Four arrows into a closed camp

Hoffman's men would let no more than fifteen visitors into camp at a time, and none at night. The National Park Service ethnographic overview prepared by Lowell John Bean and Sylvia Brakke Vane, following Lorraine Sherer, treats that rule as the first insult. Mojave hospitality, as those writers describe it, was an open camp. A closed one read as hostility before anyone raised a weapon. The Mojave answer, in the same reconstruction, was a test: four arrows shot into the camp, and mockery of how the strangers were behaving.

The officer in that camp was Lieutenant Colonel William Hoffman. General N. S. Clarke, commanding the Military Department in San Francisco, had sent him and an escort to the Colorado to arrange a military post at Beale's Crossing, the place where Edward F. Beale's wagon road met the river. Troops were supposed to follow. Word of the August 1858 attack on the Rose-Baley party had already moved. Colonel Bonneville, in New Mexico, reported to the General of the Army in Washington and, Bean and Vane write, probably sent word to Clarke. The Secretary of War's own instructions to do much the same thing arrived late. They reached Hoffman only after Beaver Lake.

What each side says was hit

Hoffman prepared to go back the way he had come. He had not left when Mojave came closer and closer and surrounded the party. He sent the pack and wagon ahead, then ordered one platoon to dismount and fire. He reported that ten or twelve were seen to fall. As the platoon marched to catch the rest of the command, some 250 to 300 Mojave started to follow and fell back after what Sherer quotes him calling "a few well-directed shots on some scattering ones."

Chooksa Homar, the Mojave narrator whose war reminiscence A. L. Kroeber took down in 1903, reported that three Mojave were hit and that none were killed. A. L. Kroeber noted that to the Indians, Hoffman's visit seemed unmotivated. Those two sentences are the whole disagreement, and they are enough. An officer counting men he thought he saw drop, from a retreating platoon, is not the same witness as a Mojave speaker counting the wounded in his own communities forty years later. Bean and Vane print both. A later retelling that picks "ten or twelve killed" and drops Homar, or the reverse, is editing the fight into a cleaner story than the overview allows.

Clarke read Hoffman's report as an attack. The orders that followed say so in the action they require. Hoffman was to march against the Mojave and the Chemehuevi. If they declined to fight, he was to demand the chiefs who had made the attack on his party and take them hostage. If the hostages were not forthcoming, Mojave fields were to be laid waste and further cultivation denied. Sherer, as cited by Bean and Vane, puts that order at pages 93 and 94 of Bitterness Road. The Chemehuevi are in the order even though the arrows at Beaver Lake are described as Mojave. A river post was being planned against two nations, not against one camp.

The spring concentration

While Hoffman was still trying to get a post planted, Beale was putting a road crew together in Albuquerque, and it seemed wise to send some of their food from Los Angeles. Bean and Vane, citing Casebier and the Kroebers, say Beale's associate Samuel A. Bishop left Los Angeles on March 1 with 38 men, ten camels, six six-mule wagons, and pack mules. At Cave Canyon they met a mail party of the Central Overland Mail Company. An estimated 1,500 Mojave, assembled by the five militant chiefs against Aratêve's advice, met this enlarged group and shot in such a way as to miss on purpose. Both sides pulled back. The militant chiefs and some others then attacked, and the intruders shot two of them, one fatally. Bishop sent most of his men back to Pah-Ute Creek, cached supplies, sent the wagons "back to civilization," and pushed on with camels and mules to cross the Colorado north of the villages and get something through to Beale. That March fight is not Beaver Lake and it is not the August battle at the fort. It is the reason the spring of 1859 was already violent before Hoffman's column finished assembling at Yuma.

Hoffman had already told Clarke that the desert route he had used was too difficult for a larger body of troops. Clarke sent him to Fort Yuma to organize men coming in and to build a supply line for a post at the 1857 crossing. Soldiers collected at Yuma. Two steamers, the Colorado and the General Jesup, stood ready to carry them upriver. Bean and Vane's overview spells the second boat "Jessup." Beale's journal, printed the year before, spells Captain Johnson's boat General Jesup. Same boat, two printings. One command of dragoons marched to the river across the Mojave Desert anyway, against Hoffman's judgment that the trip was too hard by that road.

When the parts of the command came together at the crossing, Hoffman established a post without opposition from the Mojave. On April 23, 1859, they accepted terms he had laid down. Bean and Vane, citing Sherer, list them: no opposition to roads and posts, travel free from harassment, one hostage from each of six Mojave bands, the chief who had commanded the attack on Hoffman, and three men who had taken part in that attack. The chief who had commanded the attack, in this account, was Cairook, and he gave himself up. The other eight hostages were two sons of chiefs, four brothers of chiefs, and two nephews of chiefs. Nine men, downriver to Fort Yuma. What happened on the porch of the guardhouse is another essay. The April 23 list is the one that explains why they were there.

This site's short history dates the planting of the post, as Camp Colorado, to April 19, and the name Fort Mojave to April 28, and it gives the spring force as more than six hundred. Those figures come from the secondary works the short history cites. They are not reprinted in the Bean and Vane paragraphs used here. This essay stays with what those paragraphs do print: a post established when the troops arrived together, terms accepted on April 23, and a renaming done by the officer left in charge.

The officer who changed the name

Neither Clarke nor Hoffman thought the post would last. The climate was harsh and the supply line long, and they doubted many emigrants would choose the desert. Brevet Major Lewis A. Armistead, left in command, disagreed. He thought the site was excellent: wood, water, and grass close by, and the river itself a road for supplies. He thought the name was wrong, and he changed Camp Colorado to Fort Mojave. Sherer, via the overview, puts that judgment at page 99.

The rank is the point that gets flattened. The overview calls him Brevet Major Lewis A. Armistead. This site's short history and its timeline call him Captain. A brevet is a higher title than an officer's permanent grade. Both labels are in print. Calling him only "Major Armistead," as if that were the rank he wore in the line, or only "Captain," as if the overview had not used the brevet, throws away a distinction the documents are careful about. In 1859 he is the officer who kept the post and renamed it. Later he was a Confederate general, mortally wounded at Gettysburg. That later war is not this one. It does not explain Beaver Lake.

What the novel is free to invent

When the Birds Go Silent can put Hoffman in a scene, give him a tone of voice, and decide what he notices about a cottonwood. None of that is in Sherer. What is in Sherer, as Bean and Vane transmit it, is a closed camp, four arrows, a volley, two casualty counts, an order that threatened the fields, a surrender on April 23, and a brevet major who liked the ground better than his superiors did. If a page of the novel needs Hoffman to know, on the night of Beaver Lake, that Homar would someday say nobody died, that page is guessing. Hoffman reported ten or twelve seen to fall. He did not have Homar's count.

Sources

These are the documents and studies this essay actually uses. Spellings of Mojave names follow the source being quoted.

• Lowell John Bean and Sylvia Brakke Vane, The Native American Ethnography and Ethnohistory of Joshua Tree National Park: An Overview (Cultural Systems Research, Inc., August 22, 2002), Mojave chapter, citing Lorraine M. Sherer, Bitterness Road: The Mojave, 1604 to 1860 (Ballena Press, 1994), pp. 86-99, and A. L. Kroeber and C. B. Kroeber, A Mohave War Reminiscence, 1854-1880 (University of California Press, 1973), p. 20. NPS history copy.
• This site's short history dates Camp Colorado to April 19, 1859 and the name Fort Mojave to April 28, and gives Hoffman's spring force as more than six hundred. Those day-numbers and that total are not restated here as fresh confirmations. The overview used for this essay prints the April 23 terms and the renaming, and does not print those two dates or that total.

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