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(NOTE: History is full of really strange little stories which are often left out of history books. They are left out because they are not deemed important enough to the grand tapestry of historical events as determined by the people who make the books.
That’s why they’re the focus of “Eat Your History”.)
He was a little fellow, standing a mere 5 feet-2 inches, soft-spoken, slightly built and weighing only 120 pounds. Yet his appetite for adventure and personal dominance was loud and immeasurable. He led self-raised armies against the governments of Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras, killing people as he went, only to be chased back to the United States from four ill-fated invasions. But he kept going back, driven by the dream of Manifest Destiny which he saw himself leading into Mexico and Central America.
William Walker had graduated with honors at the top of his university class when he was 14, got his medical degree in Philadelphia at 19, went on to practice law in New Orleans for a couple of years, becoming the owner and publisher of a newspaper there and then off he went, chasing the madness of the gold rush out to California. But what the little man really wanted was to be a big man and he saw his way to that end by personally taking over other countries and bending them to his will. Mind you, this guy cut a figure slightly smaller than today’s typical third-grader! If anything, that fact likely enlarged his hubris and ambition.
As a means to that end, Walker printed up and sold bonds stamped “Republic of Sonora” to raise money for the invasion of that state, then recruited a contingent of wharf rats and roughnecks in San Fransisco who had failed at gold mining and sailed off with them to Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. He petitioned the Mexican government for a grant allowing him to create an American colony in Sonora, where he proposed an outlandish plan to guard them against marauding Apaches. They turned him down, of course.
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Walker and his men sailed back to San Fransisco, where he sold scrip for land in Sonora, opened up a recruiting office and raised enough money from investors to have another go at nation building. Before making the big move to take over Sonora, Walker, with 50 men (dubbed “The First Independent Battalion”) established a foothold in Baja. He siezed the city of La Paz, captured its governor, raised his own flag, made himself president and renounced all allegiance to Mexico.
The Mexicans of course promptly attacked his “army”, killing some of the soldiers. Did this deter Walker? No, it did not. Instead he issued a proclamation, stating that he was annexing Sonora! … which, of course, was a figment of the fantasy he was forced to take back with him to the U.S.
Walker next decided it would be a cake walk to conquer Nicaragua so in May, 1855, he and 57 of his recruits sailed out of San Fransisco to join disaffected Nicaraguan rebel soldiers fighting the “legitimists” in the Capture of the City of Grenada.
Walker described his men as being “of strong character, tired of the humdrum of common life” and led them in concert with the rebels in an attack on the city of Rivas, the bastion of the legitimists.
Here Walker and his force met with heavy resistance, inspiring his Nicaraguan rebel contingent to run off. The fighting was fierce, a lot of it hand-to-hand, raging through the narrow streets of the city until Walker and his men took refuge in several adobe houses. Under fire from all sides, they managed to fight their way out and escape certain death. Walker left his wounded men behind where five of them were brutally murdered.
The filibusters made it to the coast where Walker commandeered a Costa Rican schooner at gunpoint and escaped.
At this point you might think young Walker would have experienced a flash of insight, warning him that all this filibustering was maybe not such a swell idea after all and suggesting that he oughta give up his grandiose schemes and get the hell on back home and maybe just live out the remainder of his life practicing medicine or law or simply being a journalist but, no, he was William Walker and it’s likely he wouldn’t have known a genuine insight if it walked up to him buck-naked and wearing a red hat.
Following the Battle of Rivas, Walker and his men forcibly took over a steamboat belonging to no less a figure than Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and then ferried it back to Grenada where he attacked the city and took it over. After that, he ordered his men to “burn and level the city" to “instill a salutary dread of American justice.” Which they did, leaving behind the inscription “Here was Grenada”.
Walker then revoked Vanderbilt’s transport charter and comandeered all the company’s steamships, then being very profitably used to ferry passengers across Nicaragua’s waterways to the west coast and California. This did not at all sit well with Vanderbilt, then the richest man in America. Taking money away from that guy was manifestly unwise, as Walker would soon find out.
Without firing a shot, Vanderbilt’s agents, in alliance with the Costa Ricans, re-took those ships and cut Walker off from the possibility of getting reinforcements. Walker was stuck and had no choice but to accept the offer of safe passage to Panama aboard a U.S. warship.
From there, he sailed back to New York where, unbelievably, he started raising funds again and mustering yet another rag-tag army of filibusters. On August 6, 1859, Walker and his force of 91 men landed on the coast of Honduras, captured the city of Trujillo and started marching toward Nicaragua, where he was going to resume his duties as the country’s president
But fate intervened.
The Honduran Infantry inflicted major losses, leaving in their wake dozens of dead and wounded. A flotilla of 15 British ships off the coast prevented reinforcements from joining Walker and then offered him safe passage out of there. However, the British commander changed his mind en-route and turned Walker over to Honduran authorities at Trujillo, where he was quickly tried, sentenced and put to death by firing squad.
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