparilla, anots, aloes, ipecacuanha, ginger, vanilla, Peruvian bark (quinine), coubage, copal, gum arabic, capevi, caoutchouc, dragon’s blood, and vanglo or oil plant…

Trees ready to be felled by the sharp blades of ambitious settlers include mahogany, Brazil wood, cedar, lignumvitae, fustic, yellow sanders, pine (on the heights), dragon’s blood tree, silk cotton tree, oak copal tree, buttonwood, iron wood, rose wood, Nicaragua wood, calebask, &c., &c., &c.

When these sources of wealth are once fairly opened and developed says the Evening Post,  we may look forward to another California in this now neglected and thinly peopled region. [Here Kinney, smiling, lifted his glass to no one in particular: “Another California.”]

Now some, who have heard reports in the popular press of the questionable activities of “General” Walker and his band of renegades-for-hire [Kinney had met him once and not to put a featheredge on it found the man to be a pasty-faced pint-sized puritanical Tennessee prig, full of chivalrous bullshit and cock-eyed dreams of empire, who refused to join Kinney for a friendly drink, completely bereft of the slightest commercial savvy, a total pain in the fundament, bad cess to him!] may think Kinney and his people are cut from the same mould. Hold your horses! No such thing, especially for Boston readers, who–as Fabens had pointed out in dead seriousness–tend to be downright spiny about private adventurers making up their own foreign policy on the spur of the moment, so that finally Kinney had agreed and allowed Fabens to write:

We need not say that we have no sympathy with “filibusterism” in any of its forms; nor can we assent to the atrocious doctrines … (blahblahblah) But the most rigid public moralist can scarcely frown on an enterprize of the character which we are assured belongs to the present “Kinney Expedition.”

And who is this Col. Kinney and why is he the ideal man to lead this hardy band of settlers with gold in their eyes who have to date marched themselves right down to 36 Beaver Street off Bowling Green, New York City, and have purchased cash on the barrel head one hundred and eight-seven tickets and have bought fourteen thousand five hundred dollars worth of land shares for property they’ve never laid eyes on? Who is this flowing well of bounty? Kinney scratched his balls, lit his second cigar and read on.

Physically, he is a perfect man. He has the powers of endurance of an Indian, and all the experience in rough and adventurous life of the soldier and the frontier pioneer. He was one of the earliest inhabitants of what is now the populous and thriving city of Chicago, and took an active part in the settlement of that portion of Illinois. He afterwards migrated to Texas, and led in the settlement of the portion of that State between the Nueces and Rio Grande. He still has a fine seat near Corpus Christi. Although thus comfortably and substantially located, he thirsts for new fields of enterprize, and has turned his attention to  Central  America….

Fabens had written that and fed it to those reporters and didn’t they lap it up like a cat laps cream? Despite a gut-level aversion to the man, Kinney had to admit this Harvard nancy who was now for better or worse his business partner had a way with words. A perfect man. Well done, by god! Yes sir. No two ways about it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 5. JESSE AND MARK TWAIN GO DOWN RIVER

       “I WILL MOST ASSUREDLY HANG HIM”

JESSE PELLETIER, MARK TWAIN, MR. BROWN AND MADAME

AMANDA SOULÉ have dined well aboard the Daniel Webster and now sit in their rockers on the aft deck smoking and chatting and watching the reflected lights of San Juan del Norte (or if you prefer, Greytown) glitter and slide on the smooth surface of the river, a sweet breeze off the sea keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Tomorrow the great steamer will weigh anchor and fire up her mighty engine for New Orleans, bearing Brown and Twain (or if you prefer, Sam. Clemens) away to new adventures in a country recently convulsed and transformed by four years of Civil War. Madame Amanda, looking unruffled in her feather boa despite the heat, her fine slightly arrogant mulatto features glowing as though carved from a block of buttery milk-chocolate, will return ashore in a few hours to the management of The Palace,  finest house of pleasure in the Eastern Caribbean.  Jesse Pelletier, who at the age of twenty-two some dozen years ago paid a small fortune to lie in her arms until dawn before rejoining Commodore Vanderbilt on his upriver sortie, will complete his business transactions on shore tomorrow and then head back upriver himself, to Castillo, San Carlos, stopping to visit a friend on the Solentiname Islands, then across the lake to Virgin Bay, and from there by horseback home again to San Juan del Sur and his plump and sullen wife, Xiomara, his six noisy rambunctious children, and his flophouse/general store/ship chandlery, whose profits will no doubt begin to taper off when the St. Louis-San Francisco rail link is completed in a year or so and the glorious “Nicaragua Route” begins to fade away, a mere footnote to a larger continental history.

–Did you ever meet Walker? asks Twain.

–Not much chance of that! Madame Amanda replies. The few times he came through town he was usually a few steps ahead of the authorities–the American Navy, that is. And I don’t believe he cared a whit for pleasure, at least from what I heard. The others, the men who came to serve with him, of course: they were regular… visitors. Gallant boys, for the most part, although I hasten to add that some were dyed-in-the-wool scoundrels of the foulest sort.

–I almost joined up myself, says Jesse. I was running Vanderbilt’s office in San Juan, the other San Juan, over on the Pacific, and I was young and restless, feeling cooped up in my office there. For two cents I would have lit out in search of glory.

–Well, why didn’t you? asks Brown.

–Hard to say. I’d met Walker and I knew Vanderbilt. He was my employer, after all, for a number of years. When they had their falling out, I guess some instinct of self-preservation whispered in my ear and said: stick with the strongest. Which I did. Besides, I was already all but married by then, and my wife’s folks–well, she wasn’t my wife yet, but I’d already got to know them pretty well–hated Walker. Hated the very air he breathed. So I was sort of torn, you might say.

–When were you born? asks Twain.

–’33.

–I came along in ‘35.  So we’re about the same age, same generation. Me, I was a young pup of a journeyman printer during the filibuster years, and let me tell you when we read all about Walker’s Immortals kicking up dust down here it was a tale to make a man’s heart beat faster. I know half a dozen fellers who on the pure strength of a piece of puffery with a picture or two thrown in for good measure–say in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly or Harpers–took the next boat for San Juan, del Norte or  del Sur, take your pick. Heroic elixir it was, the horse shit they published in those days.

–Horse shit! cries Brown. You’re talking about one of the all-time great Americans!

–Who? Walker? Well, he had his gifts, no doubt. No, I’m talking about his apologists in the yellow press. That’s where the stench is coming from….

–He wasn’t the only Filibuster Chief, you know, says Madame Amanda.  You-all ever hear of Kinney?

–I can’t say I…

–Hell yes, says Jesse. Walker threatened to hang him.

–That’s the one, says Madame Amanda. A first-class hustler from Pennsylvania, did scouting for Zach Taylor in the Mexican war in the ‘40s, made his way from there up to the Gulf Coast of Texas, played his cards right and became the big wheel in Corpus, I mean he owned everything .  So things were fine for a while but I believe he got bored being king of the heap and as chance would have it he got bit by the Nicaragua bug, drifted down here and met up with my dear friend and soul-mate the late Jimmy Fabens. Hard to think of two people less alike: Kinney all guns and bluster, big pecker, big dreams, and dear Frank a quiet, civilized man–a Harvard man, no less–but a hustler in his own right, one of the best, and between them they cooked up a land and colonization scheme here in Nicaragua.

–When’s this? asks Twain.

–It was…well, it had to be ‘55, same year Walker came to Leon. Here, General, share us a drop of that excellent brandy there, grand cuvée Hair of the Dog.

She holds out her glass. Brown shifts around with the decanter and pours her a healthy slug. Twain and Jesse move their rockers, too, so that now they form an intimate little circle. When they are all topped up and lit up, Madame Amanda continues.

–At first they thought they should flog the idea of colonization in Chontales, up on the lakeshore, published glowing prospectuses in the big East Coast papers–Boston, N’York. Jimmy showed me a copy once: pure earthly paradise to hear them talk. Free land–well, almost free– hot and cold running gold dust, fruit falling off the trees onto your plate. It was something! What a gift for words that Jimmy Fabens had!  Guess it shows a Harvard education is worth the money. Anyhow, it worked. People signed up in droves, put down their deposits, mostly single young men, but some families, too, got their bags packed all ready to board the steamship United States that was anchored right there in N’York harbor when lo and behold in steps the U.S. Gummint accuses the expedition of being nothing more than filibusters in sheep’s clothing.

–Which of course they were? asks Twain.

–Keep your pants on, Charlie or Sammy or whatever your name is. This is my story, ain’t it?

–Indeed it is. My apologies. Madame, the floor is yours.

–Damned right it is. You say you make your living writing stories? Well pay attention, you just might learn something.

–I devoutly hope so.

–Where was I? So: the gummint seized the boat and threw “Colonel” Kinney and Jimmy Fabens in jail and accused them of something like…what was it, violation of neutrality laws or some such hogwash. So they took them to court, but the long and short of it was that the gummint prosecutor didn’t know shit from wild honey when it came to nailing those boys and they got off scott free, because despite the official policy, most N’Yorkers–including jury members–just flat out loved  the idea of filibustering. Some of the “colonists” got cold feet and asked for their money back but a fair number decided to hang tight with the scheme and they found a different boat  and one fine evening slipped away into the fog and headed south.

She turns to Twain.

–How’m I doin’, Homer?

–Full steam ahead.

–So they head south, destination right here, this very spot. But they get blown off course or something and end up getting shipwrecked on one of those widdling little islands out there, Turks or Kirks or something, and months  later they make it to our sunny shores. As it turns out, the delay set them up better than they would have been if they’d arrived on time, because while they were off being shipwrecked the U.S. Navy was busy blowing Greytown off the map.

–Now I do recall hearing about that, says Brown.

–An elephant never forgets. Well now, here’s what happened, and I know this part of the story well because as Jesse knows I was in business here back then, not in the splendid Palace that I own today, but a comfy little house, Moonlight and Roses we called it, and a good bunch of girls…. Anyway, as perhaps you know, we Atlantic Coasters (I include myself despite being originally from N’Orleans) scarcely think of ourselves as Nicaraguans. But we do have a sense of self-respect. And Greytown had a government in those days, thanks to the wise assistance of our British friends. And all these hundreds and hundreds of gold-hungry yankees came pouring through town on the steamboats of the Transit Company of which my friend Admiral Pelletier was an employee over yonder on the far side. So: the Greytown officials requested, quite reasonably, I feel, that the Transit Company should pay into the town coffers a small consideration, some trifling sum per head, which they  insisted on calling a “passenger tax” but which I  prefer to call a “courtesy payment.”  But they refused. Not a cent.

–Vanderbilt: notable skinflint, says Twain.

–To tell the truth, says Madame Amanda, I ain’t totally sure the old buzzard was running the company  that year, but whoever it was, they said no. So things were tense to begin with when Captain Jack Smith, riverboat captain with the Transit he was, instead of coming  as usual to soothe his aching heart at the Moonlight and Roses between the legs of a bonny lass,  goes drinking instead  and ends up in a shouting match with Carlos Stevenson, a wonderful man, longshoreman, black and sweet as molasses, and they’re blowing hot air about politics and one thing leads to another and Jack Smith up and shoots Carlos dead on the spot.

She pauses for effect. All three men are leaning toward her in their chairs. In thrall. She smiles slowly.

–Well! That just lights the fuse! Jack runs over to Jimmy Fabens’ house, Jimmy drawing a salary in those days for being “U.S. Consul.” The then governor of Greytown pounds on Jimmy’s door and demands that the “murderer” be surrendered. Now as chance has it, the not-so-Honorable Solon Borland, Minister Plenipoteniary from the United States to all of Central America just happens to be aboard the Northern  Light,  recently arrived from N’York and N’Orleans. Well when he hears what’s afoot, he goes ashore and marches into the governor’s office and says, says he: my  gummint don’t reconize your  gummint, and I hereby claim custody of Capt. Jack Smith and I allow as how you have no, I repeat, no jurisdiction over him. Now when the friends of Carlos Stevenson hear about this all hell breaks loose: they begin to march to Jimmy’s house angry as all getout, ready for blood. I remember standing on my balcony watching them go by. It was not a happy moment for me. I had friends… my sympathies were with both sides at once.  So I decide to throw a shawl on and tag along, and the mob, ‘cause it’s a mob by now, arrives at Jimmy Fabens’ and Jimmy comes out on the porch, tears streaming down his cheeks, and begs them to go home–after all, he knows most of them. And he might have succeeded if the Honorable Borland hadn’t piped up pompous as a preacher and blathered a lot of inflammatory nonsense about savagery and dark passions and civilized values and essentially warning the mob not to mess with the U. S. of A.

It was like tossing hot lard in the fire! Somebody–and I think I know who but I’m not naming any names–throws a half-broken bottle and it catches old Borland smack on the cheek!

She pauses and takes a sip of brandy. There are night birds crying out along both shores. Lightning flashes from a thunderstorm up the coast.

–You have to imagine the scene: one second Borland is spouting and the crowd is yelling, the next it’s dead quiet as Borland stands there, blood pouring down his face and the crowd just open-mouthed with astonishment. By a piece of luck, a rainstorm sweeps in that very moment. Jimmy spirits Borland into the house and those of us in the yard run for shelter. What happens next I’m a little hazy about. It seems Jimmy manages to slip out during the night and make his way to the Northern Light. In short order he organizes a sort of posse from among the passengers–filibuster recruits, hopeful colonists, gold-diggers–and in the morning they come ashore to demand the release of Borland and Smith, but whoa, Nelly! somebody takes a couple of pot-shots at them and they come skedaddling back to the boat. Still,  somehow–and don’t ask me how, but I wouldn’t be astounded to learn that money changed hands–somehow Borland and Smith sneak out of the house and make it aboard the steamer. Borland’s cut is really deep and he’s hopping mad, but he also remembers what the real  function of his gummint is in Nicaragua, which is to protect the private property and inalienable right to do business of American citizens. So on the spot he deputizes fifty passengers, arms them to the teeth at gummint expense, and puts them ashore at Point Arenas over there [she motions languidly to her right with a bejewelled finger] to protect the Transit Company’s warehouses and all from the good people of Greytown over there [a different glittery finger, to the left].

–I wonder, says Twain, if the fifty actually got paid to stick around–a federally funded private security force.

–A question to be asked, says Madame Amanda. What do you  think? In any case, Borland steams off to Washington that very afternoon. Now, all this commotion is in mid-May, and six weeks or so later, with Carlos Stevenson mouldering in his grave and begining to be forgotten, and Jimmy back in his house and me and my girls in mine and things generally getting back to normal, up the creek comes an American ship, the U.S.S. Cyane,  big cannons, lots of Marines, captained by a man I had never  had the pleasure of meeting, one Hollins, curse his name! This Hollins sends word to Greytown that acting on direct orders from President Pierce in Washington he intends to bombard the town in retaliation for the insult to the flag in the person of Solly Borland, and that anyone who wants to will be ferried over to Point Arenas, but you’ve got until sunset to decide.  Well, knowing American resolve as I do, it takes me about thirty seconds to tell my girls to pack one bag each and get their pretty little asses down to the wharf.

–Sounds like comic opera to me, says Brown. The Nymphs’ Retreat.

–Well yes and no, says Madame Amanda. I grant you a boatful of hysterical courtesans, their ribbons flying every whichaway and parasols blown overboard, being rowed across a shark-infested river by distracted sailors could  be a subject for mild amusement. But fix your mind on what comes next. Nine sharp next morning the Cyane trains her guns on the town and Hollins orders them to open fire. Boom! Boom! Boom! against a simple little town of sticks and straw–not a grand  town, but charming enough to those of us who knew it. Business people like myself saw everything we’d worked for go up in smoke and splinters. It was a sorry sight.

–But I thought there was supposed to be a British presence on that coast in those days, says Jesse. A sort of protectorate. Hadn’t they even crowned the so-called King of Mosquitia and sent His Highness greetings from Queen Victoria?

–Oh yes, the English were there. A warship, the Express, right there in the river. But Hollins told the Britishers to stay out of the way and not try anything hairbrained and pointedly reminded them of what he called the Monroe Doctrine. I was there. I heard it all. So discretion being the better part of cowardice, the Express  pulled back and simply watched the show.

–So how long did this bombardment go on for, asks Twain.

–Not long. An hour, maybe. Then Hollins sent in the Marines, thirty or so, with orders to burn up whatever wasn’t blasted away.  And those gentlemen in starched whites obliged. By noon there wasn’t a building in Greytown not in flames, including Moonlight and Roses, including Jimmy Fabens’ house. It just burned and burned. And by sunset there was nothing left–no houses, no stores, no churches, no brothels, nothing. We sat on the sand at Point Arenas and watched the columns of smoke get thinner and thinner…

They are all silent for a while until finally Twain speaks.

–That’s a riproaring good story, ma’am. And I’m sure these boys’ll join me in bemoaning the disappearance of that Alexandria of the Indes. But you’ll forgive me for wondering what in tarnation this has to do with the fortunes of the redoubtable Colonel Kinney, whose fate was the argument of this epic when our telling began.

–Ah, Sammy here thinks I’ve lost my train of thought, dropped my thread–that I’ve forgotten one story by getting immersed in another. Ain’t that right, Sammy? You like your stories one-two-three, none of this looping and purling back in time. You don’t trust an old whore to know where she’s going or how to get there.

Twain lifts his hands in protest.

–I only meant….

–You only meant you think I’m so agog with the United States Marines and their acts of valor that I’ve forgotten Kinney and his hardy band shipwrecked on the Blasted Isles of Tropical Paradise. Well no such thing, old hoss. No such thing. The fires have scarcely cooled when Kinney and his bold thirty followers arrive in the town that isn’t there. Now how exactly it was that the Kinney group gave up on Chontales and focused on the Miskito Coast instead, and what happened with the Jimmy Fabens/Colonel Kinney partnership, I really can’t say. Never did quite get a straight answer. Suffice it to say that within a month of his arrival in these parts Kinney declares himself possessor of the original grant of colonizing rights to a substantial area of land given by the King of Mosquitia to one Shepherd. Whether Kinney bought the grant off Shepherd, and whether the grant was ever valid, and whether His Highness was anywhere near sober at the time he made the grant, all this is unknown to me. I was pretty busy myself July and August and September of that year building a bigger and better place of business than before, so I didn’t pay much attention to the background of this new man and his crew.  But Kinney has scarcely arrived when he says to the people of the San Juan del Norte/Greytown area: I and my people come in peace to settle this bounteous land and dedicate ourselves to its prosperity.  And sure enough, there’s a sudden building boom, a new town begins to rise out of the ashes–schools, churches, stores, even a new hotel. Kinney becomes right popular: he’s a jolly gladhanding sort of feller by nature, visits our new establishment himself whenever he can, and by the end of the year he has done two really clever things: first, he brings in a printing press and starts publication of San Juan del Norte’s first newspaper, The Central American, and second he arranges a sort of “election” whereby he becomes named “by popular acclaim” the Civil and  (mind you) Military Governor of the City and Territory of San Juan del Norte or Greytown.

–”Elected,” eh? says Jesse. Sounds like he beat Walker out in that department by a good six months or so.

–Well, Walker went for the whole basket of peas, now didn’t he, says Twain. I’d take president over governor any day of the week.

–And it does help, says Madame Amanda, to have money, an army and international recognition, none of which Kinney had. The British refused to recognize him until a real  election was held. So I guess it was about then that he made his pitch to Walker.

–What pitch? asks Brown.

–Well he sends Jack Smith (who’s back on the river by now) upstream and over to Granada with a message to Walker that says, in effect, if you, Walker, will recognize me, Kinney, as Governor of the Moskito Territory, I, Kinney, will recognize you, Walker, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Nicaragua.

–An act of desperation, sounds like to me, says Twain.

–That’s how Walker read it. His reply is memorable. You could almost set it to verse and sing it!

Tell Mr. Kinney,

            or Col.  Kinney,

            or Gov. Kinney,

            or by whatever name he styles himself,

            that if he interferes with the Territory of Nicaragua,

            and I can lay my hands on him,

            I will most assuredly hang him.

 

Lordy me, what a put-down! When the word of Walker’s rebuff reached Greytown, that was it for Kinney. His men began to slip away one after the other to join Walker. I guess the bitterest pill of all was when his partner in crime Jimmy Fabens himself disappeared, this was, oh I reckon some time in October of  ‘55, and the next thing you know there are announcements tacked up all over town offering liberal grants of land on the Pacific side to new settlers, and it’s signed J. W. Fabens, Director of Colonization (for Walker that is).  So Jimmy went over to the other side and poor Kinney went into a blue funk. Then he himself  disappeared, and the next we heard was that he had sold his “grant to the Kingdom of Mosquitia” to the Mormons for two million dollars! You heard me right: two million dollars. My stars, you have to admire the sheer shameless unadulterated American pluck  of the man!

*          *          *          *          *

Having said their farewells to  Twain and Brown, Jesse and Madame Amanda make their way down the gangplank and into the soft steamy night of the town with its smell of flowers and sound of treefrogs and massive puddles. Jesse holds her elbow to help her around the muddy places. Her fringed coach is waiting at the Transit office.

–An interesting man, your Mr. Samuel Twain or whatever he calls himself. Sharp mind. Maybe a little too sharp.

–He cut his teeth in some pretty rough places. I suspect he learned pretty early how to live by his wits.

–Well, that’s the same all over in this life, far as I’m concerned.

–Did you read that story of his I sent you?

–About the frog. O yes. Very clever, if you like that sort of thing.

–And you don’t.

–I  laughed, all right. But I can’t say it gave me much pleasure.

–How’s that.

–It’s  like watching a very skilled cardsharp, except he’s using words instead of jacks and diamonds. Dazzling, but slick. I’ve spent my life around such people. No real surprises.

–I’ve watched him pretty close for the last week or so. He drinks in everything. I got this feeling that he was, I don’t know, salting everything away   for future use, as though Nicaragua was this free Church Picnic and he’s stuffing his pockets with ham and biscuits for later on.

–I believe the word is acquisitive.

–Well I guess you and I shouldn’t get so high and mighty. We both like acquisitions. You’ve certainly done well for yourself.

–Well enough to buy me a nice house in N’Orleans for when I retire.

–Retire! A woman in the prime of life?

–Oh well, things change, you get weary of the old ways. I suspect I’ll be moving north before too very long.

She reaches for the bar at the end of the seat and with one foot on the runner lifts herself into the chaise. Jesse goes through the motions of helping her although she clearly needs no help. He’s enveloped in a cloud of sweet musky sweat-tempered perfume.  She turns to face him and smiles.

–A little nightcap at The Palace, Commander P?

–A pleasant thought. The fact is, I was wondering if we might… for old times’ sake….

–O heavens no, sorry, I don’t do that any more. Men, I mean.

–Ah. No men. At all?

–At all. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have that behind me.

–But how do you…it must get….

–My, aren’t we curious. Surely you’ll allow a lady a few boudoir secrets. But let me ask you this: have you never thought of desire as a liability?

–Yes, no, I only meant…well, I suppose everyone….

–Of course, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t spend this particular night, or part of it, in someone’s tender embraces. I have a range lovely creatures to offer you.

Jesse turns away and stares into the darkness.

–I think not. It was foolish of me to imagine I could seek you out and recapture a moment of youthful… excitement. No: if not you…

–So that’s your motto: Accept No Substitutes.

–I suppose.

–I’m touched. But let’s leave it at that, dear boy. Let’s not, as they say, rub the bloom.

She holds out her hand; he kisses her the lace glove.

–Good-bye, Mr. Jesse Pelletier. Bon voyage. Drop me a note from time to time. Keep your eyes open, pecker up, powder dry. And if the Transit collapses, as it seems bound to do before long, and your livelihood and mine go down the drain together, don’t forget to look me up some day in New Orleans. I suspect I won’t be hard to find.

–To be sure. Adieu.

She taps the edge of the roof with her fan. The driver says something to the horse. The wheels make a smooth sucking noise as they slide away into the darkness.