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By Root 1613 0

assemble a small fighting force, an easy enough task, as Harpending later recalled, since “California at that period abounded with reckless human material—ex-veterans of the Mexican War, ex-filibusters, ex–Indian fighters, all eager to engage in any undertaking that promised adventure and profit.” The freebooter units would then converge on Alcatraz, seizing the island, the arsenal at Benicia with its 30,000 stand of arms, and other key points. With that accomplished, they would proclaim a Pacific Republic and organize “an army of Southern sympathizers, sufficient in number to beat down any armed resistance.” One particular fact made the plotters especially confident of success: the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Army at San Francisco—in fact, the commander of the entire Department of the Pacific—was General Albert Sidney Johnston, a known Southern sympathizer and veteran of the Texas Revolution.33

Harpending wrote his version of the story as an old man, more than half a century later, and some of its details—those soft-footed Asiatics, for instance—seem rather more cinematic than perfectly true. Still, there is no question that in 1861, California was rife with secret pro-Southern groups, organizations with names like the Knights of the Columbian Star and the Knights of the Golden Circle. (The latter referred to the filibusters’ long-held dream of ruling a slaveholding empire encircling the Gulf of Mexico, and including the American South and Southwest, the Caribbean, and much of Latin America.) Police detectives’ reports revealed elaborate codes, rituals, signs, and countersigns—enough to leave loyal Californians badly spooked. Thus, a few hundred Knights multiplied, at least in the popular imagination, into a hundred thousand.34

Nothing seemed safe that spring, not even the rock-solid fortress at the center of San Francisco Bay. “We felt as though we were upon a volcano of social disruption,” one Unionist later remembered, “and … that the guns of Alcatraz might signal us at any moment to throw up our hands.”35

But even as the would-be founders of the Pacific Republic conspired among themselves, a counterplot of sorts was being hatched—this one in Mrs. Frémont’s front garden.

THOUSANDS OF MILES from San Francisco Bay, at the West’s opposite gateway—St. Louis, Missouri—two civilians sat disconsolately at the sidelines of the war.

One had recently taken a desk job running St. Louis’s horse-drawn trolley line. He spent most of his days pushing papers, trying his hardest to concentrate on the minutiae of fare revenues and fodder costs, in an office permeated with pungent aromas from the company’s adjacent stables. The other man was a visitor to town, a down-at-the-heels shop clerk from Illinois, who had come in search of an officer’s commission. He camped out at his in-laws’ house, trudging around the city each day, fruitlessly trying to attract the attention of the local military authorities.36

The trolley-car executive was named William Tecumseh Sherman. The luckless clerk was Ulysses S. Grant.

Of all the places where these two men could have found themselves, St. Louis was perhaps the one where war loomed largest. The leading city in one of the nation’s most populous slaveholding states, St. Louis was a military prize like no other. Not only the largest settlement beyond the Appalachians, it was also the country’s second-largest port, commanding the Mississippi as well as the Missouri River, the great waterway to the Rockies, then navigable as far upstream as what is now the state of Montana. It was also the eastern gateway of the overland trails to California, Oregon, and the Southwest. Last but far from least, the city was home to the Jefferson Barracks, the largest military installation in the entire United States, and to the St. Louis Arsenal, the biggest cache of federal arms in the South.37

Whoever held St. Louis truly held the key to the whole American West. And, in contrast to what was brewing in California, the struggle for the West in Missouri was in the open, it was armed, and it was about to explode