His friends in California were active in the meanwhile. Recruiting offices were opened in San Francisco, to which flocked the desperate, the adventurous, the reckless from every land. The Federal Government could not, at least, it did not, take active steps to check them. Between two and three hundred men were enlisted, and their passage engaged on the bark Anita. The name of the vessel and the date of her departure were kept secret from all but the leaders of the party.
On the appointed evening, December 7, 1853, they gathered at head-quarters. Horses and waggons were in readiness, and in a brief time the ammunition and supplies were on the deck of the Anita. Before midnight the embarkation was made, and the ship swung into the stream. A tow-boat carried her out of the harbour in safety. Before casting loose the lines several of the Anita's sailors secretly stole on board the tow-boat, their desertion not being perceived until the bark was beyond hail and ploughing the waves of the Pacific. The adventurers have been described by a friendly writer as "a hard set." They observed their departure by a merry carouse, the while the good bark tossed on the ocean swell and her captain cursed his recreant crew and his boisterous freight. Then the wind arose. A sea swept the decks, carrying overboard a dozen barrels of pork and making a clean breach through her starboard bulwarks. The adventurers awoke next morning, sobered and sick. A few of them who had been sailors volunteered to aid in working the vessel. The relief came none too soon, as it was found that the ship had been dragging her anchor and several fathom of cable all night, the deserters having failed to make it fast. The filibusters grimly consoled themselves with the reflection that they had not been born to be drowned.
Arrived at San Vincente, the reinforcements went into camp, amusing themselves, while they awaited orders to march, by foraging on the scattered ranches. Horses were procured by forced levies, and paid for in the promissory notes of the "Republic." Here for the first time Walker displayed the traits of stern command which afterwards made his name a word of terror in the ears of men who feared nothing else, human or divine. Half a score of the boldest desperadoes in camp formed a plot to blow up the magazine at night and desert with what plunder they might be able to seize in the confusion of the moment. To carry out their plan involved the risk of killing many of their comrades, as the ammunition was kept in the middle of the camp. Notice of the plot reached Walker, who had two of the ringleaders tried by court-martial and summarily shot. Two others were publicly whipped and drummed out of camp. Walker then ordered a muster of the troops, and after making a stirring appeal to them, called upon all who were willing to abide by his fortunes to hold up their hands. All of the original forty-five, and a few of the Anita's passengers, responded; the others shouldered their rifles and prepared to march. Walker confronted the recreants, and quietly ordered them to stack their arms, a command which, after some hesitation, they obeyed. They were then suffered to leave the camp. Less than a hundred men now formed the army of the republic. He gave orders to march to Sonora by the mountain paths, around the head of the Gulf of California. They buried the arms and ammunition of the deserters in cachés. Two men deserted on the march and joined the Indians, who harried the little band at every step.
The river Colorado was crossed on rafts. Disease and desertion thinned the ranks. The wounded died for lack of proper treatment, as there was not a case of surgical instruments in the army. They extracted arrow-heads from their wounds with probes improvised from ramrods. Every morning's roll-call showed a dwindling force. Beef was the only food left. Two men quarrelled over a handful of parched corn, and one shot the other dead. They were in rags. The President of Sonora, wearing a boot on one foot, a shoe on the other, fared no better than his followers. Those followers soon numbered less than fifty. A council of war was held, and it was decided to return to San Vincente. The Mexicans hung upon their flanks and rear, cutting off every straggler. Recrossing the mountains, they narrowly escaped annihilation in a gorge which widened out at the middle to a plateau of half a mile across, with a narrow opening at either end. Half way across the plains the Indians appeared on flank and front and opened a galling fire. Walker here showed coolness and generalship. Leaving twelve men hidden in a clump of bushes under command of Lieutenant P. S. Veeder, a cool young soldier, afterwards distinguished in Nicaragua, he retreated with the rest of the command towards the entrance of the valley. The passage had already been closed by the enemy's forces, who met the retiring party with an ill-aimed volley of arrows and bullets. At the same time those guarding the other pass joined their friends on the flanks in charging the Americans. As they passed the thicket where Veeder and his men lay in ambush, they received a deadly volley at short range. Every bullet struck down its man. Walker at the same time turned and delivered an equally well-aimed fire, which put the enemy to full flight. The two detachments then passed unmolested through the further defile before the astonished natives could be rallied to the charge. No bribes of aguardiente, with which the Mexicans were wont to ply their Indian allies could thenceforth induce the natives to face the deadly American rifles. They hung upon the line of march like coyotes, prowling about the late scene of each encampment, and robbing each new-made grave of its tenant's blanket, the only shroud of the poor filibuster who fell in the waste places of Sonora.
At San Vincente, where Walker had left in March a party of eighteen men to guard the barracks, he found not one remaining. A dozen had deserted, and the rest, unsuspicious of danger, had been swooped upon by a band of mounted Mexicans, who lassoed and tortured them to death. So many successive reverses sealed the fate of the expedition. To wait for reinforcements, even could they have come, from California was hopeless. Walker had but thirty-five men remaining. They were destitute of everything but ammunition and weapons; of these they had more than enough. At various places they had buried boxes of carbines and pistols. Eight guns were spiked at San Vincente. A hundred kegs of powder were cached on the banks of the Rio Colorado. Years afterwards the peon herdsmen or prowling Cucupa Indian stumbled, in the mountain by-paths, over the bleaching skeleton of some nameless one whose resting-place was marked by no cross or cairn, but the Colt's revolver rusting beside his bones bespoke his country and his occupation—the only relic of the would-be Conquistadores of the nineteenth century.
The stolid native who had sworn fealty to the mushroom republic, under pain of imprisonment for refusal, easily forgot his oath when the accursed "Gringo" had turned his back. The rancherio, whose sole mementos of vanished horses and cattle were the bonds of the Republic of Sonora, vainly proffered those securities at the cock-pit and the monté-table. The American of the North had come and gone like a pestilence, or like his ante-type of buccaneering days; nought remained save disappointed ambition with the one, and a bitter memory with the other.
The invasion was every way inexcusable. That his interference was unwelcome to the natives Walker soon found out; nor was he slow to learn that nothing less formidable than an army of occupation, backed by a strong power, could push his cherished dream of a new conquest of Mexico beyond the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.
With sinking heart, but bearing the calm front which never failed him, he led his starving, travel-worn band toward the California frontier. The natives made a feeble show of opposing their retreat. A host of ill-trained soldiery, formidable only in numbers, held the mountain heights; their Indian allies were drawn up on the plain to contest the passage. Colonel Melendrez, commanding the Mexican forces, sent four Indians with a flag of truce into the filibuster camp, bearing an offer of protection and free passage across the American border to all except the leader; Walker, with all the arms of the company, must be first given up. Such an offer would have been rejected, in the face of certain death, by men familiar as these were with the Punic faith of the Spaniard. Made as it was to men who had followed their chieftain through hunger and want, battle and defeat, up to this moment, when they could see their country's flag waving over the United States military camp across the border, it was treated with scornful laughter. Melendrez then begged the United States commander to interfere and compel the surrender, a request which, as it could not have been granted without a violation of Mexican territory, was properly refused. Three miles of road lay between the filibusters and the boundary line. Walker, resorting to strategy, left half a dozen men concealed behind some rocks to cover his retreat. The natives, with a wholesome dread of the American rifle, followed him at what seemed a safe distance and rode straight into the ambush. Half a dozen rifles emptied as many saddles, whereupon Melendrez and his Mexicans galloped off at full speed, leaving their Indian allies to follow as best they might. The filibusters lost one man, a victim to his own indiscretion in having borrowed a leaf from the enemy's tactics and fortified his courage with too much aguardiente.
So ended the last battle of the Republic of Sonora—if it be not a travesty to call by the name of battle a fruitless fight between a score of men on one side and a hundred ignorant savages on the other. Four and thirty tattered, hungry, gaunt pedestrians, whimsically representing in their persons the president, cabinet, army and navy of Sonora, marched across the line and surrendered as prisoners of war to Major Mckinstry, U.S.A., at San Diego, California. It was the 8th of May, 1854; and so Walker kept his thirtieth birthday.
A parole, pledging the prisoners to present themselves for trial to General Wool, at San Francisco, was signed by all, after which they were allowed to depart.